Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 1

by John Wilson

Corinna and Sappho must have been women of transcendant genius so to move Greece. For though the Greek character was most impressible and combustible, it was so only to the finest finger and fire. In that delightful land dunces were all dumb. Where genius alone spoke and sung poetry, how hard to excel! Corinna and Sappho did excel—the one, it is said, conquering Pindar—and the other all the world but Phaon.

But our own Joanna has been visited with a still loftier inspiration. She has created tragedies which Sophocles—or Euripides—nay, even Æschylus himself, might have feared, in competition for the crown. She is our Tragic Queen; but she belongs to all places as to all times; and Sir Walter truly said—let them who dare deny it—that he saw her Genius in a sister shape sailing by the side of the Swan of Avon. Yet Joanna loves to pace the pastoral mead; and then we are made to think of the tender dawn, the clear noon, and the bright meridian of her life, passed among the tall cliffs of the silver Calder, and in the lonesome heart of the dark Strathaven Muirs.

Plays on the Passions! "How absurd!" said one philosophical writer. "This will never do!" It has done—perfectly. What, pray, is the aim of all tragedy? The Stagyrite has told us—to purify the passions by pity and terror. They ventilate and cleanse the soul—till its atmosphere is like that of a calm, bright summer day. All plays, therefore, must be on the Passions. And all that Joanna intended—and it was a great intention greatly effected—was in her Series of Dramas to steady her purposes by ever keeping one great end in view, of which the perpetual perception could not fail to make all the means harmonious, and therefore majestic. One passion was, therefore, constituted sovereign of the soul in each glorious tragedy—sovereign sometimes by divine right—sometimes an usurper—generally a tyrant. In De Monfort we behold the horrid reign of Hate. But in his sister—the seraphic sway of Love. Darkness and light sometimes opposed in sublime contrast—and sometimes the light swallowing up the darkness—or "smoothing its raven down till it smiles." Finally, all is black as night and the grave—for the light, unextinguished, glides away into some far-off world of peace. Count Basil! A woman only could have imagined that divine drama. How different the love Basil feels for Victoria from Antony's for Cleopatra! Pure, deep, high as the heaven and the sea. Yet on it we see him borne away to shame, destruction, and death. It is indeed his ruling passion. But up to the day he first saw her face his ruling passion had been the love of glory. And the hour he died by his own hand was troubled into madness by many passions; for are they not all mysteriously linked together, sometimes a dreadful brotherhood?

Do you wonder how one mind can have such vivid consciousness of the feelings of another, while their characters are cast in such different moulds? It is, indeed, wonderful—but the power is that of sympathy and genius. The dramatic poet, whose heart breathes love to all living things, and whose overflowing tenderness diffuses itself over the beauty even of unliving nature, may yet paint with his creative hand the steeled heart of him who sits on a throne of blood—the lust of crime in a mind polluted with wickedness—the remorse of acts which could never pass in thought through his imagination as his own. For, in the act of imagination he can suppress in his mind its own peculiar feelings—its good and gracious affections—call up from their hidden places those elements of our being, of which the seeds were sown in him as in all—give them unnatural magnitude and power—conceive the disorder of passions, the perpetration of crimes, the tortures of remorse, or the scorn of that human weakness, from which his own gentle bosom and blameless life are pure and free. He can bring himself, in short, into an imaginary and momentary sympathy with the wicked, just as his mind falls of itself into a natural and true sympathy with those whose character is accordant with his own; and watching the emotions and workings of his mind in the spontaneous and in the forced sympathy, he knows and understands for himself what passes in the minds of others. What is done in the highest degree by the highest genius, is done by all of ourselves in lesser degree, and unconsciously, at every moment in our intercourse with one another. To this kind of sympathy, so essential to our knowledge of the human mind, and without which there can be neither poetry nor philosophy, are necessary a largeness of heart which willingly yields itself to conceive the feelings and states of others whose character is utterly unlike its own, and freedom from any inordinate overpowering passion which quenches in the mind the feelings of nature it has already known, and places it in habitual enmity to the affections and happiness of its kind. To paint bad passions is not to praise them; they alone can paint them well who hate, fear, or pity them; and therefore Baillie has done so—nay start not—better than Byron.

Well may our land be proud of such women. None such ever before adorned her poetical annals. Glance over that most interesting volume, "Specimens of British Poetesses," by that amiable, ingenious, and erudite man, the Reverend Alexander Dyce, and what effulgence begins to break towards the close of the eighteenth century! For ages on ages the genius of English women had ever and anon been shining forth in song; but faint though fair was the lustre, and struggling imprisoned in clouds. Some of the sweet singers of those days bring tears to our eyes by their simple pathos—for their poetry breathes of their own sorrows, and shows that they were but too familiar with grief. But their strains are mere melodies "sweetly played in tune." The deeper harmonies of poetry seem to have been beyond their reach. The range of their power was limited. Anne, Countess of Winchilsea—Catherine Phillips, known by the name of Orinda—and Mrs Anne Killigrew, who, as Dryden says, was made an angel, "in the last promotion to the skies"—showed, as they sang on earth, that they were all worthy to sing in heaven. But what were their hymns to those that are now warbled around us from many sister spirits, pure in their lives as they, but brighter far in their genius, and more fortunate in its nurture? Poetry from female lips was then half a wonder, and half a reproach. But now 'tis no longer rare—not even the highest—yes, the highest—for Innocence and Purity are of the highest hierarchies; and the thoughts and feelings they inspire, though breathed in words and tones, "gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman," are yet lofty as the stars, and humble too as the flowers beneath our feet.

