[In the following essay, Grimsditch argues that while Smith's poetry is noteworthy because of its imagery, Smith deserves high regard as a prose writer because of the personal nature of and the humor found in his essays.]

In literature, as in life, there is no fixed ratio between merit and reward, whether reward be taken to mean popularity and pecuniary gain or posthumous renown. Posterity, it is true, does sort out the authors who were undeniably great and relentlessly eliminates those who were undoubtedly little; but between these two extremes are placed a number of men whose status, in the eyes of the critics, is not definitely determined. Their reputations are reconsidered from time to time, and, not infrequently, as with Herman Melville and "Erewhon" Butler at the present time, the work of a writer who has been unduly neglected takes on a new lease of popularity.

Among these inhabitants of the middle state, who, like Mr. Kipling's Tomlinson, are neither good enough for heaven nor bad enough for hell, the Scottish poet and essayist, Alexander Smith, would seem to merit greater attention on the part of the present generation. "Lifted up" (as Carlyle said of Kotzebue) "on the hollow balloon of popular applause" long before his talents had reached maturity, his fall, on the deflation of that balloon, was a great one; and it would have been better for him in the end if he had made the ascent of Parnassus on foot. Yet among the minor poets and perhaps even among the major essayists he has real claims to recognition.

Smith was born at Kilmarnock on December 31st, 1830, son of a pattern-designer. No detailed accounts of his early years exist, but we are informed by his friend Patrick Proctor Alexander that his education included "some tincture of Latin and mathematics." It is improbable that he studied at all deeply along classical lines, since his works are almost entirely devoid of allusion to Greek and Roman fable at a time when such references were part of the regular poetical equipment. His family moved to Paisley and thence to Glasgow (the dates are not known) and in Glasgow Smith grew up, reading deeply in English prose and verse, astonishing the local literary and debating society by the fine quality of his contributions, and eventually finding a place for some of his poems in the columns of a local newspaper. His parents thought of making him a minister, but for some reason the idea was abandoned. It is unlikely that it was any change of views on Smith's part which prevented the carrying-out of the first design, for, in spite of a certain rationalistic flavour in his thought, passages in Edwin of Deira, the essay on "Christmas" and elsewhere prove that his faith in the Christian religion remained unshaken: at all events, on leaving school he was not sent to a University, but became apprenticed to his father's trade.

Literature, however, was his main interest, and in the year 1850 he made his début as a poet with some verses To a Friend published in the Glasgow Evening Citizen, a paper which continued, from time to time, to offer him the hospitality of its pages, wherein a number of his poems appeared under the pseudonym of "Smith Murray." The next year he sent some specimens of his work for criticism to the Rev. George Gilfillian, of Dundee, who was known as a sponsor of young authors and a contributor to various critical reviews. Gilfillian was away from home when Smith's manuscripts arrived, so his reply was somewhat delayed; but when he did eventually read the poems he pronounced a very favourable opinion and followed it up with articles in the Eclectic Review and the Critic, praising Smith's work and quoting extracts therefrom. The result of this was a considerable interest in the young Scotsman on the part of literary people before he had published any work of outstanding importance. He made friends with Hugh Macdonald and Professor John Nichol, and his acquaintance was sought by many whose interest had been aroused by Gilfillian's articles.

From the age of eighteen Smith had been in the habit of spending his summer holiday in the Highlands and the Western Isles, where he composed a good deal of verse and recited it to his companion while tramping among the glens and mountains. In 1853 he gathered together some of these poems, including A Life Drama (which was strung together from a number of separate compositions) and submitted them to the publisher Bogue, who accepted them and paid a fee of £100. This volume of Poems called forth favourable reviews not only in England, but also in France and as far afield as the United States and Australia, selling in several thousands of copies and reaching a fourth edition by 1855. In the first flush of success Smith gave up his trade and set out for London with John Nichol, visiting Miss Martineau and Philip James Bailey on the way. In the Capital he met with sympathy and encouragement from G. H. Lewes, Sir Arthur Helps and Herbert Spencer, and subsequently he was the guest of the Duke of Argyle and of Lord Dufferin. However, he soon seems to have found the necessity of having a secure regular income, for we next find him (in 1854) in the post of Secretary to the University of Edinburgh at a salary of £150 per annum. At Edinburgh he met Sydney Dobell, with whom he collaborated in Sonnets on the War (1855); but already, in 1854, had appeared W. E. Aytoun's parody Firmilian; or the Student of Badajoz: a spasmodic tragedy, under the nom de guerre of "T. Percy Jones," which dealt a satirical blow at both Smith and Dobell before they had actually met. When Smith's City Poems were published in 1857 they encountered but a lukewarm reception: his marriage in the same year to a descendant of the famous Flora Macdonald increased his responsibilities and thenceforward his life was a constant struggle against poverty and overwork. His next volume, Edwin of Deira (1861) brought down on his head accusations of plagiarism—a charge which had already been levelled at City Poems by the Athenœum of December, 1857; and though Smith preserved his dignity under these attacks he deserted verse for prose, probably hoping that "the other harmony" would be more remunerative and less likely to give rise to calumny.

