Enlightenment & Belletristic Rhetoric

The 18th century produced a transformation in rhetorical theory as significant as the Renaissance recovery; though it moved in a different direction. Where Renaissance humanism had sought to recover the expansive civic idealism of Cicero and Quintilian, Enlightenment rhetoricians sought to place rhetoric on the foundation of the new empirical and psychological sciences, to reform its excessive focus on oratorical display, and to connect it with the emerging culture of polite letters, aesthetic taste, and written prose.

The most important center of this transformation was Scotland; specifically Edinburgh and Aberdeen, where a group of thinkers associated with the Scottish Enlightenment developed new frameworks for rhetorical theory that would dominate English-language rhetorical education well into the 19th century.

Locke's Challenge and the Plain Style Ideal

The intellectual backdrop of Enlightenment rhetoric is John Locke's influential critique of figurative language in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). For Locke, the traditional rhetorical art of ornamentation; the figures, tropes, and elaborate style of the classical and Renaissance traditions; was a positive obstacle to clear thinking. Eloquence, he argued, was a tool of deception, substituting emotional manipulation for rational argument. Philosophy and science required plain, exact, literal language from which all figurative ornament was purged.

Locke's critique was exaggerated, but it set the terms of Enlightenment rhetorical reform. If rhetoric was to retain intellectual respectability in an age of empiricism and rationalism, it needed to be reconstructed on new foundations; psychological, empirical, and aesthetic rather than ornamental and performative.

George Campbell: Rhetoric and the Science of Mind

George Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) is the most philosophically sophisticated rhetorical treatise of the 18th century. Campbell's project was to ground rhetoric in the emerging science of human psychology; to explain why certain arguments and expressions are persuasive by reference to the faculties of the mind they engage.

Campbell identified four faculties as the targets of rhetorical discourse: the understanding (to which evidence and logical argument appeal), the imagination (to which vivid description and narrative appeal), the passions (to which emotional appeals are directed), and the will (the ultimate seat of action, which rhetoric ultimately seeks to move). His fourfold taxonomy both extended and complicated Aristotle's tripartite ethos/pathos/logos framework.

Campbell also produced one of the most influential early discussions of usage and grammatical correctness, arguing that language norms should be determined by reputable, national, and present usage; a descriptive rather than prescriptive standard that anticipates modern sociolinguistics.

Hugh Blair: Rhetoric, Taste, and the Belles Lettres

Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) was the most widely read rhetorical textbook in English in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, going through dozens of editions and shaping the teaching of English composition across Britain and America. Blair's approach differed significantly from Campbell's: where Campbell sought to explain rhetoric through psychology, Blair connected it with the developing discourse of aesthetic taste and literary criticism.

For Blair, rhetoric and literary criticism were aspects of the same discipline; both concerned with the analysis of effective language. His lectures move freely between the analysis of speeches, the discussion of style and the figures, the criticism of poetry and prose, and the cultivation of taste. The resulting conception of rhetoric as belles lettres; polite letters, literary culture, the formation of educated sensibility; would prove enormously influential in shaping what became English literary education.

Blair is also significant for his contribution to what we now call prose style: his extended discussions of clarity, precision, and the appropriate management of sentence structure remain practically useful guides to effective written communication.

Richard Whately and the Revival of Argumentation

Richard Whately's Elements of Rhetoric (1828) represents a partial recovery of the argumentative tradition that Campbell and Blair had subordinated to psychology and taste. Whately returned rhetoric to its classical concern with argument, making the analysis of practical reasoning; in law, politics, and public affairs; central to his system.

Whately's most enduring contribution is his treatment of presumption and burden of proof. He argued that in any dispute, one side enjoys a presumption in its favor; the existing state of affairs, the established belief, the institutional status quo; while the other party bears the burden of proving that change is warranted. This analysis of the default position in argument has been enormously influential in logic, law, and rhetorical theory, and Whately's vocabulary remains standard in contemporary argumentation studies.

The Elocution Movement

Running parallel to the philosophical developments in rhetorical theory was the elocution movement; a popular tradition that focused almost exclusively on the fifth canon, delivery. Thomas Sheridan, John Walker, and their followers developed elaborate prescriptive systems for vocal production, pitch patterns, and gestural expression. Elocution became a popular subject of genteel education, particularly for women, and produced a distinctive mode of public performance that was simultaneously celebrated and satirized.

The elocution movement's legacy is ambiguous. At its best, it preserved attention to the embodied dimensions of communication that the philosophical tradition was neglecting. At its worst, it produced mechanical, rule-bound performance that had exactly the artificial quality the tradition condemned. Its eventual collapse in the late 19th century left a gap in rhetorical education; the serious treatment of delivery; that took decades to begin to fill.