Aristotle's treatise is profound and scholarly, and every textbook of rhetoric since written is little more than a restatement of some part of his comprehensive work. It is a scientific analysis of the subject, prepared for critics and men of a highly cultured and investigating turn of mind, and was not originally intended to instruct ordinary persons in the management of words and sentences for practical purposes.
While no one doubts that an ordinary command of words may be learned, there is an almost universal impression in the public mind, and has been even from the time of Aristotle himself, that writing well or ill is almost purely a matter of talent, genius, or, let us say, instinct. It has been truly observed that the formal study of rhetoric never has made a single successful writer, and a great many writers have succeeded preëminently without ever having opened a rhetorical textbook. It has not been difficult, therefore, to come to the conclusion that writing well or ill comes by nature alone, and that all we can do is to pray for luck,―or, at the most, to practise incessantly. Write, write, write; and keep on writing; and destroy what you write and write again; cover a ton of paper with ink; some day perhaps you will succeed―says the literary adviser to the young author. And to the business man who has letters to write and wishes to write them well, no one ever says anything. The business man himself has begun to have a vague impression that he would like to improve his command of language; but who is there who even pretends to have any power to help him? There is the school grind of “grammar and composition,” and if it is kept up for enough years, and the student happens to find any point of interest in it, some good may result from it. That is the best that anyone has to offer.
Some thoughtful people are convinced that writing, even business letters, is as much a matter for professional training as music or painting or carpentry or plumbing. That view certainly seems reasonable. And against that is the conviction of the general public that use of language is an art essentially different from any of the other arts, that all people possess it more or less, and that the degree to which they possess it depends on their general education and environment; while the few who possess it in a preëminent degree, do so by reason of peculiar endowments and talent, not to say genius. This latter view, too, is full of truth. We have only to reflect a moment to see that rhetoric as it is commonly taught can by no possibility give actual skill. Rhetoric is a system of scientific analysis. Aristotle was a scientist, not an artist. Analysis tears to pieces, divides into parts, and so destroys. The practical art of writing is wholly synthesis,―building up, putting together, creating, ―and so, of course, a matter of instinct. All the dissection, or vivisection, in the world, would never teach a man how to bring a human being into the world, or any other living thing; yet the untaught instinct of all animals solves the problem of creation every minute of the world's history. In fact, it is a favorite comparison to speak of poems, stories, and other works of literary art as being the children of the writer's brain; as if works of literary art came about in precisely the same simple, yet mysterious, way that children are conceived and brought into the world.