Download `A Dialogue` owes just as much to another genre, the travelogue

Hume and the Lettres Persanes
A Reassessment of ‘A Dialogue’ in the Second Enquiry
1
Hume and the Lettres Persanes
A Reassessment of ‘A Dialogue’ in the Second Enquiry
Abstract
Hume’s critique of Montesquieu is commonly regarded as consisting mainly in his attempt to
refute the theories of causation, national character and demography developed in De l’esprit
des lois. Thus the two essays ‘Of National Character’ (1748) and ‘Of the Populousness of
Ancient Nations’ (1752) are taken to represent Hume’s response to Montesquieu. This paper
is part of a broader project that aims to reassess that response by examining a number of
works that have hithero not been analysed in this context. These works form a distinct group
in that they are written on the basis of factual information Hume gained from his reading of
the classics in 1750/1751, information that he used to reinforce his case against Montesquieu.
This group of works include ‘A Dialogue’ appended to the second Enquiry (1751). For this
short piece, it is argued, Hume drew on the literary and intellectual potential of the travelogue
genre. This provides the context for an examination of the close relationship between ‘A
Dialogue’ and Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes. The paper suggests that ‘A Dialogue’ should
be read as a direct response to the Lettres persanes in and may thus be counted among those
works composed around 1750 which reflect Hume’s engagement with Montesquieu’s works.
2
Hume and the Lettres Persanes
A Reassessment of ‘A Dialogue’ in the Second Enquiry
The present paper on Hume’s ‘A Dialogue’ is part of a broader project which aims at a
reassessment of Hume’s response to Montesquieu in the years 1749-1752, that is, in the time
between his return from Turin and his appointment as keeper of the Advocates’ Library in
Edinburgh, which marks the start of serious work on his History of England. These productive
years were mostly spent at Hume’s family estate in Ninewells in Berwickshire and they are
reaosonably well documented in the surviving letters. Of these, a number of letters sent to
Gilbert Elliot of Minto are of particular interest, since they offer us a glimpse of Hume’s
manifold literary activities during that period. In February 1751, Hume writes to Elliot,
sending him a manuscript draft of what is later to become ‘A Dialogue’ in the Enquiry
concerning the Principles of Morals. He asks Elliot to critically examine these papers, since ‘I
have scarcely wrote anything more whimsical, or whose Merit I am more diffident of.’ About
a week later Hume sent another letter to Elliot discussing his dialogue and the philsophical
problems underlying it and mentioning another literary project he has taken up:
I have amus’d myself lately with an Essay or Dissertation on the Populousness of
Antiquity, which led me into many Disquisitions concerning both the public & domestic
Life of the Antients. Having read over almost all the Classics both Greek and Latin,
since I form’d that Plan, I have extracted what serv’d most to my Purpose...
In the spring of 1751 Hume was engaged in two literary activities, the dialogue he submitted
to Elliot and was then to attach to the second Enquiry published later the same year, and the
long essay ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’ eventually published in the Political
Discourses in 1752. I am suggesting that these two literary activities were actually connected
in two important ways. Firstly, they both resulted from and built on Hume’s reading of
‘almost all the Classics both Greek and Latin’ in the early 1750s, which was at least in part a
re-reading and which he took on in order to be able to produce that substantial piece of
antiquarian scholarship, his dissertation on the population of antiquity. As we have seen, this
reading resulted in all kinds of ‘Disquisitions concerning both the public & domestic Life of
the Antients’. Almost as a side effect, Hume thus seems to have collected the information on
ancient manners and morals he was to use in ‘A Dialogue’. Secondly, both works – the essay
on population as well as the dialogue – were written in response to Montesquieu’s writings.
3
This is apparent in the case of the population essay, since here Hume sought to refute
Montesquieu’s assertion that the population of Europe had actually declined in numbers since
classical antiquity. It has been pointed out that ‘A Dialogue’ can also be read as a response to
Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes, but those two works have never been systematically
compared.
