That Adam Smith ‘had never neglected to cultivate a taste for the fine arts’ we are assured by Dugald Stewart (III.13); that he was writing a book on the imitative arts about ten years before his death we know from Smith’s own admission; but what was the precise relation of that work to well–attested earlier efforts on the one hand, and to the essay posthumously published on the other, is a question to which we shall probably never know the answer. Since the sources of our information concerning this matter cast some light on the larger question of the ‘great work’
Smith at one time contemplated it may be worth while to study them in some detail.
Neither in his early letter to Hume (Letter 137 dated 16 April 1773) nor in the later one to La Rochefoucauld (Letter 248 dated 1 November 1785) did Smith refer specifically to any study of the imitative arts. But in October 1780 in a letter (208) to Andreas Holt, Commissioner of the Danish Board of Trade, occurs a passage that casts light on more than one question relating to the Essays on Philosophical Subjects, and above all on the one we are at present concerned with.
In 1773, Smith recalls, he had had to go to London in connection with an ‘office’ that on the Duke of Buccleuch’s advice he had turned down. ‘For four years after this’, Smith continued, ‘London was my principal residence, where I finished and published my Book [sc. Wealth of Nations]. I had returned to my old retirement at Kirkaldy and was employing myself in writing another Work concerning the imitative arts . . .’ He concluded this letter with an expression of regret that owing to the duties of his new office (Commissioner of H.M. Customs in Edinburgh) ‘Several Works which I had projected are likely to go on much more slowly than they otherwise would have done’.
In the year (1781) following that of the letter just quoted, Henry Mackenzie wrote to a Mr.
Carmichael that Smith had ‘lying by him, several essays, some finished, but the greater part not quite completed on subjects of criticism and Belles Lettres’. Mackenzie, author of The Man of Feeling, was one of the most distinguished of contemporary Scottish men of letters. In commenting on this letter Scott ( ASSP, 284 and note) says that ‘He acted on behalf of Adam Smith’s literary executors in preparing his Essays for publication’. Unfortunately Mackenzie’s reference to the essays is limited to the above quotation. Apart from Smith’s letter to La Rochefoucauld (above, p. 171), no evidence as to the progress of the essays is available before http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Smith0232/GlasgowEdition/PhilosophicalSubjects...
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the time of their author’s death (1790) when letters of condolence were written to Smith’s nephew and principal legatee. In one of these letters, from Lord Loughborough, there occurs the following paragraph:
The disposition of his unprinted Works is exactly what I expected as he told me it was his determination to destroy the greater part of them, and He particularly excepted the History of Astronomy and his Treatise on the imitative Arts. The last I had seen when he was in London, but, I understood it had since received some alterations. The first I had not seen for many years, but understood from conversation that he had been employed in correcting it.
(Scott, ASSP, 313.)
Unfortunately there is no indication which year it was during Smith’s residence in London that Lord Loughborough had seen the ‘Arts’ essay, but Smith’s proposed preservation of it (in addition to the Astronomy, the only one named in Letter 137 to Hume) implies that it was on a later visit than the one Smith refers to in the letter addressed to Andreas Holt—perhaps during the visit of 1787 referred to by Professor E. C. Mossner in The Biographical Approach (1969, 20).
If this were all the evidence we had on the composition of the essay on the imitative arts the conclusion would be tolerably clear—it was ‘written’ at Kirkcaldy about 1777, ‘seen’ in London thereafter, and subsequently ‘altered’. Unfortunately an element of doubt—though not a conclusive one—is introduced by John Millar, Professor of Law at Glasgow, who in a letter (Scott, ASSP, 312–13) to David Douglas written a few days before that of Lord Loughborough stated that
‘Of the discourses which he intended upon the imitative arts, he read two to our Society at Glasgow, but the third was not then finished.’ This reference to two parts and an unfinished third is a plausible description of the essay and appendix as posthumously printed. Now Smith left the Glasgow Chair in 1764, about fourteen years before he ‘wrote’ it. At its face value, then, Millar’s evidence implies either that Smith ‘composed’ it long before he ‘wrote’ it, or that he communicated to the Glasgow Society during a later visit what he had written in 1777. Since Scott could find no record of these papers in the printed extracts from the minutes of the Glasgow society, it is impossible to decide between these alternatives. Professor D. D. Raphael regards it as most probable that Smith read earlier versions to the society and was subsequently able to amplify and confirm his theories as a result of his visit to France (below, 173). That this was a not uncommon procedure is evidenced by the fact that Joseph Black’s only ‘publication’ of his epoch–
making discovery of latent heat was to ‘a Society of professors’ at Glasgow in 1762. Millar’s 1
description may have been a conflation of two reminiscences separated by a long period of time.
