Our language depends
wholly (or very nearly so) on arrangement of words, and the key is the
logical relationship. A man who knows all the forms of the Latin or
Greek language can write it with substantial accuracy; but the man who
would master the English language must go deeper, he must master the
logic of sentence structure or word relations. We must begin our study
at just the opposite end from the Latin or Greek; but our teachers of
language have balked at a complete reversal of method, the power of
custom and time has been too strong, and in the matter of grammar we are
still the slaves of the ancient world. As for spelling, the
irregularities of our language seem to have driven us to one sole method,
memorizing: and to memorize every word in a language is an appalling
task. Our rhetoric we have inherited from the middle ages, from
scholiasts, refiners, and theological logicians, a race of men who got
their living by inventing distinctions and splitting hairs. The fact is,
prose has had a very low place in the literature of the world until
within a century; all that was worth saying was said in poetry, which the
rhetoricians were forced to leave severely alone, or in oratory, from
which all their rules were derived; and since written prose language
became a universal possession through the printing press and the
newspaper we have been too busy to invent a new rhetoric.
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