SOURCE: Costain, Keith M. “The Community of Man: Galt and Eighteenth-Century Scottish Realism.” Scottish Literary Journal 8, no. 1 (May 1981): 10-29.

[In the following essay, Costain investigates Galt's indebtedness to the social, moral, and historical thought of the Scottish Realists.]

When, in The Ayrshire Legatees, the Rev. Dr Pringle arrives in London on top of a coach he fears for his clerical dignity. But his fears prove groundless, in more than a literal sense, for, as he reports to his Session Clerk in the village of Garnock: ‘although the multitude of bygoers was like the kirk-skailing at the Sacrament, I saw not a kent face, nor one that took the least notice of my situation’.¹ No longer are the Pringles fully participating members of what Raymond Williams calls a ‘knowable community’, as they were at home in rural Garnock. Now they experience what Dr Pringle's son, Andrew, describes in a letter to a friend as ‘a painful conviction of insignificance, of nothingness’, brought about by the obligation, imposed upon the individual in a modern metropolis, of sharing with ‘the million … that consequence which he unconsciously before supposed he possessed in a general estimate of the world’ (II, The Collected Works of John Galt, Vol. II, hereafter referred to as II], 215-216). The experience of the Pringles in London resembles that of many another character in Galt's novels who exchange the village for the city, whether the city in question be London, Edinburgh, or Glasgow. The disorientation which such characters feel in unfamiliar urban surroundings—even, as in the case of the Rev. Mr Balwhidder, those offered by the small factory town of Cayenneville—enables Galt to explore the question of community.

In his novels Galt queries whether the suppositions and values behind the term ‘community’, heretofore associated with village life, can any longer be maintained in a commercial, urbanising, industrialising society. In his non-fictional works he examines the idea of community in a wider philosophical context. In both cases his thinking on the subject was considerably influenced by the Scottish Realist philosophers and philosophic historians of the eighteenth century who had created the intellectual climate of the Scotland in which Galt grew up. The intention of this essay is to indicate some of the ways in which the case the Realists make for their idea of man affected Galt's writings, fictional and non-fictional.

II

A basic premise of Scottish Realist thought is that mankind is one, so that the various factors at the root of what we have come to call ‘alienation’ disturbed the Realist thinkers. They focused their attention upon community both as a good in itself, and as an antidote to the divisive forces at work in what Adam Ferguson calls ‘this age of separations’. Writing in 1767 he was especially concerned with the division of labour in an increasingly more complex commercial system. In his view (as in the view of such Victorian successors as Carlyle and Ruskin) ‘manufactures … prosper most, where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may, without any great effort of imagination, be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men’. In such a divided society, he speculated, ‘thinking itself … may become a peculiar craft’.²

Thinking was, of course, the ‘peculiar craft’ of David Hume, whose philosophy of mind and its implications threatened the whole basis of community, at least as Thomas Reid, the principal Realist epistemologist, mistakenly interpreted Hume. In his Treatise of Human Nature Hume declared that our only certain knowledge is of ideas in the mind, and that what had hitherto been considered knowledge was, rather, belief, which operates in the sphere of opinion and ‘extends to all’ matters of fact and existence ‘without exception’.³ If Hume was right in making such an assertion then, Reid thought,

I am left alone, as the only creature of God in the universe, in that forlorn state of egoism into which it is said some of the disciples of Des Cartes were brought by his philosophy.⁴

Neither Reid nor the other Realist thinkers, however, thought that Hume was right.⁵ They believed that man's essential nature provided a basis for community rather than separation. To make their case they focused on the mind of man, and generally accepted a theory of perception, expounded by Reid, which was designed to rescue man from the ‘forlorn state of egoism’ to which Reid conceived Hume's philosophy had consigned him. Before proceeding further it must be noted that Hume observed and acted as securely upon the basis of ‘belief’ as Reid upon that of ‘Common Sense’. The Hume of the Essays and the History was as interested in social questions and in man as a social being as those (generally later eighteenth century) philosophers and thinkers referred to in this paper as ‘Realists’. With this caveat in mind, we can return to Reid.

Because the reasoning power varies widely in quality between man and man, and often proves divisive, particularly since it tends to serve arrogance and pride, Reid and his philosophical followers were at pains to indicate that all men share an immediate process of perception which operates prior to the processes of conscious reasoning. They were encouraged to do so by Francis Hutcheson who, in the midst of the ‘Age of Reason’, declared ‘there can be no exciting reason previous to affection’. He postulated an original ‘moral sense’ by which all men apprehend right and wrong, good and evil. In Hutcheson's view the function of reason in ethical matters is secondary to that of the moral sense. The purpose of reason, he maintains, is

to discern what actions really tend to the publick good on the whole, that we may not do that upon a partial view of good which afterwards, upon a fuller examination, we shall condemn and abhor ourselves for.⁶

Reid, and later Dugald Stewart, thought that Hutcheson's tendency to equate sense with feeling made his account of the moral sense too subjective for general authority. ‘All our senses are judging faculties’ (III [Essays on the Intellectual and Active Powers of Man, Vol. III, hereafter referred to as III], 385), Reid declared, and thus they manifest rational characteristics. But Reid and his ‘school’ were indebted to Hutcheson for the idea that in perception immediate powers, or commonly possessed original principles of human nature, were operative. Reid's theory of perception, not, like Hutcheson's, confined to ethical matters, also postulates the existence of immediate powers. Men share a faculty which Reid calls ‘common sense’, and which has been defined as ‘the aggregation of original principles planted in the minds of all’. Such ‘principles’, or powers, are basic and prior to all theorising.

