Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

J >> John Wilson >> Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2




"Create a soul
Under the ribs of death!"

What in the name of goodness makes us suppose that a mean, and miserable
November day, even while we are thus Rhapsodising, is drizzling all
Edinburgh with the worst of all imaginable Scottish mists--an Easterly
Haur? We know that he infests all the year, but shows his poor spite in
its bleakest bitterness in March and in November. Earth and heaven are
not only not worth looking at in an Easterly Haur, but the Visible is
absolute wretchedness, and people wonder why they were born. The
visitation begins with a sort of characterless haze, waxing more and
more wetly obscure, till you know not whether it be rain, snow, or
sleet, that drenches your clothes in dampness, till you feel it in your
skin, then in your flesh, then in your bones, then in your marrow, and
then in your mind. Your blinking eyes have it too--and so, shut it as
you will, has your moping mouth. Yet the streets, though looking blue,
are not puddled, and the dead cat lies dry in the gutter. There is no
eavesdropping--no gushing of waterspouts. To say it rained would be no
breach of veracity, but a mere misstatement of a melancholy fact. The
truth is, that _the weather cannot rain_, but keeps spit, spit,
spitting, in a style sufficient to irritate Socrates--or even Moses
himself; and yet true, veritable, sincere, genuine, and authentic Rain
could not--or if he could would not--so thoroughly soak you and your
whole wardrobe, were you to allow him a day to do it, as that shabby
imitation of a tenth-rate shower, in about the time of a usual sized
sermon. So much cold and so much wet, with so little to show for it, is
a disgrace to the atmosphere, which it will take weeks of the sunniest
the weather can afford to wipe off. But the stores of sunniness which it
is in the power of Winter in this northern latitude to accumulate,
cannot be immense; and therefore we verily believe that it would be too
much to expect that it ever can make amends for the hideous horrors of
this Easterly Haur. The Cut-throat!

On such days suicides rush to judgment. That sin is mysterious as
insanity--their graves are unintelligible as the cells in Bedlam. Oh!
the brain and the heart of man! Therein is the only Hell. Small these
regions in space, and of narrow room--but haunted may they be with all
the Fiends and all the Furies. A few nerves transmit to the soul despair
or bliss. At the touch of something--whence and wherefore sent, who can
say--something that serenes or troubles, soothes or jars--she soars up
into life and light, just as you may have seen a dove suddenly cleave
the sunshine--or down she dives into death and darkness, like a shot
eagle tumbling into the sea!

Materialism! Immaterialism! Why should mortals, whom conscience tells
that they are immortals, bewildered and bewildering ponder upon the
dust! Do your duty to God and man, and fear not that, when that dust
dies, the spirit that breathed by it will live for ever. Feels not that
spirit its immortality in each sacred thought? When did ever religious
soul fear annihilation? Or shudder to think that, having once known, it
could ever forget God? Such forgetfulness is in the idea of eternal
death. Therefore is eternal death impossible to us who can hold
communion with our Maker. Our knowledge of Him--dim and remote though it
be--is a God-given pledge that He will redeem us from the doom of the
grave.

Let us then, and all our friends, believe, with Coleridge, in his
beautiful poem of the "Nightingale," that

"In Nature there is nothing melancholy,"

not even November. The disease of the body may cause disease in the
soul; yet not the less trust we in the mercy of the merciful--not the
less strive we to keep feeding and trimming that spiritual lamp which is
within us, even when it flickers feebly in the dampy gloom, like an
earthly lamp left in a vaulted sepulchre, about to die among the dead.
Heaven seems to have placed a power in our Will as mighty as it is
mysterious. Call it not Liberty, lest you should wax proud; call it not
Necessity, lest you should despair. But turn from the oracles of
man--still dim even in their clearest responses--to the Oracles of God,
which are never dark; or if so, but

"Dark with excessive bright"

to eyes not constantly accustomed to sustain the splendour. Bury all
your books, when you feel the night of scepticism gathering around
you--bury them all, powerful though you may have deemed their spells to
illuminate the unfathomable--open your Bible, and all the spiritual
world will be as bright as day.

The disease of the body may cause disease to the soul. Ay, madness. Some
rapture in the soul makes the brain numb, and thence sudden or lingering
death;--some rupture in the brain makes the soul insane, and thence life
worse than death, and haunted by horrors beyond what is dreamt of the
grave and all its corruption. Perhaps the line fullest of meaning that
ever was written, is--

"Mens sana in corpore sano."

When nature feels the flow of its vital blood pure and unimpeded, what
unutterable gladness bathes the spirit in that one feeling of--health!
Then the mere consciousness of existence is like that emotion which
Milton speaks of as breathed from the bowers of Paradise--

"Vernal delight and joy, able to drive
All sadness but despair"

It does more--for despair itself cannot prevail against it. What a dawn
of bliss rises upon us with the dawn of light, when our life is
healthful as the sun! Then

"It feels that it is greater than it knows."

God created the earth and the air beautiful through the senses; and at
the uplifting of a little lid, a whole flood of imagery is let in upon
the spirit, all of which becomes part of its very self, as if the
enjoying and the enjoyed were one. Health flies away like an angel, and
her absence disenchants the earth. What shadows then pass over the
ethereal surface of the spirit, from the breath of disordered
matter!--from the first scarcely-felt breath of despondency, to the last
scowling blackness of despair! Often men know not what power placed the
fatal fetters upon them--they see even that a link may be open, and that
one effort might fling off the bondage; but their souls are in slavery,
and will not be free. Till something like a fresh wind, or a sudden
sunbeam, comes across them, and in a moment their whole existence is
changed, and they see the very vanishing of their most dismal and
desperate dream.

"Somewhat too much of this"--so let us strike the chords to a merrier
measure--to a "livelier lilt"--as suits the variable spirit of our
Soliloquy. Be it observed, then, that the sole certain way of getting
rid of the blue devils, is to drown them in a shower-bath. You would not
suppose that we are subject to the blue devils? Yet we are sometimes
their very slave. When driven to it by their lash, every occupation,
which when free we resort to as pastime, becomes taskwork; nor will
these dogged masters suffer us to purchase emancipation with the
proceeds of the toil of our groaning genius. But whenever the worst
comes to the worst, and we almost wish to die so that we might escape
the galling pressure of our chains, we sport buff, and into the
shower-bath. Yet such is the weakness of poor human nature, that like a
criminal on the scaffold, shifting the signal kerchief from hand to
hand, much to the irritation of his excellency the hangman, one of the
most impatient of men--and more to the satisfaction of the crowd, the
most patient of men and women--we often stand shut up in that
sentry-looking canvass box, dexterously and sinistrously fingering the
string, perhaps for five shrinking, and shuddering, and _grueing_
minutes, ere we can summon up desperation to pull down upon ourselves
the rushing waterfall! Soon as the agony is over, we bounce out the
colour of beetroot, and survey ourselves in a five-foot mirror, with an
amazement that, on each successive exhibition, is still as fresh as when
we first experienced it,

"In life's morning march, when our spirits were young."

By-and-by we assume the similitude of an immense boiled lobster that has
leapt out of the pan--and then, seeming for a while to be an
emblematical or symbolical representation of the setting Sun, we sober
down into a faint pink, like that of the Morn, and finally subside into
our own permanent flesh-light, which, as we turn our back upon
ourselves, after the fashion of some of his majesty's ministers, reminds
us of that line in Cowper descriptive of the November Moon--

"Resplendent less, but of an ampler round!"

Like that of the eagle, our youth is renewed--we feel strong as the
horse in Homer--a divine glow permeates our being, as if it were the
subdued spiritual essence of caloric. An intense feeling of self--not
self-love, mind ye, and the farthest state imaginable in this wide world
from selfishness--elevates us far up above the clouds, into the loftiest
regions of the sunny blue, and we seem to breathe an atmosphere, of
which every glorious gulp is inspiration. Despondency is thrown to the
dogs. Despair appears in his true colours, a more grotesque idiot than
Grimaldi, and we treat him with a guffaw. All ante-bath difficulties
seem now--what they really are--facilities of which we are by far too
much elated to avail ourselves; dangers that used to appear appalling
are felt now to be lulling securities--obstacles, like mountains, lying
in our way of life as we walked towards the temple of Apollo or Plutus,
we smile at the idea of surmounting, so molehillish do they look, and we
kick them aside like an old footstool. Let the country ask us for a
scheme to pay off the national debt--_there she has it_; do you request
us to have the kindness to leap over the moon--here we go; excellent Mr
Blackwood has but to say the word, and a ready-made Leading Article is
in his hand, promotive of the sale of countless numbers of "my
Magazine," and of the happiness of countless numbers of mankind. We
feel--and the feeling proves the fact--as bold as Joshua the son of
Nun--as brave as David the son of Jesse--as wise as Solomon the son of
David--and as proud as Nebuchadnezzar the son of Nebopolazzar. We survey
our image in the mirror--and think of Adam. We put ourselves into the
posture of the Belvidere Apollo.

"Then view the Lord of the unerring bow,
The God of life, and poesy, and light,
The Sun in human arms array'd, and brow
All radiant from his triumph in the fight.
The shaft hath just been shot--the arrow bright
With an immortal vengeance; in his eye
And nostril beautiful disdain, and might
And majesty flash their full lightnings by,
Developing in that one glance the Deity."

Up four flight of stairs we fly--for the bath is in the double-sunk
story--ten steps at a bound--and in five minutes have devoured one
quartern loaf, six eggs, and a rizzar, washing all over with a
punch-bowl of congou and a tea-bowl of coffee.

"Enormous breakfast,
Wild without rule or art! Where nature plays
Her virgin fancies."

And then, leaning back on our Easy-chair, we perform an exploit beyond
the reach of Euclid--why, WE SQUARE THE CIRCLE, and to the utter
demolition of our admirable friend Sir David Brewster's diatribe, in a
late number of the _Quarterly Review_, on the indifference of Government
to men of science, chuckle over our nobly-won order K.C.C.B., Knight
Companion of the Cold Bath.

Many analogies between the seasons of the year and the seasons of life,
being natural, have been a frequent theme of poetry in all countries.
Had the gods made us poetical, we should now have poured forth, a few
exquisite illustrations of some that are very affecting and impressive.
It has, however, often been felt by us, that not a few of those one
meets with in the lamentations of whey-faced sentimentalists, are false
or fantastic, and do equal violence to all the seasons, both of the year
and of life. These gentry have been especially silly upon the similitude
of Old Age to Winter. Winter, in external nature, is not the season of
decay. An old tree, for example, in the very _dead_ of winter, as it is
figuratively called, though bare of leaves, is full of life. The sap,
indeed, has sunk down from his bole and branches--down into his toes or
roots. But there it is, ready, in due time, to reascend. Not so with an
old man--the present company always excepted;--his sap is not sunk down
to his toes, but much of it is gone clean out of the system--therefore,
individual natural objects in Winter are not analogically emblematical
of people stricken in years. Far less does the Winter itself of the
year, considered as a season, resemble the old age of life considered as
a season. To what peculiarities, pray, in the character and conduct of
aged gentlemen in general, do rain, sleet, hail, frost, ice, snow,
winds, blasts, storms, hurricanes, and occasional thunder and lightning,
bear analogy? We pause for a reply. Old men's heads, it is true, are
frequently white, though more frequently bald, and their blood is not so
hot as when they were springalds. But though there be no great harm in
likening a sprinkling of white hair on mine ancient's temples to the
appearance of the surface of the earth, flat or mountainous, after a
slight fall of snow--and indeed, in an impassioned state of mind, we
feel a moral beauty in such poetical expression as "sorrow shedding on
the head of youth its untimely snows"--yet the natural propriety of such
an image, so far from justifying the assertion of a general analogy
between Winter and Old Age, proves that the analogies between them are
in fact very few, and felt to be analogies at all, only when touched
upon very seldom, and very slightly, and, for the most part, very
vaguely--the truth being, that they scarcely exist at all in reality,
but have an existence given to them by the power of creative passion,
which often works like genius. Shakespeare knew this well--as he knew
everything else; and, accordingly, he gives us Seven Ages of Life--not
Four Seasons. But how finely does he sometimes, by the mere use of the
names of the Seasons of the Year, intensify to our imagination the
mental state to which they are for the moment felt to be analogous?--

"Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by the sun of York!"

That will do. The feeling he wished to inspire, is inspired; and the
further analogical images which follow add nothing to _our_ feeling,
though they show the strength and depth of _his_ into whose lips they
are put. A bungler would have bored us with ever so many ramifications
of the same idea, on one of which, in our weariness, we might have
wished him hanged by the neck till he was dead.

We are an Old Man, and though single not singular; yet, without vanity,
we think ourselves entitled to say, that we are no more like Winter, in
particular, than we are like Spring, Summer, or Autumn. The truth is,
that we are much less like any one of the Seasons, than we are like the
whole Set. Is not Spring sharp? So are we. Is not Spring snappish? So
are we. Is not Spring boisterous? So are we. Is not Spring "beautiful
exceedingly?" So are we. Is not Spring capricious? So are we. Is not
Spring, at times, the gladdest, gayest, gentlest, mildest, meekest,
modestest, softest, sweetest, and sunniest of all God's creatures that
steal along the face of the earth? So are we. So much for our
similitude--a staring and striking one--to Spring. But were you to stop
there, what an inadequate idea would you have of our character! For only
ask your senses, and they will tell you that we are much liker Summer.
Is not Summer often infernally hot? So are we. Is not Summer sometimes
cool as its own cucumbers? So are we. Does not Summer love the shade? So
do we. Is not Summer, nevertheless, somewhat "too much i' the sun?" So
are we. Is not Summer famous for its thunder and lightning? So are we.
Is not Summer, when he chooses, still, silent, and serene as a sleeping
seraph? And so too--when Christopher chooses--are not we? Though, with
keen remorse we confess it, that, when suddenly wakened, we are too
often more like a fury or a fiend--and that completes the likeness; for
all who know a Scottish Summer, with one voice exclaim--"So is he!" But
our portrait is but half-drawn; you know but a moiety of our character.
Is Autumn jovial?--ask Thomson--so are we. Is Autumn melancholy?--ask
Alison and Gillespie--so are we. Is Autumn bright?--ask the woods and
groves--so are we. Is Autumn rich?--ask the whole world--so are we. Does
Autumn rejoice in the yellow grain and the golden vintage, that, stored
up in his great Magazine of Nature, are lavishly thence dispensed to all
that hunger, and quench the thirst of the nations? So do we. After that,
no one can be so pur-and-bat-blind as not see that North is, in very
truth, Autumn's gracious self, rather than his Likeness or Eidolon.
But--

"Lo, Winter comes to rule th' inverted year!"

So do we,

"Sullen and sad, with all his rising train--
Vapours, and clouds, and storms!"

So are we. The great author of the "Seasons" says, that Winter and his
train

"Exalt the soul to solemn thought,
And heavenly musing!"

So do we. And, "lest aught less great should stamp us mortal," here we
conclude the comparison, dashed off in few lines by the hand of a great
master, and ask, Is not North, Winter? Thus, listener after our own
heart! thou feelest that we are imaged aright in all our attributes
neither by Spring, nor Summer, nor Autumn, nor Winter; but that the
character of Christopher is shadowed forth and reflected by the Entire
Year.




A FEW WORDS ON THOMSON.


Poetry, one might imagine, must be full of Snow-scenes. If so, they have
almost all dissolved--melted away from our memory--as the transiencies
in nature do which they coldly pictured. Thomson's "Winter," of course,
we do not include in our obliviousness--and from Cowper's "Task" we
might quote many a most picturesque Snow-piece. But have frost and snow
been done full justice to by them or any other of our poets? They have
been well spoken of by two--Southey and Coleridge--of whose most
poetical compositions respectively, "Thalaba" and the "Ancient Mariner,"
in some future volume we may dissert. Thomson's genius does not so often
delight us by exquisite minute touches in the description of nature as
that of Cowper. It loves to paint on a great scale, and to dash objects
off sweepingly by bold strokes--such, indeed, as have almost always
distinguished the mighty masters of the lyre and the rainbow. Cowper
sets nature before your eyes--Thomson before your imagination. Which do
you prefer? Both. Be assured that both poets had pored night and day
upon her--in all her aspects--and that she had revealed herself fully to
both. But they, in their religion, elected different modes of
worship--and both were worthy of the mighty mother. In one mood of mind
we love Cowper best, in another Thomson. Sometimes the Seasons are
almost a Task--and sometimes the Task is out of Season. There is
delightful distinctness in all the pictures of the Bard of
Olney--glorious gloom or glimmer in most of those of the Bard of Ednam.
Cowper paints trees--Thomson woods. Thomson paints, in a few wondrous
lines, rivers from source to sea, like the mighty Burrampooter--Cowper,
in many no very wondrous lines, brightens up one bend of a stream, or
awakens our fancy to the murmur of some single waterfall. But a truce to
antithesis--a deceptive style of criticism--and see how Thomson sings
of Snow. Why, in the following lines, as well as Christopher North in
his Soliloquy on the Seasons--

"The cherish'd fields
Put on their winter-robe of purest white.
'Tis brightness all; save where the new snow melts
Along the mazy current."

Nothing can be more vivid. 'Tis of the nature of an ocular spectrum.

Here is a touch like one of Cowper's. Note the beauty of the epithet
"brown," where all that is motionless is white--

"The foodless wilds
Pour forth their _brown_ inhabitants."

That one word proves the poet. Does it not?

The entire description from which these two sentences are selected by
memory--a critic you may always trust to--is admirable; except in one or
two places where Thomson seems to have striven to be strongly pathetic,
and where he seems to us to have overshot his mark, and to have ceased
to be perfectly natural. Thus--

"Drooping, the ox
Stands cover'd o'er with snow, and then demands
The fruit of all his toil."

The image of the ox is as good as possible. We see him, and could paint
him in oils. But, to our mind, the notion of his "demanding the fruit of
all his toils"--to which we freely acknowledge the worthy animal was
well entitled--sounds, as it is here expressed, rather fantastical. Call
it doubtful--for Jemmy was never utterly in the wrong in any sentiment.
Again--

"The bleating kind
Eye the bleak heaven, and next the glistening earth,
_With looks of dumb despair._"

The second line is perfect; but the Ettrick Shepherd agreed with us--one
night at Ambrose's--that the third was not quite right. Sheep, he agreed
with us, do not deliver themselves up to despair under any
circumstances; and here Thomson transferred what would have been his own
feeling in a corresponding condition, to animals who dreadlessly follow
their instincts. Thomson redeems himself in what immediately succeeds--

"Then, sad dispersed,
Dig for the wither'd herb through heaps of snow."

For, as they disperse, they do look very sad--and no doubt are so; but
had they been in despair, they would not so readily, and constantly, and
uniformly, and successfully, have taken to the digging, but whole flocks
had perished.

You will not, we are confident, be angry with us for quoting a few lines
that occur soon after, and which are a noble example of the sweeping
style of description which, we said above, characterises the genius of
this sublime poet:--

"From the bellowing east,
In this dire season, oft the whirlwind's wing
Sweeps up the burden of whole wintry plains
At one wide waft, and o'er the hapless flocks,
Hid in the hollow of two neighbouring hills,
The billowy tempest whelms; till, upward urged,
The valley to a shining mountain swells,
Tipp'd with a wreath high-curling in the sky."

Well might the Bard, with such a snow-storm in his imagination, when
telling the shepherds to be kind to their helpless charge, addressed
them in language which, in an ordinary mood, would have been bombast.
"Shepherds," says he, "baffle the raging year!" How? Why merely by
filling their pens with food. But the whirlwind was up--

"Far off its coming _groan'd_,"

and the poet was inspired. Had he not been so, he had not cried, "Baffle
the raging year;" and if you be not so, you will think it a most absurd
expression.

Did you ever see water beginning to change itself into ice? Yes. Then
try to describe the sight. Success in that trial will prove you a poet.
People do not prove themselves poets only by writing long poems. A
line--two words--may show that they are the Muse's sons. How exquisitely
does Burns picture to our eyes moonlight water undergoing an ice-change!

"The chilly frost beneath the silver beam,
Crept, gently crusting o'er the glittering stream!"

Thomson does it with an almost finer spirit of perception--or
conception--or memory--or whatever else you choose to call it; for our
part, we call it genius--

"An icy gale, oft shifting, o'er the pool
_Breathes a blue film_, and in its mid career
Arrests the bickering stream."

And afterwards, having frozen the entire stream into a "crystal
pavement," how strongly doth he conclude thus--

"_The whole imprison'd river growls below._"

Here, again, 'tis pleasant to see the peculiar genius of Cowper
contrasted with that of Thomson. The gentle Cowper delighting, for the
most part, in tranquil images--for his life was passed amidst tranquil
nature; the enthusiastic Thomson, more pleased with images of power.
Cowper says--

"On the flood,
Indurated and fixed, the snowy weight
Lies undissolved, _while silently beneath,
And unperceived, the current steals away_."

How many thousand times the lines we are now going to quote have been
quoted, nobody can tell; but we quote them once more for the purpose of
asking you, if you think that any one poet of this age could have
written them--could have chilled one's very blood with such intense
feeling of cold! Not one.

"In these fell regions, in Arzina caught,
_And to the stony deep his idle ship
Immediate seal'd_, he with his hapless crew,
Each full exerted at his several task,
_Froze into statues; to the cordage glued
The sailor, and the pilot to the helm!_"

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