Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 1. No 1, June 1850

Married Men. – So good was he, that I now take the opportunity of making a confession which I have often had upon my lips, but have hesitated to make from the fear of drawing upon myself the hatred of every married woman. But now I will run the risk – so now for it – some time or other, people must unburden their hearts. I confess, then, that I never find, and never have found a man more lovable, more captivating than when he is a married man; that is to say, a good married man. A man is never so handsome, never so perfect in my eyes as when he is married, as when he is a husband, and the father of a family, supporting, in his manly arms, wife and children, and the whole domestic circle, which, in his entrance into the married state, closes around him and constitutes a part of his home and his world. He is not merely ennobled by this position, but he is actually beautified by it. Then he appears to me as the crown of creation; and it is only such a man as this who is dangerous to me, and with whom I am inclined to fall in love. But then propriety forbids it. And Moses, and all European legislators declare it to be sinful, and all married women would consider it a sacred duty to stone me.

Nevertheless, I can not prevent the thing. It is so, and it can not be otherwise, and my only hope of appeasing those who are excited against me is in my further confession, that no love affects me so pleasantly; the contemplation of no happiness makes me so happy, as that between married people. It is amazing to myself, because it seems to me, that I living unmarried, or mateless, have with that happiness little to do. But it is so, and it always was so. —Miss Bremer.

[From the London Examiner.]

SIDNEY SMITH ON MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy; delivered at the Royal Institution, in the years 1804, 1805, and 1806. By the late Rev. Sydney Smith, M.A. Longman and Co.

How difficult it is to discover the merits of a manuscript appears from the history of this book. Lord Jeffrey, consulted as to the expediency of its publication, while it yet existed but in pen and ink, gave a decidedly adverse opinion. But some hundred copies having been printed for private distribution, and a copy reaching Lord Jeffrey, he hastened, with his accustomed candor and sweetness of disposition, to retract his hostile verdict, after reading the book in print; and (only three days before he was attacked by the illness which terminated his valuable life) thus wrote to Sydney Smith's widow:

"I am now satisfied that in what I then said, I did great and grievous injustice to the merit of these lectures, and was quite wrong in dissuading their publication, or concluding they would add nothing to the reputation of the author; on the contrary, my firm impression is, that, with a few exceptions, they will do him as much credit as any thing he ever wrote, and produce, on the whole, a stronger impression of the force and vivacity of his intellect, as well as a truer and more engaging view of his character, than most of what the world has yet seen of his writings."

One practical application of this anecdote is to enforce the importance of calligraphical studies upon authors. A hieroglyphical hand is the false medium excluding British authors from the public; In general we should say that there is no class of men whose education in this respect is so deplorably imperfect, or to whom "only six lessons" would so often be priceless.

We must confess that the book before us has taken us by surprise, notwithstanding our affectionate esteem and admiration for its writer. It has raised our estimate of the power and range of his intellect, of his insight into human character, of his well-balanced judgment, of his tolerance and charity undebased by compromise with the vicious or mean, of the vigorous play of his thoughts, of the sustained beauty of his style, of his eloquence as well as his humor, and of his profundity no less than of his wit. Hurriedly composed and unrevised though the lectures obviously are, fragmentary as the condition is in which they have been preserved, they are an invaluable addition to English literature.

Their delivery is associated with the first outbreak of a fashion ridiculed by Lord Byron in his Beppo and his Blues. The poet's satirical touches notwithstanding, we think that those lectures at the Royal Institution were even more wanted by their fashionable auditors at the time, than the similar prelections at Mechanics' Institutes which came in vogue for less fashionable auditors some few years later. Had it only been possible to insure the services of a series of Sydney Smiths, the Institution might have gone on lecturing to the present day to the unspeakable advantage of all parties concerned. What innumerable fopperies in literature, in politics, in religion, we might thus have escaped, it is not easy to conjecture!

The "Elementary Sketches" were delivered soon after the commencement of Sydney's metropolitan career, and bear strong marks of his recent residence in Edinburgh. In their general outline they closely approximate to the course delivered from the moral philosophy chairs of Scotch Universities. The division of the subject is the same; the authorities most frequently and panegyrically cited are the same; the principles and opinions set forth are in the main the same. Sydney Smith's moral philosophy belongs undeniably to the Scotch school – to the school of Reid, Stewart, and Adam Smith. But his "sketches" do not the less indicate an original thinker, a master in the science taught, and one who can suggest to the great men we have named almost as much as he receives from them.

