Born, at Laurencekirk, Kincardine, 25 Oct. 1735. To Marischal Coll., Aberdeen, 1749; M.A., 1753. Schoolmaster and parish clerk at Fordoun, 1753–58. Contrib. to “Scots’ Magazine.” Master of Aberdeen Grammar School, 1758–60. Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic, Marischal Coll., 1760–97. Published first vol. of poems, 1761. First visit to London, 1763. Friendship with Gray begun, 1765. Married Mary Dunn, 28 June 1767. Hon. D.C.L., Oxford, 9 July 1773. Crown pension of £200, Aug. 1773. Refused Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, 1773. Active literary work. Failing health from 1793. Died, 18 Aug. 1803. Buried in St. Nicholas Churchyard, Aberdeen. Works: “Original Poems and Translations,” 1760; “Judgment of Paris,” 1765; “Verses on the Death of Churchill,” 1765; “Poems on Several Subjects,” 1766; “Essay on Truth,” 1770; “The Minstrel,” pt. i. (anon.), 1771; pt. ii., 1774; “Poems on Several Occasions,” 1776; “Essays,” 1776 (2nd edn. same year); “Letter to the Rev. H. Blair … on the Improvement of Psalmody, in Scotland” (anon., privately printed), 1778; “List of Two Hundred Scotticisms” (anon.), 1779; “Dissertations, Moral and Critical,” 1783; “Evidences of the Christian Religion,” 1786; “The Theory of Language,” 1788; “Elements of Moral Science,” vol. i., 1790; vol. ii., 1793; “Notes on Addison” (apparently not published), 1790. Collected Poems: 1805, 1810, 1822, 1831, etc. He edited: “Essays and Fragments,” by his son, J. H. Beattie (privately printed), 1794. Life: by Bower, 1804; by Sir W. Forbes, 1806.

Personal

  I found him pleasant, unaffected, unassuming, and full of conversable intelligence; with a round, thick, clunch figure, that promised nothing either of his works or his discourse, yet his eye, at intervals,… shoots forth a ray of genius that instantly lights up his whole countenance. His voice and his manners are particularly and pleasingly mild, and seem to announce an urbanity of character both inviting and edifying…. You would be surprised to find how soon you could forget that he is ugly and clumsy, for there is a sort of perfect good-will in his countenance and his smile, that is quite captivating.

  I am happy to think, that the moral effect of his works is likely to be so powerfully increased by the Memoirs of his exemplary life, which you are preparing for the press, while the respect which the public already entertains for his genius and talents, cannot fail to be blended with other sentiments still more flattering to his memory, when it is known with what fortitude and resignation he submitted to a series of trials, far exceeding those which fall to the common lot of humanity; and that the most vigorous exertions of his mind were made, under the continued pressure of the severest domestic affliction, which a heart like this could be doomed to suffer.

  Of his conduct towards his unhappy wife, it is impossible to speak in terms of too high commendation. It has already been mentioned, that Mrs. Beattie had the misfortune to inherit from her mother, that most dreadful of all human ills, a distempered imagination, which, in a very few years after their marriage, showed itself in caprices and folly, that embittered every hour of his life, while he strove at first to conceal her disorder from the world, and, if possible, as he has been heard to say, to conceal it even from himself; till at last from whim, and caprice, and melancholy, it broke out into downright insanity, which rendered her seclusion from society absolutely necessary…. When I reflect on the many sleepless nights and anxious days, which he experienced from Mrs. Beattie’s malady, and think of the unwearied and unremitting attention he paid to her, during so great a number of years, in that sad situation, his character is exalted in my mind to a degree which may be equalled, but I am sure never can be excelled, and makes the fame of the poet and the philosopher fade from my remembrance…. In his person, Dr. Beattie was of the middle size, though not elegantly, yet not awkwardly formed, but with something of a slouch in his gait. His eyes were black and piercing, with an expression of sensibility, somewhat bordering on melancholy, except when engaged in cheerful and social intercourse with his friends, when they were exceedingly animated. As he advanced in years, and became incapable of taking his usual degree of exercise, he grew corpulent and unwieldly, till within a few months of his death, when he had greatly decreased in size. When I last saw him, the diminution of his form was but too prophetic of the event that soon followed.

