Born at Edinburgh 7th April 1718, in 1730 entered the university, and in 1741 was licensed as a preacher. After occupying the churches of Collessie in Fife, Canongate, and Lady Yester’s, he was promoted in 1758 to one of the charges of the High Church, Edinburgh. In 1759 he commenced a series of university lectures on “Composition;” and in 1762 he was appointed to a new regius chair of Rhetoric and Belles-lettres, with a salary of £70 a year. He resigned this post in 1783, and published his “Lectures,” which obtained a reputation far beyond their merits, and one that time has by no means confirmed. His “Sermons” (1777) enjoyed the approval not only of Dr. Johnson, but of George III., who bestowed on Blair in 1780 a pension of £200 a year. Blair died December 27, 1800.
Personal
Dr. Blair was a different kind of man from Robertson, and his character is very justly delineated by Dr. Finlayson, so far as he goes. Robertson was most sagacious, Blair was most naïf. Neither of them could have been said to have either wit or humor. Of the latter Robertson had a small tincture—Blair had hardly a relish for it. Robertson had a bold and ambitious mind, and a strong desire to make himself considerable; Blair was timid and unambitious, and withheld himself from public business of every kind, and seemed to have no wish but to be admired as a preacher, particularly by the ladies. His conversation was so infantine that many people thought it impossible, at first sight, that he could be a man of sense or genius. He was as eager about a new paper for his wife’s drawing-room, or his own new wig, as about a new tragedy or a new epic poem.
Saturday morning proving rainy, I could not resist the temptation of staying till Sunday, and I heard Dr. Robertson in the morning, and Dr. Blair in the afternoon. They are neither of them orators, but Dr. Robertson has a serious, unaffected manner which pleased me very much. Dr. Blair is very pompous in his delivery, and all the great and fashionable attend his church. He gave us a sermon on censoriousness, which I understand is soon to be published with some others, in a third volume.
With Dr. Blair I am more at ease. I never respect him with humble veneration; but when he kindly interests himself in my welfare, or still more, when he descends from his pinnacle, and meets me on equal ground in conversation, my heart overflows with what is called liking.—When he neglects me for the mere carcass of greatness, or when his eye measures the difference of our points of elevation, I say to myself, with scarcely any emotion, What do I care for him, or his pomp either?
In Edinburgh none was more famous in the latter half of the eighteenth century than Dr. Hugh Blair. His dingy church was attended by the most fashionable when he preached; his little, dark class-room at college was full of the most cultured when he lectured; every tea-table was silent when he spoke; every supper-party was deferential as he conversed. An uneventful life of unbroken health and prosperity was the fortune of the preacher-critic of Scotland…. He was accepted as the arbiter of taste. Poems and treatises were submitted for his judgment, and his opinion was considered infallible. Home brought to him his “Douglas,” Blacklock his poems, Hume his essays, and we know how in later years his verdict on Burns’ poems was awaited with anxiety. He was the literary accoucheur of Scotland. At the same time patrons conferred with him on suitable moderate “presentees” for parishes, and town councils consulted him on candidates for professorial chairs. Is it surprising that the popular preacher, the respected critic, the deferred-to guide, had his constitutional vanity strengthened, and that all this homage made him more pompous and certain of his infallibility, especially as he was utterly devoid of any sense of humour?
Sermons
I love “Blair’s Sermons.” Though the dog is a Scotchman, and a Presbyterian, and every thing he should not be, I was the first to praise them.
Great merit they undoubtedly have; but I cannot discover in them that sublime simplicity of manner and style, which I have long thought essential to such compositions.
We have no modern sermons in the English language that can be considered as very eloquent. The merits of Blair (by far the most popular writer of sermons within the last century) are plain good sense, a happy application of scriptural quotation, and a clear harmonious style, richly tinged with scriptural language. He generally leaves his readers pleased with his judgment, and his just observations on human conduct, without ever rising so high as to touch the great passions, or kindle any enthusiasm in favour of virtue. For eloquence we must ascend as high as the days of Barrow and Jeremy Taylor: and even there, while we are delighted with their energy, their copiousness, and their fancy, we are in danger of being suffocated by a redundance which abhors all discrimination, which compares till it perplexes, and illustrates till it confounds.
