unless illustrated with the most copious citation, could do justice to
the book. The first part or Narrative is not of extraordinary, though it
is of considerable merit, and has some of Hogg's usual faults. The
_Memoirs_ proper are almost wholly free from these faults. In no book
known to me is the grave treatment of the topsy-turvy and improbable
better managed; although, by an old trick, it pleases the "editor" to
depreciate his work in the passage just mentioned. The writer, whoever
he was, was fully qualified for the task. The possibility of a young man
of narrow intellect--his passion against his brother already excited,
and his whole mind given to the theology of predestination--gliding into
such ideas as are here described is undoubted; and it is made thoroughly
credible to the reader. The story of the pretended Gil Martin,
preposterous as it is, is told by the unlucky maniac exactly in the
manner in which a man deluded, but with occasional suspicions of his
delusion, would tell it. The gradual change from intended and successful
rascality and crime into the incurring or the supposed incurring of the
most hideous guilt without any actual consciousness of guilty action may
seem an almost hopeless thing to treat probably. Yet it is so treated
here. And the final gathering and blackening of the clouds of despair
(though here again there is a very slight touch of Hogg's undue
prolongation of things) exhibits literary power of the ghastly kind
infinitely different from and far above the usual raw-head-and-bloody-bones
story of the supernatural.
Now, who wrote it?
No doubt, so far as I know, has been generally entertained of Hogg's
authorship, though, since I myself entertained doubts on the subject, I
have found some good judges not unwilling to agree with me. Although
admitting that it appeared anonymously, Hogg claims it, as we have seen,
not only without hesitation but apparently without any suspicion that it
was a particularly valuable or meritorious thing to claim, and without
any attempt to shift, divide, or in any way disclaim the responsibility,
though the book had been a failure. His publishers do not seem to have
doubted then that it was his; nor, I have been told, have their
representatives any reason to doubt it now. His daughter, I think, does
not so much as mention it in her _Memorials_, but his various
biographers have never, so far as I know, hinted the least hesitation.
At the same time I am absolutely unable to believe that it is Hogg's
unadulterated and unassisted work. It is not one of those cases where a
man once tries a particular style, and then from accident, disgust, or
what not, relinquishes it. Hogg was always trying the supernatural, and
he failed in it, except in this instance, as often as he tried it. Why
should he on this particular occasion have been saved from himself? and
who saved him?--for that great part of the book at least is his there
can be no doubt.
By way of answer to these questions I can at least point out certain
coincidences and probabilities. It has been seen that Lockhart's name
actually figures in the postscript to the book. Now at this time and for
long afterwards Lockhart was one of the closest of Hogg's literary
allies; and Hogg, while admitting that the author of _Peter's Letters_
hoaxed him as he hoaxed everybody, is warm in his praise. He describes
him in his _Autobiography_ as "a warm and disinterested friend." He
tells us in the book on Scott how he had a plan, even later than this,
that Lockhart should edit all his (the Shepherd's) works, for
discouraging which plan he was very cross with Sir Walter. Further, the
vein of the _Confessions_ is very closely akin to, if not wholly
identical with, a vein which Lockhart not only worked on his own account
but worked at this very same time. It was in these very years of his
residence at Chiefswood that Lockhart produced the little masterpiece of
"Adam Blair" (where the terrors and temptations of a convinced
Presbyterian minister are dwelt upon), and "Matthew Wald," which is
itself the history of a lunatic as full of horrors, and those of no very
different kind, as the _Confessions_ themselves. That editing, and
perhaps something more than editing, on Lockhart's part would have been
exactly the thing necessary to prune and train and direct the Shepherd's
disorderly luxuriance into the methodical madness of the Justified
Sinner--to give Hogg's loose though by no means vulgar style the dress
of his own polished manner--to weed and shape and correct and straighten
the faults of the Boar of the Forest--nobody who knows the undoubted
writing of the two men will deny. And Lockhart, who was so careless of
his work that to this day it is difficult, if not impossible, to
ascertain what he did or did not write unassisted, would certainly not
have been the man to claim a share in the book, even had it made more
noise; though he may have thought of this as well as of other things
when, in his wrath over the foolish blethering about Scott, he wrote
that the Shepherd's views of literary morality were peculiar. As for
Hogg himself, he would never have thought of acknowledging any such
editing or collaboration if it did take place; and that not nearly so
much from vanity or dishonesty as from simple carelessness, dashed
perhaps with something of the habit of literary _supercherie_ which the
society in which he lived affected, and which he carried as far at least
as any one of its members.
