DOI article:
Noble, James Ashcroft: Mr. Stevenson's Forerunner
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21805#0133
By James Ashcroft Noble 129
In the first of these passages Alexander Smith speaks of the
mantle of the essayist’s thought “ heavily brocaded with the gold
of rhetoric,” and he himself was a cunning embroiderer. It was
a gift of nature, but he did not learn at once how he could best
utilise it. He brocaded his poetry, and on poetry brocade even of
gold is an impertinence, just as is paint—-pace Gibson—on the
white marble of the sculptured group or figure. In the essay he
found a form which relies less exclusively upon body of imagina-
tion and perfectness of pure outline—which is more susceptible to
legitimate adornment by the ornamentation of a passing fancy.
It is a form in which even the conceit is not unwelcome : to use
the language of Science the conceit finds in the essay its fit
environment. Thus, in Smith’s pages Napoleon dies at St.
Helena “like an untended watch-fire ” ; Ebenezer Elliot, the
Corn Law rhymer, is “Apollo, with iron dust upon his face,
wandering among the Sheffield knife-grinders ” ; the solitary
Dreamthorp doctor has a fancy for arguing with the good simple
clergyman, but though “he cannot resist the temptation to hurl a
fossil at Moses,” “he wears his scepticism as a coquette wears her
ribbons—to annoy if he cannot subdue—and when his purpose is
served, he puts aside his scepticism—as the coquette puts her
ribbons.” When the black funeral creeps into Dreamthorp from
some outlying hamlet, the people reverently doff their hats and
stand aside, for, as Smith puts it, “ Death does not walk about
here often, but when he does, he receives as much respect as the
squire himself.” There is, in this last sentence, a touch of quiet
Addisonian irony ; and, indeed, Smith reminds us at times of
almost all his great predecessors in the art of essay-writing—of
his prime favourites Montaigne and Bacon (“ our earliest essayists
and our best” is his own eulogium) ; and also of Addison, Steele,
Lamb, Hazlitt, and Eeigh Hunt. But it is never a reminder
that
In the first of these passages Alexander Smith speaks of the
mantle of the essayist’s thought “ heavily brocaded with the gold
of rhetoric,” and he himself was a cunning embroiderer. It was
a gift of nature, but he did not learn at once how he could best
utilise it. He brocaded his poetry, and on poetry brocade even of
gold is an impertinence, just as is paint—-pace Gibson—on the
white marble of the sculptured group or figure. In the essay he
found a form which relies less exclusively upon body of imagina-
tion and perfectness of pure outline—which is more susceptible to
legitimate adornment by the ornamentation of a passing fancy.
It is a form in which even the conceit is not unwelcome : to use
the language of Science the conceit finds in the essay its fit
environment. Thus, in Smith’s pages Napoleon dies at St.
Helena “like an untended watch-fire ” ; Ebenezer Elliot, the
Corn Law rhymer, is “Apollo, with iron dust upon his face,
wandering among the Sheffield knife-grinders ” ; the solitary
Dreamthorp doctor has a fancy for arguing with the good simple
clergyman, but though “he cannot resist the temptation to hurl a
fossil at Moses,” “he wears his scepticism as a coquette wears her
ribbons—to annoy if he cannot subdue—and when his purpose is
served, he puts aside his scepticism—as the coquette puts her
ribbons.” When the black funeral creeps into Dreamthorp from
some outlying hamlet, the people reverently doff their hats and
stand aside, for, as Smith puts it, “ Death does not walk about
here often, but when he does, he receives as much respect as the
squire himself.” There is, in this last sentence, a touch of quiet
Addisonian irony ; and, indeed, Smith reminds us at times of
almost all his great predecessors in the art of essay-writing—of
his prime favourites Montaigne and Bacon (“ our earliest essayists
and our best” is his own eulogium) ; and also of Addison, Steele,
Lamb, Hazlitt, and Eeigh Hunt. But it is never a reminder
that