In this chapter we consider the place of the imagination in Hume’s approach to aesthetics, and how it explains artistic creativity, audience receptivity and the origin of the particular kind of value associated with such terms as ‘beauty’ and ‘the sublime’. Most of Hume’s remarks in this area are made about literature, with references to painting, music and architecture only fleeting and, in the estimate of some, inconsequential.1 Hume uses the term ‘literature’ broadly to include poetry, comedy, tragedy and eloquence; sometimes even history falls under the heading as well, although, as we shall see in the next chapter, historical writing bears a different relationship to the imagination that effectively distinguishes it from literary works more narrowly conceived. Since the majority of Hume’s examples are drawn from various poetic forms – lyrical, dramatic, pastoral and epic – my consideration of his aesthetics will focus on these, and, following Hume, I shall use the terms ‘literature’ and ‘poetry’ interchangeably. In principle, however, there is no reason why his views on imagination and literature cannot be applied mutatis mutandis to other art forms as well.
We begin with an overview of the main features of Hume’s philosophical aesthetics before showing how the productive power of the imagination underlies and informs his approach. The poet exploits the productive imagination to create artificial fictions, or a ‘poetical system of things’ (T 1.3.10.6/SBN 121) as Hume describes it, which, through the manipulation of language and application of techniques, creates a fanciful world of ideas that the audience is enticed to enter and take as real. The imagination is the source of both poetic creativity, in the shape of literary genius, and aesthetic receptivity that allows an audience to experience the pleasure that writers bring about; when refined, this is what, in the tradition of the eighteenth century, Hume calls ‘delicacy of taste’. Literary fictions are artificial and an audience does not believe in the existence of the objects to which they ostensibly refer but is persuaded by them for the pleasure the work brings.
To be successful in achieving their effects, however, poets must procure an easy transition among the ideas in the imagination, which is only possible by creating a poetical system that gives the appearance of reality. They do this according to three principles: by transforming ordinary experience into something extraordinary; creating ideas that are agreeable to an audience; and bringing about their effects deliberately. At the same time, poets can only achieve their results by appealing to principles of human nature, for when poetry becomes too artificial it ceases to have the desired effect on the audience. Striking this balance between nature and artifice is something that any work of literature is obliged to do, and for this reason the principles of the poetic arts can be understood as specifying rules of art or literary criticism, which, extracted from poetic practice, determine whether a work will be successful or not. Hume thus shows what constitutes good literature and he specifies normative rules that, if followed in a certain manner, should result in the production of good or even great literary works.
Hume’s Aesthetics
Before we can appreciate the role of the imagination in literary creativity and aesthetic receptivity, it will be useful to outline briefly the main features of Hume’s aesthetics, since they are assumed as background to his various discussions. Hume’s view of beauty and the arts is part of a tradition that has its immediate philosophical impetus in Locke’s influential treatment of language in Book 3 of the Essay, which, as Stephen Land emphasises, gave to eighteenth-century aesthetics a dominant semantic theory in which ‘Words are thought to work like pictures; they “represent” things either by convention or by virtue of actual resemblance’.2 This tradition can be traced to other figures from which Hume draws inspiration – especially the Abbé Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Addison and Francis Hutcheson – and its influence, as Land argues, can be seen well into the nineteenth century.3 There is much debate concerning particular aspects of Hume’s aesthetics but consensus over the general outlines of his approach, which displays four main features.4
First, the beauty and deformity of art and nature can be traced to sentiments or feelings that arise in an individual as a result of the relationship between that individual and the object in question. In ‘Of the Standard of Taste’ Hume writes:
Though it be certain that beauty and deformity, more than sweet and bitter, are not qualities in objects, but belong entirely to the sentiment, internal or external; it must be allowed, that there are certain qualities in objects, which are fitted by nature to produce those particular feelings. (E 235)
Or as he puts it in the second Enquiry:
in all decisions of taste or external beauty, all the relations are beforehand obvious to the eye; and we thence proceed to feel a sentiment of complacency or disgust, according to the nature of the object, and the disposition of our organs. (EPM Appx.1.13/SBN 291)
At least in part, Hume follows Locke and takes beauty to be a secondary quality in an audience rather than an objective feature of the world itself.5
Second, as the above quotes suggest, Hume assumes that human beings are constituted in such a way that there is a natural ‘fit’ – a ‘match’ or ‘natural aptness’ as some commentators have called it6 – between the aesthetic object and the subject who, by virtue of a natural receptivity, is capable of being affected in a certain manner. ‘Beauty is such an order and construction of parts’, as Hume writes in the Treatise, ‘as either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul’ (T 2.1.8.2/SBN 299; see also EPM 5.38/SBN 224–5 and E 63–5). For this reason Hume is sometimes seen as holding a ‘causal’ theory of taste, the view that there is some decipherable causal connection linking objects with the sentiments they elicit.7
Third, Hume argues that beauty and deformity arise due to the sentiments of pleasure and pain elicited by the object and, in some cases, the utility or fitness it exhibits in achieving its end. Judgements of beauty and deformity – normative claims about good and bad – are then expressions of these sentiments. So ‘beauty of all kinds gives us a peculiar delight and satisfaction; as deformity produces pain’ (T 2.1.8.1/SBN 298), Hume remarks, and the view of well-cultivated fields appeals to us more than ‘briars and brambles’ (EPM 2.9/SBN 179). Generally, Hume takes pain/pleasure and utility as a single principle. A ‘machine, a piece of furniture, a vestment, a house well contrived for use and conveniency, is so far beautiful’, he observes, for instance, ‘and is contemplated with pleasure and approbation’ (EPM 2.10/SBN 179). Thus ‘From innumerable instances of this kind . . . we may conclude that beauty is nothing but a form, which produces pleasure, as deformity is a structure of parts, which conveys pain’ (T 2.1.8.2/SBN 299).8
Fourth, and finally, Hume emphasises that the mere presence of beautiful objects and the capacity of human beings to be affected by them do not translate automatically into appropriate sentiments and correct judgements. There is a natural basis for being affected by objects and experiencing them as beautiful, but the extent of the satisfaction depends upon the degree to which spectators have cultivated their taste and can be affected by the work in question. Ongoing critical reflection on one’s judgements is required to educate the sentiments and achieve a ‘delicacy of taste’. For only a mind that is ‘susceptible to those finer sensations’ is in a position to ‘give praise to what deserves it’ (EPM App. 1.16/SBN; see T 3.1.2.4/SBN 472). Hume writes:
When you present a poem or a picture to a man possessed of this talent, the delicacy of his feeling makes him be sensibly touched with every part of it; nor are the masterly strokes perceived with more exquisite relish and satisfaction, than the negligencies or absurdities with disgust and uneasiness. (E 4)
Perfection in such delicacy is ‘impossible to be attained’, and those who come close to it are rare, but achieving even a modicum of good taste promises great satisfaction, and Hume thinks it is something for which we could and should strive over the course of a lifetime.9
Poetry and the Imagination
With these four main features of Hume’s aesthetics in mind, we can now turn to his treatment of poetry, which depends on the productive power of the imagination. Poets take ideas produced by the former and through the power of the latter proceed to mix, compound, separate and divide them to form new and original ideas of objects that do not correspond to anything in the world. The poet thus represents experience and subverts it in a particular way. These creations are unlike complex ideas such as ‘apple’, the discrete constituents of which can be traced to impressions of sense, but comparable to those of the New Jerusalem and a gold mountain, which can still be traced ultimately to original impressions but do not arise directly from real existence. As such, the poet creates a class of artificial fictions, or ‘poetical fictions’ as Hume sometimes calls them. The poet represents experience so that in the ‘fables we meet with in poems and romances . . . Nature there is totally confounded, and nothing mention’d but winged horses, fiery dragons, and monstrous giants’ (T 1.1.3.4/SBN 10). Poetry treats the world not as an object to be understood, but as a subject of aesthetic representation limited in the first instance by the poetic genius of the author in question. This can be seen as a weakness insofar as poetic ideas lack the force and vivacity of original impressions, but also as a strength, since, unless liberated from repeating matters of fact, the poetic arts would be impossible.
These fictions, however, gain their specifically poetic character when authors confer a certain status on them by virtue of placing them in a ‘poetical system of things’. They are not natural fictions of a vulgar sort, but arise from artifice, where the poet self-consciously connects ideas and draws relations in ways that, in many cases, they would not otherwise or obviously exhibit. This does not give the objects to which the ideas refer real existence, but, Hume says, serves as ‘sufficient foundation for any fiction’ (T 1.3.10.6/SBN 121). There are three discernible characteristics the poetic arts display and are required for ideas to attain their poetic status: the magical power to transform ordinary experience into something extraordinary; the capacity to create ideas that are agreeable to an audience; and the ability to bring about this effect deliberately. The second of these constitutes delicacy of taste in the audience, while the other two form what we can refer to as ‘poetic genius’.
The Transformation of Ordinary Experience
Given his place in the eighteenth-century tradition, it is not surprising to find in Hume’s aesthetics an emphasis on the force of language and, in particular, a version of the view that well-chosen words can produce ideas in a reader that are more vivid than those that arise from a direct perception, although they do not inspire belief in real existence. ‘The reader finds a Scene drawn in stronger Colours’, as Addison puts it in one of his essays in The Spectator, ‘and painted more to the Life in his Imagination, by the help of Words, than by an actual survey of the Scene which they describe’ (No. 416, 560). Hume expresses the same thought, that poets are like magicians or conjurors who use their pens to represent the world with such ‘strong and remarkable’ strokes that they ‘convey a lively image to the mind’ (E 191–2) and thereby transform ordinary experience into something extraordinary and marvellous.10 In Hume’s view,
All poetry, being a species of painting, brings us nearer to the objects than any other species of narration, throws a stronger light upon them, and delineates more distinctly those minute circumstances, which . . . serve mightily to enliven the imagery, and gratify the fancy. (EHU 3.11)11
Like Addison, Hume emphasises that the transformative power of poetic language embellishes the world; poetry sheds light on the topography of experience, highlighting certain details while casting others into shadow so that through its lens what is in reality ugly, repellent or mundane appears beautiful, appealing or in some way fascinating.
Thus there is a difference between the straightforward representation of the world involved in the creation of any idea and – to use Land’s phrase – a ‘true poetic imitation’, a distinction which, as Land emphasises, can be traced to John Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), where we find a neo-Platonic alternative to the prevailing Lockean picture theory of language. As Land observes:
The orthodox position expounded by Crites [in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy] sees the true symbol as essentially a copy of the actual, but Dryden holds that the true symbol cannot in principle be a copy but must be a deliberate distortion of the natural in the direction of something greater.12
Whether Hume had this work in mind or not, he certainly expresses the same idea that poetry distorts, albeit for aesthetic purposes, the subject matter it treats; poetry draws not on imitation per se, but on the productive power of the imagination to subvert experience. He writes:
Sentiments, which are merely natural, affect not the mind with any pleasure, and seem not worthy of our attention. The pleasantries of a waterman, the observations of a peasant, the ribaldry of a porter or hackney coachman, all of these are natural, and disagreeable. What an insipid comedy should we make of the chit-chat of the tea-table, copied faithfully and at full length? Nothing can please persons of taste, but nature drawn with her graces and ornaments, la belle nature. (E 191–2)
Thus, in the ‘poetical fiction of the golden age’, for example, everything frightening and threatening about the world is expunged, and the representation contains only what is ‘charming and most peaceable’. Hume continues:
The seasons, in that first period of nature, were so temperate, if we credit these agreeable fictions, that there was no necessity for men to provide for heat and cold: The rivers flowed with wine and milk: The oaks yielded honey; and nature spontaneously produced her greatest delicacies. Nor were these the chief advantages of that happy age. Tempests were not alone removed from nature; but those more furious tempests were unknown to human breasts, which now cause such uproar, and engender such confusion. Avarice, ambition, cruelty, selfishness, were never heard of: Cordial affection, compassion, sympathy were the only movements with which the mind was yet acquainted. Even the punctilious distinction of mine and thine was banished from among that happy race of mortals, and carried with it the very notion of property and obligation, justice and injustice. (EPM 3.14)
To represent the world in its ‘merely natural’ aspect would be to replicate, like memory, the empirical content of experience in all its mundane detail; the poet, on the other hand, creates an alternative reality, as in the golden age, where the world is adorned, rendered beautiful and effectively perfected by the power of language.
The Creation of Agreeable Ideas
Second, as Hume’s description of the golden age makes clear, in transforming and embellishing experience the poet at once creates ideas that are agreeable to an audience and satisfy the imagination’s desire for the pleasure it derives from relating ideas and completing a whole. Hume notes at one point that the imagination’s love of totality and the satisfaction it finds there is the reason poets employ synecdoche and ‘frequently draw their images and metaphors’ to make part stand for the whole, as in a gate to represent a city (T 3.2.3n73.5/SBN 508n). When poets achieve their effects, they do so by transforming merely natural objects and scenes into things of beauty, deliberately arousing a corresponding pleasure in the audience. As Garrett points out, ‘literary and other arts derive their primary appeal from the imagination and have their primary appeal to that faculty’.13 While poetic genius reflects the active side of the imagination, its passive role is manifest as an audience’s capacity to be moved by images the poet has created and the ideas raised in their minds as a result. Poets rely on the receptive capacity of the audience and the same mechanism of sympathy that we have seen to be central to moral life. For, Hume writes:
it is a rule in criticism, that every combination of syllables or letters, which gives pain to the organs of speech in the recital, appears also, from a species of sympathy, harsh and disagreeable to the ear. Nay, when we run over a book with our eye, we are sensible of such unharmonious composition; because we still imagine, that a person recites it to us, and suffers from the pronunciation of these jarring sounds. So delicate is our sympathy! (EPM 5.37/SBN 224)
As in the case of actions that give rise to sentiments that constitute virtue and vice, human beings cannot be indifferent to beauty and deformity, but are moved by the view of certain scenes that give rise to pleasure or pain. The same applies to works of literature, where
Every movement of the theatre, by a skilful poet, is communicated, as it were by magic, to the spectators; who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are enflamed with all the variety of passions, which actuate the several personages of the drama. (EPM 5.26/SBN 221–2)
‘But no passion, when well represented’, Hume adds later, ‘can be entirely indifferent to us; because there is none, of which every man has not, within him, at least the seeds and first principles’ (EPM 5.30/SBN 222). For this reason, an audience feels anxiety and concern when the happiness or good fortune of a favourite literary character is thwarted, and ‘where their sufferings proceed from the treachery, cruelty, or tyranny of an enemy, our breasts are affected with the liveliest resentment against the author of these calamities’ (EPM 5.27/SBN 222).
A fundamental difference, however, between reality and its poetic counterpart is that poetic ideas are always a source of pleasure rather than pain, the agreeableness arising from the effect of sympathy and a quality immediately agreeable to ourselves. The compositions of ‘poets and other authors . . . [are] chiefly calculated to please the imagination’ (E 228), Hume writes, and:
When poets form descriptions of the ELYSIAN fields, where the blessed inhabitants stand in no need of each other’s assistance, they yet represent them as maintaining a constant intercourse of love and friendship, and sooth our fancy with the pleasing image of these soft and gentle passions. (EPM 7.20/SBN 257)
Poetry achieves this effect more easily when it paints ‘lively pictures of the sublime passions, magnanimity, courage, disdain of fortune; or those of the tender affections, love and friendship; which warm the heart, and diffuse over it similar sentiments and emotions’. Yet ‘even the most disagreeable, such as grief and anger’, he continues, ‘are observed, when excited by poetry, to convey a satisfaction, from a mechanism of nature, not easy to be explained’ (EPM 7.26/ SBN 259). Pain, after all, is a real sentiment born of impressions or arising when sentiments are rekindled through memory; however weak a real sorrow may be, ‘yet in none of its gradations will it ever give pleasure’ (E 221). In a poetical reality, by contrast, the passion is transformed; poetry does not simply reproduce the original sentiment but refashions it in such a way that it becomes a source of pleasure rather than pain.
Poets are unlikely to have any theoretical grasp of this process, but they know that human passions can be engaged and, if possessed of the requisite genius, they will know how to do it: by depicting characters, conduct and events in the bright colours necessary to warm the imagination, enflame the passions, and arouse agreeable sentiments. ‘All the passions, excited by eloquence, are agreeable in the highest degree’ (E 219), Hume observes, even if the subject matter it treats would ordinarily be a source of pain. ‘From Homer down to Dr Young, the whole inspired tribe have ever been sensible, that no other representation of things would suit the feeling and observation of each individual’ (DNR 95–6). Hence the ‘unaccountable pleasure’, as Hume characterises it in ‘Of Tragedy’, ‘which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy’ (E 216). Here, he writes,
The whole art of the poet is employed, in rousing and supporting the compassions and resentment of his audience. They are pleased in proportion as they are afflicted, and never are so happy as when they employ tears, sobs, and cries to give vent to their sorrow, and relieve their heart, swoln with the tenderest sympathy and compassion. (E 216–17)
For ‘the same object of distress, which pleases in a tragedy, were it really set before us, would give the most unfeigned uneasiness’ (E 218). Some have dubbed this Hume’s ‘Principle of Conversion’ or ‘Conversion Hypothesis’,14 because, as Hume puts it, ‘from that very eloquence, with which the melancholy scene is represented. . . . [T]he whole impulse of those [melancholy] passions is converted into pleasure, and swells the delight which the eloquence raises in us’ (E 219–20).
There has been much debate over the form and content of Hume’s principle and its application to the case of tragedy, and various proposals – and much criticism – of exactly what it amounts to and whether it solves the problem in question; many have charged that Hume fails to account for the relevant facts of aesthetic experience and at least one commentator has suggested that in the final analysis he is not really discussing tragedy at all.15 Hume’s attempt to explain the phenomenon clearly assumes his discussion of ‘conversion’ in the Treatise, although, as noted in Chapter 2, he does there appear to be using the term in a different sense. As we have seen, Hume initially discusses conversion in the context of sympathy to designate that process whereby a passion or emotion is enlivened to the point where it approaches the force and vivacity – is ‘converted into’ – an impression. This ‘mechanism of nature, not easy to be explained’ can take place in our own person or, via sympathy, among different individuals. In the discussion of tragedy, this is clearly relevant since it explains what the phenomenon of conversion amounts to: we feel the passion portrayed in the drama because the sentiment in the characters becomes an idea in us and is then enlivened to the point where it appears as a new impression in the audience. It does not, however, explain what is at issue in the case of tragedy, namely, that we feel pleasure in a passion that would otherwise cause pain or, to express it differently, we take pleasure in another’s pain, and that is the whole ‘problem’ Hume is trying to solve.
One way to clarify what Hume is proposing as a solution here, and to show the place of the imagination in it, is to recognise that he is confronting, if not clearly distinguishing, two distinct issues: the psychological mechanism of conversion – which we have already met in the Treatise account of sympathy – that explains how one emotion apparently replaces another, and the literary depiction of the emotion through which ‘the melancholy scene is represented’ (E 219, emphasis added) and, in Hume’s view, forms the necessary cause for the effect of conversion to come about.16 The conversion thus takes place when the melancholic passions are redirected by the sentiments of beauty that arise from poetic representation by softening the degree of belief involved and thus ‘enlivening the mind, and fixing the attention’ (T 1.3.9.15/SBN 115). ‘The latter [sentiments of beauty], being the predominant emotion’, Hume adds, ‘seize the whole mind, and convert the former into themselves, at least tincture them so strongly as totally to alter their nature’ (E 220). We do not take pleasure in another’s pain, then, but in the beauty of the representation. There are limits to this process, scenes so ‘bloody and atrocious’, as Hume writes, that the horror roused ‘will not soften into pleasure’ (E 224); such is the case, for example, with the scene of self-mutilation in playwright Nicholas Rowe’s Ambitious Stepmother (1699).17 With the exception of such graphic violence, however, Hume holds that poetic representations of otherwise painful emotion contain less force and vivacity than the original and transform reality into fiction, giving rise to sentiments of beauty and the pleasure that attends them.18
Poetic Deliberation
Clearly – and this is the third characteristic that makes an idea a poetic fiction – authors do not produce such agreeable sentiments by accident, but employ their skills and techniques to bring them about deliberately as a particular response in the audience. Poets must have some knowledge of the principles of human nature and especially the fact that the imagination should not be strained, but engaged in such a way that it can move freely and easily among its ideas according to the principles of association. This deliberate use of poetic skill is a double-edged sword, however, since one cannot embellish the world in a fictional way without exaggeration and artifice. This ambiguity reflects the Janus-faced character of the imagination, its positive and negative sides, which make human creativity possible only by subverting experience. Depending on one’s emphasis, then, one might laud the genius of poetry for achieving its effects or condemn its power of manipulation through which reality is turned into fiction. When Hume acknowledges the positive side of the imagination he has only praise for poets, but when he recognises the negative side he denounces them as a source of artifice and deceit.
On the one hand, to be effective in transforming the world, poets must possess a certain genius, taste or spirit as well as a firm grasp of the principles governing human nature; without these qualities poets would create ideas that are dull and unable to convince, move or otherwise affect an intended audience. In Hume’s view, the essence of genius is identical to the presence of a particularly strong active imagination, the perfection of the ‘fancy to run from one end of the universe to the other in collecting ideas, which belong to the subject’. Hume refers to this as a ‘kind of magical faculty of the soul, which, tho’ it be always most perfect in the greatest geniuses, and is properly what we call genius, is however inexplicable by the utmost efforts of human understanding’ (T 1.1.7.15/SBN 24). The poet has the singular capacity to create ‘beauties of the imagination’ (E 220) that can entertain an audience:
The genius required to paint objects in a lively manner, the art employed in collecting all the pathetic circumstances, the judgment displayed in disposing them: the exercise, I say, of these noble talents, together with the force of expression, and beauty of oratorial numbers, diffuse the highest satisfaction on the audience, and excite the most delightful movements. (E 219–20)
Who can doubt, Hume asks, that this ability of poets to move the passions is a ‘considerable merit; and being enhanced by its extreme rarity, may exalt the person possessed of it, above every character of the age in which he lives?’ (EPM 7.27/SBN 259). Partly for this reason, Hume’s list of ‘Great Poets’ is as short (E 550–1) as his list of bad ones is long (H 5.149–55).
Hume’s own passion for literature is well known, discovered and tended early in his youth and still alive and well as he lay on his deathbed: Adam Smith recounts that Hume passed his final days ‘very well with assistance of amusing books’ (E xlvi). These included Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead and (what so shocked Samuel Johnson) George Campbell’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric.19 As Ernest Campbell Mossner documents, Hume was also a great promoter and patron of Scottish writers.20 Given his love and knowledge of literature, one would expect Hume to appreciate and praise poets for their skill in transforming the world and their gift for giving pleasure to a reader, including one close to death. ‘Such a superiority do the pursuits of literature possess above every other occupation’, he remarks at one point, ‘that even he, who attains but a mediocrity in them, merits the pre-eminence above those that excel the most in the common and vulgar professions’ (H 5.155). Hume surely had himself in mind with such remarks, not only given his own aspirations to become a man of letters and self-styled ‘Ambassador from the Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation’ (E 535), but also because he took such care in perfecting the literary presentation of his philosophy (the Essays alone went though nine separate editions in Hume’s lifetime).
While Hume himself cuts a fine literary figure and praises the rarity, merit and creative power of poetic genius, he at once expresses genuine suspicion of poets and their art, and strikes a note of deadly seriousness in tracing the fine line between genuine creativity and cynical manipulation. For the very same virtue of eloquence that adorns a character – his included, one must assume – can become vicious when used to conceal sinister ends. ‘Eloquence . . . when it rises to an eminent degree, and is employed upon subjects of any considerable dignity and nice discernment’ is immediately agreeable and meritorious (EPM 8.7/SBN 263), Hume declares, but a ‘little art or eloquence’ can also be employed cynically, ‘as best suits the purpose of [one’s] discourse’ (EPM, A Dialogue 19/SBN 330).
It is worth noting that this decrying of eloquence is entirely conventional, with Hume striking the same familiar tone set by Locke in his Essay where he disparages ‘figurative speeches’ as the imperfection and abuse of language (Essay 3.10.34, 508), itself part of an agonistic tradition going back to Plato’s dismissal of rhetoric as anathema to truth and virtue and Aristotle’s willingness to categorise it as a branch of dialectic, albeit an art of popular persuasion rather than a science of systematic inquiry.21 It is also reflected more generally in the unease felt by Hume’s contemporaries who realised, as Leopold Damrosch puts it, that when works of art ‘do their work effectively they intoxicate readers into analogous bondage’. Such bondage may be part of the aesthetic experience – embracing ‘captivity to a higher and a nobler mind’, as Johnson says of reading Milton – but, Damrosch adds, ‘the mere existence of metaphor, let alone of elaborate fictions, is a threat to the integrity of language and thought’.22 As Adam Potkay has argued, in this light one can read Hume as reflecting a widespread tension in the eighteenth century between the model of ancient eloquence to move the ‘just passions of civic assembly’, on the one hand, and the restraints of polite style, on the other. This found its philosophical counterpart, Potkay observes, in the view that ‘experimental ideal, procedural rigor and a transparent language of argumentation should supplant the deceptions of eloquence in all essays addressed to the understanding’.23 In this spirit, Hume suspects poetry of involving some inherent and unavoidable corruption, and while his mistrust might be conventional, it expresses at once his view that the imagination plays the dual role of facilitating and subverting experience: it brings pleasure through creative activity while using artifice and manipulation to do so. The poetic imagination is beholden to experience if an audience is to be engaged, but it requires departing from experience if it is to craft more than mere copies of memory and successfully achieve its effects.
