The Hollow Man
Christopher North. By Elsie Swann. (Oliver and Boyd. 12s. 6d. ) Miss SWANN-S admirable biography leaves Christopher North a sadder and stupider man than he appeared before. One part of his achievement—the Blackwood part—remains as it was. Christopher North, the prop and despair of " Maga," with his extraordinary high spirits, wit, and ill-nature, was genuine John Wilson : and John Wilson in those early days genuinely supposed himself to have a genius for—he did not quite know what. But when in 1820, in a spirit of dare- devilment, he stood for the Chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh, the story changed. He got the Chair, nu re because he was a Tory than because he deserved . it, for the obvious successor to Dugakl Stewart would have been Sir William Hamilton. And, having got it, he did not know what on earth to do with it. Positively, he was at his wits' end.
Near Birmingham, however, lived a quiet, unobtrusive friend of his named Alexander Blair. To him Wilson wrote, shedding every scrap of pretence. All he asked was that Blair should write him the hundred and twenty lectures that he would need for his course, and would throw up all his private affairs and come immediately and stay with Wilson
for the next three months. " It is," he informed him, "a desperate but a noble case. ." Noble or not (and' what Blair thought of him we are never told), his friend rose to the occasion, and he helped Wilson continually, not for three months, but for thirty years. Wilson provided the trimmings —the noble presence, the feats of oratory, the poetic illus- trations that brought him such fame : but every scrap of the real work was done by the patient Blair.
It is typical that Wilson should have undertaken these lectures on Political Economy, knowing nothing about the subject, but merely anxious to lose neither prestige nor income if he (or rather Blair) could help it. To the world he was magnificent, overawing, a genius. To Blair, he whined. It is an astounding story that Miss Swami has unearthed from the' Brotherton MS. Year after year that legendary figure, Christopher North, would conic striding into his class-room, fling a grubby bundle of old letters on to the desk, and ferret wildly among them until he found the one he wanted, when the torrent of rhetoric would begin. And no one. seems to have noticed that it was from the letters themselves, not from their scribbled backs, that the great Professor would read.
There were doubts, of course, though not of this. Carlyle, for one, understood him. " Poor Wilson ! . . . His whole being seems hollowed out, as it were, and false and counterfeit in his own eyes." ' He was a hollow man indeed ;_ even though there were two of him. Outwardly he had every success (in spite of such unkind cuts as " a female Words- worth " and " sic a big fool"). He was the great John Wilson, and knew everybody. He was Christopher North of the Nodes Ambrosianae. He could look back with delight upon that bombshell the Chaldee MS., which inaugurated "ma Maga " with as much notoriety as even Blackwood desired. But one wonders how much he managed to deceive himself.
Miss Swann elucidates with much spirit and sense this curious case of genius by postal tuition.
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