Darken'd walls
MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
The Poetry of Christopher Smart Moira Dearnley (Routledge and Kegan Paul 50s)
Christopher Smart was once thought of as a one-poem CA Song to David') poet who was 'unfortunately mad.' However, 'Jubilate Agno,' the poem he wrote while he was confined for madness—the period of his confinement, curi- ously enough, is exactly that of the Seven Years War—has attracted considerable atten- tion since it was first published by William Force Stead in 1939.
Smart was born in Kent in 1722, son of the steward of the estates of Viscount Vane. He was an excellent classical scholar, and in 1745 was elected a Fellow of Pembroke. Cambridge regarded him as so gifted that it did all it could to save him from the inevitable conse- quences of his spendthrift drunkenness—much more than Oriel, seventy-five years later, did for the much less dissipated Hartley Coleridge —but in 1749 he had to take up the life of a Grub Street hack in London. However, as well as writing light verse, editing miscellanies and publicly performing and writing in the guise of Mrs Mary Midnight, the Man-Midwife, he translated the classics and published poetry of a more serious sort. But he continued to drink too much, and failed to achieve solvency.
From 1756 until 1763 Smart was continu- ously under some kind of restraint. Evidently he suffered from a type of manic-depressive illness which pmetimes led him to go-down on his knees and pray in public as the impulse moved him. We know that he was in St Luke's Hospital for a year, and was discharged 'an- cured'; where else he was confined is unknown, although it seems likely that he was in Bethlehem Hospital for a 'while, since he named some of its known inmates in 'Jubilate Agno.' Wherever he was, he was --visited by Johnson —another, less afflicted manic-depressive—and Burney.
From 1763 until his death in the King's Bench prison (where he was sent for debt) in 1771, Smart's affairs went from bad to worse. His marriage of 1753 had. long failed, and although friends and admirers tried to help him, nothing could save him from decline. Yet he continued to produce religious poetry. 'A Song to David,' which he is still sometimes
popularly supposed to have written upon the walls of the 'madhouse,' like the man in Pope's 'Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot' who lock'd from Ink and Paper, scrawls/With desp'rate Char- coal round his darken'd walls . .,' was not the success Smart clearly yearned for.
Moira Dearnley's is the first full-length book to be written about 'poor Kit Smart' since the late Father Christopher Devlin's sym- pathetic study of that title. It is admirably thorough and well-informed—but, regrettably, Miss Dearnley does not seern to like Smart very much, and consequently her work con- veys no enthusiasm whatever. It is nowhere stated that it is a thesis; but it reads like one.
By drawing on the work of such Smart scholars as Arthur Sherbo, W. Moelwyn Mer- chant, Charles Parish and Geoffrey Grigson (whose essay remains the best general intro- duction). the author demonstrates once and for all that 'Jubilate Agno' is only in the most superficial and vulgar sense 'mad.' As she says, in it 'Smart's concentrated form of symboli- cal utterance allows him to speak volumes in a very few lines of poetry.' She elucidates some of the multilingual puns, accepts (as she must) that the poem was composed on the antiphonal scheme discovered by W. H. Bond (and demonstrated in his article in the Harvard Library Bulletin of 1950, and in his edition of 1954); she even speaks of the 'coherent theory' it is based on.
Yet her favourite epithets for Smart, which she employs with an almost offensively patronising relish, are 'mad' and 'insane.' Dis- cussing the famous passage about Jeoffry, Smart's cat—which Bond showed is incom- plete, since we lack the hortatory 'Let' verses, the lines we possess being 'For' verses, de- signed as responses—she desperately attempts to prove that this delightful piece of accuracy mixed with punning drollery is 'mad,' the product of a 'diseased imagination.' She agrees with Stead, who, in commenting on the fine: 'For in his morning orisons he loves .
the sun and the sun loves him'
asked what 'rational man would say that the sun loves the cat?' What miserable sort of criticism is this?
Clearly, then, for Miss Dearnley almost all poetry must be 'mad': what 'rational man' would talk about 'drinking' siren tears"? Yet her notions of what she indiscriminately de- scribes as 'madness' are not well informed. Con- fusing a sense of persecution with paranoia, she continually describes Smart as paranoid —which would not be very easy to reconcile with what she concedes was his manic- depression. . . . Nor can there now be any excuse for twice referring to George III as having suffered from mental illness: it has been shown, even to the extent of a radio pro- gramme, that he did not. The quality of Miss Dearnley's psychological, analyses may be inferred from this remark, which concludes a discussion of Smart's reasons for posing as Mrs Mary Midnight, the Man-Midwife, and for sharing his pseudonyms: 'the psychologi- cal motives for sharing a name are beyond me, but could be weird enough, I suppose.' It is a pity that a factually helpful book should be marred by an apparent lack of real interest in its subject, and by a smugly superficial attitude to mental illness. Poor Kit Smart!
'Jubilate Agno,' which has come down to us in fragments, and was not intended for publication but (probably) as a therapeutic exercise, cannot possibly be described as mad
in any meaningful sense. It appears that Smart failed to sustain his opening inspiration; but once we understand what he was trying to do we can usually follow him. And by follow- ing him in this poem we can understand 'A Song to David' more fully. One of the reasons for Smart's breakdown in 1756 must have been that, although he desperately wanted to be a poet of stature, he was in fact a mere hack—and a broke one at that. His idea of poetic greatness was not at all an Augustan one—although some of his early conventional exercises have great charm as well as skill. He may therefore be seen as a man remorse- lessly driving himself into a state so personal to himself, so unrelated to his environment, that he could proceed without inhibitions. His contemporary Gray, in his later poems, tried to achieve the wildness he knew the poetry of his age lacked; Smart came nearer in 'A Song ID David,' but paid a higher price.
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