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Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography Author(s): Mark Salber Phillips

Source: PMLA, Vol. 118, No. 3, Special Topic: Imagining History (May, 2003), pp. 436-449 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1261519 . Accessed: 07/01/2014 05:08
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PMLA

Relocating Inwardness:
and
to

Historical

Distance

the

Transition

Romantic

Enlightenment Historiography
PHILLIPS

from

MARK SALBER

Theperusal 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 Enquiryconcerning 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 Roundheads during the civil wars? Does any one feel that Hume has made himfigure 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 StuartMill, "Carlyle'sFrenchRevolution"(1837 [135-36])

MARK SALBER PHILLIPS, professor of his-

tory at Carleton University,is the author of Societyand Sentiment: Genresof

Historical in Britain, 1740-1820 Writing


(PrincetonUP,2000), as well as earlier studiesof historical and political thought in the ItalianRenaissance.This essay is partof a new examinationof the idea of historical distance.

OME OF THEMOST INTRIGUING PROBLEMS IN INTELLECtual history arise out of juxtapositions like the one presented in my two epigraphs. Both the eighteenth-century historian and his critic appearto have an equal commitmentto the imnineteenth-century portanceof emotionalengagementin the writingof history.Nevertheless, since Mill's remarks arepartof an extendeddiatribeagainstthe unsympathizingqualitiesof the historiansof the previousage, these two apparently similardeclarationsevidentlyconceal a deep disagreementaboutthe natureandpurposesof historicalnarrative. Clearly,if despiteHume'sprotestationsaboutthe importance of the emotions,Mill andhis contemporaries found eighteenth-centurywritingbloodless and abstract,it was because they soughta differentkindof engagementin the writingof history. Hostility to the work of the previousage 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 accusation Mill broughtagainst Hume and his contemporarieshas continuedto be raised by more recent critics. From R. G. Collingwood to Hayden White,l philosophers and historians have repeatedMill's complaint,and even those more sympatheticto the historicalthought of the Enlightenment have generally interested themselves primarily in its speculative and abstract qualities, neglecting the sympathetic element evident in my quotationfrom Hume. The result, inevitably,has been to accentuatethe sense of a sharpdivide between the two periods,reinscribing in moder accountsthe antagonismbetween Romantic inwardness and Enlightenment abstraction that is such an importantpart of the Romantics'reactionagainsttheirpredecessors. The nineteenthcentury'srejectionof an allegedly ahistorical Enlightenment has often been taken as a founding moment of a modern historical understanding-indeed of modernity itself. A more careful reading of eighteenthcentury historical writing, however, suggests some lines of continuitythat the Romanticgeneration was less likely to appreciate. In fact, of pace Mill and latercritics, the historiography the eighteenth century was deeply interestedin engagingthe reader'semotions to promotesympathy with the events and experiences of other times. This was, afterall, an age of sensibilityas well as of enlightenment.Nor was the sentimentalism a superficialfeatureof historicalwriting, a mattermerely of style or passing literaryfashion. On the contrary, the Enlightenment's preoccupationwith sympathyand inwardness,no less than its often discussed conjecturalmethod, exof eighteenthpressed the centralpreoccupation centuryhistoricalthought,which was the desire to frame a new kind of history that would encompass 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 characterwill take us away from the eighteenth century for a while, but it permits a more precise analysis of

what changedand what remainedessentiallythe same in the shift from the inwardnessof sensibility to that of Romanticism. Historical Distance Questions of distance have been debated in a numberof disciplines, includingaesthetics,narratology,theater,political sociology, and anthropology. Among a long list of notablediscussions of social, conceptual, or aesthetic distance, one might pick out EdwardBullough's idea of "the aesthetic attitude," Victor Shklovsky's "estrangement," Bertolt Brecht's "alienation effects" Karl Mannheim's "social distance," NorbertElias's "civilizingprocess,"Georg Simmel's "stranger," Mieke Bal's "focalization,"or JohannesFabian's"refusalof coevalness."History, however, has largely escaped this kind of discussion-though Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Advantageand Disadvantage of Historyfor Life standsas a brilliantexception.2Even so, the constructionof relationsof engagementand detachment, proximity and distance would seem to be a central issue for all kinds of historical description-including historicalrepresentation in biography,museums, and film, as well as in traditionalgenres of historicalwriting. The reason for this silence, I suggest, is that a prescriptive idea of historical distance has become so incorporatedin our common understandingsof history that the idea has been lost to view. Like our way of constructing pictorialspace since the Renaissance, historical distance now seems something given, not constructed-a natural way of markingthe procession of time, not the outcome of a specific tradition of historical thought. Indeed, our commitment to a certain kind of detachmenthas become so incorporated into the discipline that the idea of historicaldistance seems hardly distinguishable from the idea of historyitself. Though practice,in fact, has been far more flexible than prescription, historians generally greet the idea of distance in strongly positive

