Art. Literary Taste as Counter Enlightenment in Hu,e

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Literary Taste as Counter-Enlightenment in Hume's "History of England"Author(s): James NoggleReviewed work(s):Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 44, No. 3, Restoration and EighteenthCentury (Summer, 2004), pp. 617-638Published by: Rice UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3844581 .

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SEL 44, 3 (Summer 2004): 617-638 617 ISSN 0039-3657

Literary Taste as Counter-

Enlightenment in Hume's

History of England

JAMES NOGGLE

David Hume's six-volume History of England (1754-62) links culture to the engines of history in what we would now recognize as a characteristically "liberal" configuration. As Hume puts it, the "arts and commerce [are] the necessary attendants of liberty and equality" as history progresses.1 Such a three-part harmony of cultural, economic, and political advancement has been fre?

quently postulated, not only in Hume's time but also by eminent

contemporary historians, to explain Britain's distinctive achieve- ments in the eighteenth century. In The Pleasures ofthe Imagina? tion, John Brewer quotes one of Hume's characteristic statements of the view and affirms that "recent historical research bears [it] out": "Liberty and the rule of law," Brewer concludes, "which protected property, were the handmaidens of commerce which, in

turn, helped the liberal and fine arts flourish."2 This principle defines for Hume the enlightenment of his own age as it constitutes the logic of history's development toward it?a logic never

neglected through the History, even while it attends to the sur? face ironies, anachronistic details, the anticipations and regres- sions punctuating England's progress from the pre-Christian era to 1688. Beyond its account of English history's distinctive telos, then, Hume's work offers a signal instance of the master narra?

tive, the grand recit, the "Enlightenment history" that has re- mained a target of poststructuralist critique and historicist literary critics such as Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher.3

James Noggle, associate professor of English at Wellesley College, is au? thor ofThe Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Sati- rists (Oxford, 2001). He is working on a book about the temporality of taste in eighteenth-century British discourse.



618 Hume's History of England

The History's progressive scheme is consistently complicated, however, by the role played in it by cultural advancement?by the "refinement" of what Hume variously calls "the arts and sci?

ences," "polite learning," or "taste and judgment." Taste factors an anomaly into Hume's History that renders its very status as a

comprehensive, enlightened narrative problematic. Unlike the

progress of liberty or commerce, polite learning's refinement leads Hume to reflect on the complexity of his own position as both a refined writer and a refined product of history.

This self-reflexive irony has a number of important implica? tions for contemporary debates about the nature of the

Enlightenment's historical view of itself and the relationship be? tween literature and history in general. Often poststructuralist critics have portrayed the Enlightenment as a battle between cer? tain privileged terms?reason, theoretical understanding, univer?

sality, abstraction?and their opposites: contingency, recalcitrant

particularity, "the touch ofthe real" (in Greenblatt and Gallagher's phrase) just beyond our theoretical grasp.

4 Enlightenment his?

tory accordingly narrates the triumph in the course of events of the dichotomy's preferred half over its underprivileged one, or at least demonstrates the historian's own conceptual mastery over a welter of instances that would otherwise seem chaotic or ran? dom. It has seemed almost inevitable that contemporary critics, however sophisticated, maintain the dichotomy themselves. Cri-

tiquing the Enlightenment, they often simply invert its values,

arguing that all significant challenges to Enlightenment theory must historically emerge from the "dense, swarming territory beyond its own mental enclave which threatens to fall utterly outside its sway," in Terry Eagleton's words.5 If we seek the limits or shortcomings of Enlightenment history and thought in gen? eral, surely they will be found in an inability to deal with this "other" terrain.

The typical understanding of the historical role of literature and aesthetics in such conceptual schemes reflects this polarity. Either aesthetic discourse aids the Enlightenment project of ra?

tionalization, using, e.g., literature's considerable subtlety and

responsiveness to particularity to help reason conquer the "dense,

swarming territory," or it finds itself aligned with otherness, mak?

ing fugitive gestures that expose the limitations and blindness of all myths of progress and theoretical comprehension. In works such as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White's The Politics and Poet? ics of Transgression,6 it has been common to view literature as

supporting one or the other of these starkly opposed agendas,



James Noggle 619

and Greenblatt and Gallagher's book reaffirms New Historicism's orientation of truly radical literary scholarship toward an appre- ciation of the inassimilable historical nuances, the blind alleys, and so on, that disrupt the logic of the grand recit

The present account finds in Hume an alternative to this whole

way of thinking about Enlightenment history and literature's role in it. As we shall see, Hume takes the accidental details of history and the passions that produce them as grist for his theoretical

mill, not as occult challenges to it?not surprisingly, since such

oppositions are foundational for Enlightenment thought. A cur? rent of counter-Enlightenment appears in the History of England not when its narrative coherence founders on details it cannot

comprehend but rather when it ironically reveals the collapse of the dichotomies on which Enlightenment discourse is supposedly founded. The term I use for this collapse, "counter-Enlight? enment," is usually associated with Isaiah Berlin, who applies it to the thought of various anti-Enlightenment writers?and in? deed shows how writers such as Johann Georg Hamann turned elements of Hume's philosophy against its overt intellectual pur? pose.7 My application ofthe idea to Hume is somewhat different. Hume's historical writing both erects the binary logic commonly ascribed to Enlightenment history and points to the places where it breaks down. This view complicates a reading not merely of Hume's historical writing but of Enlightenment history itself, inasmuch as it would be difficult to find a better, more widely read

exemplar of the genre in English than the History of England. The present account seeks to move beyond the practice, common in both positive and negative portrayals ofthe period, of judging writers and works by determining which side of some fundamen? tal Enlightenment opposition they are on. Rather it identifies the

collapse of oppositions as a source of Hume's critical and histori? cal power.

The observation that such collapses occur in the History es?

pecially when it assesses the historical role of literature and the arts is intended to make a further polemical point. Too often, recent discussion has polarized its sense of literature's role in

history. If literature's critical, reflective power is not to be seen as

always already co-opted by the hegemonic designs of power/ knowledge, it must somehow discover a pure place for itself (how? ever flickeringly and impotently) apart from these designs and

beyond their reach.8 Hume's historical writing offers an alterna? tive to this familiar impasse. In Hume's scheme, literary culture is deeply embedded in an obviously ideological program, sup-




porting a particular view of political and economic progress that

gives meaning to England's development. But its very embeddedness within liberal ideology perfectly places it to dem? onstrate the limits ofthe justifications of liberalism. Literature is hence historically interesting neither because of the especially subtle ideological services it performs nor because of its unique capacity to resist co-optation by ideology. It instead represents the irony emerging when the learned, refined understanding is seen as both thoroughly conditioned by historical processes and

responsible for understanding them. One sophisticated analysis that ascribes a sort of binary ten?

sion to Hume's overall project is Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Formation of a Literary Career by Jerome Christensen.

Though not interested in the History of England to any signifi? cant degree, the book begins with an account of Hume's essay, "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences," which has often been seen as anticipating the History's philosophical pro? gram.9 The essay's opening paragraphs, according to Christensen, conduct "Hume to the brink of 'chance' or 'secret or unknown

causes,' where the inquirer teeters at the limit of intelligibility, that edge where the historical understanding verges on break? down."10 Hume then rescues "historical understanding" by bring? ing such distressing details under a more generally coherent

interpretive scheme: thus, Christensen says, "Serenity is re? stored."11 For Christensen, the passage represents the nervous desire of Hume, and perhaps ofthe Enlightenment in general, to

conquer the unknown with reason. But several elements of Hume's passage tell against

Christensen's notion that its drama lies in the opposition be? tween understanding and chance, explanation and mysterious particularities. For one thing, Christensen neglects to take seri?

ously the essay's strong distinction between the history of the arts and sciences on one hand and political and economic his?

tory on the other. The former is especially difficult, Hume says, because the arts and sciences advance with the work of geniuses who "are always few in number," "[t]heir taste and judgment delicate and easily perverted."12 Political and economic histories com?

prehend more and better because they concern "a great numbef'. "it is more easy to account for the rise and progress of commerce in any kingdom, than for that of learning; and a state, which should apply itself to the encouragement of the one, would be more assured of success, than one which should cultivate the other." This obtains because "[a]varice, or the desire of gain, is an



James Noggle 621

universal passion, which operates at all times, in all places, and

upon all persons."13 Politics, at least internal politics directed "by general passions and interests" such as "[t]he depression of the

lords, and rise ofthe commons in ENGLAND," are similarly pre- dictable.14 With political and economic history, something like a true binary emerges. The "historical understanding" easily accounts for them because they proceed unreflectively, passion- ately, and consistently, never diverted by too much refined

thought.

The difficulty of writing the history of the arts and sciences stems from the opposite situation. Hume declares that the "delicate and refined" nature of particular geniuses makes generaliz- ing about them difficult.15 But he also indicates that the historian's own particular genius complicates his task even more, as he finds himself participating in the process of refinement he seeks to

explain. Hume signals this reflexivity early in his ruminations on "what is owing to chance, and what proceeds from causes" in

history with an intriguingly ironic sentence: "as a man of any subtilty can never be at a loss in this particular, he has thereby an opportunity of swelling his volumes, and discovering his profound knowledge, in observing what escapes the vulgar and ig? norant."16 The droll, exaggerated tone here ("any subtilty," "never be at a loss") seems to mock the very pretension required to un- dertake the task Hume is currently undertaking, his own egotis- tical motivation to distinguish himself from the "vulgar and

ignorant," the large group. His sense of his own particularity, moreover, comes from a confidence in his ability to address the

"profound" question that he calls (also with ironic fussiness) "this

particular."17 A concatenation of particularities defines the diffi?

culty of historical writing: "[t]he distinguishing between chance and causes must depend upon every particular man's sagacity, in considering every particular incident."18

But all this particularity finally produces an assertion of the

general nature of historical conditions that attend the progress even of the arts and sciences: "Though the persons, who cultivate the sciences with such astonishing success . . . be always few, in all nations and all ages; it is impossible but a share ofthe same spirit and genius must be antecedently diffused through? out the people among whom they arise, in order to produce, form, and cultivate, from their earliest infancy, the taste and judgment of those eminent writers."19 The statement represents not so much a final triumph of general, theoretical explanation over the ear-




lier entanglement in particulars as a seamless extension of Hume's reflexive irony. The "man of subtilty" has indeed distinguished himself by resolving "this particular." But the resolution compro- mises his status as unique, inasmuch as he shares, like other cultivators of arts and sciences, "the same spirit and genius . . .

antecedently diffused throughout the people among whom" he has arisen. Hume thus reveals the motive behind his earlier ironic

exaggeration: the genius, including the genius of history, is not so distinct from the "vulgar and ignorant" after all. Such con?

sciously elaborated irony is just what makes Christensen's sense that the passage represents a crisis for Hume seem implausible. But it also prevents us from viewing the passage's resolution as

entirely a restoration of serenity. Hume's conclusion about the

sway of general historical conditions is also the particular insight of a historian still very much in the process of distinguishing himself. The opposition is not resolved in favor of either term. Rather it collapses. The general conclusion, as it happens, im?

mediately gives way to further particularity: the essay next re? minds us that only a fool, never a refined historian, would pretend to explain why Homer appeared exactly when he did.20 Such cir- cular movement generates Hume's unique brand of restless au?

thority. Making a sort of concrete universal of himself, the

Enlightenment historian here seeks not so much to conquer anomaly with a comprehensive theoretical perspective as to dem? onstrate how his own enterprise ironically unites the two.

