_ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS_
ADAM SMITH
BY
FRANCIS W. HIRST
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
NINETEEN HUNDRED AND FOUR
_Copyright in the United States of America, 1904_
PREFATORY NOTE
Early in 1793 Dugald Stewart read at two meetings of the Royal Society
of Edinburgh his “Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith.”
Written with the sympathetic pen of a friend and disciple in the
Corinthian style that Stewart loved, the memoir was too good to be
superseded. A century passed, and in 1895 appeared Mr. John Rae’s
exhaustive _Life of Adam Smith_. Mr. Rae’s comprehensive researches
cropped the ground so close that little seemed to have been left for his
successors to glean. But the discovery of Smith’s _Lectures on Justice,
Police, Revenue, and Arms_, edited by Mr. Edwin Cannan and published in
1896, has furnished new and important materials.
Of Smith’s innumerable critics and commentators, Bagehot, Oncken,
Ingram, and Hasbach seem to me to have understood him best. The
misdirected erudition of some others has only proved the importance of
allowing him to be his own interpreter.
Dr. David Murray of Glasgow has very kindly read portions of my proofs,
and has contributed most generously from his wonderful store of
learning.
F. W. H.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
Early Years 1
CHAPTER II
The Beginning of a Career 23
CHAPTER III
Theology and Religious Establishments 36
CHAPTER IV
“The Theory of Moral Sentiments” 46
CHAPTER V
In the Glasgow Chair—The Lectures on Justice And Police 68
CHAPTER VI
Glasgow and its University 94
CHAPTER VII
The Tour in France, 1764-66 118
CHAPTER VIII
Politics and Study, 1766-76 144
CHAPTER IX
The “Wealth of Nations” and its Critics 164
CHAPTER X
Free Trade 188
CHAPTER XI
Last Years 205
Index 237
ADAM SMITH
CHAPTER I
EARLY YEARS
Adam Smith was born on June 5, 1723, in the “lang toun” of Kirkcaldy. It
was one of the “mony royal boroughs yoked on end to end like ropes of
ingans, with their hie-streets and their booths, and their kraemes and
houses of stane and lime and forestairs,” which led Andrew Fairservice
to contrast “the kingdom of Fife” with the inferior county of
Northumberland; nay, it furnished him with a special boast, “Kirkcaldy,
the sell o’t, is langer than ony toun in England.” It had been a royal
borough from the time of Charles I., and had declined, like many other
Scotch towns, in the religious wars of the seventeenth century. Many of
its citizens who had fought for the Covenant had fallen on the fatal
field of Tippermuir. But it still contained about 1500 inhabitants, who
were variously employed as colliers, fishermen, salters, nailmakers, and
smugglers. From the harbour you might walk a mile or more westward along
the High Street, enjoying from time to time a glimpse of the sea and
shelving beach, where the line of shops opened for a narrow “wynd,” or a
still narrower “close” threaded the high-walled gardens of a few
substantial houses. In one of these Adam Smith wrote the _Wealth of
Nations_, and probably in one of these he was born. The father, who died
a few weeks before the birth of his only child, had been a leading
townsman. Adam Smith the elder was a man of note in his own day. From
1707 to his death he was a Writer,[1] _i.e._ solicitor, and Judge
Advocate for Scotland. He had acted as private secretary to Lord Loudon,
then Minister for Scotland; and Loudon, on leaving office in 1713,
obtained for his secretary the Comptrollership of Customs at Kirkcaldy—a
post worth about £100 a year.
His widow lived to a great age, and saw her boy rise step by step to the
fulness of fame. She is said to have been an over-indulgent mother; but
her devotion was repaid by the life-long love of a most tender son. Mrs.
Smith’s maiden name was Margaret Douglas, and she was the daughter of
the Laird of Strathendry, in the county of Fife. At Strathendry the
future economist had a narrow escape; for one day as he played at the
door he was picked up and carried off by a party of vagrant tinkers.
