in 1755 [The Investigator, CCCXXII], Hume brought out his essay “Of the Standard of Taste” in 1757, and passages in The Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1759 represent part of Smith’s response to the topic. Kames was an active speaker in the Select Society committee, and chapters 24 and 25 of Elements of Criticism represent his deliberations on the topic itself and on these recent publications. Many of his references to architecture and the views of thinkers such as the French architect and translator of Vitruvius, Claude Perrault (1613–88), mirror those debates [1.179, 202; 2.465]. Kames had sponsored and discussed with Smith his lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, given for the first time in Edinburgh in 1748 and, after 1752, in Glasgow, and there are numerous parallels between the two writers in their chosen topics and references. Discussions of other topics in Kames’s text also allude to those in the Select Society and its northern equivalent, the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, known as The Wise Club [e.g., on ridicule, 1.114; on the sublime, 1.211].
Although he sharply separated himself in one respect from Hume’s account of causation [2.86], Kames accepts all of Hume’s main points about judgments of taste. Works of fine art are intentionally made by human beings but, because intentions are not visible, “it requires reflection to discover their true character” [1.37]. Accordingly, experience, learning, and comparative judgment are as essential in forming a taste as in any other social endeavor. Truly refined pleasures may be enjoyed by only a small number of people [1.111], largely because of the time, effort, and abilities needed, but almost everyone not struggling at the level of bare survival can derive some pleasure from the arts [2.499]. He agrees that the tendency of pleasant emotions is to prolong the pleasure and that the mind essentially seeks to create order out of its impressions and experiences [1.22]: at bottom, as classical writers had insisted, propriety is the ultimate criterion of merit and our pleasurable response to it [1.338], but it can be discerned only by means of judgment or reflection [2.478].
Kames adopts a standard distinction of the day between intrinsic beauty and relative beauty, deriving from discussions in Shaftesbury [Characteristics, “The Moralists,” pt. III. sect. 2], Addison [The Spectator, no. 415], Francis Hutcheson [An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue ], David Hume’s Treatise [bk. II. pt. 2. sect. 5; bk. III. pt. 3. sect. 1], and Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments [pt. IV. ch. 1, 2]. The central point is that all judgments about relative beauty require “an act of understanding and reflection,” as is most obvious in “the beauty of utility” [1.197, 458]. In his own discussions of the sublime [1.211], Kames barely alludes to Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757, possibly to imply a distance from him; but he certainly knew John Baillie’s An Essay on the Sublime, 1747, through Alexander Gerard’s enthusiastic discussion of it in the prize essay that Kames had helped to judge. Gerard and Smith had also published their views on ridicule, to which Kames is adverting in his own discussion [1.114], although prominent French discussion in the seventeenth century had prompted the reflections of Shaftesbury, and those in The Spectator (by Addison in no. 249, and Steele in no. 422), which were particularly influential on current debate.
Gardening exercised the minds and purses of many prominent Scots from the 1720s onward, Kames even suggesting that, exceptionally, it may excel architecture in its impact on observers [2.430]. Sir John Clerk attracted attention by means of extensive circulation in manuscript of his poem “The Country Seat” in the late 1720s, and Sir John Dalrymple’s Essay on Landscape Gardening was circulating widely in Edinburgh in the 1750s among his fellow lawyers and landowners. Dalrymple took part in the Select Society’s discussions on taste, and he was a friend of Kames, Hume, Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and Robert Adam. In an emerging context of seemingly abstract or theoretical debate, where buildings and gardens might be illustrated only by geometrical plans or elevations, Kames’s practicality was widely appreciated: for example, Samuel Bard recommended to his father in New York that he study Kames before embarking on any improvements. (Kames castigates architects who resort to “blind windows” when they cannot harmonize internal plan and external appearance: 2.458, 476.) By 1764 Dalrymple and Kames had established a dominant taste for the natural style in gardening, both admiring Kent and work at Stowe, and Daniel Paterson’s gardens of 1756 for Inveraray. Among several publications on Stowe, Kames probably knew at least William Gilpin’s A Dialogue upon the Gardens . . . at Stow, 1748 (published anonymously).
Scattered throughout the book are Kames’s reflections on music and the most topical debate of the day throughout Europe, concerning the relation of music to emotions and to words [1.53, 138]. Reflections on music, and probably on such books as Charles Avison’s An Essay on Musical Expression (1752), incline him to think of a natural language for the expression of emotions, and to view music as a unique language. He alludes to the vigorous debate about the respective merits of French and Italian opera [1.141], which much occupied Rousseau, whose essays we know Kames read. It is almost certain, in view of the proximity of their views, that he had discussed all these matters with Smith, who left unfinished a work on the imitative arts and the particular character of music. The discussions of beauty in language and of versification are partly concerned with how to speak poetry properly, that is, to harmonize “sound and sense” [2.94]: comparisons with music are inevitable. To distinguish pronunciation from singing, he notes that feet regulate pronunciation and hence melody, and feet are determined by pauses [2.108].
What kinds of reception did Elements of Criticism receive? Owen Ruffhead reviewed the book in volumes 26 and 27, for 1762 and 1763, of the Monthly Review. Eight editions within a twenty-year period testify to considerable interest for a book of this kind. Along with works on rhetoric by Hugh Blair, and later George Campbell, Kames’s work, often in one of several abridged editions, entered the syllabus of American colleges founded on a Scottish model, in which almost all students took a general course in rhetoric. It was used throughout the nineteenth century in such courses. His book also entered the libraries of self-respecting intellectuals abroad, ranging from Franklin and Jefferson in America to Kant and Josef Haydn; it was helped, unusually, not by a French version but by a German translation issued only a year after the first edition had appeared, and itself reprinted four times before the end of the century.
Peter Jones
Selected Reading
Fleming, John. Robert Adam and His Circle in Edinburgh and Rome. London: John Murray, 1962.
Jones, Peter. “The Aesthetics of Adam Smith,” in Adam Smith Reviewed, edited by Peter Jones and Andrew S. Skinner. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992.
———. “Hume on the Arts and ‘The Standard of Taste’: Texts and Contexts,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, edited by David Fate Norton. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Lindsay, Ian, and Mary Cosh. Inveraray and the Dukes of Argyll. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1973.
Ross, I. S. Lord Kames and the Scotland of His Day. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.
Tait, A. A. The Landscape Garden in Scotland, 1735–1835. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1980.
Henry Home, Lord Kames, published the first edition of Elements of Criticism in 1762, although he began writing it at least a decade earlier. There are no substantive differences between the first and last editions, although there are many stylistic changes. Kames frequently multiplied examples and he expanded some discussions, but the central doctrines remain unchanged. The present edition reproduces the text of the sixth edition, of 1785, which was the last authorized by Kames himself and appeared shortly after his death. A few variations
