DOI Artikel:
Noble, James Ashcroft: Mr. Stevenson's Forerunner
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21805#0134
130 Mr. Stevenson’s Forerunner
that brings with it a Suggestion of imitation. The methods and
graces of these distinguished forerunners are to be found in
Smith’s pages only by patient analysis, and then never in their
crude state, for his personality fuses them into a new amalgam
and stamps them with a new hall-mark.
Perhaps the most purely individual qualities of Smith’s work
are given to it partly by his remarkable aptitude for the presenta-
tion of his thought in simile and metaphor ; partly by his fine
feeling for colour, and, indeed, for all the elements of picturesque-
ness ; and partly by a native tendency to sombreness of reflection
which makes such a theme as that of the essay, “On Death and
the Fear of Dying,” attractive rather than repellent, or—to
speak, perhaps, with greater accuracy—repellent, yet irresistibly
fascinating, as is the eye of the rattlesnake to its prey. The
image-making endowment makes itself manifest in almost every
passage that it would be possible to quote as characteristic ; and it
may be noted that the associative habit of mind betrays itself not
merely in the sudden simile which transfixes a resemblance on the
wing, but in the numerous pages in which Smith showed his love
for tracing the links of the chain that connects the near and the
far, the present and the past, the seen and the unseen. Thus he
writes in his Dreamthorp cottage :
“ That winter morning when Charles lost his head in front of the
banqueting-hall of his own palace, the icicles hung from the eaves of
the houses here, and the clown kicked the snowballs from his clouted
shoon, and thought but of his supper when at three o’clock the red
sun set in the purple mist. On that Sunday in June, while Waterloo
was going on, the gossips, after morning Service, stood on the country
roads discussing agricultural prospects, without the slightest suspicion
that the day passing over their heads would be a famous one in the
calendar. . . . The last setting sun that Shakspeare saw reddened the
Windows
that brings with it a Suggestion of imitation. The methods and
graces of these distinguished forerunners are to be found in
Smith’s pages only by patient analysis, and then never in their
crude state, for his personality fuses them into a new amalgam
and stamps them with a new hall-mark.
Perhaps the most purely individual qualities of Smith’s work
are given to it partly by his remarkable aptitude for the presenta-
tion of his thought in simile and metaphor ; partly by his fine
feeling for colour, and, indeed, for all the elements of picturesque-
ness ; and partly by a native tendency to sombreness of reflection
which makes such a theme as that of the essay, “On Death and
the Fear of Dying,” attractive rather than repellent, or—to
speak, perhaps, with greater accuracy—repellent, yet irresistibly
fascinating, as is the eye of the rattlesnake to its prey. The
image-making endowment makes itself manifest in almost every
passage that it would be possible to quote as characteristic ; and it
may be noted that the associative habit of mind betrays itself not
merely in the sudden simile which transfixes a resemblance on the
wing, but in the numerous pages in which Smith showed his love
for tracing the links of the chain that connects the near and the
far, the present and the past, the seen and the unseen. Thus he
writes in his Dreamthorp cottage :
“ That winter morning when Charles lost his head in front of the
banqueting-hall of his own palace, the icicles hung from the eaves of
the houses here, and the clown kicked the snowballs from his clouted
shoon, and thought but of his supper when at three o’clock the red
sun set in the purple mist. On that Sunday in June, while Waterloo
was going on, the gossips, after morning Service, stood on the country
roads discussing agricultural prospects, without the slightest suspicion
that the day passing over their heads would be a famous one in the
calendar. . . . The last setting sun that Shakspeare saw reddened the
Windows