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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 rangeof distanceconstructionsis broad.It comprehendsall points along a gradientof distance, including immediacy as well as detachment. (We have no trouble recognizing that both a have height;equally, bungalowand a skyscraper we can say that every representation of the past manipulatesdistance, howeverforeshortenedor extended.)Distancerefersnot only to mattersof form or rhetoricbut also to other significantdimensions 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 assumptionsas well as to its formaltraits. If every history must position its readersin some relationof proximityor detachmentto the past it describes,the issue of distance is as relevant to the long historyof historicalwritingas it is to recent practice. Thus, if a strong attachment to both the methodsand the rhetoricof analytic distance informs the work of Fernand Braudel or Eric Hobsbawm, what comparisons might we make to the writings of Adam Ferguson or Henry Thomas Buckle? If contemporary readersare drawnto the intriguing microhistories of CarloGinzburgor to the literaryvivacity of Simon Schama, surely other audiences were drawn to similar qualities in the histories of their own day. Romanticnarrativeswill quickly come to mind-Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present, for instance, or Jules Michelet's Le peuple-but we might also thinkof works in the chronicling tradition, like Dino Compagni's powerful eyewitness account of Florentinepolitics in the time of Dante or perhapsthatmost influential 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 confinedto genres we now regardas canonically historiographical.Not only chronicle and martyrology but also biography and memoir often carry with them a particularsense of immediacy, and the same is true for local history, family history,and much literaryhistory.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 apparentthat tacit assumptionsabout distantiationand proximityare a key elementin the way in which we distinguishthe varioushistoriographical 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 acceptassumptions of this kind. And whatis the currentlyfashionable contrastbetween history and memoryif not a problemof distance? Nor is there any reason to limit the discussion to textualrepresentations. Thoughthey emdifferent vocabularies, history painting, ploy photography, and documentary film all raise similar questions. Museums, too, with their combinationof concrete materialsand a public setting, present some of the issues in their most tangible and accessible form. Few readers of EmmanuelLeRoy Ladurie'sMontaillouor Laurel ThatcherUlrich's TheMidwife'sTale,for example, are likely to reflect on the sentimental attractionsof microhistory,but it takes no special museological awareness to spot parallel changes thathave been takingplace in historical and anthropological museumsover the past generation.When faced with the varied displays of London's ImperialWarMuseum, for example, visitors can easily distinguish the traditional mahogany-and-glass cases filled with swords and militaryuniforms from newer displays like The TrenchExperienceor TheBlitz Experience, where (as the titles indicate) we are invited to relive a specific momentor milieu from the past.

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The parallel between written microhistory and recent museum practice suggests some characteristic featuresof recent historical sensibilities, 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 consistent stance either of engagementor 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 constructionand social or intellectualcommitment. In the case of the War Museum, for example, an analysis of the Blitz exhibition would need to raise separate questions about formalvocabulary,affective coloration,and ideological implication. And beyond these aspects of distance there remains anotherdimension of our relation to the past that is concerned with what, at any given time, we judge to be most capable of explanation or understanding. This matterof cognitive distance surely plays an importantpart in establishing historical perspective, and, like the otherdimensionsof distanceI have outlined,it is partof the complex interplay of engagements that marks the historical outlook of a given period. These different kinds of distances do not standin fixed or predetermined relations;on the it is worth the effort to contrary, separatethe affective from the ideological or the ideological from the cognitive, because each of these dimensions makes its own contribution to the reader'sexperience. Nor are the formal devices of narrativealways used for the same purposes. Close-up description,for example, is often pursued as a way of enlisting the reader's sympathies in a political cause, as EdwardThompson explicitly does in "seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper,the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver ... from the enormous condescension of posterity"(12). Yet detailed narration is not always a strategy for creating sympathy, nor is immediacy in description al-

