Abstract
During the last of his long sojourns in London, the Virginia planter William Byrd II composed a Theophrastan self-characterization, which has survived as Inamorato l’Oiseaux.1 Although the ungrammatical plural in the French rendering of Byrd’s family name may have been due to a copying mistake, it could also make sense in context with his definition of character as a striving for “Balance” between two conflicting positions. Byrd saw his plural selfhood engaged in an interior “Civil war” between his “Principles and his Inclinations,” not only on the battleground of his amorous pursuits but also in his relation to “the World” (in its eighteenth-century senses of society and the universe) generally. The American colonial seeking social recognition in England presented himself as a man who, despite being a consummate cosmopolite (“He knows the World perfectly well, and thinks himself a citizen of it”), was nevertheless afraid of becoming alienated from his more internalized, less worldly sense of self (“He loves retirement, that while he is acquainted with the world, he may not be a stranger to himself”). This “Civil war” between sociability and solitude, and between Byrd’s life in England and his American background, was not brought to a peaceful conclusion in Inamorato L’Oiseaux.
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Notes
William Byrd, “Inamorato L’Oiseaux” (1722), Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1739–1741: With Letters & Literary Exercises, 1696–1741, ed. Maude H. Woodfin (Richmond, VA: Dietz Press, 1942), 276–82.
William Byrd to Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery, July 5, 1726, in Byrd et al., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, 1684–1776, ed. Marion Tinling, 2 vols. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1977), 1:354–56.
For this phrase, see Warren I. Susman, “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” in New Directions in American Intellectual History; ed. John Higham and Paul K. Conkin (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 214.
For Hume’s frequently indirect but nevertheless lasting influence on American literature, see especially Susan Manning, Fragments of Union: Making Connections in Scottish and American Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
On the significance of Boswell’s plans as the attempt “to supply his want of an inner sense of self-coherence with an external model of character,” see Susan Manning, “‘This Philosophical Melancholy’: Style and Self in Boswell and Hume,” New Light on Boswell: Critical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Bicentenary of The Life of Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 136.
James Boswell, The Journals of James Boswell, 1762–1795, intro. John Wain (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1991; repr., 1992), 99.
James Boswell, Boswell in Holland, 1763–1764, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1928; London: Heinemann, 1952), 4.
For examples, see Thomas J. Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought: Its Form and Function in the Ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694–1790 (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 47–48, 191–92nn1–6. For a prominent exception, see Fougeret de Monbron’s Le cosmopolite (1750), whose opening metaphor directly contradicts Johnson’s advice: “L’univers est une espèce de livre, dont on n’a lu que la première page quand on n’a vu que son pays. J’en ai feuilleté un assez grand nombre, que j’ai trouvé presqu’également mauvaises. Cet examen ne m’a point été instructueux.” Le cosmopolite ou le citoyen du monde (Paris, 1761), 3.
Donald W. Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 17–52. I would like to thank Anthony LaVopa for drawing my attention to the use of this interpretation.
Jerrold E. Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 127–38 (129). For comparisons between the relative weight given to both dimensions by major Scottish and French thinkers in this period, see esp. 189–91, 198–99, 228–29.
On Dumarsais as probable author of Le Philosophe, later abridged and revised by an anonymous contributor to the Encyclopédie, see A.W. Fairbairn, “Dumarsais and Le Philosophe,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 87, Transactions of the Third International Congress on the Enlightenment I, ed. Theodore Besterman (1972): 375–95;
Frank A. Kafter, “The Encyclopedists as Individuals,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 257 (1988): 119–23.
On this passage, see Annette C. Baier, The Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 188–91.
On the dual role of distance in Hume’s Atlantic imagination, see Emma Rothschild, “David Hume and the Seagods of the Atlantic,” in The Atlantic Enlightenment, ed. Susan Manning and Francis D. Cogliano (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 90–91.
Hume, “My Own Life,” in Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, ed. J.C.A Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 9.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. John W. Yolton (London: Everyman, 1993), 218–24 (219).
On the developments within Hume’s and Smith’s thought on this point, see John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (1988; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 1, esp. 36–56.
On transitional eighteenth-century arguments on national character, see Colin Kidd, “Constitutions and Character in the Eighteenth-Century British World,” in From Republican Polity to National Community: Reconsiderations of Enlightenment Political Thought, ed. Paschalis M. Kitromilides, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Jonathan Mallinson (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2003), 40–61.
Page numbers in the following section refer to Benjamin Franklin, “The Autobiography,” in The Autobiography and Other Writings, ed. Peter Shaw (New York: Bantam Books, 1982).
For a short version of Gordon Wood’s counter-thesis to common assumptions about Franklin’s “Americanness,” see Wood, “The Invention of Benjamin Franklin,” in Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York: Penguin, 2006), 67–90, esp. 82 (for the timing of the Autobiography). The title of the book is itself an interesting indication of a renewed biographical occupation with character in recent American historiography and literature.
As Wood points out, for instance, Franklin posed variously, in his letters to the press dating from his long residences in England, not only as “An American” or “A New Englandman” but also as “A Traveller,” “A Merchant,” “A London Manufacturer,” “A Lover of Britain,” “A Briton,” or as “Old England.” See Verner W. Crane, ed., Benjamin Franklin’s Letters to the Press, 1758–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1950).
James Boswell, “Sketch of the Early Life of James Boswell, Written By Himself for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 5 December 1764,” in The Journals of James Boswell 1762–1795, ed. John Wain (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1991; repr., 1992), 1–6 (1).
For a nuanced interpretation of Rousseau’s own ambivalence toward cosmopolitanism, see Georg Cavallar, The Rights of Strangers: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global Community and Political Justice since Vitoria (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 284–305.
On this priority, see Peter S. Onuf, “A Declaration of Independence for Diplomatic Historians,” Diplomatic History 22 (1998): 71–83;
David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2007) esp. 64–69.
On the incongruity of self-evidence here, see Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), 192–95;
on possible Scottish contexts of the term, see Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 181–92 (replacing Locke’s definition with Reid’s);
or Allen Jayne, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence: Origins, Philosophy, and Theology (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 109–38 (suggesting a Kamesian emphasis).
Herman Melville, Moby Dick (London: Penguin, 1994), 243.
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Spahn, H. (2011). Character and Cosmopolitanism in the Scottish-American Enlightenment. In: Ahnert, T., Manning, S. (eds) Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119956_11
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