PARIS
Smith left Geneva in December for Paris, where he arrived, according
to Dugald Stewart, about Christmas 1765. The Rev. William Cole, who
was in Paris in October of the same year, notes in his journal on the
26th of that month, that the Duke of Buccleugh arrived in Paris that
day from Spa along with the Earl and Countess of Fife; but this must
be a mistake, for Horace Walpole, who was also in Paris that autumn,
writes on the 5th of December that the Duke was then expected to
arrive in the following week, and as Walpole was staying in the hotel
where the Duke and Smith stayed during their residence in that
city--the Hotel du Parc Royal in the Faubourg de St. Germain--he
probably wrote from authentic information about the engagement of
their rooms. It may be taken, therefore, that they arrived in Paris
about the middle of December, just in time to have a week or two with
Hume before he finally left Paris for London with Rousseau on the 3rd
of January 1766. Hume had been looking for Smith ever since midsummer.
As far back as the 5th of September he wrote, "I have been looking for
you every day these three months," but that expectation was probably
founded on reports from Abbé Colbert, for Smith himself does not seem
to have written Hume since the previous October, except the short note
introducing Mr. Urquhart. At any rate in this letter of September 1765
Hume, as if in reply to Smith's account of his pupil's improvement in
his letter of October 1764, says, "Your satisfaction in your pupil
gives me equal satisfaction." It is no doubt possible that Smith may
have written letters in the interval which have been lost, but he had
clearly written none for the previous three months, and it is most
probable, with his general aversion to writing, that he wrote none for
the four or five months before that. Hume's own object in breaking the
long silence is, in the first place, to inform him that, having lost
his place at the Embassy through the translation of his chief to the
Lord-Lieutenancy of Ireland, he should be obliged to return to England
in October before Smith's arrival in Paris; and in the next, to
consult him on a new perplexity that was distressing him, whether he
should not come back to Paris and spend the remainder of his days
there. In compensation for the loss of his place, he had obtained a
pension of £900 a year, without office or duty of any kind--"opulence
and liberty," as he calls it. But opulence and liberty brought their
own cares, and he was rent with temptations to belong to different
nations. "As a new vexation to temper my good fortune," he writes to
Smith, "I am in much perplexity about fixing the place of my future
abode for life. Paris is the most agreeable town in Europe, and suits
me best, but it is a foreign country. London is the capital of my own
country, but it never pleased me much. Letters are there held in no
honour; Scotsmen are hated; superstition and ignorance gain ground
daily. Edinburgh has many objections and many allurements. My present
mind this forenoon, the 5th of September, is to return to France. I am
much press'd also to accept of offers which would contribute to my
agreeable living, but might encroach on my independence by making me
enter into engagements with Princes and great lords and ladies. Pray
give me your judgment."[159]
Events soon settled the question for him. He was appointed Under
Secretary of State in London by Lord Hertford's brother, General
Conway, and left Paris, as I have just said, early in January 1766.
Rousseau had been in Paris since the 17th of December waiting to
accompany Hume to England, and Smith must no doubt have met Rousseau
occasionally with Hume during that last fortnight of 1765, though
there is no actual evidence that he did. Before leaving, moreover,
Hume would have time to introduce his friend to the famous men of
Paris itself, and to initiate him into those literary and fashionable
circles in which he had moved like a demigod for the preceding two
years. The philosophe was then king in Paris, and Hume was king of the
philosophes, and everything that was great in court or salon fell down
and did him obeisance. "Here," he tells Robertson, "I feed on
ambrosia, drink nothing but nectar, breathe incense only, and walk on
flowers. Every one I meet, and especially every woman, would consider
themselves as failing in the most indispensable duty if they did not
favour me with a lengthy and ingenious discourse on my celebrity."
Hume could, therefore, open to his friend every door in Paris that was
worth entering, but Smith's own name was also sufficiently known and
esteemed, at least among men of letters, in France to secure to him a
cordial welcome for his own sake. _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_ had
been translated, at the suggestion of Baron d'Holbach, by E. Dous, and
the translation had appeared in 1764 under the title of _Métaphysique
de l'Ame_. It was unfortunately a very bad translation, for which
Grimm makes the curious apology that it was impossible to render the
ideas of metaphysics in a foreign language as you could render the
images of poetry, because every nation had its own abstract
ideas.[160] But though the book got probably little impetus from this
translation, it had been considerably read in the original by men of
letters when it first came out, and many of them had then formed, as
Abbé Morellet says he did, the highest idea of Smith's sagacity and
depth, and were prepared to meet the author with much interest.
Smith went more into society in the few months he resided in Paris
than at any other period of his life. He was a regular guest in almost
all the famous literary salons of that time--Baron d'Holbach's,
Helvetius', Madame de Geoffrin's, Comtesse de Boufflers', Mademoiselle
l'Espinasse's, and probably Madame Necker's. Our information about his
doings is of course meagre, but there is one week in July 1766 in
which we happen to have his name mentioned frequently in the course of
the correspondence between Hume and his Paris friends regarding the
quarrel with Rousseau, and during that week Smith was on the 21st at
Mademoiselle l'Espinasse's, on the 25th at Comtesse de Boufflers', and
on the 27th at Baron d'Holbach's, where he had some conversation with
Turgot. He was a constant visitor at Madame Riccoboni the novelist's.
He attended the meetings of the new economist sect in the apartments
of Dr. Quesnay, and though the economic dinners of the elder Mirabeau,
the "Friend of Men," were not begun for a year after, he no doubt
visited the Marquis, as we know he visited other members of the
fraternity. He went to Compiègne when the Court removed to Compiègne,
made frequent excursions to interesting places within reach, and is
always seen with troops of friends about him. Many of these were
Englishmen, for after their long exclusion from Paris during the Seven
Years war, Englishmen had begun to pour into the city, and the Hotel
du Parc Royal, where Smith lived, was generally full of English
guests. Among others who were there, as I have just mentioned, was
Horace Walpole, who remained on till Easter, and with whom Smith seems
to have become well acquainted, for in writing Hume in July he asks to
be specially remembered to Mr. Walpole.
So much has been written about the literary salons of Paris in last
century that it is unnecessary to do more here than describe Smith's
connection with them. The salon we happen to hear most of his
frequenting is the salon of the Comtesse de Boufflers-Rouvel, but that
is due to the simple circumstance that the hostess was an assiduous
correspondent of David Hume. She was mistress to the Prince de Conti,
but ties of that character, if permanent, derogated nothing from a
lady's position in Paris at that period. Abbé Morellet, who was a
constant guest at her house, even states that this connection of hers
with a prince of the blood, though illicit, really enhanced rather
than diminished her consideration in society, and her receptions were
attended by all the rank, fashion, and learning of the city. The
Comtesse was very fond of entertaining English guests, for she spoke
our language well, and had been greatly pleased with the civilities
she had received during her then recent visit to England in 1763.
Smith was not long in Paris till he made her acquaintance, and
received a very hearty welcome for the love of Hume. She began to read
his book, moreover, and it became eventually such a favourite with her
that she had thoughts of translating it.
Hume writes to her from Wootton on the 22nd of March 1766: "I am glad
you have taken my friend Smith under your protection. You will find
him a man of true merit, though perhaps his sedentary recluse life may
have hurt his air and appearance as a man of the world." The Comtesse
writes Hume on the 6th of May: "I think I told you that I have made
the acquaintance of Mr. Smith, and that for the love of you I had
given him a very hearty welcome. I am now reading his _Theory of Moral
Sentiments_. I am not very far advanced with it yet, but I believe it
will please me." And again on the 25th of July, in the same year, when
Hume's quarrel with Rousseau was raging, she appends to a letter to
Hume on that subject a few words about Smith, who had apparently
called upon her just as she had finished it: "I entreated your friend
Mr. Smith to call upon me. He has just this moment left me. I have
read my letter to him. He, like myself, is apprehensive that you have
been deceived in the warmth of so just a resentment. He begs of you to
read over again the letter to Mr. Conway. It does not appear that he
(Rousseau) refuses the pension, nor that he desires it to be made
public."[161] The _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, which she had then
begun to read, grew more and more in favour with her, and a few years
after this--in 1770--when the two sons of Smith's friend, Sir Gilbert
Elliot, visited her, they found her at her studies in her bedroom, and
talking of translating the book, if she had time, because it contained
such just ideas about sympathy. She added that the book had come into
great vogue in France, and that Smith's doctrine of sympathy bade fair
to supplant David Hume's immaterialism as the fashionable opinion,
especially with the ladies.[162] The vogue would probably be aided by
Smith's personal introduction into French literary circles, but
evidence of its extent is found in the fact that although one French
translation of the work had already appeared, three different persons
were then preparing or contemplating another--the Abbé Blavet, who
actually published his; the Due de la Rochefoucauld, who discontinued
his labour when he found himself forestalled by the Abbé; and the
Comtesse de Boufflers who perhaps did little more than entertain the
design. The best translation was published some years after by another
lady, the widow of Condorcet.
