elementary rhetorical ideas and eighteenth-century english

Elementary rhetorical ideas and eighteenth-century English

Carey McIntosh

PO Box 407, Tyringham, MA 01264, USA

1. Introduction

We cannot truly understand eighteenth-century language attitudes or usagewithout the perspectives not only of linguistics and literature but also of rhetoric.In support of this hypothesis I shall argue that certain early-modern attitudestowards language were established by classical rhetorics that almost everybodyread and studied (in the original, or in translation, or in a modernized version).These attitudes, as they appear in key passages in Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, andQuintilian (and in most of their hundreds of synthesizers and popularizers) were:(1) an ornamental view of style; (2) the principle of decorum; and (3) a generalpreference for ``simplicity'' in language (clarity, purity, and correctness). Theconsensus on these elementary rhetorical ideas was very wide indeed, extendingfrom seventeenth-century French writers (Vaugelas, Bouhours, Boileau) to Englishpoet-critics (Dryden, Pope, Addison, Johnson), to lexicographers (Kersey, Bailey,Johnson), and to the New Rhetoric of Smith, Kames, Campbell, and Blair. DavidHume's essay `Of Simplicity and Re®nement' shows the in¯uence of theserhetorical values; and their durability appears in the fact that `Purity' and`Perspicuity' are the ®rst two virtues of style in John Quincy Adams's Lectures onRhetoric of 1810.1

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1 The role of classical rhetoric in establishing sixteenth-century literary values has been discussed in

great detail (see, for example, Clark, 1922; Baldwin, 1939; Howell. 1956; Trimpi, 1962). Edinger (1977)

extends this discussion into the eighteenth century, but with di�erent literary values in mind. For the in-

¯uence of classical rhetoric on French literary values, see (among others) Mornet, 1929; Cousin, 1933;

Davidson, 1965; Scaglione, 1972. `Classical rhetoric in the eighteenth century', though a big subject, has

not been dealt with in detail; what I have been able to collect on it here should be considered introduc-

tory.

What I have to say about clarity, correctness, purity, and decorum is written asan introduction to the other nine essays in this volume, since these stylistic valuesin¯uenced both theory and practice in many if not most eighteenth-century texts:they in¯uenced rhetorics, of course, and certainly writings by women and aboutwomen's writing, as well as texts that include or deal with non-standard usage and`politeness' in prose. They o�er a reason, for example, why women were notconsidered capable of writing clearly or correctly. (It was because they did nothave access to the Latin rhetorics that authoritatively explained the rules forclarity and correctness.) The elementary and ancient rhetorical ideas underdiscussion here were endorsed by most of the New Rhetoricians. They paved theway for an important eighteenth-century event in the history of English,`standardization' (see Cooper, 1989; Milroy and Milroy, 1985).

Everyone studied rhetoric. Is this true? When you come right down to it, werethere any ``rhetorics'' worth talking about in the eighteenth century? Manyscholars do not think so. Brian Vickers (1988), for example, mourns the waning ofthe classical tradition after its triumphant `reintegration' during the Renaissance.John Bender and David Wellbery stress `the anti-rhetorical bent' of theEnlightenment: Bacon, Descartes, the Royal Society, and Locke were all in lovewith `neutral, nonpositional, and transparent' forms of discourse (Bender andWellbery, 1990, pp. 17±18); it would be hard to name a more in¯uential group oflate seventeenth-century thinkers, and all of them saw rhetoric as an obstacle tothe quest for truth. According to well-known historians and critics (for example,Wimsatt and Brooks, 1957; Ong, 1958; Perelman, 1977), the Ramist revolution ofthe sixteenth century accomplished a drastic impoverishment of rhetoric, deprivingit of invention and arrangement and memory, reducing it to style, the study ofwhich was formalized in endless and arid lists of tropes. One important history ofrhetoric declares that by the end of the seventeenth century `people who weremost interested in the power of language seemed most often to seek to purify thispower from any taint of eloquence' (Bizzell and Herzberg, 1990, p. 464).

Nevertheless, there is evidence that rhetoric was a more in¯uential force in theeighteenth century than most scholars have allowed. In spite of itsimpoverishment, everyone studied rhetoric, one of the elementary branches ofliteracy. Rhetoric appears in every eighteenth-century syllabus at every level ofeducation above the Dame schools and the Charity Schools. A book like JohnStirling's A System of Rhetoric (Stirling, 1733; 13 editions before 1800, plus twomore published in America, according to Alston) was designed for young people;like most of the rhetorics that appeared for the ®rst time in English between 1650and 1758, it is short and simple. But this does not mean that the rhetoric it taughtwas inconsequential; on the contrary, rhetoric of this simpli®ed kind was basic,fundamental, taken for granted. According to Ian Michael (1987), rhetoric wasone of the subjects that a child would be most likely to encounter in school afterreading, writing, and arithmetic. And any one who continued study above theelementary level read classical rhetoric, in translation or in the original. Cicero'sDe oratore and Quintilian's Institutio oratoria were among the most popularschool books of the eighteenth century.

C. McIntosh / Language Sciences 22 (2000) 231±249232

Some evidence for the continued vitality of classical rhetoric is bibliographical:in a list of what was published as `rhetoric' during this period, reprints andtranslations of the old warhorses among classical texts are considerably morecommon than new rhetorics, and most of the `new' English rhetorics (untilLawson and Ward, 1758 and 1759) were simpli®ed versions of some portion ofclassical rhetoric. I count ®fteen new English rhetorics published in the ®rst halfof the century. During the same period there were thirty-one editions of the basicclassic texts, Aristotle, Quintilian, Longinus, and Cicero's De Oratore, ten intranslation and twenty-one in the original Latin or Greek.2

Classical rhetoric was probably as unavoidable in an ordinary eighteenth-century school education as American History is now for Americans orShakespeare for Britons. A summary of some of the central tenets of classicalrhetoric appeared in both Newbury's Circle of the Sciences (Newbury, 1746) andDodsley's Preceptor (1748), frequently reprinted texts for what we would now callsecondary education. The dissenting academies also taught rhetoric; it was JosephPriestley's experience as tutor at Warrington Academy that generated his Lectureson Oratory and Criticism (1777).3

It is hard for us to appreciate the extent to which eighteenth-centuryrhetorical ideas were rooted in older, standard, commonplace texts. Johnson'sDictionary of 1755, for example, borrows a number of its de®nitions ofrhetorical terms (Antonomasia, Antanaclasis) from John Smith, Mystery ofRhetoric Unveiled (Smith, 1657), who had borrowed both from Dudley Fenner,who was translating Talaeus, Ramus's partner, and from Thomas Blount, whohad himself borrowed from John Hoskins (see DeMaria, 1986, p. 113; Howell,1956, pp. 276±277)!

Moreover, one should not dismiss the Latin Renaissance rhetorics as a factor ineighteenth-century attitudes towards language. Bartholomeus Keckerman's 700-page Latin rhetoric was taught at Newington Green Academy in the 1670s, andGerard Joannis Vossius's rhetorics were recommended by Samuel Johnson tosecondary-level students in 1748. Editions of Vossius's Rhetoricae contractae were

2 A fuller discussion of many of the issues touched on here, and a chronological checklist of rhetorics

published 1654±1790, may be found in Chapter 7 of McIntosh (1998). New rhetorics in French during

the hundred years before Smith, Blair, Campbell and their (largely) Scottish colleagues show more orig-

inality of thought than new rhetorics in English: Arnaud, Lamy, Bouhours, FeÂ nelon, Rollin. A good

sense of the inherited weight, of the sheer momentum of classical rhetoric in the seventeenth and eight-

eenth centuries may be derived from Thomas Conley's encyclopedic survey of rhetoric in a European

context (Conley, 1990). For a European perspective, wide-ranging and learned, see Scaglione (1972); for

extensive book-lists see Alston, 1974, Vol. VI.3 For the curriculum at select seventeenth-century grammar schools (see Clark, 1948), especially p.

122 (for Cicero and Quintilian). For the possibility that Daniel Defoe was exposed to classical rhetoric

via Bartholomeus Keckerman, Systema Rhetoricae (see Girdler, 1995); for Keckerman (see Conley,

1990, pp. 157±159). No account of eighteenth-century rhetoric, so far as I know, has analysed the

Newbery volume of 1746, published separately as The Art of Rhetorick, a small but closely-packed

anthology (276 pages) of standard classical ideas, with examples of e�ective rhetoric by St. Paul, Shake-

speare, Cicero, and others.

C. McIntosh / Language Sciences 22 (2000) 231±249 233

printed in Oxford in 1631, 1655, and 1672; editions (or versions) of Vossius'sElementa rhetorica were published in London in 1663, 1707, 1724, and inCambridge in 1663. Vossius crops up as late as 1760 in Tristram Shandy, Vol. I,chapter 19, together with Thomas Farnaby, author of a conveniently brief Latinsummary of the standard doctrines of classical rhetoric (Farnaby, 1625; 15thedition 1767).4

Finally, and in some respects most intriguingly, Renaissance logic was just as`ornamentalist' as Renaissance rhetoric. Most people studied logic and rhetorictogether, not separately; an ordinary introduction to the seven liberal artsincluded the closed ®st of logic in complementary relationship to the open handof rhetoric (Howell, 1956, pp. 3±5). Logic as taught in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries was based to one extent or another on Aristotle, whoseOrganon reinforces his Rhetoric by starting with Invention (®nding what can besaid for and against a proposition) and proceeding to Judgment (arrangingwords into propositions and propositions into syllogisms or inductions). If `theorganizing principle' of Aristotle's Topics is ®rst Invention, then Arrangement(Howell, 1956, p. 15), it follows that writers who were in¯uenced by Aristotlemust have been encouraged to conceive of ``thought'' as something separatefrom arrangement (or style) Ð which is the essential premise of an ornamentalview of style. Such writers included Cicero and most literate Europeans beforeDescartes.

2. Ornamentalism, decorum, simplicity

A brief discussion of what these three elementary rhetorical ideas meant andwhere they may have come from.5 In the early modern period they tended to beless sophisticated than the rhetorical ideas in Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian.Often they were expressed as slogans or isolated dicta. These ideas were usuallyinvoked without comment, as self-evident premises, ignoring nuances andalternative versions. And most people writing in the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies were not interested in potential contradictions among these three ideas(for example, between an ornamental view of style and the doctrine of decorum).

4 For ornamentalism in Vossius, see, in the 1655 edition of Rhetorices contractae, pp. 258, 284; for

decorum, pp. 258, 289; for clarity, pp. 279±283; for purity, pp. 258±274. Farnaby's Index Rhetoricus

had, according to Alston, at least eleven editions in the seventeenth century and several more in the

eighteenth.5 I limit myself here to the four most widely read and most frequently reprinted and translated classi-

cal authors on rhetoric. It would be possible to supplement this section with references not only to a

great many additional Latin rhetorics but also to Greek, including such authors as Isocrates, Deme-

trius, Hermogenes, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus.


2.1. An ornamental view of style

Taken to an extreme, ornamental perspectives trivialize style (and rhetoric) byassuming that the choice of words and verbal strategies is in essential waysindependent of the ideas or substance they express. At the other end of thespectrum, an extreme anti-ornamental, organic perspective virtually eliminates thepossibility of style and rhetoric, since it does not recognize that one can put the`same' thought in di�erent words. The useful approaches, in my opinion, are thosewhich avoid both extremes, acknowledging that any change in words or wordorder modi®es the overall impact of a discourse, but also that there are manydi�erent ways to achieve most of the ends proposed for a given discourse.

Key passages in the best-known texts of classical rhetoric are easy to interpretas falling within an ornamental perspective. The ®ve classical canons of rhetoricmay be viewed as an encouragement to an ornamental view of style, because theirexistence as a list of ®ve presumes, or at least suggests, that one can separate theìnvention' of ideas from their àrrangement' and from their èlocution' in words.In Book III of the Rhetoric Aristotle puts up (at ®rst) sti� resistance toornamentalism (``[style and delivery] are mere outward show'' [fantasia]; `no oneteaches geometry [in pleasingly ornamented language]': III i 6). But ornamentalperspectives are implicit in the way he introduces decorum (III ii, vii). That is, heargues that in order to give `perspicuity, pleasure, and a foreign air' to our prose,`we must make use of metaphors and epithets that are appropriate'. Similarly, `thespeaker chooses his words from ordinary language', and resorts to `strange,compound, or coined words only rarely', so that arti®ce will not be intrusive (IIIii 4±6). Prose rhythms are imposed on language to keep it from being ùnpleasant'(aeideis, III viii 1-3).

Cicero begins his discussion of style by a�rming that style and content are nomore separable than mind and body (Cicero, 1960, De Oratore III vi 24); but his®rst concrete recommendation is that `language should be pure, lucid, ornate, andsuitably appropriate' (Latine, plane, ornate, apte: III x 37) Ð regardless of subjectmatter. Whatever it is we have to say, we should choose words from our nativestock, words clear and ornatus. Ornatus is not precisely the same as òrnate'; it canbe translated as `furnished; adorned': having `¯uency, scope, and variety ofmatter' (Edinger, 1977, p. 4). But language to which the adjective ornatus appliesis carefully chosen, soigneÂ , and therefore ornamental in a transitive sense. Theterm ornatus recurs in key passages in Quintilian (I v 1; VIII i 1), and again in agreat many later Latin rhetorics, such as those by Vossius (Vossius, 1631, e.g.,1655, p. 284).

For post-Romantics like us an ornamental view of style seems mechanical,sterile. But I think we can assume that poet-critics like Dryden, Pope, andJohnson were at least as sensitive to the nuances of stylistic meaning as we are.My point is that Dryden, Pope, Johnson and their contemporaries probablyacquired the habit of talking about style as something that could ornament athought from traditional rhetoric, much of which echoes the four classicalrhetorics under examination here.


2.2. Decorum6

The idea that style should be appropriate to content and/or genre and/oroccasion and/or speaker and/or audience, is persuasive and commonsensical initself, and it also entails other `elementary' rhetorical ideas such as the three levelsof style.7 Again, my point is not that decorum is valid or not valid but that it wastaken for granted Ð no one seems to have been able to conceive of the possibilitythat an inappropriate or incongruous style might produce valuable e�ects orexpress what would otherwise be di�cult to express.

2.3. Simplicity

I use the word `simplicity' here to stand for a family of `virtues' that classicalrhetorics very commonly and ardently recommended in style or language,including clarity, `purity', and correctness. Approval of these virtues often had far-reaching consequences. It seems in many cases to have entailed such quasi-political attitudes as hostility to provincial, rural, or foreign words, to colloquialsyntax, and to the language of non-literate or less educated speakers, includingwomen and provincials. Where these so-called `virtues of style' are concerned, thedegree of unanimity in our four famous authors is surprising. All four recommendclarity, purity, and correctness, and most of them explicitly attack the opposites ofthese three virtues, obscurity, ambiguity, `barbarisms' (including non-nativewords), and solecisms.8 A general bias in favor of simplicity appears mostfrequently in disparagements of far-fetched metaphors.9

6 Aristotle, Rhetoric III ii 1, III vii 1, 3-7 (Aristotle, 1982); Cicero De Oratore III x, xli; Quintilian

VIII i 1 (Cicero, 1960); Horace, Ars poetica 1-23, 73±127.7 Aristotle mentions `exotic' (xenos ), `low' (tapeinos ), `noble' (ogkos ), and `frigid' ( psukros ) styles,

but does not isolate speci®c characters or levels of style, for which see Cicero, De Oratore III lii 199;

Quintilian XII x 58±65. See also Hendrickson (1905).8 Clarity: Aristotle, Rhetoric III ii 1; Cicero De Oratore III x 37; Quintilian VIII i 1, ii 22; attacks on

lack of clarity: Aristotle, Rhetoric III v 2±6; Cicero De Oratore III xiii 49±50, xlii 167; Quintilian VIII ii

12±16. Purity: Aristotle, Rhetoric III v 1, xii 1 (hellenidzein ); Cicero, De Oratore III x 37±38 (Latine);

Quintilian I v 8, VIII i 1; attacks on lack of purity (barbarisms): Quintilian I v 5±16. Correctness: Aris-

totle, Rhetoric III v 2±6; Cicero, De Oratore III xi 40; Horace, Ars poetica ll. 291±294, 396±398; Quinti-

lian I v 1; attacks on solecisms: Aristotle, Rhetoric III v 1±6; Cicero, De Oratore, III xi 33, xiii;

Quintilian I v 34±54; attacks on barbarisms: Quintilian I v 4±21. Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian all

give similar advice on a cautious use of archaisms, neologisms, and compounds: III ii 5; III xxxvii; VIII

iii 24±36. For the Greek origins of these rhetorical values, see Kennedy, 1963, index s.v. `virtues of

style'.9 Aristotle, Rhetoric III ii 9±10, iii 4; Cicero, De Oratore III, xli; Horace, Ars poetica 1±23; Quintilian

VIII vi 16±17.


3. Seventeenth-century France

Such was the prestige of Louis XIV's court that if its leading spokespeople hadespoused linguistic values incompatible with the purity±propriety±correctness ofQuintilian, they would surely have won converts in Great Britain and elsewhere.But they did not. Although the `modernization and re®nement' of language andstyle that made French classicism possible developed through the agency of adiscipline as specialized and severe as any in the modern era, it was founded onjust the ideals of purity and simplicity we have been discussing. Quintilian was theauthority most frequently and most submissively referred to by Vaugelas, whoselong, unorganized, and minutely detailed Remarques sur la langue franc° aise(Vaugelas, 1647, reprinted twenty-two times by 1738) pioneered and epitomizedthe cultural ideals of his time so far as they apply to language (Streicher, 1934, p.xviii, p. xxiii; Ayres-Bennett, 1987, pp. 191-228). During the last twelve years ofhis life Vaugelas was slave to the dictionary project of the AcadeÂ mie franc° aise,completing copy for the letters A±H (Rickard, 1992, p. 31) Ð a further extensionof his in¯uence.

The dedication of Vaugelas's Remarques announces that `la pureteÂ , et la netteteÂ ,du langage . . .sont les premiers fondemens de l'Eloquence'. Then, as AldoScaglione points out, the `leading ideas'' of these Remarks appear `ìn thetraditional order': ®rst purity and clarity, then propriety, elegance, and musicality(Scaglione, 1972, p. 191). There is no excellence of speech or writing of whichpureteÂ, and netteteÂ , are not the foundations (Pref. XV). In the Remark entitled`Des equivoques' Vaugelas refers to Quintilian I v 1: Ùn langage pur, est ce queQuintilien appelle emendata oratio et un langage net, ce qu'il appelle dilucidaoratio', and a few lines further on he quotes from Quintilian VIII ii 16 on`netteteÂ '. `Correctness' plays a major role in Vaugelas's numerous analyses ofambiguity in language (see Ayres-Bennett, 1987, pp. 44±60 for details).

A measure of how far late seventeenth-century French authors were willing togo to satisfy the hunger for simplicity in language and style is DominiqueBouhours's Doutes sur la langue franc° oise (Bouhours, 1674). Speaking hesitantly,as be®ts ùn gentilhomme de province', Bouhours attacks not only tautologies (`lessynonimes inutiles', such as `les bornes et les limites') but even the repetition offunction words such as par, dans, en, et, que, and si (Rickard, 1992, pp. 294±300).10

All three elementary rhetorical ideas are stitched into the fabric of Boileau'smajor statement on style and language, L'Art poeÂtique (Boileau-DespreÂ aux, 1674).As in other writers who seem to accept an ornamentalist perspective, thought canbe independent of the language that èxpresses' it: Àvant donc que d'eÂ crireapprenez . . .penser' (I 150). Decorum in Boileau follows Horace quite closely, in

10 See Rickard's nine selections from seventeenth-century French writers on `stylistics' (pp. 281±334)

for additional recommendations of purity, simplicity, clarity, and correctness in ReneÂ Bary (1659), Le

Sieur du Plaisir (1683), and Etienne Dubois (1689).


crisp disparagements of language inappropriate to occasion (I 81±86), character(III 112), speaker's emotional state (III 132), and speaker's age and character (III363±390). Simplicity becomes an explicit goal (`Soyez simple avec art' I 101), andclarity an explicit value (`de son tour heureux imitez la clariteÂ ' I 142). Our oldfriends the `barbarisme', the `soleÂ cisme', and the `eÂ quivoque', familiar to us fromQuintilian and Aristotle, also receive attention by name (I 159±160, 205±206).

It is entirely plausible to read the Port-Royal Logique (1662) as a repudiation ofall rhetoric, emphatically including classical rhetoric. Arnauld openly renouncesrhetoric as a means to communication: `le secours qu'on pouvait tirer [derheÂ torique] pour trouver des penseÂ es, des expressions, et des embellissements,n'eÂ tait pas si consideÂ rable. L'esprit fournit assez des penseÂ es, l'usage donne desexpressions; et pour les ®gures et les ornements, on n'en a toujours que trop'(Arnaud and Nicole, 1664, p. 23). The quest for `la veÂ riteÂ toute nue' led Arnauldand Lamy and their followers away from such elegances, ornaments, andmusicalities as continued to appear in the chaste productions of high neo-classicism. The Cartesian attack on rhetoric was published during the same yearsas and ran parallel to the anti-rhetoric of Sprat, Granville, and Locke (Davidson,1965, pp. 57±105). Nevertheless, Arnauld's assumption that thought can becleansed of `style' can be traced to Aristotle (Rhetoric III i 6), and the idea thatlanguage can be adjusted so that it is more or less suitable to thought isfundamental to rhetoric. Also, Arnauld's admiration of plain style harkens backto the classical love of simplicity.11

4. Dryden and Addison

Dryden's renunciation of Cowleian conceits (including such conceits in his ownearliest poetry), and his developing taste for the `sweetness' of Waller andDenham Ð both are announced (partly) in terms of our three elementaryrhetorical ideas. In e�ect, these three ideas provided a basis for attitudes towardslanguage and style that justi®ed more than one hundred years in which Englishreaders and writers preferred Denham to Donne.

Dryden's ornamentalism found expression in two recurring metaphors, languageas the `dress' of thought, and style as the `coloring' of a poem (as in ut picturapoesis ).

The ®rst happiness of the poet's imagination is properly invention, or ®nding ofthe thought; the second is fancy, or the variation, deriving, or moulding, ofthat thought . . . ; the third is elocution, or the art of clothing and adorning that

11 Barbara Warnick (1993, pp. 34±35) ascribes the respect for clarity and propriety found in Lamy,

Bouhours, FeÂ nelon, Dubos, and Rollin (all of whom were brought up on classical rhetoric and post-

date Vaugelas) to the `new' aestheticism invented by belletristic rhetoric.


thought, so found and varied, in apt, signi®cant, and sounding words. (1667,Ker, vol. I, p. 15)

Here are the ®rst three canons of classical rhetoric, slightly adapted, and theornamentalism implicit in those canons is given direct expression in the metaphorof style as the dress of thought. In À Parallel of Painting and Poetry' (1693), thesame three canons of e�ective speech are re-discovered in painting:invention=invention; arrangement=`design, or drawing'; and elocution=coloring(Ker, vol. II, pp. 138±153). Thus, in the Preface to the Fables (1700) Drydenadmits that design, disposition, manners, and thoughts all come before style, `thecolouring of the work' (vol. II , p. 252).12

Dryden probably assimilated the doctrine of decorum Ð including a rich andexpansive idea of `nature' Ð as much from French critics as from classicalrhetoric. He de®ned wit not once but several times as à propriety of thought andwords'.13 Surely some of his discomfort with `clenches upon words', or with àcatachresis or Clevelandism, wresting and torturing a word into another meaning'(Ker, vol. I, p. 31) derives from the classical ideal of appropriateness (see alsoKer, vol. II, p. 256). He follows Horace closely in ruling that `the manners mustbe suitable' to the àge, sex, dignity' of a speaker (Ker, vol. I, p. 214; see also vol.I, p. 247 and vol. II, p. 146), and in his sensitivity to decorum of genre, mocking`the ®ne woman [who] ends in a ®sh's tail' (Ker, vol. II, p. 161).

Tributes to `clarity' are not as common in Dryden's prose as in contemporaryFrench criticism, though he prefers èasy language' to àbstruse' (Ker, vol. I, p.52), and praises `the clearness, the purity, the easiness, and the magni®cence' ofVirgil's style (Ker, vol. II, p. 228). `Purity' appears as a value for language inDryden's appreciation of Terence (Ker, vol. I, p. 42) and in his reluctance to`corrupt our English idiom by mixing it too much with French' (Ker, vol. I, p.170). Dryden's concern for correctness is notorious. Not only did he take noticeof grammatical errors in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson (Ker, vol. I, pp. 165±170),but he also corrected èrrors' in his own prose when he revised the Essay ofDramatic Poesy for a second edition in 1684 (McIntosh, 1986, pp. 44±45).Dryden's taste for simplicity was life-long; it appears in the 1660s in the Essay, inthe 1670s in his animadversions against bombast in Shakespeare (Ker, vol. I, pp.167, 225), and in the 1690s when he turned to translation (Ker, vol. II, pp. 149,224).

For Joseph Addison, an ornamental view of language and style is built intothe neo-classical frame for talking about ``heroic'' or epic poetry. Theàctions' in Homer and Virgil may be `diversi®ed' by `poetical ornaments'(Spectator 267). In Paradise Lost, Milton follows Àristotle's Rule of lavishing

12 For additional passages that take an ornamental perspective, see An Essay of Dramatic Poesy

(1668), Ker I 104; the Preface to An Evening's Love (1671), Ker, vol. I, p. 146; Preface to the Trans-

lation of Ovid's Epistles, Ker, vol. I, p. 242.13 In the Àpology for Heroic Poetry' (1677), the Dedication of The Spanish Friar (1681), the Preface

to Sylvae (1685), and the Preface to Albion and Albanius (1685): Ker, vol. I, pp. 190, 248, 256, 270.


all the Ornaments of Diction on the weak unactive Parts of the Fable'; andso his description of Eden is particularly luxurious (Spectator 321). Miltondrew on Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian for some of the strategieshe used to `raise' the language of his epic poem: foreign words, archaisms,coinages (Spectator 285).

By 1711, when the in¯uence of Addison's Spectator essays began to be felt, ourthree elementary rhetorical ideas were circulating not only in Latin but also,®ltered through the sensibilities of high classicism, in French; decorum was nowpartly bienseÂ ance, and Addison pays tribute to Bouhours and Boileau.Accordingly, though Aristotle and Cicero seem to have taken pleasure in puns,Addison's Spectator essays follow the French in their contempt for this form of`false wit' (Spectator 61), for mixed styles (Spectators 39, 58, 63), for mixed genressuch as tragicomedy (Spectator 40), and for mixed metaphors (Spectators 62, 595[Tickell]).

An appreciation of `that natural Way of writing, that beautiful Simplicity,which we so much admire in the Compositions of the Ancients' (Spectators 62, 74)underlies many of Addison's critical positions, including unpopular orunconventional ones. It is `natural Simplicity of Thought' that contrasts with the`false wit' that Addison castigates in Spectators 59±63 and 409. It is `Simplicity ofThought' in the ballad of Chevy Chase that contrasts with `Gothick' extravagancein Spectator 70. Respect for simplicity justi®es Addison's attacks on `Pomp ofRhetorick' and `rant' and bombast in Spectators 103 and 40.

More speci®c virtues of style that derive from the neo-classical admiration forsimplicity appear in passing in Addison's criticism, without the emphasis we ®ndin seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rhetorics. `Perspicuity is the ®rst and mostnecessary Quali®cation' of an heroic poem (Spectator 285). Addison admires both`Depth of Sense and Perspicuity of Stile' in Spectator 463. Obscurity is one of thefaults of Paradise Lost (Spectator 297). `Purity' as a linguistic ideal seems tounderlie Addison's repudiation of `Barbarisms' (Spectators 59, 251) and his desire`to hinder any Words of a Foreign Coin from passing among us', especiallyFrenchisms (Spectator 165). We can infer that `correctness' is a virtue fromAddison's censure of solecisms in Spectator 285; in fact, according to Addison, thepotential for correctness is one of the advantages that modern writers may haveover the ancients (Spectator 61).

5. Pope and Johnson

Pope and Addison, though unfriendly after 1715, do not disagree where theseelementary rhetorical ideas are concerned. Pope's serious interest in painting isre¯ected in remarks on style as the `colouring' of a text (see his letter toCromwell, 1710, in Goldgar, p. 36). Pope, of course, produced the mostmemorable formulation in English of an ornamental view of style, in a coupletthat also a�rms `decorum': `Expression is the Dress of Thought, and still/Appearsmore decent as more suitable' (Essay on Criticism, lines 318±319). Ornamentalism


is implied at several points in this famous section of the Essay, in the lines onconceits as the `Gold and Jewels' with which unskilled poets `hide with Ornamentstheir Want of Art' (lines 293±296); in the lines on critics who `value Books, asWomen Men, for dress' (lines 305±308).

