A Literary Athlete

HOWEVER it may fare with his works as a literary survival, the personality of John Wilson will always have a certain piquancy of interest. Men of his urgent vitality of make-up and fullness of sensation are rare in life, and still more rare in literature. They impress us not so much as creators of literature as breezy embodiments of that sunny intellectual clime which all men like to inhabit. In the double rôle of Wilson, the eloquent Edinburgh professor, and Christopher North, presiding genius of Blackwood’s, and irrepressible poet, wrestler, and humorist, the subject of this sketch seemed set apart to the office of clearing the mental atmosphere, and restoring to life that evanescent quality of sparkle which belongs to things newly opened. The contagion of happy animalism is always immanent; and men of jaded sensibilities, safely housed and placidly reminiscent of their youthful exploits in this direction, were glad to come under the spell of Wilson’s unconquerable health and spirits. It brought back the glow and color of life in its earlier inspirations, and renewed for the moment the fascination of things remote and untamed. With George Borrow he shares the credit of giving roadside life and character a place in letters, and the world is not likely to forget their delight in gypsies, boxers, innkeepers, and cotters.

Some one has said of Wilson, “ Had he lived in the classic ages, they would have made a god of him; not because he wrote good verses, or had the gift of eloquence, but because his presence was godlike.” Beauty of person came to him as a family inheritance. His mother and her ten sons and daughters were all of striking and distinguished appearance ; although probably none equaled Wilson himself in that perfect poise and dynamic intensity wherein he so nearly resembled the best Greek types. Do Qnincey, in alluding to a division of voices upon this point of beauty, falls back upon the terms " massy ” and “ dignified” to describe the countenance of his friend, lingering particularly on the Ciceronian elegance of the mouth, chin, and lower portion of the face. But current testimony, added to many scattered bits of portraiture, certainly warrant the conclusion that Wilson must have been handsome and imposing beyond the wont of men.

The full-length figure of “ Christopher in his sporting jacket,” which stands at the beginning of the Recreations, indicates a person of no ordinary frame and fibre. The often-quoted features are all there: the “ eagle beak and lion-like mane,” — long yellow locks, flowing over a Byronic collar, well opened at the throat, or from beneath the flapping brim of the familiar white hat. — the ample front and defiant attitude. Doubtless, even this gives but a faint idea of the elemental graces, the shaggy strength, and pard-like agility of the original. We miss the gigantic stride, the eager, wide-eyed vision, the world-embracing motion of mind and body, with which this modern Berserker traversed a region of experience which was already becoming staid and insipid. Stalwart Allan Cunningham alone matched him in statuesque proportions and Strenuousness of temperament; although in his case these had to be toned down to the requirements of Chantrey’s stone-yard, instead of enjoying Wilson’s background of the hills and heather.

The aspect and character of Wilson,” says his daughter and biographer, Mrs. Gordon, “ have sometimes suggested to the imagination those blue-eyed and long-haired Norsemen, who made their songs amid the smiting of swords, who were as swift of foot and strong of arm as they were skilled in lore and ready in council, fierce to their enemies, tender and true to their friends.” As a whole, the picture reminds one of Walt Whitman ; although there is even closer resemblance to the literary habit and constitution of the French. With all his Gallic impetuosity and want of reserve, Wilson seems little of an Englishman, and still less of the typical Borderer, he was foreign alike to the formalism and to the physical attenuation of our average writer, and would have been most likely to affiliate with that race of poets on the other side of the Channel, who celebrate a reunion by falling into each other’s embraces, and stalking arm in arm across the country with the noisy abandon of boys. To understand the tumultuous energy of the elder Dumas, Hugo, Gautier, and the Daudet and Mistral of to-day, one must remember that they have all been men of large, powerful physique. Indeed, their robustness might seem at times too great and their heat of temper a trifle overdone, were it not that their poetry — and these have been poets even in their prose — is a revolt from artificiality, and a loud, lusty recall to the delights of nature.

Wordsworth is perhaps our best exsample of this literary reaction, but how seldom even he loses his head ! Interminable walker and unquestioned lover of freedom as he was, there was nothing spontaneous and unstudied in his motion through the fields. Every step bespeaks the professional exercise of one whose observation and communion are expected to yield a preconceived result. His is, after all, a very mild form of rebellion, meditative rather than dominant, and more inclined to look down than up and on.