Though Dugald Stewart’s ‘Life’ deals with Smith’s work on the imitative arts in terms too general to yield any significant guide to its dating, the continuation of the passage quoted above (171) provides an important insight into the working of Smith’s mind: ‘he had never neglected to cultivate a taste for the Fine Arts;—less, it is probable, with a view to the peculiar enjoyments they convey . . . than on account of their connexion with the general principles of the human mind . . . To those who speculate on this very delicate subject, a comparison of the modes of taste that prevail among different nations, affords a valuable collection of facts . . . Mr. Smith . . .
may naturally be supposed to have availed himself of every opportunity which a foreign country afforded him of illustrating his former theories.’ (Stewart, III.13.) The ‘foreign country’ to which http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Smith0232/GlasgowEdition/PhilosophicalSubjects...
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Stewart refers was of course France, where Smith travelled as the companion of the Duke of Buccleuch during the greater part of the period 1764–6. Among the ‘former theories’ Stewart included Smith’s ‘peculiar notions’ ‘with respect to the imitative arts’, especially his belief that the pleasure provided by these arts was chiefly due to the ‘difficulty of the imitation’ (III.14). That Stewart must at least have discussed these matters with Smith from time to time we may infer from his reference to the latter’s sustained interest in the ‘principles of dramatic composition’ and
‘the history of the theatre’ that ‘had furnished him with some of the most remarkable facts on which his theory of the imitative arts was founded’ (III.15). He had, so Stewart claimed, devoted leisure hours to the study of the drama and ‘he intended, if he had lived, to have prepared the result of these labours for the press. Of this work, he has left for publication a short fragment; but he had not proceeded far enough to apply his doctrine to versification and to the theatre’ (III.15). What the relation was between this ‘short fragment’ and the essay on the
‘Imitative Arts’, to which Stewart makes no specific reference, is not made clear. The appendix on the ‘Affinity between Music, Dancing, and Poetry’ could have been conceived as a ‘bridge–
passage’ between the main essay and the unachieved work on dramatic composition and the theatre. If this was not the case, then Smith’s editors must have decided not to print the
‘fragment’ to which Stewart refers. In view of such occasional imprecision—and in some cases even inconsistency—Stewart’s account should not be relied on exclusively for the detailed facts of Smith’s life and works.
The date of the composition of this essay has a special interest in relation to one of those asides that some modern readers may find the most rewarding features of these early works. Towards the end of his discussion of the visual arts Smith draws attention to the significance of rarity and costliness in the appreciation of works of art especially of those ‘arts which address themselves, not to the prudent and the wise, but to the rich and the great, to the proud and the vain’ (Imitative Arts, I.13; cf. WN I.xi.c.31). Smith illustrates this point by reminding the reader of the esteem in which topiary had ‘some years ago’ been held. The alleged ground of its contemporary rejection—‘unnaturalness’—was, he maintained, unconvincing; the true reason was that ‘the rich and the great . . . will not admit into their gardens an ornament which the meanest of the people can have as well as they’ (I.14). This judgement, supported by cogent analysis and just analogy, was surely an early appreciation of one aspect of Thorstein Veblen’s ‘Pecuniary Canons of Taste’ (chap. iv of his Theory of the Leisured Class, 1899) where he writes, ‘the marks of expensiveness come to be accepted as beautiful features of the expensive articles’. Smith’s emphasis is on exclusiveness rather than on money–value; but he was writing of England and France in the eighteenth century, Veblen of America more than a century later.
This remarkable insight into the social relativity of aesthetic norms is accompanied in the same context by what may have been an almost second–sight into a changing Zeitgeist. In an uncommonly familiar vein Smith begs the reader next time he sees examples of topiary to
‘restrain for a few minutes the foolish passion for playing the critic’, when he ‘will be sensible that they are not without some degree of beauty’. In fact Smith is not asking for a suspension of criticism but for a flexibility in relation to critical standards. In 1797 Wackenroder would in effect censure the age for condemning the Middle Ages ‘because they did not build the same kind of temples as Greece’; twelve years later August von Schlegel rejected the ‘despotism of good taste’. As the nineteenth century advanced, the form of medieval hierarchialism characteristic of eighteenth–century ‘classicism’ was giving way to the Romantic adventure of ideas.
