The Enlightenment by Norman Hampson

Author:Norman Hampson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141937137
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1990-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

Never be proud of your rank or birth, but be as proud as you please of your character. Nothing is so contrary to true dignity as the former kind of pride. You are, it is true, of a noble family, but whether a very ancient one or not I neither know nor care, nor need you, and I dare say there are twenty fools in the House of Lords who could out-descend you in pedigree. That sort of stately pride is the standing jest of all people who can make one.

When Chesterfield died he left two years’ wages to servants who had been with him for five years or more, ‘whom I consider as unfortunate friends, my equals by Nature, and my inferiors only by the difference of our fortunes’. There was more to Uncle Toby than Sterne’s imagination.

We have already seen that the age had nothing but polite contempt for assertions of national superiority. The common people might easily be prevailed upon to hate the foreigners most of them did not know. Fielding, carried away by the sight of a three-decker in the Thames, could advocate ostentatious expenditure on the navy to ‘preserve, among other nations, the notion of British superiority in naval affairs’. Statesmen took war and national competitiveness for granted. But the combined influences of the Enlightenment and the traditional values of an aristocratic society created a kind of freemasonry amongst the nobility of Europe and there were many who would have endorsed Montesquieu’s view that he was ‘human of necessity’ but ‘French by accident’.

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