This is a difficult tension to manage, especially where the difference between ideas of memory and those of imagination is found only in the degree of force and vivacity each exhibits, and that passion and reason are locked in a ‘struggle’ or ‘war’ where the movement of the former can too easily be mistaken for the ‘conclusions only of our intellectual faculties’ (T 2.3.8.13/SBN 437). Ideas of beauty and deformity are calm impressions of reflection, but they become violent when the ‘raptures of poetry and music frequently rise to the greatest height; while those other impressions . . . may decay into so soft an emotion, as to become, in a manner, imperceptible’ (T 2.1.1.3/SBN 276). Skilful writers possess a ‘native enthusiasm’ (E 139) and can sweep an audience away in a wave of passion. The ‘strong spirits’ they conjure in viewers are characteristic of and comparable to a corrupt religious state, for under the sway of a poetic enthusiasm the ‘warm imagination’ is swelled ‘with great, but confused conception’, individuals enjoy ‘raptures, transports, and surprising flights of fancy’, and at its summit may experience a kind of frenzy in which ‘every whimsy is consecrated’ (E 74). Literature and the sympathy on which it depends can exhibit just these symptoms. Hume remarks:
A man, who enters the theatre, is immediately struck with the view of so great a multitude, participating of one common amusement; and experiences, from their very aspect, a superior sensibility or disposition of being affected with every sentiment, which he shares with his fellow creatures. He observes the actors to be animated by the appearance of a full audience, and raised to a degree of enthusiasm, which they cannot command in any solitary or calm moment. (EPM 5.24–5/SBN 221)
When overheated, the imagination becomes disordered and incapable of distinguishing truth from falsehood because ‘every loose fiction or idea’ is received on the same footing as ideas of memory. The result is a state of persuasion that can even reach to delirium. ‘This is common to both poetry and madness’, Hume writes, ‘that the vivacity they bestow on the ideas is not deriv’d from the particular situations or connexions of the objects of these ideas, but from the present temper and disposition of the person’ (T 1.3.10.10/SBN 630). The poet gives a ‘bent to the imagination [and] draws along the passion, in the same manner as if its proper object were real and existent’ (T 2.2.5.12/SBN 362). The imagination has the power to bring objects closer to us so that we are tempted to enjoy the present advantage of aesthetic pleasure over and above what we know to be the dictates of judgement and the sanity of experience. The poet is implicated in such schemes, for ‘however poets may employ their wit and eloquence, in celebrating present pleasure, and rejecting all distant views to fame, health, or fortune; it is obvious, that this practice is the source of all dissoluteness and disorder, repentance and misery’ (EPM 6.15/SBN 239). Yet there is something seductive and irresistible about the images they conjure and, as Hume remarks:
’Tis difficult for us to withold our assent from what is painted out to us in all the colours of eloquence; and the vivacity produc’d by the fancy is in many cases greater than that which arises from custom and experience. We are hurry’d away by the lively imagination of our author or companion; and even he himself is often a victim to his own fire and genius. (T 1.3.10.8/SBN 123)
Unlike cases of actual madness, however, poetic enthusiasm is a temporary state, and while poetry works by creating a fanciful world, neither poets nor readers actually believe in the reality they create; poetic reality consists of artificial fictions of the imagination – ‘counterfeit on belief and judgement’ – and while the faculty might be able to set objects before us in their ‘true colours’, it cannot, Hume insists, ‘of itself, reach belief’:
[I]n the warmth of a poetical enthusiasm, a poet has a counterfeit belief, and even a kind of vision of his objects . . . [where the] blaze of poetical figures and images . . . have their effect upon the poet himself, as well as upon his readers. (SBN 123)24
In contrast to memory, whose ideas correspond to matters of fact and give rise to justified belief, the productive power of imagination exploited by the poet produces only fictions and even these are not the natural beliefs of the sort associated with primary propensities of the imagination that make life possible. Despite the increased force and vivacity they contain, even in the midst of a poetic enthusiasm poetic ideas still feel different from those arising from those of vulgar reasoning; events, characters and conduct in a literary work belong only to the world of the poetic imagination and the artifice of drawing relations where none naturally exist. Hume is convinced that poetic fictions are never as strong as even the lowest probability of belief derived directly from experience. As a result, we can distinguish the ‘feeling’ of ‘serious conviction’ from ideas aroused by the ‘fervours of poetry and eloquence’, which are the ‘mere phantom of belief or perswasion’ (T 1.3.10.10/SBN 630, emphasis added). Hume writes:
We observe, that the vigour of conception, which fictions receive from poetry and eloquence, is a circumstance merely accidental, of which every idea is equally susceptible; and that such fictions are connected with nothing that is real. This observation makes us only lend ourselves, so to speak, to the fiction: But causes the idea to feel very different from the external establish’d perswasions founded on memory and custom. They are somewhat of the same kind: But the one is much inferior to the other, both in its causes and effects. (T 1.3.10.11/SBN 631–2, emphasis added)25
The same is true of passions aroused in real life and those merely persuasive ones ‘excited by poetical fictions’; there is a perceptible difference between the two, and despite poetic magic a real passion is never confused with one inspired by literature, a point reflected in the pleasure afforded by passions that would otherwise be a source of pain. ‘A passion, which is disagreeable in real life, may afford the highest entertainment in a tragedy, or epic poem. In the latter case it lies not with that weight upon us: It feels less firm and solid’ (T 1.3.10.10/SBN 631). As Hume puts it succinctly in the Abstract, ‘Poetry, with all its art, can never cause a passion, like one in real life. It fails in the original conception of its objects, which never feel in the same manner as those which command our belief and opinion’ (T Abstract, 22/SBN 654). The imagination can imbue its creations with such force and vivacity that they strike the imagination to persuade an audience, but not to the point where they believe in the real existence of objects to which the ideas refer.
The fact that poet and audience can always distinguish poetic fiction from matter of fact, however, does not mean that poetry cannot be abused as well as used wisely. On the one hand, poetry improves the temper and encourages elegance of sentiment; it excites soft emotions, draws the mind away from hurry and business, teaches us to cherish reflection, and encourages tranquillity and agreeable melancholy (see E 7, 534 and 549). The charms of poetry can also aid the philosopher – the ‘painter’ as we shall see in Chapter 7 – in engaging the imagination to make us ‘feel the difference between vice and virtue’ (EHU 1.1/SBN 6) and encourage the reader to bestow praise and blame on what deserves it (see E 228). A strong imagination, on the other hand, also undermines the critical faculty, and makes it more difficult to resist an idea when it is painted out ‘in all the colours of eloquence’ (T 1.3.10.8/SBN 123). Poets address themselves to the passions, which, when encouraged, become intemperate and a potential vehicle for vice (see E 567). Poetry should aim at a mean between dull repetition and the distracting adornment of nature but, given the pleasure the imagination takes in novelty and surprise, over-refinement and excessive ornament are ever-present temptations. The dangers here are no worse than affectation, conceit and degeneracy of taste (see E 196), not to be wished for, perhaps, but less pernicious than the potential effects of false religion and philosophy, which (as we shall see in Chapter 7), Hume regards as having damaging consequences in the rounds of social, political and moral life.
When Hume emphasises the distorting power of the poetic arts, then, and their proclivity to produce temporary states of persuasion, he sees them as inherently deceitful. Poetry is always one remove from reality, which it disguises in the bright colours of its representations (see E 240). There is never, to use Keats’ phrase, any ‘truth’ of imagination; in transcending experience, poets trade actuality for fiction, and only under the influence of some poetic enthusiasm can they believe they have arrived at knowledge and achieved the ‘right relationship with the world’.26 The business of poetry is to give pleasure by appealing to the passions, and, consequently, the only possible coin of the poet’s trade is fiction, the deliberate employment of language to manipulate an audience. In this spirit Hume writes that the ‘beauties [of poetry] are founded on falsehood and fiction, on hyperboles, metaphor, and an abuse and perversion of terms from their natural meaning’ (E 231), which puts them in the company of priests and allegorists, who corrupted real events and heroes and thus ‘successively improved the wonder and astonishment of the ignorant multitude’ (NHR 5.6). ‘Painters too and sculptors came in for their fair share of profit in the sacred mysteries;’ he adds, ‘and furnishing men with sensible representations of their divinities, whom they cloathed in human figures, gave great encrease to the public devotion, and determined its object’ (NHR 5.7).
It is in this vein that Hume goes so far as to call poets ‘liars by profession, [who] always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions’ (T 1.3.10.5/SBN 121). Since the ‘whole art of the poet is employed, in rouzing and supporting the compassion and indignation, the anxiety and resentment of his audience’ (E 217), they have much in common with ‘harmless’ or ‘common’ liars whose ‘universal intention is to please and entertain’ and whose behaviour is condemned on account of the general love of truth that is universally approved (EMP 8.6/SBN 263).27 He writes:
We find that common liars always magnify, in their narrations, all kinds of danger, pain, distress, sickness, deaths, murders, and cruelties; as well as joy, beauty, mirth, and magnificence. It is an absurd secret, which they have for pleasing their company, fixing their attention, and attaching them to such marvellous relations, by the passions and emotions, which they excite. (E 217–18)
Much ‘vulgar lying’ of this sort, Hume argues, is a way for those whose lives are devoid of real adventures to satisfy their vanity by inventing events or, where the events are real, forging a connection to them that otherwise does not exist (T 2.1.8.6/SBN 301). Poets achieve their effects in similar ways, and as the mendacity of harmless liars finds its place in ‘humorous stories’ that are ‘agreeable and entertaining’ (EMP 8.6), so poets mix reality with fable (E 422) and, like Homer, throw themselves ‘headlong into chimæra’, unable to treat their subjects ‘without a multitude of false subtilties and refinements’ (E 115). Poets of this sort might seem dangerous, but their fictions are always artificial, and however profound the poetic enthusiasm appears, it is always fleeting and the professed belief a phantom one.
