On the Wealth of Nations

  The second problem is us and what we're used to learning about great men and women or the people who pass for them. What we're used to learning is everything. There is an ongoing biography of Lyndon Johnson, the writing of which is taking a span of time equal to that of LBJ's active political career. And it will take me more than that long to read it. A man's soul is understandable only to God, so the best that mortals can get out of such a purgatorial enterprise is an understanding of the Great Biography Subject's personality.

  'Personality' hadn't been invented in the eighteenth century. The Copernican view of the cosmos was accepted. The earth was no longer considered the center of the universe. But Romanticism's neo-Ptolemaic view of the cosmos hadn't come into fashion: the self had not yet taken the earth's place. The bundle of tics and traits and squirrelly notions that make one person different from another was not considered supremely important. Personality, in the 1700s, meant the fact of being a person rather than a thing. The solipsistic motormouth Ralph Waldo Emerson seems to have initiated the use of the word the way we use it.

  What an eighteenth-century man had was character. If he possessed any distinctive personal qualities at all, character was the one worth mentioning. As with much that's best in life, character is dull. 'Vice is always capricious: virtue only is regular and orderly,' Smith wrote in Moral Sentiments.4 In Smith's opinion, the 'difference between a man of principle and honour and a worthless fellow' is that 'the one adheres, on all occasions, steadily and resolutely to his maxims, and preserves through the whole of his life one even tenour of conduct. The other, acts variously and accidentally, as humour, inclination, or interest chance to be uppermost.'5

  Every modern person is a worthless fellow. It's no wonder that many of the most admirable – and unmodern – people of the eighteenth century do not 'come alive on the page' for us moderns. Meanwhile some of the less admirable, like Rousseau, come alive so well that they still need killing off today. Richard Brookhiser coped with this problem of good character in his biography of George Washington, Founding Father:

  We worry about our authenticity – about whether our presentation reflects who we 'really' are. Eighteenth-century Americans attended more to the outside story and were less avid to drive putty knives between the outer and inner man. 'Character' … was a role one played until one became it; 'character' also meant how one's role was judged by others. It was both the performance and the reviews. Every man had a character to maintain; every man was a character actor.6

  Adam Smith's role as the Fred Mertz in I Love Political Economy was as regular and orderly and dull as any proponent of his ideas and defender of his character could hope. Smith lived most of his adult life with his widowed mother, Margaret Douglas Smith, and his spinster cousin, Janet Douglas. They doted on him and he on them. 'And nothing could be added more.'

  Smith's comments on his mother, in a letter telling his friend and publisher William Strahan about her death at ninety, are not the stuff of twenty-first-century memoirs: 'a person who certainly loved me more than any other person ever did or ever will love me; and whom I certainly loved and respected more than I ever shall either love or respect any other person'.7

  Only one domestic anecdote comes down to us, circa 1788, from Sir Walter Scott, who was then an Edinburgh University student. At tea time, said Scott, Smith gave Janet Douglas 'sore confusion, by neglecting utterly her invitation to be seated, and walked round and round … stopping ever and anon to steal a lump from the sugar basin, which the venerable spinster was at length constrained to place on her own knee, as the only method of securing it from his most uneconomical depredations'.8 But Sir Walter Scott could make a story out of anything, and often did.

  David Douglas, the nine-year-old son of another Smith cousin, was taken into this household when Smith was a bachelor of fifty-five. Skateboards, television, and Xboxes not having been invented, Smith enjoyed this and spent his leisure giving David his lessons. (One hopes 'Variations in the Value of Silver during the Course of the Four last Centuries' was lightly taught.) David Douglas became Smith's heir. Contrary to the heirs-of-the-prominent story line with which we are familiar (what's Scots dialect for rehab?), Douglas would ascend to the Scottish bench as Lord Reston.

