You must teach him [Campbell] to consider this subscription as an exertion which cannot with propriety, nor even perhaps with success, be tried another time; and that from this time he must look forward to a plan of income and expense wholly depending upon himself and most strictly adjusted. He gets four guineas a week for translating foreign gazettes at theStaroffice; it is not quite the best employment for a man of genius, but it occupies him only four hours of the morning, and the payment ought to go a great length in defraying his annual expenses. You will be able to convey to Campbell these views of his situation and others that will easily occur to you: none ofusare entitled to use so much freedom with him.
You must teach him [Campbell] to consider this subscription as an exertion which cannot with propriety, nor even perhaps with success, be tried another time; and that from this time he must look forward to a plan of income and expense wholly depending upon himself and most strictly adjusted. He gets four guineas a week for translating foreign gazettes at theStaroffice; it is not quite the best employment for a man of genius, but it occupies him only four hours of the morning, and the payment ought to go a great length in defraying his annual expenses. You will be able to convey to Campbell these views of his situation and others that will easily occur to you: none ofusare entitled to use so much freedom with him.
One can read a good deal between the lines here. Campbell, as he mildly puts it himself, was never ‘over head and ears in love with working’; he preferred his friends to work for him. Some years before this he looked to them to get him a Government situation, ‘unshackled by conditional service’; and even now, with his pension running, and much as he prated about his pride, he ‘trusts in God’ that it will be followed up by an appointment of ‘some emolument’ in one of the Government offices. It was clearly an object with him to have his affairs made easy by outsiders. Nor wasthis all. There is no doubt that he had, temporarily at least, given way to convivial habits which his well-wishers could not but regard with regret. He admits as much himself, and Beattie only seeks to hide the fact by speaking in his solemn, periphrastic way about ‘the social pleasures of the evening’ and a ‘too-easy compliance’ with the solicitations of company. In these circumstances, it was only natural that Campbell’s friends should desire to impress upon him the necessity of guiding his affairs with greater circumspection so as to depend more upon himself. Meanwhile they went on collecting subscribers’ names for the new edition, and Campbell returned to Sydenham to continue his work on the ‘Annals’ and think about something less irksome and more remunerative.
It was at this juncture that Murray considerately came to his aid. Though the original scheme of the British Poets had fallen through, Campbell had by no means given up the idea of a work of the kind; and now, having discussed the plan with Murray, it was arranged between them that the undertaking should go on. Murray was naturally anxious that Scott’s name should be connected with the editorship, but Scott, although he at first agreed to co-operate, ultimately found it necessary to restrict himself to works more exclusively his own, and Campbell was accordingly left to proceed alone.
In the summer of 1807 his labours were interrupted by a visit to the Isle of Wight. His old complaint had returned, and he was advised to try a change of air and scene. He left London in the beginning of June, but the change did not prove successful. The demon of insomnia still haunted him, and theennuiof the place became so intolerable that he was driven to act as reader to the ladies in the boarding-house where he stayed! What, he cries, must Siberia be when Ryde is so bad! By August he was at Sydenham again, only tofind his ‘abhorred sleeplessness returning fast and inveterately.’ He had written very little poetry for some time, and such as he did write—the tribute to Sir John Moore, for example—is, like the Greek mentioned by Pallet, not worth repeating. He was now engaged almost solely upon ‘Gertrude of Wyoming,’ but his head was ‘constantly confused,’ and the poem was often laid aside for weeks at a time. Still, the manuscript advanced, and by Christmas the greater part of it was complete enough for reading to a private circle of friends.
‘Gertrude’ finally appeared, after a long process of polishing, alteration and addition, in April 1809. Some time before its publication Campbell wrote that he had no fear as to its reception; only let him have it out, and, like Sterne, he cared not a curse what the critics might say. The critics were in the main favourable. Jeffrey had already seen the proofs, and had written a long letter to the author, pointing out certain ‘dangerous faults,’ but commending the poem for its ‘great beauty and great tenderness and fancy’; and on the same day that the poem was published, theEdinburgh Reviewappeared with an article in which the editor rejoiced ‘once more to see a polished and pathetic poem in the old style of English pathos and poetry.’ Its merits, he said, ‘consist chiefly in the feeling and tenderness of the whole delineation, and the taste and delicacy with which all the subordinate parts are made to contribute to the general effect.’ At the same time he found the story confused, some passages were unintelligible, and there was a laborious effort at emphasis and condensation which had led to ‘constraint and obscurity of the diction.’ TheQuarterlyreviewer, none other than Sir Walter Scott, was more severe upon its blemishes. He complained of the ‘indistinctness’ of the narrative, of the numerous blanks which were left to be filled up by the imagination of the reader, of its occasional ambiguityand abruptness. Its excellences were, however, generously admitted; and in fact, on the whole, theQuarterlysaid as much in its favour as could be expected. In those days party spirit led to incredible freaks of literary criticism; and it was only Scott’s magnanimity that could have allowed him to forgive Campbell’s Whig politics for the sake of his poetry. Curiously enough, considering their intimacy, Campbell did not know that Scott was his reviewer, though he was not very wide of the mark when he spoke of the writer as ‘a candid and sensible man,’ who ‘reviews like a gentleman, a Christian, and a scholar.’ Of other contemporary criticisms we need not speak. The poet’s friends were of course blindly eulogistic. Alison was ‘delighted and conquered,’ and Telford, with his characteristic bombast, anticipated such applause from the public as would drive the author frantic!
‘Gertrude,’ as has more than once been pointed out, was the first poem of any length by a British writer the scene of which was laid in America, and in it Campbell is the first European to introduce his readers to the romance of the virgin forests and Red Indian warriors. The subject may have occurred to him when transcribing a passage in his own ‘Annals,’ in which reference is made to the massacre of Wyoming, although there is possibly something in Beattie’s suggestion that he got the idea from reading Lafontaine’s story of ‘Barneck and Saldorf,’ published in 1804. Campbell, however, as we know, had a keen personal interest in America. His father had lived there; three of his brothers were there now. ‘If I were not a Scotsman,’ he once remarked, ‘I should like to be an American.’ No doubt the scenery of Pennsylvania had been often described to him in letters from the other side.
But these are points that do not greatly concern us now. Nor is it necessary to enter into any minute criticism of the poem. Campbell himself preferred itto ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ (‘I mean,’ he said, ‘to ground my claims to future notice on it’), while Hazlitt regarded it as his ‘principal performance.’ With neither opinion does the popular verdict agree. Perhaps it may be that while ‘Gertrude’ is, as Lockhart said, a more equal and better sustained effort than ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ it contains fewer passages which bear detaching from the context. For one thing the poet had a story to tell in ‘Gertrude,’ and he was eminently unskilled in the management of poetic narrative. ‘I was always,’ he remarks to Scott, ‘a dead bad hand at telling a story.’ In ‘Gertrude’ he cannot keep to his story; the construction of the entire poem is loose and incoherent. Even the love scenes, which, as Hazlitt says, breathe a balmy voluptuousness of sentiment, are generally broken off in the middle. Then he was unwise in adopting the Spenserian stanza. It was quite alien to his style; even Thomson, living long before the romantic revival, managed it more sympathetically than Campbell. The necessities of the rhyme led Campbell to invert his sentences unduly, to tag his lines for the mere sake of the rhyme, and to use affected archaisms with a quite extraordinary clumsiness. Anything more unlike the sweet, easy, graceful compactness of Spenser could scarcely be imagined.
