itself; indeed, as Lady Holland was not very fond of dates, it is
sometimes not clear to which of the two residences some of them apply.
At both Sydney had a huge store-room, or rather grocer's and chemist's
shop, from which he supplied the wants, not merely of his household, but
of half the neighbourhood. It appears to have been at Combe Florey (for
though no longer poor he still had a frugal mind), that he hit upon the
device of "putting the cheapest soaps in the dearest papers," confident
of the result upon the female temper. It was certainly there that he
fitted up two favourite donkeys with a kind of holiday-dress of antlers,
to meet the objection of one of his lady-visitors that he had no deer;
and converted certain large bay-trees in boxes into the semblance of an
orangery, by fastening some dozens of fine fruit to the branches. I like
to think of the mixed astonishment and disgust of a great Russian, and a
not very small Frenchman, both not long deceased, M. Tourguénieff and M.
Paul de Saint-Victor, if they had heard of these pleasing tomfooleries.
But tomfoolery, though, when properly and not inordinately indulged, one
of the best things in life, must, like the other good things of life,
come to an end. After an illness of some months Sydney Smith died at his
house in Green Street, of heart disease, on 22nd February 1845, in the
seventy-fourth year of his age.
The memorials and evidences of his peculiar if not unique genius consist
of three different kinds; reported or remembered conversations and
jokes, letters, and formal literary work. He was once most famous as a
talker; but conversation is necessarily the most perishable of all
things, and its recorded fragments bear keeping less than any other
relics. Some of the verbal jests assigned to him (notably the famous
one about the tortoise, which, after being long known by the initiated
not to be his, has at last been formally claimed by its rightful owner),
are certainly or probably borrowed or falsely attributed, as rich
conversationalists always borrow or receive. And always the things have
something of the mangled air which sayings detached from their context
can hardly escape. It is otherwise with the letters. The best letters
are always most like the actual conversation of their writers, and
probably no one ever wrote more as he talked than Sydney Smith. The
specially literary qualities of his writing for print are here too in
great measure; and on the whole, though of course the importance of
subject is nearly always less, and the interest of sustained work is
wholly absent, nowhere can the entire Sydney be better seen. Of the
three satirists of modern times with whom he may not unfairly claim to
rank--Pascal, Swift, and Voltaire--he is most like Voltaire in his
faculty of presenting a good thing with a preface which does not in the
least prepare you for it, and then leaving it without the slightest
attempt to go back on it, and elaborate it, and make sure that his
hearer has duly appreciated it and laughed at it. And of the two, though
the palm of concentration must be given to Voltaire, the palm of
absolute simplicity must be given to Sydney. Hardly any of his letters
are without these unforced flashes of wit, from almost his first
epistle to Jeffrey (where, after rallying that great little man on being
the "only male despondent he has met," he adds the postscript, "I beg to
except the Tuxford waiter, who desponds exactly as you do") to his very
last to Miss Harcourt, in which he mildly dismisses one of his brethren
as "anything but a _polished_ corner of the Temple." There is the "usual
establishment for an eldest landed baby:" the proposition, advanced in
the grave and chaste manner, that "the information of very plain women
is so inconsiderable, that I agree with you in setting no store by it:"
the plaintive expostulation with Lady Holland (who had asked him to
dinner on the ninth of the month, after previously asking him to stay
from the fifth to the twelfth), "it is like giving a gentleman an
assignation for Wednesday when you are going to marry him on the
previous Sunday--an attempt to combine the stimulus of gallantry with
the security of connubial relations:" the simple and touching
information that "Lord Tankerville has sent me a whole buck. This
necessarily takes up a good deal of my time;" that "geranium-fed bacon
is of a beautiful colour, but it takes so many plants to fatten one pig
that such a system can never answer;" that "it is a mistake to think
that Dr. Bond could be influenced by partridges. He is a man of very
independent mind, with whom pheasants at least, or perhaps even turkeys,
are necessary;" and scores more with references to which I find the
fly-leaves of my copy of the letters covered. If any one wants to see
how much solid there is with all this froth, let him turn to the
passages showing the unconquerable manliness, fairness, and good sense
with which Sydney treated the unhappy subject of Queen Caroline, out of
which his friends were so ready to make political capital; or to the
admirable epistle in which he takes seriously, and blunts once for all,
the points of certain foolish witticisms as to the readiness with which
he, a man about town, had taken to catechisms and cabbages in an almost
uninhabited part of the despised country. In conversation he would seem
sometimes to have a little, a very little, "forced the note." The Quaker
baby, and the lady "with whom you might give an assembly or populate a
parish," are instances in point. But he never does this in his letters.
