Revelation of Character in Eighteenth-Century Historiography and William Robertson's History of the Reign of Charles V

This essay examines the idea of character in eighteenth-century historical writing through a consideration of the function it performs in William Robertson's influential History of the Reign of Charles V (1769). ¹ There have been few sustained discussions of the concept of character in eighteenth-century historical writing, despite its obvious importance for historians, readers, and critics alike. This is partly because of a lingering sense that historical characterization was a strained, artificial, and self-consciously literary ornament, consisting of labored and ultimately meaningless antitheses, and was frequently calcified in abstract language and philosophical generalization. Although Deidre Lynch's fascinating discussion of the importance of the figure of character to eighteenth-century literature does not touch upon historical writing—despite the conventional association between historical and fictive narrative—her wide-ranging analysis is relevant for its discussion of such concerns confronted by eighteenth-century historians as the representation of difference, problems of legibility and coherence, and the importance of commerce and social circulation in constituting personal identity. She has identified a series of problematic relationships inherent in the concept of character—those between the natural and the social, the individual and the generic, and the visible signs of character and its inner meaning. Her story is principally about how, by the early nineteenth century, the novel could claim to be the "type of writing that tendered the deepest, truest knowledge of character" by turning the meaning of character away from its physical manifestations and relocating it in "an inside story of secrets, hidden motivations and unplumbed depths." ² What is missing from Lynch's account is a sense of the way in which the novel usurped history's function—and in some respects appropriated its language—in claiming to penetrate the internal realms of the mind and heart. Certainly, the conventions of historical portraiture were open to attack; its suspect verification and consequent vulnerability to skepticism, its focus on external actions, and the circumscription of its subject matter by high politics and military exploits effectively shut it out from many of the new developments in the depiction of fictional character. Its apparent failure to participate in the "turn to the interior," ³ as well as the intervention of philosophical history in moving historical explanation away from the individual, seemed to render historical narrative an increasingly archaic vehicle for the penetration of character. Nonetheless, the exploration of character remained the medium in which much history, both narrative and "philosophical," was written. It is the purpose of this essay to show some of the ways in which history continued to claim for itself a role in the revelation and presentation of the character of both individuals and societies.

The close identity of historical inquiry and the revelation of character were, to contemporaries of Robertson, axiomatic. In a periodical essay appearing in number 31 of The Mirror (11 May 1779), William Craig discussed the literary genre known as the "Character." In it he claimed that "besides those who have professedly confined themselves to the delineation of character, every historian who relates events, and who describes the disposition and qualities of the persons engaged in them, is to be considered as a writer of characters." ⁴ The Encyclopaedia Britannica (1779) stated that one of the principal tasks of the historian was to disclose the "characters of those who were the principal factors of their actions, whether kings, ministers, generals, or priests," after which, "he may assume the character of one who is perfectly versed in history." ⁵ The last point is interesting: the nature of the historian himself was established by his mastery of character. The historian was to unmask and penetrate the natural temper of an individual and infer motives from the individual's public and private actions. Both the inner and outer selves of the individual had to...