  Read “Beattie’s Life,” by Sir Wm. Forbes (from Barjarg, where I was some days ago), Schneidermässig, religious “Gigmanity,” yet lovable, pitiable, in many respects worthy. Of all literary men, Beattie, according to his deserts, was perhaps (in those times) the best rewarded; yet alas! also, at length, among the unhappiest. How much he enjoyed that is far from thee!—converse with minds congenial; an element not of black cattleism, but of refinement, plenty, and encouragement. Repine not; or, what is more to be dreaded, rebel not.

  Let us recall his black and piercing eyes, “with an expression of sensibility bordering on melancholy” when in repose, but brightening into animation when he addressed those whom he loved. He afterwards—I grieve to say it of any poet—grew corpulent; but at this time he carried with him to those levées of talent a spare person, and the rare qualities of a mind which I shall briefly characterise. His imagination was, perhaps, subservient to his taste. The cultivation of his mind had been carried almost to what human nature can conceive of perfection, his chief acquirements being in moral science. As a professor, he was revered; as a friend and companion, fondly cherished. In literature he held an eminent place. The deepest piety, a true sensibility and gentleness, and a humility sincere as it was rare, softened and elevated all his mental attributes.

  Throughout the whole north of Scotland in these days, there was not one that could compete with Doctor Beattie, the recluse professor at Aberdeen, in variety of accomplishments; for he was an excellent classical scholar, a veritable poet, a scientific as well as practical musician, and indefatigable student, and, as a metaphysician, unsurpassed at that epoch, unless it were by his friend and colleague, Dr. Reid.

  This excellent and amiable man; for such he was, whatever we may think of him as a writer. Scepticism was at this time fashionable among the wits and men of letters. It was thought a great thing that such a man as Beattie, not a clergyman, should have taken up the pen against Hume and Voltaire. The essay had won him popular fame, royal favour, and a pension. The Edinburgh Town Council had wooed him to the chair of moral philosophy; the Archbishop of York had solicited him to enter the Church of England.

  During the latter half of the eighteenth century the literary traditions of the most northerly university town of Scotland—the city of John Barbour and of Hector Boece—were honourably upheld by a small knot of poets. Of these the most academic remains the most famous. Poet and professor, philosopher and man of letters, James Beattie was no less distinguished in his time by his “Minstrel” and his prose “Essay on Truth” than by the encouragement and help which he constantly afforded to men of genius less fortunately placed. Not only were Ross and Blacklock substantially indebted to him for the furtherance of their literary fortunes, but constantly in the literary history of the time one comes upon hints and helps given now to one poet and now to another, which again and again bore valuable fruit. Beattie indeed may be said to have been for forty years a gentle and more generous Johnson, at once the literary dictator and the Mæcenas of the far north.

Essay on Truth, 1770

  I am not at all surprised to hear, that your spirited attack on the head-quarters of scepticism has drawn upon you the resentment of Mr. Hume and his followers.

  I have lately been employed in reading Beattie and Blair’s “Lectures.” The latter I have not yet finished. I find the former the most agreeable of the two; indeed the most entertaining writer upon dry subjects that I ever met with. His imagination is highly poetical, his language easy and elegant, and his manner so familiar, that we seem to be conversing with an old friend, upon terms of the most social intercourse, while we read him…. In Blair we find a scholar; in Beattie both a scholar and an amiable man; indeed so amiable, that I have wished for his acquaintance ever since I read his book.

  Dr. Beattie’s great work, and that which was undoubtedly the first foundation of his celebrity, is the “Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth;” on which such unmeasured praises are bestowed, both by his present biographer, and by all the author’s male and female correspondents, that it is with difficulty we can believe that they are speaking of the performance which we have just been wearying ourselves with looking over. That the author’s intentions were good, and his convictions sincere, we entertain not the least doubt: but that the merits of his book have been prodigiously overrated, we think, is equally undeniable. It contains absolutely nothing, in the nature of argument, that had not been previously stated by Dr. Reid in his “Inquiry into the Human Mind;” and, in our opinion, in a much clearer and more unexceptionable form.

  Beattie is among the philosophers what the Quaker is among religious sectaries. The κοινὸς νοῦς, or common sense, is the spirit whose illapses he sits down and waits for, and by whose whispers alone he expects to be made wise. It has sometimes prompted him well; for there are admirable passages in the Essay. The whole train of his argument, or rather his invective, in the second part, against the sceptics, is irresistible.

