Part 8 (2/2)

”Tickler,” whose original was Wilson's maternal uncle Robert Sym, an Edinburgh ”writer,” and something of a humorist in the flesh, is very skilfully made to hold the position of common-sense intermediary between the two originals, North and the Shepherd. He has his own peculiarities, but he has also a habit of bringing his friends down from their alt.i.tudes in a Voltairian fas.h.i.+on which is of great benefit to the dialogues, and may be compared to Peac.o.c.k's similar use of some of his characters. The few occasional interlocutors are of little moment, with one exception; and the only female characters, Mrs. and Miss Gentle, would have been very much better away. They are not in the least lifelike, and usually exhibit the namby-pambiness into which Wilson too often fell when he wished to be refined and pathetic. The ”English” or half-English characters, who come in sometimes as foils, are also rather of the stick, sticky. On the other hand, the interruptions of Ambrose, the host, and his household, though a little farcical, are well judged.

And of the one exception above mentioned, the live Thomas De Quincey, who is brought in without disguise or excuse in some of the very best of the series, it can only be said that the imitation of his written style is extraordinary, and that men who knew his conversation say that the rendering of that is more extraordinary still.

The same designed exaggeration which some uncritical persons have called Rabelaisian (not noticing that the very fault of the _Noctes_ is that, unlike Rabelais, their author mixes up probabilities and improbabilities so that there is a perpetual jarring) is maintained throughout the scenery and etceteras. The comfortable but modest accommodations of Ambrose's hotels in Gabriel's Road and Picardy Place are turned into abodes of not particularly tasteful luxury which put Lord Beaconsfield's famous upholstery to shame, and remind one of what they probably suggested, Edgar Poe's equally famous and much more terrible sketch of a model drawing-room. All the plate is carefully described as ”silver”; if it had been gold there might have been some humour in it. The ”wax”

candles and ”silken” curtains (if they had been _Arabian Nights_ lamps and oriental drapery the same might be said) are always insisted on. If there is any joke here it seems to lie in the contrast with Wilson's actual habits, which were very simple. For instance, he gives us a gorgeous description of the apparatus of North's solitary confinement when writing for _Blackwood_; his daughter's unvarnished account of the same process agrees exactly as to time, rate of production, and so forth, but subst.i.tutes water for the old hock and ”Scots pint” (magnum) of claret, a dirty little terra-cotta inkstand for the silver utensil of the _Noctes_, and a single large tallow candle for Christopher's ”floods of light.” He carried the whim so far as to construct for himself--his _Noctes_ self--an imaginary hall-by-the-sea on the Firth of Forth, which in the same way seems to have had an actual resemblance, half of likeness, half of contrast, to the actual Elleray, and to enlarge his own comfortable town house in Gloucester Place to a sort of fairy palace in Moray Place. But that which has most puzzled and shocked readers are the specially Gargantuan pa.s.sages relating to eating and drinking. The comments made on this seem (he was anything but patient of criticism) to have annoyed Wilson very much; and in some of the later _Noctes_ he drops hints that the whole is mere Barmecide business. Unfortunately the same criticism applies to this as to the upholstery--the exaggeration is ”done too natural.” The Shepherd's consumption of oysters not by dozens but by fifties, the allowance of ”six common kettles-full of water” for the night's toddy ration of the three, North's above-mentioned bottle of old hock at dinner and magnum of claret after, the dinners and suppers and ”whets” which appear so often;--all these stop short of the actually incredible, and are nothing more than extremely convivial men of the time, who were also large eaters, would have actually consumed. Lord Alvanley's three hearty suppers, the exploits of the old member of Parliament in Boz's sketch of Bellamy's (I forget his real name, but he was not a myth), and other things might be quoted to show that there is a fatal verisimilitude in the Ambrosian feasts which may, or may not, make them shocking (they don't shock me), but which certainly takes them out of the category of merely humorous exaggeration. The Shepherd's ”jugs” numerous as they are (and by the way the Shepherd propounds two absolutely contradictory theories of toddy-making, one of which, according to the instructions of my preceptors in that art, who lived within sight of the hills that look down on Glenlivet, is a d.a.m.nable heresy) are not in the least like the _seze muiz, deux bussars, et six tupins_ of tripe that Gargamelle so rashly devoured. There are men now living, and honoured members of society in Scotland, who admit the soft impeachment of having drunk in their youth twelve or fourteen ”double”

tumblers at a sitting. Now a double tumbler, be it known to the Southron, is a jorum of toddy to which there go two winegla.s.ses (of course of the old-fas.h.i.+oned size, not our modern goblets) of whisky.