Nor are the characters of the poem altogether successful; indeed, with the single exception of the Indian, they are mere shadows. Gertrude herself makes a pretty portrait; but as Hazlitt has remarked, she cannot for a moment compare with Wordsworth’s Ruth, the true infant of the woods and child-nature. Brant, again, who so warmly espoused the cause of the Mohawks during the War of the American Revolution, is but a faint reality. Campbell fancied that he had drawn a true picture of the partisan, but as Brant’s son afterwards proved to him, the picture was purely imaginary. The main function of the Indian chief isapparently to give local colour to the poem, though it must be allowed that he stands out boldly among its other characters. Hazlitt comments upon his erratic appearances, remarking that he vanishes and comes back, after long intervals, in the nick of time, without any known reason but the convenience of the author and the astonishment of the reader. On the other hand, the death-song of the savage which closes the poem, is one of the best things that the author ever wrote.
Byron declared that ‘Gertrude’ was notoriously full of grossly false scenery; that it had ‘no more locality with Pennsylvania than with Penmanmaur.’ But that was an obvious exaggeration. There is better ground for the complaint about Campbell’s errors in natural history as exhibited in the poem—about his having conferred on Pennsylvania the aloe and the palm, the flamingo and the panther. The probability is that he knew as much about natural history as Goldsmith, whose friends declared that he could not tell the difference between any two sorts of barndoor fowl until they had been cooked. Once in theNew Monthly, when a contributor spoke of the rarity of seeing the cuckoo, Campbell added a correcting note to say that he had himself ‘seen whole fieldsbluewith cuckoos’! But even Shakespeare has lions in the forest of Arden, and Goldsmith makes the tiger howl in North America. There is no need to insist upon absolute accuracy in such matters. One would gladly notice instead the real merits of the poem, which, however, are not so readily discovered. Hazlitt spoke enthusiastically of passages of so rare and ripe a beauty that they exceed all praise. But we have changed our poetical point of view since Hazlitt’s day; and the most that can now be said for ‘Gertrude,’ is that it is a third-rate poem containing a few first-rate lines. It is practically dead, and can never be called back to life.
‘Gertrude’ was favourably received by the public, and particularly by the Whig party, to whose leaders Campbell was personally known, and with most of whom he was closely intimate. It was edited in America by Washington Irving in 1810, and was highly praised on the other side—a fact which at least suggests that its local scenery was not so false as Byron declared it to be. The first edition was a quarto; a second in 12mo was called for within the year. The quarto edition included some of the better known short pieces, such as ‘Ye Mariners,’ ‘The Battle of the Baltic,’ ‘Lochiel,’ ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter,’ and ‘Glenara,’ the latter founded on a wild and romantic story of which Joanna Baillie afterwards made use in her ‘Family Legend.’ The second edition contained the once-familiar ‘O’Connor’s Child,’ a rather touching piece suggested by the flower popularly known as ‘Love Lies Bleeding.’ Many years after this—in 1836—the Dublin people desired to give Campbell a public dinner as the author of ‘O’Connor’s Child’ and ‘The Exile of Erin,’ but Campbell never set foot on the Emerald Isle.
Having got ‘Gertrude’ off his hands, Campbell returned to his literary carpentering. He was now in his thirty-third year, and had produced the two long poems and the short pieces upon which his fame, such as it is, rests. Were it not for his lines on ‘The Last Man,’ it would have been much better for his reputation had he never again put pen to paper. It was a remark of Scott’s that he had broken out at once, like the Irish rebels, a hundred thousand strong. But unfortunately he had no sustaining power; he could not keep up the attack. His imaginative faculty, never robust, decayed much earlier than that of any other poet who ever gave like promise; and we have the sorry spectacle of a man still under forty living in the shadow of a reputation made when he was little more than out of his teens.
One says it regretfully, but it is the sober truth that Campbell became now a greater hack than ever. He declared in the frankest possible manner that he did not mean to think of poetry any more; he meant to make money, a desire which was very near his heart all along. He had been working fourteen hours a day for some time, but the weak flesh began to complain, and four hours had to be cut off. In 1810 he lost his youngest child, Alison, and overwhelmed himself with grief. Before he had recovered from the shock his mother passed away in Edinburgh. She had been suffering from paralysis, and so far as we can learn Campbell had nothing more touching to say of her death than toexpress his ‘sincere acquiescence’ in the dispensation of Providence.
One or two little incidents helped to revive his spirits after the snapping of these sacred ties. He had been presented to the Princess of Wales by Lady Charlotte Campbell, who thoughtfully, as he tells a correspondent—but why thoughtfully?—kept the Princess from making an ‘irruption’ into his house. The Princess summoned him to Blackheath, where he had the felicity of dancing a reel with her, and thus ‘attained the summit of human elevation.’ An onlooker remarked upon this performance that Campbell had ‘the neat national trip,’ but we have no other evidence of his dancing accomplishments. Campbell was delighted with himself; but he soon discovered that his good luck in making a royal acquaintance might prove embarrassing. He had unthinkingly remarked to the Princess that he loved operas to distraction. ‘Then why don’t you go to them?’ she inquired. Campbell made some excuse about the expense, and next day a ticket for the season arrived. ‘God help me!’ he says, in recounting the incident, ‘thisisloving operas to distraction. I shall be obliged to live in London a month to attend the opera-house—all for telling one little fib.’
As a matter of fact, Campbell had now something more serious to think about than attending the Opera. He had been engaged, at his own suggestion, to give a course of lectures on Poetry at the Royal Institution, the fee to be one hundred guineas for the course. When Scott heard of the undertaking he expressed the hope that Campbell would read with fire and feeling, and not attempt to correct his Scots accent. But Campbell did not agree with Scott on the latter point. He tells Alison that he has taken great pains with his voice and pronunciation, and has laboured hard to get rid of his Caledonianisms. Sydney Smith, he says, patronised him more than he liked about the lectures, and gave himwhat, in Campbell’s case, was clearly a wise hint against joking. In truth he seems to have had more than enough of advice from his friends, but he went his own way, and he was amply justified by the result.
The first lecture, delivered on the 24th of April 1812, proved a great success. According to a contemporary account, the hall was crowded, and the ‘eloquent illustrations’ of the lecturer received the warmest praise. Campbell says his own expectations were more than realised, though he had been so far from a state of composure that he playfully threatened to divorce his wife if she attended! At the close of the lecture distinguished listeners pressed around him with compliments. ‘Byron, who has now come out so splendidly, told me he heard Bland the poet say, “I have had moreportableideas given me in the last quarter of an hour than I ever imbibed in the same portion of time.” Archdeacon Nares fidgetted about and said: “that’s new; at least quite new tome.”’ And so on. Campbell’s friends were less critical than kind. The modern reader of his lectures will not find anything so new as Nares found, nor anything so very portable as Bland carried away. The lectures form a sort of chronological, though necessarily imperfect, sketch of the whole history of poetry, from that of the Bible down to the songs of Burns. The scheme was magnificent, but it was too vast for one man, especially for a man of Campbell’s flighty humour, and he broke away from it before he had well begun. What he has to say about Hebrew and Greek verse is of some value, but generally speaking the thought and the criticism are quite commonplace. Madame de Staël, it is true, told Campbell that, with the exception of Burke’s writings there was nothing in English so striking as these lectures. But then it was Madame de Staël who solemnly declared that she had read a certain part of ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ twenty times, and always withthe pleasure of the first reading! She must have known how well praise agreed with the poet. A second course of lectures was delivered at the same institution in 1813, but of these it is not necessary to say more than that, in the conventional language of the day, they were ‘applauded to the echo.’
Towards the close of 1813 Campbell’s health got ‘sadly crazy’ again, and he went to Brighton for sea bathing. There he soon found his lost appetite: the fish, he wrote, was delicious, and the library quite a pleasant lounge with the added luxury of music. He called upon Disraeli, ‘a good modest man,’ and was invited to dine with him. He was also introduced to the venerable Herschel and his son, the one ‘a great, simple, good old man,’ the other ‘a prodigy in science and fond of poetry, but very unassuming.’ The astronomer seemed to him like ‘a supernatural intelligence,’ and when he parted with him he felt ‘elevated and overcome.’ In such lofty language does Campbell intimate his very simple pleasures and experiences.
