Alexander Smith (poet)

Alexander Smith (1830-1867), from Good Words, 1867. Courtesy Gerald-Massey.org.

Alexander Smith (31 December 1830 - 5 January 1867) was a Scottish poet and essayist.

Life

Overview

Smith, son of a Paisley pattern-designer, followed the same occupation in Glasgow, but having become known as a poet of promise was, in 1854, appointed Secretary of Edinburgh University. After contributing to the Glasgow Citizen he published A Life Drama (1853), which received much admiration. Thereafter appeared War Sonnets (with S. Dobell), City Poems (1857), and Edwin of Deira (1861). In prose he wrote Dreamthorpe (essays), A Summer in Skye, and 2 novels, Alfred Hagart's Household and Miss Dona M'Quarrie. His poems were in a rich and glowing style, but by some good judges were held to show fancy rather than imagination. He belonged to what was called the "spasmodic" school of poetry.

Youth and education

Smith was the son of Peter Smith, a lace-pattern designer in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, where he was born. His mother, Helen (Murray), was of good highland lineage. In his childhood the family moved to Paisley, and from there to Glasgow.

After a good general education, and some hesitation as to whether he should study for the church, his parents being too poor to send him to college, Smith learned pattern-designing, at which he worked both in Glasgow and Paisley.

Career

Smith's early poems appeared in the Glasgow Citizen, in whose editor, James Hedderwick, he found a friend.

His literary tastes quickly developed; his mind was usually busy with verse, and he proved apparently an indifferent designer of lace patterns. Some of his most intelligent Glasgow friends reckoned him also but a sorry poet, in spite of the distinction he gained in the local debating club, the Addisonian Society; and it was only after he had submitted some of his work to George Gilfillan that his characteristic individuality came to be recognied. Through Gilfillan's agency specimens of his verse appeared in 1851 and 1852 in the Critic and the Eclectic Review.

From the beginning his work was the subject of keen controversy, and the appearance of his Life Drama in 1853 provoked a literary warfare. Receiving £100 for his book, Smith quit pattern-designing, and visited London with his friend John Nichol (afterwards professor of English literature at Glasgow). Passing south they saw Harriet Martineau at Ambleside, and P.J. Bailey at Nottingham. In London they made the acquaintance of Arthur Helps, G.H. Lewes (who strenuously upheld Smith's work in the ‘Leader’), and other persons of note. Returning, Smith was for a week the guest of the Duke of Argyll at Inverary. Here he met Lord Dufferin, whom he subsequently visited in Ireland.

After editing for a short time the Glasgow Miscellany and doing other journalistic and literary work in Glasgow, Smith was in 1854 appointed secretary to Edinburgh University. Smith's official work occupied him daily from 10 to 4, and he gave his evenings to literature and society. He was perhaps the founder — he was at least a member — of the Raleigh Club, at which on occasional evenings men of letters and artists smoked together. His salary of £150 as university secretary was increased to £200 on his undertaking the additional duties of registrar and secretary to the university council.

Smith wrote the life of Cowper for the 8th edition of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica,’ 1854.

In the winter of 1854 he made the acquaintance of Sydney Dobell, then staying in Edinburgh, and they collaborated in a series of sonnets on the Crimean war. This co-operation emphasized the attitude of both writers, whose style as "spasmodic" poets had just been caricatured in Blackwood's Magazine for May 1854.

Smith married, in 1857, Flora Macdonald, of the same lineage as her famous namesake, and daughter of Mr. Macdonald of Ord in Skye. After his marriage Smith passed his summer holidays in Skye, his wife's home. Skye influenced the literary production of his best days. Meanwhile his official and literary work went on, and as family demands increased he found prose more readily profitable than verse, and contributed to newspapers, magazines, and encyclopædias.

To a volume of Edinburgh Essays, 1857, Smith contributed a sympathetic and discriminating article on "Scottish Ballads" (republished in Last Leaves). This essay Thomas Spencer Baynes characterised at the time as "beautiful," adding, "His prose is quite peculiar for its condensed poetic strength" (Table Talk of Shirley, p. 53).

