Sydney Smith Part 3

Sydney Smith's eldest brother Robert ("Bobus"[24]) had married Caroline Vernon, Lord Holland's aunt. Sydney's politics were the politics of Holland House. Lord Holland was always recruiting for the Liberal army, and an Edinburgh Reviewer was a recruit worth capturing. So the hospitable doors were soon thrown open to the young clergyman from Doughty Street, who suddenly found himself a member of the most brilliant circle ever gathered under an English roof. In old age he used to declare, to the amus.e.m.e.nt of his friends, that as a young man he had been shy, but had wrestled with the temptation and overcome it. As regards the master[25] of Holland House, it was not easy to be shy in the presence of "that frank politeness which at once relieved all the embarra.s.sment of the youngest and most timid writer or artist, who found himself for the first time among Amba.s.sadors and Earls."[26] And even the imperious mistress[27] of the house found her match in Sydney Smith, who only made fun of her foibles, and repaid her insolence with raillery. Referring to this period, when he had long outlived it, he said:--

"I well remember, when Mrs. Sydney and I were young, in London, with no other equipage than my umbrella, when we went out to dinner in a hackney coach (a vehicle, by the bye, now become almost matter of history), when the rattling step was let down, and the proud, powdered red-plushes grinned, and her gown was fringed with straw, how the iron entered into my soul."

One of the most useful friends whom the Smiths discovered in London was Mr.

Thomas Bernard,[28] afterwards a baronet of good estate in Buckinghamshire, and a zealous worker in all kinds of social and educational reform. Mr.

Bernard was Treasurer of the Royal Inst.i.tution in Albemarle Street, which had been founded in 1799; and, with the laudable desire of putting a few pounds into a friend's pocket, he suggested that Sydney Smith should be invited to lecture before the Inst.i.tution. The invitation was cordially given and gratefully accepted. The lecturer chose "Moral Philosophy" for his subject, and the Introductory Lecture, in which he defined his terms, was delivered on the 10th of November 1804. The second and third lectures dealt with the History of Moral Philosophy; the fourth, with the Powers of External Perception; the fifth, with Conception; the sixth, with Memory; the seventh, with Imagination; the eighth, with Reason and Judgment; and the ninth, with the Conduct of the Understanding.

These lectures were treated by the author as forming one course, their general subject being "The Understanding." In February 1805 he wrote to his friend Jeffrey:--"I got through my first course I think creditably; whether any better than creditably others know better than myself. I have still ten to read." This second course followed immediately on the first, and, under the general head of "Taste," discussed topics so various as "Wit and Humour," "The Beautiful," "The Sublime," "The Faculties of Animals as compared with those of Man," and "The Faculties of Beasts." By this time the lectures had become fashionable. One eye-witness writes:--

"All Albemarle Street, and a part of Grafton Street, was rendered impa.s.sable by the concourse of carriages a.s.sembled there during the time of their delivery. There was not sufficient room for the persons a.s.sembling; the lobbies were filled, and the doors into them from the lecture-room were left open."

Horner reckoned "from six to eight hundred hearers and not a seat to be procured, even if you go there an hour before the time." Sir Robert Peel, who had just left Harrow, was one of the audience, and remembered the lectures forty years after their delivery. As late as 1843, Dr. Whewell[29]

inquired if they were still accessible. Sydney Smith, according to Lord Houghton, described his performances as "the most successful swindle of the season"; and, writing to Jeffrey in April 1805, he says:--

"My lectures are just now at such an absurd pitch of celebrity, that I must lose a good deal of reputation before the public settles into a just equilibrium respecting them. I am most heartily ashamed of my own fame, because I am conscious I do not deserve it, and that the moment men of sense are provoked by the clamour to look into my claims, it will be at an end."

Notwithstanding this premonition, the lecturer adventured on a third course, which was delivered at the same place in the spring of 1806.

"Galleries were erected, which had never before been required, and the success was complete." The general subject of this third course was "The Active Powers of the Mind," and it dealt with "The Evil Affections," "The Benevolent Affections," "The Pa.s.sions," "The Desires," "Surprise, Novelty, and Variety," and "Habit."

As soon as the lectures were delivered, the lecturer threw the ma.n.u.scripts into the fire; and it is satisfactory to find that he did not take his performance very seriously, or set a very high value on his philosophical attainments. In 1843 he wrote, in reply to Dr. Whewell's inquiry:--

"My lectures are gone to the dogs, and are utterly forgotten. I knew nothing of Moral Philosophy, but I was thoroughly aware that I wanted 200 to furnish my house. The success, however, was prodigious; all Albemarle Street blocked up with carriages, and such an uproar as I never remember to have seen excited by any other literary imposture.

Every week I had a new theory about Conception and Perception, and supported it by a natural manner, a torrent of words, and an impudence scarcely credible in this prudent age. Still, in justice to myself, I must say there were some good things in them. But good and bad are all gone."