The book is an excellent illustration of what could be gained by engrafting the Edinburgh philosophy on a full-grown healthy English intellect. The habits of English society, and the classical tastes imbibed at an English University, preserved Sydney Smith from that touch of pedantry which characterized the thinkers of the Scotch universities, trained in a provincial sphere, and trammeled by the Calvinistic logic even after they had freed themselves from the Calvinistic theology. Without disparaging the Edinburgh school of literature, the fact must be admitted that its most prominent ornaments have generally had the advantage of a "foreign" education. Hume and Black studied in France; Adam Smith was the member of an English university; Jeffrey had become familiar with Oxford, though he did not stay there; Homer was caught young, and civilized at Hackney; and Mackintosh and Brougham, thoroughly Scotch-bred, expanded amazingly when transplanted to the south. It may be a national weakness, but it occurs to us that Sydney Smith, who was southern born as well as bred, is still more free from narrownesses and angularities than any of them.

The healthy and genial nature of the man accounts for his most characteristic excellencies, but this book exhibits much we had not looked for. The lectures on the passions evince a power of comprehending and sympathizing with what is great in the emotional part of human nature for which we were not prepared. The lectures on the conduct of the understanding, and on habit, show that the writer had studied profoundly and successfully the discipline of the mind and character. The lectures on the beautiful are pervaded by a healthy and unaffected appreciation of the loveliness of external nature. And combined with these high qualities, is that incessant play of witty and humorous fancy (perhaps the only certain safeguard against sentimental and systematic excesses, and, when duly restrained by the judgment and moral sense, the best corrective of hasty philosophizing), so peculiar to Sydney Smith. Much of all that we have mentioned is indeed and undoubtedly attributable to the original constitution of Smith's mind; but for much he was also, beyond all question, indebted to the greater freedom of thought and conversation which (as compared with the Scotch) has always characterized literary and social opinion in England.

The topics discussed in the lectures naturally resolve themselves into, and are arranged in, three divisions. We have an analysis of the thinking faculties, or the powers of perception, conception, and reasoning; an analysis of the powers of taste, or of what Schiller and other Germans designate the æsthetical part of our nature; and an exposition of the "active powers of the mind," as they are designated in the nomenclature of the school of Reid, the appetites, passions, and will. All these themes are discussed with constant reference to a practical application of the knowledge conveyed. Every thing is treated in subordination to the establishment of rules for the right conduct of the understanding, and the formation of good habits. These practical lessons for the strengthening of the reason, and the regulation of the emotions and imagination, constitute what, in the language of Sydney Smith, and the school to which he belongs, is called "Moral Philosophy."

Apart from any particular school, the impression of the author left by the perusal of his lectures is that he was a man of considerable reading in books, but far more deeply read in the minds of those he encountered in society. It is in this extensive knowledge of the world, confirming and maturing the judgments suggested by his wisely-balanced powers of feeling and humor, that the superiority of Smith over the rest of his school consists. He knows men not merely as they are represented in books, but as they actually are; he knows them not only as they exist in a provincial sphere, narrowed by petty interests and trammeled by pedantic opinion, but as they exist in the freest community of the world, where boundless ambition and enterprise find full scope.

It appears to us that Sidney Smith is most perfectly at home – most entirely in his element – when discussing the "active powers" of man, or those impulses in which originate the practical business of life. Scarcely, if at all, secondary in point of excellence to his remarks on these topics, are those which he makes on the sublime and beautiful (a fact for which many will not be prepared), and on wit and humor (which every body will have expected). The least conclusive and satisfactory of his discussions are those which relate to the intellectual powers, or the anatomy of mind. With reference to this part of the course, however, it must be kept in remembrance that here, more than in the other two departments, he was fettered by the necessity of being popular in his language, and brief and striking in his illustrations, in order to keep within the range of the understandings and intellects of his auditory. These earlier lectures, too, survive in a more fragmentary and dilapidated condition than the rest. And after all, even where we seem to miss a sufficiently extensive and intimate acquaintance with the greatest and best writers on the subjects handled, or a sufficiently subtle and precise phraseology, we always find the redeeming qualities of lively and original conception, of witty and forcible illustration, and of sound manly sense most felicitously expressed.

In the general tone and tendency of the lectures there is something Socratic. There is the pervading common sense and practical turn of mind which characterized the Greek philosopher. There is the liberal tolerance, and the moral intrepidity. There is the amusement always insinuating or enforcing instruction. There is the conversational tone, and adaptation to the tastes and habits of the social circle. We feel that we are listening to a man who moves habitually in what is called the best society, who can relish and add a finishing grace to the pleasures of those portions of the community, but who retains unsophisticated his estimate of higher and more important matters, and whose incessant aim is to engraft a better and worthier tone of thought and aspiration upon the predominating frivolity of his associates. Nothing can be more graceful or charming than the way in which Sydney accommodates himself to the habitual language and thoughts of his brilliant auditory; nothing more manly or strengthening than the sound practical lessons he reads to them. Such a manual should now be invaluable to our aristocracy. Let them thoroughly embue themselves with its precepts, and do their best to act as largely as possible upon its suggestions. They can have no better chance of maintaining their position in the front of English society.