Such powers, Reid thought, cause all men to perceive the world in much the same way—all, for instance, in the act of perception make an intuitive judgment of the present existence of objects as external to the perceiving mind. The very structure of languages, Reid held, offered evidence of a common sense at work which enables us to assert with confidence the existence of the external world and our immediate contact with it; of a self which is distinct from the operations of the mind; and of the principle that a cause must have an effect. Understood in this philosophical way common sense reassures men of the material world's and of each other's actuality, and saves them from Humean egoism.

Galt was as much interested in mind as the Scottish Realists—indeed it is highly likely that they stimulated this interest. His preoccupation with mind is evident in his various discussions of art or of artists. In an article on painters, for instance, he indicates his determination

to pursue the consideration of the intellectual powers of the artists whom it falls within the scope of my present purpose to notice. It is the mental, not the mechanical department of the art to which I wish … to draw your attention.⁸

In his Life of Byron he never tires of asserting that his interest is primarily in Byron's intellectual development rather than in the scandalous details of his private life. Of his own talent as a novelist Galt wrote to Blackwood to say that ‘if there is any merit in any of my sketches, it is in the truth of the metaphysical anatomy of the characters’.⁹

Galt was a realist who believed in the existence of common sense though he understood ‘common sense’ to mean ‘good sense’ or ‘practical sense’ which, for him, implied moderation, correspondence with established fact, and an objectivity he did not find in what he called ‘visionary’ philosophical schemes and systems. In Galt's view common sense is ‘that sense which considers not the theory, but mere practice amidst existing circumstances’.¹⁰ Common sense, thus comprehended, would appear to be the common possession of mankind but Galt, like Reid, is prone to logical inconsistency. Reid sometimes uses ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’ as synonymous terms but characterises good sense as a combination of sound judgment and careful observation both of mankind and of the material world, from which it follows that good sense is by no means ‘common’. Galt, in turn, defines good sense as an ‘intuitive sense of propriety’, the result of ‘natural quickness of apprehension’ and ‘an observation perpetually on the watch to dissect little incidents apparently not worth examining’.¹¹ This account of good sense is also incompatible with common sense, for the ‘intuitive sense’ Galt detects—unlike the intuitive judgement described by Reid as an aspect of the whole process of perception shared by men in general—depends upon what Galt calls a ‘natural quickness of apprehension’. Such ‘natural quickness’ would seem to be confined to men of talent, like himself. His fiction certainly manifests the accompanying ‘observation perpetually on the watch to dissect little incidents apparently not worth examining’.

Whatever his logical inconsistencies may have been, however, Galt thought of common sense in the realist manner, as a basic, unifying characteristic of human nature. He thought of the moral sense in the same way, though he uses his own terminology when discussing it. His views are variously expressed: sometimes he goes further than Hutcheson in his opposition to reason as an essential motive power, whereas at other times his position is closer to that of Reid and Stewart. In his masque on the French Revolution he describes reason as ‘the power to err’. In proclaiming that ‘Heaven guides by instinct, and Hell saps by reason’ he reminds one of Blake.¹² Opposing the rationalism of Godwin in moral matters he states that ‘no sensible man imagines now that the world may be better regulated by the deductions of human reason than by the instincts conferred by Heaven’. But though, in his view, ‘those who obey the impulses of Heaven, are as likely to act rightly as the professors of obedience to human reason’¹³ there are times when, like Reid and Stewart, he resurrects reason to counter the subjective tendency such ‘impulses’ are likely to manifest. On such occasions he regards reason as ‘the sight of the mind, given to discern the false from the true’.¹⁴ He points out in his Life of West that in this task reason is assisted by art, for, he asserts, ‘the true use of painting … must reside in assisting the reason to arrive at correct moral inferences, by furnishing a probable view of the effects of motives and passions’.¹⁵ Galt's own fiction performs a similar function.

Since Galt held the realist position that men perceive the world directly by means of immediate powers it is not surprising that he also shared with the Realists their fervent belief in the value of an empirical methodology. Like the Realists Galt thought that this methodology should be applied to moral philosophy—that is to say, to the whole study of man including not only ethics but all of the social sciences which, since Galt's day, have become separate specialities expounded, almost, in separate languages.

Galt's commitment to empirical methodology is evident as early as 1805. He published in that year his ‘Essay on Commercial Policy’ in which he explains that in order to demonstrate the value of liberty to trade the ‘natural tendency of commerce’ must be considered, and ‘how far it should be restrained by political circumstances’. Once facts on these points have been gathered, and the laws governing their operations ascertained, then

the pernicious effects of governments attempting to regulate the objects of trade would be evident, and a degree of certainty on that point of political economy, proportioned to the evidence, would be obtained only inferior to mathematical truth.¹⁶

Galt's faith in Baconian enquiry is as extreme as Reid's or Adam Ferguson's. Reid termed hypotheses ‘the reveries of vain and fanciful men whose pride makes them conceive themselves able to unfold the mysteries of nature by the force of their genius’ (I [Essays on the Intellectual and Active Powers of Man, Vol. I, hereafter referred to as I], 50), while Ferguson insisted that ‘an author writes from observations he has made on his subject, not from the suggestion of books; and every production carries the mark of his character as a man, not of his mere proficiency as a student or scholar’.¹⁷ In his eagerness to promote an empirical method based upon commonly possessed processes of perception Galt sometimes takes Reid's view of hypothesis and is occasionally prone to the anti-intellectualism that tinges this latter passage of Ferguson's.

The often naive, over-simplified view of empirical enquiry which the Realists expounded, and which Galt shared with them, led them to attack a priori thinkers in general. But their ammunition was especially directed at those who belonged to the ‘selfish school’ of moral thought. They attacked Hobbes for his idea that society was an unfortunate necessity proceeding from the human aptitude for turning the state of nature into a state of war. They also set upon Rousseau who, they thought, placed the solitude of the natural state, with its supposedly simpler, happier condition of life, above society, the corruptions of which, they understood him to believe, only destroyed a primitive, pre-social, and preferable simplicity.

By contrast, the observations of the Realists convinced them that man was naturally communal, all men sharing a desire for society as they shared basic processes of perception. Reid speaks for the other Realists when he says that ‘it is obvious, from the conduct of men in all ages, that man is by nature a social animal; that he delights to associate with his species; to converse and to exchange good offices with them’ (I, 60). The exertion of the social affections, in Reid's opinion, is ‘no less natural than the exertions of the powers that are solitary and selfish’ (I, 78). In fact he and the other Realists believed that society helps men to form all the best characteristics of human nature. It especially fosters benevolence, the quality which makes community ethically meaningful, and which Reid describes as ‘medicinal both to soul and body’ (III, 154). Adam Ferguson argues in similar vein that without society man could not act as a moral being:

A person of an affectionate mind, possessed of a maxim that he himself as an individual, is no more than a part of a whole that demands his regard, has found, in that principle, a sufficient foundation for all the virtues.¹⁸

The Realists denied that man had ever experienced a pre-social state: primitive man no less than civilised man possesses the communal instinct. Differences between primitive and advanced societies are differences in the expression of this common instinct: as James Dunbar explains, ‘all capital distinctions in individuals, families, or tribes, flow from causes subsequent to birth’.¹⁹

This basic position of Realist moral thought was one to which Galt gave wholehearted assent. He was as disposed as the Realists to attack a priori thinkers whose reliance on their own theories of man, unsubstantiated by accurate observation, led them to depict the communal instinct as undesirable, weak, or simply expedient. Expressing himself like a character in one of his novels he rejoices that Godwin's ‘radical trash’ has been ‘consigned … to the midden hole of philosophy’.²⁰ In his treatise Cursory Reflections Galt discusses the ‘savage state’ of society, wondering whether there was anything in it worthy of esteem and adding, parenthetically, ‘I forget indeed that Rousseau, a French philosopher, did see a great deal very admirable in that state of rapine and murder’.²¹ In Letters from the Levant he muses:

It is indeed a strange paradox of Rousseau to maintain that mankind were happier when they resembled wild beasts than with all the enjoyments of civilized life; and that the cultivation of their intellectual faculties had tended to degrade their virtues.²²

Galt reserves a variety of weapons for Malthus whose views on population he found discriminatory and questionable on empirical grounds. The fact is, Galt redundantly asserts, that ‘the means of subsistence and population, according to the practice of the world, reciprocally promote the increase of each other’.²³ Malthus's views on sexual restraint, Galt thought, fail to take account of human psychology, and he took particular exception to Malthus's singling out of the poor as the culprits where over-population is concerned. In The Ayrshire Legatees, Mr Snodgrass, who finds Malthus's theory ‘equally contrary to religion and nature, and not at all founded on truth’ (II, 134), explains this theory to the Session Clerk of Garnock and two parish elders. One of the elders puts Malthus in an ironic light when he draws the Swiftian conclusion that ‘if it's true that we breed faster than the Lord provides for us, we maun drown the poor folks' weans like kittlings’ (II, 135).

Because he regarded man as ‘by nature a social animal’, capable of benevolence as well as selfishness, Galt attacks artists as well as thinkers who fail to represent man's communal nature and, instead, focus on the self. His advice to his own generation was ‘Close thy Wordsworth, open thy Byron’ because he thought a poet should not flee to solitude from the populous city in order to write. He praises Byron for mingling with the world. He ‘wrote from the dictates of his own breast, and described from the suggestions of things he had seen’. Byron's genius, he affirms ‘dealt not with airy fancies, but had its power and dominion amid the living and the local of the actual world’. In this respect Byron is especially superior to Shelley, whom Galt dismisses for his alleged ‘singular incapability of conceiving the existing state of things as it practically affects the nature and condition of man’.²⁴

Galt's own fiction exemplifies his belief that art must deal with the empirically observed ‘living and local of the actual world’, and thus it emphasises man's social nature. Galt disliked the term ‘novel’, owing to its association with romance and so with subjective fancy. He preferred to call his most characteristic fictions ‘theoretical histories’—works in which ‘the imagination and memory work together’ in such a way as to beget ‘reflections with a character of truth about them, such as the offspring of fancy never possesses’.²⁵ In these works characters who confront reality—who, like the Rev. Micah Balwhidder of Annals of the Parish, are ‘close observer(s) of the signs of the times’²⁶—are aware of man's communal nature even if, as in the case of James Pawkie in The Provost, they seek to exploit it. Awareness of themselves as members of a community saves the realists in Galt's fiction from the folly of such a ‘visionary’ as Claud Walkinshaw, who acts as if he has no common ties and is destroyed by his egoism, though not before he has helped to maim and destroy others. Community, the context in which man lives, inevitably defeats self in The Entail, and is idealised not only in The Entail, but in the pastoral element that may be found in most of Galt's fictions. The idealism of Galt's pastoral may seem out of place in the work of a realist, but it should be remembered that the benevolence on which it is focused, according to the observation of the Scottish Realists, is as natural to man as his selfish instincts.

Galt wrote his novels as if he were writing history, though a kind of history that allowed for the play of imagination. In doing so, like Scott though in a different manner, he was influenced by the distinct historical bias of Scottish Realist thought. This bias is not hard to understand, for if man is to be studied empirically then the evidence of his past, of his formative developments, must be taken into account in order to comprehend man as he appears in the present. When the Realists studied the evidence of human development they were convinced, to use Reid's words, that ‘it is the nature of human society to be progressive, as much as it is the nature of the individual’ (III, 435). Lord Kames alternatively phrased the point when he wrote that ‘Nations, like individuals, make a progress from infancy to maturity’.²⁷ If the human species was unified by its way of perceiving the world, and by its essentially social disposition, it was also united, the Realists thought, by its progressive character.

Just as they denied that man had ever experienced a pre-social existence in a hypothetical ‘state of nature’ so the Realists also denied that men had ever lived in groups that were not progressive. When the Realists studied the various forms of society they saw progress as having certain basic features. For example, because they were convinced of the common nature of man the Realists viewed progress as uniform for all peoples. It proceeded in stages from savagery to barbarism, and from thence to politeness and civilisation. It was as instinctive a principle as common sense or the moral sense, as John Millar suggests when he writes:

Never satisfied with any particular attainment, he (Man) is continually impelled by his desires from the pursuit of one object to that of another: and his activity is called forth in the production of the several arts which render his situation more easy and agreeable. This progress however, is slow and gradual; at the same time that, from the uniformity of the human constitution, it is accompanied with similar appearances in different parts of the world.²⁸

A similar viewpoint led James Dunbar to castigate European man for his racism. Europe, says Dunbar,

affects to move in another orbit from the rest of the species. She is even offended with the idea of a common descent; and rather than acknowledge her ancestors to have been coordinate only to other races of Barbarians, and in parallel circumstances, she breaks the unity of the system, and, by imagining specific differences among men, precludes or abrogates their common claims.²⁹

In this connection he praises the Quakers of Pennsylvania for emancipating their slaves as Galt did, in even more enthusiastic terms, in his Life of West.

The Scottish Realists thus thought of progress as natural, uniform, and gradual, which is to say that they regarded it as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. They also considered it to be unplanned, at least as far as man was concerned. Adam Ferguson explains:

Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.³⁰

Dugald Stewart, borrowing Adam Smith's famous figure, points out that even in the savage state man ‘is led by an invisible hand, and contributes his share to the execution of a plan, of the nature and advantages of which he has no conception’.³¹

Holding this view of progress, the Realists opposed ‘great man’ theories of history with the same vigour they displayed in their attacks upon aprioristic thinkers, and for analogous reasons. Those who believed that single individuals could shape history, let their talents be what they may, were just as likely to be deluded as those who relied upon the deductions of their own reasoning rather than upon knowledge gained from common sense observation. As far as the evidence went it suggested to the Realists that progressive change is the result of forces active in the whole body of society. The greatness of great men consisted not so much in shaping events—for men are the agents, not the makers, of history—but rather in recognising, before others were able to do so, the form historical events were in fact assuming.

Galt had been interested in progress from an early age—from his ninth or tenth year, according to his own account.³² Like the Realists he saw progress as a natural condition of man in society so that he thought it both dangerous and futile to attempt to govern any society by outmoded principles. Thus he favoured political reform, though he opposed political extremism. He attacked the radicals of his day for failing to recognise what the Realists had emphasised—that progress is by its nature gradual—while he also bore down upon the ultra-Tories for refusing to accept that progressive change is natural and inevitable. ‘The course of nature’ Galt wrote, ‘is not to sanction the violence with which radical alterations must be forced, by attempting to change the fabric of established society’. In Galt's view ‘the natural order of things’ has a positive tendency: it is ‘not to abrogate or abolish existing systems, but only to foster the growth … of tendencies’.³³ Galt's views concerning the natural but gradual character of progress are expressed in all his principal novels but most programmatically, perhaps, in The Radical and The Member, his contributions to the debate over the 1832 Reform Act. His viewpoint is voiced in The Member by the schoolmaster, Mr Diphthong, who informs Archibald Jobbry, M.P., the corrupt Tory, that

the great properties have had their day: they are the relics of the feudal system, when the land bore all the public burdens. That system is in principle overthrown, and is hastening to be so in fact. The system that it will be succeeded by is one that will give employment to the people—is one that will gradually bring on an equalisation of condition.³⁴

In addition to accepting the Realist position that progress is natural and gradual Galt also took the Realist view that it is uniform and unplanned. The communal and unplanned nature of progress is the subject of Annals of the Parish. In this novel the Rev. Mr Balwhidder watches his clachan increase in size and wealth, improve in the quality of its life and, through developing trade and industry, become conscious of itself (to use the minister's words) as ‘a part of the great web of commercial reciprocities’. Thus, the minister continues, speaking for his community, ‘we … felt in our corner and extremity, every touch or stir that was made on any part of the texture’ (197). Annals of the Parish illustrates how even a village, through the largely unco-ordinated but progressive efforts of a variety of people over a period of fifty years, becomes cognisant of the fact that indeed it belongs to the community of mankind.

If Annals of the Parish illustrates the Realist conception of progress The Provost, introduced by a fictional editor as the ‘autobiographic memoir’ of a ‘great man’, may be read as its corollary, as a satirical attack on the ‘great man’ theory of history. James Pawkie may connive, manipulate, and congratulate himself (in the third person) upon how he has ‘lifted himself so far above the ordinaries of his day and generation’,³⁵ but despite his political position he has no control over the spirit of the age nor, ultimately, over the power of public opinion which is one of its salient features.

Galt exposes the weaknesses of greater men in his non-fictional writings. In his book The Bachelor's Wife, for instance, he explains why Peter the Great failed to transform the Russians from a barbaric to a civilised nation overnight. Peter did not understand that progress is a natural process independent of any individual. Galt writes:

They (the Russians) set forward in the march of improvement when the rest of Europe was in comparitive maturity, and assumed many of the exterior symbols of civilization before they had passed through the different stages by which mental refinement can alone be attained.³⁶

In effect, Peter did not understand a point Galt explains in his treatise Cursory Reflections, that ‘the general affairs of mankind are very little affected by statesmen; and … the movements of the moral and political system of the world do not at all depend on their efforts or influence’.³⁷ The true situation is, rather, the reverse, as Galt indicates in Voyages and Travels when he observes that ‘an obvious demand for the improvement (generates) a disposition, on the part of the people, to extort it by force’. This disposition of the people, he notes, ‘has usually preceded those reformations of abuses, as well as those beneficial institutions, for which politicians have received the gratitude of posterity’.³⁸

As James Dunbar explains, it is society that makes progress possible: ‘a mutual intercourse gradually opens latent powers; and the extension of this intercourse is generally attended with new exertions of intellect’.³⁹ But progress is not possible without order, hence the interest of the Realists in finding a secure principle of social order rooted in human nature. They did not believe self-interest to be an adequate foundation for social order since it reflected only one (and by no means the best) side of human nature. That men were self-interested the Realists, of course, recognised; that men were only self-interested they were by no means prepared to accept. They found men capable also of benevolence, and it was in the balance of self-interest with benevolence that the Scottish Realists found their principle of social order.

For this principle, as for much else, the Realists were indebted to Francis Hutcheson who had proclaimed that ‘our public affections must … be strengthened as well as the private, to keep a balance; so must also our desires of virtue and honour’.⁴⁰ Kames and Reid took for granted the balance that Hutcheson advocated, as did most of the other Realists, so that when later in his career Hutcheson threw out self-interest and argued that social order could be based entirely on benevolence the Realists rejected this notion as not ‘agreeable to fact’.⁴¹ Kames affirmed that men exercise their benevolence within a restricted community. ‘Our appetite for society’, he wrote, ‘is limited, and our duty must be limited in proportion’.⁴²

This idea of man's limited ‘appetite for society’ brings us back to the question which Galt raises in The Ayrshire Legatees, and in the novels and stories that follow in his ‘Tales of the West’ series. Is genuine community, based upon a balance of ‘affections’, possible in an urbanising, industrialising age whose laissez-faire economic system made self-interest the hallowed motive in the market-place? Before looking more closely at Galt's attempt to answer this question it will be helpful, briefly, to outline the answers which the Realists gave.

Adam Ferguson and Lord Kames in particular worried that increasing ‘luxury’ and the growing predominance of the profit motive in a commercial society would make the ideal balance of ‘affections’ originally advocated by Hutcheson impossible to attain. ‘The desire of profit stifles the love of perfection’, Ferguson writes, and goes on to assert:

Interest cools the imagination and hardens the heart; and recommending employments in proportion as they are lucrative, and certain in their gains, it drives ingenuity, and ambition itself to the counter and the workshop.⁴³

Both Ferguson and Kames drew disturbing comparisons between the Britain of the eighteenth century and Rome just prior to its decline and fall.

On the other hand, John Miller and Dugald Stewart were more optimistic in their outlook than Ferguson and Kames. Stewart thought that although, in the past, societies had regressed as well as progressed, regression was unlikely to occur in the present. The advent of printing, wider literacy, the popular press, a world-wide trading system, and modern industry, he believed, would prevent a plunge back into barbarism. Whereas Ferguson feared that the division of labour would disrupt society, Millar held that, on the contrary, it would increase social mobility, narrow the gaps between the social ranks, and thus promote harmony and progress.⁴⁴

Adam Smith did not share Ferguson's gloom, either. In order to serve itself, he maintained, ‘interest’ was obliged to serve society. His argument in support of this contention resembles that concerning the unplanned nature of progress. People of means, he notes in The Wealth of Nations, employ their capital to support domestic industry for motives of personal gain. The capitalist, he argues,

by preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value … intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.⁴⁵

It is the same with the landowner whom Smith discusses in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. The landowner is involved in ‘the economy of greatness’ yet ‘let by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants’.⁴⁶ In these parallel cases, by advancing domestic industry and by distributing ‘the necessaries of life’, capitalist and landowner further the interests of society while consciously pursuing only self-interested goals. It must, of course, be added that besides this mysterious alchemy by which self-interest is made to serve the social good Smith relied also upon the power of sympathy—another ‘immediate power’. By means of this power men not only work for the common good inadvertently but enter into the problems and vicariously experience the troubles of their fellows. Because they do so they allow their own interested behaviour to be modified in favour of goals beneficial to society as a whole.

Galt was as concerned about the question of social order as the Realists. He thus favoured governmental policies which, he writes, ‘of necessity, by linking the interests of men into a closer texture, strengthen the obligations and motives which constitute the cement of peace’.⁴⁷ Government policy could thus assist in maintaining social order but, like the Realists, Galt thought that order (like progress itself) depended not so much on governments as upon moral forces operative in society at large.

Galt recognised that self-interest must play its part in a society's economic life. He wrote that ‘Mankind can only be judiciously employed for their own advantage, or for the advantage of those by whom they are hired’.⁴⁸ His fiction presents an impressive parade of self-made men, Whittingtonesque figures like Andrew Wylie, James Pawkie, Archibald Plack (of his novella A Rich Man), or even Claud Walkinshaw, all of whom have refused to accept the roles marked out for them by poverty or social anonymity and, by dint of hard work and a rigorous pursuit of their own interests, have made room for themselves at the top. They have all realised, with Archibald Jobbry (another of their number) that ‘talent, which nature does not seem to give out to rank, like physical peculiarity—will as it has ever been, be distributed among the community at large’.⁴⁹ Conscious of their talent, Galt's ‘new men’ arrive at what the narrator of Sir Andrew Wylie refers to as their ‘natural level in society’.⁵⁰

Galt shows his ‘new men’ to be guided by Smith's ‘invisible hand’ in that by pursuing their own interests they contribute to social development. This is especially true of peppery Mr Cayenne of Annals of the Parish, but even James Pawkie is obliged to help Gudetown develop and improve in order to remain in office and enrich himself. The ‘new men’ of Galt's fictional world—active, vigorous, practical—are represented as preferable to its parasitical petty feudal landowners. Galt castigated these ‘country gentlemen’, as he somewhat ironically called them, in a series of articles written for Blackwood's in which he accuses them of ‘private greed and public dishonesty’; of enjoying an ‘exorbitant and unnatural rental’; and, in order to create more profitable estates, of ‘remorselessly driving their tenantry like herds of swine into the market towns and destroying their cottages, that they might return no more’.⁵¹ In Galt's fiction the feudal gentry, if anything, fare even worse, as the examples of Malachi Mailings of The Last of the Lairds and his predecessor, the laird of Craiglands of Sir Andrew Wylie, both suggest.

It would thus seem that Galt took the optimistic attitude to the modern commercial and industrial era that is to be found in the writings of Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, and John Millar. But there is a tension in the body of Galt's fiction between this point of view and one closer to that of Ferguson and Kames. Galt strikes a Fergusonian note, later to be echoed in his fiction, when, in Letters from the Levant, he writes ‘the moment that a nation becomes confident of security, it gives way to corruption; and the evils and dangers of war seem as requisite for the preservation of public morals as the laws themselves’.⁵² In his novels Galt exposes the corruptions that an increasingly affluent society manifests. He does so nowhere more impressively than in The Entail, which is a powerful attack upon the mammon-worship of a commercial society that enjoys security.

