Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy; delivered at the Royal Institution, in the years 1804, 1805, and 1806. By the late Rev. Sydney Smith, M.A. Longman and Co.
How difficult it is to discover the merits of a manuscript appears from the history of this book. Lord Jeffrey, consulted as to the expediency of its publication, while it yet existed but in pen and ink, gave a decidedly adverse opinion. But some hundred copies having been printed for private distribution, and a copy reaching Lord Jeffrey, he hastened, with his accustomed candor and sweetness of disposition, to retract his hostile verdict, after reading the book in print; and (only three days before he was attacked by the illness which terminated his valuable life) thus wrote to Sydney Smith's widow:
"I am now satisfied that in what I then said, I did great and grievous injustice to the merit of these lectures, and was quite wrong in dissuading their publication, or concluding they would add nothing to the reputation of the author; on the contrary, my firm impression is, that, with a few exceptions, they will do him as much credit as any thing he ever wrote, and produce, on the whole, a stronger impression of the force and vivacity of his intellect, as well as a truer and more engaging view of his character, than most of what the world has yet seen of his writings."
One practical application of this anecdote is to enforce the importance of calligraphical studies upon authors. A hieroglyphical hand is the false medium excluding British authors from the public; In general we should say that there is no class of men whose education in this respect is so deplorably imperfect, or to whom "only six lessons" would so often be priceless.
We must confess that the book before us has taken us by surprise, notwithstanding our affectionate esteem and admiration for its writer. It has raised our estimate of the power and range of his intellect, of his insight into human character, of his well-balanced judgment, of his tolerance and charity undebased by compromise with the vicious or mean, of the vigorous play of his thoughts, of the sustained beauty of his style, of his eloquence as well as his humor, and of his profundity no less than of his wit. Hurriedly composed and unrevised though the lectures obviously are, fragmentary as the condition is in which they have been preserved, they are an invaluable addition to English literature.
Their delivery is associated with the first outbreak of a fashion ridiculed by Lord Byron in his Beppo and his Blues. The poet's satirical touches notwithstanding, we think that those lectures at the Royal Institution were even more wanted by their fashionable auditors at the time, than the similar prelections at Mechanics' Institutes which came in vogue for less fashionable auditors some few years later. Had it only been possible to insure the services of a series of Sydney Smiths, the Institution might have gone on lecturing to the present day to the unspeakable advantage of all parties concerned. What innumerable fopperies in literature, in politics, in religion, we might thus have escaped, it is not easy to conjecture!
The "Elementary Sketches" were delivered soon after the commencement of Sydney's metropolitan career, and bear strong marks of his recent residence in Edinburgh. In their general outline they closely approximate to the course delivered from the moral philosophy chairs of Scotch Universities. The division of the subject is the same; the authorities most frequently and panegyrically cited are the same; the principles and opinions set forth are in the main the same. Sydney Smith's moral philosophy belongs undeniably to the Scotch school—to the school of Reid, Stewart, and Adam Smith. But his "sketches" do not the less indicate an original thinker, a master in the science taught, and one who can suggest to the great men we have named almost as much as he receives from them.
The book is an excellent illustration of what could be gained by engrafting the Edinburgh philosophy on a full-grown healthy English intellect. The habits of English society, and the classical tastes imbibed at an English University, preserved Sydney Smith from that touch of pedantry which characterized the thinkers of the Scotch universities, trained in a provincial sphere, and trammeled by the Calvinistic logic even after they had freed themselves from the Calvinistic theology. Without disparaging the Edinburgh school of literature, the fact must be admitted that its most prominent ornaments have generally had the advantage of a "foreign" education. Hume and Black studied in France; Adam Smith was the member of an English university; Jeffrey had become familiar with Oxford, though he did not stay there; Homer was caught young, and civilized at Hackney; and Mackintosh and Brougham, thoroughly Scotch-bred, expanded amazingly when transplanted to the south. It may be a national weakness, but it occurs to us that Sydney Smith, who was southern born as well as bred, is still more free from narrownesses and angularities than any of them.
The healthy and genial nature of the man accounts for his most characteristic excellencies, but this book exhibits much we had not looked for. The lectures on the passions evince a power of comprehending and sympathizing with what is great in the emotional part of human nature for which we were not prepared. The lectures on the conduct of the understanding, and on habit, show that the writer had studied profoundly and successfully the discipline of the mind and character. The lectures on the beautiful are pervaded by a healthy and unaffected appreciation of the loveliness of external nature. And combined with these high qualities, is that incessant play of witty and humorous fancy (perhaps the only certain safeguard against sentimental and systematic excesses, and, when duly restrained by the judgment and moral sense, the best corrective of hasty philosophizing), so peculiar to Sydney Smith. Much of all that we have mentioned is indeed and undoubtedly attributable to the original constitution of Smith's mind; but for much he was also, beyond all question, indebted to the greater freedom of thought and conversation which (as compared with the Scotch) has always characterized literary and social opinion in England.
The topics discussed in the lectures naturally resolve themselves into, and are arranged in, three divisions. We have an analysis of the thinking faculties, or the powers of perception, conception, and reasoning; an analysis of the powers of taste, or of what Schiller and other Germans designate the æsthetical part of our nature; and an exposition of the "active powers of the mind," as they are designated in the nomenclature of the school of Reid, the appetites, passions, and will. All these themes are discussed with constant reference to a practical application of the knowledge conveyed. Every thing is treated in subordination to the establishment of rules for the right conduct of the understanding, and the formation of good habits. These practical lessons for the strengthening of the reason, and the regulation of the emotions and imagination, constitute what, in the language of Sydney Smith, and the school to which he belongs, is called "Moral Philosophy."