Page:Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic.djvu/11

wrote the De subimitate. Through such spokesmen, with complementary technical analysis of ancient achievement, the way seems surest toward recovering inductively the ancient artistic experience.

This experience has remained too long in abeyance for speakers, writers, and teachers of English. In the United states, though composition has been studied during the past fifty years more generally, perhaps, than in any other country except France, neither our theory nor our pedagogy has applied very widely the ancient lore. Jesuit schools, indeed, have maintained the tradition of rhetoric, as have some others teaching composition consecutively through Latin; but in general the multitude of modern text-books of English composition shows little use of ancient experience. Thus it has been possible to propose as new, and even to try, methods exploded in Rome two thousand years ago. There is no question of reviving an equally exploded archaism. Nor need we fall again into the Ciceronianism of the Renaissance. Ancient deviation, as I have tried to show, is no less instructive than ancient progress. The point is so to comprehend what the ancients learned in singularly fortunate conditions as to guide our own theory away from vain repetition toward progressive realization of our own opportunities.

Metric, except where it bears incidentally on prose rhythms, has been deliberately excluded. In the present divergence of critical interpretation an entire volume would hardly suffice for a really contributory synthesis. The larger movements of poetic, dramaturgy and the development of verse narrative, show a consistency that warrants a synthesis of ancient poetic; and there is even greater consistency in ancient rhetoric. But we may not lightly speak of ancient metric, as if it were continuous