baroque prose

Baroque Rhetoric: A Concept at Odds with Its SettingAuthor(s): Wilbur Samuel HowellSource: Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Winter, 1982), pp. 1-23Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40237304 .

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Baroque Rhetoric: A Concept At Odds With Its Setting

Wilbur Samuel Howell

I

The first American scholar to define a terminology and a content for what I am hère calling baroque rhetoric appears to hâve been Morris W. Croll of Princeton University. In 1929 Croll published an influential essay, "The Baroque Style in Prose," in which he associated the term "baroque" with certain spécifie characteristics of prose style and left no doubt that a baroque prose style and a baroque rhetoric were one and the same thing. In the

following first section I wish to look at the way in which he arrived at thèse conclusions.1

Croll began his essay not only by commenting upon the

changes which had occurred in ail forms of Western European art during the seventeenth Century but also by seeking to find an

acceptable term for those changes. He was tempted, he declared, to use "romantic" as the acceptable term, so as to contrast the spirit of seventeenth-century literature with what was

generally called the classicism of the high Renaissance. He was also tempted, he said, to use "modern" or "new" as a possible substitute for "romantic." But he decided that these possibili- ties were inexact and perplexing, and he concluded that "ba-

roque" was the term best fitted for the office that he wanted his

essay to fili. He expiai ned: "This term which was at first used only in

architecture, has lately been extended to cover the faets that

présent themselves at the same time in sculpture and in painting; and it may now properly be used to describe, or at least to name, the characteristic modes of expression in ali the arts dur-

ing a certain period - the period, that is, between the high Ren- aissance and the eighteenth Century; a period that begins in the last quarter of the sixteenth Century, reaches a culmination at about 1630, and thenceforward gradually modifies its character under new influences."2 In these exact words, written in 1929, Croll gave baroque literature a date, an artistic context, and a name in American scholarship and criticism.

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 15, No. 1. Winter 1982. Published by The Penn- sylvania State University Press, University Park and London.

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In his subséquent discussion, moreover, Croll established rhetoric as thè generai term for ail of the traits of baroque prose style. He defined the several éléments of prose technique as choice of words, choice of figures, observance of balance or

rhythm, and attention to the form of the sentence or period; "and in a füll description of baroque prose ail of thèse éléments would hâve to be considered." But of thèse éléments, "the form of the period" stands as "the most important and the détermi- nant of thè others; and this alone is to be the subject of discussion in the following pages."3 Croll proceeded to define the forms of the baroque sentence by classifying them as cuit or loose, in contrast to the prevailing Ciceronian periodic structure of the sixteenth Century; he went on to give the cuit and the loose forms a fair degree of explanation.4 Thus, for example, he said of the cuit style that it has the following four marks to

distinguish it: "first, studied brevity of members; second, the

hovering, imaginative order; third, asymmetry; and fourth, the omission of the ordinary syntactic ligatures." At that point he made an observation which can only be interpreted to be an

emerging définition of baroque rhetoric, as that définition would be nourished by the four traits just mentioned: "Each of them is related to the rest and more or less involves them; and when

they are ail taken together they constitute a definite rhetoric, which was employed during the period from 1575 to 1675 with as clear a knowledge of its tradition and its proper modeis as the

sixteenth-century Ciceronians had of the history of the rhetoric that they preferred."5

Even if we take careful note that thèse words fall within Croll9 s définition of the cuit style, and that that style was only one of the two styles which constitute his composite view of

baroque prose, we are justified, nevertheless, in concluding that thus far at least a baroque prose style and a baroque rhetoric are to his mind one and the same thing; and we may confidently say that his final définition of baroque rhetoric would consist merely in his adding his subséquent analysis of the loose style to what he had just been saying. Therefore, Croll would appear to define

baroque rhetoric as the two forms of the baroque prose style, as he elaborated them in his essay; and baroque rhetoric, as he conceived of it, would stand in contrast to the Ciceronian rhetoric of thè preceding era. In other words, baroque rhetoric in Croll9 s System is confined to the stylistic aspects of discourse-


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WILBUR SAMUEL HOWELL 3

baroque rhetoric consists in knowing how to choose words, how to choose among the figures of speech, how to achieve balance or rhythm, and how to form sentences or periods.

As for the earlier Ciceronian rhetoric to which Croll also re- fers, it, too, dealt with style and with delivery, as he knew; but it devoted its major énergies to problems connected with the quest for substance and form in nonfictional discourse. There can be no doubt that baroque rhetoric to Croll represents a

sharp break with traditional Ciceronian rhetoric, and that ba-

roque writers renounced the hallowed Ciceronian periods for a sentence structure that forms itself briefly and loosely upon an author's impulses at the moment when his inner thoughts burst into his consciousness and demand expression. The contri ved

style of the Ciceronians as distinguished from the spontaneous style of their successore - this would seem to be the leading contrast in Croll' s conception of thè two rhetorics under his

scrutiny. My analysis of baroque rhetoric begins at this point.

II

As Croll said in using the term "baroque" to cali attention to the literary phenomena which he wanted to discuss, this word had first been used as a criticai term to describe the traits of

seventeenth-century architecture. Had he been more spécifie at that point, he would certainly hâve mentioned the name of Heinrich Wölfflin. Wölfflin, a Swiss art historian who taught at the university of Basel between 1893 and 1901, and later at the universities of Berlin and Munich, published a book in 1888 called Renaissance und Barock; and in it he delivered what was to become an influential description of baroque architecture in Rome

during the period immediately following the Renaissance. And he did something else - he opened the way to application of the term

"baroque" to post-Renaissance literature. René Wellek, in his

richly informative essay on the origins and progress of baroque literary criticism, speaks thus of Wölfflin' s contribution to the latter development: "So far as I know, Wölfflin was the first to transfer the term baroque to literature. In a remarkable page of Renaissance und Barock (1888) he suggests that the contrast between Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516) and Tasso's Gerusa- lemme liberata (1584) could be compared to the distinction between Renaissance and baroque. In Tasso, he observes a


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4 BAROQUE RHETORIC

heightening, an emphasis, a striving for great conceptions absent in Ariosto, and he finds the same tendency in Berni's reworking of Bojardo's Orlando inamorato."6

The contribution described so luminously did not produce instant results. It took twenty-seven years for further interest in

baroque literature to manifest itself ; nevertheless Wölfflin should receive crédit for promoting that interest. In 1915 he brought out a new book, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, in part to elabo- rate his earlier views of the baroque characteristics of literature; and at last his theory found thè world ready for it. Students of the

literary baroque were flourishing widely by the 1920s, and at least one American scholar, Wellek, responded, in a discriminating and important judgment: "Croll knew Wölfflin9 s work and used his criteria, though very cautiously."7

III

The history of thè word "baroque" before Wölfflin bestowed upon it the meaning which it had for Croll, involves three distinct théories of origin, each of which has reputable advocates, and one of which seems on the whole to be particularly well suited to the task of Connecting the term with its modem status in artistic if not in literary criticism. I trust that thèse théories are not already so familiär to you as to make their summary altogether superfluous.

According to Helmut Hatzfeld's detailed and careful account of the first of thèse théories, thè word "baroque" came from the

Portuguese expression pérola barroca, meaning an irregulär pearl, and it was first associateci, not only with those particular gems, but also with a colloquiai Portuguese place-name Baro- quia (that is, Broakti), located in Goa, where after 1530 Portu- guese pearl fishers and pearl traders found irregulär pearls of local origin to be a flourishing item of commerce in their newly acquired colony in India.8 The notion of irregularity, not oddity, says Hatzfeld, was conveyed in early références to this particular kind of pearl, and he then points to the forms which the

Portuguese expression assumed when it passed into other languages. In a Spanish-French dictionary of 1606, it became " 'cornue ou baroque,9 that is, odd"; it also appeared in Spanish as berruecos; in German it became parocken perlen. Moreover, Hatzfeld adds such détails as thèse to show how thè word

spread to différent orbits of meaning:


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In 1688 thè word baroccho . . . actually is used in a treatise on money exchange by thè Itali an Mazzi in the sensé of "s windle." In 1739 the dramatist Marivaux, famous for his neologisms, has one lady say about another one that her features are not regulär and that she has - so to speak - a baroque face (quelque chose de baroque dans son air). About the same time the Duc de Saint Simon finds very baroque, that is, very stränge, that a simple abbé is honoured by a position destined for a bishop. In 1743 the Dictionary of Trévoux identifies thè word baroque with bizarre and states that a way of thinking, an expression, and a face may be called baroque.9

Up to this point, Hatzfeld's account may be summarized by saying that thè word "baroque" was originally of Portuguese currency, that it was used at first to designate an irregulär or odd e ari, and that in the course of time it passed into Spani sh, Italian, German, and French with its original form and sensé

recognizably stamped upon it, even though it had acquired some

pejorative auxiliary meanings. These judgments constitute what

may be called the traditional etymology of thè word. A second theory advanced to account for the présence of

"baroque" in the languages of Europe assigns thè word to a medieval Latin origin, within an odd little eddy of the stream of scholastic logic as that erudite outpouring flowed majestically through thè educational system of thè late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The Aristotelian syllogism was taught in that Sys- tem as the core of logic, and it was carefully presented in terms of the two premises that made it up, the position of the middle term in those premises, the universality or particularity of their

major and minor terms, the positive or negative character of the assertions they made, and the resulting nature of the conclusion that could be drawn from them. In theory, sixty-four possible syllogisms could be made from the various combinations of the éléments just enumerateci. But of thèse sixty-four syllogisms, only sixteen, or at most nineteen, could achieve validity under strict syllogistic rules. These valid syllogisms and the premises that made them up were représentée! in scholastic pedagogy by nineteen manufacturée! Latin words built around the vowels A, E, I, and O, separateci by arbitrarily chosen consonante.10 These nineteen manufactured words, each having no other etymology, were arrangea under the four syllogistic figures so that students, by memorizing the words, could recali fore ver what each figure



6 BAROQUE RHETORIC

might produce in the way of syllogisms of formai dependability. For the first figure, the four Latin words were usually Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferio; for the second, Cesare, Camestres, Fes- tino, Baroco. I need not go on to identify the similar synthetic words in the other two figures. What concerns us hère is baroco, the term in the second figure for its fourth syilogism. Ba- roco contains the vowel A and two occurrences of the vowel O. A means a universal affirmative major premise. The first means a particular negative minor premise. The second means a particular negative conclusion. And the second figure, of

course, is a syilogism in which thè middle term is predicate of both major and minor premises. A syilogism constructed by Benedetto Croce illustrâtes this form of deductive reasoning:

Every fool is stubborn; some people are not stubborn, hence some people are not fools.11

Croce shared the view of earlier critics of scholastic logic that this syilogism, this formai argument in baroco, was illustrative of ridiculous pedantry. Caro, an early Italian humanist, writing in 1570, had characterized the syilogism in baroco as "the peak of oddity," and at about the same time, Montaigne had singled it out with similar epithets.12 Much earlier, in 1519, Luis Vives called thè professore of Paris "sophists in baroco and baralipton."x* But despite thèse disparagements, directed not only at the notion of syllogistic pedantry but also at thè idea of outland- ishness, the term baroco was by Croce and others deemed

worthy of emerging from its Latin surroundings as a memory- prompter of undergraduate logicians and of being made the name of a soon-to-be famous and respected movement in art criticism. René Wellek declared that the term "baroque" t4is derived from baroco, the name for the fourth mode of the second figure in the scholastic nomenclature. . ." and he stated that what I outlined above as the first possibility of origin "must

apparently be abandoned."14 But in a later essay Wellek went back upon this judgment, so far as to say that the dérivation of

"baroque" from Portuguese barrôco is correct, in respect to the

origin of thè French word baroque, while the Italian noun barocco stems from the mnemonic verses of the schools of logic. Thus, concludes Wellek, "we must speak of a confluence of thèse two words of différent etymologies."15


