Sydney Smith Part 17

[130] "You see my younger brother, Courtenay, is turned out of office in India, for refusing the surety of the East India Company! Truly the Smiths are a stiff-necked generation, and yet they have all got rich but I. Courtenay, they say, has 150,000, and he keeps only a cat! In the last letter I had from him, which was in 1802, he confessed that his money was gathering very fast." (S.S. 1827).

[131] (1794-1871), Banker, Historian, and Politician.

[132] William, Viscount Melbourne (1779-1848).

[133] "Have you read Sydney Smith's Life? There is a strange mixture in his character of earnest common-sense and fun. On the whole, I think he will be thought more highly of in consequence of the publication of the Life, though it may be doubted whether his religion was not injured by his strong sense of the ludicrous. I cannot forgive him for his anti-missionary articles in the _Edinburgh Review_."--_Life of Archbishop Tait_, vol. I. chapter xiii.

What seems to be his later and juster judgment on missionary work is given, without date, by Lady Holland. "Some one, speaking of Missions, ridiculed them as inefficient. He dissented, saying, that though all was not done that was projected, or even boasted of, yet that much good resulted; and that wherever Christianity was taught, it brought with it the additional good of civilization in its train, and men became better carpenters, better cultivators, better everything."

[134] "It is immaterial whether Mr. Shufflebottom preaches at Bungay, and Mr. Ringletub at Ipswich; or whether an artful vicissitude is adopted, and the order of insane predication reversed."

[135] William Carey (1761-1834), Shoemaker, Orientalist, and Missionary.

[136] (1765-1832), Historian and Philosopher.

[137] Charles Waterton (1782-1865), Naturalist.

[138] (1748-1820.)

[139] It is possible that the argument about the Wisdom of our Ancestors in "Noodle's Oration" may have been suggested by the following extract from the Parliamentary Debates for May 26, 1797. On Mr. Grey's Motion for a Reform of Parliament, Sir Gregory Page-Turner, M.P., spoke as follows--"He craved the indulgence of the House for a few observations which he had to make. When he got up in the morning and when he lay down at night, he always felt for the Const.i.tution. On this question he had never had but one opinion. When he came first into Parliament, he remembered that the Chancellor of the Exchequer proposed a Reform, but he saw it was wrong, and he opposed it. Would it not be madness to change what had been handed, sound and entire, down from the days of their fathers?"

[140] (1809-1878.)

[141] In these a special appeal is made to "our youthful Gladstone," then recently appointed Vice-President of the Board of Trade.

[142] Afterwards Mrs. Malcolm: died in 1886.

[143] He said afterwards that this Sermon on Peace was really Channing's.

[144] Compare his letter on parting from his friends at Edinburgh, quoted by Lady Holland:--"All adieus are melancholy; and princ.i.p.ally, I believe, because they put us in mind of the last of all adieus, when the apothecary, and the heir-apparent, and the nurse who weeps for pay, surround the bed; when the curate, engaged to dine three miles off, mumbles hasty prayers; when the dim eye closes for ever in the midst of empty pillboxes, gallipots, phials, and jugs of barley-water."

CHAPTER VII

CHARACTERISTICS--HUMOUR--POLITICS--CULTURE--THEORIES OF LIFE--RELIGION

What Sydney Smith was to the outward eye we know from an admirable portrait by Eddis[145] belonging to his grand-daughter, Miss Caroline Holland. He had a long and slightly aquiline nose, of the type which gives a peculiar trenchancy to the countenance; a strongly developed chin, thick white hair,[146] and black eyebrows. His complexion was fresh, inclining to be florid. In figure he was, to use his own phrase, "of the family of Falstaff." Ticknor described him as "corpulent but not gross." Macaulay spoke of his "rector-like amplitude and rubicundity." He was of middle height, rather above it than below, and st.u.r.dily built. He used to quote a saying from one of his contemporaries at Oxford--"Sydney, your sense, wit, and clumsiness, always give me the idea of an _Athenian carter_." Except on ceremonious occasions, he was careless about his dress. His daughter says:--"His neckcloth always looked like a pudding tied round his throat, and the arrangement of his garments seemed more the result of accident than design."

