After a trip to the Highlands—one result of which was his ‘Lines to Ben Lomond,’ published shortly after in theScenic Annual—he went to Edinburgh, where, on the 5th of August, he was made a freeman and was fêted like a prince. The Paisley Council and bailies, as he humorously tells, refused him a like honour; they bestowed it on Wilson, who was an inveterate Tory, and denied it to Campbell because he was a Whig. Nevertheless, Campbell, taking no offence, went to Paisley to the dinner, and Wilson and he spent a merry time at the races afterwards, Campbell being, indeed, so ‘prodigiously interested’ as to have an even £50 on one of the events!
Returning to London in October, he was back in Scotland again in the summer of 1837. There was a printers’ centenary festival in the capital in July, and nobody could be got to take the chair ‘because it was a three-and-sixpennysoirée.’ This roused Campbell’s democratic blood, and he immediately offered to fill the breach. ‘Delta’ proposed his health, and the audience got theirhearts out by singing ‘Ye Mariners of England.’ Before the year ended he had again changed his residence. This time it was to ‘spacious chambers’ in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which, ignoring all the teachings of experience, he furnished so expensively that he had to undertake a new piece of hack work to cover the cost. The account of his difficulty with an Irish charwoman who sought to help him in arranging his books is at once amusing and pathetic. She understood, he says, neither Greek nor Latin, so that when he ordered her to bring such and such a volume of Athenæus or Fabricius she could only grunt like one of her native pigs. What did Campbell expect? Redding has a dreary picture of the disorder in which he found him one afternoon shortly after this. The rooms were in a state of extraordinary confusion. The breakfast things were still on the table, a coat was on one chair and a dressing-gown on another; pyramids of books were heaped on the floor, and papers lay scattered about in endless disarray. It was indeed a sad change from the neatness which had prevailed in Mrs Campbell’s time.
About this date the illustrated edition of his poems was published, and he found himself in some perplexity over the disposal of the drawings, for which he had paid Turner £550. He had been assured that Turner’s drawings were like banknotes, which would always bring their original price, but when he offered them for £300 no one would look at them, and Turner himself subsequently bought them for two hundred guineas. Of this illustrated edition two thousand five hundred copies went off within a twelvemonth; while of an edition on shorter paper the same number was sold in eleven months in Scotland alone. Those were happy days for poets!
At the close of this year (1837) theScenic Annualappeared, containing four pieces of Campbell’s own, notably his ‘Cora Linn, or The Falls of Clyde,’ whichhe had written while in Glasgow the previous summer. Evidently he had some doubts about the dignity of accepting the editorship of this work, which was issued by Colburn merely to use up some old plates. ‘You will hear me much abused,’ he says, ‘but as I get £200 for writing a sheet or two of paper it will take a deal of abuse to mount up to that sum.’ One cannot help recalling how Scott scorned to write for theKeepsake, but Scott’s ideas of self-respect were very different from those of Campbell. In January 1838 Campbell intimates that he is busy on a popular edition of Shakespeare for Moxon. Needless to say, it was a good-for-nothing production. It is, however, a point in his favour that he had the grace to be ashamed of it. He said he had done it hurriedly, though with the right feeling. ‘What a glorious fellow Shakespeare must have been!’ he exclaimed, when talking about the book. ‘Walter Scott was fine, but had a worldly twist. Shakespeare must have been just the man to live with.’ This hint at Scott’s worldliness is sufficiently amusing, to say the least, in view of Campbell’s own sordid ambitions.
On the 10th of March he tells how he has been corresponding with the Queen. He had got his poems and his ‘Letters from the South’ bound with as much gilt as would have covered the Lord Mayor’s coach—the bill was £6—and having sent the volumes to Windsor, they were, as such things always are, ‘graciously accepted.’ For an avowed democrat Campbell made an unaccountable outcry about this ‘honour,’ which produced nothing more substantial than an autograph portrait of Her Majesty. In truth, with all his good sense, he could be very foolish on occasion. He was one of the spectators at the coronation of the Queen in Westminster Abbey this year—later on he was presented at Court by the Duke of Argyll—and he declares that she conducted herself so well during the long and fatiguing ceremony, that he ‘shedtears many times.’ Why anyone should shed tears because a royal lady behaves herself becomingly would have been a puzzle for Lord Dundreary. But Campbell was given to blubbering on every conceivable and inconceivable pretext. Once when he went to visit Mrs Siddons he was ‘overcome, even to tears, by the whole meeting’; and we hear of him crying like a child when drawing up some papers on behalf of the despoiled Poles. What tears are ‘manly, sir, manly,’ as Fred Bayham has it, may sometimes be difficult to decide, but there can be no question about the unmanly character of much of Campbell’s snivelling.