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In 1776 Adam Smith had reminded the world of the still unrealized possibilities of economic expansion and cultural change consequent on the discovery of America; it would be interesting to know when there came to him the first urge to extend the horizon of taste in the arts. Whenever it may have been it remained an incongruity in an essay that, as some of the subsequent notes will show, remained firmly set in the unimaginative cultural atmosphere of the ‘Age of Reason’.
There is, however, in the question implied in the title ‘what are called the imitative arts’ one other aspect of the essay which has a relevance outwith the context in which it is applied: this is Smith’s recognition of the possibility of what we might call an innate semantic confusion. For his analysis of the nature of the ‘imitation’ shows that although (at least for the age in which he was writing) a degree of ‘imitation’ is an essential aim, yet its complete achievement, as in mechanical duplication, is self–defeating.
Though each reader may have some reservations as to the correctness of Smith’s individual judgements, the polished lucidity of their expression and the unified structure in which they are embedded lend support to the belief that this essay is the product of a mature understanding. Its preservation adds an important item to the evidence that the author of the Wealth of Nations was not only a genius, but one of unusual complexity and fascination about whom the last word will not be spoken for a long time to come.
OF THE NATURE OF THAT IMITATION WHICH TAKES PLACE IN WHAT ARE CALLED THE IMITATIVE
ARTS PART I
The most perfect imitation of an object of any kind must in all cases, it is evident, be another 1
object of the same kind, made as exactly as possible after the same model. 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 trifling 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.
The exact resemblance of the correspondent parts of the same object is frequently considered as 2
a beauty, and the want of it as a deformity; as in the correspondent members of the human body, in the opposite wings of the same building, in the opposite trees of the same alley, in the correspondent compartments of the same piece of carpet–work, or of the same flower–garden, in the chairs or tables which stand in the correspondent parts of the same room, etc. But in objects of the same kind, which in other respects are regarded as altogether separate and unconnected, this exact resemblance is seldom considered as a beauty, nor the want of it as a deformity. A man, and in the same manner a horse, is handsome or ugly, each of them, on account of his own http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Smith0232/GlasgowEdition/PhilosophicalSubjects...
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intrinsic beauty or deformity, without any regard to their resembling or not resembling, the one, another man, or the other, another horse. A set of coach–horses, indeed, is supposed to be handsomer when they are all exactly matched; but each horse is, in this case, considered not as a separated and unconnected object, or as a whole by himself, but as a part of another whole, to the other parts of which he ought to bear a certain correspondence: Separated from the set, he derives neither beauty from his resemblance, nor deformity from his unlikeness to the other horses which compose it.
Even in the correspondent parts of the same object, we frequently require no more than a 3
resemblance in the general outline. If the inferior members of those correspondent parts are too minute to be seen distinctly, without a separate and distinct examination of each part by itself, as a separate and unconnected object, we should sometimes even be displeased if the resemblance was carried beyond this general outline. In the correspondent parts of a room we frequently hang pictures of the same size; those pictures, however, resemble one another in nothing but the frame, or, perhaps, in the general character of the subject: If the one is a landscape, the other is a landscape too; if the one represents a religious or a Bacchanalian subject, its companion represents another of the same kind. Nobody ever thought of repeating the same picture in each correspondent frame. The frame, and the general character of two or three pictures, is as much as the eye can comprehend at one view, or from one station. Each picture, in order to be seen distinctly, and understood thoroughly, must be viewed from a particular station, and examined by itself as a separate and unconnected object. In a hall or portico, adorned with statues, the nitches, or perhaps the pedestals, may exactly resemble one another, but the statues are always different. Even the masks which are sometimes carried upon the different keystones of the same arcade, or of the correspondent doors and windows of the same front, though they may all resemble one another in the general outline, yet each of them has always its own peculiar features, and a grimace of its own. There are some Gothic buildings in which the correspondent windows resemble one another only in the general outline, and not in the smaller ornaments and subdivisions. These are different in each, and the architect had considered them as too minute to be seen distinctly, without a particular and separate examination of each window by itself, as a separate and unconnected object. A variety of this sort, however, I think, is not agreeable. In objects which are susceptible only of a certain inferior order of beauty, such as the frames of pictures, the nitches or the pedestals of statues, etc. there seems frequently to be affectation in the study of variety, of which the merit is scarcely ever sufficient to compensate the want of that perspicuity and distinctness, of that easiness to be comprehended and remembered, which is the natural effect of exact uniformity. In a portico of the Corinthian or Ionic order, each column resembles every other, not only in the general outline, but in all the minutest ornaments; though some of them, in order to be seen distinctly, may require a separate and distinct examination in each column, and in the entablature of each intercolumnation. In the inlaid tables, which, according to the present fashion, are sometimes fixed in the correspondent parts of the same room, the pictures only are different in each. All the other more frivolous and fanciful ornaments are commonly, so far at least as I have observed the fashion, the same in them all. Those ornaments, however, in order to be seen distinctly, require a separate and distinct examination of each table.
