Whether Christopher Smart was and is a question that frequently occurs when talking about him and his work. Moira Dearnley, in her analysis of his poetry, can’t help but opine that he was clearly mad and it oozes all over his poetry. Clement Hawes argues that there is a specific manic rhetoric style that Smart adopts that is not necessarily an indiction of mania itself. Chris Mounsey is convinced that Smart’s reputation and incarceration for madness was a concerted scheme by Newbery.
In many ways, it’s a useless question because the definition of madness is so nebulous. The fact that what passed as professionals at the time assessed Smart, treated him and then kicked him out as incurable means that under the wibbly standards of the time, he was mad - madness being a display of beliefs and behaviours deemed irrational by the society at the time.
Yet, did Christopher Smart suffer from what we would call a mental illness today?
Again, it’s something of a fool’s question, Smart didn’t have the cultural or mental apparatus to understand the mind the way we do. Even if he suffered the same experiences or chemical imbalances of a modern mental health patient, his conception of the mind’s workings would have been so different that a modern diagnosis would have been pointless to him. That’s beside the fact that we only have glimpses of Smart, both in other people’s record and his own. He’s simply not around to answer the kinds of questions that would lead to a certain answer.
This doesn’t stop his contemporaries being analysed and diagnosed though. Samuel Johnson has long been a poster boy for depression, it’s generally accepted as having a form of Tourette’s Disease and OCD UK have adopted him also. To be fair, Samuel Johnson was one of the most written about people of his era and so there is a greater wealth of evidence - but there’s still an element of hurling a small light down a deep well.
All those caveats aside, I’m quite convinced that Christopher Smart did suffer from a mental illness which we recognise and classify today, Bipolar Disorder.
The first indication of this is a point he makes in Jubilate Agno, “For I have a greater compass both of mirth and melancholy than another.”
But there are a number of other hints that point in that direction.
Smart was a known drunkard in an age of drunkenness. Johnson quips about him walking to the pub but being carried back. In his years as student, and even as fellow, he was known for carousing in the pubs. His actual admittance to St Luke’s Madhouse was for alcoholism and it was generally said that his later ‘attacks’ of prayer were often after drinking sessions. Substance abuse is often a sign of various mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder, with the person going on excessive binges whilst manic and self-medicating with alcohol when depressed.
There’s also the claim (that I still can’t find the source of) that Smart was addicted to hartshorn, an ammonia-like substance. I’ve written before how this was a treatment for asthma, which Smart did have and that his suddenly stopping to pray may have been a response to the feelings of doom an incoming asthma attack can cause. However, I don’t think these negate possible symptoms of bipolar, only that they are a different problem that run alongside it.
Smart engaged in many behaviours that constitute a manic state. Gray mock’s Smart’s giddiness when producing the student play, The Grateful Fair, or, A Trip to Cambridge, and the young fellow later needed a subscription to bail him out of financial problems after excessive spending. This habit of excessive spending followed him his whole life, with him as debtor, giving away the last of the money which had been given to him charitably.
He exhibits burst of manic energy at new projects, like The Midwife which floundered after the burst of a new project, The Old Woman’s Oratory. He signed a 99 year contract for the Universal Visiter. Samuel Johnson said, "I wrote for some months in 'The Universal Visitor for poor Smart, while he was mad, not then knowing the terms on which he was engaged to write, and thinking I was doing him good. I hoped his wits would soon return to him. Mine returned to me, and I wrote in 'The Universal Visitor' no longer.”
A person in a manic episode often sleeps little, talks lots and engages in risky behaviours. It was around the time of The Old Woman’s Oratory that rumours started to circulate that Smart was going into Molly Houses and there were snide insinuations that he should be referred to as ‘Kitty’ rather than ‘Kit’. His companion on this journeys was supported to be Samuel Foote, who was later accused of forcibly buggering a man, something he denied because he literally only had one leg to stand on. Yet, Foote’s modern biography does point out that his accuser did have some very specific details, and Foote’s own behaviours had been growing more reckless after the near death experience that lost him his foot.
Examples of the depressive phase are harder to find, which makes sense as they tend to be quieter. There are times throughout his writing career where the words just stop, or where he is reported being out of action due to some illness. These illnesses may have been asthmatic flare-ups, the colds and fevers that regularly put city dwellers out of commission or the ghostly apparition of a depressive period.
Certainly, the poem he wrote at the conclusion of one of these illnesses, Hymn to the Supreme Being does include a very recognisable and gripping account of depression - even as his father-in-law tried to use it to sell fever powders. In the poem, Smart talks about sending his thoughts back through his life to find at least element of goodness. He compares it to Noah, sending birds to look for dry land but says that, for him, there’s no dove with an olive branch, his life is wholly and completely wicked and useless. If this is not a vivid description of depression, I don’t know what is.
I think it would be very interesting to read/analyse Jubilate Agno with the idea of bipolar disorder in mind, to see if highs and lows in his emotional state can be traced in it. As far as we know, he wrote a couple of lines of it a day, so it could provide the closest to a daily ‘check in’ we have. That said, it’s not the perfect document to show his mental state, it’s not a diary but a poem, with aesthetic and literary rules and limitations - but it could be worth a whack.
I need Samuel Johnson to conclude this post, he had a knack for balancing different views in one sentence. On one hand, I feel that ‘knowing’ whether Smart had a mental illness like bipolar disorder would make him more understandable but on the other, it makes no difference at all. That he suffered in life is true, but that he experienced a lot of joy is also. All that’s left of him are a few anecdotes and a body of work, a body of work that gives me a lot of joy. I come, as I often do, back to the his line in On a Bed of Guernsey Lillies, “we never are deserted… quite.”