Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

by John Wilson

SOLILOQUY ON THE SEASONS.

SECOND RHAPSODY.

Have we not been speaking of all the Seasons as belonging to the masculine gender? They are generally, we believe, in this country, painted in petticoats, apparently by bagmen, as may be daily seen in the pretty prints that bedeck the paper-walls of the parlours of inns. Spring is always there represented as a spanker in a blue symar, very pertly exposing her budding breast, and her limbs from feet to fork, in a style that must be very offensive to the mealy-mouthed members of that shamefaced corporation, the Society for the Suppression of Vice. She holds a flower between her finger and her thumb, crocus, violet, or primrose; and though we verily believe she means no harm, she no doubt does look rather leeringly upon you, like one of the frail sisterhood of the Come-atables. Summer again is an enormous and monstrous mawsey, in puris naturalibus, meant to image Musidora, or the Medicean, or rather the Hottentot Venus.

"So stands the statue that enchants the world!"

She seems, at the very lightest, a good round half hundred heavier than Spring; and, when you imagine her plunging into the pool, you think you hear a porpus. May no Damon run away with her clothes, leaving behind in exchange his heart! Gadflies are rife in the dogdays, and should one "imparadise himself in form of that sweet flesh," there will be a cry in the woods that will speedily bring to her assistance Pan and all his Satyrs. Autumn is a motherly matron, evidently enceinte, and, like Love and Charity, who probably are smiling on the opposite wall, she has a brace of bouncing babies at her breast—in her right hand a formidable sickle, like a Turkish scymitar—in her left an extraordinary utensil, bearing, we believe, the heathenish appellation of cornucopia—on her back a sheaf of wheat—and on her head a diadem—planted there by John Barleycorn. She is a fearsome dear; as ugly a customer as a lonely man would wish to encounter beneath the light of a September moon. On her feet are bauchles—on her legs huggers—and the breadth of her soles, and the thickness of her ankles, we leave to your own conjectures. Her fine bust is conspicuous in an open laced boddice—and her huge hips are set off to the biggest advantage, by a jacket that she seems to have picked up by the wayside, after some jolly tar, on his return from a long voyage, had there been performing his toilet, and, by getting rid of certain encumbrances, enabled to pursue his inland journey with less resemblance than before to a walking scarecrow. Winter is a withered old beldam, too poor to keep a cat, hurkling on her hunkers over a feeble fire of sticks, extinguished fast as it is beeted, with a fizz in the melted snow which all around that unhoused wretchedness is indurated with frost; while a blue pool close at hand is chained in iciness, and an old stump, half buried in the drift. Poor old, miserable, cowering crone! One cannot look at her without unconsciously putting one's hand in his pocket, and fumbling for a tester. Yes, there is pathos in the picture, especially while, on turning round your head, you behold a big blockhead of a vulgar bagman, with his coat-tails over his arms, warming his loathsome hideousness at a fire that would roast an ox.

Such are the Seasons! And though we have spoken of them, as mere critics on art, somewhat superciliously, yet there is almost always no inconsiderable merit in all prints, pictures, paintings, poems, or prose-works, that—pardon our tautology—are popular with the people. The emblematical figments now alluded to, have been the creations of persons of genius, who had never had access to the works of the old masters; so that, though the conception is good, the execution is, in general, far from perfect. Yet many a time, when lying at our ease in a Wayside Inn, stretched on three wooden chairs, with a little round deal-table before us, well laden with oatmeal cakes and cheese and butter, nor, you may be sure, without its "tappit hen"—have we after a long day's journey—perhaps the longest day—

"Through moors and mosses many, O,"

regarded with no imaginative spirit—when Joseph and his brethren were wanting—even such symbols of the Seasons as these—while arose to gladden us many as fair an image as ever nature sent from her woods and wildernesses to cheer the heart of her worshipper who, on his pilgrimage to her loftiest shrines, and most majestic temples, spared not to stoop his head below the lowest lintel, and held all men his equal who earned by honest industry the scanty fare which they never ate without those holy words of supplication and thanksgiving, "Give us this day our daily bread!"