The extraordinary resemblance of two natural objects, of twins, for example, is regarded as a 4
curious circumstance; which, though it does not increase, yet does not diminish the beauty of either, considered as a separate and unconnected object. But the exact resemblance of two http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Smith0232/GlasgowEdition/PhilosophicalSubjects...
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productions of art, seems to be always considered as some diminution of the merit of at least one of them; as it seems to prove, that one of them, at least, is a copy either of the other, or of some other original. One may say, even of the copy of a picture, that it derives its merit, not so much from its resemblance to the original, as from its resemblance to the object which the original was meant to resemble. The owner of the copy, so far from setting any high value upon its resemblance to the original, is often anxious to destroy any value or merit which it might derive from this circumstance. He is often anxious to persuade both himself and other people that it is not a copy, but an original, of which what passes for the original is only a copy. But, whatever merit a copy may derive from its resemblance to the original, an original can certainly derive none from the resemblance of its copy.
But though a production of art seldom derives any merit from its resemblance to another object 5
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 this 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.
In Painting, a plain surface of one kind is made to resemble, not only a plain surface of another, 6
but all the three dimensions of a solid substance. In Statuary and Sculpture, a solid substance of one kind, is made to resemble a solid substance of another. The disparity between the object imitating, and the object imitated, is much greater in the one art that in the other; and the pleasure arising from the imitation seems to be greater in proportion as this disparity is greater.
In Painting, the imitation frequently pleases, though the original object be indifferent, or even 7
offensive. In Statuary and Sculpture it is otherwise. The imitation seldom pleases, unless the original object be in a very high degree either great, or beautiful, or interesting. A butcher’s stall, or a kitchen–dresser, with the objects which they commonly present, are not certainly the happiest subjects, even for Painting. They have, however, been represented with so much care and success by some Dutch masters, that it is impossible to view the pictures without some degree of pleasure. They would be most absurd subjects for Statuary or Sculpture, which are, however, capable of representing them. The picture of a very ugly or deformed man, such as Aesop, or Scarron, might not make a disagreeable piece of furniture. The statue certainly would.
Even a vulgar ordinary man or woman, engaged in a vulgar ordinary action, like what we see with so much pleasure in the pictures of Rembrant, would be too mean a subject for Statuary. Jupiter, Hercules, and Apollo, Venus and Diana, the Nymphs and the Graces, Bacchus, Mercury, Antinous and Meleager, the miserable death of Laocoon, the melancholy fate of the children of Niobe, the Wrestlers, the fighting, the dying gladiator, the figures of gods and goddesses, of heroes and heroines, the most perfect forms of the human body, placed either in the noblest attitudes, or in the most interesting situations which the human imagination is capable of conceiving, are the proper, and therefore have always been the favourite subjects of Statuary: that art cannot, without degrading itself, stoop to represent any thing that is offensive, or mean, or even indifferent. Painting is not so disdainful; and, though capable of representing the noblest objects, it can, without forfeiting its title to please, submit to imitate those of a much more humble http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Smith0232/GlasgowEdition/PhilosophicalSubjects...
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nature. The merit of the imitation alone, and without any merit in the imitated object, is capable of supporting the dignity of Painting: it cannot support that of Statuary. There would seem, therefore, to be more merit in the one species of imitation than in the other.
