Читать книгу The Pursuit of Certainty - Shirley Robin Letwin - Страница 9
ОглавлениеPuritanism does not often breed defenders of pagan virtues. Yet it was parody because he grew up in a culture preoccupied with hell that David Hume came to speak so profoundly for the tolerant civilization, devoted to living gracefully here and now, that flourished in the great Whig houses of eighteenth-century England.
He was born in Edinburgh, in 1711, the younger son of the Laird of Ninewells, a modest and picturesque estate near the village of Chirnside. After a few years at the University of Edinburgh and a faint-hearted attempt to study law, he settled on being a man of letters. At twenty-three, he left home to seclude himself in France for three years; and in the cloisters of the Jesuits’ college in La Flèche where Descartes had been a student, he wrote most of his revolutionary Treatise on Human Nature. The book was barely noticed when it appeared. But the hopeful author, “being naturally of a sanguine and cheerful temper,” soon consoled himself and retired to Ninewells to prepare a volume of essays, which was published in 1742 and met with some small success. As his literary efforts did not, however, provide enough to supplement his slender patrimony, he was obliged to look for more immediate ways of increasing his income. For a year, he lived as a companion to the mad Marquis of Annandale. Then in 1747, he became secretary to General St. Clair, and attended him on some clumsy and ill-fated expeditions, as well as in his embassies to Vienna and Turin. Hume performed his duties carefully, observed with detached interest the warlike operations in which he participated, and enjoyed the sights on the way. It was amusing to be presented at court in Vienna, especially since he could not manage a bow, but he disapproved of Maria Theresa’s efforts to establish a “Court of Chastity.” Everything was most enlightening: “There are great advantages in travelling,” he wrote in his journal to his brother, “and nothing serves more to remove prejudices.” He had not, for instance, expected to find Germany so “fine a Country, full of industrious honest People … it gives a Man of Humanity Pleasure to see that so considerable a Part of Mankind as the Germans are in so tolerable a Condition.” He predicted (with the insight that led him to foresee a little later the disturbed state of America) that if Germany were united, “it would be the greatest Power that ever was in the World.…”1
By the time his appointment with General St. Clair came to an end, he had become the David Hume familiar to us, no longer a rawboned, rustic Scotsman, disposed to be intense and a recluse, but a pordy man of the world. He still spoke English with a broad Scottish accent, and French very badly, all in a thin, somewhat effeminate voice. His appearance was even more misleading, or so it seemed to one companion who has given us the most vivid picture of him:
His face was broad and fat, his mouth wide, and without any other expression than that of imbecility. His eyes vacant and spiritless, and the corpulence of his whole person, was far better fitted to communicate the idea of a turtle-eating alderman than of a refined philosopher. … His wearing an uniform added ready to his natural awkwardness, for he wore it like a grocer of the trained bands.2
But the portraits by his friend Allan Ramsay show more than the blandness—a half amused, half melancholy man, with a dreamy quizzical expression, a man who enjoyed watching mankind and did not mind being thought more simple than he was. He appears to be an accepting man, resigned to whatever fortune granted him. And it is not surprising to find him writing as he did to Henry Home when, at the end of St. Clair’s campaign, it seemed that he would return home with no gain in resources:
I shall stay a little time in London, to see if anything new will present itself. If not, I shall return cheerfully to books, leisure, and solitude in the country. An elegant table has not spoilt my relish for sobriety; nor gaiety for study, and frequent disappointments have taught me, that nothing need be despaired of, as well as that nothing can be depended on.3
Things turned out better than he expected. Hume accumulated enough for an income of about fifty pounds a year, sufficient for his wants. Within the next few years, he became established as a literary man: another volume of essays, his Political Discourses, was at once successful. His Enquiry on Human Understanding, as well as his Enquiry on Morals, into which he had recast the Treatise, were very well received. He began to think of establishing himself somewhere permanently. As he agreed with Bayle that town was “the true scene for a man of Letters,” and had decided against London, he moved in 1751 to a flat in Edinburgh.
His life was orderly and social. In the mornings, after a walk around Salisbury Craigs, he worked; four or five times a week he dined out and returned home early to his studies. Other evenings he could be found at some tavern, like Cleriheugh’s, where his friends often gathered with other men of letters, lawyers, and magistrates. At home he provided his friends with modest fare—roasted hen, minced collops, and punch, but the best in company and conversation. His visitors included besides the leading Scots literary men and disbelievers, some liberal defenders of the faith, very often William Robertson, historian and minister, leader of the church Moderates. His old ties with Lord Kames and other friends of his youth were renewed; and he became very attached to Adam Smith, with whom he remained on the closest terms until he died.
