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Source: Editor's Introduction to Adam Smith, Lectures On Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce, vol. IV of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985).

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Introduction

1.

The Manuscript

In The Scotsman newspaper of 1 and 2 November 1961 John M. Lothian, Reader (later titular Professor) in English in the University of Aberdeen announced his discovery and purchase, at the sale of an Aberdeenshire manor–house library in the late summer of 1958, of two volumes of manuscript ‘Notes of Dr. Smith’s Rhetorick Lectures’. They had been part of the remainder of a once extensive collection begun in the sixteenth century by William Forbes of Tolquhoun Castle, and in the late eighteenth century the property of the Forbes–Leith family of Whitehaugh, an estate brought to the Forbeses by the marriage of Anne Leith. In September 1963 Lothian published an edition of the notes as Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres Delivered in the University of Glasgow by Adam Smith, Reported by a Student in 1762–63 (Nelson).

Identification of the lecturer was easy. It had always been known that Smith gave lectures on rhetoric; his manuscript of these (Stewart, I. 17) was among those destroyed in the week before his death in obedience to the strict instructions he had given, first to Hume in 1773, then in 1787 to his literary executors Joseph Black and James Hutton. Lecture 3 of the discovered report is a shortened version of the essay on the First Formation of Languages published by Smith in 1761. Further, Lothian found later in the 1958 sale volumes 2–6 of manuscript notes of lectures on Jurisprudence, and though they bore no name they turned out to be a more elaborate version of the lectures by Smith reported in notes discovered in 1876 and published by Edwin Cannan in 1896. A search in Aberdeen junk–shops was rewarded, thanks to the extraordinary serendipity which Lothian’s friends always envied him, by the finding of the missing volume 1. These volumes have the same format and paper as the Rhetoric and the same hand as its main text.

When the Whitehaugh family acquired these manuscripts is not known. Absence of mention of them in three successive catalogues of the collection now in Aberdeen University Library has probably no significance; these are lists of printed books. No link between the Forbes–Leiths and the University of Glasgow has come to light. The most probable one is that at some point they engaged as a private tutor a youth who had been one of Adam Smith’s students and who knew that he would endear himself to his notably bookish employers by bringing them this otherwise unavailable work by a philosopher already enjoying an international reputation as the author of the Moral Sentiments. Such private tutorships were among the most usual first employments of products of the Scottish universities in the eighteenth century; and of Smith himself we learn from the obituary notice in the Gentleman’s Magazine of August 1790 (lx. 761) that ‘his friends wished to send him abroad as a travelling tutor’ when he came down from Oxford in 1746 after six years as Snell Exhibitioner at Balliol—though WN V. f. i 45 suggests that even after his happy travels with the young Duke of Buccleuch in 1764–66 he had doubts about the value of such posts. Still, both his successors in the Chair of Logic at Glasgow had held them. Of course the discovery of a Whitehaugh tutor among the graduates of, say, 1763–64 would not necessarily bring us nearer to identifying the note–taker, who may have been another student. Such notes circulated very widely at the time. Indeed, given the celebrity of this lecturer it is surprising that the Rhetoric should have turned up so far in only one version. The attempt to match the handwriting of the manuscript with a signature in the Matriculation Album of the relevant period has been thwarted by the depressing uniformity of these signatures; entrants were calligraphically on their best behaviour.

In the matter of provenance an interesting possibility is opened up by a letter from John Forbes–Leith to James Beattie, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen in 1779 about his family’s library (JML xi, quoting Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland LXXII, 1938, 252). The Rhetoric is not mentioned, but its subjectmatter lay so much in Beattie’s field of interest that one is tempted to wonder whether he was in some way instrumental in acquiring the manuscript. A similar possibility is that Smith’s successor as Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1764, Thomas Reid, who maintained his contacts with friends in Aberdeen long after his move to Glasgow, may have obtained the notes and handed them on to Whitehaugh. Reid is known to have been anxious to see notes of his predecessor’s lectures: ‘I shall be much obliged to any of you Gentlemen or to any other, who can furnish me with Notes of his Prelections whether in Morals, Jurisprudence, Police, or in Rhetorick’—so he said in his Inaugural Lecture on 10 October 1764 as preserved in Birkwood MS 2131/4/II in Aberdeen University Library.

The manuscript of the Rhetoric, now Glasgow University Library MS Gen. 95. 1 and 2, is bound in half–calf (i.e. with leather tips) and marbled boards. In the top three of the six panels of the spine is incised blind in cursive: ‘Notes of Dr. Smith’s Rhetorick Lectures: Vol. 1st.’ and ‘. . . Vol. 2nd’. The pages are not numbered; the present edition supplies numbering in the margin. The gatherings, normally of four leaves each, have been numbered on the top left corner of each first page, apparently in the same (varying) ink as the text at that point. Volume 1 has 51 gatherings, of which the 14th is a bifolium, here given the page–numbers 52a, v.52a, 53b, v.53b, to indicate that it is an insertion. Volume 2 consists of gatherings 52–114; 94 has six leaves; and 74 has a bifolium of different paper stuck in loosely between the first and second leaves with no break in the continuity of the text, and a partially erased ‘My Dear Dory’ written vertically on the inner left page, i.e. ii. v. 90 under the note about Sancho Panca. The pages measure 195 × 118 mm, but gatherings 1–4 only 168 × 106 mm (of stouter paper than the rest), and 5–15 185 × 115 mm. The watermark is LVG accompanied by a crown of varying size and a loop below it, and in some of the gatherings GR under the crown. This is the L. V. Gerrevink paper commonly used throughout much of the eighteenth century. The chain lines are vertical in all gatherings. The first page of each of the earlier gatherings is much faded, as though having lain exposed for a time before the binding was done.

Three hands, here designated A, B, and C, can be distinguished. Hand C, using a dark ink, appears in only a few places in the earlier pages, and may be that of a later owner of the manuscript: sometimes merely touching up faded letters. An appreciation of the nature and authority of the notes depends on an understanding of the activities of scribes A and B, who (especially A) were responsible for transcribing them from the jottings made in class. The scribal habits, of which the textual apparatus will furnish the evidence, rule out the possibility that the pages we have were written while the students listened.

There is an apparent contradiction between two reports of Adam Smith’s attitude to note–taking. According to his student John Millar, later Professor of Law: ‘From the permission given to students of taking notes, many observations and opinions contained in these lectures (on rhetoric) have either been detailed in separate dissertations, or engrossed in general collections, which have since been given to the public’ (Stewart I. 17). The Gentleman’s Magazine obituary (lx. 762) records that ‘the Doctor was in general extremely jealous of the property of his lectures . . . and, fearful lest they should be transcribed and published, used often to repeat, when he saw any one taking notes, that “he hated scribblers”.’ The paradox is resolved if we remember the advice given by Thomas Reid, and by many a university teacher before and since, that those who write most in class understand least, ‘but those who write at home after carefull recollection, understand most, and write to the best Purpose’, and that this reflective reconstruction of what has been heard is precisely what a philosophical discourse requires (Birkwood MS 2131/8/III). The general success with which our scribes grasped the structure and tenor of Smith’s course, as well as much of the detail, exemplifies what Reid had in mind. Even the exasperated admissions of failure—‘I could almost say damn it’, ‘Not a word more can I remember’ (ii. 38, 44)—confirm the method by which they are working. In some cases the scribe begins his transcription with a heading which will recall the occasion as well as the matter, as when he notes that Smith delivered Lectures 21 and 24 ‘without Book’ or ‘sine Libro’; and he is careful to give Lecture 12, the hinge between the two halves of the course, the title ‘Of Composition’ because it begins the discussion of the various species of writing.

Our manuscript is the result of a continuous collaboration between two students intent on making the notes as full and accurate a record of Smith’s words as their combined resources can produce. The many slips and gaps which remain should not blind us to the great pains taken. Working from fairly full jottings, Scribe A writes the basic text on the recto pages (except, oddly, i. 18–68 when he uses the verso pages), and thereafter two kinds of revision take place. He corrects and expands the text, writing the revision above the line when only a word or two are involved. Unfortunately the additions of this kind are far too numerous to be specially signalized without overburdening the textual apparatus, and they have been silently incorporated in the text. In any case it is impossible to distinguish those added currente calamo from those added later, except of course where the interlined words replace a deletion (and these are always noted here). When the addition is too lengthy to be inserted between lines, Scribe A writes them on the facing page (i.e. a verso page, except at i. 18–68) at the appropriate point, and often keys them in with x or some other symbol. All such additions on the facing page are, in this edition, enclosed in brace brackets { }. Scribe A’s sources for his additional materials no doubt varied; some of it was certainly ‘recollected in tranquillity’ as Reid would have recommended; some of it such a tirelessly conscientious student would acquire by consultation with a fellow–student, or perhaps one of the sets of notes in circulation from a previous year. There is reason to think that some of the material had simply been inadvertently omitted at the first transcription.

The second revision, much less extensive but very useful, is Scribe B’s. Apart from a few corrections of A’s words, B makes two sorts of contribution. He fills in a good many of the blanks clearly left by A with this in view—alas, not enough, though he is obviously in many ways better informed than A. This comes out also in the sometimes substantial notes he writes on the verso page facing A’s text, with supplementary illustration and explanation of the points there treated. These are enclosed in { }, with a footnote assigning them to Hand B. They raise the same question of source as A’s notes. From the fact that B never himself deletes or alters what he has written and generally arranges his lines so as to end exactly within a certain space, e.g. opposite the end of a lecture (i. v. 116; ii. v. 18), we may deduce that he is working from a tidy original or fair copy: another set of notes? The order in which A and B wrote their inserted matter varied: at i. 46 A’s note is squeezed into space left by B’s, and similarly at ii. v. 30 and elsewhere: but normally B’s notes are clearly later than A’s, as at i. v. 146, and at ii. v. 101 B’s note is squeezed between two of A’s although the second of these was written (in different ink) later than the first.

There is a noticeable falling–off in verso–page notes from about Lecture 16 onwards: inexplicable, unless Scribe A was becoming more adept in transcription. Certainly the report of the last lecture is much the longest of them all, but Smith probably, like most lecturers, used more than the hour this time in order to finish his course. Scribe A relieved the tedium of transcription by occasional lightheartedness. There is the doodled caricature of a face (meant to resemble Smith’s?) ‘This is a picture of uncertainty’, at ii. 67: at ii. 166 ‘WFL’, i.e. ‘wait for laugh’, is inserted then deleted; at ii. 224 the habitual spelling ‘tho’ is for once expanded by the addition of ‘ugh’ below the line. Of special interest is the added note at i. 196 recording the witticism of ‘Mr Herbert’ about Adam Smith’s notorious absent–mindedness. The joke about Smith must have been made just after the lecture and the note added shortly after the transcription in this case.

Henry Herbert (1741–1811), later Baron Porchester and Earl of Carnarvon, was a gentleman–boarder in Smith’s house throughout the session 1762–3. On 22 February 1763 Smith wrote to Hume introducing him as ‘very well acquainted with your works’ and anxious to meet Hume in Edinburgh (Letter 70). Hume (71) found him ‘a very promising young man’, but refers to him on 13 September 1763 (75) as ‘that severe Critic, Mr Herbert’. There is a letter from Herbert to Smith (74) dated 11 September 1763.

To suggest that Herbert may have been the source of at least some of the additional notes would be an unwarranted use of Occam’s razor. No one enjoying this degree of familiarity with the lecturer and consulting him on the content of the lectures would have left so many blanks unfilled; and Smith would certainly not knowingly have helped to compile notes of his talks. It is also worth noting that the Rhetoric lectures, unlike those on Jurisprudence etc. (see LJ 14–15), were not followed by an ‘examination’ hour in which additional points might be picked up.

The well–marked scribal habits of Scribe A point to his having suffered from a defect of eyesight, some sort of stenopia or tunnelvision. He is prone to various forms of haplography, omission of a word or syllable which resembled its predecessor: ‘if I may so’ (say omitted), ‘coing’ (coining), ‘possed’ (possessed). He writes ‘on the hand’, adds r to the, and imagines he has written ‘other’. Angle brackets have been used for omissions here supplied. There are frequent repetitions of word or phrase; these have been enclosed in square brackets [ ]. There are innumerable instances of anticipation of words or phrases lying ahead: most of these have been corrected by the scribe when his eye returns to his original jottings. In one case he anticipates a phrase from the beginning of the following lecture (i. 116, 117), showing that on this occasion he had allowed a weekend to pass before transcribing Lectures 8 and 9—Friday and Monday, 3 and 6 December. He often tries to hold in his mind too long a passage, writing words that convey the sense and having to change them, when on going back to his jottings he finds the proper words. He starts to write ‘object’ and has to change it to ‘design’. Most of the many overwritten words in the manuscript are examples of this, and unfortunately it is seldom possible to decipher the original word; where it is, it has been noted. The scribe’s memory of the drift of Smith’s meaning no doubt played a part; but here as elsewhere he is eager to record the master’s ipsissima verba. He frequently reverses the order of words and phrases and restores the proper order by writing numbers above them.

The aim of the present edition has been to allow the reader to judge for himself the nature of the manuscript by presenting it as fully as print will allow; but in the interests of legibility several compromises have been made. Where the punctuation is erratic or accidental it has been normalized: e.g. commas separating subject from verb, ‘is’ from its complement, a conjunction from its clause, and the like. The original paragraphing has been retained where it clearly exists and is intended. Not all initial capitals have been retained. The scribe usually employs them for emphasis or to convey an impression of a technical or special use of a word; but in ‘Some’, ‘Same’, ‘Such’, ‘with Regard to’, ‘in Respect to’, ‘for my Part’, ‘for this Reason’, etc., the capital has been ignored. Frequently used abbreviations have been silently expanded: such are y^s (this), y^m (them), y^r (their), yⁿ (than), y^se (those), nëyr (neither), oy^r (other), Bröy^r (Brother), p̈t (part), ag̈st (against), figs (figures), dïs (divisions), nom̈ve (nominative), and others of similar type. It has not been possible to record the many changes of ink, pen, and style of writing (from copperplate to hurried), though these are no doubt indicative of the circumstances in which Scribe A was working. The misnumbering of Lecture 5 onwards has been corrected, and noted.

To sum up the textual notation used:

2.

The Lectures

The notes we have date from what was apparently the fifteenth winter in which Adam Smith lectured on rhetoric. Disappointed of a travelling tutorship on coming down from Balliol, and after two years at home in Kirkcaldy in 1746–8, he ‘opened a class for teaching rhetorick at Edinburgh’, as the obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine (Aug. 1790, lx. 762) puts it; and it goes on to remark on an advantage enjoyed by Smith and frequently to be noticed in later years: ‘His pronunciation and his style were much superior to what could, at that time, be acquired in Scotland only’. The superiority was often (as by Sir James Mackintosh in introducing the second edition of the 1755–6 Edinburgh Review in 1818) ascribed to the influence of the speech of his Glasgow Professor Francis Hutcheson, as well as to his six Oxford years. His awareness of language as an activity had certainly been sharpened by both experiences of different modes—differences so often embarrassing to his fellow–countrymen, speakers and writers alike, in the mid–century. The Edinburgh Review no. 1 named as one of the obstacles to the progress of science in Scotland ‘the difficulty of a proper expression in a country where there is no standard of language, or at least one very remote’ (EPS 229); and two years later, on 2 July 1757, Hume observes in a letter to Gilbert Elliott of Minto (Letter 135, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 1932) that we ‘are unhappy, in our Accent and Pronunciation, speak a very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of’. The background of desire for ‘self–improvement’ and the part played by the many societies in Edinburgh and elsewhere are described in JML xxiii–xxxix, and D. D. McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement (1969). Smith ‘teaching rhetorick’ in 1748 was the right man at the right moment.

In the absence of advertisement or notice of the lectures in the Scots Magazine (these would have been unusual at this time: not so ten years later) we do not know exact dates; but A. F. Tytler in his Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, containing sketches of the Progress of Literature and General Improvement in Scotland during the greater part of the eighteenth century (1807: i. 190) gives this account:

It was by his [sc. Kames’s] persuasion and encouragement, that Mr Adam Smith, soon after his return from Oxford, and when he had abandoned all views towards the Church, for which he had been originally destined, was induced to turn his early studies to the benefit of the public, by reading a course of Lectures on Rhetoric and the Belles Lettres. He delivered those lectures at Edinburgh in 1748, and the two following years, to a respectable auditory, chiefly composed of students in law and theology; till called to Glasgow. . . .

The ‘auditory’ included Alexander Wedderburn (who edited The Edinburgh Review 1755–6), William Johnston (who became Sir William Pulteney), James Oswald of Dunnikeir (a boyhood friend of Smith’s from Kirkcaldy), John Millar, Hugh Blair, ‘and others, who made a distinguished figure both in the department of literature and in public life’. When on 10 January 1751 Smith wrote (Letter 8) to the Clerk of Senate at Glasgow accepting appointment to the Chair of Logic there and explaining that he could not immediately take up his duties because of his commitments to his ‘friends here’, i.e. in Edinburgh, the plural shows that he had sponsors for his lectures besides Kames, and it has been supposed that these were James Oswald and Robert Craigie of Glendoick. There is independent evidence that at least in his last year at Edinburgh if not earlier he also lectured on jurisprudence; but Tytler is quite clear on the duration of the rhetoric course; and after Smith’s departure for Glasgow a rhetoric course continued to be given by Robert Watson till his departure for the Chair of Logic at St Andrews in 1756. This was only the beginning: one of Smith’s first ‘auditory’, Hugh Blair, on 11 December 1759, began a course on the same subject in the University of Edinburgh, which conferred the title of Professor on him in August 1760 and appointed him to a new Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (destined to become in effect the first Chair of English Literature in the world) on 7 April 1762. Smith’s original lectures were presumably delivered in one of the Societies, the Philosophical being the most likely because since the ’45 its ordinary activities had been suspended, and Kames would have seen the courses as a way of keeping it alive. In 1737 Colin Maclaurin, Professor of Mathematics (see Astronomy IV. 58), was instrumental in broadening the Society’s scope to include literature and science.

When Adam Smith arrived in Glasgow in October 1751 to begin teaching as Professor of Logic and Rhetoric he found his duties augmented owing to the illness of Thomas Craigie, the Professor of Moral Philosophy, the work of whose classes was to be shared by Smith and three other professors. We hardly need evidence to prove that, hard–pressed as he was, he would fall back on his Edinburgh materials, including the Rhetoric, which it was his statutory duty to teach. Craigie died in November and his Chair was filled by the translation to it of Smith in April 1752. Throughout the eighteenth century the ordinary or ‘public’ class of Moral Philosophy met at 7.30 a.m. for lectures on ethics, politics, jurisprudence, natural theology, and then at 11 a.m. for an ‘examination’ hour to ensure that the lecture had been understood. A ‘private’ class, sometimes called a ‘college’, attended by those who had already in the previous year taken the public class and were now attending that for the second time—or even third—but not the examination class, met at noon, normally three days a week. Each professor used the private class for a course on a subject of special interest to himself. Hutcheson had lectured on Arrian, Antoninus (Marcus Aurelius), and other Greek philosophers; Thomas Reid on the powers of the mind.

Adam Smith chose for his private class the first subject he had ever taught, Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Here a question arises. Rhetoric was now in the domain of his successor in the Chair of Logic, James Clow. There is no record of a protest from Clow, as there was in Edinburgh from John Stevenson, who had been teaching logic and rhetoric for thirty–two years when Blair’s Chair was founded. Several explanations suggest themselves, apart from personal good–will. The phrase ‘Belles Lettres’, though it did not mollify Stevenson, differentiated in a decisive way the two Glasgow courses. Clow’s emphasis seems to have rested on rhetorical analysis of passages, in keeping with the discipline of logic (see JML xxx quoting Edinburgh Univ. Lib. MS DC 8, 13). More important, at Glasgow a public class was not the offender. In any case Smith’s rhetoric students had attended Clow’s class two years before, and the opportunity (which Smith knew they enjoyed) of making correlations can only have been philosophically beneficial. Similar opportunities were opened by their hearing at the same time—and having already heard—Smith’s discourses on ethics and jurisprudence. The lectures on history and on judicial eloquence would be illustrated by those on public and private law. And we must not forget that these students were simultaneously studying natural philosophy, theoretical and practical, the fifth year subjects of the Glasgow Arts curriculum. Such juxtapositions were then as now among the great benefits of the Scottish University system, and without them Scotland would not have made the mark she did in philosophy in Adam Smith’s century. In particular, Smith’s students must have noted the multi–faceted relationship between the ethics and rhetoric, in three broad areas. First, Smith employed many of the general principles stated in TMS in illustrating the different forms of communication: for example, our admiration for the great (ii. 107 and below, section 4), or for hardships undergone with firmness and constancy (ii. 100). Smith also drew attention to the influence of environment on forms and modes of expression (ii. 113–16, 142 ff., 152 ff.) in a manner which would be familiar to those who had already heard his treatment of the rules of conduct. Secondly, Smith’s students would note the points at which the rhetoric elaborated on the discussion of the role of sympathy and the nature of moral judgement and persuasion (cf. TMS I. i. 3–4; cf. 18–19 below). The character of the man of sensibility is strikingly developed in Lecture XXX (ii. 234 ff.) while the argument as a whole implies that the spoken discourse could on some occasions affect moral judgement. Thirdly, Smith’s students would perceive that the arguments developed in the lectures on rhetoric complement the analysis of TMS, where it is remarked that:

We may judge of the propriety or impropriety of the sentiments of another person by their correspondence or disagreement with our own, upon two different occasions; either, first, when the objects which excite them are considered without any peculiar relation, either to ourselves or to the person whose sentiments we judge of; or, secondly, when they are considered as peculiarly affecting one or other of us’

(TMS, I.i.4.1).

Objects which lack a peculiar relation include ‘the expression of a picture, the composition of a discourse . . . all the general subjects of science and taste’.

Smith’s lecturing timetable is set out in LJ 13–22, with references to the sources of our information. On the Rhetoric lectures, two accounts by men who had heard them show with what clarity they were remembered more than thirty years later. The first was given by John Millar, Professor of Law, who had heard them both in Edinburgh and Glasgow, to Dugald Stewart for a memoir of Smith to be delivered at the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1793 (Stewart I. 16):

In the Professorship of Logic, to which Mr. Smith was appointed on his first introduction into this University, he soon saw the necessity of departing widely from the plan that had been followed by his predecessors, and of directing the attention of his pupils to studies of a more interesting and useful nature than the logic and metaphysics of the schools. Accordingly, after exhibiting a general view of the powers of the mind, and explaining so much of the ancient logic as was requisite to gratify curiosity with respect to an artificial method of reasoning, which had once occupied the universal attention of the learned, he dedicated all the rest of his time to the delivery of a system of rhetoric and belles–lettres. The best method of explaining and illustrating the various powers of the human mind, the most useful part of metaphysics, arises from an examination of the several ways of communicating our thoughts by speech, and from an attention to the principles of those literary compositions which contribute to persuasion or entertainment. By these arts, every thing that we perceive or feel, every operation of our minds, is expressed and delineated in such a manner, that it may be clearly distinguished and remembered. There is, at the same time, no branch of literature more suited to youth at their first entrance upon philosophy than this, which lays hold of their taste and their feelings.

The second report, written after 1776 in a letter from James Wodrow, Library Keeper at the University of Glasgow from 1750 to 1755, to the Earl of Buchan and preserved in Glasgow Univ. Lib. Murray Collection (Buchan Correspondence, ii. 171), reads:

Adam Smith delivered a set of admirable lectures on language (not as a grammarian but as a rhetorician) on the different kinds or characteristics of style suited to different subjects, simple, nervous, etc., the structure, the natural order, the proper arrangement of the different members of the sentence etc. He characterised the style and the genius of some of the best of the ancient writers and poets, but especially historians, Thucydides, Polybius etc. translating long passages of them, also the style of the best English classics, Lord Clarendon, Addison, Swift, Pope, etc; and, though his own didactic style in his last famous book (however suited to the subject) — the style of the former book was much superior—was certainly not a model for good writing, yet his remarks and rules given in the lectures I speak of, were the result of a fine taste and sound judgement, well calculated to be exceedingly useful to young composers, so that I have often regretted that some part of them has never been published.

With this stricture on the style of WN, incidentally, may be compared the remark made by Lord Monboddo to Boswell that though Smith came down from Oxford a good Greek and Latin scholar, from the style of WN ‘one would think that he had never read any of the Writers of Greece or Rome’ (Boswell, Private Papers, ed. Scott and Pottle, xiii. 92); and even his friends Hume, Millar and Blair took this view. On the other hand John Ramsay of Ochtertyre (Scotland and Scotsmen in the eighteenth Century, published 1888, i. 462) thought that in view of the purity and elegance with which he ordinarily wrote it was ‘no wonder, then, that his lectures should be regarded as models of composition’. A kindred activity of Smith’s in his Glasgow days is recorded in the Foulis Press Papers, extracted by W. J. Duncan in Notes and Documents illustrative of the Literary History of Glasgow (Maitland Club 1831, 16): in January 1752 he had helped to found a Literary Society in the University, and ‘he read papers to this society on Taste, Composition and the History of Philosophy which he had previously delivered while a lecturer on rhetoric in Edinburgh’. Of these, two were parts I and II of the essay on the Imitative Arts—this on the evidence of John Millar who was a member of the Society (EPS 172)—an essay which Smith told Reynolds he intended publishing ‘this winter’, i.e. 1782–3 (Reynolds, letter of 12 September 1782, in Correspondence of James Boswell, ed. C. N. Fifer, Yale UP 1976, 126).

What modifications the lectures on rhetoric underwent between 1748 and the session in which our notes were taken it is almost impossible to determine. There are few datable post–1748 references. Macpherson’s Ossian imitations, ‘lately published’ (ii. 113), appeared in 1760, 1762, 1763. Gray’s two Pindaric odes, if the reference at ii. 96 includes them, belong to 1757; the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, of which Smith became so fond, to 1751; Shenstone’s Pastoral Ballad to 1755. Rousseau’s Discours (i. 19) appeared in 1755 and was discussed by Smith in the Edinburgh Review no. 2 (EPS 250–4). All of these references, except perhaps the last, could easily have been inserted without radical revision of the text. The unmistakable reference to Hume’s History of England at ii. 73, whether we read ‘so’ or (‘10’ in the added marginal note, raises a complex question. The History appeared in instalments, working backwards chronologically, in 1754, 1757, 1759, and was completed in 1762, after which date the reference becomes relevant. On 12 January 1763 Smith must have read out what had stood in his manuscript for some years, and then in the last moments of the lecture made an impromptu correction when recollecting a friend’s very recent publication. Why this afterthought is also recorded by Scribe A in an afterthought is perhaps not in the circumstances all that mysterious.

The general continuity of the lecture–course from 1748 to 1763, details apart, is established by its structure and by the set of central principles which inform all twentynine reported lectures and which could not have been added or superimposed on the argument at some intermediate stage of its development. Basic to the whole is the division into ‘an examination of the several ways of communicating our thoughts by speech’ and ‘an attention to the principles of those literary compositions which contribute to persuasion or entertainment’.

To set this out in summary: first section, linguistic: (a) Language, communication, expression (Lectures 2–7, i. 85); (b) Style and character (Lectures 7–11).—Second section, the species of composition: (a) Descriptive (Lectures 12–16); (b) Narrative or historical (Lectures 17–20); (c) Poetry (Lecture 21); (d) Demonstrative oratory, i.e. panegyric (Lectures 22–23); (e) Didactic or scientific (Lecture 24); (f) Deliberative oratory (Lectures 25–27); (g) Judicial or forensic oratory (Lectures 28–30).

Two features of the course enable us to make a plausible guess at the contents of the introductory lecture—whose absence, by the way, tends to prove that this set of notes was not prepared with a view to sale. At the heart of Smith’s thinking, his doctrine, and his method of presentation (the three are always related) is the notion of the chain (see ii. 133 and cf. Astronomy II. 8–9)—articulated continuity, sequence of relations leading to illumination. Leave no chasm or gap in the thread: ‘the very notion of a gap makes us uneasy’ (ii. 36). The orator ‘puts the whole story into a connected narration’; the great art of an orator is to throw his argument ‘into a sort of a narration, filling up in the manner most suitable . . .’ (ii. 206, 197). The art of transition is a vital matter (i. 146). Smith is concerned with this on the strategic level just as contemporary writers on Milton and Thomson were on the imaginative. As a lecturer, giving an exhibition of the very craft he is discussing, he insists that his listeners know where they have been and where they are going. Dugald Stewart notes in his Life of Thomas Reid that ‘neither he nor his immediate predecessor ever published any general prospectus of their respective plans; nor any heads or outlines to assist their students in tracing the trains of thought which suggested their various transitions’ (1802: 38–9). In Smith’s case the frequent signposts would have made such a prospectus superfluous, and readers of the lectures are more likely to complain of being led by the hand than of bafflement. What all this amounts to is that the opening themephrase ‘Perspicuity of stile’ must have been clearly led up to.

The other habit of Smith’s gives a clue to how this may have been done. He often shows his impatience with intricate subdivisions and classifications of his subject, such as had long made rhetoric a notoriously scholastic game. La Bruyère speaks of ‘un beau sermon’ made according to all the rules of the rhetoricians, with the cognoscenti in the preacher’s audience following with admiration ‘toutes les énumérations où il se promène’. But though Smith thinks it all very silly and refers anyone so inclined to read about it in Quintilian, his teacherly conscience compels him to ensure that his students have heard of the old terms. Lecture 1 no doubt defined the scope of this course by saying what it was not going to include. At least since the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium early in the first century B.C. the orator’s art had been divided into invention, arrangement, expression, memory, and delivery; Quintilian’s words (Institutio Oratoria III. iii. 1; and passim) are inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio or actio. Smith in effect sees only the second and third as important, the third (style) occupying Lectures 2–11, the second underlying virtually all that Lectures 12–30 discuss.

It is to be hoped that for the sake of clarity one other traditional division was at least mentioned. As early as i. 12 ‘the didactick stile’ is compared with that of historians and orators, and the phrase and the comparison occur repeatedly throughout the lectures as if their meaning was already known. The central place occupied in Smith’s whole conception of discourse by the ‘didactick stile’ becomes clear in the lecture (24) devoted to it, where it emerges as not only a mode of expression but as a procedure of thought: the scientific (ii. 132–5), that concerned with the exposition of a system, the clarification of a multitude of phenomena by one known or proved principle. Perhaps this was too early in the course; but the analogy with music set out in Imitative Arts II. 29 (see below, section 5) by which many notes are related both to a leading or key–note and a succession of notes or ‘song’, and the observation that this is like ‘what order and method are to discourse’, would have proved helpful to the many who, then as later, find it harder to apprehend pattern in language than in sound or colour. Smith makes things harder by equating, at i. 152, the ancient (indeed Aristotelian) division of speeches into Demonstrative, Deliberative, Judicial, with his own philosophical division into narrative, didactic, rhetorical (i. 149). This, it must be admitted, involves some straining. ‘It is rather reverence for antiquity than any great regard for the Beauty or usefullness of the thing itself which makes me mention the Antient divisions of Rhetorick’ (i. 152); but in this case he could have been less scrupulous, since Quintilian (III. iv) asks ‘why three?’ rather than a score of others. He is echoing Cicero; and Jean–François Marmontel, author of the literary articles in the Encyclopédie vols 3–7 and Supplément (collected in Eléments de Littérature, 1787) pours scorn on the terms themselves: Deliberative speech, where the orator exerts all his energy to proving to the meeting that there is nothing at all to deliberate; Demonstrative, which demonstrates nothing but flattery or hatred (and, he should have added, the orator’s virtuosity—not showing but showing off); Judicial, aiming at demonstrating, and leaving it all to the judges’ deliberation. In any case Smith in the end does not scrap the ancient divison but simply adds the Didactic to it: Lectures 22–30.

By chance our notes begin at what Smith thought of first importance: style, language. ‘Nobis prima sit virtus perspicuitas’ said Quintilian (VIII. ii. 22, echoing Aristotle’s σαϕὴς λέξις, Rhetoric III. ii. 1), and defined the main ingredient in perspicuity as proprietas, each thing called by its own, its properly belonging name. The root meaning of perspicuity is the quality of being seen through, and the subject of Smith’s lectures may be said to be what it is that language allows to show through it, and how. For Smith there is much more to this transparence than the handing over of facts or feelings, and the first paragraph introduces some of this. Words are no mere convenience; they are natives of a community, as citizens are—and as i. 5–6 shows, of a particular part of the community. The Abbé du Bos devoted I. xxxvii of Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719) to showing the kind of force the words of our own language have on our minds. When an English–reading Frenchman meets the word God it is to the word Dieu and all its associations that his emotions respond.

A more immediate motive for this paragraph can best be indicated by a well–known story about the poet of the Seasons. After completing his Arts course at Edinburgh, James Thomson’s first exercise in the Faculty of Divinity was the preparation of a sermon on the Jod section of Psalm cxix. When he read it to his class on 27 October 1724 it was severely criticised by his professor, William Hamilton, for its grandiloquence of style, quite unsuitable for any congregation. Thomson, discouraged, gave up his studies, went off to London, and spent his life writing poems whose highly Latinate diction has often been remarked on: as was that of his fellow–countrymen in his own century. The Scoticisms against which Scottish writers were put on their guard, as by Hume and Beattie, were partly of this kind, and have been attributed to the Latin base of Scots Law as well as of Scottish education. Hutcheson was the first professor at Glasgow to lecture in English, and this, quite apart from his teaching, was seen as a help to the students in unlearning their linguistic tendencies. A. F. Tytler (Kames, i. 163) emphasises the influence of another Scottish professor in the same direction, that of the Edinburgh mathematician Colin Maclaurin, his ‘pure, correct and simple style inducing a taste for chasteness of expression . . . a disrelish of affected ornaments’. Scots youths were encouraged towards ‘an ease and elegance of composition as a more engaging vehicle for subjects of taste, in the room of the dry scholastic style in which they had hitherto been treated’. They were ‘attracted to the more pleasing topics of criticism and the belles lettres. The cultivation of style became an object of study’, replacing the ancient school dialectics. This, if only Tytler had provided evidence and illustration, would parallel the linguistic programme of the Royal Society as outlined by Sprat in its History in 1667: ‘this trick of Metaphors’, ‘those specious Tropes and Figures’, to be replaced by positive expressions ‘bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness as they can’.

A much wider context for Smith’s lectures is thus created, though we must not forget the immediate one suggested by i. 103: ‘We in this country are most of us very sensible that the perfection of language is very different from that we commonly speak in’. Periodically throughout the history of style there occur combats between the respective upholders of the plain and the elaborate: Plato versus the sophist Gorgias; Calvus charging Cicero with ‘Asianic’ writing as opposed to Attic purity. Smith’s teaching comes at such a moment. While he was a student John Constable’s Reflections upon accuracy of style enjoyed something of a vogue. Not published till 1734 (reprinted 1738), this attack on the highly figurative language of Jeremy Collier’s Essays (1697) had been written in 1701; and in the meantime Collier’s ‘huddle of metaphors’ and conceits had been sharply criticized in John Oldmixon’s adaptation of the influential La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (1687) by Dominique Bouhours—The arts of Logick and Rhetorick (1728). Behind all of them lies another combat: the Chevalier de Méré’s strictures on the verbal extravagances of Voiture in De la Justesse (1671), which gave Constable his title. These oppositions are of many kinds, and all differ from the one Smith sets up between the lucidity of Swift and the ‘pompousness’ of Shaftesbury—the shaping motive of much of Lectures 7–11. This is perhaps the earliest appreciation of Swift as writer; political and quasi–moral objections prevented his critical recognition till late in the century. Smith’s admiration rests on something central in the Rhetoric: ‘All his works show a complete knowledge of his Subject . . . One who has such a complete knowledge of what he treats will naturally arange it in the most proper order’ (i. 105–6). Shaftesbury is a dilettante and does not know enough. Above all he has not kept up with modern scientific advances; he makes up for superficiality and ignorance by ornament (i. 140–1, 144). That his letters ‘have no marks of the circumstances the writer was in at the time he wrote. Nor any reflections peculiarly suited to the times and circumstances’ is the most telling fault. The writing does not belong anywhere or to any one.

It is his criticism of the reverence paid to the figures of speech (whether departures from normal use of word, figurae verborum; or unusual modes of presentation, figurae sententiarum—Cicero, Orator xxxix–xl; Quintilian IX. i–iii; Rhetorica ad Herennium Book IV) that leads Smith to his decisive formulations of beauty of language. ‘When the sentiment of the speaker is expressed in a neat, clear, plain and clever manner, and the passion or affection he is possessed of and intends, by sympathy, to communicate to his hearer, is plainly and cleverly hit off, then and then only the expression has all the force and beauty that language can give it’. Figures of speech may or may not do the job. See i. 56, 73, 79. ‘The expression ought to be suited to the mind of the author, for this is chiefly governed by the circumstances he is placed in’. Language is organically related not merely to thought in the abstract (see section 3 below); it bears ‘the same stamp’ as the speaker’s nature. Ben Jonson, writing about 1622 (Timber or Discoveries), observed: ‘Language most shewes a man: speake, that I may see thee. It springs out of the most retired and inmost parts of us, and is the Image of the Parent of it, the mind. No glasse renders a mans forme or likeness so true as his speech’.

The discussion of this relationship is introduced by a nice piece of Smithian economy. The character–sketches of the plain and the simple man not only illustrate two styles and lead on to Swift and Temple (i. 85–95); they offer the student models of ethologia, the form prescribed (according to Quintilian I. ix. 3) to pupils in rhetoric as an exercise, and they prepare for the instruction in character–drawing in Lecture 15 and the discussion of the Character as a genre—invented by Theophrastus, edited by Isaac Casaubon in 1592, introduced in England by Joseph Hall in 1608, and practised by La Bruyere, who is Smith’s favourite because his collection is a microcosm of society and of mankind. When Hugh Blair, as he tells us, was lent the manuscript of Smith’s lectures (he no doubt remembered hearing this passage) when preparing his own, it was from these ethologiae that he drew hints: ‘On this head, of the General Characters of Style, particularly, the Plain and the Simple, and the characters of those English authors who are classed under them, in this, and the following Lecture, several ideas have been taken from a manuscript treatise on rhetoric, part of which was shown to me, many years ago, by the learned and ingenious author, Dr Adam Smith; and which, it is hoped, will be given by him to the Public’ (Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 1783, i. 381). The Theophrastan form influenced the historians; see the collection Characters of the Seventeenth Century, ed. D. Nichol Smith (1920). It is significant that the first critic to publish a series of studies of Shakespeare’s characters, William Richardson, the Glasgow Professor of Humanity from 1773, was a student of Adam Smith’s; his A philosophical analysis and illustration of some of Shakespeare’s remarkable characters appeared in 1774, and two more volumes in 1784 and 1788.

Boswell, another student who heard the Rhetoric lectures (in 1759), was struck by Smith’s emphasis on the personal aspects of writers, and he twice recalled the remark about Milton’s shoes (absent from our report; it should have come at ii. 107): ‘I remember Dr. Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes, instead of buckles’ (Journal of a tour to the Hebrides §9). ‘I have a pleasure in hearing every story, tho’ never so little, of so distinguished a Man. I remember Smith took notice of this pleasure in his lectures upon Rhetoric, and said that he felt it when he read that Milton never wore buckles but strings in his shoes’ (Boswell Papers i. 107). Such was the training of the future author of the greatest of all biographies of a man of letters. In no. 1 of the Spectator (1 March 1711) Addison ‘observed, that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure ’till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of a like nature, that conduce very much to the right Understanding of an Author’. John Harvey included in his Collection of Miscellany Poems and Letters (1726: 84–88) a parody of this Spectator, with a fictitious life of himself.

Beauty of style, then, is propriety in the exact sense of the word: language which embodies and exhibits to the reader that distinctive turn and quality of spirit in the author ‘qui lui est propre’, as Marivaux insisted in the Spectateur français, 8e feuille (8 September 1722). Our pleasure is, as Hutcheson noted in his Inquiry into the original of our ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725: I. sec. IV. vii), in recognizing a perfect correspondence or aptness in a curious mechanism for the execution of a design. It is characteristic of Smith that his aesthetics should thus centre on correspondence, relation, affinity. What he finds wrong with Shaftesbury’s style is that he arbitrarily made it up; it has nothing to do with his own character (i. 137–8). When the principle is extended from persons to societies—‘all languages . . . are equally ductile and equally accommodated to all different tempers’—very wide and illuminating prospects open up. Good examples are Trajan’s Rome as formative background for Tacitus (Lecture 20), the comparison of Athens and Rome as contexts for Demosthenes and Cicero (Lecture 26), and the association of the rise of prose with the growth of commerce and wealth (ii. 144 ff.). Indeed the accounts of historical writing and of the three types of oratory are made the occasions for elaborate excursus on different kinds of social and political organization, ancient and modern.

‘By sympathy’ (i. v. 56): this phrase in the formulation of the highest beauty language can attain is one of the very few which Scribe A underlines, and pains had clearly been taken by Smith to bring out the parallel between his ethical and rhetorical principles. Just as we act under the eye of an impartial spectator within ourselves, the creation of an imaginative self–projection into an outsider whose standards and responses we reconstruct by sympathy or ability to feel as he does, so our language is enabled to communicate our thoughts and ‘affections’ (i.e. inclinations) by our ability to predict its effect on our hearer. This is what is meant by seeing the Rhetoric and TMS as two halves of one system, and not merely at occasional points of contact. The connection of ‘sympathy’ as a rhetorical instrument with the vision of speech and personality as an organic unity need not be laboured. Again, it should be obvious how often Smith’s concern is with the sharing of sentiments and attitudes rather than mere ideas or facts. The arts of persuasion are close to his heart for this reason. The opening of Lecture 11 is a key passage. The conveying to a hearer of ‘the sentiment, passion or affection with which [his thought] affects him’—‘the perfection of stile’—is regulated by a ‘Rule, which is equally applicable to conversation and behaviour as writing’; ‘all the Rules of Criticism and morality when traced to their foundation, turn out to be some Principles of Common Sence which every one assents to’. One of the most frequent terms of critical praise in the Rhetoric is ‘interesting’, bearing its original and normal eighteenth century sense of involving, engaging, as at ii. 27 where, thanks to Livy’s skill, ‘we enter into all the concerns of the parties’ and are as affected as if we had been there. The reason why history is enjoyed is that events which befall mankind ‘interest us greatly by the Sympatheticall affections they raise in us’ (ii. 16). The good historian shows the effects wrought on those who were actors or spectators of the events (ii. 5; cf. ii. 62–3). Knowledge of the plot of a tragedy is an advantage since it leaves us ‘free to attend to the Sentiments’ (ii. 30). A variation on this is acutely described in dealing with the picture of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, by Timanthes (ii. 8); cf. i. 180, Addison on St Peter’s. Indeed the entire treatment of the art of description in Lectures 12–16 is profoundly instructive of Smith’s main interests. Even minutiae such as the arrangement of words in a sentence (i. v. 42–v. 52b) repay an attention beyond the merely grammatical.

The species of writing are so intimately bound up with each other that Smith finds it difficult in Lectures 12–30 to demarcate them sharply. By instinct, as already noted, he is a historian in the sense that he sees narrative as the very type of human thought–procedure; but his interest in it is also that suggested by Hume’s description of history’s records as ‘so many collections of experiments by which the moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science’. (William Richardson used similar terms about his studies of Shakespeare’s characters in 1784). The first paper read to the Literary Society in the University, on 6 February 1752, was ‘An essay on historical composition’ by James Moor, the Professor of Greek (Essays, 1759). Moor’s elaboration of the kinship of history and poetry, the unified pattern which both exhibit in events, throws interesting light on the position occupied by Lecture 21 in Smith’s progression. Bolingbroke compared history and drama; and Voltaire wrote to the Marquis d’Argenson on 26 January 1740 (Correspondence ed. T. Besterman, xxxv. 373): ‘Il faut, dans une histoire, comme dans une pièce de théâtre, exposition, noeud, et dénouement’. There may be an echo of the ancient assimilation of history and poetry in ‘the Poeticall method’ of keeping up the connection between events, other than the causal (ii. 36); and history, like poetry, is said to ‘amuse’ (ii. 62), and to have originated with the poets. Leonard Welsted expounded this view fully in his Dissertation concerning the perfection of the English Language (1724). For Quintilian (X. i. 31) a history is a poem: ‘Est enim proxima poetis et quodammodo carmen solutum’. There was indeed much collocation by the ancient rhetoricians of all these genres—history, poetry, rhetoric, philosophical exposition—as in Cicero’s Orator XX. 66–7. The Muses are said to have spoken in Xenophon’s voice (Orator XIX. 62). They are all combined by Fénelon in the educational project he outlined to the French Academy, first in 1716. That panegyrical eloquence ‘tient un peu de la poésie’ as Voltaire maintained in the Encyclopédie article on Eloquence is also Smith’s view (ii. 111–2).

The lecture on poetry (21), delivered extemporaneously, is both instructive and disappointing. The post–Coleridge student looks for more analysis of short poems; these are of little interest, naturally, to the philosopher. More important, why does not Smith of all critics tackle the problem of the pleasure afforded us by tragedy? This is specially strange since Hume, who had offered a highly ingenious answer in his essay on tragedy in 1757, expressed dissatisfaction with the treatment of sympathy in this context in TMS I. iii. 1. 9 (Corr. Letter 36, 28 July 1759), and the second edition of TMS contained a footnote on the question. The insistence in the lecture (ii. 82) on the tragic writer’s heightening of the painful nature of his story in order to lead to a satisfying ‘catastrophe’ is an oblique solution of the problem and one frequently given: the difference between suffering on the stage and in real life resides in the artifice of the former. ‘The delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction’, said Johnson in the Preface to Shakespeare (1765)—though Burke in 1757 took the opposite view, because ‘we enter into the concerns of others’. Kames in The Elements of Criticism (1762: I. ii. 1 sec. 7) discusses ‘the emotions caused by Fiction’. The function of Lecture 21 is to prepare for the arts of persuasion used by the orator, playing down or exaggerating as the need demands, by describing the similar arts of the good story–teller. Tragedy and Comedy both arrange events so as to culminate in true conclusiveness. Note that Smith’s imagination is as tuned to good cadence as is his ear.

That is why he delights in rhyme. Boswell reports that when Johnson was extolling rhyme over blank verse, ‘I mentioned to him that Dr. Adam Smith, in his lectures upon composition, when I studied under him in the College of Glasgow, had maintained the same opinion strenuously, and I repeated some of his arguments’. Johnson had no love for Smith, but—‘had I known that he loved rhyme as much as you tell me he does, I should have HUGGED him’ (Life of Johnson, ed. Hill–Powell, i. 427–8). Dugald Stewart associates this bias with Smith’s ascription of our pleasure in the Imitative Arts (e.g. I. 16, III. 2) to admiration of difficulté surmontée (Stewart III. 14–15). The phrase is by Antoine Houdar de La Motte in his controversy with Voltaire over Œdipe (1730). La Motte opposed both the Unities and Rhyme in drama: ‘toutes ces puérilités n’ont d’autre mérite que celui de la difficulté surmontée’. Both Voltaire and Smith counter this argument by pointing to the observed triumph over observed obstacles, as a source of our surprised delight in all the arts, both plastic and literary. Stewart (III. 15) wonders whether Smith’s ‘love of system, added to his partiality for the French drama’, may have led him to generalize too much in this. Rhyme is not in fact explicitly mentioned in our manuscript at ii. 74 ff., but it is implicit in couplet and reference to Pope. Cf. TMS V. i. 7.

‘The principles of dramatic composition had more particularly attracted his attention’ (Stewart III. 15); and though the dogmas about unity of Time and Place had often been attacked since Corneille’s Discours in 1660—in Farquhar’s Discourse upon Comedy (1702) and Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1762: chap. xxiii)—it is pleasant to find Smith transferring the question to ‘Unity of Interest’ (ii. 81). This time he is on La Motte’s side. In the first of his Discours sur la Tragédie (1730) this is made the supreme law of dramatic art: but, as Smith remarks, the phrase is susceptible of many interpretations, and it is a little surprising to find him not following La Motte’s thesis that concentration of the audience’s sympathy on a group of characters—always present, always acting, animating and vivifying the action of the piece—is what constitutes ‘unité d’intérêt’, as they are ‘tous dignes que j’entre dans leurs passions’. ‘That every part of the Story should tend to some one end, whatever that be’ is of course also a typically Smithian formulation.

Beside the remark on Comedy (ii. 82) we must place the full account of the comic at i. 107–v.116. Smith’s interest in the laughter–provoking (we must remember that that is simply what the eighteenth century words ridicule and ridiculous mean) was no doubt kindled early by Hutcheson, whose criticism of Hobbes’s view—‘the passion of laughter is nothing but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves’ (Leviathan vi)—first appeared in the Dublin Journal 10–12 (June 1725), collected as Reflections on Laughter (1750). Smith’s approach is proper to someone preoccupied with comparison: unexpected incongruities arising from the aggrandisement of the little (as in mock–heroic) or diminution of the grand. At i. 112 he seems to allude to Leibnitz: ‘All raillery includes a little contempt, and it is not just to try to make contemptible what does not deserve it’ (Remarks on Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks, 1711; printed in Masson’s Histoire critique de la République des Lettres, 1715). He does not accept therefore Shaftesbury’s notion of laughter as a ‘test of truth’. For Smith on wit and humour cf. the review of Johnson’s Dictionary (EPS 240–1).

Johnson would not have ‘hugged’ Smith for his words on tragi–comedy (ii. 83–4). This ‘mixed’ kind, described in Spectator 40 as monstrous, was several times vigorously defended by Johnson for its truth to life: e.g. Rambler 156 (14 Sept. 1751), as well as the Preface to Shakespeare in 1765.

To one tradition of rhetorical instruction Smith is faithful, in the readiness with which he quotes poetic examples side by side with prose. At i. 9 he refers to Samuel Clarke’s preface to his edition of the Iliad (1729) in praise of Homer’s perspicuity—such, says Clarke, that no prose writer has ever equalled him in this his ‘perpetua et singularis virtus’. Clarke also makes an interesting distinction between the poet’s ars and his oratio; so in our day Ezra Pound has insisted that poetry must have the qualities of good prose.

Like that later polymath Coleridge, Adam Smith nursed till his last days the hope of producing a magnum opus of immense scope. ‘I have likewise two other great works upon the anvil; the one is a sort of Philosophical History of all the different branches of Literature, of Philosophy, Poetry and Eloquence’ (the other being his Jurisprudence); ‘The materials of both are in a great measure collected, and some Part of both is put into tollerable good order’. So he wrote to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld on 1 Nov. 1785 (Corr., Letter 248). This was no doubt why in 1755, in a paper read to Cochrane’s Political Economy Club, he gave ‘a pretty long enumeration . . . of certain leading principles, both political and literary, to which he was anxious to establish his exclusive right; in order to prevent the possibility of some rival claims . . .’ (Stewart IV. 25). Unfortunately Stewart does not tell us which ‘literary’ principles were listed. Smith describes the opinions as having formed the subjects of his lectures since he first taught Mr Craigie’s class ‘down to this day, without any considerable variation’.

One envies the eighteenth century the freedom and width of vision made possible to them by their not circumscribing the word literature and narrowing the scope of its study as we have since done. Our two scribes enable us to glimpse that first work which would have become the foundation of the tantalizing ‘Philosophical History’ of all literature.

3.

Considerations concerning the First Formation of Languages

It may be worth remembering that the dissertation Adam Smith delivered, as by statute required, on 16 January 1751 to justify his induction into the Chair of Logic and Rhetoric at the University of Glasgow was entitled De origine idearum. In the absence of the text of this we cannot know in what sense idea was used. His first published essay was on a semantic subject. For the first number of the Edinburgh Review which he had helped to found in 1755 he chose to review Johnson’s newly issued Dictionary, and he made his review an exercise in the systematic distinction and arrangement of the meanings of words: but and humour as examples. He found Johnson’s treatment insufficiently ‘grammatical’, i.e. philosophically analytic (EPS 232–41) and offers an alternative plan. There is evidence to support the statement of A. F. Tytler in his Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames . . . containing sketches of the Progress and General Improvement in Scotland during the greater part of the eighteenth century (1807: i. 168) that of all the articles in the two numbers of the magazine this was the one which attracted most attention—and the implications of Tytler’s long sub–title help us to understand why. Tytler admits that though Smith’s article ‘displays the same philosophic views of universal grammar, which distinguish his Essay on the formation of Languages’ his metaphysical discrimination and ingenuity were less suitable than Johnson’s method ‘for conveying a critical knowledge of the English language’ (170).

Light is thrown on the beginnings of Smith’s interest in language in a letter which he wrote on 7 February 1763 to George Baird who had sent him an Abstract of An Essay on Grammar as it may be applied to the English Language (1765) by his friend William Ward. The letter (69), which was printed by Nichols in Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century (iii, 1818, 515–16), expresses surprise that Ward, mentioning various definitions of nouns, ‘takes no notice of that of the Abbé Girard, the author of a book, called, ‘Les vrais Principes de la Langue Françoise’. . . . It is the book which first set me a thinking upon these subjects, and I have received more instruction from it than from any other I have yet seen upon them. . . . The grammatical articles, too, in the French Encyclopedie have given me a good deal of entertainment.’ The comments on Ward’s design offer a useful introduction to Smith’s own thinking.

I approve greatly of his plan for a Rational Grammar, and I am convinced that a work of this kind, executed with his abilities and industry, may prove not only the best system of grammar, but the best system of logic in any language, as well as the best history of the natural progress of the human mind in forming the most important abstractions upon which all reasoning depends. . . . If I was to treat the same subject, I should endeavour to begin with the consideration of verbs; these being, in my apprehension, the original parts of speech, first invented to express in one word a complete event: I should then have endeavoured to shew how the subject was divided from the attribute; and afterwards, how the object was distinguished from both; and in this manner I should have tried to investigate the origin and use of all the different parts of speech, and of all their different modifications, considered as necessary to express all the different qualifications and relations of any single event.

Smith is too modest to say that all this—‘taken in a general view, which is the only view that I can pretend to have taken of them’—he did in fact set out in an essay published two years earlier, but, as Stewart tells us (II. 44), he was proud of the ‘considerations concerning the First Formation of Languages’: ‘It is an essay of great ingenuity, and on which the author himself set a high value’ and justly—it is a masterpiece of lucid exposition which any summary can only blur. Stewart’s comments (II. 44–56) are the most perceptive ever made on it. He saw that its value lies, not in the possible accuracy of the opinions, but in its being a specimen of an entirely modern kind of inquiry ‘which seems, in a peculiar degree, to have interested Mr Smith’s curiosity.’ To this Stewart applied the now famous phrase ‘Theoretical or Conjectural History’, and he finds examples of it in all Smith’s writings. In the absence of direct evidence, ‘when we are unable to ascertain how men have actually conducted themselves upon particular occasions’ we must consider ‘in what manner they are likely to have proceeded, from the principles of their nature, and the circumstances of their external situation.’ ‘The known principles of human nature’; ‘the natural succession of inventions and discoveries’; ‘the circumstances of society’—these are the foundations on which rests Smith’s thinking ‘whatever be the nature of his subject’; astronomy, politics, economics, literature, language. ‘In most cases, it is of more importance to ascertain the progress that is most simple, than the progress that is most agreeable to fact; for . . . the real progress is not always the most natural’ (56). Stewart is stressing the timelessness of Smith’s argument, which still makes sense even after the birth of comparative philology in 1786 with Sir William Jones’s demonstration before the Royal Asiatic Society of the kinship between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and the Germanic and Celtic languages. Smith instinctively uses the historical mode for his exposition of principles in this context while exhibiting the powers of the mind operating in their most fully human and characteristic activity: comparing, classifying, abstracting. The primacy he gives to language, which entails that something like Lecture 3 must have come early in his Rhetoric course right from its first delivery, rests on his vision of language as the embodiment of the mind’s striving towards the ‘metaphysical’, towards conceptualization.

‘Essay’, ‘Dissertation’, ‘Considerations’: the last is the appropriate title, since three (of quite different kinds) are offered. The first, ‘theoretical history’ proper, has two sections: (a) on nouns, adjectives and prepositions (1–25); (b) on verbs and pronouns (26–32). That mere chronology is not Smith’s real concern is shown by his beginning with nouns, although he believes verbs are the most ancient part of speech, which starts with the presentation of a single undifferentiated event as in the impersonal verb. He does so because the inflectional systems of the noun are well adapted to exhibiting his analysis of the process of abstraction: from classes of things, to modification by quality, gender, number, and relationship—and even within relationships, a hierarchy or range of degrees of the metaphysical, there Smith’s vision of the organic connection between thinking and speaking becomes clear. No one will attribute to him the naive notion that early man first conceived the relations by, with, or from, and then invented the device of adding –o or –e to the root of the noun to express them. Language and thought are generated together, as d’Alembert maintained in the ‘Discours préliminaire’ to the Encyclopédie in 1751. He too had learned from the Abbé Gabriel Girard’s Les vrais principes de la langue françoise, ou la parole réduite en méthode conformément aux lois de l’usage (1747) to see ‘parts of speech’, not as dead terms in school grammar, but as operations of the human intellect, and ‘grammar’ itself as the image of logic. Girard’s book is a perfect example of the beautiful unity and harmony he finds in the linguistic works of the spirit.

The second Consideration (33–40) moves from conjectural to actual history: the breakdown of the inflectional system which results from peoples of different tongue living together and being defeated by the intricacies (as they see them) of each other’s speech–structures: the Germanic Lombards confronted with Latin, or (Smith might have added) the invading Norse–speakers meeting the English. The simplification in question can be observed by anyone listening to a foreigner wrestling with his elementary English. ‘Elementary’ is the right word, speech reduced to its elements, all verb–forms reduced to the infinitive. Something comparable produces the various kinds of pidgin and creole throughout the world.

The third Consideration (41–45) is an assessment of the damage wrought by this breakdown: modern analytic languages are, as compared with earlier synthetic ones, more prolix (since a multiplicity of words must replace the old inflections), less agreeable to the ear (lacking the pleasing symmetries and variety of the inflections), and more rigid in their possibilities of word–ordering (differences of case–endings make for flexibility in arrangement without ambiguity).

Most of the many mid–eighteenth century investigators of the beginnings of language are interested in more superficial senses of the word ‘origin’: fruitless searches for a reason why a particular sound was ever chosen to denote a particular thing or idea, as in the Traité de la formation méchanique des langues et des principes physiques de l’étymologie (1765) by Charles de Brosses, parts of which were in circulation from 1751 and found their way into articles in the Encyclopédie; or speculations on ‘universal grammar’ and the causes of differences among languages, like the Hermes of James Harris (1751). How simplemindedly Smith’s highly original essay could be read is illustrated by the widely known Elements of general knowledge (1802), lectures which Henry Kett had been delivering since 1790: how did Adam Smith’s two incredible savages ever get into the situation in which he imagines them inventing speech? (i. 88–9). Kett is put down by the percipient L. Davison in ‘Some account of a recent work entitled Elements of General Knowledge’ (1804: ii. 87–88), who sees that Smith assumes language and is interested simply in how it proceeds.

Smith’s connection with The Philological Miscellany (1761) in which his essay first appeared is obscure. An anonymous contributor to The European Magazine, and London Review for April 1802 (xli. 249), writing from Oxford on 10 April 1802, after a reference to an article on Smith in the previous issue and high praise for the review of Johnson’s Dictionary, goes on: ‘in 1761 was published, I believe by Dr. Smith, “The Philological Miscellany” ’, and in it Dr. Smith’s ‘Considerations concerning the first Formation of Languages’ first appeared. No authority for attributing the volume to Smith is given; and what in any case is meant—the compiling, or the translating of the French articles? Smith’s essay is the only one to be first published here. The others are almost all from the Mémoires of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, apparently specially translated for this collection of papers on historical, classical and miscellaneous learned questions, such as Smith showed an interest in, in his letter to the Edinburgh Review no. 2, 1756 (EPS 242–54). The editor of the Miscellany ‘proposes to enrich his Work with a variety of Articles from the French Encyclopedie, and with curious Dissertations on Philological Subjects by foreign writers.’ But no further volumes appeared.

Note on the Text

In Adam Smith’s lifetime five authorized editions of this essay were published, for which the sigla PM, 3, 4, 5, 6 are here used:

[PM] the | Philological Miscellany; | consisting of | select essays | from the | memoirs of the Academy of | Belles Lettres at Paris, and | other foreign Academies. | Translated into English. | with | Original Pieces by the most Eminent | Writers of our own Country. | vol. I. | [double rule] | Printed for the Editor; | And Sold by T. Beckett and P. A. Dehondt, | in the Strand. 1761. | (8vo: pp. viii + 510).

Pp. 440–79 contains: Considerations concerning the first formation of Languages, and the different genius of original and compounded Languages. By Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow. Now first published.—The Table of Contents lists the essay in the same words. This volume, the only one of a projected twice–yearly series to appear, was published in May 1761. The British Library copy has on its fly–leaf the note: ‘Presented by M.^rs Becket Oct.^r 9. 1761.’

[3] the | theory | of | moral sentiments. | To which is added | A Dissertation on the Origin of Languages. | By Adam Smith, L.L.D. | The Third Edition. | . . MDCCLXVII.—The essay is on pp. 437–78, headed and listed in Table of Contents as in PM, but omitting ‘By . . . published’.

While this edition of TMS was going through the press in winter 1766–67 Smith wrote to his publisher William Strahan:

The Dissertation upon the Origin of Languages is to be printed at the end of Theory. There are some literal errors in the printed copy of it which I should have been glad to have corrected, but have not the opportunity, as I have no copy by me. They are of no great consequence

(Letter 100).

Seven verbal changes were nevertheless made in the text. Smith, it may be noted, here gives the essay the same title as do the title–pages of the early editions of TMS, and as Dugald Stewart in his Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, I. 26, II. 44 (see EPS).

[4] the | theory | of | moral sentiments. | [as 3] The Fourth Edition . . . MDCCLXXIV. The essay is on pp. 437–76, headed as in 3.

[5] the | theory | of | moral sentiments. | [as 3] The Fifth Edition . . . MDCCLXXXI. The essay is on pp. 437–78, headed as in 3.

[6] the | theory | of | moral sentiments. | [as 3] The Sixth Edition . . . MDCCXC. The essay is on pp. 403–62 of vol. ii.

The present text is that of 1790, the last for which Smith was responsible. He had worked long on the ‘considerable additions and corrections’ now included in the Theory. An account of the early editions, and of Smith’s carefulness over proof correction in general, is given in the introduction to TMS in the present edition: especially 47–9. The ‘Considerations’ remained entirely unchanged in substance throughout their five editions, and only a selection of variants from before 1790 need be recorded.

4–6 replace in lower case the initial capitals which PM and 3 consistently give the following words: Philosopher, Grammarians, Adjective, Schoolmen, Green (§4), Nouns, Metaphysics, Masculine, Feminine, Neutral, Genders, Substantive, Termination, Prepositions, Superiority, Inferiority, Genitive, Dative, Arbor (§§13 ff.), Grammar, Languages, Nominative, Accusative, Vocative, Cases, Variations, Declensions, Numbers, Conjugations, Verb, Logicians, Citizen, Optative, Mood, Future, Aorist, Preterit, Tenses, Passive, Participle, Infinitives, Law, Court, Verse, Prose (in the order of first occurrence).

4–6 replace with what we should regard as ‘modern’ forms the following spellings in PM and 3: concret, antient, accompanyment, surprized, forestal, compleat, indispensible, acquireable.

In the matter of punctuation, only students of eighteenth century typographical usage (or whim) will be interested in omissions and insertions of commas in intermediate editions, and they will consult the original texts. In no case is the meaning affected by these variations, though the delivery of an elocutionist declaiming the text might be. No logical or grammatical principle can be seen to be uniformly dictating the many changes from edition to edition. On the whole 4–6 agree as against PM and 3; but six of 3’s changes of PM are reversed by 6 and/or 4, 5. Only variants involving points heavier than comma are here recorded. We cannot know how many are authorial.

The seventh edition (1792) follows 6 in capitals, spelling, italics, and generally in punctuation. The other early editions have not been collated. They include: 1777 (Dublin: title–page ‘the sixth edition’), 1793 (Basel), 1797 (8th), 1801 (9th), 1804 (10th), 1808 (Edinburgh: title–page ‘the eleventh edition’), 1809 (Glasgow: title–page ‘the twelfth edition’), 1812 (11th), 1813 (Edinburgh). In The Works of Adam Smith vol. v (1811) the ‘Considerations’ are on pp. 3–48, printed as in 6. They are included in Smith’s Essays (1869, 1880). A French translation by A.M.H.B.[oulard], Considérations sur la première formation des langues, et le différent génie des langues originales et composées, was published in Paris in 1796; also one appended to the third French translation of the TMS: Théorie des sentimens moraux, trans. from ed. 7 by Sophie de Grouchy, Marquise de Condorcet (1798, revd. 1830): ‘Considérations sur l’origine et la formation des langues’, ii. 264–310.

4.

Rhetoric and literary criticism

A student of the traditional rhetoric who reads the present work as he runs (or—as Smith would put it—‘one partly asleep’), may possibly as he encounters familiar topics, concepts and terminology, conclude that this is the well–worn old story: a story so often in the past a dreary one. Smith in speaking of the many systems of rhetoric both ancient and modern observed that they were generally ‘a very silly set of books and not at all instructive’ (i. v. 59). Such a reader will have missed the motive which gives unity and direction to the lectures and the framework of thought which transforms the old discipline; above all he will be ignoring the delight which informs the whole and its details.

Steele remarked early in the century that ‘it is a very good service one man renders another when he tells him the manner of his being pleased’. Smith began lecturing at a time when the study of rhetoric was turning increasingly, especially in Scotland, to the study of taste. Hugh Blair opens the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres which he first delivered in 1759 by summing up their twofold aim: ‘Whatever enables genius to execute well, will enable taste to criticise justly’. Smith was a natural teacher of literature. One of his students, William Richardson, in a life of Archibald Arthur who later occupied the Glasgow Chair of Moral Philosophy (and who had himself studied under Smith), records: ‘Those who received instruction from Dr. Smith, will recollect, with much satisfaction, many of these incidental and digressive illustrations, and even discussions, not only in morality, but in criticism, which were delivered by him with animated and extemporaneous eloquence, as they were suggested in the course of question and answer’ (Arthur, Discourses on Theological and Literary Subjects, 1803: 507–8). Richardson’s words, though in the first instance about Smith’s ‘examination’ hour, are known to be true of his lecturing in general; and it is significant that in the account of the lectures on rhetoric which follows (515), ‘taste’ is the first topic to be mentioned, before ‘composition’. Arthur himself followed Smith’s method ‘and treated of fine–writing, the principles of criticism, and the pleasures of the imagination . . . intended by him to unfold and elucidate those processes of invention, that structure of language, and system of arrangement, which are the objects of genuine taste’. Double evidence, in effect, of Smith’s attitude to the first subject he had chosen to teach. George Jardine, another student of Smith’s who, as Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow from 1787, continued to teach along the lines his master had laid down, likewise concentrated on ‘the principles of taste and criticism’. Thomas Reid, writing about 1791 in the Statistical Account of Scotland (vol. 21, 1799 735), describe Jardine’s current practice thus: after dealing briefly with the art of reasoning and its history, he

dedicates the greater part of his time to an illustration of the various mental operations, as they are expressed by the several modifications of speech and writing; which leads him to deliver a system of lectures on general grammar, rhetoric, and belles lettres. This course, accompanied with suitable exercises and specimens, on the part of the students, is properly placed at the entrance to philosophy: no subjects are likely to be more interesting to young minds, at a time when their taste and feelings are beginning to open, and have naturally disposed them to the reading of such authors as are necessary to supply them with facts and materials for beginning and carrying on the important habits of reflection and investigation.

It is significant that accounts of the tradition in rhetorical teaching acknowledged as stemming from Adam Smith so often dwell on the ‘taste and feelings’ of the students.

The title ‘Rhetoric and Belles Lettres’, which presumably (though we do not know) was Smith’s own choice to describe his course, seems to go back to Charles Rollin’s appointment to the Chair of Rhetoric at the Collège Royal in Paris in 1688. Rollin’s lectures were published in 1726–8 as De la manière d’enseigner et d’étudier les Belles–lettres, par raport à l’esprit et au coeur—later changed to Traité des études. Apart from the suggestions of the subtitle the book cannot be shown to have taught Smith anything in the field of criticism. He needed no one else’s instruction on l’esprit et le coeur.

His pleasure as a critic is in several ways that of a philosopher. He is stimulated by prose and poetry which clearly reveal the author, and his eye (and ear) are made attentive by the conception he has worked out of the relation between the writer and the man. Theories, as Pater saw, are useful as ‘points of view, instruments of criticism which may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us’. Rhetoric had, at least since the first century bc, always been taught with copious illustrations from writers, and students had been trained by exercises in the close analysis of texts. The opening paragraphs of Biographia Literaria show how lively, and fruitful, this tradition still was in Coleridge’s schooldays. For Smith there is no separation between the two instructions, in handling language and in the enjoyment of that handling by the masters of the crafts. As we might have predicted, his most characteristic method is the comparative, the pin–pointing of an author’s essential quality by putting his work alongside that of a practitioner in the same field or a kindred one: Demosthenes and Cicero, Clarendon and Burnet. This method, used systematically over a great range of examples, is his most distinctive contribution to the literary criticism of his age—especially when we remember that the values he invokes in his judgements are, not narrowly technical, but comprehensively human and humane—common–sense, to use his own word. In English criticism only Dryden, e.g. in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy and the Preface to the Fables, had so far used comparison in an extensive and self–conscious way. Smith certainly knew the examples in the rhetorical treatises of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Demosthenes with Thucydides, Plato with Demosthenes, Isaeus with Lysias, etc.) and in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria Book X; but perhaps his immediate model was the series of comparisons of ancient writers published by René Rapin in 1664–81.

This was the age of collections of The Beauties of . . . Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Poetry, and so on. Many of Smith’s lectures must have delighted their audience by sounding like some such judiciously selected anthologies. He read extensively from the texts in class, often in his own translation (an art he took great pleasure in and found instructive in its own right: Stewart I. 9): hence the variation in length in the reported lectures. The immense popularity of these lectures was the result of their offering the spectacle of Smith’s suppleness in moving easily over the whole field of ancient and modern writing and of his inventiveness in making illuminating connections.

If we cannot number Adam Smith among the greatest critics, we need not fall into the ill–temper expressed by Wordsworth in a footnote to his Essay Supplementary to the Preface (1815); on the notion ‘that there are no fixed principles in human nature for this art [the admiration of poetry] to rest upon’, he adds: ‘This opinion seems actually to have been entertained by Adam Smith, the worst critic, David Hume not excepted, that Scotland, a soil to which this sort of weed seems natural, has produced’. The premise of this remark is so mistaken, and the quantity of Smith’s literary criticism in the printed works, especially TMS and EPS, so fragmentary and scanty, that the violence of Wordsworth’s language is difficult to explain. A clue occurs in a letter he wrote to John Wilson in June 1802, commenting on the offence given to ‘many fine ladies’ by supposedly indelicate or gross expressions in certain of the Lyrical Ballads (The Mad Mother and The Thorn), ‘and as in the instance of Adam Smith, who, we are told, could not endure the ballad of Clym of the Clough, because the author had not written like a gentleman’ (Early Letters, 1935, 296). This is a clear reference to the interview by Amicus with Smith printed in Appendix 1. The article was reprinted in The European Magazine for August 1791 (xx. 133–6), in The Whitehall Evening Post, and thence (with misprints and omissions) in a miscellany of essays dating from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries entitled Occasional Essays on Various Subjects, chiefly Political and Historical (1809). The editorship of this last is ascribed by the B.L. Catalogue to the lawyer and mathematician Francis Maseres, the ‘Baron Maseres’ of Lamb’s essay on the Inner Temple, i.e. Cursitor Baron of Exchequer. The identity of Amicus is unknown. He has been wrongly said to be Adam Smith’s old student David Steuart Erskine, later 11th Earl of Buchan (1742–1829), who in fact, under his pen–name Ascanius, criticised the article of Amicus in The Bee of 8 June 1791 (iii. 166 f.): ‘I knew him too well to think he would have liked to have had a pisgah view of such frivolous matters obtruded on the learned world after his death’—yet he goes on: ‘He had no ear for music, nor any perception of the sublime or beautiful in composition, either in poetry or language of any kind. He was too much of a geometrician to have much taste.’ Only if we think the notorious and flamboyant eccentricity of Lord Buchan extended to writing an article under one pseudonym in order to condemn it under another can we accept him as Smith’s ‘friendly’ interviewer. In any case he collected all his Bee articles for 4 May 1791 to 25 December 1793 in The anonymous and fugitive essays of The Earl of Buchan, vol. 1 (1812) so that, as the preface explains, ‘no person may hereafter ascribe to him any others than are by him, in this manner, avowed, described, or enumerated’. So all we know of ‘Amicus’ is that, as the ‘we’ of his defence of Allan Ramsay shows, he was a Scot. As to Lord Buchan, though he had his own odd ways of showing his regard for ‘the reputation of my excellent preceptor and amiable friend’ and recalled ‘having had the happiness to live long and much with him’, the regard was genuine, and in some remarks on literary immortality he groups together Homer, Thucydides, Shakespeare, Adam Smith (Essays as above, 213, 246–7, from The Bee, 29 May 1793 and 27 June 1792 respectively). Incidentally, his denial to Smith of a ‘perception of the sublime’ would have been rebutted by Edmund Burke (who had just written a book on The Sublime and the Beautiful): on 10 Sept. 1759 he wrote to Smith praising the ‘lively and elegant’ style of TMS and adding ‘it is often sublime too, particularly in that fine Picture of the Stoic Philosophy towards the end of your first part which is dressed out in all the grandeur and pomp that becomes that magnificent delusion’ (Corr. Letter 38).

Despite the introductory assurance of authenticity by the editor of The Bee, Dr. James Anderson, who had himself known Smith, the moral propriety of reprinting yet again the gossip of Amicus may rightly be questioned. John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century (1888: i. 468) remarks that Smith’s table–talk would be precious, ‘but the scraps of it published in the Bee do no honour either to his memory or the discretion of his friends’. Dugald Stewart (V. 15) contrasts the opinions which ‘in the thoughtlessness and confidence of his social hours, he was accustomed to hazard on books, and on questions of speculation’, though having much truth and ingenuity in them, with ‘those qualified conclusions that we admire in his writings’; and what he said as the fancy or the humour took him, ‘when retailed by those who only saw him occasionally, suggested false and contradictory ideas of his real sentiments’. But the Amicus piece has often been quoted (see Rae, Life, 365–71). Smith himself seems to approve of curiosity about the great—‘The smallest circumstances, the most minute transactions of a great man are sought after with eagerness. Everything that is created with Grandeur seems to be important. We watch the sayings and catch the apothegms of the great ones with which we are infinitely pleased and are fond of every opportunity of using them . . .’ (LRBL ii. 107). We are after all publishing lectures which Smith died believing he had saved from publication as not in a worthy state. Of course (there is a difference) these had in one sense been ‘published’. In 1896 Edwin Cannan sought to justify the publication of the Lectures on Jurisprudence by quoting Smith’s own words about the limits on testamentary provisions. In LJ (A) i. 165–6 they run: ‘. . . we should permit the dying person to dispose of his goods as far as he sees, that is, to settle how it shall be divided amongst those who are alive at the same time with him. For these it may be conjectured he may have contracted some affection. . . . But persons who are not born he can have no affection for. The utmost stretch of our piety can not reasonably extend to them.’ Mutatis mutandis Smith’s suppressions need not inhibit us. Johnson’s remark in Rambler 60 is not inopportune: ‘If we owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth’.

5.

System and aesthetics

On 9 July 1764 Boswell wrote from Berlin to Isabella de Zuylen (Zélide): ‘Mr. Smith whose moral sentiments you admire so much, wrote to me sometime ago, “your great fault is acting upon system”, what a curious reproof to a young man from a grave philosopher’. The letter opens: ‘. . . You know I am a man of form, a man who says to himself, Thus will I act, and acts accordingly’ (Letters, ed. C. B. Tinker, 1924, 46). In the absence of Adam Smith’s letter (strange, considering what mountains of paper Boswell preserved) we cannot tell with what irony he wrote to his former student; but the incident draws attention to the two uses in the eighteenth century of the word and the concept ‘system’. While Smith was giving these lectures two of the most powerful critiques of the idea appeared: in the wittiest and subtlest of all such attacks, Tristram Shandy (1759–67), Sterne presents a hapless philosopher–father’s attempts to make his son’s upbringing conform to theory, the Shandean system—the form of the novel itself criticises the notion of rigid form; and in 1759 Voltaire produced, in Candide, a demolition of the optimistic scheme of the universe, a series of disastrous frustrations of the illusion that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Marivaux is fond of pillorying ‘les faiseurs de systèmes’ (e.g. in Lettres au Mercure, May 1718 etc.), who are what ‘le vulgaire’ call ‘philosophers’; and Shaftesbury had already in 1711 (Characteristics: Misc. III. ii) defined a formal philosopher as a ‘system–writer’. ‘System–monger’ comes in about the same time. On 27 Sept. 1748 we find Lord Chesterfield advising his son to ‘read and hear, for your amusement, ingenious systems, nice questions, subtilely agitated with all the refinements that warm imaginations suggest’, and less sardonically he complains: ‘The preposterous notions of a systematical man who does not know the world tire the patience of a man who does’. Cf. Stewart’s (V. 15) ‘too systematical’ of Smith; and the ‘man of system’ apt ‘to be very wise in his own conceit’, in TMS, VI. ii. 2. 17.

‘System’ in the good sense is exemplified by Johnson’s defence of The Wealth of Nations against Sir John Pringle’s charge that Smith was not equipped to write such a work since he had never taken part in trade: ‘. . . there is nothing which requires more to be illustrated by philosophy than trade does’ (Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Hill–Powell, ii. 430). Another example, used by James Wodrow in a letter to the Earl of Buchan (Glasgow Univ. Lib., Murray MS 506, 169) is the comparison of Smith’s accounting for the principal phenomena in the moral world from the one general principle of sympathy, with ‘that of gravity in the natural world’. Still another is set out by Smith in a letter (30, dated 4 April 1759) to Lord Shelburne on the course of study his son Lord Fitzmaurice should pursue in his future years at Glasgow, after completing his Philosophical studies. He should, says Smith, attend the lectures of the Professor of Civil Law, as the best preparation for the study of English Law even though Civil Law has no authority in the English Courts:

The civil law is digested into a more regular system than the English Law has yet been, and tho’ the Principles of the former are in many respects different from those of the latter, yet there are many principles common to both, and one who has studied the civil law at least knows what a system of law is, what parts it consist of, and how these ought to be arranged: so that when he afterwards comes to study the law of any other country which is not so well digested, he carries at least the Idea of a System in his head and knows to what part of it he ought to refer everything that he reads.

Compare this with the motive underlying the system of meanings laid out in the review of Johnson’s Dictionary (EPS 232–41).

That something more than mere tidiness and intellectual coherence is involved for Smith is illustrated by a passage in Imitative Arts (II. 30, cf. section 2, above):

A well–composed concerto of instrumental Music, by the number and variety of the instruments, by the variety of the parts which are performed by them, and the perfect concord or correspondence of all these different parts; by the exact harmony or coincidence of all the different sounds which are heard at the same time, and by that happy variety of measure which regulates the succession of those which are heard at different times, presents an object so agreeable, so great, so various, and so interesting, that alone, and without suggesting any other object, either by imitation or otherwise, it can occupy, and as it were fill up, completely the whole capacity of the mind, so as to leave no part of its attention vacant for thinking of any thing else. In the contemplation of that immense variety of agreeable and melodious sounds, arranged and digested, both in their coincidence and in their succession, into so complete and regular a system, the mind in reality enjoys not only a very great sensual, but a very high intellectual, pleasure, not unlike that which it derives from the contemplation of a great system in any other science.

In other words, to watch the explanation of a great diversity and multiplicity of phenomena from a single general principle is to be confronted with beauty: ‘the beauty of a systematical arrangement of different observations connected by a few common principles’ (WN V. i. f. 25; cf. EPS, 13 ff). We remember that Smith’s dominant interests while a student at Glasgow under Professor Robert Simson (Stewart, I. 7) were mathematics and natural philosophy; this is where he learned ‘the idea of a system’—as set out in Astronomy IV. 19.

The issue is most clearly stated in LRBL (ii. 132–4), in the lecture (24) on scientific and philosophical exposition, the ‘didacticall’ method. One may either explain phenomena piecemeal, using a new principle for each as it is encountered, e.g. the ‘System of Husbandry’ presented in Virgil’s Georgics following Aristotle’s procedure; ‘or in the manner of Sir Isaac Newton we may lay down certain principles known or proved in the beginning, from whence we account for the severall Phenomena, connecting all together by the same chain’. This enchaînement (the favourite term among French thinkers of the time) is in every branch of study—ethics, physics, criticism—‘vastly more ingenious and for that reason more engaging than the other. It gives us a pleasure to see the phaenomena which we reckoned the most unaccountable all deduced from some principle (commonly a wellknown one) and all united in one chain, far superior to what we feel from the unconnected method. . . .’ (Cf. TMS, VII. ii. 2. 14).

The task Smith set himself in the Rhetoric was to substitute a ‘Newtonian’ (or Cartesian, cf. ii. 134), a philosophical and ‘engaging’ explanation of beauty in writing, for the old rigmarole about figures of speech and of thought, ‘topics’ of argument, subdivisions of discourse, characters of style and the rest. In this sense his lectures constitute an anti–rhetoric; and though they could not by themselves rescue the word rhetoric, or for that matter the phrases belles lettres and polite literature, from the bad press they suffered from, they exerted a profound and revolutionary influence which has still not been properly investigated, on Hugh Blair, Kames, William Richardson, George Campbell, and those they in turn taught.

‘There is no art whatever that hath so close a connection with all the faculties and powers of the mind as eloquence, or the art of speaking.’ So George Campbell introduces The Philosophy of Rhetoric in 1776. To come closer to describing Smith’s central informing principle, the formulations of two French writers whose work he knew well may help. ‘Le style est l’homme même’. This famous and generally misunderstood remark was made by the naturalist Buffon on his admission to the French Academy in 1753, in what came to be called his Discours sur le style. He is contrasting the inert facts of unanimated knowledge with what language does to them. ‘Ces choses sont hors de l’homme’ they are non–human. But utter them, and how you utter them, is ‘very man’, ‘man himself’. From a different angle Marivaux, in Le Spectateur français of 8 September 1722 (Huitième feuille), attacks the notion that you must write in the manner of this or that ancient or modern author, and aims ‘prouver qu’écrire naturellement, qu’être naturel n’est pas écrire dans le goût de tel Ancien ni de tel Moderne, n’est pas se mouler sur personne quant à la forme de ses idées, mais au contraire, se ressembler fidèlement à soi–même . . . rester dans la singularité d’esprit qui nous est échué. . . .’ Be like yourself: it was a lesson, Smith believed, the much admired Shaftesbury had never learned.

Bibliographical Note

Adam Smith’s life and thought:

John Rae: Life of Adam Smith (1895). Reprinted with ‘Guide to John Rae’s Life of Adam Smith’ by J. Viner (1965).

William R. Scott: Adam Smith as Student and Professor (1937; reprinted 1965).

R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner: Adam Smith (1982).

A. S. Skinner: A System of Social Science, Papers relating to Adam Smith (1979).

T. D. Campbell: Adam Smith’s Science of Morals (1971).

The Rhetoric:

W. S. Howell: Eighteenth–Century British Logic and Rhetoric (1971). The section on Smith, first published in 1969, was reprinted in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson (1975).

V. M. Bevilacqua: ‘Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres’ (Studies in Scottish Literature, 3 (1965), 41–60). See also Modern Language Review, 63 (1968).

For J. M. Lothian’s edition, see Abbreviations.

R. Salvucci: ‘La retorica come teoria della comunicazione’ [on A.S.] Sociologia della comunicazione, 1 (1982). See also R. Salvucci, Sviluppi della problematica del linguaggio nel XVIII secolo: Condillac, Rousseau, Smith (1982).

A. S. Skinner: ‘Adam Smith: Rhetoric and the Communication of Ideas’ in Methodological Controversy in Economics: Historical Essays, A. W. Coats ed. (1983).

Languages:

Articles on ‘Considerations’ by C. J. Berry and S. K. Land in Journal of the History of Ideas—respectively 35 (1974), 130–8; and 38 (1977), 677–90.