FIRST VISIT TO LONDON
1761. _Aet._ 38
Smith visited London for the first time in September 1761, when Hume
and probably others of his Scotch friends happened to be already
there. He had not visited London in the course of his seven years'
residence at Oxford, for, as Mr. Rogers reports, the Balliol Buttery
Books show him never to have left Oxford at all during that time, and
he had not visited London in the course of the first ten years he
spent in Glasgow, otherwise the University would be certain to have
preserved some record of it. For Glasgow University had much business
to transact in London at that period, and would be certain to have
commissioned Smith, if he was known to be going there, to transact
some of that business for it. It never did so, however, till 1761. But
in that year, on the 16th of June, the Senate having learned Smith's
purpose of going to London, authorise him to get the accounts of the
ordinary revenue of the College and the subdeanery for crops 1755,
1756, 1757, and 1758 cleared with the Treasury (that public office
being then always in deep arrears with its work); to meet with Mr.
Joshua Sharpe and settle his accounts with respect to the lands given
to the College by Dr. Williams (the Dr. Williams of Williams's
Library); to inquire into the state of the division of Snell's estate
as to Coleburn farm, and the affair of the Prebends of Lincoln; and to
get all particulars about the £500 costs in the Snell lawsuit with
Balliol, which had to be paid to the University. Those documents were
delivered, on the 27th of August, to Smith _in præsentia_, and then on
the 15th of October, after his return, he reported what he had done,
and produced a certificate, signed by the Secretary to the Treasury,
finding that the University had in the four years specified and the
years preceding expended above their revenue the sum of
£2631:6:5-11/12. I mention all these details with the view of showing
that during Smith's residence in Glasgow the University had a variety
of important and difficult business to transact in London, which they
would be always glad to get one of their own number to attend to
personally on the spot, and that as Smith was never asked to transact
any of this business for them except in 1761, it may almost with
certainty be inferred that he never was in London on any other
occasion during his connection with that University.
Now this journey to London in 1761 is memorable because it constituted
the economic "road to Damascus" for a future Prime Minister of
England. It was during this journey, I believe, that Smith had Lord
Shelburne for his travelling companion, and converted the young
statesman to free trade. In 1795 Shelburne (then become Marquis of
Lansdowne) writes Dugald Stewart: "I owe to a journey I made with Mr.
Smith from Edinburgh to London the difference between light and
darkness through the best part of my life. The novelty of his
principles, added to my youth and prejudices, made me unable to
comprehend them at the time, but he urged them with so much
benevolence, as well as eloquence, that they took a certain hold
which, though it did not develop itself so as to arrive at full
conviction for some few years after, I can truly say has constituted
ever since the happiness of my life, as well as the source of any
little consideration I may have enjoyed in it."[120]
Shelburne was the first English statesman, except perhaps Burke, who
grasped and advocated free trade as a broad political principle; and
though his biographer, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, attributes his
conversion to Morellet, it is plain from the letter to Stewart that
Morellet had only watered, it was Smith that sowed.
It is important, therefore, to fix if possible the date of this
interesting journey. It occurred, Lord Shelburne says, in his own
youth, and the only journeys to London Smith made during the period
which with any reasonable stretching may be called Shelburne's youth,
were made in 1761, 1763, and 1773. Now we have no positive knowledge
of Shelburne being in Scotland any of these years, but in 1761 his
brother, the Hon. Thomas Fitzmaurice, who had been studying under
Smith in Glasgow, and living in Smith's house, left Glasgow for
Oxford; and Shelburne, who, since his father's death that very year,
was taking, as we know from his correspondence with Sir William
Blackstone on the subject, a very responsible concern in his younger
brother's education and welfare, may very probably have gone to
Scotland to attend him back. This circumstance seems to turn the
balance in favour of 1761 and against the other two dates.
It is almost certain that the journey was not in 1773, for Shelburne
would hardly have thought of himself as so young at that date, six
years after he had been Secretary of State, and besides he had
probably cast off his prejudices by that time, and was already (as we
shall presently find) receiving instruction from Smith on colonial
policy in 1767; and whether it was 1761 or 1763, it in either case
shows at what a long period before the appearance of the _Wealth of
Nations_ Smith was advocating those broad principles which struck
Shelburne at the time for their "novelty," and were only fully
comprehended and accepted by him a few years afterwards.
Of Smith's visit to London on this occasion we know almost no
particulars, but I think the notorious incident of his altercation
with Johnson at the house of Strahan the printer must be referred to
this visit. The story was told by Robertson to Boswell and Allan
Ramsay, the painter, one evening in 1778, when they were dining
together at the painter's house, and Johnson was expected as one of
the guests. Before the doctor arrived the conversation happened to
turn on him, and Robertson said, "He and I have always been very
gracious. The first time I met him was one evening at Strahan's, when
he had just had an unlucky altercation with Adam Smith, to whom he had
been so rough that Strahan, after Smith was gone, had remonstrated,
and told him that I was coming soon, and that he was uneasy to think
that he might behave in the same way to me. 'No, no, sir,' said
Johnson, 'I warrant you Robertson and I shall do very well.'