I take particular pleasure in the following passage written to Miss
Georgiana Harcourt within two years of his death: "What a charming
existence! To live in the midst of holy people; to know that nothing
profane can approach you; to be certain that a Dissenter can no more be
found in the Palace than a snake can exist in Ireland, or ripe fruit in
Scotland! To have your society strong, and undiluted by the laity; to
bid adieu to human learning; to feast on the Canons and revel in the
Thirty-Nine Articles! Happy Georgiana!" Now if Sydney had been what some
foolish people think him, merely a scoffer, there would be no fun in
this; it would be as impertinent and in as bad taste as the stale jokes
of the eighteenth century about Christianity. But he was much else.
Of course, however, no rational man will contend that in estimating
Sydney Smith's place in the general memory, his deliberate literary
work, or at least that portion of it which he chose to present on
reflection, acknowledged and endorsed, can be overlooked. His _Life_
contains (what is infinitely desirable in all such Lives and by no means
always or often furnished) a complete list of his contributions to the
_Edinburgh Review_, and his works contain most of them. To these have to
be added the pamphlets, of which the chief and incomparably the best
are, at intervals of thirty years, _Peter Plymley_ and the _Letters to
Archdeacon Singleton_, together with sermons, speeches, and other
miscellaneous matter. The whole, except the things which he did not
himself care to reprint, can be obtained now in one volume; but the
print is not to be recommended to aged or weakly sight.
Sydney Smith had no false modesty, and in not a few letters to Jeffrey
he speaks of his own contributions to the _Edinburgh_ with the greatest
freedom, combating and quite refusing to accept his editor's suggestion
as to their flippancy and fantasticality, professing with much frankness
that this is the way he can write and no other, and more than once
telling Jeffrey that whatever they may think in solemn Scotland, his,
Sydney's, articles are a great deal more read in England and elsewhere
than any others. Although there are maxims to the contrary effect, the
judgment of a clever man, not very young and tolerably familiar with the
world, on his own work, is very seldom far wrong. I should say myself
that, putting aside the historic estimate, Sydney Smith's articles are
by far the most interesting nowadays of those contributed by any one
before the days of Macaulay, who began just as Sydney ceased to write
anonymously in 1827, on his Bristol appointment. They are also by far
the most distinct and original. Jeffrey, Brougham, and the rest wrote,
for the most part, very much after the fashion of the ancients: if a
very few changes were made for date, passages of Jeffrey's criticism
might almost be passages of Dryden, certainly passages of the better
critics of the eighteenth century, as far as manner goes. There is
nobody at all like Sydney Smith before him in England, for Swift's style
is wholly different. To begin with, Sydney had a strong prejudice in
favour of writing very short articles, and a horror of reading long
ones--the latter being perhaps less peculiar to himself than the former.
Then he never made the slightest pretence at systematic or dogmatic
criticism of anything whatever. In literature proper he seems indeed to
have had no particular principles, and I cannot say that he had very
good taste. He commits the almost unpardonable sin of not merely
blaspheming Madame de Sévigné, but preferring to her that second-rate
leader-writer in petticoats, Madame de Staël. On the other hand, if he
had no literary principles, he had (except in rare cases where politics
came in, and not often then) few literary prejudices, and his happily
incorrigible good sense and good humour were proof against the frequent
bias of his associates. Though he could not have been very sensible,
from what he himself says, of their highest qualities, he championed
Scott's novels incessantly against the Whigs and prigs of Holland House.
