Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

by John Wilson

We sometimes think that the power of painting Nature to the life, whether in her real or ideal beauty (both belong to life,) is seldom evolved to its utmost, until the mind possessing it is withdrawn in the body from all rural environment. It has not been so with Wordsworth, but it was so with Milton. The descriptive poetry in "Comus" is indeed rich as rich may be, but certainly not so great, perhaps not so beautiful, as that in "Paradise Lost."

It would seem to be so with all of us, small as well as great; and were we—Christopher North—to compose a poem on Loch Skene, two thousand feet or so above the level of the sea, and some miles from a house, we should desire to do so in a metropolitan cellar. Desire springs from separation. The spirit seeks to unite itself to the beauty it loves, the grandeur it admires, the sublimity it almost fears; and all these being o'er the hills and far away, or on the hills cloud-hidden, why it—the spirit—makes itself wings—or rather wings grow up of themselves in its passion, and naturewards it flies like a dove or an eagle. People looking at us believe us present, but they never were so far mistaken in their lives; for in the Seamew are we sailing with the tide through the moonshine on Loch Etive—or hanging o'er that gulf of peril on the bosom of Skyroura.

We are sitting now in a dusky den—with our eyes shut—but we see the whole Highlands. Our Highland Mountains are of the best possible magnitude—ranging between two and four thousand feet high—and then in what multitudes! The more familiar you become with them, the mightier they appear—and you feel that it is all sheer folly to seek to dwindle or dwarf them, by comparing them as they rise before your eyes with your imagination of Mont Blanc and those eternal glaciers. If you can bring them under your command, you are indeed a sovereign—and have a noble set of subjects. In some weather they are of any height you choose to put them—say thirty thousand feet—in other states of the atmosphere you think you could walk over their summits and down into the region beyond in an hour. Try. We have seen Cruachan, during a whole black day, swollen into such enormous bulk, that Loch Awe looked like but a sullen river at his base, her woods bushes, and Kilchurn no bigger than a cottage. The whole visible scene was but he and his shadow. They seemed to make the day black, rather than the day to make them so—and at nightfall he took wider and loftier possession of the sky—the clouds congregated round without hiding his summit, on which seemed to twinkle, like earth-lighted fires, a few uncertain stars. Rain drives you into a shieling—and you sit there for an hour or two in eloquent confabulation with the herdsman, your English against his Gaelic. Out of the door you creep—and gaze in astonishment on a new world. The mist is slowly rolling up and away in long lines of clouds, preserving, perhaps, a beautiful regularity on their ascension and evanescence, and between them

"Tier above tier, a wooded theatre
Of stateliest view,"

or cliff galleries with strange stone-images sitting up aloft; and yet your eyes have not reached the summits, nor will they reach them, till all that vapoury ten-mile-long mass dissolve, or be scattered, and then you start to see them, as if therein had been but their bases, $1, with here and there a peak illumined, reposing in the blue serene that smiles as if all the while it had been above reach of the storm.

The power of Egoism accompanies us into solitude; nay, is even more life-pervading there than in the hum of men. There the stocks and stones are more impressible than those we sometimes stumble on in human society, and, moulded at our will, take what shape we choose to give them; the trees follow our footsteps, though our lips be mute, and we may have left at home our fiddle—more potent we in our actuality than the fabled Orpheus. Be hushed, ye streams, and listen unto Christopher! Be chained, ye clouds, and attentive unto North! And at our bidding silent the cataract on the cliff—the thunder on the sky. The sea beholds us on the shore—and his one huge frown transformed into a multitudinous smile, he turns flowing affections towards us along the golden sands—and in a fluctuating hindrance of lovely foam-wreaths envelopes our feet!

