DOI article:
Noble, James Ashcroft: Mr. Stevenson's Forerunner
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21805#0136
Mr. Stevenson’s Forerunner
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my picture. On thc walls of the next Academy’s exhibition will
hang nothing half so beautiful.”
This is the tout ensemble, but every detail has its own pictorial
charm. There is the canal—a prosaic unpicturesque thing is a
canal; but this particular canal has “ a great white water-lily
asleep on its olive-coloured face,” while to the picture-making eye
“ a bärge trailing up through it in the sunset is a pretty sight ;
and the heavenly crimsons and purples sleep quite lovingly upon
its glossy ripples. Nor does the evening star disdain it, for as I
walk along I see it mirrored as clearly as in the waters of the
Mediterranean itself.”
The sombreness of reflection noted as one of the characteristic
features of Smith’s work as an essayist gives to that work a
recognisable autumnal feeling. It is often difficult to think. of
it as the work of a young man full of the ordinary buoyant life of
youth ; though when the difficulty presents itself one may remember
also that the young man was destined to die at thirty-seven—that
fatal age for the children of imagination—and it is, perhaps, not
too fanciful to indulge the thought that some presentiment of early
doom may have given to Smith’s meditative moods much of their
pensive seriousness. However this may be, it is certain that
Alexander Smith, with a constancy which the most careless reader
cannot fail to note, recurred again and again, both when oppor-
tunity offered and when opportunity had to be made, to the theme
of death, its mystery, its fear, and its fascination. In one of his
poems, which I quote from memory, he speaks of his life as a
highway which, at some unknown point, has his grave cut across ;
and even in the joyous “Spring Chanson ” the poet, addressing the
singing merle, drops suddenly from the major into the minor key,
and ends upon the note by which the key is dominated :
“ Men
J32
my picture. On thc walls of the next Academy’s exhibition will
hang nothing half so beautiful.”
This is the tout ensemble, but every detail has its own pictorial
charm. There is the canal—a prosaic unpicturesque thing is a
canal; but this particular canal has “ a great white water-lily
asleep on its olive-coloured face,” while to the picture-making eye
“ a bärge trailing up through it in the sunset is a pretty sight ;
and the heavenly crimsons and purples sleep quite lovingly upon
its glossy ripples. Nor does the evening star disdain it, for as I
walk along I see it mirrored as clearly as in the waters of the
Mediterranean itself.”
The sombreness of reflection noted as one of the characteristic
features of Smith’s work as an essayist gives to that work a
recognisable autumnal feeling. It is often difficult to think. of
it as the work of a young man full of the ordinary buoyant life of
youth ; though when the difficulty presents itself one may remember
also that the young man was destined to die at thirty-seven—that
fatal age for the children of imagination—and it is, perhaps, not
too fanciful to indulge the thought that some presentiment of early
doom may have given to Smith’s meditative moods much of their
pensive seriousness. However this may be, it is certain that
Alexander Smith, with a constancy which the most careless reader
cannot fail to note, recurred again and again, both when oppor-
tunity offered and when opportunity had to be made, to the theme
of death, its mystery, its fear, and its fascination. In one of his
poems, which I quote from memory, he speaks of his life as a
highway which, at some unknown point, has his grave cut across ;
and even in the joyous “Spring Chanson ” the poet, addressing the
singing merle, drops suddenly from the major into the minor key,
and ends upon the note by which the key is dominated :
“ Men