CIVIL REVOLUTION IN THE CANADAS.
Strange though it sound to speak of a revolution in these provinces, where the representative of the crown is notoriously supported by a large majority in the provincial parliament, and where, for years past, there has scarcely been an inquiry made as to when a regiment either came or went, or even how many troops were in the whole American colonies; yet it is nevertheless a fact, that a more important and effective revolution is now going on in the Canadas, than if half their population were in open arms against the mother country.
Before attempting either to describe or to account—which we trust in the course of this paper to be able to do—for this extraordinary state of things, it will be necessary to touch upon a few leading events in the history of both provinces, and, incidentally, upon the character and intentions of the parties engaged in them.
It is well known to all English readers, that the French of Lower Canada, forming a population of some four hundred thousand people, after a long course of factious and embarrassing legislation; after a species of civil, social, and parliamentary strife for nearly half a century, which was far more withering in its effects upon the prosperity of the country than a good fight in the beginning would have been, finally, in 1837, took up arms against the British government. Shortly afterwards they were joined by the party in Upper Canada which had long made common cause with them, though without common principles, aims, or hopes—the one's pride being indissolubly wedded to institutions which were pregnant with retrogression and decay, the other's chief merit consisting in pretension to raise men from beneath old ruins, instead of bringing old ruins down upon them. Yet both agreed in hating England, and in taking up arms, jointly and severally, to overthrow her institutions. Whatever other lesson England might have learned from the fact, she should at least have learned this—that it was no ordinary feelings of desperation or of difference that made them forego so much to each other, in order to strike an effectual blow at her; and that it could be no ordinary circumstance, if it was even in the nature of things, after they had become partners in the same defeats and humiliations—after they had been made bed-fellows by the same misfortunes—that could disunite them in favour of their common enemy; and not only turn the tide of their hatred against each other, but make the party that became loyal to England kiss the rod that had so severely scourged it.
Probably this might have been thought difficult. But where the hostility to England might have been regarded as accidental, rather than of settled and determined principle, it might be urged that the reconciling one or both these parties to the British government, might not have been impossible; or the bringing the one back to loyalty, even at the expense of its having to oppose the other, might still be in the power of wise legislation.
This brings us to consider the character and the principles, the prejudices and the predilections, of the two parties. And if the reader will follow us over a little scrap of history, possibly new to him, if we do not happen to differ on the road, we apprehend we shall agree in summing up the general results.
For many parliaments previous to the rebellion in Lower Canada, the majority in favour of the French was on an average equal to four-fifths of each house. And, instead of this majority being diminished by the agency of immigration, or by reason of the detachment of almost every Englishman and American in the province from their cause—who at first sided with them for the purpose of procuring the redress of all real abuses, most, if not all, of which, arose from the nature of their own institutions,—it continued to increase, until at last every county in the province which had a preponderance of French influence, sent a member to parliament to carry on a kind of civil war with the government. Men of the first talents in the country, who had freely spent the best of their lives and their efforts in its service, when they were compelled to leave this faction, or take leave of their loyalty to the crown, found that the breadth of their own intellects was all they were ever able to detach from its ranks. Every concession the imperial government could make, every effort to conciliate them, was met only by fresh demands—demands conceived in a spirit of hostility, and wilfully and knowingly of such a character as could not be conceded. Yet their majorities continued, and even increased, in parliament. In 1832, they carried their measures of hostility to the British, and even the Irish population so far, as to refuse to employ them for any purposes whatever, and, in some cases, those employed were dismissed. It is matter of Lower Canadian history, that one of their greatest grievances was, that they had not the control of the appointments of judges and other public officers, and the apportioning of their salaries; yet it is well known—it was publicly avowed by them in Parliament—that their object was, to starve out the British government, by starving out its officers. Still the French leaders who mooted these measures gained in popularity, and the English members for French counties continued to lessen. British manufactures were solemnly denounced in their parliament, and the use of them declared a disgrace to every Frenchman; and a tax, which they intended as a prohibition, was attempted to be placed upon British emigrants: yet withal, Mr Papineau, the great French leader, rose the higher, and his party grew the stronger. The more, in short, the French leaders could embarrass the government, and the more they could throw obstacles in the way of the improvements incident to the activity and enterprise of the English race, the more they rose in the estimation of the French constituencies. They claimed, in truth, for these very acts, their confidence, and they received what they claimed to the fullest extent. In a well-written, and, considering all the circumstances, a temperate address of the Constitutional Association of Montreal in 1832—an association got up with the view of making the situation of the British population known to the imperial government, and an association that afterwards greatly contributed to save the province during the rebellion—we find the following among other passages to the same effect, upon this subject:—
"For half a century has the population of English and Irish descent in Lower Canada been subjected to the domination of a party whose policy has been to retain the distinguishing attributes of a foreign race, and to crush in others that spirit of enterprise which they are unable or unwilling to emulate. During this period, a population, descended from the same stock with ourselves, have covered a continent with the monuments of their agricultural industry. Upper Canada and the United States bear ample testimony of the flood-tide of prosperity—the result of unrestricted enterprise, and of equitable laws. Lower Canada, where another race predominates, presents a solitary exception to this march of improvement. There, surrounded by forests inviting industry, and offering a rich reward to labour, an illiterate people, opposed to improvements, have compressed their growing numbers almost within the boundaries of their original settlements, and present, in their mode of laws, in their mode of agriculture, and peculiar customs, a not unfaithful picture of France in the seventeenth century. There also may be witnessed the humiliating spectacle of a rural population not unfrequently necessitated to implore eleemosynary relief from the legislature of the country."
But it is no new lesson to learn, that an inert and unprogressive race, with pride clinging to decay, and customs withering to enterprise, cannot harmonise, in legislative provisions, with men who want laws to assist the steps of advancing civilisation, rather than ways and means of keeping up old ruins; who prefer to gather the fruits of a thousand trees, for the planting of which enterprise has explored, and industry has employed, new and rich domains, to tying up the decaying branches of a few old ones, to which possibly memory may love to cling, but under which plain human nature might starve. To expect, in fact, that men with such opposite characteristics, apart even from their other elements of discord, should harmonise, when the party weaker in legislation was the stronger in civilisation, when the party that stood still had the power of making the other stand still also, was to expect an impossibility. And this was exactly the nature of the contest so long carried on in Lower Canada. An ox and a race-horse had been yoked together in the same legislative harness. But the misfortune was increased by the race-horse's being subject—however much he might struggle, and rear, and foam—to the motions of his dogged companion, and to the necessity of not moving at all, whenever it pleased his venerable mate to stand still. It is clear, therefore, that any legislative provision, after the rebellion, which would restore to the French this ascendency, would be but causing confusion worse confused—would be but entailing upon both parties constant contentions, with the probability, if not the certainty, of a final appeal to arms; in which case England would be left without a friend in either party—the one looking upon her as their natural enemy—the other as a power which had always sacrificed its friends when it had the means of benefiting them—had perpetually raised its defenders very high, to see how very far it could let them fall.
The party in Upper Canada which had opposed the government step by step, until it ended with rebellion in conjunction with the French, was composed of vastly different materials from these its allies. And it is somewhat singular, but it is nevertheless a fact, that this party, both as to its strength, and the true causes of its hostility to England, has never been very thoroughly understood even in the Canadas. The principle of under-rating enemies was always applied to it by its opponents in the province. The pernicious habit of looking upon men with too much contempt to take the measure of their strength, is as bad in politics as it is in a physical struggle. But the party known as the government party in Upper Canada, was generally far too self-important and too great to calculate how many dark-looking clouds it takes to make a storm. The government of England too, never very clear-sighted in colonial affairs, and with its Argus eye as directed to Canadian prospects always suffering from some defect of vision, or looking through very distorting media, was not very likely to catch the height and cut of each individual in a colonial multitude, which it scarcely ever saw even in gross; while the Governors who "did the monarch" in the province, did not generally betray much taste for sitting down by the farmer's fireside, and eating apple-sauce and sauerkraut at his table, where there neither was, nor could have been, recognised a distinction between the master and the man,—between the lord of the castle and the cook in the kitchen. Yet such were the places where governors and rulers might have seen at work the elements of democracy; might have witnessed the process of education to the levelling system. An education which, with the vast facilities for independence in America, irrespective of situation or institutions—men never get over; and in which they might have traced the natural growth of feelings and principles, that must, in the very nature of things, be in a state of continual warfare with the customs, the pride, and the love of distinction, which are the inalienable offspring of the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the social system of England. Yet here they never penetrated either to count the voters or the children. They felt—they were obliged to feel—that the great wheel of the government, which was the majority in parliament, often performed extraordinary revolutions the wrong way. But they knew not how or wherefore. They never went where they might have studied, and could have understood, the difficulty; where, to make a long story short, in order to get at what they missed, and to understand what they did not, the reader has possibly anticipated the necessity of accompanying us.
From the circumstances attending the early settlement of Upper Canada, and from the character of the early settlers themselves, the preachers of the Methodist denomination were not merely almost the only preachers they had for many years an opportunity of hearing, but were, of all others, those they most desired to hear. The clergymen of the Church of England were few, and stationed in the larger towns. But it is one of the peculiarities of Methodism, that however numerous or scattered the settlers might have been, the preacher could always manage to live among them; for he received with his circuit a sort of universal billeting-ticket, and the houses of all his flock, and all his flock's friends, thereupon became one vast home to him; and wherever he happened to take up his temporary abode, he conferred a sort of honour instead of receiving a favour. The system had another peculiarity too—at all events, at the early period we are speaking of—it had no standard of fitness in the way of education for its ministry. Yet where men of education could never think of penetrating or existing, these men were willing to go. Where no bishop could dream of sending a pastor, it is the principle of Methodism to believe the Lord will raise up or send one. If his talents are none of the brightest, they are willing to trust to Heaven to make up the deficiency; and certainly, in some instances, there is much need of it.
It is not difficult to perceive how great must have been the influence of these preachers over a people so circumstanced: how eagerly—in the absence of newspapers, and of nearly every means of learning what was going on in the province, much less in the affairs of the world—the leading characters of the neighbourhoods gathered round the preacher, after the meeting was over, at the fireside of some brother of the Church, to hear the latest news, to get the last newspaper or pamphlet, and to receive his oracular opinions upon the measures and the men agitating the country. And in two-thirds of the districts in the province, these preachers had for years, unopposed and unquestioned, those opportunities of instilling a political education—which, if they chose to make use of them, would enable them to plant a crop, whether of good or of evil, for or against the institutions of England, wholly, uneradicable,—were there even the same opportunities afforded of eradicating it that there were of sowing it.
For five successive parliaments in Upper Canada, previous to the rebellion, each party had alternately the majority in the house—the one party being known as the Tory or Family Compact; the other as the Radical or the Saddle-bag faction—a name more truthfully than elegantly applied to it, on account of its owing its majority to the exertions of these same Methodist preachers in its favour; and from their mode of travelling through the country being on horseback, with large saddle-bags swung on each side of the nag, and, by way of adding to the picturesque, with a leathern valise strapped on immediately over his tail. These bags and valise, it was alleged by their opponents, were always filled—with, we suppose, the necessary exception of stowage for hymn-books, and the other paraphernalia of their craft—with papers and pamphlets against the monarchy, the Church, and the institutions of England, and in favour of the democracy of the States. But whether the bags and valise were so filled or not; or whether, indeed, these preachers, at this early period, had it in their power to treat their friends to as many pamphlets, and papers, and almanacs—for the last was and is a method of disseminating political opinions much resorted to in America—as they were accused of, we shall not undertake to determine. This, however, we certainly can assert—that if we had out of the whole world to select the most perfect embodiment of the spirit of hostility to all the pomp, and pride, and distinction, and deference to rank, incident to monarchy, wherever it may exist, we should select these same Methodist preachers. Educated, for the most part, in the United States, or in Canada by American schoolmasters; with their conferences held in the States; the seat of their church in the States; their ministers ordained in the States; their bishops sent from there—for they were all, at this time, Episcopal Methodists—and the great body of their church flourishing there,—they imbibed, from the very beginning, American feelings of hostility to the established Church of England, and to the pride and love of distinction—to all the characteristics which must exhibit themselves wherever English society has a footing, and England's monarchy a representative. Hostility to these was, in truth, the very genius of their religion. Looked upon with contempt by Episcopal clergymen, they took a pious revenge in wildly declaiming against the pride and arrogance of those who derided them, and incidentally pointed to the luxurious grandeur and sumptuous living of the great dignitaries of the church, while its poor hard-working curates had scarcely the means of living. Treated with contumely by the few educated English who, from time to time, settled among their hearers, they pointed in their indignation to that country, and to those institutions, where one man was held no better than another, and where the many could soon level the pride and bring down the pretensions of the few. Deprived by law, as they were at this time, of nearly all the rights of Christian ministers—of the right to marry, and all similar ones, (for both the government and the church had long contended against men whom they regarded and believed, in point of education and character, to be wholly unfit to exercise these sacred functions,) they declaimed from the very bottom of their hearts against the illiberality and exclusiveness of English institutions, of English feelings, and of English pride, in depriving them of these rights; and they applauded, with equal earnestness, that government under which their church flourished, in the fullest exercise of the widest privileges of a Christian denomination. There is no exaggeration on the one side or on the other in this. It would be offensive to the church and to its adherents to say, that they regarded these preachers otherwise than we have described. It would be unjust to the Methodists to say, that they did not feel, and that they did not act, as we have given them credit for doing.
But in addition to the effect, political and national, produced by these preachers, the peculiarity of the Methodist church-government spread the same influences by many minor, but not less effectual ramifications. Every little society, in every neighbourhood, had what is called a class-leader, or local preacher, whose duty it was to exercise a sort of half-religious and half-civil domination over the part of the church immediately surrounding him, to give them advice, settle their differences, and practise the arts of small oratory and miniature government.
