It is one of the painful duties which devolve on those connected with a work like the present, to be called on from time to time to commemorate the removal from this earthly scene, of those by whose original and inventive minds its peculiar character was impressed, or to whose genius and labours in after life it owed its continued influence and reputation. More than once that melancholy task has been ours, for Death has made more than his usual gaps in the ranks of those who were associated with the rise of this Magazine and its early success. But the greatest and most distinguished of that gifted band, whose name has been identified with it from first to last, had till now been spared;—withdrawn, indeed, for some time from those circles which he had enlightened and adorned—and already surrounded by some shadow of the coming night, but still surviving among us as a link connecting the present and the past, and forming the centre of a thousand sympathising and reverential associations. He also has at last been gathered to his fellows. Professor Wilson expired at his house in Gloucester Place on the morning of the 3d April 1854. Born in May 1785, he was thus in his sixty-ninth year when he died;—not prematurely taken, it may be said, for he had nearly touched the period which is proverbially allotted as the measure of human life, yet passing from among us long before he had attained that advanced old age, which, when united with health, wisdom, and worth, seems to afford one of the happiest conditions of existence, and of which, in his case, the vigour and elasticity both of his mental and bodily frame, had seemed to human calculation to promise the attainment. It is consolatory to think that his period of seclusion and sickness passed in tranquillity both of mind and body; not perhaps painless, yet without acute or prolonged suffering;—the bodily energies waning gently, like the twilight, and the mind, though clear, partaking of that growing languor which had crept over the frame with which it was associated. As a proof of how long his mental vigour and capacity of exertion survived the effects of physical decline, it may be mentioned that two of the papers entitled “Dies Boreales,” the last of a fine series on Milton’s Paradise Lost, were written by him in August and September 1852, some months after the occurrence of that calamity by which his strong frame had been stricken down; papers written with his usual fine perception and impressive diction, but in a hand so tremulous, so feeble and indistinct, as to prove the strong effort of will by which alone such a task could have been accomplished. These were the last papers he ever wrote: they want, as is evident enough, the dazzling splendour of his earlier writings: they do not stir the heart like the trumpet tones of his prime, but they breathe a tone of sober grandeur and settled conviction; and these subdued and earnest words, now that we know them to have been his last, sink into the heart, like the parting accents of a friend, with a melancholy charm.
We leave to others, and in another form, the task of delineating the character of Professor Wilson as a poet, a novelist, a philosopher, and a critic: our more limited object is to speak of him only in connection with this Magazine, of which he was so long the animating spirit; to recall and arrest for a moment the lineaments of the man as he first appeared to us—as we were familiar with him in after life—and to embody in a few words our sense of what he has done for literature and for society, through the pages of that publication, in which, unless we greatly err, posterity will recognise the richest outpourings of his genius, and in which may be traced all the moods of his changing mind—from the first wild and sparkling effusions of youth, through the more matured creations of his manhood, down to that period when even genius takes a sober colouring from the troubles of life, and all those vivid and truthful pictures of the world around us begin unconsciously to be imbued and solemnised by the prospects of another.
When we first saw Professor Wilson—now more than three-and-thirty years ago—no more remarkable person could have attracted attention. Physically and mentally he was the embodied type of energy, power, and self-reliance. The tall and elastic frame, the massive head that crowned it, the waving hair, the finely-cut features, the eye flashing with every variety of emotion, the pure and eloquent blood which spoke in the cheek, the stately lion-like port of the man,—all announced, at the first glance, one of Nature’s nobles. And to the outward presence corresponded the mind within; for rarely have qualities so varied been blended in such marvellous and harmonious union. The culture of English scholarship had softened the more rugged features of his Scottish education. The knowledge of life, and sympathy with all its forms, from the highest to the lowest, had steadied the views and corrected the sentimental vagueness of the poetical temperament: a strong and practical sagacity pervaded, and gave reality to, all the creations of his imagination. Extensive and excursive reading—at least in English literature and the classics—combined with a singular accuracy and minuteness of natural observation, had stored his mind with facts of every kind, and stamped the results upon an iron memory. Nature and early training had so balanced his faculties that all themes seemed to come alike to his hand: the driest, provided only it bore upon the actual concerns of life, had nothing repulsive for him: he could expatiate in the field of the mournful as if it were his habitual element, and turn to the sportive and the fantastic, as if he had been all his life a denizen of the court of Comus. The qualities of the heart partook of this expansive and universal character. Affections as tender as they were impetuous, checked and softened the impulses of a fiery temper and vehement will, and infused a pathetic and relenting spirit into strains of invective that were deviating into harshness. That he should have been without warm dislikings, as well as warm attachments, would imply an impossibility. But from everything petty or rancorous he was absolutely free. Most justly was entitled to say of himself, that he never knew envy except as he had studied it in others. His opposition, if it was uncompromising, was always open and manly: to the great or good qualities of his opponent he generally did justice from the first—always in the end; and not a few of those who in early life had regarded him merely as the headlong leader of a partisan warfare, both in literature and politics, came to learn their mistake, to reverence in him the high-toned and impartial critic, and to esteem the warm-hearted and generous man.
His conversation and his public speaking had in them a charm to which no other term is applicable but that of fascination, and which, in the zenith of his powers, we never met with any one able to resist. While his glittering eye held the spectators captive, and the music of the ever-varying voice, modulating up and down with the changing character of the theme, fell on the ear, and a flood of imagery invested the subject with every conceivable attribute of the touching, the playful, or the picturesque, the effect was electric, indescribable: it imprisoned the minds of the auditors; they seemed to fear that the sound would cease—they held their breath as if under the influence of a spell.
Thus accomplished by nature and education, did Professor Wilson apply himself to his self-imposed task in this Magazine—that of imparting to periodical literature in general, and to literary criticism in particular, a new body and a new life; of pulling down the old conventional walls within which they had been confined, and of investing criticism itself with something of the creative and poetic character of the great works of imagination to which it was to be applied.
And in what a noble and true-hearted spirit was that task accomplished. Much had no doubt been done within the century to enlarge the basis of our critical views, to exchange the criticism of particulars for that of generals, to contemplate and decide according to the essence rather than the form. But we hesitate not to say, that practically the criticism of the day was sectarian and political: class criticism, not catholic. It denied or coldly accorded merit to those beyond the pale of the reviewer’s own opinions; it was too apt to assume in all cases an air of condescending superiority; and it was in its form inflexible, demurely decorous, and solemn, banishing from its sphere all that wide field of illustration afforded by the homely and the ludicrous, from the judicious contrast and opposition of which so much of added interest and novelty of view might fairly be derived. These wants the criticisms of Professor Wilson for the first time effectually supplied. Reverential in all cases where reverence was justly due, his keen sense of the ludicrous made him at the same time unsparing of ridicule, when, either in its moral or artistic aspect, the subject of the criticism required and justified the application of such a weapon. Strong as might be his party opinions, they faded out of view whenever he had to deal with any of the greater questions of literature or the pretensions of its genuine candidates; while to how many of the humblest aspirants for fame did his cordial and unstinted praise, blended with just advice and chastened censure, speak hope and comfort amidst discouragement and poverty and pain! From every nook of nature, from every mood of mind, he drew his allusions and illustrations, ever-shifting, iridescent:—under his guidance, humour and feeling, long separated, walked hand in hand; and even the gravest minds readily reconciled themselves to his gay and fanciful embroideries on the web of life, because they felt that none knew better than he that its tissue was, after all, of a sombre hue;—because every page of these compositions, quaint and startling as they were, impressed them with the assurance that wherever the shafts of his ridicule might light, the nobler qualities of the soul itself—love, honour, duty, religion, and all the charities of life—were safe as in a sanctuary from their intrusion.
It would be idle, as it would be endless, to refer to particular examples in dealing with the criticisms of Professor Wilson. But we hesitate not to say, humbly, but with the conviction of its truth, that his contributions to this Magazine contain an amount of original and suggestive criticism, unparalleled in any publication to which the present time has given birth. From the Noctes alone what an armoury of bright and polished thought might be supplied! In his other papers, what a new aspect is given to old themes! The gentle and devout spirit of Spenser seems never before to have met with a congenial exponent. The infinite depths of Shakespeare’s mind are made to reveal new treasures. Milton’s stately fabric appears to expand its proportions, and to grow, at once classic and colossal, under his hand. Dryden’s long-resounding march here meets with a spirit-stirring accompaniment; and he who “stooped to truth, and moralised his song,” finds a defender, who can appreciate the sterling vigour and condensation of his thoughts, and the lucid felicities of their expression. Towards the few genuine poets who illumined the twilight of the last century—towards those who gilded the morning of the new—towards Scott, and Byron, and Coleridge, and Wordsworth—towards the lesser stars revolving within the orb of those greater luminaries—how just, how discriminating have been his acknowledgments! And in proof that these judgments, all glowing and impassioned as they seem, were yet founded on the truest appreciation of the principles of art, we would ask (and we do so with some confidence), in how few instances has the public shown any disposition to reverse the sentence which a deep poetical insight had dictated, and a lofty sense of duty had kept so impartial and so pure!
Nor is it to the mere professed criticism of literature that these observations are applicable. The same peculiarities and the same originality pervaded his numerous and varied essays, where he came more palpably into that field which Addison and Johnson and Goldsmith had trod before him. The humblest and most unpromising topics were on system made the vehicles of important truths; deep reflections “rose like an exhalation” out of hints thrown out as if in a spirit of dalliance; but the result was to exhibit man and his nature in many a new light, and to enforce reflection on many a vital question, where, under a more formal treatment of the subject, it would unquestionably have been evaded. Never, perhaps, was the power and value of the principle of surprise more aptly illustrated than in these essays, where we are suddenly withdrawn from some vulgar and prosaic foreground; led off—blindfold, it may be, and through brake and briar—yet, as we feel, by no unfriendly hand, till, when the journey ends, and the mask drops, we find ourselves translated to some mysterious mountain height, with the ocean of this life spread beneath our feet, and around us “the breath of heaven fresh blowing.”
This, we feel, is no fit place for entering on the social or moral qualities of Professor Wilson. “Something we might have said, but to what end?” The depth and tenderness of his domestic affections are not themes for such discussion. His charities, his generosity, liberal and unfailing as they were, we would leave in that obscurity to which it was his own wish they should be consigned. His appreciation of all worth, however humble; his readiness to assist struggling merit; his utter absence of all affectation of superiority in himself; his toleration for the faults or presumption of others; his reluctance consciously to inflict pain on any one—a feeling which grew on him, as it grows on all good men, with advancing years; are they not written on the memories of all who were the objects of his aid or his forbearance? The charms of his social intercourse, who is likely to forget, whether first experienced “in life’s morning march, when his spirit was young,” or when added years and experience had pruned the luxuriance and softened the asperities of youth, but left all the bright and genial qualities of the mind undimmed, and the sympathies of the soul at once deepened and diffused? To those who had the privilege of enjoying his intimate acquaintance, as familiar friends or fellow-labourers in the same seed-field; to the many who have been indebted to him for that which he never failed to afford—wise and considerate counsel; to the thousands whom he has formed, guided, encouraged, admonished, or corrected, the thought of Professor Wilson will be among those recollections which they would most wish to arrest—those visions which, when they begin to fade, they would be most anxious to recall.
As a proof how completely he was superior to any feeling of party where a question of literature and genius was involved, and how his kindly disposition could urge him to exertion, even under the pressure of disease, we may mention, that the last occasion on which he can be said to have appeared in public, was when he left his brother’s house, and, supported by a friendly arm, came up to record his vote for a political opponent, Mr Macaulay. The last occasion on which he left his own threshold, was when he drove out to congratulate a friend on an event, on which he believed his happiness in life was likely to depend.