Hume and literature

As previously indicated, I will eventually return to Moonbound, but I need to think some things through first. For now, let’s go back twelve thousand years or so and revisit David Hume’s History of England.

When Hume was writing his History of England, the word “literature” only occasionally referred to a body of texts, or a kind of text; instead, it typically meant something like “learning.” For example, Samuel Johnson in his Life of Milton says that Milton’s father “had probably more than common literature,” because Milton addressed a complex Latin poem to him. The meaning here is not far from our “literacy.” When a person not only read but wrote, especially for publication, then that person would be “a man of letters,” or “devoted to the life of letters,” etc.

Today “literature” means something more like “poetry, fiction, drama, and sometimes essays” — what might have been called in some earlier time belles lettres, fine letters, though the correspondence in meaning is rough rather than exact. Insofar as the learned had any concept of what we now call literature, it would certainly have included poetry, fiction, drama, and essays but also history and biography. Historians and biographers were composers of artful narratives and in that sense no different than the composers of novels and tragedies. Their material was different, but their objects and purposes often very similar.

Academic historians today distinguish what they do from “narrative history,” a genre practiced by non-academics — and they do this even on the rare occasions when they admire the narrative historians. See for instance Anthony Grafton’s forward to C. V. Wedgwood’s history of the Thirty Years War: it is obvious that he reveres Wedgwood but equally obvious that he understands what she does as something quite distinct from what he does. But in the 18th century, readers and writers alike would not have had such clear distinctions in mind. They would have evaluated Hume’s History of England and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall by ways and means quite close to those they would employ in evaluating a novel by Samuel Richardson.

And Hume and Gibbon expected that kind of attention. They worked very hard to get their facts right and to assess them accurately, but they also strove to achieve the virtues that novelists and dramatists and epic poets pursued: to portray vivid characters, to generate narrative momentum and tension, to resolve such tension satisfyingly.

Moreover — I have suggested this in my earlier posts — they saw the writing of historical narratives as a means of pursuing philosophical ends: the events and persons of the past serve as models, exemplars, and warnings. Historical figures enact philosophical positions and in so doing test them.

Has historical knowledge progressed since Hume? Do historians today have a sounder understanding than Hume did of the facts and events of the past? Of course. But our historians today have neither the literary nor the philosophical ambitions that drove Hume. And it is because he had those ambitions, and fulfilled them, that I am reading him now.