Our memory is a treasure-house of written and unwritten poetry—the ingots, the gifts of the great bards, and the bars of bullion—much of the coin our own—some of it borrowed mayhap, but always on good security, and repaid with interest—a legal transaction, of which even a not unwealthy man has no need to be ashamed—none of it stolen, nor yet found where the Highlandman found the tongs. But our riches are like those that encumbered the floor of the Sanctum of the Dey of Algiers, not very tidily arranged; and we are frequently foiled in our efforts to lay our hand, for immediate use or ornament, on a ducat or a diamond, a pistole or a pearl, a sovereign, or only his crown. We feel ourselves at this moment in that predicament, when trying to recollect the genders of Thomson's "Seasons"—

"Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come,
And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud,
While music wakes around, veil'd in a shower
Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend!"

That picture is indistinctly and obscurely beautiful to the imagination, and there is not a syllable about sex—though "ethereal mildness," which is an Impersonation, and hardly an Impersonation, must be, it is felt, a Virgin Goddess, whom all the divinities that dwell between heaven and earth must love. Never to our taste—but our taste is inferior to our feeling and our genius—though you will seldom go far wrong even in trusting it—never had a poem a more beautiful beginning. It is not simple—nor ought it to be—it is rich, and even gorgeous—for the Bard came to his subject full of inspiration; and as it was the inspiration, here, not of profound thought, but of passionate emotion, it was right that music at the very first moment should overflow the page, and that it should be literally strewed with roses. An imperfect Impersonation is often proof positive of the highest state of poetical enthusiasm. The forms of nature undergo a half humanising process under the intensity of our love, yet still retain the character of the insensate creation, thus affecting us with a sweet, strange, almost bewildering, blended emotion that scarcely belongs to either separately, but to both together clings as to a phenomenon that only the eye of genius sees, because only the soul of genius can give it a presence—though afterwards all eyes dimly recognise it, on its being shown to them, as something more vivid than their own faint experience, yet either kindred to it, or virtually one and the same. Almost all human nature can, in some measure, understand and feel the most exquisite and recondite image which only the rarest genius could produce. Were it not so, great poets might break their harps, and go drown themselves in Helicon.

"From brightening fields of ether fair disclosed,
Child of the Sun, refulgent Summer comes,
In pride of youth, and felt through Nature's depth:
He comes attended by the sultry hours,
And ever-fanning breezes, on his way;
While, from his ardent look, the turning Spring
Averts her blushful face, and earth, and skies,
All smiling, to his hot dominion leaves."

Here the Impersonation is stronger—and perhaps the superior strength lies in the words "child of the Sun." And here in the words describing Spring, she too is more of an Impersonation than in the other passage—averting her blushful face from the Summer's ardent look. The poet having made Summer masculine, very properly makes Spring feminine; and 'tis a jewel of a picture—for ladies should always avert their blushful faces from the ardent looks of gentlemen. Thomson, indeed, elsewhere says of an enamoured youth overpowered by the loving looks of his mistress,—

"From the keen gaze her lover turns away,
Full of the dear ecstatic power, and sick
With sighing languishment."

This, we have heard, from experienced persons of both sexes, is as delicate as it is natural; but for our own simple and single selves, we never remember having got sick on any such occasion. Much agitated, we cannot deny—if we did, the most credulous would not credit us—much agitated we have been, when our lady-love, not contented with fixing upon us her dove-eyes, began billing and cooing in a style from which the cushat might have taken a lesson with advantage, that she might the better perform her innocent part on her first assignation with her affianced in the pine-grove on St Valentine's day; but never in all our long lives got we absolutely sick—nor even squeamish—never were we obliged to turn away with our hand to our mouth—but, on the contrary, we were commonly as brisk as a bee at a pot of honey; or, if that be too luscious a simile, as brisk as that same wonderful insect murmuring for a few moments round and round a rose-bush, and then settling himself down seriously to work, as mute as a mouse, among the half-blown petals. However, we are not now writing our Confessions—and what we wished to say about this passage is, that in it the one sex is represented as turning away the face from that of the other, which may be all natural enough, though polite on the gentleman's part we can never call it; and, had the female virgin done so, we cannot help thinking it would have read better in poetry. But for Spring to avert his blushful face from the ardent looks of Summer, has on us the effect of making both Seasons seem simpletons. Spring, in the character of "ethereal mildness," was unquestionably a female; but here she is "unsexed from the crown to the toe," and changed into an awkward hobbletehoy, who, having passed his boyhood in the country, is a booby who blushes black at the gaze of his own brother, and if brought into the company of the lasses, would not fail to faint away in a fit, nor revive till his face felt a pitcherful of cold water.