ways pairedwith ideological identification.The grisly description of the dismemberment of Damien the regicide that opens Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish is not calculated to make us identify with the criminalor to spur us to sympathywith efforts of penal reform;on the contrary, this horrificdescriptionis intended to shock us into abandoning our comfort with other, much more familiar regimes of punishment. In these terms, the graphicdescriptionof Damien's death spectacle serves as a kind of Brechtian alienation effect. It is intended to force on us the detachmentnecessary to recognize what is at stake in other forms of punishment, specifically what Foucault saw as a new regime of surveillanceinstitutedby 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 underof distance. The most familiar examstandings no doubt, come from the arts, where a ples, 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 Campbell'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 landscapesmiling near? / 'Tis distance lends enchantmentto the view, / And robes the mountains in its azure hue" (2). William Collins wrote about the music of melancholy 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 distancewas productiveof

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Historical Distance ent to Romantic and the Transition fromEnlightenm Historiography the more terribleeffects of the sublime."Ingeneral," 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 theirSublimity"(1: 51). In passages like these, added distance intensifies the aesthetic dimension of experience, so that even a painful sensation can be transformed into a source of pleasure. In other contexts distantiation suggests detachment or reflective judgment, a state of mind associated as much with conceptualskills as with aesthetic experience-and for that reason it provides a way of aligning the aesthetic detachmentof the artistwith the intellectualand ideological disinterestedness that the age associates with the scholarand the independentgentleman(see esp. Barrell). Among eighteenth-centurywriters on art, the classic statementof this position comes from JoshuaReynolds.For him, the markof genius was the capacity to "distinguish the accidental deficiencies" in nature,therebyenabling the artist to make out "an abstractidea of their forms more perfect than any one original."It is only by much experience "anda close comparison of objects in nature,that an artist becomes possessed of the idea of that central form ... from which every deviation is deformity"(4445). Reynolds recognized, of course, that all great artistsdid not approachthe observationof naturein exactly the same manner,but they all possessed a capacityfor 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 producedby form the other as produced by colour"(196). A relatedidea of distanceplayed an importantrole in the emergenthumansciences, where the power to abstractfrom experienceand to articulategeneralobservationsseemed to hold the key to more systematic forms of knowledge. Adam Smith wrote that while "commonobser-

