Sydney Smith Part 19

"I accept your obliging invitation conditionally. If I am invited by any man of greater genius than yourself, or one by whose works I have been more completely interested, I will repudiate you, and dine with the more splendid phenomenon of the two."

His crowning glory in the matter of literary criticism is that, as Ruskin told us, he was the first man in the literary circles of London to a.s.sert the value of _Modern Painters_. "He said it was a work of transcendent talent, presented the most original views in the most elegant and powerful language, and would work a complete revolution in the world of taste."[169]

With the physical sciences Sydney Smith seems to have had no real acquaintance, unless we include among them the art of the apothecary, which all through life he studied diligently and practised courageously. But he recommended Botany, with some confidence, as "certain to delight little girls"; and his friendship with the amiable and instructive Mrs.

Marcet[170] gave him a smattering of scientific terms. In a discussion on the _Inferno_ he invented a new torment especially for that excellent lady's benefit.--

"You should be doomed to listen, for a thousand years, to conversations between Caroline and Emily, where Caroline should always give wrong explanations in chemistry, and Emily in the end be unable to distinguish an acid from an alkali."

When we turn, from these smaller matters of taste and accomplishment, to the general view of life, Sydney Smith would seem, at first sight, to have been a Utilitarian: and yet he declared himself in vigorous terms an opponent of the Utilitarian School.--

"That school treat mankind as if they were mere machines; the feelings or affections never enter into their calculations. If everything is to be sacrificed to utility, why do you bury your grandmother? why don't you cut her into small pieces at once, and make portable soup of her?"

In a similar vein, he said of his friend George Grote that he would have been an important politician if the world had been a chess-board. Any system, social, political, or philosophical, which did not directly concern itself with the wants and feelings and impulses of human flesh and blood, appealed to him in vain.

"How foolish," he wrote, "and how profligate, to show that the principle of general utility has no foundation; that it is often opposed to the interests of the individual! If this be true, there is an end of all reasoning and all morals: and if any man asks, Why am I to do what is generally useful? he should not be reasoned with, but called rogue, rascal, etc., and the mob should be excited to break his windows."

He liked what he called "useful truth." He could make no terms with thinkers who were "more fond of disputing on mind and matter than on anything which can have a reference to the real world, inhabited by real men, women, and children." Indeed, all his thinking was governed by his eager and generous humanitarianism. He thought all speculation, which did not bear directly on the welfare and happiness of human beings, a waste of ingenuity; and yet, at the same time, he taught that all practical systems, which left out of account the emotional and sentimental side of man, were incomplete and ineffectual. This higher side of his nature showed itself in his lively affections, his intense love of home and wife and children, his lifelong tenacity of friendship, and his overflowing sympathy for the poor, the abject, and the suffering.

"The haunts of Happiness," he wrote, "are varied, and rather unaccountable; but I have more often seen her among little children, and by home firesides, and in country houses, than anywhere else,--at least, I think so."

When his mother died, he wrote--"Everyone must go to his grave with his heart scarred like a soldier's body," and, when he lost his infant boy, he said--"Children are horribly insecure; the life of a parent is the life of a gambler."

His more material side was well exhibited by the catalogue of "Modern Changes" which he compiled in old age, heading it with the characteristic couplet:--

"The good of ancient times let others state, I think it lucky I was born so late."[171]

It concludes with the words, "Even in the best society one third of the gentlemen at least were always drunk."

This reminds us that, in the matter of temperance, Sydney Smith was far in advance of his time. That he was no

"budge doctor of the Stoic fur, Praising the lean and sallow Abstinence,"

is plain enough from his correspondence. "The wretchedness of human life,"

he wrote in 1817, "is only to be encountered upon the basis of meat and wine"; but he had a curiously keen sense of the evils induced by "the sweet poyson."[172] As early as 1814 he urged Lord Holland to "leave off wine entirely," for, though never guilty of excess, Holland showed a "respectable and dangerous plenitude." After a visit to London in the same year, Sydney wrote:--

"I liked London better than ever I liked it before, and simply, I believe, from water-drinking. Without this, London is stupefaction and inflammation. It is not the love of wine, but thoughtlessness and unconscious imitation: other men poke out their hands for the revolving wine, and one does the same, without thinking of it. All people above the condition of labourers are ruined by excess of stimulus and nourishment, clergy included. I never yet saw any gentleman who ate and drank as little as was reasonable."

In 1828 he wrote to Lady Holland (of Holland House):--

"I not only was never better, but never half so well: indeed I find I have been very ill all my life, without knowing it. Let me state some of the goods arising from abstaining from all fermented liquors.

First, sweet sleep; having never known what sweet sleep was, I sleep like a baby or a plough-boy. If I wake, no needless terrors, no black visions of life, but pleasing hopes and pleasing recollections: Holland House, past and to come! If I dream, it is not of lions and tigers, but of Easter dues and t.i.thes. Secondly, I can take longer walks, and make greater exertions, without fatigue. My understanding is improved, and I comprehend Political Economy. Only one evil ensues from it: I am in such extravagant spirits that I must look out for some one who will bore and depress me."

In 1834 he wrote:--

"I am better in health, avoiding all fermented liquors, and drinking nothing but London water, with a million insects in every drop. He who drinks a tumbler of London water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women, and children on the face of the globe."

In spite of this disquieting a.n.a.lysis he persevered, and wrote two years later:--

"I have had no gout, nor any symptom of it: by eating little, and drinking only water, I keep body and mind in a serene state, and spare the great toe. Looking back at my past life, I find that all my miseries of body and mind have proceeded from indigestion. Young people in early life should be thoroughly taught the moral, intellectual, and physical evils of indigestion."

Saba, Lady Holland, who had a discreet but provoking trick of omitting the proper name wherever we specially thirst to know it, thus reports her father's conversation:--

"Now, I mean not to drink one drop of wine to-day, and I shall be mad with spirits. I always am when I drink no wine. It is curious the effect a thimbleful of wine has upon me; I feel as flat as----'s jokes; it destroys my understanding: I forget the number of the Muses, and think them x.x.xix, of course; and only get myself right again by repeating the lines, and finding 'Descend, ye Thirty-Nine!' two feet too long."

All this profound interest in the matter of food and drink was closely connected in Sydney Smith with a clear sense of the influence exercised by the body over the soul.--

"I am convinced digestion is the great secret of life; and that character, talents, virtues, and qualities are powerfully affected by beef, mutton, pie-crust, and rich soups. I have often thought I could feed or starve men into many virtues and vices, and affect them more powerfully with my instruments of cookery than Timotheus could do formerly with his lyre."[173]

According to his own accounts of himself he seems, like most people who are boisterously cheerful, to have had occasional tendencies to melancholy. "An extreme depression of spirits," he writes in 1826, "is an evil of which I have a full comprehension." But, on the other hand, he writes:--

"I thank G.o.d, who has made me poor, that He has made me merry. I think it a better gift than much wheat and bean-land, with a doleful heart."

"My const.i.tutional gaiety comes to my aid in all the difficulties of life; and the recollection that, having embraced the character of an honest man and a friend to rational liberty, I have no business to repine at that mediocrity of fortune which I _knew_ to be its consequence."

The truth would seem to be that, finding, in his temperament and circ.u.mstances, some predisposing causes of melancholy, he refused to sit down under the curse and let it poison his life, but took vigorous measures with himself and his surroundings; cultivated cheerfulness as a duty, and repelled gloom as a disease. He "tried always to live in the Present and the Future, and to look upon the Past as so much dirty linen." After reading Burke, and praising his "beautiful and fruitful imagination," he says--"With the politics of so remote a period I do not concern myself." He had a robust confidence in the cheering virtues of air and exercise, early hours and cold water, light and warmth, temperance in tea and coffee as well as wine--"Apothegms of old women," as he truly said, but tested by universal experience and found efficacious. He recommended constant occupation, combined with variety of interests, and taught that nothing made one feel so happy as the act of doing good. He thus describes his own experience, when, as Canon of St. Paul's, he had presented a valuable living to the friendless son of the deceased inc.u.mbent. He announced the presentation to the stricken family.--

"They all burst into tears. It flung me also into a great agitation, and I wept and groaned for a long time. Then I rose, and said I thought it was very likely to end in their keeping a buggy, at which we all laughed as violently. The poor old lady, who was sleeping in a garret because she could not bear to enter into the room lately inhabited by her husband, sent for me and kissed me, sobbing with a thousand emotions. The charitable physician wept too.... I never pa.s.sed so remarkable a morning, nor was more deeply impressed with the sufferings of human life, and never felt more thoroughly the happiness of doing good."

Of all his various remedies against melancholy, the one on which he most constantly and most earnestly insisted, was the wisdom of "taking short views,"--

"Dispel," he said, "that prophetic gloom which dives into futurity, to extract sorrow from days and years to come, and which considers its own unhappy visions as the decrees of Providence. We know nothing of to-morrow: our business is to be good and happy to-day."

_Our business is to be good and happy_. This dogma inevitably suggests the question--What was Sydney Smith's religion? First and foremost, he was a staunch and consistent Theist.--

"I hate the insolence, persecution, and intolerance, which so often pa.s.s under the name of religion, and have fought against them; but I have an unaffected horror of irreligion and impiety, and every principle of suspicion and fear would be excited in me by a man who professed himself an infidel."[174]

In a lighter vein, he talked with dread of travelling in a stage-coach with "an Atheist who told me what he had said in his heart."[175] And in 1808 he wrote to his friend Jeffrey with reference to the tone of the _Edinburgh Review_:--

"I must beg the favour of you to be explicit on one point. Do you mean to take care that the _Review_ shall not profess or encourage infidel principles? Unless this is the case, I must absolutely give up all thoughts of connecting myself with it."

The grounds on which his theism rested seem, as Sir Leslie Stephen points out, to have been exactly those which satisfied Paley. Lord Murray, who, though he was a judge, does not seem to have been exacting about the quality of argument, admiringly relates this anecdote of his friend:--

"A foreigner, on one occasion, indulging in sceptical doubts of the existence of an overruling Providence in his presence, Sydney, who had observed him evidently well satisfied with his repast, said, 'You must admit there is great genius and thought in that dish.' 'Admirable!' he replied; 'nothing can be better,' 'May I then ask, are you prepared to deny the existence of the cook?"

Of course this is nothing but Paley's ill.u.s.tration of the Watch, reproduced in a less impressive form.

But Sydney Smith was not content with a system of thought which provided him with a working hypothesis for the construction of the physical universe and the conduct of this present life. He looked above and beyond; and reinforced his own faith in immortality by an appeal to the general sense of mankind.--

"Who ever thinks of turning into ridicule our great and ardent hope of a world to come? Whenever the man of humour meddles with these things, he is astonished to find that in all the great feelings of their nature the ma.s.s of mankind always think and act aright; that they are ready enough to laugh, but that they are quite as ready to drive away, with indignation and contempt, the light fool who comes with the feather of wit to crumble the bulwarks of truth, and to beat down the Temples of G.o.d. We count over the pious spirits of the world, the beautiful writers, the great statesmen, all who have invented subtlely, who have thought deeply, who have executed wisely:--all these are proofs that we are destined for a second life; and it is not possible to believe that this redundant vigour, this lavish and excessive power, was given for the mere gathering of meat and drink.

If the only object is present existence, such faculties are cruel, are misplaced, are useless. They all show us that there is something great awaiting us,--that the soul is now young and infantine, springing up into a more perfect life when the body falls into dust."

"Man is imprisoned here only for a season, to take a better or a worse hereafter, as he deserves it. This old truth is the fountain of all goodness, and justice, and kindness among men: may we all feel it intimately, obey it perpetually, and profit by it eternally!"

He was not a theist only, but a Christian. Here again, as in the argument from Design, he followed Paley, laid great stress on Evidences, and "selected his train of reasoning with some care from the best writers." He said;--"The truth of Christianity depends upon its leading facts, and of these we have such evidence as ought to satisfy us, till it appears that mankind have ever been deceived by proofs as numerous and as strong."

Having convinced himself that the Christian religion was true, he was loyal in word and act to what he had accepted. He remonstrated vigorously against an "anti-Christian article" which crept into the _Edinburgh Review_; and felt, as keenly as the strongest sacerdotalist or the most fervent Evangelical, the bounden duty of defending the body of truth to which his Ordination had pledged him.

It can scarcely be contested that his conceptions of that truth were, in some grave respects, defective. The absolute dominion and overruling providence of G.o.d are always present to his mind, and he urges as the ground of all virtuous effort the Character and Example of Christ. But the notion of Atonement finds no place in his thought. The virtuous will attain to eternal blessedness, and the vicious will perish in their vices. The free pardon of confessed sin--access to happiness through a Divine Mediation--in a word, the Doctrine of the Cross--seems, as far as his recorded utterances go, to have been quite alien from his system of religion. The appeal to personal experience of sinfulness, forgiveness, and acceptance, he would have dismissed as mere enthusiasm--and he declared in his sermon on the Character and Genius of the Christian Religion, that "_the Gospel has no enthusiasm_." That it once was possible for a clergyman to utter these five words as containing an axiomatic truth, marks, perhaps as plainly as it is possible for language to mark it, the change effected in the religion of the Church of England by the successive action of the Evangelical Revival and of the Oxford Movement.

Sydney Smith's firm belief, from first to last, was that Religion was intended to make men good and happy in daily life. This was "the calm tenor of its language," and the "practical view" of its rule. And, as far as it goes, no one can quarrel with the doctrine so laid down. After staying with some Puritanical friends, he wrote:--