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But, as I said earlier, there is a third theory. The Italian word barocco may be derived, not from the Latin name of the fourth

syllogism of the second figure, but from the Italian name of a celebrated painter, Federigo Barocci or Baroccio, 1539-1612. One authority for this etymology is Webster9 s Third New Inter- national Dictionary ofthe English Language Unabridged (1966). If this etymology is correct, it would seem best to say that the

English word "baroque" cornes from a French offspring ofthe

Portuguese barrôco, so far as it means irregularity, oddity, or bizarreness, and from a French off spring of the Italian painter9 s name Barocci or Baroccio, so far as it means certain characteristics of a style in painting, sculpture, architecture, and li te rature. In other words, Webster' s Third does not allow the Latin term baroco with its syllogistic background to father the English or the French word "baroque," but it does allow thèse two latter words to hâve a Portuguese and an Italian origin and separate corresponding significations in French and English.16

The dérivation ofthe term "baroque" from the Italian painter9 s name has something to be said against as well as for it. On one side, Harald Olsen, a careful student of Baroccio, déclares that the latter is "no Baroque painter himself." But, on the other side, Olsen say s of him that "He has unified two essentially différent

aspects, the Mannerist feeling of affliction and the Baroque cer-

tainty and reliance."17 And of Baroccio' s picture, thè "Madonna del Popolo," Olsen speaks thus: "It ranks among the crucial

master-pieces of Cinquecento painting, and représente a proto- Baroque style whose prìnciples are further developed in the fol-

lowing compositions."18 Moreover, Olsen stresses Baroccio' s influence upon the baroque painters who came after him. "There are, on the whole," concludes Olsen, "réminiscences of Ba- rocci9 s art in nearly every painter ofthe early XVII Century . . . even Caravaggio may have been impresseci/'19 And I might add that, if Baroccio impressed Caravaggio, he may be said to have

impressed an enormously important figure in the development of

baroque painting in Europe. On this latter point, an excellent récent authority speaks as follows: "The first or 'Early Baroque9 phrase, essentially a naturalistic one, originateci in Italy, and its

pioneering figure was beyond doubt Caravaggio, an artist whose influence, during the second and third décades of the Century, had a decisive effect on many French, Netherlandish, and Span- ish (as well as Italian) artists."20 In the light of this tribu te, and of



8 BAROQUE RHETORIC

thè strong likelihood of an influence by Baroccio upon Caravag- gio and upon a large number of Italian baroque painters, Webster' s Third would seem to hâve a good case for suggesting that "baroque" in its modem French and English forms should as a term in art criticism be traced ultimately to Baroccio' s name.

In any event, such a source for the term designating an artistic

style would seem to be more convincing than a source could

possibly be if it served originally only to designate a piece of scholastic pedantry. As for thè word used in French and English to designate anything whimsical, grotesque, odd, bizarre, irregu- lär or extravagant, it would seem to fit more nicely into the ancient Portuguese commerce in irregularly shaped pearls than into the description of a distinctive style of seventeenth-century painting and architecture. Thus Wellek's (and Hatzfeld's) theory of the two origins and two différent meanings of the term "ba-

roque" would seem to be in need of substantial restatemene21

IV

When Croll decided in 1929 to speak of the baroque style of

seventeenth-century prose as if that style grew out of a distinctive theory of r he t rie, he may now be said to hâve used the modish criticai terminology of the 1920s to point to rhetorical treatises which had no such name in their own era. The term

"baroque" is not a part of any of the writings devoted to rhetoric between 1S7S and 167S, nor did any of the critics ofthat era characterize under that désignation the traits of their contempo- rary literature.22 Nevertheless, if we look at literary realities as

distinguished from criticai terminologies, we notice that several of the rhetorics of the baroque period, as defined by Croll' s own dates, at times made style their major, and at other times their exclusive concern, and that Croll himself, in doing likewise, gives us the true réfèrent of his neoteric term. It would seem reasonable, then, to examine seventeenth-century stylistic rhetorics as an absolutely necessary part of our présent analysis.

During the middle years of the sixteenth Century, a momentous change took place in the way in which rhetoric was understood as an académie subject and a criticai discipline. That

change is indelibly associateci with the name of Peter Ramus. What Ramus did, so far as we are concernée, was to redefine and reorganize grammar, rhetoric, and logic, the famous trivium




of thè medieval schools, and to live to see his reforms become phenomenally acceptable throughout Europe. We shall take occasion now to comment only upon what those reforms meant to

logic and to rhetoric.23 In approaching thèse two disciplines, Ramus was disturbed by

the similarity that had been established between them. Tradi- tional logic, which drew its doctrines from Aristotle's Organon, particularly from the Topics, was concernée! with the procédures of bringing into existence and organizing learned subject matter so as to create the most truthful or the most probable basis for belief and action. Traditional rhetoric, which drew its doctrines from Aristotle's Rhetoric and from the rhetorical works of Cicero and Quint ilian, was concernée with the same two procé- dures; but it meant its teachings to apply to populär address in the fields of law and politics, and in addition it gave special attention to the disciplines of style and présentation, neither of which was dealt with in logic. Seeing that traditional logic and rhetoric tended to duplicate each other in two of their primary functions, and believing such duplication to be inadmissible in a strict system of arts, Ramus reformed thèse two subjects by giving solely to logic what it had once shared with rhetoric, and solely to rhetoric what it had had by itself ail along. In other words, logic was made to become the sole art of invention and

arrangement, rhetoric the sole art of style and delivery; and each art was made to serve its special functions in ail discourses, learned or populär, nonfictional or fictional.