The Baron d'Holbach's weekly or bi-weekly dinners, at one of which it
has been mentioned Smith had a conversation with Turgot, were, as L.
Blanc has said, the regular states-general of philosophy. The usual
guests were the philosophes and encyclopedists and men of
letters--Diderot, Marmontel, Raynal, Galiani. The conversation ran
largely towards metaphysics and theology, and, as Morellet, who was
often there, states, the boldest theories were propounded, and things
spoken which might well call down fire from heaven. It was there that
Hume observed he had neither seen an atheist, nor did he believe one
existed, and was informed by his host in reply, "You have been a
little unfortunate; you are here at table with seventeen for the first
time."
Morellet mentions that it was at the table of Helvetius, the
philosopher, he himself first met Smith. Helvetius was a retired
farmer-general of the taxes, who had grown rich without practising
extortion, and instead of remaining a bachelor, as Smith says other
farmers-general in France did, because no gentlewoman would marry
them, and they were too proud to marry anybody else, he had married a
pretty and clever wife, an early friend of Turgot's, who helped to
make his Tuesday dinners among the most agreeable entertainments in
Paris. He had recently returned from a long sojourn in England, so
enchanted with both country and people that d'Holbach, who could find
nothing to praise in either, declared he could really have seen
nothing in England all the time except the persecution for heresy
which he had shortly before suffered in France, and would have escaped
in our freer air; and he was always very hospitable to English
celebrities, so that it may be inferred that Smith enjoyed many
opportunities of conversation with this versatile and philosophical
financier during his stay in Paris.
Morellet, whose acquaintance Smith made at Helvetius' house, became
one of his fastest friends in France, and on leaving Paris Smith gave
him for a keepsake his own pocket-book,--a very pretty English-made
pocket-book, says the Abbé, which "has served me these twenty years."
Morellet, besides being an advanced economist, whose views ran in
sympathy with Smith's own, was the most delightful of companions,
uniting with strong sense and a deep love of the right an unfailing
play of irony and fun, and ever ready, as Fanny Burney found him still
at eighty-five, to sing his own songs for the entertainment of his
friends. The Abbé was a metaphysician as well as an economist, but,
according to his account of his conversations with Smith, they seem to
have discussed mainly economic subjects--"the theory of commerce," he
says, "banking, public credit, and various points in the great work
which Smith was then meditating,"[163] _i.e._ the _Wealth of Nations_.
This book had therefore by that time taken shape so far that the
author made his Paris friends aware of his occupation upon it, and
discussed with them definite points in the scheme of doctrine he was
unfolding. Morellet formed a very just estimate of him. "I regard him
still," he says, "as one of the men who have made the most complete
observations and analyses on all questions he treated of," and he gave
the best proof of his high opinion by writing a translation of the
_Wealth of Nations_ himself. Smith would no doubt derive some
assistance towards making his observations and analyses more complete
from the different lights in which the matters under consideration
would be naturally placed in the course of discussions with men like
Morellet and his friends; but whatever others have thought, Morellet
at least sets up no claim, either on his own behalf or on behalf of
his very old and intimate college friend Turgot, or of any other of
the French economists, of having influenced or supplied any of Smith's
ideas. The Scotch inquirer had been long working on the same lines as
his French colleagues, and Morellet seems to have thought him, when
they first met, as he thought him still, when he wrote those memoirs,
as being more complete in his observations and analyses than the
others.
A frequent resort of Smith in Paris was the salon of Mademoiselle de
l'Espinasse, which differed from the others by the greater variety of
the guests and by the presence of ladies. The hostess--according to
Hume, one of the most sensible women in Paris--had long been Madame du
Deffand's principal assistant in the management of her famous salon,
but having been dismissed in 1764 for entertaining Turgot and
D'Alembert on her own account without permission, she set up a rival
salon of her own on improved principles, with the zealous help of her
two eminent friends; and to her unpretending apartments ambassadors,
princesses, marshals of France, and financiers came, and met with men
of letters like Grimm, Condillac, and Gibbon. D'Alembert indeed lived
in the house, having come there to be nursed through an illness and
remaining on afterwards, and as D'Alembert was one of Smith's chief
friends in Paris, his house was naturally one of the latter's chief
resorts. Here, moreover, he often met Turgot, as indeed he did
everywhere he went, and of all the friends he met in France there was
none in whose society he took more pleasure, or for whose mind and
character he formed a profounder admiration, than that great thinker
and statesman. If his conversation with Morellet ran mainly on
political and economic subjects, it would most probably run even more
largely on such subjects with Turgot, for they were both at the moment
busy writing their most important works on those subjects. Turgot's
_Formation and Distribution of Wealth_ was written in 1766, though it
was only published three years later in the _Éphémérides du Citoyen_;
and it cannot, I think, be doubted that the ideas and theories with
which his mind was then boiling must have been the subject of
discussion again and again in the course of his numerous conversations
with Smith. So also if Smith brought out various points in the work he
was undertaking for discussion with Morellet, he may reasonably be
inferred to have done the same with Morellet's greater friend Turgot,
and all this would have been greatly to their mutual advantage. No
vestiges of their intercourse, however, remain, though some critics
profess to see its results writ very large on the face of their
writings.
Professor Thorold Rogers thinks the influences of Turgot's reasoning
on Smith's mind to be easily perceptible to any reader of the
_Formation and Distribution of Wealth_ and of the _Wealth of Nations_.
Dupont de Nemours once went so far as to say that whatever was true in
Smith was borrowed from Turgot, and whatever was not borrowed
from Turgot was not true; but he afterwards retracted that
absurdly-sweeping allegation, and confessed that he had made it before
he was able to read English; while Leon Say thinks Turgot owed much of
his philosophy to Smith, and Smith owed much of his economics to
Turgot.[164] Questions of literary obligation are often difficult to
settle. Two contemporary thinkers, dealing with the same subject under
the same general influences and tendencies of the time, may think
nearly alike even without any manner of personal intercommunication,
and the idea of natural liberty of trade, in which the main
resemblance between the writers in the present case is supposed to
occur, was already in the ground, and sprouting up here and there
before either of them wrote at all. Smith's position on that subject,
moreover, is so much more solid, balanced, and moderate than Turgot's,
that it is different in positive character; the extremer form of the
doctrine taught by Turgot appears to have been taught also by Smith in
earlier years and abandoned. At least the fragment published by
Stewart of Smith's Society paper of 1755--eleven years before Turgot
wrote his book or saw Smith--proclaims individualism of the extremer
form, and intimates that he had taught the same views in Edinburgh in
1750. Smith had thus been teaching free trade many years before he met
Turgot, and teaching it in Turgot's own form; he had converted many of
the merchants of Glasgow to it and a future Prime Minister of
England; he had probably, moreover, thought out the main truths of the
work he was even then busy upon. He was therefore in a position to
meet Turgot on equal terms, and give full value for anything he might
take, and if obligations must needs be assessed and the balance
adjusted, who shall say whether Smith owes most to the conversation of
Turgot or Turgot owes most to the conversation of Smith? The state of
the exchange cannot be determined from mere priority of publication;
no other means of determining it exist, and it is of no great moment
to determine it at all.
