SOURCE: "Johnson and Blair on Addison's Prose Style," in Studies in Philology, Vol. 39, No. 4, October, 1942, pp. 638-49.

Of the critics in [Joseph] Addison's own century who pronounced on his style none was more approving or more exhaustive in his treatment of it than Dr. Hugh Blair. Blair was the minister of the most distinguished pulpit of eighteenth century Scotland, that of St. Giles' Cathedral, or, as it was commonly known, the High Church, in Edinburgh, and arbiter elegantiarum of Scottish letters in the latter half of the eighteenth century. On December 11, 1759, Blair began to read in the University of Edinburgh a series of lectures on rhetoric,²² which became a permanent part of the work of the institution for the next twenty-four years when the Town Council appointed Blair the first Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres less than a year later.²³ As a class exercise Blair asked his students to examine and analyze the first four of Addison's eleven papers on the pleasures of the imagination in the Spectator (nos. 411 to 421). He hoped that the assignment would help purge the students' speech of the broader traces of Scottish dialect.²⁴ Some of the students' suggestions were incorporated into Blair's own observations on the same papers, which constituted Lectures XX to XXIII, inclusive, when the lectures were committed to print in 1783 under the title Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. It is a curious fact that Blair was induced to have the lectures published by the appearance of his comments on Addison without his approval in the Biographia Britannica.²⁵ Consequently, we may assume that his criticism of Addison in the printed lectures may comprise even firmer statements of his intention than those which were given orally in the classroom. The four lectures devoted exclusively to Addison consist of a running commentary on the four Spectator papers, sentence by sentence. Addison seemed an especially suitable writer for this purpose because Blair found Addison's writings to combine both great excellencies and palpable inaccuracies of style. Blair expressed his attitude in this manner:

Without a free, impartial discussion of both the faults and beauties which occur in his composition, it is evident, this piece of criticism would be of no service: and, from the freedom which I use in criticizing Mr. Addison's Style, none can imagine, that I mean to depreciate his writings, after having repeatedly declared the high opinion which I entertain of them.²⁶

To reproduce these criticism in detail would be an endless task. Moreover, a knowledge of the terms which Blair uses in them will make them readily intelligible.

Not only did Blair conduct the minute analysis of the four Addison papers on the pleasure of the imagination, but he found it possible in the ten preceding general lectures, which advance a systematic treatment of style, to categorize Addison's style quite precisely. The meanings of the terms in both places are the same, and they can be discovered by a study of the frame-work of concepts in which the terms appear. As a result, we must approach them by means of a prior investigation of the premises from which they flow. It will become apparent that Blair manages his analysis in essentially the same way that Johnson does, but with far greater complexity.

Underlying and unifying all of Blair's discussion of style is the figurative analogy that style is to the writer's manner of thought as an image is to its object.

Style has always some reference to an author's manner of thinking. It is a picture of the ideas which rise in his mind, and of the manner in which they rise there; and, hence, when we are examining an author's composition, it is, in many cases, extremely difficult to separate the Style from the sentiment.²⁷

Psychology and rhetoric are complementary sciences. As one man's or one nation's peculiar manner of thought varies from another's, style progresses through an infinite number of modes. So directly related are these two factors that the denominations customarily given to style, like "nervous," "feeble," and "spirited," are equally applicable to thinking. Theoretically at least, one should be able to trace characters of style back to corresponding characters of thought; and, on the other hand, knowing a person's manner of thought, one should be able to predict with considerable accuracy the nature of the reflection in writing. That is, Blair's principles of style have a psychological origin. The analogical manner in which Blair manages this basic premise adumbrates the whole discussion of style, and we shall see that he constantly is working with pairs of terms, the distinctions between which are not strict and inviolable, but fluid and interacting. We may well expect, therefore, that what he will have to say about Addison's style will not be in terms of absolutes but in terms of relative qualities united in pairs and sharing degrees of assimilation between them.

Given the substance of thought, a person may conceive of the thought according to degrees of accuracy and also according to degrees of strength. The appropriate characteristics of style which rise from each of these respective modes of thought are perspicuity and ornament, perspicuity implying the more strictly intellectual management of the thought and ornament the sentiment or passion which gives thought its force. These approximate the twin purposes of writing so commonly expressed in the eighteenth century of instruction and pleasure. In perspicuity, the more fundamental of the two modes, one may distinguish contraries to which Blair gives the names precise and merely perspicuous or loose. They are occasioned by "an author's spreading out his thoughts more or less."²⁸ Addison's style may be located somewhere between these extremes, generally approaching the looser. Precision is not "the prevailing character of Mr. Addison's Style,"²⁹ but "he is not so deficient in this respect" as Archbishop Tillotson and Sir William Temple.³⁰ Nor, moreover, is Addison so diffuse as Lord Shaftesbury, whose faults are not only more prodigious than Addison's but more unpardonable "because he is a professed philosophical writer; who, as such, ought, above all things, to have studied Precision."³¹ As a relatively loose stylist, Addison, we may infer, bears some of the marks of merely perspicuous writers. He has likely chosen the proper words and placed them in their proper order, but the ideas which they represent may not have been crystal clear in his mind. More probably, since the looser style usually arises from a mismanagement of words, Addison did not have "an exact and full comprehension of the force of those words which he employs."³² In an attempt to be more precise, inexact thinkers frequently multiply words in the hope of hitting upon the exact one at one time or another. However, even so-called synonoymous terms diverge ever so slightly among themselves by reason of their accessory ideas, and the forced attempt at precision yields only a profusion of words which weaken and confuse one another and throw "a certain mist, and indistinctness"³³ over the style. Swift is the almost absolute example of the precise style, his every word sharply coinciding with his thought. He shares honors with such writers of antiquity as Tacitus and, especially, Aristotle, and with the French philosopher, Montesquieu.