The Rules of Art
In aesthetics, as in other areas of human life, Hume praises the great advance of empirical or ‘practical’ science in discovering regularities or general principles amid the diversity of human experience. These principles are appropriately thought of as abridgements, since they express formally the regularities that give order to the practices in question. Thus, in judgements of beauty and deformity, it is possible to isolate ‘what has been universally found to please in all countries and in all ages’, as Hume writes in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, and thus to allow ‘rules of composition’ to be ‘fixed’; reflection reveals common features of works that have as a matter of fact elicited pleasure rather than pain.28 Once discovered, this standard of taste can be used to reconcile the various sentiments that different individuals necessarily express. Hume does not deny that in practice there are differences in the actual judgements that individuals make, but since beauty and deformity are based on principles of human nature, they are explicable in terms of obstructions – ignorance, prejudice, lack of sense, want of delicacy and dearth of practice – that intervene between the potential to experience beauty and the appropriate sentiment of pleasure that constitutes it. ‘But when these obstructions are removed’, Hume writes, ‘the beauties, which are naturally fitted to excite agreeable sentiments, immediately display their energy; and while the world endures, they maintain their authority over the minds of men’. For this reason Homer was admired in Athens and Rome and, while his greatness may be temporarily dulled by fad and fashion, over the course of historical time ‘All the changes of climate, government, religion, and language, have not been able to obscure his glory’ (E 233). When these regularities in taste over long periods of time are made explicit, there is good reason, in Hume’s view, to speak of general or universal principles, or what he often refers to as ‘rules of criticism’ or ‘rules of art’.
As some commentators have emphasised, as in his deprecation of linguistic distortion, the content Hume gives to these rules is largely conventional, and although, as Mossner points out, they are empirical rather than a priori, there is some truth to the observation that along with his eighteenth-century contemporaries, Hume wanders little from the ‘well-worn highroad of seventeenth-century reason and Neo-Classical taste’.29 As in his orthodox view of language and metaphor, however, this easy assessment threatens to obscure the real philosophical foundations of Hume’s approach to criticism and his elucidation of principles governing works of great literature. These principles arise from reflecting on experience, and can be taken either as philosophical or critical. As philosophical principles, they have descriptive or explanatory value for the moral scientist, since they show how poets achieve their effects by creating ideas that conform to human nature and elicit agreeable sentiments in an audience. As critical principles, on the other hand, they have prescriptive or normative value for the creative artist by offering guidelines for writing great poetry. Like following a recipe, successful application of the rules is never straightforward or automatic, and the active imagination of the poet is required to use the recipe to good effect. Indeed, writers of genius never follow such rules explicitly, and though a ‘perfect’ imagination or that ‘magical faculty of the soul’ is always obvious in great works of art, the cause of the satisfaction it conveys often remains elusive (EPM 8.14).30
As the imagination itself displays ‘universal principles’ that make it ‘uniform with itself in all times and places’ (T 1.1.4.1/SBN 10), so do the creative arts that arise from it. Poetry ‘can never submit to exact truth’, but must at the same time ‘be confined by rules of art, discovered to the author either by genius or observation’ (E 231). These, in turn, are ‘founded on qualities of human nature; and the quality of human nature, which requires a consistency in every performance, . . . which renders the mind incapable of passing in a moment from one passion and disposition to a quite different one’ (T 2.2.8.18/SBN 379). Even in works of genius, in the lines of Homer and the notes of Beethoven, the work must conform to rules of criticism without which the art would fail to elicit further the movement of the imagination among its ideas. Moreover, as we have seen already, the genius of the poet consists in eliciting this response in an audience, which depends in turn on natural principles governing the passive imagination; the success of any literary work, therefore, depends on the degree to which a writer satisfies the criteria governing whether or not the intended response is brought about. These criteria are identical to the natural principles of the passive imagination that determine whether a poetic representation of the world is correct, that is, whether it has produced the appropriate ideas in the mind of the audience and facilitated the easy transition of ideas that produces pleasure: the imagination should be enlivened without becoming enervated. Accordingly, we can specify three general rules of criticism that Hume considers tantamount to techniques, which, if followed, facilitate this movement but if violated hinder it; poets whose works do not display these rules have effectively failed in the art of poetry.
Poetic Ideas as Plausible Fictions
First, in order to create a world that engages an audience, poetic depictions must be plausible fictions. The poet has the express task of persuading or convincing an audience about the poetic reality of events and thus enflaming the audience with the same passions that ‘actuate’ the figures in the work (EPM 5.26/SBN 222). For this reason, a ‘painter, who intended to represent a passion or emotion of any kind, wou’d endeavour to get a sight of the person actuated by a like emotion, in order to enliven his ideas, and give them a force and vivacity superior to what is found in those, which are mere fictions of the imagination’ (T 1.3.5.5/SBN 85). To produce indifference or check the ‘progress of the passions’ is a recipe for poetic failure (EPM 5.28/SBN 222). The imagination is satisfied as long as it can make an easy transition among its ideas, and while this does not reproduce experience and inspire true belief, the force and vivacity must be sufficient to bring about a temporary state of persuasion; the ideas must approximate truth while remaining distinct from real existence and matter of fact. ‘’Tis certain’, Hume observes, ‘we cannot take pleasure in any discourse, where our judgement gives no assent to those images which are presented to our fancy’. Poets might be ‘liars by profession’, but where they fail in giving an ‘air of truth to their fictions . . . their performances, however ingenious, will never be able to afford much pleasure’. ‘In short’, he concludes, ‘we may observe, that even when ideas have no influence on the will and passions, truth and reality are still requisite, in order to make them entertaining to the imagination’ (T 1.3.10.5/SBN 121).
The ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ of poetry, however, cannot be of the sort associated with impressions and copies made by memory, since poetic fictions can never satisfy the condition that the idea produces the ‘same effect with those impressions, which are immediately present to the senses and perception’ (T 1.3.10.3/SBN 119). ‘All the colours of poetry, however splendid’, Hume writes, ‘can never paint natural objects in such a manner as to make the description be taken for a real landscape. The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation’ (EHU 2.1/SBN 17). While there is no question of producing belief, the poet must still succeed in facilitating the easy transition of the imagination among its ideas. The force and vivacity of poetic ideas should transform the world and have a foothold in common life. Excess or deficiency of either will produce passions that are overheated and enthusiastic, on one side, or cool and disinterested, on the other. In both cases, the audience becomes disconnected from the action and the work must fail. If poets aim to elicit an emotional response in the audience and give pleasure, they must be guided by experience and certain facts of human nature.
At the same time, if poetical fictions are free of experience completely – if they are too artificial or over-contrived – the passions would not be engaged and the poetry would be ineffectual. It is thus ‘the business of poetry’, Hume writes, ‘to bring every affection near to us by lively imagery and representation, and make it look like truth and reality: A certain proof, that, wherever that reality is found, our minds are disposed to be strongly affected by it’ (EPM 5.30/SBN 222–3, emphasis added). Poetry, in other words, creates its effects by allowing reality to enter, but never with the force and vivacity that accompanies belief arising from memory or belief-like states of natural fictions. The poet elicits ‘fictitious sentiments’ produced in a poetic reality rather than real sentiments experienced in common life, and for this reason we take pleasure in the poem, even if the sentiments – such as loss, sorrow, anguish and despair experienced in tragedy – are otherwise a source of pain to the literary character or would be to the spectator experiencing the same emotions outside the literary depiction (T 2.2.7.3/SBN 369).
In order to achieve this fine balance, poets require techniques to make ideas ‘enter into the mind with facility, and prevail upon the fancy’, that ‘procure a more easy reception into the imagination for those extraordinary events, which they represent’ (T 1.3.10.6/SBN 122). Thus:
It is here esteemed contrary to the rules of art to represent any thing cool and indifferent. A distant friend, or a confident, who has no immediate interest in the catastrophe, ought, if possible, to be avoided by the poet; as communicating a like indifference to the audience, and checking the progress of the passions. (EPM 5.28/SBN 222)
At the same time, if the idea is to be plausible, it must refer to experience; for where the ‘justness of the representation is lost’, Hume contends, ‘. . . the mind is displeased to find a picture, which finds no resemblance to any original’ (E 192). A poetic description of the Elysian fields, for example, is made more convincing when the poet has a beautiful meadow or garden in view (T 1.3.9.5/SBN 109), and good ‘tragedians always borrow their fable, or at least the names of their principal actors, from some known passage in history’. Comic poets, on the other hand, are not required to go to such lengths because their characters are more familiar and ‘enter easily into the conception, . . . even tho’ at first sight they be known to be fictitious and the pure offspring of the fancy’ (T 1.3.10.6/SBN 122).
