English Lands Letters and Kings 6
We should count this, and justly, rather over-fine writing nowadays. Yet
it is throughout stamped with the peculiarities of Christopher North; he
cannot help his delightfully wanton play with language and sentiment; and
into whatever sea of topics he plunged--early or late in life--he always
came up glittering with the beads and sparkles of a highly charged
rhetoric. Close after Oxford comes that idyllic life[14] in Windermere to
which I have referred. Four or more years pass there; his trees grow
there; his new roads--hewn through the forests--wind there; he plots a new
house there; he climbs the mountains; he is busy with his boats. Somewhat
later he marries; he does not lose his old love for the poets of the Greek
anthology; he has children born to him; he breeds game fowls, and looks
after them as closely as a New England farmer’s wife after her poultry;
but with him poetry and poultry go together. There are old diaries of
his--into which his daughter gives us a peep--that show such entries as
this:--“The small Paisley hen set herself 6th of July, with no fewer than
nine eggs;” and again--“Red pullet in Josie’s barn was set with eight eggs
on Thursday;” and square against such memoranda, and in script as careful,
will appear some bit of verse like this:--
“Oh, fairy child! what can I wish for thee?
Like a perennial flowret may’st thou be,
That spends its life in beauty and in bliss;
Soft on thee fall the breath of time,
And still retain in heavenly clime
The bloom that charms in this.”
He wrote, too, while living there above Windermere, his poem of the _Isle
of Palms_; having a fair success in the early quarter of this century, but
which was quickly put out of sight and hearing by the brisker, martial
music of Scott, and by the later and more vigorous and resonant verse of
Byron.
Indeed, Wilson’s poetry was not such as we would have looked for from one
who was a “varra bad un to lick” at a wrestling bout, and who made the
splinters fly when his bludgeon went thwacking into a page of
controversial prose. His verse is tender; it is graceful; it is delicate;
it is full of languors too; and it is tiresome--a gentle girlish treble of
sound it has, that you can hardly associate with this brawny mass of
manhood.
_Wilson in Scotland._
But all that delightful life amidst the woods of Elleray--with its
game-cocks, and boats, and mountain rambles, and shouted chorus of
Prometheus--comes to a sharp end. The inherited fortune of the poet, by
some criminal carelessness or knavery of a relative, goes in a day; and
our fine stalwart wrestler must go to Edinboro’ to wrestle with the fates.
There he coquets for a time with law; but presently falls into pleasant
affiliation with old Mr. Blackwood (who was a remarkable man in his way)
in the conduct of his magazine. And then came the trumpet blasts of
mingled wit, bravado, and tenderness, which broke into those pages, and
which made young college men in England or Scotland or America, fling up
their hats for Christopher North. Not altogether a safe guide, I think, as
a rhetorician; too much bounce in him; too little self-restraint; too much
of glitter and iridescence; but, on the other hand--bating some
blackguardism--he is brimful of life and heartiness and merriment--lighted
up with scholarly hues of color.
There was associated with Wilson in those days, in work upon _Blackwood_,
a young man--whom we may possibly not have occasion to speak of again,
and yet who is worthy of mention. I mean J. G. Lockhart,[15] who
afterwards became son-in-law and the biographer of Walter Scott--a slight
young fellow in that day, very erect and prim; wearing his hat well
forward on his heavy brows, and so shading a face that was thin, clean
cut, handsome, and which had almost the darkness of a Spaniard’s. He put
his rapier-like thrusts into a good many papers which the two wrought at
together. All his life he loved literary digs with his stiletto--which was
very sharp--and when he left Edinboro’ to edit the _Quarterly Review_ in
London (as he did in after days) he took his stiletto with him. There are
scenes in that unevenly written Lockhart story of _Adam Blair_--hardly
known now--which for thrilling passion, blazing out of clear sufficiencies
of occasion, would compare well with kindred scenes of Scott’s own, and
which score deeper colorings of human woe and loves and remorse than
belong to most modern stories; not lighted, indeed, with humor; not
entertaining with anecdote; not embroidered with archæologic knowledge;
not rattling with coruscating social fireworks, but--subtle, psychologic,
touching the very marrow of our common manhood with a pen both sharp and
fine. We remember him, however, most gratefully as the charming biographer
of Scott, and as the accomplished translator of certain Spanish ballads
into which he has put--under flowing English verse--all the clashing of
Cordovan castanets, and all the jingle of the war stirrups of the Moors.
We return now to Professor Wilson and propose to tell you how he came by
that title. It was after only a few years of work in connection with
_Blackwood_ that the Chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinboro’
University--which had been held by Dugald Stewart, and later by Dr. Thomas
Brown--fell vacant; and at once the name of Wilson was pressed by his
friends for the position. It was not a little odd that a man best known by
two delicate poems, and by a bold swashbuckler sort of magazine writing
should be put forward--in such a staid city as Edinboro’, and against
such a candidate as Sir William Hamilton--for a Chair which had been held
by Dugald Stewart! But he _was_ so put forward, and successfully; Walter
Scott and the Government coming to his aid. Upon this, he went resolutely
to study in the new line marked out for him; his rods and guns were, for
the time, hung upon the wall; his wrestling frolics and bouts at
quarter-staff, and suppers at the Ambrose tavern, were laid under
limitations. He put a conscience and a pertinacity into his labor that
he had never put to any intellectual work before.[16] But there were
very many people in Edinboro’ who had been aggrieved by the
appointment--largely, too, among those from whom his pupils would come.
There was, naturally, great anxiety among his friends respecting the
opening of the first session. An eye-witness says:--
“I went prepared to join in a cabal which was formed to put him
down. The lecture-room was crowded to the ceiling. Such a collection
of hard-browed, scowling Scotsmen, muttering over their knob-sticks,
I never saw. The Professor entered with a bold step, amid profound
silence. Every one expected some deprecatory, or propitiatory
introduction of himself and his subject, upon which the mass was to
decide against him, reason or no reason; but he began with a voice
of thunder right into the matter of his lecture, kept
up--unflinchingly and unhesitatingly, without a pause--a flow of
rhetoric such as Dugald Stewart or Dr. Brown, his predecessors,
never delivered in the same place. Not a word--not a murmur escaped
his captivated audience; and at the end they gave him a right-down
unanimous burst of applause.”[17]
From that time forth, for thirty years or more, John Wilson held the
place, and won a popularity with his annual relays of pupils that was
unexampled and unshaken. Better lectures in his province may very possibly
have been written by others elsewhere--more close, more compact, more
thoroughly thought out, more methodic. His were not patterned after Reid
and Stewart; indeed, not patterned at all; not wrought into a burnished
system, with the pivots and cranks of the old school-men all in their
places. But they made up a series--continuous, and lapping each into each,
by easy confluence of topic--of discourses on moral duties and on moral
relations, with full and brilliant illustrative talk--sometimes in his
heated moments taking on the gush and exuberance of a poem; other times
bristling with reminiscences; yet full of suggestiveness, and telling as
much, I think, on the minds of his eager and receptive students as if the
rhetorical brilliancies had all been plucked away, and some master of a
duller craft had reduced his words to a stiff, logical paradigm.
From this time forward Professor Wilson lived a quiet, domestic, yet fully
occupied life. He wrote enormously for the magazine with which his name
had become identified; there is scarce a break in his thirty years’
teachings in the university; there are sometimes brief interludes of
travel; journeys to London; flights to the Highlands; there are breaks in
his domestic circle, breaks in the larger circle of his friends; there are
twinges of the gout and there come wrinkles of age; but he is braver to
resist than most; and for years on years everybody knew that great gaunt
figure, with blue eyes and hair flying wild, striding along Edinboro’
streets.
His poems have indeed almost gone down under the literary horizon of
to-day; but one who has known _Blackwood_ of old, can hardly wander
anywhere amongst the Highlands of Scotland without pleasant recollections
of Christopher North and of the musical bravuras of his speech.
_Thomas Campbell._
Another Scotsman, who is worthy of our attention for a little time, is one
of a different order; he is stiff, he is prim, he is almost priggish; he
is so in his young days and he keeps so to the very last.
A verse or two from one of the little poems he wrote will bring him to
your memory:
“On Linden when the sun was low,
All bloodless lay the untrodden snow,
And dark as winter was the flow,
Of Iser, rolling rapidly.”
And again:
“Then shook the hills with thunder riven,
Then rushed the steed to battle driven,
And louder than the bolts of heaven,
Far flashed the red artillery.”
If Thomas Campbell[18] had never written anything more than that page-long
story of the “Battle of Hohenlinden,” his name would have gone into all
the anthologies, and his verse into all those school-books where boys for
seventy years now have pounded at his martial metre in furies of
declamation. And yet this bit of martial verse, so full of the breath of
battle, was, at the date of its writing, rejected by the editor of a small
provincial journal in Scotland--as not coming up to the true poetic
standard![19]
I have spoken of Campbell as a Scotsman; though after only a short stay in
Scotland--following his university career at Glasgow--and a starveling
tour upon the Continent (out of which flashed “Hohenlinden”)--he went to
London; and there or thereabout spent the greater part of the residue of a
long life. He had affiliations of a certain sort with America, out of
which may possibly have grown his _Gertrude of Wyoming_; his father was
for much time a merchant in Falmouth, Virginia, about 1770; being however
a strong loyalist, he returned in 1776. A brother and an uncle of the poet
became established in this country, and an American Campbell of this stock
was connected by marriage with the family of Patrick Henry.
The first _coup_ by which Campbell won his literary spurs, was a bright,
polished poem--with its couplets all in martinet-like order--called the
_Pleasures of Hope_. We all know it, if for nothing more, by reason of
the sympathetic allusion to the woes of Poland
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