He gives a most well-timed warning to Jeffrey that the constant
running-down of Wordsworth had very much the look of persecution, though
with his usual frankness he avows that he has not read the particular
article in question, because the subject is "quite uninteresting to
him." I think he would, if driven hard, have admitted with equal
frankness that poetry, merely as poetry, was generally uninteresting.
Still he had so many interests of various kinds, that few books failed
to appeal to one or the other, and he, in his turn, has seldom failed to
give a lively if not a very exact or critical account of his subject.
But it is in his way of giving this account that the peculiarity,
glanced at above as making a parallel between him and Voltaire, appears.
It is, I have said, almost original, and what is more, endless as has
been the periodical writing of the last eighty years, and sedulously as
later writers have imitated earlier, I do not know that it has ever
been successfully copied. It consists in giving rapid and apparently
business-like summaries, packed, with apparent negligence and real art,
full of the flashes of wit so often noticed and to be noticed. Such are,
in the article on "The Island of Ceylon," the honey-bird "into whose
body the soul of a common informer seems to have migrated," and "the
chaplain of the garrison, all in black, the Rev. Mr. Somebody or other
whose name we have forgotten," the discovery of whose body in a serpent
his ruthless clerical brother pronounces to be "the best history of the
kind he remembers." Very likely there may be people who can read this,
even the "all in black," without laughing, and among them I should
suppose must be the somebody or other, whose name we too have forgotten,
who is said to have imagined that he had more than parried Sydney's
unforgiven jest about the joke and the surgical operation, by retorting,
"Yes! an _English_ joke." I have always wept to think that Sydney did
not live to hear this retort. The classical places for this kind of
summary work are the article just named on Ceylon, and that on Waterton.
But the most inimitable single example, if it is not too shocking to
this very proper age, is the argument of Mat Lewis's tragedy: "Ottilia
becomes quite furious from the conviction that Cæsario has been sleeping
with a second lady called Estella; whereas he has really been sleeping
with a third lady called Amelrosa."
Among the most important of these essays are the two famous ones on
Methodism and on Indian missions, which gave far more offence to the
religious public of evangelical persuasion than all Sydney's jokes on
bishops, or his arguments for Catholic emancipation, and which (owing to
the strong influence which then, as now, Nonconformists possessed in the
counsels of the Liberal party) probably had as much to do as anything
else with the reluctance of the Whig leaders, when they came into power,
to give their friend the highest ecclesiastical preferment. These
subjects are rather difficult to treat in a general literary essay, and
it may perhaps be admitted that here, as in dealing with poetry and
other subjects of the more transcendental kind, Sydney showed a touch of
Philistinism, and a distinct inability to comprehend exaltation of
sentiment and thought. But the general sense is admirably sound and
perfectly orthodox; and the way in which so apparently light and
careless a writer has laboriously supported every one of his charges,
and almost every one of his flings, with chapter and verse from the
writings of the incriminated societies, is very remarkable. Nor can it,
I think, be doubted that the publication, in so widely read a
periodical, of the nauseous follies of speech in which well-meaning
persons indulged, had something to do with the gradual disuse of a style
than which nothing could be more prejudicial to religion, for the simple
reason that nothing else could make religion ridiculous. The medicine
did not of course operate at once, and silly people still write silly
things. But I hardly think that the Wesleyan body or the Church
Missionary Society would now officially publish such stuff as the
passage about Brother Carey, who, while in the actual paroxysm of
sea-sickness, was "wonderfully comforted by the contemplation of the
goodness of God," or that about Brother Ward "in design clasping to his
bosom" the magnanimous Captain Wickes, who subsequently "seemed very
low," when a French privateer was in sight. Jeffrey was, it seems, a
little afraid of these well-deserved exposures, which, from the
necessity of abundant quotation, are an exception to the general
shortness of Sydney's articles. Sydney's interest in certain subjects
led him constantly to take up fresh books on them; and thus a series of
series might be made out of his papers, with some advantage to the
reader perhaps, if a new edition of his works were undertaken. The chief
of such subjects is America, in dealing with which he pleased the
Americans by descanting on their gradual emancipation from English
prejudices and abuses, but infuriated them by constant denunciations of
slavery, and by laughing at their lack of literature and cultivation.
