Book: Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

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




This utter absence of Revealed Religion, where it ought to have been
all-in-all--for in such trials in real life it is all-in-all, or we
regard the existence of sin or sorrow with repugnance--shocks far deeper
feelings within us than those of taste, and throws over the whole poem
to which the tale of Margaret belongs, an unhappy suspicion of
hollowness and insincerity in that poetical religion, which at the best
is a sorry substitute indeed for the light that is from heaven. Above
all, it flings, as indeed we have intimated, an air of absurdity over
the orthodox Church-of-Englandism--for once to quote a not inexpressive
barbarism of Bentham--which every now and then breaks out either in
passing compliment--amounting to but a bow--or in eloquent laudation,
during which the poet appears to be prostrate on his knees. He speaks
nobly of cathedrals, and minsters, and so forth, reverendly adorning
all the land; but in none--no, not one of the houses of the humble, the
hovels of the poor into which he takes us--is the religion preached in
those cathedrals and minsters, and chanted in prayer to the pealing
organ, represented as the power that in peace supports the roof-tree,
lightens the hearth, and is the guardian, the tutelary spirit of the
lowly dwelling. Can this be right? Impossible. And when we find the
Christian religion thus excluded from Poetry, otherwise as good as ever
was produced by human genius, what are we to think of the Poet, and of
the world of thought and feeling, fancy and imagination, in which he
breathes, nor fears to declare to all men that he believes himself to be
one of the order of the High Priests of nature?

Shall it be said, in justification of the poet, that he presents a very
interesting state of mind, sometimes found actually existing, and does
not pretend to present a model of virtue?--that there are miseries which
shut some hearts against religion, sensibilities which, being too
severely tried, are disinclined, at least at certain stages of their
suffering, to look to that source for comfort?--that this is human
nature, and the description only follows it?--that when "in peace and
comfort" her best hopes were directed to "the God in heaven," and that
her habit in that respect was only broken up by the stroke of her
calamity, causing such a derangement of her mental power as should
deeply interest the sympathies?--in short, that the poet is an artist,
and that the privation of all comfort from religion completes the
picture of her desolation?

Would that such defence were of avail! But of whom does the poet so
pathetically speak?

"Of one whose stock
Of virtues bloom'd beneath this lowly roof.
She was a woman of a steady mind,
Tender and deep in her excess of love;
Not speaking much--pleased rather with the joy
Of her own thoughts. By some especial care
Her temper had been framed, as if to make
A Being who, by adding love to fear,
Might live on earth a life of happiness.
Her wedded partner lack'd not on his side
The humble worth that satisfied her heart--
Frugal, affectionate, sober, and withal
Keenly industrious. She with pride would tell
That he was often seated at his loom
In summer, ere the mower was abroad
Among the dewy grass--in early spring,
Ere the last star had vanish'd. They who pass'd
At evening, from behind the garden fence
Might hear his busy spade, which he would ply
After his daily work, until the light
Had fail'd, and every leaf and flower were lost
In the dark hedges. So their days were spent
In peace and comfort; and a pretty boy
Was their best hope, next to the God in heaven."

We are prepared by that character, so amply and beautifully drawn, to
pity her to the utmost demand that may be made on our pity--to judge her
leniently, even if in her desertion she finally give way to inordinate
and incurable grief. But we are not prepared to see her sinking from
depth to depth of despair, in wilful abandonment to her anguish, without
oft-repeated and long-continued passionate prayers for support or
deliverance from her trouble, to the throne of mercy. Alas! it is true
that in our happiness our gratitude to God is too often more selfish
than we think, and that in our misery it faints or dies. So is it even
with the best of us--but surely not all life long--unless the heart has
been utterly crushed--the brain itself distorted in its functions, by
some calamity, under which nature's self gives way, and falls into ruins
like a rent house when the last prop is withdrawn.

"Nine tedious years
From their first separation--nine long years
She linger'd in unquiet widowhood--
A wife and widow. Needs must it have been
A sore heart-wasting."

It must indeed, and it is depicted by a master's hand. But even were it
granted that sufferings, such as hers, might, in the course of nature,
have extinguished all heavenly comfort--all reliance on God and her
Saviour--the process and progress of such fatal relinquishment should
have been shown, with all its struggles and all its agonies; if the
religion of one so good was so unavailing, its weakness should have
been exhibited and explained, that we might have known assuredly why, in
the multitude of the thoughts within her, there was no solace for her
sorrow, and how unpitying Heaven let her die of grief.

This tale, too, is the very first told by the Pedlar to the Poet, under
circumstances of much solemnity, and with affecting note of preparation.
It arises naturally from the sight of the ruined cottage near which
they, by appointment, have met; the narrator puts his whole heart into
it, and the listener is overcome by its pathos. No remark is made on
Margaret's grief, except that

"I turn'd aside in weakness, nor had power
To thank him for the tale which he had told.
I stood, and leaning o'er the garden wall,
Review'd that woman's sufferings; and it seem'd
To comfort me, while, with a brother's love,
I bless'd her in the impotence of grief.
Then towards the cottage I return'd, and traced
Fondly, though with an interest more mild,
The sacred spirit of humanity,
Which, 'mid the calm, oblivious tendencies
Of nature--'mid her plants, and weeds, and flowers,
And silent overgrowings, still survived."

Such musings receive the Pedlar's approbation, and he says,--

"My friend! enough to sorrow you have given.
The purposes of wisdom ask no more.
Be wise and cheerful, and no longer read
The forms of things with an unworthy eye.
She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here."

As the Poet, then, was entirely satisfied with the tale, so ought to be
all readers. No hint is dropped that there was anything to blame in the
poor woman's nine years' passion--no regret breathed that she had sought
not, by means offered to all, for that peace of mind which passeth all
understanding--no question asked, how it was that she had not communed
with her own afflicted heart, over the pages of that Book where it is
written, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I
will give you rest!" The narrator had indeed said, that on revisiting
her during her affliction,--

"Her humble lot of books,
Which in her cottage window, heretofore,
Had been piled up against the corner panes
In seemly order, now, with straggling leaves,
Lay scatter'd here and there, open or shut,
As they had chanced to fall."

But he does not mention the Bible.

What follows has always seemed to us of a questionable character:--

"I well remember that those very plumes,
Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall,
By mist and silent rain-drops silver'd o'er,
As once I pass'd, into my heart convey'd
So still an image of tranquillity,
So calm and still, and look'd so beautiful
Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind,
_That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the griefs
The passing shows of Being leave behind_,
Appear'd an idle dream, that could not live
Where meditation was. I turn'd away,
And walk'd along my road in happiness."

These are fine lines; nor shall we dare, in face of them, to deny the
power of the beauty and serenity of nature to assuage the sorrow of us
mortal beings, who live for awhile on her breast. Assuredly there is
sorrow that may be so assuaged; and the sorrow here spoken of--for poor
Margaret, many years dead--was of that kind. But does not the heart of a
man beat painfully, as if violence were offered to its most sacred
memories, to hear from the lips of wisdom, that "sorrow and despair from
ruin and from change, and all the griefs" that we can suffer here below,
appear an idle dream among plumes, and weeds, and spear-grass, and
mists, and rain-drops? "Where meditation is!" What meditation? Turn
thou, O child of a day! to the New Testament, and therein thou mayest
find comfort. It matters not whether a spring-bank be thy seat by Rydal
Mere, "while heaven and earth do make one imagery," or thou sittest in
the shadow of death, beside a tomb.

We said, that for the present we should confine our remarks on this
subject to the story of Margaret; but they are, more or less,
applicable to almost all the stories in "The Excursion." In many of the
eloquent disquisitions and harangues of the Three Friends, they carry
along with them the sympathies of all mankind; and the wisest may be
enlightened by their wisdom. But what we complain of is, that neither in
joy nor grief, happiness nor misery, is religion the dominant principle
of thought and feeling in the character of any one human being with whom
we are made acquainted, living or dead. Of not a single one, man or
woman, are we made to feel the beauty of holiness--the power and the
glory of the Christian Faith. Beings are brought before us whom we pity,
respect, admire, love. The great poet is high-souled and
tender-hearted--his song is pure as the morning, bright as day, solemn
as night. But his inspiration is not drawn from the Book of God, but
from the Book of Nature. Therefore it fails to sustain his genius when
venturing into the depths of tribulation and anguish. Therefore
imperfect are his most truthful delineations of sins and sorrows; and
not in his philosophy, lofty though it be, can be found alleviation or
cure of the maladies that kill the soul. Therefore never will "The
Excursion" become a bosom-book, endeared to all ranks and conditions of
a Christian People, like "The Task" or the "Night Thoughts." Their
religion is that of revelation--it acknowledges no other source but the
word of God. To that word, in all difficulty, distress, and dismay,
these poets appeal; and though they may sometimes, or often,
misinterpret its judgment, that is an evil incident to finite
intelligence; and the very consciousness that it is so, inspires a
perpetual humility that is itself a virtue found to accompany only a
Christian's Faith.

We have elsewhere vindicated the choice of a person of low degree as
Chief of "The Excursion," and exult to think that a great poet should
have delivered his highest doctrines through the lips of a Scottish
Pedlar.

"Early had he learn'd
To reverence the volume that displays
The mystery of life that cannot die."

Throughout the poem he shows that he does reverence it, and that his
whole being has been purified and elevated by its spirit. But fond as he
is of preaching, and excellent in the art or gift, a Christian Preacher
he is not--at best a philosophical divine. Familiar by his parentage and
nurture with all most hallowed round the poor man's hearth, and guarded
by his noble nature from all offence to the sanctities there enshrined;
yet the truth must be told, he speaks not, he expounds not the Word as
the servant of the Lord, as the follower of Him Crucified. There is very
much in his announcements to his equals wide of the mark set up in the
New Testament. We seem to hear rather of a divine power and harmony in
the universe than of the Living God. The spirit of Christianity as
connected with the Incarnation of the Deity, the Human-God, the link
between heaven and earth, between helplessness and omnipotence, ought to
be everywhere visible in the religious effusions of a Christian
Poet--wonder and awe for the greatness of God, gratitude and love for
his goodness, humility and self-abasement for his own unworthiness.
Passages may perhaps be found in "The Excursion" expressive of that
spirit, but they are few and faint, and somewhat professional, falling
not from the Pedlar but from the Pastor. If the mind, in forming its
conceptions of divine things, is prouder of its own power than humbled
in the comparison of its personal inferiority; and in enunciating them
in verse, more rejoices in the consciousness of the power of its own
genius than in the contemplation of Him from whom cometh every good and
perfect gift--it has not attained Piety, and its worship is not an
acceptable service. For it is self-worship--worship of the creature's
own conceptions, and an overweening complacency with his own greatness,
in being able to form and so to express them as to win or command the
praise and adoration of his fellow-mortals. Those lofty speculations,
alternately declaimed among the mountains, with an accompaniment of
waterfalls, by men full of fancies and eloquent of speech, elude the
hold of the earnest spirit longing for truth; disappointment and
impatience grow on the humblest and most reverent mind, and escaping
from the multitude of vain words, the neophyte finds in one chapter of a
Book forgotten in that babblement, a light to his way and a support to
his steps, which, following and trusting, he knows will lead him to
everlasting life.

Throughout the poem there is much talk of the light of nature, little of
the light of revelation, and they all speak of the theological
doctrines of which our human reason gives us assurance. Such expressions
as these may easily lead to important error, and do, indeed, seem often
to have been misconceived and misemployed. What those truths are which
human reason, unassisted, would discover to us on these subjects, it is
impossible for us to know, for we have never seen it left absolutely to
itself. Instruction, more or less, in wandering tradition, or in
express, full, and recorded revelation, has always accompanied it; and
we have never had other experience of the human mind than as exerting
its powers under the light of imparted knowledge. In these
circumstances, all that can be properly meant by those expressions which
regard the power of the human mind to guide, to enlighten, or to satisfy
itself in such great inquiries is, not that it can be the discoverer of
truth, but that, with the doctrines of truth set before it, it is able
to deduce arguments from its own independent sources which confirm it in
their belief; or that, with truth and error proposed to its choice, it
has means, to a certain extent, in its own power, of distinguishing one
from the other. For ourselves, we may understand easily that it would be
impossible for us so to shut out from our minds the knowledge which has
been poured in upon them from our earliest years, in order to ascertain
what self-left reason could find out. Yet this much we are able to do in
the speculations of our philosophy: We can inquire, in this light, what
are the grounds of evidence which nature and reason themselves offer for
belief in the same truths. A like remark must be extended to the
morality which we seem now to inculcate from the authority of human
reason. We no longer possess any such independent morality. The spirit
of a higher, purer, moral law than man could discover, has been breathed
over the world, and we have grown up in the air and the light of a
system so congenial to the highest feelings of our human nature, that
the wisest spirits amongst us have sometimes been tempted to forget that
its origin is divine.

Had "The Excursion" been written in the poet's later life, it had not
been so liable to such objections as these; for much of his poetry
composed since that era is imbued with a religious spirit, answering the
soul's desire of the devoutest Christian. His Ecclesiastical Sonnets are
sacred Poetry indeed. How comprehensive the sympathy of a truly pious
heart! How religion reconciles different forms, and modes, and signs,
and symbols of worship, provided only they are all imbued with the
spirit of faith! This is the toleration Christianity sanctions--for it
is inspired by its own universal love. No sectarian feeling here, that
would exclude or debar from the holiest chamber in the poet's bosom one
sincere worshipper of our Father which is in heaven. Christian brethren!
By that mysterious bond our natures are brought into more endearing
communion--now more than ever brethren, because of the blood that was
shed for us all from His blessed side! Even of that most awful mystery
in some prayer-like strains the Poet tremblingly speaks, in many a
strain, at once so affecting and so elevating--breathing so divinely of
Christian charity to all whose trust is in the Cross! Who shall say what
form of worship is most acceptable to the Almighty? All are holy in
which the soul seeks to approach him--holy

"The chapel lurking among trees,
Where a few villagers on bended knees
Find solace which a busy world disdains;"

we feel as the poet felt when he breathed to the image of some old
abbey,--

"Once ye were holy, ye are holy still!"

And what heart partakes not the awe of his

"Beneath that branching roof
Self-poised and scoop'd into ten thousand cells
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
Lingering--and wandering on as loth to die"?

Read the first of these sonnets with the last--and then once more the
strains that come between--and you will be made to feel how various and
how vast beneath the sky are the regions set apart by the soul for
prayer and worship; and that all places become consecrated--the high and
the humble--the mean and the magnificent--in which Faith and Piety have
sought to hold communion with Heaven.

But they who duly worship God in temples made with hands, meet every
hour of their lives "Devotional Excitements" as they walk among His
works; and in the later poetry of Wordsworth these abound--age having
solemnised the whole frame of his being, that was always alive to
religious emotions--but more than ever now, as around his paths in the
evening of life longer fall the mysterious shadows. More fervid lines
have seldom flowed from his spirit in its devoutest mood, than some
awakened by the sounds and sights of a happy day in May--to him--though
no church-bell was heard--a Sabbath. His occasional poems are often felt
by us to be linked together by the finest affinities, which perhaps are
but affinities between the feelings they inspire. Thus we turn from
those lines to some on a subject seemingly very different, from a
feeling of such fine affinities--which haply are but those subsisting
between all things and thoughts that are pure and good. We hear in them
how the Poet, as he gazes on a Family that holds not the Christian
Faith, embraces them in the folds of Christian Love--and how religion as
well as nature sanctifies the tenderness that is yearning at his heart
towards them--"a Jewish Family"--who, though outcasts by Heaven's
decree, are not by Heaven, still merciful to man, left forlorn on earth.

How exquisite the stanzas composed in one of the Catholic Chapels in
Switzerland,--

"Doom'd as we are our native dust
To wet with many a bitter shower,
It ill befits us to disdain
The Altar, to deride the Fane,
Where patient sufferers bend, in trust
To win a happier hour.

I love, where spreads the village lawn,
Upon some knee-worn Cell to gaze;
Hail to the firm unmoving Cross,
Aloft, where pines their branches toss!
And to the Chapel far withdrawn,
That lurks by lonely ways!

Where'er we roam--along the brink
Of Rhine--or by the sweeping Po,
Through Alpine vale, or champaign wide,
_Whate'er we look on, at our side
Be Charity--to bid us think
And feel, if we would know._"

How sweetly are interspersed among them some of humbler mood, most
touching in their simple pathos--such as a Hymn for the boatmen as they
approach the Rapids--Lines on hearing the song of the harvest damsels
floating homeward on the lake of Brientz--the Italian Itinerant and the
Swiss Goat-herd--and the Three Cottage Girls, representatives of
Italian, of Helvetian, and of Scottish beauty, brought together, as if
by magic, into one picture, each breathing in her natural grace the
peculiar spirit and distinctive character of her country's charms! Such
gentle visions disappear, and we sit by the side of the Poet as he gazes
from his boat floating on the Lake of Lugano, on the Church of San
Salvador, which was almost destroyed by lightning a few years ago, while
the altar and the image of the patron saint were untouched, and devoutly
listen while he exclaims,--

"Cliffs, fountains, rivers, seasons, times,
Let all remind the soul of heaven;
Our slack devotion needs them all;
And faith, so oft of sense the thrall,
While she, by aid of Nature, climbs,
May hope to be forgiven."

We do not hesitate to pronounce "Eclipse of the Sun, 1820," one of the
finest lyrical effusions of combined thought, passion, sentiment, and
imagery, within the whole compass of poetry. If the beautiful be indeed
essentially different from the sublime, we here feel that they may be
made to coalesce so as to be in their united agencies one divine power.
We called it lyrical, chiefly because of its transitions. Though not an
ode, it is ode-like in its invocations; and it might be set and sung to
music if Handel were yet alive, and St Cecilia to come down for an hour
from heaven. How solemn the opening strain! and from the momentary
vision of Science on her speculative Tower, how gently glides
Imagination down, to take her place by the Poet's side, in his bark
afloat beneath Italian skies--suddenly bedimmed, lake, land, and all,
with a something between day and night. In a moment we are conscious of
Eclipse. Our slight surprise is lost in the sense of a strange
beauty--solemn not sad--settling on the face of nature and the abodes of
men. In a single stanza filled with beautiful names of the beautiful, we
have a vision of the Lake, with all its noblest banks, and bays, and
bowers, and mountains--when in an instant we are wafted away from a
scene that might well have satisfied our imagination and our heart--if
high emotions were not uncontrollable and omnipotent--wafted away by
Fancy with the speed of Fire--lakes, groves, cliffs, mountains, all
forgotten--and alight amid an aerial host of figures, human and divine,
on a spire that seeks the sky. How still those imaged sanctities and
purities, all white as snows of Apennine, stand in the heavenly region,
circle above circle, and crowned as with a zone of stars! They are
imbued with life. In their animation the figures of angels and saints,
insensate stones no more, seem to feel the Eclipse that shadows them,
and look awful in the portentous light. In his inspiration he transcends
the grandeur even of that moment's vision--and beholds in the visages of
that aerial host those of the sons of heaven darkening with celestial
sorrow at the Fall of Man--when

"Throngs of celestial visages,
Darkening like water in the breeze,
A holy sadness shared."

Never since the day on which the wondrous edifice, in its consummate
glory, first saluted the sun, had it inspired in the soul of kneeling
saint a thought so sad and so sublime--a thought beyond the reaches of
the soul of him whose genius bade it bear up all its holy adornments so
far from earth, that the silent company seem sometimes, as light and
shadow moves among them, to be in ascension to heaven. But the Sun
begins again to look like the Sun, and the poet, relieved by the joyful
light from that awful trance, delights to behold

"Town and Tower,
The Vineyard and the Olive Bower,
Their lustre re-assume;"

and "breathes there a man with soul so dead," that it burns not within
him as he hears the heart of the husband and the father breathe forth
its love and its fear, remembering on a sudden the far distant whom it
has never forgotten--a love and a fear that saddens, but disturbs not,
for the vision he saw had inspired him with a trust in the tender
mercies of God? Commit to faithful memory, O Friend! who may some time
or other be a traveller over the wide world, the sacred stanzas that
bring the Poem to a close--and it will not fail to comfort thee when
sitting all alone by the well in the wilderness, or walking along the
strange streets of foreign cities, or lying in thy cot at midnight
afloat on far-off seas.

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