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Abstract
Hugh Blair and Thomas De Quincey demonstrate that the aesthetic in rhetoric could trigger powerful effects. Their ultimate aim was to achieve the sublime. Their rhetorical theory was part of the Romantic Movement that swept through the arts. Viewing Blair and De Quincey through the Romantic lens not only provides a new reading of these theories, it also provides a foundation on which to build a Neo-Romantic theory by borrowing from relevant segments of contemporary rhetorical theory. The end result is a unique perspective on discourse, an aesthetic lens that seeks to achieve the sublime built on the defining elements of Romanticism: nature, nationalism and narrative.
Notes
1. Kellner (237) attributes the Romantics’ embracing of the medieval period to their view that the Enlightenment created a “desiccated world.”
2. See Golden and Corbett (56) where Blair cites Burke’s work. I mostly cite from the Golden and Corbett abridged version of Blair’s work because it is the most accessible. However, I relied on the full texts to study and review the theory presented here. Where I found passages not in the Golden and Corbett volume, I cite the Harding edition as “Blair.”
3. Hume’s position is supported by recent research, which is nicely summarized by Haidt (25–30, 48–50, 114–27, 325–26).
4. Thomas Reid reinforced Hume’s theory in Edinburgh.
5. Lord Byron died at Missolonghi. Delacroix’s painting of “Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi” re-conceives of the French Revolution’s iconic Marianne as Greece. Victor Hugo wrote a poem about the Turks’ destruction of Missolonghi. Delacroix’s second painting portrayed the destruction of Chios.
6. He borrowed the term “organic” from Aristotle’s Poetics, chapter VII.
7. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
8. Johann Hamann (1730–1788) was one of the leaders of this movement and his pupil would become one of Romanticism’s principle architects.
9. Schiller should not be confused with Friedrich Schelling, who completed his Naturphilosophie in 1797, thereby reinforcing the Romantic Movement.
10 “The British Romantics were interested in the same issues as Hugh Blair” (Veeder 100).
11. The influence of Blair on American education can be seen in an anecdotal piece of evidence. Writing about his education at Harvard, James Freeman Clarke (47–48) recounts coursework from “Blair’s ‘Rhetoric’.”
12. Blair’s notion of taste was common during the Scottish Renaissance. See, for example, Archibald Alison’s publication of 1790, Essays on the Nature and Principle of Taste. Agnew (Thomas De Quincey 77) claims that De Quincey has a romantic “insistence on the individual’s subjective vision.”
13. Cmiel (119) claims that “By the 1850s … Blair’s ideas could be used in ways he had never expected. … Romantic concepts of the sublime became ways to dismiss ‘taste’ as a relevant political category.”
14. Later, De Quincey referred to Blair’s advice as “elegant but desultory” (Burwick 192). De Quincey’s essays on “Style,” “Rhetoric,” and “Conversation” were originally published in periodical magazines. Veeder (301) claims that De Quincey’s essay on rhetoric is a “good starting point for a discussion of the British Romantics’ view of rhetoric.”
15. De Quincey touched on probability and the enthymeme only in passing.
16. De Quincey’s relationship with Wordsworth eventually decayed when De Quincey came to believe that Wordsworth’s view was too narrow and intolerant. On the other side of the equation, Wordsworth was offended by De Quincey’s reliance on opium (Agnew, Thomas De Quincey 19, 31).
17. De Quincey’s works were consolidated into fourteen volumes by the end of the nineteenth century. However, scholars continued to find manuscripts well into the twentieth century. His diary from 1803 was published in 1927 and a volume of “New Essays” was published in 1966.
18. Experts consider him among the “first generation of Romantics,” though his actual publication dates put him into the second generation (Barrell vii).
19. De Quincey refers to the French “sentimentalists,” such as Chateaubriand, as representing those who rely on eloquence without the interaction with rhetoric and thus are only “semi-poetic” (Burwick 121).
20. In the beginning of his essay on rhetoric, De Quincey refers to Aristotle for the correct definition of rhetoric.
21. In his Rhetoric, Gibbons lays out a huge branching list of 288 tropes and figures. He is not to be confused with Edward Gibbon, the parliamentarian who wrote The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.
22. Blair admits the influence of Addison on his theory of imagination particularly with regard to “beauty, grandeur, and novelty” (Golden and Corbett 51). In his discussion of delicacy, Blair references Longinus as the master of the subject.
23. Schiller (Samtliche Werk 639) was concerned with converting natural beauty into artistic beauty, while being careful not to debase the natural in the process.
24. This view comports with the beliefs of the “Young Edinburgh Set” who were particularly interested in the conversational theories of Hume and Adam Smith (Agnew, Thomas De Quincey 65, 68).
25. Friedrich Schiller (“On the Aesthetic” 300), who lived from 1759 to 1805, was a follower of Kant’s aesthetics, but rejected Kant’s call for “disinterested satisfaction.” Schiller saw the artist as an active “mediator between man and nature” (Wellek 232–33).
26. For some Romantics, the divine is manifest in nature and they embrace pantheism. William Blake’s poetry, William Wordsworth’s Lucy Gray sonnets, Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde provide examples.
27. Often using Yeats as an example, Kermode points out that the genius of Romantic poets was to create the reconciling image, one that was rooted in material nature, yet inspired one to the transcendent.
28. Schiller conceived of “an actual union and interpenetration of matter and form” (Wellek 234).
29. Burke joined the Academy of Belles Lettres while studying at Trinity College in Dublin.
30. In his essay on Conversation, De Quincey claims that it too can aid invention process through “revelations of affinity, suggestion, relation, analogy, that could not have been approached through any avenues of methodical study” (Burwick 268–69).
31. Many of the Romantics when exploring the faculty of imagination fell back on the theory of Longinus’s Peri hupsous to make the real more real.
32. The quest for peaceful repose surfaces often in Romantic literature. The opening of Keats’s Hyperion, “Still as the silence,” inspires Yeats’s still woods of Arcadia. In some Romantic literature, death becomes the symbol of peace, stillness, or silence. Death, after all, is part of nature. De Man (181) claims that Yeats became a post-Romantic during World War I.
33. See, for example, the work of Marcus and Marcus and MacKuen on affect theory.
34. Aristotle and Heidegger primarily use the phrase “state of mind,” among other terms such as mood, or emotion (Smith and Hyde).
35. In his poem “The Soldier” he had written: “If I should die, think only this of me;/ That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England.”
36. The Scottish Romantic Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was deeply influenced by Goethe and Schiller, both about whom he wrote. Charles Dickens used Carlyle’s three-volume account (1837) of the French Revolution to provide the setting for A Tale of Two Cities.
37. Winthrop borrowed the terms from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew.
38. For a take on this structure from a rhetorical perspective, see Fisher, “Reaffirmation.” His study of the 1972 election relates directly to American civil religion.
39. See Johnson 79.