Turgot and Smith are said--on authority which cannot be altogether
disregarded, Condorcet, the biographer of Turgot--to have continued
their economic discussions by correspondence after Smith returned to
this country; but though every search has been made for this
correspondence, as Dugald Stewart informs us, no trace of anything of
the kind was ever discovered on either side of the Channel, and
Smith's friends never heard him allude to such a thing. "It is
scarcely to be supposed," says Stewart, "that Mr. Smith would destroy
the letters of such a correspondent as M. Turgot, and still less
probable that such an intercourse was carried on between them without
the knowledge of Mr. Smith's friends. From some inquiries that have
been made at Paris by a gentleman of this society[165] since Smith's
death, I have reason to believe that no evidence of the correspondence
exists among the papers of M. Turgot, and that the whole story has
taken its rise from a report suggested by the knowledge of their
former intimacy."[166] Some of Hume's letters to Turgot--one from this
year 1766, combating among other things Turgot's principle of the
single tax on the net product of the land--still exist among the
Turgot family archives, but none from Smith, for Leon Say examined
those archives a few years ago with this purpose among others
expressly in view.
An occasional letter, however, certainly did pass between them, for,
as Smith himself mentions in a letter which will appear in a
subsequent chapter, it was "by the particular favour of M. Turgot"
that he received the copy of the _Mémoires concernant les
Impositions_, which he quotes so often in the _Wealth of Nations_.
This book was not printed when he was in France, and as it needed much
influence to get a copy of it, his was most probably got after Turgot
became Controller-General of the Finances in 1774. But in any case it
would involve the exchange of letters.
Smith, with all his admiration for Turgot, thought him too
simple-hearted for a practical statesman, too prone, as noble natures
often are, to underrate the selfishness, stupidity, and prejudice that
prevail in the world and resist the course of just and rational
reform. He described Turgot to Samuel Rogers as an excellent person,
very honest and well-meaning, but so unacquainted with the world and
human nature that it was a maxim with him, as he had himself told
David Hume, that whatever is right may be done.[167]
Smith would deny the name of statesman altogether to the politician
who did not make it his aim to establish the right, or, in other
words, had no public ideal; such a man is only "that crafty and
insidious animal vulgarly termed a statesman." But he insists that the
truly wise statesman in pressing his ideal must always practise
considerable accommodation. If he cannot carry the right he will not
disdain to ameliorate the wrong, but, "like Solon, when he cannot
establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the
best that the people can bear."[168] Turgot made too little account,
he thought, of the resisting power of vested interests and confirmed
habits. He was too optimist, and the peculiarity attaches to his
theoretical as well as his practical work. Smith himself was prone
rather to the contrary error of overrating the resisting power of
interests and prejudices. If Turgot was too sanguine when he told the
king that popular education would in ten years change the people past
all recognition, Smith was too incredulous when he despaired of the
ultimate realisation of slave emancipation and free trade; and under a
biographical aspect, it is curious to find the man who has spent his
life in the practical business of the world taking the more
enthusiastic view we expect from the recluse, and the man who has
spent his life in his library taking the more critical and measured
view we expect from the man of the world.
Another statesman whom Smith knew well in Paris was Necker. His wife
had very possibly begun by this time her rather austere salon, where
free-thinking was strictly tabooed, and Morellet, her right-hand man
in the entertainment of the guests, confesses the restraint was really
irksome; and if she had, Morellet would probably have brought Smith
there. But anyhow Sir James Mackintosh, who had means of hearing about
Smith from competent sources, states explicitly that he was upon
intimate terms with Necker during his residence in the French capital,
that he formed only a poor opinion of that minister's abilities, and
that he used to predict the fall of his political reputation the
moment his head was put to any real proof, always saying of him with
emphasis, "He is a mere man of detail."[169] Smith was not always
lucky in his predictions, but here for once he was right.
While Smith was frequenting these various literary and philosophical
salons they were all thrown into a state of unusual commotion by the
famous quarrel between Rousseau and Hume. The world has long since
ceased to take any interest in that quarrel, having assured itself
that it all originated in the suspicions of Rousseau's insane fancy,
but during the whole summer of 1766 it filled column after column of
the English and continental newspapers, and it occupied much of the
attention of Smith and the other friends of Hume in Paris. It will be
remembered that when Rousseau was expelled from Switzerland, Hume, who
was an extravagant admirer of his, offered to find him a home in
England, and on the offer being accepted, brought him over to this
country in January 1766. Hume first found quarters for him at
Chiswick, but the capricious philosopher would not live at Chiswick
because it was too near town. Hume then got him a gentleman's house in
the Peak of Derby, but Rousseau would not enter it unless the owner
agreed to take board. Hume induced the owner to gratify even this
whim, and Rousseau departed and established himself comfortably at
Wootton in the Peak of Derby. Hume next procured for him a pension of
£100 a year from the king. Rousseau would not touch it unless it were
kept secret; the king agreed to keep it secret. Rousseau then would
not have it unless it were made public; the king again agreed to meet
his whim. But the more Hume did for him the more Rousseau suspected
the sincerity of his motives, and used first to assail him with the
most ridiculous accusations, and then fall on his neck and implore
forgiveness for ever doubting him. But at last, on the 23rd of June,
in reply to Hume's note intimating the king's remission of the
condition of secrecy, and the consequent removal of every obstacle to
the acceptance of the pension, Rousseau gave way entirely to the evil
spirit that haunted him, and wrote Hume the notorious letter,
declaring that his horrible designs were at last found out.
Hume lost no time in going with his troubles to Smith, and asking him
to lay the true state of the case before their Paris friends. To that
letter Smith wrote the following reply:--
PARIS, _6th July 1766_.
MY DEAR FRIEND--I am thoroughly convinced that Rousseau is
as great a rascal as you and as every man here believe him
to be. Yet let me beg of you not to think of publishing
anything to the world upon the very great impertinence which
he has been guilty of. By refusing the pension which you had
the goodness to solicit for him with his own consent, he may
have thrown, by the baseness of his proceedings, a little
ridicule upon you in the eyes of the court and the ministry.
Stand this ridicule; expose his brutal letter, but without
giving it out of your own hand, so that it may never be
printed, and, if you can, laugh at yourself, and I will pawn
my life that before three weeks are at an end this little
affair which at present gives you so much uneasiness shall
be understood to do you as much honour as anything that has
ever happened to you. By endeavouring to unmask before the
public this hypocritical pedant, you run the risk of
disturbing the tranquillity of your whole life. By leaving
him alone he cannot give you a fortnight's uneasiness. To
write against him is, you may depend upon it, the very thing
he wishes you to do. He is in danger of falling into
obscurity in England, and he hopes to make himself
considerable by provoking an illustrious adversary. He will
have a great party--the Church, the Whigs, the Jacobites,
the whole wise English nation--who will love to mortify a
Scotchman, and to applaud a man who has refused a pension
from the king. It is not unlikely, too, that they may pay
him very well for having refused it, and that even he may
have had in view this compensation. Your whole friends here
wish you not to write,--the Baron, D'Alembert, Madame
Riccoboni, Mademoiselle Rianecourt, M. Turgot, etc. etc. M.
Turgot, a friend every way worthy of you, desired me to
recommend this advice to you in a particular manner as his
most earnest entreaty and opinion. He and I are both afraid
that you are surrounded with evil counsellors, and that the
advice of your English _literati_, who are themselves
accustomed to publishing all their little gossiping stories
in newspapers, may have too much influence upon you.
Remember me to Mr. Walpole, and believe me, etc.
P.S.--Make my apology to Millar for not having yet answered
his last very kind letter. I am preparing the answer to it,
which he will certainly receive by next post. Remember me to
Mrs. Millar. Do you ever see Mr. Townshend?[170]
The deep love of tranquillity this letter breathes, the dislike of
publicity as a snare fatal to future quiet, the contempt for the petty
vanity that makes men of letters run into print with their little
personal affairs, as if they were of moment to anybody but themselves,
are all very characteristic of Smith's philosophic temper of mind; and
there is also--what appears on other occasions as well as this in the
intercourse of the two philosophers--a certain note of affectionate
anxiety on the part of the younger and graver philosopher towards the
elder as towards a man of less weight of natural character and
experience, and perhaps less of the wisdom of this world, than
himself.