  There is no record of an accusation against Adam Smith for prevarication, deceit, shifty dealing, or even for having a little too much of that good head for business that his esteemed middle class invented. Smith resigned his professorship at Glasgow to tutor the young Duke of Buccleuch. Because Smith left at midterm he tried to return his students' fees. The students liked him so well that none would accept the refund. Smith declared, 'You must not refuse me this satisfaction; nay, by heavens, gentlemen, you shall not.' Then he seized the nearest young man by his coat and stuck the refund in his pocket.9

  Smith received a life pension for having tutored the Duke of Buccleuch, who called him 'a friend whom I loved and respected, not only for his great talents, but for every private virtue'.10 Years later the duke helped get a political appointment for Smith, and Smith responded by offering to give up his pension. The only way the duke could talk Smith out of this point of honor was by invoking a more personal point of same. As Smith explained in a letter to a friend, 'His Grace sent me word … that though I had considered what was fit for my own honour, I had not consider'd what was fit for his; and that he never would suffer it to be suspected that he had procured an office for his friend, in order to relieve himself from the burden of such an annuity.'11

  Adam Smith made a good living as a member of what he described as 'that unprosperous race of men commonly called men of letters'.12 And he gave most of it away. One instance came to light in a business letter of Smith's sold at an auction in 1963.13 Smith explained that two hundred pounds (nine months' worth of his pension) needed to be sent to a 'Welch Nephew' so that the young man wouldn't have to sell his commission in the army. Smith didn't keep a carriage or spend extravagantly on his house or clothes. He entertained with potluck suppers on Sundays. 'The state of his funds at the time of his death, compared with his very moderate establishment, confirmed, beyond a doubt,' wrote an intimate acquaintance, 'what his intimate acquaintances had often suspected, that a large proportion of his annual savings was allotted to offices of secret charity.'14

  Adam Smith was a big person, with big hands, big teeth, and the big nose everyone in the eighteenth century seems to have had. In his portraits he looks a bit like that other fellow intent upon staying in character, George Washington, but plumper and less denture and democracy afflicted. 'His countenance was manly and agreeable,' said one friend,15 with, said another, 'a smile of inexpressible benignity'.16

  There is a disturbing aspect, to a modern reader, about romantic scandals involving Adam Smith: there weren't any. And we have very little information of that type that's unscandalous either. The only biographer of Smith who knew him was Dugald Stewart, occupant of Smith's old chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow University and the son of a Glasgow schoolmate of Smith's. Stewart may be suspected of reticence. He did tell one story:

  In the early part of Mr. Smith's life, it is well known to his friends that he was for several years attached to a young lady of great beauty and accomplishment … What the circumstances were which prevented their union, I have not been able to learn; but I believe it is pretty certain that, after this disappointment, he laid aside all thoughts of marriage. The lady to whom I allude died also unmarried … I had the pleasure of seeing her when she was turned of eighty, and when she still retained evident traces of her former beauty.17

  Stewart may also be suspected of sitting up late and reading love poetry.

  The author of a more recent (1995) and more thoroughgoing biography of Smith, Ian Simpson Ross, wrote, 'It is to be feared that the biographer can do little more with the topic of Smith's sex life than contribute a footnote to the history of sublimation.'18

  But I wouldn't be a truly modern reader if I didn't try. Smith left a couple of hints that he was a m
an like other men. The Theory of Moral Sentiments contains an offhand comment of the kind that men who are like other men always make when fashion's dictates are thwarting nature's inclinations: 'ladies … endeavouring, for near a century past, to squeeze the beautiful roundness of their natural shape into a square form'.19 And there is that mention in The Wealth of Nations of the potato-fed 'unfortunate women who live by prostitution' whom Smith called 'the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions'.20 Let modern readers supply a 'hmmm'.

  While with the Duke of Buccleuch on grand tour in France, Smith was set upon by a French marquise, said by Smith's nineteenth-century biographer, John Rae, to be 'bent upon making so famous a conquest'.21 It was all Smith could do to fend her off, which embarrassed Smith and amused the members of his traveling party. But this may not have been a matter of chastity alone. A friend told a friend that the real reason Smith fought shy of the marquise was his love for an English lady staying in the same town. This seems to have resulted in a disappointment additional to the one described by Dugald Stewart. Perhaps Smith renounced marriage forever more than once. Men have been known to.

