Occasionally, upon reading a work of literature, one comes across a phrase, a sentence, or a thought that is particularly well-expressed, and gets echoed down the years in the works of other authors with whom it resonates. Sometimes it’s just that – an echo, so faint it might have come from somewhere else. Sometimes it’s clear as a bell, though even then the writer might not be fully conscious of its origin.
And sometimes, because the thought behind the phrase is commonplace – though perhaps never so well-turned – one is apt to wonder whether it was the original invention of that author, or whether he had cribbed it from someone else (again, perhaps unconsciously).
There is a line in Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), which struck me the first time (of many) that I read it:
“All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision” (Vol. I, p. 64).
I would not go out of my way to argue that the thought is original to Shaftesbury. But one finds it in many later writers, expressed in words so similar, that there can be no mistaking the provenance. Here are a few examples:
“I like the description of your pic-nic, where I take it for granted, that your cards are only to break the formality of a circle, and your Symposion intended more to promote conversation than drinking. Such an amicable collision, as Lord Shaftesbury very prettily calls it, rubs off and smooths those rough corners, which mere nature has given to the smoothest of us.” Lord Chesterfield, letter to his son (29 October 1748).
(No mistaking that one; it’s a direct citation.)
“The genius of a people where nothing but the monarchy is salique, having ceded this department, with sundry others, totally to the women – by a continual higgling with customers of all ranks and sizes from morning to night, like so many rough pebbles shook long together in a bag, by amicable collisions, they have worn down their asperities and sharp angles…” Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), p. 54.
“It was those Meetings in particular [i.e. of the Select Society], That Rub’d off all Corners as we call it, by Collison [sic.], and made the Literati of Edinr. Less Captious and Pedantick than they were Elsewhere.” Alexander Carlyle (1722-1805), Anecdotes and Characters of the Times, p. 150n.
From the above fairly obvious allusions, we descend to the less obvious. Here, they tend to fall into two classes: a) they either borrow Shaftesbury’s idea and express it in different words, or b) they borrow Shaftesbury’s imagery to express a thought somewhat different. The next example is Samuel Johnson’s verbose but elegant expansion of (what I believe to be) his source in Shaftesbury:
“In cities, and yet more in courts, the minute discriminations which distinguish one from another are for the most part effaced, the peculiarities of temper and opinion are gradually worn away by promiscuous converse, as angular bodies and uneven surfaces lose their point and asperities by frequent attrition against one another, and approach by degrees to uniform rotundity.” Samuel Johnson, Rambler No. 138 (13 July 1751).
Although the wording is quite different from Shaftesbury’s, the thought is very similar. Except that here, Johnson puts his own typically pessimistic spin on it: Yes, liberty enables us to rub off our rough corners in a sort of amicable collision, but we get polished down to a sameness in the process; there is a loss of individuality and variety. Politeness leaves little room for eccentricity.
In the next example, from Herder (1744-1803), Shaftesbury’s idea is extended from individuals to polities:
“[S]o many edges had first to be worn down with force before that round, smooth, well-behaved thing which we are could appear!… Behold how these great state-bodies, within which mankind is no doubt best cared for, are now rubbing against one another without destroying each other, and cannot ever destroy each other!” Johann Gottfried Herder, Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind (1774), §2
The next two examples are of interest for their authors’ genealogical proximity to Shaftesbury. In a very Shaftesburean philosophical dialogue, his nephew James Harris (1709-1780) offered up this line:
“My Reproaches produced a sort of amicable Controversy.” Three Treatises (1744), in The Works of James Harris, Esq. (1801), Vol. I, pp. 25-26:
One cannot help but think that Shaftesbury’s more famous descendent, the 7th Earl, had this passage of his ancestor’s in mind when, in the preface to his a collection of his speeches, speaking of the mental life of the agricultural labourer, as contrasted with the urban industrial labourer, he wrote:
“He has not, of course, the acquirements and acuteness of the urban operative; his labour is passed in comparative solitude, and he returns to his home at night, in a remote cottage or a small village, without the resource of clubs, mechanics’ institutes, and the friction of his fellow-men” [italics added]. Speeches… upon Subjects Having Relation Chiefly to the Claims and Interests of the Labouring Class, (1868), p. viii.
I assuming throughout here that the third Earl’s phrasing was original (corners and rough sides, amicable collision, etc.), if not the idea itself.
QUERY: Was it? Is there a predecessor whom Shaftesbury was imitating, much like the above authors imitated him?
Though not identical, here is a candidate:
“Moreover, thanks to the prizes which a republic offers, an orator’s intellectual gifts are whetted by practice, burnished, so to speak, by friction, and share, as is only natural, the light of freedom which illuminates the state.” Longinus, On the Sublime, 44.3.
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Bibliography
CHESTERFIELD, Philip Dormer, 4th Earl of. Selected Letters of Lord Chesterfield. London: Oxford University Press, 1929.
HARRIS, James. The Works of James Harris, Esq. (2 vols.). London: F. Wingrave, 1801 (facsimile, Bristol: Thoemmes, 2003).
HERDER, Johann Gottfried. Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind. Ioannis D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin (trans.). Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004.
JOHNSON, Samuel. Works (12 vols.). London: F. C. and J. Rivington et al., 1823.
SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (3 volumes). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001.
SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of. Speeches of the Earl of Shaftesbury, K. G. upon Subjects Having Relation Chiefly to the Claims and Interests of the Labouring Class. London: Chapman and Hall, 1868.
STERNE, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick, to which are added The Journal to Eliza and A Political Romance. Ian Jack (ed.). London: Oxford University Press, 1968.