The same rule applies to the depiction of characters in literary works. ‘The persons introduced in tragedy and epic poetry’, Hume writes, ‘must be represented as reasoning, and thinking, and concluding, and acting, suitably to their character and circumstances; and without judgement, as well as taste and invention, a poet can never hope to succeed in so delicate an undertaking’ (E 240). The words and actions of literary personae must be proportionate to the situations in which they find themselves, but without repeating scenes in every detail, which would be tedious and mundane. For ‘with what pretence’, Hume asks, ‘could we employ our criticism upon any poet or polite author, if we could not pronounce the conduct and sentiments of his actors, either natural or unnatural, to such characters, and in such circumstances?’ (EHU 8.18/SBN 90).
Poetic Works and Design
Second, a work of literature must exhibit order and coherence by having a plan and a design, created by the poet in conformity with the principles of association. Hume largely accepts the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action in this regard, but replaces the ‘necessity of reason’ with the ‘novel explanation’ of the principles of association to explain how these unities worked.31 For Hume, what is true of experience generally is true of poetry in particular: even in our wildest and most wandering poetic reveries, our thoughts cannot ‘be allowed to run at adventures, if we would produce a work, which will give any lasting entertainment to mankind’ (EHU 3.10). For ‘every kind of composition, even the most poetical, is nothing but a chain of propositions and reasonings; not always, indeed, the justest and most exact, but still plausible and specious, however disguised by the colouring of the imagination’ (E 240). Without the active imagination of the author employed to discover and express the connections in this chain, the passive imagination of the audience is left without direction and it is impossible to take pleasure in the work. Hume writes:
In all compositions of genius . . . it is requisite, that the writer have some plan or object; and though he may be hurried from his plan by the vehemence of thought, as in an ode, or drop it carelessly, as in an epistle or essay, there must be some aim or intention, in his first setting out, if not in the composition of the whole work. A production without a design would resemble more the ravings of a madman, than the sober efforts of genius and learning. (EHU 3.5)
The poet enjoys some freedom in bringing this unity about, and may choose from different principles as long as regular connections are forged and an overall design emerges. The events in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for example, resemble one another in being fabulous transformations brought about by the power of the gods (EHU 3.7), as Homer unifies the life of Achilles through the hero’s anger (EHU 3.10 and 16).
There are, however, limits to the poet’s freedom of expression in creating unified literary works imposed by the general end that poetry has in view – to give pleasure – and the natural principles of the imagination that have to be propitiated if the easy transition between ideas that produces the agreeable sentiments is to be achieved. This proportioning of means to ends must be kept ‘constantly in our view’, Hume says, ‘when we peruse any performance; and we must be able to judge how far the means employed are adapted to their respective purposes’ (E 240). This is the case most notably in epic narratives familiar from Antiquity, exemplified by the Odyssey and the Æneid, which are unified by tracing causal connections among events (EHU 3.12). The poet unifies the whole by connecting events in a causal chain, but the literary form and the nature of human faculties effectively limit the writer. Hume makes this point by comparing poetry to the demands of historical and biographical narrative:
The unity of action . . . to be found in biography or history, differs from that of epic poetry, not in kind, but in degree. In epic poetry, the connexion among the events is more close and sensible: The narration is not carried on through such a length of time: And the actors hasten to some remarkable period, which satisfies the curiosity of the reader. This conduct of the epic poet depends on that particular situation of the Imagination and of the Passions, which is supposed in that production. The imagination, both of writer and reader, is more enlivened, and the passions more enflamed than in history, biography, or any species of narration, which confine themselves to strict truth and reality. (EHU 3.10)
Given that epic achieves its end poetically, by representing the world to bring pleasure to an audience, it must unify events by achieving a fine balance between reality and fiction, enlivening the imagination enough to engage the audience but without the prolonged intensity that enervates them. Epic poets are therefore not entitled to recount events according to ‘strict truth and reality’; this would be a memorial reiteration, and tracing connections to a distant origin – as Hume begins his History with an account of the ancient Britons, for example – would result in a work that, in literature at least, would extend to a tedious and exhausting length. The poet must still be careful to include sufficient reference to ‘minute circumstances’ in order to engage and amuse readers, but not so many details as to bore and exhaust them. Time itself must be represented poetically, sequences condensed and events glossed if the imagination is not be hindered in its movements. As Hume points out, the reader of the Iliad does not want to be informed every time Achilles ties his shoelaces, but there must be sufficient detail for the reader to engage with the unfolding action. Voltaire’s play La Henriade suffers from insufficient detail, since ‘events are run over with such rapidity, that we scarcely have leisure to become acquainted with the scene or action’ (EHU 3.11). As Hume notes, ancient epics achieve this effect by employing the technique of ‘oblique narrative’ (storytelling through a character in retrospect) to ensure that ‘events follow with rapidity, and in a very close connection: And the concern is preserved alive, and, by means of the near relations of the objects, continually encreases, from the beginning to the end of the narration’ (EHU 3.12).
Further, poets should avoid making any abrupt and complete transition from one event, theme or character to another, which would interfere with the progress of the imagination. For
were the poet to make a total digression from his subject, and introduce a new actor, nowise connected with the personages, the imagination, feeling a breach in the transition, would enter coldly into the new scene; would kindle by slow degrees; and in returning to the main subject of the poem, would pass, as it were, upon foreign ground, and have its concern to excite anew, in order to take part with the principal actors. (EHU 3.12)
For the same reason, a tragedian should never represent the hero as too ingenious and witty, which would interrupt the ‘regular flowing of the passions and sentiments’ and leave the audience untouched by the unfolding events (T 1.4.1.11/SBN 185–6), nor should serious and profound sentiments or different styles be combined in a single work. In such cases, Hume insists, the audience is obliged to compare things that are different in kind: a tragedy abounding in comic beauties and a comedy in tragic elements are contradictions in terms; the imagination is obliged continually to break from one and start afresh with the other. Where consistency is breached in such a manner, the imagination is interrupted and the effect of the writing lost.32
Poetic Works and Simplicity
Third, literature must exhibit simplicity – in thought, expression and composition – a virtue Hume prized in his work and his character.33 Since the noblest works of art are ‘beholden for their chief beauty to the force and happy influence of nature’ (E 139), this aim can only be realised if the poet imitates nature itself. There is no reason for the poet to do more than put touches on a canvas already completed. When poets acknowledge themselves as understudies to the master and guide of nature, a world of poetic possibilities opens up as they at once discover techniques that can hardly fail to arouse sentiments of pleasure necessary to satisfy the imagination. Hume writes:
It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature’s productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the hand of the master. Some of the drapery may be of his drawing; but he is not allowed to touch the principal figure. Art may make a suit of clothes: But nature must produce a man. (E 138)
Objects are beautiful, in part, because they are structured in a way that fits our capacity to be affected; we take pleasure from harmonious compositions (EPM 5.37/SBN 224) and figures that are balanced (EPM 6.28/SBN 245), like the parts of an animal moving together in a perfect whole or a pillar slender at its top and wider at its base. ‘From innumerable instances of this kind’, Hume writes, ‘. . . we may conclude that beauty is nothing but a form, which produces pleasure, as deformity is a structure of parts, which conveys pain’ (T 2.1.8.2/SBN 299). The same is true of poetic objects, where there is a natural fit between the beauty and unity of poetic representations and the capacity of the imagination to be affected by them. Hume observes:
In all nobler productions of genius, there is a mutual relation and correspondence of parts; nor can either the beauties or blemishes be perceived by him, whose thought is not capacious enough to comprehend all those parts, and compare them with each other, in order to perceive the consistence and uniformity of the whole. (E 240)
At the same time as poets must not obscure the beauty of nature through excessive ornamentation and artifice, they must still represent rather than reiterate her features. Nature already possesses poise and balance, and her forms are fitted to produce pleasure in those with sufficient taste to detect them, but poetry nevertheless should offer readers la belle nature rather than the mere repetition of detail. Literature should aim to balance the imitation of nature’s inherent simplicity and refinement with a representation of her with embellishment enough to engage the imagination (see E 191–6). Such a balance is difficult to attain – it is the work of genius – but poetry is more likely to be realised successfully if poetic representations follow nature as closely as possible. Art conceived and executed in this manner will bring lasting enjoyment and endure through the ages: ‘A pleasant comedy, which paints the manners of the age, and exposes a faithful picture of nature, is a durable work, and is transmitted to the latest posterity’ (H 6.153).
