`His Infirmities Are Not Noxious to Society'

Dr. Johnson’s devotion to his mad friend Christopher Smart (1722-1771), the most idiosyncratic poet of his day, is well-known. Boswell reports him saying in 1765:

“‘Madness frequently discovers itself merely by unnecessary deviation from the usual mode of the world. My poor friend Smart shewed the disturbance of his mind, by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place. Now although, rationally speaking, it is greater madness not to pray at all, than to pray as Smart did, I am afraid there are so many who do not pray, that their understanding is not called in question.”

Smart had been confined to various asylums from 1757 to 1763. When they bothered with a diagnosis, contemporaries described the poet as suffering from “religious mania.” Boswell continues:

“Concerning this unfortunate poet, Christopher Smart, who was confined in a mad-house, he had, at another time, the following conversation with Dr [Charles] Burney: – Burney. `'How does poor Smart do, Sir; is he likely to recover?’ Johnson. `It seems as if his mind had ceased to struggle with the disease; for he grows fat upon it.’ Burney. `Perhaps, Sir, that may be from want of exercise.’ Johnson. `No, Sir; he has partly as much exercise as he used to have, for he digs in the garden. Indeed, before his confinement, he used for exercise to walk to the ale-house; but he was carried back again.’”

Johnson instinctively defends Smart’s “normalcy,” including his heavy drinking. Deviance from conventional behavior never bothered Johnson. He judged eccentricity by the harm it did. His tolerance was expansive and his house was a sanctuary into which he welcomed such outcasts as Francis Barber, Dr. Robert Levet and Anna Williams. Smart seems never to have harmed a soul. Johnson says:

“`I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities are not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.’”

I’ve just found something I hadn’t known before, a reference to an essay, “Some Thoughts on the English Language,” written by Smart and published in the monthly periodical Universal Visitor and Memorialist in January 1756. Nine months earlier, Johnson had published A Dictionary of the English Language. Smart likens the dictionary to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London (completed in 1708, one year before Johnson’s birth) and the lexicographer to the architect, noting that both the book and Christopher Wren’s building should endure for all time. The author of “Jubilate Agno,” including the much-loved “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry,” says the Dictionary is “a monument of English philology” and “a work I look upon with equal pleasure and amazement, as I do upon St. Paul’s Cathedral; each the work of one man, each the work of an Englishman.”