SYDNEY SMITH (1771-1845)
It has been said of Sydney Smith that he was not only a humourist, but a "good-humourist," and this is undoubtedly true. Politics, indeed, according to their usual custom, sometimes rather acidulated his good humour; but anybody possessed of the noun, with the least allowance of the adjective, should be propitiated by the way in which the almost Radical reformer of Peter Plymley's Letters in 1807 became the almost Tory and wholly conservative maintainer of ecclesiastical rights in those to Archdeacon Singleton thirty years later.
Both, however, were "Letters" of the sophisticated kind: but we have plenty of perfectly genuine correspondence, also agreeable and sometimes extremely amusing. Whether Sydney (his friends always abbreviated him thus, and he accepted the Christian name) describes the makeshifts of his Yorkshire parish or the luxuries of his Somerset one; whether he discusses the effect of a diet of geraniums on pigs or points out that as Lord Tankerville has given him a whole buck "this takes up a great deal of my time" – he is always refreshing. He has no great depth, but we do not go to him for that: and he is not shallow in the offensive sense of the word. His gaiety does not get on one's nerves as does that of some – perhaps most – professional jokers: neither, as is too frequently the case with them, does it bore. His letters are not the easiest to select from: for they are usually short and their excellence lies rather in still shorter flashes such as those glanced at above; as the grave proposition that "the information of very plain women is so inconsiderable that I agree with you in setting no store by it;" or as this other (resembling a short newspaper paragraph) "The Commissioner will have hard work with the Scotch atheists: they are said to be numerous this season and in great force, from the irregular supply of rain." But the following specimens are fairly representative. They were written at an interval of about ten years: the first from Foston, the second from Combe Florey. "Miss Berry," the elder of the famous sisters who began by fascinating Horace Walpole and ended by charming Thackeray: "Donna Agnes" was the younger. "Lady Rachel," the famous wife of the person who suffered for the Rye House plot (Lady Rachel Wriothesley, of Rachel Lady Russell, but Miss Berry had written a Life of her under her maiden name). Sydney's politics show in his allusion to the assassination of the Duc de Berri, son of Charles X. of France (who had, however, not then come to the throne); in his infinitely greater sorrow for the dismissal of the mildly Liberal minister Decazes; and in his spleen at the supporters of the English Tory government of Lord Liverpool. (The "little plot" was Thistlewood's). In the second letter the "hotel" is his new parsonage in Somerset: "Bowood," Lord Lansdowne's Wiltshire house, a great Whig rallying place. I suppose "Sea-shore Calcott" is Sir A. W. Calcott the painter. "Luttrell" (Henry), a talker and versifier very well known in his own day, but of less enduring reputation than some others. "Napier's Book," the brilliant if somewhat partisan History of the Peninsular War. I am not quite certain in which of two senses Sydney uses the word caractère. As ought to be well known this does not exactly correspond to our "character" – but most commonly means "temper" or "disposition." It has, however, a peculiar technical meaning of "official description" or "estimate" which would suit Sir William Napier well. The Napiers were "kittle cattle" from the official point of view.
26. To Miss Berry
Foston, Feb 27th, 1820.
I thank you very much for the entertainment I have received from your book. I should however have been afraid to marry such a woman as Lady Rachel; it would have been too awful. There are pieces of china very fine and beautiful, but never intended for daily use…
I have hardly slept out of Foston since I saw you. God send I may be still an animal, and not a vegetable! but I am a little uneasy at this season for sprouting and rural increase, for I fear I should have undergone the metamorphose so common in country livings. I shall go to town about the end of March; it will be completely empty, and the drugs that remain will be entirely occupied about hustings and returning-officers.
Commerce and manufacturers are still in a frightful state of stagnation.
No foreign barks in British ports are seen,
Stuff'd to the water's edge with velveteen,
Or bursting with big bales of bombazine;
No distant climes demand our corduroy,
Unmatch'd habiliment for man and boy;
No fleets of fustian quit the British shore,
The cloth-creating engines cease to roar,
Still is that loom which breech'd the world before.
