An Old Master

An Old Master by Woodrow Wilson

"An Old Master" is Woodrow Wilson's essay-length tribute to Adam Smith as the ideal embodiment of the nearly lost art of academic lecturing. Wilson opens by defending the traditional college lecture against the era's growing preference for data-driven, laboratory-style instruction, arguing that while modern methods may produce thoroughness and technical competence, they risk losing the "literary atmosphere" and broad intellectual outlook that gifted lecturers once brought to the classroom. He contends that a truly inspiring lecturer, one who masters the "secret of style," can impart something no specialist drilling in method ever can: an undying impulse toward big ideas. Rather than argue this thesis abstractly, Wilson proposes to illustrate it by studying an "old master" of the form, and settles on Adam Smith as his exemplar, a choice he frames as fresher than the more obvious Continental figures like Lanfranc, Abelard, or Colet. The essay then turns into a character study of Smith drawn chiefly from Dugald Stewart's memoir. Wilson describes a man who was reserved, absent-minded, and poor at managing his own practical affairs, yet gentle and benign in manner, and capable, once drawn into conversation, of astonishing his listeners with the range and ingenuity of his thought. This paradox, a shy, impractical private man who became one of his university's most compelling public speakers, forms one of Wilson's recurring themes: the deepest, most systematic thinkers are often quiet in company but commanding on the platform, since their reserve reflects fullness of mind rather than emptiness. Wilson traces Smith's rise from a volunteer lecture course in Edinburgh, undertaken on Lord Kames's advice, to the Glasgow chair of Logic and then to the chair of Moral Philosophy once held by Hutcheson, where he revitalized a position left dormant by his forgettable predecessor Thomas Craigie. Under the era's expansive Scottish definition of "moral philosophy," Smith organized his teaching into four parts: natural theology, ethics (later published as "The Theory of Moral Sentiments"), the principles of justice, and political regulations bearing on national wealth and power (the seed of "The Wealth of Nations"). Because Smith burned his lecture notes before his death, Wilson notes, historians must reconstruct his design from students' recollections and from surviving fragments, including his essays on the history of astronomy, ancient physics, ancient logic, and the imitative arts, all remnants of an unrealized master plan to narrate the whole development of law and civilization, of how, in Bagehot's phrase, savage man became a Scotchman. A substantial portion of the essay examines "The Wealth of Nations" as proof of Smith's extraordinary breadth, quoting at length from Henry Thomas Buckle's catalog of the book's astonishing range of topics, from the division of labor and the origin of money to feudal jurisdiction, university decay, colonies, and poor laws, all unified, in Buckle's words, by "the splendor of one great genius." Wilson stresses that this encyclopedic survey was itself meant only as a supplement to the "Theory of Moral Sentiments," part of a still grander architecture in which human conduct is explained through the interplay of self-interest and sympathy, treated separately so as not to blur Smith's arguments. Wilson also highlights Smith's proto-historical treatment of jurisprudence, influenced by Montesquieu, as an early instance of the philosophical, evolutionary approach to history that later scholarship would fully develop. The essay's second major theme is style. Wilson argues that Smith's lasting influence rests not merely on native sagacity but on painstakingly cultivated literary craft, an "artless" fluency that Stewart notes was in fact achieved only with great labor. Despite an awkward delivery and rugged manner, Smith's clarity, force, and imaginative illustration let him command both classroom and, later, readership, a point Wilson reinforces with Dr. Barnard's verse placing "Smith how to think" among the era's great literary talents. Wilson connects this to Smith's early tenure in the Logic chair, where he already emphasized rhetoric and persuasion over formal syllogistics, treating logic as a living art rather than a dry system. Wilson closes by generalizing from Smith's example: broad, synthetic minds like his, more concerned with the relations between things than with narrow specialization, are essential to education precisely because they fuse scattered truths into coherent, inspiring wholes. Such men, he argues, must inevitably write and speak as literary artists, since their catholic sympathies cannot be confined to formal, technical statement. The essay ends as both a portrait of Smith, the "impracticable Commissioner of Customs" who nonetheless founded the science of economic life, and a broader plea for universities to keep space open for teachers whose eloquence and expansive vision can still awaken students the way Smith once awakened Glasgow.

By Woodrow Wilson · First published 1893 · Genre: Literary Essay, Biographical Essay, Educational Theory · 5,558 words

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Why has no one ever written on the art of academic lecturing and its many notable triumphs? In some quarters new educational canons have spoken an emphatic condemnation of the college lecture, and it would seem to be high time to consider its value, as illustrative of an art about to be lost, if not as exemplary of forces to be retained, even if modified. Are not our college class-rooms, in being robbed of the old-time lecture, and getting instead a science-brief of _data_ and bibliography, being deprived also of that literary atmosphere which once pervaded them? We are unquestionably gaining in thoroughness; but are we gaining in thoughtfulness? We are giving to many youths an insight, it may be profound, into specialties; but are we giving any of them a broad outlook?

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