Quintilian

Another important classical source for the new rhetoric is the theorisation of the relationship between ethics, philosophy and rhetoric in Quintilian’s first century Institutio Oratoria. As Mehtonen discusses at length in Obscure Language, Quintilian emerged ‘during the early modern period as one of the authorities in Western obscurity doctrine’ and as the ‘rhetorician of the era of transition, at the juncture between antiquity and the Middle Ages when Christianity had begun its spread throughout the Roman Empire’, his doctrines ‘merge seamlessly with epistemological discussion of the nature of knowledge and the clear and obscure criteria of truth’.³¹ But while Mehtonen is right that what Quintilian was concerned with was the absence of philosophical interest in communication and its relation to epistemology in contemporaneous rhetorical discussion, Quintilian was primarily interested in the absence of philosophical ethics in the discourse of rhetoric.³² This interest was related to the absence of a guarantee for the benevolent origin of rhetoric, but ‘the sarcasm of Quintilian… regarding the dubious nature of oracular pronouncements loses its resonance in the Christian Middle Ages, when theories of rhetoric were applied expressly to religious and theological contexts’.³³ Thus it is in the secularised context of the new rhetoric, in which the virtue of the writer or orator could no longer rest on assertions of participation in the divine, that Quintilian’s submerged interested in rhetorical ethics resurfaced. His aim was ‘the education of the perfect orator’ who must at once possess rhetorical skill and ‘be a good man’, for the character of the orator is essential to the development of his ability, as ‘no man can speak well who is not good himself’.³⁴ But such claims for virtue are contradicted throughout the Institutio by Quintilian’s awareness that ‘speaking in a persuasive manner… is within the power of a bad man no less than a good.³⁵ Though Quintilian’s problematic guarantee of virtue by virtue of style is distinguished from Longinus’s similar assertions by the absence of any appeal to divine influence, it remains nonetheless an assertion riven by unresolved contradictions and assumptions, rather than a systematic argument.

On occasion, Quintilian does admit that the affectation of virtue may itself be a tool, claiming that when it comes to the question of successful influence over an audience, to be thought to possess virtue is therefore equivalent to possessing virtue. For this reason, which is especially important in relation to the obfuscating function of the figurative, ‘artifice and stratagem should be masked, since detection in such cases spells failure’, and ‘secrecy’ and deceit - that is, an instrumental obscurity - are essential when clarity would fail to persuade.³⁶ Like Longinus, Quintilian thus sets the stage for a positive instrumental valuation of rhetorical obscurity which replicates unresolved assertions and contradictions concerning the indiscrimination or interchangeability of the divine and the demonic, or the honest and the dishonest, in the artificial adoption of a replicable rhetoric traditionally associated with virtue.

The function of obscurity as figurative concealment is grounded in Quintilian’s belief that moving the passions of the recipient pre-reflectively, against or without its will, is a legitimate rhetorical and poetical activity. This is the reason that even though solecisms are a fault in the language of instruction, they are, as figures, permissible for use by poets and orators, precisely because they produce an instrumental obscurity. Metaphors are particularly useful because they are ‘designed to move the feelings’, and it is in this function that they cease to be mere tropes, for ‘there is no more effective method of exciting the emotions than an apt use of figures’.³⁷ And because moving the audience toward the proper end by any means is the goal of the orator, ‘[t]here is also available the device of dissimulation, when we say one thing and mean another, the most effective of all means of stealing into the minds of men’.³⁸ Thus an obscure style is proper if it is used successfully to manipulate the passions of the audience: ‘when we come across denunciations such as that directed against Rullus for the obscurity of his language… we shall give [his stylistic transgressions] our sanction as reasonable concessions to passion and just resentment, and as useful in stirring up hatred against those whom it is desired to render unpopular’.³⁹

As an artificial effect, clarity itself can be appropriated by the speaker as a disguise and used not for the purpose of straightforward communication, but rather for manipulation. A style associated with (or which reflexively associates itself with) figures of clarity, in other words, can be an instrument of obscurity. This concealment is at once essential for the purpose of persuasion and immensely difficult to achieve, and it is therefore the highest form of art, since ‘to avoid all display of art in itself requires consummate art’.⁴⁰ The validation of obscurity in style (as in the case of Rullus) is thus transformed into a validation of obscurity concealed in clarity:

[s]ome, however, regard this quality [palpability, ‘evidentia’] as actually being injurious at times, on the ground that in certain cases it is desirable to obscure the truth. This contention is, however, absurd. For he who desires to obscure the situation, will state what is false in lieu of the truth, but must still strive to secure an appearance of palpability for the facts which he narrates.⁴¹

The power of the art of rhetoric thus involves donning the artful disguise of clarity. It is only telling half the story of the spectre of Quintilian in the discourse of the new rhetoric to claim, as Miriam Brody does, that

[a]s Quintilian himself had written in the Institutes of the Orator, and as Smith, Campbell, and Blair had served up rhetoric’s advice for the eighteenth century, the more ornamented the language, the more “flowery the diction,” the more disguised the natural world that language eternally and imperfectly attempts to describe.⁴²

The real import, the crucial destabilising centre of the rhetorics of Longinus and Quintilian, is thereby covered over in favour of an ideology which favours the naturalness of clarity. The most significant contribution of these two classical sources to the new rhetoric of obscurity, and through it to the development of Romantic obscurity, was an unacknowledged critique of clarity and its relation to virtue and honesty as a style or a manner that was potentially even more artificial than plain obscurity. This submerged critique manifested itself only as an unresolved, contradictory network of assertions which replicated the sublime’s obfuscation of its own obscure foundations.

In Quintilian and Longinus, the new rhetoricians found a precedent for a study of the relation between the styles and the figures of clarity and obscurity, and of the power of rhetoric and poetry to have pre-reflective effects on an audience. They also found a precedent for an understanding of the function and meaning of the obscurity of the figure, and of its association with an ambiguous and contradictory ethical and instrumental valuation of the styles of clarity and obscurity. Perhaps most importantly, however, they found a precedent for the positive valuation of obscurity, not only as a rhetorical instrument, but also as a sign of the communicator’s relation to a transcendent, mysterious origin of rhetoric which served as the ground for his claim to goodness and the justification of his power. And with no classical guarantee provided for the divine origin of persuasive rhetoric, the possibility of a demonic origin of clarity persists just under the surface of the eighteenth-century philosophy of rhetoric. Finally, once there was a possibility that the concept of obscurity could be positively valued, there emerged a possibility that the figures of obscurity could be positively valued as well.