That valuable and high-spirited young man was humbled—after a struggle which concealed misfortunes—to reveal his situation and in sickness to receive assistance from one whose advancement and re-establishment in life he had planned but a few weeks before, when no reverse of fortune was dreaded. His situation required more than my resources were adequate to impart, but still it prevented his feelings being deeply wounded by addressing strangers. I did not regret my own share of the hardships, but I acknowledge that in those days of darkness and distress I had hardly spirit to write asingle letter. I have often left the sick-bed of my friend for a room of my own which wanted the heat of a fire in the month of January, and on the borders of Denmark.
That valuable and high-spirited young man was humbled—after a struggle which concealed misfortunes—to reveal his situation and in sickness to receive assistance from one whose advancement and re-establishment in life he had planned but a few weeks before, when no reverse of fortune was dreaded. His situation required more than my resources were adequate to impart, but still it prevented his feelings being deeply wounded by addressing strangers. I did not regret my own share of the hardships, but I acknowledge that in those days of darkness and distress I had hardly spirit to write asingle letter. I have often left the sick-bed of my friend for a room of my own which wanted the heat of a fire in the month of January, and on the borders of Denmark.
The failure of this enterprise was obviously a great disappointment to Campbell. The prospects of the tour had seemed to him peculiarly enticing, and he never ceased to deplore the necessity which led to its being abandoned.
Another acquaintance made at this time happily bore some fruit. A certain Anthony M’Cann, ‘a brave United Irishman,’ had, with other unfortunate fellow-countrymen who were engaged in the Rebellion of 1798, taken refuge on the banks of the Elbe. Campbell fell in with him and his fellow exiles, and passed a good part of his leisure in their society. The literary result was that pathetic if somewhat overrated song, ‘The Exile of Erin,’ which Campbell wrote after one evening finding Tony M’Cann more than usually depressed. Many years later an absurd claim to the authorship of this song was raised on behalf of an Irishman named Nugent, whose sister swore to having seen it in her brother’s handwriting before the date of Campbell’s continental visit. Campbell was naturally pained by the accusation, but he produced irrefragable proofs of his title to the song; and although the charge of plagiarism was revived after his death, there is not the slightest ground for doubting his authorship. The subject is fully dealt with by Beattie, but to discuss it nowadays would be altogether superfluous.
Before leaving home, Campbell had entered into an agreement with Mr Perry of theMorning Chronicleto send him something for his columns, and ‘The Exile of Erin’ was published by him on the 28th of January 1801. In a prefatory note the author expressed the hope that the song might induce Parliament to ‘extend their benevolence to those unfortunate men, whom delusion and error have doomed to exile, but who sigh for a return totheir native homes.’ Campbell’s sympathy with the Irish exiles appears to have been as strong as his sympathy with the Poles. He adopted as his seal a shamrock with the motto ‘Erin-go-Bragh,’ and his enthusiasm was so flamboyant that on his arrival in Edinburgh he was actually in some danger of being imprisoned for conspiring with General Moreau in Austria and with the Irish in Hamburg to land a French army in Ireland! Campbell might well be astonished at the idea of ‘a boy like me’ conspiring against the British Empire. Subsequently he made valiant efforts to obtain leave for M’Cann to return home. These efforts were unsuccessful, but he lived to see the exile established in Hamburg, through a fortunate marriage, as one of its wealthiest citizens.
During his residence at Altona, Campbell, when not engaged in composition, seems to have busied himself chiefly in trying to plumb the depths of German philosophy. He says—and he is ‘almost ashamed to confess it’—that for twelve consecutive weeks he did nothing but study Kant. Distrusting his own imperfect acquaintance with German, he took a disciple of the master through his philosophy, but found nothing to reward the labour. His metaphysics, he remarked, were mere innovations upon the received meaning of words, and conveyed no more instruction than the writings of Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas. Of German philosophy in general Campbell entertained a very poor opinion. The language in his view was much richer in the field ofBelles Lettres; and he claimed to have got more good from reading Schiller, Wieland, and Bürger than from any of the severer studies which he undertook at this time. Wieland he regarded with especial favour: he could not conceive ‘a more perfect poet.’ Of Goethe and Lessing, strangely enough, he makes practically no mention.
