by Will Durant
not only as a man but as a British subject, … for the flourishing commerce of Germany, Spain, Italy, and even France itself. I am at least certain that Great Britain and all those nations would flourish more did their sovereigns and ministers adopt such enlarged and benevolent sentiments towards each other.… The increase of riches and commerce in any one nation, instead of hurting, commonly promotes the riches and commerce of all its neighbors.135
These ideas, perhaps influenced by the laissez-faire physiocrats, influenced their turn Hume’s friend Adam Smith, played a part in developing a British policy of free trade, and are finding fulfillment in Western Europe today.
6. History
In 1752, after a campaign of the orthodox party against him as an insolent infidel, Hume was elected keeper of the library of the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh. Despite the modest salary of forty pounds a year, the appointment meant much to him, for it made him master of thirty thousand volumes. It was through access to this library that he was able to write his History of England. In 1748 he had confessed to a friend: “I have long had an intention, in my riper years, of composing some history.”136 He called history “the great mistress of wisdom”;137 he hoped to discover in it the causes of the rise and fall of nations; besides,
to see all the human race pass as it were in review before us, appearing in their true colors, without any of those disguises which, during their lifetime, so much perplexed the judgment of beholders—what spectacle can be imagined so magnificent, so various, so interesting? What amusement, either of the senses or of the imagination, can be compared with it?138
It is one of the glories of the eighteenth century that it produced within a generation three of the world’s greatest historians: Voltaire, Hume, and Gibbon, all grounded in philosophy, seeking to reinterpret history in non-theological terms, and in the broadest perspective of the knowledge accumulated by their time. Gibbon never tired of praising Hume and acknowledging his influence; he valued Hume’s praise of the initial volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) above any other commendation. Did Hume in turn owe much to Voltaire? He had reached and formulated his own philosophy as debtor to the English deists rather than to the French skeptics; the Treatise of Human Nature antedated all the major works of Voltaire, Diderot, and Montesquieu. But Hume’s History of England (1754–62) may have owed something to Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV (1751), even to the Essai sur les moeurs, parts of which were printed in 1745 and 1755. All three of these historians agreed in exposing superstition, rejecting supernatural explanations, and identifying progress with the development of knowledge, manners, and arts.
Hume wrote his History backward. Its first volume (1754) covered the reigns of James I and Charles I—the years 1603–49; the second (1756) ran from 1649 to 1688; the third and fourth (1759), from 1485 to 1603; the fifth and sixth (1761), from the invasion of England by Julius Caesar to the accession of Henry VII in 1485.
The furor of criticism that fell upon the first volume surprised him. He believed that the domination of England by the Whigs since their importation of William III in 1688, and their fear of the Jacobite revolts of and 1745, had discolored English historiography with anti-Stuart passion; and he supposed that he was free from contrary predilections. “I thought that I was the only historian that had at once neglected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudice.”139 He forgot that he was a Scot, that Scotland was still secretly mourning her Bonnie Prince Charlie, and that the Scots, probably including Hume, had never forgiven England for killing the half-Scot Charles I and bringing in first a Dutchman and then a German to rule England, Scotland, and Wales. So, while admitting that Charles had overstretched the royal prerogative and deserved to be dethroned, he pictured Parliament as likewise overreaching its privilege and equally guilty of the Civil War. He admitted the right of the nation to depose a bad king, but he wished that no one had ever pushed that right to extremes; he feared the “fury and injustice of the people,” and felt that the execution of the “mild and benign” Charles had dangerously loosened popular habits of respect for government. He scorned the Puritans as “sanctified hypocrites,” who “polluted” their language with “mysterious jargon” and “interlaced their iniquities with prayers.”140 He dismissed the Commonwealth as a period of murderous piety, military tyranny, and social disorder, cured only by the Stuart Restoration. Voltaire, reviewing the History, thought Hume quite impartial:
Mr. Hume … is neither pro-Parliament nor royalist, neither Anglican nor Presbyterian; he is simply judicial.… The fury of parties has for a long time deprived England of a good historian as well as of a good government. What a Tory wrote was disowned by the Whigs, who in their turn were given the lie by the Tories.… But in the new historian we find a mind superior to his materials; he speaks of weaknesses, blunders, cruelties as a physician speaks of epidemic diseases.141
British critics did not agree with Voltaire. They did not complain that Hume had seldom consulted original sources, but (he recalled) he
was assailed by one cry of reproach, disapprobation, and even detestation: English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, freethinker and religionist, patriot and courtier, united in their rage against the man who had presumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I and the Earl of Strafford; and after the first ebullitions of their fury were over, what was still more mortifying, the book seemed to sink into oblivion. Mr. Millar told me that in a twelvemonth he sold only forty-five copies of it.142
He was so discouraged that for a time he thought of moving, as in his youth, to some provincial town in France, where he could live under an assumed name. However, France and England were at war, and Volume II was nearly finished; he resolved to persevere. His prejudice grew from being opposed; in revising Volume I he made “above a hundred alterations,” but, he tells us with all the puckish delight of a mountainous imp, “I have made all of them invariably to the Tory side.”143 Nevertheless the succeeding volumes had a good sale; the Tories now hailed him as their stout defender, and some Whigs admitted the charm of a style simple, clear, incisive, and direct, sometimes anticipating Gibbon’s judicial dignity. The account of the dramatic conflict between Henry II and Thomas à Becket rivals Gibbon’s narrative of the capture of Constantinople by the Turks. The cumulative impression made by the six volumes raised Hume’s fame to its peak. In 1762 Boswell rated him as “the greatest writer in Britain”144—but Boswell was a Scot. In 1764 Voltaire modestly pronounced the book “perhaps the best history ever written in any language.”145 Gibbon and Macaulay have thrown it into the shade, and Macaulay has balanced its prejudice. We are not advised to read Hume’s History of England today; its record of the facts has long since been improved upon; but one reader, who began it as a task, found it an illumination and a delight.
