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The influence of this attitude towards explanation can also be seen in Smith’s thinking on the style of writing best suited to conveying one’s argument. The discovery of a set of student notes from Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, together with the posthumously published essay ‘Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts’, has given us insight into his views on literary criticism and aesthetics.²⁷ The theory developed there dwells on the sentimental nature of the aesthetic experience, the need for a sense of the style appropriate to the social context, and the need for literature to convey ideas in as clear a fashion as possible.

In his essay on the Imitative Arts, Smith’s idea that we admire the beauty of a system is deployed in the field of aesthetics.²⁸ He grounds his observation on the idea that our admiration of an imitative art is not based on the exactness of the copy, but rather on the invocation of the original in another medium. Our admiration of a fine portrait of ourselves is something distinct from the exact image we see reflected in a mirror. The ‘art’ of art is the skill by which two dissimilar objects are brought to resemble each other. It is the connection of these two different things that prompts our admiration, or, as Smith puts it, the ‘disparity between the imitating and the imitated object is the foundation of the beauty of imitation’.²⁹ The pleasure that we experience is like the pleasure that arises from the systematic connection of ideas. We admire the skill and thought that are involved in the systematic arrangement that leads our mind from one thing to another. Moreover, our admiration is enhanced if we are able to understand how the imitation is brought about. The ‘more pleasing satisfaction of science’³⁰ is that we are able to understand how the work of art has been produced. Like the person who saw behind the scenes of the opera, we lose our innocent wonder and gain a different sort of pleasure from understanding how things work.

It is worth drawing out a couple of the observations that Smith makes here as they allow us to understand why he presents his ideas in the way that he does. His main concern is with clarity of expression, what he calls ‘perspicuity’.³¹ Writers should avoid jargon and overwrought or flowery prose; they should stick to short sentences and write in as plain a style as possible. This is particularly the case in philosophy and in historical and didactic writing. Smith’s reason for this is related to the account of how we develop beliefs in the Astronomy, but it is also crucially related to the account of the moral sentiments, to which we will turn in the next chapter.

It is worth quoting Smith’s account of a successful literary style here as it will help us to understand why he constructs his books in the way that he does.

When the sentiment of the speaker is expressed in a neat, clear, plain and clever manner, and the passion or affection he is possessed of and intends, by sympathy, to communicate to his hearer, is plainly and cleverly hit off, then and then only the expression has all the force and beauty that language can give it.³²

Smith’s view on simplicity of expression rather than the use of figures of speech or literary techniques represents a shift in literary style that would gain strength through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as history and philosophy sought to distance themselves from rhetoric. For Smith, the expert will seek to convey his knowledge rather than obscure it. As he puts it: ‘One who has such a complete knowledge of what he treats will naturally arrange it in the most proper order.’³³ Facts should be clearly stated, narratives straightforwardly related, and arguments arranged in a gapless fashion around a simple core principle. Perspicuous writing arranges the expression of ideas in their ‘natural’ order and allows the reader’s mind to flow seamlessly along with the text. The use of literary effects, metaphors, and allusions must be kept to a minimum and judged only by their success in illustrating the ideas for the reader. Overly florid prose was anathema to Smith and forms the basis of his criticism of writers such as Lord Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Joseph Addison (1672–1719).

Writing with perspicuity meant writing in short, clear sentences whose aim was to convey ideas rather than show off literary skill. Smith believed that this was a relatively recent phenomenon. Prose was a product of ‘commerce and opulence’,³⁴ of a society where facts needed to be stated and understood. No one, as Smith pointed out, ever made a bargain in verse.³⁵ The obsession with clearly conveying ideas runs through his discussion of the different styles of writing and argument in the rest of the lectures. His favoured style was plain, simple, and clear – though one may wonder at the extent to which his published writings actually lived up to this ideal.

Most significantly for our interests, this view on style shapes Smith’s views on how historians should write about the past. Smith distinguishes between two broad styles of argument: the didactic and the rhetorical. The didactic focuses on proving a proposition by weighing the evidence, while the rhetorical takes sides and seeks to prove a proposition by literary affect. Neither of these is appropriate for writers of history. Historians should adopt the narrative style, where facts are simply related without assessment. They may engage in a critical reflection on their sources in order to determine the accuracy of the facts that they relate, but they should not approach history with a view to ‘proving’ something. The best historians, and Smith here references Thucydides and Tacitus, do something else in addition: their narratives examine historical events in terms of cause and effect. An account that merely describes one thing after another is not an explanation of events. Returning to the argument of the Astronomy, he notes that ‘we are not satisfied when we have a fact told to us which we are at a loss to conceive what it was that brought it about’.³⁶

This, according to Smith, is the most promising approach to history. He also rejects the ancient habit of meticulously describing the character of particular historical individuals and their psychological condition as explanations for events. These are literary illustrations rather than a clear causal chain of events. Good history provides a chain of events and shows how one leads to the other. As such, the writing of history is like all other writing in Smith’s view: it is best achieved through a gapless narrative with a simple principle that has great explanatory reach in accounting for a particular chain of events. Smith refers to this as the Newtonian method, one which is ‘the most Philosophical’³⁷ and preferable to Socratic didacticism and Aristotelian teleology.

In order to convince the reader, the core principle needs to be illustrated by a series of immediately recognizable examples. In his lectures on rhetoric, Smith provides us with the two key types of such examples which dominate the rest of his work: the historical case study and the generalized character sketch.³⁸ It is through these two techniques that he demonstrates the plausibility of his theories. The Newtonian ability to connect the apparently unconnected in one chain under one principle is persuasive if the examples used are either from common experience or from detailed empirical cases. Through these techniques, readers are drawn along with the author and find their imagination running smoothly from one observation to the next until the explanatory whole is laid before them.

As we will see in the rest of the book, Smith remains committed to the main principles of the method outlined in this chapter. He was modest about what he expected to be able to learn from his studies and he was very careful to arrange them around a central explanatory principle, and to illustrate them with examples that would carry his reader’s imagination along with him. His aim was to trace cause and effect in history.