There was also a physical aspect. Proper exercise of the organs of speech is regarded by medical opinion as comparable to walking and swimming. In modern times we lay stress on the exercise of all parts of the body, but tend to neglect the proper cultivation of elocution. If we developed it more we might hear less of such prevalent things as ‘minister’s’ and ‘schoolmaster’s’ sore throat. Medical evidence goes to show that better exercise of the vocal organs is far more effective than surgical remedies.
More important was the aesthetic side. We to-day have largely lost the sense of beauty in speech. Language has become to us for the most part a matter of the written word. We have ceased to feel as vividly as Isocrates did in his letter to Philip[1371] the need of the living voice to express the soul of which the letters are the body. The artistic joy which is found in the form and arrangement of words, in the sound given to them by a dramatic speaker, in the gestures of an accomplished orator—this joy has largely disappeared. Yet we feel that it was there in the Latin panegyrists. We may say that theirs is ‘a tale of little meaning’, but we must admit that ‘the words are strong’—strong and beautiful. To read their productions is like looking on a piece of mediaeval art, a stained-glass window, where the figures are grotesque and the fable futile, but the richly blended colours bind us by their beauty. They knew and lived for the inner loveliness of words. And perhaps they would say to us: ‘You who read so widely and know so much, you think you understand. But in order really to understand you must hear the word pronounced so that its sound as well as its form calls up a picture to the mind. It is only when you conceive of the study of a language as artistic both in sound and in form that it becomes the key to poetry. Do you not sometimes neglect the sound in your studies?’
They might also have said that there was an inarticulateness in modern times which led to misunderstanding: that if men had been taught to express their thoughts better there would be less strife and less dumb agony. And to a certain extent they would have been right.
But against them we can urge serious charges. The simplest and most fundamental objection to the rhetorical system is that it neglected the search for truth. It thought too much of means and too little of ends. Lessing stated in his Laocoon the eternal aim of science. ‘The ultimate object of the sciences is truth. Truth is necessary to the soul, and in the satisfaction of this essential need it is tyranny to employ even the slightest check.’[1372] The words apply to the education of our period. For the teachers of that time did not make truth their chief end, and how much tyranny there resulted for the soul of man we have had some opportunity of seeing.
The ancients felt this themselves. They recognized the force of Seneca’s dictum: ‘Scholae non vitae discimus’. Tacitus had criticized the system in his Dialogue, and Petronius is very outspoken in his condemnation. He considers that the school produces in its pupils not wisdom but folly, seeing that what they hear or see there has no bearing on practical life. ‘It is for ever pirates standing in chains on the beach, tyrants writing edicts in which they order sons to cut off their fathers’ heads, oracles to avert a pestilence demanding the sacrifice of three or more virgins, verbal honey-balls, all words and acts sprinkled, as it were, with poppy seed and sesame. Children brought up in these surroundings can no more be sensible than those who live in a kitchen can be fragrant.’[1373]
The school-exercises which Aphthonius prescribed clearly illustrate these objections. The artificiality of obeying all the rules at all times for a certain type of subject is apparent even in the models. In a little essay on ‘Poverty’, introduced by two verses of Theognis, the poet, under the heading ἐγκωμιαστικόν, is praised at length for seeing what an exaggerated emphasis poets lay on myths, and turning to serious moral teaching.[1374] He is also praised for observing metrical rules, which is at any rate less harmful than the sentiment expressed in the text that it is better to die than to be poor. Under the heading ‘cause’ it is alleged that poverty is incompatible with virtue. Those who are rid of poverty grow up fine men and do glorious deeds and entertain the poor. Look at Irus, the beggar (under the heading παραδείγματα)—he was so poor that he had even to change his name: for formerly he was called Arnaeus. And think of all the woes of Ulysses himself when he came home in the disguise of a beggar. How terrible it is to be poor! For all this a verse must be found from some poet (under the heading μαρτυρία παλαιῶν) in order to give the seal of respectability. This quotation is generally chosen quite irrespective of the main theme, Euripides being quoted on this occasion to the effect that poverty cannot change nobility of birth.
Truth is made to consist in the nature of the charge brought, and not sought in the human facts of the case. Thus, in the stock example of a speech against a tyrant,[1375] we have a ‘conjectural attack on the man’s past life’, and an ‘exclusion of pity’ worked up with the utmost artificiality. Ingenuity, not truth, is the object. And the same can be said of the ‘Encomium’, in which we find the germ of the panegyric. Of all these exercises those which fall under the heading of ‘Description’[1376] are the only ones which possess any kind of naturalness.
The reflection of this unnaturalness is abundantly seen in the literature of the day. Almost any work of Ausonius could be taken as an illustration. He consciously opposes grace to strength, and the result is disappointing. ‘Si qua tibi in his versiculis videbuntur ... fucatius concinnata quam verius, et plus coloris quam suci habere, ipse sciens fluere permisi, venustula ut essent magis quam forticula.’[1377] He takes nineteen lines to express the number six,[1378] and fourteen lines to say that there were thirty oysters.[1379] Such a ‘numerum doctis involutum ambagibus’ seems to have been a common way of expending ‘poetic’ energy. Then, as if this were not enough, he goes on to expound the ‘doctae ambages’ in the baldest possible way (Septenis quater adde et unum et unum, etc.) in twelve more lines. Similar examples could be indefinitely multiplied. Nor were they just the whim of an idle humour. We meet them everywhere. Bishop Sidonius at the age of fifty says, in a serious estimate of a man’s poetic abilities, that he was good at ‘echoing’ and ‘recurrent’ verses, and at ‘anadiplosis’[1380] (i.e. resuming a verse with the end phrase of the previous one). Asked by a correspondent as to recurrent verses, he gives a stock example (antiquum), which shows that the literary practice was of some standing. The point of such a verse was that it could be read backwards letter for letter without altering the sense:
Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor,
while in a ‘versus echoicus’ the first part of the first verse was the same as the second part of the second. He adds another kind which he had composed while delayed by a swollen river, and here the merit was that the words could be read backwards retaining the order of the letters in each word, without prejudice to the sense: