Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 359, September 1845

His brawny arm shall drudging Labour strain,
And for our pleasure suffer daily pain:
Trade shall for us exert her utmost pow'rs,
Hers all the toil, and all the profit ours:
For us the oak shall from his native steep
Descend, and fearless travel thro' the deep;
The sail of commerce, for our use unfurl'd,
Shall waft the treasures of each distant world;
For us sublimer heights shall science reach;
For us their statesmen plot, their churchmen preach:
Their noblest limbs of counsel we'll disjoint,
And, mocking, new ones of our own appoint:
Devouring War, imprison'd in the north,
Shall at our call in horrid pomp break forth;
And when, his chariot wheels with thunder hung,
Fell Discord braying with her brazen tongue,
Death in the van, with Anger, Hate, and Fear,
And Desolation stalking in the rear,
Revenge, by Justice guided, in his train,
He drives inpet'ous o'er the trembling plain,
Shall at our bidding quit his lawful prey,
And to meek, gentle, gen'rous Peace give way.
"'Think not, my sons! that this so bless'd estate
Stands at a distance on the roll of Fate;
Already big with hopes of future sway,
Ev'n from this cave I scent my destin'd prey.
Think not that this dominion o'er a race,
Whose former deeds shall Time's last annals grace,
In the rough face of peril must be sought,
And with the lives of thousands dearly bought:
No – fool'd by cunning, by that happy art
Which laughs to scorn the blund'ring hero's heart,
Into the snare shall our kind neighbours fall,
With open eyes, and fondly give us all."

Alongside of any one of the masterpieces of Dryden or Pope, this, perhaps the most vigorous thing of Churchill's, is seen to be a daub. Yet Cockney connoisseurs still think it a fine picture. When fresh from the easel, it was thus praised by a metropolitan critic: —

"You'll own the great Churchill possesses, I hope,
More fancy than Cowley, more numbers than Pope;
More strength, too, than Dryden – for, think on what's past,
He has not only rivall'd, but beat them at last."

A hearty national prejudice is no bad foundation for a Poem. It implies one great requisite of success – a secure large sympathy. This "trusted home" animates the poet; and a reception, answering to the confidence, awaits the work. Moreover, ungrounded or exaggerated as these depreciations and antipathies are likely to be, they usually spring out of some deep-laid element in the character of those who entertain them, and have thus the vital warmth and strength that feed poetry, and an original truth of nature mixed up amongst fallacies of opinion. Caricatured representation is the proper vehicle. For Censure is then half disarmed, when to her exception, "This is not so," the reply lies upon the face of the performance, "Neither is it offered for true." The hyperbole of the phrase covers the distortion of the thinking. If we are to find fault with Churchill's "Prophecy of Famine," it must be upon some other ground than the injustice or cruelty of the attack upon poor Scotland, or the hardness of the hits delivered, it may be, by a fist gloved in iron.

Who grudges the attack? Not Sawney himself, if it is made in masterly style. A magnanimous combatant, who has the true enthusiasm of the fight, admires the skill of the stroke that threatens him with defeat or death. Spite, malice, aversion, enmity, are not ingratiating demonstrations. Far from it. Ill-will is naturally met with ill-will. But besides that which is unavoidably self-regarding in such a relation of parties, room is open for views of a more general feature, of a more generous complexion. John Bull scowls at Sawney, and makes mouths at his oatmeal diet, with lips to which the memory of his own roast-beef cleaves. The last-mentioned dish is not altogether unknown north of the Tweed. But John Bull knows not the unimaginable fact, or knew it not, for the barrier is now widely broken down. Sawney has humour enough to be amused by the writhing apprehension of dry and lean fare which deforms the well-fed and jocund face of the bacon-bolter.

There is in the description and Amabæan lament of the two gaunt and shivering young Arcadians, and in the cave of the tutelary Goddess, Famine, the intention at least of the picturesque and poetical. The fault is, that the thing has no bringing out or completeness. It is incomposite – as a plan, unintelligible. Are the dramatis personæ, Sawney, Jockey, and the Goddess, with Sawney's love, the whole population of Scotland? Do the two lads, and their sheep, and Famine, occupy the same sole cave which is all the houses in Scotland? Is it a comprehensive Allegory under the guise of a pastoral Idyl? A ground is laid; and it is easy to conceive that a Hogarth in verse, with his stored eye, and that hand mimic and creative, which, by some unmistaken touch of nature, sets upon capricious extravagance the known seal of truth, might have finished a picture which experience itself would have half-believed in spite of its conviction, that never had there been such an hungered race. But such a Hogarth in verse was not Churchill. Upon the ground laid, a Satire might have been made out by such a genius, exaggerated, witty, poetical – pleasing even to the posterity of the victims. But instead of crowded ideas, here are but three or four. This writing does, in fact, not express the national prejudices of South Britain against North Britain. It expresses the zeal of party and of a partizan. One can hardly conceive such an ignorance of Scotland in England, as that a man of ability wishing to traduce and ridicule the country, should sit down contented under such a paucity of mischievous information. He writes under one simple rule – negation. To deny food, to deny clothes, to deny houses, to deny sunshine, grass, rivers even, requires no mental effort of any kind, and is the part of a dunce and an ignoramus. For any thing positive, the Scotch are proud, have high cheekbones, and love brimstone and rebellion. That is the amount of the picture. Famine consoles the two hungry lads who mourn over the Fifteen and the Forty-five, with prophesying the invasion and conquest of England by the Bute Administration – a glorious hope, a national redress, and a private filling of empty purses and stomachs. Churchill was himself poverty-stricken in mind, during the composition of this blunder, to a degree that never befell any true poet.

An Englishman of this day must be puzzled to bring back the time when Scotland was so completely a terra incognita to her sister, as that this rude and unlearned caricature could pass. Indeed, he hardly understands the hate – he to whom prose and verse, from one great hand, and poetry profusedly scattered like flowers all over the soil from another, have made hallowed the land of romance, and of dreams more beautiful than romance, and for whom the words, "Caledonia, stern and wild," mean any thing but repulsion. But one must remember, that poetry was at the time at a low ebb, almost stagnant in England, and that any thing that looked like an image was aprodigy. If Gray and Collins now and then struck the lyre, they stood apart from the prevailing prosaic and common-place tone of the times. An Englishman of to-day knows the name of Home by one of the most popular tragedies on his stage, if not one of the most vigorous, yet amongst modern dramas, one of the most affecting; and he wonders when that name is introduced by Churchill for the purpose of aggravating the contempt of Scotland, represented as a region Bœotian in wit, quite as much as by its atmosphere. He understands by what attraction Collins addressed to Home his "Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands." Political hatred, the dislike, the indignation, which may have been widely enough diffused through the nation, at the interloping of Scotchmen in the high places of power and emolument – this was the sentiment in the national bosom which gave a meaning to the poem, and found it a reception. Such a sentiment is not scrupulous or critical – it is passionate merely – and asks not the happinesses of humour, wit, fancy, of the graphical and the characteristic. It asks bitter animosity, and vile vituperation, and is satisfied.

The individuality of a nation is curiously made up. The country which they inhabit makes a part of it, the most easily understood. Their manners, customs, and institutions make another part of it, much of which is outward, picturesque, and easily seen. Their history, that which they have done, and that which they have endured, makes a part. And lastly, that which runs through all, rises out of all, animates all, their proper personality, their intellectual and moral character, makes a part – and now you have the whole. We demand of the writer who will, in earnest, paint the people, that he shall know all these things extensively, variously, profoundly. And of the Satirist, who will hold up the nation to dislike and to laughter, that he too shall show he knows them, their defects and their deformities, their crimes and their customs, their sins and their sorrows, their sufferings and their absurdities, their monstrosities and their misfortunes, God's curse or of their own consciences, that may have stricken their country and their condition, and starved the paupers in body and in soul. Such chastisement might be terrible, and not undeserved. But to inflict it, was far beyond the power of poor Charles Churchill.

"Waft me, some Muse, to Tweed's enchanting stream,
Where all the little Loves and Graces dream:
Where, slowly winding, the dull waters creep,
And seem themselves to own the power of sleep;
Where on the surface lead, like feathers, swims;
There let me bathe my yet unhallow'd limbs,
As once a Syrian bathed in Jordan's flood;
Wash off my native stains, correct that blood
Which mutinies at call of English pride,
And, deaf to prudence, rolls a patriot tide."

Ay, much the better would he have been of a dip in the Tweed. He was a big, burly fellow; but, though no great swimmer, he would have found it buoyant after a debauch. His native stains, washed off, would, alas! have sadly discoloured the Angler's Delight. Worse than a hundred Sheep-washings. But at one gleam of the showery bow, the waters would have resumed their lustre. He was the last man in the world who ought to have abused brimstone; for his soul had the Itch. A wallow in the sweet mould – the pure mire of Cardronna Mains – on a dropping day, would have been of service to his body, bloated with foul blood. Smeared with that sanative soil, he might have been born again – no more a leper.

"I remember well," says Dr Kippis, "that he dressed his younger son [the son of his wife – not of the mistress for whom he abandoned her] in a Scottish plaid, like a little Highlander, and carried him every where in that garb. The boy being asked by a gentleman with whom I was in company, why he was clothed in such a manner, answered with great vivacity, – 'Sir, my father hates the Scotch, and does it to plague them.'" For a father to dress up his son in the garb of a people, despised and detested with perpetual scunner, seems an odd demonstration either of party spite or of paternal fondness – about as sensible as, on the anniversary of his birth-day, in compliment to his mother, to have dressed him up like a monkey.

