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II. Romantic Invention versus Romantic GeniusKlaus Dockhorn’s essay ‘Wordsworth und die rhetorische Tradition in England’ argued thatWordsworth should be recognised as a classical rather than a romantic writer due to his classicalmanners, his use of classical rhetoric, his concerns with morals and his Horatian desire to ‘instruct’ aswell as ‘delight’ his readers. Dockhorn also proposed that Wordsworth made striking and deliberateuse of a particular rhetorical device, the ‘ethos-pathos formula’, which originated in Book VI ofQuintilian’s De Institutione Oratoria. Quintilian had distinguished between two different types ofemotion or passion as he adopted Cicero’s adaptation of Aristotle’s terms to suit his own teachingsabout the role played by appeals to the emotions in oratory, and Dockhorn had discoveredWordsworth’s use of these distinctions in his work in the late 1790s.In On Wordsworth’s Prelude, Herbert Lindenberger drew attention to the fact that when, inThe Prelude, Wordsworth, records that he ‘grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear’ (I 305-6),he was using those terms to describe a particular dichotomy. He notes that behind Wordsworth’susage stood a whole century of discussion on the nature of the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘sublime’ (23), andhe refers to earlier studies that had already discussed the nature of this dichotomy before turning toDockhorn’s essay. 11 In the essay Dockhorn had argued that Wordsworth’s understanding of thisdichotomy owed less to Edmund Burke’s famous treatment of the sublime and the beautiful, and moreto Wordsworth’s ‘training in the ancient rhetorical tradition which distinguishes between pathos andethos as the opposing types of emotion which poetry seeks to depict, or which possesses the orator atalternate moments’ (25). Quintilian had described a dynamic art that the orator needed to exploit as hemade appeals to pathos, (to the passions), and appeals to ethos, (to the ‘manners’) in his delivery of anargument. Sometimes ‘vehement’, states of emotion needed to be raised in the minds of an audiencefor powerful (sublime) effect to help ‘persuade’ them of a particular cause. But at the same time theorator had to know how to calm and placate a hostile audience, and restore a more balanced mood bymaking appeals to ethos, to the audience’s kinder, and gentler, natures. The best orator had to knowhow to play on the emotions and control the feelings of his audience by utilising this ability to stir upand then calm their passions. Wordsworth shows evidence of knowing Quintilian’s description of thistechnique in writing The Borderers, and his later assertion in the Lyrical Ballads that ‘poetry ispassion’, was based on his understanding of Quintilian. 12Lindenberger found Dockhorn’s thesis useful and illuminating, using it in his own study ofThe Prelude and pointing out how Wordsworth applied the two terms, which not only modify andoffset each other, but were also used to illustrate a transition, a development from pathos to ethos. ‘Inthe three major philosophical poems of the Great Decade - ‘Tintern Abbey,’ the ‘Immortality Ode,’11 The classic studies being: Samuel H Monk, The Sublime. Marjorie H. Nicholson, Mountain Gloom andMountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite. Ernest L. Tuveson, The Imagination as aMeans of Grace, Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism.12 See Wordsworth’s note to ‘The Thorn’: ‘For the Reader cannot be too often reminded that Poetry is passion:it is the history or science of feelings’ (MLB 38: 55-6).5