parson in the country, he used, not being able to afford more delicate
luminaries, to adorn his drawing-room with a hundred little lamps of
tin metal and mutton fat. When you know this, you see it in all his
writings. There is the same preference of perspicuity throughout them.
Elegance, fine savour, sweet illustration, are quite secondary. His only
question to an argument was, ‘Will it tell?’ as to an example, ‘Will it
exemplify?’ Like what is called ‘push’ in a practical man, his style goes
straight to its object; it is not restrained by the gentle hindrances,
the delicate decorums of refining natures. There is nothing more
characteristic of the Scandinavian mythology, than that it had a god with
a hammer. You have no better illustration of our English humour, than the
great success of this huge and healthy organisation.
There is something about this not exactly to the Whig taste. They do
not like such broad fun, and rather dislike unlimited statement. Lord
Melbourne, it is plain, declined to make him a bishop. In this there
might be a vestige of Canningite prejudice, but on the whole, there was
the distinction between the two men which there is between the loud wit
and the _recherché_ thinker—between the bold controversialist and the
discriminative statesman. A refined _noblesse_ can hardly respect a
humorist; he amuses them, and they like him, but they are puzzled to
know whether he does not laugh at them as well as with them; and the
notion of being laughed at, ever, or on any score, is alien to their shy
decorum and suppressed pride. But in a broader point of view, and taking
a wider range of general character, there was a good deal in common.
More than any one else, Sydney Smith was Liberalism in life. Somebody
has defined Liberalism as the spirit of the world. It represents its
genial enjoyment, its wise sense, its steady judgment, its preference
of the near to the far, of the seen to the unseen; it represents, too,
its shrinking from difficult dogma, from stern statement, from imperious
superstition. What health is to the animal, Liberalism is to the polity.
It is a principle of fermenting enjoyment, running over all the nerves,
inspiring the frame, happy in its mind, easy in its place, glad to
behold the sun. All this Sydney Smith, as it were, personified. The
biography just published of him will be very serviceable to his fame.
He has been regarded too much as a fashionable jester, and metropolitan
wit of society. We have now for the first time a description of him as
he was,—equally at home in the crude world of Yorkshire, and amid the
quintessential refinements of Mayfair. It is impossible to believe that
he did not give the epithet to his parish: it is now called Foston _le
Clay_. It was a ‘mute inglorious’ Sydney of the district, that invented
the name, if it is really older than the century. The place has an obtuse
soil, inhabited by stiff-clayed Yorkshiremen. There was nobody in the
parish to speak to, only peasants, farmers, and such like (what the
clergy call ‘parishioners’) and an old clerk who thought every one who
came from London a fool, ‘but you I do zee, Mr. Smith, be no fool.’ This
was the sort of life.
‘I turned schoolmaster, to educate my son, as I could
not afford to send him to school. Mrs. Sydney turned
schoolmistress, to educate my girls, as I could not afford
a governess. I turned farmer, as I could not let my land.
A man-servant was too expensive; so I caught up a little
garden-girl, made like a milestone, christened her Bunch, put
a napkin in her hand, and made her my butler. The girls taught
her to read, Mrs. Sydney to wait, and I undertook her morals.
Bunch became the best butler in the county.
‘I had little furniture, so I bought a cart-load of deals;
took a carpenter (who came to me for parish relief, called
Jack Robinson) with a face like a full-moon, into my service;
established him in a barn, and said, “Jack, furnish my house.”
You see the result!
‘At last it was suggested that a carriage was much wanted in
the establishment. After diligent search, I discovered in
the back settlements of a York coach-maker an ancient green
chariot, supposed to have been the earliest invention of the
kind. I brought it home in triumph to my admiring family.
Being somewhat dilapidated, the village tailor lined it, the
village blacksmith repaired it; nay, (but for Mrs. Sydney’s
earnest entreaties,) we believe the village painter would
have exercised his genius upon the exterior; it escaped this
danger however, and the result was wonderful. Each year added
to its charms: it grew younger and younger; a new wheel, a new
spring; I christened it the _Immortal_; it was known all over
the neighbourhood; the village boys cheered it, and the village
dogs barked at it; but “Faber meæ fortunæ” was my motto, and we
had no false shame.
‘Added to all these domestic cares, I was village parson,
village doctor, village comforter, village magistrate, and
Edinburgh Reviewer; so you see I had not much time left on my
hands to regret London.’
It is impossible that this should not at once remind us of the life of
Sir Walter Scott. There is the same strong sense, the same glowing,
natural pleasure, the same power of dealing with men, the same power of
diffusing common happiness. Both enjoyed as much in a day, as an ordinary
man in a month. The term ‘animal spirits’ peculiarly expresses this
bold enjoyment; it seems to come from a principle intermediate between
the mind and the body; to be hardly intellectual enough for the soul,
and yet too permeating and aspiring for crude matter. Of course, there
is an immense imaginative world in Scott’s existence to which Sydney
Smith had no claim. But they met upon the present world; they enjoyed
the spirit of life; ‘they loved the world, and the world them;’ they
did not pain themselves with immaterial speculation—roast beef was an
admitted fact. A certain, even excessive practical caution which is
ascribed to the Englishman, Scott would have been the better for. Yet his
biography would have been the worse. There is nothing in the life before
us comparable in interest to the tragic, gradual cracking of the great
mind; the overtasking of the great capital, and the ensuing failure; the
spectacle of heaving genius breaking in the contact with misfortune.
The anticipation of this pain increases the pleasure of the reader; the
commencing threads of coming calamity shade the woof of pleasure; the
proximity of suffering softens the ὕβρις, the terrible, fatiguing energy
of enjoyment.
A great deal of excellent research has been spent on the difference
between ‘humour’ and ‘wit,’ into which metaphysical problem ‘our limits,’
of course, forbid us to enter. There is, however, between them, the
distinction of dry sticks and green sticks; there is in humour a living
energy, a diffused potency, a noble sap; it grows upon the character of
the humorist. Wit is part of the machinery of the intellect; as Madame
de Staël says, ‘_La gaieté de l’esprit est facile à tous les hommes
d’esprit_.’ We wonder Mr. Babbage does not invent a punning-engine;
it is just as possible as a calculating one. Sydney Smith’s mirth was
essentially humorous; it clings to the character of the man; as with the
sayings of Dr. Johnson, there is a species of personality attaching to
it; the word is more graphic because Sydney Smith—that man being the man
that he was,—said it, than it would have been if said by any one else.
In a desponding moment, he would have it he was none the better for the
jests which he made, any more than a bottle for the wine which passed
through it: this is a true description of many a wit, but he was very
unjust in attributing it to himself.
Sydney Smith is often compared to Swift; but this only shows with how
little thought our common criticism is written. The two men have really
nothing in common, except that they were both high in the Church, and
both wrote amusing letters about Ireland. Of course, to the great
constructive and elaborative power displayed in Swift’s longer works,
Sydney Smith has no pretension; he could not have written ‘Gulliver’s
Travels;’ but so far as the two series of Irish letters goes, it
seems plain that he has the advantage. Plymley’s letters are true;
the treatment may be incomplete—the Catholic religion may have latent
dangers and insidious attractions which are not there mentioned—but
the main principle is sound; the common sense of religious toleration
is hardly susceptible of better explanation. Drapier’s letters, on
the contrary, are essentially absurd; they are a clever appeal to
ridiculous prejudices. Who cares now for a disputation on the evils to be
apprehended a hundred years ago from adulterated halfpence, especially
when we know that the halfpence were not adulterated, and that if they
had been, those evils would never have arisen? Any one, too, who wishes
to make a collection of currency crotchets, will find those letters worth
his attention. No doubt there is a clever affectation of common-sense
as in all of Swift’s political writings, and the style has an air of
business; yet, on the other hand, there are no passages which any one
would now care to quote for their manner and their matter; and there are
many in ‘Plymley’ that will be constantly cited, so long as existing
controversies are at all remembered. The whole genius of the two writers
is emphatically opposed. Sydney Smith’s is the ideal of popular, buoyant,
riotous fun; it cries and laughs with boisterous mirth; it rolls hither
and thither like a mob, with elastic and common-place joy. Swift was a
detective in a dean’s wig; he watched the mob; his whole wit is a kind
of dexterous indication of popular frailties; he hated the crowd; he was
a spy on beaming smiles, and a common informer against genial enjoyment.
His whole essence was a soreness against mortality. Show him innocent
mirth, he would say, How absurd! He was painfully wretched, no doubt,
in himself: perhaps, as they say, he had no heart; but his mind, his
brain had a frightful capacity for secret pain; his sharpness was the
sharpness of disease; his power the sore acumen of morbid wretchedness.
It is impossible to fancy a parallel more proper to show the excellence,
the unspeakable superiority of a buoyant and bounding writer.
At the same time, it is impossible to give to Sydney Smith the highest
rank, even as a humorist. Almost all his humour has reference to the
incongruity of special means to special ends. The notion of Plymley
is want of conformity between the notions of ‘my brother Abraham,’
and the means of which he makes use; of the quiet clergyman, who was
always told he was a bit of a goose, advocating conversion by muskets,
and stopping Bonaparte by Peruvian bark. The notion of the letters to
Archdeacon Singleton is, a bench of bishops placidly and pleasantly
destroying the Church. It is the same with most of his writings. Even
when there is nothing absolutely practical in the idea, the subject is
from the scenery of practice, from concrete entities, near institutions,
superficial facts. You might quote a hundred instances. Here is one: ‘A
gentleman, in speaking of a nobleman’s wife of great rank and fortune,
lamented very much that she had no children. A medical gentleman who was
present observed, that to have no children was a great misfortune, but
he had often observed it was _hereditary_ in families.’ This is what we
mean by saying his mirth lies in the superficial relations of phenomena
(some will say we are pompous, like the medical man); in the relation
of one external fact to another external fact; of one detail of common
life to another detail of common life. But this is not the highest topic
of humour. Taken as a whole, the universe is absurd. There seems an
unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments.
How can a _soul_ be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have
the price of linseed, the fall of butter, the tare on tallow, or the
brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit ‘petty expenses,’ and
charge for ‘carriage paid’? All the world’s a stage;—‘the satchel, and
the shining morning face’—the ‘strange oaths;’—‘the bubble reputation’—the
‘Eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances.’
Can these things be real? Surely they are acting. What relation have they
to the truth as we see it in theory? What connection with our certain
hopes, our deep desires, our craving and infinite thought? ‘In respect of
itself, it is a good life; but in respect it is a shepherd’s life, it is
nought.’ The soul ties its shoe; the mind washes its hands in a basin.
All is incongruous.
_Shallow._ Certain, ’tis certain; very sure, very sure; death,
as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die. How a
good yoke of bullocks at Stamford fair?
_Silence._ Truly, cousin, I was not there.
_Shallow._ Death is certain.—Is old Double, of your town,
living yet?
_Silence._ Dead, sir.
_Shallow._ Dead. See! See! He drew a good bow,—and dead. He
shot a fine shoot. John of Gaunt loved him well, and betted
much money on his head.—Dead! He would have clapped i’ the
clout at fourscore, and carried you a forehandshaft, a fourteen
and fourteen and-a-half, that it would have done a man’s heart
good to see.—How a score of ewes now?
_Silence._ Thereafter as they be; a score of ewes may be worth
ten pounds.
_Shallow._ And is Double dead!—
It is because Sydney Smith had so little of this Shakespearian humour,
that there is a glare in his pages, and that in the midst of his best
writing, we sigh for the soothing superiority of quieter writers.
Sydney Smith was not only the wit of the first Edinburgh, but likewise
the divine. He was, to use his own expression, the only clergyman who
in those days ‘turned out’ to fight the battles of the Whigs. In some
sort this was not so important. A curious abstinence from religious
topics characterises the original Review. There is a wonderful omission
of this most natural topic of speculation in the lives of Horner and
Jeffrey. In truth, it would seem that, living in the incessant din of
a Calvinistic country, the best course for thoughtful and serious men
was to be silent—at least they instinctively thought so. They felt no
involuntary call to be theological teachers themselves, and gently
recoiled from the coarse admonition around them. Even in the present
milder time, few cultivated persons willingly think on the special dogmas
of distinct theology. They do not deny them, but they live apart from
them: they do not disbelieve them, but they are silent when they are
stated. They do not question the existence of Kamschatka, but they have
no call to busy themselves with Kamschatka; they abstain from peculiar
tenets. Nor in truth is this, though much aggravated by existing facts,
a mere accident of this age. There are some people to whom such a course
of conduct is always natural: there are certain persons who do not, as
it would seem cannot, feel all that others feel; who have, so to say, no
_ear_ for much of religion: who are in some sort out of its reach. ‘It is
impossible,’ says a late divine of the Church of England, ‘not to observe
that innumerable persons (may we not say the majority of mankind?) who
have a belief in God and immortality, have, nevertheless, scarcely any
consciousness of the peculiar doctrines of the Gospel. They seem to live
aloof from them in the world of business or of pleasure, “the common
life of all men,” not without a sense of right, and a rule of truth and
honesty, yet insensible’ to much which we need not name. ‘They have never
in their whole lives experienced the love of God, the sense of sin, or
the need of forgiveness. Often they are remarkable for the purity of
their morals; many of them have strong and disinterested attachments
and quick human sympathies; sometimes a stoical feeling of uprightness,
or a peculiar sensitiveness to dishonour. It would be a mistake to say
that they are without religion. They join in its public acts; they are
offended at profaneness or impiety; they are thankful for the blessings
of life, and do not rebel against its misfortunes. Such men meet us at
every step. They are those whom we know and associate with; honest in
their dealings, respectable in their lives, decent in their conversation.
The Scripture speaks to us of two classes, represented by the church and
the world, the wheat and the tares, the sheep and the goats, the friends
and enemies of God. We cannot say in which of these two divisions we
should find a place for them.’ They believe always a kind of ‘natural
religion.’ Now these are what we may call, in the language of the
present, Liberals. Those who can remember, or who will re-read our
delineation of the Whig character, may observe its conformity. There is
the same purity and delicacy, the same tranquil sense; an equal want of
imagination, of impulsive enthusiasm, of shrinking fear. You need not
speak like the above writer of ‘peculiar doctrines;’ the phenomenon is no
speciality of a particular creed. Glance over the whole of history. As
the classical world stood beside the Jewish; as Horace beside St. Paul;
like the heavy ark and the buoyant waves, so are men in contrast with one
another. You cannot imagine a classical Isaiah; you cannot fancy a Whig
St. Dominic; there is no such thing as a Liberal Augustine. The deep sea
of mysticism lies opposed to some natures; in some moods it is a sublime
wonder; in others an ‘impious ocean,’—they will never put forth on it at
any time.
All this is intelligible, and in a manner beautiful as a character;
but it is not equally excellent as a creed. A certain class of Liberal
divines have endeavoured to petrify into a theory, a pure and placid
disposition. In some respects Sydney Smith is one of these; his sermons
are the least excellent of his writings; of course they are sensible
and well-intentioned, but they have the defect of his school. With
misdirected energy, these divines have laboured after a plain religion;
they have forgotten that a quiet and definite mind is confined to a
placid and definite world; that religion has its essence in awe, its
charm in infinity, its sanction in dread; that its dominion is an
inexplicable dominion; that mystery is its power. There is a reluctance
in all such writers; they creep away from the unintelligible parts of the
subject: they always seem to have something behind;—not to like to bring
out what they know to be at hand. They are in their nature apologists;
and, as George the Third said, ‘I did not know the Bible needed an
apology.’ As well might the thunder be ashamed to roll, as religion
hesitate to be too awful for mankind. The invective of Lucretius is truer
than the placid patronage of the divine. Let us admire Liberals in life,
but let us keep no terms with Paleyans in speculation.
