Salber Philips Relocating Inwardness Historical Distance and the Transition From Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography

Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment toRomantic HistoriographyAuthor(s): Mark Salber PhillipsSource: PMLA, Vol. 118, No. 3, Special Topic: Imagining History (May, 2003), pp. 436-449Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1261519 .

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PMLA

Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance

and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography

MARK SALBER PHILLIPS

The perusal of a history seems a calm entertainment; but would be no entertainment at all, did not our hearts beat with correspondent movements to those which are described by the historian. -David Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751 [112])

[D]id any one ever gain from Hume's history anything like a picture of what

may actually have been passing, in the minds, say, of Cavaliers or of Round- heads during the civil wars? Does any one feel that Hume has made him figure to himself with any precision what manner of men these were; how far they were like ourselves, how far different; what things they loved and hated, and what sort of conception they had formed of the things they loved and hated? And what kind of a notion can be framed of a period of history, unless we begin with that as a preliminary?

John Stuart Mill, "Carlyle's French Revolution" (1837 [135-36])

MARK SALBER PHILLIPS, professor of his-

tory at Carleton University, is the author of Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 (Princeton UP, 2000), as well as earlier studies of historical and political thought in the Italian Renaissance. This essay is

part of a new examination of the idea of historical distance.

436

OME OF THE MOST INTRIGUING PROBLEMS IN INTELLEC- tual history arise out of juxtapositions like the one presented in my two epigraphs. Both the eighteenth-century historian and his

nineteenth-century critic appear to have an equal commitment to the importance of emotional engagement in the writing of history. Nevertheless, since Mill's remarks are part of an extended diatribe against the unsympa- thizing qualities of the historians of the previous age, these two apparently similar declarations evidently conceal a deep disagreement about the nature and purposes of historical narrative. Clearly, if despite Hume's protes- tations about the importance of the emotions, Mill and his contemporaries found eighteenth-century writing bloodless and abstract, it was because they sought a different kind of engagement in the writing of history.

Hostility to the work of the previous age served an obvious purpose for the Enlightenment's immediate successors (for ease of reference I

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will simply call them Romantics), but the accu- sation Mill brought against Hume and his con-

temporaries has continued to be raised by more recent critics. From R. G. Collingwood to Hay- den White,l philosophers and historians have

repeated Mill's complaint, and even those more

sympathetic to the historical thought of the En-

lightenment have generally interested themselves primarily in its speculative and abstract

qualities, neglecting the sympathetic element evident in my quotation from Hume. The result, inevitably, has been to accentuate the sense of a

sharp divide between the two periods, reinscrib-

ing in moder accounts the antagonism between Romantic inwardness and Enlightenment abstraction that is such an important part of the Romantics' reaction against their predecessors.

The nineteenth century's rejection of an al-

legedly ahistorical Enlightenment has often been taken as a founding moment of a modern historical understanding-indeed of modernity itself. A more careful reading of eighteenth- century historical writing, however, suggests some lines of continuity that the Romantic generation was less likely to appreciate. In fact, pace Mill and later critics, the historiography of the eighteenth century was deeply interested in

engaging the reader's emotions to promote sympathy with the events and experiences of other times. This was, after all, an age of sensibility as well as of enlightenment. Nor was the sentimentalism a superficial feature of historical writing, a matter merely of style or passing literary fashion. On the contrary, the Enlightenment's preoccupation with sympathy and inwardness, no less than its often discussed conjectural method, expressed the central preoccupation of eighteenth- century historical thought, which was the desire to frame a new kind of history that would en- compass a much wider view of social life.

In this essay, I explore the continuities and discontinuities between these two periods. A short discussion of a theoretical character will take us away from the eighteenth century for a while, but it permits a more precise analysis of

Mark Salber Phillips 437

what changed and what remained essentially the same in the shift from the inwardness of sensi-

bility to that of Romanticism.

Historical Distance

Questions of distance have been debated in a number of disciplines, including aesthetics, nar-

ratology, theater, political sociology, and anthro-

pology. Among a long list of notable discussions of social, conceptual, or aesthetic distance, one

might pick out Edward Bullough's idea of "the aesthetic attitude," Victor Shklovsky's "es-

trangement," Bertolt Brecht's "alienation effects" Karl Mannheim's "social distance," Norbert Elias's "civilizing process," Georg Sim- mel's "stranger," Mieke Bal's "focalization," or Johannes Fabian's "refusal of coevalness." His-

tory, however, has largely escaped this kind of

discussion-though Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life stands as a brilliant exception.2 Even so, the construction of relations of engagement and detachment, proximity and distance would seem to be a central issue for all kinds of historical

description-including historical representation in biography, museums, and film, as well as in traditional genres of historical writing. The reason for this silence, I suggest, is that a prescrip- tive idea of historical distance has become so

incorporated in our common understandings of

history that the idea has been lost to view. Like our way of constructing pictorial space since the Renaissance, historical distance now seems

something given, not constructed-a natural way of marking the procession of time, not the outcome of a specific tradition of historical thought. Indeed, our commitment to a certain kind of detachment has become so incorporated into the discipline that the idea of historical distance seems hardly distinguishable from the idea of history itself.

Though practice, in fact, has been far more flexible than prescription, historians generally greet the idea of distance in strongly positive



438 Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography

terms. Often called objectivity, distance is assumed to be a function of temporality, a clarity of vision that comes with the passage of time. This view of historical distance, however, is only a starting point, since it must be evident that every history faces the task of positioning its audience in relation to a past. Thus distance is not simply given but also constructed, and the range of distance constructions is broad. It com- prehends all points along a gradient of distance, including immediacy as well as detachment. (We have no trouble recognizing that both a bungalow and a skyscraper have height; equally, we can say that every representation of the past manipulates distance, however foreshortened or extended.) Distance refers not only to matters of form or rhetoric but also to other significant dimensions of engagement or disengagement. As a result, questions about distance can be directed to a history's ideological implication as well as to its affective coloration, to its cognitive assumptions as well as to its formal traits.

If every history must position its readers in some relation of proximity or detachment to the past it describes, the issue of distance is as rele- vant to the long history of historical writing as it is to recent practice. Thus, if a strong attach- ment to both the methods and the rhetoric of an- alytic distance informs the work of Fernand Braudel or Eric Hobsbawm, what comparisons might we make to the writings of Adam Fergu- son or Henry Thomas Buckle? If contemporary readers are drawn to the intriguing microhisto- ries of Carlo Ginzburg or to the literary vivacity of Simon Schama, surely other audiences were drawn to similar qualities in the histories of their own day. Romantic narratives will quickly come to mind-Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present, for instance, or Jules Michelet's Le peuple-but we might also think of works in the chronicling tradition, like Dino Compagni's powerful eyewitness account of Florentine politics in the time of Dante or perhaps that most in- fluential work of English historiography, John Foxe's Acts and Monuments.

These last examples indicate that the questions of presence and distance I am raising are not confined to genres we now regard as canoni- cally historiographical. Not only chronicle and martyrology but also biography and memoir often carry with them a particular sense of immediacy, and the same is true for local history, family history, and much literary history. By the same token, antiquarianism, universal history, and encyclopedic writing are generally presented in the impersonal tones of disinterested inquiry. Indeed, if we press the question, it is soon apparent that tacit assumptions about distantiation and proximity are a key element in the way in which we distinguish the various historiographical genres. The distinctions we draw among history, memoir, and journalism or between microhistory and general history surely depend on the ability of audiences to recognize and accept assumptions of this kind. And what is the currently fashionable contrast between history and memory if not a problem of distance?

Nor is there any reason to limit the discussion to textual representations. Though they em- ploy different vocabularies, history painting, photography, and documentary film all raise similar questions. Museums, too, with their combination of concrete materials and a public setting, present some of the issues in their most tangible and accessible form. Few readers of Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie's Montaillou or Lau- rel Thatcher Ulrich's The Midwife's Tale, for example, are likely to reflect on the sentimental attractions of microhistory, but it takes no special museological awareness to spot parallel changes that have been taking place in historical and anthropological museums over the past generation. When faced with the varied displays of London's Imperial War Museum, for example, visitors can easily distinguish the traditional mahogany-and-glass cases filled with swords and military uniforms from newer displays like The Trench Experience or The Blitz Experience, where (as the titles indicate) we are invited to relive a specific moment or milieu from the past.

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The parallel between written microhistory and recent museum practice suggests some characteristic features of recent historical sensi- bilities, especially our pervasive interest in

everyday experience and affective proximity. Nevertheless, at any given moment of historical

thought, we should not expect to find a consis- tent stance either of engagement or detachment. Even in the scope of a single work, distance is not a simple matter; rather, it is a variable and

complex effect, shaped by balances or tensions

among a variety of separable aspects of narrative construction and social or intellectual commitment. In the case of the War Museum, for

example, an analysis of the Blitz exhibition would need to raise separate questions about formal vocabulary, affective coloration, and ide-

ological implication. And beyond these aspects of distance there remains another dimension of our relation to the past that is concerned with what, at any given time, we judge to be most ca-

pable of explanation or understanding. This matter of cognitive distance surely plays an im-

portant part in establishing historical perspective, and, like the other dimensions of distance I have outlined, it is part of the complex interplay of engagements that marks the historical outlook of a given period.

These different kinds of distances do not stand in fixed or predetermined relations; on the contrary, it is worth the effort to separate the affective from the ideological or the ideological from the cognitive, because each of these dimensions makes its own contribution to the reader's experience. Nor are the formal devices of narrative always used for the same purposes. Close-up description, for example, is often pur- sued as a way of enlisting the reader's sympathies in a political cause, as Edward Thompson explicitly does in "seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver ... from the enormous con- descension of posterity" (12). Yet detailed nar- ration is not always a strategy for creating sympathy, nor is immediacy in description al-


ways paired with ideological identification. The grisly description of the dismemberment of Damien the regicide that opens Michel Fou- cault's Discipline and Punish is not calculated to make us identify with the criminal or to spur us to sympathy with efforts of penal reform; on the contrary, this horrific description is intended to shock us into abandoning our comfort with other, much more familiar regimes of punish- ment. In these terms, the graphic description of Damien's death spectacle serves as a kind of Brechtian alienation effect. It is intended to force on us the detachment necessary to recognize what is at stake in other forms of punish- ment, specifically what Foucault saw as a new regime of surveillance instituted by the reforms of the Enlightenment.