Recent discussions of The History of England itself by J. G. A. Pocock and Mark Salber Phillips bring the lessons of "Ofthe Rise and Progress" to it. But like Christensen, they take the essay to

propose a broad dichotomy between general theory and particu? lar mysteriousness, finding the distinction equally relevant to all three kinds of history, economic, political, and cultural. Thus

they also neglect the essay's suggestion that cultural refinement renders the historian's perspective uniquely problematic. Pocock

says that Hume's historical enterprise is structured to show "that there are always two histories to be written": one a narrative of the "general change of human conditions" and another of par? ticular, contingent events suggestive of "the mysteries of the hu? man psyche and the human condition";21 Phillips calls the former "the proper territory ofthe philosophical historian."22 The details of Hume's narrative, including economic and especially political events, tend for Pocock to relate in "anomalous and ironic" ways to a history of general causes, and for Phillips as well, though he sees a "spectrum of understanding" between the extremes.23 Both



James Noggle 623

furthermore associate the two genres with different genders, though interestingly they disagree about which gender goes with which type of history. Pocock says that "[i]t was the philosophical history . . . which was recommended to women readers," while

Phillips thinks that women will tend to "pay attention to the hu? man foreground of events," and that men "will take in a more

remote, but wider horizon."24 (The tendency of Hume's historical

composition to collapse dichotomies could explain how Pocock and Phillips could produce plausible opposing accounts of Hume's

linkage ofthe genders to the two historical genres.) A relatively stable dichotomy between "general change" and

"anomalous" details does obtain when the History treats econom? ics and politics. To this extent, then, Hume's work reflects the tension that many recent writers identify between the master narrative and the anecdotal anomalies that test its comprehensive power.25 Of course Hume's is not quite the same sort of En?

lightenment history, the masterful survey of human progress, as the one imagined by Immanuel Kant, for instance, in the "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View" (1784), which Karen O'Brien notes in a recent book about Enlighten? ment historiography.26 Unlike Kant, Hume immerses himself in the messy details of past political situations and promotes spe? cific, contemporary critical aims. The embodiment of "sceptical Whiggism" (in Duncan Forbes's phrase), he insists on ironies of

English political development to ridicule politically motivated

appeals to an "ancient" constitution by modern writers such as

Henry St. John, First Viscount Bolingbroke.27 Still, the History does strive to be politically objective and detached, to rise above

factionalism, as he declares in "My Own Life": "I thought that I was the only historian, that had at once neglected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudices" (l:xxvii- xxxiv, xxx). The History's authority rests on its determination to witness the action of historical laws of politics as well as econom? ics on an array of seemingly random details from a disinterested,

enlightened distance. Thus the ironic relationship in Hume's work that Pocock de-

tects between general, philosophical history and particular de? tails usually tends to substantiate rather than undercut the

enlightened authority ofthe historian, who understands the function of accidents in a way historical agents (usually) do not. Far from subverting the logic of the grand recit, the idea of accident

helps Hume produce one. He spells out the principle of ironic

development of English politics: "An acquaintance with the an-




cient periods of their government is . . . curious, by shewing [the

English] the remote, and commonly faint and disfigured origi? nals of the most finished and most noble institutions, and by instructing them in the great mixture of accident, which com?

monly concurs with a small ingredient of wisdom and foresight, in erecting the complicated fabric of the most perfect govern? ment" (2:525). Hume's accidental anecdotes reveal the mostly unplanned nature of England's progress toward an enlightened modernity of commercial and political liberty. For instance, in volume 2, he remarks that the commons' political function under Edward I "was very different from that which it has since exer? cised with so much advantage to the public": "Instead of check-

ing and controuling the authority ofthe king, they were naturally induced to adhere to him, as the great fountain of law and jus? tice, and to support him against the power ofthe aristocracy" (p. 109). The idea of Edward as "the great fountain of law and jus? tice" rings with irony inasmuch as Hume noted a few pages be? fore that his "power of levying talliages or taxes upon them at

pleasure" attacked the commons' wealth and liberty at a stroke: "such unlimited authority in the sovereign was a sensible cheek

upon commerce, and was utterly incompatible with all the prin? ciples ofa free government" (p. 106).

Still, Edward's cultivation ofthe commons can now be recog? nized as the means by which they "rose by slow degrees to their

present importance .. . and in their progress made arts and com?

merce, the necessary attendants of liberty and equality, flourish in the kingdom" (p. 109). Actual liberty thus has roots not in an

ancient, wisely framed constitution but in its opposite?tyranni- cal manipulation. Similar knowing remarks punctuate the His?

tory, as in volume 3 on Henry VIIFs intrusion into the unjust proceedings of ecclesiastical courts: "A happy innovation; though at first invented for arbitrary purposes!" (p. 288). Though the historical agents usually do not know it, and though progress occurs largely by "accident," it is progress nonetheless, obeying "necessary" laws into which the historian has superior insight.