Wilson reveled in the outward world, not as literary capital, but for its own sake ; tramping, or, more properly speaking, bounding, up and down the country roads with a supreme indifference to ordinary considerations of fatigue which is truly astonishing. This he began at Oxford, where he was the envy alike of the scholar, the pugilist, and the society man. We are in a measure prepared for the assurance that his athleticism was the marvel of his day. but hardly for his examiner’s pride in showing him off in the class-room, and the terms “splendid” and " glorious ” as used in official reference to his manner of taking the degree. The remark of Sotheby, who happened to be present on this occasion, shows how largely temperament had already begun to affect Wilson’s success in life, when he declared that it was worth coming from London to hear the young man translate a Greek chorus. We next learn of his leaving a dinner party in Grosvenor Square at nine o’clock, and appearing on foot and in full dress next morning, in time for the opening of the college gate at Oxford, sixty miles away. Later, he loved to fish his way across the Border and up among the Highland lochs ; carrying a whole world of zest and cheer among the remote cottagers, who learned to look forward to the coming of their visitor with an almost superstitious feeling of wonder at his good-humored daring and endurance.

Nor were they alone in their suspicion of the man’s vivacity and unconventionalism. Staid Scotchmen, as a rule, were inclined to cry “ hallucination ” when a college professor of morals could not pass a band of wandering tinkers, leaping and wrestling by the roadside, without stripping to the encounter. Even Border love of frolic was to have its limits, although it would be safe to say that Wilson never found them.

A walk of seventy miles and a wet skin to boot were nothing to him, so he only came back well weighted with the catch. Most fishermen are prepared to yield pursuit at the water’s edge, but Wilson waded to the waistband, or even chin ; sometimes disappearing entirely, to emerge later on, swimming with one hand, and still angling with the other, so as not to lose a moment of the cloudy day. At the age of sixty-five the veteran sportsman would stand in the water up to the loins for the sake of his favorite pastime, apparently not in the least troubled by the thought of consequences. Perhaps when, later, dependence upon a crutch had actually come, the remembrance of a hundred and thirty trout taken from Loch Awe in one day may have made the price he was paying seem small. No dreamy, contemplative Walton here, who fished with texts and caught sermons, but a roistering, bighearted lover of the brooks and streams, who was content to accept them at their face value.

Of all Lake writers, Wilson best kept the wild native flavor of the region. His rovers and sluggers are veritable flesh and blood, and, whether equally entertaining or not. convey a far more accurate impression of North Country life and character than the vanishing outlines and lay figures of Wordsworth’s verse. At least they were human, and have afforded many individuals of elderly and conservative tendency a taste of social reaction without any necessity of apologizing for the company they kept. “ Wordsworth was a dear old granny,” remarks Theodore Parker, “ with a most hearty love of mankind, especially of the least attractive portions of it.— beggars and fools. ' But Wilson did not repeat the experiment of the musing, self-conscious rustic of the Excursion, rather striking the key-note of the life about him in its large-limbed and Olympic features of sport.

“ It is impossible,” he writes, “ to conceive the intense and passionate interest taken by the whole northern population in this most rural and muscular amusement, wrestling. For weeks before the great Carlisle annual contest nothing else is talked of on road, field, flood, foot, or horseback; we fear it is thought of even in church, which we regret and condemn ; and in every little comfortable ‘public’ within a circle of thirty miles’ diameter, the home-brewed quivers in the glasses on the oaken tables to knuckles smiting the board, in corroboration of the claims to the championship of a Grahame, a Cass, a Laugklin, Solid Yaik, a Wilson, or a Wightman.” Although, with unusual good fortune in these cases, Wilson himself managed to keep out of the ring, he was yet sufficiently well known among old wrestlers to enjoy the reputation of being a ‘‘ varra hard un to lick.” and to be glowingly spoken of throughout the countryside for his liberal encouragement to these annual festivities. Such belts and prizes as he contributed to the Ambleside games had never been striven for before. He had the name of being the best English far leaper of his day ; and so familiar were his feats as a pugilist that a professional, whom he had once undertaken to punish for his insolence, turned upon him with the exclamation that he must be either “ Jack Wilson or the devil.” According to De Quincey, “ there was no one who had any talent, real or fancied, for thumping or being thumped, but he had experienced some preeing of his merits from Mr. Wilson.”

Wilson never ceased to thank God for his bringing up in a moorland parish. Reverse of fortune finally transferred him to the city, and even at last cramped him into the traditional limits of a professor’s chair ; but the impulse of that earlier experience never left him. He could still make frequent excursions — incursions, those who watched him often felt inclined to call them — into the old haunts. Then at his desk he could live over the out-door scenes and pleasures which came to constitute so large a part of his literary material. There was the festival of the First Day of the Rooks, when with the lads and lasses he again walked " mute among the wild flowers on the moor,” or danced to the harper’s music in the ample country kitchen, or raided distant farm-houses on loaded wains of hay. Later, too, there were lonely rambles among the glens and waterfalls of the Trossachs; and many passages in the Recreations, such as the description of a Highland snow-storm, have wonderfully caught the atmosphere of mountain life and scenery.

But the Recreations, as a whole, strikes one now as a moderately available strain played on a lax string. The reader’s responsiveness is marred by a too long sustained attempt at exhilaration, and for the most part he questions why the artist does not tighten up the instrument and bring the impression to a climax. This rampant joyousness of life and limb, this sense of the blessedness of mere existence, is very diverting up to a point; but the happy effect is threatened the moment Christopher in his sporting jacket begins to get overheated and out of breath, as if somehow it were plainly more sport for him than for us. Enthusiasm has at most but a tenuous applicability in a work of art, and Wilson did not always know how to tone down his vehemence to the best requirements of the situation. Feeling was everything with him ; and he comes to us with a great rush of emotion so sane and wholesome as to warrant the regret that it was not given a more economical expression.

This, too, undoubtedly accounted for his failure as a poet. The man himself was poetic, — which is perhaps more than can safely be said of nine tenths of those who succeed in verse, — but the storm and stress of his nature seem to have paralyzed rather than liberated his touch. It was as if, by another instance of arrested development, the urgent fancy and idealism were able to get no further than the finger tips. There was too much motion in the air. The pointer was never quite steady to any one quarter of the heavens, and the fine frenzy was not fine enough to regulate without disturbing its own phrasing and formulation. Only to have withheld the actual attempt might have been to force the world to acknowledge in him the possibilities of a poet. As it was, the creative spark, brief and compact, and capable on that very account of a kindling expansiveness, was in him a flame and glow, consuming rather than illumining the thought. The heat, which men of smaller make and fewer resources would have husbanded for some single concentration of aim, Wilson squandered in turbulent and continual play.

Wilson was the centre of a group of men — mostly contributors to the periodicals, like himself — who admired him immensely, and did not hesitate to tell him so. Hogg, in particular, although independent enough at times in his reproof, was also unblushing in his praise. He is represented as asserting to his patron’s face that he is the wisest and wittiest of men ; at the same time adding, “ Dinna turn awa’ your face, or you ’ll get a crick in your neck.” Maga, he informed its presiding genius, would not survive his loss a single day ; and “ before you and her cam’ out this wasna the same warld it has been sin’ syne.”

This singular and in many ways remarkable man owed much to Wilson, although, as in the case of another benefactor, Scott, there seems to have been a family feeling of resentment at the free use which had been made of the Shepherd’s name and peculiarities. But Wilson painted his friend with general correctness, in spite of some elements of burlesque introduced to heighten the effect of the picture. The latter himself forgave the offense before his death, and not without good reason. The caricature will very likely outlive the character ; and after men have ceased reading the poet, they may still laugh over the eccentric Shepherd of the Noctes, and remember that he once wrote Donald McDonald, When the Kye comes Hame, and Auld Ettrick John. The man who gloried in his descent from the " weird, wiry old hill folk,” but who had known only six months’ schooling in his life, and for literary precedent but a stray copy of Burns, might well have felt himself honored by even borrowed immortality at the hands of so assured a master of flight.

Wilson struck a true note in the Noctes, although, like most that he did, it was too long drawn out. Skelton’s abridgment in one volume, however, a selection based upon the characteristic feature of comedy, gives what must always be regarded as a standard compilation of national humor. Seldom, if ever, has the Scotch dialect been handled so satisfactorily to lay understanding, while in point of “ copiousness, flexibility, and splendor” a competent judge declares that Wilson’s use of it has never been surpassed, even by Scott and Burns. Noctes Ambrosianaa has been called the " last specimen on a large scale of the national language of Scotland which the world is ever likely to see.” It is a rollicking bit of biography, an offhand sort of confessions in various moods of undress, whose many serious asides have been so well worked in as not to interfere with the general effect of frolic and fun.

Nor could literature well spare the two accessory figures of Tickler and the Shepherd, both drawn from the life, and yet idealized to suit the author’s purpose of amusement: the one, that " noble and genuine old Tory,” whose features the writer copied from his uncle, Mr. Robert Sym, a large-hearted lover of animals and children, and as much more good-natured as lie was taller in stature than the rest of mankind ; the other truculent, boisterous, and at times even abusive, a nature as mingled and uncertain as that Scotch climate he had braved so long. The Shepherd of the Noctes may not appear a “ creature of perfections,” but he at least suggests one of his own aphorisms, “ God’s blessings are aye God’s blessings, though they come in sma’s and driblets.” Sometimes he is testy, sometimes mellow, and sometimes, it must be confessed, a trifle maudlin; but always he is himself, and true to the choleric type of Borderer he represents.

Never did happier triumvirate than this get together for the delectation of themselves and the reading public ; nor is there a finer instance on record of what we may call the mature hilarities of elderly men. Youth is apt to be unsubdued and more or less oppressive in its jollity, as if the contrasts of shade were needed to add restfulness to the light. But here a subtle element of pathos, like the tear in much of our truest laughter, tells that the quality of mirth is unstrained and not inconsistent with experience. Basking in its gentle luminousness, one is tempted, with Timothy Tickler, to wish that the world might stand still some dozen years, — at least till we are all at rest together, — and that the blessed interval might become just such another long ambrosial night of harmless good-fellowship.

Then, too, the humors of the editorial room. How well one is made to see the “ Balaam Box,” evidently not wholly given over to the asinine and stupid, as it is being hoisted on to the table, and to share in the feeling of horror at the cremation which hangs over ill-fated contributors ! Blackwood’s was living and personal to these men. It was “ Old Ebony ” who presided at their board, and to him they referred all the honor of their deliberations. It was he who had gathered all this host of spoiling talent, this pent - up volcano of Tory fling and sentiment in the arid wastes of Whiggism. No more should Jeffrey and the Edinburgh Review have matters all their own way. It should henceforth be Maga against the “ Blue and Yellow,”tooth and nail. And what an array of fresh young lances it was, with Lockhart, Wilson, and Hogg well to the front, and including, as the light went on, the “ Great Unknown,” the “ Man of Feeling.” Sir David Brewster, De Quincey, Sir William Hamilton, and his brother of Cyril Thornton fame, to bring up the rear ! Scapegoats and victims they found in plenty, and the public was kept agog with curiosity and agape with laughter. The reflection of all this is admirably caught in the history of those wonderful evenings in Mr. Ambrose’s Blue Parlor in Picardy Place. The universality of the materials in use and the sustained, unflagging temper of the whole thing give the piece a resisting power which time is not likely to overcome.

It will remain a fact, however, that Wilson wrote too much. His was the vice of a journalistic age. He made Blackwood’s, and then Blackwood’s unmade him. Like Thackeray, he did most of his writing after he had lost his fortune; but the difference between the two was world-wide. The former found his field, and worked it under a constant hesitation and restraint, but to undoubted artistic results. Wilson, on the other hand, worked his vein long after the ore had given out. Exuberance of spirits and a turn for homely philosophizing hardly constitute an inexhaustible equipment for the sort of performance which outlasts the day. There was, however, enough of the man to float the tradition of a once timely and popular accomplishment. Least of all can this repressive nineteenth century alford to ignore his eager and uncompromising presence. “He threw himself,” says his daughter, “into the very heart of existence;” and what else in turn could existence do but accept his hail and challenge ? He was one of the vanishing race of “grand old boys,” whom the world may less willingly forget the older it grows. More than that, he seems a part of Scotia’s hills and highways, and likely to live in the delight of those who wander up and down that land of pleasant memories.

Probably, after all, it was the students who loved him best. How they cheered and stood by him, even while one cannot help suspecting that they half knew the professorship belonged by right of merit to his rival. Sir William Hamilton ! The absurdity of filling university chairs upon the basis of party politics was never better illustrated than here. But, teacher and taught, from all accounts they must have given the humdrum lectureship some uproarious days in philosophy ; and whether or not either one ever got far into that despair of science called “ morals,” they each evidently imagined they were doing something, and undoubtedly had a good time of it.

One hazards this, however, not without a recollection of the tomes with which, on the settlement of the bitter contest, the new-fledged professor surrounded himself. “ I am perfectly appalled,” writes his wife, “ when I go into the dining-room and see all the folios, quartos, and duodecimos with which it is literally filled, and the poor culprit himself sitting in the midst, with a beard as long and red as an adult carrot, for he has not shaved for a fortnight.” But giants in specialty are not made in a day, nor created in the flush of freshly gained elections; and however the fervid poet may have eased his conscience by stated draughts at his appointed profundity, one seems to see the sacrifice to duty in it all, and to feel the relief which must have come to him from those Nights at the Snuggery with Tickler, the Shepherd, and good Mrs. Gentle. One need not hold him either a great poet or philosopher, and yet reject the libel which his brother editor, the “ Scorpion,” indited in his honor as president of a certain club in Edinburgh : —

Even better was the retort of the injured party upon the sharp-tongued offender : —

Perhaps we cannot better take leave of one who will always remain so much more interesting than his best achievement than by quoting the words which Jeffrey wrote to him in 1815, while Wilson was yet on the threshold of his literary life: " It is impossible, I think, to read your writings without feeling affection for the writer ; and under the influence of such a feeling, I doubt if it is possible to deal with them with the same impartiality with which works of equal merit, but without that attraction, might probably be treated. Nor do I think that this is desirable or would even be fair ; for part, and not the least part, of the merit of poetry consists in its moral effects, and the power of exciting kind and generous affections seems as much entitled to admiration as that of presenting pleasing images to the fancy.”

Edward. F. Hayward.