His manner in society was cordial, unrestrained, and even boisterous. "I live," he said in an admirable figure, "with open doors and windows." His poor paris.h.i.+oners regarded him with "a curious mixture of reverence and grin."[147] His daughter says that, "on entering the pulpit, the calm dignity of his eye, mien, and voice, made one feel that he was indeed, and felt himself to be, 'the pastor standing between our G.o.d and His people,'

to teach His laws, to declare His judgments, and proclaim His mercies."

Enough has been quoted from his writings to give the reader a clear notion of his style. In early life it was not scrupulously correct,[148] and to the end it was marked here and there by an archaism such as "I have strove," and "they are rode over." It was singularly uninvolved and uncomplicated, and was animated, natural, and vigorous in the highest degree. As years went on, it gained both in ease and in accuracy, but never lost either its force or its resonance. It ran up and down the whole gamut of the English tongue, from sesquipedalian cla.s.sicisms (which he generally used to heighten a comic effect) to one-syllabled words of the homeliest Anglo-Saxon. His punctuation was careless, and the impression produced by his written composition is that of a man who wrote exactly as he spoke, without pause, premeditation, or amendment; who was possessed by the subject on which he was writing, and never laid down the pen till that subject lived and breathed in the written page.[149] Here and there, indeed, it is easy to note an unusual care and elaboration in the structure of the sentences and the cadence of the sound, and then the style rises to a very high level of rhetorical dignity.

Enough too has been quoted, both from his writings and from his conversation, to ill.u.s.trate the quality and quant.i.ty of his humour. It bubbled up in him by a spontaneous process, and flowed over into whatever he wrote or said. Macaulay described his "rapid, loud, laughing utterance,"

and adds--"Sydney talks from the impulse of the moment, and his fun is quite inexhaustible." He was, I think, the greatest humourist whose jokes have come down to us in an authentic and unmutilated form. Almost alone among professional jokers, he made his merriment--rich, natural, fantastic, unbridled as it was--subserve the serious purposes of his life and writing.

Each joke was a link in an argument; each sarcasm was a moral lesson.

_Peter Plymley_, and the _Letters to Archdeacon Singleton_, the essays on America and on Persecuting Bishops, will probably be read as long as the _Tale of a Tub_ or Macaulay's review of "Satan" Montgomery; while of detached and isolated jokes--pure freaks of fun clad in literary garb--an incredible number, current in daily converse, deduce their birth from this incomparable clergyman.[150] "In ability," wrote Macaulay in 1850, "I should say that Jeffrey was higher, but Sydney rarer. I would rather have been Jeffrey; but there will be several Jeffreys before there is a Sydney."

It would of course be absurd to pretend that all his jokes were of an equally high order. In his essays and public letters he is always and supremely good; in his private letters and traditional table-talk he descends to the level of his correspondent or his company. Thus, in spite of his own protests against playing on words, he found his clerk "a man of great amen-ity of disposition." He complimented his friends Mrs. Tighe and Mrs. Cuffe as "the cuff that every one would wear, the tie that no one would loose." His fondness for Lord Grey's family led him to call himself "Grey-men-ivorous." When the Hollands were staying with him, "his house was as full of hollands as a gin-shop." He nicknamed Sir George Philips's home near Manchester Philippi. He ascribed his brother's ugly mansion at Cheam to "Chemosh, the abomination of Moab." In 1831 he wrote to his friend Mrs. Meynell that "the French Government was far from stable--like Meynell's[151] horses at the end of a long day's chase." When a lady asked him for an epitaph on her pet dog Spot, he proposed "Out, d.a.m.ned Spot!"

but, "strange to say, she did not think it sentimental enough." When William Cavendish,[152] who had been Second Wrangler, married Lady Blanche Howard, Sydney wrote--"Euclid leads Blanche to the altar--a strange choice for him, as she has not an angle about her." It was with reference to this kind of pleasantry that he said:--