His tone was always easy and good-humoured, never righteous. It suited his ideal of society, “the happy times when Atticus and Cassius, the Epicureans, Cicero, the Academic, and Brutus, the Stoic, could all of them, live in unreserved friendship together, and were insensible to all those distinctions, except so far as they furnished agreeable matter to discourse and conversation.”1 Afraid of no one, and not disposed to guard his tongue, the host was often far from reverent—ready with a tale about churches and bishops and crowds of immortal souls, or about the Mohammedan converted to Catholicism who concluded that God no longer existed because he had been eaten yesterday in Church. He could as easily gossip about the divorce of a duchess or the paternity of a lord, as discourse on the immorality of Restoration drama, or Shakespeare’s lack of refinement. Ordinary affairs of business were well within his province—he quarrelled with his publishers, inquired into the credentials of a Latin tutor, used his influence to solicit favours for his friends, and followed the politics of the day with critical and sometimes caustic impartiality. He was disappointed when the pious and respectable thought him unfit to teach moral philosophy at Glasgow, but he generally dismissed them with a laugh. When there was a move to excommunicate him, he wrote to Allan Ramsay:
You may tell that reverent gentleman the Pope, that there are many here who rail at him, and yet would be much greater persecutors had they the power of doing. The last Assembly sat on me. They did not propose to burn me, because they cannot. But they intend to give me over to Satan, which they think they have the power of doing. My friends, however, prevailed, and my damnation is postponed for a twelvemonth.… Anderson, the godly, spiteful, pious, splenetic, charitable, unrelenting, meek, persecuting, Christian, inhuman, peace making, furious Anderson is at present very hot in pursuit of Lord Kames.1
He did succeed, soon after moving to Edinburgh, in becoming Librarian for the Faculty of Advocates, and used his access to the library to write a history of England. It was meant to be an impartial account, and it turned out to offend no one, Hume found, other than the Whigs and Tories, English, Scots, and Irish, churchmen and sectarians, free-thinkers and pious, patriots and courtiers. Nevertheless, it sold, and he became more than independent, indeed “opulent.” Between volumes of the history, he also published a Natural History of Religion, which was, to his satisfaction, violently attacked by the pious. In the summer of 1758, in order to put his Tudor volumes through the press, he went to London for his first visit in ten years. It had always attracted him, and now the freedom from bigotry, and the respect for himself as a literary man that he found there pleased him so much that he was disposed never to leave. He met everyone: at the table of David Garrick, he became acquainted with Burke, whose “very pretty Treatise on the Sublime” interested him. The young Gibbon boldly sought him out. Through his old friend, Gilbert Elliot, Lord of the Admiralty and favourite of Pitt, he met George Grenville, Charles Townshend, and Temple; he played whist with the Duke of Argyll; and Shelburne invited him to join the distinguished circle he was gathering around him. Still, parody in disgust with the London mobs and the general nationalist hysteria inspired by Pitt, he decided to forsake “that mobbish people.” The big world with its wit, its elegance, and gaiety attracted him, but he preferred, after all, his simple independent life in Edinburgh. When Boswell came to see him in 1762, he found Hume “sitting at his ease reading Homer,” in his “pretty little house,” actually the third story of a vast building, James’s Court, where he had hung classical engravings around the sitting room.
But his plans to remain peacefully in Edinburgh were broken by an invitation in 1763 to assist the Earl of Hertford in his embassy to Paris. With a short interruption, Hume stayed on in Paris for five years, first as secretary to the embassy, then as chargé d’affaires, and finally, under General Conway, as undersecretary, serving ably in all these capacities. In Paris, his history and his essays had won him more fame than at home—Voltaire admired him, he became an intimate of Diderot and d’Alembert, Mme. du Deffand and the other leading hostesses vied for his presence in their salons, and his popularity amazed and wounded Horace Walpole. He became so fond of Mme. de Boufflers that he was tempted to become her permanent admirer, but remembered in time, assisted by her ambitions to marry the Prince de Conti, that he was but an awkward fat Scotsman, and fled back to Edinburgh.
From France Hume took home, along with a host of gratifying memories, a volatile French genius, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had been commended to his care by Mme. de Boufflers. Hume undertook to get for him a pension from the king of England, and to arrange for his living quarters, refusing to heed friends who assured him that Rousseau’s suspicious nature was beyond rescue. But a man like Rousseau was not within Hume’s comprehension; when the storm broke Hume was, most unlike himself, enraged, and the quarrel became an international scandal. But not even Rousseau’s strange ingratitude could for long disturb his serenity. He was immune to rancour, just as he was a stranger to sin and tragedy. His only regret was, he wrote to Gilbert Elliot, that his old house in James’s Court was
too small to display my great Talent for Cookery, the Science to which I intend to addict the remaining Years of my Life; I have just now lying on the Table before me a Receipt for making Soupe a la Reine copy’d with my own hand. For Beef and Cabbage (a charming Dish), and old Mutton and old Claret, nobody excels me. I make also Sheep head Broth in a manner that Mr Keith [Ambassador to Vienna, St Petersburg, and Copenhagen] speaks of it for eight days after, and the Duc de Nivernois would bind himself Apprentice to my Lass to learn it.1
He lived long enough to congratulate Gibbon on reviving English letters and to rejoice that Smith’s Wealth of Nations lived up to all expectations. During the long illness that preceded his death, his only worry was to arrange ror me publication of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion which his friends, solicitous for his reputation, wished him to suppress. He continued to pay calls and receive visitors, and was amused, though never convinced, by the varied, hopeful prognostications of his physicians. There was much to laugh about in death as in life. Not long before he died, he read Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead and tried to think, he told Adam Smith, of what excuses he might make to Charon: could he stay for a new edition of his works?
But Charon would answer, “When you have seen the effect of these, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no end of such excuses; so, honest friend, please step into the boat.” But I might still urge, “Have a little patience, good Charon, I have been endeavouring 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 would then lose all temper and decency. “You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term?”
After all, Hume pointed out to his friends, he had done all he had meant to do, and left his friends and relations in good circumstances—“I therefore have all reason to die contented.”1
When Boswell came to investigate the dying man’s state of mind, Hume was reading a new book, Dr. Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, and much to Boswell’s dismay, showed no sign of either repentance or agitation. Johnson, the devout Christian, could not bear even to discuss death; Hume expected annihilation very shortly, and was content. He wanted nothing beyond his span on earth and feared nothing thereafter. He had no quarrel with the natural lot of man. For he was, as he said in his funeral oration on himself, “a man of mild Dispositions, of Command of Temper, of an open, social, and cheerful Humour, capable of Attachment, but little susceptible of Enmity, and of great Moderation in all Passions.”