”Indeed,” said a humorous and indulgent lady correspondent of Wilson's, ”indeed, I really think you eat too many oysters at the _Noctes_;” and any one who believes in distributive justice must admit that they did.

If, therefore, the reader is of the modern cutlet-and-cup-of-coffee school of feeding, he will no doubt find the _Noctes_ most grossly and palpably gluttonous. If he be a very superior person he will smile at the upholstery. If he objects to horseplay he will be horrified at finding the characters on one occasion engaging in a regular ”mill,” on more than one corking each other's faces during slumber, sometimes playing at pyramids like the bounding brothers of acrobatic fame, at others indulging in leap-frog with the servants, permitting themselves practical jokes of all kinds, affecting to be drowned by an explosive haggis, and so forth. Every now and then he will come to a pa.s.sage at which, without being superfine at all, he may find his gorge rise; though there is nothing quite so bad in the _Noctes_ as the picture of the ravens eating a dead Quaker in the _Recreations_, a picture for which Wilson offers a very lame defence elsewhere. He must put all sorts of prejudice, literary, political, and other, in his pocket. He must be prepared not only for constant and very scurrilous flings at ”c.o.c.kneys”

(Wilson extends the term far beyond the Hunt and Hazlitt school, an extension which to this day seems to give a strange delight to Edinburgh journalists), but for the wildest heterodoxies and inconsistencies of political, literary, and miscellaneous judgment, for much b.a.s.t.a.r.d verse-prose, for a good many quite uninteresting local and ephemeral allusions, and, of course, for any quant.i.ty of Scotch dialect. If all these allowances and provisos are too many for him to make, it is probably useless for him to attempt the _Noctes_ at all. He will pretty certainly, with the _Quarterly_ reviewer, set their characters down as boozing buffoons, and decline the honour of an invitation to Ambrose's or The Lodge, to Southside or the tent in Ettrick Forest.

But any one who can accommodate himself to these little matters, much more any one who can enter into the spirit of days merrier, more leisurely, and if not less straitlaced than our own, yet lacing their laces in a different fas.h.i.+on, will find the _Noctes_ very delightful indeed. The mere high jinks, when the secret of being in the vein with them has been mastered, are seldom unamusing, and sometimes (notably in the long swim out to sea of Tickler and the Shepherd) are quite admirable fooling. No one who has an eye for the literary-dramatic can help, after a few _Noctes_ have been read, admiring the skill with which the characters are at once typified and individualised, the substance which they acquire in the reader's mind, the personal interest in them which is excited. And to all this, peculiarly suited for an alterative in these solemn days, has to be added the abundance of scattered and incomplete but remarkable gems of expression and thought that come at every few pages, sometimes at every page, of the series.

Some of the burlesque narratives (such as the Shepherd's Mazeppa-like ride on the Bona.s.sus) are inimitably good, though they are too often spoilt by Wilson's great faults of prolixity and uncertainty of touch.

The criticisms, of which there are many, are also extremely unequal, but not a few very fine pa.s.sages may be found among them. The politics, it must be owned, are not good for much, even from the Tory point of view. But the greatest attraction of the whole, next to its suns.h.i.+ny heartiness and humour, is to be found in innumerable and indescribable bits, phrases, sentences, short paragraphs, which have, more than anything out of the dialogues of the very best novels, the character and charm of actual conversation. To read a _Noctes_ has, for those who have the happy gift of realising literature, not much less than the effect of actually taking part in one, with no danger of headache or indigestion after, and without the risk of being playfully corked, or required to leap the table for a wager, or forced to extemporise sixteen stanzas standing on the mantelpiece. There must be some peculiar virtue in this, for, as is very well known, the usual dialogue leaves the reader more outside of it than almost any other kind of literature.

