"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."