In July he paid another visit to Scotland, this time in connection with family affairs. Mrs Dugald Stewart died while he was in Edinburgh, and one more link binding him to the past was broken. Returning to his lonely chambers, he reports himself as working from six in the morning till midnight, a treadmill business which he unblushingly admits to be due to sheer avarice. ‘The money! the money!’ he exclaims; ‘the thought of parting with it isunthinkable, and pounds sterling are to me “dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart.”’ He calls himself spendthrift—as wretched and regular a miser as ever kept money in an old stocking; and finds an excuse for himself only in the fact that he is getting more interested in public charities. His principal literary work was now a Life of Petrarch. Archdeacon Coxe had left a biography uncompleted, and Campbell agreed to finish it for £200. He found it, however, so stupid that he decided to write a Life of Petrarch himself, though he frankly allowed that until quite recently he had something like an aversion to Petrarch because of the monotony of his amatory sonnets, and his wild, semi-insane passion for Laura. He had nothing but pity for a man who could be in love for twenty years with a woman who was a wife and a prolific mother to boot. The Life of Petrarchoccupied him until the spring of 1840. It was a sorry performance, and may be dismissed without further remark. Campbell had neither the sympathy with the Italian poet nor the intimate knowledge of his life and work which were requisite in his biographer, and the book is simply what he called it himself—a mere piece of manufacture.
Very little of importance had happened while he was engaged on this production. There were visits to Brighton and to Ramsgate in search of health; and another link had been severed by the death of Alison, his ‘mind’s father.’ He had projected a small edition of his poems as a resource for his closing years, and in November 1839 Moxon had thrown off ten thousand copies in double column, to be sold at two shillings each. Of original lyrical work nothing of any note was produced, the pieces including ‘My Child Sweetheart,’ ‘Moonlight,’ and ‘The Parrot.’ In September 1840 he was at Chatham for the launch of a couple of warships, when he made a speech and wrote his lines on ‘The Launch of a First-rate.’ Campbell had a patriotic partiality for the navy, and liked to hear about the exploits of seamen, but his speech on this occasion was a great deal better than the verses which followed it.
Feeling more than ever the cheerlessness of his chambers, he now made another expensive change of residence. He longed for the comforts of ahome, and with his niece, Margaret, the daughter of his deceased brother, Alexander Campbell, whom he brought from Glasgow to superintend his domestic arrangements, he leased the house No. 8 Victoria Square, Pimlico, about which he spoke to everybody as a child speaks about a new toy. He removed in the spring of 1841; but he had not been long in occupation when he fell ill and went off suddenly to Wiesbaden. Beattie says he would not abide strictly by regimen, and to his othercomplaints was now added an attack of rheumatism. At Wiesbaden he met Hallam, the historian, ‘a most excellent man, of great acuteness and of immense research in reading,’ but no other notability seems to have crossed his path. He benefited greatly by the waters and baths, and at Ems even managed to write the ballad of ‘The Child and Hind,’ the story of which, printed in a Wiesbaden paper, plagued him so that he could not help rhyming. This piece was obviously meant as an imitation of the old ballad, but it is as little successful as such imitations usually are.
Reaching London once more, he sat down contented—for the time being—at his own fireside; and in November he writes of his intention to live now as a gentleman poet. He was highly pleased with his niece. She was ‘well-principled and amiable,’ a ‘nice, comfortable housekeeper,’ and a ‘tolerable musician.’ Some people jeered at her for her scruples about going to the play, but Campbell allowed nothing to be said in her hearing that might alarm her pious feelings. He taught her French and Greek, engaged the best masters for her general education, and spared no expense in books. His affectionate feelings towards her are well expressed in the lines beginning ‘Our friendship’s not a stream to dry,’ and a more tangible token of his regard was shown at his death, when he left her nearly the whole of his property.
He had now been busy for some time with ‘The Pilgrim of Glencoe,’ and the poem was published, with other short pieces, in February 1842. It fell still-born from the press. Some zealous admirer said it ought to have been as good as a bill at sight, but alack! the bill was found to be unnegotiable. The publisher made strenuous exertions to obtain a hearing for the poem, but all to no purpose. The public would not be roused from their indifference, and ‘The Pilgrim of Glencoe’ sunk at once into the shades of oblivion.
Campbell was manifestly unprepared for such a reverse. He had expected a quick and profitable return from the book, and had entered into heavy responsibilities, which now threatened his independence. One cannot help remarking again upon the mystery of these continued money difficulties. There was no reason why Campbell should be everlastingly in financial straits. He had his pension, he had been uncommonly lucky in the matter of legacies, he enjoyed property to the extent of £200 a year, and the profits of his work besides. There ought now to have been less cause than ever for pleading poverty. That there were difficulties is, however, abundantly evident, from the fact that he precipitately resolved to dispose of his house and retire to some retreat where he could live cheaply and await the advances of old age. London, he protested, was no longer the place for him. His friends, too, observed that his constitution was visibly failing: he walked with a feeble step, and his face wore an expression of languor and anxiety.
Under these disquieting conditions he made his will, and began to look about for the ‘remote corner.’ In the meantime he was preparing still another edition of his collected poems, which he intended to publish by subscription. He says that for several years past the sale of his books had been steadily going down, so that his poems, which had yielded him on an average £500 per annum, would not now bring him much more than a tenth of that amount. By keeping the book in his own hands he expected to make a goodly sum. But the experiment failed. The subscriptions dribbled in only at rare intervals, and some money having come to him from the death of his eldest and only surviving sister in March 1843, as well as a little legacy from Mr A’Becket, the new edition, like its predecessors, passed into the hands of Mr Moxon. The volume was a handsome one of four hundred pages, with fifty-sixvignettes by leading artists. It had a not inconsiderable sale, and brought a substantial addition to Campbell’s exchequer.
Unhappily he had neither health nor spirits to enjoy his improved fortunes. He had outlived all his own family; he was getting more and more depressed, more and more feeble. To leave London seemed ill-advised, but he was determined upon it, and having made excursions to Brittany and elsewhere in search of a place of retirement, he at length fixed on Boulogne.[3]There he arrived with his niece in July 1843. Redding saw him just before leaving and found him in good humour, though he appeared weak and looked far older than he was. He had sold a thousand volumes from his library, and injudiciously spent £500 on the purchase of an annuity, because he dreaded that he might run through the principal. Boulogne proved not uncongenial to his tastes—a gay place with many public amusements, the Opera and the ‘Comedie,’ as well as concerts and races. But he was never able to derive any pleasure from it. Even the books he had brought from London were never placed on their shelves.
He had still some work which he intended doing, particularly a treatise on ancient geography, but ‘incurable indolence’ overcame him, and he resigned himself to the arm-chair. He complained of weakness, and felt a gradually increasing disinclination for any kind of exertion. In March 1844 Beattie received from him the last letter he ever wrote. A rapid decay of bodily strength had set in, and he never rallied. He had frequently told Beattie, his ‘kind, dear physician,’ that if he ever fell seriously ill care should be taken to acquaint him with the fact. Beattie was accordinglysummoned to Boulogne, but his services were unavailing, except in so far as he could make the closing days easier for the patient. When the end came, on the 15th of June, it came peacefully, so peacefully that those who were watching by the bedside hardly knew when the spirit had fled.
Thus died Thomas Campbell, the last of all his long family, ‘a lonely hermit in the vale of years.’ There was a story that a representative of the Glasgow Cemetery Company had waited on the poor enfeebled poet about a year before his death to beg his body for their new cemetery. However this may have been—and one would prefer not to believe the story—when Campbell wrote his ‘Field Flowers’ it seems clear that he contemplated a grave by the Clyde. Redding says: ‘He often spoke of our going down together to visit the scenery, and of his preference for it as a last resting-place.’ But the field-flowers, ‘earth’s cultur’less buds,’ were not to bloom on his grave. His body was brought to England, and on the 3rd of July was laid with great pomp in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, where a fine statue now marks his tomb. A deputation of Poles attended, and as the coffin was lowered a handful of earth from the grave of Kosciusko was scattered over the lid. It was a simple but touching tribute. Two points struck his intimate friends when they read the inscription on the coffin lid. He was described as LL.D., a distinction he detested, and as ‘Author of “The Pleasures of Hope,”’ which he detested too.
Something of Campbell’s person and character will have already been gathered from the foregoing pages. His friends unite in praise of his eyes and his generally handsome appearance as a young man. Lockhart says that the eyes had a dark mixture of fire and softness which Lawrence’s pencil alone could reproduce. Patmore speaks of his ‘oval, perfectly regular’ features, to which his eyes and his bland smile gave an expression such as the moonlight gives to a summer landscape. The thinness of the lips is commented upon by several writers; and it is even said that Chantrey declined to execute a bust because the mouth could never look well in marble. Gilfillan observes that there was nothing false about him but his hair: ‘he wore a wig, and his whiskers were dyed’—to match the wig! Most of his acquaintances remark on the wig, which in his palmy days was ‘true to the last curl of studious perfection’; Lockhart alone declares that it impaired his appearance because his choice of colour was abominable. Byron’s picture of him as he appeared at Holland House in 1813 has often been quoted: ‘Campbell looks well, seems pleased and dressed to sprucery. A blue coat becomes him; so does his new wig. He really looked as if Apollo had sent him a birthday suit or a wedding garment, and was witty and lively.’
But the completest and most consistent description is to be found in Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography. Hunt says: ‘His skull was sharply cut and fine, with plenty,according to the phrenologists, both of the reflective and amative organs… His face and person were rather of a small scale; his features regular, his eye lively and penetrating; and when he spoke dimples played about his mouth, which, nevertheless, had something restrained and close in it. Some gentle puritan strain seemed to have crossed the breed and to have left a stamp on his face, such as we often see in the female Scotch face rather than on the male.’ After Mrs Campbell’s death in 1828 he lost something of his old finical neatness, but he continued to the last to be ‘curious in waistcoats and buttons.’ Madden speaks of him in his later years as ‘an elderly gentleman in a curly wig, with a blue coat and brass buttons, very like an ancient mariner out of uniform and his natural element.’ Before he left London for Boulogne, he would be seen in the streets with an umbrella tucked under his arm, his boots and trousers all dust and dirt, ‘a perfect picture of mental and bodily imbecility.’