This peculiar charm is of necessity wanting to the rest of Wilson's works, and in so far they are inferior to the _Noctes_; but they have compensatory merits of their own, while, considered merely as literature, there are better things in them than anything that is to be found in the colloquies of those men of great gormandising abilities--Christopher North, James Hogg, and Timothy Tickler. Of the four volumes of _Essays Critical and Imaginative_, the fourth, on Homer and his translators, with an unfinished companion piece on the Greek drama, stands by itself, and has indeed, I believe, been separately published. It is well worth reading through at a sitting, which cannot be said of every volume of criticism. What is more, it may, I think, be put almost first in its own division of the art, though whether that division of the art is a high or low one is another question. I should not myself rank it very high. With Wilson, criticism, at least here, is little more than the eloquent expression of likes and dislikes. The long pa.s.sages in which he deals with the wrath of Achilles and with the love of Calypso, though subject to the general stricture already more than once pa.s.sed, are really beautiful specimens of literary enthusiasm; nor is there anything in English more calculated to initiate the reader, especially the young reader, in the love at least, if not the understanding, of Homer. The same enthusiastic and obviously quite genuine appreciation appears in the essay on the ”Agamemnon.” But of criticism as criticism--of what has been called tracing of literary cause and effect, of any coherent and co-ordinated theory of the good and bad in verse and prose, and the reasons of their goodness or badness, it must be said of this, as of Wilson's other critical work, that it is to be found _nusquam nullibi nullimodis_. He can preach (though with too great volubility, and with occasional faults of taste) delightful sermons about what he likes at the moment--for it is by no means always the same; and he can make formidable onslaughts with various weapons on what he dislikes at the moment--which again is not always the same. But a man so certain to go off at score whenever his likes or dislikes are excited, and so absolutely unable to check himself whenever he feels tempted thus to go off, lacks the very first qualifications of the critic:--lacks them, indeed, almost as much as the mere word-grinder who looks to see whether a plural substantive has a singular verb, and is satisfied if it has not, and horrified if it has.

His most famous sentence ”The Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities live for ever” is certainly n.o.ble. But it would have been better if the Humanities had oftener choked the Animosities at their birth.

Wilson's criticism is to be found more or less everywhere in his collected writings. I have said that I think it a pity that, of his longest critical attempts, only one has been republished; and the reason is simple. For with an unequal writer (and Wilson is a writer unequalled in his inequality) his best work is as likely to be found in his worst book as his worst work in his best book; while the constant contemplation for a considerable period of one subject is more likely than anything else to dispel his habits of digression and padding. But the ubiquity of his criticism through the ten volumes was, in the circ.u.mstances of their editing, simply unavoidable. He had himself superintended a selection of all kinds, which he called _The Recreations of Christopher North_, and this had to be reprinted entire. It followed that, in the _Essays Critical and Imaginative_, an equally miscellaneous character should be observed. Almost everything given, and much not given, in the Works is worth consideration, but for critical purposes a choice is necessary. Let us take the consolidated essay on Wordsworth (most of which dates before 1822), the famous paper on Lord, then Mr., Tennyson's poems in 1832, and the generous palinode on Macaulay's ”Lays”

of 1842. No three papers could better show Wilson in his three literary stages, that of rather cautious tentative (for though he was not a very young man in 1818, the date of the earliest of the Wordsworth papers, he was a young writer), that of practised and unrestrained vigour (for 1832 represents about his literary zenith), and that of reflective decadence, for by 1842 he had ceased to write habitually, and was already bowed down by mental sorrows and physical ailments.

