Sydney Smith

by George William Erskine Russell

CHARACTERISTICS—HUMOUR—POLITICS—CULTURE—THEORIES OF LIFE—RELIGION

What Sydney Smith was to the outward eye we know from an admirable portrait by Eddis[145] belonging to his grand-daughter, Miss Caroline Holland. He had a long and slightly aquiline nose, of the type which gives a peculiar trenchancy to the countenance; a strongly developed chin, thick white hair,[146] and black eyebrows. His complexion was fresh, inclining to be florid. In figure he was, to use his own phrase, "of the family of Falstaff." Ticknor described him as "corpulent but not gross." Macaulay spoke of his "rector-like amplitude and rubicundity." He was of middle height, rather above it than below, and sturdily built. He used to quote a saying from one of his contemporaries at Oxford—"Sydney, your sense, wit, and clumsiness, always give me the idea of an Athenian carter." Except on ceremonious occasions, he was careless about his dress. His daughter says:—"His neckcloth always looked like a pudding tied round his throat, and the arrangement of his garments seemed more the result of accident than design."

His manner in society was cordial, unrestrained, and even boisterous. "I live," he said in an admirable figure, "with open doors and windows." His poor parishioners regarded him with "a curious mixture of reverence and grin."[147] His daughter says that, "on entering the pulpit, the calm dignity of his eye, mien, and voice, made one feel that he was indeed, and felt himself to be, 'the pastor standing between our God and His people,' to teach His laws, to declare His judgments, and proclaim His mercies."

Enough has been quoted from his writings to give the reader a clear notion of his style. In early life it was not scrupulously correct,[148] and to the end it was marked here and there by an archaism such as "I have strove," and "they are rode over." It was singularly uninvolved and uncomplicated, and was animated, natural, and vigorous in the highest degree. As years went on, it gained both in ease and in accuracy, but never lost either its force or its resonance. It ran up and down the whole gamut of the English tongue, from sesquipedalian classicisms (which he generally used to heighten a comic effect) to one-syllabled words of the homeliest Anglo-Saxon. His punctuation was careless, and the impression produced by his written composition is that of a man who wrote exactly as he spoke, without pause, premeditation, or amendment; who was possessed by the subject on which he was writing, and never laid down the pen till that subject lived and breathed in the written page.[149] Here and there, indeed, it is easy to note an unusual care and elaboration in the structure of the sentences and the cadence of the sound, and then the style rises to a very high level of rhetorical dignity.

Enough too has been quoted, both from his writings and from his conversation, to illustrate the quality and quantity of his humour. It bubbled up in him by a spontaneous process, and flowed over into whatever he wrote or said. Macaulay described his "rapid, loud, laughing utterance," and adds—"Sydney talks from the impulse of the moment, and his fun is quite inexhaustible." He was, I think, the greatest humourist whose jokes have come down to us in an authentic and unmutilated form. Almost alone among professional jokers, he made his merriment—rich, natural, fantastic, unbridled as it was—subserve the serious purposes of his life and writing. Each joke was a link in an argument; each sarcasm was a moral lesson. Peter Plymley, and the Letters to Archdeacon Singleton, the essays on America and on Persecuting Bishops, will probably be read as long as the Tale of a Tub or Macaulay's review of "Satan" Montgomery; while of detached and isolated jokes—pure freaks of fun clad in literary garb—an incredible number, current in daily converse, deduce their birth from this incomparable clergyman.[150] "In ability," wrote Macaulay in 1850, "I should say that Jeffrey was higher, but Sydney rarer. I would rather have been Jeffrey; but there will be several Jeffreys before there is a Sydney."

It would of course be absurd to pretend that all his jokes were of an equally high order. In his essays and public letters he is always and supremely good; in his private letters and traditional table-talk he descends to the level of his correspondent or his company. Thus, in spite of his own protests against playing on words, he found his clerk "a man of great amen-ity of disposition." He complimented his friends Mrs. Tighe and Mrs. Cuffe as "the cuff that every one would wear, the tie that no one would loose." His fondness for Lord Grey's family led him to call himself "Grey-men-ivorous." When the Hollands were staying with him, "his house was as full of hollands as a gin-shop." He nicknamed Sir George Philips's home near Manchester Philippi. He ascribed his brother's ugly mansion at Cheam to "Chemosh, the abomination of Moab." In 1831 he wrote to his friend Mrs. Meynell that "the French Government was far from stable—like Meynell's[151] horses at the end of a long day's chase." When a lady asked him for an epitaph on her pet dog Spot, he proposed "Out, damned Spot!" but, "strange to say, she did not think it sentimental enough." When William Cavendish,[152] who had been Second Wrangler, married Lady Blanche Howard, Sydney wrote—"Euclid leads Blanche to the altar—a strange choice for him, as she has not an angle about her." It was with reference to this kind of pleasantry that he said:—

"A joke goes a great way in the country. I have known one last pretty well for seven years. I remember making a joke after a meeting of the clergy, in Yorkshire, where there was a Rev. Mr. Buckle, who never spoke when I gave his health. I said that he was a buckle without a tongue. Most persons within hearing laughed, but my next neighbour sat unmoved and sunk in thought. At last, a quarter of an hour after we had all done, he suddenly nudged me, exclaiming, 'I see now what you meant, Mr. Smith; you meant a joke.' 'Yes,' I said, 'sir; I believe I did.' Upon which he began laughing so heartily, that I thought he would choke, and was obliged to pat him on the back."