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vation" shows us the world in all its particularity and incoherence, philosophy is "the science of the connecting principles of Nature"("History" 45). Advancing powers of abstraction markedthe difference between the artisan and the philosopher (Smith, Inquiry 1: 21) or the progress of social institutions from simpler to more enlightenedtimes. "Ina rude age,"as John Millar put it in a discussion of medieval law, "the observationof mankindis directed to particular objects; and seldom leads to the formation of generalconclusions"(2: 354). The same back in human principlecould be pushedfurther and made still more history speculative, as Smith did in consideringthe origin of language. Humanspeech, he argued,must have had its beadginnings in the concretenessof substantives; jectives would have been arrivedat with more difficulty because they must be "formedby abstractionand generalization" (Lectures10). In the science of optics, distanceperception had become an important problemfor investigation, and optical analogies in turnstimulatedsocial observers to think about the ways distance was registeredin the social realm. Hume in particular was impressed by George Berkeley's demonstrationthat distance perception,instead of being a matterof simple sense impressions, dependedon experience andjudgment(Treatise 42), and he applied the same idea to historical reading. "Thereis no necessity," wrote Hume, "thata generous action, barely mentioned in an old history or remote gazette, should communicate any strongfeelings of applauseand admiration."Virtue"placedat such a distance"is like a star;rationally ("to the eye of reason")we may know thatthe staris a sun like our own, but it "is so infinitely removed"that our senses feel neitherits light norits heat."Bringthis virtuenearer, by our acquaintanceor connexion with the persons, or even by an eloquent recital of the case; ourheartsare immediatelycaught,our sympathy enlivened, and our cool approbationconverted into the warmestsentimentsof friendshipandregard" (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 physicalones we learnby experienceto judge the of things, so thatsomething genuineproportions trivial but nearto us does not finally seem more thansomethinggreatbut distant.3 important Hume's deepest interest resided in the affective consequences of distance-its capacity to diminish the strengthof the passions, for example, 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 distancebecome an importantexplanation for the value given to an exotic object or to a long-established dynasty. Hume also complicated the issue by distinguishingbetween the effects of spatial and chronological distances, arguingthat"a very greatdistanceencreasesour esteem and admirationfor an object"but a distance in time increasesit more thana distancein space (Treatise277). He reasonedthatthe imagination moves more easily through space than through time (and more easily forward than back) and that this resistance registers itself in the intensityof 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 broughteven from the remotest partsof the world"(279). If we turnto the issue of moralpsychology, distanceplays, if anything,a still moreprominent role. Here the centralchallenge was to fashion a naturalisticscience of humankind thatwould be more generousto humannaturethanthe "selfish system" of Thomas Hobbes and BernardMandeville-a task that both Hume and Smith tackled by making the reciprocities of sympathy a central featureof humannature.The result was an extendedexaminationof self-interestand fellow feeling in which variationin distanceserved 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 peculiar force and vivacity,and excel every otherobject, in its influence on the imagination.Ourself is intimately present to us, and whatever is related to self must partakeof that quality"(Treatise 274). (This observation encapsulates a central principle in the aesthetics of sentimentalism, which focused much of its effort on ways to increasethe sense of presencethe writer could give to the situations and events described.) "Contiguous objects," he went on to observe, have a much greater influence on us thanthe "distantand remote."For this reason,if you talk to someone abouthis situationin thirty years' time, he will pay little heed. "Speak of what is to happen to-morrow, and he will lend you attention.The breakingof a mirrorgives 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 sympathycontinually suggested the importanceof distancein 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 familial bonds are the strongest(MoralSentiments 219).4 By the same token, if by some circumstance a son or brotheris removed from this intimacy, filial or fraternalfeelings may remain properbut are unlikely ever to recover "thatdelicious sympathy" that normally accompanies theirrelationship-a thoughtthatinspiredSmith to cry out against the folly of public schooling: "Theeducationof boys at distantgreat schools, of young men at distant colleges, of young ladies in distantnunneriesand boardingschools, seems ... to have hurt most essentially the domestic morals, and consequently the domestic happiness,both of Franceand England"(222).5

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To establish the deep-seatedness of sympaboth Hume and Smith chose to emphasize thy, the range of its naturalvariation. Distance, we might say, tests the mechanisms of fellow feeling, providinga pictureof the complexityandvariety of humanaffections-their responsiveness to kinship and physical proximity,for instance, or to effective literaryrepresentation both in hisand fiction. But this tory investigationof distance did not yet provide a propermoral psychology, only a way of grounding that psychology in an understandingof what comes most naturallyto the human mind. The essential second step remained: to discover how these reciprocities of self and other could give rise to moral convictions strongenoughto disciplineournaturalpartiality for whateveris closer and dearer.In this next stage of theirinquiry,the variabilities of distance retained an importantplace but as something that needed to be corrected more than embraced.Havingmade distancethe measureof spontaneous human sympathy, in other words, HumeandSmithwere also committedto viewing moraleducationas the acquisitionof a capacity for redistancing. The analogy with optics, as I have alreadysaid, is strong. "In general,"Hume wrote, "all sentiments of blame or praiseare variable,accordingto our situationof nearnessor remoteness,with regard to the person blam'd or prais'd, and according to the presentdisposition of our mind."But experience teaches us how to correct our sentiments-or at least to correctour languagewhen our sentimentsare incorrigible. Ourservant, if diligentandfaithful, mayexcite sentiments of love andkindnessthan stronger Marcus as represented in history; butwe Brutus, thattheformer charsay notuponthataccount, acteris morelaudable thanthelatter. Weknow thatwerewe to approach equallynearto that renown'dpatriot,he wou'dcommand a much of affection andadmiration. higher degree 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 momentaryappearancesof things, and overlookourpresentsituation" (Treatise372). Hume's outline of this process of communicationand correctionwas filled in by Smith in the famous passages on sympathyand the spectator in the Theory of Moral Sentiments.6But perhapsenough has now been said to provide a context for a closer look at the specific issue of historicaldistance.

Hume on Tragedy and Historical Distance In a strikingpassage in the essay "Of Tragedy," Hume wrote thatwhen Clarendon,the greathistorianof the English Revolution,approachesthe execution of the king, he "hurries over the king's death, without giving one circumstance of it." Clarendonevidently considers it as too horrid a sceneto be contemplatedwith any satisfaction,or even without the utmostpain and aversion.He himself, as well as thereaders of thatage, weretoo deeply concernedin the events,and felt a pain from whichan historian anda reader of ansubjects, otherage would regardas the most pathetic andmostinteresting, the and,by consequence, mostagreeable. (Essays223-24) Hume's subjectin this essay is an old question in literarycriticism: 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 understandingof Clarendon'sreticence, 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 intriguing awarenessof the ductility of historical distance. Despite the brevity of his remarks, Hume gives more than a hint of the manysidedness of the subject. First, there is the important issue of variability,which Hume put at the center of his dis-

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cussion. He clearly accepts that both Clarendon torical distancefrom within a traditionof letters and his audience found themselves in a kind of thathas long been interestedin literature's power to the that ruled out to engage the emotions. The discussion of tragsome proximity regicide of the event, especially possible representations edy seems to have helped him see an analogy in (we surmise)the kind of detailed,pathetictreathistory, and to a large extent he has simply exment that Hume would offer his readers in the tendedan establishedquestionto a new genre8 Historyof England.The implicationis thatvarithough in doing so he has also expanded the ation in distance should not be considered a issue in importantways that are appropriateto in historical his preoccupation fault; rather,change with historicalwriting.9 perspective is not only legitimate but also inevitable. This sense is reinforcedby the suggestionthatthe alThe Complexities of Distance in terationhas little to do with the historian'sindiEighteenth-Century Narratives vidual preferences,being as much a propertyof the audienceas of the writer. Hume emphasizedthe emotional impact of hisHume that distance Second, torical narrative,but at bottom the stakes were recognized must be consideredboth as a reflectionof someas much ideological as affective. If Clarendon's thing occurring outside the text and as a conavoidance of this "infinitelydisagreeable"substruction that operates within the text to shape ject had an evident political meaning (223), so the emotional responses of the reader.Clearly, must the fact that a laterreadercould regardthe we can understandthe change in distance that same events as "pathetic" and "agreeable." This Clarendon's sense of from separates history layering of one kind of distance over anotherHume's only if we considerthe differencein exformal, affective, ideological, and (ultimately) perience between their two generations. But if cognitive-reminds us not to think of distance the passage of time has led to new political peras a single, unitary dimension. Instead, as we ceptions, the resultwill be registeredas much in explore the theory and practice of historical the form and rhetoric of the narrativeas in its writing in the eighteenthcentury,we need to be content.Clarendon's accountwas appropriate for alert to the variety of distances in play and the its age, but no one now, Hume seems to say, differentways in which they may combine. could rest contentwith its hurried, uncircumstanLooked at in this way, the problem of untial narrative; the contemporary attracted reader, derstandingeighteenth-centuryhistoriography by the pathosof the story,would be eagerto hear becomes a matterof reconciling different posthe tragedyunfoldin all its evocativedetail. tures in relationto the past-postures that often Third, the literary context of Hume's disappearin the same authorand even in the same cussion is important. Unlike those essays that text. On the one hand, there was a strong imdeal with issues of history, politics, or political pulse in the Enlightenmentto approachhistory "Of addresses a economy, as a kind of laboratoryfor establishing a natuTragedy"specifically traditionof belles lettres. The question of tragralistic science of humankind. The result was edy's power to move the emotions goes back, a generalizing spirit that later critics came to of course, to Aristotle's discussion of catharsis deride but that had inestimable importance at in the Poetics, but Hume's real interlocutorsin the time, since it underpinnedthe confidence this essay are Jean-Baptiste Dubos and Berof eighteenth-century historians that they held nardFontenelle, two key figures in Frenchbelin their grasp principles of explanation that letristtradition.Hume does not initially come to elevated their understandingbeyond anything Clarendon's writing from a historiographical availableto earlierwriters.This was the spiritexconcern;instead,he approachesthe issue of hispressed by the Edinburghclergymanand minor