In the first paper, or set of papers, it is evident that he is ambitiously groping after a more systematic style of criticism than he found in practice to be possible for him. Although he elsewhere scoffs at definitions, he tries to formulate very precisely the genius of Scott, of Byron, and of Wordsworth; he does his best to connect his individual judgments with these formulas; he shuns mere verbal criticism, and (to some extent) mere exaltation or depreciation of particular pa.s.sages. But it is quite evident that he is ill at ease; and I do not think that any one now reading the essay can call it a successful one, or can attempt to rank it with those which, from different points of view, Hazlitt and De Quincey (Hazlitt nearly at the same time) wrote about Wordsworth. Indeed, Hazlitt is the most valuable of all examples for a critical comparison with Wilson; both being violent partisans and crotcheteers, both being animated with the truest love of poetry, but the one possessing and the other lacking the ”tie-beam” of a consistent critical theory.

A dozen years later Wilson had cast his slough, and had become the autocratic, freespoken, self-const.i.tuted dictator, Christopher North. He was confronted with the very difficult problem of Mr. Tennyson's poems.

He knew they were poetry; that he could not help seeing and knowing. But they seemed to him to be the work of a ”c.o.c.kney” (it would be interesting to know whether there ever was any one less of a c.o.c.kney than the author of ”Mariana”), and he was irritated by some silly praise which had been given to them. So he set to work, and perpetrated the queerest jumble of sound and unsound criticism that exists in the archives of that art, so far as a humble but laborious student and pract.i.tioner thereof knoweth. He could not for the life of him help admiring ”Adeline,” ”Oriana,” ”Mariana,” ”The Ode to Memory.” Yet he had nothing but scorn for the scarcely less exquisite ”Mermaid” and ”Sea Fairies”--though the first few lines of the latter, excluded by this and other pseudo-criticism from the knowledge of half a generation of English readers, equal almost anything that the poet has ever done. And only the lucky memory of a remark of Hartley Coleridge's (who never went wrong in criticism, whatever he did in life) saved him from explicitly d.a.m.ning ”The Dying Swan,” which stands at the very head of a whole cla.s.s of poetry. In all this essay, to borrow one of his own favourite words, he simply ”plouters”--splashes and flounders about without any guidance of critical theory. Compare, to keep up the comparative method, the paper with the still more famous and far more deadly attack which Lockhart made a little later in the _Quarterly_. There one finds little, if any, generosity; an infinitely more cold-blooded and deliberate determination to ”cut up.” But the critic (and how quaint and pathetic it is to think that the said critic was the author of ”I ride from land to land” and ”When youthful hope is fled”) sees his theory of poetry straight before him, and never takes his eye off it. The individual censures may be just or unjust, but they fit together like the propositions of a masterpiece of legal judgment. The poet is condemned under the statute,--so much the worse for the statute perhaps, but that does not matter--and he can only plead No jurisdiction; whereas with Christopher it is quite different. If he does not exactly blunder right (and he sometimes does that), he constantly blunders wrong--goes wrong, that is to say, without any excuse of theory or general view. That is not criticism.

We shall not find matters much mended from the strictly critical point of view, when we come, ten years later, to the article on the ”Lays.”

Here Christopher, as I hold with all respect to persons of distinction, is absolutely right. He does not say one word too much of the fire and life of those wonderful verses, of that fight of all fights--as far as English verse goes, except Drayton's ”Agincourt” and the last canto of ”Marmion”; as far as English prose goes, except some pa.s.sages of Mallory and two or three pages of Kingsley's--the Battle of the Lake Regillus.

The subject and the swing attracted him; he liked the fight, and he liked the ring as of Sir Walter at his very best. But he goes appallingly wrong all through on general critical points.

Yet, according to his own perverse fas.h.i.+on, he never goes wrong without going right. Throughout his critical work there are scattered the most intelligent ideas, the neatest phrases, the most appreciative judgments.

How good is it to say that ”the battle of Trafalgar, though in some sort it neither began nor ended anything, was a kind of consummation of national prowess.” How good again in its very straightforwardness and simplicity is the dictum ”it is not necessary that we should understand fine poetry in order to feel and enjoy it, any more than fine music.”

Hundreds and thousands of these things lie about the pages. And in the next page to each the critic probably goes and says something which shows that he had entirely forgotten them. An intelligent man may be angry with Christopher--I should doubt whether any one who is not occasionally both angry and disgusted with him can be an intelligent man. But it is impossible to dislike him or fail to admire him as a whole.