A graver fault than this boyish love of punning is the undeniable vein of coarseness which here and there disfigures Sydney Smith's controversial method. In 1810 he wrote, very characteristically, about his friend Lord Grey—"His deficiency is a want of executive coarseness." This is a fault with which he could never have charged himself. His own "executive coarseness" is referable in part to the social standard of the day, when ladies as refined as the Miss Berrys "d——d" the too-hot tea-kettle, and Canning referred to a political opponent as "the revered and ruptured Member." In a similar vein Sydney jokes incessantly about skin-disease in Scotland; writes of a neighbour whose manners he disliked that "she was as cold as if she were in the last stage of blue cholera"; and, after his farmers had been dining with him, says that "they were just as tipsy as farmers ought to be when dining with the parson."

When he came to dealing publicly with a political opponent, he seems to have thought that, the coarser were his illustrations, the more domestic and personal his allusions, the better for the cause which he served. The Letters of Peter Plymley abound in medical and obstetrical imagery. The effect of the Orders in Council on the health of Europe supplies endless jokes. Peter roars with laughter at the thought of his sister-in-law, Mrs. Abraham Plymley, "led away captive by an amorous Gaul." Nothing can be nastier (or more apt) than his comparison between the use of humour in controversy and that of the small-tooth comb in domestic life; nothing less delicate than the imaginary "Suckling Act" in which he burlesques Lord Shaftesbury's Ten Hours Bill. He barbs his attacks on an oppressive Government by jokes about the ugliness of Perceval's face and the poverty of Canning's relations—the pensions conferred on "Sophia" and "Caroline," their "national veal" and "public tea"; and the "clouds of cousins arriving by the waggon." When a bishop has insulted him, he replies with an insinuation that the bishop obtained his preferment by fraud and misrepresentation,[153] and jeers at him for having begun life as a nobleman's Private Tutor, called by the "endearing but unmajestic name of Dick." It is only fair to say that these aberrations from good taste and good feeling became less and less frequent as years went on. That they ever were permitted to deform the splendid advocacy of great causes is due to the fact that, when Sydney Smith began to write, the influence of Smollett and his imitators was still powerful. Burke's obscene diatribes against the French Revolution were still quoted and admired. Nobody had yet made any emphatic protest against the beastliness of Swift or the brutalities of Junius.[154]

When these necessary deductions have been made, we can return to the most admiring eulogy. In 1835 Sydney wrote:—

"Catch me, if you can, in any one illiberal sentiment, or in any opinion which I have need to recant; and that, after twenty years' scribbling upon all subjects."

It was no mean boast, and it was absolutely justified by the record. From first to last he was the convinced, eager, and devoted friend of Freedom, and that without distinction of place or race or colour. He would make no terms with a man who temporized about the Slave-Trade.—

"No man should ever hold parley with it, but speak of it with abhorrence, as the greatest of all human abominations."

The toleration of Slavery was the one and grave exception to his unstinted admiration of the United States, which afforded, in his opinion, "the most magnificent picture of human happiness" which the world had ever seen. And this because in America, more than in any other country, each citizen was free to live his own life, manage his own affairs, and work out his own destiny, under the protection of just and equal laws. As regards political institutions in England, he seems to have been converted rather gradually to the belief that Reform was necessary. In 1819 he wrote to his friend Jeffrey:—

"The case that the people have is too strong to be resisted; an answer may be made to it, which will satisfy enlightened people perhaps, but none that the mass will be satisfied with. I am doubtful whether it is not your duty and my duty to become moderate Reformers, to keep off worse."

In 1820 he wrote:—"I think all wise men should begin to turn their faces
Reform-wards." In 1821 he writes about the state of parties in the House of
Commons:—

"Of all ingenious instruments of despotism, I most commend a popular assembly where the majority are paid and hired, and a few bold and able men, by their brave speeches, make the people believe they are free."

And then again, with regard to religious liberty, what can be finer than his protest against the spirit of persecution?—

"I admit there is a vast luxury in selecting a particular set of Christians and in worrying them as a boy worries a puppy dog; it is an amusement in which all the young English are brought up from their earliest days. I like the idea of saying to men who use a different hassock from me, that till they change their hassock, they shall never be Colonels, Aldermen, or Parliament-men. While I am gratifying my personal insolence respecting religious forms, I fondle myself into an idea that I am religious, and that I am doing my duty in the most exemplary (as I certainly am in the most easy) way."

It may perhaps be dangerous to persecute the Roman Catholics of Ireland. They are many, they are spirited—they may turn round and hurt us. It might be wiser to try our hands on some small body like the Evangelicals of Clapham or the followers of William Wilberforce (at whom in passing he aims a Shandeau sneer).—

"We will gratify the love of insolence and power; we will enjoy the old orthodox sport of witnessing the impotent anger of men compelled to submit to civil degradation, or to sacrifice their notions of truth to ours. And all this we may do without the slightest risk, because their numbers are (as yet) not very considerable. Cruelty and injustice must, of course, exist: but why connect them with danger? Why torture a bull-dog, when you can get a frog or a rabbit? I am sure my proposal will meet with the most universal approbation. Do not be apprehensive of any opposition from Ministers. If it is a case of hatred, we are sure that one man[155] will defend it by the Gospel: if it abridges human freedom, we know that another[156] will find precedents for it in the Revolution."

As years went on, he was sometimes displeased by the doings of his Liberal friends, but he was never "stricken by the palsy of candour"; he never forsook the good cause for which he had fought so steadily, never made terms with political deserters. After the Conservative triumph of 1841 he wrote:—"The country is in a state of political transition, and the shabby are preparing their consciences and opinions for a tack."

But, though he was so keen and so consistent a champion of civil and religious freedom, he was a sworn foe to anarchy and licence. Like most people who had seen the later stages of the French Revolution, he had a holy horror of mob-law and mob-justice. "If I am to be a slave," he said, "I would rather be the slave of a king than of a rabble"; but he vehemently objected to being the slave of either. He likened Democracy and Despotism to the "two tubes of a double-barrelled pistol," which menaced the life of the State. "The democrats are as much to be kept at bay with the left hand as the Tories are with the right." "A thousand years," he wrote in 1838, "have scarce sufficed to make our blessed England what it is: an hour may lay it in the dust."

After the riots at Bristol in 1831, consequent on the rejection of the Reform Bill, he strenuously demanded stern punishment for the rioters. He wrote to the Prime Minister:—

"Pray do not be good-natured about Bristol. I must have ten people hanged, and twenty transported, and thirty imprisoned; it is absolutely necessary to give the multitude a severe blow, for their conduct at Bristol has been most atrocious. You will save lives by it in the end. There is no plea of want, as there was in the agricultural riots."

You will save lives by it in the end. There spoke the truly humanitarian spirit which does not shrink from drawing the sword at the bidding of real necessity, but asks itself once and again whether any proposed effusion of blood is really demanded by the exigencies of the moral law.

On questions of peace and war, Sydney Smith was always on the right side.[157] He saw as clearly as the most clamorous patriot that England was morally bound to defend her existence and her freedom. He exhorted her to rally all her forces and strive with agonies and energies against the anti-human ambition of Napoleon. And, when once the great deliverance was achieved, he turned again to the enjoyment and the glorification of Peace.—

"Let fools praise conquerors, and say the great Napoleon pulled down this kingdom and destroyed that army: we will thank God for a King[158] who has derived his quiet glory from the peace of his realm."

"The atrocities, and horrors, and disgusts of war have never been half enough insisted upon by the teachers of the people; but the worst of evils and the greatest of follies have been varnished over with specious names, and the gigantic robbers and murderers of the world have been holden up for imitation to the weak eyes of youth."

No wars, except the very few which we really required for national self-defence, could attract his sympathy. Wars of intervention in the affairs of other nations, even when undertaken for excellent objects, he regarded with profound mistrust.

When in 1823, the nascent liberties of Spain were threatened, he wrote:—

"I am afraid we shall go to war; I am sorry for it. I see every day in the world a thousand acts of oppression which I should like to resent, but I cannot afford to play the Quixote. Why are the English to be the sole vindicators of the human race?"

And again:—

"For God's sake, do not drag me into another war! I am worn down, and worn out, with crusading and defending Europe, and protecting mankind; I must think a little of myself. I am sorry for the Spaniards—I am sorry for the Greeks—I deplore the fate of the Jews; the people of the Sandwich Islands are groaning under the most detestable tyranny; Bagdad is oppressed—I do not like the present state of the Delta—Thibet is not comfortable. Am I to fight for all these people? The world is bursting with sin and sorrow. Am I to be champion of the Decalogue, and to be eternally raising fleets and armies to make all men good and happy? We have just done saving Europe, and I am afraid the consequence will be, that we shall cut each other's throats."

In 1830 he wrote to his friend Lady Holland about her son,[159] afterwards
General Fox:—

"I am very glad to see Charles in the Guards. He will now remain at home; for I trust that there will be no more embarkation of the Guards while I live, and that a captain of the Guards will be as ignorant of the colour of blood as the rector of a parish. We have had important events enough within the last twenty years. May all remaining events be culinary, amorous, literary, or any thing but political!"

And so again, according to Lord Houghton, he said in later life:—

"I have spent enough and fought enough for other nations. I must think a little of myself. I want to sit under my own bramble and sloe-tree with my own great-coat and umbrella."

This is no fatty degeneration of the chivalrous spirit. It is merely the old doctrine of Non-intervention speaking in a lighter tone.

An account of a man's personal characteristics must contain some estimate of his æsthetic sense. This was not very strongly developed in Sydney Smith. He admired the beauties of a smiling landscape, such as he saw in the Vale of Taunton, and hated grimness and barrenness such as he remembered at Harrogate. "I thought it the most heaven-forgotten country under the sun when I saw it; there were only nine mangy fir-trees there, and even they all leaned away from it." He enjoyed bright colours and sweet scents, and had a passion for light. His views of Art were primitive. We have seen that he preferred gas to Correggio. He admired West,[160] and did not admire Haydon.[161] He bought pictures for the better decoration of his drawing-room, and, when they did not please him, had them altered to suit his taste,—

"Look at that sea-piece, now; what would you desire more? It is true, the moon in the corner was rather dingy when I first bought it; so I had a new moon put in for half-a-crown, and now I consider it perfect."

This perhaps may be regarded as burlesque, and so may his sympathetic remark to the gushing connoisseur—

"I got into dreadful disgrace with him once, when, standing before a picture at Bowood, he exclaimed, turning to me, 'Immense breadth of light and shade!' I innocently said, 'Yes;—about an inch and a half.' He gave me a look that ought to have killed me."

But his gratitude to his young friend Lady Mary Bennet, who covered the walls of his Rectory with the sweet products of her pencil, is only too palpably sincere. It may perhaps be imputed to him for æsthetic virtue that he considered the national monuments in St. Paul's, with the sole exception of Dr. Johnson's, "a disgusting heap of trash." It is less satisfactory that he found the Prince Regent's "suite of golden rooms" at Carlton House "extremely magnificent."

To music he was more sympathetic, but even here his sympathies had their limitations. Music in the minor key made him melancholy, and had to be discontinued when he was in residence at St. Paul's;[162] and this was not his only musical prejudice.—

"Nothing can be more disgusting than an oratorio. How absurd to see five hundred people fiddling like madmen about the Israelites in the Red Sea!"

"Yesterday I heard Rubini and Grisi, Lablache and Tamburini. The opera, by Bellini, I Puritani, was dreadfully tiresome, and unintelligible in its plan. I hope it is the last opera I shall ever go to."

"Semiramis would be to me pure misery. I love music very little. I hate acting. I have the worst opinion of Semiramis herself, and the whole thing seems to me so childish and so foolish that I cannot abide it. Moreover, it would be rather out of etiquette for a Canon of St. Paul's to go to the opera; and, where etiquette prevents me from doing things disagreeable to myself, I am a perfect martinet."

After a Musical Festival at York he writes to Lady
Holland:—

"I did not go once. Music for such a length of time (unless under sentence of a jury) I will not submit to. What pleasure is there in pleasure, if quantity is not attended to, as well as quality? I know nothing more agreeable than a dinner at Holland House; but it must not begin at ten in the morning, and last till six. I should be incapable for the last four hours of laughing at Lord Holland's jokes, eating Raffaelle's cakes, or repelling Mr. Allen's[163] attack upon the Church."

Yet, in spite of these limitations, he took lessons on the piano, and often warbled in the domestic circle. In 1843 he writes—"I am learning to sing some of Moore's songs, which I think I shall do to great perfection," His daughter says, with filial piety, that, when he had once learnt a song, he sang it very correctly, and, "having a really fine voice, often encored himself." A lady who visited him at Combe Florey corroborates this account, saying that after dinner he said to his wife, "I crave for Music, Mrs. Smith. Music! Music!" and sang, "with his rich sweet voice, A Few Gay Soarings Yet." In old age he said;—

"If I were to begin life again, I would devote much time to music. All musical people seem to me happy; it is the most engrossing pursuit; almost the only innocent and unpunished passion."

When we turn from the æsthetic to the literary faculty, we find it a good deal better developed. That he was a sound scholar in the sense of being able to read the standard classics with facility and enjoyment we know from his own statements. In the early days of the Edinburgh Review he perceived and extolled the fine scholarship of Monk[164] and Blomfield[165] and Maltby.[166] The fact that Marsh[167] was a man of learning mitigated the severity of the attack on "Persecuting Bishops." His glowing tribute to the accomplishments of Sir James Mackintosh is qualified by the remark that "the Greek language has never crossed the Tweed in any great force." In brief, be understood and respected classical scholarship. He was keenly interested in English literature, and kept abreast of what was produced in France; but German he seems to have regarded as a kind of joke, and Italian he only mentions as part of a young lady's education.

In 1819 he wrote to his son at Westminster:—

"For the English poets, I will let you off at present with Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Shakespeare; and remember, always in books, keep the best company. Don't read a line of Ovid till you have mastered Virgil; nor a line of Thomson till you have exhausted Pope; nor of Massinger, till you are familiar with Shakespeare."

He thought Locke "a fine, satisfactory sort of a fellow, but very long-winded"; considered Horace Walpole's "the best wit ever published in the shape of letters"; and dismissed Madame de Sévigné as "very much over-praised." Of Montaigne he says—"He thinks aloud, that is his great merit, but does not think remarkably well. Mankind has improved in thinking and writing since that period."

It was, of course, part of his regular occupation to deal with new books in the Edinburgh; and, apart from these formal reviews, his letters are full of curious comments. In 1814 he declines to read the Edinburgh's criticism of Wordsworth, because "the subject is to me so very uninteresting." In the same year he writes:—

"I think very highly of Waverley, and was inclined to suspect, in reading it, that it was written by Miss Scott of Ancrum."

In 1818 he wrote about The Heart of Midlothian:—

"I think it excellent—quite as good as any of his novels, excepting that in which Claverhouse is introduced, and of which I forget the name…. He repeats his characters, but it seems they will bear repetition. Who can read the novel without laughing and crying twenty times?"

In 1820:—

"Have you read Ivanhoe? It is the least dull, and the most easily read through, of all Scott's novels; but there are many more powerful."

Later in the same year:—

"I have just read The Abbot; it is far above common novels, but of very inferior execution to his others, and hardly worth reading. He has exhausted the subject of Scotland, and worn out the few characters that the early periods of Scotch history could supply him with. Meg Merrilies appears afresh in every novel."

In 1821:—

"The Pirate is certainly one of the least fortunate of Sir Walter's productions. It seems now that he cannot write without Meg Merrilies and Dominie Sampson. One other such novel, and there's an end; but who can last for ever? who ever lasted so long?"

In 1823:—

"Peveril is a moderate production, between his best and his worst; rather agreeable than not."

His judgment on The Bride of Lammermoor is indeed deplorable. He thought it like Scott's previous work, but "laboured in an inferior way, and more careless, with many repetitions of himself. Caleb is overdone…. The catastrophe is shocking and disgusting."[168]

Incidentally we find him praising Lister's Granby, and Hope's Anastasius. He early discovered and consistently admired Macaulay, though he drew the line at the Lays of Ancient Rome, on the ground that he "abhorred all Grecian and Roman subjects." It is curious to note the number and variety of new books which he more or less commends, and which are now equally and completely forgotten. As we come nearer our own times, however, we find an important conversion. In 1838 he writes:—

"Nickleby is very good. I stood out against Mr. Dickens as long as I could, but he has conquered me."

In 1843 he writes to Dickens:—

"Pecksniff and his daughters, and Pinch, are admirable—quite first-rate painting, such as no one but yourself can execute. Chuffey is admirable. I never read a finer piece of writing."

And, when Dickens asks him to dinner, he replies:—

"I accept your obliging invitation conditionally. If I am invited by any man of greater genius than yourself, or one by whose works I have been more completely interested, I will repudiate you, and dine with the more splendid phenomenon of the two."

His crowning glory in the matter of literary criticism is that, as Ruskin told us, he was the first man in the literary circles of London to assert the value of Modern Painters. "He said it was a work of transcendent talent, presented the most original views in the most elegant and powerful language, and would work a complete revolution in the world of taste."[169]

With the physical sciences Sydney Smith seems to have had no real acquaintance, unless we include among them the art of the apothecary, which all through life he studied diligently and practised courageously. But he recommended Botany, with some confidence, as "certain to delight little girls"; and his friendship with the amiable and instructive Mrs. Marcet[170] gave him a smattering of scientific terms. In a discussion on the Inferno he invented a new torment especially for that excellent lady's benefit.—

"You should be doomed to listen, for a thousand years, to conversations between Caroline and Emily, where Caroline should always give wrong explanations in chemistry, and Emily in the end be unable to distinguish an acid from an alkali."

When we turn, from these smaller matters of taste and accomplishment, to the general view of life, Sydney Smith would seem, at first sight, to have been a Utilitarian: and yet he declared himself in vigorous terms an opponent of the Utilitarian School.—

"That school treat mankind as if they were mere machines; the feelings or affections never enter into their calculations. If everything is to be sacrificed to utility, why do you bury your grandmother? why don't you cut her into small pieces at once, and make portable soup of her?"

In a similar vein, he said of his friend George Grote that he would have been an important politician if the world had been a chess-board. Any system, social, political, or philosophical, which did not directly concern itself with the wants and feelings and impulses of human flesh and blood, appealed to him in vain.

"How foolish," he wrote, "and how profligate, to show that the principle of general utility has no foundation; that it is often opposed to the interests of the individual! If this be true, there is an end of all reasoning and all morals: and if any man asks, Why am I to do what is generally useful? he should not be reasoned with, but called rogue, rascal, etc., and the mob should be excited to break his windows."

He liked what he called "useful truth." He could make no terms with thinkers who were "more fond of disputing on mind and matter than on anything which can have a reference to the real world, inhabited by real men, women, and children." Indeed, all his thinking was governed by his eager and generous humanitarianism. He thought all speculation, which did not bear directly on the welfare and happiness of human beings, a waste of ingenuity; and yet, at the same time, he taught that all practical systems, which left out of account the emotional and sentimental side of man, were incomplete and ineffectual. This higher side of his nature showed itself in his lively affections, his intense love of home and wife and children, his lifelong tenacity of friendship, and his overflowing sympathy for the poor, the abject, and the suffering.

"The haunts of Happiness," he wrote, "are varied, and rather unaccountable; but I have more often seen her among little children, and by home firesides, and in country houses, than anywhere else,—at least, I think so."

When his mother died, he wrote—"Everyone must go to his grave with his heart scarred like a soldier's body," and, when he lost his infant boy, he said—"Children are horribly insecure; the life of a parent is the life of a gambler."

His more material side was well exhibited by the catalogue of "Modern Changes" which he compiled in old age, heading it with the characteristic couplet:—

"The good of ancient times let others state,
I think it lucky I was born so late."[171]

It concludes with the words, "Even in the best society one third of the gentlemen at least were always drunk."

This reminds us that, in the matter of temperance, Sydney Smith was far in advance of his time. That he was no

"budge doctor of the Stoic fur,
Praising the lean and sallow Abstinence,"

is plain enough from his correspondence. "The wretchedness of human life," he wrote in 1817, "is only to be encountered upon the basis of meat and wine"; but he had a curiously keen sense of the evils induced by "the sweet poyson."[172] As early as 1814 he urged Lord Holland to "leave off wine entirely," for, though never guilty of excess, Holland showed a "respectable and dangerous plenitude." After a visit to London in the same year, Sydney wrote:—

"I liked London better than ever I liked it before, and simply, I believe, from water-drinking. Without this, London is stupefaction and inflammation. It is not the love of wine, but thoughtlessness and unconscious imitation: other men poke out their hands for the revolving wine, and one does the same, without thinking of it. All people above the condition of labourers are ruined by excess of stimulus and nourishment, clergy included. I never yet saw any gentleman who ate and drank as little as was reasonable."

In 1828 he wrote to Lady Holland (of Holland House):—

"I not only was never better, but never half so well: indeed I find I have been very ill all my life, without knowing it. Let me state some of the goods arising from abstaining from all fermented liquors. First, sweet sleep; having never known what sweet sleep was, I sleep like a baby or a plough-boy. If I wake, no needless terrors, no black visions of life, but pleasing hopes and pleasing recollections: Holland House, past and to come! If I dream, it is not of lions and tigers, but of Easter dues and tithes. Secondly, I can take longer walks, and make greater exertions, without fatigue. My understanding is improved, and I comprehend Political Economy. Only one evil ensues from it: I am in such extravagant spirits that I must look out for some one who will bore and depress me."

In 1834 he wrote:—

"I am better in health, avoiding all fermented liquors, and drinking nothing but London water, with a million insects in every drop. He who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women, and children on the face of the globe."

In spite of this disquieting analysis he persevered, and wrote two years later:—

"I have had no gout, nor any symptom of it: by eating little, and drinking only water, I keep body and mind in a serene state, and spare the great toe. Looking back at my past life, I find that all my miseries of body and mind have proceeded from indigestion. Young people in early life should be thoroughly taught the moral, intellectual, and physical evils of indigestion."

Saba, Lady Holland, who had a discreet but provoking trick of omitting the proper name wherever we specially thirst to know it, thus reports her father's conversation:—

"Now, I mean not to drink one drop of wine to-day, and I shall be mad with spirits. I always am when I drink no wine. It is curious the effect a thimbleful of wine has upon me; I feel as flat as——'s jokes; it destroys my understanding: I forget the number of the Muses, and think them xxxix, of course; and only get myself right again by repeating the lines, and finding 'Descend, ye Thirty-Nine!' two feet too long."

All this profound interest in the matter of food and drink was closely connected in Sydney Smith with a clear sense of the influence exercised by the body over the soul.—

"I am convinced digestion is the great secret of life; and that character, talents, virtues, and qualities are powerfully affected by beef, mutton, pie-crust, and rich soups. I have often thought I could feed or starve men into many virtues and vices, and affect them more powerfully with my instruments of cookery than Timotheus could do formerly with his lyre."[173]

According to his own accounts of himself he seems, like most people who are boisterously cheerful, to have had occasional tendencies to melancholy. "An extreme depression of spirits," he writes in 1826, "is an evil of which I have a full comprehension." But, on the other hand, he writes:—

"I thank God, who has made me poor, that He has made me merry. I think it a better gift than much wheat and bean-land, with a doleful heart."

"My constitutional gaiety comes to my aid in all the difficulties of life; and the recollection that, having embraced the character of an honest man and a friend to rational liberty, I have no business to repine at that mediocrity of fortune which I knew to be its consequence."

The truth would seem to be that, finding, in his temperament and circumstances, some predisposing causes of melancholy, he refused to sit down under the curse and let it poison his life, but took vigorous measures with himself and his surroundings; cultivated cheerfulness as a duty, and repelled gloom as a disease. He "tried always to live in the Present and the Future, and to look upon the Past as so much dirty linen." After reading Burke, and praising his "beautiful and fruitful imagination," he says—"With the politics of so remote a period I do not concern myself." He had a robust confidence in the cheering virtues of air and exercise, early hours and cold water, light and warmth, temperance in tea and coffee as well as wine—"Apothegms of old women," as he truly said, but tested by universal experience and found efficacious. He recommended constant occupation, combined with variety of interests, and taught that nothing made one feel so happy as the act of doing good. He thus describes his own experience, when, as Canon of St. Paul's, he had presented a valuable living to the friendless son of the deceased incumbent. He announced the presentation to the stricken family.—

"They all burst into tears. It flung me also into a great agitation, and I wept and groaned for a long time. Then I rose, and said I thought it was very likely to end in their keeping a buggy, at which we all laughed as violently. The poor old lady, who was sleeping in a garret because she could not bear to enter into the room lately inhabited by her husband, sent for me and kissed me, sobbing with a thousand emotions. The charitable physician wept too…. I never passed so remarkable a morning, nor was more deeply impressed with the sufferings of human life, and never felt more thoroughly the happiness of doing good."

Of all his various remedies against melancholy, the one on which he most constantly and most earnestly insisted, was the wisdom of "taking short views,"—

"Dispel," he said, "that prophetic gloom which dives into futurity, to extract sorrow from days and years to come, and which considers its own unhappy visions as the decrees of Providence. We know nothing of to-morrow: our business is to be good and happy to-day."

Our business is to be good and happy. This dogma inevitably suggests the question—What was Sydney Smith's religion? First and foremost, he was a staunch and consistent Theist.—

"I hate the insolence, persecution, and intolerance, which so often pass under the name of religion, and have fought against them; but I have an unaffected horror of irreligion and impiety, and every principle of suspicion and fear would be excited in me by a man who professed himself an infidel."[174]

In a lighter vein, he talked with dread of travelling in a stage-coach with "an Atheist who told me what he had said in his heart."[175] And in 1808 he wrote to his friend Jeffrey with reference to the tone of the Edinburgh Review:—

"I must beg the favour of you to be explicit on one point. Do you mean
to take care that the Review shall not profess or encourage infidel
principles? Unless this is the case, I must absolutely give up all
thoughts of connecting myself with it."

The grounds on which his theism rested seem, as Sir Leslie Stephen points out, to have been exactly those which satisfied Paley. Lord Murray, who, though he was a judge, does not seem to have been exacting about the quality of argument, admiringly relates this anecdote of his friend:—

"A foreigner, on one occasion, indulging in sceptical doubts of the existence of an overruling Providence in his presence, Sydney, who had observed him evidently well satisfied with his repast, said, 'You must admit there is great genius and thought in that dish.' 'Admirable!' he replied; 'nothing can be better,' 'May I then ask, are you prepared to deny the existence of the cook?"

Of course this is nothing but Paley's illustration of the Watch, reproduced in a less impressive form.

But Sydney Smith was not content with a system of thought which provided him with a working hypothesis for the construction of the physical universe and the conduct of this present life. He looked above and beyond; and reinforced his own faith in immortality by an appeal to the general sense of mankind.—

"Who ever thinks of turning into ridicule our great and ardent hope of a world to come? Whenever the man of humour meddles with these things, he is astonished to find that in all the great feelings of their nature the mass of mankind always think and act aright; that they are ready enough to laugh, but that they are quite as ready to drive away, with indignation and contempt, the light fool who comes with the feather of wit to crumble the bulwarks of truth, and to beat down the Temples of God. We count over the pious spirits of the world, the beautiful writers, the great statesmen, all who have invented subtlely, who have thought deeply, who have executed wisely:—all these are proofs that we are destined for a second life; and it is not possible to believe that this redundant vigour, this lavish and excessive power, was given for the mere gathering of meat and drink. If the only object is present existence, such faculties are cruel, are misplaced, are useless. They all show us that there is something great awaiting us,—that the soul is now young and infantine, springing up into a more perfect life when the body falls into dust."

"Man is imprisoned here only for a season, to take a better or a worse hereafter, as he deserves it. This old truth is the fountain of all goodness, and justice, and kindness among men: may we all feel it intimately, obey it perpetually, and profit by it eternally!"

He was not a theist only, but a Christian. Here again, as in the argument from Design, he followed Paley, laid great stress on Evidences, and "selected his train of reasoning with some care from the best writers." He said;—"The truth of Christianity depends upon its leading facts, and of these we have such evidence as ought to satisfy us, till it appears that mankind have ever been deceived by proofs as numerous and as strong." Having convinced himself that the Christian religion was true, he was loyal in word and act to what he had accepted. He remonstrated vigorously against an "anti-Christian article" which crept into the Edinburgh Review; and felt, as keenly as the strongest sacerdotalist or the most fervent Evangelical, the bounden duty of defending the body of truth to which his Ordination had pledged him.

