LECTURER AT EDINBURGH
1748-1750. _Aet._ 25-27
In returning to Scotland Smith's ideas were probably fixed from the
first on a Scotch university chair as an eventual acquisition, but he
thought in the meantime to obtain employment of the sort he afterwards
gave up his chair to take with the Duke of Buccleugh, a travelling
tutorship with a young man of rank and wealth, then a much-desired
and, according to the standard of the times, a highly-remunerated
occupation. While casting about for a place of that kind he stayed at
home with his mother in Kirkcaldy, and he had to remain there without
any regular employment for two full years, from the autumn of 1746
till the autumn of 1748. The appointment never came; because from his
absent manner and bad address, we are told, he seemed to the ordinary
parental mind a most unsuitable person to be entrusted with the care
of spirited and perhaps thoughtless young gentlemen. But the visits he
paid to Edinburgh in pursuit of this work bore fruit by giving him
quite as good a start in life, and a much shorter cut to the
professorial position for which he was best fitted. During the winter
of 1748-49 he made a most successful beginning as a public lecturer by
delivering a course on the then comparatively untried subject of
English literature, and gave at the same time a first contribution to
English literature himself by collecting and editing the poems of
William Hamilton of Bangour. For both these undertakings he was
indebted to the advice and good offices of Lord Kames, or, as he then
was, Mr. Henry Home, one of the leaders of the Edinburgh bar, with
whom he was made acquainted, we may safely assume, by his friend and
neighbour, James Oswald of Dunnikier, whom we know to have been among
Kames's most intimate friends and correspondents. Kames, though now
fifty-two, had not yet written any of the works which raised him
afterwards to eminence, but he had long enjoyed in the literary
society of the North something of that position which Voltaire laughs
at him for trying to take towards the world in general; he was a law
on all questions of taste, from an epic poem to a garden plot. He had
little Latin and no Greek, for he never was at college, and the
classical quotations in his _Sketches_ were translated for him by A.F.
Tytler. But he had thrown himself with all the greater zeal on that
account into English literature when English literature became the
rage in Scotland after the Union, and he was soon crossing steel with
Bishop Butler in metaphysics, and the accepted guide of the new Scotch
poets in literary criticism. Hamilton of Bangour confesses that he
himself
From Hume learned verse to criticise,
the Hume meant being his early friend, Henry Home of Kames, and not
his later friend, David Hume the historian.[19] Home's place in the
literature of Scotland corresponds with his place in its agriculture;
he was the first of the improvers; and Smith, who always held him in
the deepest veneration, was not wrong when, on being complimented on
the group of great writers who were then reflecting glory on Scotland,
he said, "Yes, but we must every one of us acknowledge Kames for our
master."[20]
When Home found Smith already as well versed in the English classics
as himself, he suggested the delivery of this course of lectures on
English literature and criticism. The subject was fresh, it was
fashionable, and though Stevenson, the Professor of Logic, had already
lectured on it, and lectured on it in English too to his class, nobody
had yet given lectures on it open to the general public, whose
interest it had at the moment so much engaged. The success of such a
course seemed assured, and the event fully justified that
prognostication. The class was attended among others by Kames himself;
by students for the bar, like Alexander Wedderburn, afterwards Lord
Chancellor of England, and William Johnstone, who long played an
influential part in Parliament as Sir William Pulteney; by young
ministers of the city like Dr. Blair, who subsequently gave a similar
course himself; and by many others, both young and old. It brought
Smith in, we are informed, a clear £100 sterling, and if we assume
that the fee was a guinea, which was a customary fee at the period,
the audience would be something better than a hundred. It was probably
held in the College, for Blair's subsequent course was delivered there
even before the establishment of any formal connection with the
University by the creation of the professorship.
