" IF gentlemen cannot breathe fresh air without injustice. let
them putrefy in Cranbourne Alley."—" If a man does not vote for the Bill [the 11(...Orm Bill, he is unclean—the plague spot is upon him—push him into the lazaretto of the last century."—" Any cruelty may be practised to gorge the stomachs of the rich—none to enliven the holidays of the poor." It is not easy to reconcile these sentences with the white stock of Sydney Smith, the heavily fleshed jowl, the small apply top chin, the mouth, as wide and flat as an oyster, extended in the smug smile of a professional entertainer.
I have loved God and hated iniquity," said the greatest of mediaeval popes, " therefore I die in exile," but Sydney Smith died among the fleshpots, a fashionable preacher, the intimate friend of the great Whigs : his hatred of iniquity lacked the sterling mark.
But it is for his hatred of iniquity, however qualified, his championship of the poor against the Game Laws, of the Catholics in the cause of emancipation, that he deserves to be remembered, and it is the chief virtue of Mr. Hesketh Pearson's rather loosely constructed biography that he gives full weight to the author of Peter Plumley's Letters. Mr. Chesterton in an admirable introduction pays more than sufficient tribute to Sydney Smith's humour. It very seldom had the exactitude of wit ; he relied on voice, on a rude gusto, to " put over " that kind of hit-or-miss nonsense practised today by certain humorists of the daily Press. Single jokes of the kind are sometimes amusing, but taken in battalions they are the reverse. When Mr. Pearson gathers in one chapter all the witticisms of Smith he can find recorded in contemporary
memoirs, the result is as devastating as one of the little com- pilations of Good Stories for After-Dinner Speakers."
Smug Sydney " Byron called him, and Greville in a passage which Mr. Pearson, who is Smith's admirer, wisely does not quote in full, wrote :
" People so entirely expected to be made to die of laughing, and he was so aware of this, that there never seemed to be any question of conversation when he was of the party, or at least no more than just to afford Sydney pegs to hang his jokes on. This is the misfor- tune of all great professed wits, and I have very little doubt that Sydney often felt oppressed with the weight of his comical obliga- tions, and came on the stage like a great actor, forced to exert him- self, but not always in the vein to play his part."
It was Smith's, and perhaps England's, misfortune, that this reformer fitted so well the temper of his time, a noisy guzzling time, quite lacking in wit and infecting even its finest spirits with the crudity of its humour, so that even Keats in his letters reported his own and his friends' latest puns and prac- tical jokes with all the gusto of Tom Hood. " Frequent and loud laughter," wrote Lord Chesterfield, "is a sure sign of a weak mind," and one wonders what comment he would have made on the Regency mentality : Sir James Macintosh rolling on the floor in fits of mirth at one of Smith's stories, Thomas Moore leaving his breakfast crying with laughter, Sarah Siddons helped from the table in convulsions.
But the fact remains that this man who played the fool so ably in society championed the peasantry as they have never been championed since. It might be said that only when he was serious was he genuinely witty. " The least worthy of God's creatures must fall—the rustic without a soul—not the Christian partridge, not the immortal pheasant, not the rational woodcock, or the accountable hare." Perhaps we have the public school system, the horrors he suffered at Winchester, to thank for the reformer. Indeed one is tempted to wonder if the Whig party of that date could have existed without a childhood that had made them aware of cruelty and injustice. The unimaginative need to feel brutality themselves to waken them to brutality ; and Lord Holland's shrivelled fingers may have made him more easily sympathize with the peasant crippled in the landlord's steel trap. All the Whig leaders, and Smith not least among them, retained some of the character of the fag, crippled in spirit, half revolutionaries, hating in the dormitory, ingratiating in the study.
GRAHAM GREENE.
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