It can scarcely be contested that his conceptions of that truth were, in some grave respects, defective. The absolute dominion and overruling providence of God are always present to his mind, and he urges as the ground of all virtuous effort the Character and Example of Christ. But the notion of Atonement finds no place in his thought. The virtuous will attain to eternal blessedness, and the vicious will perish in their vices. The free pardon of confessed sin—access to happiness through a Divine Mediation—in a word, the Doctrine of the Cross—seems, as far as his recorded utterances go, to have been quite alien from his system of religion. The appeal to personal experience of sinfulness, forgiveness, and acceptance, he would have dismissed as mere enthusiasm—and he declared in his sermon on the Character and Genius of the Christian Religion, that "the Gospel has no enthusiasm." That it once was possible for a clergyman to utter these five words as containing an axiomatic truth, marks, perhaps as plainly as it is possible for language to mark it, the change effected in the religion of the Church of England by the successive action of the Evangelical Revival and of the Oxford Movement.

Sydney Smith's firm belief, from first to last, was that Religion was intended to make men good and happy in daily life. This was "the calm tenor of its language," and the "practical view" of its rule. And, as far as it goes, no one can quarrel with the doctrine so laid down. After staying with some Puritanical friends, he wrote:—

"I endeavour in vain to give them more cheerful ideas of religion: to teach them that God is not a jealous, childish, merciless tyrant; that He is best served by a regular tenour of good actions,—not by bad singing, ill-composed prayers, and eternal apprehensions. But the luxury of false religion is, to be unhappy!"

It was probably this strong conviction that everything pertaining to religion ought to be bright and cheerful, that led him, as far back as the days when he was preaching in Edinburgh, to urge the need for more material beauty in public worship.—

"No reflecting man can ever wish to adulterate manly piety (the parent of all that is good in the world) with mummery and parade. But we are strange, very strange creatures, and it is better perhaps not to place too much confidence in our reason alone. If anything, there is, perhaps, too little pomp and ceremony in our worship, instead of too much. We quarrelled with the Roman Catholic Church, in a great hurry and a great passion; and, furious with spleen, clothed ourselves with sackcloth, because she was habited in brocade; rushing, like children, from one extreme to another, and blind to all medium between complication and barrenness, formality and neglect. I am very glad to find we are calling in, more and more, the aid of music to our services. In London, where it can be commanded, good music has a prodigious effect in filling a church; organs have been put up in various churches in the country, and, as I have been informed, with the best possible effect. Of what value, it may be asked, are auditors who come there from such motives? But our first business seems to be, to bring them there from any motive which is not undignified and ridiculous, and then to keep them there from a good one: those who come for pleasure may remain for prayer."

When Sydney speaks of our "quarrel with the Roman Catholic Church," he speaks of a quarrel in which, at least as far as doctrine is concerned, he had his full share. Never was a stouter Protestant. Even in the passages in which he makes his strongest appeals for the civil rights of Romanists, he goes out of the way to pour scorn on their religion. Some of his language is unquotable: here are some milder specimens:—

"As for the enormous wax candles, and superstitious mummeries, and
painted jackets of the Catholic priests, I fear them not."

"Spencer Perceval is in horror lest twelve or fourteen old women may
be converted to holy water and Catholic nonsense."

"I am as disgusted with the nonsense of the Roman Catholic religion as you can be; and no man who talks such nonsense shall ever tithe the products of the earth."

"Catholic nonsense" is not a happy phrase on the lips of a man who was officially bound to recite his belief in the Catholic Faith and to pray for the good estate of the Catholic Church. A priest who administers Baptism according to the use of the Church of England should not talk about "the sanctified contents of a pump," or describe people who cross themselves as "making right angles upon the breast and forehead." But time brings changes in religious, as well as in social, manners, and Peter Plymley prophesied nearly thirty years before Keble's sermon on "National Apostasy" had started the second revival of the English Church.[176]

No one who has studied the character and career of Sydney Smith would expect him to be very sympathetic with the work which bore the name of Pusey. In 1841 he preached against it at St. Paul's.

"I wish you had witnessed, the other day, my incredible boldness in attacking the Puseyites. I told them that they made the Christian religion a religion of postures and ceremonies, of circumflexions and genuflexions, of garments and vestures, of ostentation and parade; that they took tithe of mint and cummin, and neglected the weightier matters of the law,—justice, mercy, and the duties of life: and so forth."

From Combe Florey he wrote:—

"Everybody here is turning Puseyite. Having worn out my black gown, I preach in my surplice; this is all the change I have made, or mean to make."

In 1842 he wrote to a friend abroad:—

"I have not yet discovered of what I am to die, but I rather believe I shall be burnt alive by the Puseyites. Nothing so remarkable in England as the progress of these foolish people.[177] I have no conception what they mean, if it be not to revive every absurd ceremony, and every antiquated folly, which the common sense of mankind has set to sleep. You will find at your return a fanatical Church of England, but pray do not let it prevent your return. We can always gather together, in Green Street, a chosen few who have never bowed the knee to Rimmon."

It may be questioned whether the Hermit of Green Street was very well qualified to settle the points at issue between the "Puseyites" and himself, or had bestowed very close attention on what is, after all, mainly a question of Documents. In earlier days, when it suited his purpose to argue for greater liberality towards Roman Catholics, he had said:—

"In their tenets, in their church-government, in the nature of their endowments, the Dissenters are infinitely more distant from the Church of England than the Catholics are."