The Patriot Satirist! The question inevitably obtrudes itself – what is the pointing of destiny, which singles out Churchill for the indignant protector, in verse, of England's freedom and welfare? What calls his hand into the van of battle, with the strong lance of justice laid in rest, to tilt against the ill-defended breast of poor, proud, hungry, jacobinical, place-loving, coin-attached and coin-attaching, muse-left, gibbet-favoured, tartan-clad, sulphur-scented, and thistle-growing Scotland? The hero of liberty, the self-offered martyr for the rights and the wrongs of a great people, should carry on his front, one might suppose, some evidence of the over-mastering spirit which, like a necessity, finds him out, and throws him, as if a lot-drawn champion, alone into the jaws and jeopardy of the war. It should be one, of whom, if you knew him yet obscure, you might divine and say, "This is his hour —his is the mind that consecrates its possessor to a consecrated cause, that discriminates, essentially as the spirits of light as divided from the spirits of darkness, the lover of his country from the factious partizan, and from the seditious demagogue." There should be a private life and character that but repeat themselves in the public ones, on a bolder and gigantic scale. Else how ready does the apprehension rise, that the professed hostility to unjust men in power is no more than the reluctance of an ill-disciplined spirit, under the offence and constraint of institutions which set superiors over his head, and gall him by bridling an unruly will; – whilst the clamorous zeal for the general good is purely the choice of the staking gamester between red and black, and the preference of the million-headed patron to the cheapener with a few heads or with one. The two known traits, which largely comprehend the private life of Churchill, do not prepossess one in his favour. He left his profession, the church; and he exchanged his wife, after many years' cohabitation, for a mistress; two paramount desecrations unhappily met. And the trumpet-call to the war-field of patriotism sings but uncheeringly, when the blast is winded by the breath of Wilkes.

When the shame of England burns in the heart of Cowper, you must believe him; for through that heart rolled the best of England's blood. But Churchill! Faugh!

notes

1

Memoirs of the Life of John Constable, Esq., R.A. Composed chiefly of his Letters. By C. R. Leslie, R.A. Second Edition. Longmans.

2

Even there we see that he viewed the matter as a task, and piqued himself only on having succeeded in a tour-de-force. Writing to Archdeacon Fisher, he says – "It was the most difficult subject in landscape I ever had on my easel. I have not flinched at the windows, buttresses, &c.; but I have still kept to my grand organ, colour, and have as usual made my escape in the evanescence of chiaroscuro." – (P. 109.)

3

"I cannot but recall here a passage in a letter to Mr Fisher, written by Constable nearly ten years before his death, in which, after speaking of having removed his family to Hampstead, he says, 'I could gladly exclaim, here let me take my everlasting rest!'"

4

One of the greatest and most memorable of the Turkish princes was Mahmood the Ghaznavide, who reigned in the eastern provinces of Persia, A.D. 997-1028. His father, Sebactagi, arose from the condition of a slave to the command of the city and province of Ghazna. In the fall of the dynasty of the Sammanides, the fortune of Mahmood was confirmed. For him the title of sultan (signifying lord and master) was first invented, and his kingdom was enlarged from Transoxiana to the neighbourhood of Ispahan, from the shores of the Caspian to the mouth of the Indus. The prowess and magnificence of Mahmood, his twelve expeditions into Hindostan, and the holy wars he waged against the idol-worship of that country, in one of which he destroyed an image of peculiar sanctity at Diu or Du in Guzerat, and carried off the gates of Somnauth, (so recently, once more, become a trophy of triumph and defeat,) the vast treasures amassed in his campaigns, and the extent and greatness of the Ghaznavide empire, have always been favourite subjects with Eastern historians. The instance of his justice recorded in the verses, is given by Gibbon, from whose history this note is chiefly taken.

Ghazna, from being the emporium of India, and the metropolis of a vast dominion, had almost shrunk from the eye of the geographer, until, under the modified appellation of Ghizni, it again emerged into importance in our Affghan war. A curious crowd of associations is suggested by the fact, that the town which gave its name to a dynasty that shook the successors of Mahomet on their thrones, now confers the dignity of Baron on a native of one of the obscurest villages in Ireland – Lord Keane of Ghizni, and of Cappoquin in the county of Waterford.

5

Kaff of late years is considered to have been more a creation of Eastern mythology, than a genuine incontestable mountain. Its position is supposed to be at the highest point of the great Hindoo-Kosh range. Such was its astonishing altitude, that, says D'Herbelot, "vous trouvez souvent dans leurs anciens livres, pour exprimer le lever du soleil, cette façon de parler, aussitôt que cet astre parût sur la cime du Mont Cáf, le monde fut éclairé de sa lumière: de même pour comprendre toute l'etendue de la terre et de l'eau, ils disent Depuis Cáf à Cáf– c'est à dire, d'une de ses extremités à l'autre."

6

The name of Sind, Attok, or Indus, is applied indifferently to the mighty stream that forms the western boundary of Hindostan.

7