Example, an old adage has it, is not proof. But then, apart from mathematics and litigation, proof is not everywhere required, while examples have various uses. “Example is the school of mankind,” wrote Edmund Burke, “and they learn at no other.” In his book Farnsworth’s Classical English Style (2020), Ward Farnsworth holds that “examples show how principles work, and the principles can be adapted to less dramatic settings. You can learn from the Gettysburg Address even if you aren’t writing the Gettysburg Address.” In Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric (2010), the professor at the University of Texas School of Law adds that “examples also can do more than exposition to teach lessons about the beauty of a device, about its technical details, and about the occasions for its use.” 

In these two titles, along with Farnsworth’s Classical English Metaphor (2016) and now Farnsworth’s Classical English Argument, examples abound, hundreds upon hundreds of them. What is distinctive about these four books on language, its traditions, devices, possibilities, and aesthetics, is that, unlike other books and essays on writing—Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” come to mind—they do not instruct their readers on what to avoid but on what makes for good writing. As the preface to Farnsworth’s Classical English Style puts it, these books “ask why good writing sounds that way.” In addition to publishing The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual in 2018 and The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook in 2021, Farnsworth is currently at work on a Latin textbook, which is built on examples from Seneca, Cicero, Erasmus, and others. 

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His larger project is the revival of rhetoric in our day. “Rhetoric now has a bad name,” he writes in the preface to Farnsworth’s Classic English Metaphor, “to many people it has come to mean bombast. I wish to help with the rehabilitation of the word, however, and to encourage its use in the honorable way that was common until recently—the sense of ‘rhetoric’ that made it something for Lincoln to study and for Churchill to write about, and that caused it to be considered one of the liberal arts.” 

Not the least impressive thing about Farnsworth’s four Classical English books is the range of knowledge they display. This comes through in his choice of examples, drawn chiefly from writings of the 18th and 19th centuries, though occasionally from the King James Bible and Shakespeare and from the early decades of the 20th century. The greatest number of his examples come from Edmund Burke, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Samuel Johnson and—a jump in time here—Winston Churchill. Some come from literary artists (Daniel Defoe, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Herman Melville, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw), but the larger number are from philosophers, statesman, English parliamentarians, Irish orators, and U.S. founders and senators, with occasional comic relief supplied by Max Beerbohm and H.L. Mencken. “Men so constantly associated with actors,” Mencken in one of these examples writes, “tend to take on the qualities of the actor—his idiotic vanity, his herculean stupidity, his chronic underrating of his betters.” All derive from writing that has endured. 

Ward Farnsworth’s four books take up various subjects in the realm of language, which he sets out in concise, always clear prose, and then illustrates by examples. “Examples, if they are to teach all these things,” he writes, “must be not only apt but extensive.” After each of his subjects—metonymy, isocolon, polyptoton, cadence, et alia—Farnsworth sets out seven, eight, sometimes more than a dozen examples. He recommends that his books “can be read in any order by those who prefer to wander around, a practice I encourage. The book [here he refers to Farnsworth’s Classical English Argument, though it applies as well to the others] is meant as a reference, though a readable one—the kind in which learning (and entertainment, too) may be helped by some serendipity.” 

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Browsable though they may be, I read the books in the order in which they were published, but found I could not read more than a dozen or so pages at a sitting. Far from being page-turners, the books are page-stoppers—which is meant not as a criticism but a compliment. The provided examples are rich and interesting in themselves, and on many one wishes to pause and dwell on both their construction and meaning. Some of these four books are better suited to instruction by example than others. His latest, Farnsworth’s Classical English Argument, may be one of the others. Examples of brilliant metaphors or lengthy sentences or anastrophes are more readily illustrated than examples of kinds of argument. Yet on the wide variety of argument and the equally capacious number of defenses against them, Farnsworth does not disappoint. 