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literary figure John Logan in a brief work entitled Elementsof the Philosophy of History: "To common mindsevery thing appearsparticular. A Philosopher sees in the great, and observes a whole. The curiouscollect anddescribe.The scientific arrange andgeneralize"(10). This side of Enlightenmenthistoriography is well known;10less so its other, more sentimental face. There is plenty of evidence that historians, much like the novelists and poets of the day, were keenly interestedin engaging the reader's sympathies, especially by presenting scenes of virtue in distress. This dimension of Enlightenmenthistoriography 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 in works on belles lettres. articulated Raisingthe issue of distanceleads us to recfeaturesof ognize a split between two important the historical outlook of the eighteenth century. To simplify considerably,much of the most interesting 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 discernthe 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 stronglyconcernedwith cultivatinga sense of immediacy. History no less than fiction, it was argued,should exercise the moral imagination of its readers by presenting them with scenes thatare as vivid and affectingas possible. This tension between cognitive distantiation and affective proximitybecomes still more interesting when we recognize that many of the same voices speak prominently on both sides of this divide, most notablyKames, Smith, and Hume. For those of us who readeighteenth-century historieswith sympathy, the strainbetweenthese two impulses provides a tension that adds life and interest to this literature.At the same time,

recognizing the division makes it easier to understandhow 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 writing, but in encouragingthis 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 separatinghis generationfrom thatof Clarendon. Eighteenth-Century Inwardness: Kames's Elements of Criticism The most remarkable instanceof this doubledistance is Smith," but HenryHome, Lord Kames, providesa more manageableexample 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 humankindbut the moral psycholin essence, ogy of the reader.Kames'sargument, is that literary representation has the same power to stir the passions as actual experience, but only if the scene represented carrieswith it a high degree of vividness.This vivacity resultsin 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 profoundlyimportant role in the moral education of humankind. will always have Though literaryrepresentation an impact that is weakerthan the force of experience itself, "idealpresence"allows the lessons of experience to be preparedfor or repeated in ways that account for "thatextensive influence which languagehathover the heart"(1: 95-96).

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Ideal presence, as the name implies, is an aestheticprinciplewhose specific concern is the abbreviationof 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 us, sight; and from readersor hearers,transform as it were, into spectators: ... in a word every thing becomes dramatic as much as possible." Plutarch, he added, observes that Thucydides "makeshis readera spectator,and inspires him with the same passions as if he were an eyewitness"(2: 347-48). Similarly,in anotherplace he wrote, "The force of language consists in raising complete images; which have the effect to transport the readeras by magic into the very and time of the importantaction, and to place convert him as it were into a spectator,beholding every thing thatpasses"(2: 326).12 The notion of transportingthe reader into "thevery place and time"of the event would become significantnot only for historicalnarrative itself but also for a whole family of associated genres, including the historical novel, biography, and literaryhistory.The phrasecarrieswith it a strongsense of the transformation of historical distance that would become pervasivein the early part of the next century. But Kames was not singling out historical evocation as suchthough as the reference to Plutarch'sjudgment 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 commandsour 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 appearsclear, 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 trueif we reflectthatthe persons

describedare no longer alive: "a man long dead, and insensible now of past misfortunes,cannot move our pity more than if he had never existed"(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 spectatorshipthat 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 recalledthe firstappearance of his work and claims that Britons of every religious and political stripe were united "in their rage against the man, who had presumed 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 reminder of the political and religious partisanship that played a centralrole in the response to Hume's work in this early phase. This ideological critique did not disappearin 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 discontent comes into view, one that paints Hume's history as intellectually abstract and emotionally thin. This second phase of criticismheld the work up to new criteriaof judgment, and it embraced all of Enlightenment historiography in its condemnation. The first articulationof this criticism that I know of comes from James Mackintosh, the Whig historianand politician.In his journalsfor 1811, Mackintoshsketcheda brief but admiring portraitof Hume: "No other narrativeseems 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: It is hardto imagine a bettersummaryof 168).14 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 historicaloutlookof the Enlightenment. In Mackintosh'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 "wastoo habituallya 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 failuresof sympathy,Mackintoshstill judged Humethe greatestof historians, but two decades later the balance had shifted decisively. In the review of Carlyle with which I began,Mill permitted himself to wonder whetherHume,William Robertson,and Edward Gibbon, for all their talents, should be considered historiansat all. Theirhistories,he charged, were populatedby "mereshadows and dim abstractions"whom no readerwould recognize as "beingsof his own flesh and blood."Mill asked, "Does Hume throw his own mind into the mind of an Anglo-Saxon, or an Anglo-Norman? ... Wouldnot the sight, if it could be had, of a single table or pair of shoes made by an AngloSaxon, 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 narrativeskill, has contrivedto tell us from all his materials?" (135). Carlyle, Macaulay, and others made much the same point, urging on historians the task of a qualityof immediacythat,depending retrieving

on the occasion, these critics identifiedwith the freshnessof primary documents,the vividnessof Herodotus,or the fictionalimaginationof Walter Scott.'5None of them, it is clear,thoughtthat,in repudiating the qualities of aloofness and abstraction they identifiedwith theirEnlightenment predecessors, they mightactuallybe following in the footstepsof Humeand Smiththemselves. Locations of Inwardness from Enlightenment to Romanticism Ourimage of the historicalsensibilityof the Enlightenment as wholly abstractand detached is in many ways a myth createdby the Romantics as a foil for theirown critique.For this reason,I have triedto show that alongside its "philosophical" detachment,Enlightenment historiography also responded to a strong sentimentalistinfluence that focused on the aesthetic attractions and moraltrainingthatresult from soliciting the reader'ssympathy.In the largerpicture,then,we need to balancethese two aspects of eighteenthcenturyhistoriography, keeping in mind thatthis combined a view of historicalknowledge period that emphasizesgeneralitywith a view of narrative that stresses the aesthetic and ethical value of immediacy. When the problemof continuity is statedin this way, some elements of discontinuity stand out more clearly. The Romantics deepened the desire for immediacyin some areaswhere sentimentalism had preparedthe way, but they also broughta new demandfor engagement in other areaswhereeighteenth-century historicalthought valueda greaterdegreeof distantiation. The stylistic changes thatwe normallyidentify with Romantic historiographycan be seen as a further stage in a long-standingmovementtowardactuality andimmediacy;but the shift to a new sense of proximityor engagementon both ideological andcognitivegroundshas fewerprecedents in the eighteenth century and therefore contributes more fundamentallyto the sense we have of ena new historicalsensibility. countering

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Both groups of writers were interested in finding ways to make history more vivid or drawritersthe matic, but for the eighteenth-century search for immediacy centered on the psychology of reading, not on the quality of knowing. Their program called for strategies to involve so readersas closely as possible in the narrative, that they would respond more like witnesses than detached observers. Consequently,in belletrist discussion attention to formal distance was tied to the desire to abridge affective distance, and affective distance in turn was regarded as key to the ethical value of historical writing.The historian'sown relationto the past, however, was not explicitly at issue, and we miss the characteristicallyhistoricist view that an equivalent abridgment of distance cognitively would provide a clearer or deeper understandingof realitiesremotefrom the present. In Smith and Kames, in other words, the abridgingeffects of sympathybelong to the setting of criticism and moralpsychology, not that of historical method or explanation.When they wrote about historical narrative,after all, both men were writing in a traditionof belles lettres. Fromwithinthis spherethey reworkedthe traditional view that history teaches by presenting ideal examples of characterand action, replacing it with a new sense that history might contributeto virtueby providingvicariousexercises for the moral imagination. But it has to be recognized that these sentimentalist doctrines did not immediatelymove beyond the issue of ethical instructionor change how Smith and Kames thoughtabouthistoricalunderstanding. This is what changed in the new century,in ways that begin to be seen in Mill's criticism of Hume's failure to "throwhis mind"into the situation of anothertime. Mill's attackon the Enlightenment expressed a view of historical knowledge that was centralto importantstrands 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 understandingwas not construed as a matterof simple identification with the past. (Such naivete was the hallmarkof the chroniclers and romancersthat so attractedthe Romanticimagination.)Rather,genuine historical understandingbegins from a recognition of differencebut strivesto overcomethe opacity of the past by an act of the imagination. Moresuperficial minds, it was thought, might content themselves with the simplicities of factual of empty generalknowledge or the abstractions ization. But when one wantedto understand the real experience of past times, neither abstract theorizing nor external observation would do. Instead,historianswould need to cultivate special qualities of historicalinsight in orderto see more directlyinto past experience. This view of historical understandinggiven ideological impetus by the sense of engagementcommonto both liberalandnationalist ideologies and codified as a historical epistemology by Wilhelm Dilthey, Benedetto Croce, FriedrichMeinecke, and R. G. Collingwoodhas done a greatdeal to shape subsequentthinking aboutthe properforms of historicalwriting. For the historians of the Enlightenment, who began with quite differentideas abouthistorical distance, the continuing influence of this now canonicalview has createda persistentlyhostile climate of reception, from whose presuppositions only now are we beginningto liberateboth Hume andourselves.

