Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




The oftener--the more we read the "Winter"--especially the last two or
three hundred lines--the angrier is our wonder with Wordsworth for
asserting that Thomson owed the national popularity that his "Winter"
immediately won, to his "commonplace sentimentalities, and his vicious
style!" Yet true it is, that he was sometimes guilty of both; and, but
for his transcendent genius, they might have obscured the lustre of his
fame. But such sins are not very frequent in the "Seasons," and were all
committed in the glow of that fine and bold enthusiasm, which to his
imagination arrayed all things, and all words, in a light that seemed to
him at the time to be poetry--though sometimes it was but "false
glitter." Admitting, then, that sometimes the style of the "Seasons" is
somewhat too florid, we must not criticise single and separate passages,
without holding in mind the character of the poet's genius and his
inspirations. He luxuriates--he revels--he wantons--at once with an
imaginative and a sensuous delight in nature. Besides, he was but young;
and his great work was his first. He had not philosophised his poetical
language, as Wordsworth himself has done, after long years of
profoundest study of the laws of thought and speech. But in such study,
while much is gained, may not something be lost? And is there not a
charm in the free, flowing, chartered libertinism of the diction and
versification of the "Seasons"--above all, in the closing strains of the
"Winter," and in the whole of the "Hymn," which inspires a delight and
wonder seldom breathed upon us--glorious poem, on the whole, as it
is--from the more measured march of the "Excursion?"

All those children of the Pensive Public who have been much at school,
know Thomson's description of the wolves among the Alps, Apennines, and
Pyrenees,

"Cruel as death, and hungry as the grave!
Burning for blood, bony and gaunt and grim!" &c.

The first fifteen lines are equal to anything in the whole range of
English descriptive poetry; but the last ten are positively bad. Here
they are:--

"The godlike face of man avails him nought!
Even beauty, force divine! at whose bright glance
The generous lion stands in soften'd gaze,
Now bleeds, a hapless undistinguish'd prey.
But if, apprised of the severe attack,
The country be shut up, lured by the scent,
On churchyard drear (inhuman to relate!)
The disappointed prowlers fall, and dig
The shrouded body from the grave; o'er which,
Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they howl."

Wild beasts do not like the look of the human eye--they think us ugly
customers--and sometimes stand shilly-shallying in our presence, in an
awkward but alarming attitude, of hunger mixed with fear. A single wolf
seldom or never attacks a man. He cannot stand the face. But a person
would need to have a godlike face indeed to terrify therewith an army of
wolves some thousand strong. It would be the height of presumption in
any man, though beautiful as Moore thought Byron, to attempt it. If so,
then

"The godlike face of man avails him nought,"

is, under the circumstances, ludicrous. Still more so is the trash about
"beauty, force divine!" It is too much to expect of an army of wolves
some thousand strong, "and hungry as the grave," that they should all
fall down on their knees before a sweet morsel of flesh and blood,
merely because the young lady was so beautiful that she might have sat
to Sir Thomas Lawrence for a frontispiece to Mr Watts's "Souvenir." 'Tis
all stuff, too, about the generous lion standing in softened gaze at
beauty's bright glance. True, he has been known to look with a certain
sort of soft surliness upon a pretty Caffre girl, and to walk past
without eating her--but simply because, an hour or two before, he had
dined on a Hottentot Venus. The secret lay not in his heart, but in his
stomach. Still the notion is a popular one, and how exquisitely has
Spenser changed it into the divinest poetry in the character of the
attendant lion of

"Heavenly Una, with her milk-white lamb!"

But Thomson, so far from making poetry of it in this passage, has
vulgarised and blurred by it the natural and inevitable emotion of
terror and pity. Famished wolves _howking_ up the dead is a dreadful
image--but "_inhuman to relate_," is not an expression heavily laden
with meaning; and the sudden, abrupt, violent, and, as we feel,
unnatural introduction of ideas purely superstitious, at the close, is
revolting, and miserably mars the terrible _truth_.

"Mix'd with foul shades and frighted ghosts, they howl."

Why, pray, are the shades foul, and the ghosts only frightened? And
wherein lies the specific difference between a shade and a ghost?
Besides, if the ghosts were frightened, which they had good reason to
be, why were not they off? We have frequently read of their wandering
far from home, on occasions when they had no such excellent excuse to
offer. This line, therefore, we have taken the liberty to erase from our
pocket-copy of the "Seasons"--and to draw a few keelavine strokes over
the rest of the passage--beginning with "man's godlike face."

Go read, then, the opening of "Winter," and acknowledge that, of all
climates and all countries, there are none within any of the zones of
the earth that will bear a moment's comparison with those of Scotland.
Forget the people if you can, and think only of the region. The lovely
Lowlands undulating away into the glorious Highlands--the spirit of
sublimity and the spirit of beauty one and the same, as it blends them
in indissoluble union. Bury us alive in the dungeon's
gloom--incommunicable with the light of day as the grave--it could not
seal our eyes to the sight of Scotland. We should see it still by rising
or by setting suns. Whatever blessed scene we chose to call on would
become an instant apparition. Nor in that thick-ribbed vault would our
eyes be deaf to her rivers and her seas. We should say our prayers to
their music, and to the voice of the thunder on a hundred hills. We
stand now in no need of senses. They are waxing dim--but our spirit may
continue to brighten long as the light of love is allowed to dwell
therein, thence proceeding over nature like a victorious morn.

There are many beautiful passages in the poets about RAIN; but who ever
sang its advent so passionately as in these strains?--

"The effusive south
Warms the wide air, and o'er the void of heaven
Breathes the big clouds with vernal showers distent.
At first a dusky wreath they seem to rise,
Scarce staining ether; but by swift degrees,
In heaps on heaps, the doubling vapour sails
Along the loaded sky, and mingling deep
Sits on th' horizon round a settled gloom:
Not such as wintry storms on mortals shed,
Oppressing life; but lovely, gentle, kind,
And full of every hope and every joy,
The wish of nature. Gradual sinks the breeze
Into a perfect calm, that not a breath
Is heard to quiver through the closing woods,
Or rustling turn the many-twinkling leaves
Of aspen tall. Th' uncurling floods diffused
In glassy breadth, seem through delusive lapse
Forgetful of their course. 'Tis silence all
And pleasing expectation. Herds and flocks
Drop the dry sprig, and, mute-imploring, eye
The falling verdure!"

All that follows is, you know, as good--better it cannot be--till we
come to the close, the perfection of poetry, and then sally out into the
shower, and join the hymn of earth to heaven--

"The stealing shower is scarce to patter heard
By such as wander through the forest walks,
Beneath th' umbrageous multitude of leaves.
But who can hold the shade, while heaven descends
In universal bounty, shedding herbs,
And fruits, and flowers, on Nature's ample lap?
Swift Fancy fired anticipates their growth;
And, while the milky nutriment distils,
Beholds the kindling country colour round."

Thomson, they say, was too fond of epithets. Not he, indeed. Strike out
one of the many there--and your sconce shall feel the crutch. A poet
less conversant with nature would have feared to say, "sits on the
horizon round _a settled gloom_," or rather, he would not have seen or
thought it was a settled gloom; and, therefore, he could not have said--

----"But lovely, gentle, kind,
And full of every hope and every joy,
_The wish of Nature._"

Leigh Hunt--most vivid of poets, and most cordial of critics--somewhere
finely speaks of a ghastly line in a poem of Keats'--

"Riding to Florence with the murder'd man;"

that is, the man about to be murdered--imagination conceiving as one,
doom and death. Equally great are the words--

"Herds and flocks
Drop the dry sprig, and, mute-imploring, eye
The falling verdure."

The verdure is seen in the shower--to be the very shower--by the poet at
least--perhaps by the cattle, in their thirsty hunger forgetful of the
brown ground, and swallowing the dropping herbage. The birds had not
been so sorely distressed by the drought as the beasts, and therefore
the poet speaks of them, not as relieved from misery, but as visited
with gladness--

"Hush'd in short suspense,
The plumy people streak their wings with oil,
To throw the lucid moisture trickling off,
And wait th' approaching sign, to strike, at once,
Into the general choir."

Then, and not till then, the _humane_ poet bethinks him of the insensate
earth--insensate not; for beast and bird being satisfied, and lowing and
singing in their gratitude, so do the places of their habitation yearn
for the blessing--

"E'en mountains, vales,
And forests, seem impatient, to demand
The promised sweetness."

The _religious_ Poet then speaks for his kind--and says devoutly--

"Man superior walks
Amid the glad creation, musing praise,
And looking lively gratitude."

In that mood he is justified to feast his fancy with images of the
beauty as well as the bounty of nature; and genius in one line has
concentrated them all--

"Beholds the kindling country colour round."

'Tis "an a' day's rain"--and "the well-showered earth is deep-enriched
with vegetable life." And what kind of an evening? We have seen many
such--and every succeeding one more beautiful, more glorious to our eyes
than another--because of these words in which the beauty and the glory
of one and all are enshrined--

"Till, in the western sky, the downward sun
Looks out, effulgent, from amid the flush
Of broken clouds, gay-shifting to his beam.
The rapid radiance, instantaneous, strikes
Th' illumined mountain, through the forest streams,
Shakes on the floods, and in a yellow mist,
Far smoking o'er th' interminable plain,
In twinkling myriads lights the dewy gems.
Moist, bright, and green, the landscape laughs around.
Full swell the woods; their every music wakes,
Mix'd in wild concert with the warbling brooks
Increased, the distant bleatings of the hills,
And hollow lows responsive from the vales,
Whence, blending all, the sweeten'd zephyr springs.
Meantime, refracted from yon eastern cloud,
Bestriding earth, the grand ethereal bow
Shoots up immense; and every hue unfolds
In fair proportion, running from the red
To where the violet fades into the sky."

How do you like our recitation of that surpassing strain? Every shade of
feeling should have its shade of sound--every pause its silence. But
these must all come and go, untaught, unbidden, from the fulness of the
heart. Then indeed, and not till then, can words be said to be set to
music--_to a celestial sing-song_.

The mighty Minstrel recited old Ballads with a warlike march of sound
that made one's heart leap, while his usually sweet smile was drawn in,
and disappeared among the glooms that sternly gathered about his
lowering brows, and gave his whole aspect a most heroic character. Rude
verses, that from ordinary lips would have been almost meaningless, from
his came inspired with passion. Sir Philip Sidney, who said that "Chevy
Chase" roused him like the sound of a trumpet, had he heard Sir Walter
Scott recite it, would have gone distracted. Yet the "best judges" said
he murdered his own poetry--we say about as much as Homer. Wordsworth
recites his own Poetry (catch him reciting any other)
magnificently--while his eyes seem blind to all outward objects, like
those of a somnambulist. Coleridge was the sweetest of sing-songers--and
his silver voice "warbled melody." Next to theirs, we believe our own
recitation of Poetry to be the most impressive heard in modern times,
though we cannot deny that the leathern-eared have pronounced it
detestable, and the long-eared ludicrous; their delight being in what is
called Elocution, as it is taught by player-folk.

O friendly reader of these our Recreations! thou needst not to be
told--yet in love let us tell thee--that there are a thousand ways of
dealing in description with Nature, so as to make her poetical; but
sentiment there always must be, else it is stark nought. You may infuse
the sentiment by a single touch--by a ray of light no thicker, nor one
thousandth part so thick, as the finest needle ever silk-threaded by
lady's finger; or you may dance it in with a flutter of sunbeams; or you
may splash it in as with a gorgeous cloud-stain stolen from sunset; or
you may bathe it in with a shred of the rainbow. Perhaps the highest
power of all possessed by the sons of song, is to breathe it in with the
breath, to let it slip in with the light of the common day!

Then some poets there are, who show you a scene all of a sudden, by
means of a few magical words--just as if you opened your eyes at their
bidding--and in place of a blank, a world. Others, again, as good and as
great, create their world gradually before your eyes, for the delight of
your soul, that loves to gaze on the growing glory; but delight is lost
in wonder, and you know that they, too, are warlocks. Some heap image
upon image, piles of imagery on piles of imagery, as if they were
ransacking and robbing, and red-reavering earth, sea, and sky; yet all
things there are consentaneous with one grand design, which, when
consummated, is a Whole that seems to typify the universe. Others give
you but fragments--but such as awaken imaginations of beauty and of
power transcendent, like that famous Torso. And some show you Nature
glimmering beneath a veil which, nunlike, she has religiously taken; and
then call not Nature ideal only in that holy twilight, for then it is
that she is spiritual, and we who belong to her feel that we shall live
for ever.

Thus--and in other wondrous ways--the great poets are the great
painters, and so are they the great musicians. But how they are so, some
other time may we tell; suffice it now to say, that as we listen to the
mighty masters--"sole or responsive to each other's voice"--

"Now, 'tis like all instruments,
Now like a lonely lute;
And now 'tis like an angel's song
That bids the heavens be mute!"

Why will so many myriads of men and women, denied by nature "the vision
and the faculty divine," persist in the delusion that they are
poetising, while they are but versifying "this bright and breathing
world?" They see truly not even the outward objects of sight. But of all
the rare affinities and relationships in Nature, visible or audible to
Fine-ear-and-Far-eye the Poet, not a whisper--not a glimpse have they
ever heard or seen, any more than had they been born deaf-blind.

They paint a landscape, but nothing "prates of their whereabouts," while
they were sitting on a tripod, with their paper on their knees,
drawing--their breath. For, in the front ground is a castle, against
which, if you offer to stir a step, you infallibly break your head,
unless providentially stopped by that extraordinary vegetable-looking
substance, perhaps a tree, growing bolt upright out of an intermediate
stone, that has wedged itself in long after there had ceased to be even
standing-room in that strange theatre of nature. But down from "the
swelling instep of a mountain's foot," that has protruded itself through
a wood, while the body of the mountain prudently remains in the extreme
distance, descends on you, ere you have recovered from your unexpected
encounter with the old Roman cement, an unconscionable cataract. There
stands a deer or goat, or rather some beast with horns, "strictly
anonymous," placed for effect, contrary to all cause, in a place where
it seems as uncertain how he got in as it is certain that he never can
get out till he becomes a hippogriff.

The true poet, again, has such potent eyes, that when he lets down the
lids, he sees just as well, perhaps better than when they were up; for
in that deep, earnest, inward gaze, the fluctuating sea of scenery
subsides into a settled calm, where all is harmony as well as
beauty--order as well as peace. What though he have been fated, through
youth and manhood, to dwell in city smoke? His childhood--his
boyhood--were overhung with trees, and through its heart went the murmur
of waters. Then it is, we verily believe, that in all poets, is filled
with images up to the brim, Imagination's treasury. Genius, growing, and
grown up to maturity, is still a prodigal. But he draws on the Bank of
Youth. His bills, whether at a short or long date, are never
dishonoured; nay, made payable at sight, they are as good as gold. Nor
cares that Bank for a run, made even in a panic, for besides bars and
billets, and wedges and blocks of gold, there are, unappreciable beyond
the riches which against a time of trouble

"The Sultaun hides in his ancestral tombs,"

jewels and diamonds sufficient

"To ransom great kings from captivity."

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, THE
MOUNTAINS, 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."

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.