"Crown'd with the sickle and the wheaten sheaf,
While Autumn, nodding o'er the yellow plain,
Comes jovial on," &c.,

is, we think, bad. The Impersonation here is complete, and though the sex of Autumn is not mentioned, it is manifestly meant to be male. So far, there is nothing amiss either one way or another. But "nodding o'er the yellow plain" is a mere statement of a fact in nature—and descriptive of the growing and ripening or ripened harvest—whereas it is applied here to Autumn, as a figure who "comes jovial on." This is not obscurity—or indistinctness—which, as we have said before, is often a great beauty in Impersonation; but it is an inconsistency and a contradiction—and therefore indefensible on any ground either of conception or expression.

"There are no such essential vices as this in the "Castle of Indolence"—for by that time Thomson had subjected his inspiration to thought—and his poetry, guided and guarded by philosophy, became celestial as an angel's song.

"See, Winter comes, to rule the varied year,
Sullen and sad, with all his rising train,
Vapours, and clouds, and storms. Be these my theme,
These! that exalt the soul to solemn thought,
And heavenly musing. Welcome, kindred glooms!
Congenial horrors, hail! with frequent foot,
Pleased have I, in my cheerful morn of life,
When nursed by careless Solitude I lived,
And sung of Nature with unceasing joy,
Pleased have I wander'd through your rough domain;
Trod the pure virgin-snows, myself as pure;
Heard the winds roar, and the big torrents burst;
Or seen the deep-fermenting tempest brew'd
In the grim evening sky. Thus passed the time,
Till through the lucid chambers of the south
Look'd out the joyous Spring, look'd out, and smiled!"

Divine inspiration indeed! Poetry, that if read by the bedside of a dying lover of nature, might

"Create a soul
Under the ribs of death!"

What in the name of goodness makes us suppose that a mean, and miserable November day, even while we are thus Rhapsodising, is drizzling all Edinburgh with the worst of all imaginable Scottish mists—an Easterly Haur? We know that he infests all the year, but shows his poor spite in its bleakest bitterness in March and in November. Earth and heaven are not only not worth looking at in an Easterly Haur, but the Visible is absolute wretchedness, and people wonder why they were born. The visitation begins with a sort of characterless haze, waxing more and more wetly obscure, till you know not whether it be rain, snow, or sleet, that drenches your clothes in dampness, till you feel it in your skin, then in your flesh, then in your bones, then in your marrow, and then in your mind. Your blinking eyes have it too—and so, shut it as you will, has your moping mouth. Yet the streets, though looking blue, are not puddled, and the dead cat lies dry in the gutter. There is no eavesdropping—no gushing of waterspouts. To say it rained would be no breach of veracity, but a mere misstatement of a melancholy fact. The truth is, that the weather cannot rain, but keeps spit, spit, spitting, in a style sufficient to irritate Socrates—or even Moses himself; and yet true, veritable, sincere, genuine, and authentic Rain could not—or if he could would not—so thoroughly soak you and your whole wardrobe, were you to allow him a day to do it, as that shabby imitation of a tenth-rate shower, in about the time of a usual sized sermon. So much cold and so much wet, with so little to show for it, is a disgrace to the atmosphere, which it will take weeks of the sunniest the weather can afford to wipe off. But the stores of sunniness which it is in the power of Winter in this northern latitude to accumulate, cannot be immense; and therefore we verily believe that it would be too much to expect that it ever can make amends for the hideous horrors of this Easterly Haur. The Cut-throat!

On such days suicides rush to judgment. That sin is mysterious as insanity—their graves are unintelligible as the cells in Bedlam. Oh! the brain and the heart of man! Therein is the only Hell. Small these regions in space, and of narrow room—but haunted may they be with all the Fiends and all the Furies. A few nerves transmit to the soul despair or bliss. At the touch of something—whence and wherefore sent, who can say—something that serenes or troubles, soothes or jars—she soars up into life and light, just as you may have seen a dove suddenly cleave the sunshine—or down she dives into death and darkness, like a shot eagle tumbling into the sea!

