Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




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."

That many did--do--and will admire the bad or indifferent passages in
"The Seasons"--won by their false glitter or commonplace sentimentalism,
is no doubt true: but the delight, though as intense as perhaps it may
be foolish, with which boys and virgins, woman-mantuamakers and
man-milliners, and "the rest," peruse the Rhapsody on Love--one passage
of which we ventured to be facetious on in our Soliloquy on the
Seasons--and hang over the picture of Musidora undressing, while Damon
watches the process of disrobement, panting behind a tree, will never
account for the admiration with which the whole world hailed the
"Winter," the first published of "The Seasons;" during which, Thomson
had not the barbarity to plunge any young lady naked into the cold bath,
nor the ignorance to represent, during such cold weather, any young lady
turning her lover sick by the ardour of her looks, and the vehemence of
her whole enamoured deportment. The time never was--nor could have
been--when such passages were generally esteemed the glory of the poem.
Indeed, independently of its own gross absurdity, the assertion is at
total variance with that other assertion, equally absurd, that people
admired most in the poem what they least understood; for the Rhapsody on
Love is certainly very intelligible, nor does there seem much mystery in
Musidora going into the water to wash and cool herself on a hot day. Is
it not melancholy, then, to hear such a man as Mr Wordsworth,
earnestly, and even somewhat angrily, trying to prove that "these are
the parts of the work which, after all, were probably most efficient in
first recommending the author to general notice?"

With respect to the "sentimental commonplaces with which Thomson
abounds," no doubt they were and are popular; and many of them deserve
to be so, for they are on a level with the usual current of human
feeling, and many of them are eminently beautiful. Thomson had not the
philosophical genius of Wordsworth, but he had a warm human heart, and
its generous feelings overflow all his poem. These are not the most
poetical parts of "The Seasons," certainly, where such effusions
prevail; but still, so far from being either _vicious_ or _worthless_,
they have often a virtue and a worth that must be felt by all the
children of men. There is something not very credible in the situation
of the parties in the story of the "lovely young Lavinia," for example,
and much of the sentiment is commonplace enough; but will Mr Wordsworth
say--in support of his theory, that the worst poetry is always at first
(and at last too, it would seem, from the pleasure with which that tale
is still read by all simple minds) the most popular--that that story is
a bad one? It is a very beautiful one.

Mr Wordsworth, in all his argumentation, is so blinded by his
determination to see everything in but one light, and that a most
mistaken one, that he is insensible to the conclusion to which it all
leads, or rather, which is involved in it. Why, according to him, _even
now_, when people have not only learned the "art of seeing"--a blessing
for which they can never be too thankful--but when descriptive poetry
has long flourished far beyond its palmiest state in any other era of
our literature, still are we poor common mortals who admire "The
Seasons," just as deaf and blind now, or nearly so, to their real
merits--allowed to be transcendent--as our unhappy forefathers were when
that poem first appeared, "a glorious apparition." The Rhapsody on Love,
and Damon and Musidora, are still, according to him, its chief
attraction--its false ornaments--and its sentimental commonplaces--such
as those, we presume, on the benefits of early rising, and,

"Oh! little think the gay licentious proud!"

What a nest of ninnies must people in general be in Mr Wordsworth's
eyes! And is "The Excursion" not to be placed by the side of "Paradise
Lost," till the Millennium?

Such is the _reasoning (!)_ of one of the first of our English poets,
against not only the people of Britain, but mankind. One other sentence
there is which we had forgotten--but now remember--which is to help us
to distinguish, in the case of the reception "The Seasons" met with,
between "wonder and legitimate admiration!" "The subject of the work is
the changes produced in the appearances of nature by the revolution of
the year; _and, undertaking to write in verse, Thomson pledged himself
to treat his subject as became a poet_!" How original and profound!
Thomson redeemed his pledge; and that great pawnbroker, the public,
returned to him his poem at the end of a year and a day. Now, what is
the "mighty stream of tendency" of that remark? Were the public, or the
people, or the world, gulled by this unheard-of pledge of Thomson, to
regard his work with that "wonder which is the natural product of
ignorance!" If they were so in his case, why not in every other? All
poets pledge themselves to be poetical, but too many of them are
wretchedly prosaic--die and are buried, or what is worse, protract a
miserable existence, in spite of their sentimental commonplaces, false
ornaments, and a vicious style. But Thomson, in spite of all these,
leapt at once into a glorious life, and a still more glorious
immortality.

There is no mystery in the matter. Thomson--a great poet--poured his
genius over a subject of universal interest; and "The Seasons" from that
hour to this--then, now, and for ever--have been, are, and will be
loved, and admired by all the world. All over Scotland "The Seasons" is
a household book. Let the taste and feeling shown by the Collectors of
Elegant Extracts be poor as possible; yet Thomson's countrymen, high and
low, rich and poor, have all along not only gloried in his illustrious
fame, but have made a very manual of his great work. It lies in many
thousand cottages. We have ourselves seen it in the shepherd's shieling,
and in the woodsman's bower--small, yellow-leaved, tatter'd, mean,
miserable, calf-skin-bound, smoked, _stinking_ copies--let us not fear
to utter the word, ugly but true--yet perused, pored, and pondered over
by those humble dwellers, by the winter ingle or on the summer brae,
perhaps with as enlightened--certainly with as imagination-overmastering
a delight as ever enchained the spirits of the high-born and
highly-taught to their splendid copies lying on richly-carved tables,
and bound in crimson silk or velvet, in which the genius of painting
strives to embody that of poetry, and the printer's art to lend its
beauty to the very shape of the words in which the bard's immortal
spirit is enshrined. "The art of seeing" has flourished for many
centuries in Scotland. Men, women, and children, all look up to her
loveful blue or wrathful black skies, with a weather-wisdom that keeps
growing from the cradle to the grave. Say not that 'tis alone

"The poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, and hears Him in the wind!"

In Scriptural language, loftier even than that, the same imagery is
applied to the sights seen by the true believer. Who is it "that maketh
the clouds His chariot?" The Scottish peasantry--Highland and
Lowland--look much and often on nature thus; and they live in the heart
of the knowledge and of the religion of nature. Therefore do they love
Thomson as an inspired bard--only a little lower than the Prophets. In
like manner have the people of Scotland--from time immemorial--enjoyed
the use of their ears. Even persons somewhat hard of hearing, are not
deaf to her waterfalls. In the sublime invocation to Winter, which we
have quoted--we hear Thomson recording his own worship of nature in his
boyish days, when he roamed among the hills of his father's parish, far
away from the manse. In those strange and stormy delights did not
thousands of thousands of the Scottish boyhood familiarly live among the
mists and snows? Of all that number he alone had the genius to "here
eternise on earth" his joy--but many millions have had souls to join
religiously in the hymns he chanted. Yea, his native land, with one
mighty voice, has for upwards of a century responded,

"These, as they change, Almighty Father, these
Are but the varied God!"




THE SNOWBALL BICKER OF PEDMOUNT.


Beautiful as Snow yet is to our eyes, even through our spectacles, how
grey it looks beside that which used to come with the long winters that
glorified the earth in our youth, till the white lustre was more
delightful even than the green--and we prayed that the fine fleecy
flakes might never cease falling waveringly from the veil of the sky! No
sooner comes the winter now, than it is away again to one of the Poles.
Then, it was a year in itself--a whole life. We remember slides a
quarter of a mile long, on level meadows; and some not less steep, down
the sides of hills that to us were mountains. No boy can slide on one
leg now--not a single shoe seems to have sparables. The florid style of
skating shows that that fine art is degenerating; and we look in vain
for the grand simplicity of the masters that spread-eagled in the age of
its perfection. A change has come over the spirit of the curler's dream.
They seem to our ears indeed to have "quat their roaring play." The cry
of "swoop-swoop" is heard still--but a faint, feeble, and unimpassioned
cry, compared with that which used, on the Mearns Brother-Loch, to make
the welkin ring, and for a moment to startle the moon and stars--those
in the sky, as well as those below the ice--till again the tumult
subsided--and all the host of heaven above and beneath became serene as
a world of dreams. Is it not even so, Shepherd? What is a rink now on a
pond in Duddingston policy, to the rinks that rang and roared of old on
the Loch o' the Lowes, when every stone circled in a halo of spray,
seemed instinct with spirit to obey, along all its flight, the voice of
him that launched it on its unerring aim, and sometimes, in spite of his
awkward skillessness, when the fate of the game hung on his own single
crank, went cannonading through all obstacles, till it fell asleep,
like a beauty as it was, just as it kissed the Tee!

Again we see--again we sit in the Snow-house, built by us boys out of a
drift in the minister's glebe, a drift--judging by the steeple, which
was sixty--about twenty feet high--and purer than any marble. The roof
was all strewed with diamonds, which frost saved from the sun. The porch
of the palace was pillared--and the character of the building outside
was, without any servile imitation--for we worked in the glow of
original genius, and none of us had then ever seen itself or its
picture--wonderfully like the Parthenon. Entering, you found yourself in
a superb hall, lighted up--not with gas, for up to that era gas had not
been used except in Pandemonium--but with a vast multitude of farthing
candles, each in a turnip stuck into the wall--while a chandelier of
frozen snow-branches pendent from the roof set that presence-chamber in
a blaze. On a throne at the upper end sat young Christopher North--then
the king of boys, as now of men--and proud were his subjects to do him
homage. In niches all around the sidewalls were couches covered with
hare, rabbit, foumart, and fox's skins--furnished by these animals slain
by us in the woods and among the rocks of that sylvan and moorland
parish--the regal Torus alone being spread with the dun-deer's hide from
Lochiel Forest in Lochaber. Then old airs were sung--in sweet single
voice--or in full chorus that startled the wandering night traveller on
his way to the lone Kings-well; and then in the intermediate hush, old
tales were told "of goblin, ghost, or fairy," or of Wallace Wight at the
Barns of Ayr or the Brig o' Stirling--or, a glorious outlaw, harbouring
in caves among the Cartlane Craigs--or of Robert Bruce the Deliverer, on
his shelty cleaving in twain the skull of Bohun the English knight, on
his thundering war-steed, armed cap-a-pie, while the King of Scotland
had nothing on his unconquered head but his plain golden crown. Tales of
the Snow-house! Had we but the genius to recall you to life in undying
song!

Nor was our frozen hall at times uncheered by the smiles of beauty. With
those smiles was heard the harmless love-whisper, and the harmless kiss
of love; for the cottages poured forth their little lasses in
flower-like bands, nor did their parents fear to trust them in the fairy
frozen palace, where Christopher was king. Sometimes the old people
themselves came to see the wonders of the lamp, and on a snow-table
stood a huge bowl--not of snow--steaming with nectar that made Hyems
smile as he hung his beard over the fragrant vapour. Nay, the minister
himself--with his mother and sister--was with us in our fantastic
festivities, and gave to the architecture of our palace his wondering
praise. Then Andrew Lyndsey, the blind Paisley musician, a Latin
scholar, who knew where Cremona stood, struck up on his famous fiddle
jig or strathspey--and the swept floor, in a moment, was alive with a
confused flight of foursome reels, each begun and ended with kisses, and
maddened by many a whoop and yell--so like savages were we in our glee,
dancing at the marriage of some island king!

Countless years have fled since that Snow-palace melted away--and of all
who danced there, how many are now alive! Pshaw! as many probably as
then danced anywhere else. It would never do to live for ever--let us
then live well and wisely; and when death comes--from that sleep how
blessed to awake! in a region where is no frost--no snow--but the sun of
eternal life.

Mercy on us! what a hubbub!--Can the harriers be hunting in such a
snowfall as this, and is poor pussy in view before the whole murderous
pack, opening in full cry on her haunches? Why--Imagination, thou art an
ass, and thy long ears at all times greedy of deception! 'Tis but a
country Schoolhouse pouring forth its long-imprisoned stream of life as
in a sudden sunny thaw, the Mad Master flying in the van of his
helter-skelter scholars, and the whole yelling mass precipitated, many
of them headlong, among the snow. Well do we know the fire-eyed Poet
pedagogue, who, more outrageous than Apollo, has "ravished all the
Nine." Ode, elegy, epic, tragedy, or farce--all come alike to him; and
of all the bards we have ever known--and the sum total cannot be under a
thousand--he alone, judging from the cock and the squint of his eye,
labours under the blessing or the curse--we wot not whilk it be--of
perpetual inspiration. A rare eye, too, is his at the setting of a
springe for woodcocks, or tracking a maukin on the snow. Not a daredevil
in the school that durst follow the indentations of his toes and fingers
up the wall of the old castle, to the holes just below the battlements,
to thrust his arm up to the elbows harrying the starlings' nests. The
corbies ken the shape of his shoulders, as craftily he threads the wood;
and let them build their domicile as high as the swinging twigs will
bear its weight, agile as squirrel, and as foumart ferocious, up speels,
by the height undizzied, the dreadless Dominie; and should there be
fledged or puddock-haired young ones among the wool, whirling with
guttural cawings down a hundred feet descent, on the hard rooty ground
floor from which springs pine, oak, or ash, driven out is the life, with
a squelsh and a squash, from the worthless carrion. At swimming we
should not boggle to back him for the trifle of a cool hundred against
the best survivor among those water-serpents, Mr Turner, Dr Bedale,
Lieutenant Ekenhead, Lord Byron, Leander, and Ourselves--while, with the
steel shiners on his soles, into what a set of ninnies in their ring
would he not reduce the Edinburgh Skating Club?

Saw ye ever a Snowball Bicker? Never! Then look there with all the eyes
in your head--only beware of a bash on the bridge of your nose, a bash
that shall dye the snow with your virgin blood. The Poet-pedagogue,
_alias_ the Mad Dominie, with Bob Howie as his Second in Command, has
chosen the Six stoutest striplings for his troop, and, at the head of
that Sacred Band, offers battle to Us at the head of the whole School.
Nor does that formidable force decline the combat. War levels all
foolish distinctions of scholarship. Booby is Dux now, and Dux
Booby--and the obscure dunce is changed into an illustrious hero.

"The combat deepens--on, ye brave,
Who rush to glory or the grave!
Wave, Nitton, all thy banners wave,
And charge with all thy schoolery!"

Down from the mount on which it had been drawn up in battle array, in
solid square comes the School army, with shouts that might waken the
dead, and inspire with the breath of life the nostrils of the great
Snow-giant built up at the end of yonder avenue, and indurated by last
night's frost. But there lies a fresh fall--and a better day for a
bicker never rose flakily from the yellow East. Far out of distance, and
prodigal of powder lying three feet deep on the flats, and heaped up in
drifts to tree and chimney-top, the tirailleurs, flung out in front,
commence the conflict by a shower of balls that, from the bosom of the
yet untrodden snow between the two battles, makes spin like spray the
shining surface. Then falling back on the main body, they find their
places in the front rank, and the whole mottled mass, grey, blue, and
scarlet, moves onwards o'er the whiteness, a moment ere they close,

"Calm as the breeze, but dreadful as the storm!"

"Let fly," cries a clear voice--and the snowball storm hurtles through
the sky. Just then the valley-mouth blew sleety in the faces of the
foe--their eyes, as if darkened with snuff or salt, blinked
bat-like--and with erring aim flew their feckless return to that shower
of frosty fire. Incessant is the silent cannonade of the resistless
School--silent but when shouts proclaim the fall or flight of some
doughty champion in the adverse legion.

See--see--the Sacred Band are broken! The cravens take ignominiously to
flight--and the Mad Dominie and Bob Howie alone are left to bear the
brunt of battle. A dreadful brotherhood! But the bashing balls are
showered upon them right and left from scores of catapultic arms--and
the day is going sore against them, though they fight less like men than
devils. Hurra! the Dominie's down, and Bob staggers. "Guards, up and at
them!" "A simultaneous charge of cocks, hens, and earocks!" No sooner
said than done. Bob Howie is buried--and the whole School is trampling
on its Master!

"Oh, for a blast of that dread horn,
On Fontarabian echoes borne,
That to King Charles did come,
When Rowland brave and Olivier,
And every paladin and peer,
On Roncesvalles died!"

The smothered ban of Bob, and the stifled denunciations of the Dominie,
have echoed o'er the hill, and,

"Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,"

the runaways, shaking the snows of panic from their pows,

"Like dewdrops from the lion's mane,"

come rushing to the rescue. Two of the Six tremble and turn. The high
heroic scorn of their former selves urges four to renew the charge, and
the sound of their feet on the snow is like that of an earthquake. What
bashes on bloody noses! What bungings-up of eyes! Of lips what
slittings! Red is many a spittle! And as the coughing urchin groans, and
claps his hand to his mouth, distained is the snowball that drops
unlaunched at his feet. The School are broken--their hearts die within
them--and--can we trust our blasted eyes?--the white livers show the
white feather, and fly! O shame! O sorrow! O sin! they turn their backs
and fly! Disgraced are the mothers that bore them--and "happy in my
mind," wives and widows, "were ye that died," undoomed to hear the
tidings of this wretched overthrow! Heavens and earth! sixty are flying
before Six!--and half of sixty--oh! that we should record it!--_are
pretending to be dead!!_ Would indeed that the snow were their
winding-sheet, so that it might but hide our dishonour!

Look, we beseech you, at the Mad Dominie! like Hector issuing from the
gates of Troy, and driving back the Greeks to their ships; or
rather--hear, spirit of Homer!--like some great, shaggy, outlandish
wolf-dog, that hath swum ashore from some strange wreck, and, after a
fortnight's famine on the bare sea-cliffs, been driven by the hunger
that gnaws his stomach like a cancer, and the thirst-fever that can only
be slaked in blood, to venture prowling for prey up the vale, till,
snuffing the scent of a flock of sheep, after some grim tiger-like
creeping on his belly, he springs at last, with huge long spangs, on the
woolly people, with bull-like growlings quailing their poor harmless
hearts, and then fast throttling them, one after another--till, as it
might seem rather in wantonness of rage than in empty pangs, he lies
down at last in the midst of all the murdered carcasses, licking the
blood off his flews and paws--and then, looking and listening round with
his red turbid eyes, and sharp-pointed ears savagely erect, conscious of
crime and fearful of punishment, soon as he sees and hears that all the
coast is clear and still, again gloatingly fastens his tusks behind the
ears, and then eats into the kidneys of the fattest of the flock, till,
sated with gore and tallow, he sneaks stealthily into the wood, and
coiling himself up all his wiry length--now no longer lank, but swollen
and knotted like that of a deer-devouring snake--he falls suddenly
asleep, and re-banquets in a dream of murder.

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