112
“HUME — AS A HISTORIAN,” The Episcopal Watchman, vol. 7, no. 24 (19 October 1833), p. 95.
Anonymous
On The Episcopal Watchman see selection #111. The first paragraph of this essay was original, but the reminder is an excerpt of Leonard Withington’s essay, “Hume, as a Historian,” first published in the American Quarterly Observer earlier in 1833. See selection #53 for Withington and his essay.
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HUME — AS A HISTORIAN.
We freely respond to the sentiments of a writer on this subject, in the last “American Quarterly Observer.” The grand object of history is to transmit to mankind the lessons which the good providence of God teaches, and it is of vital importance that the record should be found faithful. Whoever has read the History of England by Hume, knows how much he is chargeable with the sins of omission, and commission. By nature and disposition a sophist, his controling [sic] purpose seems to have been to gain admiration by showing his ingenuity. His style of writing is peculiarly fascinating, and had he always entered upon a candid and severe investigation of the facts and occurrences that came within his province, he would have been entitled to our highest respect and confidence. But he wanted a right perception of moral truth. He wanted a heart that could be more truly alive to the errors and vices of his fellow men, and a mind less disposed to pervert the real nature of moral obligation.
“It is a melancholy circumstance that history has so often fallen into the hands of men acute; rather than wise: willing rather to show their own intellectual omnipotence, than to give a fair representation of real events; men of perverted intellects and depraved hearts. Such men will certainly never reach the sublime and beautiful of history. No man can write well, unless his soul speaks; unless his passions prompt his pen. He may be a master of a very fine style; he may draw his characters with much delicacy and discrimination; he may satirize folly, and sometimes make truth ridiculous; he may show great intellectual power; power which we should admire in an ancient orator, or a modern lawyer. He misleads the world, and perhaps himself.
Of all the men who have led the way in this perverted style of history, perhaps none have been more popular and successful than DAVID HUME.
But never was there a mind, of equal power, less fitted for the task [of writing the history of Eng.] than that of David Hume. I can imagine Sir Isaac Newton writing novels, in the style of Richardson; I can imagine Thomas Moore writing pious hymns, as he did; though it must be confessed he makes sad work of it; I can imagine Mr. Locke translating the epigrams of Martial; I can almost imagine Milton (horresco referens,) writing a comedy, in the style of Congreve — I say I can imagine all these things, more easily than I can imagine the supersensuous and high principled history of England, with all its spiritual lights and shades, falling into the grasp of such an animalized being as David Hume — if it had not actually taken place. What is it? It is the serpent of seduction, crawling beneath the flowers of paradise.
In the first place, his unfitness for the task was seated in the very tissue of his soul. He had no perception of the sublime and beautiful in morals. — He could follow the patriot to his agony of glory, and the martyr to his stake, without one touch of sympathy with the generosity of the one, or the devotion of the other. His conceptions as well as his heart, seems to have been defective. We often find that men of very imperfect lives, and gross in their pleasures, still preserve a bright apprehension of moral beauty. Thompson, the poet, if his biographers have not been unjust to his memory, was on the whole a luxurious and sensual man, loving a good supper better than a morning landscape, which he so finely describes. However low his pleasures might have been (and I am afraid they were much lower than we should be willing to remember, while reading the seasons,) and he still preserved in his mind the bright ideal of moral beauty. There was a discord and divorce between his fancy and his heart. But it was not so with Hume. There was a dreadful harmony between them. No glowing forms of spiritual life flitted before his mind; no high conceptions of man’s final destiny and social improvement visited his waking or his sleeping dreams. He was the most impassive being that ever crawled among the reptiles of lower life. It was said of Rousseau, that when a man begins to reason sophistically, he looses his heart in his sophistry. Hume never seems to sympathize with the self-sacrifices which the patriot makes; he sees men pleading, suffering, dying in the cause of the best interest of mankind, and never catches one spark of the flame. He puts down, with a caustic satire, some of the most generous hearts that ever beat and bled for the elevation or felicity of the human race.”