These details about Campbell’s doings are gatheredmainly from his letters to Richardson. He was still looking forward eagerly to the arrival of his friend; and when he wrote it was generally with the object of keeping his enthusiasm awake by glowing descriptions of Hungary, which he characterised as a ‘poetical paradise,’ the country ‘worthy of our best research,’ all the rest of Germany being only so much ‘vulgar knowledge.’ Campbell’s well-laid schemes were, however, destined to be upset, and in a way which he evidently never anticipated. A great political crisis was at hand. England had determined to detach Denmark from the coalition by force of arms, and on the 12th of March the British fleet left Yarmouth Roads for the Sound. Altona being on the Danish shore was no longer eligible as a residence for English subjects, and Campbell, having already had more than enough of the pomp and circumstance of war, resolved to return home. He took a berth in theRoyal George, bound for Leith, and the vessel dropped slowly down the river to Gluckstadt, in front of the Danish batteries. The passage proved very tedious, and in the end, instead of getting to Leith, theRoyal Georgewas spied by a Danish privateer and chased into Yarmouth. This was early in April, and on the 7th of the month Campbell arrived in London, where, through the good graces of Perry, he was at once made free of the best literary society of the day.
In connection with the continental sojourn thus hurriedly terminated, it remains now to consider the literary product of the nine months’ absence from home. Like many another poet, Campbell will be remembered, if he is remembered at all, by his shorter pieces; and it is interesting to note that of these the best were written or at any rate conceived on alien soil. The ‘Exile of Erin’ has already been mentioned. ‘Hohenlinden’ did not appear until 1802, but there is every reason for believing that it was at least outlinedshortly after the date of the occurrences which it so vividly pictures. Galt tells an amusing story of its rejection by a Greenock newspaper as not being ‘up to the editor’s standard’; but it took the fancy of Sir Walter Scott. When Washington Irving was at Abbotsford in 1817, Scott observed to him: ‘And there’s that glorious little poem, too, of “Hohenlinden”; after he [Campbell] had written it he did not seem to think much of it, but considered some of it d—d drum and trumpet lines. I got him to recite it to me, and I believe that the delight I felt and expressed had an effect in inducing him to print it.’ The anecdote related by Scott in connection with Leyden is well-known. Campbell and Leyden, as we have seen, had quarrelled. When Scott repeated ‘Hohenlinden’ to Leyden, the latter said: ‘Dash it, man, tell the fellow I hate him, but, dash it, he has written the finest verses that have been published these fifty years.’ Scott did not fail to deliver the message. ‘Tell Leyden,’ said Campbell, ‘that I detest him, but that I know the value of his critical approbation.’
Curiously enough, Carlyle, quoting in 1814 a poem of Leyden’s on the victory of Wellington at Assaye, remarks that ‘if there is anything in existence that surpasses this it must be “Hohenlinden”—but what’s like “Hohenlinden”?’ Leyden’s verses in truth read somewhat tamely, but Carlyle’s criticism of poetry was not to be depended upon, especially at this early date, when he preferred Campbell to either Byron or Scott. His impassioned liking for ‘Hohenlinden’ was, however, well justified by its merits. It has been described as the only representation of a modern battle which possesses either interest or sublimity. Sublimity is a word of which we are not particularly fond in these days, perhaps because it was so freely used by critics a hundred years ago. We prefer simplicity; and it is surely the simplicity of‘Hohenlinden’ which mainly accounts for its effect. Each stanza is a picture—not a finished etching, but rather an ‘impression’; no delicate shades of colour, but broad strokes of red and black on white. No word is wasted, no scene is elaborated; and if what is depicted is all pretty obvious—well, blood is red, and gunpowder is sulphurous, and there is little room for invention. To call it great art would be absurd; it is excellent scene-painting.
Next to ‘Hohenlinden’ among the pieces of this period must be placed ‘Ye Mariners of England’ and ‘The Soldier’s Dream.’ The first was written at Altona when rumours of England’s intention to break up the coalition began to spread. It was printed by Perry above the signature of ‘Amator Patriæ,’ with an intimation that it was avowedly an imitation of the seventeenth century sea-song, ‘Ye Mariners of England,’ which Campbell used to sing at musical soirees in Edinburgh. It is one of the most stirring of his war pieces. ‘The Soldier’s Dream,’ beginning ‘Our bugles sang truce,’ was not given to the public until the spring of 1804, but it is generally believed to have been written at Altona, and in any case it was inspired by the events which the poet witnessed during his residence at Ratisbon. Several other pieces were composed or revised at this time, but they are of little importance. Byron declared that the ‘Lines on leaving a Scene in Bavaria’ were ‘perfectly magnificent,’ but the praise is grotesquely extravagant. The lines certainly bear traces of genuine feeling, but the piece as a whole is obscure and unfinished.
