Sydney Smith Part 1

Sydney Smith.

by George W. E. Russell.

PREFACE

In writing this Study of Sydney Smith, I have been working in a harvest-field where a succession of diligent gleaners had preceded me.

As soon as Sydney Smith died, his widow began to acc.u.mulate material for her husband's biography. She did not live to see the work accomplished, but she enjoined in her will that some record of his life should be written.

The duty was undertaken by his daughter, Saba Lady Holland, who in 1855 published _A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith_. To this memoir was subjoined a volume of extracts from his letters, compiled by his friend and admirer Mrs. Austin.

For nearly thirty years Lady Holland's Memoir and Mrs, Austin's Selection of Letters together const.i.tuted the sole Biography of Sydney Smith, and they still remain of prime authority; but they are lamentably inaccurate in dates.

Lord Houghton's slight but vivid monograph was published in 1873. In 1884 Mr. Stuart Reid produced _A Sketch of the Life and Times of Sydney Smith_, in which he supplemented the earlier narrative with some traditions derived from friends then living, and "painted the figure of Sydney Smith against the background of his times." In 1898 the late Sir Leslie Stephen contributed an article on Sydney Smith to the _Dictionary of National Biography_; but added little to what was already known.

On these various writings I have perforce relied, for their respective authors seemed to have exhausted all available resources. Lord Carlisle has some of Sydney Smith's letters at Castle Howard, and Lord Ilchester has some at Holland House; but both a.s.sure me that everything worth publishing has already been published.

I have, however, been more fortunate in my application to my cousin, Mr.

Rollo Russell, and to four of Sydney Smith's descendants--Mr. Sydney Holland, Mr. Holland-Hibbert of Munden, Miss Caroline Holland, and Mrs.

Cropper of Ellergreen. To all these my thanks are due for interesting information, and access to valuable records. In common with all who use the Reading-Room of the British Museum, I am greatly indebted to the skill and courtesy of Mr. G.F. Barwick.

So much for the biographical part of my work. In the critical part I have relied less on authority, and more on my own devotion to Sydney Smith's writings. That devotion dates from my schooldays at Harrow, and is due to the kindness of my father. He had known "dear old Sydney" well, and gave me the Collected Works, exhorting me to study them as models of forcible and pointed English. From that day to this, I have had no more favourite reading.

G.W.E.R.

November 12th, 1904.

SYDNEY SMITH

CHAPTER I

EDUCATION--SALISBURY PLAIN--EDINBURGH

A worthy tradesman, who had acc.u.mulated a large fortune, married a lady of gentle birth and manners. In later years one of his daughters said to a friend of the family, "I dare say you notice a great difference between papa's behaviour and mamma's. It is easily accounted for. Papa, immensely to his credit, raised himself to his present position from the shop; but mamma was extremely well born. She was a Miss Smith--one of _the old Smiths, of Ess.e.x_."

It might appear that Sydney Smith was a growth of the same majestic but mysterious tree, for he was born at Woodford; but further research traces his ancestry to Devonshire. "We are all one family," he used to say, "all the Smiths who dwell on the face of the earth. You may try to disguise it in any way you like--Smyth, or Smythe, or Smijth[1]--but you always get back to Smith after all--the most numerous and most respectable family in England." When a compiler of pedigrees asked permission to insert Sydney's arms in a County History, he replied, "I regret, sir, not to be able to contribute to so valuable a work; but the Smiths never had any arms. They invariably sealed their letters with their thumbs." In later life he adopted the excellent and characteristic motto--_Faber meae fortunae_; and, to some impertinent questions about his grandfather, he replied with becoming gravity--"He disappeared about the time of the a.s.sizes, and we asked no questions."

As a matter of fact, this maligned progenitor came to London from Devonshire, established a business in Eastcheap, and left it to his two sons, Robert and James. Robert Smith[2] made over his share to his brother and went forth to see the world. This object he pursued, amid great vicissitudes of fortune and environment, till in old age he settled down at Bishop's Lydeard, in Somerset. He married Maria Olier, a pretty girl of French descent, and by her had five children: Robert Percy--better known as "Bobus"--born in 1770; Sydney in 1771; Cecil in 1772; Courtenay in 1773; and Maria in 1774.

