Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




"Supplication to man may diffuse itself through many topics of
persuasion; but supplication to God can only cry for mercy." And in that
cry we say that there may be poetry; for the God of Mercy suffers his
creatures to approach his throne in supplication, with words which they
have learned when supplicating one another; and the feeling of being
forgiven, which we are graciously permitted to believe may follow
supplication, and spring from it, may vent itself in many various and
most affecting forms of speech. Men will supplicate God in many other
words besides those of doubt and of despair; hope will mingle with
prayer; and hope, as it glows, and burns, and expands, will speak in
poetry--else poetry there is none proceeding from any of our most sacred
passions.

Dr Johnson says, "Of sentiments purely religious, it will be found that
the most simple expression is the most sublime. Poetry loses its lustre
and its power, because it is applied to the decoration of something more
excellent than itself." Here he had in his mind the most false notions
of poetry, which he had evidently imagined to be an art despising
simplicity--whereas simplicity is its very soul. Simple expression, he
truly says, is in religion most sublime--and why should not poetry be
simple in its expression? Is it not always so--when the mood of mind it
expresses is simple, concise, and strong, and collected into one great
emotion? But he uses--as we see--the terms "lustre" and "decoration"--as
if poetry necessarily, by its very nature, was always ambitious and
ornate; whereas we all know, that it is often in all its glory direct
and simple as the language of very childhood, and for that reason
sublime.

With such false notions of poetry, it is not to be wondered at that Dr
Johnson, enlightened man as he was, should have concluded his argument
with this absurdity--"The ideas of Christian theology are too simple for
eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestic for ornament; to
recommend them by tropes and figures, is to magnify by a concave mirror
the sidereal hemisphere." No. Simple as they are--on them have been
bestowed, and by them awakened, the highest strains of eloquence--and
here we hail the shade of Jeremy Taylor alone--one of the highest that
ever soared from earth to heaven; sacred as they are, they have not been
desecrated by the fictions--so to call them--of John Milton; majestic as
are the heavens, their majesty has not been lowered by the ornaments
that the rich genius of the old English divines has so profusely hung
around them, like dewdrops glistening on the fruitage of the Tree of
Life. Tropes and figures are nowhere more numerous and refulgent than in
the Scriptures themselves, from Isaiah to St John; and, magnificent as
are the "sidereal heavens" when the eye looks aloft, they are not to our
eyes less so, nor less lovely, when reflected in the bosom of a still
lake or the slumbering ocean.

This statement of facts destroys at once all Dr Johnson's splendid
sophistry--splendid at first sight--but on closer inspection a mere
haze, mist, or smoke, illuminated by an artificial lustre. How far more
truly, and how far more sublimely, does Milton, "that mighty orb of
song," speak of his own divine gift--the gift of Poetry! "These
abilities are the inspired gift of God, rarely bestowed, and are of
power to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and
public civility; to allay the perturbation of the mind, and set the
affections to a right tune; to celebrate in glorious and lofty hymns the
throne and equipage of God's Almightiness, and what he suffers to be
wrought with high providence in his Church; to sing victorious agonies
of Martyrs and Saints, the deeds and triumphs of just and pious nations,
doing valiantly through faith against the enemies of Christ; to deplore
the general relapse of kingdoms and states from virtue and God's true
worship. Lastly, whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, and in
virtue amiable or grave; whatsoever hath passion, or admiration in all
the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily
subtleties and reflections of men's thoughts from within; all these
things, with a solid and treatable smoothness, to paint out and
describe--Teaching over the whole book of morality and virtue, through
all instances of example, with such delight to those, especially of soft
and delicious temper, who will not so much as look upon Truth herself
unless they see her elegantly dressed; that, whereas the paths of
honesty and good life that appear now rugged and difficult, appear to
all men easy and pleasant, though they were rugged and difficult
indeed."

It is not easy to believe that no great broad lights have been thrown on
the mysteries of men's minds since the days of the great poets,
moralists, and metaphysicians of the ancient world. We seem to feel more
profoundly than they--to see, as it were, into a new world. The things
of that world are of such surpassing worth, that in certain awe-struck
moods we regard them as almost above the province of Poetry. Since the
revelation of Christianity, all moral thought has been sanctified by
Religion. Religion has given it a purity, a solemnity, a sublimity,
which, even among the noblest of the heathen, we shall look for in vain.
The knowledge that shone but by fits and dimly on the eyes of Socrates
and Plato, "that rolled in vain to find the light," has descended over
many lands into "the huts where poor men lie"--and thoughts are familiar
there, beneath the low and smoky roofs, higher far than ever flowed from
the lips of Grecian sage meditating among the magnificence of his
pillared temples. The whole condition and character of the Human Being,
in Christian countries, has been raised up to a loftier elevation; and
he may be looked at in the face without a sense of degradation, even
when he wears the aspect of poverty and distress. Since that Religion
was given us, and not before, has been felt the meaning of that sublime
expression--The Brotherhood of Man.

Yet it is just as true that there is as much misery and suffering in
Christendom--nay, far more of them all--than troubled and tore men's
hearts during the reign of all those superstitions and idolatries. But
with what different feelings is it all thought of--spoken of--looked
at--alleviated--repented--expiated--atoned for--now! In the olden time,
such was the prostration of the "million," that it was only when seen in
high places that even Guilt and Sin were felt to be appalling;--Remorse
was the privilege of Kings and Princes--and the Furies shook their
scourges but before the eyes of the high-born, whose crimes had brought
eclipse across the ancestral glories of some ancient line.

But we now know that there is but one origin from which flow all
disastrous issues, alike to the king and the beggar. It is sin that does
"with the lofty equalise the low;" and the same deep-felt community of
guilt and groans which renders Religion awful, has given to poetry in a
lower degree something of the same character--has made it far more
profoundly tender, more overpoweringly pathetic, more humane and
thoughtful far, more humble as well as more high, like Christian Charity
more comprehensive; nay, we may say, like Christian Faith, felt by those
to whom it is given to be from on high; and if not utterly destroyed,
darkened and miserably weakened by a wicked or vicious life.

We may affirm, then, that as human nature has been so greatly purified
and elevated by the Christian Religion, Poetry, which deals with human
nature in all its dearest and most intimate concerns, must have partaken
of that purity and that elevation--and that it may now be a far holier
and more sacred inspiration, than when it was fabled to be the gift of
Apollo and the Muses. We may not circumscribe its sphere. To what
cerulean heights shall not the wing of Poetry soar? Into what
dungeon-gloom shall she not descend? If such be her powers and
privileges, shall she not be the servant and minister of Religion?

If from moral fictions of life Religion be altogether excluded, then it
would indeed be a waste of words to show that they must be worse than
worthless. They must be, not imperfect merely, but false; and not false
merely, but calumnious against human nature. The agonies of passion
fling men down to the dust on their knees, or smite them motionless as
stone statues, sitting alone in their darkened chambers of despair. But
sooner or later, all eyes, all hearts, look for comfort to God. The
coldest metaphysical analyst could not avoid _that_, in his sage
enumeration of "each particular hair" that is twisted and untwisted by
him into a sort of moral tie; and surely the impassioned and
philosophical poet will not, dare not, for the spirit that is within
him, exclude _that_ from his elegies, his hymns, and his songs, which,
whether mournful or exulting, are inspired by the life-long, life-deep
conviction, that all the greatness of the present is but for the
future--that the praises of this passing earth are worthy of his lyre
only because it is overshadowed by the eternal heavens.

But though the total exclusion of Religion from Poetry aspiring to be a
picture of the life or soul of man, be manifestly destructive of its
very essence--how, it may be asked, shall we set bounds to this
spirit--how shall we limit it--measure it--and accustom it to the curb
of critical control? If Religion be indeed all-in-all, and there are few
who openly deny it, must we, nevertheless, deal with it only in
allusion--hint it as if we were half afraid of its spirit, half
ashamed--and cunningly contrive to save our credit as Christians,
without subjecting ourselves to the condemnation of critics, whose
scorn, even in this enlightened age, has--the more is the pity--even by
men conscious of their genius and virtue, been feared as more fatal than
death?

No: Let there be no compromise between false taste and true Religion.
Better to be condemned by all the periodical publications in Great
Britain than your own conscience. Let the dunce, with diseased spleen,
who edits one obscure Review, revile and rail at you to his heart's
discontent, in hollow league with his black-biled brother, who, sickened
by your success, has long laboured in vain to edit another, still more
unpublishable--but do you hold the even tenor of your way, assured that
the beauty which nature, and the Lord of nature, have revealed to your
eyes and your heart, when sown abroad will not be suffered to perish,
but will have everlasting life. Your books--humble and unpretending
though they be--yet here and there a page not uninspired by the spirit
of Truth, and Faith, and Hope, and Charity--that is, by Religion--will
be held up before the ingle light, close to the eyes of the pious
patriarch, sitting with his children's children round his knees--nor
will any one sentiment, chastened by that fire that tempers the sacred
links that bind together the brotherhood of man, escape the solemn
search of a soul, simple and strong in its Bible-taught wisdom, and
happy to feel and own communion of holy thought with one unknown--even
perhaps by name--who although dead yet speaketh--and, without
superstition, is numbered among the saints of that lowly household.

He who knows that he writes in the fear of God and in the love of man,
will not arrest the thoughts that flow from his pen, because he knows
that they may--will be--insulted and profaned by the name of cant, and
he himself held up as a hypocrite. In some hands, ridicule is indeed a
terrible weapon. It is terrible in the hands of indignant genius,
branding the audacious forehead of falsehood or pollution. But ridicule
in the hands either of cold-blooded or infuriated Malice, is harmless as
a birch-rod in the palsied fingers of a superannuated beldam, who in her
blear-eyed dotage has lost her school. The Bird of Paradise might float
in the sunshine unharmed all its beautiful life long, although all the
sportsmen of Cockaigne were to keep firing at the star-like plumage
during the Christmas holydays of a thousand years.

We never are disposed not to enjoy a religious spirit in metrical
composition, but when induced to suspect that it is not sincere; and
then we turn away from the hypocrite, just as we do from a pious
pretender in the intercourse of life. Shocking it is, indeed, to see
"fools rush in where angels fear to tread;" nor have we words to express
our disgust and horror at the sight of fools, not rushing in among those
awful sanctities before which angels vail their faces with their wings,
but mincing in, with red slippers and flowered dressing-gowns--would-be
fashionables, with crow-quills in hands like those of milliners, and
rings on their fingers--afterwards extending their notes into Sacred
Poems for the use of the public--penny-a-liners, reporting the judgments
of Providence as they would the proceedings of a police court.




SACRED POETRY.

CHAPTER II.


The distinctive character of poetry, it has been said, and credited
almost universally, is _to please_. That they who have studied the laws
of thought and passion should have suffered themselves to be deluded by
an unmeaning word is mortifying enough; but it is more than
mortifying--it perplexes and confounds--to think that poets themselves,
and poets too of the highest order, have declared the same degrading
belief of what is the scope and tendency, the end and aim of their own
divine art--forsooth, _to please_! Pleasure is no more the end of
poetry, than it is the end of knowledge, or of virtue, or of religion,
or of this world. The end of poetry is pleasure, delight, instruction,
expansion, elevation, honour, glory, happiness here and hereafter, or it
is nothing. Is the end of "Paradise Lost" to please? Is the end of
Dante's Divine Comedy to please? Is the end of the Psalms of David to
please? Or of the songs of Isaiah? Yet it is probable that poetry has
often been injured or vitiated by having been written in the spirit of
this creed. It relieved poets from the burden of their duty--from the
responsibility of their endowments--from the conscience that is in
genius. We suspect that this doctrine has borne especially hard on all
sacred poetry, disinclined poets to devoting their genius to it--and
consigned, if not to oblivion, to neglect, much of what is great in that
magnificent walk. For if the masters of the Holy Harp are to strike it
but to please--if their high inspirations are to be deadened and dragged
down by the prevalent power of such a mean and unworthy aim--they will
either be contented to awaken a few touching tones of "those strains
that once did sweet in Zion glide"--unwilling to prolong and deepen them
into the diapason of praise--or they will deposit their lyre within the
gloom of the sanctuary, and leave unawakened "the soul of music sleeping
on its strings."

All arguments, or rather objections to, sacred poetry, dissolve as you
internally look at them, like unabiding mist-shapes, or rather like
imagined mirage where no mirage is, but the mind itself makes ocular
deceptions for its own amusement. By sacred poetry is mostly meant
Scriptural; but there are, and always have been, conceited and callous
critics, who would exclude all religious feelings from poetry, and
indeed from prose too, compendiously calling them all cant. Had such
criticasters been right, all great nations would not have so gloried in
their great bards. Poetry, it is clear, embraces all we can experience;
and every high, impassioned, imaginative, intellectual, and moral state
of being becomes religious before it passes away, provided it be left
free to seek the empyrean, and not adstricted to the glebe by some
severe slavery of condition, which destroys the desire of ascent by the
same inexorable laws that palsy the power, and reconcile the toilers to
the doom of the dust. If all the states of being that poetry illustrates
do thus tend, of their own accord, towards religious elevation, all high
poetry must be religious; and so it is, for its whole language is
breathing of a life "above the smoke and stir of this dim spot which men
call earth;" and the feelings, impulses, motives, aspirations,
obligations, duties, privileges, which it shadows forth or embodies,
enveloping them in solemn shade or attractive light, are all, directly
or indirectly, manifestly or secretly, allied with the sense of the
immortality of the soul, and the belief of a future state of reward and
retribution. Extinguish that sense and that belief in a poet's soul, and
he may hang up his harp.

Among the great living poets, Wordsworth is the one whose poetry is to
us the most inexplicable--with all our reverence for his transcendent
genius, we do not fear to say the most open to the most serious
charges--on the score of its religion. From the first line of the
"Lyrical Ballads" to the last of "The Excursion"--it is avowedly one
system of thought and feeling, embracing his experiences of human life,
and his meditations on the moral government of this world. The human
heart--the human mind--the human soul--to use his own fine words--is
"the haunt and main region of his song." There are few, perhaps none of
our affections--using that term in its largest sense--which have not
been either slightly touched upon, or fully treated, by Wordsworth. In
his poetry, therefore, we behold an image of what, to his eye, appears
to be human life. Is there, or is there not, some great and lamentable
defect in that image, marring both the truth and beauty of the
representation? We think there is--and that it lies in his Religion.

In none of Wordsworth's poetry, previous to his "Excursion," is there
any allusion made, except of the most trivial and transient kind, to
Revealed Religion. He certainly cannot be called a Christian poet. The
hopes that lie beyond the grave--and the many holy and awful feelings in
which on earth these hopes are enshrined and fed, are rarely if ever
part of the character of any of the persons--male or female--old or
young--brought before us in his beautiful Pastorals. Yet all the most
interesting and affecting ongoings of this life are exquisitely
delineated--and innumerable of course are the occasions on which, had
the thoughts and feelings of revealed religion been in Wordsworth's
heart during the hours of inspiration--and he often has written like a
man inspired--they must have found expression in his strains; and the
personages, humble or high, that figure in his representations, would
have been, in their joys or their sorrows, their temptations and their
trials, Christians. But most assuredly this is not the case; the
religion of this great Poet--in all his poetry published previous to
"The Excursion"--is but the "Religion of the Woods."

In "The Excursion," his religion is brought forward--prominently and
conspicuously--in many elaborate dialogues between Priest, Pedlar, Poet,
and Solitary. And a very high religion it often is; but is it
Christianity? No--it is not. There are glimpses given of some of the
Christian doctrines; just as if the various philosophical disquisitions,
in which the Poem abounds, would be imperfect without some allusion to
the Christian creed. The interlocutors--eloquent as they all are--say
but little on that theme; nor do they show--if we except the
Priest--much interest in it--any solicitude; they may all, for anything
that appears to the contrary, be deists.

Now, perhaps, it may be said that Wordsworth was deterred from entering
on such a theme by the awe of his spirit. But there is no appearance of
this having been the case in any one single passage in the whole poem.
Nor could it have been the case with such a man--a man privileged, by
the power God has bestowed upon him, to speak unto all the nations of
the earth, on all themes, however high and holy, which the children of
men can feel and understand. Christianity, during almost all their
disquisitions, lay in the way of all the speakers, as they kept
journeying among the hills,

"On man, on nature, and on human life,
Musing in Solitude!"

But they, one and all, either did not perceive it, or, perceiving it,
looked upon it with a cold and indifferent regard, and passed by into
the poetry breathing from the dewy woods, or lowering from the cloudy
skies. Their talk is of "Palmyra central, in the desert," rather than of
Jerusalem. On the mythology of the Heathen much beautiful poetry is
bestowed, but none on the theology of the Christian.

Yet there is no subject too high for Wordsworth's muse. In the preface
to "The Excursion," he says daringly--we fear too daringly,--

"Urania, I shall need
Thy guidance, or a greater muse, if such
Descend to earth, or dwell in highest heaven!
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep--and aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
All strength--all terror--single or in bands,
That ever was put forth in personal form,
Jehovah with his thunder, and the choir
Of shouting angels, and the empyreal thrones;
I passed them unalarm'd!"

Has the poet, who believes himself entitled to speak thus of the power
and province given to him to put forth and to possess, spoken in
consonance with such a strain, by avoiding, in part of the very work to
which he so triumphantly appeals, the Christian Revelation? Nothing
could have reconciled us to a burst of such--audacity--we use the word
considerately--but the exhibition of a spirit divinely imbued with the
Christian faith. For what else, we ask, but the truths beheld by the
Christian Faith, can be beyond those "personal forms," "beyond Jehovah,"
"the choirs of shouting angels," and the "empyreal thrones?"

This omission is felt the more deeply--the more sadly--from such
introduction as there is of Christianity; for one of the books of "The
Excursion" begins with a very long, and a very noble eulogy on the
Church Establishment in England. How happened it that he who pronounced
such eloquent panegyric--that they who so devoutly inclined their ear to
imbibe it--should have been all contented with

"That basis laid, these principles of faith
Announced,"

and yet throughout the whole course of their discussions, before and
after, have forgotten apparently that there was either Christianity or a
Christian Church in the world?

We do not hesitate to say, that the thoughtful and sincere student of
this great poet's works, must regard such omission--such inconsistency
or contradiction--with more than the pain of regret; for there is no
relief afforded to our defrauded hearts from any quarter to which we can
look. A pledge has been given, that all the powers and privileges of a
Christian poet shall be put forth and exercised for our behoof--for our
delight and instruction; all other poetry is to sink away before the
heavenly splendour; Urania, or a greater muse, is invoked; and after all
this solemn, and more than solemn preparation made for our initiation
into the mysteries, we are put off with a well-merited encomium on the
Church of England, from Bishop to Curate inclusive; and though we have
much fine poetry, and some high philosophy, it would puzzle the most
ingenious to detect much, or any, Christian religion.

Should the opinion boldly avowed be challenged, we shall enter into
further exposition and illustration of it; meanwhile, we confine
ourselves to some remarks on one of the most elaborate tales of domestic
suffering in "The Excursion." In the story of Margaret, containing, we
believe, more than four hundred lines--a tolerably long poem in
itself--though the whole and entire state of a poor deserted wife and
mother's heart, for year after year of "hope deferred, that maketh the
heart sick," is described, or rather dissected, with an almost cruel
anatomy--not one quivering fibre being left unexposed--all the
fluctuating, and finally all the constant agitations laid bare and naked
that carried her at last lingeringly to the grave--there is not--except
one or two weak lines, that seem to have been afterwards purposely
dropped in--one single syllable about Religion. Was Margaret a
Christian?--Let the answer be yes--as good a Christian as ever kneeled
in the small mountain chapel, in whose churchyard her body now waits for
the resurrection. If she was--then the picture painted of her and her
agonies, is a libel not only on her character, but on the character of
all other poor Christian women in this Christian land. Placed as she
was, for so many years, in the clutches of so many passions--she surely
must have turned sometimes--ay, often, and often, and often, else had
she sooner left the clay--towards her Lord and Saviour. But of such
"comfort let no man speak," seems to have been the principle of Mr
Wordsworth; and the consequence is, that this, perhaps the most
elaborate picture he ever painted of any conflict within any one human
heart, is, with all its pathos, repulsive to every religious
mind--_that_ being wanting without which the entire representation is
vitiated, and necessarily false to nature--to virtue--to resignation--to
life--and to death. These may seem strong words--but we are ready to
defend them in the face of all who may venture to impugn their truth.

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