In nonfictional prose, essayists, moralists, naturalists, and others regularly evoked nature scenes. The most sumptuous masters of prose composed landscapes as elaborately as landscape painters. The French writer and statesman Chateaubriand (1768–1848), for example, who was not outstandingly successful in inventing plots or in creating characters independent from his own self, was a master of description; his writings influenced the French Romantic poets, who set the impassive splendour of outward nature in contrast to the inner anguish of mortals. The 19th-century English art critic John Ruskin had a more precise gift of observation, as revealed in his descriptions of Alpine mountains and of the humblest flowers or mosses, but his ornate and sonorous prose was the climax of a high-flown manner of writing that later read like the majestic relic of another era. American nonfictional writers of the same period such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau scrupulously described the lessons of organization, of unity, and of moral beauty to be deciphered from the vicissitudes of nature. Russian essayists vied with novelists in their minute yet rapturous descriptions of the thaw releasing the torrents of spring or the implacable force of the long Northern winters. Writers more inclined to the observation of social life, in satirical sketches of the mechanically polite and artificial habitués of salons, helped the novel of social life come into existence in several Western countries.

Narrative

The narrative element is less conspicuous in writing that does not purport to relate a story than in fictional works, but there is a role for narrative in letters, diaries, autobiographies, and historical writing. Most often, an incident is graphically related by a witness, as in letters or memoirs; an anecdote may serve to illustrate a moral advice in an essay; or an entertaining encounter may be inserted into an essay or a travel sketch. Digression here represents the utmost in art; it provides a relief from the persistent attention required when the author is pursuing his purpose more seriously. Similarly, such writing provides a pleasant contrast to the rigid structure of the majority of novels since the late 19th century. In historical writing, however, simplicity and clarity of narrative are required, though it may be interspersed with speeches, with portraits, or with moral and polemical allusions. In other forms of nonfictional prose, the meandering fancy of the author may well produce an impression of freedom and of truth to life unattainable by the more carefully wrought novel. Many writers have confessed to feeling relieved when they ceased to create novels and shifted to impromptu sketches or desultory essays. The surrealist essayists of the 20th century poured their scorn on detective fiction as the most fiercely logical form of writing. In contrast, the author of essays or other nonfictional prose may blend dreams and facts, ventures into the illogical, and delightful eccentricities.

Expository and argumentative modes

The rules of old-fashioned rhetoric apply better to expository and argumentative prose than to the other modes. These rules were first set down in ancient Greece by teachers who elicited them from the smooth eloquence of Socrates, the impassioned and balanced reasoning of Demosthenes, and others. The ancient Romans went further still in codifying figures of speech, stylistic devices, and even the gestures of the orator. Such treatises played a significant part in the education of the Renaissance Humanists, of the classical and Augustan prose writers of 17th-century England and France, of the leaders of the French Revolution in the 18th century, and even in 19th-century historians and statesmen such as Guizot in France and Macaulay and Gladstone in Britain. But the sophisticated oratory of such 18th-century British orators as Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edmund Burke, and Charles Fox or, during the 20th century, that of Winston Churchill, hardly seems attuned to audiences in the age of television.

It has been suggested by students of German history that Adolf Hitler, in his vituperative speeches at Nuremberg in the 1930s, fascinated the Germans because they had been unaccustomed, unlike other Western nations, to eloquence in their leaders. If a large part of a population is illiterate, unending flows of eloquence may constitute a convenient means of educating the masses. Elsewhere, a more familiar and casual type of address from political leaders tends to be preferred in an era of mass media. The gift of a superior orator has been facetiously defined as that of saying as little as possible in as many words as possible. Like sermons, many types of formal address such as lectures, political speeches, and legal pleadings appear to be doomed as documents of literary value, as Burke’s or Lincoln’s orations and addresses were when they were learned by heart by the younger generations and helped mold the style and contribute to the moral education of men.