In several striking cases, however, the historical role of polite learning, taste, and literature presents Hume with a more com?

plicated picture. One appears early in the complete work (late in his process of composition), in volume I's remarks on Alfred the

Great, the only unequivocally celebrated culture hero in the His?

tory. The portrait perhaps invites us to view Alfred as a reflection of Hume's own ideals as a philosopher: "He seems indeed to be the model of that perfect character, which, under the denomina-



James Noggle 625

tion of a sage or wise man, philosophers have been fond of delin-

eating, rather as a fiction of their imagination, than in hopes of ever seeing it really existing" (1:74). Alfred's near-ideal character could be a fictional effect of his historical remoteness, but Hume seems to take this as an opportunity to draw him after his own heart (p. 75). Gratifying sentiments concerning Alfred's support of English liberty follow Hume's every description of his authori- tative executive measures: "amidst these rigours of justice, this

great prince preserved the most sacred regard to the liberty of his

people; and it is a memorable sentiment preserved in his will, that it was just the English should for ever remain as free as their own thoughts" (p. 79). This respect for liberty naturally complements one for commerce: "He prompted men of activity to betake themselves to navigation, to push commerce into the most remote countries, and to acquire riches by propagating industry among their fellow-citizens" (p. 81). Such attributes made Alfred a useful figure for diverse ideological articulations of Britain's

greatness in the eighteenth century: James Thomson's "Rule, Britannia!" after all, appeared as part of Alfred, a Masque in 1740. For Hume, Alfred is important because he grasps the necessary interrelation of political liberty and commercial activity with as full a portion ofthe "small ingredient of wisdom and foresight" as

history's "great mixture of accident" allows. Alfred's love and promotion of arts and learning complete this

picture with a slight but significant difference. Hume continues, after describing the moralizing tendency of Alfred's legal system: "As good morals and knowledge are almost inseparable, in every age, though not in every individual; the care of Alfred for the

encouragement of learning among his subjects was another use? ful branch of his legislation, and tended to reclaim the English from their former dissolute and ferocious manners: But the King was guided in this pursuit, less by political views, than by his natural bent and propensity towards letters" (p. 79). As an indi?

vidual, Alfred demonstrates both "good morals" in his administration of justice, and learned "knowledge," though he seems to lack the final knowledge that knows its own beneficial social and

political effects: Alfred's learning is at once "inseparable" from his own successful administration and distinct from his political views. Hume notices this separation a little earlier, describing the initial signs of Alfred's greatness: "[h]is genius was first rouzed

by the recital of Saxon poems, in which the queen took delight"? a pointedly feminized origin soon developing to include more edi?

fying literature in Latin (p. 64). The effect of literature on him is




double, at once enabling him to be a great king and diverting his ambition: "Absorbed in these elegant pursuits, he regarded his accession to royalty rather as an object of regret than of triumph; but being called to the throne . . . he shook off his literary indo-

lence, and exerted himself in the defence of his people" (p. 64). This "literary indolence" helps make Alfred fit to rule, not just because shaking it off shows him willing to sacrifice pleasure for

duty but because it predicts, in its "inseparable" connection to

"good morals," his later commitment to political justice, even

though again he does not seem fully conscious ofthe connection. Literature edifies and ennobles Alfred even as it appears to oper? ate in competition with the very duties, the promotion of com?

merce, liberty, and good government, that it will later enable him to perfect.

Alfred's story does not present a simple contrast between an

entirely irrational love of poetry and the rational demands of gov? ernmental and economic policy. It rather portrays learning as a

special kind of refined consciousness both distinct from and cru?

cially supportive of more practical pursuits. Some historians such as Paul de Rapin-Thoyras praise Alfred for his deliberate policies for promoting learning, while others such as Sir John Spelman lament his early absorption in secular literature.28 Hume's ac? count is especially Humean in its emphasis on the unintended, beneficial public effects of Alfred's sentimental literary attach? ment. Given the perhaps admittedly fantasized dimension of the

portrait, it is not surprising that similarities suggest themselves between it and Hume's autobiographical musings in My Own Life, written in 1776 and prefixed to the History. There he declares, "I . . . was seized very early with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life, and the great source of my enjoyments" (l:xxvii). While never overcoming his own literary indolence to enter the legal profession (as his family hoped he

would),29 he does, like Alfred, serve his country by turning his inclination to national account, giving England its first compre? hensive nonpartisan history. Hume the enlightened historian has

gained an insight into the historical function of letters that Alfred

lacks, but their like immersions in literary pursuits ultimately enable both to attain an enlightened perspective that not only grasps but also promotes the nation's interests. Thus, among all Alfred's talents, his learning seems most sympathetic to Hume and most crucial to his later performance as an enlightened ruler, and his reluctance to assume the throne more an index of so?

phisticated intelligence fostered by "elegant pursuits" than an



James Noggle 627

irrational, poetically self-indulgent blindness to political neces-

sity. The contingency of individual genius is maintained in its

very expression of the necessity of refinement's contributions to other kinds of historical progress.

Throughout the History, cultural refinement reflects ironically forward upon the enlightenment of Hume's own time. He pours scorn on the literary and social articulations of chivalry even as he approves of its ultimate social effects: 'These ideas of chivalry infected the writings, conversation, and behaviour of men, dur?

ing some ages; and even after they were, in a great measure, banished by the revival of learning, they left modern gallantry and the point of honour, which still maintain their influence, and are the genuine offspring of those ancient affectations" (1:487). The irony here closely resembles that found in political develop- ments throughout the History, such as Edward I's manipulation ofthe commons that ultimately constitutes their liberty: the genu? ine offspring of affectations could for Hume be a suitably ironic subtitle of that "most perfect and most accurate system of lib?

erty," the English constitution itself (2:525). But with chivalry, the irony's direction is reversed. It is one thing to note that lib?

erty arose slowly and inadvertently from tyranny. For Hume, the remarkable change ought only to make his readers "cherish their

present constitution, from a comparison or contrast with the con? dition of those distant times" (p. 525). On the contrary, "gallantry" and "point of honor" are survivors from a ridiculed, benighted epoch, but still the vocabulary for the most refined expressions of manners in his own enlightened day?a less "remote" and "dis-

figured" reflection of themselves than they might like (p. 525). Archaic politics invites an ironic contrast, while archaic culture invites an ironic comparison, with the present.