The lectures Smith then delivered on English literature were burnt at
his own request shortly before his death. Blair, who not only heard
them at the time, but got the use of them--or, at least, of part of
them--afterwards for the preparation of his own lectures on rhetoric,
speaks as if there was some hope at one time that Smith would publish
them, but if he ever entertained such an intention, he was too
entirely preoccupied with work of greater importance and interest to
himself to obtain leisure to put them into shape for publication. It
has been suggested that they are practically reproduced in the
lectures of Blair. Blair acknowledges having taken a few hints for his
treatment of simplicity in style from the manuscript of Smith's
lectures. His words are: "On this head, of the general characters of
style, particularly the plain and the simple, and the characters of
those English authors who are classed under them, in this and the
following lecture, several ideas have been taken from a manuscript
treatise on rhetoric, part of which was shown to me many years ago by
the learned and ingenious author, Dr. Adam Smith; and which it is
hoped will be given by him to the public."[21] Now many of Smith's
friends considered this acknowledgment far from adequate, and Hill,
the biographer of Blair, says Smith himself joined in their complaint.
It is very unlikely that Smith ever joined in any such complaint, for
Henry Mackenzie told Samuel Rogers an anecdote which conveys an
entirely contrary impression. Mackenzie was speaking of Smith's wealth
of conversation, and telling how he often used to say to him, "Sir,
you have said enough to make a book," and he then mentioned that Blair
frequently introduced into his sermons some of Smith's thoughts on
jurisprudence, which he had gathered from his conversation, and that
he himself had told the circumstance to Smith. "He is very welcome,"
was the economist's answer; "there is enough left."[22] And if Smith
made Blair welcome to his thoughts on jurisprudence, a subject on
which he intended to publish a work of his own, we may be certain he
made him not less heartily welcome to his thoughts on literature and
style, on which he probably entertained no similar intention. Besides,
if we judge from the two chapters regarding which he owns his
obligation to Smith, Blair does not seem to have borrowed anything but
what was the commonest of property already. He took only what his
superficial mind had the power of taking, and the pith of Smith's
thinking must have been left behind. To borrow even a hat to any
purpose, the two heads must be something of a size.
We cannot suppose, therefore, that we have any proper representation
or reflection of Smith's literary lectures in the lectures of Blair,
but it would be quite possible still, if it were desired, to collect a
not inadequate view of his literary opinions from incidental remarks
contained in his writings or preserved by friends from recollections
of his conversation. Wordsworth, in the preface to the _Lyrical
Ballads_, calls him "the worst critic, David Hume excepted, that
Scotland, a soil to which this sort of weed seems natural, has
produced," and his judgments will certainly not be confirmed by the
taste of the present time. He preferred the classical to the romantic
school. He thought with Voltaire that Shakespeare had written good
scenes but not a good play, and that though he had more dramatic
genius than Dryden, Dryden was the greater poet. He thought little of
Milton's minor poems, and less of the old ballads collected by Percy,
but he had great admiration for Pope, believed Gray, if he had only
written a little more, would have been the greatest poet in the
English language, and thought Racine's _Phædrus_ the finest tragedy
extant in any language in the world. His own great test of literary
beauty was the principle he lays down in his Essay on the Imitative
Arts, that the beauty is always in the proportion of the difficulty
perceived to be overcome.
Smith seems at this early period of his life to have had dreams of
some day figuring as a poet himself, and his extensive familiarity
with the poets always struck Dugald Stewart as very remarkable in a
man so conspicuous for the weight of his more solid attainments. "In
the English language," says Stewart, "the variety of poetical passages
which he was not only accustomed to refer to occasionally, but which
he was able to repeat with correctness, appeared surprising even to
those whose attention had never been attracted to more important
acquisitions." The tradition of Smith's early ambition to be a poet is
only preserved in an allusion in Caleb Colton's "Hypocrisy," but it
receives a certain support from a remark of Smith's own in
conversation with a young friend in his later years. Colton's allusion
runs as follows:--
Unused am I the Muse's path to tread,
And curs'd with Adam's unpoetic head,
Who, though that pen he wielded in his hand
Ordain'd the _Wealth of Nations_ to command;
Yet when on Helicon he dar'd to draw,
His draft return'd and unaccepted saw.