There is a third and very extensive division of Wilson's work which may not improbably be more popular, or might be if it were accessible separately, with the public of to-day, than either of those which have been surveyed. His ”drunken _Noctes_,” as Carlyle unkindly calls them, require a certain peculiar att.i.tude of mind to appreciate them. As for his criticisms, it is frequently said, and it certainly would not become me to deny it, that n.o.body reads criticism but critics. But Wilson's renown as an athlete, a sportsman, and a lover of nature, who had a singular gift in expressing his love, has not yet died; and there is an ample audience now for men who can write about athletics, about sport, and about scenery. Nor is it questionable that on these subjects he is seen, on the whole, at his best. True, his faults pursue him even here, and are aggravated by a sort of fas.h.i.+on of the time which made him elaborately digress into politics, into literature, even (G.o.d rest his soul!) into a kind of quasi-professional and professorial sermonising on morals and theology, in the midst of his sporting articles. But the metal more attractive of the main subject would probably recommend these papers widely, if they were not scattered pell-mell about the _Essays Critical and Imaginative_, and the _Recreations of Christopher North_.

Speaking generally they fall into three divisions--essays on sport in general, essays on the English Lakes, and essays on the Scottish Highlands. The best of the first cla.s.s are the famous papers called ”Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket,” and the scattered reviews and articles redacted in the _Recreations_ under the general t.i.tle of ”Anglimania.” In the second cla.s.s all are good; and a volume composed of ”Christopher at the Lakes,” ”A Day at Windermere,” ”Christopher on Colonsay” (a wild extravaganza which had a sort of basis of fact in a trotting-match won on a pony which Wilson afterwards sold for four pounds), and ”A Saunter at Grasmere,” with one or two more, would be a thing of price. The best of the third cla.s.s beyond all question is the collection, also redacted by the author for the _Recreations_, ent.i.tled ”The Moors.” This last is perhaps the best of all the sporting and descriptive pieces, though not the least exemplary of its authors vagaries; for before he can get to the Moors, he gives us heaven knows how many pages of a criticism on Wordsworth, which, in that place at any rate, we do not in the least want; and in the very middle of his wonderful and sanguinary exploits on and near Ben Cruachan, he ”interrupts the m.u.f.fins” in order to deliver to a most farcical and impertinent a.s.semblage a quite serious and still more impertinent sermon. But all these papers are more or less delightful. For the glowing description of, and the sneaking apology for, cat-worrying which the ”Sporting Jacket” contains, nothing can be said. Wilson deliberately overlooks the fact that the whole fun of that nefarious amus.e.m.e.nt consists in the pitting of a plucky but weak animal against something much more strongly built and armed than itself. One may regret the P.R., and indulge in a not wholly sneaking affection for c.o.c.k-fighting, dog-fighting, and anything in which there is a fair match, without having the slightest weakness for this kind of brutality. But, generally speaking, Wilson is a thoroughly fair sportsman, and how enthusiastic he is, no one who has read him can fail to know. Of the scenery of loch or lake, of hill or mountain, he was at once an ardent lover and a describer who has never been equalled. His accustomed exaggeration and false emphasis are nowhere so little perceptible as when he deals with Ben Cruachan or the Old Man of Coniston, with the Four Great Lakes of Britain, East and West (one of his finest pa.s.sages), or with the glens of Etive and Borrowdale. The accursed influence of an unchastened taste is indeed observable in the before-mentioned ”Dead Quaker of Helvellyn,”

a piece of unrelieved nastiness which he has in vain tried to excuse.