With India he also dealt often, his brothers' connection with it giving
him an interest therein. Prisons were another favourite subject, though,
in his zeal for making them uncomfortable, he committed himself to one
really atrocious suggestion--that of dark cells for long periods of
time. It is odd that the same person should make such a truly diabolical
proposal, and yet be in a perpetual state of humanitarian rage about
man-traps and spring-guns, which were certainly milder engines of
torture. It is odd, too, that Sydney, who was never tired of arguing
that prisons ought to be made uncomfortable, because nobody need go
there unless he chose, should have been furiously wroth with poor Mr.
Justice Best for suggesting much the same thing of spring-guns. The
greatest political triumph of his manner is to be found no doubt in the
article "Bentham on Fallacies," in which the unreadable diatribes of the
apostle of utilitarianism are somehow spirited and crisped up into a
series of brilliant arguments, and the whole is crowned by the famous
"Noodle's Oration," the summary and storehouse of all that ever has been
or can be said on the Liberal side in the lighter manner. It has not
lost its point even from the fact that Noodle has now for a long time
changed his party, and has elaborated for himself, after his manner, a
similar stock of platitudes and absurdities in favour of the very things
for which Sydney was fighting.
The qualities of these articles appear equally in the miscellaneous
essays, in the speeches, and even in the sermons, though Sydney Smith,
unlike Sterne, never condescended to buffoonery or theatrical tricks in
the pulpit. In _Peter Plymley's Letters_ they appear concentrated and
acidulated: in the _Letters to Archdeacon Singleton_, in the
_Repudiation Letters_, and the _Letters on Railways_ which date from his
very last days, concentrated and mellowed. More than one good judge has
been of the opinion that Sydney's powers increased to the very end of
his life, and it is not surprising that this should have been the case.
Although he did plenty of work in his time, the literary part of it was
never of an exhausting nature. Though one of the most original of
commentators, he was a commentator pure and simple, and found, but did
not supply, his matter. Thus there was no danger of running dry, and as
his happiest style was not indignation but good-natured raillery, his
increasing prosperity, not chequered, till quite the close of his life,
by any serious bodily ailment, put him more and more in the right
atmosphere and temper for indulging his genius. _Plymley_, though very
amusing, and, except in the Canning matter above referred to, not
glaringly unfair for a political lampoon, is distinctly acrimonious, and
almost (as "almost" as Sydney could be) ill-tempered. It is possible to
read between the lines that the writer is furious at his party being out
of office, and is much more angry with Mr. Perceval for having the ear
of the country than for being a respectable nonentity. The main
argument, moreover, is bad in itself, and was refuted by facts. Sydney
pretends to be, as his friend Jeffrey really was, in mortal terror lest
the French should invade England, and, joined by rebellious Irishmen
and wrathful Catholics generally, produce an English revolution. The
Tories replied, "We will take good care that the French shall _not_
land, and that Irishmen shall _not_ rise." And they did take the said
good care, and they beat the Frenchmen thorough and thorough while
Sydney and his friends were pointing their epigrams. Therefore, though
much of the contention is unanswerable enough, the thing is doubtfully
successful as a whole. In the _Letters to Archdeacon Singleton_ the tone
is almost uniformly good-humoured, and the argument, whether quite
consistent or not in the particular speaker's mouth, is absolutely
sound, and has been practically admitted since by almost all the best
friends of the Church. Here occurs that inimitable passage before
referred to.