If thus like him we lay a rune in vain,
Like him we'll strive some humbler prize to gain.
Smith's own confession is contained in a report of some conversations
given in the _Bee_ for 1791. He was speaking about blank verse, to
which he always had a dislike, as we know from an interesting incident
mentioned by Boswell. Boswell, who attended Smith's lectures on
English literature at Glasgow College in 1759, told Johnson four years
after that Smith had pronounced a strong opinion in these lectures
against blank verse and in favour of rhyme--always, no doubt, on the
same principle that the greater the difficulty the greater the beauty.
This delighted the heart of Johnson, and he said, "Sir, I was once in
company with Smith, and we did not take to each other, but had I known
that he loved rhyme as much as you tell me he does, I should have
hugged him." Twenty years later Smith was again expressing to the
anonymous interviewer of the _Bee_ his unabated contempt for all blank
verse except Milton's, and he said that though he could never find a
single rhyme in his life, he could make blank verse as fast as he
could speak. "Blank verse," he said; "they do well to call it blank,
for blank it is. I myself even, who never could find a single rhyme in
my life, could make blank verse as fast as I could speak." The critic
would thus appear here again to have been the poet who has failed,
though in this case he had the sense to discover the failure without
tempting the judgment of the public.
Indeed he had already begun to discover his true vocation, for besides
his lectures on English literature, which he delivered for three
successive winters, he delivered at least one winter a course on
economics; and in this course, written in the year 1749, and delivered
in the year 1750-51, Smith advocated the doctrines of commercial
liberty on which he was nurtured by Hutcheson, and which he was
afterwards to do so much to advance. He states this fact himself in a
paper read before a learned society in Glasgow in 1755, which
afterwards fell into the hands of Dugald Stewart, and from which
Stewart extracts a passage or two, which I shall quote in a subsequent
chapter. They certainly contain a plain enough statement of the
doctrine of natural liberty; and Smith says that a great part of the
opinions contained in the paper were "treated of at length in some
lectures which I have still by me, and which were written in the hand
of a clerk who left my service six years ago"--that is, in 1749--and
adds that "they had all of them been the subjects of lectures which I
read at Edinburgh the winter before I left it, and I can adduce
innumerable witnesses both from that place and from this who will
ascertain them sufficiently to be mine."[23] These ideas of natural
liberty in industrial affairs were actively at work, not only in
Smith's own mind, but in the minds of others in his immediate circle
in Scotland in those years 1749 and 1750. David Hume and James Oswald
were then corresponding on the subject, and though it is doubtful
whether Smith had seen much or anything of Hume personally at that
time (for Hume had been abroad with General St. Clair part of it, and
did not live in Edinburgh after his return), it was in those and the
two previous years that Smith was first brought into real intellectual
contact with his friend and townsman, James Oswald.
Oswald, it may be mentioned, though still a young man--only eight
years older than Smith--had already made his mark in Parliament where
he sat for their native burgh, and had been made a Commissioner of the
Navy in 1745. He had made his mark largely by his mastery of economic
subjects, for which Hume said, after paying him a visit at Dunnikier
for a week in 1744, that he had a "great genius," and "would go far in
that way if he persevered." He became afterwards commissioner of trade
and plantations, Lord of the Treasury, and Vice-Treasurer of Ireland,
and would have certainly gone further but for his premature death in
1768 at the age of fifty-two. Lord Shelburne once strongly advised
Lord Bute to make him Chancellor of the Exchequer. Smith thought as
highly of Oswald as Hume. He used to "dilate," says Oswald's grandson,
who heard him, "with a generous and enthusiastic pleasure on the
qualifications and merits of Mr. Oswald, candidly avowing at the same
time how much information he had received on many points from the
enlarged views and profound knowledge of that accomplished
statesman."[24] Dugald Stewart saw a paper written by Smith which
described Oswald not only as a man of extensive knowledge of economic
subjects, but a man with a special taste and capacity for the
discussion of their more general and philosophical aspects. That
paper, we cannot help surmising, is the same document of 1755 I have
just mentioned in which Smith was proving his early attachment to the
doctrines of economic liberty, and would naturally treat of
circumstances connected with the growth of his opinions. However that
may be, it is certain that Smith and Oswald must have been in
communication upon economic questions about that period, and Oswald's
views at that period are contained in the correspondence to which
reference has been made.