NOTES
This essay reworksandcritiquessome of the views I firstpresentedin Societyand Sentiment.Earlierexplorationsof some of these ideas appearedin my "HistoricalDistance and the Britain"and "Hume Historiographyof Eighteenth-Century and Historical Distance." I am pleased to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,the GuggenheimMemorialFoundation, the Quatercentenary Fellowship of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a visiting fellowship at King's College,

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Cambridge.For theircomments and criticisms I owe a great deal to a numberof friends and colleagues, including Peter Burke, April London, Edward Hundert, Mary Catherine andRuthPhillips. Moran,Noelle Gallagher, J to "Hume viewed the historical White, According 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 see 71-85. historiography, 2 Alexis de Tocqueville'sDemocracyalso has some suggestive passages on historical distance (chs. 1-4, 20). Among recent work by historians, see the rich essays by CarloGinzburgin Wooden Eyes. 3 See Moral Sentiments135: "Inthe same manner,to the selfish andoriginalpassionsof humannature,the loss or gain of a very small interest of our own, appearsto be of vastly more importance, excites a much morepassionatejoy or sorrow, . . . thanthe greatestconcernof anotherwith whom we have no particularconnexion."Before a propercomparison can be made, Smith argues, we must mentally shift places, viewing the situationneitherwith our own eyes nor with the otherperson's,but "withthe eyes of a thirdperson." 4 Similarly Hume writes, "We sympathize more with personscontiguousto us, thanwith personsremotefrom us: With our acquaintance,than with strangers:With our countrymen,thanwith foreigners"(Treatise371). 5 Rousseau makes the same assumptions about the natural orderof sympathiesbut seeks a political orderthat will be strongenough to overridethem (87-88). 6 In brief, Smith presents sympathy as an "imaginary change of situations"that brings the actor and the spectator to adjusttheir feelings to each other:the spectatorengaging his feelings with those of the actor,the actorcalming his responses as he reexamines his situation througheyes of the spectator(22-23). But, of course, this displacementis only the point of departure; the goal of our moraleducation is to acquire the capacity for self-distantiation that Smith famously conceives as the operationof an impartialspectator. 7 EarlWasserman's "ThePleasuresof Tragedy"remains an excellent review of this theme. 8 Fontenelle's solution to the problem-a solution that Hume largelyaccepts-involves a kind of distantiation: "We weep for the misfortuneof a hero, to whom we are attached. In the same instantwe comfort ourselves, by reflecting,that it is nothing but a fiction" (Reflexions sur la poetique, as quotedby 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 Historyof England. 10 See, for example, John Pocock's important recent study on Gibbon,Barbarismand Civilization. 1' Smith was the greatestpolitical economist of the age, but his Lectureson Rhetoricwas also its most searchingexaminationof historicalnarrative.See my Society and Sentiment,chs. 1 and 3.
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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 transportourselves in fancy to the scenes of those distantand forgottenadventures,and imagine ourselves acting the part of a Scipio or a Camillus, a Timoleonor an Aristides"(Moral Sentiments75). 13Note the parallelbetween Kames's views and those of Fontenelle. But where Kames wished to discourage any kind of reflection that might interruptthe sense of immediacy, Fontenelle saw the consciousness of fiction as a necesof the impactof tragedy. sary and useful attenuation 14The Memoirs culls passages from Mackintosh's extensive manuscriptjournals, held in the British Library, which are a rich source of comment on his literaryand historicalreading,as well as on privateand official life. 15 The Romantic period is rife with statementsthat indicate the desire for a new sense of proximity in historical writing.Macaulay,for example, makes reiterateduse of images of abbreviateddistance to describe his ambition for a new, more imaginativelyconstructedhistoricalunderstanding: "Tomake 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 personifiedqualities in an allegory,to call up our ancestorsbefore us with all their peculiarities of language, manner,and garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummagetheir old fashionedwardrobes..." (1).

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