The famous ‘Battle of the Baltic’ was not published until 1809, but as it was suggested to Campbell by the sight of the Danish batteries as he sailed past them on his way home from Hamburg, it will be convenient to deal with it here. The subject of the poem is known in history as the Battle of Copenhagen, which was foughton the 2nd of April 1801. Campbell sent a first draft of it to Scott in 1805. This draft consisted of twenty-seven stanzas, while the published version has only eight. It has been remarked that if the original form had been adhered to, ‘The Battle of the Baltic’ might have become a popular ballad for a time and then been forgotten, whereas, in its condensed form, it is one of the finest and most enduring war-songs in the language. Its metre, which theEdinburgh Reviewthought ‘strange and unfortunate,’ is really one of its merits. The lines of unequal length relieve it of monotony; the sharp, short final line of each stanza being indeed an excellent invention. The poem has defects in plenty, which have been often enough pointed out: not a stanza would pass muster to-day; but it would be ungracious to criticise too severely one of the few vigorous battle pieces we have.
During his sojourn on the Continent Campbell had suffered incredible hardships, hardships such as he hesitated to divulge even to his friends. Now he was to experience an agreeable change—a transition from ‘the tedium of cold and gloomy evenings, unconsoled by the comforts of life, and from the barbarity of savages (where an Englishman was not sure of his life) to the elegant society of London and pleasures of every description.’ He appears to have landed with little more than the Scotsman’s proverbial half-crown in his pocket, but Perry, a Scot like himself, proved the friend in need. ‘I will be all that you could wish me to be,’ he said, and he kept his word. Calling upon him one day, Campbell was shown a letter from Lord Holland, inviting him to dine at the King of Clubs, a survival of the institution where Johnson used to lay down his little senate laws. ‘Thither with his lordship,’ says Campbell, writing in 1837, ‘I accordingly repaired, and it was an era in my life. There I met, in all their glory and feather, Mackintosh, Rogers, the Smiths, Sydney, and others. In the retrospect of a long life I know no man whose acuteness of intellect gave me a higher idea of human nature than Mackintosh; and without disparaging his benevolence—for he had an excellent heart—I may say that I never saw a man who so reconciled me to hereditary aristocracy like the benignant Lord Holland.’ Of Lady Holland, Campbell had an equally high opinion. She was, he said, a ‘formidable woman, cleverer byseveral degrees than Buonaparte,’ whose name, it is interesting to note, occurs again and again in his letters.
Among the other friends he made at this time were Dr Burney and Sir John Moore, Mrs Inchbald and Mrs Barbauld, J. P. Kemble, and Mrs Siddons. From a man so notoriously proud and reserved as Kemble he says he looked for little notice; but Kemble’s behaviour at their first meeting undeceived him. ‘He spoke with me in another room, and, with a grace more enchanting than the favour itself, presented me with the freedom of Drury Lane Theatre. His manner was so expressive of dignified benevolence that I thought myself transported to the identity of Horatio, with my friend Hamlet giving me a welcome.’ Kemble’s condescending kindness he ill-requited in 1817 with a set of wordy, inflated ‘valedictory stanzas,’ in which he displayed all his poetical apparatus of ‘conscious bosoms,’ ‘classic dome,’ ‘supernal light,’ and so forth. Mrs Siddons he describes as a woman of the first order, who sang some airs of her own composition with incomparable sweetness. In Rogers he found ‘one of the most refined characters, whose manners and writing may be said to correspond.’ Everybody and everything, in fact, delighted him; the pains of the past were forgotten, and the future began to look brighter than it had ever done before.
Unfortunately, just as he had got into this happy state of mind, he was startled by the news of his father’s death. He had heard nothing of the old man’s illness, and bitterly reproached himself for having left him in his last days. It was, however, some comfort to him to learn that Dr Anderson had watched at his bedside, and, when all was over, had seen his remains laid reverently in the cemetery of St John’s Chapel. He died as he had lived, pious and placid, full of religious hope as of years. Campbell went home to console his mother and sisters, and to settheir affairs in order. His father’s annuity from the Glasgow Merchants’ Society died with him; the sisters were good-looking but valetudinarian, and Campbell could only promise that if a new edition of ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ succeeded he would furnish a house in which they might keep boarders and teach school. Once in the house, he told them, they would have to trust in Providence.
The prospect certainly did not look promising, either for Campbell or his dependents. A thousand subscribers were required to make an edition of ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ safe and profitable, and as that number was not to be obtained in the north, Campbell was advised to go to London to canvass a larger public. Meanwhile he had to make both ends meet, and in default of precise information we must surmise that he turned out a deal of joyless, uncongenial work. Nor, with all his industry, did he succeed in relieving his straitened circumstances. The whole year was one of great privation, when the common necessaries of life were being sold at an exorbitant price, and ‘meal-mob’ rioters were parading the streets and breaking into the bakers’ shops. People who had much more substantial resources than Campbell felt the temporary embarrassment. What Campbell should have done it would not be easy to say; what he did do it would be quite easy to censure. In spite of all his fine friends, for all the lavish promises of Perry and others, he was misguided enough to borrow money—on ‘Judaic terms’—with, of course, the inevitable result. Beattie does not mention the sum borrowed, but he says it was nearly doubled by enormous interest, and could only be repaid by excessive application. Campbell was always notoriously careless in money matters, and even the concern he naturally felt as a devoted son and brother can hardly excuse the imprudence with which he added to his obligations at this period. But prudence, as Coleridgeonce pointed out, is not usually a plant of poetic growth.
