Reviews of the Week
The Smith of Smiths
Sydney Smith: A biography and a selection. By Gerald Bullett.
(Michael Joseph. I 5, SYDNEY Shunt has long given me such pleasure that I picked up this book by Mr. Bullett with lively expectations but at the same time with certain qualms I like Sydney Smith so much that I was perturbed to think that 1 might not like the new book about him. (One of his own remafks came back to me with peculiar force—" I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so.") I was put off at the start by the portrait of Smith—the only likeness in the book—which Mr. Bullett had : selected for his dust-jacket and frontispiece. A trim, dandified, :'unexciting fellow, this—and surely (if recollection served) quite misleadingly handsome? For Sydney Smith, as one might almost "have assumed of a man with such an original and vigorous sense .of humour, was a man with a Nose, even, perhaps, a " Luminous Nose." Mr. Bullett's picture was surely intended to flatter; it was taken from a favourable angle and the Nose has been explained away. I turned to Osbert Burdett's biography, which I believe is more fully illustrated than any other life of Smith, and was at once .confirmed in my fears. There was Maclise's racy caricature, making great play with the Nose, and there were reproductions of Westmacott's bust and of a miniature on ivory and of an engraving `after a portrait of 1817—none of which had shirked the Nose. :I also found Mr. Bullett's picture, taken from a print published ,.toy Longman in 1840 (which Mr. Bullett does not tell us). Clearly 1/4:this was a minority view and not characteristic. I began to read *Mr. Bullett's book with some severity, hoping that he was not 'going to throw away any more scoring points.
My next reaction, however, was favourable. It was clear from t;the start that Mr. Bullett had not attempted another full-length sYsiography of Smith. Perhaps he rightly considered that Hesketh Pearson's and Osbert Burdett's books—both published in 1934, to the accompaniment, one assumes, of much gnashing of publishers' teeth—had adequately met the public demand in this respect. Instead, Mr. Bullett has divided his 313 pages into 93 pages of biography and 220 pages of selections from Sydney Smith's writings. It seemed to me, at first sight, a good idea thus to divert 'our attention from the man to the works; but as I read the famous Letters of Peter Plymley (printed in their entirety and taking up eighty of Mr. Bullett's pages) I began to wonder how many people were likely nowadays to make a serious study of this admirably effective but somewhat long-winded propaganda in favour of -.Catholic emancipation. Sydney Smith was a great reformer; it is well that the flame of his Liberalism should be kept burning today. At the same time, one may doubt how far the present-day reader will be inclined to follow in detail, either in the Plymley Letters. the political speeches, or the Edinburgh Review articles, the tenor of his arguments against abuses that have, for the most part, been
remedied long ago. And many of the papers here printed in full arc available in G. C. Heseltine's excellent book of selections, published as recently as 1929.
It is far otherwise with the miscellaneous short extracts (all too few) that Mr. Bullett has collected from note-books, letters, articles,
table-talk, and other sources. We cannot have too many of these, for the genius of Sydney Smith, like that of Samuel Butler, is best illustrated in snatches. Here, again, however, Mr. Bullett has been anticipated, for a book called The Wit and Wisdom of the Rev. Sydney Smith was published many years ago, a substantial volume containing hundreds of excerpts, many of them from articles which Mr. Bullett has reproduced in full (not always to their best advantage). If this Wit and Wisdom volume could be reprinted, as it deserves, it might be prefaced by Mr. Bullett's new short biography. It is not a very lively or remarkable sketch that Mr. Bullett has written ; much is omitted, notably any account of the friendship between Smith and Dickens; but -I feel that the appraisal is sensible and just. I dislike his habit of running together his quotations and his own observations, so that they make long unbroken paragraphs of up to two pages in length. Only a very exceptional performer, like Sir Osbert Sitwell, can get away with this ; in other hands it makes for monotony.
But a final word should be one of thanks to Mr. Bullett for reminding the modern generation that Sydney Smith was not only a wit but also a great and good man. He was not beyond criticism and sometimes can disappoint even his admirers ; as Mr. Bullett says, " he had the vice, as well as the virtue, of moderation.'" Yet he set his face resolutely in the right direction and many important reforms owed much to his advocacy. His love of freedom lent wings to his wit. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out. Sydney Smith was the real originator of Nonsense, the precursor of Lear and Lewis Carroll. "To say that a bishop deserved to be preached to death by wild curates is not merely satire; it is a
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