commend to the modern reader, if I may use the word commend in its
proper sense and with no air of patronage. Even Scotchmen (perhaps,
indeed, Scotchmen most of all) are wont nowadays to praise them rather
apologetically, as may be seen in the case of their editor and abridger
Mr. Skelton. Like most other very original things they drew after them a
flock of imbecile imitations; and up to the present day those who have
lived in the remoter parts of Scotland must know, or recently remember,
dreary compositions in corrupt following of the _Noctes_, with
exaggerated attempts at Christopher's worst mannerisms, and invariably
including a ghastly caricature of the Shepherd. Even in themselves they
abound in stumbling-blocks, which are perhaps multiplied, at least at
the threshold, by the arbitrary separation in Ferrier's edition of
Wilson's part, and not all his part, from the whole series; eighteen
numbers being excluded bodily to begin with, while many more and parts
of more are omitted subsequently. The critical mistake of this is
evident, for much of the machinery and all the characters of the
_Noctes_ were given to, not by, Wilson, and in all probability he
accepted them not too willingly. The origin of the fantastic personages,
the creation of which was a perfect mania with the early contributors to
_Blackwood_, and who are, it is to be feared, too often a nuisance to
modern readers, is rather dubious. Maginn's friends have claimed the
origination of the _Noctes_ proper, and of its well-known motto
paraphrased from Phocylides, for "The Doctor," or, if his chief
_Blackwood_ designation be preferred, for the Ensign--Ensign O'Doherty.
Professor Ferrier, on the other hand, has shown a not unnatural but by
no means critical or exact desire to hint that Wilson invented the
whole. There is no doubt that the real original is to be found in the
actual suppers at "Ambrose's." These Lockhart had described, in _Peter's
Letters_, before the appearance of the first _Noctes_ (the reader must
not be shocked, the false concord is invariable in the book itself) and
not long after the establishment of "Maga." As was the case with the
magazine generally, the early numbers were extremely local and extremely
personal. Wilson's glory is that he to a great extent, though not
wholly, lifted them out of this rut, when he became the chief if not the
sole writer after Lockhart's removal to London, and, with rare
exceptions, reduced the personages to three strongly marked and very
dramatic characters, Christopher North himself, the Ettrick Shepherd,
and "Tickler." All these three were in a manner portraits, but no one is
a mere photograph from a single person. On the whole, however, I suspect
that Christopher North is a much closer likeness, if not of what Wilson
himself was, yet at any rate of what he would have liked to be, than
some of his apologists maintain. These charitable souls excuse the
egotism, the personality, the violence, the inconsistency, the absurd
assumption of omniscience and Admirable-Crichtonism, on the plea that
"Christopher" is only the ideal Editor and not the actual Professor. It
is quite true that Wilson, who, like all men of humour, must have known
his own foibles, not unfrequently satirises them; but it is clear from
his other work and from his private letters that they _were_ his
foibles. The figure of the Shepherd, who is the chief speaker and on the
whole the most interesting, is a more debatable one. It is certain that
many of Hogg's friends, and, in his touchy moments he himself,
considered that great liberty was taken with him, if not that (as the
_Quarterly_ put it in a phrase which evidently made Wilson very angry)
he was represented as a mere "boozing buffoon." On the other hand it is
equally certain that the Shepherd never did anything that exhibited half
the power over thought and language which is shown in the best passages
of his _Noctes_ eidolon. Some of the adventures described as having
happened to him are historically known as having happened to Wilson
himself, and his sentiments are much more the writer's than the
speaker's. At the same time the admirably imitated patois and the subtle
rendering of Hogg's very well known foibles--his inordinate and
stupendous vanity, his proneness to take liberties with his betters, his
irritable temper, and the rest--give a false air of identity which is
very noteworthy. The third portrait is said to have been the farthest
from life, except in some physical peculiarities, of the three.