Ideas of Distance in the

Eighteenth Century

Before we apply these broad considerations to the specifics of eighteenth-century historical thought, it will be useful to survey some of the common contexts for eighteenth-century understandings of distance. The most familiar examples, no doubt, come from the arts, where a strong association was forged between distance and aesthetic experience. In Thomas Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," the adult who surveys the schoolboy scene "from the stately brow / Of WINDSOR'S heights" looks back with nostalgia on the innocence of childhood (Lonsdale 60). In Thomas Camp- bell's "Pleasures of Hope," the gaze is toward the future, but distance softens that as well: "Why do those cliffs of shadowy tint appear / More sweet than all the landscape smiling near? / 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, / And robes the mountains in its azure hue" (2). William Collins wrote about the music of mel- ancholy that is sweetened by distance ("And from her wild sequester'd Seat, / In Notes by Distance made more sweet" [Lonsdale 483]), while for Hugh Blair distance was productive of



Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenm

the more terrible effects of the sublime. "In general," he observed, "all objects that are greatly raised above us, or far removed from us, either in space or in time, are apt to strike us as great. Our viewing them, as through the mist of distance or antiquity, is favourable to the impressions of their Sublimity" (1: 51).

In passages like these, added distance in- tensifies the aesthetic dimension of experience, so that even a painful sensation can be trans- formed into a source of pleasure. In other contexts distantiation suggests detachment or reflective judgment, a state of mind associated as much with conceptual skills as with aesthetic

experience-and for that reason it provides a way of aligning the aesthetic detachment of the artist with the intellectual and ideological disin- terestedness that the age associates with the scholar and the independent gentleman (see esp. Barrell). Among eighteenth-century writers on art, the classic statement of this position comes from Joshua Reynolds. For him, the mark of genius was the capacity to "distinguish the acci- dental deficiencies" in nature, thereby enabling the artist to make out "an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original." It is

only by much experience "and a close comparison of objects in nature, that an artist becomes possessed of the idea of that central form ... from which every deviation is deformity" (44- 45). Reynolds recognized, of course, that all great artists did not approach the observation of nature in exactly the same manner, but they all

possessed a capacity for seeing the most general truths. Both Raphael and Titian, for example, "had the power of extending their view to the whole; but one looked only for the general effect as produced by form the other as produced by colour" (196).

A related idea of distance played an important role in the emergent human sciences, where the power to abstract from experience and to ar- ticulate general observations seemed to hold the key to more systematic forms of knowledge. Adam Smith wrote that while "common obser-

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vation" shows us the world in all its particular- ity and incoherence, philosophy is "the science of the connecting principles of Nature" ("His- tory" 45). Advancing powers of abstraction marked the difference between the artisan and the philosopher (Smith, Inquiry 1: 21) or the progress of social institutions from simpler to more enlightened times. "In a rude age," as John Millar put it in a discussion of medieval law, "the observation of mankind is directed to particular objects; and seldom leads to the forma- tion of general conclusions" (2: 354). The same

principle could be pushed further back in human

history and made still more speculative, as Smith did in considering the origin of language. Human speech, he argued, must have had its be- ginnings in the concreteness of substantives; ad- jectives would have been arrived at with more

difficulty because they must be "formed by abstraction and generalization" (Lectures 10).

In the science of optics, distance perception had become an important problem for investigation, and optical analogies in turn stimulated social observers to think about the ways distance was registered in the social realm. Hume in particular was impressed by George Berkeley's demonstration that distance perception, instead of being a matter of simple sense impressions, depended on experience and judgment (Treatise 42), and he applied the same idea to historical

reading. "There is no necessity," wrote Hume, "that a generous action, barely mentioned in an old history or remote gazette, should communicate any strong feelings of applause and admiration." Virtue "placed at such a distance" is like a star; rationally ("to the eye of reason") we may know that the star is a sun like our own, but it "is so infinitely removed" that our senses feel neither its light nor its heat. "Bring this virtue nearer, by our acquaintance or connexion with the persons, or even by an eloquent recital of the case; our hearts are immediately caught, our sympathy enlivened, and our cool approbation converted into the warmest sentiments of friendship and regard" (Morals 117). Smith, similarly, drew an

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analogy between what he called "the eye of the

body" and the "natural eye of the mind" to make the point that in ethical matters as well as in

physical ones we learn by experience to judge the

genuine proportions of things, so that something trivial but near to us does not finally seem more

important than something great but distant.3 Hume's deepest interest resided in the af-

fective consequences of distance-its capacity to diminish the strength of the passions, for ex-

ample, or to inspire a feeling of reverence for ancient things. Thus affective distance does not stand on its own; it opens out onto aesthetic and ideological questions, where the emotions evoked by distance become an important explanation for the value given to an exotic object or to a long-established dynasty. Hume also com-

plicated the issue by distinguishing between the effects of spatial and chronological distances, arguing that "a very great distance encreases our esteem and admiration for an object" but a distance in time increases it more than a distance in

space (Treatise 277). He reasoned that the imagination moves more easily through space than

through time (and more easily forward than back) and that this resistance registers itself in the intensity of the psychological effect. "[A]nd this is the reason why all the relicts of antiquity are so precious in our eyes, and appear more valuable than what is brought even from the re- motest parts of the world" (279).