After Alfred, the three cooperative motors of historical devel?

opment never achieve anything like the harmony Hume consis-

tently hints will arrive with eighteenth-century modernity. Sometimes arts flourish when commerce languishes or liberty founders.30 In themselves, such imbalances do not invalidate the

guiding idea of Hume's philosophical history that "arts and com? merce [are] the necessary attendants of liberty and equality." In

fact, their complex interrelation as causes and effects of one an? other seems to guarantee that most of the past will fail to syn- chronize them perfectly. Sometimes, as in the discussion of Edward I, it sounds as if "arts and commerce" begin their rise

only after the groundwork for political liberty has been laid. At other times, Hume says that artistic refinement causes political




progress: for instance, "[o]ne chief advantage, which resulted from the introduction and progress of the arts, was the introduction and progress of freedom; and this consequence affected men both in their personal and civil capacities" (2:522). A complex causal

picture emerges, filled with odd shifts of priority, that still en? ables the philosophical historian to discern the historical prin? ciple directing it.

But while these moments of disequalibrium offer yet another

way in which "accident" confirms Hume's enlightened synthesis, their unsettling energy seems strangely concentrated in learning's historical appearances, which often throw an ironic light on the

perspective trying to account for them. For instance, in volume

3, Henry VIII promotes learning with an enlightenment that seems ill-suited to his regressive political and economic programs. The latter inspire crisp analysis: "if there were really a decay of com?

merce, and industry, and populousness in England, the statutes of this reign . . . were not in other respects well calculated to

remedy the evil" (3:330); Henry's reign "abounds with monopoliz- ing laws, confining particular manufactures to particular towns"

(p. 331). His political failures are sufficiently obvious and crude to inspire simpler but equally confident declarations, as Hume denounces "his cruelty, his extortion, his violence, his arbitrary administration" (p. 322). After such evaluations, the description of the king's personal and public success with learning sounds the discordant note: "Henry, as he possessed, himself, some tal? ent for letters, was an encourager of them in others. He founded

Trinity college in Cambridge, and gave it ample endowments . . . The countenance given to letters by this king and his ministers, contributed to render learning fashionable in England: Erasmus

speaks with great satisfaction of the general regard paid by the

nobility and gentry to men of knowledge" (pp. 331-2). What makes the irony uncomfortable is not Henry's distance from, but his

anticipation of, Hume's own Addisonian program to "render learn?

ing fashionable in England," and his sponsorship ofthe very his? torical process that makes the philosophical historian's eventual denunciation of his economics and politics possible.31

The most complex historical function of literature appears when Hume more explicitly dramatizes the involvement of the taste of his own enlightened age with that of the past. In volume 5 ofthe History, the first written, James I's reign presents a situ? ation that is exactly the reverse of the one during Henry VHI's: the state of English learning is "very bad" while commerce flour- ishes and liberty advances (5:149). But literature and learning



James Noggle 629

again sound the discordant note. James's reign offered "all the

advantages which distinguish a flourishing people. Not only the

peace which he maintained, was favourable to industry and com? merce: His turn of mind inclined him to promote the peaceful arts" (p. 142). But the endeavors of James and the nation "for

promoting trade, were attended with greater success than those for the encouragement of learning" (p. 149). Even James's abso? lutist leanings seem more a literary problem than a political one: "the king's despotism was more speculative than practical" (p. 45). Hume complains, "a very bad taste in general prevailed dur?

ing that period; and the monarch himself was not a little infected with it" (p. 149). Jacobean writers' affection for "[t]he glaring fig? ures of discourse, the pointed antithesis, the unnatural conceit, the jingle of words" casts them historically as primitives, impres- sive but lacking the polish of later ages: "the English writers were

possessed of great genius before they were endowed with any degree of taste, and by that means gave a kind of sanction to those forced turns and sentiments, which they so much affected. Their distorted conceptions and expressions are attended with such vigour of mind, that we admire the imagination which pro? duced them, as much as we blame the want of judgment which

gave them admittance" (pp. 149, 150). But the passage mingles praise with criticism to acknowledge the genuine admiration he knows his contemporaries ("we") have for this writing: bad Jaco? bean taste after all opens the gate to let its indisputably "great genius" out, so it cannot be all bad.

Hume more directly recognizes his own supposedly refined

age's taste for such effects in the series of literary portraits in the

History's appendices, beginning with volume 5: "To enter into an exact criticism ofthe writers of that age, would exceed our present purpose. A short character of the most eminent, delivered with the same freedom which history exercises over kings and minis-

ters, may not be improper. The national prepossessions, which

prevail, will perhaps render the former liberty not the least perilous for an author" (5:150-1). His trepidation here differs strik-

ingly from the less "perilous" travestying of contemporary vulgar-Whig political pieties throughout the History. The pas? sage suggests a stronger correspondent awareness of himself as a particular "author" about to set his own taste against current "national prepossessions" concerning other authors. As much as Jacobean writing was sunk in "barbarism and ignorance," it nonetheless appeals to mid-eighteenth-century literary fashions (p. 150). In fact, the elements of Jacobean style, "tinsel eloquence,"




"false glister" (p. 150), and so on, smack of a false refinement characteristic of Hume's own period, criticized in his essay "Of

Simplicity and Refinement in Writing," which claims that "the excess of refinement" leads contemporary taste to delight in "a blaze of wit and conceit," and concludes that "perhaps there are, at present, some symptoms ofa like degeneracy of taste, in France as well as in England."32 Contemporary taste, even among Hume's esteemed French, is at once refined and regressive, which is ex?

actly why in England it responds to like tendencies in Jacobean literature.