Most of the jibes in Peri Bathous, the elaborate Scriblerian spoof of bad writersthat Pope (and probably Arbuthnot) concocted in 1728, are based on one oranother of these elementary rhetorical values. Violations of decorum take manyforms: language inappropriate to character (à prince talking like a Jack-pudding',Goldgar, 1965, p. 49, p. 138); language inappropriate to genre (Goldgar, 1965, pp.61±62); language inappropriate to subject matter (Goldgar, 1965, p. 79, p. 153);an unsuitable mixture of styles (`when the gentle reader is in expectation of somegreat image', he or she ìs presented with something very low': Goldgar, 1965, p.69); an unsuitable mixture of genres, which Pope sums up with a well-known linefrom Horace's Ars poetica (`Serpents are paired with birds', Goldgar, 1965, p. 49).Simplicity is one of the virtues that Pope and his contemporaries found in `nature'(Òne clear, unchang'd, and Universal Light' Essay, line 71) and in Homer(Goldgar, 1965, p. 123). Hence Pope's hostility to far-fetched metaphors (Essay,line 289, Goldgar, 1965, pp. 36, 62) and to `¯orid', ingenious, ìntricate andwonderful' styles (Goldgar, 1965, pp. 75, 68, 63). His regard for `correctness' and`clarity' provide a basis for Pope's mockery of `the Several Sorts of Style of thePresent Age' (Goldgar, 1965, p. 73) and for his criticism of obscurity in Milton(Goldgar, 1965, p. 157).

But Pope's prefaces to his translations allow us also to glimpse a positiveappreciation of these rhetorical values. In Homer he ®nds `nature, purity,perspicuity, and simplicity' (Goldgar, 1965, p. 154; see also p. 124). Homer'sèxpression [style] is like the coloring of some great masters, which discovers itselfto be laid on boldly and executed with rapidity' (Goldgar, 1965, p. 114). Style inthe Odyssey ìs not always clothed in the majesty of verse proper to tragedy, butsometimes descends into the plainer narrative, and sometimes even to that familiardialogue essential to comedy'; however, it always preserves `propriety' (Goldgar,1965, p. 152).

Samuel Johnson (1709±84) lived on into the age of Burns, Blake, Goethe, andWordsworth, and some critics associate Romantic celebrations of art as expressionwith `the true death of rhetoric' (Scaglione, 1972, p. 336). Nevertheless, Johnson'sloyalty to Renaissance and humanist literary ideals is nowhere more evident thanin his loyalty to our elementary rhetorical ideas.

Johnson seems to have understood many of the limitations of neoclassical rulesand dogmas. `There is always an appeal open from criticism to nature.' `Thatbook is good in vain which the reader throws away.' Ìt is false, that anyrepresentation [i.e., any stage play] is mistaken for reality.' Well-known judgmentslike these have earned for Johnson the reputation of speaking not merely forclassical or neo-classical doctrines but for ordinary readers and writers of any age.All this does not mean that Johnson did not subscribe to the basic principles ofornamentalism, decorum, and simplicity in language.

One might argue that Johnson carried ornamentalism farther than his


predecessors: not only does he maintain that thought precedes arrangement andstyle, but also that poetry itself is `merely a luxury' compared to morality andreligion (Boswell, 1791, vol. II, pp. 351±352). Poetry itself is a kind of ornamentÐ `poets, indeed, profess ®ction, but the legitimate end of ®ction is theconveyance of truth' (Lives, vol. I, p. 271). Poetry, ®ction, and criticism, then, areall `subordinate' arts; their role is to promote moral truth. `They who profess themost zealous adherence to truth are forced to admit that she owes part of hercharms to her ornaments, and loses much of her power over the soul, when sheappears disgraced by a dress uncouth or ill-adjusted' (Rambler 168).

Johnson revives both the two important ornamentalist metaphors we found inDryden and Pope. `Language is the dress of thought; and as the noblest mien, ormost graceful action, would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated tothe gross employments of rusticks or mechanicks, so the most heroick sentimentswill lose their e�cacy, and the most splendid ideas drop their magni®cence, if theyare conveyed by words used commonly upon low and trivial occasions' (Lives,vol. I, pp. 58±59). Pope's fancy was luxurious, and he had àll the gay varieties ofdiction . . .ready at his hand to colour and embellish it' (Lives, vol. III, p. 104).And Johnson cultivated another famous ornamentalist metaphor, of style orpoetry or imagination as the `¯owers' adorning the pathway that we followthrough life: the `splendid ampli®cations and sparkling sentences' of the Essay onMan were `¯owers [which] caught the eye' and which concealed dubiousphilosophical principles (Lives, vol. III, p. 164).14

If Johnson's approach to language is ornamentalist, it is not stupidly ormechanically so. He knew that `di�erence of thoughts will produce di�erence oflanguage' (Idler 70). Here, as elsewhere in good neo-classical thinking, theprinciple of decorum takes precedence over the principle of ornamentalism. Thus,all the `cumbrous splendor' and `glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments'that Thomas Gray can muster for his odes do not succeed in poeticizing the`puerilities of obsolete mythology' (Lives, vol. III, pp. 437, 440, 439). Àllornaments owe their beauty to their propriety' (Works, vol. IX, pp. 441±442).`The introduction of propriety in word and thought' by Dryden and Pope was forJohnson one of the major achievements of English poetry (Lives, vol. I, p. 420).

In general, then, for Johnson, language must be appropriate to thought, feeling,occasion, and genre (Johnson, 1740, 1759). Dryden's use of the phrase `rattlingbones' in lines on the Last Judgment is ùnexpectedly mean' (Lives, vol. I, p. 439);

14 For additional examples of language or style as the dress of thought, see Lives, vol. III, p. 243 (on

the doctrine of Pope's Essay on Man `disrobed of its ornaments'); for additional examples of style as

the `coloring' of the painting that is a poem, see Lives, vol. III, p. 247 (Pope had `colours of language

always before him ready to decorate his matter with every grace of elegant expression'), Lives, vol. III,

p. 240, Idler 34; for an additional example of the ¯ower metaphor, see Lives I 420 (`we had few ele-

gances or ¯owers of speech, the roses had not yet been plucked from the bramble, or di�erent colours

had not been joined to enliven one another'). The ¯oral metaphor is of course traditional, in the phrase

`¯owers of rhetoric', referring to ®gures and tropes; see OED s.v. ¯ower 6 d; the same metaphor appears

frequently in similar contexts in Latin (De Oratore III xxv 96; Quintilian VIII iii 97).