If we turn to the issue of moral psychology, distance plays, if anything, a still more prominent role. Here the central challenge was to fashion a naturalistic science of humankind that would be more generous to human nature than the "selfish system" of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Man- deville-a task that both Hume and Smith tack- led by making the reciprocities of sympathy a central feature of human nature. The result was an extended examination of self-interest and fellow feeling in which variation in distance served as an important axis of investigation.

"There is an easy reason," Hume wrote, "why every thing contiguous to us, either in


space or time, sho'd be conceiv'd with a pecu- liar force and vivacity, and excel every other ob-

ject, in its influence on the imagination. Ourself is intimately present to us, and whatever is related to self must partake of that quality" (Trea- tise 274). (This observation encapsulates a central principle in the aesthetics of sentimentalism, which focused much of its effort on

ways to increase the sense of presence the writer could give to the situations and events described.) "Contiguous objects," he went on to observe, have a much greater influence on us than the "distant and remote." For this reason, if

you talk to someone about his situation in thirty years' time, he will pay little heed. "Speak of what is to happen to-morrow, and he will lend

you attention. The breaking of a mirror gives us more concern when at home, than the burning of a house, when abroad, and some hundred

leagues distant" (274-75). For Smith, too, the topic of sympathy con-

tinually suggested the importance of distance in social life. "Every man," he wrote, "feels his own pleasures and his own pains more sensibly than those of other people. The former are the original sensations; the latter the reflected or sympathetic images of those sensations." Next to the self come members of his family and household. He is "more habituated to sympathize with them" than he can be with anyone more removed, with the obvious result that fa- milial bonds are the strongest (Moral Sentiments 219).4 By the same token, if by some circumstance a son or brother is removed from this in- timacy, filial or fraternal feelings may remain proper but are unlikely ever to recover "that de- licious sympathy" that normally accompanies their relationship-a thought that inspired Smith to cry out against the folly of public schooling: "The education of boys at distant great schools, of young men at distant colleges, of young ladies in distant nunneries and boarding schools, seems ... to have hurt most essentially the domestic morals, and consequently the domestic happiness, both of France and England" (222).5




To establish the deep-seatedness of sympathy, both Hume and Smith chose to emphasize the range of its natural variation. Distance, we

might say, tests the mechanisms of fellow feel-

ing, providing a picture of the complexity and va-

riety of human affections-their responsiveness to kinship and physical proximity, for instance, or to effective literary representation both in his-

tory and fiction. But this investigation of distance did not yet provide a proper moral psychology, only a way of grounding that psychology in an

understanding of what comes most naturally to the human mind. The essential second step remained: to discover how these reciprocities of self and other could give rise to moral convic- tions strong enough to discipline our natural par- tiality for whatever is closer and dearer. In this next stage of their inquiry, the variabilities of distance retained an important place but as some-

thing that needed to be corrected more than embraced. Having made distance the measure of

spontaneous human sympathy, in other words, Hume and Smith were also committed to viewing moral education as the acquisition of a capacity for redistancing. The analogy with optics, as I have already said, is strong.

"In general," Hume wrote, "all sentiments of blame or praise are variable, according to our situation of nearness or remoteness, with regard to the person blam'd or prais'd, and according to the present disposition of our mind." But experience teaches us how to correct our sentiments-or at least to correct our language when our sentiments are incorrigible.

Our servant, if diligent and faithful, may excite stronger sentiments of love and kindness than Marcus Brutus, as represented in history; but we say not upon that account, that the former character is more laudable than the latter. We know that were we to approach equally near to that renown'd patriot, he wou'd command a much higher degree of affection and admiration.

These corrections, Hume concluded, are common to all the senses, and in fact we could not

communicate with one another if we did not "correct the momentary appearances of things, and overlook our present situation" (Treatise 372).

Hume's outline of this process of commu- nication and correction was filled in by Smith in the famous passages on sympathy and the spectator in the Theory of Moral Sentiments.6 But

perhaps enough has now been said to provide a context for a closer look at the specific issue of historical distance.