Shakespeare, whose "short character" immediately follows the worries about "national prepossessions," is the name for Hume that best expresses this estranged reflection of primitive English Renaissance culture in his own refined one (5:150). (Hume re? serves a sense of unsettledness for his portraits of the very best

writers, as in his account of the "natural inequality in Milton's

genius" [6:151].) Shakespeare's work powerfully influenced

midcentury English taste, as Hume often notes with dismay. In a 1751 letter discussing John Home's play Agis, Hume remarks, "'Tis very likely to meet with success, and not to deserve it, for the author tells me, he is a great admirer of Shakespeare."33 Hume's distaste for Shakespeare is not so very quixotic for his time or hard to understand, but it gains a particular complexity in the context of the History:

If Shakespeare be considered a Man, born in a rude age, and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruc?

tion, either from the world or from books, he may be re?

garded as a prodigy: If represented as a Poet, capable of

furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined or intelli?

gent audience, we must abate much of this eulogy. In his

compositions, we regret, that many irregularities, and even

absurdities, should so frequently disfigure the animated and passionate scenes intermixed with them; and at the same time, we perhaps admire the more those beauties, on account of their being surrounded with such deformi- ties. A striking peculiarity of sentiment, adapted to a sin?

gular character, he frequently hits, as it were by inspiration; but a reasonable propriety of thought he can?

not, for any time, uphold. (5:151)



James Noggle 631

According to Hume, the admiration of modern, eighteenth-cen? tury readers for Shakespeare's prodigious genius is justified as a

historically qualified judgment, a view of him as "a Man, born in a rude age." The more unfavorable attitude, when moderns read him "as a Poet," revises their view of themselves, now "a refined or intelligent audience" valuing "reasonable propriety," as it re? vises their view of him. The double act of taste Hume imagines here demands that moderns place not only Shakespeare himself but their own admiration for him in a historical development, recognizing how their own enlightened age has surpassed his.

But this does not quite cover the ambiguity of the response that Hume describes. The refined light of modernity never fully dissipates our sense of Shakespeare's prodigious might: "A great and fertile genius he certainly possessed, and one enriched equally with a tragic and comic vein; but, he ought to be cited as a proof, how dangerous it is to rely on these advantages alone for attain?

ing an excellence in the finer arts. And there may even remain a

suspicion, that we over-rate, if possible, the greatness of his ge? nius; in the same manner as bodies often appear more gigantic, on account of their being disproportioned and mishapen [sic]. He died in 1616, aged 53 years" (5:151).

Earlier, Shakespeare's "beauties" were set off by his "defor-

mities," but here his "greatness" and his disproportion appear together in a single complex act of perception?and the passage's logic of mutually defining contrasts derives from the historically imbued one of Shakespeare "as a Man, born in a rude age" and

Shakespeare "as a Poet." The uncertain use of the authorial "we" throughout the pas?

sage activates the ambiguity of such contrastive judgments in a

literary present, especially as Hume tentatively concludes, "[a]nd there may even remain a suspicion, that we over-rate, if pos? sible." Of course, the "we" itself could be more or less simply ironic: among us there are boosters of English culture who over- rate Shakespeare, but a few of us (like Hume) have our doubts about such judgments. There is no reason to believe that Hume was not sure that Shakespeare was overrated. But neither is there

any reason to believe that Hume doubted the remarkable power of his work.34 So ambiguity subsists if we read Hume as wonder -

ing whether even his very measured praise is too generous, in?

spired dubiously by his effort to place Shakespeare in a

developmental history of taste. Hume the author seems willing to

display the "subtilty" of his judgment, and the possibility that it

may be "easily perverted" (to use the language of "Ofthe Rise and




Progress"), at the expense of a blandly confident, comprehensive critical authority. The statement concluding the portrait, "He died in 1616, aged 53 years," has an odd ring, a flat historical fact that only underscores the difference between such certainties and the critical subtlety that came before.35 The self-questioning refinement of the portrait lets the Enlightenment historian show how the dichotomies of value organizing his discourse cannot

always be sustained. On Shakespeare, past and present, enlight? ened and uncertain historical perspectives, progressive and de-

generate acts of taste, converge. A final reflection on taste's power to combine historical en?

lightenment with a sense of contingency requires a return to Hume's Essays, the most complicated of them, "Of the Standard of Taste." It begins by noticing two contrary intuitions we have about taste, first remarking "the great inconsistence and contra-

riety" of tastes from "distant nations and remote ages" to today, then undercutting this with "a species of common sense which

opposes it," that some poets are better than others and that people of refined taste usually concur on who they are.36 Commentators

agree that the essay rejects the former, skeptical view, and seeks the principles that make the latter possible.37 The strongest ar?

gument for the consistency of taste is Homer: "All the changes of

climate, government, religion, and language, have not been able to obscure his glory." From Homer follows the idea that "there are certain general principles of approbation or blame, whose influence a careful eye may trace in all operations ofthe mind."38 After citing a number of difficulties that prevent widespread agree- ment at any given time, Hume settles authority on particular critics, whose refinement is sufficiently obvious for them to step forward from the crowd: "Though men of delicate taste be rare,

they are easily to be distinguished in society."39 This turn to the judges of great literature may be taken as

typical of eighteenth-century procedures of canon formation. Privi-

leged access to a tastefully composed literary past, distinct enough from present political and class struggles to seem objective and

timeless, helped a cultural elite achieve hegemony. As Jonathan

Brody Kramnick describes Hume's position, "[t]he standard of taste is the standard of a certain minority, a minority that reflex-

ively declares a sparse fraction ofthe cultural product to be valu? able . . . [and] fails on a standard of pastness, on the durable

beauty of such writers as Milton and Homer."40 But Hume never fully separates the present act of taste from

the history from which it emerges. A sense of historical contin-



James Noggle 633

gency returns late in the essay, as Hume acknowledges that "there still remain two sources of variation" in taste: "The one is the different humours of particular men; the other, the particular manners and opinions of our age and country."41 Some of these can be overcome, but some cannot:

The want of humanity and of decency, so conspicuous in the characters drawn by several ofthe ancient poets, even sometimes by Homer and the Greek tragedians, dimin- ishes considerably the merit of their noble performances, and gives modern authors an advantage over them. We are not interested in the fortunes and sentiments of such

rough heroes: We are displeased to find the limits of vice and virtue so much confounded: And whatever indulgence we may give to the writer on account of his prejudices, we cannot prevail on ourselves to enter into his sentiments, or bear an affection to characters, which we plainly dis? cover to be blameable [sic].42

