S TEFAN H. U HLIG The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric That rhetoric has lost its classical preeminence has long been a refrain of intellectual and cultural modernity. Whether we date the resources, and lasting challenges, of an evolving present from the threshold of Romanticism, Lockean epistemology, or the earlier departures from an overwhelmingly discursive model of enquiry in Bacon or Descartes - it looks like a foundational truism that rhetoric has vanished as a global paradigm for cogent speech or writing. That rhetoric ought to be discarded, stripped of its false glories, or at least tightly controlled has been a programmatic claim not just for modernist aesthetics and poetics, but more broadly for the methods of philosophy and natural sciences. As if to formalize this late Platonic victory against sophistic skills, the modern school and university curriculum has more or less removed all opportunity for the systematic study of rhetorical techniques. Against the background of such ample evidence that rhetoric died more than a minor death across the modern period, this essay revisits a literary and institutional environment in which the disestablishment of rhetoric occurred so late, and gradually enough, as to be nearly imperceptible. The Scottish and, before long, North American attempt to recast rhetoric alongside belles lettres sought, inductively, to rederive its lessons from vernacular models of style. It also called upon the critical resources that had come to be available by the mid-eighteenth century in the adjacent studies of poetics and aesthetics. This self-consciously updated disciplinary project proved in many ways surprisingly successful and adaptable within a larger institutional and intellectual framework that was ultimately stacked against it. Its protracted, nearly silent death is a revealing episode in the extended, and itself often quite open-ended, inconclusive history of literary studies. Although there are resonances here with openly Hegelian idioms like the end of art, the widespread diagnosis of the death, or disestablishment, of rhetoric in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rests, by comparison, on a much broader base of concrete evidence. Precisely since it was moreover made, and championed from the outset, by modernity’s protagonists, the corresponding judgement by the present-day historian involves a different kind of claim. Hegel’s own thesis of the end of art did not entail that artmaking, or even great or revolutionary art, must end. What Hegel formulated as a feature of his systematically historicized philosophy was that, in virtue of the progress of self-knowledge, man’s ultimate relationship with art S TEFAN H. U HLIG 238 had necessarily changed. What had been lost was not the cultural institution but the “need for art” in the most spiritually pressing, universal sense Hegel ascribed to earlier societies, a need that was henceforth to be met by philosophy itself. To that extent, Hegel’s contention that art “in its highest vocation” had long become a “thing of the past” does nothing to challenge its enduring prominence as both a practice and an object of reflection, or indeed concerted study. 1 Much work, not least in literary studies, over recent decades has served to develop and to complicate our understanding of the obsolescence of perhaps the most wide-rangingly important intellectual technology in classical or early modern contexts. We might start a list of salient examples with John Bender and David Wellbery’s The Ends of Rhetoric. The volume launched with an incisive overview of the disruptions wrought by cognitive and creative constructions of subjectivity - from Bacon or Galileo to Kant or copyright law - against the classical hegemony of rhetoric over all forms of communication. At the same time, their collection argued for a modernist return or “repetition” (as opposed to mere residual continuities with older practices) of Nietzschean “rhetoricality”: a generalized, non-instrumental principle of groundless discursivity that manifests itself in fields as varied as philosophy of science, psychoanalysis, or literary criticism and linguistics. The end of rhetoric, by contrast, is a premise that extends and reconsiders arguments made by practitioners, opponents, even champions through all stages of the intellectual modernity to which the phrase is nowadays applied. And from the present vantage point there can be little doubt that the historic challenges to its utility and value were eventually matched by an enormous loss of leverage: in the arts and humanistic disciplines no less than in the sciences or moral thought. 2 1 Indeed Hegel thought that there was “a greater need in our day” for “philosophy of art” than there had been “in days when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction.” See Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 11. In a different spirit, Brian Vickers surveyed the long history of rhetoric, not excluding Plato’s fateful charge against conviction without knowledge, in an effort to recover its prestige for future scholarship - largely by urging the demands of continuity on tropological interests in structural linguistics, Hayden White’s metahistory, or De Manian deconstruction. David Wellbery has more recently returned to part of the terrain surveyed in The Ends of Rhetoric, and traced ways in which Romanticism worked to translate recognizably rhetorical configurations into the self-organizing features of subjective or poetic ends within themselves. Wellbery finds the endpoint of traditional rhetoric marked by its extensive transformation into self-recursive systems, whether in the notion of organic form or the self-legislating Kantian subject. No doubt the echoes of 2 John Bender and David E. Wellbery, “Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric,” in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), 5. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 239 its classical authority might help to drive such epoch-making change, but Wellbery’s reflexive systems clearly break all ties with the notoriously instrumental purposes of rhetoric as an educational or disciplinary enterprise. The present essay studies a more closely circumscribed, domain-specific version of the afterlife of rhetoric. Compared to Wellbery’s transdisciplinary perspective, we will hardly be surprised to find more qualified, pragmatic adaptations in the effort, deep into the English-speaking nineteenth century, to teach a retooled rhetoric course in universities. It is nonetheless of more than antiquarian interest what motivates and, over roughly the duration of a century, then happens to the Scottish, eighteenth-century attachment between rhetoric and belles lettres (in itself a volatile and somewhat aspirational category for this curricular development). Scholars of classical and modern literatures have long acknowledged that there is a tangled history to how the literary field came to be studied in the modern university. Even a short list of internal elements and factors to this story would include the fate of post- Aristotelian poetics as a study, eighteenth-century aesthetics, philology, the historiography of literatures as cultural archives and, not least, the long decline of rhetoric in the anglophone academy. For now, this history is not especially well understood in its relations or significance, though it arguably forms an intellectual history of which even the heydays of cross-disciplinary theory have not simply freed us. It is just one of its unanswered questions how the efforts made by rhetoric in conjunction with belles lettres failed before departments framed themselves explicitly around the history and theory of literature. There have been efforts to define a range of eighteenth-century Scottish or dissenting reappraisals of vernacular communication skills as points of origin for twentieth-century literary studies. 3 3 See for instance Franklin E. Court, Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750-1900 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992); and Robert Crawford, ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). Yet this drawn-out episode forms merely one part in a larger puzzle of collective scholarly and pedagogical self-definition. We find the search for a new rhetoric moving successfully across sociolinguistic, institutional, or geographic boundaries. At the same time, the project yields discontinuities and failed ambition where the vindicatory historian hopes for institutional self-affirmation. In the following, I seek to trace its Scottish and American instantiations as an inductive venture to reform the workings of rhetorical instruction. It would be a more challenging endeavour to identify what aspects of that project may have contributed to its end. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 240 Defensive Rhetoric For all the staying power of rhetorically inflected teaching in the Scottish and American college curricula, the broader academic odds were clearly stacked against the overarching relevance of powers of invention, disposition, even eloquence within the modern university. At least three notable developments can help account for the technology’s pervasive frailty from the decades around 1600 to more recent testimony in the Romantic period. There are obviously wide differences between the motivations or the scope of cognitive empiricism, the relations between rhetoric and logic in the trivium, or Romantic transformations in poetics and aesthetics. Yet the regularities and sway of eloquence were equally opposed by anti-instrumental stances in the theory of art, the ceding of inventive powers to the dialectic method, or the ever-soaring quest for knowledge drawn from things, not words. Often these versions of communicative scepticism overlapped and, whether separately or jointly, drastically contracted the ongoing opportunities for work that valued rhetoric. The reasons for this adverse modern climate reach back far and wide, and by the time Scottish curricular reforms took stock, the disenchantment had become only too palpable. In the most fundamental terms, the shrinking base for rhetoric within the neo-classical encyclopaedia coincides with the emergence of empirical alternatives to text-based intellectual routines. Anthony Grafton once summed up a whole array of changing practices and methods by observing that “between 1550 and 1650 Western thinkers ceased to believe that they could find all important truths in ancient books.” 4 The corresponding changes superseded continuities between, most simply, words and things, or between classical texts and the book of nature - a traditionally continuous horizon which Michel Foucault described suggestively as “a vast space requiring interpretation.” Foucault assigned the force of language in this previous integration of a textual “treasure” with the natural world to its ability to operate analogously as “the sign of things.” Things would, no less than words, present as signs, “to be discovered and then, little by little, made to speak.” 5 4 Anthony Grafton, with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992), 1. Within this classical regime, what counted as a fact would have to resonate with textual authority, and observation had to make its case before a copious discursive heritage. It is not hard to locate crucial roles for rhetoric in this hermeneutic model of enquiry. All this changed when Grafton’s scholars came to look up, ever more attentively, from their traditional texts. What was at stake for rhetoric from then on was not just its curricular authority - as supported by scho- 5 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), 33-4. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 241 lastic progress from the language arts to mathematics, or the humanist recombination of grammar and rhetoric with poetry, history, and moral philosophy. 6 Once the “primacy” of discourse, as Foucault described it, “went into abeyance,” the new paradigms of learning worked hard to control the ancient leverage of the language arts. A more far-reaching issue was its structural, encyclopaedic function as an engine of exchange and thought - all the more vulnerable for having been so classically self-evident. 7 Francis Bacon’s mighty “instauration” in the early 1600s pushed against the boundaries of learned discourse by reclaiming for the mind its native capabilities to “exercise over the nature of things the authority which properly belongs to it.” 8 This ostensibly restorative attempt assailed the values of a textual tradition Bacon blamed for mere “perpetual agitation,” a debating culture that was piously or, by turns, fractiously “whirling about,” too often “ending” an enquiry just “where it began.” 9 When Bacon vowed that, in the face of such redundancies, a “way must be opened for the human understanding entirely different from any hitherto known,” that path toward the future could not draw on mere conviction or the well-turned argument, since both relied precisely on a set of general presumptions and established lines of thought. 10 Accordingly, Valerius Terminus recast the “true end, scope, or office of knowledge” in terms that challenged rhetoric and eloquence. It should henceforth be understood “to consist not in any plausible, delectable, reverend, or admired discourse, or any satisfactory arguments, but in effecting and working, and in discovery of particulars not revealed before.” 11 To aid this more effective “commerce between the mind of man and the nature of things,” the Instauratio Magna pressed a more specific chastening of both inventio and elocutio. 12 6 On the humanist curriculum see, for instance, Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Humanism,” The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 113-14; and Charles G. Nauert, Jr., Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 12-13, 17-19, 36-41. Bacon anticipated that for future learning it would prove “not only useful, but absolutely necessary, that the excess of honour and admiration with which our existing stock of inventions is regarded be in the very entrance and threshold of the work, and that frankly and without 7 Foucault, Order, 43. 8 Francis Bacon, “The Great Instauration” (1620), The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, vol. 4 (London: Longmans, 1875), 13. 9 Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 8. 10 Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 13. 11 Francis Bacon, “Valerius Terminus,” The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 3 (London: Longmans, 1876), 233; quoted in Bender and Wellbery, 8. 12 Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 7. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 242 circumlocution, stripped off.” 13 To guide future enquiry, this intellectual sobriety would sift mere wars of words from what had been securely understood. We need not overlook the mediating or explanatory tasks Baconian method left for rhetoric to note its forceful separation from the grounds of cognitive authority. 14 Where controversial “agitation” had been relative to one side or another of a spiralling, and thus itself largely immovable, debate, the force of Bacon’s project was to neutralize enquiry for a formal, and effectively collective, “mind of man.” 15 René Descartes’s groundwork towards the modern structures of philosophy and science mounted similar resistance to the sway of eloquence in organized enquiry. The Discourse on the Method opened by attributing persistent disagreements in the ambit of the sciences to a contingent cultural errancy rather than any differences between our native gifts of understanding. If both reason and the “power of judging well” were posited as “naturally equal in all men,” the obvious “diversity of our opinions” which the Discourse faced could have arisen “solely because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things.” 16 Such straying might of course be caused by different factors, but the posthumously published Rules for the Direction of the Mind identified especially pressing sources of distraction. As for Bacon, ancient texts remained important to the work of separating “what truths have already been discovered” from the “points which remain to be worked out in the various disciplines.” But their most conscious virtues also carried the “considerable danger that if we study these works too closely traces of their errors will infect us.” 17 Descartes worried that ancient eloquence would yield “the most subtle arguments” in a mere tactical “attempt to get us to adopt their point of view.” And even where authors had proved their timeless “luck to discover something certain and evident,” they would keep such philosophical truths eloquently “wrapped up in various obscurities, either because they fear that the simplicity of their argument may depreciate the importance of their finding, or because they begrudge us the plain truth.” 18 13 Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 13. In the Discourse, Des- 14 For a sense of the range of different positions, see Brian Vickers, “Bacon and Rhetoric,” The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 200-31. Compare Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1956), 364-75. 15 Bacon, “Great Instauration,” 8. Compare Paolo Rossi, “Bacon’s Idea of Science,” Peltonen, Companion to Bacon, 32. 16 René Descartes, “Discourse on the Method” (1637), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al., vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), 111. Compare Howell, Logic and Rhetoric, 342-50. 17 René Descartes, “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” The Philosophical Writings vol. 1, 13. 18 Descartes, “Rules,” 13. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 243 cartes’s speaker famously recounted his conversion from the misconceptions of an early education in the classical languages and disciplines. Even then, the powers of constructive self-expression evidenced “gifts of the mind rather than fruits of study.” At best, rhetoric had lost its dominant advantage if “those with the strongest reasoning and the most skill at ordering their thoughts so as to make them clear and intelligible” were guaranteed to be “always the most persuasive, even if they speak only low Breton and have never learned rhetoric.” 19 John Locke’s empiricist critique of human understanding offers a revealing index of the pressures brought to bear on rhetoric by decisive transformations in the sciences and natural philosophy. The history of science amply documents the calls throughout the 1600s for impartial intellectual clarity (with mathematics as a paradigm) joined with learning through “experience” of new particulars. From the earliest, the Cartesian turn worked to impugn the dignity of studied eloquence. 20 Book three of the Essay explored the “imperfection” and “abuse” of words to help improve our fragile efforts to communicate the “internal Conceptions” of the mind. Both run directly counter to a textual tradition that had come to look self-servingly contrarian and stale. Locke famously made language central to his reconstruction of the sensory formation of ideas, a fact that illustrates all the more clearly just how wide a gap between discovery and eloquence had opened up right at the centre of the philosophical enlightenment. 21 Locke listed numerous “unavoidable” 22 doubts and uncertainties in how, by “voluntary Imposition,” 23 arbitrary sounds may signify ideas. His list of “willful” or abusive faults (like empty jargon, inconsistency, naive essentialism, and so on) is just as long. 24 Their joint interference with the common good led Locke repeatedly to call for forms of hermeneutic modesty or (towards others) charity. 25 19 Descartes, “Discourse,” 114; quoted in Bender and Wellbery, “Rhetoricality,” 11. This linguistic scepticism clearly distanced all responsible communication from the effort to exploit, indeed to amplify, precisely the ability of language to manipulate our understanding. Classical persuasion looked effectively beyond the pale alongside pleas to join in damage limitation. Locke’s listing of avoidable misapprehensions saved his comments on concerted eloquence until the very end, just prior to his sketch of “remedies.” As separate aims, Locke damned the 20 For an overview see Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions, 1500-1700 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), 131-48. 21 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 402. 22 Locke, Essay, 476. 23 Locke, Essay, 405. 24 Locke, Essay, 409. 25 See, for instance, Locke, Essay, 489. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 244 “Pleasure and Delight” of figuration or “allusion” with faint praise - no doubt with sideways glances towards poetry. Yet outside their securely segregated forms, these must be forcefully detached from intellectual progress, in whichever modern form: if we would speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetoric, besides Order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheat: And therefore however laudable or allowable Oratory may render them in Harangues and Popular Addresses, they are certainly, in all Discourses that pretend to inform or instruct, wholly to be avoided; and where Truth and Knowledge are concerned, cannot but be thought a great fault, either of the Language or Person that makes use of them. (508) Such Lockean indignation had compelling echoes in the programmatic context of the early Royal Society. Even without the cultural resonance, however, of the paradigm of natural philosophy, Locke’s systematic Essay indicates the narrow ledge on which the status of rhetorical ability had come to rest. As if that loss of overarching status had not been enough, it was accompanied by long-term and more recent fractures in relations with the other language arts which might have otherwise empowered eloquence. Though distant chronologically, both logic and, towards Romanticism, an internalized poetics would yield added, and more closely localized, discouragement for a coherent eighteenth-century discipline of rhetoric. Timothy Reiss has probed deeply into early modern intellectual history to document the dissociation of language and wisdom, or specifically discovery, in its effect on the coherence of the trivium, and the increasing status of the mathematical, quadrivial arts. He traces the beginnings of hard questions about whether language could, in fact, “meaningfully furnish any path whatever to discovery” - not least in their divisive impact on the standard integration of a “triple propaedeutic of grammar, rhetoric, and logic/ dialectic” within which, “since Hellenistic and Latin antiquity, the tasks of these three arts, even when distinct”, had structurally “been cumulative.” For Reiss, as for much of the related scholarship, the sixteenth-century work of Peter Ramus and his ally Omer Talon typifies the pressures which these transformations brought to bear on rhetoric in its role alongside logic. As Ramus noted in attacking Cicero’s rhetorical authority, both rhetoric and logic claimed to teach discovery, or how to find and order arguments, as well as how to memorize and to communicate such thought. Faced with this ostensible redundancy Ramus, as Reiss describes his intervention, “became famous for cutting the Gordian knot of their similarities, placing inventio, dispositio, and The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 245 memoria under logic, elocutio and actio under rhetoric.” 26 Scholars have offered different assessments of this notable retrenchment of the scope of rhetoric to style - to tropes and figures - and to physical delivery. Peter Mack’s new survey of Renaissance rhetoric notes the influence of Ramism while also stressing that, in Ramist practice, rhetoric and logic were meant to be taught together, and hence to complete each other. Ramist pedagogy narrowed rhetoric to the promulgation of materials that were produced elsewhere, and validated under different protocols. 27 In an argument that led beyond the period context, Wilbur Howell’s previous studies understood Ramist reforms to have been central, not least in their contribution to the deep divisions between different kinds of rhetoric-writing that emerged over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 28 Howell described rhetoric as fracturing into Ciceronian revisionism, the elocutionary movement, and eventually the “new rhetoric” of Smith and Blair once Ramism had “threatened” its enduring loss of any real involvement in discovery or argument. 29 A last exhibit to help situate the craft’s uncertain modern bearings is provided by its fraught yet undeniably committed disaffiliation by Romantic manifestos in the theory of poetry and art. The classical and neo-classical relationship between the arts of rhetoric and poetics was in some ways variable, indeed uneven. There is little doubt, however, that their deep compatibility was mutually enabling. There was obvious overlap around questions of style, or tropes and figures. The most important interaction, though onesided, was of course that works of poetry were for the longest time considered and produced by individuals who learnt their qualifying eloquence It may be hard to settle the relationship between the overall uncoupling of enquiry and language and, in Ramist teaching, a more local differentiation of an art of eloquence and presentation. However, Howell’s insistence on the vulnerability of rhetoric is certainly borne out by Reiss’s finding of a newly dominant mathematical quadrivium or, outside the arts curriculum, by the fate of rhetoric in the history of empiricism and the rise of natural philosophy. 26 Timothy J. Reiss, Knowledge, Discovery and Imagination in Early Modern Europe: The Rise of Aesthetic Rationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 2, 5. 27 Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380-1620 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011), 142- 45, 163. 28 See Wilbur Samuel Howell, Eighteenth-Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971), 24-6, 75-80; and his account of the original impact of Ramist rhetoric in Logic and Rhetoric, 146-81. For a brief overview of the appeal of Ramist rhetoric, not least in the North American context, see George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, 2 nd rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999), 249-52. 29 Howell, Eighteenth-Century Logic, 78. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 246 from rhetoric. 30 Ben Jonson’s Timber moves from Cicero and Quintilian to poetics by declaring, simply, that its objects constitute “the most prevailing Eloquence” and show, in that regard, “the most exalted Charact[er].” 31 In addition to expressive forms or ornaments, rhetoric could offer a default view of the workings of invention or arrangement. A work like Puttenham’s late sixteenth-century The Arte of English Poesie absorbed all three. 32 Conversely, Quintilian’s extensive treatment of the education of the orator assigned considerable importance to the student’s formative “digestion” of the poets. 33 It is all the more revealing to note just how readily Romantic arguments were able to repudiate deliberately crafted eloquence. Coleridge expressed a core assumption - long since axiomatic - that poetic language must defy all paraphrase (even within a given idiom) to gain its singular validity. Wellbery rightly finds Coleridge at odds with the positionality of elocutio (in relation to specific audiences, speakers, or occasions) when he defines as one of the “conditions and criteria of poetic style” that, “whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense, or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction.” 34 30 I have relied on Thomas O. Sloane’s illuminating survey of these issues in his entry on “Rhetoric and Poetry” for the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993), 1045-52. For additional material on the traditional relationship between rhetoric and poetry, see the first three essays in Wilbur Samuel Howell, Poetics, Rhetoric, and Logic: Studies in the Basic Disciplines of Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1975); Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), 145- 66; and Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, 135-6. Wordsworth defied the force of “diction” as a fungible, generic resource all the more strictly in his foregrounding of a felt affect as the measure of poetic worth. Readers could not “be too often remind- 31 Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 633. 32 See George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie. Contrived into three Bookes: The first of Poets and Poesie, the second of Proportion, the third of Ornament (London: Richard Field, 1589). 33 Quintilian’s case for repeated and absorptive reading is at 10.1.19. The Institutio envisaged that boys who had just learnt to read and write be schooled by the grammar teacher in reading aloud and ennaratio (exegesis) of the poets. Poetic texts were to be “combed,” alongside every other “type of literature,” for “learned information” (or historiae) and “for words” (1.4.2-6; see 1.8 for additional details). The adult orator was to return to reading the poets (10.1.27-30) alongside historians, philosophers and orators as part of the joint exercise of reading, writing and speaking, designed to improve his eloquence beyond the “rules for Elocution, necessary as they are for theoretical knowledge” (10.1.1). See The Orator’s Education, trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001). Compare Curtius, European Literature, 436-8. 34 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W.J. Bate (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 1: 23. See Wellbery, “Transformation,” 185. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 247 ed” that poetry “is passion,” 35 that its genesis involved an “overflow of powerful feelings,” or its recollection. 36 Wordsworth thought of such experiences as both invaluable and elusive in the context of a stupefying cultural modernity, acting to “blunt” all active and “discriminating powers of the mind.” 37 Since the relevant poetic affect clearly could not - under such extensively disabling circumstances - be contrived at will, Wordsworth sought to conceive of his language as not made but found. It was a central plank of his “experiment” to see “how far” an existing language, say, of “conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted,” or would prove fortuitously suited, “to the purposes of poetic pleasure.” The inner workings of invention or expression this involved were clearly set against the broader cultural instruments that helped to numb the subject’s faculties. Wordsworth accordingly opposed the “natural delineation” of distinctly “human passions,” “characters,” or “incidents” to the sheer “gaudiness and inane phraseology” recirculated by uncritically “modern” authors. 38 His best-remembered testimony against “mechanical” stylistic tactics disavowed the lexicon “of what is usually called poetic diction.” With that turn against inherited stylistic resources, Wordsworth repelled a habitus of craftsmanship that took, he noted, “as much pains to avoid” as his rhetorically indebted counterparts would “ordinarily take to produce it.” 39 Though anti-rhetorical manoeuvres fuelled much theorizing in the period, Wordsworth’s resistance was unusually expansive. Not only were poets to derive new figurative powers from a culturally neglected, and emphatically untrained, discursive world of rural sociability. Critics and theorists were likewise to detach themselves from prized resources in engaging with a reconceived, experiential subjectivity in its distinctive realm. Wordsworth explained that he could not fully defend to a potential reader what had motivated his poetic practice, at least not without suggesting “the selfish and foolish hope of reasoning him into an approbation of these particular Poems.” Poetic pleasure would resist such organized conviction - whether it be founded on a “systematic” effort to mount “arguments,” or on the mere persuasiveness of one’s “opinions.” 40 35 William Wordsworth, “Note to ‘The Thorn’ (1800),” in “Lyrical Ballads” and Other Poems, 1797-1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992), 351. In this definition of significant experience against both rhetoric and abstract ratio, Wordsworth echoes Kant, whose systematic mapping of our spheres of understanding diagnosed a compara- 36 William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800/ 1802),” The Prose Works, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 126. 37 Wordsworth, “Preface,” 128. 38 “Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads (1798),” in The Prose Works, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 116. 39 Wordsworth, “Preface,” 130-1. 40 Wordsworth, “Preface,” 120. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 248 ble antipathy. The felt claim of reflective judgement - of the beautiful or the sublime - again defied conceptual argument. For its part, rhetoric might usurp the free play of the understanding and imagination which defined the genuine fine arts, and none more so than poetry. In that professional, oratorical capacity, however, Kant convicted rhetoric of multiple dishonesty. Its ulterior purposes ran counter to poetic self-sufficiency which, as mere “entertaining play,” worked “honestly and uprightly.” At the same time, its “deceiving by means of beautiful illusion” could have no lasting status either “in parliament or the pulpit.” Moving “people, like machines,” to judgements which would “lose all weight for them in calm reflection,” rhetoric for Kant betrayed enlightenment itself. 41 The New Rhetoric Their precarious textual transmission has conspired to give Adam Smith’s lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres an intriguing place within our understanding of the eighteenth-century Scottish efforts to remake rhetorically driven teaching in the arts curriculum. On his instructions, Smith’s executors destroyed the manuscript, along with other texts, of the course he taught for at least fifteen years, first in 1748 as public lectures in Edinburgh and then at Glasgow University from 1751. 42 Our text is a set of student notes, and while their modern editor makes a convincing case for their reliability, it seems likely that a carefully considered publication would have clarified both certain points of phrasing and Smith’s overall design. 43 As things stand, the Lectures offer a suggestive, if perhaps not fully detailed, view of a new educational venture. 44 Contemporaries recalled Smith’s lectures to have formed a course on “Rhetoric and the Belles Lettres.” 45 Our text emphatically describes them as “a system of Rhetorick” by analogy with their long line of famous predecessors. 46 41 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 204, 205. Smith also flagged, however, from the outset that his pedagogical 42 J.C. Bryce, “Introduction,” in Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983), 1. 43 Bryce, “Introduction,” 3-5. 44 On Smith’s place in the “new rhetoric”, see Howell’s standard account in Eighteenth- Century Logic, 536-76. Also see, more recently, Mark Salber Phillips, “Adam Smith, Belletrist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, ed. Knud Haakonsen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 57-78. 45 See Bryce, “Introduction,” 7-9. 46 Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J.C. Bryce (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983), 27. I have retained original errors of spelling. Hereafter cited by page numbers in the text. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 249 intentions were at odds with the tradition - one in which “so many systems of retoric both ancient and modern were formed,” only to prove “generally a very silly set of Books and not at all instructive” (26). This complaint took concrete forms in Smith’s design, and helped to shape an educational prototype that looks - in hindsight and with our restricted textual evidence - at once invigorating for Smith’s auditors and openly unorthodox. For one thing, his lectures’ sense of their didactic purview is effectively confined to eloquence, or style. From Smith’s mid-eighteenth-century perspective, it may have looked obvious that neither the discovery nor the ordering processes involved in how his students ought to think could usefully be taught under the auspices of speech or composition. Inventio and dispositio were accordingly the primary components for his reconditioned “system” to discard. 47 Smith claimed to find “the least difficult matter,” “in every sort of eloquence,” to be manifestly the “choise of the arguments” as followed by their “proper arrangement.” He ascribed the same view even to Quintilian and Cicero who, like all subsequent “best Authors,” “never seem” to Smith “to be in ernest unless when” - with a predictable shift of attention - they give up on thought and revert back to “Stile,” exploring “ornaments of Language and Expression” (148). 48 These self-consciously linguistic features, Smith seemed to agree, were what most clearly invited “particular directions” and, in needing the “most skill,” could justify a separate rhetoric course. 49 At the same time, Smith’s previous lecture on “what is called the tropes and figures of speech” had, perhaps surprisingly, already cancelled out much of the substance formerly involved in teaching elocutio. Smith there blamed his Latin counterparts for crediting “all the beauties of language,” in their full experiential range, to misconceived manipulations of the tropes and figures. As if rhetoric could straightforwardly augment the “rules” of grammar (which the ancients rightly used to “regulate their language”), Greeks and Romans had persisted with this “old scheme” in their inability to understand the force of more creative or less regular expressive forms. Rather than attend to these “exceptions” - whose effects in fact could never be “reduced” (25) to rules - inveterate “Grammarians” (26) had hence codified the tropes and figures. In the process, they had reified a set of forms as if they might possess a separate, expressive agency. 47 Smith’s lectures did not separately focus on either memory or delivery. 48 Bryce supplies a misleading footnote in support of Smith’s remarks on Cicero and Quintilian. Institutio 3.3 offers a convenient account of the structural importance to both authors of invention and disposition. 49 Institutio 8.3 stressed the competitive appeal of eloquence by suggesting that, in his pursuit of “elegance and Ornament,” the orator sought “to recommend himself as well as his Cause” and - when compared with other branches of his art - fought “with weapons that are not only effective but polished and gleaming” (8.3.2). S TEFAN H. U HLIG 250 Smith explained, however, that the leverage of such less “common forms of speech” had to be bound up with the more integral nature of our efforts to communicate. It must be understood, in a holistic fashion, as “entirely derived from the expression they are placed in.” Figures “have no intrinsick worth” for Smith, and thus what registers as elegance or beauty must flow not from separable forms, but from a subject’s “sentiment,” or sense, and its accompanying “passion.” Smith argued, in fact, that an affective plain style could - prior to conventional ornamentation - convey “all that is passionate, tender and moving” or, conversely, what might be experienced as “noble” or “sublime” (25). It could moreover be effective in this way without having to draw on a distinctively linguistic expertise. All that was needed were communicative acts - at once semantic and affective - between sympathetic subjects: When the sentiment of the speaker is expressed in a neat, clear, plain and clever manner, and the passion or affection he is possessed of and intends, by sympathy, to communicate to his hearer, is plainly and cleverly hit off, then and then only the expression has all the force and beauty that language can give it. It matters not the least whether the figures of speech are introduced or not. (25-6) What was primary for Smith was not stylistic eloquence, but a discursive and affective self-possession that would naturally express itself. In the absence of his unrecorded opening lecture, the existing Lectures start by commenting on “perspicuity of stile” (3). Yet Smith made clear throughout that such transparency is less a choice (as in, say, Cicero’s division into grand, middle, or low styles) than the default condition of discursive sociability. 50 Where rhetoric once helped a speaker think of what to say no less than how to frame that message most engagingly, Smith’s sympathetic subject came more fully formed to the discursive scene. Along with thought or intellectual arrangement, the propriety of what an author “is possessed of and intends” served to displace conventional eloquence. As if to conjure up a sort of inborn copyright, Smith stressed the fervid self-reliance of all true engagement with an audience of others, and not least across an interval of time. He ends a section on prose writers by remarking that “perfection of stile” lies, simply, in Expressing, in the most concise, proper and precise manner the thought of the author, and that in the manner which best conveys the sentiment, passion or affection with which it affects or he pretends it does affect him and which he designs to communicate to his reader. (55) 51 50 See Cicero, Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1954), book 4. 51 Our text of Smith’s Lectures variously uses “sentiment” to describe both affective and semantic features of language. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 251 This insistence on discursive ownership left students with a range of choices: between different basic styles as well as the various kinds of practical, historical, didactic, or poetic composition which the Lectures go on to discuss. Once these were made, however, the authorial “manner” of the subject left no separate role for a technology of topics, tropes or figures. Smith went on to emphasize that this was nowhere more apparent than in the pervasive quest for “elegance” or beauty. It was here that the traditional orator was able to do most to prove himself, and to extol his art. 52 this Sentiment is nobler and more beautifull than such as are commonly met with, then your Language has all the Beauty it can have, and the figures of speech … can contribute towards it only so far as they happen to be just and naturall forms of Expressing that Sentiment. (26) What counts for Smith, however, is again primarily what his discursive subjects can claim to be proper to themselves. As long as language manifestly (or “perspicuously”) flows from “what you would express,” and the “affection” which “this matter inspires you with” (26), the aesthetic impact of a composition is above all else a function of what individuals can contribute. Only if There are suggestive parallels between Smith’s displacement of the bulk of previous rhetorical instruction and the Romantic advocacy of authentic affect. Wordsworth’s use of “passion,” for example, to oppose the promises of a poetic toolkit had quite comparable implications for poetic language. 53 For all their willingness to jettison most of the previously key components of the craft, the Lectures still aspired to the status of a “system” of discursive education. Smith relied on his account of affective and intellectual intent to help support linguistic competence across the full range of occasions in the different genres, disciplines, or institutional contexts. At the same time, the comparison with more exhaustive moves to naturalize creative practices (through poetry as passion, say, or systematically in Kant’s account of art as genius) may help to clarify a challenge for Smith’s project. If the primacy of sentiment or affect could displace so much of what once constituted the technology of rhetoric, what could Smith hope to teach his students? His account of sympathetic discourse between subjects who, ostensibly, say or write simply what comes naturally (to vary Stanley Fish’s more recent pragmatist injunction) raises a real risk of paradox. What Smith defined as the propriety of a discursive effort contrasts sharply, as he frequently reminds us, with Yet unlike Romantic efforts to recast poetics or aesthetic judgement, Smith’s curriculum had no intention to restrict itself to principally pleasurable or imaginative forms. 52 Compare Institutio 8.3 as cited in n. 49. 53 Compare James Engell, “The New Rhetoric and Romantic Poetics,” Rhetorical Traditions and British Romantic Literature, ed. Don H. Bialostosky and Lawrence D. Needham (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995), 217-32. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 252 existing strategies of thinking, ordering or eloquence - with what we might have thought a rhetoric course would teach. The Lectures’ central way of coping with this difficulty is to shift their weight from rules or precepts (so beloved by Smith’s grammarians) to teaching by example. Smith opened, as we saw, with an account of self-expression and communication, and his early lectures placed a corresponding stress on the formation and the idiomatic workings of a range of different languages including, in some greater detail, English. 54 Smith began his survey of exemplary forms by mounting “character”, i.e. the proper or authorial style, of contemporary writers like Shaftesbury, Swift or Addison against the merely technological, and hence impersonal, force of conventional craft (40, 55). He then dedicated the remaining lectures to a more or less detailed account of the available discursive options: the old kinds of oratory (demonstrative, deliberative, forensic) were thus joined by descriptive discourse, historiography and poetry, as well as the more recent species of didactic or especially scientific presentation. At least in the notes we have, these “accounts” are often less remarkable for substance than for how they teach, that is for their didactic function within Smith’s design. Nothwithstanding his misgivings against the idolatry of figurative language, Smith provided “a few observations” (27) on selected tropes and figures, most suggestively on the expressive force of metaphor (29-31). Both the substance and the intellectual fulcrum of his teaching lay, however, in exposés of a series of stylistic options which he offered much as if they constituted natural kinds. 55 The detailed articulation of this rhetoric of example had to wait until one of Smith’s students wrote up his own Edinburgh course which, after starting it in 1759, he had taught first as a rhetoric professor and then as the inaugural chair of rhetoric and belles lettres. The Lectures worked hard to disrupt a structure of impersonal, abstracted rules that might impose themselves on interactive subjects. Smith taught instead from a prospectus of existing kinds and authors, and no doubt looked to his students to extend the learning process. What his Lectures offered them was some exposure to the paradigms of style, and Smith provided some account of how students might think about and read authors like Clarendon, Swift or Addison in their distinctive styles and genres. 56 54 Smith noted that there was “nowhere more use made of figures than in the lowest and most vulgar conversation. The Billingsgate language is full of it.” (34) Once they were published twenty-four years later, Hugh Blair’s Lectures proved - to judge by its dissemination outside Scotland and well into the next century - perhaps the most successful 55 Mark Phillips has stressed the interest of Smith’s discussion of historiographical discourse. 56 See Robert Morell Schmitz, Hugh Blair (Morningside Heights, NY: King’s Crown Press, 1948), 61-63; and Bryce, “Introduction,” 8. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 253 modern textbook in the literary field. It represents at once the aspirations and, when all was said and done, the failure of the Scottish effort to shift rhetoric teaching from perennial rules to learning by example and, especially in Blair’s hands, to a culture of imaginative reading. Like his old professor, Blair rejected teaching in the “arts of speech and writing” that would compensate the loss of order and discovery to logic (and to natural philosophy) by aggrandizing the skills of eloquence: a “sort of art” that could not but seem “ostentatious and deceitful” now, that would involve “the minute and trifling study of words alone; the pomp of expression; the studied fallacies of rhetoric; ornament substituted in the room of use.” 57 Blair defined as broadly as he could the field of intellectual and discursive competence at which he aimed. His introductory address extolled “lights mutually communicated” as opposed to merely “solitary” ponderings (1). Blair’s explicit broadening of his focus to include receptive skills produced so large a purview that we might describe it as a practical philosophy of language. “Whether,” Blair sketched out, “Perspicuity” proved once again the single “fundamental quality” (185) of style for any genre, discipline or context. In a text that constantly looks for the common ground, Blair’s fervent opening commitment was to institute didactic “principles of reason and good sense” to occupy “the place of artificial and scholastic rhetoric” (3) - a site that clearly looked abandoned to the pedagogy of the late enlightenment. the influence of the speaker, or the entertainment of the hearer, be consulted; whether utility or pleasure be the principal aim in view, we are prompted, by the strongest motives, to study how we may communicate our thoughts to one another with most advantage. (1-2) To negotiate these axes between pleasure, knowledge, and belief, Blair claimed an equal stake in regular cognition and the realm of taste. On the one hand, he recalled long-standing hopes that a “true rhetoric and sound logic” might remain “nearly allied” (6-7). On the other, his substantive first four lectures were concerned entirely with matters of aesthetics (taste, genius, criticism, beauty, and sublimity). That it would prove “no less essential to man to have some discernment of beauty, than it is to possess the attributes of reason and of speech” (17) was a contention resting both on recent theory and on Blair’s sense of the civic relevance of such a claim to “manners of the present age” (7). At least since Addison, the eighteenth century had explored how “principles of Taste” could, one way or the other, be conceived as 57 Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), ed. Harold F. Harding, vol. 1 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1965), 3. Hereafter cited by page numbers in the text. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 254 “deeply founded in the human mind” (17). 58 How could Blair hope to teach discursive competence within this openended field, now complicated by his argument for the embedded mental leverage of taste? There was a forceful sense of novelty and pedagogical ambition in his move to preface his more recognizably rhetorical discussions with a set of lectures on key terms - “currently employed,” as Blair complained, “without distinct ideas annexed to them” (36). These took his students through a digest (without much originality) of commonsensically empiricist views (roughly, say, from Addison to Burke, Johnson or Hume). As we have noted, genius and taste, criticism, beauty, and sublimity were clarified at length, with markedly more space devoted to receptive than productive categories. Blair then began a more familiar treatment, at least for a Smithian disciple, of linguistic origins and evolution, the development of writing, general grammar, sentence structure, and the grounds of figurative language. In all, Blair ran through fourteen lectures before, in the structure of his course, the question of explicit teaching, rules or precepts could present itself with any force. By then, there had been every indication that - within the large horizon he had mapped out for the art of discourse - there was not much that could in any straightforward sense be taught. As if in parallel, Blair noted an evolving social obligation that indeed would give the exercise of taste a role in all self-conscious discourse. Having “become refined,” the “public ear” would at present “not easily bear what is slovenly and incorrect.” “Every author must,” in any field, accordingly “aspire to some merit in expression, as well as in sentiment, if he would not incur the danger of being neglected and despised” (7). Blair’s Lectures reproduced some of the key assumptions which had helped Smith to attenuate the rule-bound structure of traditional rhetoric. The reciprocity between specific styles and classic authors was a commonplace. 59 58 Blair signalled the modernity of “taste considered as a power or faculty of the mind” in noting that “much less is to be found” on the subject “among the antient, than among the modern rhetorical and critical writers” (17). Yet Blair raised new doubts about composition as a craft when he insisted that “the best” way to define style lay not in the regularities that might “relate to it” but in “an author’s way of thinking.” He referred his students back to principles of judgement (like taste “founded” in the mind) by describing style as “a picture” of “ideas which rise in” a specific subject’s “mind, and of the manner in which they rise there” (183). Blair showed the same revisionary edge - though also with a similar lack of expressiveness - in ending a protracted tussle between, on the one hand, the “advantage” of “method and rule,” “in every art” and, on the other, the explicit postulate that our discursive powers are intrinsically “founded in nature” (276). If the 59 The saying “the style is the man” is commonly associated with the Comte de Buffon. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 255 “sentiment of passion” which, again, “lies under the figured expression” is “in truth” what “gives it any merit” (277), Blair was right to emphasize that even in the realm of language arts, “all science” necessarily “arises from observations on practice” (276). Much of this experimental learning - based, predictably, on the superior practices of textual examples - might need to extend beyond the lecture hall. Blair followed up another nod to “mere rhetorical rules” (which his Lectures signally failed to enjoin) by granting, rather strikingly, that “supposing natural genius to be favourable, more by a great deal” of improvement in communicative practice “will depend upon private application and study, than upon any system of instruction that is capable of being communicated” (6). So what could his Lectures hope to do? As we have noted, Blair frontloaded an extended treatment of key concepts in aesthetics, though his stance on even the most central points remained so evenhanded as to obfuscate this innovative feature of his course. What followed was, much as in Smith, a demonstration or an illustrative overview of paradigms drawn from the different branches of oratory or written composition. As Blair himself previewed his course, First, some introductory dissertations on the nature of taste, and upon the sources of its pleasures. Secondly, the consideration of language: Thirdly, of style: Fourthly, of eloquence properly so called, or public speaking in its different kinds. Lastly a critical examination of the most distinguished species of composition, both in prose and verse. (14) Among more recent authors, Milton, Francis Atterbury, Swift, and Addison took pride of place. Blair’s most extensive criticism was devoted, paragraph by paragraph, to four Spectator essays, chosen from the very sequence on the pleasures of the imagination that had contributed much to his aesthetic dissertations (not a fact, remarkably, noted by Blair). After their conceptual preparation, Blair’s descriptive survey of the “kinds” or “species” which a student might encounter moved the burden of his teaching solidly towards a rhetoric of example. Blair’s prolegomena sought to reframe the work of discourse around taste, and a related lexicon of basic judgement. His review of compositional types aimed to encourage a heuristic discourse that might equally aid those who read, write, or speak publically. Neither approach to rhetoric teaches much by way of craft. And whereas emphases on teaching by example rather than by precept have a long and varied history, 60 60 Seneca’s “the way is long if one follows precepts, but short and helpful if one follows patterns [exempla]” is often cited in this context. See Epistles 1-65, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1917), 26-7. the new rhetoric’s effort to erect a system of exemplary, experiential learning throws up questions for Blair’s rigorous empiricism. Without theory (or indeed rules), how do we S TEFAN H. U HLIG 256 know what makes a text exemplary, and what do texts exemplify? If we are to examine one, or to compare it to another, how do we come by criteria or guidelines for that exercise? Blair’s theoretical preliminaries were no doubt meant to fill that gap. Yet in practice these do little more than set out their agreement with his rhetoric of example. Blair was most explicit about how his students ought to learn from textual “facts” or “observations” in his “natural account” of “criticism” - in itself one of the terms as yet “without distinct ideas annexed to them,” and hence in urgent need of reconstruction. What was to define it was the gradual emergence of more general, accumulated insights from particular experience that was, to start with, free from rule-bound prejudice. The basic task was “to distinguish what is beautiful and what is faulty” in an individual “performance,” and thus “from particular instances to ascend to general principles; and so to form rules or conclusions concerning the several kinds of beauty in works of Genius” (36). It should accordingly be clear that what might count as “rules of Criticism” could not - as a technical or craft-tradition might suggest - be formed by any induction, à priori, as it is called; that is, they are not formed by a train of abstract reasoning, independent of facts and observations. Criticism is an art founded wholly on experience; on the observation of such beauties as have come nearest to the standard which I before established: that is, of such beauties as have been found to please mankind most generally. (36-7) This process was to operate both for a long-term sense of canonicity and for the individual, who would require such a “standard” to identify what might be “beautiful” or “faulty” in the first place. David Hume had previously explored the risks of circularity involved in this empiricist account of judgement. 61 Blair’s stress on the crucial role that “private application” was to play for his didactic goals reflects the overall degree to which his Lectures shift the educational responsibility of rhetoric to reception. By establishing a role for criticism that would parallel expressive skills, Blair moved in equal parts away from the supremacy of composition (be it vocal or in writing) and from principally classroom-based criteria of success. His introductory lecture openly considered “what advantages” might be expected to accrue to those, In his effort to replace “scholastic rhetoric” with a forward-looking course, Blair based his Lectures on the prospect that a student’s wellsupported, but also subjectivized “experience” would over time translate into discursive competence. We should recall that this ambition was to hold not just for poetry and oratory, but for the universal sphere of mutual enlightenment. 61 See David Hume, “Essay of the Standard of Taste” (1757), Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985), 226-49. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 257 “as there are many,” who had “no such objects as either composition or public speaking in view” (8). They ought to, for one thing, reap the full rewards of what was now, emphatically, a “study of discourse” (3; my emphasis). It was simply that, To them, rhetoric is not so much a practical art as a speculative science; and the same instructions which assist others in composing, will assist them in judging of, and relishing, the beauties of composition. Whatever enables genius to execute well, will enable taste to criticise justly. (8) What I am suggesting is in part that these tenses - that the contrast between “will enable” and “enables” - may well matter to Blair’s mirror-imaging of critical and compositional abilities. Preceptive teaching might look to the course itself, and to the classroom setting, for its practical success. By contrast Blair signalled that - even at their propaedeutic level - the exemplary, and hence experiential features of his teaching would look to the longer term. Especially those with “speculative” interests, as he previously put it, might seek “only to improve their taste” in order “to acquire principles” which would, in time, “enable them to judge for themselves in that part of literature called the Belles Lettres” (3-4). In the end, this more extended time horizon was a function of Blair’s central emphasis on taste, and on its “deeply founded” (17) operation in the mind. If the rhetoric of example could lead students to “reflect” self-consciously upon “the operations of the imagination,” this might, in due course, “increase our acquaintance with some of the most refined feelings which belong to our frame” (10). No wonder that Blair recommended “private application and study” alongside whatever teaching might be more immediately “communicated.” At its centre, Blair’s discursive training hinged on students” self-improvement through their powers of judgement. With that gamble on the longer term, his Lectures were in a distinctive sense designed to undergo the test of time. Mobility and Stasis The new Scottish rhetoric was designed as a departure. It sought to remake the craft of composition as a subject for the future: one that would explore the patterns, regularities, and even faculties involved in sociable communication. As a practical and elementary philosophy of language, the new rhetoric was from the start involved with questions of mobility that characterized the socio-linguistic - and hence cultural and economic - opportunities of students at the Scottish universities. When the poet John Home campaigned for the establishment of a new rhetoric chair for Adam Ferguson in 1756, he made it clear that “Eloquence in the Art of speaking” would be “more necessary for a Scotchman than any body else as he lies under some disadvantages S TEFAN H. U HLIG 258 which Art must remove.” 62 As the textbook version of the Scottish effort to transform what rhetoric might teach, Blair’s Lectures proved exceptionally mobile and, so far as we can tell, effective in a range of different educational contexts - and for a protracted period of time. They were translated promptly into several European languages, but a more striking index of Blair’s long-term resonance lies in the sheer number of English editions, printings, and abridgements, both in Britain and in North America. This special resonance of education for relatively marginal participants in British culture was confirmed by Smith, who noted the complexities that enter into “the idea we form of a good stile” once such conceptions operate at cultural or geographic distances. “We in this country,” Smith conceded to his students, “are most of us very sensible that the perfection of language is very different from that we commonly speak in” (42). The Scottish rhetoric was in part meant to negotiate such differences. There was, moreover, a more literal sense in which it bridged the distances between contrasting sociocultural contexts. 