  Anyway Smith did make a conquest, of the heart if not the rest of Mme Riccoboni in Paris. She was a famous actress who quit the stage to become a more famous author of romantic novels. She wrote a letter to her friend the playwright and actor David Garrick, a letter which John Rae and other Smith biographers as late as the 1960s discreetly left in French:

  Oh these Scotts! These Scottish dogs! They come to please me and afflict me! I am like those silly young girls who listen to a lover without thinking of regret, always the neighbor of pleasure. Scold me, beat me, kill me! But I love Mr. Smith, I love him very much. I would like the devil to carry away all our literary minds, our philosophers, and bring back Mr. Smith.22

  Not to be outdone in effusiveness (though an effusiveness of a very Scots kind) Smith included Mme Riccoboni in his revision of The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

  The poets and romance writers, who best paint the refinements and delicacies of love and friendship, and of all other private and domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson, Maurivaux, and Riccoboni; are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno, Chrysippus, or Epictetus.23

  An update of Smith's list being something like 'Stoppard, Pinter, Updike, Bellow, and Danielle Steele'.

  However it was that, in the Enlightenment, character outweighed personality, Smith had plenty of the latter. We'd be inclined to set aside his character and just call him one. He talked to himself. His head swayed continually from side to side. When he walked he looked as though he was headed off in all directions. He told friends that once, as he passed along the High Street in Edinburgh, he heard a market woman tsk-tsk about an obviously prosperous lunatic being allowed to wander alone.

  Smith was splendidly absentminded. While he was working on The Wealth of Nations at his mother's house in Kirkcaldy, he is supposed to have gone out into the garden in his dressing gown and, lost in thought, wandered into the road. He walked to Dumferline, fifteen miles away, before steeple bells broke his reverie and he realized he was wearing his robe and slippers in the midst of a crowd going to church.

  Someone who breakfasted with Smith in London said that Smith, deeply involved in a conversation, put bread and butter and boiling water into a teapot, served himself, and pronounced it the worst cup of tea he'd ever had. Smith was avoided as a whist partner by his fellow professors at Glasgow University because if he got an idea during a game he would claim he had no more cards in the suit being played. Dining at Dalkeith House, the country seat of the Duke of Buccleuch, Smith began a scathing commentary on some important politician with the politician's closest relative sitting across the table. Smith stopped when he realized this. But then he began talking to himself, saying that the devil may care but it was all true.

  Most of these anecdotes fall into the journalist's category of 'too good to check'. But there is evidence of their general truth in the student notes taken during Smith's Glasgow lectures on rhetoric. Smith mentioned an absentminded character in a French play, and scribbled into the notebook margin is a Latin tag to the effect of 'Look who's talking.'

  When Smith was a government official in Edinburgh he had a ceremonial guard consisting of a porter dressed in an elaborate military-style tunic and wielding a seven-foot staff. Each day when Smith arrived the porter would perform a sort of drill team exercise. One day Smith became fascinated by this and, using his bamboo cane in place of the staff, matched the porter's every motion, present arms for present arms, about face for about face, parade rest for parade rest. Afterward no one could convince Smith that he'd done anything odd. Dugald Stewart says Smith had an aesthetic theory that much of the pleasure we get from the imitative arts has to do with the difficulty of the imitation. Maybe that's what Smith was thinking about. Or maybe he was just having a goof.

  As absent as Smith's mind was, he was present. He thought highly enough of sociability that he included it in his section on propriety in Moral Sentiments: 'Society and conversation … are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquillity.'24 He belonged to a profusion of clubs, from the Royal Society of London to something called the Select Society of Edinburgh, which debated things such as the ideal size of farms in Scotland and offered a prize to anyone who could 'cure the greatest number of smokey chimneys'. He was even made an honorary captain of the Edinburgh city guard, though whether before or after his performance with the porter I don't know.