Smith seems to have shown Hume's letter to their common friends in
Paris, and while deeply interested, as was only natural, in the
quarrel, they with one consent took Hume's side, the only possible
view of the transaction. The subject continued to furnish matter of
conversation and conference among Hume's French literary friends
during the whole time of Smith's residence in Paris. Hume sent Smith
another letter a little later on in the month of July, which he asked
him specially to show to D'Alembert. This Smith did on the 21 st, when
he met D'Alembert at dinner at Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse's, in
company with Turgot, Marmontel, Roux, Morellet, Saurin, and Duclos;
and on the same evening D'Alembert wrote Hume that he had just had the
honour of seeing Mr. Smith, who had shown him the letter he had
received, and that they had talked much together about Hume and his
affairs. Apparently Smith's objections to Hume publishing anything on
the quarrel were now overcome; at all events, the result of this
consultation of Hume's French friends was to advise publication; and
accordingly a week or two later Hume sent on a complete narrative of
his relations with Rousseau, together with the whole correspondence
from first to last, to D'Alembert, with full permission to make any
use of it he thought best, and he wrote Smith at the same time asking
him to go and get a sight of it. "Pray tell me," he adds, "your
judgment of my work, if it deserves the name. Tell D'Alembert I make
him absolute master to retrench or alter what he thinks proper in
order to suit it to the latitude of Paris."[171]
On the 27th of July Turgot writes Hume, mentioning that he had that
day met Smith at Baron d'Holbach's, and they had discussed the
Rousseau affair together. Smith had told him of the letter from
Rousseau to General Conway, which he had been shown on the 25th by the
Comtesse de Boufflers, and had repeated to him the same interpretation
of that letter which he had already expressed to the Comtesse, viz.
that Rousseau had not made the secrecy a ground for refusing the
pension, but merely regretted that that condition made it impossible
for him adequately to show his gratitude. Smith was thus inclined to
give Rousseau the benefit of a better construction when a better
construction was possible, but Hume writes Turgot on the 5th of August
that Smith was quite wrong in that supposition.
One of those two letters of Smith's on the Rousseau affair mentions
the name of Madame Riccoboni among those of Hume's friends with whom
he had been in communication on the subject, and Madame Riccoboni
about the same date writes Garrick that Smith and Changuion, the
English ambassador's private secretary, were her two great confidants
on the business of this famous quarrel. Madame Riccoboni had been a
popular actress, but giving up the stage for letters, had become the
most popular novelist in France. Her _Letters of Fanny Butler_ and her
_History of Miss Jenny_ were dividing the attention of Paris with the
novels of our own Richardson; and Smith, in the 1790 edition of his
_Theory_, brackets her with Racine, Voltaire, and Richardson as
instructors in "the refinements and delicacies of love and
friendship." She was an effusive admirer of Smith, as, indeed, she was
of Changuion, and of that _bel Anglais_ Richard Burke, and of Garrick
himself;--"you are," she writes the player, "the dearling of my
heart";--and when Smith was returning home from France, she gave him
the following letter of introduction to Garrick:--
Je suis bien vaine, my dear Mr. Garrick, de pouvoir vous
donner ce que je perds avec un regret trés-vif, le plaisir
de voir Mr. Smith. Ce charming philosopher vous dira combien
il a d'esprit, car je le défie de parler sans en montrer. Je
sui vraiment fâchée que la politesse m'oblige à lui donner
ma lettre ouverte: cet usage établi retient mon coeur tout
prêt à lui rendre justice, mais sa modestie est aussi grande
que son mérite, et je craindrois que la plus simple vérité
ne parût à ses yeux une grosse flaterie; je puis vous dire
de lui, ce qu'il disoit un jour d'un autre--le métier de cet
homme-là est d'être aimable. J'ajouterai,--et de mériter
l'estime de tous ceux qui ont le bonheur de le connoitre.
Oh ces Ecossois! ces chiens d'Ecossois! ils viennent me
plaire et m'affliger. Je suis comme ces folles jeunes filles
qui écoutent un amant sans penser an regret, toujours voisin
du plaisir. Grondez-moi, battez-moi, tuez-moi! mais j'aime
Mr. Smith, je l'aime beaucoup. Je voudrois que le diable
emportât tous nos gens de lettres, tous nos philosophes, et
qu'il me rapportât Mr. Smith. Les hommes supérieurs se
cherchent. Rempli d'estime pour Mr. Garrick, désirant le
voir et l'entretenir, Mr. Smith a voulu être introduit par
moi. Il me flate infiniment par cette préférence, bien des
gens se mélent de présenter un ami à un autre ami, peu sont
comme moi dans le cas d'être sûre de la reconnoissance des
tous deux. Adieu, mon très-aimable et très-paresseux ami.
Embrassez pour moi vôtre gracieuse compagne. La mienne vous
assure l'un et l'autre de sa plus tendre amitié.
RICCOBONI.[172]
Not content with this letter of recommendation which she gave to Smith
to deliver, Madame Riccoboni at the same time sent Garrick another
through the post, and shows the sincerity of the feelings of high
esteem she had expressed in the open letter by expressing them again
quite as decisively in the closed one:--
_6 Octobre._
Aujourd'huy je vous écris uniquement pour vous prévenir sur
une visite que vous recevrez à Londres. Mr. Smith, un
Ecossois, homme d'un très grand mérite, aussi distingué par
son bon naturel, par la douceur de son caractère que par son
esprit et son sçavoir, me demande une lettre pour vous. Vous
verrez un philosophe moral et pratique; gay, riant, à cent
lieues de la pédanterie des nôtres. Il vous estime beaucoup
et désire vous connoître particulièrement. Donnez son nom à
votre porte, je vous en prie, vous perdriez beaucoup à ne
pas le voir, et je serois désolée de ne pas recevoir de lui
un détail du bon accueil que vous lui aurez fait.... Donnez
son nom à votre porte, je vous le répète. S'il ne vous voit
pas, je vous étrangle.[173]
Smith had apparently begged of her also a letter of introduction to R.
Burke, and she wrote him one, but he went away without it; as she says
to Garrick, in a letter of 3rd January 1767: "Ma bête de philosophe
est partie sans songer à la prendre." Nor apparently had Smith as yet
delivered her letter to Garrick, for she asks, "Vous ne l'avez pas
encore vu Mr. Smith? c'est la plus distraite créature! mais c'est une
des plus aimables. Je l'aime beaucoup et je l'estime encore
d'avantage."[174] A few weeks later, on the 29th of January, she again
returns to the subject of Smith, asking Garrick whether he had yet
seen him, whether he was in London or had delivered her letter, and
adding, "C'est un homme charmant, n'est-il pas?"[175]
Madame Riccoboni was not the only Frenchwoman who was touched with
Smith's personal charms; we hear of another, a marquise, "a woman too
of talents and wit," who actually fell in love with him. It was during
an excursion Smith made from Paris to Abbeville, with the Duke of
Buccleugh and several other English noblemen and a certain Captain
Lloyd, a retired officer, who was afterwards a friend, perhaps a
patient, of Dr. Currie, the author of the _Life of Burns_, and told
the doctor this and many other anecdotes about the economist. Lloyd
was, according to Currie, a most interesting and accomplished man, and
his acquaintance with Smith was one of great intimacy. The party seem
to have stayed some days at Abbeville--to visit Crecy, no doubt, like
patriotic Englishmen, and this French marquise was stopping at the
same hotel. She had just come from Paris, where she found all the
world talking about Hume, and having heard that Smith was Hume's
particular friend and almost as great a philosopher as he, she was
bent on making so famous a conquest, but after many persistent efforts
was obliged eventually to abandon the attempt. Her philosopher could
not endure her, nor could he--and this greatly amused his own
party--conceal his embarrassment; but it was not philosophy altogether
that steeled his breast. The truth, according to Lloyd, was that the
philosopher was deeply in love with another, an English lady, who was
also stopping in Abbeville at the time. Of all Currie heard concerning
Smith from Captain Lloyd this is the only thing he has chosen to
record, and slight though it is, it contributes a touch of nature to
that more personal aspect of Smith's life of which we have least
knowledge. Stewart makes mention of an attachment which Smith was
known to have cherished for several years in the early part of his
life to a young lady of great beauty and accomplishment, whom Stewart
had himself seen when she was past eighty, but "still retained evident
traces of her former beauty," while "the powers of her understanding
and the gaiety of her temper seemed to have suffered nothing from the
hand of time." Nobody ever knew what prevented their union, or how far
Smith's addresses were favourably received, but she never married any
more than he. Stewart says that "after this disappointment he laid
aside all thoughts of marriage"; but the Abbeville attachment seems to
have been a different one from this and a later.