63 Following the 1783 edition, which looked back on more than twenty years of active lecturing and was issued simultaneously in Edinburgh, London, and Dublin, there were at least ten full-length editions by 1800, and at least twenty-seven by the middle of the nineteenth century. Of these, at least fifteen appeared in North America (not counting various abridgements). 64 In the nineteenth-century Scottish universities, curricular reforms soon tended to displace courses like Blair’s with teaching that would concentrate on logic, moral philosophy, or more basic forms of composition teaching (of the kind that still continues for remedial purposes at university level). 65 By contrast, the evolving landscape of American collegiate education proved consistently receptive to the project of which Blair was the chief export. Even before the Lectures were printed at Philadelphia in 1784, the College of Rhode Island (later Brown University) ordered the original from England. There is ample evidence that Blair supplied the single most consistently used arts textbook in the period from independence to the Civil War. 66 62 Quoted from Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985), 108. If we combine curricular and bibliographic evidence, we may well ask how many 63 The first German, Italian, and French editions appeared respectively in Leipzig (1785- 86), Parma (1801-02), and Geneva (1808). 64 For a partial list of editions, see Schmitz, Hugh Blair, 144-5. 65 See Thomas P. Miller, The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the Cultural Provinces (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997), 262-7. 66 See Franklin E. Court, The Scottish Connection: The Rise of English Literary Study in Early America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2001), 14-15; and Warren Guthrie, “The Development of Rhetorical Theory in America, 1635-1850: III. Domination of the English Rhetorics,” Speech Monographs, 15 (1948): 61-2. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 259 other works of literary theory or education have, outside the classical tradition, seen a comparable degree of cultural dissemination. Yet alongside this remarkable capacity to circulate for many decades and across a broad contextual domain, it is equally striking to observe the ways in which the Scottish rhetoric stagnated - not least since its stasis and mobility would coincide. It is not just in Scotland that the project failed to find continuous adopters, or to translate into modern disciplinary forms. Its North American success was similarly marked by an extensive cultural presence, indeed prominence, combined with a persistent lack of intellectual influence. Of the three major rhetoric courses that were crafted in the period, and have survived, only John Witherspoon’s early Princeton lectures share Blair’s interest in “taste, and criticism” (or his faible for “preliminary discourses”). 67 In works like Richard Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric, a traditional perspective on the role of rhetoric alongside logic sought to reconcile the rifts which philosophical critique had introduced into the language arts by separating adult eloquence from intellectual discovery. 68 Other than Whately, the two textbooks to compete with Blair both disassembled ways of thinking about language which the Scottish rhetoric had sought to merge. Without help from taste or criticism, George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric sought to reconstruct a modern sense of eloquence that would include validity and evidence as part of its appeal. Campbell’s text had been a prominent alternative to Smith’s and Blair’s endeavours long before it met with institutional success. 69 67 John Witherspoon, “Lectures on Eloquence,” Selected Writings, ed. Thomas Miller (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1990), 231, 233. The two other texts are John Quincy Adams, Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Delivered to the Classes of Senior and Junior Sophisters in Harvard University, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1810); and Edward T. Channing, Lectures Read to the Seniors in Harvard College (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1856). The last alternative to Blair, another Scottish legacy, decoupled criticism from all practical concern with composition. Elements of Criticism by Henry Home, Lord Kames, was entirely reception-oriented, and provided college students 68 Richard Whately, Elements of Rhetoric: Comprising an Analysis of the Laws of Moral Evidence, with Rules for Argumentative Composition and Elocution, ed. Douglas Ehninger (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2010). Whately’s textbook was first published in Dublin in 1828, and became an instant success in the American colleges. See Guthrie, “Development,” 65; and Albert R. Kitzhaber, Rhetoric in American Colleges, 1850-1900, intr. John T. Gage (Dallas: Southern Methodist UP, 1990), 53-4. 69 George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, ed. Lloyd F. Bitzer (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1963). First drafted in the 1750s, Campbell’s Philosophy appeared in 1776, and became popular in the 1820s. See Howell, Eighteenth-Century Logic, 577-612; Guthrie, “Development,” 63; and Kitzhaber, Rhetoric, 52-3. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 260 with a copious digest of what early-eighteenth-century aesthetic theory had had to say about the workings of the different fine arts. 70 How, then, should we think about this correlation of an extraordinary distribution, via Blair, for Scottish rhetoric and belles lettres with the project’s failure to inspire any concrete adaptation or development in the academy? By the later nineteenth century, all institutional initiative in Britain and in the United States fed into the establishment of literature departments, whose supporting paradigm of scholarship fused literary historiography with philological prowess. 71 Accounts of the distinctiveness and separation of the spheres of modern cultural activity, like that produced by Jürgen Habermas, have often pointed to Kant’s three Critiques as the high watermark of a modernity in which science and philosophy, art or aesthetics, and law or moral thought develop on quite different tracks. For all their drive to educate the judgement for enlightened sociability, the spread of Blair’s ideas had by then led to little more than their dispersal. Obviously the failure, just like the success, of such a disciplinary development is likely to have been overdetermined. We may find a starting point, however, in Blair’s aim to improve the total range of future discourse and communication with a rhetoric anchored in capacities of taste. Blair largely sidestepped precepts in his effort to engage his students with demonstrative examples. His large-scale pedagogical attempt to show, not tell, installed the individual learning experience as an important measure of success. This may have been a hard act to pull off in an increasingly divided modern landscape of communication and research. 72 70 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (1762), ed. Peter Jones, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005). On the collegiate use of Kames, see Louis Franklin Snow, The College Curriculum in the United States (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1907), 122, 125; and Court, Scottish Connection, 43-50, 151-2. In view of such specific and self-differentiating forms of discourse, Blair’s effort to derive both communication and enlightenment from the first principles of taste might lead us to compare his propaedeutic work with Schiller’s theoretical construction of aesthetic education as a comprehensively redemptive force. The task which both would face - whether belatedly or with intent - would be to overcome the deep divisions of modernity through an emphatically non-disciplinary, holistic mode of education. What the contrast with Schiller’s idealist proposals may point up is not only how unprepared Blair’s elementary faith in a discursive sociability looks within an increasingly divergent world of modern disciplines. It serves moreover to remind us that the Scottish rhetoric of example left itself wide 71 See, for instance, Miller, Formation, 255-67. For arguments that claim a lasting legacy for Blair in modern literary studies, contrast Court, Institutionalizing; and Crawford, Scottish Invention. 72 See for instance Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), esp. 1-2, 206-10. The Long Goodbye to Rhetoric 261 open to heuristic failure. Blair did much to overcome scholastic precepts, but the readers he empowered may have let him down. S TEFAN H. U HLIG 262 Works Cited Adams, John Quincy. Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, Delivered to the Classes of Senior and Junior Sophisters in Harvard University, 2 vols. Cambridge: Hilliard and Metcalf, 1810. Bacon, Francis. The Works of Francis Bacon. Eds. James Spedding. Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. London: Longmans, 1861-79. Bender, John, and David E. Wellbery. 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