Accordingly he was gentle and good-humoured and gracious with me the
whole evening, and he has been so on every occasion that we have met
since. I have often said laughing that I have been in a great measure
indebted to Smith for my good reception."[121]
Now this incident must have occurred years before 1778, the date of
Ramsay's dinner-party at which it was related, for Robertson speaks of
having met Johnson many times between; and it probably occurred before
1763, because in 1763 Boswell mentions in his journal having told
Johnson one evening that Smith had in his lectures in Glasgow
expressed the strongest preference for rhyme over blank verse, and
Johnson alludes in his reply to an unfriendly meeting he had once had
with Smith. "Sir," said he, "I was once in company with Smith, and we
did not take to each other, but had I known that he loved rhyme so
much as you tell me he does I should have hugged him."[122] This
answer seems to imply that the meeting was not quite recent--not in
1763--and if it occurred before 1763, it must have been in 1761.
It was, no doubt, this unhappy altercation that gave rise to the
legendary anecdote which has obtained an immortality it ill deserved,
but which cannot be passed over here, because it has been given to the
world by three independent authorities of such importance as Sir
Walter Scott, Lord Jeffrey, and Bishop Wilberforce. Scott communicates
the anecdote to Croker for his edition of Boswell's _Johnson_, as it
was told him by Professor John Millar of Glasgow, who had it from
Smith himself the night the affair happened. Wilberforce gives it
ostensibly as it was heard by his father from Smith's lips; and
Jeffrey, in reviewing Wilberforce's book in the _Edinburgh Review_,
says he heard the story, in substantially the same form as Wilberforce
tells it, nearly fifty years before, "from the mouth of one of a party
into which Mr. Smith came immediately after the collision."
The story, as told by Scott, is in this wise:[123] "Mr. Boswell has
chosen to omit (in his account of Johnson's visit to Glasgow), for
reasons which will be presently obvious, that Johnson and Adam Smith
met at Glasgow; but I have been assured by Professor John Millar that
they did so, and that Smith, leaving the party in which he had met
Johnson, happened to come to another company where Millar was. Knowing
that Smith had been in Johnson's society, they were anxious to know
what had passed, and the more so as Dr. Smith's temper seemed much
ruffled. At first Smith would only answer, 'He's a brute; he's a
brute;' but on closer examination it appeared that Johnson no sooner
saw Smith than he attacked him for some point of his famous letter on
the death of Hume. Smith vindicated the truth of his statement. 'What
did Johnson say?' was the universal inquiry. 'Why, he said,' replied
Smith, with the deepest impression of resentment, 'he said, You lie.'
'And what did you reply?' 'I said, You are a son of a ----!' On such
terms did these two great moralists meet and part, and such was the
classical dialogue between two great teachers of philosophy."
Wilberforce's version is identical with Scott's, except that it
commits the absurdity of making Smith tell not the story itself, but
the story of his first telling it. "'Some of our friends,' said Adam
Smith, 'were anxious that we should meet, and a party was arranged for
the purpose in the course of the evening. I was soon after entering
another society, and perhaps with a manner a little confused. "Have
you met Dr. Johnson?" my friends exclaimed. "Yes, I have." "And what
passed between you?"'" and so on. All this at any rate is legendary
outgrowth on the very face of it, and nonsensical even for that. But
even the story itself, as told so circumstantially by Scott, is
demonstrably mythical in most of its circumstances. Johnson was never
in Glasgow except one day, the 29th of October 1773, and in October
1773 Smith was in London, and as we know from an incidental
parenthesis in the _Wealth of Nations_,[124] engaged in the
composition of that great work. Hume, again, did not die till 1776, so
that there were better and more "obvious reasons" than Scott imagined
for Boswell's omitting mention of a meeting between Johnson and Smith
at Glasgow which never took place, and a collision between them about
a famous letter which was not then written. Time, place, and subject
are all alike wrong, but these Scott might think but the mortal parts
of the story, and he sometimes varied them in the telling himself.
Moore heard him tell it at his own table at Abbotsford somewhat
differently from the version he gave to Croker.[125] But when so much
is plainly the insensible creation of the imagination, what reliance
can be placed on the remainder? All we know is that apparently at
their very first meeting those two philosophers did, in Strahan's
house in London in September 1761, have a personal altercation of an
outrageous character, at which, if not the very words reported by
Scott, then words quite as strong must manifestly have passed between
them; that their host declared Johnson to be entirely in the wrong,
and that Smith withdrew from the company, and would very possibly go,
as the story relates, to another company, his Scotch friends at the
British Coffee-House in Cockspur Street, then the great Scotch
resort,--a house which was kept by the sister of his friend Bishop
Douglas, which was frequented much by Wedderburn, John Home, and
others, and to which Smith's own letters used to be addressed.
One thing remains to be said: if the world has never been able to
suffer this little morsel of scandal to be forgotten, the two
principals in the feud themselves were able to forget it entirely.
Smith was at a later period in the habit of meeting Johnson constantly
at the table of common friends in London, and was elected in 1775 a
member of Johnson's famous club, which would of course have been
impossible--and indeed in so small a society never have been thought
of--had the slightest remnant of animosity continued on either side.
Johnson, it is true, was still occasionally rude to Smith, as he was
occasionally rude to every other member of the club; and certainly
Smith never established with him anything of the cordial personal
friendship he enjoyed with Burke, Gibbon, or Reynolds; but their
common membership in the Literary Club is proof of the complete burial
of their earlier quarrel.
FOOTNOTES:
[120] Stewart's _Life of Smith; Works_, ed. Hamilton, vol. x. p. 95.
[121] Boswell's _Johnson_, ed. Hill, iii. 331.
[122] _Ibid._ i. 427.
[123] Boswell's _Johnson_, ed. Hill, v. 369.
[124] Book IV. chap. vii.
[125] Russell's _Life of Moore_, p. 338.