With wonderful symmetry Homer returns, now not to illustrate the argument that great writers demonstrate taste's durability, but to exemplify the challenge uncouth writers present to the modern mind. The point is not that Hume contradicts himself. Homeric poetry has many fine qualities, apart from its manners, that critics in modern London and Paris can admire along with those in ancient Athens and Rome. It is rather to note the histori? cal dimension in Hume of a recurrent interpretive tension, now between judging Homer "the poet" in light of "the manners of his

age" and judging the Homeric "composition" by the standards of "modern authors"43?resembling the tension between Shakespeare "as a Man, born in a rude age" and "as a Poet," which induced the

critically puzzling interaction between his beauties and deformi- ties. While the problematic manners in Homer concern morality and decency rather than the "false glister" of Jacobean style, the two species of "deformity" at least abut one another, as Jacobean "forced turns and sentiments" (5:150) call upon the reader un-

naturally to stretch her sympathies as the "sentiments of such

rough heroes" in Homer do. The stakes of this turn clarify as the passage concludes with

a characteristically Humean assertion of modernity's grounds for

disapproving of ancient manners: "a very violent effort is requi- site to change our judgment of manners, and excite sentiments of approbation or blame, love or hatred, different from those to




which the mind from long custom has been familiarized. And where a man is confident ofthe rectitude of that moral standard,

by which he judges, he isjustly jealous of it, and will not pervert the sentiments of his heart for a moment, in complaisance to any writer whatsoever."44 Here the critic is justified not by an enlight? ened sense of his culture's historical advancement?by modernity's economic, political, and intellectual emergence out of barbarism?but by his familiarization with "long custom," of which he is the product rather than the detached judge. The

oxymoronic assertion that the critic is "justly jealous" of his own view expresses the convergence of justification and feeling at the outer limit of Hume's thought, which in this case compels the "true critic" to accept the prejudices history has given him, mak?

ing what Annette C. Baier in another context calls "the crucial Humean turn, from intellect to feeling"45?or, to go a step further,

asserting the paradoxical identity ofthe two. Taste's abiding prin? ciples do emerge in the essay, just as great writers stand out from their historical circumstances in "Of the Rise and Progress in the Arts and Sciences." But like the works of past geniuses, the judgments of critics must be referred to their "antecedent"

conditions, the manners and sentiments they share with the "great number" of which they are parts. It is tempting to read all of Hume's remarks on the advancement of taste in history in terms of this double limit. The taste ofthe true critic, ofthe enlightened historian, really does grasp the purpose of civilization, the differ? ences between John Bunyan and Joseph Addison, between Alfred the Great and Henry VIII. But at crucial moments, the philosopher-historian-critic must recognize the historical status of his own judgments, their involvement with his own circumstances, even while asserting their validity. Far from vitiating Hume's his? torical project, this reminder constitutes its peculiarly Humean

strength. The arts and sciences in Hume's History expose the connec?

tion between enlightenment and contingency more clearly than

politics or commerce does. Thus, a gap appears between eighteenth-century Britain's liberal, commercial pieties and its sense of its own cultural refinement?often seen as a seamless ideo-

logical fabric by recent critics who equally often credit Hume as one of its main contrivers. More generally, the arts and sciences reveal a range of complications internal to Enlightenment his?

tory very different from those noted by many historically sensi- tive cultural critics now. Literature in history for Hume aligns itself neither with an overbearing Enlightenment agenda of uni-



James Noggle 635

versality and theoretical truth nor with an array of unnamable

poetic effects emitted from history to challenge that agenda. It rather constitutes a unique discursive region where the two

poles?the enlightened and the nonrational, the modern and the

archaic, the general and the particular, theory and anomaly? look like the same thing. This collapsed perspective is a product of the History's understanding of itself as tasteful, a thing of re? finement ambiguously expressing both general authority and a

particular mind's individuated, contingent "subtilty." The History identifies itself as a member of the set of details and develop? ments it comprehends, thereby differing essentially from the rela?

tively blind and immediate impulses of economic or political interest. In this reflexive motion lies the essence of historical in?

sight.

NOTES

1 David Hume, The History of England: From the Invasion of Julius Cae? sar to the Revolution in 1688, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983), 2:109. I use this text, based on the 1778 edition, throughout; subsequent references will appear parenthetically by volume and page number.

2 John Brewer, Pleasures ofthe Imagination: English Culture in the Eigh? teenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), p. xxvii. A more gen? eral historical survey stressing the interconnection of commercialism and culture in eighteenth-century British society is Paul Langford's A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783, The New Oxford History of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); see esp. pp. 1-7 and 59-121.

3 See Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher's summation of trends attacking the grand recit in Practicing New Historicism (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 49-74.

4 Greenblatt and Gallagher use the phrase in Practicing New Historicism (see especially pp. 28-31) to designate the elusive object of counter-history's quest.

5 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 13.

6 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White propose a strong opposition between reason and heterogeneity that determines literature's political and poetic investments: "the very blandness and transparency of bourgeois reason is in fact nothing other than the critical negation of a social 'colourfulness,' of a

heterogeneous diversity of specific contents, upon which it is, nonetheless, completely dependent" (The Politics and Poetics of Transgression [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986], p. 199). Elizabeth A. Bohls invokes a similar

dichotomy that places aesthetic discourse firmly on the theoretical/rational side in her essay, "Disinterestedness and the Denial ofthe Particular: Locke, Adam Smith, and the Subject of Aesthetics," in Eighteenth-Century Aesthet? ics and the Reconstruction of Art, ed. Paul Mattick (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 16-51.