It may seem rather hard after praising a man's ewe lamb so highly to
question his right in her. But I do not think there is any real
hardship. I should think that the actual imagination of the story is
chiefly Hogg's, for Lockhart's forte was not that quality, and his own
novels suffer rather for want of it. If this be the one specimen of what
the Shepherd's genius could turn out when it submitted to correction and
training, it gives us a useful and interesting explanation why the mass
of his work, with such excellent flashes, is so flawed and formless as a
whole. It explains why he wished Lockhart to edit the others. It
explains at the same time why (for the Shepherd's vanity was never far
off) he set apparently little store by the book. It is only a hypothesis
of course, and a hypothesis which is very unlikely ever to be proved,
while in the nature of things it is even less capable of disproof. But I
think there is good critical reason for it.
At any rate, I confess for myself, that I should not take anything like
the same interest in Hogg, if he were not the putative author of the
_Confessions_. The book is in a style which wearies soon if it be
overdone, and which is very difficult indeed to do well. But it is one
of the very best things of its kind, and that is a claim which ought
never to be overlooked. And if Hogg in some lucky moment did really
"write it all by himself," as the children say, then we could make up
for him a volume composed of it, of "Kilmeny," and of the best of the
songs, which would be a very remarkable volume indeed. It would not
represent a twentieth part of his collected work, and it would probably
represent a still smaller fraction of what he wrote, while all the rest
would be vastly inferior. But it would be a title to no inconsiderable
place in literature, and we know that good judges did think Hogg, with
all his personal weakness and all his literary shortcomings, entitled to
such a place.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] For something more, however, see the Essay on Lockhart below.
III
SYDNEY SMITH
The hackneyed joke about biographers adding a new terror to death holds
still as good as ever. But biography can sometimes make a good case
against her persecutors; and one of the instances which she would
certainly adduce would be the instance of Sydney Smith. I more than
suspect that his actual works are less and less read as time goes on,
and that the brilliant virulence of _Peter Plymley_, the even greater
brilliance, not marred by virulence at all, of the _Letters to
Archdeacon Singleton_, the inimitable quips of his articles in the
_Edinburgh Review_, are familiar, if they are familiar at all, only to
the professed readers of the literature of the past, and perhaps to some
intelligent newspaper men who find Sydney[8] to be what Fuseli
pronounced Blake, "d----d good to steal from." But the _Life_ which
Lady Holland, with her mother's and Mrs. Austin's aid, produced more
than thirty years ago has had a different fate; and a fresh lease of
popularity seems to have been secured by another _Life_, published by
Mr. Stuart Reid in 1883. This was partly abridged from the first, and
partly supplied with fresh matter by a new sifting of the documents
which Lady Holland had used. Nor do the authors of these works, however
great must be our gratitude to them, take to themselves any such share
of the credit as is due to Boswell in the case of Johnson, to Lockhart
in the case of Scott, to Carlyle in the case of Sterling. Neither can
lay claim to the highest literary merit of writing or arrangement; and
the latter of the two contains digressions, not interesting to all
readers, about the nobility of Sydney's cause. It is because both books
let their subject reveal himself by familiar letters, scraps of journal,
or conversation, and because the revelation of self is so full and so
delightful, that Sydney Smith's immortality, now that the generation
which actually heard him talk has all but disappeared, is still secured
without the slightest fear of disturbance or decay. With a few
exceptions (the Mrs. Partington business, the apologue of the dinners at
the synod of Dort, "Noodle's Oration," and one or two more), the things
by which Sydney is known to the general, all come, not from his works,
but from his _Life_ or _Lives_. No one with any sense of fun can read
the Works without being delighted; but in the Life and the letters the
same qualities of wit appear, with other qualities which in the Works
hardly appear at all. A person absolutely ignorant of anything but the
Works might possibly dismiss Sydney Smith as a brilliant but bitter and
not too consistent partisan, who fought desperately against abuses when
his party was out, and discovered that they were not abuses at all when
his party was in. A reader of his Life and of his private utterances
knows him better, likes him better, and certainly does not admire him
less.