In short, the general rule for poets is to avoid any hint of Locke’s figurative speeches, flourishes that distort natural language and inhibit the easy movement of the imagination. The imagination is pleased by the novelty of innovative productions, but those ‘which are merely surprising’, Hume writes, ‘without being natural, can never give any lasting entertainment to the mind. To draw chimeras is not, properly speaking, to copy or imitate’ (E 192). ‘Fine writing’, on the other hand, ‘. . . consists of sentiments, which are natural, without being obvious’ (E 191), so that ‘Uncommon expressions, strong flashes of wit, pointed similes, and epigrammatic turns . . . are a disfigurement, rather than an embellishment of discourse’. Such flourishes in literary works are equivalent to the multiplicity of ornaments on a Gothic building: as the eye is ‘distracted . . . and loses the whole by its minute attention to the parts; . . . [so] the mind, perusing a work overstocked with wit, is fatigued and disgusted with the constant endeavour to shine and surprise’ (E 192–3). For this reason, Hume considers the pastoral form of poetry to be the most entertaining since it mimics nature as closely as poetry is able and presents scenes that are best fitted to arouse agreeable sentiments in an audience. The ‘chief source of its pleasure’, Hume writes, ‘arises from those images of a gentle and tender tranquillity, which it represents in its personages, and of which it communicates a like sentiment to the reader’. So naturally suited are these scenes to the imagination of an audience that there is hardly need to convert painful scenes into a source of pleasure. Consequently, where ideas of pain and suffering are included in pastorals, they produce the opposite of the intended effect. Thus, in Hume’s estimation:
[The Italian poet] Sannazarius, who transferred the scene to the seashore, though he presented the most magnificent object in nature, is confessed to have erred in his choice. The idea of toil, labour, and danger, suffered by the fishermen, is painful; by an unavoidable sympathy, which attends every conception of human happiness or misery. (EPM 5.29/SBN 222)
Hume’s idea of simplicity and refinement is manifest most clearly in the literature of Antiquity, the age of Augustus and the Greeks at the height of Athenian culture, distinguished by their ‘correctness and delicacy’ (H 6.543) and ‘an amiable simplicity, which . . . is so fitted to express the genuine movements of nature and passions’ (H 5.149). Homer, Hume writes, ‘copies true, natural manners, which, however rough or uncultivated, will always form an agreeable and interesting picture’ (H 4.386). From ‘the simple purity of Athens’, however, Hume discerns an increasing desire for novelty, a gradual move away from the simple depiction of nature to increasing artifice and adornment, which leads authors ‘wide of simplicity and nature’ and encourages a ‘degeneracy of taste’ (E 196). ‘The glaring figures of discourse, the pointed antithesis, the unnatural conceit, the jingle of words; such false ornaments were not employed by early writers’ (H 5.149). This ‘general degeneracy of style and language’ becomes pronounced in ‘that tinsel eloquence, which is observable in many of the Roman writers, from which Cicero himself is not wholly exempted, and which so much prevails in Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, Martial, and the Plinys’ (H 5.150), comes of age in the rebirth of letters in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and reaches fruition in the Restoration dramas in the reign of Charles II. ‘The productions, represented at that time on the state, were such monsters of extravagance and folly’, Hume declares, ‘so utterly destitute of all reason or even common sense; that they would be the disgrace of English literature, had not the nation made atonement for its former admiration of them, by the total oblivion to which they are now condemned’ (H 6.542). Even before that, under Elizabeth Tudor and the Stuarts, learning was ‘attired in the same unnatural garb, which it wore at the time of its decay among the Greeks and Romans’, as is evident in Shakespeare, whose works involve irregularities, absurdities and deformities (H 5.151); Johnson, who did little more than translate ‘into bad English the beautiful passages of the Greeks’ (H5.151); and John Donne, whose satires, in Hume’s view, though they contain ‘some flashes of wit and ingenuity . . . are totally suffocated and buried by the harshest and most uncouth expressions, that is anywhere to be met with’ (H 5.152).
In fact, Hume gives praise only when writers come close to the Augustan/Greek model, and then it is for elements or particular works rather than for a corpus as a whole. For example, he writes that Edmund Spenser
contains great beauties, a sweet and harmonious versification, easy elocution, a fine imagination. Yet does the perusal of his work become so tedious, that one never finishes it from the mere pleasure which it affords: It soon becomes a kind of task-reading; and it requires some effort and resolution to carry us on to the end of his long performance. (H 4.386)
In comparison with Homer, the ‘pencil of the English poet [in The Faerie Queen] was employed in drawing the affectations, and conceits, and fopperies of chivalry, which appear ridiculous as soon as they lose the recommendation of the mode’ (H 4.386). Hume also finds much to praise in the ‘great poet’ John Milton (DNR 10.13) and bemoans his neglect. Yet ‘Even in the Paradise Lost, his capital performance’, he remarks, ‘there are very long passages, amounting to near a third of the work, almost wholly destitute of harmony and elegance, nay, of all vigour of imagination’ (H 6.150–1). Similarly, Hume sees great genius in some of Dryden’s compositions – A Song for St Cecilia’s Day and Absalom and Achitophel – but considers his plays to be ‘utterly disfigured by vice or folly or both. . . . Even his fables are ill-chosen tales, conveyed in an incorrect, though spirited versification’. Some pieces, Hume concludes, constitute the ‘refuse of our language’ (H 6.543).
Hume’s criticisms might be harsh and are certainly contestable, but they are neither arbitrary nor inconsistent with his view of literature and the rules governing good composition. The rules of art are abridgements of practice and express an ideal at which poets should aim. It is in the nature of genius to create rare works that come close to this perfection, judged as such by their success in engaging the imagination to produce pleasure. This is only possible if the poet attends to the principles governing that faculty, since these are the criteria, the satisfaction of which determines the success of a poetic work. As Hume’s comments on various writers make clear, there is still much value in writing that falls short of genius, and literature remains a source of great pleasure even if it does not follow all the rules of criticism or follows particular ones imperfectly. Hume is quick to point out, though, that as in apparently miraculous violations of the laws of nature, where the event is accountable by way of intervening and equally regular causes (EHU 10.12/SBN 114–15), when a work violates the rules and gives pleasure, other elements that do conform to good taste will be found. The Italian Renaissance poet Ariosto, for example, repels insofar as he breaks some rules – ‘by monstrous and improbable fictions, by his bizarre mixture of the serious and comic styles, by the want of coherence in his stories, or by the continual interruptions of his narration’ – but charms in conforming to others – ‘by the force and clearness of his expression, by the readiness and variety of his inventions, and by his natural pictures of the passions’ (E 232). Similarly, that the English dramatist Matthew Prior successfully combined the comic and the tragic in a single volume does not undermine the rule against such juxtapositions, and is explicable in terms of the reader who ‘considers these performances as entirely different, and by this break in the ideas, breaks the progress of the affections, and hinders the one from influencing or contradicting the other’ (T 2.2.8.18/SBN 380).
At work here is that productive power of the imagination to create poetic fictions by transposing and changing its ideas and following its tendency to move easily among them, with a view to creating a whole and feeling the pleasure that brings. Where this smooth and easy passage is lost, the art of poetry is wanting. Whether poetic ideas are viewed positively as the offspring of genius or negatively as the bastard of deceit, poetry rearranges ideas and departs from experience, and in so doing pleasantly deceives its willing audience by setting up a new and a poetic reality, distinct from but in important respects beholden to matter of fact. In Hume’s view, the imagination is both the active source of poetic genius and the means by which an audience is passively affected by poetic artifice. Poets are thus constrained by certain principles of human nature if they are to achieve the emotional response they desire. These principles are manifest as poetic techniques or, otherwise conceived, rules of criticism that abridge poetic practice and offer guidelines for the creation of entertaining and even great literary works. At the same time, because poetical fictions are self-conscious creations, they never rise to the status of belief.
Despite his strong words about the inherent mendacity of the poetic arts, Hume recognised and enjoyed them as part of a refined, tasteful and civilised existence, and since the objects in a poetic reality are easily distinguished from those with real existence, even minds lifted high on the wings of poetry do not pose dangers of the sort associated with the gloomy fictions of religion or the ideological ones of philosophy. For this reason, we might expect Hume to have banished philosophers rather than poets from the polis, preferring the company of those who entertain and inspire their audience rather than others who are more likely to depress or threaten it.
Notes
1. See Peter Kivy, ‘Hume’s Neighbour’s Wife: An Essay on the Evolution of Hume’s Aesthetics’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 23: 3 (1983), p. 201, and Peter Jones, ‘Hume’s Literary and Aesthetic Theory’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. David Fate Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 256. More generous evaluations of Hume’s interest in the arts are to be found in Laird, Hume’s Philosophy of Human Nature, pp. 276–7, and James Noxon, ‘Hume’s Opinion of Critics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 20: 2 (1961), pp. 157 and 161.