No other sermons in Great Britain have been followed by so splendid a success as the once famous, now forgotten, discourses of Hugh Blair. Neither of Tillotson, nor Jeremy Taylor in past times, nor of Arnold or Newman or even Frederick Robertson in our own time, can be recorded, as of Blair, that they were translated into almost all the languages of Europe, and won for their author a public reward from the Crown. Nor was it only the vulgar public that was satisfied. Even the despot of criticism (fastidious judge, zealous High Churchman, fanatically English as he was), the mighty Samuel Johnson, who had a few years before declared that no Scottish clergyman had written any good work on religious subjects, pronounced, after his perusal of Blair’s first sermon, “I have read it with more than approbation—to say it is good is to say too little.”
They are not so much sermons as essays, composed by a professor of rhetoric to illustrate the principles of his art. For unction there was mere mouthing; instead of the solid common sense of earlier writers, an infinite capacity for repeating the feeblest of platitudes; their style seems to be determined by an attempt at the easy flow of the Addisonian period, disturbed by a recollection of Johnsonian grandiloquence; the morality can scarcely be dignified by the name of prudential, unless all prudence be summed up in the great commandment, be respectable; the theology is retained rather to give a faint seasoning to the general insipidity of moral commonplace than seriously to influence the thought; and the nearest approach to a philosophical argument is some feeble echo of Pope’s “Essay on Man.” Blair, in short, is in theology what Hayley was in poetry—a mere washed-out retailer of second-hand commonplaces, who gives us the impression that the real man has vanished, and left nothing but a wig and gown.
They are perhaps grammatically correct in composition, but they are monotonous in style, and as for grasp of thought or reasoning, elevated emotion, or impassioned eloquence, they have none.
Of his sermons, which were originally published in five volumes, it may be said that they were unduly praised at the time of their appearance, and that they are as unduly neglected now. Samuel Johnson called them “auro magis aurei;” and King George the Third, who was a great patron of Blair, and who gave him a pension of two hundred pounds a year, is reported to have often said that he wished to hear that the Bible and Blair’s sermons were in the hands of every youth in the United Kingdom. These opinions from the leader of literature and the leader of fashion may perhaps account in some degree for the number of editions through which Blair’s sermons passed; while the fact that the distinctive features of the Gospel are largely absent from them may explain the oblivion into which now they have fallen. But for style and method they may still be studied with advantage, though they do not now, of course, hold the same relatively high place in these respects which they did at the date of their publication. They have a distinctively modern cast, and his mode of opening up and dividing a subject is often felicitous and suggestive. In matter, however, they are exceedingly defective.
Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres, 1783
They were originally designed for the initiation of youth into the study of belles lettres, and of composition. With the same intention they are now published; and, therefore, the form of Lectures, in which they were at first composed, is still retained. The author gives them to the world, neither as a work wholly original, nor as a compilation from the writings of others. On every subject contained in them, he has thought for himself. He consulted his own ideas and reflections: and a great part of what will be found in these Lectures is entirely his own. At the same time he availed himself of the ideas and reflections of others, as far as he thought them proper to be adopted. To proceed in this manner, was his duty as a public professor. It was incumbent on him to convey to his pupils all the knowledge that could improve them; to deliver not merely what was new, but what might be useful, from whatever quarter it came. He hopes, that to such as are studying to cultivate their taste, to form their style, or to prepare themselves for public speaking or composition, his Lectures will afford a more comprehensive view of what relates to these subjects than, as far as he knows, is to be received from any one book in our language.
These “Lectures on Rhetoric” have been for several years known to the public. They were printed by their excellent author, in the latter period of his life, after he had retired from the discharge of his academical duties. They contain an accurate analysis of the principles of literary composition, in all the various species of writing: a happy illustration of those principles by the most beautiful and apposite examples, drawn from the best authors both ancient and modern; and an admirable digest of the rules of elocution, as applicable to the oratory of the pulpit, the bar, and the popular assembly. They do not aim at the character of a work purely original; for this, as the author justly considered, would have been to circumscribe their utility; neither, in point of style, are they polished with the same degree of care that the author has bestowed on some of his other works, as, for example, his “Sermons:” Yet so useful is the object of these lectures, so comprehensive their plan, and such the excellence of the matter they contain, that, if not the most splendid, they will perhaps prove the most durable monument of their author’s reputation.