I am very sorry for the little fat Duke de Berri, but infinitely more so for the dismissal of De Cases, – a fatal measure.
I must not die without seeing Paris. Figure to yourself what a horrid death, – to die without seeing Paris! I think I could make something of this in a tragedy, so as to draw tears from Donna Agnes and yourself. Where are you going to? When do you return? Why do you go at all? Is Paris more agreeable than London?
We have had a little plot here in a hay-loft. God forbid anybody should be murdered! but, if I were to turn assassin, it should not be of five or six Ministers, who are placed where they are by the folly of the country gentlemen, but of the hundred thousand squires, to whose stupidity and folly such an Administration owes its existence.
Ever your friend,Sydney Smith.
27. To N. Fazakerly, Esq.
Combe Florey, October, 1829.
Dear Fazakerly,
I don't know anybody who would be less affronted at being called hare-brained than our friend who has so tardily conveyed my message, and I am afraid now he has only given you a part of it. The omission appears to be, that I had set up an hotel on the Western road, that it would be opened next spring, and I hoped for the favour of yours and Mrs. Fazakerly's patronage. "Well-aired beds, neat wines, careful drivers, etc. etc."
I shall have very great pleasure in coming to see you, and I quite agree in the wisdom of postponing that event till the rural Palladios and Vitruvii are chased away; I have fourteen of them here every day. The country is perfectly beautiful, and my parsonage the prettiest place in it.
I was at Bowood last week: the only persons there were seashore Calcott and his wife, – two very sensible, agreeable people. Luttrell came over for the day; he was very agreeable, but spoke too lightly, I thought, of veal soup. I took him aside, and reasoned the matter with him, but in vain; to speak the truth, Luttrell is not steady in his judgments on dishes. Individual failures with him soon degenerate into generic objections, till, by some fortunate accident, he eats himself into better opinions. A person of more calm reflection thinks not only of what he is consuming at the moment, but of the soups of the same kind he has met with in a long course of dining, and which have gradually and justly elevated the species. I am perhaps making too much of this; but the failures of a man of sense are always painful.
I quite agree about Napier's book. I do114 not think that any[114] man would venture to write so true, bold, and honest a book; it gave me a high idea of his understanding, and makes me very anxious about his caractère
Ever yours,Sydney Smith.
SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832)
Since this little book was undertaken it has been announced, truly or not, that the bulk of Scott's autograph letters has been bought by a fortunate and wise man of letters for the sum of £1500. Neither life nor literature can ever be expressed in money value: but if one had £1500 to spend on something not directly necessary, it is possible to imagine a very large number of less satisfactory purchases. For as was briefly suggested in the Introduction, Scott's letters – while saturated with that singular humanity and nobility of character in which he has hardly a rival among authors of whom we know much – are distinctly remarkable from the purely literary point of view. His published work, both in verse and prose, has been accused (with what amount of justice we will not here trouble ourselves to discuss) – of carelessness in style and art. No such charge could possibly be brought against his letters, which hit the happy mean between slovenliness and artificial elaboration in a fashion that could hardly be bettered. The great variety of his correspondents, too, provides an additional attraction: for letters indited to the same person are apt to show a certain monotony. And Scott is equal to any and every occasion. Here as elsewhere the "Diary" drains off a certain proportion of matter: but chiefly for the latest period and in circumstances scarcely happy enough for letters themselves.
The following letter was selected because of its admirable treatment of a theme – the behaviour, responsibility, and general status of Authors as objects of public judgment – on which an infinite amount of deplorable and disgusting nonsense has been talked and written. It starts, as will be seen, with the quarrel between Lord and Lady Byron – and then generalises. Not many things show Scott's golden equity and fairness better. He is perhaps "a little kind" to Campbell, who was, one fears, an extra-irritable specimen of the irritable race: but this is venial. And probably he did not mean the stigma which might be inferred from the conjunction of "Aphra and Orinda." They were certainly both of Charles II.'s time: but while poor Aphra was, if not wholly vicious, far from virtuous, the "matchless Orinda" (Katherine Philips) bears no stain on her character.
28. To Joanna Baillie
(End of April 1816)
My dear friend,
I am glad you are satisfied with my reasons for declining a direct interference with Lord B[yron]. I have not, however, been quite idle, and as an old seaman have tried to go by a side wind when I had not the means of going before it, and this will be so far plain to you when I say that I have every reason to believe the good intelligence is true that a separation is signed between Lord and Lady Byron. If I am not as angry as you have good reason to expect every thinking and feeling man to be, it is from deep sorrow and regret that a man possessed of such noble talents should so utterly and irretrievably lose himself. In short, I believe the thing to be as you state it, and therefore Lord Byron is the object of anything rather than indignation. It is a cruel pity that such high talents should have been joined to a mind so wayward and incapable of seeking control where alone it is to be found, in the quiet discharge of domestic duties and filling up in peace and affection his station in society. The idea of his ultimately resisting that which should be fair and honourable to Lady B. did not come within my view of his character – at least of his natural character; but I hear that, as you intimated, he has had execrable advisers. I hardly know a more painful object of consideration than a man of genius in such a situation; those of lower minds do not feel the degradation, and become like pigs, familiarised with the filthy elements in which they grovel; but it is impossible that a man of Lord Byron's genius should not often feel the want of that which he has forfeited – the fair esteem of those by whom genius most naturally desires to be admired and cherished.
I am much obliged to Mrs. Baillie for excluding me in her general censure of authors; but I should have hoped for a more general spirit of toleration from my good friend, who had in her own family and under her own eye such an exception to her general censure – unless, indeed (which may not be far from the truth), she supposes that female genius is more gentle and tractable, though as high in tone and spirit as that of the masculine sex. But the truth is, I believe, we will find a great equality when the different habits of the sexes and the temptations they are exposed to are taken into consideration. Men early flattered and coaxed, and told they are fitted for the higher regions of genius and unfit for anything else, – that they are a superior kind of automaton and ought to move by different impulses than others, – indulge their friends and the public with freaks and caprioles like those of that worthy knight of La Mancha in the Sierra Morena. And then, if our man of genius escapes this temptation, how is he to parry the opposition of the blockheads who join all their hard heads and horns together to butt him out of the ordinary pasture, goad him back to Parnassus, and "bid him on the barren mountain starve." It is amazing how far this goes, if a man will let it go, in turning him out of the ordinary course of life into the stream of odd bodies, so that authors come to be regarded as tumblers, who are expected to go to church in a summerset, because they sometimes throw a Catherine-wheel for the amusement of the public. A man even told me at an election, thinking I believe he was saying a severe thing, that I was a poet, and therefore that the subject we were discussing lay out of my way. I answered as quietly as I could, that I did not apprehend my having written poetry rendered me incapable of speaking common sense in prose, and that I requested the audience to judge of me not by the nonsense I might have written for their amusement, but by the sober sense I was endeavouring to speak for their information, and only expected [of] them, in case I had ever happened to give any of them pleasure, in a way which was supposed to require some information and talent, [that] they would not, for that sole reason, suppose me incapable of understanding or explaining a point of the profession for which I had been educated. So I got a patient and very favourable hearing. But certainly these great exertions of friends and enemies have forced many a poor fellow out of the common paths of life, and obliged him to make a trade of what can only be gracefully executed as an occasional avocation. When such a man is encouraged in all his freaks and follies, the bit is taken out of his mouth, and, as he is turned out upon the common, he is very apt to deem himself exempt from all the rules incumbent on those who keep the king's highway. And so they play fantastic tricks before high heaven.