Early in 1750 David Hume sent Oswald the manuscript of his well-known
essay on the Balance of Trade, afterwards published in his _Political
Essays_ in 1752, asking for his views and criticisms; and Oswald
replied on the 10th of October in a long letter, published in the
_Caldwell Papers_,[25] which shows him to have been already entirely
above the prevailing mercantilist prejudices, and to have very clear
conceptions of economic operations. He declares jealousies between
nations of being drained of their produce and money to be quite
irrational; that could never happen as long as the people and industry
remained. The prohibition against exporting commodities and money, he
held, had always produced effects directly contrary to what was
intended by it. It had diminished cultivation at home instead of
increasing it, and really forced the more money out of the country the
more produce it prevented from going. Oswald's letter seems to have
been sent on by Hume, together with his own essay, to Baron Mure, who
was also interested in such discussions. The new light was thus
breaking in on groups of inquirers in Scotland as well as elsewhere,
and Smith was from his earliest days within its play.
Amid the more serious labours of these literary and economic lectures,
it would be an agreeable relaxation to collect and edit the scattered
poems, published and unpublished, of Hamilton of Bangour, the author
of what Wordsworth calls the "exquisite ballad" of "The Braes o'
Yarrow," beginning--
Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride,
Busk ye, busk ye, my winsome marrow,
Busk ye, busk ye, my bonny, bonny bride,
And think no more on the Braes o' Yarrow.
This ballad had appeared in Allan Ramsay's _Tea-Table Miscellany_ so
long ago as 1724, and it was followed by Hamilton's most ambitious
effort, the poem "Contemplation," in 1739, but the general public of
Scotland only seem to have awakened to their merits after the poet
espoused the Jacobite cause in 1745, and celebrated the victory of
Prestonpans by his "Ode to the Battle of Gladsmuir"--the name the
Jacobites preferred to give the battle. This ode, which had been set
to music by M'Gibbon, became a great favourite in Jacobite households,
and created so much popular interest in the author's other works that
imperfect versions of some of his unpublished poems, and even of those
which were already in print, began to appear. The author was himself
an outlaw, and could not intervene. The ode which had lifted him into
popularity had at the same time driven him into exile, and he was then
living with a little group of young Scotch refugees at Rouen, and
completely shattered in bodily health by his three months' hiding
among the Grampians. Under those circumstances his friends thought it
advisable to forestall the pirated and imperfect collections of his
poems which were in contemplation by publishing as complete and
correct an edition of them as could possibly be done in the absence of
the author. And this edition was issued from the famous Foulis press
in Glasgow in 1748. In doing so they acted, as they avow in the
preface, "not only without the author's consent, but without his
knowledge," but it is absurd to call an edition published under those
circumstances, as the new _Dictionary of National Biography_ calls it,
a "surreptitious edition." It was published by the poet's closest
personal friends as a protection for the poet's reputation, and
perhaps as a plea for his pardon.