There is a conflict in most of Galt's novels between a past associated with an ideal community and a present given over to self, and thus posing a threat to social harmony. Galt's ‘new men’ are not unequivocally idealised but, like the ‘feudal relics’ they replace, they are satirised for the very egoism that has enabled them to succeed in social and economic terms. They are unfavourably contrasted with the denizens of the pastoral region of Galt's fictional world. Galt's pastoral idealises agrarian village life (though not the feudal gentry) for its alleged community based upon a benevolence fostered by and constantly renewed through contact with objects of natural beauty. The pastorally depicted, close-knit community of the village of Garnock in The Ayrshire Legatees which, through its relationship with London by means of the travelling Pringle family, points up the anonymous, atomised nature of the metropolis, reappears in various guises in several of Galt's other novels. Dalmailing, in Annals of the Parish, for example, is shown to be a more harmonious community than that of the factory town of Cayenneville built on its doorstep, especially when, after the death of Mr Cayenne, the town is almost destroyed through the rash speculation of his successor. The contrast between Dalmailing and industrial Glasgow is even greater. After contemplating the latter Mr Balwhidder flees gratefully back to the village, and yet he remains proud of his son's status as a Glasgow merchant of substance.

The tension created in Galt's Scottish fiction between opposing points of view concerning social order and the value of progress suggests that he believed social harmony could be preserved in an urban-industrial society by striking a balance between past and present, between established values and the forces of progress—a balance that would allow each its legitimate claims. Galt suggested two practical steps that might be taken to achieve this result, both of which required social reform. The first involved a revision of the basis of the class system; the second, the development of a system of popular education.

The Scottish Realist thinkers opposed the radical notion that the hierarchical structure of society should be altered, for they considered it to be ‘natural’. But they argued that social harmony in the modern world would be more likely to ensue if the rise of the individual up through the hierarchy were to depend upon his personal talents, abilities, and achievements rather than upon the accident of his birth. This was Galt's position also. It is evident in his Life of Wolsey, the subject of which is portrayed as herald of ‘a system in which power shall be possessed by right of intellectual attainment’. Galt praises Wolsey for his ‘intrepid disregard of precedents’ and for being among those who have ‘agitated and altered the regular frame of society by their influence’.⁵³ In a more restricted sphere the ‘new men’ of Galt's novels are the same kind of people; in the canon of Galt's works Wolsey, as he is interpreted in the Life, is their forerunner.

Self-expression, Galt saw, must be encouraged and rewarded by a society prepared to remove the more blatant obstructions to personal advancement that were associated with rank. But he also saw that such a development must not lead to the decay of men's social consciences, and to remind men of their mutual obligations he relied upon education. Industrialism, he thought, provided the basis for a system of popular education whose effect would be to bring men closer together. It did so, as Galt viewed the matter, by centralising the work-force, by improving the material lot of the common people (though here we must recall that he was writing about the early stages of the Industrial Revolution), and by mentally awakening them. These points are made dramatically in Annals of the Parish in which, although Mr Balwhidder is depicted as having misgivings about the new industrial era, he is also shown to appreciate the manner in which it gave the workers an appetite for education. He rejoices in the factory workers' bookshop, their mutual education, and at the fact that they hire a teacher to educate their children. He is pleased when, at his retirement, he is presented with an inscription written not by a Dalmailing farm labourer but by a worker from Cayenneville—‘a weaver lad that works for his daily bread’ (204). The minister ends his chronicle on a note of hope for the future that has been fostered by what he has seen of popular education in an emerging industrial society. He observes:

The progress of book-learning and education has been wonderful since (the beginning of my ministry), and with it has come a spirit of greater liberality than the world knew before; bringing men of adverse principles into a more humane communion with each other.

(204)

It was also Galt's faith that popular education would encourage ‘humane communion’ in an urban-industrial society which had the power, as he indicated in the case of the Pringles, to induce in the individual ‘a painful conviction of insignificance, of nothingness’.

Despite his backward glances Galt was essentially a man of the modern world. He warned that the enthusiasm of the devotee either of classical antiquity or of the medieval era ‘leads him to attach more value to the past than it deserves, and to regard the present with far less esteem than it merits’.⁵⁴ His optimism was not of that unqualified kind which prodded Walter Bagehot to remark of Adam Smith that The Wealth of Nations contributed to a scheme intended to show ‘how, from being a savage, man rose to be a Scotchman’.⁵⁵ Galt's was a guarded optimism, occasionally overset with doubt. Yet it was strong enough to allow him to believe that man's communal instinct would find constructive outlets for its expression in spite of the divisive forces unleashed by the kind of society European man had fashioned by the early nineteenth century.

Notes

1. The Works of John Galt, ed. by D. S. Meldrum and William Roughead, 10 vols (Edinburgh, 1936), II, 91. Further references to the Ayrshire Legatees will be made to this edition and will be given in the text of the essay by volume and page number.

2. An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767), p. 280.

3. See Norman Kemp Smith, The Philosophy of David Hume: a Critical Study of its Origins and Central Doctrines (London, 1941), p. 66.