In the midst of all his cares and anxieties, Campbell found some solace in the society of such literary and other friends as the Rev. Archibald Alison—the ‘Man of Taste’—Professor Dugald Stewart, Lord Jeffrey, Dr Anderson, and the family of Grahames, of whom the author of ‘The Sabbath’ was the best known member. The fact of his having been at the seat of war gave his conversation a peculiar interest, and his pilgrimage generally was regarded as a subject of no little curiosity. His old pupil, Lord Cunninghame, remarks upon the change which his continental visit had evidently effected in his view of public affairs and the accepted order of things at home. Whatever youthful, hot-headed Republican notions he may have indulged before he went abroad, we gather that he had come back considerably sobered down, and now he deigned to express—he was still very young!—a decided preference for the British Constitution.
But literature was after all of more importance to him than politics. Such plans as he had formed at this time he freely discussed with Sir Walter Scott, from whom he received much encouragement and good advice. Lord Minto was another friend who proved of value. Minto had just returned from Vienna, where he had been acting as Envoy Extraordinary, and with the view perhaps of hearing his version of recent events in Germany, he invited the poet to his house at Castle Minto, some forty-five miles from Edinburgh. The visit turned out in every way agreeable, and when Campbell left, it was with the understanding that he would join Lord Minto in London in the course of the parliamentary session. A London visit promised many advantages, among them the opportunity of securing subscribers for the new edition of ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ and Campbell returned to Edinburgh to makehis preparations. He travelled overland, spending a few days in Liverpool with Currie, the biographer of Burns, and while there convulsing his friends by the nervousness he displayed on horseback. When he reached London he found that Minto had prepared a ‘poet’s room’ for him at his house in Hanover Square, and there he took up his residence for the season, giving, it is understood, occasional service as secretary in return for the hospitality.
He says he found Minto’s conversation very instructive, but Minto was a Tory of the Burke school, which Campbell regarded as inimical to political progress. Campbell naïvely remarks in one of his letters that at an early period of their acquaintance they had a discussion on the subject of politics, when he thought of giving Minto his political confession of faith. If it should not meet with Minto’s approval, then the intimacy might end. Campbell does not appear to have rehearsed his whole political creed, but he went so far as to tell Minto that he was a Republican, and that his opinion of the practicability of a Republican form of government had not been materially affected by all that had happened in the French Revolution. Lord Minto was much too sensible a man to disturb himself about the political views of his overweening young guest, which, with a gentle sarcasm apparently unobserved by the poet, he set down as ‘candid errors of judgment.’ Still, there must have been some lively debates around the table now and again. The correspondence makes special mention of Touissant, the negro chieftain of San Domingo, as a subject of frequent wrangling. Campbell looked upon Touissant as a second Kosciusko, while Minto could only dwell upon the horrors that were likely to follow upon his achievements in the cause of so-called freedom.
But these heated discussions were confined mainly to the morning hours. Campbell’s chief concerns layin other directions. Lord Minto left him very much master of his own time, and his literary friendships were now revived and extended at Perry’s table, at the King of Clubs, and elsewhere. Minto introduced him to Wyndham, whom he describes as ‘a Moloch among the fallen war-makers,’ to Lord Malmesbury and Lord Pelham—‘plain, affable men’—and to others. He met Malthus, whose theories he cordially supported, and found him ‘most ingenious and pleasant, very sensible and good.’ He was much flattered by the friendly notice of Mrs Siddons, and when the Kembles admitted him to their family circle, he announced in a burst of flunkeyism that he had attained the acme of his ambitions. With Telford the engineer, one of his Edinburgh patrons, and a genuine if not very judicious lover of poetry, he spent many of his leisure hours. Telford was intimate with the Secretary of State, and in one of his letters he hints to Alison that he may take some steps to direct the Minister’s practical attention to the ‘young Pope.’
Whether Telford carried out his intention does not appear; but at any rate there was no patronising of the young Pope, who continued to occupy his poet’s room, and presently began to tell his friends in the north that he ardently longed to get away from his present scene of ‘hurry and absurdity,’ to the refined and select society of Edinburgh. Many young fellows in his position would have counted themselves lucky at being housed in such distinguished quarters; but Campbell was in a low state of health at the time, and that doubtless accounted for his aggravated fits of despondency. In any case he had his wish about returning to Edinburgh. At the close of the parliamentary session Minto started for Scotland, taking Campbell with him, and by the end of June he had exchanged his poet’s room for the much humbler abode of his mother and sisters in Alison Square.
