Sydney Smith (1771-1845) was
sometimes compared to Jonathan Swift as a clerical wit. For all the differences in
their politics and mode of humor the comparison remains suggestive. Both wrote in
opposition to the court pretensions, centralized government, and British
imperialism; both used wit and Christianity to champion to further the cause of
liberty. Humor was not, however, conducive to professional advancement; Swift and
Smith, who might otherwise have become bishops, were left to swallow their pride as
intellectual mediocrities were promoted above them. Tory administration were no
more likely to bestow a mitre on the author of Peter Plymley's Letters than
Whig administrations on the author of A Tale of a Tub.
“His jokes were sermons, and
his sermons jokes” wrote Byron—equivocally—of the “brilliant diner-out,
though but a curate.” In Don Juan “Peter Pith” is posted
to a “fat fen vicarage” far from the glittering tables where a wit
might shine. One thinks of Swift. But the Yorkshire living Smith was given in 1806
was not so remote or so Boetian as Byron implied, being centrally located on the
road between Edinburgh and London, and not so far from Castle Howard, Bishopthorpe
Palace, and Howick, the stately homes of Smith's patrons. As a founder and
principal writer for the Edinburgh Review Smith occupied an intellectual
position equidistant from the Athens of the North and the seat of power in the
South; he was a conduit for information passing between the two metropolises.
Though far from Holland House the diner-out could still enjoy a good meal.
While the magnates among his
friends could not, or would not, make Smith a bishop, he believed in the patronage
system and used it effectively, rising from a lowly curate on Salisbury Plain to a
Canon of St. Paul's, becoming one of the wealthiest clerics in Britain. Though a
stout Whig, Smith was no democrat. A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith
(1855) paints the portrait of an Old Whig. For as much as he mocked country ways,
Smith's political outlook reflected the “fens” as much as Swift's did
Dublin. Like many a west-country Whig, Sydney Smith, was habitually opposed to
government corruption and foreign imperialism; he was less an advocate for the
rights of man than for the rule of law—law as interpreted by just, intelligent, and
patriotic country magistrates like himself.
Byron's pen-portrait in Don
Juan echoes criticism of Smith's sermons in the Quarterly
Review—that the fashionable preacher who complained about the dullness of
pulpit oratory was himself a shallow, worldly man. This objection was less than
just but not wholly wrong. Smith had very little to say about theology; he wrote
critically about many things but Christian doctrine was not among them. He was a
Christian moralist as opposed to a Christian theologian and adhered uncritically to
contemporary Anglican doctrine. Smith objected strenuously, if privately, to the
free-thinking characteristic of the Edinburgh Review, and publicly to the
dogmatism of dissent and to what he regarded as the misguided enthusiasm of
missionaries in India. Like Henry Fielding, Sydney Smith appealed to a
worldly-wise, common-sense Christianity. He too had a soft spot for poachers.
When Saba Holland published A
Memoir in 1855 she set about to challenge the received view of her father.
In her pages he figures less as the fat Silenus of Holland House than as the
slender Parson Adams of Fielding's Joseph Andrews, an impoverished scholar
and firm yet loving shepherd of a rural flock. While Smith's poverty was not
exactly of the Parson Adams variety (Mrs. Smith sold a pearl necklace for 1500
pounds to help her husband set up house) he was indeed poor in comparison to his
brothers and fellow diners-out. Saba Holland dilates on the pride the rural parson
took in inventing a back-scratching machine for the pleasure of his farm animals, a
side of Sidney Smith the world had never seen before. Nor is it particularly
difficult, in this account, to imagine Howarth as a kind of Paradise Hall, or Earl
Grey as a version of Squire Allworthy. In A Memoir, Holland House, while not
ignored, makes but occasional appearances.
Saba Holland's doting, amusing,
life of her father is more memoir than biography; names and dates, titles and
promotions are dutifully chronicled but it is Sydney Smith's conversation and
domestic life that are emphasized. At a time when the private lives of public men
were often regarded as off limits, her candid portrait was warmly received and the
Memoir quickly ran through three editions. It is unusual in another
respect, separating the life from the correspondence in contrast to the usual
life-and-letters format. This was an accident of the book's gestation that requires
comment since it has a bearing on how the story of Sydney Smith's life is
presented.
From the time of her husband's
death in 1845, if not before, Caroline Pybus Smith (1768-1852) planned a
life-and-letters volume to commemorate his memory. After retrieving a substantial
body of letters she approached Thomas Moore, Francis Jeffrey, and Sarah Austin with
offers of the correspondence but the potential biographers declined the potentially
lucrative commission. In her will she again declared her desire for a biography to
be published, and the obligation fell to her elder daughter, Saba (1802-1866), wife
of Sir Henry Holland, resident physician of Holland House. Lady Holland, a
reluctant biographer, was able to persuade Sarah Austin (1793-1867), her father's
friend and correspondent as well as a professional woman of letters, to edit the
second volume. This division of labor accounts for the unusual format of the work,
and may account from some of its other peculiarities.
While I have not undertaken a
collation of the three editions, it appears that decisions about what to include
and what not to include were being made even as the book was in press. While the
first volume is awkwardly shorter than the second, some of its letters are printed
in a smaller font to save space. What was obviously intended as an afterward to the
second volume appended, somewhat nonsensically, to its preface. At least one letter
(number 113) was added in the second edition (it includes a Byron reference and is
reproduced here with the second edition of the second volume) and other letters
were renumbered. The text of the letters, not to put too fine a point on the
matter, is utterly corrupt, even by nineteenth-century standards. Reader, beware!
Sarah Austin is very frank about
her obligations as selector and censor (the nonagenarian Samuel Rogers was still
alive, barely, and so most of the many references to him were silently excised).
She says, “I have generally omitted not only the usual formulae at the
conclusion of letters, but many continually recurring expressions of kindness and
affection, friendly greetings, domestic news sought and communicated”
(2:xvii-xviii). But when she continues, “It is hardly necessary to say that
not a word has been added” she says what is not true, as a comparison with
Nowell C. Smith's 1953 edition of the Letters of Sydney Smith makes
manifest. For example, where Smith writes to Francis Jeffrey, 18 November 1807,
“Your notions of the English Constitution delight the Tories beyond all
belief; and you have now nearly atoned for Drummond's atheism” (1953,
1:126) Sarah Austin has “you have now nearly atoned for D——’s
opinions” (my emphasis). Elisions and substitutions sometimes make
nonsense of what Smith wrote.
The question arises of the extent
to which Lady Holland was involved with editing the letters. Sarah Austin says
“It was she [Saba Holland] who collected, transcribed, and
arranged the mass of letters out of which I had to choose”
(2:xix-xx, my emphasis). The chronological sequence is often faulty and the dates
assigned to letters—printed without comment as datelines—are sheer invention. It
would not have been difficult to ascertain the year in which Lord Holland died or
when Sydney Smith's articles appeared in the Edinburgh Review, but this was
not done. What is worse, passages from letters of different dates are conflated,
making further nonsense of chronology. For example, in a letter dated June 1810
Smith supposedly writes to Lady Holland, “If I could envy any man for
successful ill-nature, I should envy Lord Byron for his skill in satirical
nomenclature” (2:74). But since this letter also contains material from 1818
and the sentence in question is not to be found in Nowell C. Smith's edition, there
is really no telling to what it refers.
Perhaps what Sarah Austin was
given to edit was a partially completed life-and-letters—transcribed letters
without the connective tissue, arranged and edited as they would have appeared in
the biography Saba Holland decided not to write. Certain it is that excisions in
the printed correspondence reinforce a “Parson Adams” view of Sydney
Smith: acerbic remarks are thoroughly scrubbed, as are all references to payments
for contributions to the Edinburgh Review and most passages in which Sydney
Smith expresses his hopes and schemes for professional advancement. The cumulative
effect of the many small omissions is not inconsiderable. If this was done by
design, it must be said that the design was entirely successful: reviewers from
across the political spectrum hailed the transformation of the former regency wit
into an idealized pastor and parent.
This is pointed out not to suggest
that A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith is a deliberate attempt at
falsification, but that it needs to be read in context, and especially to be read
in conjunction with Nowell C. Smith's admirable edition of the correspondence which
doubles the number of letters, restores omitted passages where letters have
survived (some of the tarter items may have been destroyed after the castrated
versions were published), and which does a superb job of identifying obscure
references to persons and events. In very few instances has this edition, made with
the benefit of internet research, been able to improve on what he accomplished.
There is, however, one peculiarity of Smith's otherwise exemplary edition: only the
names of Britons are indexed. That deficiency is rectified here.
David Hill Radcliffe