While in Paris Smith was a very steady playgoer. He was always a great
admirer of the French dramatists, and now enjoyed very much seeing
their plays actually represented on the stage, and discussing them
afterwards, we may be sure, with an expert like Madame Riccoboni.
Speaking of his admiration for the great French dramatists, Dugald
Stewart states that "this admiration (resulting originally from the
general character of his taste, which delighted more to remark that
pliancy of genius which accommodates itself to general rules than to
wonder at the bolder flights of an undisciplined imagination) was
increased to a great degree when he saw the beauties that had struck
him in the closet heightened by the utmost perfection of theatrical
exhibition."[176] The French theatre, indeed, gave him much material
for reflection. In his later years his thoughts and his conversation
often recurred to the philosophy of the imitative arts. He meant had
he lived to have written a book on the subject; he has actually left
us a single essay, one of the most finished pieces of work he ever
did; and among his friends he was very fond in those days of speaking
and theorising on that topic, and supporting his conclusions by
illustrations from his wide reading and his observation of life. These
illustrations seem to have been drawn frequently from his experiences
of the French theatre.
The Earl of Buchan says that Smith had no ear for music, but there are
few things he seems to have nevertheless enjoyed better than the
opera, both serious and comic. He thought the "sprightly airs" of the
comic opera, though a more "temperate joy" than "the scenes of the
common comedy," were still a "most delicious" one.'[177] "They do not
make us laugh so loud, but they make us smile more frequently." And he
held the strongest opinion that music was always on virtue's side, for
he says the only musical passions are the good ones, the bad and
unsocial passions being, in his view, essentially unmelodious. But he
thought scenery was much abused on the French operatic stage. "In the
French operas not only thunder and lightning, storms and tempests, are
commonly represented in the ridiculous manner above mentioned, but
all the marvellous, all the supernatural of epic poetry, all the
metamorphoses of mythology, all the wonders of witchcraft and magic,
everything that is most unfit to be represented upon the stage, are
every day exhibited with the most complete approbation and applause of
that ingenious nation."[178]
Amid all this gaiety of salons and playhouses Smith found a graver
retreat with the philanthropic sect of the economists in the
apartments of the king's physician, Dr. Quesnay, in Paris and
Versailles. Dupont de Nemours told J.B. Say that he had often met
Smith at their little meetings, and that they looked on him as a
judicious and simple man, and apparently nothing more, for, he adds,
Smith had not at that time shown the stuff he was made of.[179] If
they did not then recognise his paramount capacity as they afterwards
did, there were some things about his opinions which Dupont thought
they learnt better then than they could from the great work in which
he subsequently expounded them. In a note to one of Turgot's works, of
which he was editor, Dupont appeals from an opinion expressed, or
understood to be expressed, by Smith in his published writings, to the
opinion on the same subject which he used to hear from Smith's own
lips in the unreserved intercourse of private life. "Smith at
liberty," he says, "Smith in his own room or in that of a friend, as I
have seen him when we were fellow-disciples of M. Quesnay, would not
have said that."[180]
Though Smith met with them, and was indeed their very close scientific
as well as personal associate, it is of course impossible, strictly
speaking, to count him, as Dupont does, among the disciples of
Quesnay. He was no more a disciple of Quesnay than Peter was a
disciple of Paul, although, it is true, Paul wrote first. He neither
agreed with all the creed of the French economists, nor did he
acquire the articles he agreed with from the teaching of their master.
He had been for sixteen years before he met them teaching the two
principal truths which they set themselves to proclaim: (1) that the
wealth of a country does not consist in its gold and silver, but in
its stock of consumable commodities; and (2) that the true way of
increasing it is not by conferring privileges or imposing restraints,
but by assuring its producers a fair field and no favour. He had
taught those truths in 1750, and Quesnay had not written anything
bearing on them till 1756. Moreover, much in their system on which
they laid most stress he has publicly repudiated. Still he speaks both
of their system and of their master with a veneration which no
disciple could easily surpass. He pronounces the system to be, "with
all its imperfections, perhaps the nearest approximation to the truth
that has yet been published upon the subject of political economy,"
and the author of the system to be "ingenious and profound," "a man of
the greatest simplicity and modesty, who was honoured by his disciples
with a reverence not inferior to that of any of the ancient
philosophers for the founders of their respective systems."[181] He
might not, like the Marquis de Mirabeau, call Quesnay a greater than
Socrates, or the _Economic Table_ a discovery equal to the invention
of printing or of money, but he thought him so clearly the head of the
economic inquirers of the world that he meant to have dedicated the
_Wealth of Nations_ to Quesnay had the venerable French economist been
alive at the time of its publication. Smith was therefore a very
sympathetic associate of this new sect, though not a strict adherent.
It may be well to explain in a word to the general reader that this
sect were patriots and practical social and political reformers quite
as much as theoretical economists. They believed the condition of the
French people to have grown so bad as to be a grave danger to the
State, and they preached their system as a revelation of the only way
of salvation. They were too earnest for the Paris wits. Voltaire
always sneered at them till he came to know Turgot. Grimm calls them
"the pietists of philosophy," and Hume, bantering Morellet, wonders
how a man like Turgot could herd with such cattle, "the most
chimerical and the most arrogant that now exist since the annihilation
of the Sorbonne." But they were grappling with living problems, and
seeing into the real situation so much further than their
contemporaries, that an historian like de Tocqueville thinks the best
key to the Revolution is to be found in their writings. The malady of
the age, they held, was the ever-increasing distress of the
agricultural population. The great nobles, the financiers, the
farmers-general, the monopolists, were very rich; but the
agriculturists--the vast body of the people--were sinking into a
hopeless impoverishment, for between tithes and heavy war taxes and
farmer-generals' extortions, and the high rents which, to Turgot's
despair, the smaller peasantry would persist in offering without
reflecting in the least on the rise in their burdens,--between all
these things, the net product of agriculture--what was left in the
hands of the cultivator after all expenses were paid away--was getting
less and less every year, and the ruin of the peasantry meant the ruin
of the nation. "Poor peasants, poor kingdom," said they; "poor
kingdom, poor king."
And the remedy was plain: the net product of agriculture must somehow
be made to rise instead of fall. They supported their contention with
a certain erroneous theory that agriculture is the sole source of
wealth, but the error made little practical difference to the
argument, for agriculture is always a sufficiently important source of
wealth to make its improvement a national concern. How then was the
net product to be increased? By better methods of cultivation, by
removal of legal and official interferences, and by lightening the
public burdens through the abolition of all existing taxes and of the
existing system of collecting them through farmers-general, and the
institution instead of a single tax on the net product of the soil, to
be collected directly by responsible officials. According to the
reminiscences of strangers who happened to fall into their company,
the talk of the economists always ran much on the net product and the
single tax, for they believed the two great needs of the country were
agricultural improvement and financial reform. When Quesnay was
offered a farmer-generalship of the taxes for his son, he said, "No;
let the welfare of my children be bound up with the public
prosperity," and made his son a farmer of the land instead.
In Quesnay's rooms in the palace of Versailles Smith would sometimes
hear words that would sound very strange in the house of the king.