  Smith must have been a likable man. John Rae tells a story of a French professor of geology being subjected by Smith to an evening of bagpipe music. It was, in the words of the geology professor, 'a most hideous noise'. But afterward the same Frenchman reported that 'there was nobody in Edinburgh he visited more frequently than Smith.'25

  Smith knew David Hume, Edward Gibbon, Pitt the Younger, Sir Walter Scott, Voltaire, Rousseau, Edmund Burke, James Watt, Benjamin Franklin, and le Duc de La Rochefoucauld. It's impossible today to imagine knowing a range of such people. There are no such people.

  Smith's closest friendship was with David Hume, whom he met in Edinburgh in about 1750. They were a sort of high-minded, very intellectual Laurel and Hardy without the tantrums or pie throwing, or a Hardy and Hardy since neither was skinny or laconic. A passage in Moral Sentiments seems to be the straight man's version of the relationship:

  But of all the attachments to an individual, that which is founded altogether upon the esteem and approbation of his good conduct and behaviour, confirmed by much experience and long acquaintance, is, by far, the most respectable … The attachment which is founded upon the love of virtue, as it is certainly, of all attachments, the most virtuous; so it is likewise the happiest, as well as the most permanent and secure.26

  For the Hume version, there is an elaborate set piece, a twelve-hundred-word comic routine in a letter, written from London, to Smith who was in Glasgow awaiting news of how the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments had been received. Hume lists every important person to whom he's given a copy and provides biographical details of them before saying,

  I have delayd writing to you till I cou'd tell you something of the Success of the Book, and coud prognosticate with some Probability whether it shoud be finally damnd to Oblivion, or shoud be registerd in the Temple of Immortality. Tho' it has been publishd only a few Weeks, I think there appear already such strong Symptoms, that I can almost venture to fortell its Fate. It is in short this – But I have been interrupted in my Letter by a foolish impertinent Visit of one who has lately come from Scotland. He tells me, that the University of Glasgow intend to declare Rouets Office Vacant … ,

  Hume then expends a long paragraph on gossip about who might get this post, leading to gossip about mutual acquaintances and a digression on their friend Lord Kames and his book Historical Law-Tracts, of which Hume says,

  A man might as well think of making a fine Sauce by a Mixture of Wormwood and Aloes a
s an agreeable Composition by joining Metaphysics and Scotch Law … But to return to your Book, and its Success in this Town, I must tell you – A Plague of Interruptions! I orderd myself to be deny'd; and yet here is one that has broke in upon me again. He is a man of Letters, and we have had a good deal of literary Conversation. You told me, that you was curious of literary Anecdotes, and therefore I shall inform you of a few …

  Which Hume does.

  But what is all this to my Book? say you. – My Dear Mr. Smith, have Patience: Compose yourself to Tranquillity: Show yourself a Philosopher in Practice as well as Profession: Think on the Emptiness, and Rashness, and Futility of the common Judgements of Men: How little they are regulatd by Reason in any Subject, much more in philosophical Subjects, which so far exceed the Comprehension of the Vulgar.

  An apposite Latin quotation is inserted followed by a string of further admonishments to equanimity and a story about how the Athenian politician Phocion always suspected that he'd made a mistake when he was applauded by the populace. 'Supposing, therefore,' wrote Hume, 'that you have duely prepard yourself for the worst by all these Reflections; I proceed to tell you the melancholy News, that your Book has been very unfortunate; For the Public seem disposd to applaud it extremely. It was lookd for by the foolish People with some Impatience; and the Mob of Literati are beginning already to be very loud in its Praises.'27

  In this book, which the mob of literati were loudly praising, Adam Smith wrote that he believed 'the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved.'28 Smith was not, however, one of those dreadful individuals of whom it is said, 'He was beloved by all.' Dr Johnson didn't like him. Supposedly they had their first encounter at a party in London, and later that evening Smith turned up at another party saying of Johnson, 'He's a brute; he's a brute.' Johnson had attacked Smith for defending Hume's character despite Hume's atheistic views, and Smith had persisted in championing Hume.