Luckily he was soon missed, pursued and overtaken in Leslie Wood; and
thus, in the grandiose dialect of Dugald Stewart, there was preserved to
the world “a genius, which was destined, not only to extend the
boundaries of science, but to enlighten and reform the commercial policy
of Europe.”
The next landmark in the boy’s history is a copy of _Eutropius_, on the
fly-leaf of which is inscribed in a childish hand, “Adam Smith, his
book, May 4th, 1733.” Before his tenth birthday, therefore, he had
already made some progress in Latin. The Burgh School of Kirkcaldy,
which he attended, was a good grammar school of the kind that already
abounded in Scotland. It was patronised by the Oswalds of Dunnikier, the
principal people of the neighbourhood. James Oswald, who soon made a
mark in politics, was Smith’s senior by some years, but they became
life-long friends. Robert Adams, the architect who planned Edinburgh
University, was another friend and schoolfellow; and so was John
Drysdale, who twice held the helm of the Scotch Church as Moderator of
its General Assembly. In 1734 the schoolboys played a moral piece
written for the purpose by the head master, David Millar. As a teacher
he had a considerable reputation, but as a dramatist he will be judged
by the title of his play, “A Royal Counsel for Advice; or Regular
Education for Boys the Foundation of all other Improvements.” Adam Smith
soon attracted notice at school “by his passion for books and by the
extraordinary powers of his memory.” Too weak and delicate to join in
active games, he was yet popular with his schoolfellows; for his temper,
“though warm, was to an uncommon degree friendly and generous.” In
company his absentmindedness was often noticed, and this habit, with a
trick of talking to himself, clung to him to the end.
In his fourteenth year Smith left the Grammar School of Kirkcaldy for
the University of Glasgow, where he was to remain until the spring of
1740. He entered, probably, in October 1737, at the beginning of the
session. As the full course extended over four sessions and Smith only
attended three, he did not take his degree; but he had the good fortune
to study Greek under Dunlop, mathematics under Simson, the editor of
Euclid, and morals under Hutcheson, perhaps the greatest philosopher of
his generation, and certainly the most eloquent.
Glasgow, though still but a small place, was already the most prosperous
and progressive of Scotch towns. After a century of decay it had found
salvation in the Act of Union, which gave it free trade with England and
a share in the colonial monopoly. Readers of _Rob Roy_ will remember how
the inimitable Jarvie enlarged upon these advantages and on the
facilities Glasgow possessed “of making up sortable cargoes for the
American market.” It was very loyal, therefore, to the House of Hanover.
In the rising of 1745, Charles Edward got considerable support from
Edinburgh, and even from Manchester, but none from Glasgow, which,
indeed, soon afterwards obtained a parliamentary vote of £10,000 in
recognition of its exertions and as compensation for its losses. Glasgow
was the only town in Scotland, as a learned writer has observed, to
exhibit the same kind of visible progress in the first half of the
eighteenth century which the rest of the country developed in the
second. Its shipping, sadly cramped by the Navigation Act, began to
expand after the Union. In 1716 the “first honest vessel in the West
India trade” sailed from the Clyde, and in 1735, two years before
Smith’s arrival, Glasgow owned sixty-seven vessels with a total burden
of 5600 tons, nearly half of the total Scotch, though only one-eightieth
of the total English tonnage.
In this rising mart Smith learned to value the English connection, and
as he trod its busy streets and watched the merchandise of the West
pouring into its warehouses, the boy saw that a new world had been
called in to enrich the old. With the new sights and sounds came new
ideas that had not yet penetrated the gloom of Holyrood or the rusty
pride of the Canongate. From the lips of his master, Hutcheson, he heard
that fruitful formula which his own philosophy was to interpret and
develop, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” His mind was
opened at once to the wisdom of the ancients and to the discoveries of
the moderns. He learned from Bacon, and Grotius, and Locke, and Newton
to discern through the obscuring mists of mediæval philosophy the
splendid dawn of science. To the end of his life he loved to recall “the
abilities and virtues of the never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Hutcheson.”
Unorthodox yet not irreligious, radical yet not revolutionary, receptive
yet inspiring, erudite yet original, Hutcheson was one of those rare
reformers whose zeal is fertilised by knowledge and enforced by
practical devotion. In early manhood he had refused to seek an easy
advancement by subscribing to the tenets of the Church of England in
Ireland, and while Smith was at Glasgow he braved the resentment of the
Presbytery by teaching moral principles which were supposed to
contravene the Westminster Confession. He was also the first in the
University to abandon the practice of lecturing in Latin; and Dugald
Stewart tells us that his old pupils were all agreed about his
extraordinary talent as a public speaker. His pen was so unequal to his
tongue that Stewart applies to Hutcheson what Quintilian said of
Hortensius: “apparet placuisse aliquid eo dicente quod legentes non
invenimus.”—“He gave a pleasure to his hearers which his readers miss.”
Hutcheson’s work in Glasgow (1730-1746) was of the utmost importance to
Scotland. “I am called the New Light here,” he said. He stood for reform
of the universities, for the criticism of abuses and privileges, for
free thought, free speech, and the spirit of inquiry. He took a lively
interest in his pupils, and tried to keep them abreast of the times. He
set Adam Smith to write an analysis of Hume’s _Treatise of Human Nature_
as soon as it appeared, and the lad of seventeen did his exercise so
well that Hume got it printed in London and had a copy of the _Treatise_
sent him by way of reward. Hutcheson has been called an eclectic.
Certainly he had read widely and thought deeply upon the difficulties
and perplexities of a new age, an age of scientific discovery and
philosophic doubt, an age tired of the syllogism, disdainful of divine
right, eager to find natural principles of morality, law, and
government. From the _System of Moral Philosophy_, published after his
death, we get a clear notion of the range of his lectures. He considered
man as a social animal, and accordingly refused to divorce the science
of individual ethics from the science of politics. He followed Aristotle
in including chapters on jurisprudence and economics in his scheme of
moral philosophy. It has been well said that the same natural liberty
and optimism which served Smith as assumptions were the theses of
Hutcheson, who himself learned much from Shaftesbury. Hutcheson and
Smith were both reformers, and were more hopeful, if less cheerful, than
Hume. Hume was a genial cynic without any zeal for reform, who found
repose in Butler’s doctrine that things are what they are, and that
their consequences will be what they will be.
But with Hutcheson and Smith it was a real religion to see that society
should be better governed; they made it the supreme object of their
lives to increase the happiness of mankind by diffusing useful truths
and exposing mischievous errors. In the scope of his philosophy, in
temper and practical aim, Smith may be called the spiritual descendant
of Hutcheson. There are also marked resemblances in their subject matter
and even in some minor points of doctrine, as a careful comparison
recently instituted by a very competent writer abundantly shows.[2] We
find Smith using the same authorities as his predecessor and quoting
them to much the same purpose. Even Hutcheson’s crude and fragmentary
economics offered many suggestions that were afterwards developed and
harmonised by Smith in his lectures. The Sunday lectures on Natural
Theology, by which Hutcheson sought to reduce the intolerance and soften
the harshness of Scottish orthodoxy, made a lasting impression upon the
mind of his great pupil.
Besides his work with Hutcheson, Smith laid at Glasgow the foundation of
an early mastery of the classics, and prepared himself for a wide course
of reading in the literature and wisdom of the ancients. But mathematics
and natural philosophy are said to have been his favourite pursuits at
this time—indeed he seems to have attained in both a considerable
proficiency, which never escaped the tenacious grip of his memory.
Matthew Stewart, Dugald’s father, was one of his fellow-students. Long
afterwards, when Professor of Mathematics in Edinburgh, he was heard
discussing with Smith “a geometrical problem of considerable
difficulty,” which had been set them as an exercise by Simson. Matthew
Stewart, who died in 1785, is commemorated with Simson in the sixth
edition of Smith’s _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, published fifty years
after this time. After observing that “mathematicians who may have the
most perfect assurance of the truth and of the importance of their
discoveries, are frequently very indifferent about the reception which
they may meet with from the public,” Adam Smith cites Dr. Robert Simson
of Glasgow, and Dr. Matthew Stewart of Edinburgh, “the two greatest
mathematicians that I ever had the honour to be known to, and I believe,
the two greatest that have lived in my time,” as men who never seemed to
feel the slightest uneasiness from the neglect with which some of their
most valuable works were received. For several years, he adds, even Sir
Isaac Newton’s _Principia_ fell flat, but his tranquillity did not
suffer for a single quarter of an hour. Newton always stood at the very
top of Smith’s calendar.
Smith left Glasgow at the early age of seventeen. His mother, acting on
the advice of her relatives, had destined the boy for the Church of
England, which then opened the door to so many lucrative positions.
Perhaps they hoped from his talents for a career like that of his famous
countryman, Bishop Burnet, who indeed had himself been a Professor of
Divinity at Glasgow. The intention went so far that in his third year
Smith sought and obtained one of those exhibitions which have taken so
many distinguished Scots from the University of Glasgow to Balliol
College, Oxford. The Snell Exhibitions, as they are called, were founded
by an old Glasgow student of that name in 1679, with a view to educating
Scots for the service of the Episcopalian Church. It chanced, however,
that during his residence at Oxford, an application made by the Oxford
authorities to compel the Snell Exhibitioners “to submit and conform to
the doctrines of the Church of England and to enter into holy orders”
was refused by the Court of Chancery; so that when the time came Smith
was able to choose his own career and to strike off from the easier road
which took his Fifeshire friend Douglas in due time to a bishopric. The
change from Glasgow to Oxford was immense. It was more than exile; it
was transmigration from a living to a dead society, from the thrill of a
rising and thriving community, where men lived and moved and thought, to
a city of dreaming spires and droning dons. In June 1740 he rode on
horseback to Oxford and matriculated on the 17th of July, entering
himself in a round schoolboy hand as “Adamus Smith, e Coll. Ball. Gen.
Fil. Jul. 7mo. 1740.”
It will be remembered that when Captain Waverley crossed the border,
five years later, on his way to join the Young Pretender, the houses of
Tully Veolan seemed miserable in the extreme, “especially to an eye
accustomed to the smiling neatness of English cottages.” Smith rode
through Carlisle, and he told Samuel Rogers in 1789 that he recollected
being much struck as he approached that town by the richness of England
and by the superiority of English agriculture. England indeed was then
remarkably prosperous, thanks to a long peace, low taxes, and good
harvests. Food was generally cheap and plentiful. Trade was good; and
better means of transit by road and canal were being developed. But the
land of the Scots, “during fifty generations the rudest perhaps of all
European nations, the most necessitous, the most turbulent, and the most
unsettled,” was still unimproved. The roads were almost impassable for
wheeled vehicles. Coaches were unknown.[3] Many of the most fertile
tracts were waste, and there is respectable authority for the opinion
that some parts of the Lowlands were worse cultivated than in the
thirteenth century. Under such conditions, rude beyond conception,
poverty was universal. Even the gentry could seldom afford such bare
comforts as half a century later their own farmers possessed. As for the
common people, clothed in the coarsest garb and starving on the meanest
fare, they dwelt in despicable huts with their cattle. It is significant
that in those days Scotland had no fatted kine. There was no market for
good meat, and the taste only grew with the means for gratifying it.
Adam Smith was fond of telling at his own table in after years, how on
the first day he dined in the hall of Balliol, having fallen into one of
his fits of absent-mindedness, he was roused by the servitor who told
him to “fall to, for he had never seen such a piece of beef in
Scotland.”
Of the hundred undergraduates then at Balliol about eight came from
Scotland, and four of these were Snell Exhibitioners. Their
peculiarities of manner and dialect marked them off from the rest of the
college, and they were treated as foreigners. Their relations with the
authorities were unpleasant. In 1744, Smith and the other Exhibitioners
stated their grievances to the Senate of Glasgow University, and
explained how their residence might be made “more easy and commodious.”