During this second visit to London he seems to have written very little, but what he did write has retained at least a certain school-book popularity. There was ‘Hohenlinden,’ finished at this time, and of which we have already spoken, and there was ‘Lochiel’s Warning,’ a ‘furious war prophecy,’ in the composition of which he says he became greatly agitated and excited. ‘Lochiel,’ like ‘Hohenlinden,’ had been intended for the new edition of his poems, but, at the unexplained request of his friends, both pieces were printed anonymously and dedicated to Alison. Both had run the gauntlet of private criticism before being submitted to the public. When the rough draft of ‘Lochiel’ was handed to Minto—who with Currie and other friends criticised several successive drafts—he made some objection to the ‘vulgarity’ of hanging, and this objection was supported later on when the manuscript was passed about in Edinburgh. But Campbell was determined to show how his hero might swing with sufficient dignity in a good cause; and his objectors were silenced when he demonstrated to them that Lochiel had a brother who actually suffered death by means of the rope.
Of course his friends were not all so hypercritical as Minto. When he read ‘Lochiel’ to Mrs Dugald Stewart, she laid her hand on his head with the remark that it would bear another wreath of laurel yet. Campbell said this made a stronger impression upon him than if she had spoken in a strain of the loftiest laudation; nay, he declared it to have been one of the principal incidents in his life that gave him confidence in his own powers. Telford was even more enthusiastic. ‘I am absolutely vain of Thomas Campbell,’ he says in a letter to Alison. ‘There never was anything like him—he is the very spirit of Parnassus. Have you seen his “Lochiel”? He will surpass everything ancient or modern—your Pindars, your Drydens, and your Grays.I expect nothing short of a Scotch Milton, a Shakespeare, or something more than either.’
To transcribe such stuff is really a tax on the biographer’s patience. It was in this atmosphere of foolish adulation that Campbell spent those very years when a young man most needs the tonic air of rigorous criticism. Such coddling and cossetting never yet made a poet. Nothing that Campbell ever did justifies a panegyric like that just quoted; least of all is it justified by ‘Lochiel’s Warning,’ a bit of first-rate fustian which would assuredly be forgotten but for its ‘Coming events cast their shadows before,’ and a certain rhetorical fluency, which—with its convenient length—make it a favourite with teachers of elocution. Campbell told Minto that he was tempted to throw the poem away in vexation at his inability to perfect it, and Scott himself had to insist on his retaining what were considered its finest lines. A writer, above all a poet, ought surely toknow—as Tennyson, as Stevenson knew—when he has done a good thing; when he doesnotknow, his friends are ill-advised in keeping his effusions from the flames. Scott, with his usual generosity, called the idea of the line quoted above a ‘noble thought, nobly expressed.’ The thought is Schiller’s; and whatever ‘nobility’ there may be in the expression is spoilt in a great measure by the jingle of the first line of the couplet—
’Tis the sunset of lifegives me mystical lore.
’Tis the sunset of lifegives me mystical lore.
’Tis the sunset of lifegives me mystical lore.
Even if this were not the case, its cachet of nobility could hardly survive the ridiculous story told by Beattie. Campbell, according to this circumstantial tale, was at Minto. He had gone early to bed and was reflecting on the Wizard’s warning when he fell asleep. During the night he suddenly awoke repeating: ‘Events to come cast their shadows before.’ It was the very image for which he had been waiting a week.
He rang the bell more than once with increased force. At last, surprised and annoyed by so unseasonable a peal, the servant appeared. The poet was sitting with one foot on the bed and the other on the floor, with an air of mixed impatience and inspiration. ‘Sir, are you ill?’ inquired the servant. ‘Ill! never better in my life. Leave the candle and oblige me with a cup of tea as soon as possible.’ He then started to his feet, seized hold of the pen, and wrote down the ‘happy thought,’ but as he wrote changed the words ‘events to come’ into ‘coming events,’ as it now stands in the text.
He rang the bell more than once with increased force. At last, surprised and annoyed by so unseasonable a peal, the servant appeared. The poet was sitting with one foot on the bed and the other on the floor, with an air of mixed impatience and inspiration. ‘Sir, are you ill?’ inquired the servant. ‘Ill! never better in my life. Leave the candle and oblige me with a cup of tea as soon as possible.’ He then started to his feet, seized hold of the pen, and wrote down the ‘happy thought,’ but as he wrote changed the words ‘events to come’ into ‘coming events,’ as it now stands in the text.