Will always be esteemed valuable as an exercise of correct taste, and an accumulation of good sense, on the various branches of the art of speaking and writing…. In the first place, with respect to the language, though the selection of words is proper enough, the arrangement of them in the sentences is often in the utmost degree stiff and artificial. It is hardly possible to depart further from any resemblance to what is called a living or spoken style, which is the proper diction at all events for popular addresses, if not for all the departments of prose composition. Instead of the thought throwing itself into words, by a free, instantaneous, and almost unconscious action, and passing off in that easy form, it is pretty apparent there was a good deal of handicraft employed in getting ready proper cases and trusses, of various but carefully measured lengths and figures, to put the thoughts into, as they came out, in very slow succession, each of them cooled and stiffened to numbness in waiting so long to be dressed…. In the second place, there is no texture in the composition. The sentences appear often like a series of little independent propositions, each satisfied with its own distinct meaning, and capable of being placed in a different part of the train, without injury to any mutual connection, or ultimate purpose, of the thoughts. The ideas relate to the subject generally, without specifically relating to one another.
Though not equal to Campbell’s “Philosophy of Rhetoric” in depth of thought or in ingenious original research, they are written in a most pleasing style, convey a large amount of valuable information, suggest many most useful hints, and contain an accurate analysis of the principles of literary composition in almost every species of writing, and an able digest of the rules of eloquence as adapted to the pulpit, the bar, or to popular assemblies. In short, they form an admirable system of rules for forming the style and cultivating the taste of youth; and the time will be far distant, if it ever arrives, when they shall cease to be a text-book in every well-devised course of study for a liberal education.
Deserves special mention for his lectures on “Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres,” which for a long time constituted the principal text-book on those subjects in our schools and colleges. A better understanding of the true scope of rhetoric as a science has caused this work to be superseded by later text-books. Blair’s lectures treat principally of style and literary criticism, and are excellent for their analysis of some of the best authors, and for happy illustrations from their works.
His “Rhetoric” is a very vapid performance compared with Campbell’s.
The chair of Belles-Lettres was filled by the accomplished Dr. Hugh Blair, whose lectures remain one of the best samples of the correct and elegant, but narrow and frigid style, both of sentiment and criticism, which then flourished throughout Europe, and nowhere more than in Edinburgh.
His position as a critic was improved by the publication in 1783 of his “Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,” which made him the literary pope of Scotland.
General
A tiresome critic, in the French style: he was placed far below Johnson.
Looked at the “Life of Hugh Blair;”—a stupid book, by a stupid man, about a stupid man. Surely it is strange that so poor a creature as Blair should ever have had any literary reputation at all. The “Life” is in that very vile fashion which Dugald Stewart set;—not a life, but a series of disquisitions on all sorts of subjects.
The lectures expressed the canons of taste of the time in which Addison, Pope, and Swift were recognised as the sole models of English style, and are feeble in thought, though written with a certain elegance of manner. A tenth edition appeared in 1806, and they have been translated into French. The same qualities are obvious in the sermons, which for a long time enjoyed extraordinary popularity…. The sermons were translated into many languages, and until the rise of a new school passed as the models of the art. They are carefully composed; he took a week over one (Boswell’s Tour, ch. iii.), and they are the best examples of the sensible, if unimpassioned and rather affected, style of the moderate divines of the time. They have gone through many editions.
The only reason for mentioning Blair amid so many of his betters is that he wrote popular lectures on rhetoric, in which he said a deal about proportioning the sentence, but nothing about the paragraph; and one is curious to see if such men as Blair, Campbell, and Kames, personally followed paragraph law. Blair’s smooth Shaftesburian style leads him securely from sentence to sentence; he writes nearly six monotonous sentences to the paragraph; he follows the loose order of procedure in the paragraph, and observes the law of unity. In brief, it is strange that such mildly correct rhetoricians as he, wrote respectable paragraphs, but, amid the multitude of their stylistic theories, had no theory of the process.