In short my point is this: Hume’s writings dating from 1750/51, in particular the essay on
population and the dialogue, but furthermore the essay ‘Of some Remarkable Customs’ (also
published in the Political Discourses), can be understood as belonging to a group of short
works that were based on the same body of information, which Hume gained from his
(re)reading of the classics and at the same time part of Hume’s overall critique of
Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and De l’esprit des lois. Hume’s fullest response to the
Lettres persanes lies in ‘A Dialogue’, which we must now turn to.
‘A Dialogue’ is written at about the same time as Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural
Religion, which Hume also showed to Elliot, who dissuaded him from publishing them in his
lifetime. Instead of reiterating familiar facts about Hume’s appropriation of the Ciceronian
dialogue, I will suggest that the literary form of ‘A Dialogue’ owes just as much to another
genre, the travelogue. At the outset of the dialogue, one of the interlocutors, Palamedes, is
described as ‘a great rambler in his principles as in his person (...), who has run over, by study
and travel, almost every region of the intellectual and material world’. By the eighteenth
century, such a characterisation had become a conventional feature of travel writing, as such
echoed and parodied by Mr Spectator and Lemuel Gulliver, who assured their readers that
they were as versed in the real world as in the world of learning. Palamedes’ account of the
people of ‘Fourli’ and the narrators imaginative reply likewise owe something to the
travelogue tradition. Let us now briefly examine the literary and intellectual potential of that
tradition on which Hume, well aware of the ressources of Augustan literature and an admirer
of Gulliver’s Travels, could draw for ‘A Dialogue’.
The accounts travellers brought home from all the corners of the earth confronted readers with
the variety of human institutions, customs, belief-systems and moral standards. Authors or
narrators of travelogues often suggested ways in which these might be compared and
contrasted with the customs, practices and beliefs prevalent in European societies. In the
words of Paul Hazard, traveling and travel writing in the early Enlightenment ‘meant at all
events comparing manners and customs, rules of life, philosophies, religions; arriving at some
notion of the relative; discussing; doubting.’ There is a connection between the realization of
4
the varieties of beliefs and customs on the one hand and the develoment of sceptical doubts
concerning supposedly universal characteristic of human societies and standards of morality
on the other. This Scepticism is probably best expressed in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire, a
work Hume was familiar with since the late 1730s. Bayle’s article on Japan in the second
edition of the Dictionnaire contains a number of observations on the religious life and moral
conduct of the Japanese that invite the reader to draw parallels with their own Christian
societies. Bayle’s description of Japanese religion is thus a thinly veiled critique of European
forms of priestcraft, superstition and monasticism. Moreover, Bayle suggests that it would be
highly interesting to read an account of Western society ‘by an inhabitant of Japan or China
who had lived many years in the great cities of Europe.’ Eighteenth century literature abounds
in such accounts. Paris and London are visited on a regular basis by Turkish spies, Indian
kings, Persian travellers and Chinese visitors. Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes, published in
1721, is probably the most influential and enduring product of this eighteenth-century fashion.
All of these works posed afresh an old question. How was the confusing variety of customs,
beliefs and morals to be reconciled with supposedly universal standards of human behaviour
and standards of moral conduct? Montesquieu remained interested in this problem long after
the first publication of the Lettres persanes in 1721. His magnum opus, De l’esprit des lois,
eventually published in 1748, represents a monumental attempt to formulate a coherent
system that helped structure the empirically observed diversity of human cultures encountered
in the works of the ancients and the travel writing of the moderns. In the preface,
Montesquieu writes that ‘I began by examining men, and I believe that, amidst the infinite
diversity of laws and mores, they were not led by their fancies alone.’ He then goes on to
describe – or rather prescribe – universal laws, uniform national characters and – this is what
most eighteenth century readers picked out from this vast work – his theory of climate and
physical causation. Hume would have agreed with Montesquieu’s formulation of the problem,
but it is well known that he did not agree with the proposed solution. Although De l’esprit des
lois made a most immediate and long lasting impact on Hume and his fellow Scottish literati,
they significantly differed from le President in their approach to this problem and the theories
they developed to account for the diversity of manners and morals.