This is not exactly a case ofmons parturit murem; it is more like the woman in the parable who beat up all her friends to rejoice with her in the discovery of her trinket; still more like the proud bantam who disturbs the whole neighbourhood for joy that a chick has been egged into the world. It would be difficult indeed to find a more striking example of much ado about nothing.
Sometime during the month of August Campbell had an intimation from Lord Minto that he was coming to Edinburgh, and would expect the poet to accompany him when he went south. Minto came, and Campbell left with him. In a letter to Scott Campbell says he must make the stay a short one, because he has arranged to take lessons in drawing from Nasmyth, but of that scheme nothing further is heard. Redding avers that Campbell could not use a pencil in the delineation of the simplest natural object, and instances an attempt to draw a cat which looked very like a crocodile. On the way to Minto the party halted at Melrose to allow Campbell to inspect the Abbey, with which he says he was pleased to enthusiasm. Scotland in the eleventh century, he exclaims sarcastically, could erect the Abbey of Melrose, and in the nineteenth could not finish the College of Edinburgh. He comments upon the fine, wild, yet light outline of its architecture, and says his mind was filled with romance at beholding ‘in the very form and ornaments of the pile, proofs of its forest originthat lead us back to the darkest of Gothic ages.’ When they arrived at Minto they were welcomed by Scott, among other visitors; and Campbell retired early to spend the evening with Hawkins’ Life of Johnson, in which he found ‘some valuable stuff in the midst of superabundant nonsense.’
On the whole, he does not seem to have been very happy at Minto during this visit. Lord Minto’s politeness, he tells Alison, only twitches him with the sin of ingratitude for not being more contented under his hospitable roof. But a lord’s house, fashionable strangers, luxuriously-furnished saloons, and winding galleries where he can hardly find his own room, make him as wretched as he can be, ‘without being atutor.’ Everyone, it is true, treats him civilly; the servants are assiduous in setting him right when he loses his way; but degraded as he is to a state of second childhood in this ‘new world,’ it would be insulting his fallen dignity to smile hysterically and pretend to be happy. All of which is sheer fudge—nothing more than the splenetic utterance of anenfant gaté.
Happily, Campbell had business at home, and there was no reason why he should sit by the waters of Minto and sigh when he thought of Edinburgh. The new edition of his poems was now in the press, and he returned to the capital to revise the proofs. While he was thus engaged, other work of a less agreeable kind divided his attention. An Edinburgh bookseller had commissioned him to prepare ‘The Annals of Great Britain,’ a sort of continuation of Smollett, which he contracted to finish in three volumes octavo, at £100 per volume. The work was to be ‘anonymous and consequently inglorious’—a labour, in fact, ‘little superior to compilation, and more connected with profit than reputation.’ It was a distinct drop for the author of ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ and he knew it. Indeed, such was his sensitiveness on the point that he boundhis employer to secrecy, and tried to hide the fact from even his most intimate friends. One cannot help comparing this behaviour with that of Tennyson; Campbell falling, even in his own estimation, below his very moderate level, deliberately doing work of which he was ashamed; Tennyson, perhaps going to the other extreme, sacrificing his worldly happiness and, it is to be feared, in part the health of the woman he loved, to the pursuit of his ideals. But Tennyson was a poet.
‘The Annals of Great Britain’ was not published until some years after this, but the book may be dismissed at once. It was little more than a dry catalogue of events chronologically arranged, a mere piece of journeyman’s work done to turn a penny, without accuracy of information or the slightest regard for style. Campbell told Minto that the publisher did not desire that he should make the work more than passable, and it is barely passable. It is quite forgotten now; indeed, a writer inFraser’s Magazinefor November 1844 declares that even then the most intelligent bookseller in London was unaware of its existence. Redding says that the author’s own library was innocent of a copy.
While Campbell was hammering away at this perfunctory performance in Edinburgh, some whisper of honours and independence awaiting him in London seems to have reached his ears. It was only a whisper, but the time had clearly come when he must make up his mind once for all about the future. By his own admission, poetry had now deserted him; he had lost both the faculty and the inclination for writing it. Dull prose, he saw, must henceforward be his stand-by. As a market for dull prose, London undoubtedly ranked before Edinburgh; and so he took the plunge, though he had no fixed engagement in London, no actual business there except to superintend the printing of his poems. It was a bold venture, but in the end itprobably turned out as well as any other venture would have done.