The author’s own political views are admirably kept under wraps. In no way do they slant or otherwise affect his work on these four volumes. He apologizes for the relative paucity of female writers from the 18th and 19th centuries available to him, and quotes fairly frequently from Frederick Douglass, a powerful writer. But none of his books is marred by wokish false sentimentality. In the preface to Farnsworth’s Classical English Style, he writes: 

It’s also natural to ask what relevance these ideas about rhetoric could have in an era when Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. Lincoln is one of this book’s heroes, and from a rhetorical standpoint Trump might be considered the anti-Lincoln. But Trump confirms the importance of our subject. A large part of his appeal was rhetorical…. His way of talking was unlike that of his adversaries…. Put dignified language into his mouth and he amounts to nothing…. But such a casual lack of dignity in a tycoon, television star, and presidential candidate—this was something! A more vivid collision of high and low would be hard to devise, and many people have found it compelling or amusing enough to make all objections seem trivial. 

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More than one reviewer has pointed out that the new Farnsworth’s Classical English Argument demonstrates all too vividly the decline in political discourse between the 18th and 19th centuries and the current day. True enough, one has to strain to think of contemporary English or American political figures notable for their use of their language or the subtlety of their arguments. I happen to appreciate Senator Tom Cotton’s straightforward language and general gravity of demeanor, and I attend to the comic metaphors and similes with which Louisiana senator John Kennedy lards his comments, the most recent of which I heard ran: “In Washington they’ll unplug your life support to charge their cell phones.” Perhaps that’s not quite up there with Samuel Johnson’s “unexpected copulation of ideas,” but it ain’t bad. For the rest, too few are the current senators and representatives who are impressively distinctive let alone distinguished. 

Farnsworth’s Classical English Argument provides chapters on, among other subjects, “Insult and Invective,” “Deploying Emotion,” “Deduction and Induction,” “Ad Hominem Arguments,” “Reductio ad Absurdum,” and—a new one for me—“Abduction and Related Forms of Inference.” In the up-to-the-moment category, there is a chapter titled “Slippery Slopes” and another “Empathy and Related Uses of the Imagination.” The overall point, the gravamen, of the book is set out in its preface: 

The writers and speakers we’ll examine were able to disagree about important things without the quick descent into savagery or imbecility that has become so familiar. [Are you out there Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?] They were invested in good manners to an extent that can seem strange to modern ears; they were protective of the dignity of their enterprise and the parties to it. But that’s not to say they were gentler. Those customs sometimes let them vilify each other with more zing than is common now while debasing themselves less.

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In explanatory notes, often providing definitions, Farnsworth sets out the examples that are to follow. Here he is on slippery slopes: “Someone makes a proposal that seems harmless in itself. It’s attacked because taking the good step now will lead to bad ones later. This pattern is often known now as a slippery slope, but it has been the subject of other metaphors as well.” And here from his introductory words to the chapter on “Ethos”: “Your own ethos is typically fortified by showing yourself to be humble, trustworthy, seeking the best for your audience, having the same values that they do, etc. This chapter thus considers various ways to position oneself in relation to the audience.” 

But everywhere through the book one comes upon hidden gems, such as this one from Thomas Babington Macaulay: “Let us use one weight and one measure. Let us not throw history aside when we are proving a theory, and take it up again when we have to refute an objection founded on the principles of that theory.” Or David Hume on natural religion: “A mind, whose acts and sentiments and ideas are not distinct and successive; one, that is wholly simple, and totally immutable, is a mind which has no thought, no reason, no will, no sentiment, no love, no hatred; or, in a word, is no mind at all.” 

The man who composed and orchestrated Farnsworth’s Classical English Argument and its three preceding volumes, is among the few living Americans I know who qualify as truly learned—beyond erudite, deeper, subtler, of greater breadth and wider culture. The only writer I can think to compare him with is Quintilian, the first-century A.D. author of Institutio Oratoria, a work popular in the early years of the Roman empire that took up the subject of education, cited various Greek and Roman writers worthy of study, and provided many insights into human nature and about the value of art. Quintilian, too, deplored the fallen state of rhetoric in his time and wished to revive it. He was the Ward Farnsworth of his day.