Enlighten this, jerks

You disappoint me, Enlightenment period. How can a time of intellectual resurgence be so boring? Bizzell and Herzberg say the Enlightenment was “marked by revolutions in science, philosophy, and politics” (791). Okay, that’s fine. I’m no wannabe scientist, and certainly not a real one, but with philosophy—with its tendency toward the abstract—thrown in the mix, I thought there might be something for me here. This is only barely the case.

So, rhetorical theory notably moved back to focusing on all five classical canons (792). Couldn’t you take a hint from that, Enlightenment? The classical rhetoricians, however exhausting in some cases, spoke and wrote in ways that combined ornament and function. Cicero was perhaps the simplest, and even he could manage often to conjure up a combination of words that was pleasing to the ear. However, you just seem to dislike aesthetically pleasing things, and it seems undeniable that effective communication can still be eloquent.

I take offense, then, as a card-carrying ethosician, to the fact that you called for plainness in rhetoric and that rhetoric “seemed to be an art of obfuscation” to you (795). Surely, matters of rhetoric are relevant to your beloved science, philosophy, and politics. This goes so far as a want for a “world without rhetoric” as called for by the British Royal Society (795) and is supported by Thomas Sprat who concluded in 1667 that, “eloquence ought to be banish’d out of all civil Societies, as a thing fatal to Peace and good Manners” (796).

Well, Mr. Sprat, I happen to think that poor manners would be a refusal to offer your audience something they should actually like to hear, or not giving those on the behalf of whom you speak the courtesy of a well-articulated cause that inspires people, or not even respecting the content of your speech enough to elevate it above any other mundane topic. You see, not only are you arguing against what’s creative and interesting, you assume that because something is creative and interesting that truth must be obscured in some way.

Thankfully, not all of your Enlightenment chums were so in love with the boring as to denounce eloquence entirely. The stigma around ornamental speaking may have even led to Gilbert Austin’s evolution of elocution in his Chironomia (804), and reasonably so—after all, while it is quite possible to obfuscate truth through language, it’s hard to do so by standing a certain way and waving your hands around, unless it’s so obnoxious as to distract from what’s being said.

Anyhow, Austin’s and Thomas Sheridan’s focus on elocution provide for me a shining light in what sounds like an otherwise sleep-inducing time. And here’s a question: Does anyone agree with the criticisms of eloquence at all? Did the critics of rhetoric ignore its artistic and functional value or disbelieve it had them? Did this period really offer anything new to the theories of classical rhetoricians or did it just move rhetoric back to where it was (with the five canons)?

And finally, and most importantly, if you had a baby and it was a two-headed Cicero-Quintilian monster, what would you name it? Quinticero, or Cicilian?