But the whole of the series from which this is taken (”Christopher in his Aviary”) is in his least happy style, alternately grandiose and low, relieved indeed by touches of observation and feeling, as all his work is, but hardly redeemed by them. The depths of his possible fall may also be seen from a short piece which Professor Ferrier, obligingly describing it as ”too lively to be omitted,” has adjoined to ”Christopher at the Lakes.” But, on the whole, all the articles mentioned in the list at the beginning of this paragraph, with the capital ”Streams” as an addition, with the soliloquies on ”The Seasons,”

and with part (_not_ the narrative part) of ”Highland Storms,” are delightful reading. The progress of the sportsman has never been better given than in ”Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket.” In ”The Moors”

the actual sporting part is perhaps a little spoilt by the affectation of infallibility, qualified it is true by an aside or two, which so often mars the Christopherian utterances. But Wilson's description has never been bettered. The thunderstorm on the hill, the rough conviviality at the illicit distillery, the evening voyage on the loch, match, if they do not beat, anything of the kind in much more recent books far better known to the present generation. A special favourite of mine is the rather unceremonious review of Sir Humphry Davy's strangely over-praised ”Salmonia.” The pa.s.sage of utter scorn and indignation at the preposterous statement of the chief personage in the dialogues, that after an exceptionally hard day's walking and fis.h.i.+ng ”half a pint of claret per man is enough,” is sublime. Nearly the earliest, and certainly the best, protest against some modern fas.h.i.+ons in shooting is to be found in ”The Moors.” In the same series, the visit to the hill cottage, preceding that to the still, has what it has since become the fas.h.i.+on to call the idyllic flavour, without too much of the rather mawkish pathos with which, in imitation of Mackenzie and the sensibility-writers of the last century, Wilson is apt to daub his pictures of rural and humble life. The pa.s.sages on Oxford, to go to a slightly different but allied subject, in ”Old North and Young North” (a paper not yet mentioned), may have full appeal to Oxford men, but I can hardly be mistaken in thinking that outsiders must see at least some of the beauty of them. But the list of specially desirable things in these articles is endless; hardly one of them can be taken up without discovering many such, not one of them without discovering some.[15]

And, throughout the whole collection, there is the additional satisfaction that the author is writing only of what he thoroughly knows and understands. At the Lakes Wilson lived for years, and was familiar with every cranny of the hills, from the Pillar to Hawes Water, and from Newby Bridge to Saddleback. He began marching and fis.h.i.+ng through the Highlands when he was a boy, enticed even his wife into perilous pedestrian enterprises with him, and, though the extent of his knowledge was perhaps not quite so large as he pretends, he certainly knew great tracts as well as he knew Edinburgh. Nor were his qualifications as a sportsman less authentic, despite the somewhat Munchausenish appearance which some of the feats narrated in the _Noctes_ and the _Recreations_ wear, and are indeed intended to wear. His enormous baskets of trout seem to have been, if not quite so regular as he sometimes makes them out, at any rate fully historical as occasional feats. As has been hinted, he really did win the trotting-match on the pony, Colonsay, against a thoroughbred, though it was only on the technical point of the thoroughbred breaking his pace. His walk from London to Oxford in a night seems to have been a fact, and indeed there is nothing at all impossible in it, for the distance through Wycombe is not more than fifty-three miles; while the less certainly authenticated feat of walking from Liverpool to Elleray (eighty miles at least), without more than a short rest, also appears to be genuine. Like the heroes of a song that he loved, though he seems to have sung it in a corrupt text, he could wrestle and fight and jump out anywhere; and, until he was thoroughly broken by illness, he appears to have made the very most of the not inconsiderable spare time of a Scotch professor who has once got his long series of lectures committed to paper, and has nothing to do for the rest of his life but collect bundles of pound notes at the beginning of each session. All this, joined to his literary gifts, gives a reality to his out-of-door papers which is hardly to be found elsewhere except in some pa.s.sages of Kingsley, between whom and Wilson there are many and most curious resemblances, chequered by national and personal differences only less curious.

I do not think he was a good reviewer, even after making allowance for the prejudices and partisans.h.i.+ps of the time, and for the monkey tricks of mannerism, which, at any rate in his earlier days, were inc.u.mbent on a reviewer in ”Maga.” He is too p.r.o.ne to the besetting sins of reviewing--the right hand defections and left hand fallings off, which, being interpreted, consist first in expressing agreement or disagreement with the author's views, and secondly in digressing into personal statements of one's own views of things connected with them instead of expounding more or less clearly what the book is, and addressing oneself to the great question, Is it a good or a bad piece of work according to the standard which the author himself strove to reach?

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