I N a speech which he made not long ago Lord
Rosebery regretted that Sydney Smith was not now more widely read. Indeed, it is regrettable. The coruscation of his wit has thrown his wisdom into obscurity. The world remembers him as a great wit and a brilliant talker at Lady Holland's table, and forgets him as a politician, a philanthropist, and a divine, in all of which capacities he served his country to excellent purpose. His effect upon the public opinion of his day was enormous. If not an original thinker, he was, as was said of him by a con- temporary," a great diffuser of ideas," and for this work of diffusion he was marvellously equipped. He could persuade the wise by reason and confute the fool by ridicule, and rivet the attention of the ordinary man by pouring into his ears lucid and sparkling reproductions of his own dull common- sense. He laboured to procure the assistance of counsel for every man tried on a criminal charge, to protect the boy chimney-sweep from the cruelty of his master, and to secure the mentally infirm against a system of treatment which would now be considered barbarous if applied tb the morally infamous. Though he was a loyal member of the Establish- ment, the fear of Bishops was never before his eyes. He struck a blow for the defenceless curate persecuted by his ecclesiastical superior for which, if any such now exist, they may still be thankful. "How any man of Purple Palaces and Preferment can let himself loose against this poor working man of God we are at a loss to conceive—a learned man in a hovel with sermons and saucepans, lexicons and bacon, Hebrew books and ragged children—good and patient—a comforter and a preacher—the first and purest pauper in the Hamlet, and yet showing that in the midst of his worldly misery he has the heart of a gentleman, the spirit of a Christian, and the kindness of a pastor." A friend of the great and an advocate of the poor, he cherished no sentimental illusions in regard to either the governors or the governed. He hated nothing so much as fanaticism, and distrusted nothing so much as enthusiasm. In these two allied feelings lay the secret of his intellectual strength and his intellec- tual weakness, the secret of that which made him a powerful man and prevented his being a great one. He entered the Church of England under pressure, and almost against his will ; but once within her walls, he worked for her good to the utmost of his ability, loosened her bonds, widened her borders, and confirmed the saving dogma of her fallibility. The Church, he ever maintained, must be distinguished from religion itself. "A Church establishment is only an instrument for teaching religion, but an instrument of admirable contrivance and vast utility. The Church of England is the wisest and most enlightened sect of Christians. I think so, or I would not belong to it for an hour." This is no doubt a thoroughly lay view. There was nothing sacerdotal about Sydney Smith. It is not the view of the High Anglican in the vestry. It is, if we may venture to use the expression, the view of the Churchman in the street. The future Canon of St. Paul's was not interested in theology, and he doubted if the desultory teaching of it did any particular good. He seems to have regarded it as men now regard medicine, as a subject for open yet expert study, to be entirely directed, for the benefit of the public, towards the discovery of plain rules of health. His indifference to theology is mixed up with his horror of enthusiasm, and he exhorted the clergy to preach morals, not mysteries, assuring them that every moral subject is a Christian subject. "It is not possible," he says, "to raise up any dangerous enthusiasm by telling men to be just, good, and charitable; but keep this part of Christianity out of sight, and talk long and enthusiastically before ignorant people of the mysteries of our religion, and you will not fail to attract a crowd of followers." This crowd, he seems to think, will be excited rather than improved by the discourse. His deter- mination to have in religious matters "nothing foolish, nothing romantic, nothing bordering on ridicule or enthusiasm," made him, while theoretically just to all creeds, extraordinarily hard upon, and, indeed, grossly unjust to, the Wealeyans. He saw the ridiculous side of the Methodist revival, and did not see that it was by far the smallest side. Nevertheless—in spite of his blindness to the fact that what be called enthusiasm was often the living and vital part of religion, the spirit that quickeneth—the religion which this sometimes injudicious
satirist taught was real, no mere formalism, and no mere morality. If be dwelt continually upon good works, he dwelt also upon the "purity and government of the heart." But though he occasionally gave verbal vent to prejudice, like all men of complete common-sense, he fought for practical tolerance and equality of civil and legal rights. He realised that in the affairs of life good men are united by similarity of conscience, however they may be divided upon points of doctrine. Let us dissect a Roman Catholic, he satirically suggested, and see if he is really different from other men. Then coming back to seriousness, he says: "If experience has taught us anything, it has taught us the futility of controlling men's notions of eternity by Act of Parliament."
As a politician Sydney Smith was, as we have said, free from that inherited reverence for an oligarchy which was still strong in his day, free also from that absurd worship of the natural man with which Rousseau had lately instilled certain types of mind. He earnestly desired the government of the wise, from wherever the wise might spring, and hated to see a stupid man in office, by whatever means he had got there. His words about the preferment of Bishops apply to secular as well as to ecclesiastical preferments. "It is a melancholy thing to see a man clothed in soft raiment, lodged in a public place, endowed with a rich portion of the products of other men's industry, using all the influence of his splendid situation, however conscientiously, to deepen the ignorance and inflame the fury of his fellow-creatures. These are the miserable results of that policy, which has been so frequently pursued for these fifty years past, of placing men of mean or middling abilities in high ecclesiastical stations. In ordinary times it is of less importance who fills them, but when the bitter period arrives in which the people must give up some of their darling absurdities—when the senseless clamour which has been carefully handed down from father fool to son fool can be no longer indulged—when it is of incalculable importance to turn the people to a better way of thinking, the greatest impediments to all amelioration are too often found among those to whose counsels at such periods the country ought to look for wisdom and peace." Never greatly impressed by the special aptitude for government possessed by the governing classes, he congratulates America that she is free of the "feudal nonsense" which encourages, he thinks, a warlike spirit, exhorting her at the same time not to cultivate an appetite for "glory."
Intensely as Sydney Smith cared for liberty, for the rights of the individual and the greatest happiness of the greatest number ; hard as he worked for his poor parishioners in his private, and for the good of their class in his public, capacity, he seems never altogether to have understood or done justice to the British working Man. Perhaps the purely intellectual man seldom does, and perhaps in the "feudal nonsense" he so lightly pushed aside lies hidden a secret of mutual comprehension which society can ill afford to lose. This which we are about to quote is surely too harsh a verdict :—" The ploughman marries the ploughwoman because she is plump, generally uses her ill, regards his children as an incumbrance, often flogs them, and for sentiment has nothing more nearly approaching to it than the ideas of boiled bacon and mashed potatoes. This is the state of the lower orders of mankind,— deplorable, yet true."
In the good effects of education, especially religious education, he firmly believed. "When you see a child brought up in the way he should go," he preached, "you see a good of which you cannot measure the quantity nor perceive the end. It may be communicated to the children's children of that child. It may last for centuries ; it may be communicated to innumerable individuals. It may be planting a plant and sowing a seed which may fill the land with the glorious increase of righteousness and bring upon us the blessings of the Almighty?' Perhaps he would say that in condemning his harsh verdict on the poor we of the present generation forget how great a change the diffusion of education has wrought for good. He believed, wrongly perhaps, that no essential difference exists between the brain of a man and a woman, and he ridicules the notion that a woman may lose by learning that which is more valuable to her than knowledge. "Can anything be more absurd than to suppose that the perpetual solici- tulle a mother feels towards her children can depend upon her ignorance of Greek and mathematics, or that she would desert an infant for a quadratic equation?" He deprecates earnestly the harshness and cruelty of the public. school system as it existed in his day, declaring that "those young people will turn out the best men who have been most effectually guarded in their childhood from every species of useless vexation." He disapproved the amount of time given to classics and athletics, and tried to persuade the cultivated class to look more to intellectual profit and less to mere intellectual exercise, desiring that a boy should bring something away from school besides training. Not that he wished to increase the number of thinking machines in the world, or that he thought too little of the importance of the physique. "That man," he said sarcastically of a certain scholar, "has too little body to cover his mind; his intellect is improperly exposed."
While always spurring on the reformer, seeking to throw discredit upon procrastination, and asking "which is the properest day to do good," Sydney Smith did not expect to see great things done quickly, nor did he despair because they took long. He exhorts the unemancipated Roman Catholic of his day to " Wait ; all great alterations in human affairs are produced by compromise." You cannot get the public to take in new ideas as fast as an individual. "It requires twenty or thirty years," he argues upon one occasion, "to state such things to such numbers."
By nature exceedingly ambitious, and hotly desirous of rising in a profession which was not that of his choice, Sydney Smith sacrificed his career "to add something to the cause of liberality, justice, and truth." Pre-eminently practical, be yet realised that a man cannot "disclaim theory without disclaiming thought." Only in one matter did his practice fall below his principles. He disliked the missionary ardour of the Dissenters, and persecuted them with his sarcasm, while defending their rights with his reason, and thus proved himself deficient not in that common-sense and kind- ness which make a man tolerant, but only in that higher form of imagination which creates intellectual sympathy. Truly, however, he stands before the English world as a figure to be proud of, a man of whose private and public life we can never know too much : charming at home and brilliant abroad, using his intellectual weapons with all his might in accord- ance with his conscience and without counting the cost. Perfection we cannot have. "There is," as he himself said, "something in every character which must be for ever connived at."
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