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The Cosmology of Praise: Smart's Jubilate Agno

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John Block Friedman
John Block Friedman*
Affiliation:
Connecticut College, New London
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Extract

Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno, like many other poems of its period, celebrates God's goodness to men and the plenitude of His creation. But one need only compare it with other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works similar in theme—the quasi-scientific treatises of John Ray, William Derham, and Thomas Burnet, or James Thomson's The Seasons—to see how urgent and personally felt Smart's hymn of praise is. It was Smart's belief that God creates and sustains a cosmic harmony upon which the universe is contingent—in effect, God sings the universe into being—and the poet's duty is to serve as a kind of choir-master leading the creation in an answering song. Because harmony between God and His creation is necessary for the physical continuation of the universe, Smart's concern with the multitude of animals, birds, fish, plants, stones, and even planets in the Jubilate is much more than a rambling appreciation of them. He invokes them as models for men. For, in fulfilling their proper natures, the Lobster, the Hornet, and the Wild Beet contribute naturally to the universal harmony what man must contribute voluntarily, namely praise to the Creator of all.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 2 , May 1967 , pp. 250 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 Recent studies by D. J. Greene, “Smart, Berkeley, the Scientists and the Poets,” JHI, xiv (1953), 327–352, and Albert J. Kuhn, “Christopher Smart: The Poet as Patriot of the Lord,” ELH, xxx (1963), 121–136, have demonstrated the coherence of the scientific and religious attitudes expressed in the poem.

2 I quote from the text of W. H. Bond, ed., Jubilate Agno (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), p. 42.

3 See Arthur Sherbo, “Christopher Smart, Reader of Obituaries,” MLN, lxxi (1956), 177–182.

4 The form of the Jubilate imitated what Smart thought to be the musical form of David, for, as Bond points out (p. 20), its antiphonal structure was based on eighteenth-century theories of Hebrew prosody. Bishop Robert Lowth, in his popular Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753), had observed that in David's time, Hebrew poetry was organized by parallelism. “The sacred hymns were alternately sung by opposite choirs. … One of the choirs sang a single verse to the other, while the other constantly added a verse in some respect correspondent to the former. These distichs … consist of versicles or parallelisms” (New York, 1829, pp. 155–156). Bond suggests that Smart's interest in the reform of the Anglican liturgy may also have had some bearing on the antiphonal character of the Jubilate Agno, as liturgical readings from the Psalter are commonly performed responsively.

5 The expansion of Psalm xix.1 in the Benedicite of the Book of Common Prayer probably influenced Smart's conception of the Jubilate more than did its original in the Bible. Among the members of the creation which the Benedicite exhorts to praise are many ordinarily considered voiceless, e.g., “Showers,” “Green Things,” “Whales.”

6 An Historical Account of the Life and Reign of David King of Israel (London, 1759), i, 151. Delaney's euhemeristic argument that Orpheus and David were historically one was based on parallels between events in classical accounts of Orpheus and events in the life of David as outlined in the Old Testament. Robert Brittain discusses Smart's familiarity with Delaney's book in his edition of Poems by Christopher Smart (Princeton, N. J., 1950), p. 293.

7 The picture is reproduced as the frontispiece of Francis A. Yates's The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947).

8 Printed in Norman Callan, ed., The Collected Poems of Christopher Smart (London, 1949), i, 240.

9 Saint Ambrose, Enarrationes in Psalmos, PL, 14, 922.

10 Philo of Alexandria, De Opficio Mundi, 126, in Philo, with an English Translation, tr. F. H. Colson et al. (London, 1929–34).

11 Abraham Cowley, Poems, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge, 1905), i, 457–460. Cowley's figure has an interesting history. His reference is, in part, to a four-stringed lyre of Orpheus (symbolic of the four elements rather than the seven spheres), which he claims to have learned of from Athanasius Kircher. Kircher in turn says he got the idea from Manuel Bryennius' De Harmonica, ed. Johannis Wallis, Opera Mathematica (Oxford, 1699), iii, 361, where it occurs as a modification of a metaphor of Aristides Quintilianus: “wise men say that the universe is a kind of lyre struck by the plectrum of God” (De Musica, iii, 25). For Kircher's discussion, see his Musurgia Universalis sive Ars Magna Consoni et Dissoni (Rome, 1650), x, 371.

12 On Smart's anti-Newtonianism, see Greene, p. 351.

13 William Derham, Physico-Theology (London, 1742), p. 427.

14 On the Omniscience of the Supreme Being, Callan, i, 235.

15 See Saint Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1957), xii, ii, 38. There are a number of indications in the Jubilate Agno that Smart knew and used Isidore's encyclopaedia and that he was influenced by his fanciful etymologies. Uranoscopus appears in Isidore “so named because of the eye in its head by which it always looked upward” (xii, vi, 35). Mus, which occurs very close to catus, has an interesting etymology: “Mus is a small animal having a Greek name (μs) but all its derivatives become Latin” (xii, iii, 1). In his introduction to the history of language, Isidore points out (ix, i, 3) that Hebrew, Greek, and Latin are sacred languages, supreme throughout the world, and notes that Pilate wrote the charge against Christ in each of them in the accounts given by Luke and John.

16 See Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul (London, 1713), i, xi, 41, 44. More's Antidote Against Atheism may also have influenced Smart. In it are to be found the doctrine of signatures coupled with a discussion of the utility of all the forms of animals as proving the existence of a creator. Smart was much interested in the first of these throughout the Jubilate. “For the letter which signifies god by himself is on the fibre of some leaf in every Tree” (p. 104). “For the Lupine professes his Saviour in Grain. / For the very Hebrew letter is fairly graven upon his Seed” (p. 131). Compare these passages with More: “[Is it] not a very easie and genuine Inference, from the observing that several Herbs are marked with some Mark or Sign that intimates their virtue, what they are good for, and there being such a Creature as Man in the World, that can read and understand these Signs and Characters; hence to collect that the Author both of Man and them knew the Nature of them both …” (An Antidote Against Atheism, London, 1712, p. 56). The passage on the forms of animals and their multitude as proof of God, which Smart would obviously agree with, is to be found on pp. 62–78 in this edition.

17 See Benjamin Whichcote, Aphorisms (London, 1753), “The Spirit of a Man is the Candle of the Lord; Lighted by God, and Lighting us to God. Res illuminata, illuminans” (p. 70).

18 Smart tells us expressly that Jeoffry praised God in ten acts or “degrees,” as Smart called them. In Psalm xcii, David exhorts men to praise God “upon an instrument of ten strings.” Saint Augustine explains that the psaltery of ten strings signifies the ten commandments and that man must not only sing to the psaltery but carry it as well; words and deeds give one the song together with the harp. Enarrationes in Psalmos xci (92), PL, 37, 1174.