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He then inquires into the reason, why courage is the principal virtue of barbarous nations, and why they esteem deeds of heroism, however useless or mischievous, as far more meritorious than useful efforts of government or internal organization. He contrasts the heroism of the barbarous periods of the ancient world, with those of the dark ages of modern Europe; and finding the former selfish and aggrandizing, while the latter is characterized by the more generous features of chivalry, he thus accounts for this characteristic.
"The method by which these courteous knights acquired this extreme civility of theirs, was by mixing love with their courage. Love is a very generous passion, and well fitted both to that humanity and [23]courage they would reconcile. The only one that can contest with it is friendship, which, besides that it is too refined a passion for common use, is not by many degrees so natural as love, to which almost every one has a great propensity, and which it is impossible to see a beautiful woman, without feeling some touches of. Besides, as love is a capricious passion, it is the more susceptible of these fantastic forms, which it must take when it mixes with chivalry. Friendship is a solid and serious thing, and, like the love of their country in the Roman heroes, would dispel and put to flight all the chimeras, inseparable from this spirit of adventure. So that a mistress is as necessary to a cavalier or knight-errant, as a god or saint to a devotee. Nor would he stop here, or be contented with a submiss reverence and adoration to one of the sex, but would extend in some degree the same civility to the whole, and by a curious reversement of the order of nature, make them the superior. This is no more than what is suitable to that infinite generosity of which he makes profession. Every thing below him he treats with submission, and every thing above him, with contumacy. Thus he carries these double symptoms of generosity which Virgil makes mention of into extravagance.
Hence arises the knight-errant's strong and irreconcileable aversion to all giants, with his most humble and respectful submission to all damsels. These two affections of his, he unites in all his adventures, which are always designed to relieve distressed damsels from the captivity and violence of giants.
"As a cavalier is composed of the greatest warmth of love, tempered with the most humble submission [24]and respect, his mistress's behaviour is in every point the reverse of this; and what is conspicuous in her temper is the utmost coldness along with the greatest haughtiness and disdain; until at last, gratitude for the many deliverances she has met with, and the giants and monsters without number that he has destroyed for her sake, reduces her, though unwilling, to the necessity of commencing a bride. Here the chastity of women, which, from the necessity of human affairs, has been in all ages and countries an extravagant point of honour with them, is run into still greater extravagance, that none of the sexes may be exempt from this fantastic ornament.
"Such were the notions of bravery in that age, and such the fictions by which they formed models of it. The effects these had on their ordinary life and conversation was, first, an extravagant gallantry and adoration of the whole female sex, and romantic notions of extraordinary constancy, fidelity, and refined passion for one mistress. Secondly, the introduction of the practice of single combat. How naturally this sprung up from chivalry may easily be understood. A knight-errant fights, not like another man full of passion and resentment, but with the utmost civility mixed with his undaunted courage. He salutes you before he cuts your throat; and a plain man, who understood nothing of the mystery, would take him for a treacherous ruffian, and think that, like Judas, he was betraying with a kiss, while he is showing his generous calmness and amicable courage. In consequence of this, every thing is performed with the greatest ceremony and order; and whenever either chance or his superior bravery make either of them victorious, he generously gives his antagonist his life, and again embraces him as his friend. When these fantastic [25]practices have come in use, the amazed world, who, merely because there is nothing real in all this, must certainly imagine there is a great deal, could not but look upon such a courteous enmity as the most heroic and sublime thing in nature; and instead of punishing any murder that might ensue, as the law directs in such cases, would praise and applaud the murderer."[25:1]
[26]Perhaps the reader of these passages will have come to the conclusion that the powers of reason displayed in them are as bold and original as the imagination is meagre and servile. The reflections on Gothic architecture are the commonplace opinions of the day, uttered by one who was singularly destitute of sympathy with the human intellect, in its early efforts to resolve itself into symmetry and elegance; whose mind shrunk from the contemplation of any work of man that did not bear the stamp of high intellectual culture. The same want of sympathy with man in his rude and grand, though inharmonious efforts, here attends both the chivalric manners and the solemn architecture of the dark ages. Of the former, he has made a cold, clear, unsympathizing, perhaps accurate estimate. The latter, unless a large proportion of the architectural enthusiasts of the present day have raised the taste of the age upon false foundations, he utterly misappreciated.
It must have been about his seventeenth year that Hume commenced, and abruptly relinquished the practical study of the law,—a curious episode in his history, which he thus describes in his "own life:" "My studious disposition, my sobriety, and my industry, gave my family a notion that the law was a proper profession for me; but I found an insurmountable aversion to every thing but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning; and while they fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring."
But this by no means gives the reader a full and faithful impression of his motives. The passage calls up the vision of a contemplative, gentle, unambitious youth, shrinking from the arid labours that lead to wealth and distinction, and content to dream away [27]his life in obscurity with the companionship of his favourite books. The document already referred to, and immediately to be quoted, shows that far other thoughts were in his mind; that he did not shrink from the professional labours of the bar, to sink into studious ease, but rejected them to encounter higher and more arduous toils—that he did not drop passively from the path of ambition opened to him, but deserted it for a higher and more adventurous course. He had indeed already before him the prospect of being a discoverer in philosophy, and his mind, crowded with the images of his new system, could see nothing else in life worthy of pursuit.
Without this clue, Hume's aversion to the study of the law would have been a problem not to be easily solved. Had he lived in the present day, when the mass of statute and precedent that have accumulated even within the narrow domain of Scottish law, have completely precluded those luxurious digressions into the field of speculation and theory, which characterized the legal practice of our ancestors, one might readily comprehend the aversion of his fastidiously cultivated logical mind to such hard and coarse materials. But a lawyer's library, in his days, consisted of the classics, the philosophers of mind, and the civilians. The advocate often commenced his pleadings with a quotation from the young philosopher's favourite poet Virgil, and then digressed into a speculative inquiry into the general principles of law and government: the philosophical genius of Themis long soaring sublime, until at last, folding her wings, she rested on some vulgar question about dry multures or an irritancy of a tailzie, to the settlement of which the wide principles so announced were applied. Surely that science, within the boundaries of which [28]the speculative spirit of Lord Kames had room for its flights, could not have been rejected on the ground that it cramped and restrained the faculty of generalizing.[28:1] Yet in a letter to Smith, of 12th April, 1759, which shows that Hume retained his antipathy to the study to an advanced period of his life, he says, "I am afraid of Kames' Law Tracts. A man might as well think of making a fine sauce by a mixture of wormwood and aloes, as an agreeable composition by joining metaphysics and Scottish law. However, the book I believe has merit, though few people will take the pains of inquiring into it."