7. The Old Philosopher
In 1755 a movement was begun by some Scottish divines to indict Hume before the General Assembly of the Kirk on a charge of infidelity. Meanwhile the “Scottish Enlightenment” had generated a liberal movement among the young ministers, and they were able to prevent any open condemnation of the philosopher-historian; but ecclesiastical attacks upon him continued, stinging him again into meditating flight. His opportunity came when (1763) the Earl of Hertford invited him as deputy secretary on an embassy to France, and secured for him a pension of £200 a year for life.
He had long since admired French intellect, had been influenced by the earlier writers of the French Illumination, and had corresponded with Montesquieu and Voltaire. His works had received far more praise in France than in England. The Comtesse de Boufflers fell in love with him through print, wrote ingratiatingly to him, came to London to see him; he escaped her. But when he reached Paris she took him in tow, made him the lion of her salon, and struggled to arouse a manly passion in his breast; she found him too stabilized for amours. He was feted in one gathering after another; “no feast is complete without him,” said Mme.
d’Épinay. The aristocracy opened its arms to him; great ladies—even the ailing Pompadour—fluttered about him. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that Louis XIV never, in any three weeks of his life, suffered so much flattery.” He met Turgot, d’Alembert, d’Holbach, and Diderot; and Voltaire, from his distant throne at Ferney, called him “my St. David.” The Earl of Hertford was astonished to find that his secretary was far more sought after and bowed to than himself. Horace Walpole resented all this, and some of the philosophes, growing jealous, made fun of Hume’s corpulence. At one party, when Hume entered, d’Alembert, quoting the Fourth Gospel, remarked, “Et verbum caro factum est” (And the word was made flesh); whereupon a lady admirer is reported to have retorted, with incredible wit, “Et verbum caro factum est” (And the word was made lovable).146 No wonder Hume, harassed in Edinburgh, unpopular in London, wrote: “There is a real satisfaction in living at Paris, from the great number of sensible, knowing, and polite company with which that city abounds.”147
In November, 1765, a new British ambassador came, and Hume’s appointment ended. He returned to Edinburgh, but in 1767 he accepted the post of undersecretary at the Foreign Office in London. It was in this period that he brought Rousseau into England, and had famous trouble with him there; this story must wait. In August, 1769, aged fifty-eight, he retired finally to Edinburgh, being now “very opulent (for I possessed a revenue of £ 1,000 a year), healthy, and though somewhat stricken in years, with the prospect of enjoying long my ease, and of seeing the increase of my reputation.”148
His home on St. David Street became a salon, with Adam Smith, William Robertson, and other Scottish celebrities gathering about him as their acknowledged sovereign. They liked him not only for his mind. They saw that despite his iconoclastic reasoning he was amiable in discourse, cheerful of mood, moderate in controversy, tolerant of contrary views, not letting diversity of ideas abate the cordiality of his friendships. He seems (like Montaigne and Voltaire) to have valued friendship above love; “friendship is the chief joy of human life.”149 Yet he was popular with women, perhaps because he had no wife. He was a favorite guest in many homes; if his corpulence ruined the chairs,150 his wit atoned for his weight. He suggested a tax on obesity, but expected that some “divines might pretend that the Church was in danger”; he blessed the memory of Julius Caesar for having preferred fat men. “Upon the whole,” said Adam Smith, “I have always considered him … as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will admit.”151
If one must seek flaws in so amiable a character, or blind spots in so brilliant a mind, the hardest to forgive are the references to the “hideous hypothesis” of the “atheist” Spinoza,152 which must have aimed at protective discoloration. Hume’s psychology was the most penetrating of his time, but it did not quite account for the sense of personal identity; one mental state does not merely recall another, it may recall it as mine. The replacement of “cause” with “regular sequence” has required only a change of phrase; “regular sequence” is enough for science and philosophy; and the History of England still seeks to explain events by causes.153 A skepticism that confessedly is abandoned in actual life must be wrong in theory, for practice is the final test of theory. And it is strange that while reducing cause to custom, and morality to sympathetic feeling, Hume gave so little weight to custom and feeling in his interpretation of religion, and showed such lack of sympathy for the persistent functions of religion in history. He was quite insensitive to the consolations of faith, the comfort it brought to souls shivering in the immensity of mystery, or the loneliness of grief, or the harsh fatality of defeat. The success of Wesley was history’s answer to Hume.
Despite these cavils, we acknowledge again the cutting edge of Hume’s catalytic mind. He was in himself the Enlightenment for the British Isles; there, except in political vision, he was essentially all that a dozen philosophes were for France. While feeling French influence deeply, he came to the ideas of the Enlightenment, and struck some of its most telling blows, before the philosophes—even before Voltaire—had bared their fangs against l’infâme; they owed as much to him as he to them. “I salute you,” wrote Diderot, “I love you, I revere you.”154 In England he ended deism by challenging the capacity of reason to defend even the simplest fundamentals of religious faith; he carried the war not merely to the walls but to the citadel of the ancient creed. Gibbon was the offspring of Hume in philosophy, and his transcending disciple in history. In Germany the Enquiry concerning the Human Understanding woke Kant from his “dogmatic slumber” by apparently undermining all science, metaphysics, and theology through questioning the objectivity of cause. After reading the manuscript of Ha-mann’s translation of the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Kant incorporated in the final preparation of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Hume’s criticisms of the argument from design, and accounted them unanswerable.155
“May it be my fate, for my own sake and for that of all my friends,” Hume wrote, “to stop short at the threshold of old age, and not to enter too far into that dismal region.”156 Fate took him at his word. Says his autobiography:
In the spring of 1775 I was struck with a disorder in my bowels, which at first gave me no alarm, but has since, as I apprehend it, become mortal and incurable. I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits; insomuch that were I to name the period of my life which I should most choose to pass over again, I might be tempted to point to this later period. I possess the same ardor as ever in my study, and the same gaiety in company. I consider, besides, that a man of sixty-five, by dying, cuts off only a few years of infirmities.157
Diarrhea, the favorite vengeance of the gods upon the human great, conspired with internal hemorrhages to reduce him seventy pounds in that one year 1775. To the Comtesse de Boufflers he wrote: “I see death approaching gradually, without anxiety or regret. I salute you, with- great affection and regard, for the last time.”158 He went to take the waters at Bath, but they proved useless against chronic ulcerated colitis. His mind remained calm and clear.
He returned to Edinburgh July 4, 1776, prepared to die “as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.”159 When he read, in Lucan’s Dialogues of the Dead, the various excuses that the dying gave to Charon for not promptly boarding his boat to cross the Styx into eternity, he remarked that he could not find any excuse fit to his own case, except perhaps to plead: “Have a little patience, good Charon.… I have been endeavoring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.” But Charon answered: “You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy that I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into the boat this instant!”160
Boswell, importunate and impertinent, insisted on putting the dying man to the question—did he not now believe in another life? Hume replied, “It is a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist forever.” But, persisted Boswell, surely the thought of a future state is pleasing? “Not at all,” answered Hume; “it is a very gloomy thought.” Women came and begged him to believe; he diverted them with humor.161
He died quietly, “free from much pain” (said his doctor), on August 25, 1776. Despite a heavy rain a large crowd attended his burial. A voice was heard to remark, “He was an atheist.” Another answered, “No matter, he was an honest man.”162
* * *
I. A descendant of that earl was in 1964 prime minister of Great Britain. “Home” was and is pronounced “Hume.”
CHAPTER V
Literature and the Stage
1714–56
I. THE REALM OF INK
ENGLAND was throbbing if not with literature at least with p
rint. Not only had population grown, especially in the towns and above all in London, but literacy had spread as a necessity of commerce and industry and city life. The burgeoning bourgeoisie took to books as a distinction and a relief; women took to books and thereby gave audience and motives to Richardson and the novel. The reading public was further expanded by circulating libraries, of which the first on record was set up in 1740; soon there were twenty-two in London alone. The collective middle class began to replace the individual aristocrat as the patron of literature; so Johnson could flout Chesterfield. Government subsidies no longer—as formerly with Addison, Swift, and Defoe—commanded superior pens through political plums.