But the Brighton holiday was only the prelude to one much longer and much more interesting. During the short-lived peace of 1802 Campbell had often expressed a wish to visit the scenes of the Revolution and above all the Louvre; and now that the abdication of Buonaparte, the capture of Paris, and the presence of the allied armies had drawn thousands of English subjects to the French capital, he resolved to carry out the long-cherished plan. On the 26th of August 1814, he was writing from Dieppe, where one of the rabble called after him: ‘Va-t’-en Anglais! vous cherchez nous faire perir de faim.’ On the way to Paris he halted for two days at Rouen, where he found his brother Daniel—‘poor as ever’—with whom he had parted at Hamburg in 1800. Landing in Paris, he met Mrs Siddons, and in her company visited the Louvre and the Elysian Fields, which he held to be as contemptible in comparisonto Hyde Park and the Green Park as the French public squares and buildings are superior to those of London.
At the Louvre, where he spent four hours daily, he grandiloquently says he was struck dumb with emotion, his heart palpitated, and his eyes filled with tears at the sight of that ‘immortal youth,’ the Belvidere Apollo. Next to the Louvre in interest, he mentions the Jardin des Plantes, ‘a sight worth travelling to see.’ The Pantheon he describes as ‘a magnificent place,’ adding that the vaults of Voltaire and Rousseau are the only cleanly things he has seen in Paris; so neat and tidy that they remind him rather of a comfortable English pantry than of anything of an awe-inspiring nature. Versailles is ‘very splendid indeed,’ but the palace is ‘not large enough for the basis, and the trees are clipped with horrible formality.’ He is not lost in admiration of the French women. ‘There are two sorts of them—the aquiline, or rather nut-cracker faces, and the broad faces; both are ugly.’ On the other hand, he finds that the handsomest Englishmen are inferior to the really handsome Frenchmen. The Englishman always looks very John Bullish; and nothing that the French say flatters him so much as when they declare that they would not take him forun Anglois. The Opera he describes as ‘a set of silly things, but with some exquisite music’; the French acting in tragedy he does not relish, but their comic acting is perfection. Of notable people whom he met he mentions the elder Schlegel, Humboldt, Cuvier, Denon the Egyptian traveller—‘a very pleasing person’—and the Duke of Wellington. To the latter he was introduced merely as ‘Mr Campbell,’ and the Duke afterwards told Madame de Staël that he ‘thought it was one of the thousands of that name from the same country; he did not know it wastheThomas.’ Schlegel he describes as a very uncommon man, learned and ingenious, but avisionary and a mystic. He and Humboldt, ‘after much entreaty,’ made him repeat ‘Lochiel.’ When Schlegel came to England, he was generally Campbell’s guest, and the two, notwithstanding that their characters and tastes were so dissimilar, appear to have entertained a sincere regard for each other.
After a two months’ stay in Paris, Campbell returned to England, with, as Beattie pompously phrases it, a rich and varied fund of materials for reflection. He found his work much in arrear, and had just begun to make some headway with it when the unlooked-for intelligence reached him that by the death of his Highland cousin, MacArthur Stewart of Ascog, he had fallen heir to a legacy of nearly £5000. The will described him as ‘author of “The Pleasures of Hope”‘; but it was not for the honours of authorship that he was rewarded. ‘Little Tommy, the poet,’ said the testator, ‘ought to have a legacy because he was so kind as to give his mother sixty pounds yearly out of his income.’
Stewart died at the end of March 1815, and by the middle of April Campbell was in Edinburgh—whither he had gone to look after his interests—feeling ‘as blythe as if the devil were dead.’ After seeing his old friends in the capital, he went to Kinniel on a visit to Dugald Stewart, and then, taking the Canal boat from Falkirk, set out for Glasgow, where he made a round of his relations. He spent a very happy time altogether, and when he returned to Sydenham, it was, as he thought, to look out on a future of prosperity and comparative ease. A few days after his arrival, Waterloo decided the fate of Europe, and for a time he did nothing but speak and write of the prodigies of British valour performed on that field. Some tributary stanzas written to the tune of ‘The British Grenadiers’ show that while he did not fancy being taken for an Englishman in Paris, he was very proud to appear as a John Bull jingo at home.
Under his improved prospects he seems to have had some difficulty in settling down to his old literary tasks. We hear of him working again at the eternal ‘Specimens,’ but otherwise his pen seems to have lain idle. The American heir was coming over in August to take possession of the Ascog estates; and Campbell hoped to reap some additional pecuniary advantages for himself and his sisters. The heir was a cousin of the poet and a brother of the Attorney-General for Virginia. Beattie suggests that if Campbell’s elder brother had been aware of the law which rendered aliens to the Crown of Great Britain incapable of inheriting entailed property, and had made up his title as the nearest heir, he might have been proprietor of the old estates, which were afterwards sold for £78,000. But no such luck was to befall the Campbell family. The heir came into possession, and neither Campbell nor his sisters benefited further by his stroke of fortune. Campbell reported that he was an amiable gentleman, but, so far as he could see, was not inclined to be generous. Very likely he considered that Campbell had been well provided for already. At any rate the poet had to content himself, as he might well do, with his pension and his legacy and continue his literary cobbling as before.
His interests now became somewhat more varied. His surviving son had been sent to school, but having had to be removed on account of his health, Campbell set to teach the boy himself. He got up at six every morning and by seven was hammering Greek and Latin into the youth’s head. It was all nonsense, he declared, but in his son’s interests he dared not act up to his theory, which was to leave Greek and Latin, and instruct him in ‘other things.’ In Campbell’s view it was a vestige of barbarism that ‘learning’ only means, in its common acceptation, a knowledge of the dead languages and mathematics. Later on he speaks of his intention to drill the lad in‘epistolary habits,’ but this intention he was, alas! never able to realise.
While the Greek and Latin lessons were going on, some of Campbell’s friends were busy with plans for his benefit. Scott, avowedly anxious to have his personal society, proposed that he should allow himself to be engineered—it was a delicate matter of supplanting an inefficient professor—into the Rhetoric Chair in Edinburgh University. The post was a tempting one, worth from £400 to £500 a year; but nothing is left to show how Campbell took the suggestion. In 1834 he was again urged to appear as a candidate for an Edinburgh professorship, but declined because he expected to live only ten years longer, and it would take him half that time to prepare his lectures. It is not unlikely that he would have regarded the present proposal with favour, but his thoughts were immediately turned in a different direction by the disinterested action of another friend. The Royal Institution had just been opened in Liverpool, and Roscoe was anxious that Campbell should give a dozen lectures there. Some preliminary hitch occurred about the fee, but this was got over, and Campbell ultimately drew no less a sum than £340 from the course. Considering that the lectures were practically those already delivered at the Royal Institution of London, he might compliment himself on being remarkably well paid; yet it is said that when he was afterwards pressed to deliver a second course at Liverpool, presumably on the same terms, he declined.
Campbell made his appearance in Liverpool at the end of October 1818. The lecture-room, wrote one of the listeners some thirty years later, was ‘crowded by theéliteof the neighbourhood.’ The lecturer’s prose ‘was declared to be more poetic than his poetry; his glowing imagination gave a double charm to those passages from the poets which he cited as illustrations. The effect and animation of his eye, his figure, hisvoice, in reciting these passages are still vividly remembered.’ From Liverpool he went on to Birmingham, where he received £100 for repeating the lectures there. At Birmingham ‘it pleased fate that Thomas should take the measles,’ and Campbell himself had to get blisters applied to his chest to relieve his breathing. Under the circumstances he could not be expected to visit much; but he was introduced to Miss Edgeworth, who captivated him by the unassuming simplicity of her manner, and he ‘met L—d [Lloyd], the quondam partner of L—b [Lamb] in poetry—an innocent creature, but imagines everybody dead.’ He called upon Gregory Watt’s father—theJames Watt—with whom, though he was then eighty-three, he says he spent one of the most amusing days he ever had with a man of science and a stranger to his own pursuits.