It is not difficult to perceive how this system must have furnished a leader to every little neighbourhood; how the ambition first formed by a class-meeting must have wished the larger sphere of a political one; and how the consciousness of ability to govern a congregation naturally led to the conviction that the same abilities might be usefully employed in the magistracy, or even in parliament. And it is a significant fact, that since the friends of these class-leaders have been in power, in every neighbourhood where the Methodists have had a footing, two-thirds of the magistrates appointed by the government were, and are, these very class-leaders themselves. But, at the time we are speaking of, the idea of appointing a person a magistrate, whose only qualification consisted in his exhibiting a stentorian voice at Methodist meetings, or being an influential member of "his society," was utterly repugnant to the feelings of men educated to dislike such persons, even when they are unpretending, much less when they aspire to offices of honour and distinction. No class-leaders, therefore, in neighbourhoods where every man was alike a lord of the soil, saw themselves looked up to as leaders by the many, at the same time that they were looked down upon as boorish pretenders by the few. But what galled them yet more was, that they constantly saw the few placed in offices of honour and emolument over them, and thus "rubbing in," as they termed it, the insult and the injustice of their own exclusion. Like the preachers, too, they pointed, in their indignation and revenge, to that country and those institutions where the people could raise the man, and not the crown—where they could not only attain what they aimed at, but crush what they abhorred.
Partly from this system of religious and political education, and partly from the great number of Americans who settled in the province immediately after the revolutionary war, and who came in with, and at the suggestion of Governor Simcoe, as well as the many who came in without him—but mainly from the tinge of nationality that all large communities impart to small ones adjacent to them—the manners, the customs, the accent, and even the prejudices, of the rural native population in Upper Canada, are scarcely distinguishable from the American. Their very slang words are the same, and their dislike of what they term "blooded critters,"—namely, Englishmen, who cannot help evincing their inveterate dislike of either associating themselves, or allowing their families to associate, with persons whose education and habits they consider beneath them. Every feature, indeed, by which an Englishman can detect the influence of the levelling system in the States, particularly among the farming and lower classes, he can also detect, and fully to the same extent, among all the American, the Dutch, and most of the rural native Canadian population in Upper Canada. It would be digressing too far from the main object of this paper to bring forward examples—and we know hundreds—where English gentlemen have been subjected to innumerable petty annoyances, (such as cutting down their fences, and letting the cattle into their corn-fields,) merely because it became hinted about the neighbourhoods where they had settled that they were "blooded critters," and refused to eat at the same table with their labourers, and associate upon an equal footing with their neighbours, irrespective of their habits, character, and education; where men have left the harvest-fields as soon as they discovered that two tables were set in the house; and where families have been obliged, to avoid inconveniences that could not be endured, to conform, if not altogether, at least for a time, to the general usage of admitting no distinction between master and man. It must suffice for our purpose now, to say that these things exist—that they exist to the extent that we have described them; and without going into the question of the policy or the impolicy of Englishmen not conforming to the general and prevailing customs of the country in which they settle, or of the merit or demerit of these customs themselves, all we wish to say here is, that these customs are, in our humble opinion, inimical to all monarchical education—to that state of society where rank must be recognised, respectability distinguished, and refinement preserved, or monarchy cease to exist, or become a mockery.
But what was the strength of all these natural and unmistakable elements of hostility to monarchy under any form, and to a people bred under monarchical institutions in any circumstances? What was the power of the Methodists, in so far as that was used against the government, over the constituencies of the province? What was the power of those who were not Methodists, but who united with them in opposing the government? And what was the power of the really honest Yankees in the province, who never hesitated to avow that they hated the British government, root, branches, and all? And in what way did their united feelings and intentions develop themselves?
For upwards of a quarter of a century they maintained,—with all the power and patronage of the government against them; with most of the talent born in the province, and the whole, or very nearly so, of that imported into it, against them; and with seven-eighths, yes, nine-tenths, of the emigrants who were able to purchase property when they came, or who subsequently became voters, against them,—alternate, and more than alternate, majorities in parliament. It can answer no good purpose now, it never answered any, to deny or to disguise this fact. This class of men formed, as what we have already stated must have satisfied the reader, fully two-thirds of the electors in the counties. In the Home District, where M'Kenzie, who headed the rebellion in 1837, had absolute control over the elections; in the Midland District, where Mr Bidwell, an American by birth, by education, and from principle, exercised a similar influence; in the London District, where Duncombe, who also headed the rebels, could carry any man into parliament he pleased; what was the character of the voters in the townships and counties which gave them this power? They were the Methodists, educated as we have described; they were the Americans and Dutch, with strong predilections in favour of democracy, and still stronger dislike of the natural and inevitable characteristics of society which arise from monarchy itself. In the Gore district, in the Niagara district, and in the Newcastle district, what do the poll-books exhibit for the counties which sent member after member, with hardly an exception, to support M'Kenzie in the parliament, and some of them to support him in the rebellion? The number of Hezekiahs, and Jedediahs, and Jonathans, of Eliacums, and Ezekiels, shows pretty clearly what was their origin, and what were their political predilections. But these democratic leanings were by no means arbitrarily confined to names, for there was both a Duke of Wellington and a Horatio Nelson in the Gore District gaol for treason in 1838. The Duke was a preacher, and regularly held forth to his fellow prisoners, until the scamp at last—we suppose to acquire a practical idea of the nature of sin—stole a watch from one of his companions, and was thereupon regularly deposed from his high calling; and the scene of his labours changed from among the political offenders down to the petty larceny fraternity. All of which may be found duly chronicled in the records of the sheriff's office of the Gore District for the period.
But there is no circumstance, perhaps, that we could mention, that could convey a better idea of the relative regard for England and the United States, of the class of people we have been describing, than the fact—well known to every person who has lived among them—that a Yankee schoolmaster, without either education or intelligence—with nothing on earth to recommend him, save an inveterate propensity for vapouring and meddling in the affairs, religious and political, of every sect and class wherever he goes—can, and ever has, exercised more influence among them in a few months, than a whole neighbourhood of English gentlemen could in years. And we speak neither from hearsay nor conjecture: we speak from what we have seen and know, and what is susceptible of full proof.
The political measures of this party, like all others, soon shaped themselves into an embodiment of their motives and principles, and into a means, the most natural and the most certain, of gaining and keeping power. Ambition, mounted between two saddle-bags, upon a jog-trot pony, was not likely to shine in the character of a courtier. A strong nasal accent, and a love of the levelling system, were but poor recommendations to English gentlemen, and English governors, for offices of distinction and the command of her Majesty's militia forces. But both were powerful at the hustings. What they could not win from the crown they could gain from the electors. What monarchical feelings and a monarchical education could not brook, democratic voters would assuredly elevate. The consequences were such as may be conceived. Their measures became, to all intents and purposes, democratic. They began by requiring, as indispensable to the proper "image and transcript," as they called it, of the British constitution, that the legislative council—analogous to the House of Lords—should be rendered elective; that the magistracy should be made elective; that voting by ballot, as it is practised in the States, should be introduced; and that every officer in the country, from a colonel to a constable, should be chosen by the people. How much of monarchy would have been left after all this—how many of the distinguishing characteristics that the English government imparts to a British people, would have been discernible, after all these measures were in full operation, it would not have been very difficult to foresee.
Lord Durham, in speaking of this party, and of that which opposed it, observes:—
"At first sight it appears much more difficult to form an accurate idea of the state of Upper than of Lower Canada. The visible and broad line of demarcation which separates parties, by the distinctive characters of race, happily has no existence in Upper Canada. The quarrel is one of an entirely English, if not British, population. Like all such quarrels, it has, in fact, created not two but several parties, each of which has some objects in common with some one of those to which it is opposed. They differ on one point and agree on another; the sections which unite together one day are strongly opposed the next; and the very party which acts as one against a common opponent, is in truth composed of divisions seeking utterly different or incompatible objects. It is very difficult to make out, from the avowals of parties, the real objects of their struggles; and still less easy is it to discover any cause of such importance as would account for its uniting any large mass of the people in an attempt to overthrow, by forcible means, the existing form of government."
There could not have been anything more mischievously incorrect, or more likely to lead to unfortunate conclusions, than these statements. We can safely challenge the whole parliamentary history of the province, the character of the leading measures and of the leading men, and the result of every election, for twenty-five years, to find even a reasonable pretext for them, although we believe they were made in full conviction of their truth by the nobleman who made them. Of course, he could not have properly understood what he was writing about. For six successive elections previous to the rebellion, the whole history of England does not afford an example of each party's going to the hustings with so little change in men, measures, principles, or feelings, as in every one of these. In every new House of Assembly the same identical leaders, and the same followers, singled out the same men four years after four years; and neither accidents nor changes, the reproaches of treason on the one side, or the accusations of corruption on the other, caused the loss of a man to one party or the gain of one to the other. The whole heart, soul, and hopes of the two parties were as distinct and opposite as those of any two parties that ever had an existence. Nor could it have been otherwise, when the tendencies of the one were so manifestly against the existence of a fabric, which every feeling of the other urged them to preserve at all hazards and under all circumstances.
At last an important event in the history of the province brought the contest between these parties to an issue. When Sir Francis Head assumed the government in 1836, he found the party which had opposed it for so many years with a large majority in Parliament. With the view, if possible, of reconciling the two parties, and of getting both to unite with him in furthering the real interests of the province, he formed an executive council of the leaders of both. But the council had scarcely been formed, before the leaders of the party which had been so perpetually in opposition declined remaining in it, unless Sir Francis would surrender up to them, practically, the same powers that are enjoyed by the ministry in England. This he neither could nor would do. An angry correspondence ensued. They significantly pointed, in the event of the character of the struggle being changed, to aid from the great democracy of America. He asserted that the great right arm of England should be wielded, if necessary, to support the crown. They finally concluded by stopping the supplies. He dissolved the house.
In the election contest which ensued, it was distinctly and emphatically declared by the government, that the contest was no longer as between party and party in a colony, but as between monarchy and democracy in America. Monarchy was, in fact and in truth, the candidate at the election. And whether the whole of the party engaged in this desperate opposition participated in the declaration made to Sir Francis, that they would look for aid to the States, and which elicited from him the reply, "Let them come if they dare," is not a matter that they have ever enlightened the public upon. But that he was forced and obliged to make monarchy the candidate in this election, or let democracy threaten and bully him out of the country, is a historical fact, and incontrovertible in the Canadas, but most grossly and most unfortunately misunderstood in England.
The government party gained the election. But after the contest, the opposition, seeing their hopes of success—which were founded upon the plan of embarrassing the government into their measures, by gaining majorities in parliament and stopping the supplies—all destroyed by the result of this election; and knowing that immigration was every year adding to the strength of their opponents, finally determined to change the struggle from the hustings and the parliament, to the camp and the battle-field—to risk all in a bold attempt to strike down the oak at a blow, instead of attempting to destroy it, branch by branch, by democratic measures and factious legislation. That there were men of this party who did not approve of this desperate step, and that there were others who thought it premature, we believe and know; but that the great body of the party itself sympathised with the leaders in it, and would have gloried in, and contributed by all the means in their power to their success, had it been attainable, we are not only sure of, but could prove by the history of the whole affair, given by those who had the best means of understanding it.
When Lord Durham arrived in Canada, he found this party in the situation of masses of threatening, but scattered clouds. Some had voluntarily withdrawn to the States; others were there, either to escape arrest, or from consciousness of their guilt in the rebellion. The great body of the party remained in the province, with all those feelings towards England and her loyalists, that humbled pride, many sufferings, a contemptible struggle, and a mortifying defeat, were likely to engender. But though the storm had passed over, the clouds were nearly all left. The party had, in reality, gained by experience much more than it had lost in numbers. It had come to the understanding that England's great right arm could not be so easily broken. It had learned, and its friends in the States had learned—what was most useful to both under the circumstances—that if England's institutions were to be destroyed in America, it must be done by some other means than by blows and bayonets.
And it was with this party, thus situated, and composed of the materials, and influenced by the considerations, we have mentioned, that Lord Durham proposed, by a union of the provinces, to neutralise the legislative influence of the French of Lower Canada—to destroy their supremacy, which was pregnant with rebellion, and to subvert their power, which had been synonymous with decay. For without the aid of this party, or a great portion of it, the loyalists could not accomplish this; much less could it ever be accomplished if this party should happen to unite with the French. A vast power, too, whether for good or for evil, and hitherto unknown in a colony, was thrown among them all to be scrambled for. We mean a power analogous to that of the ministry in England, and known by the name of a Responsible Government in Canada. This power, always held in England by the heads of great parties—by men of lofty intellects and great characters—by men who were literally invested with the moral worth, the intelligence, the rank, and the honour of millions—this mighty power was tossed up in the Canadas like a cap in a crowd, to fall upon the head of whomsoever it might chance. It mattered not whether it was a Frenchman, the dearest object of whose existence was the destruction of England's power, that gained the majority. The cap must be his. It mattered not whether it was a democrat, whose secret but highest aim was the annihilation of England's monarchy, that succeeded at the elections: the mantle of England's honour, and of upholding England's crown in America, must fall upon him. We should be sorry to propose the curtailment of a single privilege of a single Briton, in any part of the world where the flag of his country waves over him. In what we shall have to say hereafter as to the government of the colonies, we do not intend doing so. But what we mean to say of this vast power, which was thrown among the people to be scrambled for at this time in the Canadas, is, that what in England must have been, from the very nature of things, a guarantee for all orders in the state being preserved and protected under it, was in the Canadas, equally from the nature of things, precisely the reverse. No ministry in England could be formed without the nobility, the gentry, the wealth—all that owed its all to the preservation of the institutions of the country—being represented in it. In the Canadas a ministry could be—yes, from the very nature of things, a ministry must be—formed, where Frenchmen, who hated England—where democrats, who hated monarchy, must control the destinies of England's subjects—the existence of England's empire in the west. We would not be understood, therefore, as desiring to curtail a single privilege; but we would, nevertheless, keep edge-tools out of the hands of madmen and enemies. We would not remove the rope from the neck of another to put it round our own.