his language in Annus Mirabilis shows `the sublime . . .mingled with the ridiculous'(Lives, vol. I, p. 431). `When Mackbeth is con®rming himself in the horridpurpose of stabbing his king', his soliloquy has àll the force of poetry' Ð orwould have but for the word knife, `the name of an instrument used by butchersand cooks in the meanest employments', and but for the phrase `peeping througha blanket': these destroy the sublimity and terror appropriate to tragedy; thereader can hardly help laughing (Rambler 168). It is not that Johnson dislikes thelearned allusions in John Donne; rather, he sees learned language as incompatiblewith the sentiments of love that Donne professes (Lives, vol. I, pp. 19±20).15

Simplicity in language is not as important to Johnson as to Dryden and Pope,but he does take notice of the àwful simplicity' of Homer (Lives, vol. III, p. 238),and he acknowledges (following Longinus) `the simplicity of grandeur which ®llsthe imagination' (Rambler 36).

Johnson strongly endorsed the three speci®c qualities of style and language thatare associated with simplicity in the rhetorical tradition. `Clarity,' `purity,' and`correctness' Ð all three have a role to play in Johnson's literary criticism. Thus,Johnson censures literary obscurity (for example, in Dryden, Lives, vol. I, p. 460,and in Shakespeare, Yale, vol. VII, pp. 21, 33). The sublime cloudiness of (forexample) Donne and Gray gets short shrift from Johnson. `Purity' in languagewas one of the excellences that Johnson prided himself on having promoted in theEnglish of The Rambler (No. 208), and he calls attention to Frenchisms inBlackwell, Dryden, and Pope (Works, vol. X, p. 190; Lives, vol. I, pp. 463±464,vol. III, p. 250). Johnson assumes that the language of literature should begrammatically correct (Lives, vol. III, p. 249).

Perhaps the European tradition of lexicography as it evolved in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries owes more to classical rhetoric in general, and to theseelementary rhetorical ideas in particular, than anyone (so far as I know) hasrecognized. For example, some of the major categories for words in earlydictionaries might have come directly out of Aristotle or Cicero or Quintilian: allthree of these rhetorics distinguish foreign words, coinages, and archaisms asdiscrete lexical categories, each with its own special powers (Rhetoric III ii 3, 6; DeOratore III x 33; Quintilian I v 104±107, 111±113, vi 131). The lists ofabbreviations for words (what modern lexicographers would call ``labels'') in mostEnglish dictionaries before Johnson (Phillips, 1658; Coles, 1676; Kersey, 1708;Bailey, 1721) include something equivalent to Ò.W.' (old word), `P. W.' (PoeticalWord), `F.' (French), Ì.' (Italian), `N.C.' (North Country). Johnson as

15 For additional examples of Johnson on propriety of language see: Observations on Macbeth (Yale,

vol. VII, pp. 17±18); Rambler 140 (`Sentiments are proper and improper as they consist more or less

with the character and circumstances of the person to whom they are attributed, with the rules of the

composition in which they are found, or with the settled and unalterable nature of things'); Review of

Blackwell (Works X 190±193); Preface to Shakespeare (Yale, vol. VII, pp. 73±74); Lives, vol. I, p. 59

(Cowley criticized for using the same diction in imitating `the gentle Anacreon' as in imitating `the tem-

pestuous Pindar').


lexicographer puts coinages (`words which are found only in particular books') ina category by themselves (Plan 1747, p. 28).

In Johnson's own Dictionary of the English Language (1755), `clarity,' `purity,'and `correctness' are cardinal values. These three terms go a great way towardssumming up the goals of the Dictionary. In his 1747 Plan Johnson declared that`The chief intent of it [the proposed dictionary] is to preserve the purity andascertain the meaning of our English idiom' (Johnson, 1747, p. 4). `Clarity' is acentral concern in Johnson's discussion of word de®nitions in the Preface. Hecomplains that clear de®nitions are hard to give not only for àmbiguous andperplexed' words but also for the simplest and commonest words, since simplerwords with which to de®ne them do not exist. `Barbarous or impure words andexpressions', according to the Plan, were to `be branded with some note ofinfamy' (1747, p. 29). In the Dictionary itself, Johnson employed many labels inaddition to `barbarous' (`low', `bad', `ludicrous', `familiar', ìnelegant'), but`purity' continued to be one of the linguistic values by which he steered thisponderous ship: Ì have studiously endeavoured to collect examples andauthorities' from `the pure sources of genuine diction' (Preface, par. 61).`Correctness' as a value produced the label `solecism' for the phrase `never so', asit prompted Johnson to add a grammar to the prefatory matter for the Dictionary.

6. The New Rhetoric of 1748±93

What we now think of as an eighteenth-century `New Rhetoric' began with thee�orts of a few distinguished Scots literati to re-interpret traditional rhetoric forthemselves and their students. The foundations of lectures and treatises onrhetoric by Smith, Blair, Beattie, and others had been laid in Greece and Rome. Ifwe take Aristotle's Rhetoric as an inventory of the standard topics and doctrinesin classical rhetoric, then the New Rhetoric `covered' almost all these topics: therelation of rhetoric to logic; the uses of rhetoric; de®nitions of rhetoric; ethos,pathos, logos; enthymeme and example; probability; forensic and epideicticrhetoric; arrangement (the parts of a discourse); musicality in language; and thecharacter of audiences.16 The New Rhetoric makes substantial contributions totwo of the ®ve classical canons: to Invention, in its writings on the imaginationand on original genius, and to Style in almost all its books and lectures; it hassomething interesting to say about the other three canons too, on Arrangement(Blair, Lectures 31-2), Memory (Beattie 1783, pp. 1±71), and Delivery (BlairLecture 33).

