Dugald Stewart failed to collect any information about Smith’s Oxford days, but a few relics have been preserved by Lord Brougham in the appendix to the discursive and rather disappointing essay upon Adam Smith that appears in his Lives of the Philosophers. “I have now before me,” says Brougham, “a number of Dr. Smith’s letters written when at Oxford between the years 1740 and 1746 to his mother: they are almost all upon mere family and personal matters; most of them indeed upon his linen and other such necessaries, but all show his strong affection for his parent.” The few quotations Brougham gives are barely worth recording. On November 29, 1743, Adam Smith writes: “I am just recovered of a violent fit of laziness, which has confined me to my elbow chair these three months.” Again on July 2, 1744: “I am quite inexcusable for not writing to you oftener. I think of you every day, but always defer writing till the post is just going, and then sometimes business or company, but oftener laziness, hinders me.” He speaks of “an inveterate scurvy and shaking of the head” which have been perfectly cured by tar water, “a remedy very much in vogue here for all diseases.”
His college contemporaries, says Mr. Rae, “were a singularly undistinguished body,” with the exception of a Fifeshire man, John Douglas, who had gone direct to Oxford from the Grammar School at Dunbar. Douglas at first had a small exhibition at St. Mary’s Hall, but after fighting at Fontenoy, he obtained a Snell Exhibition. He distinguished himself later as a pamphleteer and was rewarded with the Bishopric of Salisbury. With this exception, Adam Smith seems to have made no friends at Oxford. Besides his books he must have enjoyed from time to time walks and excursions into the surrounding country. In the Wealth of Nations he was able to make close comparisons of the condition of the labouring classes in England and Scotland, and there is a passage, about the use of coal and wood by the common people in Oxfordshire, to show that he had certainly acquired as an undergraduate the faculty of minute and picturesque observation which he afterwards turned to such account.[5] What Smith did in the vacations we do not know. He could not have had much money to spare, and there is no indication that he ever returned home or even visited London.
At last, in August 1746, after taking his degree as a Bachelor of Arts, he retraced his steps to Scotland, and gave up all thought of a clerical career. In the words of his biographer, “he chose to consult in this instance his own inclinations in preference to the wishes of his friends; and abandoning at once all the schemes which their prudence had formed for him, he resolved to return to his own country and to limit his ambition to the uncertain prospect of obtaining, in time, some one of those moderate preferments to which literary attainments lead in Scotland.” He was now in 1746 again in his mother’s house at Kirkcaldy, “engaged in study, but without any fixed plan for his future life.” So far as I am aware, none of Adam Smith’s biographers has definitely assigned to this period any of the writings which he either published or left to his executors. In the latter class, however, there is a group of fragments dealing with the history of Astronomy, of Ancient Physics, and of Ancient Logic and Metaphysics, and an elaborate essay on The Imitative Arts, which are collectively described by his executors in an advertisement as “parts of a plan he once had formed for giving a connected history of the liberal sciences and elegant arts.”[6]
The essay on The Imitative Arts belongs to a different design and to a slightly later period. But it seems clear that the History of Astronomy was composed at this time.[7] There is no other period of his life in which he would have been so well able to collect the materials for an examination of the systems of the Greek, the Arabian, and the mediæval astronomers as in the six years of Oxford study, or so likely to shape them into a finished treatise as in the two quiet years spent at Kirkcaldy immediately after his return, when, we are told, he was “engaged in study, but without any fixed plan for his future life.” The History of Astronomy, which takes us from the schools of Thales and Pythagoras through the systems of Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, and Descartes to that of Sir Isaac Newton, is complete in itself, though from certain notes and memoranda which accompanied it Smith’s executors were led to believe that he contemplated some further extension.[8] It ends very appropriately with an enthusiastic description of Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery as the greatest ever made by man. He had acquired “the most universal empire that was ever established in philosophy,” and was the only natural philosopher whose system, instead of being a mere invention of the imagination to connect otherwise discordant phenomena, appeared to contain in itself “the real chains which nature makes use of to bind together her several operations.” In attributing the History of Astronomy to Oxford and Kirkcaldy I except the concluding pages, which must have been added in the last years of his life; for in a letter to Hume (1773) he spoke of it as a history of Astronomical Systems to the time (not of Newton but) of Descartes.
Although complete in itself, this masterly essay was plainly meant by its author to form only one book in a great history of philosophy. It begins with three short introductory sections, the first on surprise, the second on wonder, and the third on the origin of philosophy. It is the function of philosophy, he says, to discover the connecting principles of nature, and to explain those portents which astonish or affright mankind. He then shows that celestial appearances have always excited the greatest curiosity, and describes with extraordinary learning and vivacity the long series of attempts that had been made to account for “the ways of the sky and the stars”—
“How winter suns in ocean plunge so soon,
And what delays the timid nights of June.”
The History of Ancient Physics, a much shorter fragment, is placed in his collected works immediately after the History of Astronomy. It evidently belongs to the same early period, but is of little interest. Upon The History of Ancient Logics and Metaphysics we shall have something to say in our next chapter.
After two years of waiting, Adam Smith got his opportunity. His neighbour, James Oswald of Dunnikier, had become Kirkcaldy’s representative in Parliament, and was now a Commissioner of the Navy. Through Oswald Smith seems to have been introduced to Henry Home (Lord Kames), a leader of the Edinburgh Bar, and arbiter of Scottish elegancies. Home was a warm patron of English literature, and was busily importing it along with English ploughs and other Southern improvements into his native land. What a contrast between this typical Scotch patriot of 1750 and grim old Fletcher of Saltoun, the corresponding type of 1700, whose remedy for Scottish ills was to restore slavery, and place all labourers in the situation of salters and colliers! Finding that Smith had acquired the accent and was well read in the prose and poetry of England, Home encouraged him to give what we should now call extension lectures in Edinburgh. Accordingly the young Oxford graduate delivered a course of lectures on English literature in the winter of 1748-9, adding in the following year a course on political economy in which he preached the doctrines of natural liberty and free trade. The English lectures were attended by Henry Home, Alexander Wedderburn, and William Johnstone (Sir William Pulteney), and proved no mere success of esteem; for they brought in a clear £100, and were so popular that they were repeated in the two following winters. The manuscript of these lectures was burnt shortly before his death, and the world is probably not much the poorer. Smith shared the opinions of his age, and set up Dryden, Pope, and Gray on pedestals from which they were soon to be thrown down by the children of nature and romance. He gave these lectures afterwards at Glasgow, and Boswell, who attended them in 1759, told Johnson that Smith had condemned blank verse. Johnson was delighted, and cried out: “Sir, I was once in company with Smith, and we did not take to each other; but had I known that he loved rhyme as much as you tell me he does, I should have hugged him.” One cannot help wondering what would have been said if Boswell had repeated another of our author’s critical opinions, that Johnson was “of all writers ancient and modern the one who kept off the greatest distance from common sense.”
The most valuable part of Adam Smith’s critical lectures has been preserved in an essay on the Imitative Arts, which I should judge from internal evidence to have been drafted at this time, but to have been revised and improved in later years. Considering that neither Burke’s essay on the Sublime and Beautiful nor Lessing’s Laocoon had then appeared, we cannot but admire the originality he displayed in analysing the different effects produced by sculpture, painting, music, and dancing, and in distinguishing the different pleasures that attend the various kinds and degrees of imitation. He works out with much ingenuity the theory of the difficulté surmontée by which Voltaire accounted for the effect of verse and rhyme. Smith extends this principle to other arts, and seeks, always cleverly, often successfully, to show that much of our delight in art arises from our admiration for the artist’s skill in overcoming difficulties. He declares that a disparity between the imitating and the imitated object is the foundation of the beauty of imitation. The great masters of statuary and painting never produce their effects by deception. To prove this, he refers to the rather unpleasing effect produced by painted statues and by the reflections of a mirror. Photography would have supplied him with another illustration.