Materialism! Immaterialism! Why should mortals, whom conscience tells that they are immortals, bewildered and bewildering ponder upon the dust! Do your duty to God and man, and fear not that, when that dust dies, the spirit that breathed by it will live for ever. Feels not that spirit its immortality in each sacred thought? When did ever religious soul fear annihilation? Or shudder to think that, having once known, it could ever forget God? Such forgetfulness is in the idea of eternal death. Therefore is eternal death impossible to us who can hold communion with our Maker. Our knowledge of Him—dim and remote though it be—is a God-given pledge that He will redeem us from the doom of the grave.

Let us then, and all our friends, believe, with Coleridge, in his beautiful poem of the "Nightingale," that

"In Nature there is nothing melancholy,"

not even November. The disease of the body may cause disease in the soul; yet not the less trust we in the mercy of the merciful—not the less strive we to keep feeding and trimming that spiritual lamp which is within us, even when it flickers feebly in the dampy gloom, like an earthly lamp left in a vaulted sepulchre, about to die among the dead. Heaven seems to have placed a power in our Will as mighty as it is mysterious. Call it not Liberty, lest you should wax proud; call it not Necessity, lest you should despair. But turn from the oracles of man—still dim even in their clearest responses—to the Oracles of God, which are never dark; or if so, but

"Dark with excessive bright"

to eyes not constantly accustomed to sustain the splendour. Bury all your books, when you feel the night of scepticism gathering around you—bury them all, powerful though you may have deemed their spells to illuminate the unfathomable—open your Bible, and all the spiritual world will be as bright as day.

The disease of the body may cause disease to the soul. Ay, madness. Some rapture in the soul makes the brain numb, and thence sudden or lingering death;—some rupture in the brain makes the soul insane, and thence life worse than death, and haunted by horrors beyond what is dreamt of the grave and all its corruption. Perhaps the line fullest of meaning that ever was written, is—

"Mens sana in corpore sano."

When nature feels the flow of its vital blood pure and unimpeded, what unutterable gladness bathes the spirit in that one feeling of—health! Then the mere consciousness of existence is like that emotion which Milton speaks of as breathed from the bowers of Paradise—

"Vernal delight and joy, able to drive
All sadness but despair"

It does more—for despair itself cannot prevail against it. What a dawn of bliss rises upon us with the dawn of light, when our life is healthful as the sun! Then

"It feels that it is greater than it knows."

God created the earth and the air beautiful through the senses; and at the uplifting of a little lid, a whole flood of imagery is let in upon the spirit, all of which becomes part of its very self, as if the enjoying and the enjoyed were one. Health flies away like an angel, and her absence disenchants the earth. What shadows then pass over the ethereal surface of the spirit, from the breath of disordered matter!—from the first scarcely-felt breath of despondency, to the last scowling blackness of despair! Often men know not what power placed the fatal fetters upon them—they see even that a link may be open, and that one effort might fling off the bondage; but their souls are in slavery, and will not be free. Till something like a fresh wind, or a sudden sunbeam, comes across them, and in a moment their whole existence is changed, and they see the very vanishing of their most dismal and desperate dream.

"Somewhat too much of this"—so let us strike the chords to a merrier measure—to a "livelier lilt"—as suits the variable spirit of our Soliloquy. Be it observed, then, that the sole certain way of getting rid of the blue devils, is to drown them in a shower-bath. You would not suppose that we are subject to the blue devils? Yet we are sometimes their very slave. When driven to it by their lash, every occupation, which when free we resort to as pastime, becomes taskwork; nor will these dogged masters suffer us to purchase emancipation with the proceeds of the toil of our groaning genius. But whenever the worst comes to the worst, and we almost wish to die so that we might escape the galling pressure of our chains, we sport buff, and into the shower-bath. Yet such is the weakness of poor human nature, that like a criminal on the scaffold, shifting the signal kerchief from hand to hand, much to the irritation of his excellency the hangman, one of the most impatient of men—and more to the satisfaction of the crowd, the most patient of men and women—we often stand shut up in that sentry-looking canvass box, dexterously and sinistrously fingering the string, perhaps for five shrinking, and shuddering, and grueing minutes, ere we can summon up desperation to pull down upon ourselves the rushing waterfall! Soon as the agony is over, we bounce out the colour of beetroot, and survey ourselves in a five-foot mirror, with an amazement that, on each successive exhibition, is still as fresh as when we first experienced it,

"In life's morning march, when our spirits were young."