Hume on Tragedy and Historical Distance

In a striking passage in the essay "Of Tragedy," Hume wrote that when Clarendon, the great historian of the English Revolution, approaches the execution of the king, he "hurries over the

king's death, without giving one circumstance of it." Clarendon evidently

considers it as too horrid a scene to be contem- plated with any satisfaction, or even without the utmost pain and aversion. He himself, as well as the readers of that age, were too deeply concerned in the events, and felt a pain from subjects, which an historian and a reader of another age would regard as the most pathetic and most interesting, and, by consequence, the most agreeable. (Essays 223-24)

Hume's subject in this essay is an old question in literary criticism: why tragedy pleases.7 In this context, his reference to history, though surely indicative of a wider interest, is brief and tantalizing. Even so, his sympathetic understanding of Clarendon's reticence, combined with his clear sense that the event that was most painful to an earlier generation has become most "interesting" to his own, points to an in-

triguing awareness of the ductility of historical distance. Despite the brevity of his remarks, Hume gives more than a hint of the many- sidedness of the subject.

First, there is the important issue of vari- ability, which Hume put at the center of his dis-

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cussion. He clearly accepts that both Clarendon and his audience found themselves in a kind of proximity to the regicide that ruled out some possible representations of the event, especially (we surmise) the kind of detailed, pathetic treat- ment that Hume would offer his readers in the History of England. The implication is that variation in distance should not be considered a fault; rather, change in historical perspective is not only legitimate but also inevitable. This sense is reinforced by the suggestion that the al- teration has little to do with the historian's indi- vidual preferences, being as much a property of the audience as of the writer.

Second, Hume recognized that distance must be considered both as a reflection of something occurring outside the text and as a construction that operates within the text to shape the emotional responses of the reader. Clearly, we can understand the change in distance that separates Clarendon's sense of history from Hume's only if we consider the difference in experience between their two generations. But if the passage of time has led to new political per- ceptions, the result will be registered as much in the form and rhetoric of the narrative as in its content. Clarendon's account was appropriate for its age, but no one now, Hume seems to say, could rest content with its hurried, uncircumstan- tial narrative; the contemporary reader, attracted by the pathos of the story, would be eager to hear the tragedy unfold in all its evocative detail.

Third, the literary context of Hume's discussion is important. Unlike those essays that deal with issues of history, politics, or political economy, "Of Tragedy" specifically addresses a tradition of belles lettres. The question of tragedy's power to move the emotions goes back, of course, to Aristotle's discussion of catharsis in the Poetics, but Hume's real interlocutors in this essay are Jean-Baptiste Dubos and Ber- nard Fontenelle, two key figures in French bel- letrist tradition. Hume does not initially come to Clarendon's writing from a historiographical concern; instead, he approaches the issue of his-


torical distance from within a tradition of letters that has long been interested in literature's power to engage the emotions. The discussion of tragedy seems to have helped him see an analogy in history, and to a large extent he has simply extended an established question to a new genre8 though in doing so he has also expanded the issue in important ways that are appropriate to his preoccupation with historical writing.9

The Complexities of Distance in

Eighteenth-Century Narratives

Hume emphasized the emotional impact of historical narrative, but at bottom the stakes were as much ideological as affective. If Clarendon's avoidance of this "infinitely disagreeable" subject had an evident political meaning (223), so must the fact that a later reader could regard the same events as "pathetic" and "agreeable." This layering of one kind of distance over another- formal, affective, ideological, and (ultimately) cognitive-reminds us not to think of distance as a single, unitary dimension. Instead, as we explore the theory and practice of historical writing in the eighteenth century, we need to be alert to the variety of distances in play and the different ways in which they may combine.

Looked at in this way, the problem of understanding eighteenth-century historiography becomes a matter of reconciling different postures in relation to the past-postures that often appear in the same author and even in the same text. On the one hand, there was a strong im- pulse in the Enlightenment to approach history as a kind of laboratory for establishing a naturalistic science of humankind. The result was a generalizing spirit that later critics came to deride but that had inestimable importance at the time, since it underpinned the confidence of eighteenth-century historians that they held in their grasp principles of explanation that elevated their understanding beyond anything available to earlier writers. This was the spirit expressed by the Edinburgh clergyman and minor



444 Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography PMLA

literary figure John Logan in a brief work enti- tled Elements of the Philosophy of History: "To common minds every thing appears particular. A

Philosopher sees in the great, and observes a whole. The curious collect and describe. The sci- entific arrange and generalize" (10).

This side of Enlightenment historiography is well known;10 less so its other, more sentimental face. There is plenty of evidence that historians, much like the novelists and poets of the day, were keenly interested in engaging the reader's sympathies, especially by presenting scenes of virtue in distress. This dimension of

Enlightenment historiography may be lost if we choose to focus exclusively on the more philosophical texts, but-following Hume's lead in the essay "Of Tragedy"-we will find it strongly articulated in works on belles lettres.

Raising the issue of distance leads us to rec-

ognize a split between two important features of the historical outlook of the eighteenth century. To simplify considerably, much of the most in-

teresting historical work of the Enlightenment drew its strength from a theory of knowledge that assumed the importance of cognitive distance. Only the comprehensive philosophical eye, it was thought, could discern the underlying patterns that give order to the development of

society. At the same time, if we turn our attention to matters of form and of morals, we see that the discussion of narrative in this period was strongly concerned with cultivating a sense of immediacy. History no less than fiction, it was argued, should exercise the moral imagination of its readers by presenting them with scenes that are as vivid and affecting as possible. This tension between cognitive distantiation and affective proximity becomes still more interesting when we recognize that many of the same voices speak prominently on both sides of this divide, most notably Kames, Smith, and Hume.