In Statuary, scarcely any drapery is agreeable. The best of the ancient statues were either 8
altogether naked or almost naked; and those of which any considerable part of the body is covered, are represented as clothed in wet linen—a species of clothing which most certainly never was agreeable to the fashion of any country. This drapery too is drawn so tight, as to express beneath its narrow foldings the exact form and outline of any limb, and almost of every muscle of the body. The clothing which thus approached the nearest to no clothing at all, had, it seems, in the judgment of the great artists of antiquity, been that which was most suitable to Statuary. A great painter of the Roman school, who had formed his manner almost entirely upon the study of the ancient statues, imitated at first their drapery in his pictures; but he soon found that in Painting it had the air of meanness and poverty, as if the persons who wore it could scarce afford clothes enough to cover them; and that larger folds, and a looser and more flowing drapery, were more suitable to the nature of his art. In Painting, the imitation of so very inferior an object as a suit of clothes is capable of pleasing; and, in order to give this object all the magnificence of which it is capable, it is necessary that the folds should be large, loose, and flowing. It is not necessary in Painting that the exact form and outline of every limb, and almost of every muscle of the body, should be expressed beneath the folds of the drapery; it is sufficient if these are so disposed as to indicate in general the situation and attitude of the principal limbs. Painting, by the mere force and merit of its imitation, can venture, without the hazard of displeasing, to substitute, upon many occasions, the inferior in the room of the superior object, by making the one, in this manner, cover and entirely conceal a great part of the other. Statuary can seldom venture to do this, but with the utmost reserve and caution; and the same drapery, which is noble and magnificent in the one art, appears clumsy and awkward in the other. Some modern artists, however, have attempted to introduce into Statuary the drapery which is peculiar to Painting. It may not, perhaps, upon every occasion, be quite so ridiculous as the marble periwigs in Westminster Abbey: but, if it does not always appear clumsy and awkward, it is at best always insipid and uninteresting.
It is not the want of colouring which hinders many things from pleasing in Statuary, which please 9
in Painting; it is the want of that degree of disparity between the imitating and the imitated object, which is necessary, in order to render interesting the imitation of an object which is itself not interesting. Colouring, when added to Statuary, so far from increasing, destroys almost entirely the pleasure which we receive from the imitation; because it takes away the great source of that pleasure, the disparity between the imitating and the imitated object. That one solid and coloured object should exactly resemble another solid and coloured object, seems to be a matter of no great wonder or admiration. A painted statue, though it certainly may resemble a human figure much more exactly than any statue which is not painted, is generally acknowledged to be a disagreeable, and even an offensive object; and so far are we from being pleased with this superior likeness, that we are never satisfied with it; and, after viewing it again and again, we always find that it is not equal to what we are disposed to imagine it might have been: though it should seem to want scarce any thing but the life, we could not pardon it for thus wanting what it 1
is altogether impossible it should have. The works of Mrs. Wright, a self–taught artist of great merit, are perhaps more perfect in this way than any thing I have ever seen. They do admirably well to be seen now and then as a show; but the best of them we should find, if brought home to http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Smith0232/GlasgowEdition/PhilosophicalSubjects...
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our own house, and placed in a situation where it was to come often into view, would make, instead of an ornamental, a most offensive piece of household furniture. Painted statues, accordingly, are universally reprobated, and we scarce ever meet with them. To colour the eyes of statues is not altogether so uncommon: even this, however, is disapproved by all good judges.
‘I cannot bear it,’ (a gentleman used to say, of great knowledge and judgment in this art,) ‘I cannot bear it; I always want them to speak to me.’
Artificial fruits and flowers sometimes imitate so exactly the natural objects which they represent, 10
that they frequently deceive us. We soon grow weary of them, however; and, though they seem to want nothing but the freshness and the flavour of natural fruits and flowers, we cannot pardon them, in the same manner, for thus wanting what it is altogether impossible they should have.
But we do not grow weary of a good flower and fruit painting. We do not grow weary of the foliage of the Corinthian capital, or of the flowers which sometimes ornament the frize of that order. Such imitations, however, never deceive us; their resemblance to the original objects is always much inferior to that of artificial fruits and flowers. Such as it is, however, we are contented with it; and, where there is such disparity between the imitating and the imitated objects, we find that it is as great as it can be, or as we expect that it should be. Paint that foliage and those flowers with the natural colours, and, instead of pleasing more, they will please much less. The resemblance, however, will be much greater; but the disparity between the imitating and the imitated objects will be so much less, that even this superior resemblance will not satisfy us. Where the disparity is very great, on the contrary, we are often contented with the most imperfect resemblance; with the very imperfect resemblance, for example, both as to figure and colour,