Hume’s full exploration and exploitation of the contrast between foreign and domestic, past
and present, is ingenious and highly subversive in more than one sense. Firstly, it erodes the
basis for the both sides in the ancient-modern controversy to which Hume refers in passing.
Apart from the idea that the Ancients were somehow superior to the Moderns, Hume blew up
5
the notion that the French and English national characters could somehow be compared
themselves with that of the Greeks or Romans respectively. The narrator then turns against the
Moderns by reversing the device and imaginately putting himself in the agora to describe the
modern French to the ancient Athenians, a device akin to the travelogue traditon and already
employed by Hume in EHU, Section XI (where an Epicurean speaks before the Athenian
assembly).
But much more subversively, the Dialogue shows that attitudes and conduct generally
depicted and decried as immoral by any standard was not so. True that the English common
law might not apply to the ancients, but Hume sought to show that fundamental tenets of
modern, Christian morality were not supported by them and could thus not be seen as
universal. Here as elsewhere, Hume comes close to Bayle’s (in)famous assertions that a
society of atheists was possible and that the pagan Greeks had a valid system of morality. The
case made in a dialogue is rendered even more subversive by the examples chosen to illustrate
it: blasphemy, pederasty, incest, suicide, infanticide, parricide, tyrannicide. It is certainly no
coincidence that this list of ancient customs highly regarded in antiquity matches with the
catalogue of mortal sins in Christian ethics. Hume takes great pains to account for these either
by reference to some peculiar historical circumstances or to some universal value or virtue
from which that custom might have been inferred by falacious reasoning or by the necessity
of those circumstances. The case Palamedes makes is for the relativity of moral standards,
belief systems and cultural practices. However, in line with Hume’s argument in the main
body of EPM, the narrator of the dialogue makes a strong case for the existence of universal
virtues and values, which can be recognized as such by their useful or agreeable nature.
The parallels between the two main characters, Usbek and Palamedes, with regard to the
notions of moral relativism they express extend to the examples they chose to explore and
illustrate these notions. In his description of the morals, manners and sexual conduct of
Alcheic, an Athenian ‘man of merit’ Palamedes mentions pederasty, incest and adultery.
Having commited all of these, Alcheic is still held in the highest regarded by his compatriots,
even after he has put an end to his own life. This underlines the profound difference between
ancient and modern (particularly Christian) standards of ethics. Pederasty is mentioned in
Bayle’s depiction of Japanese monastic life, while suicide, incest and adultery are all
discussed openly and without condemnation in Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes. In fact, the
treatment of adultery in both works is very similar. The description of the prevalence of
adultery in contemporary French society and the careless attitude adopted by many French
husband towards their wives infidelity is contrasted with the restricted ‘commerce between
6
the sexes’ and the rigid morality of the Persian harem (in the Lettres persanes) and ancient
Athens (in ‘A Dialogue’). This draws our attention to a common theme of both works, the
representation and critique of eighteenth century French society. Montesquieu and Hume
discuss French maxims of honour, the law of primogeniture, monasticism and the role of
women in society, and what is more, they are assessed in a similar way. Both condemn
primogeniture as an unfair law, both describe the ascendancy of women in France, whose
influence has to be reckoned with in state affairs. In short, the depiction of modern French
society in ‘A Dialogue’ is akin to that which emerges from the Lettres persanes. This suggests
that Hume drew on Montesquieu’s social satire for his own critique of modern French socity,
even when we take into account that some of the observations were fairly commonplace at the
time.
As we have seen, in 1750/51, when Hume wrote his dialogues he was re-reading the classics
in order to reinforce his case against Montesquieu he had started building up in 1748. Hume
used the devices associated with the fictional travelogue to explore a past that seemed overfamiliar and present evidence and explanation that were subversive in terms of the
ancient/modern controvery and from the point of view of Christian ethics. More specifically,
he draws on controversial issues or even taboos – incest, suicide, adultery – discussed by
Montesquieu and paints a similar picture of French society. By reassessing ‘A Dialogue’, we
may find that Hume’s response to Montesquieu was in a profound sense a response to the
Lettres persanes as well as a critique of De l’esprit des lois.
7