The task of collecting and editing the poems was entrusted to Adam
Smith. We are informed of this fact by the accurate and learned David
Laing, and though Laing has not imparted his authority for the
information, it receives a certain circumstantial corroboration from
other quarters. We find Smith in the enjoyment of a very rapid
intimacy with Hamilton during the two brief years the poet resided in
Scotland between receiving the royal pardon in 1750 and flying again
in 1752 from a more relentless enemy than kings--the fatal malady of
consumption, from which he died two years later at Lyons. Sir John
Dalrymple, the historian, speaks in a letter to Robert Foulis, the
printer, of "the many happy and flattering hours which he (Smith) had
spent with Mr. Hamilton." We find again that when Hamilton's friends
propose to print a second edition of the poems, they come to Smith for
assistance. This edition was published in 1758, and is dedicated to
the memory of William Craufurd, merchant, Glasgow, a friend of the
poet mentioned in the preface to the first edition as having supplied
many of the previously unpublished pieces which it contained. Craufurd
appears to have been an uncle of Sir John Dalrymple, and Sir John asks
Foulis to get Smith to write this dedication. "Sir," says he, in
December 1757, "I have changed my mind about the dedication of Mr.
Hamilton's poems. I would have it stand 'the friend of William
Hamilton,' but I assent to your opinion to have something more to
express Mr. Craufurd's character. I know none so able to do this as my
friend Mr. Smith. I beg it, therefore, earnestly that he will write
the inscription, and with all the elegance and all the feelingness
which he above the rest of mankind is able to express. This is a thing
that touches me very nearly, and therefore I beg a particular answer
as to what he says to it. The many happy and the many flattering hours
which he has spent with Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Craufurd makes me think
that he will account his usual indolence a crime upon this occasion. I
beg you will make my excuse for not wryting him this night, but then I
consider wryting to you upon this head to be wryting to him."[26] It
is unlikely that Smith would resist an appeal like this, and the
dedication bears some internal marks of his authorship. It describes
Mr. Craufurd as "the friend of Mr. Hamilton, who to that exact
frugality, that downright probity and pliancy of manners so suitable
to his profession, joined a love of learning and of all the ingenious
arts, an openness of hand and a generosity of heart that was far both
from vanity and from weakness, and a magnanimity that would support,
under the prospect of approaching and inevitable death, a most
torturing pain of body with an unalterable cheerfulness of temper, and
without once interrupting even to his last hour the most manly and the
most vigorous activity of business." This William Craufurd is
confounded by Lord Woodhouselee, and through him by others, with
Robert Crauford, the author of "The Bush aboon Traquair," "Tweedside,"
and other poems, who was also an intimate friend of Hamilton of
Bangour, but died in 1732.
Another link in the circumstantial evidence corroborating David
Laing's statement is the fact that Smith was certainly at the moment
in communication with Hamilton's personal friends, at whose instance
the volume of poems was published. Kames, who was then interesting
himself so actively in Smith's advancement, was the closest surviving
friend Hamilton possessed. They had been constant companions in youth,
leading spirits of that new school of dandies called "the
beaux"--young men at once of fashion and of letters--who adorned
Scotch society between the Rebellions, and continued to adorn many an
after-dinner table in Edinburgh down till the present century.
Hamilton owns that it was Kames who first taught him "verse to
criticise," and wrote to him the poem "To H.H. at the Assembly"; while
Kames for his part used in his old age, as his neighbour Ramsay of
Ochtertyre informs us, to have no greater enjoyment than recounting
the scenes and doings he and Hamilton had transacted together in those
early days, of which the poet himself writes, when they "kept
friendship's holy vigil" in the subterranean taverns of old Edinburgh
"full many a fathom deep."
FOOTNOTES:
[19] Home and Hume, it may be mentioned, are only different ways of
spelling the same name, which, though differently spelt, was not
differently pronounced.
[20] Tytler's _Life of Kames_, i. 218.
[21] Blair's _Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres_, i. 381.
[22] Clayden's _Early Life of Samuel Rogers_, p. 168.
[23] Stewart's _Works_, ed. Hamilton, vol. x. p. 68.
[24] _Correspondence of James Oswald_, Preface.
[25] _Caldwell Papers_, i. 93.
[26] Duncan's _Notes and Documents illustrative of the Literary
History of Glasgow_, p. 25.