Hazlitt has a long paper "On Persons One would Wish to have Seen." And
surely, if he had lived at this time, he would have added genial and
lovable Kit North to the list of those thus honored. There are few of
those who belonged to his day and generation to whom we should have a
stronger wish to be presented, than to Wilson,--the student, the
Bohemian, the bookworm, the sportsman, the professor, the kindliest,
merriest, and most entertaining of genial companions,--the great hero of
the "Noctes Ambrosianae."
Not even Lamb--the quaint and merry companion, so full of quips and puns
that laughter lingered with any company he graced with his pathetic
little body and quizzical countenance--could rival Christopher as a
fountain of merriment and eternal good-cheer. His humor was not quiet
and subtle like Lamb's, but broad, rich, bordering on farce, and of
"imagination all compact." And Lamb could by no means rival him in
splendor of description, vivacity of retort, energy of criticism, or in
riotous and uproarious mirth. De Quincey alone could match the splendor
of his diction when describing outward sights and sounds, and De Quincey
had not a tithe of his intense love of Nature, and appreciation of her
glory and magnificence. Ruskin alone equals him in this, and he scarcely
reaches the height of rhetorical eloquence to which Wilson soars so
easily.
In these same "Noctes" we have descriptions of some of those nights
when, as Carlyle would have said, "there was much good talk." And Wilson
was mainly the talker. The chief characteristic of his discourse was its
prodigality of humor and its infinite variety. His imagination too ran
riot, and his wit sparkled ever and anon with a radiance all its own.
His memory was prodigious, and in his conversation he taxed it for
anecdotes and illustrations drawn from the four quarters of the globe,
and from the most remote and unusual stores of literary hoarding. His
mind was many-sided as well as keen, and he kept all his faculties in
full play, not excepting his sympathies, which were as broad as the
world of men.
Can we wonder that those who crowded the table where he sat, lingered on
till the daylight drove them from the board? or that no man who had had
him for a boon companion could ever be satisfied with another? Can we
wonder that the students who crowded his lecture-room after he became a
professor thought every other lecturer commonplace and dull? Not that he
gave them more information than others--perhaps he did not give them as
much; but he excited and inspired them. He quickened their minds, and
wakened their dormant faculties. Some of the white heat of his own
enthusiasm he communicated to their colder natures, and they enjoyed the
unusual warmth. Those who listened to those wonderful discourses can
never be persuaded that eloquence did not die with Christopher North.
They were all addressed to the hearts of his listeners, and thrills, and
tears, and laughter that was not loud but deep, accompanied his speech
from the beginning to the very end. Let one who thus listened to him
speak:--
"We have heard him in the assembly-rooms, speaking on the genius of
Scott, a little after the death of the Wizard, and in the tremble
of his deep voice could read his sorrow for the personal loss, as
well as his enthusiasm for the universal genius. We have heard him
in his class-room, in those wild and wailing cadences, which no
description can adequately re-echo, in those long, deep-drawn,
slowly expiring sounds, which now resembled the moanings of a
forsaken cataract, and now seemed to come hoarse and hollow from
the chambers of the thunder, advocating the immortality of the
soul, describing Caesar weeping at the grave of Alexander,
repeating, with an energy which might have raised the dead, Scott's
lines on the landing of the British in Portugal, and discovering
the secret springs of laughter, beauty, sublimity, and terror, to
audiences whom he melted, electrified, subdued, solemnized,
exploded into mirth, or awed into silence, at his pleasure."
His eloquence gained little from his personal appearance, about which
there was something savage, leonine, massive, but little that was
refined or attractive in the usual sense of that word. Still his face is
described by some as magnificent, and his gray, flashing eyes, as being
remarkably expressive. In his dress he was exceedingly slovenly except
upon state occasions. His professor's gown, as he stalked along the
college-terraces, flew in tattered stripes behind him, his shirts were
usually buttonless, and his hat like a reminiscence of a pre-historic
age. His yellow hair always floated over his shoulders, in confusion
worse confounded, and he wore immense unkempt whiskers hanging upon his
breast. Dickens thus describes him:--
"At his heels followed a wiry, sharp-eyed shaggy devil of a
terrier, dogging his steps as he went slashing up and down, now
with one man beside him, now with another, and now quite alone, but
always at a fast rolling pace, with his head in the air, and his
eyes as wide open as he could get them. A bright,
clear-complexioned, mountain-looking fellow, he looks as if he had
just come down from the Highlands, and had never taken a pen in
hand."
His carelessness of appearances extended to his rooms, which looked like
small sections from the primeval chaos. The book-shelves were of
unpainted wood, knocked together in the rudest fashion, and the books
were many of them tattered and without backs. A case containing foreign
birds was used also as a wardrobe, and all of his rare possessions in
natural history were mixed up with a most motley collection of books and
papers,--these latter consisting of all sorts of scraps, of which no one
else could have made anything. He always seemed to be able to find them
when wanted, even in the worst confusion; but how he did it was a
mystery to his friends. "Here and there, in the interstices between
books, were stuffed what appeared to be dingy, crumpled bits of paper,
but they were in reality bank-notes, his class fees; which he never
carried in a purse, but stuffed away wherever it seemed most convenient
at the moment." He never, even in the coldest weather, had a fire in his
room.
No account of Kit North would be complete that left out entirely the
convivialities of the table, though we should make a great mistake if we
took the humorous caricatures of the "Noctes Ambrosianae" for accounts of
literal feats in that line. This has sometimes been done, and he is
frequently represented as a glutton and a drunkard. He was neither,
although he did perform some remarkable feats both of eating and
drinking in his day. His life of constant out-of-door exercise gave him
a keen appetite, and a perfect digestion, and he loved the hilarity of
the table as well as any man of his day. But in his later life he became
a _teetotaller_. Even in his earlier days it was often the excitement of
company which quickened all of his powers to their utmost tension, when
the effect was attributed to wine. So fond was he of all sorts and kinds
of out-of-the-way company, that he was at one time in the habit of going
at midnight to the Angel Inn, where many of the up and down London
coaches met, and there to preside at the passengers' supper, carving for
them, inquiring all about their respective journeys, and astonishing
them with his wit and pleasantry. He would also linger about with
coachmen and guards, and was present at, and took a hand in, many a
street row, unknown by those with whom he mingled.
He is said to have remained for three months in the back room of a
Highland blacksmith, strolling daily about the hills, and performing
some of his prodigious pedestrian feats, to the great surprise of the
rustics. He is also said to have followed the lady who became his wife
all over the lake country of Scotland in the disguise of a waiter,
serving her at table wherever the party happened to be, until the
suspicions of her father were aroused by seeing the same waiter at every
inn. Wilson then made himself known, declared his admiration for the
lady, and finally became her accepted suitor. After their marriage he
took her with him all over the Highlands on foot, assuring her that only
so could she become really acquainted with their beauties. No man
perhaps ever loved the Highlands as Christopher North loved them,--with
the possible exception of Walter Scott.--and we can truly envy his young
bride to be thus escorted through their deepest labyrinths, and
introduced to their most delicate and hidden beauties. Here he
introduced his beloved also to the cottages of the peasants, and made
her acquainted with the poetry of that life which has inspired some of
the finest of modern literature. He knew as well as Hogg, or Scott, or
Lockhart, that the characteristic romance of a people like the Scotch is
to be sought chiefly in the cottages of the poor, and that the finest
poetry of such a people has for the most part a like inspiration. And
these same peasants showed to their best advantage always when
Christopher was around. They loved him instinctively, although they knew
him only as a sportsman, or in some cases, perhaps, as a naturalist. But
his large heart always shone forth in his intercourse with the poor, and
he seemed conscious of no superiority to them, meeting them always on
the common ground of humanity, and sympathizing, in his hearty and
genial way, in all their joys and sorrows. They _took to him_ just as
dogs and children did.
And his descriptions of their cramped and narrow lives, enlivened by his
characteristic humor, are among the best pictures the world has
cherished of Scottish rural life. He did not spare their vices, but gave
many dramatic pictures of the darker sides of peasant life, with which
he gained a close acquaintance during those long foot-journeys which he
was so fond of making, living really what we would call the life of a
tramp, for long periods. Sometimes he camped with gypsies for weeks, and
at all times was intimate with all of the so-called lower classes.
Tinkers, cairds, poachers, were his familiar roadside acquaintances, and
he extracted great amusement from their peculiarities. Sometimes he had
to win the respect of these worthies by knocking them down in the
beginning of the acquaintance, but after that they usually stood by him
to the end. He usually figured as the champion of the weak in these
games at fisticuffs, but sometimes he managed things on his own account.
Although he loved to wander in the Highlands, he made his home among the
lakes at Elleray. This home was a rambling, mossy-roofed cottage, of
very picturesque appearance, overhung by a giant sycamore.
"Never," he says, "in this well-wooded world, not even in the days
of the Druids, could there have been such another tree. It would be
easier to suppose two Shakspeares. Oh, sweetest and shadiest of
sycamores, we love thee beyond all other trees."
And he thus discourses of the lakes amid which he lived,--and about
whose borders he wandered so continually:--
"Each lake hath its promontories, that every step you walk, every
stroke you row, undergo miraculous metamorphoses, accordant to the
change that comes o'er the spirit of your dream, as your
imagination glances again over the transfigured mountains. Each
lake hath its bays of bliss, where might ride at her moorings, made
of the stalks of water-lilies, the fairy bark of a spiritual life.
Each lake hath its hanging terraces of immortal green, that along
her shores run glimmering far down beneath the superficial
sunshine, where the poet in his becalmed canoe, among the lustre,
could fondly swear by all that is most beautiful on earth, and air,
and water, that these three are one, blended as they are by the
interfusing spirit of heavenly peace."
Lover of beauty as he was, yet he was well content with what he could
find in Scotland; he cared little for England, and nothing for the
Continent. There was enough to exhaust the seeing possibilities of a
lifetime in his own little land, with its rocks and lakes and heathery
hills. This was because he really had the poet's eye and heart. Such do
not need to traverse the whole wide world to find enough of beauty; it
is only the mediocre and the commonplace who care to gaze superficially
at the landscapes of two continents. But Wilson knew his land not only
with the eye of a poet, but also with that of a naturalist. His favorite
pastime was ornithology, and he made fine collections of specimens in
this line.
He was a great sportsman, and a story is told by his daughter, Mrs.
Gordon, of his travelling seventy miles in one day, to fish in a certain
favorite loch among the braes of Glenarchy, called Loch Toila. He was
also a good shot, and very enthusiastic in sport even to old age.
Boating was another favorite pastime; and engaged in one or another of
these out-of-door pursuits, he passed a very large portion of his whole
life. When he did write, he did it with great rapidity, composing one of
the "Noctes" at a sitting. His love for the animal creation was very
deep, and he would never submit to seeing any creature abused. He one
day saw a man cruelly beating his horse, which was overloaded with
coals, and could not move. He remonstrated with the driver, who,
exasperated at the interference, took up the whip in a threatening way,
as if with intent to strike the professor. In one instant the
well-nerved hand of Wilson, not new to these encounters, twisted the
whip from the coarse fist of the driver, and walking up to the cart, he
unfastened the _trams_ and hurled the whole weight of the coals into the
street. He then took the horse and led it away, depositing it in the
hands of the authorities, with injunctions to see that the beast was
better treated in future.
He made great pets of game-birds, the aristocracy of the species, with
their delicate heads and exquisite plumage, and kept at one time no less
than sixty-two in the back yard of his house. The noise was simply
unendurable to all but Wilson, who was never annoyed by it in the least.
He kept one lame sparrow for eleven years, caring for it with the
tenderest solicitude.
He was always well known in the houses of the poor, and he never gave up
one of his humble friends. He was tender and gentle always to these, as
to the members of his own household, where it was said the very strength
of his hand was softened, that he might caress the infant, or play with
the little ones at his feet. With all children he was a prime favorite,
and in his declining years his grandchildren were his daily playmates.
Noah's ark, trumpets, drums, pencils, puzzles, dolls, were all supposed
by them to possess interest in his eyes equal to their own.
He was thrown much upon these children for his pleasures near the close
of his life. That frame of gigantic build and of gigantic strength
became almost helpless from paralysis, and he was cared for till death
by his daughter, the mother of these favored little ones. Oh, it is sad
to think of it! Poor Christopher,--the active, the alert, the
keen-sighted, the fleet-footed, the gay and rollicking sportsman, the
famous angler, the champion boxer, too, upon occasions,--laid low, and
propped helpless upon pillows within walls, which he had always hated so
sincerely. He writes:--
"Our spirit burns within us, but our limbs are palsied, and our
feet must brush the heather no more. Lo, how beautifully those
fast-travelling pointers do their work on that black mountain's
breast; intersecting it into parallelograms and squares and
circles, and now all a-stoop on a sudden, as if frozen to death.
Higher up among the rocks and cliffs and stones, we see a stripling
whose ambition it is to strike the sky with his forehead, and wet
his hair in the misty cloud, pursuing the ptarmigan. . . . Never
shall eld deaden our sympathies with the pastimes of our
fellow-men, any more than with their highest raptures, their
profoundest griefs."
It is safe to say that he kept his word, and was to the last, the same
genial, warm-hearted, impulsive, wayward man who had by these and other
engaging qualities made for himself so large a place in the heart of his
countrymen, during the long years he had wandered over her moors and
hills, seeing all her beauties, and describing them as no other had
done.
He was almost the last of that band of strong men who cast such lustre
over the beginning of this century. Coleridge had gone before, and
Wordsworth, Byron, and Campbell, Shelley, and Canning, and Peel, and
Jeffrey, and Moore, and he lingered on in a solitude made greater by
that last stroke of calamity which deprived him of motion for a time
that was weary and heart-breaking to him, and over which the world yet
sheds its sympathizing tears. He died at the age of sixty-eight.
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