Suggestions had reached him from Glasgow and Edinburgh that he should deliver his lectures in these towns, but although, with his usual facility, he had come to think that lecturing was likely to be hismetier, at present he literally had not a voice to exert without imminent hazard. And there was another danger. ‘I know well,’ he says, ‘what would happen from the hospitality of Glasgow or Edinburgh… I should enjoy the hospitality to the prejudice of my health. For though I now abstain habitually from even the ordinary indulgence in eating and taking wine, yet the excitement of speaking always hurts me.’ And so, partly to avoid the conviviality which Dickens and Thackeray enjoyed later as lecturers in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Campbell declined the invitations from the north, and went home to Sydenham.
While he was absent on this literary tour, the long-delayed ‘Specimens of the British Poets’—Miss Mitford makes very merry over the time spent on the work—had at length been published in seven octavo volumes. It proved only a moderate success. The plan was wellconceived, but Campbell committed the initial mistake of deciding to print, not the best specimens of his authors, but only such pieces mainly as had not been printed by Ellis and by Headley. Of Sir Philip Sidney, for example, he says: ‘Mr Ellis has exhausted the best specimens of his poetry; I have only offered a few short ones.’ The absurdity of this procedure need not be pointed out. People do not go to a book of specimens for examples of a writer in his second-best manner. They want the cream of a poet, not, as Campbell has too often given them, the skimmed milk of his genius.
But the work was faulty on other grounds. Its biographical and bibliographical information was notoriously incorrect and imperfect. Campbell had no taste for the drudgery of antiquarian research: not in his line, he boldly announced, was the labour of trying to discover the number of Milton’s house in Bunhill Fields. His facts as a natural consequence were never to be depended upon. In the ‘Specimens’ the inaccuracies are more than usually abundant, and would, even if the work were otherwise satisfactory, entirely discount its value. ‘Read Campbell’s Poets,’ said Byron in his Journal; ‘marked the errors of Tom for correction.’ Again: ‘Came home—read. Corrected Tom Campbell’s slips of the pen.’ Some of Tom’s errors were, no doubt, mere slips; but more were clearly attributable to ignorance and laziness. If, for example, he had been at the trouble to take his Shakespeare from the shelf he would never have been guilty of such a misquotation as the following:
To gild refined gold, to paint thelily,To throw a perfume onthe violet.
To gild refined gold, to paint thelily,To throw a perfume onthe violet.
To gild refined gold, to paint thelily,
To throw a perfume onthe violet.
The work absolutely bristles with errors of this kind. Of the introductory essay and the prefatory notices of the various writers it is possible to speak somewhat more favourably. The essay, though written in an affectedstyle, is still worth reading, especially the portions dealing with Milton and Pope. The lives, again, are marked by a fair appreciation of the powers of the respective poets, from the point of view of the old school; and although there is nothing subtle in the criticisms, there is welcome evidence of that sympathetic spirit which loves poetry for its own sake. This is the most that can be said for a work which Lockhart unaccountably eulogised as ‘not unworthy to be handed down with the classical verse of its author.’ No second edition of it was called for before 1841, when Campbell had some difference with Murray about its revision. Murray’s original agreement with Campbell had been for £500, but when the work was completed he doubled that sum and added books to the value of £200 which Campbell had borrowed. This munificent generosity Campbell rewarded by refusing to correct his own errors, though he was offered a handsome sum to do so; and the result was that he had to submit to the ‘Specimens’ being silently revised by another hand. The incident, which is not a little damaging to Campbell’s character, proves again that Campbell was treated by the booksellers far more liberally than he deserved.
Having disposed of the ‘Specimens,’ he was free to look about for other work. At the beginning of 1820 he tells a friend that he has a new poem on the anvil, with several small ones lying by, and only waits until he has enough for a volume to publish them. He is to lecture again at the Royal Institution in the Spring, and as both his fellow-lecturers have been knighted, he thinks it not unlikely that he will be knighted too. On the whole he was in excellent spirits; and the necessity for unremitting toil having been removed, he began to arrange for a holiday. This time he decided to revisit Germany, and having let his house furnished for a year, and concluded his lecture course, he embarked with his family for Holland in the end of May.
Landing at Rotterdam, with the view of which from the Maas he was ‘much captivated,’ he proceeded by the Hague and Leyden to Haarlem, where he was ‘transported’ with the famous organ in the Cathedral. From Amsterdam he wrote to say that the faces of the people were as unromantic as the face of their country, but he was pleased to see their houses ‘so painted and cleaned’ that poverty could have no possible terrors for them. At Bonn he renewed his acquaintance with Schlegel, who on this occasion bored him sadly. Schlegel, it seems, was ludicrously fond of showing off his English. He thought he understood English politics, too, and pestered Campbell with his crude speculations about England’s impending bankruptcy and the misery of her lower orders. ‘I had no notion,’ says Campbell, ‘that a great man could ever grow so wearisome.’
Leaving his son, now in his sixteenth year, with Professor Kapp, who was to board and instruct him for £5 a month, he went to Frankfort, visiting on the way the Rolandseck, where he wrote his ‘Roland the Brave.’ At Frankfort he had daily lessons in German from a Carthusian monk, who was rather surprised at his strange plan of overcoming the difficulties of the language by dint of Greek. At Ratisbon he revived many memories. Of the twelve monks whom he had known at the Scots College in 1800, only two were now alive; but their successors were ‘very liberal of their beer, and it is by no means contemptible.’ When he got to Vienna—where he read Hebrew with a Jewish poet named Cohen—he found that his fame had preceded him. His arrival was publicly announced, translations of ‘Ye Mariners’ and the Kirnan ‘Lines’ appeared in one of the leading journals, and invitations showered in upon him from the best people in the capital. He met a large number of the Polish nobility, who crowded about him with affectionate zeal. He forgot all his sorrows listening to the organ in St Stephen’s. Thetheatres he found tiresome. The actors indeed were good, but what could they make of such a language? From Vienna he returned to Bonn through Bavaria. He was now impatient to be home; and, having transferred his son to the care of Dr Meyer, he bade farewell to his friends, and was in London by the end of November.
Before leaving for the Continent he had entered into an agreement with Colburn for editing theNew Monthly Magazinefor three years, from January 1821. He was to have £500 per annum, and was to furnish annually six contributions in prose and six in verse. Campbell had not shown any special fitness for the duties of an editor, but he knew the value of his own name, which, indeed, was probably the reason of Colburn’s applying to him. He had, as Patmore says, the most extensive and the most unquestioned reputation of the writers of the day, and the proprietor’s judgment was soon proved by the unprecedented popularity of the magazine. Campbell certainly showed some zeal at the start. He got together a very efficient staff of contributors, with Mr Cyrus Redding as his sub-editor. Moreover, in order to be near the office he decided to exchange his Sydenham house for one in town, and he took private lodgings in Margaret Street until a permanent residence could be found. There, shutting himself up from outside society, he ‘received and consulted with his friends, cultivated acquaintance with literary men of all parties, answered correspondents, pretended to read contributions, wrote new and revised old papers, and, in short, identified his own reputation and interests with those of the magazine.’ TheNew Monthly, for the time being, became the record of his literary life.