Ramus9 famous Dialectique of 1555 gave his logic its most concise vernacular form, and his rhetoric was written up in Latin by Orner Talon and in French in 1555 by Antoine Foclin, under the title, La Rhétorique Françoise.24 These two works stand in sharp opposition to their traditional counterparts and to the prevailing system of logic and rhetoric, as outlined, for ex-

ample, in Thomas Wilson's Rule of Reason (1551) and Arte of Rhétorique (1553). 25 In particular, Ramus' s rhetoric, as formu- lated by Talon and Foclin, may be said to stand, in the first half of its generai outlook, for the treatises which Croll would hâve had in mind as he referred to the distinctive theory behind ba-

roque prose. And thèse latter treatises were perhaps much more numerous than Croll would hâve imagi ned. The reformed rhetoric of Ramus or the baroque rhetoric of Croll' s spéculations found expression in the works of many authors - in Gabriel


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Harvey's Rhetor and Ciceronianus (1577), Dudley Fenner's Artes of Logike and Rethorike (1584), Abraham Fraunce' s Arca- dian Rhetorike (1588), and in Charles Butler' s Rhetoricae Libri Duo (1598), and a number of other books by other writers.26

Three characteristics of Ramus' reform of logic and rhetoric are of profound concern in my search to understand the rhetorical theory of the baroque period.

First, by making logic solely responsible for bringing into existence and organizing literary subject matter of all kinds whatever, without at the same time recognizing the Aristotelian distinctions between invention and disposition in philosophical argument and in populär address, on the one hand, and in poetry, on the other, Ramus may be said to hâve abolished altogether the distinction between nonfiction and fiction, and to hâve assumed that the same System of creating and organizing literary substance would

prevail everywhere. Aristotle had taken the pains to carry out a différent set of prescriptions. He had written Topics to suggest a scheme for the invention and arrangement of learned discourse; he had written Rhetoric to suggest a scheme for the invention and

arrangement of populär public address; and he had written his remarkable Poetics to suggest a scheme for the invention and

arrangement of that most fateful of ail the types of discourse, literary fiction. But Ramus had decided to blend thèse various Aristotelian distinctions into one, and to déclare, not only that the ten places of his own logic would provide substance for any kind of discourse, nonpoetic or poetic, but also that the two plans making up his own theory of organization of discourse - the sci- entific and the prudential methods - would suffice for the poet as well as for the philosopher and the orator.

In the second place, by assigning invention and arrangement to logic, and by denying that thèse two procédures had any connection with rhetoric, Ramus may be said to hâve deprived rhetoric of what had been its chief responsibility of old, its concern for substance and form. To his way of thinking, substance and form were to be separateci from style and delivery, as if thèse four realities were sequential, not simultaneous. The rhetorician might be allowed to take substance and form from the logic ian, and to go on from there to add style to his composi- tion, but he would not be supposed to enjoy the excitement of

joining thè right word to thè rìght idea at the instant when the idea was perceived. Moreover, since substance in literature is



WILBUR SAMUEL HOWELL 1 1

merely another name for truth, or for the best probabilities that can be evolved under the urgencies of literary création, Ramus' reform separated the quest for truth from the quest for verbal

expression, as if thèse two endeavors belonged in compartments insulated from one another. This would mean that baroque rhetoric must by law be stylistic, and that any concern on its part for

devising and arranging truth must be technically illegal. In his survey of the history of rhetoric between ancient times

and the Renaissance, a modem critic has argued that when rhetoric turned its back upon substance and form, and devoted itself to the niceties of style, it tended to become a more perfect rhetoric, emancipated from its old tormented questioning about what it is true or probable, released at last from the shackles of

philosophical inquiry and logicai cohérence - freed forever, in short, to dwell fondly upon the external contrivances as distin-

guished from the internai capacities of discourse.27 If this critic is right, then Ramus' reform of rhetoric would hâve to be viewed as a permanent improvement in the history of that sub-

ject. But for our more humble purposes, Ramus1 reform should rather be viewed as a distinct change from the ancient classical orientation of Thomas Wilson' s Renaissance rhetoric to the ba-

roque rhetoric postulated later by Croll. During the baroque period, indeed, Ramus' reformed rhetoric found itself gradually consigned by its very limitations to the back streets of history. But in its heyday it was first in everybody's mind.

In the third place, by making rhetorical style consist exclu-

sively of the schemes and the tropes, and by jettisoning such other traditional parts of stylistic doctrine as plainness, aptness, judicious ordering, and the exercise of choice among the three kinds of writing (grand, middle, common),28 Ramus made one aspect of style serve for a whole set of aspects, and thus he

simplifiée! a complex subject into an exclusive reliance upon words and sentences used in systematic violation of their ordi-

nary function in speech. Tropes, said an English Ramist, Dudley Fenner, in 1584, are "a garnishing of speache, whereby one worde is drawen from his firste proper signification to another ..." while a scheme or a figure "is a garnishing of speache, wherein the course of the same is chaunged from the more simple and plaine maner of speaking, vnto that whiche is more füll of excellencie and grâce."29 Notice that both of thèse définitions stipulate a departure from everyday usage - that



12 BAROQUE RHETORIC

tropes and figures lie outside of the course followed when words or sentences are held to literal requirements. If a speaker or writer wants to praise a man for his courage, and proceeds then to say of him that he is lionhearted, the resulting expression is a

trope, a metaphor, not a literal phrase. If a speaker or writer wants to characterize an event in such a

way as to make it momentous beyond the resources of ordinary statement, and if he proceeds then to say that the event is not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning, the result-

ing expression violâtes literalness, and it is called in the ancient

terminology an example of the scheme of antimetabole. Meta-

phors and antimetaboles, métonymies and antithèses, synec- doches and Oxymorons - thèse and their kindred contrivances make up the whole of the stylistic theory of Ramus and his followers. Moreover, thèse contrivances make up the proper style of literature, as opposed to the nonliterary style of daily speech. Thus, so far as its external expression is conce rned, literature consists in a systematic répudiation of the speech used

by men and women in ordinary affai rs. If we cali this systematic répudiation baroque as well as Ramistic, and go on to point out how far the writers of the Romantic movement, notably Words- worth, rebelled against it, we shall perhaps hâve characterized, in part at least, the différence between seventeenth-century and late eighteenth-century literary style. But I mean this only as a

suggestion, not as a thesis. What I should like briefly to dwell

upon instead is that, within the baroque peri od, even critics who were not strict Ramists in their treatment of the schemes and

tropes believed nevertheless that ordinary everyday usage was beneath the level of literature, and that, on the literary level, the more figurative the usage became, the more truly literary it was, until it finally reached the stage of verse, which might be defined as tropes and schemes controlied within thè master scheme known as si militer de sine ns, or like ending.

