Christopher Smart

( Parley ings with Certain People of Importance in their Day. 1887.) [ The Man. ] (1722-1771.) It has only recently been discovered that Smart was anything more than a writer of second-rate eighteenth-century poetry. He was born at Ship bourne, in Kent, in 1722. He was a clever youth, and the Duche of Cleveland sent him to Cambridge, and allowed him £40 a year till her death in 1742. He did well at college, and became a fellow of Pembroke, gaining the Seaton prize five times. When he came to London he mixed in the literary society adorned by Dr. Johnson, Garrick, Dr. James, and Dr. Burney—all of whom helped him in his constant difficulties. He married a daughter of Mr. Newbery, the publisher. He became a Bohemian man of letters, but the only work by which he will be remembered is the Song to David , the history of which is sufficiently remarkable. It was written while he was in confinement as a person of unsound mind, and was—it is said, though we know not if the fact be precisely as usually stated—written with a nail on the wall of the cell in which he was detained. The poem bears no evidence of the melancholy circumstances under which it was composed: it is powerful and healthy in every line, and is evidently the work of a sincerely religious mind. He was unfortunately a man of di ipated habits, and his insanity was probably largely due to intemperance. He died in 1771 from the effects of poverty and disease. His Song to David was published in 1763, and is quite unlike any other production of the century. The poem in full consists of eighty-six verses, of which Mr. Palgrave, in the Golden Treasury , gives the following:— “He sang of God—the mighty Source Of all things, the stupendous force On which all strength depends; From Whose right arm, beneath Whose eyes, All period, power, and enterprise Commences, reigns, and ends. “The world,—the clustering spheres, He made, The glorious light, the soothing shade, Dale, champaign, grove, and hill: The multitudinous aby . Where Secrecy remains in bli , And Wisdom hides her skill. “Tell them, I AM , Jehovah said To Moses, while earth heard in dread, And, smitten to the heart, At once above, beneath, around, All Nature, without voice or sound, Replied, O Lord, Thou art .” [ The Poem. ] “How did this happen?” asks Mr. Browning. He imagined that he was exploring a large house, had gone through the decently-furnished rooms, which exhibited in their arrangement good taste without extravagance, till, on pushing open a door, he found himself in a chapel which was “From floor to roof one evidence Of how far earth may rival heaven.” Prisoned glory in every niche, it glowed with colour and gleamed with carving: it was “Art’s response to earth’s despair.” He leaves the chapel big with expectation of what might be in store for him in other rooms in the mansion, but there was nothing but the same dead level of indifferent work everywhere, just as in the rooms which he had pa ed through on his way to the exquisite chapel: nothing anywhere but calm Common-Place. Browning says this is a diagnosis of Smart’s case: he was sound and sure at starting, then caught up in a fireball. Heaven let earth understand how heaven at need can operate; then the flame fell, and the untransfigured man resumed his wonted sobriety. But what Browning wants to know is, How was it this happened but once? Here was a poet who always could but never did but once! Once he saw Nature naked; once only Truth found vent in words from him. Once the veil was pulled back, then the world darkened into the repository of show and hide.