By-and-by we assume the similitude of an immense boiled lobster that has leapt out of the pan—and then, seeming for a while to be an emblematical or symbolical representation of the setting Sun, we sober down into a faint pink, like that of the Morn, and finally subside into our own permanent flesh-light, which, as we turn our back upon ourselves, after the fashion of some of his majesty's ministers, reminds us of that line in Cowper descriptive of the November Moon—

"Resplendent less, but of an ampler round!"

Like that of the eagle, our youth is renewed—we feel strong as the horse in Homer—a divine glow permeates our being, as if it were the subdued spiritual essence of caloric. An intense feeling of self—not self-love, mind ye, and the farthest state imaginable in this wide world from selfishness—elevates us far up above the clouds, into the loftiest regions of the sunny blue, and we seem to breathe an atmosphere, of which every glorious gulp is inspiration. Despondency is thrown to the dogs. Despair appears in his true colours, a more grotesque idiot than Grimaldi, and we treat him with a guffaw. All ante-bath difficulties seem now—what they really are—facilities of which we are by far too much elated to avail ourselves; dangers that used to appear appalling are felt now to be lulling securities—obstacles, like mountains, lying in our way of life as we walked towards the temple of Apollo or Plutus, we smile at the idea of surmounting, so molehillish do they look, and we kick them aside like an old footstool. Let the country ask us for a scheme to pay off the national debt—there she has it; do you request us to have the kindness to leap over the moon—here we go; excellent Mr Blackwood has but to say the word, and a ready-made Leading Article is in his hand, promotive of the sale of countless numbers of "my Magazine," and of the happiness of countless numbers of mankind. We feel—and the feeling proves the fact—as bold as Joshua the son of Nun—as brave as David the son of Jesse—as wise as Solomon the son of David—and as proud as Nebuchadnezzar the son of Nebopolazzar. We survey our image in the mirror—and think of Adam. We put ourselves into the posture of the Belvidere Apollo.

"Then view the Lord of the unerring bow,
The God of life, and poesy, and light,
The Sun in human arms array'd, and brow
All radiant from his triumph in the fight.
The shaft hath just been shot—the arrow bright
With an immortal vengeance; in his eye
And nostril beautiful disdain, and might
And majesty flash their full lightnings by,
Developing in that one glance the Deity."

Up four flight of stairs we fly—for the bath is in the double-sunk story—ten steps at a bound—and in five minutes have devoured one quartern loaf, six eggs, and a rizzar, washing all over with a punch-bowl of congou and a tea-bowl of coffee.

"Enormous breakfast,
Wild without rule or art! Where nature plays
Her virgin fancies."

And then, leaning back on our Easy-chair, we perform an exploit beyond the reach of Euclid—why, we Square the Circle, and to the utter demolition of our admirable friend Sir David Brewster's diatribe, in a late number of the Quarterly Review, on the indifference of Government to men of science, chuckle over our nobly-won order K.C.C.B., Knight Companion of the Cold Bath.