4. Essays on the Intellectual and Active Powers of Man, 3 vols (Dublin, 1790), I, 198. All other references to Reid will be made to his Essays, and will be given in the text of the essay by volume and page number.

5. Reid misunderstood Hume for the latter denied the existence of the external world, and of the self, only as matters of certain knowledge; he recognised that by a necessity of our nature we are constrained to believe that both self and external world exist. It is simply that our knowledge of them is only probable, and therefore in the realm of opinion rather than in that of demonstrable knowledge. Hume quarrelled as little with common-sense beliefs as Reid and his ‘school’.

6. An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (London, 1728), pp. 216, 105-106.

7. James McCosh, The Scottish Philosophy, from Hutcheson to Hamilton (New York, 1875). p. 222.

8. ‘Transactions of the Dilettante Society of Edinburgh: No. 1’, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, VI (October, 1819), 227.

9. Margaret Oliphant, Annals of a Publishing House: William Blackwood and His Sons, their Magazine and Friends, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1897), I, 458. Galt's phrase ‘metaphysical anatomy’ refers to psychological analysis.

10. ‘Moore's Life of Sheridan’, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, XIX (February, 1826), 117.

11. The Bachelor's Wife: a Selection of Curious and Interesting Extracts, with Cursory Observations (Edinburgh, 1824), p. 80.

12. The masque was printed in The Literary Life and Miscellanies of John Galt, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London, 1834), III, 328 ff.

13. The Autobiography of John Galt, 2 vols (London, 1833), I, 43; II, 198.

14. Literary Life, I, 285.

15. The Life of Benjamin West, Part I (1816). Reprinted in Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints (Gainsville, Florida, 1960), pp. 157-158.

16. ‘An Essay on Commercial Policy’, The Philosophical Magazine, XXIII (November, 1805), 104.

17. An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 4th edition (London, 1773), p. 483.

18. Ibid., p. 63.

19. Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (London, 1780), p. 443.

20. Autobiography, I, 42.

21. Cursory Reflections of Political and Commercial Topics as Connected With the Regent's Accession to the Royal Authority (London, 1812), p. 87.

22. Letters from the Levant (London, 1813), pp. 202-203.

23. ‘Bandana on Emigration, Letter First’, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, XV (April, 1824), 433.

24. The Life of Lord Byron (London, 1830), pp. 219, 255.

25. Letters from the Levant, p. 218.

26. Annals of the Parish, ed. by James Kinsley, Oxford English Novels (London, 1967), p. 170. Further references to this novel will be made to this edition, and will be given in the text of the article by page number.

27. Sketches of the History of Man, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1788), IV, 250.

28. ‘The Origin and Distinction of Ranks’, printed in William C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow 1735-1801: his Life and Thought and his Contributions to Sociological Analysis (Cambridge, 1960), p. 218.

29. Essays on the History of Mankind, p. 155.

30. History of Civil Society, 4th edition, p. 205.

31. Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 6th edition, 2 vols (London and Edinburgh, 1818), I, 274.

32. Literary Life, II, 117.

33. Literary Life, II, 47; Autobiography, II, 266.

34. The Member: an Autobiography (London, 1832), pp. 264-265.

35. The Provost, ed. by Ian A. Gordon, Oxford English Novels (London, 1973), p. 3.

36. The Bachelor's Wife, p. 204.

37. Cursory Reflections, p. 18.

38. Voyages and Travels in the Years 1809, 1810 and 1811 (London, 1812), p. 97.

39. Essays on the History of Mankind, pp. 4-5.

40. An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions, p. 53.

41. See Dugald Stewart, Outlines of Moral Philosophy, 5th edition (Edinburgh, 1829), p. 303, and Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1892), p. 192.

42. Sketches, II, 190.

43. History of Civil Society, 4th edition, p. 364.

44. Stewart's views on this matter are given in his ‘Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith’, prefixed to Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1892), p. lii. See also Stewart's Elements, I, 264-265. For Millar's position see ‘Selected Writings’ in Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, p. 336.

45. The Wealth of Nations, edited by Edwin Cannan (New York, 1937), p. 423.

46. Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 264-65.

47. ‘Bandana on Colonial Undertakings’, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, XX (August, 1826), 306.

48. ‘Bandana on Emigration’, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, XX (September, 1826), 474.

49. The Member, p. 144.

50. The Works of John Galt, IV, 155.

51. ‘Hints to the Country Gentlemen, in a Letter to C. North, Esq’., in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, XII (October, 1822), 483, 485, 490.

52. Letters From the Levant, pp. 66-67. The passage bears comparison with Ferguson's dictum that ‘he who has never struggled with his fellow-creatures, is a stranger to half the sentiments of mankind’, History of Civil Society, 4th edition, p. 428.

53. Life of Cardinal Wolsey, 3rd edition (London, 1846), pp. 130, 6, 200.

54. Letters From the Levant, p. 305.

55. Biographical Studies, 2nd edition (London, 1889), p. 255.