Although Aytoun enjoyed the fun of ridiculing the excesses of the "Spasmodic School," he had (like Blackie and the other university professors) a real admiration for Smith, whose work he introduced to Blackwood's Magazine. Other outlets were also found — Macmillan, the Museum, Chambers's Encyclopædia, various newspapers — and in 1863 appeared Dreamthorp: a Book of Essays written in the Country. Occasionally florid in style, nor wholly destitute of trivial conceits, these essays embody some excellent descriptive and literary work.

In 1865 Smith published A Summer in Skye, a delightful holiday book, vivacious in narrative, bright and picturesque in description, and overflowing with individuality. For Macmillan's ‘Golden Treasury Series’ he edited, in 2 volumes, in 1865, the Poetical Works of Burns, prefixing a memoir which is second only to Lockhart's in grasp and appreciative delineation. A graphic but somewhat unequal story of Scottish life, largely autobiographical, and entitled Alfred Hagart's Household, with sequel, Miss Dona M'Quarrie, was republished from Good Words, in 2 volumes, 12mo, 1866, and 8vo, 1867. In 1866 he edited Howe's Golden Leaves from the American Poets.

Incessant work overtaxed his strength. He became seriously ill in the late autumn of 1866, and he died on 5 Jan. 1867 at Wardie, near Granton, Midlothian; he was buried in Warriston cemetery, Edinburgh. His wife, with a family, survived him. His eldest daughter, gracefully introduced into his Skye lyric, "Blaavin," died 2 months after him.

Writing

The Life Drama, and other poems, published in 1853, reached a 2nd edition that year, and passed into a 3rd in 1854, and into a 4th in 1855. Marked by youthful inexperience, and extravagant in form and imagery, the poems (especially the title-piece) abound in strong gnomic lines and display fine imaginative power. In April 1853 John Forster elaborately reviewed the book in the Examiner, prompting Matthew Arnold's opinion that Smith "has certainly an extraordinary faculty, although I think that he is a phenomenon of a very dubious character" (Arnold, Letters, i. 29).

"The latest disciple of the school of Keats," Clough called him in the North American Review for July 1853. "The poems," said the critic, "have something substantive and lifelike, immediate and first-hand about them" (Clough, Prose Remains, p. 358).

The leading periodicals of the time were agreed as to the striking character of the poems, but they differed regarding their absolute merits.

Sonnets on the Crimean War, by Smith and Dobell, appeared in 1855. As a sonneteer, while he was thoughtful and readable, Smith lacks fluency and harmony of movement. In 1857 he issued City Poems, in which he touches a high level with "Glasgow," ‘The Boy's Poem," and especially "Squire Maurice," probably his most compact and impressive achievement in verse.

The Athenæum, No. 1056 (December 1857), found evidence in the City Poems of "mutilated property of the bards," and there arose a sharp discussion over charges of plagiarism freely laid against Smith. Even Punch (probably by the hand of Shirley Brooks) was stirred to active interference, and entered for the defence. The charge was at once as valid and as futile as a similar accusation would be against Milton, for example, and Gray, and Burns. The question is discussed with adequate fulness in an appendix to Last Leaves, a posthumous volume of Smith's miscellanies, edited with memoir by his friend, P.P. Alexander.

In Edwin of Deira (Cambridge and London, 1861, 8vo), Smith writes an attractive and spirited poem, exhibiting commendable self-restraint and a chastened method. Unfortunately, the poem challenged attention almost simultaneously with Tennyson's Idylls of the King, and it is surprising that, under such a disadvantage, it reached a 2nd edition in a few months. Still, Smith did not escape the old charge of plagiarism and imitation. He was even blamed for utilising Tennyson's latest work, though his poem was mainly, if not entirely, written before the Idylls appeared (Alexander, Memoir, p. lxxxii). Envious comparisons thus instituted were inevitably detrimental, and a fine poem has probably never received its due.

In 1868 appeared Last Leaves, edited by Patrick Proctor Alexander.