On the way south he was again the guest of Currie at Liverpool, where he remained ‘drinking with this one and dining with that one’ for ten days. Then he visited the pottery district of Staffordshire, where an old college friend was employed. It was his first real experience of the ‘chaos of smoke,’ and he did not like it. The country, he remarked, for all its furnaces, was not a ‘hot-bed of letters,’ though he had met with a character who enjoyed a reputation for learning by carrying a Greek Testament to church. The people were a heavy, plodding, unrefined race, but they had good hearts, and what was just as important, they gave good dinners. ‘These honest folks showed me all the symptoms of their affection that could be represented by the symbols of meat and drink, and if ale, wine, bacon, and pudding could have made up a stranger’s paradise I should have found it among the Potteries.’ One untoward thing happened: Campbell lost his wig. For it should have been mentioned that just before he left Edinburgh, finding that his hair was getting alarmingly thin, he had adopted the peruke, which he continued to wear for the rest of his life. A bewigged poet of twenty-five must have been a somewhat singular spectacle in those days, but Campbell made up for the antiquated head-gear by a notable spruceness in other ways. He wore a blue coat with bright, gilt buttons, a white waistcoat and cravat, buff nankeens and white stockings, with shoes and silver buckles—a perfect scheme of colour.
In this gay attire, though ‘agonised’ by the want of his wig, he arrived in London on the 7th of March (1802). Telford at once took charge of him by making him his guest at the Salopian Hotel, Charing Cross. Of Telford’s admiration for Campbell as a poet we have already learnt something; his opinion of Campbell as a man was apparently not quite so enthusiastic. Nothingis recorded of Campbell’s conduct during the former visits to London, but what are we to infer from the fact that Telford and Alison now united to ‘advise and remonstrate with the young poet, at a moment when he was again surrounded by all the seductive allurements of a great capital’? Alison sent him a letter of paternal counsel for the regulation of his life and studies; and Telford confided to Alison that he had asked Campbell to live with him in order to have him constantly in check. If Campbell really had any leaning towards social or other extravagances, it was promptly counteracted by an event of which we shall have to speak presently.
Meanwhile, Telford does not appear to have helped him much by introducing him to ‘all sorts of novelty.’ In fact, if we may believe himself, Campbell did not take at all kindly to London and its ways. Life there is ‘absolutely a burning fever’; he hates its unnatural and crowded society; it robs him of both health and composure. He cannot settle himself to anything; he has one eternal round of invitations, and has got into a style of living which suits neither his purse nor his inclination. Sleep has become a stranger to him; every morning finds him with a headache. Study and composition are out of the question. He sits ‘under the ear-crashing influence of ten thousand chariot wheels’; when night comes on he has no solace but his pipe, and he drops into bed like an old sinner dropping into the grave.
Campbell was very likely homesick, but his correspondence and the evidence of his intimates put it beyond doubt that he was not cut out for society. Indeed he expressly admits it himself. Fashionable folks, he exclaims in one of his letters, have a slang of talk among themselves as unintelligible to ordinary mortals as the lingo of the gipsies, and perhaps not so amusing if one did understand it. A man of his lowlybreeding feels in their company something of what Burke calls proud humility, or rather humble contempt. As for conversation with these minions ofle beau monde, he says it is not worth courting since their minds are not so much filled as dilated. This was another of Campbell’s many foolish utterances of the kind. It must have been made in a fit of spleen, for Campbell, like Burns, could dinner very comfortably with a lord when the meeting was likely to favour his own interests.
Johnson declared of Charing Cross that the full tide of human existence was there, but Campbell had nothing of Johnson’s affection for the streets. He objected to the noise because it made conversation impossible, or at least difficult. Hence it was that, ‘the roaring vortex’ having proved unendurable to him, he now changed his quarters to a dingy den of his own at 61 South Molton Street. Here he went on preparing the ‘Annals’ and the new edition of his poems, toiling with the stolid regularity of the mill-horse for ten hours a day. The new edition of the poems was published in the beginning of June, when his spirits had sunk to ‘the very ground-floor of despondency.’ It was a handsome quarto, and the printing, in the author’s opinion, was so well done that, except one splendid book from Paris, dedicated to ‘that villain Buonaparte,’ there was nothing finer in Europe. It was really the seventh edition of ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ but it contained several engravings and some altogether new pieces, among which, in addition to ‘Lochiel’ and ‘Hohenlinden,’ were the once bepraised ‘Lines on Visiting a Scene in Argyllshire’ (the old family estate of Kirnan), and ‘The Beech Tree’s Petition.’
In the course of some pleasantry at the house of Rogers, Campbell once remarked that marriage in nine cases out of ten looks like madness. His own case was clearly not the tenth, at any rate from a prudential pointof view. The sale of his new volume had given a temporary fillip to his exchequer, and with the proverbial rashness of his class, he began to think of taking a wife. His reasons were certainly more substantial than his finances. He says that without a home of his own he found it impossible to keep to his work. When he lived alone in lodgings he became so melancholy that for whole days together he did nothing, and could not even stir out of doors. In the company of a certain lady he had found for the first time in his life a ‘perpetual serenity of mind,’ and now he was determined to hazard everything for such a prize. It was a big hazard, and he foresaw the objections. His infatuation, he remarks to Currie, will inevitably set many an empty head a-shaking. But happiness and prosperity do not, in his view, depend upon frigid maxims; and the strong motive he will now have to exertion he regards as ‘worth uncounted thousands’ for encountering the ills of existence.