Extraordinary though it seem that human credulity could go so far—if the character of the parties, if the character even of the measures of the parties, in Upper Canada was understood—as to expect that the giving to the one which had opposed the government, as it were by nature, the power, by uniting with the French, of crushing its enemies for ever, that it would not do so; that it would not join with its old allies in dividing the spoils of prosperity, as it had already done in sharing the mortifications of defeat; that it would not join them, even for the purpose of having revenge, each of its own enemy in its own province;—yet such was the hope, such the infatuation of Lord Durham. He let a little stream of abstract right fall into a whole sea of French prejudices and democratic infatuations, and he expected that it would change the great face of the waters. And what has been the result?—that the little stream has been lost in the great sea; that, instead of its changing the sea, it has but added to its weight; that all the prejudices, all the infatuations are left; and the power that was expected to change them has been converted into tools for them to work with.
Up to the last election, the French had never fairly recovered their former influence, or rather had not the opportunity of fully exerting their powers in the elections. Up to the same period, the reform party, as they styled themselves in Upper Canada, had laboured under a similar disadvantage. The latter had suffered for the want of its leaders, three of whom were outlaws in the States, as well as from other causes. But at the last election—a fair one for all parties—the French recovered all their former power, and the Upper Canadian party all its former counties. The French, therefore, were making all the strides they could towards the domination that, according to Lord Durham, was pregnant with rebellion; the reform party had just the opportunity that he fondly wished for them, of checking the evil, and of establishing an enlightened and moderate British party between the two extremes. And what did they do? The measures and the facts must speak for themselves.
The following resolution, moved by Mr Lafontaine, attorney-general for Lower Canada, taken in the abstract, would seem harmless and fair enough:—
"Resolved, that this house do now resolve itself into a committee to take into consideration the necessity of establishing the amount of losses incurred by certain inhabitants of Lower Canada during the political troubles of 1837 and 1838, and of providing for the payment thereof."
But when the following commentary of items, intended to be paid under it, is added to it, the nature of the political troubles of 1837 and 1838, and the intention of the resolution, will be better understood:—
Items selected from the Report of the Commissioners appointed to ascertain the Amount of Rebellion Losses in Lower Canada, and their observations thereon:—
"No. 1109. Wolfred Nelson, Montreal. Property destroyed, £23,109, 19s. 5d.; but Dr Nelson deducts the amount of his liabilities (for which his creditors have claimed, or may claim) and claims the balance only, say £12,379, 12s. 7d.
1089. Pierre Beauchere, St Ours. £69, 10s., quartering insurgents under the command of 'General Mathiot,' and £131, 6s. 3d. for imprisonment five months and nine days.
1107. Jos. Guimond, Chateauguay, conviction recorded. The wife claims £8, 10s. for the purchase of the confiscated estate bought by her.
P. N. Pacaud, Three Rivers. Claims £400 for false imprisonment, and £25 for expenses there, and £500 for absence from the Province, to avoid arrest, &c.
27. J. Dorion, M.D., St Ours. Claims £300 as due from Dr Nelson's estate; £175 for three months' imprisonment, &c.
32. Theophile Robert, Montreal. Conviction recorded. Claims £215 for loss of time whilst in exile.
34. Cyrille Beaudriault, Sault au Recollet. Claims £268, 16s. for interest, and £200 profit, on the goods destroyed and pillaged.
77. Church of St Cyprien, Napierville. The sum of £327, 12s. 6d. was taken from the treasury of the Church, forcibly, by Dr Cote, against the will and remonstrance of the churchwardens.
398. Jos. Dumouchel, Ste. Martine. Conviction recorded. Claims £1878, 13s. 9d., including £525 for compensation for seven years' imprisonment and exile.
564. Etienne Langlois, Blairfindie. Conviction recorded. Claims £345 for loss of time while in exile, and £34 passage from Sidney to Canada.
565. Louis Pinsonneau, St Remi. Conviction recorded. Claims £2275, 10s. 9d., including £855, 15s. for imprisonment and exile.
634. David Blanchette, St Cyprien. Conviction recorded. Claims £520, 16s. 8d. for imprisonment and exile.
654. Pierre Lavois, St Cyprien. Conviction recorded. Claims £300 for being exiled six years, at £50 per annum.
656. Louis Laurelin, St Cyprien, claims £50 for imprisonment and expenses, having been acquitted.
789. Luc H. Masson, St Benoit, claims £450 for the interruption of his business during three years.
Euph. Lamard, St Réme. Conviction recorded. Claims £519, including £150, six years' rent of property destroyed.
838. Archelaus Welch, West Farnham, claims £80, 7s. 6d. loss on sale of timber, on account of the troubles in 1837.
850. Théodore Béchard, Blairfrudie. Conviction recorded. Claims £670, 6s. 8d., value of his estate confiscated and purchased by his wife.
931. Edouard Major, Ste. Scholastique, claims £921, 4s. 7d., including £250 for interest, and £150 for the loss of profit, in discontinuing business.
992. Léandre Ducharme, Montreal. Conviction recorded. Claims for imprisonment and transportation, living in exile, and passage home, £262, 5s.
1327. B. Viger, Boucherville, claims £2000. Exile to Bermuda.
1651. C. Baiseune, St Benoit, claims £150 for three years' exclusion from his profession as a notary, owing to the loss of his books, when prepared to pass his examination as notary.
1812. J. B. Archambeault, and 216 others, of St Eustache, claim £489, 13s. for guns taken and not returned to the owners.
1916. Ninety Persons of St Eustache, for guns taken and not returned, £205, 0s. 10d.
1951. F. Dionne, St Cesaire, claims £12 per annum, or £200 for his brother, who lost his senses from imprisonment and ill usage.
2215. H. D'Eschambault, Boucherville, claims the sum of £12,000, as partner of Dr Nelson, for the creditors of the joint estate; but as the separate creditors have filed, or will file, their separate claims, this claim is not inserted. Dr Nelson also deducted this amount from his claim, as still due to the creditors of the firm.
2174. L. Perrault, Montreal, claims £500, absence in the United States, and £1105, loss of business."
That this flagitious calendar of charges was deliberately intended to be paid by her Majesty's Canadian ministry, it may probably be more satisfactory to the reader to establish by the testimony of that ministry itself, than by any statements of our own.
Mr Merritt, the president of the council, and occupying a similar position in the government of Canada that Lord John Russell does in the government of England, thus writes to his constituents, who had addressed him on the subject, and remonstrated against paying these charges:—"On becoming a member of the government (he was appointed president of the council upon Mr Sullivan's being raised to the bench, a short time before the meeting of parliament) I found their payment determined on by the administration." The reader will observe, that it was against the payment of the items above quoted, that Mr Merritt's constituents remonstrated. He answered, that their payment was decided upon before he took office. But he continues:—"My first impression was, I confess, against it; but I soon became convinced that they had no alternative. I neither wish to be misunderstood, nor relieved from responsibility. Although the government approved of Mr Boulton's amendment, [which was an amendment of its own resolution,] which excludes those who were sent to Bermuda, I was prepared to vote for excluding none." That is to say,—Mr Merritt had the manliness to risk his character, by voting for what his fellow-ministers had convinced him was necessary. They wanted the manliness to do what they had previously convinced him, according to their ideas, would be but an act of justice.
But the fact was, her Majesty's Canadian Executive Council had calculated too highly upon their own strength, or, having provoked the storm, they shrunk back in terror at its violence and its consequences. They were, therefore, obliged to resort to the skin of the fox, to make up what they found they wanted of that of the lion. And the substitution was managed after the following manner:
The amendment alluded to by Mr Merritt, or the operative part of it, was in these words:
"That the losses, so far only as they have arisen from the total, or partially unjust, unnecessary, or wanton destruction of the dwellings, buildings, property, and effects of the said inhabitants [of Lower Canada], and by the seizure, taking, or carrying away of their property and effects, should be satisfied; provided that none of the persons who have been convicted of high treason, alleged to have been committed in that part of this province formerly called Lower Canada, since the first day of November 1847, or who, having been charged with high treason, or other offences of a treasonable nature, and having been committed to the custody of the sheriff in the gaol of Montreal, submitted themselves to the will and pleasure of her Majesty, and were thereupon transported to her Majesty's island of Bermuda, shall be entitled to any indemnity for losses sustained during or after the said rebellion, or in consequence thereof."
This amendment is worded carefully enough, and, like Mr Lafontaine's resolution, is apparently just and harmless in its abstract signification; but it proves, like the former, a vastly different matter when its intentions come to be discovered by its practical application.
It is necessary that the reader should understand that there were a great number of the French rebels, particularly the leading characters, who fled the country immediately after the first few contests were over—and some of them were brave enough not even to wait so long—who came back under the amnesty, and consequently neither submitted themselves to the custody of the sheriff of Montreal, nor were prosecuted in any way: these are, therefore, no matter how high, or how notorious their treason, exempted from disability, under this amendment, to claim rebellion losses. Among these was a Doctor Wolfred Nelson, who was commander-in-chief of the rebels at the battles of St Denis and St Charles; who fought with them as well as he could; who published the declaration of independence for the Canadas; who, after he had made his escape to the States, hovered round the borders as the leader of the piratical gangs that devastated the country; and whom General Wood was finally despatched by the United States government to put down. This individual is now a member of the Canadian parliament for a French county, and is an admitted claimant, under Mr Boulton's amendment, for twenty-three thousand pounds, for his rebellion losses. His own words in the debate upon the question are these:—"As to the claims made for my property, I had sent in a detailed account of the losses which had occurred, and which amounted to £23,000, of which £11,000 did not belong to me, but to my creditors. I mentioned their names, and as far as my memory would serve, that was the amount." Now, setting aside the doctrine, subversive even of all traitors' honour, and of all security under any government, that men may first half destroy a country by rebellion, and afterwards make up the other half of its destruction by claiming indemnity for incidental losses; setting aside this question, and viewing the matter in the abstract light, that all claims for injuries should be paid, we should like to know who is to pay the creditors of the poor widows of the soldiers and the loyalists whose blood stained the snows of Canada in suppressing Dr Wolfred Nelson's rebellion? Who is to feed their children, who are at this moment—we can vouch for the fact in at least one instance—shoeless and houseless, wandering upon the world? Yet Dr Nelson's creditors, on account of Dr Nelson's crime, must be paid. Who is to pay the creditors of the merchants, of the millers, of the lumberers, who were ruined by the general devastation that Dr Nelson's rebellion brought upon Lower Canada? Still Dr Nelson's creditors must be paid, although he spent the very money in bringing about other people's ruin. Who is to indemnify the people of England for two millions sterling spent in putting down Dr Nelson's rebellion? Yet Dr Nelson's property must be made good, and Dr Nelson's creditors must be paid, because England was under the necessity of putting down Dr Nelson's insurrection. And will—can England look on with indifference while Upper Canada—whose loyalists, when she was without a soldier to hoist her flag, did it for her—whose people freely and gladly sacrificed their lives, as well in the hardships as in the struggle with the traitor and the assassin, and whose trade and property were wellnigh ruined by this Dr Wolfred Nelson's rebellion—is now called upon to make good to him money he spent in carrying it on, and property that shared but the common ruin he brought upon the whole country? Yet Dr Nelson's payment is now decided upon by the parliament of Canada; and as the climax of such unheard-of legislation, he voted for it himself.
When such a coach-and-four as this can walk through Mr Boulton's amendment, it is needless to spend time upon smaller fry. The loyalists of Canada have now, or will have, if the governor, or the British government assents to the measure, to pay for the very torch that was employed to set fire to their homes; for the guns that were used to shoot them down by the wayside; for the shoes that an enemy who challenged them to fight, wore out in running away; for the time that men who, assassin-like, established hunters' lodges in the States, for the purpose of cutting down the defenceless, and burning up the unprotected, were engaged in the conception and execution of their diabolical designs. These may be strong statements, but they are facts. We need go no farther than Dr Nelson's case, who claims indemnity for the very money he spent in buying powder and balls to destroy her Majesty's subjects, and who claims £12,000 for injury to his property, while he himself was at the head of gangs of desperadoes laying waste the whole southern frontier of the province to sustain them.
But, to convey an idea to the English reader of the full extent to which payment may be, and is contemplated to be, made to parties engaged in the rebellion, under this amendment, we need but quote the questions that were put to Mr Lafontaine, before the final vote was taken on the question, and the manner in which he treated them.
"In committee last night, Colonel Prince stated that a great deal of uncertainty existed as to the class of persons whom it was intended by the ministry to pay, under the measure introduced by them, and he begged Mr Attorney General Lafontaine to settle the matter explicitly by replying to certain questions which he would put to him. Colonel Prince promised, on his part, to regard the replies as final, and after receiving them, he would allude no further to the rebellion claims.
He then put the following questions in a deliberate, solemn manner, pausing between each for an answer.
'Do you propose to exclude, in your instructions to the commissioners to be appointed under this act, all who aided and abetted in the rebellion of 1837-1838?'
No Reply.
'Do you propose to exclude those, who, by their admissions and confessions, admitted their participation in the rebellion?'
No Reply.
'Do you mean to exclude those whose admission of guilt is at this very moment in the possession of the government, or of the courts of law, unless these admissions have been destroyed with the connivance of honourable gentlemen opposite?'
No Reply.
'Do you mean to exclude any of those 800 men who were imprisoned in the jail of Montreal, for their participation in the rebellion, and who were subsequently discharged from custody through the clemency of the government, and whose claims I understand to exceed some £70,000?'
No Reply.
'Do you not mean to pay every one, let his participation in the rebellion have been what it may, except the very few who were convicted by the courts-martial, and some six or seven who admitted their guilt and were sent to Bermuda?'
No Reply."
Montreal Gazette.
But what course did the enlightened reformers of Upper Canada take in this business—did that party which Lord Durham expressly stated was made up, for the most part, of men of strong British feelings, and by whose aid the French domination was to be crushed? Out of the strongest majority—out of the most united and effective representation of the whole party that has ever been had since Sir Francis Head assumed the government of the province, one only voted against the French; seventeen voted with them, and five found it convenient to be absent.
