The Training of a Public Speaker | Page 5

so devoid of sense and knowledge as to find
art in architecture, in weaving, in pottery, and imagine that rhetoric, the
excellence of which we have already shown, could arrive at its present
state of grandeur and perfection without the direction of art? I am
persuaded that those of the contrary opinion were so more for the sake
of exercising their wit on the singularity of the subject than from any
real conviction.
IS ELOQUENCE A GIFT OF NATURE?
Some maintain that rhetoric is a gift of nature, yet admit that it may be
helped by exercise. Antonius, in Cicero's books of the Orator, calls it a
sort of observation and not an art. But this opinion is not there asserted
as truth, but only to keep up the character of Antonius, who was a
connoisseur at concealing art. Lysias seems to be of the same opinion,
which he defends by saying that the most simple and ignorant people
possess a kind of rhetoric when they speak for themselves. They find
something like an exordium, they make a narration, they prove, refute,
and their prayers and entreaties have the force of a peroration. Lysias
and his adherents proceed afterward to vain subtleties. "That which is
the effect of art," say they, "could not have existed before art. In all
times men have known how to speak for themselves and against others,
but masters of rhetoric have been only of a late date, first known about
the time of Tisias and Corax; therefore oratorical speech was prior to
art, consequently it could not be the result of art, and therefore, rhetoric
is not an art." We shall not endeavor to enquire into the time when
rhetoric began to be taught, but this we may say, that it is certain
Homer makes mention not only of Phoenix, who was a master, skilled
in both speaking and fighting, but also of many other orators. We may
observe likewise from Homer, that all the parts of a discourse are found
in the speech of the three captains deputed to Achilles, that several
young men dispute for the prize of eloquence, and that among other

ornaments of sculpture on the buckler of Achilles, Vulcan did not
forget law-causes and the pleaders of them.
It will be sufficient, however, to answer that "Everything perfected by
art has its source in nature." If it were not so, we should exclude
medicine from the catalog of arts, the discovery of which was owing to
observations made on things conducive or harmful to public health, and
in the opinion of some it is wholly grounded on experiments. Before it
was reduced to an art, tents and bandages were applied to wounds, rest
and abstinence cured fever; not that the reason of all this was then
known, but the nature of the ailment indicated such curative methods
and forced men to this regimen. In like manner architecture can not be
an art, the first men having built their cottages without its direction.
Music must undergo the same charge, as every nation has its own
peculiarities in dancing and singing. Now, if by rhetoric be meant any
kind of speech, I must own it prior to art; but if not everyone who
speaks is an orator, and if in the primitive ages of the world men did
not speak orator-like, the orator, consequently, must have been made so
by art, and therefore could not exist before it.
RHETORIC AND MISREPRESENTATION
The next objection is not one so much in reality as it is a mere cavil;
that "Art never assents to false opinions, because it can not be
constituted as such without precepts, which are always true; but
rhetoric assents to what is false, therefore it is not an art." I admit that
sometimes rhetoric says false things instead of true, but it does not
follow that it assents to what is false. There is a wide difference
between assenting to a falsehood, and making others assent to it. So it
is that a general of an army often has recourse to stratagems. When
Hannibal perceived himself to be blocked up by Fabius, he ordered
faggots of brush-wood to be fastened about the horns of some oxen,
and fire being set to the faggots, had the cattle driven up the mountains
in the night, in order to make the enemy believe he was about to
decamp. But this was only a false alarm, for he himself very well knew
what his scheme was. When Theopompus the Spartan, by changing
clothes with his wife, made his escape out of prison, the deception was

not imposed upon himself, but upon his guards. Thus, when an orator
speaks falsehood instead of truth, he knows what he is about; he does
not yield to it himself, his