Critical introduction

by John Drinkwater

Into a not very voluminous body of work, Alexander Smith managed to pack almost every known poetic vice and some that must surely have waited for him to discover. If extremes of badness alone could exclude a poet from consideration, Smith would have found no place in a collection such as this; he would, indeed, not have been even a name. His work is wild with an almost constant confusion of hysteria with passion; every story he tells, and narrative was his favourite medium, is destroyed by an entirely erratic psychologic sense; he drops easily from the most hectic manner to such flatness as —

“My heart is in the grave with her,

The family went abroad;”

his imagery can achieve a falsity which is almost revolting, as in —

“As holds the wretched west the sunset’s corpse;”

and he writes habitually as though poetry should be a dissipation instead of a discipline. And yet, in spite of such cardinal and withering defects, which cannot but be allowed by the least susceptible judgment, it is impossible to leave a reading of Smith’s collected poems without a friendly feeling for the poet, and a willing concession that, however sadly they are obscured, here are qualities of an admirable kind: qualities indeed that are as rare as poetry itself.

His defects are unfortunately of such a kind as to make it extremely difficult to give him any very gallant show by quotation, since he never flies clear of his bad habits for more than a few lines at a time, never even for one complete short poem; and they make it still more difficult to hope that his due reward will ever come from any considerable public reading his work in its entirety, since they must bring nine readers out of ten to desperation long before the end is reached. Thus inexorably does the fastidious art of poetry enforce its demand for nothing less than perfect service.

Many poets with smaller natural endowment than Alexander Smith are and will be more carefully remembered, and to attempt to arrest judgment in these matters is futile. Nevertheless, it is pleasant to think a little of those finer strains in this strange energy, and to hope that in recording and illustrating them something may be done to preserve from too deep a neglect a gift that more happily organized would certainly have won durable and high honour.

Behind the undisciplined welter which earned for Smith and one or two of his contemporaries the name of “spasmodics,” is a genuine poetic emotion, which for all its failure to find any sustained adequate expression, breaks into continual notes of energetic and sometimes impressive beauty. The faults, heavy as they are, are always the faults of a fervent, delighted nature, never of dull formality. Smith’s poetry is under-educated, which at worst is better than being over-educated. And in addition to these recurrent glimpses of an ardent nature truly making some gesture for itself, we find scattered through his work traces of a vivacious descriptive faculty, touched by a companionably racy humour. It is, perhaps, in such shrewd and deft pictures as those of the Abbot and the Crown Inn, here given: in such lines of rough poetic sense as —

“You shine through each disguise;

You are a masker in a mask of glass …”

and such quick-wittedness as—

“As gaily dight,

As goldfinch swinging on a thistle top …”

that his perception is most original and least clouded by poetic “smother.” Finally, he must be allowed something at least of the story-teller’s art. He never carries a tale through without dulling prolixity, and, as has been said, his grasp of motive is always uncertain; but there are times, especially in the opening stages of Edwin of Deira, and in the single incident of the assassin-beggar later in the same poem, where he does absorb the attention in the movement of his narrative.

I may say here, in opposition to the opinion of an eminent critic, that Edwin of Deira “might, without much loss, have remained unwritten,” that this poem seems to me easily to be Smith’s nearest approach to sustained achievement. If in mere interest as a story the last two books had maintained the standard of the first two, the whole would have remained of a not very exalted kind, but in that kind quite notably good. The truth seems to be that Smith was chiefly ambitious to create poetry directly out of his emotional experience, to resolve his own soul into music, and that whenever he attempted to do this he was prostrated by a poetic excitement instead of being braced by poetic intensity, and that he was most successful when he was not too poignantly interested in some incident or image that left the balance of his own personality undisturbed.

To say that his poetry was under-educated is not to imply that he was unacquainted with the work of his fellow poets. On the contrary his knowledge of poetry has sometimes been held to show itself too emphatically in his own work. It is, rather, his art that is under-educated; it is too argumentative, too anxiously active. His expression is under-deliberated and under-wrought. As for the direct influence of other men on his work, little need be said of such occasional things as his—

“And in your heart a linnet sits and sings,”

which recalls so closely Crashaw’s—

“Love’s nightingales shall sit and sing.”

These parallels are common enough in every poet’s work. But it is interesting to note that while Smith may confidently enough be said to have caught more than an accent at times from Tennyson, as he very honourably might do, it is not easy to point to particular passages that resemble the great Victorian poet, and yet it is very easy to find in Smith a strange likeness to another much later poet who also nourished his own rare if unfulfilled gift from Tennyson’s riches, very probably without ever having read a line of Smith. Such lines as —

  “By hermit streams, by pale sea-setting stars
And by the roaring of the storm-tost pines;
And I have sought for thee upon the hills
In dim sweet dreams, on the complacent sea,
When breathless midnight …”

and —

  “He clasped his withered hands
Fondly upon her head, and bent it back,
As one might bend a downward-looking flower …”

and—

  “Are farewells said in heaven? and has each bright
And young divinity a sunset hour?”

might in many ears miss anything characteristic of Tennyson, but they would hardly be challenged anywhere if they were set down as coming from Stephen Phillips So obscurely do great influences assert themselves.

Recognition

Smith's friends erected over his grave an Iona cross, having in the centre a bronze medallion with a profile by the sculptor Brodie.

His poems "Love" and "Barbara " were included in the Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900.

Publications

Poetry

• A Life Drama, and other poems. 1853; Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1858.
• Poems. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1853.
• Sonnets on the War (with Sydney Dobell). London: D. Bogue, 1855.
• City Poems. Cambridge, UK: Macmillan, 1857; Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1857.
• Edwin of Deira. Cambridge, UK, & London: Macmillan, 1861; Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1861.
• A Life Drama, City Poems, etc. London: Walter Scott, 1901.
• The Poetical Works. Edinburgh: W.P. Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell, 1909.

Fiction

• Alfred Hagart's Household. London: A. Strahan, 1866; Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1866. Volume I, Volume II
• Miss Oona McQuarrie. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1866.

Non-fiction

• Dreamthorp: A book of essays written in the Country. Edinburgh: W.P. Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell, 1863; London: Strahan, 1863; Boston: J.E. Tilton, 1864; London: Routledge / New York: Dutton, 1905
  • Dreamthorp: Eight essays (with engravings by Boyd Hanna). Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, [1947?]
• A Summer in Skye. Edinburgh: W.P. Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell, 1865; London: Strahan, 1865; Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1865.
• Last Leaves: Sketches and criticisms (edited by Patrick Proctor Alexander). Edinburgh: W.P. Nimmo, 1868.
• The Company of Books. London: A.H. Christlieb, 1891.
• Dreamthorp; with selections from 'Last Leaves'. London & New York: Humphrey Milford for Oxford University Press, 1914.
• Books and Gardens. Herrin, IL: Trovillion Private Press, 1946.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat..

See also

From "A Boy's Poem" by Alexander Smith - read by Russ Kick

• List of British poets

References

•  Bayne, Thomas Wilson (1898) "Smith, Alexander (1830-1867)" in Lee, Sidney Dictionary of National Biography 53 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 13-15 . Wikisource, Web, Mar. 3, 2017.
• Rev. Thomas Brisbane, The Early Years of Alexander Smith, Poet and Essayist. Hodder & Stoughton, 1869.
• Alexander Smith, Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale,. 1984)
• A memoir of Smith by P.P. Alexander was prefixed to a volume entitled Last Leaves.

External links

Poems

• Smith in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900: "Barbara," "Love"
• Alexander Smith (1829-1867) in the Scottish Poetry Library
• Smith in A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895: from A Life Drama, "Beauty," "To —"
• Smith in The English Poets: An anthology: Extract from A Life Drama, Sonnet: "Like clouds or streams we wandered on at will", Extract from Edwin of Deira, Extract from Horton, Extract from Squire Maurice
• Alexander Smith at PoemHunter (6 poems)
• Alexander Smith at Poetry Nook (16 poems)

Prose

• Essays by Alexander Smith at Quotidiana.org

Books

• Works by Alexander Smith (poet) at Project Gutenberg
• A Summer in Skye : full book available online
• Alexander Smith at Amazon.com

About

• Smith, Alexander" in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
• Alexander Smith in The Quiver

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Smith, Alexander (1830-1867)