I do not mean to imply that the New Rhetoric copied the old. It attempted tobe useful to its audience in the second half of the eighteenth century, and so it

16 Topics covered in Aristotle but not in the New Rhetoric: the list of Topics (I ii, iv; II xviii±ix, xxiii±

iv: but see Priestley, lectures 3 and 4); the catalogue of psychological states and characters (II ii±xvii);

and the discussions of signs (I ii), maxims (II xx), and rhythm (III viii).


ignored such classical topics as speech rhythms and the `status' of an argument.The New Rhetoric was up to date; integrated into its writings were many of theperspectives in recent publications by Hume, Hutcheson, Burke, and a host ofFrench writers (see Bevilacqua, 1965, 1967a,b; Bitzer, 1969; Ehninger, 1963, 1965;Engell, 1989; Howell, 1971; Johnson, 1991; Struever, 1985; Warnick, 1993).

When it comes to language and style, however, the New Rhetoric seems to haveaccepted just those elementary rhetorical values we have seen so widely distributedin French and English writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. `All thequalities of a good Style may be ranged under two heads', says Hugh Blair,`Perspicuity and Ornament' (1783, vol. I, p. 184). In many of his lectures Blair`considered Style . . .with relation to the di�erent degrees of ornament employed tobeautify it' (vol. I, p. 387). `Purity, Propriety, and Precision' are three of thevirtues Blair discusses in great detail (vol. I, p. 186). Lecture 19 is on `Simplicityand A�ectation in Style', and a great many paragraphs in Lectures 20±24 aredevoted to grammatical correctness. A complete inventory of passages on theseelementary rhetorical ideas in Blair, Campbell, Kames, Monboddo, Beattie,Priestley, Gerard, and Adam Smith would be too lengthy to print in an essay likethis.17 Even the language in which the New Rhetoric talks about language harkensback to major classical rhetorics: perspicuitas and proprietas, ambiguitas,obscuritas, soloecismus, and barbarismus; perspicuity and propriety, ambiguity,obscurity, solecisms, and barbarisms.

7. Implications

British and American scholars have not paid much attention to the in¯uence ofclassical rhetoric on post-Elizabethan stylistic values. Histories of criticism haveoften focused on di�erent issues, such as the evolution of `wit', or of satire, or ofRomantic points of view. A skillful summary of the great changes in Englishliterary taste promoted by Dryden and Pope (Monk and Lipking, 1992) refers to`classicizing tendencies' in Ben Jonson, and to Charles II's long exile in France. Itquotes Sir John Beaumont, writing in 1625 or earlier on the `True Form ofEnglish Poetry':

Pure phrase, ®t epithets, a sober careOf metaphors, descriptions clear . . .Strong ®gures drawn from deep invention's springs,Consisting less in words and more in things:

17 1A sample: perspicuity as a primary virtue of style appears in Smith, Lecture 2; Campbell pp. 154±

156, 216±217; Blair, Lecture 10; Kames, Chapter 18; Priestley, Lecture 32; Beattie, 1793. pp. 511, 514.

Decorum appears as a primary virtue in style in Smith, Lecture 7; Blair, Lecture 10; Kames (`the

language ought to correspond to the subject': Chapter 18); Beattie (1776, pp. 499±514). Metaphors

should not be too far-fetched: Smith, Lecture 6; Campbell, pp. 266, 293±298; Blair, Lecture 15; Kames,

Chapter 20; Priestley, Lectures 22±23; Beattie (1776, pp. 530±561).


A language not a�ecting ancient times,

Nor Latin shreds, by which the pedant climbs.

Monk and Lipking use these lines as evidence that `a native ``classicism'' existed

side by side with metaphysical poetry. The emphasis on the correct (``pure''), the

appropriate (``®t'')', on clarity and nature Ð `these indicate exactly the direction

English literature was to take after the Restoration' (1992, vol. I, pp. 1774±1775).

Our investigation of elementary rhetorical ideas o�ers a hypothesis for the

particular form that those `classicizing tendencies' took.

The great scholarly editions of Dryden, The Spectator, Pope, and Johnson for

the most part skim over direct borrowings from classical rhetoric of the kind I

have been discussing here. When Dryden writes that the `®rst happiness' of a

poet's imagination is `Invention, or ®nding of the thought', and `the second is

Fancy, or the variation, deriving or moulding of that thought', and `the third is

Elocution, or the Art of clothing and adorning that thought' in `signi®cant and

sounding words', the California editors make no reference to rhetoric. They say

that it is `highly unlikely that any one writer was the source' for this passage,

which is certainly true.

The very high value placed on clarity and correctness may also have contributed

to the evolution of prose style, both in France and in Great Britain. Vaugelas

himself was still writing in what Lanson calls the `le style ``Louis XIII''' (Lanson,

1908, pp. 55±61), enlarging sentences in a desultory way that might have horri®ed

LaBruyeÁ re. There are big di�erences between the prose styles of Swift, Defoe,

Arbuthnot, or Mandeville writing in the ®rst three decades of the century, and the

prose styles of Burke, Godwin, Cumberland, or Wollstonecraft in the last three

decades. I have argued elsewhere (1998) that by and large English prose in the last

quarter of the eighteenth century is more polite, more gentri®ed, and more written

than early eighteenth-century prose. Prose published around 1710 is

characteristically more oral, more informal and colloquial, whereas late

eighteenth-century prose became more bookish, more elegant, more precise, and

more consciously rhetorical. If so, classical rhetoric, as reinterpreted by men like

Addison, Blair, Johnson, and Campbell, may have played a part.

We may ask why these elementary rhetorical values sometimes had obvious and

visible e�ects on writers writing, and sometimes not. Rabelais and Shakespeare

and Donne seem to have paid very little attention to them. But for about a

century and a half, they were very common indeed; and perhaps they help explain

why the best (and worst) literary minds of the age preferred Denham to Donne.

Some notion of the power and extent of these ideas adds considerably to our

sense of how revolutionary Romanticism really was. If every individual, and every

thought or feeling of every individual, is unique, there can be only one set of

words which exactly expresses that person and her attitudes; so the whole idea of

choosing among alternative words is nonsense. It was a very serious form of

nonsense for a great many readers and writers for more than 2000 years.


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elementary rhetorical ideas and eighteenth-century english

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