Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

part of genius returns to the dust. But then this mortal part was so large a part of Wilson. He was such a magnificent man! No literary man of our time has had such muscles and sinews, such an ample chest, such perfect lungs, such a stalwart frame, such an expansive and Jove-like brow. Had he lived in the classic ages they would have made a god of him,-not because he wrote good verses, or possessed the divine gift of eloquence, but because his presence was god-like. There was a ruddy glow of health about him too,-such as the people of no nation have possessed as a nation, since the culture of the body, as an art of the national life, has been neglected. The critic, therefore, who never saw Wilson cannot rightly estimate the sources of his influence. We, on the contrary, who looked upon him, who heard him speak, know that we can never listen to his like again; can never again look upon one who, while so intellectually noble, so eloquent, so flushed with poetic life, did so nearly approach, in strength and comeliness, the type of bodily perfection. The picture of that old man eloquent in his college class-room-the old man who had breasted the flooded Awe, and cast his fly across the bleakest tarns of Lochabar-pacing restlessly to and fro like a lion in his confined cage, his grand face working with emotion while he turns to the window, through which are obscurely visible the spires and smoky gables of the ancient city, his dilated nostril yet 'full of youth,' his small grey eye alight with visionary fire, as he discourses somewhat discursively, it must be owned, of truth and beauty, and goodness-is one not to be

forgotten. Had he talked the merest twaddle, the effect would have been quite the same; he was a living poem where the austere grandeur of the old drama was united with the humour and tenderness of modern story-tellers; and some such feeling it was that attracted and riveted his hearers.

It has been said by unfriendly critics, that Wilson was an egotist. Montaigne and Charles Lamb were egotists; but we do not complain of an egotism to which not the least charm of their writings is to be attributed. The truth is, that the charge against Wilson rests on a misconception. Christopher North was egotistical; but Christopher North was a creation of the imagination. He represented to the world the invincible Tory champion, before whose crutch the whole breed of Radicals, and Whiglings, and Cockneys fled, as mists before the sun. It was impossible to endow this gouty Apollo with the frailties of mortal combatants. Haughty scorn, immaculate wisdom, unassailable virtue, were the characteristics of the potent tyrant. We have as little right to say that Wilson was an egotist because Christopher North was egotistical (though, no doubt, he could have looked the part admirably), as to say that Milton was a fallen angel because he drew the devil. Men (whiggish and priggish) may continue to resent, indeed, as indelicate and unbecoming, the licence of his fancy, and the airy extravagance of his rhetoric; but a juster and more catholic criticism confesses that, in the wide realms of literature, there is room for the grotesque gambols of Puck, for Ariel's moonlight flittings,

for the imaginative riot of Wilson and Heine, and Jean Paul.

THESE are some of the heroes of whom we talked.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

men had in common-in what, in other words, the heroic element consists?

In all of them, undoubtedly, there was a nobility of life, a greatness of soul, of which we see little in the common world: but is there not, above and beyond these, some more special and vital element of union, binding together men, whose careers and characters (when regarded from the outside) are so widely separated? I think that there is such an element; and that this element is the imagination.

All these men were idealists. Even Cavour was a dreamer. So much the worse for him,' the materialist and the prig reply. To me it seems, on the contrary, that Cavour's dreaming was his salvation. Had Cavour been an unimaginative man, the chances are that he would have become a mere trickster. There is no say

ing to what depths of diplomatic baseness he might have sunk. But the ideal element in him, not only made him great, but kept him pure. The thoughts of a man whose monomania (if you like the word) was a free Italy, could never become very mean. Into this

pure temple of his soul no foul or noxious creature could enter. But if he had had no such imaginative conception of the nature of his work, Cavour's was precisely the kind of character that, amid diplomatic

trickery and verbal finesse, would rapidly have deteriorated. So that to a certain extent the presence of the imagination keeps a man pure; and then I think the other half of the proposition, that no man who is not imaginative can be really first-rate in any department of work, may be accepted without much further controversy. The imagination made Napier a great general and Cavour a great statesman, as it made Buonarotti a great artist and Milton a great poet. The imagination is the bright consummate flower' of the mind; and when the imagination is absent, the intellect, never working with supreme felicity, never attains to supreme excellence. Religion itself is an exercise of the imagination; and a prosaic religion is a contradiction in terms,-implying as it does, a false or radically inadequate conception of the Divine nature. In this sense it may be said quite truly that many 'religious' people know less of the Christian religion than the unbelievers whom they denounce; and that the Record newspaper (to take an extreme case) has no religion whatever.

240

IX.

OUR CAMP IN THE WOODLAND.

YOME,' said Letty, 'leave that musty Quarterly,

'COME,'

and let us pitch our tent in the woodland.' And -nothing loth-I went with her to the woods.

There was an old story-book which I read in my youth, and of which I retain a vivid recollection, wherein it was narrated how two friends (a schoolboy, I think, and a rather didactic moralist), walked out together into the fields, and among the lanes, and how they saw many wonderful things. They saw the waterrats in the mill-dam, and the trout lying under the big stones in the stream waiting for May-flies, and the lapwing which, with its pretty affected broken-hearted ways, wiled them from its nest. And a delightful sunshiny feeling lay about the book-the sunshine in which childhood basks. On some such vague quest Letty and I went forth, knowing as little where our pursuit would lead us as Sir Galahad when he left home to search for the Sangreal.

Dobbins, the donkey, was caught and caparisoned. Dobbins has the profound donkey look (which makes a donkey's face one of the most inscrutable of faces), but

« ElőzőTovább »