Mercier de la Rivière, Quesnay's favourite disciple, while writing his
book on the _Natural and Essential Order of Political Societies_,
published in 1767, almost lived in Quesnay's apartments, discussing
the work point by point with the master. The Marquis de Mirabeau
mentions having seen him there six whole weeks running, "moulding and
remoulding his work, and consequently denying father and mother" for
the time. One day Madame du Hausset heard a memorable conversation
there between these two economists. "This kingdom," observed Mirabeau,
"is in a miserable state. There is neither energy in the nation nor
money to serve in its place." "No," replied Mercier de la Rivière,
counsellor of the Parliament of Paris and late Governor of Martinico,
"it cannot be regenerated except by a conquest like that of China, or
by a great internal convulsion; but woe to those who will be there
then, for the French people does nothing by halves." The words made
the little lady-in-waiting tremble, and she hurried out of the room;
but M. de Marigny, brother of the king's mistress, who was also
present, followed her, and bade her have no fear, for these were
honest men, if a little chimerical, and they were even, he thought,
on the right road, though they knew not when to stop and went past the
goal.[182]
The doctor's room was a little sanctuary of free speech pitched by an
odd chance in the heart of a despotic court, but his loyalty was known
to be as sterling as his patriotism, and Louis himself would come
round and listen to his economic parables, and call him the king's
thinker?-as indeed he was, for he was no believer in states-general or
states-particular, he had no interest in court or party intrigues, and
his thought was always for the power of the king as well as for the
welfare of the people. Marmontel, who used to come to him feigning an
interest in the net product and the single tax, merely, as he
confesses, to secure the doctor's word with Madame de Pompadour about
an appointment he wanted, writes that "while storms gathered and
dispersed again underneath Quesnay's _entre-sol_, he wrought at his
axioms and his calculations in rural economy as calmly and with as
much indifference to the movements of the court as if he were a
hundred leagues away. Below they discussed peace and war, the choice
of generals, the dismissal of ministers, while we up in the entre-sol
reasoned about agriculture and calculated the net product, or
sometimes dined gaily with Diderot, D'Alembert, Duclos, Helvetius,
Turgot, Buffon; and Madame de Pompadour, not being able to get that
company of philosophers to descend into her salon, used to come up
there herself to see them at table, and have a talk with them."[183]
None of the famous men mentioned here were members of the sect except
Turgot.
The year 1766 was a year of exceptional activity in this economist
camp. Turgot, as we have seen, was writing an important work, and
Mercier de la Rivière another. The other members of the group were
busy too, for they had just for the first time secured an organ in the
press in the _Journal de l'Agriculture du Commerce et des Finances_,
of which their youngest convert, Dupont de Nemours, was made editor
in June 1765, and in which Quesnay himself wrote an article almost
every month till Dupont's dismissal in November 1766. The Government,
moreover, which had thrown Mirabeau into prison for his first book and
had suppressed his second only a year or two before, now ceased from
troubling, and gave even a certain official countenance to the
_Journal de l'Agriculture_, for after the war it no longer shut its
eyes to the distress that prevailed, and began to give an ear to
remedies. They were making converts too, among others the Abbé
Baudeau, who used to write them down in his journal, the _Éphémérides
du Citoyen_, but now offered to make it their organ when they lost the
_Journal de l'Agriculture_. They were thus in the first flush of their
active propaganda, which in a year or two more made political economy,
Grimm says, the _science de la mode_ in France, and won converts to
the single tax among the crowned heads of Europe. Quesnay too had
taken apartments in town in the house of a disciple to be nearer his
friends for pushing the propaganda, so that Smith had especially
abundant opportunities of seeing him and them that year.
No memorial of all their intercourse, however, has survived except the
slight and rather indefinite reminiscence of Dupont de Nemours, to
which allusion has been made. Dupont remembers that Smith used to
discuss with them a question, which they no doubt would be often
discussing, for they were greatly interested in it,--the question of
the effect upon the wages of labour of a tax upon the commodities
consumed by the labourers; and he says that Smith, in the freedom of
private intercourse with them, expressed quite a different opinion
upon that subject from that which he delivered in the _Wealth of
Nations_, with the fear of vested interests before his eyes. Dupont
could not have read the _Wealth of Nations_ very carefully when he
hinted this accusation of timidity before vested interests, for there
was scarcely a vested interest existing at the time that has not
incurred in its turn most vigorous censure in that work. But as the
alleged difference amounts merely to this, that Smith in his book
asserts a principle with a certain specific limitation to it which he
used to assert in conversation without the limitation, it probably
represents no real change of opinion, but only a difference between
the more exact expositions of the book and the less exact expositions
of conversation. The point was this. Smith held, with Dupont and his
friends, that a direct tax on the wages of labour, like the French
industrial _taille_, would, if the demand for labour and the price of
provisions remained the same, have the effect of raising the wages of
labour by the sum required to pay the tax. He held, again, with them
that an indirect tax on the commodities consumed by the labourers
would act in exactly the same way if the commodities taxed were
necessaries of life, because a rise in the price of necessaries would
imperil the labourer's ability to bring up his family. But what seemed
new to Dupont was that Smith now in his book held that if the
commodities taxed were luxuries, the tax would not act in that way. It
would act as a sumptuary law. The labourer would merely spend less on
such superfluities, and since this forced frugality would probably
increase rather than diminish his ability to bring up a family, he
would neither require nor obtain any rise of wages. The high tobacco
duty in France and England and a recent rise of three shillings on the
barrel of beer had no effect whatever on wages.
That is what Dupont says Smith would not have contended in France. He
would not have drawn this distinction between the taxation of a
necessary and the taxation of a luxury, and he only drew it in his
book to avert the clamour of offended interests, though against his
real convictions. The imputation of dissimulation, though explicitly
enough made, may be disregarded. The alternative of a real change of
opinion is quite possible, inasmuch as the position Smith has actually
reached on this question in his book is far from final or perfect; it
is obvious at a glance that in a community such as he supposes, where
the labourers are in the habit of consuming both necessaries and
luxuries, a tax on necessaries would have exactly the same effect as
he attributes to a tax on luxuries; it would force the labourer to
give up some of his luxuries. But there might be no real change of
opinion, and yet a good deal of apparent difference between the loose
statements of a speaker in a language of which he had only imperfect
command and his more complete and precise statements in a written
book. Dupont, it may be added, seems to think that Smith in his talks
with the French economists expressed much more unfavourable views of
the inconveniences, changes, and general evils of the English system
of taxation than would be gathered from the _Wealth of Nations_.
Before Smith left France he had occasion, unhappily, to resort to
Quesnay the physician as well as to Quesnay the economist. He had been
in the habit while in Paris of taking his pupils for excursions to
interesting places in the vicinity, as he had done from Toulouse, and
in August 1766 they went to Compiègne to see the camp and the military
evolutions which were to take place during the residence of the Court
there. In Compiègne the Duke of Buccleugh took seriously ill of a
fever,--the consequence of a fall from his horse while hunting, says
his aunt, Lady Mary Coke,--and, as will be seen from the following
letter, he was watched and nursed by his distinguished tutor with a
care and devotion almost more than paternal. The letter is written to
Charles Townshend, the Duke's step-father:--
COMPIÈGNE, _26th August 1766_.
DEAR SIR--It is, you may believe, with the greatest concern
that I find myself obliged to give you an account of a
slight fever from which the Duke of Buccleugh is not yet
entirely recovered, though it is this day very much abated.
He came here to see the camp and to hunt with the King and
the Court. On Thursday last he returned from hunting about
seven at night very hungry, and ate heartily of a cold
supper with a vast quantity of sallad, and drank some cold
punch after it. This supper, it seems, disagreed with him.
He had no appetite next day, but appeared well and hearty as
usual. He found himself uneasy on the field and returned
home before the rest of the company. He dined with my Lord
George Lennox, and, as he tells me, ate heartily. He found
himself very much fatigued after dinner and threw himself
upon his servant's bed. He slept there about an hour, and
awaked about eight at night in a good deal of disorder. He
vomited, but not enough to relieve him. I found his pulse
extremely quick. He went to bed immediately and drank some
vinegar whey, quite confident that a night's rest and a
sweat, his usual remedy, would relieve him. He slept little
that night but sweat profusely. The moment I saw him next
day (Sunday) I was sure he had a fever, and begged of him to
send for a physician. He refused a long time, but at last,
upon seeing me uneasy, consented. I sent for Quenay, first
ordinary physician to the King. He sent me word he was ill.