636 Hume's History ojEngland

7 For Isaiah Berlin's elaboration of the term, see Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth, 1979), especially "The

Counter-Enlightenment," pp. 1-24. On Hume and the Counter-Enlighten- ment, see "Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism," pp. 162-87 in that volume.

8 This dilemma has been a theme of countless assessments of new historicism and other political criticism derived from Michel Foucault's notion that power productively elaborates itself through discourses that only seem subversive (see, e.g., his attack on the "repressive hypothesis" in The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. [New York: Vintage, 1978], 1:10- 49). One relatively early discussion of sources and versions of the dilemma in literary criticism is Gerald Graff s essay, "Co-optation," in The New His- toricism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 168-81.

9 See Nicholas Phillipson's chapter on the Essays, "A Philosopher's Agenda for a History of England," in Hume, Historians on Historians Series (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), pp. 53-75.

10 Jerome Christensen, Practicing Enlightenment: Hume and the Forma- tion of a Literary Career (Madison and London: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1987), p. 22.

11 Ibid. 12 Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (In-

dianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), pp. 113, 114. 13 Hume, Essays, pp. 112-3, emphasis original. 14 Ibid. 15 Hume, Essays, p. 112. 16 Hume, Essays, p. 111; emphasis in original. 17Ibid.; emphasis added. 18 Hume, Essays, p. 112. 19 Hume, Essays, p. 114. 20 Hume, Essays, pp. 114-5. 21 J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cam?

bridge Univ. Press, 1999), 2:184, 183, 184. 22 Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writ?

ing inBritain, 1740-1820 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), p. 49. 23 Pocock, p. 184; Phillips, p. 49. 24 Pocock, p. 185; Phillips, p. 61. 25 Pocock's recognition in Hume of a combination of anecdotal details

and general explanation is not "poststructuralist" in any meaningful sense. For one thing, he characterizes Hume's particulars as composing a 'Tacitean narrative of high politics, statecraft and war . . . not. . . obedient to general causes" (p. 184), in a discursive tension with the typical Enlightenment grand narrative very different from the one generated by "the fingerprints of the accidental, suppressed, defeated, uncanny, abjected, or exotic" in Greenblatt and Gallagher's model (as they note on p. 52).

26Karen O'Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon, Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Litera? ture and Thought 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), p. 9; see pp. 9-12 for useful limits on the freight the term "Enlightenment history" is



James Noggle 637

sometimes wished to carry when applied to eighteenth-century historians such as Hume.

27 For Duncan Forbes's application of this label to Hume in the context of the History, see Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge and London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), p. 299.

28 Paul de Rapin-Thoyras's History of England (10 vols., 1724-27, trans. Nicolas Tindal, 15 vols., 1728-32) was more or less the standard one in the eighteenth century before Hume's. It went through many editions, and vol? umes by other hands were added. The discussion of Alfred appears on pp. 327-36 of vol. 1 ofthe 4th English edn. (London, 1757); Alfred's "inclination for study" is discussed on p. 335. See also John Spelman's seventeenth- century Latin biography of Alfred that appeared in English in 1709, The Life ofsElfred the Great, trans. Thomas Hearne (Oxford, 1709), p. 55.

29 See Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 2d edn. (Ox? ford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 52-65.

30 This failed harmony characterizes even his own era, as Hume some? times admits: "During [Sir Robert Walpole's] time trade has flourished, lib? erty declined, and learning gone to ruin" (Essays, p. 576)?a remark to which Pocock has returned over the years. In Barbarism and Religion, 2:186-91, he tentatively offers a complicated explanation referring to Hume's views of cul? ture in republics versus culture in "civilised monarchies" (2:189) (though the Walpolean configuration does not really fit either type). It seems best to conclude, as Pocock did in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Politi? cal Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge and London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), that despite the History's repeated insistences on the correlation of liberty and culture in the English case, "the gap between liberty on the one hand and culture on the other has in no sense been bridged"?and that "[i]t seems of importance to the interpreta? tion of Hume to put forward the suggestion that it never was to be" (p. 131).

31 See Hume's "Of Essay-Writing," in which he laments the last age's "Separation of the Learned from the Conversible World," very much in the register of Joseph Addison's Spectator 10, and predicts a happy future of their union (Essays, pp. 533-44, 534).

32 Hume, "Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing," Essays, pp. 191-6, 196.

33 Hume to John Clephane, 18 Feb. 1751, in Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 1:149-50.

34 In a later letter on the same topic, Hume says "the author, I thought, had corrupted his taste by the imitation of Shakespeare, whom he ought only to have admired" (Hume to Joseph Spence, 15 Oct. 1754, in Letters, 1:204).

35 Oddly enough, this piece of information is incorrect: the History's early editions give Shakespeare's date of death as 1617, which the 1770 edition corrects?but it retains the mistake that he died at 53. (After Shakespeare's, each literary portrait in the History likewise ends by dating the subject's death, with his age.)

36 Hume, Essays, pp. 227, 230. 37 See, e.g., George Dickie on Hume in The Century of Taste: The Philo?

sophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 123-41.




38 Hume, Essays, p. 233. 39 Hume, Essays, p. 243. For an emphasis on this aspect of the essay,

see Paul Guyer, 'The Standard of Taste and the 'Most Ardent Desire of Soci? ety,'" in Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, ed. Ted Cohen, Guyer, and Hillary Putnam, Philosophical Inquiries 2 (Lubbock: Texas Tech Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 37-66.

40 Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-Capital- ism and the Cultural Past, 1700-1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 73-4.

41 Hume, Essays, p. 243. 42 Hume, Essays, p. 246. 43 Ibid. 44 Hume, Essays, p. 247. 45Annette C. Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Rejlections on Hume's 'Trea?

tise" (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), p. 20.



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Art. Literary Taste as Counter Enlightenment in Hu,e