He was born in 1771, the son of an eccentric and apparently rather
provoking person, who for no assigned reason left his wife at the church
door in order to wander about the world, and who maintained his vagabond
principles so well that, as his granddaughter ruefully records, he
bought, spent money on, and sold at a loss, no less than nineteen
different houses in England and Wales. Sydney was also the second of
four clever brothers, the eldest and cleverest being the somewhat famous
"Bobus," who co-operated in the _Microcosm_ with Canning and Frere,
survived his better known brother but a fortnight, founded a family, and
has left one of those odd reputations of immense talent not justified by
any producible work, to which our English life of public schools,
universities, and Parliament gives peculiar facilities. Bobus and Cecil
the third brother were sent to Eton: Sydney and Courtenay, the fourth,
to Winchester, after a childhood spent in precocious reading and arguing
among themselves. From Winchester Sydney (of whose school-days some
trifling but only trifling anecdotes are recorded,) proceeded in regular
course to New College, Oxford, and being elected of right to a
Fellowship, then worth about a hundred pounds a year, was left by his
father to "do for himself" on that not extensive revenue. He did for
himself at Oxford during the space of nine years; and it is supposed
that his straitened circumstances had something to do with his dislike
for universities, which however was a kind of point of conscience among
his Whig friends. It is at least singular that this residence of nearly
a decade has left hardly a single story or recorded incident of any
kind; and that though three generations of undergraduates passed through
Oxford in his time, no one of them seems in later years to have had
anything to say of not the least famous and one of the most sociable of
Englishmen. At that time, it is true, and for long afterwards, the men
of New College kept more to themselves than the men of any other college
in Oxford; but still it is odd. Another little mystery is, Why did
Sydney take orders? Although there is not the slightest reason to
question his being, according to his own standard, a very sincere and
sufficient divine, it obviously was not quite the profession for him.
He is said to have wished for the Bar, but to have deferred to his
father's wishes for the Church. That Sydney was an affectionate and
dutiful son nobody need doubt: he was always affectionate, and in his
own way dutiful. But he is about the last man one can think of as likely
to undertake an uncongenial profession out of high-flown dutifulness to
a father who had long left him to his own resources, and who had neither
influence nor prospects in the Church to offer him. The Fellowship would
have kept him, as it had kept him already, till briefs came. However, he
did take orders; and the later _Life_ gives more particulars than the
first as to the incumbency which indirectly determined his career. It
was the curacy of Netheravon on Salisbury Plain; and its almost complete
seclusion was tempered by a kindly squire, Mr. Hicks-Beach,
great-grandfather of the present Sir Michael Hicks-Beach. Mr.
Hicks-Beach offered Sydney the post of tutor to his eldest son; Sydney
accepted it, started for Germany with his pupil, but (as he
picturesquely though rather vaguely expresses it) "put into Edinburgh
under stress of war" and stayed there for five years.
The sojourn at Edinburgh began in June 1798: it ended in August 1803. It
will thus be seen that Sydney was by no means a very young man even when
he began reviewing, the year before leaving the Scotch capital. Indeed
the aimless prolongation of his stay at Oxford, which brought him
neither friends, money, nor professional experience of any kind, threw
him considerably behindhand all his life; and this delay, much more than
Tory persecution or Whig indifference, was the cause of the comparative
slowness with which he made his way. His time at Edinburgh was, however,
usefully spent even before that invention of the _Review_, over which
there is an amicable and unimportant dispute between himself and
Jeffrey. His tutorship was so successful that Mr. Hicks-Beach rewarded
it with a cheque for a thousand pounds: he did duty in the Episcopal
churches of Edinburgh: he made friends with all the Whigs and many of
the Tories of the place: he laughed unceasingly at Scotchmen and liked
them very much. Also, about the middle of his stay, he got married, but
not to a Scotch girl. His wife was Miss Catherine Pybus, of Cheam, and
the marriage was as harebrained a one, from the point of view of
settlements, as Jeffrey's own.[9] Sydney's settlement on his wife is
well known: it consisted of "six small silver teaspoons much worn," with
which worldly goods he did her literally endow by throwing them into her
lap. It would appear that there never was a happier marriage; but it
certainly seemed for some years as if there might have been many more
prosperous in point of money. When Sydney moved to London he had no
very definite prospect of any income whatever; and had not Mrs. Smith
sold her mother's jewels (which came to her just at the time), they
would apparently have had some difficulty in furnishing their house in
Doughty Street. But Horner, their friend (the "parish bull" of Scott's
irreverent comparison), had gone to London before them, and impressed
himself, apparently by sheer gravity, on the political world as a good
young man. Introduced by him, Sydney Smith soon became one of the circle
at Holland House. It is indeed not easy to live on invitations and your
mother-in-law's pearls; but Sydney reviewed vigorously, preached
occasionally, before very long received a regular appointment at the
Foundling Hospital, and made some money by lecturing very agreeably at
the Royal Institution on Moral Philosophy--a subject of which he
honestly admits that he knew, in the technical sense, nothing. But his
hearers did not want technical ethics, and in Sydney Smith they had a
moral philosopher of the practical kind who could hardly be excelled
either in sense or in wit. One little incident of this time, however,
throws some light on the complaints which have been made about the delay
of his promotion. He applied to a London rector to license him to a
vacant chapel, which had not hitherto been used for the services of the
Church. The immediate answer has not been preserved; but from what
followed it clearly was a civil and rather evasive but perfectly
intelligible request to be excused. The man was of course quite within
his right, and a dozen good reasons can be guessed for his conduct. He
may really have objected, as he seems to have said he did, to take a
step which his predecessors had refused to take, and which might
inconvenience his successors. But Sydney would not take the refusal, and
wrote another very logical, but extremely injudicious, letter pressing
his request with much elaboration, and begging the worthy Doctor of
Divinity to observe that he, the Doctor, was guilty of inconsistency and
other faults. Naturally this put the Doctor's back up, and he now
replied with a flat and very high and mighty refusal. We know from
another instance that Sydney was indisposed to take "No" for an answer.
However he obtained, besides his place at the Foundling, preacherships
in two proprietary chapels, and seems to have had both business and
pleasure enough on his hands during his London sojourn, which was about
the same length as his Edinburgh one. It was, however, much more
profitable, for in three years the ministry of "All the Talents" came
in, the Holland House interest was exerted, and the Chancellor's living
of Foston, near York, valued at five hundred pounds a year, was given to
Sydney. He paid for it, after a fashion which in a less zealous and
convinced Whig might seem a little dubious, by the famous lampoons of
the _Plymley Letters_, advocating the claims of Catholic emancipation,
and extolling Fox and Grenville at the expense of Perceval and Canning.
Very edifying is it to find Sydney Smith objecting to this latter that
he is a "diner out," a "maker of jokes and parodies," a trifler on
important subjects--in fact each and all of the things which the Rev.
Sydney Smith himself was, in a perfection only equalled by the object of
his righteous wrath. But of Peter more presently.
Even his admiring biographers have noticed, with something of a chuckle,
the revenge which Perceval, who was the chief object of Plymley's
sarcasm, took, without in the least knowing it, on his lampooner. Had it
not been for the Clergy Residence Bill, which that very respectable, if
not very brilliant, statesman passed in 1808, and which put an end to
perhaps the most flagrant of all then existing abuses, Sydney, the enemy
of abuses, would no doubt have continued with a perfectly clear
conscience to draw the revenues of Foston, and while serving it by a
curate, to preach, lecture, dine out, and rebuke Canning for making
jokes, in London. As it was he had to make up his mind, though he
obtained a respite from the Archbishop, to resign (which in the
recurring frost of Whig hopes was not to be thought of), to exchange,
which he found impossible, or to bury himself in Yorkshire. This was a
real hardship upon him, because Foston, as it was, was uninhabitable,
and had had no resident clergyman since the seventeenth century. But
whatever bad things could be said of Sydney (and I really do not know
what they are, except that the combination of a sharp wit, a ready pen,
and strong political prejudices sometimes made him abuse his talents),
no one could say that he ever shirked either a difficulty or a duty.