  The book was received very favourably, passed through five large editions in four years, and was translated into French, German, Dutch, and Italian. In the history of philosophy it has not the slightest importance. The loose, commonplace character of the professor’s reasoning made the essay popular among such readers as wish to be thought acquainted with the philosophy of the day, while they have neither the ability nor inclination to grapple with metaphysical problems. Attacks on Hume in singularly bad taste abound throughout the book. Hume is said to have complained that he “had not been used like a gentleman,” and this probably is the only notice that he deigned to take of the professor’s labours.

  The book had an enormous vogue, and procured for its author a renown which, however evanescent, was for the moment astonishing. But it was in England rather than in Scotland that its reception was most flattering…. But as a fact the book was but a piece of literary flotsam such as is often cast up by the breaking waves of controversy. As a philosophical disputant Beattie is beneath contempt. Occasionally he scores a good point, but it may almost always be traced to Reid. He makes a sound accusation against the Scottish school, that they were ignorant of the work of the ancient philosophers and blind to their merits; but the accusation is one which he was utterly incapable of pushing home. The book is indeed a commonplace and frothy mixture of popular invective and almost childish argument.

The Minstrel, 1771–74

  The design was to trace the progress of a Poetical Genius, born in a rude age, from the first dawning of fancy and reason, till that period at which he may be supposed capable of appearing in the world as a Minstrel, that is, as an itinerant Poet and Musician;—a character which, according to the notions of our forefathers, was not only respectable, but sacred. I have endeavoured to imitate Spenser in the measure of his verse, and in the harmony, simplicity, and variety of his composition. Antique expressions I have avoided; admitting, however, some old words, where they seemed to suit the subject; but I hope none will be found that are now obsolete, or in any degree not intelligible to a reader of English poetry. To those who may be disposed to ask, what could induce me to write in so difficult a measure, I can only answer that it pleases my ear, and seems, from its Gothic structure and original, to bear some relation to the subject and spirit of the Poem. It admits both simplicity and magnificence of sound and of language beyond any other stanza that I am acquainted with. It allows the sententiousness of the couplet, as well as the more complex modulation of blank verse. What some critics have remarked, of its uniformity growing at last tiresome to the ear, will be found to hold true only when the poetry is faulty in other respects.

  I read the “Minstrel” with as much rapture as poetry, in her noblest, sweetest charms, ever raised in my soul. It seemed to me that my once most-beloved minstrel, Thomson, was come down from heaven, refined by the converse of purer spirits than those he lived with here, to let me hear him sing again the beauties of nature, and the finest feelings of virtue, not with human, but with angelic strains.

  I am charmed with “The Minstrel,” and have circulated its fame. I have enclosed a note, by which you will see how much it pleased Lord Lyttelton. I have sent one into the country to Lord Chatham; and I wrote immediately to a person who serves many gentlemen and ladies with new books, to recommend it to all people of taste. I am very sorry the second edition of Dr Beattie’s book is not yet in town. I have recommended it, too, to many of our bishops and others; but all have complained this whole winter, that the booksellers deny having any of either the first or second edition.

  I thanked you in my last for Johnson; I now thank you, with more emphasis, for Beattie,—the most agreeable and amiable writer I ever met with; the only author I have seen, whose critical and philosophical researches are diversified and embellished by a poetical imagination, that makes even the driest subject and the leanest, a feast for an epicure in books. He is so much at his ease, too, that his own character appears in every page; and, which is very rare, we see not only the writer, but the man; and that man so gentle, so well-tempered, so happy in his religion, and so humane in his philosophy, that it is necessary to love him, if one has the least sense of what is lovely. If you have not his poem called “The Minstrel,” and cannot borrow it, I must beg you to buy it for me; for, though I cannot afford to deal largely in so expensive a commodity as books, I must afford to purchase at least the poetical works of Beattie.

  It was his supreme delight to saunter in the fields the livelong night, contemplating the sky, and marking the approach of day; and he used to describe, with peculiar animation, the pleasure he received from the soaring of the lark in the summer morning. A beautiful landscape which he has magnificently described in the twentieth stanza of the first book of the “Minstrel,” corresponds exactly with what must have presented itself to his poetical imagination, on those occasions, at the approach of the rising sun, as he would view the grandeur of that scene from the hill in the neighbourhood of his native village. The high hill which rises to the west of Fordoun, would, in a misty morning, supply him with one of the images so beautifully described in the twenty-first stanza. And the twentieth stanza of the second book of the “Minstrel” describes a night-scene unquestionably drawn from nature, in which he probably had in view Homer’s sublime description of the moon, in the eighth book of the Iliad, so admirably translated by Pope, that an eminent critic had not scrupled to declare it to be superior to the original. He used, himself, to tell, that it was from the top of a high hill in the neighbourhood that he first beheld the ocean, the sight of which, he declared, made the most lively impression on his mind.