"A joke goes a great way in the country. I have known one last pretty well for seven years. I remember making a joke after a meeting of the clergy, in Yorks.h.i.+re, where there was a Rev. Mr. Buckle, who never spoke when I gave his health. I said that he was a buckle without a tongue. Most persons within hearing laughed, but my next neighbour sat unmoved and sunk in thought. At last, a quarter of an hour after we had all done, he suddenly nudged me, exclaiming, 'I see _now_ what you meant, Mr. Smith; you meant a joke.' 'Yes,' I said, 'sir; I believe I did.' Upon which he began laughing so heartily, that I thought he would choke, and was obliged to pat him on the back."

A graver fault than this boyish love of punning is the undeniable vein of coa.r.s.eness which here and there disfigures Sydney Smith's controversial method. In 1810 he wrote, very characteristically, about his friend Lord Grey--"His deficiency is a want of executive coa.r.s.eness." This is a fault with which he could never have charged himself. His own "executive coa.r.s.eness" is referable in part to the social standard of the day, when ladies as refined as the Miss Berrys "d----d" the too-hot tea-kettle, and Canning referred to a political opponent as "the revered and ruptured Member." In a similar vein Sydney jokes incessantly about skin-disease in Scotland; writes of a neighbour whose manners he disliked that "she was as cold as if she were in the last stage of blue cholera"; and, after his farmers had been dining with him, says that "they were just as tipsy as farmers ought to be when dining with the parson."

When he came to dealing publicly with a political opponent, he seems to have thought that, the coa.r.s.er were his ill.u.s.trations, the more domestic and personal his allusions, the better for the cause which he served. The _Letters of Peter Plymley_ abound in medical and obstetrical imagery. The effect of the Orders in Council on the health of Europe supplies endless jokes. Peter roars with laughter at the thought of his sister-in-law, Mrs.

Abraham Plymley, "led away captive by an amorous Gaul." Nothing can be nastier (or more apt) than his comparison between the use of humour in controversy and that of the small-tooth comb in domestic life; nothing less delicate than the imaginary "Suckling Act" in which he burlesques Lord Shaftesbury's Ten Hours Bill. He barbs his attacks on an oppressive Government by jokes about the ugliness of Perceval's face and the poverty of Canning's relations--the pensions conferred on "Sophia" and "Caroline,"

their "national veal" and "public tea"; and the "clouds of cousins arriving by the waggon." When a bishop has insulted him, he replies with an insinuation that the bishop obtained his preferment by fraud and misrepresentation,[153] and jeers at him for having begun life as a n.o.bleman's Private Tutor, called by the "endearing but unmajestic name of d.i.c.k." It is only fair to say that these aberrations from good taste and good feeling became less and less frequent as years went on. That they ever were permitted to deform the splendid advocacy of great causes is due to the fact that, when Sydney Smith began to write, the influence of Smollett and his imitators was still powerful. Burke's obscene diatribes against the French Revolution were still quoted and admired. n.o.body had yet made any emphatic protest against the beastliness of Swift or the brutalities of Junius.[154]

When these necessary deductions have been made, we can return to the most admiring eulogy. In 1835 Sydney wrote:--

"Catch me, if you can, in any one illiberal sentiment, or in any opinion which I have need to recant; and that, after twenty years'

scribbling upon all subjects."

It was no mean boast, and it was absolutely justified by the record. From first to last he was the convinced, eager, and devoted friend of Freedom, and that without distinction of place or race or colour. He would make no terms with a man who temporized about the Slave-Trade.--

"No man should ever hold parley with it, but speak of it with abhorrence, as the greatest of all human abominations."