I then sent for Senac; he was ill likewise. I went to Quenay
myself to beg that, notwithstanding his illness, which was
not dangerous, he would come to see the Duke. He told me he
was an old infirm man, whose attendance could not be
depended on, and advised me as his friend to depend upon De
la Saone, first physician to the Queen. I went to De la
Saone. He was gone out, and was not expected home that
night. I returned to Quenay, who followed me immediately to
the Duke. It was by this time seven at night. The Duke was
in the same profuse sweat which he had been in all day and
all the preceding night. In this situation Quenay declared
that it was improper to do anything till the sweat should be
over. He only ordered him some cooling ptisane drink.
Ouenay's illness made it impossible for him to return next
day (Monday) and De la Saone has waited on the Duke ever
since, to my entire satisfaction. On Monday he found the
Duke's fever so moderate that he judged it unnecessary to
bleed him.... To-day, Wednesday, upon finding some little
extraordinary heat upon the Duke's skin in the morning, he
proposed ordering a small quantity of blood to be taken from
him at two o'clock, but upon returning at that hour he found
him so very cool and easy that he judged it unnecessary.
When a French physician judges bleeding unnecessary, you may
be sure that the fever is not very violent. The Duke has
never had the smallest headache nor any pain in any part of
his body; he has good spirits; his head and his eye are
both clear; he has no extraordinary redness in his face; his
tongue is not more foul than in a common cold. There is some
little quickness in his pulse, but it is soft, full, and
regular. In short, there is no one bad symptom about him,
only he has a fever and keeps his bed.... De la Saone
imagines the whole illness owing to the indigestion of
Thursday night. Some part of the undigested matter having
got into his blood, the violent commotion which this had
occasioned had burst, he supposes, some small vessel in his
veins.... Depend upon hearing from me by every post till his
perfect recovery; if any threatening symptom should appear I
shall immediately despatch an express to you; so keep your
mind as easy as possible. There is not the least probability
that any such symptom ever will appear. I never stirr from
his room from eight in the morning till ten at night, and
watch for the smallest change that happens to him. I should
sit by him all night too if the ridiculous, impertinent
jealousy of Cook, who thinks my assiduity an encroachment
upon his duty, would not be so much alarmed, as it gave some
disturbance even to his master in his present illness.
The King has inquired almost every day at his levée of my
Lord George and of Mr. De la Saone concerning the Duke's
illness. The Duke and Dutchess of Fitzjames, the Chevalier
de Clermont, the Comte de Guerchy, etc. etc., together with
the whole English nation here and at Paris, have expressed
the greatest anxiety for his recovery. Remember me in the
most respectful manner to Lady Dalkeith, and believe me to
be with the greatest regard, dear sir, your most obliged and
most humble servant,
ADAM SMITH.
COMPIÈGNE, _26th August 1766_.
Wednesday, 5 o'clock afternoon.[184]
Could there be a more pleasing exhibition of the thorough kindness of
a manly heart than this picture of the great philosopher sitting day
after day by the bedside of his pupil, watching eagerly every
indication of change, and only consenting to leave the room for a time
at night out of consideration for the silly jealousy of the valet, who
thought the tutor's presence an invasion of his own rights?
The Duke recovered and they returned to Paris. But while still at
Compiègne they heard of a sad event that could not fail to shock them
greatly, the death of their greatly esteemed young friend and
fellow-traveller, Sir James Macdonald. "Were you and I together, dear
Smith," writes Hume at this time, "we should shed tears at present for
the death of poor Sir James Macdonald. We could not possibly have
suffered a greater loss than in that valuable young man."[185]
In this letter Hume had dropped a remark showing that he was still
clinging to the idea which he had repeatedly mentioned to Smith of
returning and making his home for the remainder of his days somewhere
in France--in Paris, or "Toulouse, or Montauban, or some provincial
town in the South of France, where"--to quote his words to Sir G.
Elliot--"I shall spend contentedly the rest of my life with more
money, under a finer sky and in better company than I was born to
enjoy." Of this idea Smith strongly disapproved. He thought that Hume
would find himself too old to transplant, and that he was being
carried away by the great kindness and flatteries he had received in
Paris into entertaining a plan which could never promote his
happiness, because, in the first place, it would probably prove fatal
to work, and in the next, it would certainly deprive him of the
support of those old and rooted friendships which could not be
replaced by the incense of an hour. For his own part, and with a view
to his own future, Smith was of an entirely opposite mind. The
contrast between the two friends in natural character stands out very
strongly here. Smith had enjoyed his stay in France almost as much as
Hume, and had been welcomed everywhere by the best men and women in
the country with high respect, but now that the term of his tutorship
is approaching its end, he longs passionately for home, feels that he
has had his fill of travel, and says if he once gets among his old
friends again, he will never wander more. This appears from a letter
he wrote Millar, the bookseller, probably after his return from
Compiègne, of which Millar sent the following extract to Hume:
"Though I am very happy here, I long passionately to rejoin my old
friends, and if I had once got fairly to your side of the water, I
think I should never cross it again. Recommend the same sober way of
thinking to Hume. He is light-headed, tell him, when he talks of
coming to spend the remainder of his days here or in France. Remember
me to him most affectionately."[186]
His return, for which he was then looking with so much desire, came
sooner than he anticipated, and came, unfortunately, with a cloud. His
younger pupil, the Hon. Hew Campbell Scott, was assassinated in the
streets of Paris, on the 18th of October 1766, in his nineteenth
year;[187] and immediately thereafter they set out for London,
bringing the remains of Mr. Scott along with them, and accompanied by
Lord George Lennox, Hume's successor as Secretary of Legation. The
London papers announce their arrival at Dover on the 1st of November.
The tutorship, which ended with this melancholy event, was always
remembered with great satisfaction and gratitude by the surviving
pupil. "In October 1766," writes the Duke of Buccleugh to Dugald
Stewart, "we returned to London, after having spent near three years
together without the slightest disagreement or coolness, and, on my
part, with every advantage that could be expected from the society of
such a man. We continued to live in friendship till the hour of his
death, and I shall always remain with the impression of having lost a
friend whom I loved and respected, not only for his great talents, but
for every private virtue."
Smith's choice for this post of travelling tutor was thought in many
quarters at the time to be a very strange choice. Shrewd old Dr.
Carlyle thought it so strange that he professes to be quite unable as
a man of the world to understand Charles Townshend making it, except
"for his own glory of having sent an eminent Scotch philosopher to
travel with the Duke."[188] He thought Smith had too much "probity and
benevolence" in his own soul to suspect ill in another or check it,
and that a man who seemed too absent to make his own way about could
hardly be expected to look efficiently after the goings of another.
"He was," says Carlyle, "the most absent man in company I ever knew,"
and "he appeared very unfit for the intercourse of the world as a
travelling tutor."[189]
Still Townshend's choice was thoroughly justified by the result, and
Carlyle admits it, but thinks that was due less to the efficiency of
the tutor than to the natural excellence of the pupil. And there is no
doubt that Smith was exceptionally fortunate in his pupil. In his
after life this Duke Henry took little part in politics, but he made
himself singularly beloved among his countrymen by a long career
filled with works of beneficence and patriotism, and brightened by
that love of science which has for generations distinguished the house
of Buccleuch. It may be true that with such a pupil Smith's natural
defects would find little opportunity of causing trouble, but it seems
certain, as I have before said, that these defects were habitually
exaggerated by Smith's contemporaries, and Carlyle himself
acknowledges that Smith's travels with the Duke cured him considerably
of his fits of abstraction. This is confirmed by Ramsay of Ochtertyre,
who says that Smith grew smarter during his stay abroad, and lost much
of the awkwardness of manner he previously exhibited.