George Puttenham, in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), is one of the strengest advocates of the view just stated; in his

vocabulary omoioteleton was the word for similiter desinens.30 In the opinion of thèse critics, oratory was below the level of verse in the literary hierarchy, but it was nonetheless a recogniz- able step above ordinary speech. Puttenham recalls thè story of the speaker of the House of Commons whe earned contempt by delivering to Queen Mary an officiai speech in which his words


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were not at ail figurative and eloquent, as would befit the royal occasion, but suited rather to "an ordinary taie to be told at his table in the countrey."31 Then, too, Thomas Wilson notes that sermons were sometimes delivered in meter; and he adds that some listeners, not wholly pleased with the preacher's rhymes, thought he should be given a Iute and allowed to play it as he spoke, so that the congrégation could dance if they wished.32 This kind of preaching, indeed, seems to hâve constituted what the preacher thought to be as near to the highest literature as a sermon would be capable of reaching. At any rate, it illustrâtes what happens when men are more preoccupied with the manner in which they say things than with the matter of what is said. And it illustrâtes, too, what kinds of actual writing would probably hâve to be studied by one who claimed seventeenth-century prose as baroque rhetoric and sought to give it a content that would describe ail the practices behind it.

My mention of Puttenham as a rhetorical theorist who did not subscribe to Ramism but did write within the boundaries of stylistic rhetoric was deliberately intended to emphasize that, although the reforms of Ramus were a dominating influence upon rhetorical theory between 15SS and 1600, and a dwindling but appréciable influence for fifty years thereafter, a stylistic rhetoric flourished outside of Ramism, and should by rights be associated with my présent topic.33 Puttenham was one of the promi- nent members of this school, and such others as Richard Sherry, Henry Peacham, John Hoskins, Thomas Blount, and John Smith should be kept in mind. But I shall not now discuss their contri- butions to baroque rhetoric. What I would hâve to say would duplicate in many ways my présent discussion of Ramus9 s reform, and in other respects would not provide baroque rhetoric with much in the way of additional subject matter. But I do feel that baroque rhetoric should be considered the term for ail the stylistic rhetorics of the baroque period, and should not be defined in relation to Ramism alone, even if the latter représente the most spectacular development of its time.

V

In the baroque period there was a rhetoric not confined to style, but it cannot be called baroque rhetoric in CrolTs sensé of the term, since its authors would hâve thought of themselves not



14 BAROQUE RHETORIC

as stylistic rhetoricians34 but as followers of the füll rhetorical program of Aristotle and Cicero. In other words, they would hâve regarded rhetoric as a theory of substance and of form, as well as of style and delivery. They would hâve considered the

quest for truth or good probability to be a concern which rhetoric must hâve in its own field; they would hâve understood what that field was, and in what respects it differed from the field of logic, to one side, and the field of poetry, to the other; they would hâve seen form as a concern of logic, to be sure, but of rhetoric and poetry, as well; they would hâve seen style as a common interest of poet, orator, historian, and populär writer; they would hâve remembered that the periodic sentence, with its balanced members, its suspensions of meaning, its air of contri- vance and préfabrication, its seeming déniai of spontaniety, was not the only sentence recommended by Cicero, but was supposed to be an alternative to such other options as plainness and

discreetly elevated modération; and they would hâve seen deliv-

ery as a talent which orators would naturally cultivate and other nonfictional writers would probably not be willing to ignore. Thus they should be said to hâve represented classicism, even if

they lived and wrote in a period that would one day be called anti-classical, or baroque; and their rhetoric, when formulateci into a system, would hâve promoted literary studies of wider

range than CrolTs, even if we acknowledge, as we must, that CrolTs study of seventeenth-century prose style is illuminating and elegant within its own narro w boundaries.

Fénelon's Dialogues on Eloquence are a superb contrast and corrective to the baroque rhetoric of CrolTs spéculations.35 Presumably written in 1679,36 and thus a product of the seventeenth Century, which is usually defined as the füll baroque period, the Dialogues on Eloquence take the position that rhetoric is concernée! with the whole classical conception of discourse, not with style alone, and that the critic of discourse must approach thè individuai literary work with that whole conception in mind, if he is to achieve genuine literary understanding. When I say that the Dialogues on Eloquence embody the whole classical conception of discourse, I do not mean that their classicism re verts back to the Renaissance classicism of Thomas Wilson' s Arte of Rhétorique, but rather that Wilson was faithful to the classicism of the Rhetorica ad Herennium and its Ciceronian antécédents, whereas Fénelon was faithful to the classicism of




an era that he deemed to be at hand.37 Fénelon wrote a classical rhetoric for the Enlightenment, Wilson for the high Renaissance. It seems fitting that the Dialogues on Eloquence, though com-

posed in the baroque period, should not hâve been published until 1717, two years after Fénelon's death, for they reached a

large and influential audience in the years that folio wed, and they seem in retrospect to represent the âge of John Locke and of the new classical rhetoric of eighteenth-century Scotland rather than that of Thomas Wilson.

The basic situation in the Dialogues on Eloquence involves a confrontation between baroque rhetoric and the new classicism. Three friends, known to us only as A, B, and C, meet together one day.38 has just attended an Ash Wednesday sermon, and is extravagant in his enthusiasm for it. A wants to know what made that particular sermon so mémorable - were its qualities associated with the preacher's plan, his arguments, his moral, his principal truths? In answer, describes the sermon in some détail, and thus the stage is set for the clash between B's rhetoric and A's, or in other words, between the baroque and the neo-classical, as thèse terms apply to the theory of discourse.