Many analogies between the seasons of the year and the seasons of life, being natural, have been a frequent theme of poetry in all countries. Had the gods made us poetical, we should now have poured forth, a few exquisite illustrations of some that are very affecting and impressive. It has, however, often been felt by us, that not a few of those one meets with in the lamentations of whey-faced sentimentalists, are false or fantastic, and do equal violence to all the seasons, both of the year and of life. These gentry have been especially silly upon the similitude of Old Age to Winter. Winter, in external nature, is not the season of decay. An old tree, for example, in the very dead of winter, as it is figuratively called, though bare of leaves, is full of life. The sap, indeed, has sunk down from his bole and branches—down into his toes or roots. But there it is, ready, in due time, to reascend. Not so with an old man—the present company always excepted;—his sap is not sunk down to his toes, but much of it is gone clean out of the system—therefore, individual natural objects in Winter are not analogically emblematical of people stricken in years. Far less does the Winter itself of the year, considered as a season, resemble the old age of life considered as a season. To what peculiarities, pray, in the character and conduct of aged gentlemen in general, do rain, sleet, hail, frost, ice, snow, winds, blasts, storms, hurricanes, and occasional thunder and lightning, bear analogy? We pause for a reply. Old men's heads, it is true, are frequently white, though more frequently bald, and their blood is not so hot as when they were springalds. But though there be no great harm in likening a sprinkling of white hair on mine ancient's temples to the appearance of the surface of the earth, flat or mountainous, after a slight fall of snow—and indeed, in an impassioned state of mind, we feel a moral beauty in such poetical expression as "sorrow shedding on the head of youth its untimely snows"—yet the natural propriety of such an image, so far from justifying the assertion of a general analogy between Winter and Old Age, proves that the analogies between them are in fact very few, and felt to be analogies at all, only when touched upon very seldom, and very slightly, and, for the most part, very vaguely—the truth being, that they scarcely exist at all in reality, but have an existence given to them by the power of creative passion, which often works like genius. Shakespeare knew this well—as he knew everything else; and, accordingly, he gives us Seven Ages of Life—not Four Seasons. But how finely does he sometimes, by the mere use of the names of the Seasons of the Year, intensify to our imagination the mental state to which they are for the moment felt to be analogous?—

"Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by the sun of York!"

That will do. The feeling he wished to inspire, is inspired; and the further analogical images which follow add nothing to our feeling, though they show the strength and depth of his into whose lips they are put. A bungler would have bored us with ever so many ramifications of the same idea, on one of which, in our weariness, we might have wished him hanged by the neck till he was dead.

We are an Old Man, and though single not singular; yet, without vanity, we think ourselves entitled to say, that we are no more like Winter, in particular, than we are like Spring, Summer, or Autumn. The truth is, that we are much less like any one of the Seasons, than we are like the whole Set. Is not Spring sharp? So are we. Is not Spring snappish? So are we. Is not Spring boisterous? So are we. Is not Spring "beautiful exceedingly?" So are we. Is not Spring capricious? So are we. Is not Spring, at times, the gladdest, gayest, gentlest, mildest, meekest, modestest, softest, sweetest, and sunniest of all God's creatures that steal along the face of the earth? So are we. So much for our similitude—a staring and striking one—to Spring. But were you to stop there, what an inadequate idea would you have of our character! For only ask your senses, and they will tell you that we are much liker Summer. Is not Summer often infernally hot? So are we. Is not Summer sometimes cool as its own cucumbers? So are we. Does not Summer love the shade? So do we. Is not Summer, nevertheless, somewhat "too much i' the sun?" So are we. Is not Summer famous for its thunder and lightning? So are we. Is not Summer, when he chooses, still, silent, and serene as a sleeping seraph? And so too—when Christopher chooses—are not we? Though, with keen remorse we confess it, that, when suddenly wakened, we are too often more like a fury or a fiend—and that completes the likeness; for all who know a Scottish Summer, with one voice exclaim—"So is he!" But our portrait is but half-drawn; you know but a moiety of our character. Is Autumn jovial?—ask Thomson—so are we. Is Autumn melancholy?—ask Alison and Gillespie—so are we. Is Autumn bright?—ask the woods and groves—so are we. Is Autumn rich?—ask the whole world—so are we. Does Autumn rejoice in the yellow grain and the golden vintage, that, stored up in his great Magazine of Nature, are lavishly thence dispensed to all that hunger, and quench the thirst of the nations? So do we. After that, no one can be so pur-and-bat-blind as not see that North is, in very truth, Autumn's gracious self, rather than his Likeness or Eidolon. But—

"Lo, Winter comes to rule th' inverted year!"

So do we,

"Sullen and sad, with all his rising train—
Vapours, and clouds, and storms!"

So are we. The great author of the "Seasons" says, that Winter and his train

"Exalt the soul to solemn thought,
And heavenly musing!"

So do we. And, "lest aught less great should stamp us mortal," here we conclude the comparison, dashed off in few lines by the hand of a great master, and ask, Is not North, Winter? Thus, listener after our own heart! thou feelest that we are imaged aright in all our attributes neither by Spring, nor Summer, nor Autumn, nor Winter; but that the character of Christopher is shadowed forth and reflected by the Entire Year.

---