The lady authors are not exempt from these vagaries, being exposed to the same temptations; and all I can allow Mrs. Baillie in favour of the fair sex is that since the time of the Aphras and Orindas of Charles II's time, the authoresses have been ridiculous only, while the authors have too often been both absurd and vicious. As to our leal friend Tom Campbell, I have heard stories of his morbid sensibility chiefly from the Minto family, with whom he lived for some time, and I think they all turned on little foolish points of capricious affectation, which perhaps had no better foundation than an ill-imagined mode of exhibiting his independence. But whatever I saw of him myself – and we were often together, and sometimes for several days – was quite composed and manly. Indeed, I never worried him to make him get on his hind legs and spout poetry when he did not like it. He deserves independence well; and if the dog which now awakens him to the recollection of his possessing it, happened formerly to disturb the short sleep that drowned his recollection of so great a blessing, there is good reason for enduring the disturbance with more patience than before.
But surely, admitting all our temptations and irregularities there are men of genius enough living to restrain the mere possession of talent from the charge of disqualifying the owner for the ordinary occupation and duties of life. There never were better men, and especially better husbands, fathers, and real patriots, than Southey and Wordsworth; they might even be pitched upon as most exemplary characters. I myself, if I may rank myself in the list, am, as Hamlet says, indifferent honest, and at least not worse than an infidel in loving those of my own house. And I think that generally speaking, authors, like actors, being rather less commonly believed to be eccentric than was the faith fifty years since, do conduct themselves as amenable to the ordinary rules of society.
This tirade was begun a long time since, but is destined to be finished at Abbotsford. Your bower is all planted with its evergreens, but must for seven years retain its original aspect of a gravel pit.
(Rest lost.)
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)
It is a strange thing, and could hardly have happened in any country but England, that there is to this day no complete collection or edition of the works of Coleridge – one of the most poetical of our poets, one of the most important of our critics, and one of the most influential, if one of the least methodical and conclusive, of our philosophers. Indeed we never knew what good prose he could write till the fragments called Anima Poetae were published, two-thirds of a century after his death. But that no collected edition of his letters appeared till very shortly before this is explicable without any difficulty. Coleridge's temperament was not heroic, and his correspondence as well as his conduct justified, in regard to much more than his nonage, the ingenious phrase of an American lady-essayist that he must have been "a very beatable child." To a certain extent, however, the correspondence does also justify our adoption (see Introduction) of the charitable theory that enlargement of understanding brings about extension of pardon. And putting this aside, the letters sometimes give us an idea of what his admittedly marvellous conversation (or rather monologue) must have been like. They are not very easy to select from, for their author's singular tendency to divagation affects them. But they sometimes display that humour which he undoubtedly possessed, though his best-known published writings seldom admit of it: and the divagation itself has its advantages. In the following Coleridge appears in curiously different lights. After joking at his own Pantheism he becomes amazingly practical, for it was, as Scott points out somewhere, a fault of Southey's to cling to the system of "half-profits," a fault which often made his enormous labours altogether unprofitable. "I-rise to I-set" = "getting-up to bed-time" seems to have been a favourite quip of his. "Stuart," the Editor of the Morning Post for which Coleridge was then writing. "The Anthology" – an Annual one edited by Southey. As for the Anti-Jacobin libel it was, admirable as was the wit that accompanied it, utterly indefensible; for it accused Coleridge of having at this time "left his poor children fatherless and his wife destitute" (the extraordinary thing is that he actually did this later!) Of course he never executed the Life of Lessing.115 "The Wedgwoods" had given him an annuity. The assault on "Mr. Gobwin" is one of poor Hartley Coleridge's most delightful feats. Had he been a little older, he might have pointed out to the author of Political Justice that lecturing his mother for his, Hartley's, fault was quite unjustifiable: and indeed that objecting to it at all was improper. The right way (according to that great work itself) would have been to discuss with Hartley whether the advantage in physical exercise and animal spirits derived by him from wielding the nine-pin, outweighed the pain experienced by Gobwin, and so was justifiable on the total scheme of things. ("Moshes," as indeed is obvious, was Hartley's pet-name).
29. To Robert Southey
Tuesday night, 12 o'clock(December 24) 1799.