Sydney Smith was born on the 3rd of June; and was baptized on the 1st of July in the parish church of Woodford. His infancy was pa.s.sed at South Stoneham, near Southampton. At the age of six he was sent to a private school at Southampton, and on the 19th of July 1782 was elected a Scholar of Winchester College. He stayed at Winchester for six years, and worked his way to the top place in the school, being "Prefect of Hall" when he left in 1788. Beyond these facts, Winchester seems to retain no impressions of her brilliant son, in this respect contrasting strangely with other Public Schools. Westminster knows all about Cowper--and a sorry tale it is.

Canning left an ineffaceable mark on Eton. Harrow abounds in traditions, oral and written, of Sheridan and Byron, Peel and Palmerston. But Winchester is silent about Sydney Smith.

Sydney, however, was not silent about Winchester. In one of the liveliest pa.s.sages of his controversial writings, he said:--

"I was at school and college with the Archbishop of Canterbury:[3]

fifty-three years ago he knocked me down with the chess-board for checkmating him--and now he is attempting to take away my patronage. I believe these are the only two acts of violence he ever committed in his life."

Now Howley was a prefect when Sydney was a junior, and this game of chess must have been (as a living Wykehamist has pointed out to me) "a command performance." The big boy liked chess, so the little boy had to play it: the big boy disliked being checkmated, so the little boy was knocked down.

This and similar experiences probably coloured Sydney's mind when he wrote in 1810:--

"At a Public School (for such is the system established by immemorial custom) every boy is alternately tyrant and slave. The power which the elder part of these communities exercises over the younger is exceedingly great; very difficult to be controlled; and accompanied, not unfrequently, with cruelty and caprice. It is the common law of these places, that the younger should be implicitly obedient to the elder boys; and this obedience resembles more the submission of a slave to his master, or of a sailor to his captain, than the common and natural deference which would always be shown by one boy to another a few years older than himself. Now, this system we cannot help considering as an evil, because it inflicts upon boys, for two or three years of their lives, many painful hardships, and much unpleasant servitude. These sufferings might perhaps be of some use in military schools; but to give to a boy the habit of enduring privations to which he will never again be called upon to submit--to inure him to pains which he will never again feel--and to subject him to the privation of comforts, with which he will always in future abound--is surely not a very useful and valuable severity in education. It is not the life in miniature which he is to lead hereafter, nor does it bear any relation to it; he will never again be subjected to so much insolence and caprice; nor ever, in all human probability, called upon to make so many sacrifices. The servile obedience which it teaches might be useful to a menial domestic; or the habit of enterprise which it encourages prove of importance to a military partisan; but we cannot see what bearing it has upon the calm, regular, civil life, which the sons of gentlemen, destined to opulent idleness, or to any of the more learned professions, are destined to lead. Such a system makes many boys very miserable; and produces those bad effects upon the temper and disposition which boyish suffering always does produce. But what good it does, we are much at a loss to conceive. Reasonable obedience is extremely useful in forming the disposition. Submission to tyranny lays the foundation of hatred, suspicion, cunning, and a variety of odious pa.s.sions....

"The wretchedness of school tyranny is trifling enough to a man who only contemplates it, in ease of body and tranquillity of mind, through the medium of twenty intervening years; but it is quite as real, and quite as acute, while it lasts, as any of the sufferings of mature life: and the utility of these sufferings, or the price paid in compensation for them, should be clearly made out to a conscientious parent before he consents to expose his children to them."

Lady Holland tells us that in old age her father "used to shudder at the recollections of Winchester," and represented the system prevailing there in his youth as composed of "abuse, neglect, and vice." And, speaking of the experience of lower boys at Public Schools in general, he described it as "an intense system of tyranny, of which the English are very fond, and think it fits a boy for the world; but the world, bad as it is, has nothing half so bad."

"A man gets well pummelled at a Public School; is subject to every misery and every indignity which seventeen years of age can inflict upon nine and ten; has his eye nearly knocked out, and his clothes stolen and cut to pieces; and twenty years afterwards, when he is a chrysalis, and has forgotten the miseries of his grub state, is determined to act a manly part in life, and says, 'I pa.s.sed through all that myself, and I am determined my son shall pa.s.s through it as I have done'; and away goes his bleating progeny to the tyranny and servitude of the Long Chamber or the Large Dormitory. It would surely be much more rational to say, 'Because I have pa.s.sed through it, I am determined my son shall not pa.s.s through it. Because I was kicked for nothing, and cuffed for nothing, and f.a.gged for everything, I will spare all these miseries to my child.'"

And, while he thus condemned the discipline under which he had been reared, he had no better opinion of the instruction. Not that he was an opponent of cla.s.sical education: on the contrary, he had a genuine and reasoned admiration for "the two ancient languages." He held that, compared to them, "merely as vehicles of thought and pa.s.sion, all modern languages are dull, ill-contrived, and barbarous." He thought that even the most accomplished of modern writers might still be glad to "borrow descriptive power from Tacitus; dignified perspicuity from Livy; simplicity from Caesar; and from Homer some portion of that light and heat which, dispersed into ten thousand channels, has filled the world with bright images and ill.u.s.trious thoughts. Let the cultivator of modern literature addict himself to the purest models of taste which France, Italy, and England could supply--he might still learn from Virgil to be majestic, and from Tibullus to be tender; he might not yet look upon the face of nature as Theocritus saw it; nor might he reach those springs of pathos with which Euripides softened the hearts of his audience."

This sound appreciation of what was best in cla.s.sical literature was accompanied in Sydney Smith by the most outspoken contempt for the way in which Greek and Latin are taught in Public Schools. He thought that schoolmasters encouraged their pupils to "love the instrument better than the end--not the luxury which the difficulty encloses, but the difficulty--not the filbert, but the sh.e.l.l--not what may be read in Greek, but Greek itself?"

"We think that, in order to secure an attention to Homer and Virgil, we must catch up every man, whether he is to be a clergyman or a duke, begin with him at six years of age, and never quit him till he is twenty; making him conjugate and decline for life and death; and so teaching him to estimate his progress in real wisdom as he can scan the verses of the Greek Tragedians."

He desired that boys should obtain a quick and easy mastery over the authors whom they had to read, and on this account he urged that they should be taught by the use of literal and interlinear translations; but "a literal translation, or any translation, of a school-book is a contraband article in English schools, which a schoolmaster would instantly seize, as a custom-house officer would seize a barrel of gin."

Grammar, gerund-grinding, the tyranny of the Lexicon and the Dictionary, had got the schoolboys of England in their grasp, and the boy "was suffocated with the nonsense of grammarians, overwhelmed with every species of difficulty disproportionate to his age, and driven by despair to pegtop or marbles"; while the British Parent stood and spoke thus with himself:--

"Have I read through Lilly? Have I learnt by heart that most atrocious monument of absurdity, the Westminster Grammar? Have I been whipt for the substantives? whipt for the verbs? and whipt for and with the interjections? Have I picked the sense slowly, and word by word, out of Hederich? and shall my son be exempt from all this misery?... Ay, ay, it's all mighty well; but I went through this myself, and I am determined my children shall do the same."

Another grotesque abuse with regard to which Sydney Smith was a reformer fifty years before his time was compulsory versification.--

"There are few boys who remain to the age of eighteen or nineteen at a Public School without making above ten thousand Latin verses--a greater number than is contained in the _Aeneid_; and, after he has made this quant.i.ty of verses in a dead language, unless the poet should happen to be a very weak man indeed, he never makes another as long as he lives."[4]

"The English clergy, in whose hands education entirely rests, bring up the first young men of the country as if they were all to keep grammar-schools in little country-towns; and a n.o.bleman, upon whose knowledge and liberality the honour and welfare of his country may depend, is diligently worried, for half his life, with the small pedantry of longs and shorts."

The same process is applied at the other end of the social scale. The baker's son, young Crumpet, is sent to a grammar-school, "takes to his books, spends the best years of his life, as all eminent Englishmen do, in making Latin verses, learns that the _Crum_ in Crumpet is long and the _pet_ short, goes to the University, gets a prize for an essay on the Dispersion of the Jews, takes Orders, becomes a Bishop's chaplain, has a young n.o.bleman for his pupil, publishes a useless cla.s.sic and a Serious Call to the Unconverted, and then goes through the Elysian transitions of Prebendary, Dean, Prelate, and the long train of purple, profit, and power."

In this vivacious pa.s.sage, Sydney Smith caricatures his own career; which, though it neither began in a baker's shop nor ended in an episcopal palace, followed pretty closely the line of development here indicated. At Winchester he "took to his books" with such goodwill that, in spite of all hindrances, he became an excellent scholar, and laid the strong foundations for a wide and generous culture. His family indeed propagated some pleasing traditions about his schooldays--one of a benevolent stranger who found him reading Virgil when other boys were playing cricket, patted his head, and foretold his future greatness; another of a round-robin from his schoolfellows, declining to compete against him for prizes, "because he always gained them." But this is not history.

From Winchester Sydney Smith pa.s.sed in natural course to the other of "the two colleges of St. Mary Winton"; and, in the interval between Winchester and Oxford, his father sent him for six months to Normandy, with a view to improving his French. Revolution was in the air, and it was thought a salutary precaution that he should join one of the Jacobin clubs in the town where he boarded, and he was duly entered as "Le Citoyen Smit, Membre Affilie au Club des Jacobins de Mont Villiers."

But he was soon recalled to more tranquil scenes. He was elected Scholar of New College, Oxford, on the 5th of January 1789, and at the end of his second year he exchanged his Scholarship for a Fellowship. From that time on he never cost his father a farthing, and he paid a considerable debt for his younger brother Courtenay, though, as he justly remarks, "a hundred pounds a year was very difficult to spread over the wants of a College life." Ten years later he wrote--"I got in debt by buying books. I never borrowed a farthing of anybody, and never received much; and have lived in poverty and economy all my life."

His career at Oxford is buried in even deeper obscurity than his schooltime at Winchester. This is no doubt to be explained, on the intellectual side, by the fact that members of New College were at that time exempt from public examination; and, on the social side, by the straitened circ.u.mstances which prevented him from showing hospitality, and the pride which made him unwilling to accept what he could not return. We are left to gather his feelings about Oxford and the system pursued there, from casual references in his critical writings; and these are uncomplimentary enough.

When he wishes to stigmatize a proposition as enormously and preposterously absurd, he says that there is "no authority on earth (always excepting the Dean of Christ Church), which could make it credible to me." When stirred to the liveliest indignation by the iniquities which a Tory Government is practising in Ireland, he exclaims--"A Senior Proctor of the University of Oxford, the Head of a House, or the examining chaplain to a Bishop, may believe these things can last; but every man of the world, whose understanding has been exercised in the business of life, must see (and see with a breaking heart) that they will soon come to a fearful termination."

He praised a comparison of the Universities to "enormous hulks confined with mooring-chains, everything flowing and progressing around them," while they themselves stood still.

When pleading for a wider and more reasonable course of studies at Oxford, he says:--

"A genuine Oxford tutor would shudder to hear his young men disputing upon moral and political truth, forming and putting down theories, and indulging in all the boldness of youthful discussion. He would augur nothing from it but impiety to G.o.d and treason to Kings."

Protesting against the undue predominance of cla.s.sical studies in the Universities, as at the Public Schools, he says:--

"Cla.s.sical literature is the great object at Oxford. Many minds so employed have produced many works, and much fame in that department: but if all liberal arts and sciences useful to human life had been taught there; if some had dedicated themselves to chemistry, some to mathematics, some to experimental philosophy; and if every attainment had been honoured in the mixt ratio of its difficulty and utility; the system of such an University would have been much more valuable, but the splendour of its name something less."