"Tickler," whose original was Wilson's maternal uncle Robert Sym, an
Edinburgh "writer," and something of a humorist in the flesh, is very
skilfully made to hold the position of common-sense intermediary between
the two originals, North and the Shepherd. He has his own peculiarities,
but he has also a habit of bringing his friends down from their
altitudes in a Voltairian fashion which is of great benefit to the
dialogues, and may be compared to Peacock's similar use of some of his
characters. The few occasional interlocutors are of little moment, with
one exception; and the only female characters, Mrs. and Miss Gentle,
would have been very much better away. They are not in the least
lifelike, and usually exhibit the namby-pambiness into which Wilson too
often fell when he wished to be refined and pathetic. The "English" or
half-English characters, who come in sometimes as foils, are also rather
of the stick, sticky. On the other hand, the interruptions of Ambrose,
the host, and his household, though a little farcical, are well judged.
And of the one exception above mentioned, the live Thomas De Quincey,
who is brought in without disguise or excuse in some of the very best of
the series, it can only be said that the imitation of his written style
is extraordinary, and that men who knew his conversation say that the
rendering of that is more extraordinary still.
The same designed exaggeration which some uncritical persons have called
Rabelaisian (not noticing that the very fault of the _Noctes_ is that,
unlike Rabelais, their author mixes up probabilities and improbabilities
so that there is a perpetual jarring) is maintained throughout the
scenery and etceteras. The comfortable but modest accommodations of
Ambrose's hotels in Gabriel's Road and Picardy Place are turned into
abodes of not particularly tasteful luxury which put Lord Beaconsfield's
famous upholstery to shame, and remind one of what they probably
suggested, Edgar Poe's equally famous and much more terrible sketch of a
model drawing-room. All the plate is carefully described as "silver"; if
it had been gold there might have been some humour in it. The "wax"
candles and "silken" curtains (if they had been _Arabian Nights_ lamps
and oriental drapery the same might be said) are always insisted on. If
there is any joke here it seems to lie in the contrast with Wilson's
actual habits, which were very simple. For instance, he gives us a
gorgeous description of the apparatus of North's solitary confinement
when writing for _Blackwood_; his daughter's unvarnished account of the
same process agrees exactly as to time, rate of production, and so
forth, but substitutes water for the old hock and "Scots pint" (magnum)
of claret, a dirty little terra-cotta inkstand for the silver utensil of
the _Noctes_, and a single large tallow candle for Christopher's "floods
of light." He carried the whim so far as to construct for himself--his
_Noctes_ self--an imaginary hall-by-the-sea on the Firth of Forth, which
in the same way seems to have had an actual resemblance, half of
likeness, half of contrast, to the actual Elleray, and to enlarge his
own comfortable town house in Gloucester Place to a sort of fairy palace
in Moray Place. But that which has most puzzled and shocked readers are
the specially Gargantuan passages relating to eating and drinking. The
comments made on this seem (he was anything but patient of criticism) to
have annoyed Wilson very much; and in some of the later _Noctes_ he
drops hints that the whole is mere Barmecide business. Unfortunately the
same criticism applies to this as to the upholstery--the exaggeration is
"done too natural." The Shepherd's consumption of oysters not by dozens
but by fifties, the allowance of "six common kettles-full of water" for
the night's toddy ration of the three, North's above-mentioned bottle of
old hock at dinner and magnum of claret after, the dinners and suppers
and "whets" which appear so often;--all these stop short of the actually
incredible, and are nothing more than extremely convivial men of the
time, who were also large eaters, would have actually consumed. Lord
Alvanley's three hearty suppers, the exploits of the old member of
Parliament in Boz's sketch of Bellamy's (I forget his real name, but he
was not a myth), and other things might be quoted to show that there is
a fatal verisimilitude in the Ambrosian feasts which may, or may not,
make them shocking (they don't shock me), but which certainly takes them
out of the category of merely humorous exaggeration. The Shepherd's
"jugs" numerous as they are (and by the way the Shepherd propounds two
absolutely contradictory theories of toddy-making, one of which,
according to the instructions of my preceptors in that art, who lived
within sight of the hills that look down on Glenlivet, is a damnable
heresy) are not in the least like the _seze muiz, deux bussars, et six
tupins_ of tripe that Gargamelle so rashly devoured. There are men now
living, and honoured members of society in Scotland, who admit the soft
impeachment of having drunk in their youth twelve or fourteen "double"
tumblers at a sitting. Now a double tumbler, be it known to the
Southron, is a jorum of toddy to which there go two wineglasses (of
course of the old-fashioned size, not our modern goblets) of whisky.
"Indeed," said a humorous and indulgent lady correspondent of Wilson's,
"indeed, I really think you eat too many oysters at the _Noctes_;" and
any one who believes in distributive justice must admit that they did.
If, therefore, the reader is of the modern cutlet-and-cup-of-coffee
school of feeding, he will no doubt find the _Noctes_ most grossly and
palpably gluttonous. If he be a very superior person he will smile at
the upholstery. If he objects to horseplay he will be horrified at
finding the characters on one occasion engaging in a regular "mill," on
more than one corking each other's faces during slumber, sometimes
playing at pyramids like the bounding brothers of acrobatic fame, at
others indulging in leap-frog with the servants, permitting themselves
practical jokes of all kinds, affecting to be drowned by an explosive
haggis, and so forth. Every now and then he will come to a passage at
which, without being superfine at all, he may find his gorge rise;
though there is nothing quite so bad in the _Noctes_ as the picture of
the ravens eating a dead Quaker in the _Recreations_, a picture for
which Wilson offers a very lame defence elsewhere. He must put all sorts
of prejudice, literary, political, and other, in his pocket. He must be
prepared not only for constant and very scurrilous flings at "Cockneys"
(Wilson extends the term far beyond the Hunt and Hazlitt school, an
extension which to this day seems to give a strange delight to Edinburgh
journalists), but for the wildest heterodoxies and inconsistencies of
political, literary, and miscellaneous judgment, for much bastard
verse-prose, for a good many quite uninteresting local and ephemeral
allusions, and, of course, for any quantity of Scotch dialect. If all
these allowances and provisos are too many for him to make, it is
probably useless for him to attempt the _Noctes_ at all. He will pretty
certainly, with the _Quarterly_ reviewer, set their characters down as
boozing buffoons, and decline the honour of an invitation to Ambrose's
or The Lodge, to Southside or the tent in Ettrick Forest.
But any one who can accommodate himself to these little matters, much
more any one who can enter into the spirit of days merrier, more
leisurely, and if not less straitlaced than our own, yet lacing their
laces in a different fashion, will find the _Noctes_ very delightful
indeed. The mere high jinks, when the secret of being in the vein with
them has been mastered, are seldom unamusing, and sometimes (notably in
the long swim out to sea of Tickler and the Shepherd) are quite
admirable fooling. No one who has an eye for the literary-dramatic can
help, after a few _Noctes_ have been read, admiring the skill with which
the characters are at once typified and individualised, the substance
which they acquire in the reader's mind, the personal interest in them
which is excited. And to all this, peculiarly suited for an alterative
in these solemn days, has to be added the abundance of scattered and
incomplete but remarkable gems of expression and thought that come at
every few pages, sometimes at every page, of the series.
Some of the burlesque narratives (such as the Shepherd's Mazeppa-like
ride on the Bonassus) are inimitably good, though they are too often
spoilt by Wilson's great faults of prolixity and uncertainty of touch.
The criticisms, of which there are many, are also extremely unequal,
but not a few very fine passages may be found among them. The politics,
it must be owned, are not good for much, even from the Tory point of
view. But the greatest attraction of the whole, next to its sunshiny
heartiness and humour, is to be found in innumerable and indescribable
bits, phrases, sentences, short paragraphs, which have, more than
anything out of the dialogues of the very best novels, the character and
charm of actual conversation. To read a _Noctes_ has, for those who have
the happy gift of realising literature, not much less than the effect of
actually taking part in one, with no danger of headache or indigestion
after, and without the risk of being playfully corked, or required to
leap the table for a wager, or forced to extemporise sixteen stanzas
standing on the mantelpiece. There must be some peculiar virtue in this,
for, as is very well known, the usual dialogue leaves the reader more
outside of it than almost any other kind of literature.
This peculiar charm is of necessity wanting to the rest of Wilson's
works, and in so far they are inferior to the _Noctes_; but they have
compensatory merits of their own, while, considered merely as
literature, there are better things in them than anything that is to be
found in the colloquies of those men of great gormandising
abilities--Christopher North, James Hogg, and Timothy Tickler. Of the
four volumes of _Essays Critical and Imaginative_, the fourth, on Homer
and his translators, with an unfinished companion piece on the Greek
drama, stands by itself, and has indeed, I believe, been separately
published. It is well worth reading through at a sitting, which cannot
be said of every volume of criticism. What is more, it may, I think, be
put almost first in its own division of the art, though whether that
division of the art is a high or low one is another question. I should
not myself rank it very high. With Wilson, criticism, at least here, is
little more than the eloquent expression of likes and dislikes. The long
passages in which he deals with the wrath of Achilles and with the love
of Calypso, though subject to the general stricture already more than
once passed, are really beautiful specimens of literary enthusiasm; nor
is there anything in English more calculated to initiate the reader,
especially the young reader, in the love at least, if not the
understanding, of Homer. The same enthusiastic and obviously quite
genuine appreciation appears in the essay on the "Agamemnon." But of
criticism as criticism--of what has been called tracing of literary
cause and effect, of any coherent and co-ordinated theory of the good
and bad in verse and prose, and the reasons of their goodness or
badness, it must be said of this, as of Wilson's other critical work,
that it is to be found _nusquam nullibi nullimodis_. He can preach
(though with too great volubility, and with occasional faults of taste)
delightful sermons about what he likes at the moment--for it is by no
means always the same; and he can make formidable onslaughts with
various weapons on what he dislikes at the moment--which again is not
always the same. But a man so certain to go off at score whenever his
likes or dislikes are excited, and so absolutely unable to check himself
whenever he feels tempted thus to go off, lacks the very first
qualifications of the critic:--lacks them, indeed, almost as much as the
mere word-grinder who looks to see whether a plural substantive has a
singular verb, and is satisfied if it has not, and horrified if it has.
His most famous sentence "The Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities
live for ever" is certainly noble. But it would have been better if the
Humanities had oftener choked the Animosities at their birth.
Wilson's criticism is to be found more or less everywhere in his
collected writings. I have said that I think it a pity that, of his
longest critical attempts, only one has been republished; and the reason
is simple. For with an unequal writer (and Wilson is a writer unequalled
in his inequality) his best work is as likely to be found in his worst
book as his worst work in his best book; while the constant
contemplation for a considerable period of one subject is more likely
than anything else to dispel his habits of digression and padding. But
the ubiquity of his criticism through the ten volumes was, in the
circumstances of their editing, simply unavoidable. He had himself
superintended a selection of all kinds, which he called _The Recreations
of Christopher North_, and this had to be reprinted entire. It followed
that, in the _Essays Critical and Imaginative_, an equally miscellaneous
character should be observed. Almost everything given, and much not
given, in the Works is worth consideration, but for critical purposes a
choice is necessary. Let us take the consolidated essay on Wordsworth
(most of which dates before 1822), the famous paper on Lord, then Mr.,
Tennyson's poems in 1832, and the generous palinode on Macaulay's "Lays"
of 1842. No three papers could better show Wilson in his three literary
stages, that of rather cautious tentative (for though he was not a very
young man in 1818, the date of the earliest of the Wordsworth papers, he
was a young writer), that of practised and unrestrained vigour (for 1832
represents about his literary zenith), and that of reflective decadence,
for by 1842 he had ceased to write habitually, and was already bowed
down by mental sorrows and physical ailments.
In the first paper, or set of papers, it is evident that he is
ambitiously groping after a more systematic style of criticism than he
found in practice to be possible for him. Although he elsewhere scoffs
at definitions, he tries to formulate very precisely the genius of
Scott, of Byron, and of Wordsworth; he does his best to connect his
individual judgments with these formulas; he shuns mere verbal
criticism, and (to some extent) mere exaltation or depreciation of
particular passages. But it is quite evident that he is ill at ease; and
I do not think that any one now reading the essay can call it a
successful one, or can attempt to rank it with those which, from
different points of view, Hazlitt and De Quincey (Hazlitt nearly at the
same time) wrote about Wordsworth. Indeed, Hazlitt is the most valuable
of all examples for a critical comparison with Wilson; both being
violent partisans and crotcheteers, both being animated with the truest
love of poetry, but the one possessing and the other lacking the
"tie-beam" of a consistent critical theory.
A dozen years later Wilson had cast his slough, and had become the
autocratic, freespoken, self-constituted dictator, Christopher North. He
was confronted with the very difficult problem of Mr. Tennyson's poems.
He knew they were poetry; that he could not help seeing and knowing. But
they seemed to him to be the work of a "cockney" (it would be
interesting to know whether there ever was any one less of a cockney
than the author of "Mariana"), and he was irritated by some silly praise
which had been given to them. So he set to work, and perpetrated the
queerest jumble of sound and unsound criticism that exists in the
archives of that art, so far as a humble but laborious student and
practitioner thereof knoweth. He could not for the life of him help
admiring "Adeline," "Oriana," "Mariana," "The Ode to Memory." Yet he had
nothing but scorn for the scarcely less exquisite "Mermaid" and "Sea
Fairies"--though the first few lines of the latter, excluded by this and
other pseudo-criticism from the knowledge of half a generation of
English readers, equal almost anything that the poet has ever done. And
only the lucky memory of a remark of Hartley Coleridge's (who never went
wrong in criticism, whatever he did in life) saved him from explicitly
damning "The Dying Swan," which stands at the very head of a whole class
of poetry. In all this essay, to borrow one of his own favourite words,
he simply "plouters"--splashes and flounders about without any guidance
of critical theory. Compare, to keep up the comparative method, the
paper with the still more famous and far more deadly attack which
Lockhart made a little later in the _Quarterly_. There one finds little,
if any, generosity; an infinitely more cold-blooded and deliberate
determination to "cut up." But the critic (and how quaint and pathetic
it is to think that the said critic was the author of "I ride from land
to land" and "When youthful hope is fled") sees his theory of poetry
straight before him, and never takes his eye off it. The individual
censures may be just or unjust, but they fit together like the
propositions of a masterpiece of legal judgment. The poet is condemned
under the statute,--so much the worse for the statute perhaps, but that
does not matter--and he can only plead No jurisdiction; whereas with
Christopher it is quite different. If he does not exactly blunder right
(and he sometimes does that), he constantly blunders wrong--goes wrong,
that is to say, without any excuse of theory or general view. That is
not criticism.
We shall not find matters much mended from the strictly critical point
of view, when we come, ten years later, to the article on the "Lays."
Here Christopher, as I hold with all respect to persons of distinction,
is absolutely right. He does not say one word too much of the fire and
life of those wonderful verses, of that fight of all fights--as far as
English verse goes, except Drayton's "Agincourt" and the last canto of
"Marmion"; as far as English prose goes, except some passages of Mallory
and two or three pages of Kingsley's--the Battle of the Lake Regillus.
The subject and the swing attracted him; he liked the fight, and he
liked the ring as of Sir Walter at his very best. But he goes
appallingly wrong all through on general critical points.
Yet, according to his own perverse fashion, he never goes wrong without
going right. Throughout his critical work there are scattered the most
intelligent ideas, the neatest phrases, the most appreciative judgments.
How good is it to say that "the battle of Trafalgar, though in some
sort it neither began nor ended anything, was a kind of consummation of
national prowess." How good again in its very straightforwardness and
simplicity is the dictum "it is not necessary that we should understand
fine poetry in order to feel and enjoy it, any more than fine music."
Hundreds and thousands of these things lie about the pages. And in the
next page to each the critic probably goes and says something which
shows that he had entirely forgotten them. An intelligent man may be
angry with Christopher--I should doubt whether any one who is not
occasionally both angry and disgusted with him can be an intelligent
man. But it is impossible to dislike him or fail to admire him as a
whole.