To return to Thomson. Wordsworth labours to prove, in one of his "postliminious prefaces," that the true spirit of "The Seasons," till long after their publication, was neither felt nor understood. In the conduct of his argument he does not shine. That the poem was at once admired he is forced to admit; but then, according to him, the admiration was false and hollow—it was regarded but with that wonder which is the "natural product of ignorance." After having observed that, excepting the "Nocturnal Reverie" of Lady Winchilsea, and a passage or two in the "Windsor Forest" of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the "Paradise Lost" and "The Seasons" does not contain a single new image of external nature, he proceeds to call the once well-known verses of Dryden in the "Indian Emperor," descriptive of the hush of night, "vague, bombastic, and senseless," and Pope's celebrated translation of the moonlight scene in the "Iliad," altogether "absurd,"—and then, without ever once dreaming of any necessity of showing them to be so, or even, if he had succeeded in doing so, of the utter illogicality of any argument drawn from their failure to establish the point he is hammering at, he all at once says, with the most astounding assumption, "having shown that much of what his [Thomson's] biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in fact, have been blind wonderment—how is the rest to be accounted for?" "Having shown"!!! Why, he has shown nothing but his own arrogance in supposing that his mere ipse dixit will be taken by the whole world as proof that Dryden and Pope had not the use of their eyes. "Strange to think of an enthusiast," he says (alluding to the passage in Pope's translation of the "Iliad"), "as may have been the case with thousands, reciting those verses under the cope of a moonlight sky, without having his raptures in the least disturbed by a suspicion of their absurdity!" We are no enthusiasts—we are far too old for that folly; but we have eyes in our head, though sometimes rather dim and motey, and as good eyes, too, as Mr Wordsworth, and we often have recited—and hope often will recite them again—Pope's exquisite lines, not only without any "suspicion of their absurdity," but with the conviction of a most devout belief that, with some little vagueness perhaps, and repetition, and a word here and there that might be altered for the better, the description is most beautiful. But grant it miserable—grant all Mr Wordsworth has so dictatorially uttered—and what then? Though descriptive poetry did not flourish during the period between "Paradise Lost" and "The Seasons," nevertheless, did not mankind enjoy the use of their seven senses? Could they not see and hear without the aid of those oculists and aurists, the poets? Were all the shepherds and agriculturists of England and Scotland blind and deaf to all the sights and sounds of nature, and all the gentlemen and ladies too, from the king and queen upon the throne, to the lowest of their subjects? Very like a whale! Causes there were why poetry flowed during that era in another channel than that of the description of natural scenery; and if it flowed too little in that channel then—which is true—equally is it true that it flows now in it too much—especially among the poets of the Lake School, to the neglect, not of sentiments and affections—for there they excel—but of strong direct human passion applied to the stir and tumult—of which the interest is profound and eternal—of all the great affairs of human life. But though the descriptive poets during the period between Milton and Thomson were few and indifferent, no reason is there in this world for imagining, with Mr Wordsworth, that men had forgotten both the heavens and the earth. They had not—nor was the wonder with which they must have regarded the great shows of nature, the "natural product of ignorance," then, any more than it is now, or ever was during a civilised age. If we be right in saying so—then neither could the admiration which "The Seasons," on the first appearance of that glorious poem, excited, be said, with any truth, to have been but a "wonder, the natural product of ignorance."

Mr Wordsworth having thus signally failed in his attempt to show that "much of what Thomson's biographer deemed genuine admiration, must, in fact, have been blind wonderment," let us accompany him in his equally futile efforts to show "how the rest is to be accounted for." He attempts to do so after this fashion: "Thomson was fortunate in the very title of his poem, which seemed to bring it home to the prepared sympathies of every one; in the next place, notwithstanding his high powers, he writes a vicious style; and his false ornaments are exactly of that kind which would be most likely to strike the undiscerning. He likewise abounds with sentimental commonplaces, that, from the manner in which they were brought forward, bore an imposing air of novelty. In any well-used copy of 'The Seasons,' the book generally opens of itself with the Rhapsody on Love, or with one of the stories, perhaps of Damon and Musidora. These also are prominent in our Collections of Extracts, and are the parts of his work which, after all, were probably most efficient in first recommending the author to general notice."

Thomson, in one sense, was fortunate in the title of his poem. But a great poet like Wordsworth might—nay, ought to have chosen another word—or have given of that word a loftier explanation, when applied to Thomson's choice of the Seasons for the subject of his immortal poem. Genius made that choice—not fortune. The "Seasons" are not merely the "title" of his poem—they are his poem, and his poem is the Seasons. But how, pray, can Thomson be said to have been fortunate in the title or the subject either of his poem, in the sense that Mr Wordsworth means? Why, according to him, people knew little, and cared less, about the Seasons. "The art of seeing had in some measure been learned!" That he allows—but that was all—and that all is but little—and surely far from being enough to have disposed people in general to listen to the strains of a poet who painted nature in all her moods, and under all her aspects. Thomson, then, we say, was either most unfortunate in the title of his poem, or there was not with the many that indifference to, and ignorance of natural scenery, on which Mr Wordsworth so strenuously insists as part, or rather whole, of his preceding argument.

The title, Mr Wordsworth says, seemed "to bring the poem home to the prepared sympathies of every one!" What! to the prepared sympathies of those who had merely, in some measure, learned the "art of seeing," and who had "paid," as he says in another sentence, "little accurate attention to the appearances of nature!" Never did the weakest mind ever fall into grosser contradictions than does here one of the strongest, in vainly labouring to bolster up a silly assertion, which he has desperately ventured on from a most mistaken conceit that it was necessary to account for the kind of reception which his own poetry had met with from the present age. The truth is, that had Mr Wordsworth known, when he indited these luckless and helpless sentences, that his own poetry was, in the best sense of the word, a thousand times more popular than he supposed it to be—and Heaven be praised, for the honour of the age, it was and is so!—never had they been written, nor had he here and elsewhere laboured to prove that in proportion as poetry is bad, or rather as it is no poetry at all, is it, has been, and always will be, more and more popular in the age contemporary with the writer. That Thomson, in "The Seasons," sometimes writes a vicious style, may be true; but it is not true that he often does so. His style has its faults, no doubt, and some of them inextricably interwoven with the web of his composition. It is a dangerous style to imitate—especially to dunces. But its virtue is divine; and that divine virtue, even in this low world of ours, wins admiration more surely and widely than earthly vice—be it in words, thoughts, feelings, or actions—is a creed that we will not relinquish at the beck or bidding even of the great author of "The Excursion."