A few years afterwards, one of them told the Master that what the
Exhibitioners wanted was to be transferred to some other college on
account of their “total dislike of Balliol.” The friction between
Balliol and Glasgow lasted long, and it was no doubt his own
unsatisfactory experience that drew from Adam Smith thirty years
afterwards a strong condemnation of close scholarships.[4]
The University of Oxford was at that time and for the rest of the
century sunk deep in intellectual apathy, a muddy reservoir of sloth,
ignorance, and luxury from which men sank as by a law of gravitation
into the still lower level of civil and ecclesiastical sinecures. In the
colleges there were only degrees of badness; but the charity of Snell
had been rather unkind to Smith, for Balliol being Jacobite was
particularly rowdy and intolerant. It has been mentioned that in his
last year at Glasgow, Smith wrote for Hutcheson an abstract of David
Hume’s _Treatise of Human Nature_ which brought him a presentation copy
from the author. This copy he seems to have carried south with him; for
the Balliol authorities, it is recorded, caught Smith in the act of
reading the godless work, censured him severely, and confiscated a book
which more than a century afterwards was to be sumptuously edited by two
honoured alumni of the same college.
The narrow spirit which this incident illustrates seems to have made a
painful impression upon the student’s memory. In the _Wealth of Nations_
he complains bitterly of the compulsory “sham-lecture,” and visits with
severe censure the casuistry and sophistry by which the ancient course
of philosophy had been corrupted. This completed course, he says, was
meant to train ecclesiastics, and “certainly did not render it more
proper for the education of gentlemen or men of the world, or more
likely either to improve the understanding or to mend the heart.” At
Oxford “the greater part of the public professors have for many years
given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.” College discipline
was in general contrived “not for the benefit of the students, but for
the interests, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters.”
In England the public schools were “much less corrupted than the
universities; for in the schools a boy was taught, or at least might be
taught Greek and Latin,” whereas “in the universities the youth neither
are taught, nor always can find any proper means of being taught, the
sciences which it is the business of those incorporated bodies to
teach.” It is only fair to add that Gibbon’s experiences of Magdalen,
Bishop Butler’s of Christ Church, and Bentham’s of Queen’s, were equally
adverse. And Balliol could at least offer its undergraduates the
advantage of an excellent library. When such a cloud lay heavy upon that
ancient seat of learning, it is no wonder if Smith with his sedentary
disposition and frugal habits—he probably lived on his exhibition of
£40—should have spent his six years at Balliol in the society of its
books rather than of its tipsy undergraduates. Oxford, it has been
observed by the most diligent of his biographers, is the only place he
lived in which failed to furnish him with friends. But he never
displayed towards it the lively antipathy of Gibbon; far from regretting
his residence there, he mentioned it with gratitude many years
afterwards. In Oxford he certainly gained the liberal knowledge of
ancient and modern literature that enriches and adorns all his writings.
The bookshops must have introduced him to his favourite Pope, to Swift
and Addison, and the fashionable writers of the day. He employed himself
frequently, he used to say, in the practice of translations, especially
of French authors, in order to improve his style.
“How intimately,” writes Dugald Stewart, “he had once been conversant
with more ornamental branches of learning, in particular with the works
of the Roman, Greek, French, and Italian poets, appeared sufficiently
from the hold they kept of his memory after all the different
occupations and inquiries in which his maturer faculties had been
employed.” He had an extraordinary knowledge of English poetry, and
could quote from memory with a correctness which, says the same grave
Scot, “appeared surprising even to those whose attention had never been
directed to more important acquisitions.” What little intellectual
activity outside politics still lingered on at Oxford was probably
connected with philological speculations such as those of James Harris,
the learned, if somewhat priggish, author of _Hermes_. At any rate,
Smith went deeply into every branch of grammar. Andrew Dalzel, who was
Professor of Greek at Edinburgh in Adam Smith’s old age, often remarked
on “the uncommon degree in which Mr. Smith retained possession even to
the close of his life of different branches of knowledge which he had
long ceased to cultivate,” and particularly mentioned to his colleague
Dugald Stewart, “the readiness and correctness” of his memory on
philological subjects and his acuteness in discussing the _minutiæ_ of
Greek grammar.
Dugald Stewart failed to collect any information about Smith’s Oxford
days, but a few relics have been preserved by Lord Brougham in the
appendix to the discursive and rather disappointing essay upon Adam
Smith that appears in his _Lives of the Philosophers_. “I have now
before me,” says Brougham, “a number of Dr. Smith’s letters written when
at Oxford between the years 1740 and 1746 to his mother: they are almost
all upon mere family and personal matters; most of them indeed upon his
linen and other such necessaries, but all show his strong affection for
his parent.” The few quotations Brougham gives are barely worth
recording. On November 29, 1743, Adam Smith writes: “I am just recovered
of a violent fit of laziness, which has confined me to my elbow chair
these three months.” Again on July 2, 1744: “I am quite inexcusable for
not writing to you oftener. I think of you every day, but always defer
writing till the post is just going, and then sometimes business or
company, but oftener laziness, hinders me.” He speaks of “an inveterate
scurvy and shaking of the head” which have been perfectly cured by tar
water, “a remedy very much in vogue here for all diseases.”
His college contemporaries, says Mr. Rae, “were a singularly
undistinguished body,” with the exception of a Fifeshire man, John
Douglas, who had gone direct to Oxford from the Grammar School at
Dunbar. Douglas at first had a small exhibition at St. Mary’s Hall, but
after fighting at Fontenoy, he obtained a Snell Exhibition. He
distinguished himself later as a pamphleteer and was rewarded with the
Bishopric of Salisbury. With this exception, Adam Smith seems to have
made no friends at Oxford. Besides his books he must have enjoyed from
time to time walks and excursions into the surrounding country. In the
_Wealth of Nations_ he was able to make close comparisons of the
condition of the labouring classes in England and Scotland, and there is
a passage, about the use of coal and wood by the common people in
Oxfordshire, to show that he had certainly acquired as an undergraduate
the faculty of minute and picturesque observation which he afterwards
turned to such account.[5] What Smith did in the vacations we do not
know. He could not have had much money to spare, and there is no
indication that he ever returned home or even visited London.
At last, in August 1746, after taking his degree as a Bachelor of Arts,
he retraced his steps to Scotland, and gave up all thought of a clerical
career. In the words of his biographer, “he chose to consult in this
instance his own inclinations in preference to the wishes of his
friends; and abandoning at once all the schemes which their prudence had
formed for him, he resolved to return to his own country and to limit
his ambition to the uncertain prospect of obtaining, in time, some one
of those moderate preferments to which literary attainments lead in
Scotland.” He was now in 1746 again in his mother’s house at Kirkcaldy,
“engaged in study, but without any fixed plan for his future life.” So
far as I am aware, none of Adam Smith’s biographers has definitely
assigned to this period any of the writings which he either published or
left to his executors. In the latter class, however, there is a group of
fragments dealing with the history of Astronomy, of Ancient Physics, and
of Ancient Logic and Metaphysics, and an elaborate essay on _The
Imitative Arts_, which are collectively described by his executors in an
advertisement as “parts of a plan he once had formed for giving a
connected history of the liberal sciences and elegant arts.”[6]
The essay on _The Imitative Arts_ belongs to a different design and to a
slightly later period. But it seems clear that the _History of
Astronomy_ was composed at this time.[7] There is no other period of his
life in which he would have been so well able to collect the materials
for an examination of the systems of the Greek, the Arabian, and the
mediæval astronomers as in the six years of Oxford study, or so likely
to shape them into a finished treatise as in the two quiet years spent
at Kirkcaldy immediately after his return, when, we are told, he was
“engaged in study, but without any fixed plan for his future life.” The
_History of Astronomy_, which takes us from the schools of Thales and
Pythagoras through the systems of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo,
Kepler, and Descartes to that of Sir Isaac Newton, is complete in
itself, though from certain notes and memoranda which accompanied it
Smith’s executors were led to believe that he contemplated some further
extension.[8] It ends very appropriately with an enthusiastic
description of Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery as the greatest ever made by
man. He had acquired “the most universal empire that was ever
established in philosophy,” and was the only natural philosopher whose
system, instead of being a mere invention of the imagination to connect
otherwise discordant phenomena, appeared to contain in itself “the real
chains which nature makes use of to bind together her several
operations.” In attributing the _History of Astronomy_ to Oxford and
Kirkcaldy I except the concluding pages, which must have been added in
the last years of his life; for in a letter to Hume (1773) he spoke of
it as a history of Astronomical Systems to the time (not of Newton but)
of Descartes.
Although complete in itself, this masterly essay was plainly meant by
its author to form only one book in a great history of philosophy. It
begins with three short introductory sections, the first on surprise,
the second on wonder, and the third on the origin of philosophy. It is
the function of philosophy, he says, to discover the connecting
principles of nature, and to explain those portents which astonish or
affright mankind. He then shows that celestial appearances have always
excited the greatest curiosity, and describes with extraordinary
learning and vivacity the long series of attempts that had been made to
account for “the ways of the sky and the stars”—
“How winter suns in ocean plunge so soon,
And what delays the timid nights of June.”
_The History of Ancient Physics_, a much shorter fragment, is placed in
his collected works immediately after the _History of Astronomy_. It
evidently belongs to the same early period, but is of little interest.
Upon _The History of Ancient Logics and Metaphysics_ we shall have
something to say in our next chapter.
After two years of waiting, Adam Smith got his opportunity. His
neighbour, James Oswald of Dunnikier, had become Kirkcaldy’s
representative in Parliament, and was now a Commissioner of the Navy.
Through Oswald Smith seems to have been introduced to Henry Home (Lord
Kames), a leader of the Edinburgh Bar, and arbiter of Scottish
elegancies. Home was a warm patron of English literature, and was busily
importing it along with English ploughs and other Southern improvements
into his native land. What a contrast between this typical Scotch
patriot of 1750 and grim old Fletcher of Saltoun, the corresponding type
of 1700, whose remedy for Scottish ills was to restore slavery, and
place all labourers in the situation of salters and colliers! Finding
that Smith had acquired the accent and was well read in the prose and
poetry of England, Home encouraged him to give what we should now call
extension lectures in Edinburgh. Accordingly the young Oxford graduate
delivered a course of lectures on English literature in the winter of
1748-9, adding in the following year a course on political economy in
which he preached the doctrines of natural liberty and free trade. The
English lectures were attended by Henry Home, Alexander Wedderburn, and
William Johnstone (Sir William Pulteney), and proved no mere success of
esteem; for they brought in a clear £100, and were so popular that they
were repeated in the two following winters. The manuscript of these
lectures was burnt shortly before his death, and the world is probably
not much the poorer. Smith shared the opinions of his age, and set up
Dryden, Pope, and Gray on pedestals from which they were soon to be
thrown down by the children of nature and romance. He gave these
lectures afterwards at Glasgow, and Boswell, who attended them in 1759,
told Johnson that Smith had condemned blank verse. Johnson was
delighted, and cried out: “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.” One cannot help
wondering what would have been said if Boswell had repeated another of
our author’s critical opinions, that Johnson was “of all writers ancient
and modern the one who kept off the greatest distance from common
sense.”