He contributed to numerous periodicals, and in 1863 collected a number of his essays in a volume called Dreamthorp, now deservedly the best known of his works, which was reprinted by the Oxford University Press in 1914 with an introduction by Professor Hugh Walker. Two years later appeared A Summer in Skye and an edition of Burns. Smith even essayed fiction, and a novel of his entitled Alfred Hagart's Household ran as a serial in Good Words and was issued in book form in 1866. He then wrote a sequel, Miss Oona McQuarrie, and one of his last literary tasks was the editing of J. W. S. Howe's Golden Leaves from the American Poets, in 1866, for towards the end of that year his health broke down, and he died of typhoid fever on January 5th, 1867. In 1868 Patrick P. Alexander made a selection from his periodical contributions and gave them to the world with the title Last Leaves.

It is easy but uncritical to dismiss Smith, Dobell and P. J. Bailey with the contemptuous epithet "Spasmodic." Such labels, attached to a group of men who are sincerely striving after artistic expression, are very harmful, however salutary they may be when affixed to obvious charlatans. A famous instance which comes to mind is Dr. Johnson's condemnation of the "Metaphysicals" in his Life of Cowley where he employed the term with a deprecatory connotation, and, in his haste to discover the faults of a type of work outside his ken, almost entirely overlooked its great and outstanding virtues. There is no need to put forward the untenable claim that Smith had the "grand style" in verse. We may search in vain for lines like

. . . magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn

or like

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through thee,
are fresh and strong.

But none the less he possessed many of the qualities of a true poet and wrote much verse which deserves to live by virtue of the music of its cadences, the vivid beauty of its imagery and the delicate play of its imaginative power. In the medium of the essay his accomplishment was still greater, and the man who does not know Dreamthorp, "A Lark's Flight" and "Christmas" has denied himself some of the most delightful passages in English prose, second only to Lamb's excursions in the same kind.

A Life-Drama, Smith's first long poem, is, taken as a whole, an unsuccessful performance. It is a drama in name only, and, from the nature of its subject as well as from the looseness of its construction, cannot even be ranked with that literary genre of doubtful legitimacy, the unplayable poetic play. It deals with the soul-struggle of a young poet, Walter, who is seeking fame and ideal love and is baulked of the one by incapacity and of the other, first by the death of the earliest beloved and then by a moral lapse. Torn by remorse, Walter, after unburdening himself to an outcast woman on a city bridge at midnight and then grasping fame, only to find it dust and ashes, returns to his Violet and finds salvation in a love purified with suffering. Walter is too self-conscious and overmuch concerned with niceties of sentiment, toying with each pleasurable or painful emotion as it comes, unable to take a firm stand on any moral or intellectual principle. Smith was compared with Keats in the days of his success, and though to mention him at this hour in the same breath with the Keats of the Odes and Hyperion would be to display a total lack of sense of proportion, A Life-Drama does call to mind in parts the early work of that master. Edward's song in Scene 8, for instance, with its

O kiss me into faintness sweet and dim!

and

My heart, like moon-charmed waters, all unrest,

recalls the somewhat sickly lusciousness found in certain passages of Endymion. The poem is mainly in blank verse, for the most part unrelieved by feminine endings, and containing a very large proportion of end-stopped lines, so that the general effect inclines to monotony. Some of its lines are as flat and prosaic as the flattest of Wordsworth, for example:

The family went abroad.

and

I shall go down to Bedfordshire to-morrow.