  “Lives there the man,” who has a heart to feel, and an understanding to appreciate, who does not even hug the “Minstrel” of Beattie? Most sweet and soothing and instructive is that thoroughly picturesque and sentimental poem, throughout: while the stanza exhibits one of the happiest of modern attempts at that of the Spencerian structure.

  His fame now rests upon “The Minstrel” alone. Since its first publication, many poems of a far loftier and more original character have been produced in England; yet still does it maintain its popularity; and still in Edwin, that happy personification of the poetic temperament, do young and enthusiastic readers delight to recognize a picture of themselves. Though we cannot fail to regret that Beattie should have left it incomplete, yet we do not long for the concluding books from any interest which we take in the story, such as is excited by some other unfinished works of genius, the tale of “Cambuscan,” for instance, or the legend of “Christabel.” In “The Minstrel,” indeed, there is but little invention; it is a poem of sentiment and description, conveying to us lessons of true philosophy in language of surprising beauty, and displaying pictures of nature, in her romantic solitudes, painted by a master’s hand.

  No poem has ever given more delight to minds of a certain class, and in a certain stage of their progress … that class a high one, and that stage perhaps the most delightful in the course of their pilgrimage. It was to this class that the poet himself belonged; the scenes which he delineated were those in which he had grown up, the feelings and aspirations those of his own boyhood and youth, and the poem derived its peculiar charm from its truth.

  This afternoon I read through Beattie’s “Minstrel,” which I never read carefully before. It does not seem to me in most parts to possess fire enough—you can’t see the “kindling touch” of genius in it.

  “The Minstrel” is an harmonious and eloquent composition, glowing with poetical sentiment; but its inferiority in the highest poetical qualities may be felt by comparing it with Thomson’s “Castle of Indolence,” which is perhaps the other work in the language which it most nearly resembles, but which yet it resembles much in the same way as gilding does solid gold, or as colored water might be made to resemble wine.

  Beattie had not the same power of luscious delineation, nor the same command over language, which belonged to Thomson; yet, on the other hand, he sometimes rises to a strain of manly force and dignity which was beyond the compass of the other.

  Of James Beattie it is enough to record that he published incoherent fragments of a mock-antique “Minstrel,” in the Spenserian stanza.

  His thought is nowhere great; it verges on originality, but is never conspicuously fresh and new. “The Minstrel” besides is defective in the execution of its plan. The idea at the root of it was a happy one; and Wordsworth subsequently gave partial proof of what might be done with it. But Beattie did not really carry out his purpose. The figure of Edwin remains a mere shadow; and the reader cannot be said to behold the growth of a mind whose features are nowhere brought before his eye.

  “The Minstrel,” like “The Seasons,” abounds in insipid morality, the commonplaces of denunciation against luxury and ambition, and the praise of simplicity and innocence.

  “The Minstrel or the Progress of Genius” can satisfy only the most moderate expectations, or the least fastidious taste. There is absolutely no story; the expression is seldom or never striking, and the versification (it is Spenserian), though not contemptible, has no distinction. But all the objects of the early, confused, Romantic appetite—country scenes, woods, ruins, the moon, chivalry, mountains—are dwelt upon with a generous emotion, and with at least poetic intention. Above all, Beattie was important “for them,” to apply once more one of the most constantly applicable of critical dicta. His time could understand him, as it could not have understood purer Romanticism, and it is probable that, for an entire generation at least, and perhaps longer, “The Minstrel” served to bring sometimes near, and sometimes quite, to poetry, readers who would have found Coleridge too fragmentary, Shelley too ethereal, and both too remote.

General

  Dr. Beattie’s style is singularly free and perspicuous, and adapted in the highest degree to the purpose of familiar lecturing to his pupils; but for the author we should deem it something less than elegant, and something less than nervous. In early life he took great pains to imitate Addison, whose style he always recommended and admired…. In many parts of the letters, we are constrained to perceive a degree of egotism inconsistent with the dignity of a philosopher or a man. The writer seems unwilling to lose any opportunity of recounting the attentions, the compliments, the testimonies of admiration, which he has received from individuals or the public. The complacency with which he expatiates on himself and his performances, is but imperfectly disguised by the occasional and too frequent professions of holding himself and those performances cheap. This is a very usual but unsuccessful expedient, with those who have reflection enough to be sensible that they have rather too much ostentation, but not resolution enough to restrain themselves from indulging in it.