The most valuable part of Adam Smith’s critical lectures has been
preserved in an essay on the _Imitative Arts_, which I should judge from
internal evidence to have been drafted at this time, but to have been
revised and improved in later years. Considering that neither Burke’s
essay on the _Sublime and Beautiful_ nor Lessing’s _Laocoon_ had then
appeared, we cannot but admire the originality he displayed in analysing
the different effects produced by sculpture, painting, music, and
dancing, and in distinguishing the different pleasures that attend the
various kinds and degrees of imitation. He works out with much ingenuity
the theory of the _difficulté surmontée_ by which Voltaire accounted for
the effect of verse and rhyme. Smith extends this principle to other
arts, and seeks, always cleverly, often successfully, to show that much
of our delight in art arises from our admiration for the artist’s skill
in overcoming difficulties. He declares that a disparity between the
imitating and the imitated object is the foundation of the beauty of
imitation. The great masters of statuary and painting never produce
their effects by deception. To prove this, he refers to the rather
unpleasing effect produced by painted statues and by the reflections of
a mirror. Photography would have supplied him with another illustration.
It may here be said that, though judged by modern standards of criticism
Smith’s taste was faulty, yet all his favourite authors are in the first
rank, and there is no instance recorded of his having bestowed praise on
anything bad either in prose or poetry. “You will learn more as to
poetry,” he once said, “by reading one good poem than by a thousand
volumes of criticism.” Wordsworth in one of his prefaces calls him most
unjustly “the worst critic, David Hume excepted, that Scotland, a soil
to which this sort of weed seems natural, has produced.” The Lake Poet,
who did not distinguish between the quality of the “Ode on the
Intimations” and “Peter Bell,” was probably thinking of some literary
anecdotes that appeared in _The Bee_ in 1791 after Smith’s death. The
writer, who may or may not be trustworthy, is only repeating table talk.
He mentions that Smith depreciated Percy’s _Reliques_ and some of
Milton’s minor poems. With regard to blank verse, Smith said: “they do
well to call it blank, for blank it is. I myself, even I, who never
could find a single rhyme in my life, could make blank verse as fast as
I could speak.” From this censure he always excepted Milton; but he
thought the English dramatists should have used rhyme like the French.
Racine’s _Phèdre_ appealed to him as the finest of all tragedies.
Voltaire was his literary pope. Oddly enough, his first publisher’s
commission was to collect and edit (anonymously, of course) for the
Foulis Press an edition of the poems of a well-known Jacobite, Hamilton
of Bangour. The book was published in 1748, and contained the “Braes of
Yarrow,” which Wordsworth called an exquisite ballad. Hamilton had
played poet laureate to the Young Pretender in 1745, and was still an
exile in France. In 1750, when the poet was pardoned, he struck up a
warm friendship with his anonymous editor, and (according to Sir John
Dalrymple) Smith spent with him “many happy and flattering hours.”
It has been said that in addition to his lectures on English literature
Smith also delivered a course on Economics. This we know from a
manuscript by which Dugald Stewart vindicates Adam Smith’s claim to have
been the original discoverer of the leading principles of political
economy. This manuscript, a paper read by Smith to a learned society
some years later, proves that he wrote, or rather dictated, his economic
lectures in 1749, and delivered them in the following winter.
At this time David Hume and James Oswald were corresponding on
commercial topics. In 1750 Hume, who was then abroad, sent Oswald his
famous essay on the _Balance of Trade_, and asked for criticism. Oswald
replied in a long letter which shows that he too held very enlightened
views on public finance, and we may be pretty certain that Smith as well
as Hume derived at this time much benefit from intercourse with Oswald.
In fact, in his preface to Oswald’s correspondence, Oswald’s grandson
boasts that he has heard Adam Smith, then the renowned author of the
_Wealth of Nations_, “dilate 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.”
Some allowance should be made for the natural exaggeration of a Scotch
kinsman; but Smith certainly rated Oswald high, describing him in the
paper above mentioned as one who combined a taste for general principles
with the detailed information of a statesman. Stewart adds that “he was
one of Mr. Smith’s earliest and most confidential friends.” They must
have seen a great deal of one another both in Kirkcaldy and Edinburgh in
the five years between his return from Oxford and the appointment we
have now to record.