With all this show of work, Campbell, by every account, proved a very unsatisfactory editor, though no more unsatisfactory than Bulwer Lytton and Theodore Hook who succeeded him. Allowing for the probableexaggeration of his own importance as sub-editor, there is enough in Redding’s reminiscences to show that he found his position difficult enough. Campbell had so little acquaintance with periodical literature that he declares he never saw a number of theNew Monthlyuntil Colburn put one into his hands! He gave no attention to the topics of the day, and his knowledge of current literature was so limited that contributors often foisted on him articles which they had furtively abstracted from contemporary writers. Of method he had none. His papers lay about in hopeless confusion, and if he wanted to get rid of them for the time, he would jumble them into a heap, or cram them into a drawer. Articles sent by contributors would be placed over his books on the shelves, slip down behind and lie forgotten. He always shied at the perusal of manuscripts, and he kept the printer continually waiting for ‘copy.’ Talfourd says he would balance contending epithets for a fortnight, and stop the press for a week to determine the value of a comma. In short, he was the very worst imaginable kind of editor, especially from the contributor’s point of view. Nevertheless, he soon drew a strong brigade of writers around him—among them Hazlitt, Talfourd, Horace Smith, and Henry Roscoe—and placing implicit confidence in their work, he made his editorship a snug sinecure. ‘Tom Campbell,’ said Scott, ‘had much in his power. A man at the head of a magazine may do much for young men, but Campbell did nothing, more from indolence, I fancy, than disinclination or a bad heart.’ That was the true word; Campbell, to use the expressive term of his countrymen, simply could not be ‘fashed.’
While things were proceeding thus in the editorial sanctum a painful crisis was approaching in Campbell’s domestic affairs. He had not long returned from the Continent when reports of his son began to give him uneasiness. Thomas, he says, talks of going to sea,which indicates that he is not disposed to do much good on land. Early in the spring of 1821 the youth turned up in London. He had been transferred from Bonn to Amiens, but disliking the place and the people, he had run away from his instructor. Campbell was greatly affected by his unexpected arrival, but Tony M’Cann, who was in the house, proposed to celebrate the event by killing the fatted calf! In the autumn the boy was sent to a school at Poplar, at a cost to his father of £120 per annum, but he had not been many weeks there when symptoms, the meaning of which had hitherto been mistaken, became so pronounced that he had to be removed to an asylum. It is a distressing subject, and there is no need to go into details. Young Campbell was ultimately placed under the care of Dr Matthew Allen at High Beech, Essex. There he chiefly remained until three months after his father’s death in 1844, when he was liberated by the verdict of a jury declaring him to be of sound mind. The taint of insanity clearly came from the mother’s side. One of her sisters had been deranged for many years before her death; and indeed it has been hinted that Mrs Campbell herself suffered from some ‘mental alienation’ during her last days. A writer in Hogg’sWeekly Instructorfor April 12, 1845, expressly says so. He seems to have known Campbell, but his statement, so far as can be ascertained, is uncorroborated.
In 1822 Campbell removed to a small house of his own at 10 West Seymour Street—a ‘beautiful creation,’ with ‘the most amiable curtains, the sweetest of carpets, the most accomplished chairs, and a highly interesting set of tongs and fenders.’ Here he wrote one of his best things and one of his worst. ‘The Last Man’ was published in theNew Monthlyin 1823. Gilfillan calls it the most Christian of all Campbell’s strains. It is, in fact, one of the most striking of his shorter productions. The same idea was used by Byron in his‘Darkness,’ and this led to some controversy as to which of the two poets had been guilty of stealing from the other. Campbell maintained that he had many years before mentioned to Byron his intention of writing the poem, and there is no reason to doubt his word. Of course the idea of one man, the last of his race, remaining when all else has been destroyed, is quite an obvious one; and in any case Campbell treated it in a manner altogether different from Byron, of whose daring misanthropy he was completely innocent.
It has been said that at West Seymour Street Campbell also wrote one of his worst poems. This was his ‘Theodric,’ not ‘Theodoric,’ as it is constantly mis-spelled. He seems to have been engaged on it early in 1823; but he confesses that so far from being in a poetic mood he is barely competent for the dull duty of editorship. It is well to remember this in judging the poem. He had begun it at a time when horrible dreams of his son being tortured by asylum attendants disturbed his rest; he had finished it with the obstreperous youth temporarily at home—outrageous, dogged, and disagreeable, ‘excessively anxious to convince us how very cordially he hates both his mother and me.’ He knew that ‘Theodric’ had faults, but he regarded these as so little detrimental that he believed when it recovered from the first buzz of criticism it would attain a steady popularity. It appeared in November 1824, but the popularity which Campbell anticipated never came to it. ‘I am very glad,’ he says, ‘that Jeffrey is going to review me, for I thinkhehas the stuff in him to understand “Theodric.”’ But neither Jeffrey nor anybody else understood ‘Theodric’; certainly nobody appreciated it. The wits at Holland House disowned it; theQuarterlycalled it ‘an unworthy publication’; and friend joined foe in the chorus of condemnation. An anonymous punster referred to it as the ‘odd trick’ of the season; and itsexcessively overdone alliterations (such as ‘Heights browsed by the bounding bouquetin’) were made the subject of scornful hilarity. The poem, in truth, was a sad failure, and the universal censure with which it met was thoroughly deserved. Campbell had ‘attempted to imitate the natural simplicity and homely familiarity of the style of Crabbe and Wordsworth,’ and had only succeeded in becoming elaborately tame and feeble.
Just before the publication of ‘Theodric,’ he had paid a short visit to Cheltenham for his health’s sake; now he went to Lord Spencer’s at Althorp, ‘a most beautiful Castle of Indolence,’ tempted by the hope of seeing books which he could not see elsewhere. He really wanted to study, yet he capriciously complained that after breakfast the company, including his Lordship, went off to shoot and left him alone! In short, he was no sooner at Althorp than he wished himself home again.
When he returned to town, in January 1825, it was to take part in what he afterwards called the only important event in his career. This was the founding of the London University, the idea of which he appears to have conceived during his recent intercourse with the Professors of Bonn. The scheme was discussed at various private and public conferences during the spring and summer, and the financial basis of the undertaking being apparently assured, Campbell proceeded to Berlin in September to ascertain how far the University there might serve as a model for London. He spent a week in the Prussian capital, which he compares unfavourably with London in everything but cookery, and came away with ‘every piece of information respecting the University,’ and every book he wished for. At Hamburg he was given a public dinner by eighty English residents, and was driven about the town by his oldprotégé, the ‘Exile of Erin.’ Back in London, he appeared at a meeting in support of the Western Literary and Scientific Institution, and in an eloquent speech declared that ifhis plan of a Metropolitan University succeeded he would ask for no other epitaph on his grave than to be celebrated as one of its originators. The plan, fortunately, did succeed, and although Lord Brougham, to serve his own political ambitions, tried to rob him of the honour, there cannot be a doubt that it rightly belongs to Campbell. Moreover, King’s College would never have existed but for the London University, so that Campbell, as he used to remark, did a double good.
Meanwhile, at the beginning of 1826, he was interesting himself in certain domestic affairs. He was having a spacious study constructed, and he proposed to treat himself to a new carpet and some elegant leather chairs. Every volume was to be removed from the drawing-room; and henceforth he was to smoke in a garret, not in his study. His fancy also rioted by anticipation in ‘a geranium-coloured paper with gold leaves to harmonise with the glory of my gilded and red-bound books.’ But there his purse and his vanity were at loggerheads. While the masons were hammering in the house, the Glasgow students had decided to ask Campbell to allow himself to be put forward as their Lord Rector. At first he complied, but as the time approached he began to waver in his decision. He was not well, his son’s malady distressed him, and his pecuniary affairs—thanks in a great measure to his own reckless extravagance—were again in deep water. Writing on November 6 (1826) he says: ‘I got in bills on Saturday morning for the making up of my new house, treble the amount expected; and also confirmation of an acquaintance being bankrupt, for whom I had advanced the deposits on three shares in the London University. I could not now accept the Rectorship if it were at my option. If I travelled it must be on borrowed money. Friends I have in plenty who would lend, but I fear debt as I do the bitterness of death.’ This seemed decisive enough, and yet nine days laterthe Principal of Glasgow University was announcing to him that he had been elected Lord Rector by the unanimous vote of the four ‘nations.’
The rival candidates were Mr Canning and Sir Thomas Brisbane, and the contest had proved more than usually exciting, from the fact that all the professors except Millar and Jardine were opposed to Campbell on the not very solid ground of ‘political distrust.’ Some enemy even sought to damage his cause by circulating a report that his mother had been ‘a washerwoman in the Goosedubs of Glasgow.’ Wilson, referring in the ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ’ to this incident, remarked that in England such baseness would be held incredible; but Wilson forgot that the fight was practically a political one, and in politics any stick is, or was, good enough to beat a dog with. Campbell’s triumph was, however, all the greater that it was achieved under such conditions; and we can easily imagine the glow of pride with which he went down to Glasgow in the succeeding April (1827).
He landed on the 9th of the month, after a journey which he had cause to remember from the circumstance that Matilda brought ‘seventy parcels of baggage,’ and on the 12th he delivered his inaugural address in the old College Hall. There is abundant evidence of his high spirits in an incident recorded by Allan Cunningham. Snow lay on the ground at the time, and when Campbell reached the College Green he found the students pelting each other. ‘The poet ran into the ranks, threw several snowballs with unerring aim, then, summoning the scholars around him in the Hall, delivered a speech replete with philosophy and eloquence.’ The snowballing was not very dignified perhaps, but it was strictly in character, and must have added immensely to Campbell’s popularity with the ‘darling boys’ of his Alma Mater. The Rectorial address was received with intense enthusiasm. One listener describesit as elegant and highly poetical, and says that it was delivered with great ease and dignity. Another, a student, writes: ‘To say we applauded is to say nothing. We evinced every symptom of respect and admiration, from the loftiest tribute, even our tears—drawn forth by his eloquent recollections of olden times—down to escorting him with boisterous noise along the public streets.’
Campbell remained in Glasgow until the 1st of May, banqueting with the Professors and the Senatus (who, by the way, created him an LL.D., a title which he never used), hearing explanations by the Faculty, and coaching himself up in University ordinances and finance. For Campbell filled the Rectorial office in no sinecure fashion. Perhaps, as Redding says, he made more of the post than it was worth, out of a little harmless vanity and somewhat of local attachment. But at any rate he did not spare himself. He got his inaugural address printed, and sent every student a copy of it, inscribed with his autograph. He wrote a series of Letters on the Epochs of Greek and Roman Literature, which, after running through theNew Monthly, he presented to the students in volume form. He investigated the rights of the students too, and secured them many advantages of which they had been unjustly deprived. All these duties he performed in person, thus involving several special journeys to Glasgow; so that, on the whole, it may safely be said that he conducted himself like a model Lord Rector.
The result was seen in his re-election, not only for a second but for a third term, which was almost unprecedented, and indeed was said to be contrary to the statutes and usage of the University. His popularity with the students all through was very great. They founded a Campbell Club in his honour; commissioned a full-length portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence; and presented him with a silver punch-bowl, which figuresin his will as one of his ‘jewels.’ When he was elected for the third time they went wild with delight. Campbell was staying with his cousin, Mr Gray, in Great Clyde Street, a few paces from the river. There the students gathered to the number of fourteen hundred, and a speech being called for, Campbell appeared at the window. ‘Students,’ he said, ‘sooner shall that river’—pointing to the Clyde—‘cease to flow into the sea, than I, while I live, will forget the honour this day done to me.’ There is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous. At this stage an old washerwoman passing on the outskirts of the crowd was arrested by the sight of what she conceived to be a lunatic speaking from a window. ‘Puir man!’ she remarked to a student, ‘can his freends no tak’ him in?’ A royal time it must have been for the poet in Glasgow altogether. He was naturally much attached to the city, and although he complains of feeling melancholy while walking about his old haunts, yet it was a melancholy not without alleviations. The Rectorship had been ‘a sunburst of popular favour,’ the ‘crowning honour’ of his life; and as for Glasgow itself, why it flowed with ‘syllogisms and ale.’
The third year of Campbell’s Rectorship expired in the autumn of 1829, but meanwhile, in May 1828, he had lost his wife. Mrs Campbell had been ailing for some time, and his anxiety on her account darkens all the correspondence of the period. For several months he acted both as housekeeper and sick-nurse, and seldom crossed his door except to get something for the invalid. Mrs Campbell’s death was an irreparable loss to him. She had been an affectionate, even a childishly adoring wife (she used to take visitors upstairs on tiptoe to show the poet ‘in a moment of inspiration’!) and it does not surprise us to read of the bereaved husband relieving his feelings with tears at the sight of a trinket or a knot of ribbon that belonged to her. Mrs Campbell hadtributes from many quarters. Redding said that no praise could be too high for her good management and her general conduct in domestic life. Mrs Grant of Laggan, writing of Campbell’s pecuniary embarrassments, remarked that ‘his good, gentle, patient little wife was so frugal, so sweet-tempered, that she might have disarmed poverty of half its evils.’ It was maliciously hinted in Scotland that she lived unhappily with her husband, but upon that point we may safely accept the testimony of Redding. ‘I never,’ he says, ‘found Mrs Campbell out of temper. I never saw a remote symptom of disagreement, though I entered the poet’s house for years at all times, without ceremony. I believe the tale to be wholly a fiction.’
Mrs Campbell’s death sent the poet out into the world and into company very different from that with which he had been used to associate. Redding makes touching reference to the change at his fireside. The recollection of Mrs Campbell’s uniform cheerfulness and hospitality, the sight of her tea-table without her presence, her vacant chair, that inexpressible lack of something which long custom had made like second nature—these things gave to Campbell’s home a melancholy colouring which his old friends never cared to contemplate. ‘Man,’ says Lytton, ‘may have a splendid palace, a comfortable lodging, nay, even a pleasant house, but man has no home where the home has no mistress.’ Henceforward Campbell had practically no home. He moved about from house to house, always seeking the comfort which he never found, his books and his papers and his general belongings getting ever into a greater state of confusion for want of the hand that had so quietly and skilfully ordered his domestic affairs.
The literary product of these years of bereavement and the Glasgow Rectorship was naturally very slight. Indeed the letters to the students, already mentioned, formed almost the only writings of any importance. Inconcert with the elder students he projected a Classical Encyclopædia, but for some unexplained reason the project was allowed to drop. The victory of Navarino in October 1827 produced some stanzas which he not inaptly called ‘a rumble-tumble concern,’ and the ‘Lines to Julia M——,’ as well as the short lyric, ‘When Love came first to Earth,’ seem to have been written in 1829. It was, however, an essentially barren period, unmarked by a single piece above the average of the third-rate writer.
Some time just before the expiration of his Rectorship at Glasgow in 1829, Campbell changed his residence from Seymour Street to Middle Scotland Yard, where he furnished on such a grand scale that he had to mortgage a prospective edition of his poems to pay the bill. In connection with this change there were hints of a second marriage—hints which continued to be whispered about for many a day, to Campbell’s evident annoyance. He declared that there was no foundation for the report, that it was ‘the baseless fabric of a vision’; yet we are assured by Beattie that he took his new house at the suggestion of ‘an amiable and accomplished friend deeply interested in his welfare, and destined, as he fondly imagined, to restore him to the happiness of married life.’ Who the amiable lady was we are not told; nor is anything said as to why the engagement fell through. The presumption is that Campbell changed his mind, and did not want to have the matter discussed.
At this time a suitable marriage would certainly have been no act of madness, for Campbell was clearly feeling himself more than usually lonesome. Indeed, it was with the avowed object of mitigating his forlorn condition that he established the Literary Union, a social club over which he presided till he finally left London in 1843. The burden of work and removal had again thrown him into a wretched state of health, and in September (1829) he writes to say that he isdoing next to nothing apart from theNew Monthly. Protracted study exhausts him, and he dare not take wine, which is the only reviving stimulus left. Starvation alone alleviates his distress: a hearty meal means an agony of suffering; therefore he stints himself at table, and loses flesh daily.
So the beginning of 1830 found him. His friend Sir Thomas Lawrence had just died, and although he was profoundly ignorant of the technique of art, and had even a limited appreciation of pictures and painting, he boldly undertook to write the artist’s life. He set to the work in a comically serious fashion. He had a printed notice sent to his friends and fastened to the door of his study, intimating his desire to be left undisturbed till the book was finished. These notices—for Campbell issued them regularly—were the subject of much merriment among his acquaintances. It was an announcement of the kind that drew from Hook the jest about Campbell having been safely delivered of a couplet. In the present case the ruse apparently did not answer, for in a week or two he fled to the country. He seems to have spent a good deal of time over the Life, but nothing ever came of his labours. Colburn insisted on having the book in a few months, and Campbell, declaring that he could ‘get no materials,’ petulantly threw it aside.
This was in December 1830. By that time Campbell had severed his connection with theNew Monthly. Colburn had parted with Redding in October, and the editor’s difficulties were in consequence greatly increased. He went out of town, and in his absence an attack on his old friend, Dr Glennie of Dulwich, was inadvertently passed by Redding’s successor, Mr S. C. Hall. Campbell does not explicitly say that this incident was the cause of his resignation, but as he mentions interminable scrapes and threatened law-suits, we may safely assume that it was. At any rate he said good-bye to Colburnin no amiable mood. Colburn had a bill of £700 against him, partly for books and partly for the expense of the current unsold edition of his poems. How was he to discharge such a debt? The difficulty was temporarily met by an agreement with Cochrane, the publisher, whereby the latter was to pay the £700 in return for Campbell’s undertaking the editorship of a new venture, to be calledThe Metropolitan Magazine, and for two hundred unsold copies of his poems in Colburn’s hands. Unluckily, Cochrane could not make up the £700, and Campbell, in order to satisfy Colburn, had to stake the rent of his house and sell off his poems at such price as they would bring. At the close of 1830 he went into lodgings, and instead of settling down, as he had hoped, to enjoy a kind of mildotium cum dignitate, he had perforce to resume his seat on the thorny cushion of the editorial chair. When he left theNew Monthly, Redding asked him, ‘What about the reduced finances?’ ‘Devil take the finances,’ said he; ‘it is something to be free if a man has but a shirt and a carpet bag.’ His soreness of heart at having to sell his liberty again may thus be imagined.
Campbell’s connection with theMetropolitan Magazineproved anything but agreeable. True, things went smoothly enough for a time. In the autumn he felt himself ten inches taller because he had got a third share in the property. The share cost him £500, and he had to borrow the money from Rogers, for whose security—though Rogers generously declined any security—he insured his life and pledged his library and house furniture. But the concern turned out to be a bubble, and Campbell suffered agonies of suspense about his money. He got it back in the long run, and it was returned to Rogers. But this was only the beginning of his troubles. At the request of Captain Chamier, one of the proprietors, he continued in the editorship, but the magazine passed through manyvicissitudes. When it came into the hands of his old friend Captain Marryat, Campbell wanted to cut connection with it entirely, and was prevailed upon to remain only by Marryat promising to relieve him of the correspondence. Shortly after this, Marryat offered the editorship to Moore who, however, declined to supplant Campbell, and so joined the staff merely as a contributor. Campbell presently reported that ‘we go on in very good heart.’ But these conditions did not last. Campbell found that he could not work comfortably under Marryat—who was just about to give the magazine a swing with his ‘Peter Simple’—and he threw up the editorship, which in point of fact he had held only in name. He seems to have left everything to his sub-editor. He seldom examined a manuscript unless it came from one of his friends; nor did he give by his contributions—nine short pieces of verse—anything like value for the money he received. His editorship, in short, was purely ornamental.
But it is necessary to retrace our steps. Just after taking on theMetropolitanin 1831, Campbell fixed upon a quiet residence at St Leonard’s which he now used as an occasional retreat from the bustle of London. We hear of him strolling with complacent pride on the beach while the band played ‘The Campbells are Comin’’ and ‘Ye Mariners of England.’ He tells his sister that refined female society had become of great consequence to him, and that he found it concentrated here. He had no pressing engagements, and accordingly had written more verses than he had done for many years within the same time. His ‘Lines on the View from St Leonards,’ published first in theMetropolitan, were well-known, though they are now forgotten. A visit to one of the paper mills at Maidstone in July 1831 was made to inquire about the price of paper for an edition of ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ which Turner had promised to illustrate. Campbell had a little joke withthe manager at the mills. ‘I am a paper-stainer,’ he said, and then he explained that he stained with author’s ink, after which the manager became ‘intensely disdainful.’ At Stoke, near Bakewell, whither he had gone to see Mrs Arkwright, a daughter of Stephen Kemble, he heard Chevalier Neukomm play the organ. This, he says, was as great an era in his sensations as when he first beheld the Belvidere Apollo. In the music he imagined that he heard his dead Alison speaking to him from heaven, and when he could listen no longer he slipped out to the churchyard, where he ‘gave way to almost convulsive sensations.’ Some years later he met Neukomm again, and at his request turned a part of the Book of Job—the ‘sublime text’ of which he often extolled—into verse for an oratorio. The effort appears as a ‘fragment’ in his works, and Neukomm is said to have composed the music, though no mention of such an oratorio is made in any of the biographical notices of the composer.
We come now to an important episode in the life of Campbell—an episode which for long engaged almost his sole attention. His interest in the cause of Poland had already been strikingly expressed in ‘The Pleasures of Hope.’ It was an interest which, as his friend Dr Madden puts it, had all the strength of a passion, all the fervour of patriotism. Poland was his idol. ‘He wrote for it, he worked for it, he sold his literary labour for it; he used his influence with all persons of eminence in political life of his acquaintance in favour of it; and, when it was lost, in favour of those brave defenders of it who had survived its fall. He threw himself heart and soul into the cause; he identified all his feelings, nay, his very being with it.’ The names of Czartoryski and Niemeiewitz were never off his lips. A tale of a distressed Pole was his greeting to friends when they met; a subscription the chorus of his song. In fact, he was quite mad on the subject, as madas ever Byron was about Greece, or Boswell about Corsica.
What roused him first was the fall of Warsaw, by the news of which he was so affected that Madden feared for his life or his reason. He began very practically by subscribing £100 to the Warsaw Hospital Fund, ‘a mighty sum for a poor poet,’ as he says in an unpublished letter. He had written some ‘Lines on Poland’ for theMetropolitan, and these, along with the Lines on St Leonards, he proposed to publish in abrochure, by which he expected to raise £50 more. The number of exiles in London gradually increased. Many of them were starving. Campbell constituted himself their guardian, appealed urgently for money on their behalf, and subsequently, early in 1831, founded a Polish Association with the object of relieving distress and distributing literature calculated to arouse public sympathy on the matter.
Of this Association he was appointed chairman. The duties proved anything but light. In June 1832 he writes that he has a heavy correspondence to keep up, both with friends at home and with foreigners. He has letters in French, German, and even Latin to write, and these afford him nothing like a sinecure. There was also a monthly journal calledPoloniato edit; besides which the German question—another and the same with the Polish—involved him in much vexatious correspondence with the patriots of the Fatherland. At this date he was constantly working from seven in the morning till midnight; he even changed his dinner hour to two o’clock to have a longer afternoon for his beloved Poles. It was impossible that such a strain could last; and at length, in May 1833, he withdrew from the Association as having become too arduous and exciting for his health. Thus closed a part of his career which was as honourable to him as anything he ever did, and upon which he looked back with feelingsof sad pleasure. His zeal was perhaps a little ill-regulated, but his sincerity and his active practical efforts on behalf of many brave, unfortunate men bore the impress of a noble and a generous nature. The Poles showed their gratitude in many touching ways; and we have his own express declaration that only once in his life did he experience anything at all like their warm-hearted recognition of his services on their behalf.
During the whole of this distracted period Campbell had all but completely forsaken his own proper business. He had, of course, continued to edit theMetropolitan, and his random contributions to that journal must have filled up some time, but from the fall of Warsaw in March 1831 to his ceasing connection with the Polish Association in May 1833 his interests were centred entirely on the affairs of the exiles. Even the agitation about the Reform Bill had passed almost unheeded, though he was among those who celebrated the passing of the Bill by dining with the Lord Mayor at the Guildhall, on which occasion he remarked that the turtle soup tasted as if it had already felt the beneficent effects of Reform. From Glasgow had come in 1832 an appeal that he would allow himself to be nominated as a candidate for Parliament, but he declined the honour because a seat in the House would entail a life of ‘dreadful hardship,’ and cut up his literary occupation.
The only work of any note which he did while actively interested in the Poles was the Life of Mrs Siddons. He finished the book, at the end of 1832, in one volume, but the ‘tyrant booksellers’ would not look at it until he had expanded it into two volumes. It was at length published in June 1834. Few words need be wasted over it. Mrs Siddons, of whom he entertained an extravagantly high opinion, had entrusted him with what he loftily termed the ‘sacred duty’ of writing her life, but he was thoroughly unfitted for such a commission, and it is the simple truth that no man ofeven average ability ever produced a worse biography. TheQuarterlycalled it ‘an abuse of biography,’ and its author ‘the worst theatrical historian we have ever had.’ It is full of the grossest blunders, and some of its expressions are turgid and nonsensical beyond belief. Thus of Mrs Pritchard we read that she ‘electrified the house with disappointment,’ a statement upon which theQuarterlyremarked: ‘This, we suppose, is what the philosophers call negative electricity.’ The thing was rendered additionally absurd by the noise which Campbell had made about the writing of the book. He talked about it and wrote about it to everybody, as if it were to be themagnum opusof his life. From this the public and his friends naturally formed great expectations, and when they found they had been deluded they covered Campbell with ridicule.
With the money which the publication of this wretched book brought him Campbell now afforded himself a long break. He conceived the idea of a classical pilgrimage in Italy as likely not only to benefit his health but to furnish him with materials for a new poem. A change in the tide of his affairs carried him however to Paris, and he never set eyes on the sunny land. He arrived in the French capital in July, when the weather was so hot that he told the Parisians theirbeau climatwas fit only for devils. He was eagerly welcomed by many of the Polish exiles, who gave him, what he did not dislike, a grand dinner, at which Prince Czartoryski proclaimed him ‘the pleader, the champion, the zealous and unwearied apostle of our holy cause.’ He heard Louis Philippe deliver his address to the Peers and Deputies, and made a ‘dispassionate enquiry’ into the characteristics of French beauty, which resulted in the conviction that the French ladies have no beauty at all! He began work on a Geography of Classical History, rising every morning with the sun, and studying for twelve hours a day. Presently some French friends interested him inthe recent conquest and colonisation of Algiers, and, with his characteristic caprice, he decided to go there at once and write a book on the colony.
He landed in Algiers on the 18th of September (1834) to find Captain St Palais translating his poems for publication. ‘Prancing gloriously’ on an Arabian barb, he felt as if he had dropt into a new planet. The vegetation gave him ecstatic delight, and he was greatly elated when he discovered some ruins unmentioned by previous travellers. As usual he began to harass himself about money, but the announcement opportunely arrived that Telford had left him £1000, and he resolved to go on with his tour. He covered the entire coast from Bona to Oran, and penetrated as far as Mascara, seventy miles into the interior. For several nights he slept under the tents of the Arabs, and he made much of hearing a lion roar in his ‘native savage freedom.’ But all this, and a great deal more, may be read in his ‘Letters from the South,’ an informative and even lively work in two volumes, which appeared originally in theNew Monthly. Campbell’s account of Algerian scenery is so glowingly eloquent that if unforeseen objects had not diverted his attention, the African tour would probably have formed the subject of a new poem. As it was, the tour remained poetically barren, save for some lines on a dead eagle and ajeu d’espritwritten for the British Consul’s children.
Campbell was back in Paris in May 1835, and after ‘a long and gracious audience’ with Louis Philippe, he returned to London to tell more stories than Tom Coryatt, and enjoy a temporary fame as an African traveller. The tour seems, however, to have done him harm rather than good. Redding says he was astonished at the change in his appearance. He looked a dozen years older; he was in unusually low spirits, and he kept harping upon his disordered constitution. From this date onwards the record of his career is not worthdwelling upon in any detail. He suffered greatly from spells of ill-health; he shifted fitfully from one residence to another; he visited this place and that place; and with constant cackle about his busy pen, did almost nothing. Under these circumstances the briefest summary of the remaining years of his life will suffice.
Upon his return from Paris in 1835 he settled down at York Chambers, St James’ Street, where he prepared his ‘Letters from the South’ and arranged about the new edition of his poems to be illustrated by Turner. In May 1836 he started for Scotland, where he remained for four months, spending, he says, the happiest time he had ever spent in the land of his fathers. On former visits he had always been hurried and haunted by the necessity of sending manuscripts or proofs to London; but now he was his own master. At Glasgow he dined with the Campbell Club, and got over the function ‘very well,’ having left Professor Wilson and other choice spirits to prolong the carousal into the small hours.Apropos, a story is told of Wilson and Campbell which is too good to be missed. The poet’s cousin, Mr Gray, had a bewitchingly pretty maid, who had set Campbell—so he says—dreaming about the heroines of romance. The day after the dinner, Wilson, with other members of the Club, called at the house while the Gray family were absent. ‘I rang to get refreshment for them,’ says Campbell, ‘and fair Margaret brought it in. The Professor looked at her with so much admiration that I told him in Latin to contain his raptures, and he did so; but rose and walked round the room like a lion pacing his cage. Before parting he said, “Cawmel, that might be your ain Gertrude. Could not you just ring and get me a sight of that vision of beauty again?” “No, no,” I told him, “get you gone, you Moral Philosophy loon, and give my best respects to your wife and daughters.”’ As a set-off to this, it may be recorded that Campbell wassadly dismayed at seeing so many of the Glasgow ‘bonnie lassies’ going about with bare feet. ‘I am constantly,’ he says, ‘preaching against this national disgrace to my countrymen. It is a barbarism so unlike, so unworthy of, the otherwise civilised character of the commonality, which is the most intelligent in Europe; and it is a disgrace unpalliated by poverty in Glasgow, where the industrious are exceedingly well-off.’ The Club dinner was followed by a meeting of the Polish Association, at which Campbell gave a forty-five minutes’ speech that, by his own report, caused quite a sensation. He went to hear his old College chum, Dr Wardlaw, preach, and afterwards compared him with Chalmers. Chalmers, he said, ‘carries his audience by storm, but Wardlaw is a reasoning and well-informed person,’ a double-edged compliment to the more famous divine which Campbell probably did not see.