For those of us who read eighteenth-century histories with sympathy, the strain between these two impulses provides a tension that adds life and interest to this literature. At the same time,

recognizing the division makes it easier to understand how the work of this period fell out of favor with a subsequent generation of readers, who came to focus their attention on only one side of the Enlightenment's historiographical legacy. The sentimentalism of Hume and his

contemporaries contributed a great deal to the

growing taste for immediacy in historical writ-

ing, but in encouraging this tendency, these writers unintentionally fostered a new climate of taste by which their own works would come to be judged as excessively cold and detached. The result was a second shift in distance, much like the one that Hume recognized as separating his

generation from that of Clarendon.

Eighteenth-Century Inwardness: Kames's Elements of Criticism

The most remarkable instance of this double distance is Smith," but Henry Home, Lord Kames, provides a more manageable example for a brief discussion. When we think of Kames as a historical thinker, we generally have in mind the

conjecturalist program of his Sketches of the

History of Man. When we turn to his Elements of Criticism (1762), however, we find a different emphasis. Here the central issue is not the

progress of humankind but the moral psychology of the reader. Kames's argument, in essence, is that literary representation has the same power to stir the passions as actual experience, but only if the scene represented carries with it a

high degree of vividness. This vivacity results in a loss of critical distance, turning the reader's experience into a kind of "waking dream." Kames called this crucial effect "ideal presence" and he claimed for it a profoundly important role in the moral education of humankind. Though literary representation will always have an impact that is weaker than the force of experience itself, "ideal presence" allows the lessons of experience to be prepared for or repeated in ways that account for "that extensive influence which language hath over the heart" (1: 95-96).




Ideal presence, as the name implies, is an aesthetic principle whose specific concern is the abbreviation of distance. In practice, much of Kames's critical writing amounts to reiterated

injunctions to make description as actual and vivid as possible. "Writers of genius," he wrote, "sensible that the eye is the best avenue to the heart, represent every thing as passing in our

sight; and from readers or hearers, transform us, as it were, into spectators: ... in a word every thing becomes dramatic as much as possible." Plutarch, he added, observes that Thucydides "makes his reader a spectator, and inspires him with the same passions as if he were an eyewitness" (2: 347-48). Similarly, in another place he wrote, "The force of language consists in

raising complete images; which have the effect to transport the reader as by magic into the very place and time of the important action, and to convert him as it were into a spectator, behold-

ing every thing that passes" (2: 326).12 The notion of transporting the reader into

"the very place and time" of the event would become significant not only for historical narrative itself but also for a whole family of associated

genres, including the historical novel, biography, and literary history. The phrase carries with it a strong sense of the transformation of historical distance that would become pervasive in the

early part of the next century. But Kames was not singling out historical evocation as such-

though as the reference to Plutarch's judgment on Thucydides shows, history is one among many literatures that demonstrate the truth of his central principle. "Upon examination," he writes, "it will be found, that genuine history commands our passions by means of ideal presence solely; and therefore that with respect to this effect, genuine history stands upon the same footing with fable. To me it appears clear, that our sympathy must vanish so soon as we begin to reflect upon the incidents related in either." If we think that a story is nothing but fiction, he continues, the effect will be dissipated, but the same is true if we reflect that the persons

described are no longer alive: "a man long dead, and insensible now of past misfortunes, cannot move our pity more than if he had never ex- isted" (1: 87-88).13

Romantic Reactions: The Reception of Hume's History

There is no room here to describe the complex balance of irony and sentiment, speculativeness and spectatorship that shapes Hume's practice as a historian (see Phillips, Society, chs. 1-2). Instead, I want only to show that the reception of his great narrative is a way of tracing the

changes of sensibility that affected historical

writing as much as they did any other literature in the early part of the nineteenth century. In

"My Own Life," Hume recalled the first appear- ance of his work and claims that Britons of

every religious and political stripe were united "in their rage against the man, who had pre- sumed to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles I and the Earl of Strafford" (xxx). The picture he paints is, of course, exaggeratedly negative. Nonetheless, it serves as a useful re- minder of the political and religious partisan- ship that played a central role in the response to Hume's work in this early phase. This ideological critique did not disappear in the nineteenth

century; in fact, it reached a culmination in

George Brodie's History of the British Empire, published in 1822, and it remained an element in the reception of T. B. Macaulay's history. Gradually, however, a different sort of discon- tent comes into view, one that paints Hume's history as intellectually abstract and emotion- ally thin. This second phase of criticism held the work up to new criteria of judgment, and it embraced all of Enlightenment historiography in its condemnation.