But, bad as this measure is, and plainly as it shows that England's friends have been rendered politically powerless in the provinces, it is even better than the representation scheme, which these two parties have still more unitedly, and, if anything, more determinedly endeavoured to push through parliament. The following extracts from the leading journals of both provinces, will convey an idea of the intention of this measure, and what it is likely to lead to:—
"The rebellion claims which have roused, in every English breast, a feeling of strong antipathy against the French Canadian race, is but an affair of skirmishing, preparatory to the great battle for perpetual domination in Canada by the French Canadian race over those whom Mr Lafontaine has styled their 'natural enemies.' It is the Representation scheme that is to raise over us, for ever, our 'French Masters.' As an affair of money, that of the Rebellion Losses is an injury and insult to every man who obeyed the order of the government in its time of need. It has planted deeply the seeds of a never-dying irritation, but it involves not our national existence. The Representation scheme is a triple iniquity, and will cement, if the madness of party be strong enough to carry it, all the little differences of parties among Englishmen, into one settled, determined hatred of the French race. It is a triple iniquity—an injury, an insult, and slavery to our children."—Montreal Gazette.
"By the Ministerial scheme, then, it is proposed to give the British Canadian population, say 13 members—as follows: —Ottawa 2, Argenteuil 1, Drummond (doubtful) 1, Sherbrooke 2, Shefford 1, Huntingdon 1, Megantic 1, Missisquoi 1, Gaspé 1, Stanstead 1, Sherbrooke Town 1. Thus leaving 62 members for the Franco-Canadians—giving the former an increase on their present number of 3 and the latter of 30! Can this be called a just proportion? It cannot."—Montreal Herald.
"That measure extends over the whole of the province—Lower as well as Upper Canada; and one of its leading features being, according to the testimony of Mr Hincks, to insure to the French Canadians the perpetuation of their ascendency in the legislature, as a distinct race, we may look forward in future to the infliction of the most oppressive measures, upon the colonists of British origin, which the masters of the Union may choose to dictate. These are the fruits of radical ascendency in the executive and the legislature, from Upper Canada, and the prostration of those of British origin in Lower Canada."—British Colonist, Toronto.
Fortunately, however—fortunately even for those it was intended to invest with so great a power, this measure did not pass. For to give a naturally unprogressive race legislative superiority over an inevitably progressive one, is but to prolong a contest, or make more desperate an immediate struggle. The race that advances will not perpetually strive with a rope round its neck, or a chain round its leg. If it cannot loose itself, it will turn round and fight its holders. The French might have bound the English, but they would have had to fight them. A miss, however, is as good as a mile. It required a vote of two-thirds of the whole house to make such a change in the representation. Fifty-six voters would have done it; they had but fifty-five; so that this part of the storm at all events has passed over.
But how did the enlightened reformers of Upper Canada act, upon a measure avowedly and undisguisedly intended to perpetuate French domination? Every man of them voted for it. What a melancholy comment this is upon the following—the closing reflection of Lord Durham, upon the government of Canada. What a comment it is upon the attempt to change a people by a measure; to purge out of Frenchmen errors as strong as their nature—out of democrats feelings as large as their souls, by a single pill of abstract right in the shape of responsible government.
"In the state of mind in which I have described the French Canadian population, as not only now being, but as likely for a long while to remain, the trusting them with an entire control over this province would be, in fact, only facilitating a rebellion. Lower Canada must be governed now, as it must be hereafter, by an English population; and thus the policy which the necessities of the moment force on us, is in accordance with that suggested by a comprehensive view of the future and permanent improvement of the province."—Report Can. E., p. 127.
But it is not alone that British prosperity is now crushed by the domination of a retrogressive race, but it is that a British people are obliged to feel the galling and unnatural fact, that the power of the government of England is wielded to keep up institutions in America, to the destruction of which, in Europe, it owes its freedom and its greatness. It is not alone that loyalty is sickened to the very death in Upper Canada, at seeing the best gifts of the crown handed over to political pickpockets—for we hold every man, and we can call upon all America to second us in it, as no better than a political pickpocket, who is a democrat in his heart and soul, and whines out "God save the Queen," to pillage her Majesty's treasury—it is not alone that loyalty is galled to madness at this, but it is that loyalty is obliged to see that, however much it may beat these men at the hustings, and by virtue of the constitution, they can still laugh at all its efforts as long as they can play the part of French tools. In all history, in short, there is not a parallel to the state of things at present existing in the Canadas. To men whose very accents, whose very faces are a living libel upon all loyalty to England, England has by her legislation given power to trample under their feet the only friends she had in the hour of her need. To men who are contending for the perpetuation of institutions which all Europe was obliged to throw off before it could breathe a free breath, or extend a free arm, England has by her legislation given the power, not only to drive her children into the slough of despond, but to mount upon their shoulders there, and sink them irretrievably. England has literally in the Canadas made her loyalists political slaves; her enemies their political task-masters.
Hamilton, Canada West.
23d April, 1849.
Dies Boreales.
No. I.
CHRISTOPHER UNDER CANVASS.
Scene—Cladich, Lochawe-side.
Time—Sunrise.
North—Buller—Seward.
NORTH.
"Under the opening eyelids of the Morn!" Mefeels, Amici, at this moment, the charm of that Impersonation. Slowly awaking from sleep—scarcely conscious of her whereabouts—bewildered by the beauty of the revelation, nor recognising her beloved lochs and mountains—visionary and nameless all as if an uncertain prolongation of her Summer's Night's Dream.
SEWARD.
I was not going to speak, my dear sir.
NORTH.
And now she is broad awake. She sees the heaven and the earth, nor thinks, God bless her, that 'tis herself that beautifies them!
SEWARD.
Twenty years since I stood on this knoll, honoured sir, by your side—twenty years to a day—and now the same perfect peace possesses me—mysterious return—as if all the intervening time slid away—and this were not a renewed but a continuous happiness.
NORTH.
And let it slide away into the still recesses of Memory—the Present has its privileges—and they may be blamelessly, wisely, virtuously enjoyed—and without irreverence to the sanctity of the Past. Let it slide away—but not into oblivion—no danger, no fear of oblivion—even joys will return on their wings of gossamer;—sorrows may be buried, but they are immortal.
SEWARD.
I see not the slightest change on this Grove of Sycamores. Twenty years tell not on boles that have for centuries been in their prime. Yes—that one a little way down—and that one still farther off—have grown—and those striplings, then but saplings, may now be called Trees.
BULLER.
I never heard such a noise.
NORTH.
A cigar in your mouth at four o'clock in the morning! Well—well.
BULLER.
There, my dear sir, keep me in countenance with a Manilla.
NORTH.
The Herb! You have high authority—Spenser's—for "noise."
BULLER.
I said Noise—because it is Noise. Why, the hum of bees overhead is absolutely like soft sustained thunder—and yet no bees visible in the umbrage. The sound is like that of one single bee, and he must be a giant. Ay—there I see a few working like mad—and I guess there must be myriads. The Grove must be full of bees' nests.
NORTH.
Not one. Hundreds of smokes are stealing up from hidden or apparent cottages—for the region is not unpopulous, and not a garden without its hives—and early risers though we be, the matutinæ apes are still before us, and so are the birds.
BULLER.
They, too, are making a noise. Who says a shilfa cannot sing? Of the fifty now "pouring his throat," as the poet well says, I defy you to tell which sings best. That splendid fellow on the birch-tree top—or yonder gorgeous tyke on the yellow oak—or——
NORTH.
"In shadiest covert hid" the leader of the chorus that thrills the many-nested underwood with connubial bliss.
SEWARD.
Not till this moment heard I the waterfall.
BULLER.
You did, though, all along—a felt accompaniment.
NORTH.
I know few dens more beautiful than Cladich-Cleugh!
BULLER.
Pardon me, sir, if I do not attempt that name.
NORTH.
How mellifluous!—Cladich-Cleugh!
BULLER.
Great is the power of gutturals.
NORTH.
It is not inaccessible. But you must skirt it till you reach the meadow where the cattle are beginning to browse. And then threading your way through a coppice, where you are almost sure to see a roe, you come down upon a series of little pools, in such weather as this so clear that you can count the trouts; and then the verdurous walls begin to rise on either side and right before you; and you begin to feel that the beauty is becoming magnificence, for the pools are now black, and the stems are old, and the cliffs intercept the sky, and there are caves, and that waterfall has dominion in the gloom, and there is sublimity in the sounding solitude.
BULLER.
Cladick-Cloock.
NORTH.
A miserable failure.
BULLER.
Cladig-Cloog.
NORTH.
Worser and worser.
SEWARD.
Any footpath, sir?
NORTH.
Yes—for the roe and the goat.
BULLER.
And the Man of the Crutch.
NORTH.
Good. But I speak of days when the Crutch was in its tree-bole——
BULLER.
As the Apollo was in its marble block.
NORTH.
Not so good. But, believe me, gentlemen, I have done it with the Crutch.
SEWARD.
Ay, sir, and could do it again.
NORTH.
No. But you two are yet boys—on the sunny side of fifty—and I leave you, Seward, to act the guide to Buller up Cladich-Cleugh.
BULLER.
Pray, Mr North, what may be the name of that sheet of water?
NORTH.
In Scotland we call it Loch-Owe.
BULLER.
I am so happy—sir—that I talk nonsense.
NORTH.
Much nonsense may you talk.
BULLER.
'Twas a foolish question—but you know, sir, that by some strange fatality or another I have been three times called away from Scotland without having seen Lock-Owe.
NORTH.
Make good use of your eyes now, sirrah, and you will remember it all the days of your life. That is Cruachan—no usurper he—by divine right a king. The sun is up, and there is motion in the clouds. Saw you ever such shadows? How majestically they stalk! And now how beautifully they glide! And now see you that broad black forest, half-way up the mountain?
BULLER.
I do.
NORTH.
You are sure you do.
BULLER.
I am.
NORTH.
You are mistaken. It is no broad black forest—it is mere gloom—shadow that in a minute will pass away, though now seeming steadfast as the woods.
BULLER.
I could swear it is a forest.
NORTH.
Swear not at all. Shut your eyes. Open them. Where now your wood?
BULLER.
Most extraordinary ocular deception.
NORTH.
Quite common. Yet no poet has described it. See again. The same forest a mile off. No need of trees—sun and cloud make our visionary mountains sylvan: and the grandest visions are ever those that are transitory—ask your soul.
BULLER.
Your Manilla is out, my dear sir. There is the case.
NORTH.
Caught like a cricketer. You must ascend Cruachan. "This morning gives us promise of a glorious day;" you cannot do better than take time by the forelock, and be off now. Say the word—and I will myself row you over the Loch. No need of a guide: inclining to the left for an hour or two after you have cleared yonder real timber and sap wood—and then for an hour or two, to the right—and then for another hour or two straight forwards—and then you will see the highest of the three peaks within an hour or two's walk of you—and thus, by mid-day, find yourself seated on the summit.
BULLER.
Seated on the summit!
NORTH.
Not too long, for the air is often very sharp at that altitude—and so rare, that I have heard tell of people fainting.
BULLER.
I am occasionally troubled with a palpitation of the heart—
NORTH.
Pooh, nonsense. Only the stomach.
BULLER.
And occasionally with a determination of blood to the head—
NORTH.
Pooh, nonsense. Only the stomach. Take a calker every two hours on your way up—and I warrant both heart and head—
BULLER.
Not to-day. It looks cloudy.
NORTH.
Why, I don't much care though I should accompany you—
BULLER.
I knew you would offer to do so, and I feel the delicacy of putting a decided negative on the proposal. Let us defer it till to-morrow. For my sake, my dear sir, if not for your own, do not think of it; it will be no disappointment to me to remain with you here—and I shudder at the thought of your fainting on the summit. Be advised, my dear sir, be advised—
NORTH.
Well then, be it so—I am not obstinate; but such another day for the ascent there may not be during the summer. On just such a day I made the ascent some half-century ago. I took it from Tyanuilt—having walked that morning from Dalmally, some dozen miles, for a breathing on level ground, before facing the steepish shoulder that roughens into Loch Etive. The fox-hunter from Gleno gave me his company with his hounds and terriers nearly half-way up, and after killing some cubs we parted—not without a tinful of the creature at the Fairies' Well—
BULLER.
A tinful of the creature at the Fairies' Well!
NORTH.
Yea—a tinful of the creature at the Fairies' Well. Now I am a total-abstinent—
BULLER.
A total-abstinent!
NORTH.
By heavens! he echoes me. Pleasant, but mournful to the soul is the memory of joys that are past! A tinful of the unchristened creature to the health of the Silent People. Oh! Buller, there are no Silent People now.
BULLER.
In your company, sir, I am always willing to be a listener.
NORTH.
Well, on I flew as on wings.
BULLER.
What! Up Cruackan?
NORTH.
On feet, then, if you will; but the feet of a deer.
BULLER.
On all-fours?
NORTH.
Yes—sometimes on all-fours. On all-fours, like a frog in his prime, clearing tiny obstructions with a spang. On all-fours, like an ourang-outang, who, in difficult places, brings his arms into play. On all-fours, like the—
BULLER.
I cry you mercy.
NORTH.
Without palpitation of the heart; without determination of blood to the head; without panting; without dizziness; with merely a slight acceleration of the breath, and now and then something like a gasp after a run to a knowe which we foresaw as a momentary resting-place—we felt that we were conquering Cruachan! Lovely level places, like platforms—level as if water had formed them, flowing up just so far continually, and then ebbing back to some unimaginable sea—awaited our arrival, that on them we might lie down, and from beds of state survey our empire, for our empire it was felt to be, far away into the lowlands, with many a hill between—many a hill, that, in its own neighbourhood, is believed to be a mountain—just as many a man of moderate mental dimensions is believed by those who live beneath his shade to be of the first order of magnitude, and with funeral honours is interred.
BULLER.
Well for him that he is a hill at all—eminent on a flat, or among humbler undulations. All is comparative.
NORTH.
Just so. From a site on a mountain's side—far from the summit—the ascender hath sometimes a sublimer—often a lovelier vision—than from its most commanding peak. Yet still he has the feeling of ascension—stifle that, and the discontent of insufficiency dwarfs and darkens all that lies below.
BULLER.
Words to the wise.
NORTH.
We fear to ascend higher lest we should lose what we comprehend: yet we will ascend higher, though we know the clouds are gathering, and we are already enveloped in mist. But there were no clouds—no mist on that day—and the secret top of Cruachan was clear as a good man's conscience, and the whole world below like the promised land.
BULLER.
Let us go—let us go—let us go.
NORTH.
All knowledge, my dear boy, may be likened to stupendous ranges of mountains—clear and clouded, smooth and precipitous; and you or I in youth assail them in joy and pride of soul, not blind but blindfolded often, and ignorant of their inclination; so that we often are met by a beetling cliff with its cataract, and must keep ascending and descending ignorant of our whereabouts, and summit-seeking in vain. Yet all the while are we glorified. In maturer mind, when experience is like an instinct, we ascertain levels without a theodolite, and know assuredly where dwell the peaks. We know how to ascend—sideways or right on; we know which are midway heights; we can walk in mist and cloud as surely as in light, and we learn to know the Inaccessible.
BULLER.
I fear you will fatigue yourself—
NORTH.
Or another image. You sail down a stream, my good Buller, which widens as it flows, and will lead through inland seas—or lochs—down to the mighty ocean: what that is I need not say: you sail down it, sometimes with hoisted sail—sometimes with oars—on a quest or mission all undefined; but often anchoring where no need is, and leaping ashore, and engaging in pursuits or pastimes forbidden or vain—with the natives—
BULLER.
The natives!
NORTH.
Nay, adopting their dress—though dress it be none at all—and becoming one of themselves—naturalised; forgetting your mission clean out of mind! Fishing and hunting with the natives—
BULLER.
Whom?
NORTH.
The natives—when you ought to have been pursuing your voyage on—on—on. Such are youth's pastimes all. But you had not deserted—not you: and you return of your own accord to the ship.
BULLER.
What ship?
NORTH.
The ship of life—leaving some to lament you, who knew you only as a jolly mariner, who was bound afar! They believed that you had drawn up your pinnace for ever on that shore, in that lovely little haven, among reeds and palms—unknowing that you would relaunch her some day soon, and, bounding in her over the billows, rejoin your ship, waiting for you in the offing, and revisit the simple natives no more!
BULLER.
Methinks I understand now your mysterious meaning.
NORTH.
You do. But where was I?
BULLER.
Ascending Cruackan, and near the summit.
NORTH.
On the summit. Not a whit tired—not a bit fatigued; strong as ten—active as twenty ownselves on the flat—divinely drunk on draughts of ether—happier a thousand times, greater and more glorious, than Jupiter, with all his gods, enthroned on Olympus.
BULLER.
Moderately speaking.
NORTH.
In imagination I hear him barking now as he barked then—a sharp, short, savage, angry and hungry bark—
BULLER.
What? A dog? A Fox?
NORTH.
No—no—no. An Eagle—the Golden Eagle from Ben-Slarive, known—no mistaking him—to generations of Shepherds for a hundred years.
BULLER.
Do you see him?
NORTH.
Now I do. I see his eyes—for he came—he comes sughing close by me—and there he shoots up in terror a thousand feet into the sky.
BULLER.
I did not know the Bird was so timid—
NORTH.
He is not timid—he is bold; but an Eagle does not like to come all at once within ten yards of an unexpected man—any more than you would like suddenly to face a ghost.
BULLER.
What brought him there?
NORTH.
Wings nine feet wide.
BULLER.
Has he no sense of smell?
NORTH.
What do you mean, sir?
BULLER.
No offence.
NORTH.
He has. But we have not always all our senses about us, Buller, nor our wits either—he had been somewhat scared, a league up Glen Etive, by the Huntsman of Gleno—the scent of powder was in his nostrils; but fury follows fear, and in a minute I heard his bark again—as now I hear it—on the highway to Benlura.
BULLER.
He must have had enormous talons.
NORTH.
My hand is none of the smallest—
BULLER.
God bless you, my dear sir,—give me a grasp.
NORTH.
There.
BULLER.
Oh! thumbikins!
NORTH.
And one of his son's talons—whom I shot—was twice the length of mine; his yellow knobby loof at least as broad—and his leg like my wrist. He killed a man. Knocked him down a precipice, like a cannon-ball. He had the credit of it all over the country—but I believe his wife did the business, for she was half-again as big as himself; and no devil like a she-devil fighting for her imp.
BULLER.
Did you ever rob an Eyrie, sir?
NORTH.
Did you over rob a Lion's den? No, no, Buller. I never—except on duty—placed my life in danger. I have been in many dangerous-looking places among the Mountains, but a cautious activity ruled all my movements—I scanned my cliff before I scaled him—and as for jumping chasms—though I had a spring in me—I looked imaginatively down the abyss, and then sensibly turned its flank where it leaned on the greensward, and the liberated streamlet might be forded, without swimming, by the silly sheep.
BULLER.
And are all those stories lies?
NORTH.
All. I have sometimes swam a loch or a river in my clothes—but never except when they lay in my way, or when I was on an angling excursion—and what danger could there possibly be in doing that?
BULLER.
You might have taken the Cramp, Sir.
NORTH.
And the Cramp might have taken me—but neither of us ever did—and a man, with a short neck or a long one, might as well shun the streets in perpetual fear of apoplexy, as a good swimmer evade water in dread of being drowned. As for swimming in my clothes—had I left them on the hither, how should I have looked on the thither side?
BULLER.
No man, in such circumstances, could, with any satisfaction to himself, have pursued his journey, even through the most lonesome places.
BULLER.
Describe the view from the summit.
NORTH.
I have no descriptive power—but, even though I had, I know better than that. Why, between Cruachan and Buchail-Etive lie hundreds on hundreds of mountains of the first, second, and third order—and, for a while at first, your eyes are so bewildered that you cannot see any one in particular; yet, in your astonishment, have a strange vision of them all—and might think they were interchanging places, shouldering one another off into altering shapes in the uncertain region, did not the awful stillness assure you that there they had all stood in their places since the Creation, and would stand till the day of doom.
BULLER.
You have no descriptive power!
NORTH.
All at once dominion is given you over the Whole. You gradually see Order in what seemed a Chaos—you understand the character of the Region—its Formation—for you are a Geologist, else you have no business—no right there; and you know where the valleys are singing for joy, though you hear them not—where there is provision for the cattle on a hundred hills—where are the cottages of Christian men on the green braes sheltered by the mountains—and where may stand, beneath the granite rocks out of which it was built, the not unfrequent House of God.
BULLER.
To-morrow we shall attend Divine Service—
NORTH.
At Dalmally.
BULLER.
I long ago learned to like the ritual of the Kirk. I should like to believe in a high-minded purified Calvinist, who could embrace, in his brotherly heart, a high-minded purified English Bishop, with all his Episcopacy.
NORTH.
And why should he not, if he can recognise the Divine Spirit flowing through the two sets of sensible demonstrations? He can; unless the constitution of the Anglican Christian Religion wars, either by its dogmas or by its ecclesiastical ordinances, against his essential intelligence of Christianity.
BULLER.
And who shall say it does?
NORTH.
Many say it—not I.
BULLER.
And you are wise and good.
NORTH.
Many thousands—and hundreds of thousands, wiser and better. I can easily suppose a Mind—strong in thought, warm in feeling, of an imagination susceptible and creative—by magnanimity, study, and experience of the world, disengaged from all sectarian tenets—yet holding the absolute conviction of religion—and contemplating, with reverence and tenderness, many different ways of expression which this inmost spiritual disposition has produced or put on—having a firmest holding on to Christianity as pure, holy, august, divine, true, beyond all other modes of religion upon the Earth—partly from intuition of its essential fitness to our nature—partly from intense gratitude—partly, perhaps, from the original entwining of it with his own faculties, thoughts, feelings, history, being. Well, he looks with affectionate admiration upon the Scottish, with affectionate admiration on the English Church—old affection agreeing with new affection—and I can imagine in him as much generosity required to love his own Church—the Presbyterian—as yours the Episcopalian—and that, Latitudinarian as he may be called, he loves them both. For myself, you know how I love England—all that belongs to her—all that makes her what she is—scarcely more—surely not less—Scotland. The ground of the Scottish Form is the overbearing consciousness, that religion is immediately between man and his Maker. All hallowing of things outward is to that consciousness a placing of such earthly things as interpositions and separating intermediates in that interval unavoidable between the Finite and the Infinite, but which should remain blank and clear for the immediate communications of the Worshipper and the Worshipped.
BULLER.
I believe, sir, you are a Presbyterian?
NORTH.
He that worships in spirit and in truth cannot endure—cannot imagine, that anything but his own sin shall stand betwixt him and God.
BULLER.
That, until it be in some way or another extinguished, shall and must.
NORTH.
True as Holy Writ. But intervening saints, images, and elaborate rituals—the contrivance of human wit—all these the fire of the Spirit has consumed, and consumes.
BULLER.
The fire of the Presbyterian spirit?
NORTH.
Add history. War and persecution have afforded an element of human hate for strengthening the sternness——
BULLER.
Of Presbyterian Scotland.
NORTH.
Drop that word—for I more than doubt if you understand it.
BULLER.
I beg pardon, sir.
NORTH.
The Scottish service, Mr Buller, comprehends Prayer, Praise, Doctrine—all three necessary verbal acts amongst Christians met, but each in utmost simplicity.
BULLER.
Episcopalian as I am, that simplicity I have felt to be most affecting.
NORTH.
The Praise, which unites the voices of the congregation, must be written. The Prayer, which is the burning towards God of the soul of the Shepherd upon the behalf of the Flock, and upon his own, must be unwritten—unpremeditated—else it is not Prayer. Can the heart ever want fitting words? The Teaching must be to the utmost, forethought, at some time or at another, as to the Matter. The Teacher must have secured his intelligence of the Matter ere he opens his mouth. But the Form, which is of expediency only, he may very loosely have considered. That is the Theory.
BULLER.
Often liable in practice, I should fear, to sad abuse.
NORTH.
May be so. But it presumes that capable men, full of zeal, and sincerity, and love—fervent servants and careful shepherds—have been chosen, under higher guidance. It supposes the holy fire of the new-born Reformation—of the newly-regenerated Church——-
BULLER.
Kirk.
NORTH.
Of the newly-regenerated Church, to continue undamped, inextinguishable.
BULLER.
And is it so?
NORTH.
The Fact answers to the Theory more or less. The original Thought—simplicity of worship—is to the utmost expressed, when the chased Covenanters are met on the greensward, between the hillside and the brawling brook, under the coloured or uncoloured sky. Understand that, when their descendants meet within walls and beneath roofs, they would worship after the manner of their hunted ancestors.
BULLER.
I wish I were better read than I am, in the history of Scotland, civil and ecclesiastical.
NORTH.
I wish you were. I say, then, my excellent friend, that the Ritual and whole Ordering of the Scottish Church is moulded upon, or issues out of, the human spirit kindling in conscious communication of the Divine Spirit. The power of the Infinite—that is, the Sense of Infinitude, of Eternity—reigns there; and the Sense in the inmost soul of the sustaining contact with Omnipotence, and self-consciousness intense, and elation of Divine favour personally vouchsafed, and joy of anticipated everlasting bliss, and triumph over Satan, death, and hell, and immeasurable desire to win souls to the King of the Worlds.
BULLER.
In England we are, I am ashamed to say it, ill informed on——
NORTH.
In Scotland we are, I am ashamed to say it, ill informed on——
BULLER.
But go on, sir.
NORTH.
What place is there for Forms of any kind in the presence of these immense overpowering Realities? For Forms, Buller, are of the Imagination; the Faculty that inhales and lives by the Unreal. But some concession to the humanity of our nature intrudes. Imagination may be subordinated, subjugated, but will not, may not, forego all its rights. Therefore, Forms and hallowing associations enter.
BULLER.
Into all Worship.
NORTH.
Form, too, is, in part, Necessary Order.
BULLER.
Perhaps, sir, you may be not unwilling to say a few words of our Ritual.
NORTH.
I tremble to speak of your Ritual; for it appears to me as bearing on its front an excellence which might be found incompatible with religious truth and sincerity.
BULLER.
I confess that I hardly understand you, sir.
NORTH.
The Liturgy looks to be that which the old Churches are, the Work of a Fine Art.
BULLER.
You do not urge that as an objection to it, I trust, sir?
NORTH.
A Poetical sensibility, a wakeful, just, delicate, simple Taste, seems to have ruled over the composition of each Prayer, and the ordering of the whole Service.
BULLER.
You do not urge that as an objection to it, I trust, sir?
NORTH.
I am not urging objections, sir. I seldom—never, indeed—urge objections to anything. I desire only to place all things in their true light.
BULLER.
Don't frown, sir—smile. Enough.
NORTH.
The whole composition of the Service is copious and various. Human Supplication, the lifting up of the hands of the creature knowing his own weakness, dependence, lapses, and liability to slip—man's own part, dictated by his own experience of himself, is the basis. Readings from the Old and New Volume of the Written Word are ingrafted, as if God audibly spoke in his own House; the Authoritative added to the Supplicatory.
BULLER.
Finely true. We Church of England men love you, Mr North—we do indeed.
NORTH.
The hymns of the sweet Singer of Israel, in literal translation, adopted as a holier inspired language of the heart.
BULLER.
These, sir, are surely three powerful elements of a Ritual Service.
NORTH.
Throughout, the People divide, the service with the Minister. They have in it their own personal function.
BULLER.
Then the Homily, sir.
NORTH.
Ay, the Homily, which, one might say, interprets between Sunday and the Week—fixes the holiness of the Day in precepts, doctrines, reflections, which may be carried home to guide and nourish.
BULLER.
Altogether, sir, it seems a meet work of worshippers met in their Christian Land, upon the day of rest and aspiration. The Scottish worship might seem to remember the flame and the sword. The persecuted Iconoclasts of two centuries ago, live in their descendants.
NORTH.
But the Ritual of England breathes a divine calm. You think of the People walking through ripening fields on a mild day to their Church door. It is the work of a nation sitting in peace, possessing their land. It is the work of a wealthy nation, that, by dedicating a part of its wealth, consecrates the remainder—that acknowledges the Fountain from which all flows. The prayers are devout, humble, fervent. They are not impassioned. A wonderful temperance and sobriety of discretion; that which, in worldly things, would be called good sense, prevails in them; but you must name it better in things spiritual. The framers evidently bore in mind the continual consciousness of writing for ALL. That is the guiding, tempering, calming spirit that keeps in the Whole one tone—that, and the hallowing, chastening awe which subdues vehemence, even in the asking for the Infinite, by those who have nothing but that which they earnestly ask, and who know that unless they ask infinitely, they ask nothing. In every word, the whole Congregation, the whole Nation prays—not the Individual Minister; the officiating Divine Functionary, not the Man. Nor must it be forgotten that the received Version and the Book of Common Prayer—observe the word Common, expressing exactly what I affirm—are beautiful by the words—that there is no other such English—simple, touching, apt, venerable—hued as the thoughts are—musical—the most English English that is known—of a Hebraic strength and antiquity, yet lucid and gracious as if of and for to-day.
BULLER.
I trust that many Presbyterians sympathise with you in these sentiments.
NORTH.
Not many—few. Nor do I say I wish they were more.
BULLER.
Are you serious, sir?
NORTH.
I am. But cannot explain myself now. What are the Three Pillars of the Love of any Church? Innate Religion—Humanity—Imagination. The Scottish worship better satisfies the first Principle—that of England the last; the Roman Catholic still more the last—and are not your Cathedrals Roman Catholic? I think that the Scottish and English, better than the Roman Catholic, satisfy the Middle Principle—Humanity, being truer to the highest requisitions of our Nature, and nourish our faculties better, both of Will and Understanding, into their strength and beauty. Yet what divine-minded Roman Catholics there have been—and are—and will be!
BULLER.
Pause for a moment, sir,—here comes Seward.
NORTH.
Seward! Is he not with us? Surely he was, all hour or two ago—but I never missed him—your conversation has been so interesting and instructive. Seward! why you are all the world like a drowned rat?
SEWARD.
Rat I am none—but a stanch Conservative. Would I had had a Protectionist with me to keep me right on the Navigation Laws.
NORTH.
What do you mean? What's the matter?
SEWARD.
Why, your description of the Pools in Cladich-Cleugh inspired me with a passion for one of the Naïads.
NORTH.
And you have had a ducking!
SEWARD.
I have indeed. Plashed souse, head over heels, into one of the prettiest pools, from a slippery ledge some dozen feet above the sleeping beauty—were you both deaf that you did not hear me bawl?
NORTH.
I have a faint recollection of hearing something bray, but I suppose I thought it came from the Gipsies' Camp.
BULLER.
Are you wet?
SEWARD.
Come—come—Buller.
BULLER.
Why so dry?
NORTH.
Sair drooket.
BULLER.
Where's your Tile?
SEWARD.
I hate slang.
BULLER.
Why, you have lost a shoe—and much delightful conversation.
NORTH.
I must say, Seward, that I was hurt by your withdrawing yourself from our Colloquy.
SEWARD.
Sir, you were beginning to get so prosy——
BULLER.
I insist, Seward, on your making an apology on your knees to our Father for your shocking impiety—I shudder to repeat the word—which you must swallow—P—R—O—S—Y!
SEWARD.
On my knees! Look at them.
NORTH.
My dear, dearer, dearest Mr Seward—you are bleeding—I fear a fracture. Let me——
SEWARD.
I am not bleeding—only a knap on the knee-pan, sir.
BULLER.
Not bleeding! Why you must be drenched in blood, your face is so white.
NORTH.
A non sequitur, Buller. But from a knap on the knee-pan I have known a man a lamiter for life.
SEWARD.
I lament the loss of my Sketch-Book.
BULLER.
It is a judgment on you for that Caricature.
NORTH.
What caricature?
BULLER.
Since you will force me to tell it, a caricature of——Yourself, sir. I saw him working away at it with a most wicked leer on his face, while you supposed he was taking notes. He held it up to me for a moment—clapped the boards together with the grin of a fiend—and then off to Cladick-Cloock—where he met with Nemesis.
NORTH.
Is that a true bill, Mr Seward?
SEWARD.
On my honour as a gentleman, and my skill as an artist, it is not. It is a most malignant misrepresentation——
BULLER.
It was indeed.
SEWARD.
It was no caricature. I promised to Mrs Seward to send her a sketch of the illustrious Mr North; and finding you in one of the happiest of your many-sided attitudes——
NORTH.
The act is to be judged by the intention. You are acquitted of the charge.
BULLER.
To make a caricature of You, sir, under any circumstances, and for any purpose, would be sufficiently shocking; but HERE AND NOW, and that he might send it to his Wife—so transcends all previous perpetration of crimen læsæ majestatis, that I am beginning to be incredulous of what these eyes beheld—nay, to disbelieve what, if told to any human being, however depraved, would seem to him impossible, even in the mystery of iniquity, and an insane libel on our fallen nature.
SEWARD.
I did my best. Nor am I, sir, without hope that my Sketch-Book may be recovered, and then you will judge for yourself, sir, if it be a caricature. A failure, sir, it assuredly was, for what artist has succeeded with YOU?
NORTH.
To the Inn, and put on dry clothes.
SEWARD.
No. What care I about dry or wet clothes! Here let me lie down and bask in this patch of intenser sunshine at your feet. Don't stir, sir; the Crutch is not the least in the way.
NORTH.
We must be all up and doing—the Hour and the Men. The Cavalcade. Hush! Hark! the Bagpipe! The Cavalcade can't be more than a mile off.
SEWARD.
Why staring thus like a Goshawk, sir?
BULLER.
I hear nothing. Seward, do you?
SEWARD.
Nothing. And what can he mean by Cavalcade? Yet I believe he has the Second Sight. I have heard it is in the Family.
NORTH.
Hear nothing? Then both of you must be deaf. But I forget—we Mountaineers are Fine-Ears—your sense of hearing has been educated on the Flat. Not now? "The Campbells are coming,"—that's the march—that's the go—that's the gathering.
BULLER.
A Horn—a Drum, sure enough—and—and—that incomprehensible mixture of groans and yells must be the Bagpipe.
NORTH.
See yonder they come, over the hill-top—the ninth mile-stone from Inverary! There's the Van, by the Road-Surveyor lent me for the occasion, drawn by Four Horses. And there's the Waggon, once the property of the lessee of the Swiss Giantess, a noble Unicorn. And there the Six Tent-Carts, Two-steeded; and there the Two Boat-Carriages—horsed I know not how. But don't ye see the bonny Barges aloft in the air? And Men on horseback—count them—there should be Four. You hear the Bagpipe now—surely—"The Campbells are coming." And here is the whole Concern, gentlemen, close at hand, deploying across the Bridge.
BULLER.
Has he lost his senses at last?
SEWARD.
Have we lost ours? A Cavalcade it is, with a vengeance.
NORTH.
One minute past Seven! True to their time within sixty seconds. This way, this way. Here is the Spot, the Centre of the Grove. Bagpipe—Drum and Horn—music all—silence. Silence, I cry, will nobody assist me in crying silence?
SEWARD AND BULLER.
Silence—silence—silence.
NORTH.
Give me the Speaking-Trumpet that I may call Silence.
SEWARD.
Stentor may put down the Drum, the Horns, the Fifes, and the Serpent, but the Bagpipe is above him—the Drone is deaf as the sea—the Piper moves in a sphere of his own—
BULLER.
I don't hear a syllable you are saying—ah! the storm is dead, and now what a BLESSED CALM.
NORTH.
Wheel into line—Prepare to—
Pitch Tents.
Enter the Field of the Sycamore Grove on Horseback—ushered by Archy M'Callum—Harry Seward—Marmaduke Buller—Vallance Volusene—Nepos Woodburn. Van, Waggon, Carriages, and Carts, &c., form a Barricade between the Rear of the Grove and the road to Dalmally.
Adjutant Archy M'Callum! call the Roll of the Troops.
ADJUTANT.
Peter of the Lodge, Sewer and Seneschal—Here. Peterson ditto, Comptroller of the Cellars—Here. Kit Peterson, Tiger there—Here. Michael Dods, Cook at that Place—Here. Ben Brawn, Manciple—Here. Roderick M'Crimmon, King of the Pipes—-Here. Pym and Stretch, Body-men to the young Englishers—-Here, Here. Tom Moody, Huntsman at Under-cliff Hall, North Devon—-Here. The Cornwall Clipper, Head Game-keeper at Pendragon—Here. Billy Balmer of Bowness, Windermere, Commodore—Here.
NORTH.
Attention! Each man will be held answerable for his subordinates. The roll will be called an hour after sunrise, and an hour before sunset. Men, remember you are under martial law. Camp-master M'Kellar—Here. Let the Mid Peak of Cruachan be your pitching point. Old Dee-side Tent in the centre, right in Front. Dormitories to the east. To the west the Pavilion. Kitchen Range in the Rear. Donald Dhu, late Sergeant in the Black Watch, see to the Barricade. The Impedimenta in your charge. In three hours I command the Encampment to be complete. Admittance to the Field on the Queen's Birth-day. Crowd! disperse. Old Boys! What do you think of this? You have often called me a Wizard—a Warlock—no glamour here—'tis real all—and all the Work of the Crutch. Sons—your Fathers! Fathers—your Sons. Your hand, Volusene—and, Woodburn, yours.
SEWARD.
Hal, how are you?
BULLER.
How are you, Marmy?
NORTH.
On the Stage—in the Theatre of Fictitious Life—such a Meeting as this would require explanation—but in the Drama of Real Life, on the Banks of Lochawe, it needs none. Friends of my soul! you will come to understand it all in two minutes' talk with your Progeny. Progeny—welcome for your Sires' sakes—and your Lady Mothers'—and your own—to Lochawe-side. I see you are two Trumps. Volusene—Woodburn—from your faces all well at home. Come, my two old Bucks—let us Three, to be out of the bustle, retire to the Inn. Did you ever see Christopher fling the Crutch? There—I knew it would clear the Sycamore Grove.
Scene II.—Interior of the Pavilion.
Time—Two P.M.
North—Seward—Buller.
SEWARD.
Still at his Siesta in his Swing-Chair. Few faces bear to be looked on asleep.
BULLER.
Men's faces.
SEWARD.
His bears it well. Awake, it is sometimes too full of expression. And then, how it fluctuates! Perpetual play and interchange as Thought, Feeling, Fancy, Imagination——
BULLER.
The gay, the grave, the sad, the serious, the pathetic, the humorous, the tragic, the whimsical rules the minute—
"'Tis everything by fits, and nothing long."
SEWARD.
Don't exaggerate. An inapt quotation.
BULLER.
I was merely carrying on your eulogium of his wide-awake Face.
SEWARD.
The prevalent expression is still—the Benign.
BULLER.
A singular mixture of tenderness and truculence.
SEWARD.
Asleep it is absolutely saint-like.
BULLER.
It reminds me of the faces of Chantry's Sleeping Children in Litchfield Cathedral.
SEWARD.
Composure is the word. Composure is mute Harmony.
BULLER.
It may be so—but you will not deny that his nose is just a minim too long—and his mouth, at this moment, just a minim too open—and the crow-feet——
SEWARD.
Enhance the power of those large drooping eyelids, heavy with meditation—of that high broad forehead, with the lines not the wrinkles of age.
BULLER.
He is much balder than he was on Deeside.
SEWARD.
Or fifty years before. They say that, in youth, the sight of his head of hair once silenced Mirabeau.
BULLER.
Why, Mirabeau's was black, and my grandmother told me North's was yellow—or rather green, like a star.
NORTH.
Your Grandmother, Buller, was the finest woman of her time.
BULLER.
Sleepers hear. Sometimes a single word from without, reaching the spiritual region, changes by its touch the whole current of their dreams.
NORTH.
I once told you that, Buller. At present I happen to be awake. But surely a man may sit on a swing-chair with his eyes shut, and his mouth open, without incurring the charge of somnolency. Where have you been?
SEWARD.
You told us, sir, not to disturb you till Two——
NORTH.
But where have you been?
SEWARD.
We have written our despatches—read our London Papers—and had a pull in Gutta Percha to and from Port Sonachan.
NORTH.
How does she pull?
BULLER.
Like a winner. I have written to the builder—Taylor of Newcastle—to match her against any craft of her keel in the kingdom.
NORTH.
Sit down. Where are the Boys.
SEWARD.
Off hours ago to Kilchurn. They have just signalised—"Two o'clock. 1 Salmo Ferox, lb. 12-20 Yellow-fins, lb. 15-6 Pike, lb. 36."
NORTH.
And not bad sport, either. They know the dinner hour? Seven sharp.
SEWARD.
They do—and they are not the lads to disregard orders.
NORTH.
Four finer fellows are not in Christendom.
SEWARD.
May I presume to ask, sir, what volumes these are lying open on your knees?
NORTH.
The Iliad—and Paradise Lost.
SEWARD.
I fear, sir, you may not be disposed to enlighten us, at this hour.
NORTH.
But I am disposed to be enlightened. Oxonians—and Double First-Class Men—nor truants since—you will find in me a docile pupil rather than a Teacher. I am no great Grecian.
BULLER.
But you are, sir; and a fine old Trojan too, methinks! What audacious word has escaped my lips!
NORTH.
Epic Poetry! Tell but a Tale, and see Childhood—the harmless, the trustful, the wondering, listen—"all ear;" and so has the wilder and mightier Childhood of Nations, listened, trustful, wondering, "all ear," to Tales lofty, profound—said, or, as Art grew up, sung.
SEWARD.
ΕΠΕ, Say or Tell.
BULLER.
ΑΕΙΔΕ, Sing.
NORTH.
Yes, my lads, these were the received formulas of beseeching with which the Minstrels of Hellas invoked succour of the divine Muse, when their burning tongue would fit well to the Harp transmitted Tales, fraught with old heroic remembrance, with solemn belief, with oracular wisdom. ΕΠΕ, Tell, ΕΠΟΣ, The Tale. And when, step after step, the Harp modelling the Verse, and the Verse charming power and beauty, and splendour and pathos—like a newly-created and newly-creating soul—into its ancestral Tradition—when insensibly the benign Usurper, the Muse, had made the magnificent dream rightly and wholly her own at last.— ΕΠΟΣ, The Sung Tale. Homer, to all following ages the chief Master of Eloquence whether in Verse or in Prose, has yet maintained the simplicity of Telling.
"For he came beside the swift ships of the Achæans,
Proposing to release his daughter, and bringing immense ransom;
Having in his hand the fillet of the far-shooting Apollo,
On the golden rod: and he implored of the Achæans,
And the sons of Atreus, most of all, the two Orderers of the People."
These few words of a tongue stately, resplendent, sonorous, and numerous, more than ours—and already the near Scamandrian Field feels, and fears, and trembles. Milton! The world has rolled round, and again round, from the day of that earlier to that of the later Mæonides. All the soul-wealth hoarded in words, which merciful Time held aloft, unsubmerged by the Gothic, by the Ottoman inundation; all the light shrined in the Second, the Intellectual Ark that, divinely built and guided, rode tilting over the tempestuous waste of waters; all the mind, bred and fostered by New Europe, down to within two hundred years of this year that runs: These have put differences between the Iliad and the Paradise Lost, in matter and in style, which to state and illustrate would hold me speaking till sunset.
BULLER.
And us listening.
NORTH.
The Fall of Hector and of his Troy! The Fall of Adam and of his World!
BULLER.
What concise expression! Multum in parvo, indeed, Seward.
NORTH.
Men and gods mingled in glittering conflict upon the ground that spreads between Ida's foot and the Hellespont! At the foot of the Omnipotent Throne, archangels and angels distracting their native Heaven with arms, and Heaven disburthening her lap of her self-lost sons for the peopling of Hell!
SEWARD.
Hush! Buller—hush!
NORTH.
In way of an Episode—yes, an Episode—see the Seventh Book—our Visible Universe willed into being!
SEWARD.
Hush! Buller—hush!
NORTH.
For a few risings and settings of yon since-bedimmed Sun—Love and celestial Bliss dwelling amidst the shades and flowers of Eden yet sinless—then, from a MORE FATAL APPLE, Discord clashing into and subverting the harmonies of Creation.
"Sin, and her shadow, Death; and Misery,
Death's Harbinger."
The Iliad, indeed!
SEWARD.
I wish you could be persuaded, sir, to give us an Edition of Milton.
NORTH.
No. I must not take it out of the Doctor's hands. Then, as to Milton's style. If the Christian Theologian must be held bold who has dared to mix the Delivered Writings with his own Inventions—bold, too, was he, the heir of the mind that was nursed in the Aristotelian Schools, to unite, as he did, on the other hand, the gait of an understanding accomplished in logic, with the spontaneous and unstudied step of Poetry. The style of Milton, gentlemen, has been praised for simplicity; and it is true that the style of the Paradise Lost has often an austere simplicity; but one sort of it you miss—the proper Epic simplicity—that Homeric simplicity of the Telling.
SEWARD.
Perhaps, sir, in such a Poem such simplicity could not be.
NORTH.
Perhaps not. Homer adds thought to thought, and so builds up. Milton involves thought with thought, and so constructs. Relation is with him argumentative also, and History both Philosophy and Oratory. This was unavoidable. He brought the mind of the latter age to the Form of Composition produced by the primitive time. Again, the style is fitted to the general intention of a Poem essentially didactic and argumentative. Again, the style is personal to himself. He has learnedly availed himself of all antecedent Art—minutely availed himself, yet he is no imitator. The style is like no other—it is intensely and completely original. It expresses himself. Lofty, capacious, acute, luminous, thoroughly disciplined, ratiocinative powers wonderfully blend their action with an imagination of the most delicate and profound sensibility to the beautiful, and of a sublimity that no theme can excel.
SEWARD.
Lord Bacon, sir, I believe, has defined Poetry, Feigned History—has he not?
NORTH.
He has—and no wonder that he thought much of "Feigned History"—for he had a view to Epos and Tragedy—the Iliad and Odyssey—the Attic Theatre—the Æneid—Dante—Ariosto—Tasso—the Romances of Chivalry—moreover, the whole Immense Greek Fable, whereof part and parcel remain, but more is perished. Which Fables, you know, existed, and were transmitted in Prose,—that is, by Oral Tradition, in the words of the relator,—long before they came into Homeric Verse—or any verse. He saw, Seward, the Memory of Mankind possessed by two kinds of History, both once alike credited. True History, which remains True History, and Fabulous History, now acknowledged as Poetry only. It is no wonder that other Poetry vanished from importance in his estimation.
BULLER.
I follow you, sir, with some difficulty.
NORTH.
You may with ease. Fabulous History holds place, side by side, with True History, as a rival in dignity, credence, and power, and in peopling the Earth with Persons and Events. For, of a verity, the Personages and Events created by Poesy hold place in our Mind—not in our Imagination only, but in our Understanding, along with Events and Personages historically remembered.
SEWARD.
An imposing Parallelism!
NORTH.
It is—but does it hold good? And if it does—with what limitations?
SEWARD.
With what limitations, sir?
NORTH.
I wish Lord Bacon were here, that I might ask him to explain. Take Homer and Thucydides—the Iliad and the History of the Peloponnesian War. We thus sever, at the widest, the Telling of Calliope from the Telling of Clio, holding each at the height of honour.
BULLER.
At the widest?
NORTH.
Yes; for how far from Thucydides is, at once, the Book of the Games! Look through the Iliad, and see how much and minute depicturing of a World with which the Historian had nothing to do! Shall the Historian, in Prose, of the Ten Years' War, stop to describe the Funeral Games of a Patroclus? Yes; if he stop to describe the Burying of every Hero who falls. But the Historian in Prose assumes that a People know their own Manners, and therefore he omits painting their manners to themselves. The Historian in Verse assumes the same thing, and, therefore, strange to say, he paints the manners! See, then, in the Iliad, how much memorising of a whole departed scheme of human existence, with which the Prose Historian had nothing to do, the Historian in regulated Metre has had the inspiration and the skill to inweave in the narrative of his ever-advancing Action.
BULLER.
Would his lordship were with us!
NORTH.
Give all this to—the Hexameter. Remember always, my dear Seward, the shield of Achilles—itself a world in miniature—a compendium of the world.
SEWARD.
Of the universe.
NORTH.
Even so; for Sun, and Moon, and Stars are there, Astronomy and all the learned sisterhood!
SEWARD.
Then to what species of narrative in prose—to one removed at what interval from the history of the Peloponnesian War, belongs that scene of Helen on the Walls of Troy? That scene at the Scæan gate? In the tent of Achilles, where Achilles sits, and Priam kneels?
NORTH.
Good. The general difference is obviously this—Publicity almost solely stamps the Thucydidean story—Privacy, more than in equal part, interfused with Publicity, the Homeric. You must allow Publicity and Privacy to signify, besides that which is done in public and in private, that which proceeds of the Public and of the Private will.
SEWARD.
In other words, if I apprehend you aright, the Theme given being some affair of Public moment, Prose tends to gather up the acts of the individual agents, under general aspects, into masses.
NORTH.
Just so. Verse, whenever it dare, resolves the mass of action into the individual acts, puts aside the collective doer—the Public, and puts forward individual persons. Glory, I say again, to the Hexameter!
BULLER.
Glory to the Hexameter! The Hexameter, like the Queen, has done it all.
NORTH.
Or let us return to the Paradise Lost? If the mustering of the Fallen Legions in the First Book—if the Infernal Council held in the Second—if the Angelic Rebellion and Warfare in the Fifth and Sixth—resemble Public History, civil and military, as we commonly speak—if the Seventh Book, relating the Creation by describing the kinds created, be the assumption into Heroic Poetry of Natural History—to what kind of History, I earnestly ask you both, does that scene belong, of Eve's relation of her dream, in the Fifth Book, and Adam's consolation of her uneasiness under its involuntary sin? To what, in the Fourth Book, her own innocent relation of her first impressions upon awaking into Life and Consciousness?
BULLER.
Ay!—to what kind of History? More easily asked than answered.
NORTH.
And Adam's relation to the Affable Archangel of his own suddenly-dawned morning from the night of non-existence, aptly and happily crowned upon the relation made to him by Raphael in the Seventh Book of his own forming under the Omnipotent Hand?
SEWARD.
Simply, I venture to say, sir, to the most interior autobiography—to that confidence of audible words, which flows when the face of a friend sharpens the heart of a man—and Raphael was Adam's Friend.
NORTH.
Seward, you are right. You speak well—as you always do—when you choose. Behold, then, I beseech you, the comprehending power of that little magical band—Our Accentual Iambic Pentameter.
SEWARD.
"Glory be with them, and eternal praise,
The Poets who on earth have made us heirs
Of Truth and pure Delight by heavenly lays!"
NORTH.
Glory to Verse, for its power is great. Man, from the garden in Eden, to the purifying by fire of the redeemed Earth—the creation of things Visible—Angels Upright and Fallen—and Higher than Angels—all the Regions of Space—Infinitude and Eternity—the Universality of Being—this is the copious matter of the Song. And herein there is place found, proper, distinct, and large, and prominent, for that whispered call to visit, in the freshness of morning, the dropping Myrrh—to study the opening beauty of the Flowers—to watch the Bee in her sweet labour—which tenderly dissipates from the lids of Eve her ominously-troubled sleep—free room for two tears, which, falling from a woman's eyes, are wiped with her hair—and for two more, which her pitying husband kisses away ere they fall. All these things Verse disposes, and composes, in One Presentment.
BULLER.
Glory to Verse, for its power is great—glory to our Accentual Iambic Pentameter.
NORTH.
Let us return to the Iliad. The Iliad is a history told by a mind that is arbiter, to a certain extent only, of its own facts. For Homer takes his decennial War and its Heroes, nay, the tenor of the story too, from long-descended Tradition. To his contemporary countrymen he appears as a Historian—not feigning, but commemorating and glorifying, transmitted facts.
SEWARD.
Ottfried Müller, asking how far Homer is tied up in his Traditions, ventures to suspect that the names of the Heroes whom Achilles kills, in such or such a fight, are all traditionary.
NORTH.
Where, then, is the Feigned History? Lord Bacon, Ottfried Müller, and Jacob Bryant, are here not in the main unagreed. "I nothing doubt," says Bacon, "but the Fables, which Homer having received, transmits, had originally a profound and excellent sense, although I greatly doubt if Homer any longer knew that sense."
BULLER.
What right, may I ask, had Lord Bacon to doubt, and Ottfried Müller to suspect——
NORTH.
Smoke your cigar. Ottfried Müller——
BULLER.
Whew!—poo!
NORTH.
Ottfried Müller imagines that there was in Greece a pre-Homeric Age, of which the principal intellectual employment was Myth-making. And Bryant, we know, shocked the opinion of his own day by referring the War of Troy to Mythology. Now, observe, Buller, how there is feigning and feigning—Poet after Poet—and the Poem that comes to us at last is the Poem of Homer; but in truth, of successive ages, ending in Homer——
SEWARD.
Who was then a real living flesh and blood Individual of the human species.
NORTH.
That he was——
SEWARD.
And wrote the Iliad.
NORTH.
That he did—but how I have hinted rather than told. In the Paradise Lost, the part of Milton is, then, infinitely bolder than Homer's in the Iliad. He is far more of a Creator.
SEWARD.
Can an innermost bond of Unity, sir, be shown for the Iliad?
NORTH.
Yes. The Iliad is a Tale of a Wrong Righted. Zeus, upon the secret top of Olympus, decrees this Righting with his omnipotent Nod. Upon the top of Ida he conducts it. But that is done, and the Fates resume their tenor. Hector falls, and Troy shall fall. That is again the Righting of a Wrong, done amongst men. This is the broadly-written admonition: "Discite Justitiam."
SEWARD.
You are always great, sir, on Homer.
NORTH.
Agamemnon, in insolence of self-will, offends Chryses and a God. He refused Chyseis—He robs Achilles. In Agamemnon the Insolence of Human Self-will is humbled, first under the hand of Apollo—then of Jupiter—say, altogether, of Heaven. He suffers and submits. And now Achilles, who has no less interest in the Courts of Heaven than Chryses—indeed higher—in overweening anger fashions out a redress for himself which the Father of Gods and Men grants. And what follows? Agamemnon again suffers and submits. For Achilles—Patroclus' bloody corse! Κειται Πατροκλος—that is the voice that rings! Now he accepts the proffered reconciliation of Agamemnon, before scornfully refused; and in the son of Thetis, too, the Insolence of Human Self-will is chastened under the hand of Heaven.
SEWARD.
He suffers, but submits not till Hector lies transfixed—till Twelve noble youths of the Trojans and their Allies have bled on Patroclus' Pyre. And does he submit then? No. For twelve days ever and anon he drags the insensible corse at his horses' heels round that sepulchral earth.
BULLER.
Mad, if ever a man was.
NORTH.
The Gods murmur—and will that the unseemly Revenge cease. Jove sends Thetis to him—and what meeter messenger for minister of mercy than a mother to her son! God-bidden by that voice, he submits—he remits his Revenge. The Human Will, infuriated, bows under the Heavenly.
SEWARD.