In 1813 he had intervened in the controversy which raged round the cradle of that most pacific institution, the British and Foreign Bible Society, and had taken the unexpectedly clerical view that Churchmen were bound to "circulate the Scriptures with the Prayer Book, in preference to any other method." But he grounded a claim to promotion on the fact that he had "always avoided speculative, and preached practical, religion." He spoke of a "theological" bishop in the sense of dispraise, and linked the epithet with "bitter" and "bustling." Beyond question he had read the Bible, but he was not alarmingly familiar with the sacred text. It is reported[178] that he once referred to the case of the man who puts his hand to the plough and looks back[179] as being "somewhere in the Epistles." He forgot the names of Job's daughters, until reminded by a neighbouring Squire who had called his greyhounds Jemima, Kezia, and Keren-Happuch. He attributed the Nunc Dimittis to an author vaguely but conveniently known as "The Psalmist," and by so doing drew down on himself the ridicule of Wilson Croker.[180] It may be questioned whether he ever read the Prayer Book except in Church. With the literature of Christian antiquity he had not, so far as his writings show, the slightest acquaintance; and his knowledge of Anglican divines—Wake, and Cleaver, and Sherlock, and Horsley—has a suspicious air of having been hastily acquired for the express purpose of confuting Bishop Marsh. So we will not cite him as a witness in a case where the highest and deepest mysteries of Revelation are involved, and where a minute acquaintance with documents is an indispensable equipment. We prefer to take leave of him as a Christian preacher, seeking only the edification of his hearers. In a sermon on the Holy Communion, preached from the pulpit of St. Paul's, he delivers this striking testimony to a religious truth, which, if stated in a formal proposition, he would probably have disavowed:—

"If you, who only partake of this Sacrament, cannot fail to be struck with its solemnity, we who not only receive it, but minister it to every description of human beings, in every season of peril and distress, must be intimately and deeply pervaded by that feeling…. To know the power of this Sacrament, give it to him whose doom is sealed, who in a few hours will be no more. The Bread and the Wine are his immense hope! they seem to stand between him and infinite danger, to soothe pain, to calm perturbation, and to inspire immortal courage."

What is the conclusion of the whole matter? It is, in my judgment, that Sydney Smith was a patriot of the noblest and purest type; a genuinely religious man according to his light and opportunity; and the happy possessor of a rich and singular talent which he employed through a long life in the willing service of the helpless, the persecuted, and the poor. To use his own fine phrase, the interests of humanity "got into his heart and circulated with his blood."[181] He wrote and spoke and acted in prompt and uncalculating obedience to an imperious conviction.—

"If," he said, "you ask me who excites me, I answer you, it is that Judge Who stirs good thoughts in honest hearts—under Whose warrant I impeach the wrong, and by Whose help I hope to chastise it."

Here was both the source and the consecration of that glorious mirth by which he still holds his place in the hearts and on the lips of men. His playful speech was the vehicle of a passionate purpose. From his earliest manhood, he was ready to sacrifice all that the sordid world thinks precious for Religious Equality and Rational Freedom.

[145] Eden Upton Eddis (1812-1901).

[146] Miss Holland writes—"His hair, when I know him, was beautifully fine, silvery, and abundant; rather taillé en brosse, like a Frenchman's."

[147] Lord Houghton.

[148] A hostile reviewer of his Sermons quotes from them such phrases as—"Lays hid," "Has sprang," "Has drank," "Rarely or ever."

[149] See p. 90.

[150] I have not attempted to make a catalogue of these jokes. Such catalogues will be found in the previous Memoirs of Sydney Smith, and in Sir Wemyss Reid's Life of Lord Houghton.

[151] Hugo Charles Meynell-Ingram (1784-1869), of Hoar Cross and Temple Newsam.

[152] (1808-1891), became 7th Duke of Devonshire in 1858.

[153] This insinuation was quite unfounded.

[154] It is pleasant to cite the testimony of Lord Houghton, who assured Mr. Stuart Reid that he "never knew, except once, Sydney Smith to make a jest on any religious subject; and then he immediately withdrew his words and seemed ashamed that he had uttered them."

[155] Spencer Perceval.

[156] Lord Hawkesbury.

[157] See Appendix E.

[158] William IV.

[159] Charles Richard Fox (1796-1873).

[160] Benjamin West (1738-1820).

[161] Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846).

[162] I am indebted for this tradition to the Rev. H.S. Holland, D.D., Canon of St. Paul's.

[163] John Allen was nicknamed "Lady Holland's Atheist."

[164] Bishop of Gloucester.

[165] Bishop of London.

[166] Bishop of Durham.

[167] Bishop of Peterborough.

[168] Quoted by Mr. Stuart Reid.

[169] Præterita, vol. II. chap. ix.

[170] Jane Marcet (1769-1858), authoress of Conversations on Chemistry.

[171] See Appendix C.

[172] Comus.

[173] See Appendix D.

[174] Compare his attack on Hobbes, of whom he says that his "dirty recreation" of smoking did not interrupt any "immoral, irreligious, or unmathematical track of thought in which he happened to be engaged."— Lectures on Moral Philosophy, xxvi.

[175] Dixit insipiens in corde suo; Non est Deus.—Psalm xiv.

[176] July 14, 1833. "I have ever considered and kept the day as the start of the religious movement of 1833."—CARDINAL NEWMAN, Apologia.

[177] In early life he wrote from Edinburgh;—"In England, I maintain, (except among ladies in the middle rank of life) there is no religion at all. The Clergy of England have no more influence over the people at large than the Cheesemongers of England."

[178] By Mr. Stuart Reid.

[179] St. Luke ix. 62.

[180] "What can we think of the fitness of a man to address his Queen and his country in the dogmatical strain of this pamphlet, who does not know the New Testament from the Old; the Psalms from the Gospel, David from Simeon; who expatiates so pompously on the duty and benefit of prayer, yet mistakes and miscalls a portion of the Common Prayer, which he is bound in law and in conscience to repeat every evening of his life."—Quarterly Review, July 1837.

The reference is to the Sermon on the Queen's Accession. The blunder was rectified in a later edition.

[181] He said this of Lord Grey.