We have not forgotten an order of poets, peculiar, we believe, to our own enlightened land—a high order of poets sprung from the lower orders of the people—and not only sprung from them, but bred as well as born in "the huts where poor men lie," and glorifying their condition by the light of song. Such glory belongs—we believe—exclusively to this country and to this age. Mr Southey, who in his own high genius and fame is never insensible to the virtues of his fellow-men, however humble and obscure the sphere in which they may move, has sent forth a volume—and a most interesting one—on the uneducated poets; nor shall we presume to gainsay one of his benevolent words. But this we do say, that all the verse-writers of whom he there treats, and all the verse-writers of the same sort of whom he does not treat, that ever existed on the face of the earth, shrink up into a lean and shrivelled bundle of dry leaves or sticks, compared with these Five—Burns, Hogg, Cunningham, Bloomfield, and Clare. It must be a strong soil—the soil of this Britain—which sends up such products; and we must not complain of the clime beneath which they grow to such height, and bear such fruitage. The spirit of domestic life must be sound—the natural knowledge of good and evil high—the religion true—the laws just—and the government, on the whole, good, methinks, that have all conspired to educate these children of genius, whose souls Nature had framed of the finer clay.

Such men seem to us more clearly and certainly men of genius, than many who, under different circumstances, may have effected higher achievements. For though they enjoyed in their condition ineffable blessings to dilate their spirits, and touch them with all tenderest thoughts, it is not easy to imagine, on the other hand, the deadening or degrading influences to which by that condition they were inevitably exposed, and which keep down the heaven-aspiring flame of genius, or extinguish it wholly, or hold it smouldering under all sorts of rubbish. Only look at the attempts in verse of the common run of clodhoppers. Buy a few ballads from the wall or stall—and you groan to think that you have been born—such is the mess of mire and filth which often, without the slightest intention of offence, those rural, city, or suburban bards of the lower orders prepare for boys, virgins, and matrons, who all devour it greedily, without suspicion. Strange it is that even in that mural minstrelsy, occasionally occurs a phrase or line, and even stanza, sweet and simple, and to nature true; but consider it in the light of poetry read, recited, and sung by the people, and you might well be appalled by the revelation therein made of the tastes, feelings, and thoughts of the lower orders. And yet in the midst of all the popularity of such productions, the best of Burns's poems, his "Cottar's Saturday Night," and most delicate of his songs, are still more popular, and read by the same classes with a still greater eagerness of delight. Into this mystery we shall not now inquire; but we mention it now merely to show how divine a thing true genius is, which, burning within the bosoms of a few favourite sons of nature, guards them from all such pollution, lifts them up above it all, purifies their whole being, and without consuming their family affections or friendships, or making them unhappy with their lot, and disgusted with all about them, reveals to them all that is fair and bright and beautiful in feeling and in imagination, makes them very poets indeed, and should fortune favour, and chance and accident, gains for them wide over the world the glory of a poet's name.

From all such evil influences incident to their condition—and we are now speaking but of the evil—the Five emerged; and first and foremost—Burns. Our dearly beloved Thomas Carlyle is reported to have said at a dinner given to Allan Cunningham in Dumfries, that Burns was not only one of the greatest of poets, but likewise of philosophers. We hope not. What he did may be told in one short sentence. His genius purified and ennobled in his imagination and in his heart the character and condition of the Scottish peasantry—and reflected them, ideally true to nature, in the living waters of Song. That is what he did; but to do that, did not require the highest powers of the poet and the philosopher. Nay, had he marvellously possessed them, he never would have written a single line of the poetry of the late Robert Burns. Thank Heaven for not having made him such a man—but merely the Ayrshire Ploughman. He was called into existence for a certain work, for the fulness of time was come—but he was neither a Shakespeare, nor a Scott, nor a Goethe; and therefore he rejoiced in writing the "Saturday Night," and "The Twa Dogs," and "The Holy Fair," and "O' a' the Airts the Win' can blaw," and eke "The Vision." But forbid it, all ye Gracious Powers! that we should quarrel with Thomas Carlyle—and that, too, for calling Robert Burns one of the greatest of poets and philosophers.

Like a strong man rejoicing to run a race, we behold Burns in his golden prime; and glory gleams from the Peasant's head, far and wide over Scotland. See the shadow tottering to the tomb! frenzied with fears of a prison—for some five-pound debt—existing, perhaps, but in his diseased imagination—for, alas! sorely diseased it was, and he too, at last, seemed somewhat insane. He escapes that disgrace in the grave. Buried with his bones be all remembrances of his miseries! But the spirit of song, which was his true spirit, unpolluted and unfallen, lives, and breathes, and has its being, in the peasant-life of Scotland; his songs, which are as household and sheepfold words, consecrated by the charm that is in all the heart's purest affections, love and pity, and the joy of grief, shall never decay, till among the people have decayed the virtues which they celebrate, and by which they were inspired; and should some dismal change in the skies ever overshadow the sunshine of our national character, and savage storms end in sullen stillness, which is moral death, in the poetry of Burns the natives of happier lands will see how noble was once the degenerated race that may then be looking down disconsolately on the dim grass of Scotland with the unuplifted eyes of cowards and slaves.

The truth ought always to be spoken; and therefore we say that in fancy James Hogg—in spite of his name and his teeth—was not inferior to Robert Burns—and why not? The Forest is a better schoolroom for Fancy than ever Burns studied in; it overflowed with poetical traditions. But comparisons are always odious; and the great glory of James is, that he is as unlike Robert as ever one poet was unlike another.