But when all this has been said there are many purple patches, and many instances of that power of evolving vivid and telling "images" which, so long ago as Longinus, was rightly considered a high poetic virtue. In such a simile as

Her unpolluated corse doth sleep in earth
Like a pure thought within a sinful soul

the transition from an unpleasant idea to a peaceful and gracious conception is skilfully effected. Equally apposite, in a different way, is the jovial Arthur's rough-and-ready piece of optimistic philosophy:

. . . . . . . . The world's a tun,
A gloomy tun, but he who taps the world
Will find much sweetness in't. . . .

A Life-Drama is imbued with a rich feeling for nature, more especially under the glowing hues of sunset or the pale light of stars or moon. There is a singularly delicate beauty in many of Walter's speeches and soliloquies; and into his mouth are put some of the best lines in the poem:

I saw the pale and penitential moon
Rise from dark waves that plucked at her, and go
Sorrowful up the sky. . . .

The exquisite lyrics of Beddoes give more than half their value to his plays, and the same is true, in lesser degree, of the lyrics scattered over the pages of this poem of Smith's; for example, the Lady's song (Scene 2), in simple ballad metre, which begins excellently—

In winter when the dismal rain
Came down in slanting lines,
And Wind, that grand old harper, smote
His thunder-harp of pines,

A Poet sat in his antique room,
His lamp the valley kinged,
'Neath dry crusts of dead tongues he found
Truth, fresh and golden-winged.

This lacks something of the naïveté of the ballad, but it is in the old form and not far away from the old sentiment and falls pleasantly on the ear. Arthur's drinking-song in Scene 8 has the requisite rollicking metre and may bear comparison with Thomas Love Peacock's

A heel-tap! A heel-tap! I never could bear it,

so far as versification is concerned. Walter has another lyric, in Scene 4, wherein an interesting metrical experiment is made, depending largely on recurring rhyme through three ten-line stanzas. A further similarity with Beddoes may be detected in the occasional references to modern science.

Much of the questing after fame, expression and ideal love which plays so large a part in A Life-Drama is probably a reflection of the poet's own desires. We know that Keats gave voice to very similar longings for the fulfilment of his poetic purpose in Hyperion: a Vision, and if Smith had possessed as great a gift, his spiritual autobiography would have been better worth the reading.

In the same volume appear eight sonnets and three other pieces, "An Evening at Home," "Lady Barbara" and "To—". Of these, by far the most notable is "Lady Barbara," in Spenserian stanzas, one of the best things Smith ever wrote in verse. Its language is distinguished and pregnant with romance, quite without conceits or straining after the unusual, but attaining that choice of the inevitable word which brings full realisation of what the late Sir Walter Raleigh meant, when he said in his essay on Style that there was no such thing as a synonym. What synonym could satisfactorily replace the adjective in this line from the mouth of a man doomed to sail the seas for ever?

And onward I must float, through slow moon-measured years.

Pictures "flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude"; pictures serene, or bizarre, like those conjured up by Sir Eustace Grey. The sonnets are not very good examples of the Petrarchan form, and the same is true of Sonnets on the War, written with Dobell two years later, wherein the regular sonnet-structure is scarcely ever employed, either in the sequence of the rhymes or the break in thought at the end of the octet, to the detriment of the general effect. "An Evening at Home" contains the sketch of the idea afterwards worked up into the long poem: Edwin of Deira. It also contains a line,

A simple primrose on a grassy bank,

reminiscent of a famous verse in Wordsworth's Peter Bell. Accidental similarities of phrasing like this, and a passage in Edwin of Deira, Book I, on the bats,

That skim the twilight on their leathern wings,

which recalls Collins's Ode to Evening, may have given rise to the accusations of plagiarism brought against Smith. But everything that we know of his private life, everything we can gather from his very self-revelatory work (apart from P. P. Alexander's detailed refutation of many of the charges in his note to Last Leaves) makes it extremely unlikely that he stooped to conscious borrowing from his predecessors.