The first articulation of this criticism that I know of comes from James Mackintosh, the Whig historian and politician. In his journals for 1811, Mackintosh sketched a brief but admiring portrait of Hume: "No other narrative seems to

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unite, in the same degree, the two qualities of

being instructive and affecting. No historian

approached him in the union of the talent of

painting pathetic scenes with that of exhibiting comprehensive views of human affairs" (2: 168).14 It is hard to imagine a better summary of the tension between proximity and detachment that this essay explores, but Mackintosh attached to this praise a criticism that would be

prophetic for the growing reaction against the historical outlook of the Enlightenment. In Mac- kintosh's view, Hume's skeptical and rationalist

temper seemed a limitation on his capacity for historical sympathy. Too often, Mackintosh

thought, Hume used his intelligence in the place of evidence. He "was too habitually a speculator and too little of an antiquary, to have a great power of throwing back his mind into former

ages, and of clothing his persons and events in their moral dress; his personages are too modern and argumentative-if we must not say too rational" (2: 169).

Despite Hume's failures of sympathy, Mac- kintosh still judged Hume the greatest of historians, but two decades later the balance had shifted decisively. In the review of Carlyle with which I began, Mill permitted himself to wonder whether Hume, William Robertson, and Edward Gibbon, for all their talents, should be considered historians at all. Their histories, he charged, were populated by "mere shadows and dim abstractions" whom no reader would recognize as

"beings of his own flesh and blood." Mill asked, "Does Hume throw his own mind into the mind of an Anglo-Saxon, or an Anglo-Norman? ... Would not the sight, if it could be had, of a sin-

gle table or pair of shoes made by an Anglo- Saxon, tell us, directly and by inference, more of his whole way of life, more of how men thought and acted among the Anglo-Saxons, than Hume, with all his narrative skill, has con- trived to tell us from all his materials?" (135).

Carlyle, Macaulay, and others made much the same point, urging on historians the task of retrieving a quality of immediacy that, depending

on the occasion, these critics identified with the freshness of primary documents, the vividness of Herodotus, or the fictional imagination of Walter Scott.'5 None of them, it is clear, thought that, in

repudiating the qualities of aloofness and abstraction they identified with their Enlightenment predecessors, they might actually be following in the footsteps of Hume and Smith themselves.

Locations of Inwardness from

Enlightenment to Romanticism

Our image of the historical sensibility of the En-

lightenment as wholly abstract and detached is in many ways a myth created by the Romantics as a foil for their own critique. For this reason, I have tried to show that alongside its "philosophical" detachment, Enlightenment historiography also responded to a strong sentimentalist influence that focused on the aesthetic attractions and moral training that result from soliciting the reader's sympathy. In the larger picture, then, we need to balance these two aspects of eighteenth- century historiography, keeping in mind that this

period combined a view of historical knowledge that emphasizes generality with a view of narrative that stresses the aesthetic and ethical value of immediacy.

When the problem of continuity is stated in this way, some elements of discontinuity stand out more clearly. The Romantics deepened the desire for immediacy in some areas where sentimentalism had prepared the way, but they also

brought a new demand for engagement in other areas where eighteenth-century historical thought valued a greater degree of distantiation. The styl- istic changes that we normally identify with Ro- mantic historiography can be seen as a further stage in a long-standing movement toward actu- ality and immediacy; but the shift to a new sense of proximity or engagement on both ideological and cognitive grounds has fewer precedents in the eighteenth century and therefore contributes more fundamentally to the sense we have of en- countering a new historical sensibility.

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18.3 |

Both groups of writers were interested in

finding ways to make history more vivid or dramatic, but for the eighteenth-century writers the search for immediacy centered on the psychology of reading, not on the quality of knowing. Their program called for strategies to involve readers as closely as possible in the narrative, so that they would respond more like witnesses than detached observers. Consequently, in bel- letrist discussion attention to formal distance was tied to the desire to abridge affective dis-

tance, and affective distance in turn was re-

garded as key to the ethical value of historical

writing. The historian's own relation to the past, however, was not explicitly at issue, and we miss the characteristically historicist view that an equivalent abridgment of distance cogni- tively would provide a clearer or deeper under-

standing of realities remote from the present. In Smith and Kames, in other words, the

abridging effects of sympathy belong to the set-

ting of criticism and moral psychology, not that of historical method or explanation. When they wrote about historical narrative, after all, both men were writing in a tradition of belles lettres. From within this sphere they reworked the traditional view that history teaches by presenting ideal examples of character and action, replac- ing it with a new sense that history might con- tribute to virtue by providing vicarious exercises for the moral imagination. But it has to be rec-

ognized that these sentimentalist doctrines did not immediately move beyond the issue of ethical instruction or change how Smith and Kames

thought about historical understanding. This is what changed in the new century, in

ways that begin to be seen in Mill's criticism of Hume's failure to "throw his mind" into the situation of another time. Mill's attack on the En-

lightenment expressed a view of historical

knowledge that was central to important strands of nineteenth-century thought and has continued to have enormous influence in shaping the views of the historical profession. The key feature of this way of thinking about history is the


opposition it established between distance and

insight. Historical understanding was not con- strued as a matter of simple identification with the past. (Such naivete was the hallmark of the chroniclers and romancers that so attracted the Romantic imagination.) Rather, genuine historical understanding begins from a recognition of difference but strives to overcome the opacity of the past by an act of the imagination. More-

superficial minds, it was thought, might content themselves with the simplicities of factual

knowledge or the abstractions of empty generalization. But when one wanted to understand the real experience of past times, neither abstract

theorizing nor external observation would do. Instead, historians would need to cultivate special qualities of historical insight in order to see more directly into past experience.