My dear Southey,
My Spinosism (if Spinosism it be, and i' faith 'tis very like it) disposed me to consider this big city as that part of the supreme One which the prophet Moses was allowed to see – I should be more disposed to pull off my shoes, beholding Him in a Bush, than while I am forcing my reason to believe that even in theatres He is, yea! even in the Opera House. Your "Thalaba" will beyond all doubt bring you two hundred pounds, if you will sell it at once; but do not print at a venture, under the notion of selling the edition. I assure you that Longman regretted the bargain he made with Cottle concerning the second edition of the "Joan of Arc," and is indisposed to similar negotiations; but most and very eager to have the property of your works at almost any price. If you have not heard it from Cottle, why, you may hear it from me, that is, the arrangement of Cottle's affairs in London. The whole and total copyright of your "Joan," and the first volume of your poems (exclusive of what Longman had before given), was taken by him at three hundred and seventy pounds. You are a strong swimmer, and have borne up poor Joey with all his leaden weights about him, his own and other people's! Nothing has answered to him but your works. By me he has lost somewhat – by Fox, Amos, and himself very much. I can sell your "Thalaba" quite as well in your absence as in your presence. I am employed from I-rise to I-set (that is, from nine in the morning to twelve at night), a pure scribbler. My mornings to booksellers' compilations, after dinner to Stuart, who pays all my expenses here, let them be what they will; the earnings of the morning go to make up an hundred and fifty pounds for my year's expenditure; for, supposing all clear, my year's (1800) allowance is anticipated. But this I can do by the first of April (at which time I leave London). For Stuart I write often his leading paragraphs on Secession, Peace, Essay on the new French Constitution, Advice to Friends of Freedom, Critiques on Sir W. Anderson's Nose, Odes to Georgiana D. of D. (horribly misprinted), Christmas Carols, etc., etc. – anything not bad in the paper, that is not yours, is mine. So if any verses there strike you as worthy the "Anthology," "do me the honour, sir!" However, in the course of a week I do mean to conduct a series of essays in that paper which may be of public utility. So much for myself, except that I long to be out of London; and that my Xstmas Carol is a quaint performance, and, in as strict a sense as is possible, an Impromptu, and, had I done all I had planned, that "Ode to the Duchess" would have been a better thing than it is – it being somewhat dullish, etc. I have bought the "Beauties of the Anti-jacobin," and attorneys and counsellors advise me to prosecute, and offer to undertake it, so as that I shall have neither trouble or expense. They say it is a clear case, etc. I will speak to Johnson about the "Fears in Solitude." If he gives them up they are yours. That dull ode has been printed often enough, and may now be allowed to "sink with deep swoop, and to the bottom go," to quote an admired author; but the two others will do with a little trimming.
My dear Southey! I have said nothing concerning that which most oppresses me. Immediately on my leaving London I fall to the "Life of Lessing"; till that is done, till I have given the Wedgwoods some proof that I am endeavouring to do well for my fellow-creatures, I cannot stir. That being done, I would accompany you, and see no impossibility of forming a pleasant little colony for a few years in Italy or the South of France. Peace will come soon. God love you, my dear Southey! I would write to Stuart, and give up his paper immediately. You should do nothing that did not absolutely please you. Be idle, be very idle! The habits of your mind are such that you will necessarily do much; but be as idle as you can.
Our love to dear Edith. If you see Mary, tell her that we have received our trunk. Hartley is quite well, and my talkativeness is his, without diminution on my side. 'Tis strange but certainly many things go in the blood, beside gout and scrophula. Yesterday I dined at Longman's and met Pratt, and that honest piece of prolix dullity and nullity, young Towers, who desired to be remembered to you. To-morrow Sara and I dine at Mister Gobwin's, as Hartley calls him, who gave the philosopher such a rap on the shins with a ninepin that Gobwin in huge pain lectured Sara on his boisterousness. I was not at home. Est modus in rebus. Moshes is somewhat too rough and noisy, but the cadaverous silence of Gobwin's children is to me quite catacombish, and, thinking of Mary Wollstonecraft, I was oppressed by it the day Davy and I dined there.
God love you and
S. T. Coleridge.