Part 7 (1/2)
Smart gained the Seatonian prize in 1755, having apparently failed in 1754, and then appears no more in Pembroke records.
The circ.u.mstance of his having made Cambridge too hot to hold him seems to have pulled Smart's loose faculties together. The next five years were probably the sanest and the busiest in his life. He had collected his scattered odes and ballads, and published them, with his ambitious georgic, _The Hop Garden_, in the handsome quarto before us. Among the seven hundred subscribers to this venture we find ”Mr.
Voltaire, historiographer of France,” and M. Roubilliac, the great statuary, besides such English celebrities as Gray, Collins, Richardson, Savage, Charles Avison, Garrick, and Mason. The kind reception of this work awakened in the poet an inordinate vanity, which found expression, in 1753, in that extraordinary effusion, _The Hilliad_, an attempt to preserve Dr. John Hill in such amber as Pope held at the command of his satiric pa.s.sion. But these efforts, and an annual Seatonian, were ill adapted to support a poet who had recently appended a wife and family to a phenomenal appet.i.te for strong waters, and who, moreover, had just been deprived of his stipend as a fellow.
Smart descended into Grub Street, and bound himself over, hand and foot, to be the serf of such men as the publisher Newbery, who was none the milder master for being his relative. It was not long after, doubtless, that Smart fell lower still, and let himself out on a lease for ninety-nine years, to toil for a set pittance in the garrets of Gardner's shop; and it was about this time, 1754, that the Rev. T.
Tyers was introduced to Smart by a friend who had more sympathy with his frailties than Gray had, namely, Dr. Samuel Johnson.
After a world of vicissitudes, which are very uncomfortable reading, about 1761 Smart became violently insane once more and was shut up again in Bedlam. Dr. Johnson, commenting on this period of the poet's life, told Dr. Burney that Smart grew fat when he was in the madhouse, where he dug in the garden, and Johnson added: ”I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I'd as lief pray with Kit Smart as with any one else. Another charge was that he did not love clean linen; and I have no pa.s.sion for it.” When Boswell paid Johnson his memorable first visit in 1763, Smart had recently been released from Bedlam, and Johnson naturally spoke of him. He said: ”My poor friend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind by falling upon his knees and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place.” Gray about the same time reports that money is being collected to help ”poor Smart,” not for the first time, since in January 1759, Gray had written: ”Poor Smart is not dead, as was said, and _Merope_ is acted for his benefit this week,” with the _Guardian_, a farce which Garrick had kindly composed for that occasion.
It was in 1763, immediately after Smart's release, that the now famous _Song to David_ was published. A long and interesting letter in the correspondence of Hawkesworth, dated October 1764, gives a pleasant idea of Smart restored to cheerfulness and placed ”with very decent people in a house, most delightfully situated, with a terrace that overlooks St. James's Park.” But this relief was only temporary; Smart fell back presently into drunkenness and debt, and was happily relieved by death in 1770, in his forty-eighth year, at the close of a career as melancholy as any recorded in the chronicles of literature.
Save for one single lyric, that glows with all the flush and bloom of Eden, Smart would take but a poor place on the English Parna.s.sus.
His odes and ballads, his psalms and satires, his masques and his georgics, are not bad, but they are mediocre. Here and there the very careful reader may come across lines and phrases that display the concealed author of the _Song to David_, such as the following, from an excessively tiresome ode to Dr. Webster:
_When Israel's host, with all their stores, Pa.s.sed through_ the ruby-tinctured crystal sh.o.r.es, The wilderness of waters and of land.
But these are rare. His odes are founded upon those of Gray, and the best that can be said of them is that if they do not quite rise to the frozen elegance of Akenside, they seldom sink to the flaccidity of Mason. Never, for one consecutive stanza or stroke, do they approach Collins or Gray in delicacy or power. But the _Song to David_--the lyric in 516 lines which Smart is so absurdly fabled to have scratched with a key on the white-washed walls of his cell--this was a portent of beauty and originality. Strange to say, it was utterly neglected when it appeared, and the editor of the 1791 edition of Smart's works expressly omitted to print it on the ground that it bore too many ”melancholy proofs of the estrangement of Smart's mind” to be fit for republication. It became rare to the very verge of extinction, and is now scarcely to be found in its entirety save in a pretty reprint of 1819, itself now rare, due to the piety of a Rev. R. Harvey.
It is obvious that Smart's contemporaries and immediate successors looked upon the _Song to David_ as the work of a hopelessly deranged person. In 1763 poetry had to be very sane indeed to be attended to.
The year preceding had welcomed the _s.h.i.+pwreck_ of Falconer, the year to follow would welcome Goldsmith's _Traveller_ and Grainger's _Sugar Cane_, works of various merit, but all eminently sane. In 1763 Shenstone was dying and Rogers was being born. The tidy, spruce, and discreet poetry of the eighteenth century was pa.s.sing into its final and most p.r.o.nounced stage. The _Song to David_, with its bold mention of unfamiliar things, its warm and highly-coloured phraseology, its daring adjectives and unexampled adverbs, was an outrage upon taste, and one which was best accounted for by the tap of the forefinger on the forehead. No doubt the poem presented and still may present legitimate difficulties. Here, for instance, is a stanza which it is not for those who run to read:
_Increasing days their reign exalt, Nor in the pink and mottled vault The opposing spirits tilt; And, by the coasting reader spy'd, The silverlings and crusions glide For Adoration gilt_.
This is charming; but if it were in one of the tongues of the heathen we should get Dr. Verrall to explain it away. Poor Mr. Harvey, the editor of 1819, being hopelessly puzzled by ”silverlings,” the only dictionary meaning of which is ”shekels,” explained ”crusions” to be some other kind of money, from [Greek: krousis]. But ”crusions” are golden carp, and when I was a child the Devons.h.i.+re fishermen used to call the long white fish with argent stripes (whose proper name, I think, is the launce) a silverling. The ”coasting reader” is the courteous reader when walking along the coast, and what he sees are silver fish and gold fish, adoring the Lord by the beauty of their scales. The _Song to David_ is cryptic to a very high degree, but I think there are no lines in it which patient reflection will not solve. On every page are stanzas the verbal splendour of which no lover of poetry will question, and lines which will always, to me at least, retain an echo of that gusto with which I have heard Mr.
Browning's strong voice recite them:
_The wealthy crops of whitening rice 'Mongst thyine woods and groves of spice, For Adoration grow; And, marshall'd in the fenced land, The peaches and pomegranates stand, Where wild carnations blow.
The laurels with the winter strive; The crocus burnishes alive Upon the snow-clad earth;
For Adoration ripening canes And cocoa's purest milk detains The westering pilgrim's staff; Where rain in, clasping boughs inclos'd, And vines with oranges dispos'd, Embower the social laugh.
For Adoration, beyond match, The scholar bulfinch aims to catch The soft flute's ivory touch; And, careless on the hazle spray, The daring redbreast keeps at bay The damsel's greedy clutch_.
To quote at further length from so fascinating, so divine a poem, would be ”purpling too much my mere grey argument.” Browning's praise ought to send every one to the original. But here is one more stanza that I cannot resist copying, because it seems so pathetically applicable to Smart himself as a man, and to the one exquisite poem which was ”the more than Abis.h.a.g of his age”:
_His muse, bright angel of his verse, Gives balm for all the thorns that pierce, For all the pangs that rage; Blest light, still gaining on the gloom, The more than Michal of his bloom, The Abis.h.a.g of his age_.
POMPEY THE LITTLE
THE HISTORY OF POMPEY THE LITTLE; _or, the Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog. London: Printed for M. Cooper, at the Globe in Paternoster Row, MDCCLI_.
In February 1751 the town, which had been suffering from rather a dreary spell since the acceptable publication of _Tom Jones_, was refreshed and enlivened by the simultaneous issue of two delightfully scandalous productions, eminently well adapted to occupy the polite conversation of ladies at drums and at the card-table. Of these one was _The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality_, so oddly foisted by Smollett into the third volume of his _Peregrine Pickle_. This was recognised at once as being the work of the frail and adventurous Lady Vane, about whom so many strange stories were already current in society.
The other puzzled the gossips much longer, and it seems to have been the poet Gray who first discovered the authors.h.i.+p of _Pompey the Little_. Gray wrote to tell Horace Walpole who had written the anonymous book that everybody was talking about, adding that he had discovered the secret through the author's own carelessness, three of the characters being taken from a comedy shown him by a young clergyman at Magdalen College, Cambridge. This was the Rev. Francis Coventry, then some twenty-five years of age. The discovery of the authors.h.i.+p made Coventry a nine-days' hero, while his book went into a mult.i.tude of editions. It was one of the most successful _jeux d'esprit_ of the eighteenth century.
The copy of the first edition of _Pompey the Little_, which lies before me, contains an excellent impression of the frontispiece by Louis Boitard, the fas.h.i.+onable engraver-designer, whose print of the Ranelagh Rotunda is so much sought after by amateurs. It represents a curtain drawn aside to reveal a velvet cus.h.i.+on, on which sits a graceful little Italian lap-dog with pendant silky ears and sleek sides spotted like the pard. This is Pompey the Little, whose life and adventures the book proceeds to recount. ”_Pompey_, the son of _Julio_ and _Phyllis_, was born A.D. 1735, at _Bologna_ in _Italy_, a place famous for lap-dogs and sausages.” At an early age he was carried away from the boudoir of his Italian mistress by Hillario, an English gentleman ill.u.s.trious for his gallantries, who brought him to London.
The rest of the history is really a chain of social episodes, each closed by the incident that Pompey becomes the property of some fresh person. In this way we find ourselves in a dozen successive scenes, each strongly contrasted with the others. It is the art of the author that he knows exactly how much to tell us without wearying our attention, and is able to make the transition to the next scene a plausible one.