As a matter of fact, however, they were not "all gone." Mrs. Smith had rescued the ma.n.u.scripts, a good deal damaged, from the flames, and after her husband's death she published the three courses in one volume under the t.i.tle, _Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy_.

Was it worth while to publish them? The answer must depend on the object of publication. If the book was meant to be considered as a serious contribution to mental science, the ma.n.u.scripts might as well have remained where their author threw them. If, on the other hand, it was intended only to show the versatility, adroitness, and plausibility of a young man in need of money, nothing could have better ill.u.s.trated those aspects of Sydney Smith's character and career. He is thirty-three years old, married, with an increasing family, and no means of subsistence beyond periodical journalism and odd jobs of clerical duty. "Two or three random sermons," he says, "I have discharged, and thought I perceived that the greater part of the congregation thought me mad. The clerk was as pale as death in helping me off with my gown, for fear I should bite him." He wants money to furnish his house. A benevolent friend obtains him the opportunity of lecturing. It is not uncharitable to suppose that he chooses a subject in which accurate knowledge and close argument will be less requisite than fluency, fancy, bold statement, and extraordinarily felicitous ill.u.s.tration. The five years spent in Edinburgh can now be turned to profitable account. Dugald Stewards lectures can be exhumed, decorated, and reproduced. The whole book reeks of Scotland. The lecturer sets out by declaring that Moral Philosophy is taught in the Scotch Universities alone. England knows nothing about it. At Edinburgh Moral Philosophy means Mental Philosophy, and is concerned with "the faculties of the mind and the effects which our reasoning powers and our pa.s.sions produce upon the actions of our lives." It has nothing to do with ethics or duty. And the definition used in Edinburgh is also used in Albemarle Street. Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown[30] and Adam Smith, Hume and Reid and Oswald and Beattie and Ferguson, are names which meet us on every page. The lecturer has learnt from Scotsmen, and reproduces what the Scotsmen taught him. Mind and Matter are two great realities. When people are informed that all thought is explained by vibrations and "vibratiuncles" of the brain, and that what they consider their arms and legs are not arms and legs but ideas, then, says the lecturer, they will pardonably identify Philosophy with Lunacy. "Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one octavo volume; and nothing remained after his time but Mind; which experienced a similar fate at the hand of Mr. Hume in 1737.... But is there any one out of Bedlam who _doubts_ of the existence of matter? who doubts of his own personal ident.i.ty? or of his consciousness? or of the general credibility of memory?"

From this rough-and-ready delimitation of the area within which Moral Philosophy must work, if it is to escape the reproach of insanity, the lecturer goes on, as becomes a divine, to champion his study against the reproach of tending to Atheism. He groups all our senses, faculties, and impulses together, and says: "All these things Moral Philosophy observes, and, observing, adores the Being from whence they proceed."

Having thus defined his subject, the lecturer goes on, in his second and third lectures, to trace the history of Moral Philosophy, from Pythagoras to Mrs. Trimmer. Plato is praised for beauty of style, and blamed for mistiness of doctrine. Aristotle is contrasted, greatly to his disadvantage, with Bacon. "Volumes of Aristotelian philosophy have been written which, if piled one upon another, would have equalled the Tower of Babel in Height, and far exceeded it in Confusion." But to Bacon "we are indebted for an almost daily extension of our knowledge of the laws of nature in the outward world; and the same modest and cautious spirit of enquiry, extended to Moral Philosophy, will probably give us clear, intelligible ideas of our spiritual nature."

The remaining lectures of this course are those which suffered most severely from the flames, and are indeed in so fragmentary a condition as to render any close criticism of them impossible. But enough has been quoted to show that Sydney Smith, so far as he was in any sense concerned with philosophy, was a sworn foe to mysticism and ideality, and a worshipper of Baconian common-sense even in the sphere of mind and soul.

He was never tired of poking fun at his philosophical friends in Edinburgh.

When sending some Scotch grouse to Lady Holland, he said--"I take the liberty to send you two brace of grouse--curious, because killed by a Scotch metaphysician: in other and better language, they are mere ideas, shot by other ideas, out of a pure intellectual notion called a gun." In another letter to the same correspondent he says--"I hope you are reading Mr. Stewart's book, and are far gone in the Philosophy of Mind--a science, as he repeatedly tells us, still in its infancy. I propose, myself, to wait till it comes to years of discretion."

To his friend Jeffrey he wrote in 1804:--

"I exhort you to restrain the violent tendency of your nature for a.n.a.lysis, and to cultivate synthetical propensities. What is virtue?

What's the use of truth? What's the use of honour? What's a guinea but a d----d yellow circle? The whole effort of your mind is to destroy.

Because others build slightly and eagerly, you employ yourself in kicking down their houses, and contract a sort of aversion for the more honourable, useful, and difficult task of building well yourself."

He reports a saying of his little boy's, "which in Scotland would be heard as of high metaphysical promise. Emily was asking why one flower was blue, and another pink, and another yellow. 'Why, in short,' said Douglas, 'it is their _nature_; and, when we say that, what do we mean? It is only another word for _mystery_; it only means that we know nothing at all about the matter.' This observation from a child eight years old is not common."

The second and third courses of lectures would force us (even if we had not the lecturer's confession to guide us) irresistibly to the conclusion that he had said all he knew about Moral Philosophy, and rather more, in the first course. It is only by the exercise of a genial violence that his dissertations on Wit and Humour, Irish Bulls, Taste, Animals, and Habit, can be forced to take shelter under the dignified t.i.tle of Moral Philosophy. But, philosophical defects apart, they are excellent lectures.

They abound in miscellaneous knowledge and out-of-the-way reading, and they bristle with ill.u.s.trations which have pa.s.sed into the common anecdotage of mankind.

"In the late rebellion in Ireland, the rebels, who had conceived a high degree of indignation against some great banker, pa.s.sed a resolution that they would burn his notes, which accordingly they did, with great a.s.siduity; forgetting that, in burning his notes, they were destroying his debts, and that for every note which went into the flames, a correspondent value went into the banker's pocket."

In every war of the last century this story has been revived. It would be curious to see if it can be traced back further than Sydney Smith.

From the lecture on Habit, I cull this pleasing anecdote:--

"The famous Isaac Barrow, the mathematician and divine, had an habitual dislike of dogs, and it proceeded from the following cause:--He was a very early riser; and one morning, as he was walking in the garden of a friend's house, with whom he was staying, a fierce mastiff, that used to be chained all day, and let loose all night, for the security of the house, set upon him with the greatest fury. The doctor caught him by the throat, threw him, and lay upon him; and, whilst he kept him down, considered what he should do in that exigence. The account the doctor gave of it to his friends was, that he had once a mind to have killed the dog; but he altered his resolution upon recollecting that it would be unjust, since the dog only did his duty, and he himself was to blame for rambling out so early. At length he called out so loud, that he was heard by some in the house, who came out, and speedily separated the mastiff and the mathematician. However, it is added, that the adventure gave the doctor a strong habitual aversion for dogs; and I dare say, if the truth were known, fixed in the dog's mind a still stronger aversion to doctors."

This last sentence is in exactly the same vein of humour as the comment, in the review of Waterton's Travels,[31] on the snake that bit itself. "Mr.

Waterton, though much given to sentiment, made a Labairi snake bite itself, but no bad consequences ensued--nor would any bad consequences ensue, if a court-martial was to order a sinful soldier to give himself a thousand lashes. It is barely possible that the snake had some faint idea whom and what he was biting."

The house which was furnished with the products of this Moral Philosophy was No. 18 Orchard Street, Portman Square, and here the Smiths lived till they left London for a rural parish. Meanwhile, the excellent Bernard had secured some clerical employment for his friend. Through his influence the Rev. Sydney Smith was elected "alternate Evening Preacher at the Foundling Hospital," on the 27th of March 1805. He tried to open a Proprietary Chapel on his own account, but was foiled by the obstinacy of the Rector in whose parish it was situate.[32] He was appointed Morning Preacher at Berkeley Chapel, Mayfair, and combined his duties there with similar duties at Fitzroy Chapel, now St. Saviour's Church, Fitzroy Square.[33] These various appointments, coupled with his lectures at the Royal Inst.i.tution, brought him increasingly into public notice. His preaching was admired by some important people. His contributions to the _Edinburgh_, so entirely unlike anything else in periodical literature, were eagerly antic.i.p.ated and keenly canva.s.sed. It was reported that King George III. had read them, and had said, "He is a very clever fellow, but he will never be a bishop." His social gifts won him friends wherever he went; and Lord and Lady Holland, though themselves not addicted to the public observances of religion, were anxious to promote his professional advancement; but this was not easy.

"From the beginning of the century," he wrote, "to the death of Lord Liverpool, was an awful period for those who had the misfortune to entertain Liberal opinions, and were too honest to sell them for the ermine of the judge or the lawn of the prelate--a long and hopeless career in your profession, the chuckling grin of noodles, the sarcastic leer of the genuine political rogue--prebendaries, deans, and bishops made over your head--reverend renegadoes advanced to the highest dignities of the Church, for helping to rivet the fetters of Catholic and Protestant dissenters, and no more chance of a Whig administration than of a thaw in Zembla."

But this gloomy period of oppression and exclusion was broken by a transient gleam. Pitt died on the 23rd of January 1806, and Lord Grenville[34] succeeded him, at the head of the ministry of "All the Talents." In this place, perhaps, may be not unsuitably inserted the epitaph which Sydney Smith suggested for Pitt's statue in Hanover Square.

To the Right Honourable William Pitt Whose errors in foreign policy And lavish expenditure of our Resources at home Have laid the foundation of National Bankruptcy And scattered the seeds of Revolution, This Monument was erected By many weak men, who mistook his eloquence for wisdom And his insolence for magnanimity, By many unworthy men whom he had enn.o.bled, And by many base men, whom he had enriched at the Public Expense.

But for Englishmen This Statue raised from such motives Has not been erected in vain.

They learn from it those dreadful abuses Which exist under the mockery Of a free Representation, And feel the deep necessity Of a great and efficient Reform.

In Lord Grenville's ministry Lord Erskine became Lord Chancellor, and Lord Holland Lord Privy Seal. In the autumn of 1806 the living of Foston-le-Clay, eight miles from York, fell vacant. It was in the Chancellor's gift; the Lord Privy Seal said a word to his colleague; the Chancellor cordially accepted "the nominee of Lord and Lady Holland"; and that nominee was Sydney Smith. Foston was worth 500 a year, and Dr.

Markham, Archbishop of York, allowed the new Rector to be non-resident, accepting his duties at the Foundling Hospital as a sufficient justification for absence from his parish. Early in 1807 he preached at the Temple Church, and published by request, a sermon on Toleration, which drew this testimony from a scandalized peer:[35]--

"Sydney Smith preached yesterday a sermon on the Catholic question....

It would have made an admirable party speech in Parliament, but as a sermon, the author deserved the Star Chamber, if it still existed."

During the summer of 1807, the Smiths lived in a hired house at Sonning on the Thames; and one of their neighbours was the great civilian Sir William Scott,[36] afterwards Lord Stowell (who deserves to be honoured for having coined the phrase--"The elegant simplicity of the Three per cents"). The old judge took a fancy to the young clergyman, and pointed out, in a friendly spirit, how much he had lost by his devotion to Whiggism. In later life, Sydney Smith wrote to Lord John Russell[37]--"I remember with pleasure, thirty years ago, old Lord Stowell saying to me, 'Mr. Smith, you would have been a much richer man if you had joined us.'"

But the Tory table-talk of Earley[38] was powerless to seduce this staunch partisan from his political allegiance; and, just at this period, he was meditating the most skilful and the most resounding blow which he ever struck for freedom and justice.

It was a critical time. The besotted resistance of the King to the slightest concession in favour of his Roman Catholic subjects had driven the ministry of "All the Talents" out of office in the spring. The High Tories succeeded them, and the General Election which ensued on the change of government gave a strong majority for "No Popery" and reaction.

Meanwhile the greatest genius that the world has ever seen was wading through slaughter to a universal throne, and no effective resistance had as yet been offered to a progress which menaced the freedom of Europe and the existence of its states. At such a juncture it seemed to Sydney Smith that England could not spare a single soldier or sailor, nor afford to alienate the loyalty of a single citizen. "Buonaparte," he wrote, "is as rapid and as terrible as the lightning of G.o.d; would he were as transient." It was nothing short of national suicide to reject men desirous of serving in the army and navy on account of their beliefs, to madden English Romanists by defrauding them of their civil rights, and to outrage the whole people of Ireland by affixing a legal stigma to their religion.

His musings on this pregnant theme took shape in--

A LETTER ON THE SUBJECT OF THE CATHOLICS TO MY BROTHER ABRAHAM WHO LIVES IN THE COUNTRY BY PETER PLYMLEY.

This Letter was published in the summer of 1807, and "its effect was like a spark on a heap of gunpowder," It was followed by nine more, bearing the same t.i.tle, four of which appeared in the same year and five in the next. A little later Sydney Smith wrote to Lord Grey--"I wish I could write as well as Plymley: but, if I could, where is such a case to be found? When had any lawyer such a brief?"

In 1808 _Peter Plymley's Letters_ were collected and published in a pamphlet, and the pamphlet ran through sixteen editions. "The government of that day," wrote Sydney Smith in 1839, "took great pains to find out the author; all that they _could_ find out was that they were brought to Mr.

Budd, the publisher, by the Earl of Lauderdale.[39] Somehow or another it came to be conjectured that I was the author.[40]... They had an immense circulation at the time, and I think above twenty thousand copies were sold." Some little s.p.a.ce must be bestowed upon these masterpieces of humour and wisdom.

[19] "Yet mark one caution, ere thy next Review Spread its light wings of Saffron and of Blue, Beware lest blundering Brougham spoil the sale, Turn Beef to Bannocks, Cauliflowers to Kail."

BYRON, _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_.

[20] Barrister, and writer of political pamphlets between 1791 and 1807.

[21] George Ticknor (1791-1871), American traveller and man of letters.