The toleration of Slavery was the one and grave exception to his unstinted admiration of the United States, which afforded, in his opinion, "the most magnificent picture of human happiness" which the world had ever seen. And this because in America, more than in any other country, each citizen was free to live his own life, manage his own affairs, and work out his own destiny, under the protection of just and equal laws. As regards political inst.i.tutions in England, he seems to have been converted rather gradually to the belief that Reform was necessary. In 1819 he wrote to his friend Jeffrey:--

"The case that the people have is too strong to be resisted; an answer may be made to it, which will satisfy enlightened people perhaps, but none that the ma.s.s will be satisfied with. I am doubtful whether it is not your duty and my duty to become moderate Reformers, to keep off worse."

In 1820 he wrote:--"I think all wise men should begin to turn their faces Reform-wards." In 1821 he writes about the state of parties in the House of Commons:--

"Of all ingenious instruments of despotism, I most commend a popular a.s.sembly where the majority are paid and hired, and a few bold and able men, by their brave speeches, make the people believe they are free."

And then again, with regard to religious liberty, what can be finer than his protest against the spirit of persecution?--

"I admit there is a vast luxury in selecting a particular set of Christians and in worrying them as a boy worries a puppy dog; it is an amus.e.m.e.nt in which all the young English are brought up from their earliest days. I like the idea of saying to men who use a different ha.s.sock from me, that till they change their ha.s.sock, they shall never be Colonels, Aldermen, or Parliament-men. While I am gratifying my personal insolence respecting religious forms, I fondle myself into an idea that I am religious, and that I am doing my duty in the most exemplary (as I certainly am in the most easy) way."

It may perhaps be dangerous to persecute the Roman Catholics of Ireland.

They are many, they are spirited--they may turn round and hurt us. It might be wiser to try our hands on some small body like the Evangelicals of Clapham or the followers of William Wilberforce (at whom in pa.s.sing he aims a Shandeau sneer).--

"We will gratify the love of insolence and power; we will enjoy the old orthodox sport of witnessing the impotent anger of men compelled to submit to civil degradation, or to sacrifice their notions of truth to ours. And all this we may do without the slightest risk, because their numbers are (as yet) not very considerable. Cruelty and injustice must, of course, exist: but why connect them with danger?

Why torture a bull-dog, when you can get a frog or a rabbit? I am sure my proposal will meet with the most universal approbation. Do not be apprehensive of any opposition from Ministers. If it is a case of hatred, we are sure that one man[155] will defend it by the Gospel: if it abridges human freedom, we know that another[156] will find precedents for it in the Revolution."

As years went on, he was sometimes displeased by the doings of his Liberal friends, but he was never "stricken by the palsy of candour"; he never forsook the good cause for which he had fought so steadily, never made terms with political deserters. After the Conservative triumph of 1841 he wrote:--"The country is in a state of political transition, and the shabby are preparing their consciences and opinions for a tack."

But, though he was so keen and so consistent a champion of civil and religious freedom, he was a sworn foe to anarchy and licence. Like most people who had seen the later stages of the French Revolution, he had a holy horror of mob-law and mob-justice. "If I am to be a slave," he said, "I would rather be the slave of a king than of a rabble"; but he vehemently objected to being the slave of either. He likened Democracy and Despotism to the "two tubes of a double-barrelled pistol," which menaced the life of the State. "The democrats are as much to be kept at bay with the left hand as the Tories are with the right." "A thousand years," he wrote in 1838, "have scarce sufficed to make our blessed England what it is: an hour may lay it in the dust."

After the riots at Bristol in 1831, consequent on the rejection of the Reform Bill, he strenuously demanded stern punishment for the rioters. He wrote to the Prime Minister:--

"Pray do not be good-natured about Bristol. I must have ten people hanged, and twenty transported, and thirty imprisoned; it is absolutely necessary to give the mult.i.tude a severe blow, for their conduct at Bristol has been most atrocious. You will save lives by it in the end. There is no plea of want, as there was in the agricultural riots."

_You will save lives by it in the end._ There spoke the truly humanitarian spirit which does not shrink from drawing the sword at the bidding of real necessity, but asks itself once and again whether any proposed effusion of blood is really demanded by the exigencies of the moral law.