The ethics of rhetoric

by Richard M. Weaver

Let us mark the bristling superlatives. Of adjectives in superlative form we find most certain, soberest, wisest, most Christian, darkest, deepest, basest, lowermost, most dejected, most underfoot, and [most] downtrodden. Of those words which have a superlative force or meaning, I would list—allowing that this must be a matter of judgment—naught, cancel, broken, marvellous, fervent, eternal, universal, undoubtedly, supereminence, beatific, dateless, irrevoluble, eternity, inseparable, overmeasure, for ever, and eternally. But the most interesting form of the superlative mode is the pattern of repetition by which Milton, through a progressive accumulation of substantives and adjectives, builds up a crescendo. First there will be one or more groups of two, then perhaps a group of three, and finally, for the supreme effect, a breathtaking collocation of five. Such a pattern appears in the concluding sentence of the prayer: impairing and diminution; distresses and servitude; dignity, rule, and promotion; darkest and deepest; control, trample, and spurn; raving and bestial; slaves and negroes; basest, lowermost, most dejected, most underfoot and downtrodden. Here, it will be noticed, the sequence is 2-2-3-2-3-2-2-5. The pattern in itself is revealing. First there are two pairs which ready us for attaining the group of three; then another pair to rest upon before we attain the group of three again; then two more pairs for a longer respite while we ready ourselves for the supreme effort of the group of five.

The prayer is not, of course, an ordinary passage; yet what is seen here is discoverable in some measure in all of Milton’s prose. He wrote in this superlative vein because his principal aim was the divorcement of good and evil. To show these wide apart, he had to talk in terms of best and worst, and being a rhetorician of vast resources, he found ways of making the superlative even more eminent than our regular grammatical forms make it, which naturally marks him as a great creative user of the language.

The topic of grouping appropriately introduces another aspect of Milton’s style which I shall refer to more specifically as systematic collocation. No one can read him with the object of forming some descriptive image of his prose without being impressed by his frequent use of pairs of words similar in meaning to express a single object or idea. These pairs will be comprised, in a roughly equal number of instances, of nouns and of adjectives, though fairly often two verbs will make up the collocation and occasionally two adverbs. It seems probable that these pairs, more than any other single feature of the style, give the impression of thickness, which is in turn the source of the impression of strength. Or to present this in another way, what the pairs create is the effect of dimension. It needs no proving at this stage that Milton had too well stored a mind and too genuine a passion to coast along on mere fluency. If he used two words where another author would use one, that fact affords presumption that his second word had its margin of meaningful addition to contribute. And so we find it: these pairs of substantives give his prose a dimensional quality, because this one will show one aspect of the thing named and that one another. It would require a rather long list to include the variety of aspects which Milton will bring out by his practice of double naming; sometimes it is in form and substance, or the conceptual and the material nature of the thing; sometimes it is appearance and meaning; sometimes process and tendency; sometimes one modifier will express the active and another the passive nature of the thing described. Always the practice causes his subject matter to convey this sensation of depth and realness, which is a principal factor in the vitality of his style.

We shall look at some examples of this highly interesting method. The first is from the Areopagitica. I have italicized the pairs.

Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after a sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full midday beam, purging and unscaling her long abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means, and in their envious gabble, would prognosticate a year of sects and schisms.[142]

Noble and puissant direct attention to ethical and to physical attributes; purging and scaling do not form so complementary a pair but perhaps denote two distinct phases of a process; timorous and flocking is an excellent pair to show inward nature and outward behavior, and must be accounted one of the most successful uses of the method; sects and schisms would seem to refer to social or ecclesiastical and to theological aspects of division.

In a sentence from Of Reformation in England, he says: “But what do I stand reckoning upon advantages and gains lost by the misrule and turbulency of the prelates?”[143] Advantages and gains stand for two sorts of progress made prior to the misrule and turbulency of the prelates, which in turn signify the formal outward policies and the inner spirit of ambition and presumption. From the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce: “The ignorance and mistake of this high point hath heaped up one huge half of all the misery that hath been since Adam.”[144] Here ignorance would seem to describe a passive lack of awareness, whereas mistake describes active misapprehension or misapplication. Finally here are examples from Animadversions upon the Remonstrant’s Defence Against Smectymnuus.

We all know that in private or personal injuries, yea, in public sufferings for the cause of Christ, his rule and example teaches us to be so far from a readiness to speak evil, as not to answer the reviler in his language, though never so much provoked: yet in the detecting and convincing of any notorious enemy to truth and his country’s peace, especially that is conceited to have a voluble and smart fluence of tongue, and in the vain confidence of that, and out of a more tenacious cling to worldly respects, stands up for all the rest to justify a long usurpation and convicted pseudepiscopy of prelates, with all their ceremonies, liturgies and tyrannies, which God and man are now ready to explode and hiss out of the land: I suppose, and more than suppose, it will be nothing disagreeing from Christian meekness to handle such a one in a rougher accent, and to send home his haughtiness well bespurted with his own holy water.[145]

Here private and personal may be taken as giving us two aspects of the individual; rule and example differ as abstract and concrete; detecting and convincing (the latter apparently in the older sense of “overcoming”) denote two stages of a process; truth and his country’s peace may be taken to express the metaphysical and the embodied forms of the same thing; voluble and smart seem to refer to what is perceivable by the senses and by the intellect respectively; long usurpation and convicted pseudepiscopy differ as simple action and action which has been judged: God and man bring together the divine and the human; explode and hiss out of the land again express two stages of a process.