Your mere genius, who has instincts, and is poetical and not scientific, who grows from within—he is like our mountain river, clear, wilful, odd; running round corners; disappearing it may be underground, coming up again quite unexpectedly and strong, as if fed from some unseen spring, deep down in darkness; rising in flood without warning, and coming down like a lion; often all but dry; never to be trusted to for driving mills; must at least be tamed and led off to the mill; and going down full pace, and without stop or stay, into the sea.
Your man of talent, of acquirements, of science—who is made,—who is not so much educed as edified; who, instead of acquiring his vires eundo, gets his vires eundi, from acquirement, and grows from without; who serves his brethren and is useful; he rises often no one knows where or cares; has perhaps no proper fountain at all, but is the result of the gathered rain-water in the nigher flats; he is never quite clear, never brisk, never dangerous; always from the first useful, and goes pleasantly in harness; turns mills; washes rags—makes them into paper; carries down all manner of dye-stuffs and feculence; and turns a bread-mill to as good purpose as any clearer stream; is docile, and has, as he reaches the sea, in his dealings with the world, a river trust, who look after his and their own interests, and dredge him, and deepen him, and manage him, and turn him off into docks, and he is in the sea before he or you know it.
Though we do not reckon the imagination of Dr. Chalmers among his master faculties, it was powerful, effective, magnificent. It did not move him, he took it up as he went along; it was not that imperial, penetrating, transmuting function that we find it in Dante, in Jeremy Taylor, in Milton, or in Burke; he used it to emblazon his great central truths, to hang clouds of glory on the skirts of his illustration; but it was too passionate, too material, too encumbered with images, too involved in the general mêlée of the soul, to do its work as a master. It was not in him, as Thomas Fuller calls it, "that inward sense of the soul, its most boundless and restless faculty; for while the understanding and the will are kept, as it were, liberâ custodiâ to their objects of venm et bonum, it is free from all engagements—digs without spade, flies without wings, builds without charges, in a moment striding from the centre to the circumference of the world by a kind of omnipotency, creating and annihilating things in an instant—restless, ever working, never wearied." We may say, indeed, that men of his temperament are not generally endowed with this power in largest measure; in one sense they can do without it, in another they want the conditions on which its highest exercise depends. Plato and Milton, Shakspere and Dante and Wordsworth, had imaginations tranquil, sedate, cool, originative, penetrative, intense, which dwelt in the "highest heaven of invention." Hence it was that Chalmers could personify or paint a passion; he could give it in one of its actions; he could not, or rather he never did impassionate, create, and vivify a person—a very different thing from personifying a passion—all the difference, as Henry Taylor says, between Byron and Shakspere.
In his impetuosity, we find the rationale of much that is peculiar in the style of Dr. Chalmers. As a spoken style it was thoroughly effective. *
* We have not noticed his iterativeness, his
reiterativeness, because it flowed naturally from his
primary qualities. In speaking it was effective, and to us
pleasing, because there was some new modulation, some
addition in the manner, just as the sea never sets up one
wave exactly like the last or the next. But in his books it
did somewhere encumber his thoughts, and the reader's
progress and profit. It did not arise, as in many lesser
men, from his having said his say—from his having no more
in him; much less did it arise from conceit, either of his
idea or of his way of stating it; but from the intensity
with which the sensation of the idea-if we may use the
expression—made its first mark on his mind. Truth to him
never seemed to lose its first freshness, its edge, its
flavour; and Divine truth, we know, had come to him so
suddenly, so fully, at mid-day, when he was in the very
prime of his knowledge and his power and quickness—had so
possessed his entire nature, as if, like him who was
journeying to Damascus, a Great Light had shone round about
him—that whenever he reproduced that condition, he began
afresh, and with his whole utterance, to proclaim it. He
could not but speak the things he had seen and felt, and
heard and believed; and he did it much in the same way, and
in the same words, for the thoughts and affections and
posture of his soul were the same. Like all men of vivid
perception and keen sensibility, his mind and his body
continued under impressions, both material and spiritual,
after the objects were gone. A curious instance of this
occurs to us. Some years ago, he roamed up and down through
the woods near Auchindinny, with two boys as companions. It
was the first bur& of summer, and the trees were mere than
usually enriched with leaves. He wandered about delighted,
silent, looking at the leaves, "thick and numberless." As
the three went on, they came suddenly upon a high brick
wall, newly built, for peach trees, not yet planted. Dr.
Chalmers halted, and looking steadfastly at the wall,
exclaimed most earnestly, "What foliage! what foliage!" The
boys looked at one another, and said nothing, but on getting
home, expressed their astonishment at this very puzzling
phenomenon. What a difference! leaves and parallelograms; a
forest and a brick wall!
He seized the nearest weapons, and smote down whatever he hit. But from this very vehemence, this haste, there was in his general style a want of correctness, of selectness, of nicety, of that curious felicity which makes thought immortal, and enshrines it in imperishable crystal. In the language of the affections he was singularly happy; but in a formal statement, rapid argumentation and analysis, he was often as we might think, uncouth, imperfect, and incorrect: chiefly owing to his temperament, to his fiery, impatient, swelling spirit, this gave his orations their fine audacity—this brought out hot from the furnace, his new words—this made his numbers run wild—lege solutis. We are sure this view will be found confirmed by these "Daily Readings," when he wrote little, and had not time to get heated, and when the nature of the work, the hour at which it was done, and his solitariness, made his thoughts flow at their "own sweet will," they are often quite as classical in expression, as they are deep and lucid in thought—reflecting heaven with its clouds and stars, and letting us see deep down into its own secret depths: this is to us one great charm of these volumes. Here he is broad and calm; in his great public performances by mouth and pen, he soon passed from the lucid into the luminous.
What, for instance, can be finer in expression than this? "It is well to be conversant with great elements—life and death, reason and madness."
"God forgets not his own purposes, though he executes them in his own way, and maintains his own pace, which he hastens not and shortens not to meet our impatience."
"I find it easier to apprehend the greatness of the Deity than any of his moral perfections, or his sacredness;" and this—
"One cannot but feel an interest in Ishmael—figuring him to be a noble of nature—one of those heroes of the wilderness who lived on the produce of his bow, and whose spirit was nursed and exercised among the wild adventures of the life that he led. And it does soften our conception of him whose hand was against every man, and every man's hand against him, when we read of his mother's influence over him, in the deference of Ishmael to whom we read another example of the respect yielded to females even in that so-called barbarous period of the world. There was a civilisation, the immediate effect of religion in these days, from which men fell away as the world grew older."