When his first three years' leave expired, he went down in 1809 with his
family to York, and established himself at Heslington, a village near
the city and not far from his parish. And when a second term of
dispensation from actual residence was over, he set to work and built
the snuggest if the ugliest parsonage in England, with farm-buildings
and all complete, at the cost of some four thousand pounds. Of the
details of that building his own inimitable account exists, and is or
ought to be well known. The brick-pit and kiln on the property, which
were going to save fortunes and resulted in nothing but the production
of exactly a hundred and fifty thousand unusable bricks: the four oxen,
Tug, Lug, Haul and Crawl, who were to be the instruments of another
economy and proved to be, at least in Sydneian language, equal to
nothing but the consumption of "buckets of sal volatile:" the entry of
the distracted mother of the household on her new domains with a baby
clutched in her arms and one shoe left in the circumambient mud: the
great folks of the neighbourhood (Lord and Lady Carlisle) coming to call
graciously on the strangers, and being whelmed, coach and four,
outriders and all, in a ploughed field of despond: the "universal
scratcher" in the meadows, inclined so as to let the brute creation of
all heights enjoy that luxury: Bunch the butler, a female child of
tender years but stout proportions: Annie Kay the factotum: the
"Immortal," a chariot which was picked up at York in the last stage of
decay, and carried the family for many years half over England--all
these things and persons are told in divers delightful scraps of
autobiography and in innumerable letters, after a fashion impossible to
better and at a length too long to quote.
Sydney Smith was for more than twenty years rector of Foston, and for
fully fifteen actually resided there. During this time he made the
acquaintance of Lord and Lady Grey, next to Lord and Lady Holland his
most constant friends, visited a little, entertained in his own
unostentatious but hearty fashion a great deal, wrote many articles for
the _Edinburgh Review_, found himself in a minority of one or two among
the clergy of Yorkshire on the subject of Emancipation and similar
matters, but was on the most friendly terms possible with his diocesan,
Archbishop Vernon Harcourt. Nor was he even without further preferment,
for he held for some years (on the then not discredited understanding of
resignation when one of the Howards was ready for it) the neighbouring
and valuable living of Londesborough. Then the death of an aunt put an
end to his monetary anxieties, which for years had been considerable, by
the legacy of a small but sufficient fortune. And at last, when he was
approaching sixty, the good things of the Church, which he never
affected to despise, came in earnest. The Tory Chancellor Lyndhurst gave
him a stall at Bristol, which carried with it a small Devonshire living,
and soon afterwards he was able to exchange Foston (which he had greatly
improved), for Combe Florey near Taunton. When his friend Lord Grey
became Prime Minister, the stall at Bristol was exchanged for a much
more valuable one at St. Paul's; Halberton, the Devonshire vicarage, and
Combe Florey still remaining his. These made up an ecclesiastical
revenue not far short of three thousand a year, which Sydney enjoyed for
the last fifteen years of his life. He never got anything more, and it
is certain that for a time he was very sore at not being made a bishop,
or at least offered a bishopric. Lord Holland had rather rashly
explained the whole difficulty years before, by reporting a conversation
of his with Lord Grenville, in which they had hoped that when the Whigs
came into power they would be more grateful to Sydney than the Tories
had been to Swift. Sydney's acuteness must have made him wince at the
omen. For my part I do not see why either Harley or Grey should have
hesitated, as far as any scruples of their own went. But I think any
fair-minded person must admit the possibility of a scruple, though he
may not share it, about the effect of seeing either the _Tale of a Tub_
or _Peter Plymley's Letters_, with "By the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop
of----" on the title-page. The people who would have been shocked might
in each case have been fools: there is nothing that I at least can see,
in either book, inconsistent with sound religion and churchmanship. But
they would have been honest fools, and of such a Prime Minister has to
take heed. So Amen Corner (or rather, for he did not live there, certain
streets near Grosvenor Square) in London, and Combe Florey in the
country, were Sydney Smith's abodes till his death. In the former he
gave his breakfasts and dinners in the season, being further enabled to
do so by his share (some thirty thousand pounds) of his brother
Courtenay's Indian fortune. The latter, after rebuilding it,--for he had
either a fate or a passion for bricks and mortar,--he made on a small
scale one of the most beautiful and hospitable houses in the West of
England.