I met the other day, in an old Dutch chronicle, with a passage
so apposite to this subject, that, though it is somewhat too
light for the occasion, I cannot abstain from quoting it. There
was a great meeting of all the clergy at Dordrecht, and the
chronicler thus describes it, which I give in the language of
the translation: "And there was great store of Bishops in the
town, in their robes goodly to behold, and all the great men of
the State were there, and folks poured in in boats on the Meuse,
the Merse, the Rhine, and the Linge, coming from the Isle of
Beverlandt and Isselmond, and from all quarters in the Bailiwick
of Dort; Arminians and Gomarists, with the friends of John
Barneveldt and of Hugh Grote. And before my Lords the Bishops,
Simon of Gloucester, who was a Bishop in those parts, disputed
with Vorstius and Leoline the Monk, and many texts of Scripture
were bandied to and fro; and when this was done, and many
propositions made, and it waxed towards twelve of the clock, my
Lords the Bishops prepared to set them down to a fair repast, in
which was great store of good things--and among the rest a
roasted peacock, having in lieu of a tail the arms and banners
of the Archbishop, which was a goodly sight to all who favoured
the Church--and then the Archbishop would say a grace, as was
seemly to do, he being a very holy man; but ere he had finished,
a great mob of townspeople and folks from the country, who were
gathered under the windows, cried out _Bread! bread!_ for there
was a great famine, and wheat had risen to three times the
ordinary price of the _sleich_; and when they had done crying
_Bread! bread!_ they called out _No Bishops!_ and began to cast
up stones at the windows. Whereat my Lords the Bishops were in a
great fright, and cast their dinner out of the window to appease
the mob, and so the men of that town were well pleased, and did
devour the meats with a great appetite; and then you might have
seen my Lords standing with empty plates, and looking wistfully
at each other, till Simon of Gloucester, he who disputed with
Leoline the Monk, stood up among them and said, _Good my Lords,
is it your pleasure to stand here fasting, and that those who
count lower in the Church than you do should feast and fluster?
Let us order to us the dinner of the Deans and Canons which is
making ready for them in the chamber below._ And this speech of
Simon of Gloucester pleased the Bishops much; and so they sent
for the host, one William of Ypres, and told him it was for the
public good, and he, much fearing the Bishops, brought them the
dinner of the Deans and Canons; and so the Deans and Canons went
away without dinner, and were pelted by the men of the town,
because they had not put any meat out of the windows like the
Bishops; and when the Count came to hear of it, he said it was a
pleasant conceit, _and that the Bishops were right cunning men,
and had ding'd the Canons well_."
Even in the Singleton Letters, however, there are some little lapses of
the same kind (worse, indeed, because these letters were signed) as the
attack on Canning in the Plymley Letters. Sydney Smith exclaiming
against "derision and persiflage, the great principle by which the world
is now governed," is again edifying. But in truth Sydney never had the
weakness (for I have known it called a weakness) of looking too
carefully to see what the enemy's advocate is going to say. Take even
the famous, the immortal apologue of Mrs. Partington. It covered, we are
usually told, the Upper House with ridicule, and did as much as anything
else to carry the Reform Bill. And yet, though it is a watery apologue,
it will not hold water for a moment. The implied conclusion is, that the
Atlantic beat Mrs. Partington. Did it? It made, no doubt, a great mess
in her house, it put her to flight, it put her to shame. But when I was
last at Sidmouth the line of high-water mark was, I believe, much what
it was before the great storm of 1824, and though the particular Mrs.
Partington had no doubt been gathered to her fathers, the Mrs.
Partington of the day was, equally without doubt, living very
comfortably in the house which the Atlantic had threatened to swallow
up.