SYDNEY SMITH.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXII, Issue 7779, 25 June 1887, Page 3

SYDNEY SMITH.

There was one aido of ISyduoy Smith's rich wit, which Johnson would have welcomed—the short, sharp, weighty sayings on Kfe and human nature which have so much in common with his own. " Yes, you will iind people ready enough to act as the good Samaritan without the oil and tlio twopence." Such a saying only requires to be ushered in with a ! "Sir" to be in the very manner of Johnson, and worthy of his best. But, though Sydney Smith could thus rival Johnson iv Johnson's own domain, his own peculiar realm was one on which Johnson could not enter. His wit wan, at its best, the perfect wit ot fancy. His well-known saying, for example, that a certain deau deserved to he preached to death by wild curates is one which it is impossible even to imagine in the mouth .of Johnson. It is precisely one of those things which could have spiling up in no other mind than that which factually produced it, ■ It bears, like wincj the twang of its own. soil, The

wit of it bears no resemblance to the wit of intellect. Reason has no part in it ; the wit of fancy is " the insane root, which takes the reason prisoner." It would be hard to prove by logic where its merit lies. As Charles Lamb said of the story of the Oxford scholar who met a porter carrying a hare, and asked whether it was his own hair or a wig — " There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A man might blot ten sides of paper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who should be laughter-proof." It is, in short, the wit of fancy, and to fancy only it appeals. Such was the most characteristic wit of Sydney Smith. Every idea that entered his mind seemed to be attended by a ludicrous image. Someone asked him what he thought of the Lord Mayor. " I felt myself in his presence," he said, " like the Roman whom Pyrrhus tried to frighten with an elephant, and remained calm." "My dear Kodgers," he once observed to the poet, "If we were fcatii in America vre should be tarred and tattered ; and lovely as we both are by HMrc, I should be an ostrich and you an emu." No man ever equalled Sydney Smith in the wit of extravagance. He understood better than any other that the artistic use of exaggeration is not wit ; nor can we lay down any law for making it become SO. It succeeds, when it does succeed, not by rule or method, hut by certain natural happy instinct, impossible to analyse, but by which acts by intuition. It was in this faculty that Sydney Smith excelled all men. We will take a few examples :— "The Scots would have you believe they can ripen fruit ; and to be candid, I must own that, in remarkaWy warm summers, I liaxe tasted peaches that made most excellent-pickles." Part of the effect of this is due, no doubt, to the art with which it is expressed — to its air of candid expression —which seems to be yielding the points in favor of the Scots at the very moment when it tells so ludicrously against them. Again — " When so showy a woman as Mrs appears at a place, though there are no garrisons within twelve miles, the horizon is immediately crowded with majors." In this case it is not so much the mere exaggeration which gives it effect as the grotesquerie of the picture which it pre sents to the mind's eye. Again— " Such is the honor the French have of our cuisine that, at the dinner given in honor of CJuizot, at the Athenamm, his cook was heard to exclaim, 'Ah ! mon pauvre maitre ! je ne le reverraiphts.' " . It is, perhaps, scarcely, necessary to say that Guizot's cook', of course, never " ex- ! claimed " anything of the kind, and that j Sydney Smith invented the whole story. I And a line sample of artistic exaggeration it is. — Temple Bar. I -■■ ■