  He wrote English better than any other of his countrymen, and had formed his style and manner of composition on our Addison; but what he admired in him was his tuneful prose and elegant expression. He had no notion of that writer’s original and inimitable humour.

  The few of his poems which he thought worthy of being selected from the rest, and of being delivered to posterity, have many readers, to whom perhaps one recommendation of them is that they are few. They have, however, and deservedly, some admirers of a better stamp. They soothe the mind with indistinct conceptions of something better than is met with in ordinary life. The first book of the “Minstrel,” the most considerable amongst them, describes with much fervour the enthusiasm of a boy “smit with the love of song,” and awakened to a sense of rapture by all that is most grand or lovely in the external appearance of nature. It is evident that the poet had felt much of what he describes, and he therefore makes his hearers feel it. Yet at times, it must be owned, he seems as if he were lashing himself into a state of artificial emotion.

  On the whole, Beattie may be ranked beside, or near, Campbell, Collins, Gray, and Akenside. Deficient in thought and passion, in creative power, and copious imagination, he is strong in sentiment, in mild tenderness, and in delicate description of nature. Whatever become of his Essay on Truth, or even of his less elaborate and more pleasing Essays on Music, Imagination, and Dreams, the world can never, at any stage of its advancement, forget to read and admire the “Minstrel” and the “Hermit,” or to cherish the memory of their warm-hearted and sorely-tried author.

  Beattie, a metaphysical moralist, with a young girl’s nerves and an old maid’s hobbies.

  His style has considerable power of the rotund declamatory order; copious, high-sounding, and elegant; occasionally in its appeals to established feeling throwing out rhetorical interrogations, followed by brief, abrupt answers.

  His poems will ever hold a place among the classical writings of Great Britain. His “Minstrel” and his “Hermit” are exquisite poems of their kind: simple, graceful, tender, and leaving a peaceful and peace-giving impression on the mind; and therefore not likely to be appreciated by those whose tastes were formed by the passionate and startling style of poetry introduced in the next page by Byron, who was at school in Aberdeen while Beattie was in his declining years. His prose works do not exhibit much grasp or depth of thought, but are characterized by much ease and elegance.

  Beattie also wrote odes, but any interference with the dust that has settled upon them would be officious and unnecessary; it is by his “Minstrel” that he lives, so far as he can be said to live at all, for there is no great delight to be got from his other poems. “The Minstrel,” however, has real merit. It was due in good part to the influence of Spenser, whom he greatly admired, but even in beautiful passages we find such conventional phrases as “glittering waves and skies in gold arrayed.” Yet in the first book we find very genuine love of nature expressed with real poetical skill.

  Beattie is perhaps the most difficult poet of the eighteenth century for a nineteenth-century reader to criticise sympathetically. His original poetical power was almost nil. But he had a delicate and sensitive taste, and was a diligent student of the works of Gray and Collins on the one hand, and of the ballads which Percy had just published on the other. His earlier poems are merely so many variations on the “Elegy” and the “Ode on the Passions.” His “Judgment of Paris” and his “Lines on Churchill” are perhaps those of his works in which he was least indebted to others, and they are almost worthless intrinsically, besides being (at least the Churchill lines) in the worst possible taste.

  Beattie’s odes are feeble echoes of “The Bard” of Gray and “The Passions” of Collins; his “Judgment of Paris” is mere rhetoric; his imitation of Shakespeare’s “Blow, blow, thou winter wind” is chiefly remarkable for the number of technical faults compressed within so narrow compass. “The Minstrel” itself is more noteworthy as a symptom than for its intrinsic merits.

  The author of the “Minstrel” was an honest man and a respectable poet, but he prided himself too much on what he called common sense, and failed to see that in the search after truth other and even higher faculties may be also needed.

  His fame to-day is as a tale that is told. His prose works, so lauded in their generation, are forgotten. His “Minstrel” lingers still with a slender reputation after its days of glory, and its author is stamped with that disastrous title of mediocrity—“a pleasing poet.”