The best portrait of Campbell is the well-known one by Sir Thomas Lawrence, engraved in most editions of his works. It was painted when he was about forty years of age, and represents him very much as Byron described him. Redding, who had good means of judging, says that, barring the lips, which were too thick, it was ‘the perfection of resemblance.’ Campbell was somewhat vain of his appearance, and would never have asked, like Cromwell, to be painted warts and all. He had, in particular, a sort of feminine objection to an artist making him look old. Late in life he sat to Park, the sculptor, when his desire to be reproduceden beaumade him decline to take off his wig. Park made a very successful bust, but Campbell disliked it just because of its extreme truthfulness. In the Westminster Abbey statue by Marshall, the features, according to those who knew him, are preserved with happy fidelity, though the attitude is somewhat theatrical,and we get the notion of a much taller and more athletic figure.
Campbell’s social habits have been variously described. There can be no doubt that occasionally he took too much wine; so did most people at that time. Beattie makes a long story about it, pleading this and that in extenuation, but there is no need to enlarge on the matter now. It was merely, as Campbell said himself, a case of being unable to resist ‘such good fellows.’ He was never a solitary drinker, like De Quincey with his opium. When he was left a widower he went more into company than he had done before; and apart from his special temptations, there was the fact that with his excitable temperament his last defences were carried before a colder man’s outworks. Moreover, he found that wine gave an edge to his wit, and hence he may often have passed the conventional bounds in the mere endeavour to promote the hilarity of his friends.
His other indulgences seem to have been quite innocent. Hunt hints at his love of a good dinner, which indeed has been seen from his letters. He was almost as fond of the pipe as Tennyson, and he had even been known to chew tobacco when he found it inconvenient to smoke. He liked music, though he knew no more about the theory of the art than Scott. The national songs of his country specially appealed to him; and he was severe upon Dr Burney, the musical historian, because he had not done justice to the old English composers. He played the flute—how wonderfully flute-playing has gone out of fashion!—and could ‘strike in now and then with a solo.’ His early ‘vain little weak passion’ to have ‘a fine characteristic, manly voice’ was never realised, but with such voice as he had, he often gratified his friends in a Scots song or in his own ‘Exile of Erin.’ ‘The Marseillaise’ was his favourite air, and when on his deathbed he several times asked his niece to play it.
But Campbell gave himself very little time for recreation and social enjoyment. Most of his waking hours were spent in his study, where he dawdled unconscionably over the lightest of tasks. As a rule he attempted verse only when in the mood. He told George Thomson, who had asked him for some lyrics, that if he sat on purpose to write a song he felt sure it would be a failure. On the other hand, he sat down to produce prose with the clock-work regularity of Anthony Trollope. He wrote very slowly, and would often recast a whole piece out of sheer caprice, the second version being not seldom inferior to the first. Several of his friends speak of his practice of adding pencil lines to unruled paper for making transcripts of his verse. His habits of study were erratic and desultory. He could not fix his thoughts for any length of time; yet he always pretended to be prodigiously busy. Even the minutes necessary for shaving he grudged: a man, he said, might learn a language in the time given to the razor. Scott wondered that he did so little considering the number of years he devoted to literature. But the reason is plain: he did not know how to economise his time. His imagination was active enough, but it was ill-regulated and flighty, and his incapacity for protracted exertion led to the abandonment of many well-conceived designs. This instability, this restless, wayward irresolution, was the weak point in his character. He would start of a sudden into the country in order to be alone, and he would be back in London next day. He would arrange visits in eager anticipation of enjoyment, and when he arrived at his destination would ask to be immediately recalled on urgent editorial business! ‘There is something about me,’ he truly said, ‘that lacks strength in brushing against the world, and battling out the evil day.’ And he was right when he named himself ‘procrastination Tom.’
Campbell was not, in the usual sense of the term, asociety man. He liked the company of ladies, especially when they were pretty, but ‘talking women’ he detested. Even Madame de Staël he disparaged because she was fond of showing off. For the ‘high gentry,’ to use his own words, he had an ‘unconquerable aversion.’ To retain their acquaintance, he said, meant a life of idleness, dressing, and attendance on their parties. He censured his own countrymen for their snobbish deference to the great, citing an instance of Scott having become painfully obsequious in a company when some unknown lordling arrived. Anything like formality, above all the idea of being invited out for other than a social and friendly object, made him silent and even morose. ‘They asked me to show me,’ he observed of a certain function; ‘I will never dine there again.’ Lockhart, writing of this phase of his character, says there was no reason why he should not have been attentive to persons vastly his superiors who had any sort of claim upon him; no reason why he should not have enjoyed, and profited largely by enjoying, ‘the calm contemplation of that grand spectacle denominated the upper world.’ As a society star, Lockhart is perhaps to be excused for not sympathising with the position. Campbell had his bread to make by his own industry, and he could not possibly fill his hours with forenoon calls and nightly levees. But more than that, he was not formed, either by habit or by mode of thinking, for the conventional round of social life. A man who puts his knife in the salt-cellar—as, according to Lady Morgan, Campbell once did at an aristocratic table—is not made for associating with the ‘high gentry.’ The ‘upper world’ may indeed be, as Lockhart says it is, ‘the best of theatres, the acting incomparably the first, the actresses the prettiest.’ But Campbell seems always to have felt as much out of place there as a country cousin would feel in a greenroom. Various references in his letters suggest that he was troubled with a nervousself-consciousness, the bourgeois suspicion that his ‘betters’ were laughing in their sleeve at him, and the natural result wasgaucherieand sometimes incivility. But among his equals he was another man. Hunt tells of one great day at Sydenham—a specimen, no doubt, of many such days—when Theodore Hook came to dinner and amused the company with some extempore drollery about a piece of village gossip in which Campbell and a certain lady were concerned. Campbell enjoyed the fun immensely, and ‘having drunk a little more wine than usual,’ he suddenly took off his wig and dashed it at Hook’s head, exclaiming: ‘You dog! I’ll throw my laurels at you.’ Little wonder that one who thus mingled vanity with horse-play was not quite at home among duchesses!
No two authorities agree as to Campbell’s powers as a talker, but the truth would seem to be that he shone only at his own table or among his intimates, and even then, as already hinted, only when stimulated by wine. He was indeed too reserved to be quite successful as a conversationalist. One of his friends said he knew a great deal but was seldom in the mood to tell what he knew. He ‘trifled in his table-talk, and you might sound him about his contemporaries to very little purpose.’ As early as the year 1800 he remarked that he would always hide his emotions and personal feelings from the world at large, and although we come upon an occasional burst of confidence in his letters, he may be said to have kept up his reserve to the end. Madden called him ‘a mostshiveryperson’ in the presence of strangers; Tennyson said he was a very brilliant talker in atête-a-tête. According to an American admirer, he was quite commonplace unless when excited; Lockhart found him witty only when he had taken wine. Lytton was disappointed with him on such occasions as he met him in general society, but spoke of an evening at his house when Campbell led the conversation withthe most sparkling talk he had ever heard. Nothing, he said, could equal ‘the riotous affluence of wit, of humour, of fancy’ that Campbell poured forth.
To this may be added a second quotation from Leigh Hunt, which will serve to bring out some other points. Hunt writes:
Those who knew Mr Campbell only as the author of ‘Gertrude of Wyoming’ and ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ would not have suspected him to be a merry companion overflowing with humour and anecdote, and anything but fastidious. Those Scotch poets have always something in reserve … I know but of one fault he had, besides an extreme cautiousness in his writings, and that one was national—a matter of words, and amply overpaid by a stream of conversation, lively, piquant, and liberal, not the less interesting for occasionally betraying an intimacy with pain, and for a high and somewhat overstrained tone of voice, like a man speaking with suspended breath, and in the habit of subduing his feelings. No man felt more kindly towards his fellow-creatures, or took less credit for it. When he indulged in doubt and sarcasm, and spoke contemptuously of things in general, he did it, partly, no doubt, out of actual dissatisfaction, but more perhaps than he suspected out of a fear of being thought weak and sensitive; which is a blind that the best men commonly practise. He professed to be hopeless and sarcastic, and took pains all the while to set up a University.
Those who knew Mr Campbell only as the author of ‘Gertrude of Wyoming’ and ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ would not have suspected him to be a merry companion overflowing with humour and anecdote, and anything but fastidious. Those Scotch poets have always something in reserve … I know but of one fault he had, besides an extreme cautiousness in his writings, and that one was national—a matter of words, and amply overpaid by a stream of conversation, lively, piquant, and liberal, not the less interesting for occasionally betraying an intimacy with pain, and for a high and somewhat overstrained tone of voice, like a man speaking with suspended breath, and in the habit of subduing his feelings. No man felt more kindly towards his fellow-creatures, or took less credit for it. When he indulged in doubt and sarcasm, and spoke contemptuously of things in general, he did it, partly, no doubt, out of actual dissatisfaction, but more perhaps than he suspected out of a fear of being thought weak and sensitive; which is a blind that the best men commonly practise. He professed to be hopeless and sarcastic, and took pains all the while to set up a University.
He seems to have had a very good opinion of his own powers as a talker, and apparently he sometimes failed from sheer over-anxiety to shine. At Holland House he used to set himself up against Sydney Smith. Of one visit he says: ‘I was determined I should make as many good jokes and speak as much as himself; and so I did, for though I was dressed at the dinner-table much like a barber’s clerk, I arrogated greatly, talked quizzically, metaphorically. Sydney said a few good things; I said many.’
This is, of course, all flummery, whether Campbell was really serious in his assertion or not. Whatever wit he may have shown on rare occasions, he was not,like Sydney Smith, naturally witty. As a writer hisfortelay in the didactic and rhetorical, and when he attempted to move in a lighter step he became ridiculous. ‘There never was a man,’ says Redding, ‘who had less of the comic in his character than Campbell.’ Some of his friends aver that he often had fits of punning, but such of his puns as have survived do not lead us to believe that he can ever have been very successful in that most mechanical form of wit. ‘I have only one muse and you two, so you must be the better poet,’ he once said to Redding; the explanation being that Campbell’s house had one mews while Redding’s house had two. At another time Redding having complained that he could not get into his desk for his cash because he had lost the key, Campbell replied: ‘Never mind, if nothing better turns up you are sure of a post among thelack-keys.’ When Hazlitt published ‘The New Pygmalion’ he declared that the title ought to have been ‘Hogmalion’; and he told a friend that the East was the place to write books on chronology because it was the country ofdates. These are specimens of Campbell’s puns, from which it will be gathered that humour was certainly not one of his endowments.
Nowhere does this lack of real humour come out more clearly than in his letters, which are plain and ponderous almost to the verge of boredom. There is nothing in them of that ever-glowing necessity of brain and blood which makes the letters of Scott and Byron, for example, so humanly interesting. He has no lightness like Walpole, no quiet whimsicality like Cowper, no sidelights on literature and life like Stevenson. Lockhart’s apology for him is that, chained so fast to the dreary tasks of compilation, he could not be expected to have a stock of pleasantry for a copious correspondence. But none of the brilliant letter-writers can be suspected of having kept a choice vintage of epistolaryFalernian in carefully sealed bottles. A man’s individuality expresses itself in his letters as naturally as a fountain flows. The truth is that Campbell was too reserved, or too artificial, or both, to make a good letter-writer.
By all accounts he had not the best of tempers; indeed he admitted that to many people he had been ‘irritable, petulant, and overbearing.’ Of personal quarrels, however, he had very few; and although he said that he had been several times on the point of sending challenges, he was not once concerned in a duel. His chivalry led him to take the then bold step of defending Lady Byron’s character against the strictures of her husband, and when the press abused him he regarded it as a compliment. Of his kind-heartedness there are many proofs, apart from the generous way in which he dealt with his widowed mother and his sisters. No man was more ready to perform a good deed. His charities were varied and widespread. He held the view that in tales of distress one can never believe too much, and naturally he was often imposed upon. When he was in the country he seldom wrote without some confidential communication in the way of largess, often in a pecuniary form. On one occasion he sent Redding a couple of pounds for a poor unfortunate whom he had been trying to reclaim. He made strenuous efforts to get the child of a couple who had been condemned to death adopted by some kindly person; and there is a story of him weeding out hundreds of volumes from his library to help a penniless widow to stock a little book shop. When subscriptions were being asked for a memorial to Lord Holland, he excused himself by saying that he must give all he could spare to the Mendicity Society.
At the same time, in money matters he was almost criminally careless. The British Consul at Algiers said that his servant might have cheated him to any extent.He disliked making calculations of cash received or paid away, and there were times when he knew nothing of the real state of his finances. He would profess to be in great distress about money when, as a matter of fact, he had a roll of bank notes in his pocket. In 1841 Beattie, while he was absent at Wiesbaden, found in an old slipper at the bottom of a cupboard in his house a large number of notes twisted into the form of ‘white paper matches.’ When reproached with this piece of imprudence Campbell, admitting that the security was ‘slippery,’ remarked that ‘it must have happened after putting on my night-cap.’ At certain periods of his life, notably after his wife’s death, he was positively miserly, but even then he had his wayward fits of generosity. He would throw away pounds one day, and the next day grudge sixpences. Very often he forgot what he had spent or given in charity, but he never forgot what he owed.
One of the most charming traits in his character was his love for children. As he put it in his ‘Child Sweetheart,’ he held it a religious duty
To love and worship children’s beauty.They’ve least the taint of earthly clod—They’re freshest from the hand of God.
To love and worship children’s beauty.They’ve least the taint of earthly clod—They’re freshest from the hand of God.
To love and worship children’s beauty.
They’ve least the taint of earthly clod—
They’re freshest from the hand of God.
He could not bear to see a child crossed, to hear it cry, or have it kept reluctantly to books. Once at St Leonards he drew a little crowd around him on the street while trying to soothe a sick baby. What he called ‘infantile female beauty’ especially attracted him: ‘he-children,’ he said, not very elegantly, ‘are never in beauty to be compared withsheones.’ He saw a remarkably pretty little girl in the Park, and was afterwards so haunted by the vision that he actually inserted an advertisement in theMorning Chroniclewith the view of making her acquaintance. Hoaxes were the natural result. One reply directed him to the house of an oldmaid—‘a wretch who,’ as he used to say with peevish humour, ‘had never heard of either me or my poetry.’ Campbell was a man of sixty when this incident occurred. His friends not unreasonably suspected his sanity; but he was only putting into practice the theory which he propounded in the lines just quoted.
Politically Campbell was a Whig of the Whigs, with rancorous prejudices which sometimes led him into unpleasant scrapes. On the question of Freedom he held very pronounced opinions. He was called the bard of Hope, but he was the bard of Liberty too. He abhorred despotism of all kinds. ‘Let us never think of outliving our liberty,’ he once wrote. The emancipation of the negroes he termed ‘a great and glorious measure.’ He does not seem to have been a perfervid Scot, though he speaks of something offending his tartan nationality. We are told that he never spared the disadvantages of his country’s climate, nor the foibles of the Lowlanders, whatever these may have been; but just as Johnson loved to gird at Garrick, though allowing no one else to censure him, so Campbell would not permit his native country to be attacked by another. He once rejected an otherwise suitable paper for theNew Monthlybecause something which the writer had said about Edinburgh did not meet with his approval.
Of his religious views very little is to be learnt, certainly nothing from his poems. Beattie says that as a young man he suffered great anxiety on the subject of religion, and spent much time in its investigation before he arrived at ‘satisfactory conclusions.’ What these conclusions were does not exactly appear. Redding expressly affirms that he was sceptical, adding that he was very cautious in discussing religious subjects with strangers. His freedom from bigotry was generally remarked: he condemned every form of intolerance, and never cared to ask a man what his creed was. He told his nephew Robert, who seems to have had somemisgivings on the point, that he could get no harm by attending a Roman Catholic Church. ‘God listens to human prayers wherever they are offered up.’ The Catholics might be mistaken, but persecution was not a necessary part of their system; and if it were, did not Calvin and the Kirk of Geneva, ‘which is the mother of the Scotch Kirk,’ get Servetus burnt alive for being a heretic? Campbell himself seldom went to church in London, but when he was in Scotland he did as the Scots did, and heroically sat out the sermon. It is clear that his countrymen, of whose rigid righteousness he had many good stories, did not regard him as heterodox, otherwise the General Assembly would never have asked him, as they did in 1808, to make a new metrical version of the Psalms ‘for the benefit of the congregations.’ Nor is it certain that he was really sceptical, though it is very likely that he hesitated upon some points of dogma. It is, however, only in his later years that we get any indication of his religious sensibility, and then only of the vaguest kind. When Mrs Campbell died he exclaimed, as if he had doubted the fact before, ‘Theremustbe a God; that is evident; there must be an all-powerful, inscrutable God.’ Again, when speaking of the sufferings of the Poles, he remarked: ‘Thereisa Supreme Judge, and in another world there will be rewards and punishments.’ But we are not justified in forming any conclusion about his settled religious convictions from emotional outbursts resulting from special circumstances and in the shadow of the tomb. In all likelihood he paid the conventional observance to religion, and, if he thought about doctrines at all, took care not to shock his family and prejudice his popularity with any expression of heterodoxy.
Campbell’s literary pasturage does not appear to have been very wide or very rich. Robert Carruthers, of Inverness, who wrote an interesting account of somemornings spent with him, says his library was not extensive. There were one or two good editions of the classics, a set of the ‘Biographie Universelle,’ some of the French, Italian, and German authors, the Edinburgh Encyclopædia, and several standard English works, none very modern. Apparently he made no attempt to keep abreast of current literature; he stuck by his old favourites, and would often be found poring over Homer or Euripides. In his early days Milton, Thomson, Gray, and Goldsmith were his idols among the poets. Goldsmith, it was said, he could never read without shedding tears, another instance of his tendency to snivel. Thomson’s ‘Castle of Indolence’ is frequently mentioned with approbation in his letters—‘it is a glorious poem,’ he said to Carruthers—and seems, indeed, to have been to some extent the model of his ‘Gertrude.’ Allan Ramsay he called one of his prime favourites, but, strange to say, he does not appear to have regarded Burns with any special enthusiasm. Certainly he told the poet’s son that Burns was the Shakespeare of Scotland, and ‘Tam-o’-Shanter’ a masterpiece; but, on the other hand, he contended—unaccountably enough, for surely Burns’ nationality was the very fount of his inspiration—that Burns was ‘the most un-Scotsman-like Scotsman that ever existed’; and in conversation he was known to have denounced his own countrymen for their extravagant adulation of the Ayrshire poet.
Campbell had something of Southey’s amiable weakness for minor bards, and would often praise work which he must have known to be of poor quality. He thought very highly of James Montgomery of Sheffield; and he once called Mrs Hemans ‘the most elegant poetess that England has produced.’ He had no great admiration for the Lake School of poets. He declared that while doing some good in freeing writers from profitless and custom-ridden rules, they went too far by substitutinglicentiousness for wholesome freedom. For Coleridge’s poetry he evinced an especial distaste, due partly, no doubt, to the fact that Coleridge had attacked ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ in his lectures. Of his criticism he spoke more favourably, but maintained that he had borrowed many of his ideas from Schlegel. In French poetry his favourite was Racine, whose tenderness, he said, was unequalled even by Shakespeare. But perhaps of all the poets his darling was Pope, whom he defended in a manner described by Byron as ‘glorious.’ The ‘Rape of the Lock’ he held to be unsurpassed. Of three American writers—Channing, Irving and Bryant—he had the highest opinion. The first he considered ‘superior as a prose writer to every other living author,’ a statement at which we can only raise our eyebrows. Among the novelists he specially extolled Smollett and Fielding. To the latter he says he never did justice in his youth, but shortly before his death he wrote that he had come to ‘venerate’ him, and to regard him as the better philosopher of the two, the truer painter of life. All this shows no exceptional critical discernment; and Sydney Smith was no less happy in his phrase than usual when he said that Campbell’s mind had ‘rolled over’ a large field. A rolling stone gathers no moss. But that is more than Smith could have meant.
And now what, it must be asked, is Campbell’s place as a poet? Before trying to answer the question it is necessary to understand exactly what we mean by it. If a poet’s place depends on the extent to which he is read, then Campbell has no place, or almost none. He is not read, save by school-children for examinations. Milton and many another, it might be said, are in the same case; but there is a difference. Milton will always remain a supreme model, or at least a suggestive fount of inspiration; and the lover of poetry can be sure of never turning to him without some pleasure, some gain.But Campbell’s pages are not turned to by the lover of poetry for solace or refreshment, for inspiration or guidance. As Horace Walpole said of two poems by writers to whom Campbell owed something—Akenside and Thomson—‘the age has done approving these poems, and has forgot them.’ What is this but to say that the poems in the main are lacking in the one essential—thepoetic? The well-spring of poetry was not vouchsafed to Campbell. He worked from the outside, not from the depths of his own spirit. He spoke of having a poem ‘on the stocks,’ of beating out a poem ‘on the anvil.’ By these words does he not stand, before the highest tribunal, condemned? We read of him polishing and polishing until what little of original idea there was must have been almost refined away. We never hear of him bringing forth his thoughts with pain and travail. His letters are full of complaints about his vein being dried up, of his mind being too much cumbered with mundane concerns to have leisure for poetry; but we never once get a hint of any real misgiving as to his powers. ‘There is no greater sin,’ said Keats, ‘than to flatter oneself with the idea of being a great poet… How comfortable a thing it is to feel that such a crime must bring its own penalty, that if one be a self-deluder, accounts must be balanced!’
Time has brought in its revenges for Campbell. His poems enshrine no great thoughts, engender no consummate expression. Felicities, prettinesses, harmonies of a sort one may find; respectabilities, vigour, patriotic and liberal sentiments declaimed with gusto. But these do not raise him above the level of a third-rate poet. His war songs will keep him alive, and that after all is no mean praise.
FOOTNOTES[1]It may be convenient to set down in a note a list of Campbell’s brothers and sisters, with dates of birth and death. The details are from the family Bible: Mary, 1757-1843; Isabella, 1758-1837; Archibald, 1760-1830; Alexander, 1761-1826; John, 1763-1806; Elizabeth, 1765-1829; Daniel, 1767-1767; Robert, 1768-1807; James, 1770-1783; Daniel, 1773-? Archibald and Robert went to Virginia, and John to Demerara.[2]As these sheets are passing through the press, Mr W. K. Leask reminds me of Aytoun’s visit to the Scottish Monastery as recorded in the ‘Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers.’ And of course the reference in ‘Redgauntlet’ is well known.[3]Since these lines were written, a memorial tablet has been placed on the house in the Rue St Jean where Campbell resided. The tablet describes him as ‘the celebrated English poet.’ Was he not, then, a Famous Scot?
[1]It may be convenient to set down in a note a list of Campbell’s brothers and sisters, with dates of birth and death. The details are from the family Bible: Mary, 1757-1843; Isabella, 1758-1837; Archibald, 1760-1830; Alexander, 1761-1826; John, 1763-1806; Elizabeth, 1765-1829; Daniel, 1767-1767; Robert, 1768-1807; James, 1770-1783; Daniel, 1773-? Archibald and Robert went to Virginia, and John to Demerara.
[1]It may be convenient to set down in a note a list of Campbell’s brothers and sisters, with dates of birth and death. The details are from the family Bible: Mary, 1757-1843; Isabella, 1758-1837; Archibald, 1760-1830; Alexander, 1761-1826; John, 1763-1806; Elizabeth, 1765-1829; Daniel, 1767-1767; Robert, 1768-1807; James, 1770-1783; Daniel, 1773-? Archibald and Robert went to Virginia, and John to Demerara.
[2]As these sheets are passing through the press, Mr W. K. Leask reminds me of Aytoun’s visit to the Scottish Monastery as recorded in the ‘Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers.’ And of course the reference in ‘Redgauntlet’ is well known.
[2]As these sheets are passing through the press, Mr W. K. Leask reminds me of Aytoun’s visit to the Scottish Monastery as recorded in the ‘Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers.’ And of course the reference in ‘Redgauntlet’ is well known.
[3]Since these lines were written, a memorial tablet has been placed on the house in the Rue St Jean where Campbell resided. The tablet describes him as ‘the celebrated English poet.’ Was he not, then, a Famous Scot?
[3]Since these lines were written, a memorial tablet has been placed on the house in the Rue St Jean where Campbell resided. The tablet describes him as ‘the celebrated English poet.’ Was he not, then, a Famous Scot?