This view of historical understanding- given ideological impetus by the sense of en-

gagement common to both liberal and nationalist

ideologies and codified as a historical episte- mology by Wilhelm Dilthey, Benedetto Croce, Friedrich Meinecke, and R. G. Collingwood- has done a great deal to shape subsequent think-

ing about the proper forms of historical writing. For the historians of the Enlightenment, who

began with quite different ideas about historical distance, the continuing influence of this now canonical view has created a persistently hostile climate of reception, from whose presupposi- tions only now are we beginning to liberate both Hume and ourselves.

NOTES This essay reworks and critiques some of the views I first presented in Society and Sentiment. Earlier explorations of some of these ideas appeared in my "Historical Distance and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain" and "Hume and Historical Distance." I am pleased to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Quatercentenary Fellowship of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a visiting fellowship at King's College,




Cambridge. For their comments and criticisms I owe a great deal to a number of friends and colleagues, including Peter Burke, April London, Edward Hundert, Mary Catherine Moran, Noelle Gallagher, and Ruth Phillips.

J According to White, "Hume viewed the historical

record as little more than the record of human folly, which led him finally to become as bored with history as he had become with philosophy" (55). For Collingwood's hostility to Enlightenment historiography, see 71-85.

2 Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy also has some sug- gestive passages on historical distance (chs. 1-4, 20). Among recent work by historians, see the rich essays by Carlo Ginzburg in Wooden Eyes.

3 See Moral Sentiments 135: "In the same manner, to the selfish and original passions of human nature, the loss or gain of a very small interest of our own, appears to be of vastly more importance, excites a much more passionate joy or sor- row, . . . than the greatest concern of another with whom we have no particular connexion." Before a proper comparison can be made, Smith argues, we must mentally shift places, viewing the situation neither with our own eyes nor with the other person's, but "with the eyes of a third person."

4 Similarly Hume writes, "We sympathize more with

persons contiguous to us, than with persons remote from us: With our acquaintance, than with strangers: With our coun- trymen, than with foreigners" (Treatise 371).

5 Rousseau makes the same assumptions about the natural order of sympathies but seeks a political order that will be strong enough to override them (87-88).

6 In brief, Smith presents sympathy as an "imaginary change of situations" that brings the actor and the spectator to adjust their feelings to each other: the spectator engaging his feelings with those of the actor, the actor calming his responses as he reexamines his situation through eyes of the spectator (22-23). But, of course, this displacement is only the point of departure; the goal of our moral education is to acquire the capacity for self-distantiation that Smith fa- mously conceives as the operation of an impartial spectator.

7 Earl Wasserman's "The Pleasures of Tragedy" remains an excellent review of this theme.

8 Fontenelle's solution to the problem-a solution that Hume largely accepts-involves a kind of distantiation: "We weep for the misfortune of a hero, to whom we are attached. In the same instant we comfort ourselves, by reflecting, that it is nothing but a fiction" (Reflexions sur la poetique, as quoted by Hume [Essays 218n]).

9 "Of Tragedy" first appeared in Four Dissertations, published by Millar in 1757, a time when Hume was also engaged on his History of England.

10 See, for example, John Pocock's important recent study on Gibbon, Barbarism and Civilization.

1' Smith was the greatest political economist of the age, but his Lectures on Rhetoric was also its most searching examination of historical narrative. See my Society and Senti- ment, chs. 1 and 3.

12 Similarly, Smith writes, "When we read in history concerning actions of proper and beneficent greatness of mind, how eagerly do we enter into such designs? ... In imagination we become the very person whose actions are represented to us: we transport ourselves in fancy to the scenes of those distant and forgotten adventures, and imagine ourselves acting the part of a Scipio or a Camillus, a Timoleon or an Aristides" (Moral Sentiments 75).

13 Note the parallel between Kames's views and those of Fontenelle. But where Kames wished to discourage any kind of reflection that might interrupt the sense of immediacy, Fontenelle saw the consciousness of fiction as a necessary and useful attenuation of the impact of tragedy.

14 The Memoirs culls passages from Mackintosh's extensive manuscript journals, held in the British Library, which are a rich source of comment on his literary and historical reading, as well as on private and official life.

15 The Romantic period is rife with statements that indicate the desire for a new sense of proximity in historical writing. Macaulay, for example, makes reiterated use of images of abbreviated distance to describe his ambition for a new, more imaginatively constructed historical understanding: "To make the past present, to bring the distant near, to place us in the society of a great man or on the eminence which overlooks the field of a mighty battle, to invest with the reality of human flesh and blood beings whom we are too much inclined to consider as personified qualities in an allegory, to call up our ancestors before us with all their pe- culiarities of language, manner, and garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their old fashioned wardrobes ..." (1).

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Documents

Salber Philips Relocating Inwardness Historical Distance and the Transition From Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography