The difficulties of appraising “Christopher North” as a critic are, or should be, well known in general; but it is doubtful whether many persons have recently cared to put themselves in a position to appreciate them directly. No such revival has come to him as that which has come to Hazlitt: and I have elsewhere given at some length[[896]] the reasons which make me inclined to fear that no such revival is very likely to come soon. For Wilson accumulated, with a defiance valorous enough but certainly not discreet, provocation after provocation to Nemesis and Oblivion. He is immensely diffuse; he is not more diffuse than he is desultory; and in the greater part of his work he sets his criticism with a habitual strain of extravagant and ephemeral bravura which even the most tolerant and catholic may not seldom find uncongenial. Strange medley of his criticism. But all this, though bad, is followed by things worse—critical incivility of the worst kind, violent political and other partisanship, a prevailing capriciousness which makes his critical utterances almost valueless, except as words to the wise; and occasional accesses of detraction and vituperation which suggest either the exasperation or some physical ailment, or a slight touch of mental aberration. And yet, side by side with all this, there is an enthusiastic love of literature; a very wide knowledge of it; a real capacity for judging, wherever this capacity is allowed to exercise itself; a generosity (as in the famous palinodes to Leigh Hunt and to Macaulay) which only makes one regret the more keenly that this generosity is so Epimethean; and, lastly, a faculty of phrase which, irregular and uncertain as it is, apt as it is to fall on one side into bombast and on the other into bathos, is almost always extraordinary. An anthology of critical passages might be extracted from Wilson which few critics could hope to surpass; but the first and probably the last exclamation of any one who was driven by this to the contexts would be, “How on earth could such good taste live in company with a Siamese brother so hopelessly bad!”[[897]]

The Homer and the other larger critical collections.

Wilson’s admirers, from his daughter downwards, have lamented that the Homer—a good thing but not his best—was the only one of his longer and more connected critical exercitations that was included[[898]] in his collected works, while three others—the Spenser, the Specimens of British Critics, and the dialogue Dies Boreales—were excluded. The reasons of the exclusion seem obvious enough. At a rough and unprofessional “cast-off,” I should guess each of the two earlier series at about 300 of these present pages, and the Dies at nearer 400. This would have meant at least another three volumes added to a collection already consisting of twelve. The Devil’s Advocate, moreover, would have had other things to urge. Whatever Wilson had gained by age and sobering (and he had gained much), he had lost nothing of his tendency to exuberance and expatiation. After the first paper or two, the whole of the Spenser criticism is occupied with an examination of the First Book of the Faerie Queene only—the best known part of the poem. The Specimens of British Critics—an admirable title which might have served for a most novel, useful, and interesting work—means in fact a very copious examination of Dryden’s critical utterances and a rather copious one of those of Pope—so that this professor at any rate has not filled this hiatus. And the Dies, though they have got rid of some of the superabundant animal spirits of the Noctes, are (it is necessary to say it) very much duller.

The Spenser.

Yet the regretters had some reason. I myself could relinquish without much sorrow, from the matter actually republished, more than as much as would accommodate the Spenser, nearly as much as would make room for the Specimens also. As for the former, the famous compliment of Hallam[[899]] (not a person likely, either on his good or his bad side, to be too lenient to Wilson’s faults) is at least a strong prerogative vote. Nor does it[[900]] stand in need of this backing. Wilson spends far too much time in slaying forgotten Satans that never were very Satanic—the silliness of the excellent Hughes, the pedantry of the no less excellent Spence, the half-heartedness, even, of Tom Warton. He does not entirely discard his old horse-play and his old grudges, though we can well pardon him for the fling that “the late Mr Hazlitt” did not think Sidney and Raleigh gentlemen. But he discards them to a very great extent; as well as the old namby-pambiness which sometimes mars his earlier work, when he is sentimental, and which, with him as with Landor, was a real danger. And the thing is full of admirable things,—the generous admission that “Campbell’s criticism is as fine and true as his poetry”; the victorious defence of the Spenserian stanza against those who think it a mere following of the Italians: a hundred pieces of good exposition and appreciation. While as for mere writing, we have “written fine” after De Quincey and Wilson himself for some eighty years. But have we often beaten this: “Thus here are many elegies in one; but that one [Daphnaida] is as much a whole as the sad sky with all its misty stars”?[[901]]

The Specimens of British Critics.

The Specimens of British Critics,[[902]] ten years later, maintains, and even with rare exceptions improves, the standard of taste in the Spenser, but its faults of disproportion, irrelevance, and divagation are much greater. The author himself once insinuates that his work may be taken for “an irregular history of British Criticism,” and it certainly might have been made such—“nor so very irregular neither,” as they would have said in the days when Englishmen were allowed to write English, and grammarians to prate about grammar. But Wilson cannot resist his propensity to course any hare that starts. As has been said above, he has the compass of a by no means meagre volume for dealing ostensibly with no British critics but Dryden and Pope. If he dealt with them only, and only as critics, there would not be much fault to find, though we might wish for a better and fuller planned work. But not a quarter—not, we might almost venture to say, a tenth—of his space is occupied with them or with criticism. A very large part is given to discussion, not merely of Dryden and Pope but of Churchill as satirists; Dryden’s plays, rhymed and other, receive large consideration, his theory of translation almost a larger, with independent digressions on every poet whom he translates. Two or three whole papers are devoted to Chaucer, not merely as Dryden translated him but in all his works, in his versification, and so forth. I do not wonder that, seeing a farrago so utterly non-correspondent to its title, any one should have hesitated to reprint it. But I do know that there is admirable criticism scattered all over it, that if it appeared as Miscellanies in English Criticism, or Critical Quodlibeta, or something of that sort, it would be worth the while of every one who takes an interest in the subject to read it: and I do think it a pity that it should be practically as if it were not.