Touched by the prayers and the sight of that kneeling gray-haired Father, he has given him back his dead son—and from the ransom a costly pall of honour, to hide the dead son from the father's eyes—and of his own Will and Power Twelve Days' truce; and the days have expired, and the Funeral is performed—and the pyre is burned out—and the mound over the slayer of Patroclus is heaped—and the Iliad is done—and this Moral indelibly writes itself on the heart—the words of Apollo in that Council—
Τλητον γας Θυμον Μοισαι Θνητωσιε εδωχαν.
The Fates have appointed to mortals a Spirit that shall submit and endure.
NORTH.
Right and good. Τλητον is more than "shall suffer." It is, that shall accept suffering—that shall bear.
SEWARD.
Compare this one Verse and the Twenty-four Books, and you have the poetical simplicity and the poetical multiplicity side by side.
BULLER.
Right and good.
NORTH.
Yes, my friends, the Teaching of the Iliad is Piety to the Gods—
SEWARD.
Reverence for the Rights of Men—
NORTH.
A Will humbled, conformed to the Will of Heaven—
BULLER.
That the Earth is justly governed.
NORTH.
Dim foreshadowings, which Milton, I doubt not, discerned and cherished. The Iliad was the natural and spiritual father of the Paradise Lost—
SEWARD.
And the son is greater than the sire.
NORTH.
I see in the Iliad the love of Homer to Greece and to humankind. He was a legislator to Greece before Solon and Lycurgus—greater than either—after the manner fabled of Orpheus.
SEWARD.
Sprung from the bosom of heroic life, the Iliad asked heroic listeners.
NORTH.
See with what large-hearted love he draws the Men—Hector, and Priam, and Sarpedon—as well as the Woman Andromache—enemies! Can he so paint humanity and not humanise? He humanises us—who have literature and refined Greece and Rome—who have Spenser, and Shakspeare, and Milton—who are Christendom.
SEWARD.
He loves the inferior creatures, and the face of nature.
NORTH.
The Iliad has been called a Song of War. I see in it—a Song of Peace. Think of all the fiery Iliad ending in—Reconciled Submission!
SEWARD.
"Murder Impossibility," and believe that there might have been an Iliad or a Paradise Lost in Prose.
NORTH.
It could never have been, by human power, our Paradise Lost. What would have become of the Seventh Book? This is now occupied with describing the Six Days of Creation. A few verses of the First Chapter of Genesis extended into so many hundred lines. The Book, as it stands, has full poetical reason. First, it has a sufficient motive. It founds the existence of Adam and Eve, which is otherwise not duly led to. The revolted Angels, you know, have fallen, and the Almighty will create a new race of worshippers to supply their place—Mankind.
SEWARD.
For this race that is to be created, a Home is previously to be built—or this World is to be created.
NORTH.
I initiated you into Milton nearly thirty years ago, my dear Seward; and I rejoice to find that you still have him by heart. Between the Fall of the Angels, and that inhabiting of Paradise by our first parents, which is largely related by Raphael, there would be in the history which the poem undertakes, an unfilled gap and blank without this book. The chain of events which is unrolled would be broken—interrupted—incomplete.
SEWARD.
And, sir, when Raphael has told the Rebellion and Fall of the Angels, Adam, with a natural movement of curiosity, asks of this "Divine Interpreter" how this frame of things began?
NORTH.
And Raphael answers by declaring at large the Purpose and the Manner. The Mission of Raphael is to strengthen, if it be practicable, the Human Pair in their obedience. To this end, how apt his discourse, showing how dear they are to the Universal Maker, how eminent in his Universe!
SEWARD.
The causes, then, of the Archangelic Narrative abound. And the personal interest with which the Two Auditors must hear such a revelation of wonders from such a Speaker, and that so intimately concerns themselves, falls nothing short of what Poetry justly requires in relations put into the mouth of the poetical Persons.
NORTH.
And can the interest—not now of Raphael's, but of Milton's "fit audience"—be sustained throughout? The answer is triumphant. The Book is, from beginning to end, a stream of the most beautiful descriptive Poetry that exists. Not however, mind you, Seward, of stationary description.
SEWARD.
Sir?
NORTH.
A proceeding work is described; and the Book is replete and alive with motion—with progress—with action—yes, of action—of an order unusual indeed to the Epos, but unexcelled in dignity—the Creative Action of Deity!
SEWARD.
What should hinder, then, but that this same Seventh Book should have been written in Prose?
NORTH.
Why this only—that without Verse it could not have been read! The Verse makes present. You listen with Adam and Eve, and you hear the Archangel. In Prose this illusion could not have been carried through such a subject-matter. The conditio sine quâ non of the Book was the ineffable charm of the Description. But what would a series of botanical and zoological descriptions, for instance, have been, in Prose? The vivida vis that is in Verse is the quickening spirit of the whole.
BULLER.
But who doubts it?
NORTH.
Lord Bacon said that Poetry—that is, Feigned History—might be worded in Prose. And it may be; but how inadequately is known to Us Three.
BULLER.
And to all the world.
NORTH.
No—nor, to the million who do know it, so well as to Us, nor the reason why. But hear me a moment longer. Wordsworth, in his famous Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, asserts that the language of Prose and the language of Verse differ but in this—that in verse there is metre—and metre he calls an adjunct. With all reverence, I say that metre is not an adjunct—but vitality and essence; and that verse, in virtue thereof, so transfigures language, that it ceases to be the language of prose as spoken, out of verse, by any of the children of men.
SEWARD.
Remove the metre, and the language will not be the language of prose?
NORTH.
Not—if you remove the metre only—and leave otherwise the order of the words—the collocation unchanged—and unchanged any one of the two hundred figures of speech, one and all of which are differently presented in the language of Verse from what they are in Prose.
SEWARD.
It must be so.
NORTH.
The fountain of Law to Composition in Prose is the Understanding. The fountain of Law to Composition in Verse is the Will.
SEWARD.
?
NORTH.
A discourse in prose resembles a chain. The sentences are the successive links—all holding to one another—and holding one another. All is bound.
SEWARD.
Well?
NORTH.
A discourse in verse resembles a billowy sea. The verses are the waves that rise and fall—to our apprehension—each by impulse, life, will of its own. All is free.
SEWARD.
Ay. Now your meaning emerges.
NORTH.
E profundis clamavi. In eloquent prose, the feeling fits itself into the process of the thinking. In true verse, the thinking fits itself into the process of the feeling.
SEWARD.
I perpend.
NORTH.
In prose, the general distribution and composition of the matter belong to the reign of Necessity. The order of the parts, and the connexion of part with part, are obliged—logically justifiable—say, then, are demonstrable. See an Oration of Demosthenes. In verse, that distribution and composition belong to the reign of Liberty. That order and connexion are arbitrary—passionately justifiable—say, then, are delectable. See an Ode of Pindar.
SEWARD.
Publish—publish.
NORTH.
In prose the style is last—in verse first; in prose the sense controls the sound—in verse the sound the sense; in prose you speak—in verse you sing; in prose you live in the abstract—in verse in the concrete; in prose you present notions—in verse visions; in prose you expound—in verse you enchant; in prose it is much if now and then you are held in the sphere of the fascinated senses—in verse if of the calm understanding.
BULLER.
Will you have the goodness, sir, to say all that over again?
NORTH.
I have forgot it. The lines in the countenance of Prose are austere. The look is shy, reserved, governed—like the fixed steady lineaments of mountains. The hues that suffuse the face of her sister Verse vary faster than those with which the western or the eastern sky momently reports the progress of the sinking, of the fallen, but not yet lost, of the coming or of the risen sun.
BULLER.
I have jotted that down, sir.
NORTH.
And I hope you will come to understand it. Candidly speaking, 'tis more than I do.
SEWARD.
I do perfectly—and it is as true as beautiful, sir.
BULLER.
Equally so.
NORTH.
I venerate Wordsworth. Wordsworth's poetry stands distinct in the world. That which to other men is an occasional pleasure, or possibly delight, and to other poets an occasional transport, THE SEEING THIS VISIBLE UNIVERSE, is to him—a Life—one Individual Human Life—namely, his Own—travelling its whole Journey from the Cradle to the Grave. And that Life—for what else could he do with it?—he has versified—sung. And there is no other such Song. It is a Memorable Fact of our Civilisation—a Memorable Fact in the History of Human Kind—that one perpetual song. Perpetual but infinitely various—as a river of a thousand miles, traversing, from its birthplace in the mountains, diverse regions, wild and inhabited, to the ocean-receptacle.
BULLER.
Confoundedly prosaic at times.
NORTH.
He, more than any other true poet, approaches Verse to Prose—never, I believe, or hardly ever, quite blends them.
BULLER.
Often—often—often, my dear sir.
NORTH.
Seldom—seldom—seldom if ever, my dear sir. He tells his Life. His Poems are, of necessity, an Autobiography. The matter of them, then, is his personal reality; but Prose is, all over and properly, the language of Personal Realities. Even with him, however, so peculiarly conditioned, and, as well as I am able to understand his Proposition, against his own Theory of writing, Verse maintains, as by the laws of our insuppressible nature it always will maintain, its sacred Right and indefeasible Prerogative.
To conclude our conversation—
BULLER.
Or Monologue.
NORTH.
Epos is Human History in its magnitude in Verse. In Prose, National History offers itself in parallelism. The coincidence is broad and unquestioned; but on closer inspection, differences great and innumerable spring up and unfold themselves, until at last you might almost persuade yourself that the first striking resemblance deceived you, and that the two species lack analogy, so many other kinds does the Species in Verse embosom, and so escaping are the lines of agreement in the instant in which you attempt fixing them.
BULLER.
Would that Lord Bacon were here!
NORTH.
And thus we are led to a deeper truth. The Metrical Epos imitates History, without doubt, as Lord Bacon says—it borrows thence its mould, not rigorously, but with exceeding bold and free adaptations, as the Iliad unfolds the Ten Years' War in Seven Weeks. But for the Poet, more than another, ALL IS IN ALL.
SEWARD.
Sir?
NORTH.
What is the Paradise Lost, ultimately considered?
BULLER.
Oh!
NORTH.
It is, my friends, the arguing in verse of a question in Natural Theology. Whence are Wrong and Pain? Moral and Physical Evil, as we call them, in all their overwhelming extent of complexity sprung? How permitted in the Kingdom of an All-wise and Almighty Love? To this question, concerning the origin of Evil, Milton answers as a Christian Theologian, agreeably to his own understanding of his Religion,—so justifying the Universal Government of God, and, in particular, his Government of Man. The Poem is, therefore, Theological, Argumentative, Didactic, in Epic Form. Being in the constitution of his soul a Poet, mightiest of the mighty, the intention is hidden in the Form. The Verse has transformed the matter. Now, then, the Paradise Lost is not a history told for itself. But this One Truth, in two answering Propositions, that the Will of Man spontaneously consorting with God's Will is Man's Good, spontaneously dissenting, Man's Evil. This is created into an awful and solemn narrative of a Matter exactly adapted, and long since authoritatively told. But this Truth, springing up in the shape of narrative, will now take its own determination into Events of unsurpassed magnitude, now of the tenderest individuality and minuteness; and all is, hence, in keeping—as one power of life springs up on one spot, in oak-tree, moss, and violet, and the difference of stature, thus understood, gives a deep harmony, so deep and embracing, that none without injury to the whole could be taken away.
BULLER.
What's all this! Hang that Drone—confound that Chanter. Burst, thou most unseasonable of Bagpipes! Silence that dreadful Drum. Draw in your Horns—
SEWARD.
Musquetry! cannon! huzzas! The enemy are storming the Camp. The Delhis bear down on the Pavilion. The Life is in danger. Let us save the King.
NORTH.
See to it, gentlemen. I await the issue in my Swing-chair. Let the Barbarians but look on me and their weapons will drop.
BULLER.
All's right. A false alarm.
NORTH.
There was no alarm.
BULLER.
'Twas but a Salute. The Boys have come back from Kilchurn. They are standing in front beside the spoil.
NORTH.
Widen the Portal. Artistically disposed! The Whole like one huge Star-fish. Salmo ferox, centre—Pike, radii—Yellow-fins, circumference—Weight I should say the tenth of a ton. Call the Manciple. Manciple, you are responsible for the preservation of that Star-fish.
BULLER.
Sir, you forget yourself. The People must be fed. We are Seven. Twelve are on the Troop Roll—Nine Strangers have sent in their cards—the Gillies are growing upon us—the Camp-followers have doubled the population since morn, and the circumambient Natives are waxing strong. Hunger is in the Camp—but for this supply, Famine; Iliacos intra muros PECCATUR et extra; Dods reports that the Boiler is wroth, the Furnace at a red heat, Pots and Pans a-simmer—the Culinary Spirit impatient to be at work. In such circumstances, the tenth of a ton is no great matter; but it is better than nothing. The mind of the Manciple may lie at rest, for that Star-fish will never see to-morrow's Sun; and motionless as he looks, he is hastening to the Shades.
NORTH.
Sir, you forget yourself. There is other animal matter in the world besides Fish. No penury of it in camp. I have here the Manciple's report. "One dozen plucked Earochs—one ditto ditto Ducklings—d. d. d. March Chick—one Bubblyjock—one Side of Mutton—four Necks—six Sheep-heads, and their complement of Trotters—two Sheep, just slaughtered and yet in wholes—four Lambs ditto—the late Cladich Calf—one small Stot—two lb. 40 Rounds in pickle—four Miscellaneous Pies of the First Order—six Hams—four dozen of Rein-deer Tongues—one dozen of Bears' Paws—two Barrels of——"
BULLER.
Stop. Let that suffice for the meanwhile.
NORTH.
The short shadow-hand on the face of Dial-Cruachan, to my instructed sense, stands at six. You young Oxonians, I know, always adorn for dinner, even when roughing it on service; and so, V. and W., do you. These two elderly gentlemen here are seen to most advantage in white neckcloths, and the Old One is never so like himself as in a suit of black velvet. To your tent and toilets. In an hour we meet in the—Deeside.