Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/187

Rh month old, and were never known in all their lives to make a party to Newhaven or Leith for a fish dinner. North's prodigious powers of speed in composition when the steam was fairly up, were proverbial; but he must choose his own when, and what, and how. "Does your body, sir," asks the Shepherd in the fortieth Noctes, "ever get wearied wi' writin'? for as to your mind, ane micht as weel ask if the vis generawtrix Naturæ ever got wearied." "I write, James, by screeds," replies the symposiarch:—"Whenever I feel the fit coming on, which it often does about ten in the morning—never sooner—I encourage it by a caulker—a mere nutshell, which my dear friend, the English Opium-eater, would toss off in laudanum; as soon as I feel there is no danger of a relapse—that my demon will be with me during the whole day—I order dinner at nine—shut myself up within triple doors—and as I look at the inner one in its green-baized brass-knobbedness, there comes upon me an inspiring sense of security from all interruption," &c. In paragraphs like these, North may safely enough stand for Wilson—the same wayward being whom Mrs. Grant of Laggan had, years before, called "the most provoking creature imaginable." "He is young," she writes, "handsome, wealthy, witty; has great learning, exuberant spirits, a wife and children that he dotes on (circumstances one would think consolidating), and no vice that I know, but, on the contrary, virtuous principles and feelings. Yet his wonderful eccentricity would put anybody but his wife wild. She, I am convinced, was actually made on purpose for her husband, and has that kind of indescribable controlling influence over him that Catherine is said to have had over that wonderful savage the Czar Peter." In thus illustrating the temperament of the man, we are not seeking to imply its essential incompatibility with the conditions of high poetic achievement, but to intimate the obstruction it presented, in this particular case, to such perseverant toil, self-restraint, and condensed strength, as were demanded from one of his mettle.

Who, in reading his verses, would suppose them to come from a man so flighty and wilful—from so many-sided a being, a latter-day Titan, burly and hearty as the Homeric heroes of yore? And who, again, would suppose it, in reading his prose fictions—"Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life," "The Forresters," and "The Trials of Margaret Lindsay." These tales are marked by the same languid beauty as the poems. Sometimes they are suffused by a "pastoral melancholy" touchingly fine. Tenderness and grace characterise them all. But there is a kind of intoning accent in the narrator's voice, which savours of the unreal, and suggests fatigue. He seems to indulge unconsciously in falsetto. We see his actors through a veil of gauze. His shepherds and shepherdesses are hardly more alive to us than are the Chloes and Strephons of the eighteenth century, or the pseudo-pastoral beaux and belles of Watteau. The rough scenes of Scottish life were seen by Burns, says Mr. Carlyle, "not in any Arcadian illusion, but in the rude contradiction, in the smoke and soil of a too harsh reality." Wilson, as well as Burns, was from boyhood familiar with "huts where poor men lie:" but his pictures of them are "Arcadian illusions," rose-coloured and idealised. Yet a charm there is about some of these stories that clings to memory and heart; and moods of mind there are when one of them is more lovingly dwelt upon than fictions of far higher and broader power. "The Covenanter's