Stewart is disposed to think, however, that the public have not the
same reason to be satisfied with Smith's acceptance of this tutorship
as either he himself or his pupil had, and that the world at large has
been seriously the loser for it, because "it interrupted that studious
leisure for which nature seemed to have designed him, and in which
alone he could have hoped to accomplish those literary projects which
had flattered the ambition of his youthful genius." Now it is, of
course, idle to speculate on the things that might have been. Kant was
never forty miles from Konigsberg, and had Smith remained in Glasgow
all his days there is no reason to doubt he could have produced works
of lasting importance. But it is a truism to say that the works would
have been other and different from what we have. To a political
philosopher foreign travel is an immense advantage, and there never
was a country where graver or more interesting problems, both economic
and constitutional, offered themselves for study than France in the
latter half of last century, nor any political philosopher who enjoyed
better opportunities than Smith of discussing such problems with the
ablest and best-informed minds on the spot. Smith's residence in
France, whatever it was to his pupil, must have been an invaluable
education to himself, supplying him day after day with constant
materials for fresh comparison and thought. Samuel Rogers was greatly
struck with the difference between Smith and the historian Robertson.
The conversation of Robertson, who, as we know, had never been out of
his own country, was much more limited in its range of interest, but
Smith's was the rich conversation of a man who had seen and known a
great deal of the world. It does not appear that Smith suffered in
France from any such want of literary leisure as Stewart speaks of,
for he began writing a book in Toulouse because he had so little else
to do, and he had not attempted anything of the kind in Glasgow, so
far as we know, for five years; but, at all events, for the wealth of
illustration which his new book exhibits, the variety of its points of
view, the copiousness of its data drawn from personal observation, the
world is greatly indebted to the author's residence abroad. And had
Smith lived to finish his work on Government we should probably have
had more results of his observation of France, but the _Wealth of
Nations_ itself contains many.
M'Culloch has expressed astonishment that for all his long stay in
France Smith should have never perceived any foreshadowings of the
coming Revolution, such as were visible even to a passing traveller
like Smollett. But Smith was quite aware of all the gravities and
possibilities of the situation, and occasionally gave expression to
anticipations of vital change. He formed possibly a less gloomy view
of the actual condition of the French people than he would have heard
uttered in Quesnay's room at Versailles, because he always mentally
compared the state of things he saw in France with the state of things
he knew in Scotland, and though it was plain to him that France was
not going forward so fast as Scotland, he thought the common opinion
that it was going backward to be ill founded.[190] Then France was a
much richer country, with a better soil and climate, and "better
stocked," he says, "with all those things which it requires a long
time to raise up and accumulate, such as great towns and convenient
and well-built houses both in town and country."[191] In spite of
these advantages, however, the common people in France were decidedly
worse off than the common people of Scotland. The wages of labour were
lower--the real wages--for the people evidently lived harder. Their
dress and countenance showed it at once. "When you go from Scotland to
England the difference which you may remark between the dress and
countenance of the common people in the one country and in the other
sufficiently indicates the difference in their condition. The contrast
is still greater when you return from France." In England nobody was
too poor to wear leather shoes; in Scotland even the lowest orders of
men wore them, though the same orders of women still went about
barefooted. But "in France they are necessaries neither to men nor to
women; the lowest rank of both sexes appearing there publicly,
without any discredit, sometimes in wooden shoes and sometimes
barefooted."[192] Another little circumstance struck him as a proof
that the classes immediately above the rank of labourer were worse off
in France than they were here. The taste for dressing yew-trees into
the shape of pyramids and obelisks by "that very clumsy instrument of
sculpture" the gardener's shears had gone out of fashion in this
country, merely because it got too common, and was discarded by the
rich and vain. The multitude of persons able to indulge the taste was
sufficiently great to drive the custom out of fashion. In France, on
the other hand, he found this custom still in good repute,
"notwithstanding," he adds, "that inconstancy of fashion with which we
sometimes reproach the natives of that country." The reason was that
the number of people in that country able to indulge this taste was
too few to deprive the custom of the requisite degree of rarity. "In
France the condition of the inferior ranks of people is seldom so
happy as it frequently is in England, and you will there seldom find
even pyramids and obelisks of yew in the garden of a tallow-chandler.
Such ornaments, not having in that country been degraded by their
vulgarity, have not yet been excluded from the gardens of princes and
great lords."[193]
He discusses one great cause of the poorer condition of the French
than of the English people. It was generally acknowledged, he says,
that "the people of France was much more oppressed by taxation than
the people of Great Britain"; and the oppression he found, by personal
investigation, to be all due to bad taxes and bad methods of
collecting them. The sum that reached the public treasury represented
a much smaller burden per head of population than it did in this
country. Smith calculated the public revenue of Great Britain to
represent an assessment of about 25s. a head of population, and in
1765 and 1766, the years he was in France, according to the best,
though, he admits, imperfect, accounts he could get of the matter, the
whole sum passed into the French treasury would only represent an
assessment of 12s. 6d. per head of the French population.[194]
Taxation ought thus to be really lighter in France than in Great
Britain, but it was made into a scourge by vicious modes of assessment
and collection. Smith even suggested for France various moderate
financial reforms, repealing some taxes, increasing others, making a
third class uniform over the kingdom, and abolishing the farming
system; but though these reforms would be sufficient to restore
prosperity to a country with the resources of France, he had no hope
of it being possible to carry them against the active opposition of
individuals interested in maintaining things as they were.
Smith was thus perfectly alive to the prevailing poverty and distress
of the French population, to the oppression they suffered, to the
extreme difficulty, the hopelessness even, of any improvement of their
situation while the existing distribution of political forces
continued, and was able to defeat all efforts at reform. Now from all
this it was not very far to the idea of a political upheaval and a new
distribution of political forces, and Smith saw tendencies abroad in
that direction also. He told Professor Saint Fond in 1782 that the
"Social Compact" would one day avenge Rousseau for all the
persecutions he had suffered from the powers that were.
FOOTNOTES:
[159] _Hume MSS._, R.S.E. Partially published in Burton's _Life_.
[160] _Correspondance Littéraire_, I. iv. 291.
[161] _Burton's Letters of Eminent Persons to David Hume_, p. 238.
[162] Lady Minto, _Memoirs of Hugh Elliot_, p. 13.
[163] Morellet's _Mémoires_, i. 237.
[164] Schelle, _Dupont de Nemours et les Physiocrates_, p. 159.
[165] _i.e._ the Royal Society of Edinburgh, to whom Stewart first
read his _Life of Smith_.
[166] Stewart's _Works_, v. 47.
[167] Clayden's _Early Life of Samuel Rogers_, p. 95.
[168] _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, Part VI. sec. ii.
[169] Mackintosh, _Miscellaneous Works_, iii. 13.
[170] Brougham's Men of Letters, ii. 226.
[171] Burton's Hume, ii. 348.
[172] Garrick Correspondence, ii. 550.
[173] Garrick Correspondence, ii. 549.
[174] Ibid. ii. 501.
[175] Ibid. ii. 511.
[176] Stewart's _Works,_ x. 49, 50.
[177] "Essay on the Imitative Arts," _Works_, v. 281.
[178] _Works_, v. 294.
[179] Say, _Cours Complet, OEuvres_, p. 870.
[180] Turgot's _OEuvres_, v. 136.
[181] _Wealth of Nations_, Book IV. chap. ix.
[182] Memoirs of Madame du Hausset, p. 141.
[183] Marmontel's Memoirs, English Translation, ii. 37.
[184] Fraser's _Scotts of Buccleuch_, ii. 405.
[185] Burton's _Life of Hume_, ii. 348.
[186] Hill's _Letters of Hume_, p. 59. Original in R.S.E.
[187] _New Statistical Account of Scotland_, i. 490. (Account of
Dalkeith by the late Dr. Norman Macleod, then minister of that parish,
and Mr. Peter Steel, Rector of Dalkeith Grammar School.)
[188] _Autobiography_, p. 280.
[189] _Ibid._
[190] _Wealth of Nations_, Book I. chap. ix.
[191] _Ibid._, Book V. chap. ii. art. iii.
[192] _Wealth of Nations_, Book V. chap. ii. art. iv.
[193] "Essay on the Imitative Arts," _Works_, v. 260.
[194] _Wealth of Nations_, Book V. chap. ii. art. iv.