2. Stephen K. Land, From Signs to Propositions: The Concept of Form in Eighteenth-Century Semantic Theory (London: Longman, 1974), p. 22.
3. See Land, From Signs to Propositions, Ch. 2. For the place of Hume in eighteenth-century aesthetics more generally, see Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, vol. 1, Ch. 2; Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition, Ch. 2; Dabney Townsend, Hume’s Aesthetic Theory: Taste and Sentiment (New York: Routledge, 2001), Chs. 1 and 2; Peter Jones, Hume’s Sentiments: Their Ciceronian and French Context (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982); Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics, 2nd edn, rev. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, [1976] 2003), esp. Ch. 1; and Teddy Brunius, David Hume on Criticism. Figura 2. Studies Edited by the Institute of Art History, University of Uppsala (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell, 1952), Ch. 6.
4. For an overview of literature (up to 2004 at least) relevant to the discussion in this chapter, see Timothy M. Costelloe, ‘Hume’s Aesthetics: The Literature and Directions for Future Research’, Hume Studies, 30: 1 (2004), pp. 87–126. For extended treatments of Hume’s aesthetics, see Townsend, Hume’s Aesthetic Theory, and Costelloe, Aesthetics and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume.
5. See also T 2.1.8.6/SBN 301; EMP Appx. 1.14/SBN 291–2, and E 165, 235. Hume’s view also reveals important points of departure from Locke. See Kivy, ‘Hume’s Neighbour’s Wife’; William H. Halberstadt, ‘A Problem in Hume’s Aesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 30: 2 (1971), pp. 209–11; Carolyn W. Korsmeyer, ‘Hume and the Foundations of Taste’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 35: 2 (1976), pp. 201–15; and George Dickie, The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 123–4. Cf. Simon Blackburn, ‘Hume on the Mezzanine Level’, Hume Studies, 19: 2 (1993), pp. 273–88, and Theodore A. Gracyk, ‘Rethinking Hume’s Standard of Taste’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52: 2 (1994), pp. 169–82.
6. See Peter Railton, ‘Aesthetic Value, Moral Value, and the Ambitions of Naturalism’, in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 67 and 93; and Nick Zangwill, ‘Hume, Taste, and Teleology’, Philosophical Papers, 23: 1 (1994), p. 9.
7. See Peter Jones, ‘Hume’s Aesthetics Reassessed’, Philosophical Quarterly, 26 (1976), pp. 48–62; Jeffrey Wieand, ‘Hume’s Two Standards of Taste’, Philosophical Quarterly, 34: 135 (1984), pp. 129–42; and Roger A. Shiner, ‘Hume and the Causal Theory of Taste’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 54: 3 (1996), pp. 237–49.
8. Similar remarks are to be found inter alia at T 2.3.9.4/SBN 439, EPM 5.1, 6.22 and 6.28.
9. For commentary that emphasises this aspect of Hume aesthetics, see Katherine Everett Gilbert and Helmut Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, 2nd edn, rev. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishers, [1939] 1972), p. 246; Redding S. Sugg, Jr, ‘Hume’s Search for the Key with the Leather Thong’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 16: 1 (1957), pp. 96–102; Harold Osborne, ‘Some Theories of Aesthetic Judgment’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 38: 2 (1979), pp. 135–44; Paul Guyer, ‘The Standard of Taste and the “Most Ardent Desire of Society”’, in Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell, ed. Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer and Hilary Putman (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993), p. 41; James Shelley, ‘Hume and the Nature of Taste’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 56: 1 (1998), pp. 29–38, and Rochelle Gurstein, ‘Taste and the “Conversible World” in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 61: 2 (2000), pp. 203–21.
10. On this point, see Ralph Cohen, ‘The Rationale of Hume’s Literary Inquiries’, in David Hume: Many-sided Genius, ed. Kenneth R. Merrill and Robert W. Shahan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), pp. 97–115, esp. 104–6.
11. The final sentences of EHU 3.3 and 3.4–18 in their entirety do not appear in the 1777 edition of the first Enquiry used by SBN, but do appear in all editions from 1748 to 1772, and are included by Beauchamp (pp. 102–7).
12. Land, From Signs to Propositions, pp. 31 and 35. See John Dryden, On Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (London: Dent & Dutton, 1962).
13. Don Garrett, ‘The Literary Arts in Hume’s Science of the Fancy’, Kriterion, 44: 108 (2003), p. 168.
14. See, for example, Margaret Paton, ‘Hume on Tragedy’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 13: 2 (1973), p. 121, and Mark Packer, ‘Dissolving the Paradox of Tragedy’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 47: 3 (1989), p. 212.
15. See Alex Neill, ‘Yanal and Others on Hume and Tragedy’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 50: 2 (1992), p. 152, and ‘Hume’s Singular Phænomenon’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 39: 2 (1999), pp. 112–25. For an overview of the debate and some contributors to it, see Costelloe, ‘Hume’s Aesthetics’, pp. 107–9.
16. See Neill, ‘Hume’s Singular Phænomenon’, p. 113.
17. Hume also points out that disposition and national character sometimes determine where such limits are drawn. The English are so modest and of good sense that ‘their comic poets, to move them, must have recourse to obscenity; their tragic poets to blood and slaughter: And hence their orators, being deprived of any such resource, have abandoned altogether the hopes of moving them, and have confined themselves to plain argument and reasoning’ (E 622).
18. Hume sees the same principles at work in religion where, through conversion, the ‘most dismal and gloomy passions’ are a source of pleasure (T 1.3.9.15/SBN 115). I discuss this in more detail in Chapter 6.
19. See Adam Smith’s letter to William Strahan (dated 9 November 1776), L2: 450–2, and Adam Potkay, The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 194–6.
20. Ernest Campbell Mossner, ‘Hume’s “Of Criticism”’, in Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics, 1660–1800. Essays in Honor of Samuel Holt Monk, ed. Howard Anderson and John S. Shea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967), pp. 244–5.
21. See Richetti, Philosophical Writing, pp. 5–6.
22. Leopold Damrosch, Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 58. See also Land, From Signs to Propositions, pp. 50–74; Gilbert and Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, Ch. 8; and M. A. Box, The Suasive Art of David Hume (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), Ch. 2.
23. See Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), esp. Chs. 1 and 2. The quotes are taken from pp. 2 and 4. Potkay regards Hume’s ‘Of Eloquence’ as an ambivalent expression of disappointment at and celebration of the fact that Athenian warmth had been defeated by the coolness of English manners: in the essay, Potkay proposes, ‘Hume attests to the loss of eloquence that he regrets in the very act of writing about it with analytic distance’ (p. 49).
24. Norton deletes this passage entirely without reproducing the original; SBN keeps the original and lists the addendum in the Appendix (see SBN 630–2).
25. This passage appeared in Hume’s Appendix with instructions to be inserted at the end of T 1.3.10. In the penultimate sentence, Hume’s original has ‘eternal’ (SBN 632), which Norton changes to ‘external’ in his edition. For present purposes, nothing material hinges on whether one chooses the original or the amended reading.
26. See Keats’ letter 31, in The Poetical and Other Writings of John Keats Vol 6: p. 98, and for a discussion of the concept, Andrew J. Welburn, The Truth of Imagination (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989), pp. 3–4.
27. On at least one occasion, Hume is willing to credit poets with ‘a certain taste or common instinct’ that led them to recognise the artificial character of justice, a fact that had escaped the philosophical mind, at least. See T 3.2.2.15–16/SBN 493–4.
28. See, in this context, Garrett, ‘The Literary Arts in Hume’s Science of the Fancy’, pp. 173–4, and Costelloe, Aesthetics and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume, Ch. 1.
29. Gilbert and Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, p. 233. See also Mary Mothersill, ‘Hume and the Paradox of Taste’, in George Dickie, Richard Scalfani and Ronald Roblin (eds), Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, 2nd edn (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989), pp. 269–86, and Mossner, ‘Hume’s “Of Criticism”’, pp. 199 and 243.
30. The concept of rules as abridgements is borrowed from Michael Oakeshotte, ‘Rationalism in Politics’, in Michael Oakeshotte, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and expanded edn (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, [1962] 1991), pp. 5–42.
31. See Gilbert and Kuhn, A History of Esthetics, p. 235.
32. See EPM 8.12/SBN 266 and T 2.2.8.18/SBN 379–80. Hume follows Horace and Addison in decrying the tragic-comic style. See, for example, Horace, The Art of Poetry 2.1–9.23, in Satires, Epistles, The Art of Poetry, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), and Addison, Spectator No. 409, p. 530.
33. Hume wrote to Hugh Blair of an experience in Paris: ‘what gave me chief pleasure was to find that most of the elogiums bestowed on me turned on my personal character; my naivety and simplicity of manners, the candour and mildness of my disposition &c.’ (L I, 437), quoted in Damrosch, Fictions of Reality in the Age of Johnson and Hume, p. 19.