And now we come reluctantly to the point. It breaks our heart to say to Mr. Skelton—for we believed in Professor Wilson once—it breaks our heart to say that Wilson’s Rabelaisianism is nothing but jolly-doggism of the most prepense, affected, and piteous kind. In reading the ‘Noctes’ we feel, as Jefferson’s Rip van Winkle must have felt, surrounded by the ghosts on the top of the Katskill mountains. We say to ourselves, ‘How comparatively comfortable we should feel if those bloodless, marrowless spectres wouldn’t pretend to be jolly—if they would not pretend to be enjoying their phantom bowls and their ghostly liquor!’
Though John Skinner and Thomas Amory have but a small endowment of the great master’s humour, their animal spirits are genuine. They do not hop, skip, and jump for effect. Their friskiness is the friskiness of the retriever puppy when let loose; of the urchin who runs shrieking against the shrieking wind in the unsyllabled tongue that all creatures know, ‘I live, I live, I live!’ But, whatever might have been the physical health of Wilson, there is a hollow ring about the literary cheerfulness of the ‘Noctes’ that, notwithstanding all that has been said to the contrary, makes us think that he was at heart almost a melancholy man; that makes us think that the real Wilson is the Wilson of the ‘Isle of Palms,’ ‘The City of the Plague,’ of the ‘Trials of Margaret Lyndsay,’ of the ‘Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life,’ Wilson, the Wordsworthian, the lover of Nature, whom Jeffrey describes when he says that ‘almost the only passions with which his poetry is conversant are the gentler sympathies of our nature—tender compassion—confiding affection, and gentleness and sorrow.’
He wished to be thought a rollicking, devil-me-care protagonist, a good-tempered giant ready to swallow with a guffaw the whole cockney army if necessary. This kind of man he may have been—Mr. Skelton inferentially says he was; all we know is that his writings lead us to think he was playing a part. A temperamental humourist, we say decidedly, he was not.
Is there, then, no humour to be found in this book? In a certain sense no doubt humour may be found there. Just as science tells us that all the stars in heaven are composed of pretty much the same elements as the familiar earth on which we live, or dream we live, so is every one among us composed of the same elements as all the rest, and one of the most important elements common to all human kind is humour. And, if a man takes to expressing in literary forms the little humour within him, it is but natural that the more vigorous, the more agile is his intellect and the greater is his literary skill, the more deceptive is his mere intellectual humour, the more telling his wit. Now, Wilson’s intellect was exceedingly and wonderfully fine. As strong as it was swift, it could fly over many a wide track of knowledge and of speculation unkenned by not a few of those who now-a-days would underrate him, dropping a rain of diamonds from his wings like the fabulous bird of North Cathay.”