Nicholas Phillipson
Page 31
In the published letter to Strahan, the story has been tweaked and the remarks about the Church and the clergy removed. ‘Have a little patience, good Charon,’ Hume is now reported as saying; ‘I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the Public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfal of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.’
The final irony was to be that when the Dialogues were finally published anonymously by Strahan in 1779 on the authority of Hume’s nephew, there was no public uproar at all, but Smith’s Letter to Strahan itself provoked outrage from High Churchmen in England, led by George Horne, the President of Magdalen College, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford and future Bishop of Norwich. Horne had already set himself up as the scourge of ‘that modern paper building of philosophical infidelity’ and his Letter to Adam Smith, LL.D. on the Life, Death and Philosophy of his Friend David Hume, Esq. excoriated Smith for his blatant failure to present Hume as a man who ought to have sought the consolations of religion on his deathbed. ‘You would persuade us’, he said,
by the example of David Hume, Esq., that atheism is the only cordial for low spirits and the proper antidote against the fear of death, but surely he who can reflect with complacency on his friend thus employing his talents in this life, and thus amusing himself with Lucian, whist and Charon at his death, can smile over Babylon in ruins, esteem the earthquakes which destroyed Lisbon as agreeable occurrences, and congratulate the hardened Pharaoh on his overthrow in the Red Sea.18
It was a pamphlet which detonated a short and violent press controversy which must have reminded Smith of the Oxford zealotry he had encountered some thirty years earlier. According to Ramsay of Ochtertyre, it caused some of his Edinburgh friends ‘who revered his character and admired his writings’ to think of him ‘as an avowed sceptic’, something that caused him ‘very great pain’.19 More surprising, however, was the reaction of some of Smith’s friends in Johnson’s Club. James Boswell, who had recently referred to his old professor as ‘a professed infidel with a bag-wig’, reported a dismissive attack on the Letter to Strahan by Edmund Burke, a friend of Smith as well as Hume. Burke thought Smith’s eulogy typical of the clannishness of modern infidels.
Talking of David Hume, Mr Burke laughed at his life and at Smith’s appendix ‘most virtuous,’ etc. ‘This,’ said he, ‘is said for the credit of their church, and the members of no church use more art for its credit.’ He said, ‘Here was a man [Hume] at a great age [sixty-five], who had been preparing all along to die without showing fear, does it, and rout is made about it. Men in general die easily … Almost all men have a belief and hope of futurity, without any very clear certainty, which supports them at death.’ BOSWELL. ‘But death is terrible.’ BURKE. ‘Yes, to us at present. Because it is like an execution, dying in full health. But when we’re gradually prepared for it, not shocking.’ While he talked thus my mind was illuminated, and I looked forward to death with ease and resolution and even a flutter not unpleasing.20
The episode provoked Smith’s wry comment: ‘A single, and as, I thought a very harmless Sheet of paper, which I happened to Write concerning the death of our late friend Mr Hume, brought upon me ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain.’21
Smith was to resolve the anxieties about religious controversy which had tested his oldest and most important friendship with all the fastidiousness of the aesthete. Texts should be allowed to speak for themselves, their philosophy uncontaminated by the vulgarities of public curiosity about their authors or, worse still, by their authors’ capacity for self-advertisement. He was appalled by Strahan’s suggestion that My Own Life should be prefaced by a selection of Hume’s letters. ‘If a collection of Mr Humes letters … was to receive the public approbation, as yours certainly would, the Curls of the times would immediately set about rummaging the cabinets of all those who had ever received a scrap of paper from him. Many things would be published not fit to see the light to the great mortification of all those who wish well to his memory.’22 He was equally offended by the vulgarity of Hume’s plans for his own memorial, a conspicuously expensive monumental tomb designed by Robert Adam for the Calton Burying Ground in Edinburgh: ‘I don’t like that monument. It is the greatest piece of vanity I ever saw in my friend Hume.’23 This distaste for self-advertisement helps to explain why Smith, almost alone among the Scottish literati, was never painted by the great portraitists of the Scottish Enlightenment, Allan Ramsay, David Martin and Henry Raeburn, and why he would be so determined to destroy nearly all of his private papers. It was part of a mindset that would be infused with the deeply idiosyncratic Stoicism with which the final edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments was to be coloured.
With the controversies after Hume’s death behind him, Smith was able to give his full attention to a project he had begun in May or June on his return to Kirkcaldy, the book on the imitative arts which was to be his contribution to the theory of taste and criticism. It is clear from the contents of his library that this was a subject that had interested him for some time, and it arose quite naturally from the remarkable theory of need that had prefaced the Glasgow lectures on police and had been removed from the Wealth of Nations. In considering the consequences of the division of labour for the progress of civilization, he had shown how the material progress of mankind created the aesthetic and intellectual needs which science and the arts set out to satisfy. Having spent some fifteen exhausting years on the material needs of mankind and the creation of wealth, he was now turning to the supremely elusive question of man’s aesthetic needs and the role of the imitative arts in satisfying them.
Although the book never materialized, Smith gave two papers on the subject to the Glasgow Literary Society in 1788 and left notes for a third. These dealt with imitation in the visual arts, in music and in dancing, and were among the papers spared from the forthcoming archival bonfire. The first two lectures show Smith at the height of his powers, engaged on a subject that was central to his philosophical interests, indebted to Hume, and critical of the French and above all of Rousseau. The debts to Hume were deep and long-standing. In his Treatise Hume had identified the philosophy of criticism as one of the essential components of a philosophy of the understanding on which a science of man depended but had, disappointingly, devoted only two rather slender essays to the subject: ‘Of Tragedy’ and ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, both published in 1757, five years after the Political Discourses. Nevertheless, they would be of as much importance in opening up Smith’s aesthetic thinking as Hume’s essays on commerce had been for his thinking about political economy. Hume’s essays were a contribution to a largely French-led debate about the pleasure we derive from the horrors of tragedy, and about the wider question of whether there could ever be a fixed standard of taste by which to judge the merits of a work of art. So far as Smith was concerned, the essay on tragedy was particularly relevant. Here Hume had suggested that the pleasure we derive from tragedy or any work of art derives from an appreciation of the author’s rhetorical skills in representing the passions, and from the curious fact that ‘tragedy is an imitation; and imitation is always of itself agreeable.’24 For Smith, the view that imitation always pleases was an overstatement because it failed to take account of the intensity of the pleasure aroused by different forms of imitation:
What, for example, would be the most perfect imitation of the carpet which now lies before me? Another carpet, certainly, wrought as exactly as possible after the same pattern. But, whatever might be the merit or beauty of this second carpet, it would not be supposed to derive any from the circumstance of its having been made in imitation of the first. This circumstance of its being not an original, but a copy, would even be considered as some diminution of that merit; a greater or smaller, in proportion as the object was of a nature to lay claim to a greater or smaller degree of admiration. It would not much diminish the merit of a common carpet, because in such t
rifling objects, which at best can lay claim to so little beauty or merit of any kind, we do not always think it worth while to affect originality: it would diminish a good deal that of a carpet of very exquisite workmanship. In objects of still greater importance, this exact, or, as it would be called, this servile imitation, would be considered as the most unpardonable blemish. To build another St. Peter’s, or St. Paul’s church, of exactly the same dimensions, proportions, and ornaments with the present buildings at Rome, or London, would be supposed to argue such a miserable barrenness of genius and invention as would disgrace the most expensive magnificence.25
If imitation of this sort failed to please as much as a great classical sculpture or a fine modern painting of a Dutch interior, what was one to make of the enormous appeal of instrumental music, which had no obvious claim to be regarded as imitative at all? He was interested in Hume’s view that we derive aesthetic pleasure from the skill and eloquence of the playwright or artist, but characteristically preferred to think of that pleasure as arising from our sense of wonder at the artist’s ability to represent an object or a situation in another medium.
But though a production of art seldom derives any merit from its resemblance to another object of the same kind, it frequently derives a great deal from its resemblance to an object of a different kind, whether that object be a production of art or of nature. A painted cloth, the work of some laborious Dutch artist, so curiously shaded and coloured as to represent the pile and softness of a woollen one, might derive some merit from its resemblance even to the sorry carpet which now lies before me. The copy might, and probably would, in this case, be of much greater value than the original. But if the carpet was represented as spread, either upon a floor or upon a table, and projecting from the back ground of the picture, with exact observation of perspective, and of light and shade, the merit of the imitation would be still greater.26
This proposition was to be the axiom on which Smith’s theory of the pleasure arising from the imitative arts was to rest, the last such axiom he was to propose in the course of his philosophical career. However, compared with the confidently posed axioms on which earlier systems had been based, this was presented with some caution and hesitation, as though Smith was not yet quite sure whether its reach was wide enough to encompass a general theory of aesthetics: ‘a production of art seldom derives any merit from its resemblance to another object of the same kind, it frequently derives a great deal from its resemblance to an object of a different kind’ (my italics).27 Just what the problems of extending the reach of this axiom were would become clear in the discussion of music, and above all in Smith’s extraordinary discussion of the pleasures we derive from music and particularly from that most abstract of musical forms, the concertos and overtures which have no obvious connection with imitation at all.
To develop this dimension of his theory he returned to the natural history of language he had first explored in Edinburgh in 1748, which remained at the core of his science of man. There he had suggested that our capacity for language had its origins in need, and had developed a suggestive conjecture about the natural progress of language from the inchoate signs and sounds of the child or the aborigine to the highly structured language systems on which the progress of civilization had depended. Smith used this conjecture to accommodate his account of the origins and progress of music and dancing, ‘perhaps, the first and earliest pleasures of [man’s] own invention’.28 These were pleasures which belonged to the world of leisure rather than of work, to the long periods of inertia between hunting expeditions characteristic of savage societies and to the leisure enjoyed by the fortunate few in a modern commercial society. In origin, all music was probably vocal, ‘as [the voice] is always the best, so it would naturally be the first and earliest of musical instruments’, and dancing was originally the natural accompaniment of song; Smith commented that he had been much struck by the spectacle of an African slave performing a war dance to his own song ‘with such vehemence of action and expression, that the whole company, gentlemen as well as ladies, got up upon the chairs and tables, to be as much as possible out of the way of his fury’.29 The subsequent natural history of music was a story of the way in which musical voice-sounds and rhythm developed as a medium for expressing different passions, acquiring a new level of imitative reach when coupled with words, poetry and narratives. Indeed while poetry and prose could only hope to describe the succession of a person’s passions, vocal music had the unique ability of being able to imitate them:
It is upon this account that the words of an air, especially of a passionate one, though they are seldom very long, yet are scarce ever sung straight on to the end, like those of a recitative; but are almost always broken into parts, which are transposed and repeated again and again, according to the fancy or judgment of the composer. It is by means of such repetitions only, that Music can exert those peculiar powers of imitation which distinguish it, and in which it excels all the other Imitative Arts.30
Indeed, in modern opera, music had become a complex and distinctive vehicle of imitation through its use of words, music and performance. Smith’s illustrative portrait of the fine opera singer engaged in a uniquely complex act of imitation is notably cogent and equally suggestive of Smith’s interest in an art form he must have encountered in Handel’s London and Rameau’s Paris.
In a good opera actor, not only the modulations and pauses of his voice, but every motion or gesture, every variation, either in the air of his head, or in the attitude of his body, correspond to the time and measure of Music: they correspond to the expression of the sentiment or passion which the Music imitates, and that expression necessarily corresponds to this time and measure. Music is as it were the soul which animates him, which informs every feature of his countenance, and even directs every movement of his eyes. Like the musical expression of a song, his action adds to the natural grace of the sentiment or action which it imitates, a new and peculiar grace of its own; the exquisite and engaging grace of those gestures and motions, of those airs and attitudes which are directed by the movement, by the time and measure of Music; this grace heightens and enlivens that expression.31
Thus far Smith had argued that it was its association with words that had turned vocal music into a singularly complex imitative art. Indeed Rousseau – ‘an Author, more capable of feeling strongly than of analising accurately’ – had been largely responsible for developing a general theory of music on this basis. But none of this explained the appeal of purely ‘instrumental music’, which was seldom imitative in any recognizable sense whatever. It was here that the force of Smith’s original observation could be found: that the essential appeal of music lay, as the ancients had seen, in a succession of sounds and measures capable of arousing or soothing the mind, for
time and measure are to instrumental Music what order and method are to discourse; they break it into proper parts and divisions, by which we are enabled both to remember better what is gone before, and frequently to foresee somewhat of what is to come after … and, according to the saying of an ancient philosopher and musician, the enjoyment of Music arises partly from memory and partly from foresight.32
It led him to the striking conclusion that the appeal of non-vocal, instrumental music lay in its systemic character, whose appeal was not unlike that of a system of philosophy. ‘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.’33
This raised the question whether music itself could be described as an imitative art, or whether the notion of imitation was capable of sustaining the general theory of aesthetics demanded by the terms of Hume’s science of man. It was presumably a question Smith would have had to consider if he had been able to finish
the book. The last, aborted paper was intended to deal with dancing and tragedy. ‘Yes dancing,’ wrote William Richardson, one of Smith’s former students, who heard his papers in Glasgow in 1788, ‘for he conceives it to be an Imitative art; and I believe means to prove, that the Greek tragedy was no other than a musical Ballet.’34 However, neither the lecture nor the proposed book were to be finished. On 24 January 1778 Smith was appointed to what the Solicitor General Alexander Wedderburn described as ‘a very good office’, a seat on the Board of Customs in Scotland at a salary of £600.35 It was an appointment which meant moving with his mother and cousin from Kirkcaldy to Edinburgh. It was by his own account not an onerous job, but it was time consuming. Worse still, Hume’s death was to establish him as the iconic philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment, a man whose company was always in demand by his friends and whose acquaintance was sought by the growing procession of cultural tourists who visited the city. It was not a situation to encourage a philosopher, accustomed to work in relative isolation, to develop what would surely have become a general theory of aesthetics of uncommon power.
Smith’s new appointment cannot have been wholly unexpected. Hugh Blair had anticipated something of the sort when he congratulated Smith on the publication of the Wealth of Nations: ‘I Cannot believe but that they will place you at some of the great Boards in England. They are Idiots if they do not’, though William Strahan was right in thinking that Margaret Smith’s declining health would make any move to London impossible.36 Nor was Smith averse to public recognition of this sort. When the Duke of Buccleuch proposed him for a vacancy on the Scottish Board in October 1777 he was quick to announce ‘I am now a candidate for a seat at that Board’. The Buccleuchs, the Duchess in particular, lobbied on his behalf. Grey Cooper, one of the Lords of Treasury, regarded the appointment agreed.37 So did London gossip, as reported by Edward Gibbon, a fellow-member of Johnson’s Club, on 26 November: