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“FOR THE NATIONAL REGISTER. Memorandums for an Essay against Luxury [and] Extract from an Essay ‘On Refinement in the Arts.’ — By one David Hume,” The National Register, A Weekly Paper: Containing a Series of Important Public Documents, and Proceedings of Congress, vol. 4 (2 August 1817), pp. 66–7.
Anonymous
The National Register was published in Washington by Joel K. Mead in ten volumes from March 1816 to October 1820. Its contents are well-described by the Register’s subtitle: a weekly paper, containing a series of the important public documents, and the proceedings of Congress; statistical tables, reports and essays, original and selected, upon agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and finance; science, literature and the arts; and biographical sketches; with summary statements of the current news and political events; making two volumes yearly. In the essay reprinted in full below an anonymous author gives a humorous defense of Hume’s views on luxury as found in his essay “Of Refinement in the Arts.” On the National Register see API, p. 152. For the wider context to which this debate on “luxury” belongs, see James Moore, “Hume’s Political Science and the Classical Republican Tradition,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol. 10 (1977), pp. 809–39. Hume’s essay was entitled “Of Luxury” from 1752 through 1758; it was renamed “Of Refinement in the Arts” in the Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1760. For a modern reprinting of the entire essay, see Essays, pp. 268–80.
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Memorandums for an Essay against Luxury.
1st Proposition. — Man was born without clothing: cite Adam and Eve in proof. Contrary to nature to wear small-clothes: therefore luxurious. Weavers, tailors, and seamstresses, pernicious in society, and tend to overthrow the republic. No occasion for sole-leather: the skin of the feet in men hardens by exposure, which renders shoes wholly unnecessary. Cookery a vile art, and not required by mankind in this probationary state. Men may subsist upon raw rattle-snakes — vide Wilkinson’s memoirs. Nonsense to build houses: it renders people effeminate. Blankets a superfluity in winter: cold only ideal; but as it operates chiefly upon the imagination, and is a kind of a stimulant, it is a prodigious corroborant of genius; which is a sufficient reason for sleeping in the open air in winter. Safety of the nation depends upon our forbearing to eat “kidney fat” — vide Cicero and Juvenal, and all the ancient orators and poets, who are much better authority than the historians, because the former never exaggerate or amplify. Print the Greek and Roman classics by way of illustration, and as an appendix to this essay. Refer to Ephraim Jenkinson and the Cosmogony; — Berosus, Ocellus Lucanus, &c. “The pigs they sleep,” &c. &c.
2d Proposition. — If clothing and houses be necessary, they are only necessary in a certain degree. Quote the English and the French, who are the most extravagant persons in the world in dress, and who, as nations, have been both blotted from the face of the earth on that account. — Calmuc Tartars live in tents; a very wise people. The Athenians a silly people, because, their country being full of fine marble, they carried on a trade with foreign nations in statues. The art of painting flourishes best: among those who are strangers to luxury. The Swiss very frugal and quite famous for the encouragement of the fine arts. Indian mode of life the true one. No luxury, and, consequently, no vice among them — vide Brackenridge’s Sketches of Louisiana. Society altogether artificial: man not gregarious. — Industry leads to luxury: labor should be restrained within due bounds. Tipling houses very good: they keep laborers from work, and prevent their getting too rich. To walk about, and follow the first impulses of nature, the only genuine philosophy. Skirts to coats entirely needless. Ridiculous to wear a jacket and a coat too. Manufactures the ruin of any country. David Hume an idiot. Time — “A light heart, and a thin pair of——, will go through the world, my brave boys.”
PHILO-LUCILIUS
Extract from an Essay “On Refinement in the Arts.” — By one David Hume
“Luxury is a word of an uncertain signification, and may be taken in a good as well as in a bad sense. In general, it means great refinement in the gratification of the senses; and any degree of it may be innocent or blameable, according to the age, or country, or condition of the person. To imagine that the gratifying of any sense, or the indulging of any delicacy in meat, drink, or apparel, is, of itself, a vice, can never inter into a head that is not disordered by the phrensies of enthusiasm. I have, indeed, heard of a monk abroad, who, because the windows of his cell opened upon a noble prospect, made a covenant with his eyes never to turn that way, or receive so sensual a gratification. And such is the crime of drinking Champaigne or Burgundy, preferable to small beer or porter. These indulgencies are only vices, when they are pursued at the expense of some virtue, as liberality or charity; in like manner as they are follies, when for them a man ruins his fortune, and reduces himself to want and beggary. Where they entrench upon no virtue, but leave ample subjects whence to provide for friends, family, and every proper object of generosity or compassion, they are entirely innocent, and have in every age been acknowledged such by almost all moralists.
“Industry, knowledge, and humanity, are linked together by an indissulable chain, and are found, from experience as well as reason, to be peculiar to the more polished, and, what are commonly denominated, the more luxurious ages.
“All the latin classics, whom we peruse in our infancy, universally ascribe the ruin of their state to the arts and riches imported from the east; insomuch that Sallust represents a taste for painting as a vice, no less than lewdness and drinking. And so popular were these sentiments, during the latter ages of the republic, that this author abounds in phrases of the old rigid Roman virtue, though himself the most egregious instance of modern luxury and corruption; speaks contemptuously of the Grecian eloquence, though the most elegant writer in the world; nay, employs preposterous digressions and declamations to this purpose, though a model of taste and correctness.
“But it would be easy to prove, that these writers mistook the cause of the disorders in the Roman state, and ascribed to luxury and the arts, what really proceeded from an ill-modelled government, and the unlimited extent of conquests. Refinement on the pleasures and conveniences of life has no natural tendency to beget venality and corruption. The value which all men put upon any particular pleasure, depends on comparison and experience; nor is a porter less greedy of money, which he spends on bacon and brandy, than a courtier who purchases Champaigne and ortolans.”