Just as Blair found a principle of designating styles in the relative clearness with which thought is conceived, he also set up another classification on the degree of sentiment and passion expressed in writing. In these two faculties stylistic ornament has its genesis. "Real and proper ornaments of style … ," Blair says, "flow in the same stream with the current thought."³⁴ They may consist either in the "graceful, strong, or melodius construction of words"³⁵ or in the coloring of a figurative language. Again there are contraries of style, but in this scheme stages of relative variation in between are discernible. The result is a scale of styles based on the amount of ornament in proportion to the thought which a particular author's style may incorporate. At one extreme is the dry style, which is destitute of all ornament whatsoever. Aristotle is the "thorough example of a Dry Style";³⁶ "he writes like a pure intelligence, who addresses himself solely to the understanding, without making any use of the channel of the imagination."³⁷ Then succeed three intervening denominations of style, the plain, the neat, and the elegant, in the order of their increasing use of ornament. At the other extreme is the florid style, which is a false luxuriance of words, dazzling and gaudy, lacking any foundation in the imagination or passions. The elegant style, which stands next to the florid, is that into which Addison's style falls, along with that of Dryden, Pope, Temple, Bolingbroke, Atterbury, and a few others whom Blair does not name. This style implies a balance between perspicuity and ornament, between the informative work of the understanding and the beautifying work of the imagination. There is a "harmonious and happy"³⁸ arrangement of words and a judicious use of figurative language. Without falling into the excesses of the florid style, Addison's style is "full of those graces which a flowery imagination diffuses over writing."³⁹

So long as Blair confined himself to the direct relation between a writer's manner of thought and his expression, the two classifications which we have just examined are exhaustive. However, one may look at writing not only for evidences of the writer's workmanship but also for revelations of his total character. Now we see the man and not the writer, and we are introduced to the final pair of contrary terms, simplicity and affectation. Cutting across both the previous classifications, these have as their principle the genuineness of the expression in writing and a lack of effort in producing it. The implication, of course, is that the simple style is preferable. Simplicity, therefore, is not opposed to ornament, but to affectation of ornament. It is not synonymous with immaturity, but presupposes some aptness for writing. Intellectual and imaginative defects of style may even exist, but they are superseded if the manner is strongly expressive of great goodness and worth. Considering the approximation of writing to the man, it becomes increasingly important that he be possessed of virtue and religion. It is as a simple writer that Blair ascribes to Addison the highest praise: "Of … the highest, most correct, and ornamented degree of the simple manner, Mr. Addison is, beyond doubt, in English Language, the most perfect example. …"⁴⁰

It is obvious that Blair's categories of style are not exhaustive, but only functional. It would be impossible to isolate all the available degrees of style in all three classifications. The discussion is profitable in enabling us to see writers in relative terms. It is only with Blair's system in mind that the terms emerging from all three classifications become intelligible in his longest abstract statement about Addison's style:

Perspicuous and pure he is in the highest degree; his precision, indeed, not very great; yet nearly as great as the subjects which he treats of require: the construction of his sentences easy, agreeable, and commonly very musical; carrying a character of smoothness, more than of strength. In Figurative Language, he is rich; particularly, in similes and metaphors; which are so employed, as to render his Style splendid without being gaudy. There is not the least Affectation in his manner; we see no marks of labour; nothing forced or constrained; but great elegance joined with great ease and simplicity. He is, in particular, distinguished by a character of modesty, and of politeness, which appears in all his writings. No author has a more popular and insinuating manner; and the great regard which he every where shews for virtue and religion, recommends him highly. If he fails in any thing, it is in want of strength and precision, which renders his manner, though perfectly suited to such essays as he writes in the Spectator, not altogether a proper model for any of the higher and more elaborate kinds of composition. Though the public have ever done much justice to his merit, yet the nature of his merit has not always been seen in its true light: for, though his poetry be elegant, he certainly bears a higher rank among the prose writers, than he is intitled to among the poets; and, in prose, his humour is of a much higher, and more original strain, than his philosophy.⁴¹….

Notes

…²² Alexander Grant, The Story of the University of Edinburgh During Its First Three Hundred Years (London, 1884), II, 358.

²³ Andrew Dalzel, History of the University of Edinburgh from Its Foundation (Edinburgh, 1862), II, 428-29. There are two contemporary biographies of Blair, one by James Finlayson (1801) and one by John Hill (1807).

²⁴ Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (London, 1783), I, 430 n. All page references to the Lectures which follow are to this edition.

²⁵ I, iii.

²⁶ I, 409.

²⁷ I, 183-84.

²⁸ I, 371.

²⁹ I, 192.

³⁰Ibid.

³¹Ibid.

³² I, 202.

³³ I, 195.

³⁴ I, 365.

³⁵ I, 272.

³⁶ I, 380.

³⁷Ibid.

³⁸ I, 383.

³⁹ I, 409.

⁴⁰ I, 394.

⁴¹ I, 394-95.