And so we must draw to a conclusion. We have in some sort given a
description of, with one great exception, the most remarkable men
connected at its origin with the Edinburgh Review. And that exception
is a man of too fitful, defective, and strange greatness to be spoken
of now. Henry Brougham must be left to after-times. Indeed, he would
have marred the unity of our article. He was connected with the Whigs,
but he never was one. His impulsive ardour is the opposite of their
coolness; his irregular, discursive intellect contrasts with their quiet
and perfecting mind. Of those of whom we have spoken, let us say, that
if none of them attained to the highest rank of abstract intellect; if
the disposition of none of them was ardent or glowing enough to hurry
them forward to the extreme point of daring greatness; if only one can be
said to have a lasting place in real literature, it is clear that they
vanquished a slavish cohort; that they upheld the name of freemen in a
time of bondmen; that they applied themselves to that which was real,
and accomplished much which was very difficult; that the very critics
who question their inimitable excellence will yet admire their just and
scarcely imitable example.
_HARTLEY COLERIDGE._[23]
(1852.)
Hartley Coleridge was not like the Duke of Wellington.[24] Children are
urged by the example of the great statesman and warrior just departed—not
indeed to neglect ‘their book’ as he did—but to be industrious and
thrifty; to ‘always perform business,’ to ‘beware of procrastination,’
to ‘NEVER fail to do their best:’ good ideas, as may be ascertained by
referring to the masterly despatches on the Mahratta transactions—‘great
events,’ as the preacher continues, ‘which exemplify the efficacy of
diligence even in regions where the very advent of our religion is as yet
but partially made known.’ But
‘What a wilderness were this sad world,
If man were always man and never child!’
And it were almost a worse wilderness if there were not some, to relieve
the dull monotony of activity, who are children through life; who act on
wayward impulse, and whose will has never come; who toil not and who spin
not; who always have ‘fair Eden’s simpleness:’ and of such was Hartley
Coleridge. ‘Don’t you remember,’ writes Gray to Horace Walpole, when
Lord B. and Sir H. C. and Viscount D., who are now great statesmen, were
little dirty boys playing at cricket? For my part I do not feel one bit
older or wiser now than I did then.’ For as some apply their minds to
what is next them, and labour ever, and attain to governing the Tower,
and entering the Trinity House,—to commanding armies, and applauding
pilots,—so there are also some who are ever anxious to-day about what
ought only to be considered to-morrow; who never get on; whom the earth
neglects, and whom tradesmen little esteem; who are where they were; who
cause grief, and are loved; that are at once a by-word and a blessing;
who do not live in life, and it seems will not die in death: and of such
was Hartley Coleridge.
A curious instance of poetic anticipation was in this instance vouchsafed
to Wordsworth. When Hartley was six years old, he addressed to him these
verses, perhaps the best ever written on a real and visible child:—
‘O thou, whose fancies from afar are brought,
Who of thy words dost make a mock apparel
And fittest to unutterable thought
The breeze-like motion and the self-born carol;
Thou fairy voyager, that dost float
In such clear water that thy boat
May rather seem
To brood on air than on an earthly stream;
O blessed vision, happy child,
Thou art so exquisitely wild,
I think of thee with many fears
For what may be thy lot in future years.
...
O too industrious folly!
O vain and causeless melancholy!
Nature will either end thee quite,
Or, lengthening out thy season of delight,
Preserve for thee by individual right
A young lamb’s heart among the full-grown flocks.’