The Ash Wednesday sermon and the other works which discusses in explaining his theory of rhetoric turn out to emphasize the speaker' s ingenuity and affectation rather than the truth- fulness and integrity of his approach to subject matter, his de-

light in unusual patterns of speech rather than in plainness and

sincerity, his desire for being thought populär rather than hon- est, and his overriding wish to amuse rather than benefit his hearers. B's zealous description of the Ash Wednesday sermon illustrâtes this attitude towards rhetoric:

Oh well, then, let me tell you what I remember. Hère is the text: "Cinerem tamquam panem manducabam," 'Tor I hâve eaten ashes like bread." Could you find a more ingenious text for Ash Wednesday? He pointed out that, according to this passage, ashes ought today to be the food for our soûls. Then he inserted into his introduction, in the most engaging way in the world, the story of Artemisia and her husband's ashes. His transition to his Ave Maria was most skillful. His division of topics was happy -

you shall judge of that for yourself. Although thèse ashes, he said, may be a symbol of punishment, they are a source of con- gratulation. Although they may seem to abase us, they are a fountainhead of fame. Although they may represent death, they are a medicine that brings immortai life. He repeated that division



16 BAROQUE RHETORIC

in many ways, and each time he gave new luster to his antithèses. The rest of the speech was not less polished nor less brilliant: the diction was pure; the thoughts fresh; the periods rhythmical, and each with some surprising stroke at thè end. He painted for us moral pictures in which each one of us recognized himself; he anatomized the passions of the human heart in such a way as to equal the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld. To my mind, in sum, it was a perfect speech.39

A' s answer to thèse words of rai se contains in large part his own (and Fénelon's) theory of rhetoric, as we can see when that

theory has finally emerged from the Dialogues on Eloquence. A

begins his answer by calling the Ash Wednesday sermon "mis- chie vous."40 He characterizes it as "A sermon in which there are false applications of the Scripture, in which a secular story is told in a cold and childish manner, and in which you see reigning throughout a vain affectation of wit. ..." And when objects that the Ash Wednesday sermon did not seem to fit that description of it, A quotes its text and comments thus upon its author's

good judgment in choosing it: "Would it not have been proper for him to determine whether the interprétation with which he was dealing was contrary to thè true meaning, before he gave it to the people as thè word of God?"41 Then A speaks as follows:

David or whoever else may be the author of Psalm 101 speaks there of his misfortunes. He says that his enemies, seeing him in the dust, struck down at their feet, grinded (this is hère a poetical expression) into nourishing himself upon the bread of ashes and a drink mingled with tears, cruelly mocked him. What connection is there between the lament of David, wrenched from his throne and persecuted by his son Absolom, and the humility of a Christian who puts ashes upon his forehead to remind himself of death and to disengage himself from the pleasures of this world? Did he not have another text in the Scripture that he might have taken? Jesus Christ, the apostles, the prophets - did they never speak of death and the ashes of the grave, to which God reduces our vanity? . . . His is a depraved taste, a blind enthusiasm to say something new.42

At this point in the Dialogues two things occur. admits that the Ash Wednesday text was not suitable in its literal interpréta- tion. And C, who says very little in the first Dialogue, but a lot in the third in support of A's theory,43 says hère, "As for my- self, I wish to know whether things are true before I find them beautiful." This remark, which goes far towards summarizing Fénelon's own final view of the proper standard for rhetorical




subject matter, leads A to continue his analysis of the Ash

Wednesday sermon. He says:

The rest of the sermon is in the same vein as the text. Don't you see this, sir? Why seek the pleasant in a subject so terrifying? And why amuse thè li stener by a secular story of the grief of Artemisia, when one ought to thunder and présent only the terri- ble images of death?44

I see [Interrupts ] that you don't like flashes of wit. But without that attraction, what would become of éloquence? Do you wish to limit ail preachers to the simplicity of missionaries? Sim- plicity is necessary for the common people; but gentlemen hâve more refined ears, and one must adjust oneself to their taste.45

B's interruption reminds us of the emphatic distinction made by Puttenham between the ordinary vocabulary of common life, and the literary vocabulary of thè polite world.46 A replies:

That is another matter. I meant to finish showing you how badly this sermon is conceived. It only remained for me to speak of the division of topics, but I think you yourself know well enough what makes me disapprove of that. Hère is a man who gives three points as the subject of his entire discourse. When you divide, it is necessary to divide simply, naturally. One must hâve a division that is found ready-made in the very subject itself; a division that clarifies, that puts thè materiate into classes, that is easily remembered, and that helps one to retain everything else; a division, in short, that reveals the size of the subject and of its parts. But you see hère a man who undertakes first to bedazzle you, who retails to you three epigrams or three riddles, who turns and twists them subtly - you think you are seeing sleight of hand. Is there in such things the serious and grave mien suited to making you expect something useful and important?47

These quotations give us a fair picture of the rhetoric of which Fénelon disapproves and of that which he advocates. As the Dia- logues progress, it becomes more and more obvious that to A genuine éloquence, genuinely moving discourse, results notfrom the speaker" s search for conceits and antithèses, but from his dedicated commitment to a cause beyond personal selfishness or sectarian blindness.48 The perception of the whole human truth within such a cause is what moves people to belief and action, and the speaker9 s business is to assist in making that perception a reality. The speaker speaks to prove, to portray, to strike.49 His

proofs are aimed at establishing the truth of his cause, and hère he



18 BAROQUE RHETORIC

is the philosopher; his portraiture is aimed at making that truth vivid, and hère he is almost the poet; his ability to strike is aimed at saying things in such a way as to make visible his own deep feelings towards them, and hère he is thè sensitive and sincere human being.50 A draws a distinction between poetry and oratory by saying that poetry is not verse, as the ignorant might imagine, but "a lively fiction which portrays nature,"51 whereas oratory, lacking the assistance of the fictional component, can hope at best to be almost poetry - can hope to présent the facts almost as if they had the magie of fiction in them.52 A also insists that

poetry and oratory cannot be separateci in criticism by saying that the one gives pleasure and the other seeks persuasion. Poetry and

oratory are alike persuasive, are alike pleasurable, and the attain- ment of the latter goal in serious discourse is never more than a

way station on the road to the former goal.53 As for the tropes and the schemes, those sole constituents of Ramistic rhetoric, they are not condemned by Fénelon - they are made rather to obey the dictâtes of persuasion as well as pleasure, and they become anti- rhetorical only when they forget their double function. Says A of them:

Let us distinguisi!, if you will. That which serves to please in order to persuade is good. Solid and well-expounded proofs are unquestionably pleasing; the lively and naturai movements of the speaker hâve much charm; faithful and animated portraitures en- chant. Thus the three things which we make essential to élo- quence give pleasure; but they are not limited to this effect. It is a question of knowing whether we shall approve of thoughts and expressions which hâve no purpose but to please, and which cannot in an y way hâve a more substantial purpose. These I cali conceits. Of course, you are always to keep well in mind, if you will, that I praise in discourse ail the pleasing traits which minis- ter to persuasion; and that I reject only those wherein the author, füll of self-admiration, has sought to exhibit himself and to amuse the listeners with his wit, rather than to absorb them utterly in his subject. The refore, I believe that it is necessary to condemn not only ail puns, for they are only insipid and childish, but also all conceits, that is to say, ail those things which serve only for sparkle, and which hâve about them nothing substantial and nothing conduci ve to persuasion.54

One final point about Fénelon' s Dialogues. In connection with A's discussion of movement, the third of his requirements for




persuasive utterance, he finds it necessary to borrow from Ci- cero' s De Oratore an example of the way in which movement

may be said to apply to a speaker' s words as distinguished from his physical actions. Says A: "Cicero reports that even the enemies of Gracchus were not able to restrain their tears when Gracchus uttered thèse words: 'Wretched! Where shall I go? What sanctuary remains to me? The Capital? It is inundated with the blood of my brother. My home? I shall see there my unhappy mother dissolved in tears and dying of grief.' There you hâve movements."55 One interesting thing about this illustration from a work written in 55 B.C. is that it measures up to the cuit style which Croll called baroque and thought typical of the seventeenth

Century. As I hâve pointed out, the cuit style in Croll' s sensé of the terni has studied brevity of members, the hovering, imaginative order, asymmetry, and the omission of ordinary, syntactic ligatures. Cicero's quotation of Gracchus's words has each one of the traits of Croll's cuit style. It has studied brevity among its members; its words corne forth suspended, irresolute, painfully imagined; three of its sentences are broken, uneven, asymmetri- cal; and the ordinary syntactic ligatures are omitted in three of its seven grammatical units. In other words, Croll's cuit style, which he himself considered "Anti-Ciceronian, or baroque prose,"56 turns out to be exactly illustrateci by a passage which Fénelon

quoted from Cicero's most influential rhetorical work. If the ba-

roque style was evolved in the seventeenth Century as a protest against what Croll called the Ciceronianism of the sixteenth cen-

tury, how does it corne about that the cuit style, one of the two chief forms of baroque rhetoric, can easily be exemplified in the

writings that lie at the root of that earlier Ciceronianism? Some-

thing seems to be out of focus hère. The enemy turns out to be not so hostile after all. Cicero looks as if even he had his Anti-Cicero- nian moments. And the baroque style, confined as it is by Croll to the seventeenth Century, appears to hâve been known and used in the first Century before Christ. This seems to indicate that the

baroque style of Croll's analysis is not as Anti-Ciceronian as Croll

thought it to be, perhaps because Croll may hâve suffered, as did a great many literary scholars of his time, from the settled convic- tion that the classical rhetoric of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian did not need accurate study so much as polite and sometimes mistaken lip service.



20 BAROQUE RHETORIC

VI

So thè quest for thè baroque rhetoric which Croll equated solely with prose style, and which he thought to be the only historical représentative of seventeenth-century rhetoric, turas out to hâve produced results that Croll did not envisage. Seven-

teenth-century rhetoric has been found to consist of four distinct bodies of historical doctrines. To Ramus, rhetoric was assigned uncompromisingly to style and delivery, with style its dominant interest. To the traditionalists like Sherry, Peacham, Hoskins, and Thomas Blount, rhetoric was stylistic in a more relaxed way than Ramus allowed. To the Ciceronians like Thomas Wilson, Thomas Vicars, Thomas Farnaby, William Pemble, and Obadiah Walker, rhetoric concernée! itself with style, to be sure, but it ne ver forgot that substance and form were its main business, and that style was the servant rather than thè master of thèse two other rhetorical imperatives. To Fénelon, who may be called a spokesman of the Enlightenment, rhetoric was neoclas- sical - it was Ciceronian, it was Piatonic, it was a comprehensive theory of nonfictional discourse.

Confronted by thèse four seventeenth-century rhetorics, where are we? One thing is sure. We are in a good position to ask whether the term ''baroque rhetoric'* is an acceptable criticai terni for us to use today. My feeling is that it is an inadequate term, if by it we mean seventeenth-century rhetoric. Critics of architecture, sculpture, painting, and music may well find the term "baroque" congenial, illuminating, precise, in their dealings with Western European art of the seventeenth Century. In literary criticism, the concept of a baroque literature, say, for England, seems not yet to hâve acquired the précision and illumination of such older terms as Jacobean and Caroline drama, metaphysical poetry, Cavalier lyrics, Miltonic tragedy and epic, Restoration drama, and the like, perhaps because the term "baroque" tends to erect a screen between English life and English letters, whereas the older terms bring letters and life together. But I leave this delicate question to literary scholars. What I recommend in

my own field is that, in speaking of seventeenth-century rhetoric, we do not adhère to Croll9 s example but specify instead that rhetoric in that period should be understood as having theorized upon populär discourse, sometimes with regard only for its style, sometimes with regard not only for its style, but also for its sub-



WILBUR SAMUEL HO WELL 2 1

s tance, its form, and its présentation as well, and sometimes with, or sometimes without, its fictional as distinguished from its nonfictional aspects. Perhaps this kind of définition is too compli- cateci for easy use. Perhaps it is not acceptable to some of you. But I think it would be a good guide for a comprehensive study of seventeenth-century nonfictional writing, and perhaps it would encourage modera critics to see rhetoric at last in terms of its own respectable history and its own fully established identity.

