David Huine
David-flume. :By J..Y. T. Greig: 1Jonathan Gape. 16s.) IT was high time that somebOdy wrote a fun-length liidgraphY of David Hume, and Mr. Greig is to be congratulated. The last biography, Burton's, published in 1846, a very respectable effort in the nineteenth-century manner, suffers from the sort of omissions which the nineteenth 'century considered necessary in the hires of the great: A substantial amount-of additional material has,- moreover, come to light' since flurtcin wrote, and of this Mr. Greig has made full use. More inipoitant is the fact that Hume himself has acquired a new reputation ; to the nineteenth century lie was a considerable, to the twentieth he is the supreme -English philosopher. It is not merely that his scepticism is attuned to the temper of the age, nor even that the contemporary attitude, to. the eighteenth century finds in the lucidity of his style and the urbanity of his manners striking exemplars of the qualities that win its admiration, liut the tendency of much modern philosophy is to go back to Hume for Its problems, if not for the solution of them. Kant did not,- some of us are inclined to think, answer Hume-after all, had we must either accept in psycho- logical atomism the full implications of his devastating analysis, or find new answers for ourselves. However, Mr. Greig is concerned- little enough with Hume's opinions. His brief' first 'chapter contains a summary but quite adequate sketch of Hume's philosophy;- and, this disposed of, he addresses himself to his real subject, the man and his life.
Thee study of a great man should focus attention not upon itself but upon its subject ; indeed, its excellence consists in its ability to make the reader forget the author. Judged by this standard, Mr. Greig's biography is'ethinently successful. To its preparation there has, it is obvious, gone an immense amount of painstaking work. Mr. Greig has done this work competently and presented its results in a fluent and orderly narrative. He writes well and with ease ; his judgements are always sensible and sometimes penetrating, and he obviously knows what he is talking about. For the rest he remains, as a biographer should, unobtrusively in the background, and, beyond recording the impression which he has given me of having thoroughly enjoyed writing the book and communicating his enjoyment to at least one reader, I do not know that there is any more than I should wish to say of him, or that he would wish to have said of himself.
Two reflections remain from the reading of this enjoyable biography. First, the ironical way in which fate has treated Hume's reputation. This in his own day was prodigious ; he was received in, nay 'inore, -he -distinguished the best intellectual society of Paris, where he lived,for -several years as secretary, to the . English Ambassador. All the great ladies-,courted him ; in fact, he became so much the fashion that a lady who had not even seen him was banished from court. In Edinburgh, to which he returned to spend the last seven years of his life, he was the r,acknowledged leader of the intellectual life of a city, which partly owed to him its.title of the Modern -Athens, -and a score of legends testify at once to his reputation and the genial charm with which he supported it. But this reputation was founded not .upon the work which has subsequently made Hume one of the most famous. of Scotsmen—his Treatise •of Human Nature, which contains all that is important in his philosophy written in his early twenties. fell still-born from the press— but upon" his History of England,- Published in 1762, when 'Hume was fifty-one, which, after remaining a standard work for a hundred years, has now only an antiquarian interest. The history has the.. peculiar qualities of Ilume's work, detachment and lucidity, and is dominated throughout by the desire to tell the truth. But the virtues of the meta- physician are the vices of the historian, and to the modern taste the once famous history cannot but seem a monstrously dull book. -Replete with abstract generalizations and Latinized words, it is lacking in colour, vividness and detail.
Htune's is no isolated instance of an eighteenth-century reputation transformed by tune. Posterity, indeed, seems to have delighted to play tricks with the reputations of the 'great men of tfie period.' Swift, whb' fancied himself a politician and was feared as a politician-pamphleteer, is known and reverenced in a thousand- nurseries ; and Bach, who prided himself on his ability as an executant on the organ, is the most popular composer of our age. • Secondly, I had always thought of Hume as an out- standing example of the philosopher in thought who was also a philosopher in life. rile POssessed; I conceived, above all men the quality of philosophical calm. " In what resides the most characteristic virtue of humanity ? asks Mr. Lytton Strachey at the beginning of his celebrated essay on Hume, and answers by suggesting that it is in detach- ment: -To adinifers of detachment Hume, he prodeeds, " must be a great saint in the calendar." The conception of Hume's detachment is enriched by the legend of his extraordinary virtue. For this Adam Smith's stately pane- gyric is largely responsible : " Upon the whole I have always considered him, both in his life time and since his-death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and generous man, as, perhaps, the nature of human frailty will admit." Hume detached, –linme virtuous'? - I winder. -Read the account in Mr. Greig's book of the famous quarrel with Rousseau—which, by the way, Mr. Greig tells admirably —and see for yourself. Rousseau admittedly behaved abominably ; but then nobody ever supposed that Rousseau was either virtuous or detached—but Mime behaved no better than anybody else.-- He is an angry man who, when he loses his temper, tries to wound ; lie is a vain man, who is made -to look a fool, and, knowing it, does not hesitate to use such expressions as " Basilisk " and " rattlesnake " of his erstwhile friend. Rousseau no doubt deserved them
both. But virtuous and detached C. E. M. JoAn.
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