Turning to City Poems it is evident that a great expansion of talent and a sensible progress in taste have taken place during the four years between the two volumes. The poet is still preoccupied with the subjects which occupied his mind when he wrote A Life-Drama. Like the central figure of "Horton,"

. . . . His sin of sins
Was ne'er to be the master of himself,

but he approaches considerably nearer to self-mastery than he has done before; his strength of character has increased and with it his command over his medium, which is still, in the main, blank verse. "Horton" contains a considerable amount of disquisition on the nature and purpose of poetry, and deals with the trials of yet another poet, maligned, misunderstood and driven to roistering by the tragic death of the woman he loves, a few days from the date fixed for marriage. His song, revealing the real soul, unknown to his boon-companions, gives voice to the great sorrow which weighs him down, and the name of Barbara, on which each stanza ends, forms a sad refrain. A verse may be given here:

'Mong angels do you think
Of the precious golden link
I clasped around your happy arm while sitting by yon brink?
Or when that night of gliding dance, of laughter and guitars,
Was emptied of its music, and we watched through latticed bars,
The silent midnight heaven, creeping o'er us with its stars,
Till the day broke, Barbara?

In City Poems the autobiographical element is strong, and a phrase in "A Boy's Poem": "It was the closing evening of the year, The night that I was born," slips out and reveals it beyond question, but, even were this not so, the dominant ideas of this poem, "Glasgow" and "Horton" accord so well with the known facts of the poet's life that no serious doubt can remain. In "Glasgow" we hear the song of the unwilling town-dweller, wistfully casting his mind back to days spent amid nature's splendour but nevertheless finding, as a true artist ever will find, that the city has a beauty of its own for him who has eyes to see it. "A Boy's Poem" is instinct with fine feeling for the moods and aspects of nature, and full of the tragedy of poverty and unrequited love, and an ever-present sense of the supremacy and inevitability of death. "Squire Maurice" seems to mark the stage at which Smith was at last able to project himself into another personality, and presents an interesting case of conscience—the problem before the Squire being that of the clash between his social status and preconceived ideals of feminine perfection and the deep love of a village girl. It is the kind of subject that Crabbe delighted in, and to say that Smith's treatment of it has points of superiority to Crabbe's methods is to give him only his due allowance of praise.

This self-projection is carried a step further in Edwin of Deira wherein Smith not only escapes from his introspective Old Man of the Sea but achieves a certain amount of action and a concrete subject-matter which is lacking in his earlier work. Edwin, king of Deira, seeking refuge from his enemies at the court of King Redwald, falls in love with his daughter, Bertha. This love is reciprocated, but before they marry there is more fierce bloodshed provoked by Ethelbert; and Regner, favourite son of Redwald, is killed. There is an appealing description of the mourning, and then of the marriage between Edwin and Bertha. A child is born to them, and at last, by the instrumentality of a band of evangelists, the natives of Deira, after desecrating the shrines of their ancient faith and finding that no harm results, are baptised as Christians.

Edwin of Deira was in great part written before Tennyson's Idylls appeared, but it was unfortunate for Smith that his choice of a knightly theme should have occurred at this time, for it raised once more the outcry of plagiarism. For all their superficial similarity in certain particulars, however, Edwin and the Idylls are distinguished by differences of intention and method which ought to have been apparent to the critics. Smith's poem, however much it may fall short of Tennyson's wonderful pageant of the Arthurian legend, is, in a sense, the culmination of his poetic achievement. The vivid metaphor and simile, the keen perception of beauty, the transparent sincerity of sentiment which we find in the early poems are still there, but over and above these qualities are superadded a greater reticence, a more unaffected simplicity, and a surer ear for the harmony of verse.

The tale of Smith's work in metre (leaving aside such pieces as are buried in the files of the newspapers) is completed by "A Spring Chanson" (Last Leaves) and a few poems incorporated in A Summer in Skye. The "Chanson" recaptures some of the freshness of the Middle English lyric, and that section of it which runs off from the irregular four-beat measure into a trochaic cadence reminds one a little of Blake's Auguries of Innocence, but the auguries here are rather of spring:

Ón all/hármless/créeping/thíngs
Cómes de/síre of/páinted/wíngs.

On taking up the essays, one is struck immediately by the facility with which Smith seems to have attained an accomplished prose style without apparent gropings after a method. This is not to say that there are not certain passages which have a more immediate appeal and remain longer in the memory than others, but it would be difficult to trace any line of development from the early work to the later, showing definite gradations of progress. In the prose even more than in the verse there are rich jewels of imagery. "Youth," he says, in "An Essay on an Old Subject" (Last Leaves), "is a lyrical poet, middle age a quiet essayist, fond of recounting experiences, and of appending a moral to every incident." Or again, "Winter is like a Red Indian, noble in his forests and solitudes, deteriorated by cities and civilisation." ("Winter": Last Leaves). Speaking of battered editions of classic literature in a village library he says: "The viands are celestial if set forth on a dingy tablecloth." (Dreamthorp). His sentences, in the main, are short, and on occasion he can strike clause on clause to drive home a contention, turning the subject round on every side but avoiding tautology. A passage from the essay on Dunbar (Dreamthorp) will exemplify this:

In our theatres the pantomime, which was originally an adumbration of human life, has become degraded. Symbolism has departed from the boards, and burlesque reigns in its stead. The Lord Mayor's Show, the last remnant of the antique spectacular taste, does not move us now; it is held a public nuisance; it provokes the rude chaff of the streets. Our very mobs have become critical. Gog and Magog are dethroned. The knight feels the satiric comments through his armour. The very steeds are uneasy, as if ashamed.

Smith's breadth of reading is apparent not only from the definite references he makes to different authors, but in quotation, conscious like most of his Shakespearean phrases or unconscious like the obvious, unacknowledged echo of La Rochefoucauld which occurs in "On the Importance of a Man to Himself: "Love and friendship are the discoveries of ourselves in others, and our delight in the recognition."

The essays in Dreamthorp and Last Leaves fall into two divisions—familiar notes and literary appreciations, while A Summer in Skye is more or less a series of the same two kinds loosely joined together by the recital of the actual tour. The English familiar essay is one of the most pleasing manifestations of the national genius. Its essence is that it shall be personal, discursive and good-humoured, without polemical purpose or violence of passion, a green oasis where the intellectually wearied may rest awhile from his labours. No better description of the genre could be found than the paper in Dreamthorp, "On the Writing of Essays," which shows Smith not only a master-craftsman but a craftsman fully conscious of his own methods and literary lineage; while his remarks on Montaigne and his contrast of the Frenchman with Bacon prepare us for the exhibition of sound and penetrating criticism which is given in the Dunbar, the Geoffrey Chaucer and elsewhere.

In the title-essay and the others of the Dreamthorp volume Smith appears in the guise of a middle-aged philosopher living in the retirement of a small village, looking with a kindly eye upon the simple pursuits and amusements of the natives, recking nothing of the great world of cities, and discoursing with pleasant candour and humility on any subject which comes to his hand. There is a certain pathos in the assumption of this personality, for the placid country life mirrored in the pages of Dreamthorp, wherein a good-humoured argument between the doctor and the clergyman becomes worthy to be set down as an incident, is just the happy, carefree state to which the over-worked, town-dwelling secretary and literary free-lance never attained; and he died when only on the threshold of middle age. "An Essay on an Old Subject" (Last Leaves) gives voice to the praises of the "forties" as the time of life when the truest happiness can be tasted:

On the whole, I take it that middle age is a happier period than youth. In the entire circle of the year there are no days so delightful as those of a fine October, when the trees are bare to the mild heavens, and the red leaves bestrew the road, and you can feel the breath of winter, morning and evening—no days so calm, so tenderly solemn, and with such a reverent meekness in the air. The lyrical upburst of the lark at such a time would be incongruous. The only sounds suitable to the season are the rusty caw of the homeward-sliding rook—the creaking of the wain returning empty from the farmyard. . . .

If in Smith's verse a hectic note at times intrudes and spoils the harmony, in the prose no such disturbing element is present. Mellowness of thought, ripeness of judgment, serenity of temper, make the author of Dreamthorp and A Summer in Skye a very different being from him whose lineaments can be discerned in Walter or Horton. Even such a subject as "Death and the Fear of Dying" is treated without a hint of morbidity: he begins with extracts from Montaigne and Bacon, acknowledging the bravery of their outlook, but commencing his own remarks by the statement that their words are ineffectual in the face of the mighty fact. The fact always claims Smith's highest respect. He can write sympathetically of superstitions and omens, but never for one moment does his own reason allow him to believe therein. He adverts to the recognition of the fact of death running through human consciousness, heightening pleasure by a sense of transience, and to the dignity conferred on the meanest beggar by its presence. He contrasts the shallowness of a line of Byron's with the depth of one of Hamlet's soliloquies, and, refusing to venture on any theological or metaphysical speculations, closes thus, simply, without dogmatism:

It may not be so difficult, may not be so terrible, as our fears whisper. The dead keep their secrets, and in a little while we shall be as wise as they—and as taciturn.

The troubles and compensations of the literary life are discussed in "Men of Letters" (Dreamthorp), an essay full of thought, and of that wistfulness which is one of the most attractive qualities in Smith's writings—because it is sincere and not the pose of the sentimentalist. "A Lark's Flight" reveals another quality which has been hitherto unexpected—a dramatic gift of no mean order. Two criminals are being executed in public, and, just as the executioner is about to perform his task, a lark starts up from the grass by the scaffold and is still pursuing his singing flight heavenwards when the two men have passed into eternity. The passage which describes this incident has been likened by Professor Hugh Walker to the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, than which praise could no higher go.

Smith's literary likes and dislikes are difficult to account for, as will be seen on reading "A Shelf from my Bookcase" (Dreamthorp). Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, Aytoun's Ballads of Scotland, the Lyra Germanica, Boswell's Johnson and Ebenezer Elliott form a strange assortment. It is strange, too, to find Wordsworth expressly excluded from among his "intimates" along with Shakespeare and Milton, for it is part of Wordsworth's greatness that he can still be read in the "indolent, languid" mood of which Carlyle complained when writing of the Waverley Novels. Smith is well-read in the English essay, he knows his Chaucer, he delights in the old Scottish poetry and has something suggestive to say about each of them. He has a certain gift of throwing out a critical epigram, which, though it be not all-embracing (few epigrams can be that) yet gives a very fair idea of the author under discussion. Thus of Leigh Hunt he says: "He called one of his books 'A Book for the Parlour Window'; all his books are for the parlour window." ("Essayists Old and New": Last Leaves); and of Chaucer: "He is like a cardinal virtue, a good deal talked about, a good deal praised, honoured by a vast amount of distant admiration, but with little practical acquaintance." But apart from such mots, Smith can enter into the spirit of a writer, giving a good interpretation of his work and his point of view, fulfilling one of the primary aims of criticism by arousing the desire to read the books criticised.

No account of Smith's essays would be complete without some allusion to the delightful Summer in Skye, which, as has been said, is less a connected narrative of travel than a series of essays on the scenery, history, legend, manners and customs of the romantic island. Herein Smith shows that he is soaked in the traditional lore of the Hebrides; and furthermore that he can retail the feuds of the Macleods and the Macdonalds in such a manner that no whit of their interest is lost. Living before modern scholarship had knocked the bottom out of Macpherson's claims, he is a firm believer in the authenticity of "Ossian" and refers to him often, quoting him at some length. Association has great sway over his mind: he likes to visualise Johnson and Boswell in the Hebrides (the Doctor alluding to the mountains as "protuberances"!), or to conjure up pictures of ancient, bloodthirsty heroes and deeds of treachery and strife. Above all, his faculty of scenic description here reaches its greatest excellence. Like most men of high imaginative power he endows nature with a personality, and conveys with great artistry the impression of gaunt and eerie majesty made by the stark mountains of Skye, the swift changes of weather and their effect on the character of the islanders, and the sense of inanimate nature frowning sternly on the puny race of men who draw a precarious livelihood from her soil. The personal character-sketches, too, are on a high level, and the picture we retain of Mr. M'lan is clear in every feature and alive in every line.

Alexander Smith is an egotist, but of the kind whose egotism is delightful. In his essay "On the Importance of a Man to Himself" he distinguishes between the two types of egotism—

The one is the offspring of a narrow and unimaginative personality; the other of a large and genial one.

This last was Smith's: his life was blameless and filled with untiring effort after art, whether in verse or prose. He was not destined to become a great poet, but as a prose-writer his place is high and secure, and in both mediums he has much to give the present age which it should not lightly reject.