Department ofEnglish Princeton University

NOTES

!For the original version of CrolTs essay, see Studie s in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, éd. Kemp Malone and Martin B. Ruud (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1929), pp. 427-56. See also Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm Essays by Morris W. Croll, ed. J. Max Patrick et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 207-33. This latter édition is cited as Croll in the présent essay. 2CroU, p. 207. 3Ibid., p. 209. 4Ibid., pp. 211-30. 5Ibid., p. 214. 6See René Wellek, "The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship," The

Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism, V (1946), 78. See the same source for the other détails mentioned hère. Cited below as Wellek. For an authoritative re- statement of Wellek* s views, with slight modifications, see his "Baroque in Literature," Dictionary ofthe History ofldeas, éd. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968-1974), I, 188-95. 7Wellek, p. 84. For a chronological list of works dealing with the baroque in

literary scholarship from 1888 to 1946, see the same source, pp. 97-103. 8See Hatzfeld's essay, "Use and Misuse of 'Baroque* as a Criticai Term in

Literary History," University of Toronto Quarterly," 31 (1962), 180. Cited below as Hatzfeld. 9Hatzfeld, p. 181.

10William and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: At the Clar- endon Press, 1962), pp. 231-32, trace the first appearance of thèse nineteen words, as rendered into famous mnemonic verses, to William of Shyreswood's Latin logic, the Introductiones in Logicarti (first part of the thirteenth Century) and give the verses as folio ws: "Barbara celarent darii ferio baralipton/Celantes dabitis, fapesmo frisesomorum;/Cesare campestres festino baroco; darapti/ Felapton disamis datisi bocardo ferison." See also W.S. Howell, Eighteenth- Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 35, 47. »Quotedby Wellek, p. 77. "Hatzfeld. d. 180. I3Quoted by Wellek, p. 77, from Gustav Schnürer, Katholische Kirche und Kultur in der Barockzeit (Paderborn, 1937), p. 68. For "baralipton," see above, n. 10. I4Wellek, p. 77. I5See Wellek, "Postscript 1962," in Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 115-16.



22 BAROQUE RHETORIC

16The OED also rejects the dérivation of baroque from the Latin syllogistic terni baroco; and it traces baroque to Portuguese barrôco and Spanish barrueco. Moreover, it cites Littré as authority for the Latin ascription. See Emile Littré, Dictionnaire de la Langue Française, s.v. baroco, baroque. 17See Olsen* s Federico Barocci: A Criticai Study in Italian Cinquecento Paint- ing (Uppsala, 1955), pp. 15-16. 18Ibid., p. 101. 19Ibid., p. 104. 20John Rupert Martin, Baroque (New York, 1977), p. 28. 21For Wellek's theory, see above, n. 15; for Hatzfeld's see his essay, p. 180. 22The text and index of my Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Prince- ton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1956) (cited below as Howell) do not refer to this word, and the same statement applies to Peter France1 s Rhetoric and Truth in France: Descartes to Diderot (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1972). The OED gives 1851, 1867, 1879 and 1882 as the dates when "baroque** becomes part of the English vocabulary; and on the second and third of those occasions, first as an adjective and then as a noun, it has an architectural but not a literary signification. 23For a discussion of those reforms, see Howell, pp. 146-72. 24See Walter J. Ong, S.J., Ramus and Talon Inventory (Cambridge, MA: Har- vard University Press, 1958), p. 185 (for the Dialectique), pp. 91, 95 (for the Rhetorica and Foclin's Rhétorique Françoise). Cited below as Ong. 25For analyses of Wilson's two works, see Howell, pp. 12-31, 98-110. 26Ibid., pp. 247-81; see also Ong, pp. 89, 111-12, 119-20, 129, 133, 135-46. 27Brian Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 21-22, 41-43. 28For a Renaissance version of the traditional theory of style or elocutio as the third ingrédient of rhetoric, see Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhétorique ([London], 1553), fol. 85-11, in Robert Hood Bowers, ed., The Arte of Rhétorique (1553) By Thomas Wilson: A Facsimile Reproduction (Gainesville, FL, 1962), pp. 182-234. I cite this édition below. 29See Howell, p. 256. 30George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Edward Arber (London, 1869), pp. 24-25, 184. 3IIbid., p. 151. 31 Arte of Rhétorique, fol. 89R(p. 189). "See Howell, pp. 125-137, 326-335. 34 Ibid., pp. 318-26. In addition to Fénelon, who is discussed below, thèse authors include not only Thomas Wilson, whose Arte of Rhétorique had éditions in 1553, 1560, 1562, 1563, 1567, 1580, 1584, and 1585, but also Thomas Vicars, Thomas Farnaby, William Pemble, Obadiah Walker, and to some extent Charles Butler and John Newton. 35My présent références to this work are based upon my Fenelon's Dialogues on Eloquence A Translation with an Introduction and Notes (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton Universitv Press, 1951). Cited as Dialogues on Eloquence. 36Ibid., p. 36. 37See Howell, pp. 504-19. 3gDialo2ues on Eloauence. dd. 57-87. 39Ibid., pp. 58-59. 40Ibid., p. 59. 41Ibid., pp. 59-60. 42Ibid., p. 60. 43Ibid., p. 5. 44Ibid.. D. 60. 45Ibid.,p. 61. 4*See above, n. 30. Dialogue s on Eloauence. d. 61. 48Ibid., p. 91.




49Ibid., p. 92. 50Ibid., pp. 89, 92-94, 96-97. 5IIbid., p. 94. See also Oratory and Poetry in Fénelon's Literary Theory," in my Poe tics, Rhetoric, and Logic Studie s in the Basic Disciplines of Critici s m (Ithaca and London: Cornell Universitv Press. 1975). dp. 123-40. "Dialogues on Eloquence, p. 95. "Ibid.. p. 94. 54Ibid., p. 95. "Ibid., p. 96. For the passage in Cicero, see De Oratore. 3.56. 214. 56Croll, p. 208.



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