To appreciate the book as a whole – and its purpose, thought, and sentiment impart to it a unity of the highest kind – it must be not only read but studied. A few citations, however, gleaned here and there at random, may convey some notion of the characteristic beauties and felicities of thought and expression which are scattered through every page of it.

socrates

Socrates was, in truth, not very fond of subtle and refined speculations; and upon the intellectual part of our nature, little or nothing of his opinions is recorded. If we may infer any thing from the clearness and simplicity of his opinions on moral subjects, and from the bent which his genius had received for the useful and the practical, he would certainly have laid a strong foundation for rational metaphysics. The slight sketch I have given of his moral doctrines contains nothing very new or very brilliant, but comprehends those moral doctrines which every person of education has been accustomed to hear from his childhood; but two thousand years ago they were great discoveries, two thousand years since, common sense was not invented. If Orpheus, or Linus, or any of those melodious moralists, sung, in bad verses, such advice as a grandmamma would now give to a child of six years old, he was thought to be inspired by the gods, and statues and altars were erected to his memory. In Hesiod there is a very grave exhortation to mankind to wash their faces: and I have discovered a very strong analogy between the precepts of Pythagoras and Mrs. Trimmer; both think that a son ought to obey his father, and both are clear that a good man is better than a bad one. Therefore, to measure aright this extraordinary man, we must remember the period at which he lived; that he was the first who called the attention of mankind from the pernicious subtleties which engaged and perplexed their wandering understandings to the practical rules of life; he was the great father and inventor of common sense, as Ceres was of the plow, and Bacchus of intoxication. First, he taught his contemporaries that they did not know what they pretended to know; then he showed them that they knew nothing; then he told them what they ought to know. Lastly, to sum the praise of Socrates, remember that two thousand years ago, while men were worshiping the stones on which they trod, and the insects which crawled beneath their feet; two thousand years ago, with the bowl of poison in his hand, Socrates said, "I am persuaded that my death, which is now just coming, will conduct me into the presence of the gods, who are the most righteous governors, and into the society of just and good men; and I derive confidence from the hope that something of man remains after death, and that the condition of good men will then be much better than that of the bad." Soon after this he covered himself up with his cloak and expired.

plato

Of all the disciples of Socrates, Plato, though he calls himself the least, was certainly the most celebrated. As long as philosophy continued to be studied among the Greeks and Romans, his doctrines were taught, and his name revered. Even to the present day his writings give a tinge to the language and speculations of philosophy and theology. Of the majestic beauty of Plato's style, it is almost impossible to convey an adequate idea. He keeps the understanding up to a high pitch of enthusiasm longer than any existing writer; and, in reading Plato, zeal and animation seem rather to be the regular feelings than the casual effervescence of the mind. He appears almost disdaining the mutability and imperfection of the earth on which he treads, to be drawing down fire from heaven, and to be seeking among the gods above, for the permanent, the beautiful, and the grand! In contrasting the vigor and the magnitude of his conceptions with the extravagance of his philosophical tenets, it is almost impossible to avoid wishing that he had confined himself to the practice of eloquence; and, in this way giving range and expansion to the mind which was struggling within him, had become one of those famous orators who

"Wielded at will that fierce democratic,Shook th' arsenal, and fulmin'd over GreeceTo Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne."

After having said so much of his language, I am afraid I must proceed to his philosophy; observing always, that, in stating it, I do not always pretend to understand it, and do not even engage to defend it. In comparing the very few marks of sobriety and discretion with the splendor of his genius, I have often exclaimed as Prince Henry did about Falstaff's bill, "Oh, monstrous! but one half-pennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!"

dr. reid

In answer to these metaphysical lunacies, Dr. Reid has contended that, for all reasoning, there must be some first principles from whence such reasoning originates, and which must necessarily be incapable of proof or they would not be first principles; and that facts so irresistibly ingrafted upon human belief as the existence of mind and matter, must be assumed for truths, and reasoned upon as such. All that these skeptics have said of the outer and the inner world may, with equal justice, be applied to every other radical truth. Who can prove his own personal identity? A man may think himself a clergyman, and believe he has preached for these ten years last past; but I defy him to offer any sort of proof that he has not been a fishmonger all the time … ever doubt that all reasoning must end in arbitrary belief; that we must, at last, come to that point where the only reply can be, "I am so– this belief is the constitution of my nature – God willed it." I grant that this reasoning is a ready asylum for ignorance and imbecility, and that it affords too easy a relief from the pain of rendering a reason: but the most unwearied vigor of human talents must at last end there; the wisdom of ages can get no further; here, after all, the Porch, the Garden, the Academy, the Lyceum, must close their labors.

Much as we are indebted to Dr. Reid for preaching up this doctrine, he has certainly executed it very badly; and nothing can be more imperfect than the table of first principles which he has given us – an enumeration of which is still a desideratum of the highest importance. The skeptics may then call the philosophy of the human mind merely hypothetical; but if it be so, all other knowledge must, of course, be hypothetical also; and if it be so, and all is erroneous, it will do quite as well as reality, if we keep up a certain proportion in our errors: for there may be no such things as lunar tables, no sea, and no ships; but, by falling into one of these errors after the other, we avoid shipwreck, or, what is the same thing, as it gives the same pain, the idea of shipwreck. So with the philosophy of the human mind: I may have no memory, and no imagination – they may be mistakes; but if I cultivate them both, I derive honor and respect from my fellow-creatures, which may be mistakes also; but they harmonize so well together, that they are quite as good as realities. The only evil of errors is, that they are never supported by consequences; if they were, they would be as good as realities. Great merit is given to Dr. Reid for his destruction of what is called the ideal system, but I confess I can not see the important consequences to which it has yet led.

puns

I have mentioned puns. They are, I believe, what I have denominated them – the wit of words. They are exactly the same to words which wit is to ideas, and consist in the sudden discovery of relations in language. A pun, to be perfect in its kind, should contain two distinct meanings; the one common and obvious; the other, more remote; and in the notice which the mind takes of the relation between these two sets of words, and in the surprise which that relation excites, the pleasure of a pun consists. Miss Hamilton, in her book on Education, mentions the instance of a boy so very neglectful, that he could never be brought to read the word patriarchs; but whenever he met with it he always pronounced it partridges. A friend of the writer observed to her, that it could hardly be considered as a mere piece of negligence, for it appeared to him that the boy, in calling them partridges, was making game of the patriarchs. Now, here are two distinct meanings contained in the same phrase; for to make game of the patriarchs is to laugh at them; or to make game of them is, by a very extravagant and laughable sort of ignorance of words, to rank them among pheasants, partridges, and other such delicacies, which the law takes under its protection and calls game; and the whole pleasure derived from this pun consists in the sudden discovery that two such different meanings are referable to one form of expression. I have very little to say about puns; they are in very bad repute, and so they ought to be. The wit of language is so miserably inferior to the wit of ideas, that it is very deservedly driven out of good company. Sometimes, indeed, a pun makes its appearance which seems for a moment to redeem its species; but we must not be deceived by them; it is a radically bad race of wit. By unremitting persecution, it has been at last got under, and driven into cloisters – from whence it must never again be suffered to emerge into the light of the world.

importance of being able to despise ridicule

I know of no principle which it is of more importance to fix in the minds of young people than that of the most determined resistance to the encroachment of ridicule. Give up to the world, and to the ridicule with which the world enforces its dominion, every trifling question of manner and appearance; it is to toss courage and firmness to the winds, to combat with the mass upon such subjects as these. But learn from the earliest days to insure your principles against the perils of ridicule: you can no more exercise your reason, if you live in the constant dread of laughter, than you can enjoy your life, if you are in the constant terror of death. If you think it right to differ from the times, and to make a stand for any valuable point of morals, do it, however rustic, however antiquated, however pedantic it may appear – do it, not for insolence, but seriously and grandly– as a man who wore a soul of his own in his bosom, and did not wait till it was breathed into him by the breath of fashion. Let men call you mean, if you know you are just; hypocritical, if you are honestly religious; pusillanimous, if you feel that you are firm: resistance soon converts unprincipled wit into sincere respect; and no after-time can tear from you those feelings which every man carries within him who has made a noble and successful exertion in a virtuous cause.

bulls and charades

A bull – which must by no means be passed over in this recapitulation of the family of wit and humor – a bull is exactly the counterpart of a witticism: for as wit discovers real relations that are not apparent, bulls admit apparent relations that are not real. The pleasure arising from bulls, proceeds from our surprise at suddenly discovering two things to be dissimilar in which a resemblance might have been suspected. The same doctrine will apply to wit and bulls in action. Practical wit discovers connection or relation between actions, in which duller understandings discover none; and practical bulls originate from an apparent relation between two actions which more correct understandings immediately perceive to have none at all. In the late rebellion in Ireland, the rebels, who had conceived a high degree of indignation against some great banker, passed a resolution that they would burn his notes; which they accordingly did, with great assiduity; forgetting, that in burning his notes they were destroying his debts, and that for every note which went into the flames, a correspondent value went into the banker's pocket. A gentleman, in speaking of a nobleman's wife of great rank and fortune, lamented very much that she had no children. A medical gentleman who was present observed, that to have no children was a great misfortune, but he thought he had remarked it was hereditary in some families. Take any instance of this branch of the ridiculous, and you will always find an apparent relation of ideas leading to a complete inconsistency.