The lady for whom Campbell thus braved the uncertain future was a daughter of his maternal cousin, Mr Robert Sinclair, who had been a wealthy Greenock merchant and magistrate, and was now, after having suffered some financial reverses, living retired in London. She bore ‘the romantic name of Matilda,’ and is described by Campbell as a beautiful, lively, and lady-like woman, who could make the best cup of Mocha in the world. Beattie remarks upon the Spanish cast of her features: her complexion was dark, her figure spare, graceful, and below the middle height, and when she smiled her eyes gave an expression of tender melancholy to her face. Like Campbell, she had been abroad, and it is said that at the Paris Opera she attracted great attention in her favourite head-dress of turban and feathers. The Turkish Ambassador, who was in a neighbouring box, declared that he had seen nothing so beautiful in Europe. We have learned thatCampbell himself was handsome, but Mr Sinclair naturally did not regard good looks as a guarantee of an assured income, and he stoutly opposed the match. The prospective husband was not, however, to be put off by talk about the precarious profits of literature. When was he likely to be in a better position to marry? He had few or no debts; the subscriptions to his quarto were still coming in; the ‘Annals’ was to bring him £300; and at that very moment he had a fifty pound note in his desk.
Mr Sinclair remained unmoved by this recital of wealth, but finding that his daughter’s health was suffering, he waived his objections, and arrangements were made for the marriage to take place at once. Campbell now adopted every means in his power to make money. He wrote to his friend Richardson, requesting him to take prompt measures for levying contributions among the Edinburgh booksellers, the stockholders of the new edition. ‘In the name of Providence,’ he demands in desperation, ‘how much can you scrape out of my books in Edinburgh? If you can dispose of a hundred volumes at fifteen shillings each, it will raise me £75. I shall require £25 to bring me down to Scotland … and under £50 I cannot furnish a house, which, at all events, I am determined to do.’ This request was made only nine days before the marriage, which was celebrated at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on the 10th of October 1803—not September, as Beattie and Campbell himself have it. After a short honeymoon trip, the pair returned to town and settled down in Pimlico, where the father-in-law had considerately furnished a suite of rooms for them.
Campbell’s idea had been to make his home in some ‘cottage retreat’ near Edinburgh. He did not want society or callers; he wanted to be sober and industrious; therefore he would live in the country if he should have to go ten miles in search of a box. Hedwells lovingly on this prospect in letters to his friends; but although he did not abandon the notion for some time, it never came to anything. As a matter of fact, his new responsibilities led to engagements which practically chained him to London; to say nothing of the circumstance that he had joined the Volunteers, in view of the threatened invasion of which he sung. Moreover, he had got into some trouble with his Edinburgh publisher, and probably he felt that his presence in or near the capital would only add to his personal annoyance. How different his after life might have been had he carried out his original intention, it is useless to speculate.
As it was, he had not been long married when financial difficulties began to bear heavily upon him. He started badly by borrowing money from one of his sisters; later on he borrowed £55 from Currie; and finally he had to ask a loan of £50 from Scott. A man of really independent spirit, such as Campbell professed to be, would have felt all this very galling, but there is nothing to indicate that Campbell experienced more than a momentary sense of shame at the position in which he had placed himself. By and by we find him confessing to Currie that he doubted whether he had ever been a poet at all, so grovelling and so parsimonious had he become: ‘I have grown a great scrub, you would hardly believe how avaricious.’ To explain the necessity for these unpoetic borrowings would be somewhat difficult. It certainly did not arise from idleness or want of work. Campbell was constantly being offered literary employment, and he had by this time formed a profitable engagement withThe Star. In November he describes himself as an exceedingly busy man, habitually contented, and working twelve hours a day for those depending on him. ‘I am scribble, scribble, scribbling for that monosyllable which cannot be wanted—bread, not fame.’ But the scribbling,it may be presumed, did not furnish him with much ready cash, and the current household expenses had to be provided for. By this time there were debts, too. Bensley, the printer, pressed him for a bill of £100; he owed one bookseller £30, and he had an account of £25 for his Volunteer uniform and accoutrements, which were to have cost originally only £10.
Campbell seldom writes a letter without referring to these sordid concerns; but, on the other hand, he just as often speaks of his newly-found felicity by his own fireside. Never, he says, did a more contented couple sit in their Lilliputian parlour. Matilda sews beside him all day, and except to receive such visitors as cannot be denied, they remain without interruption at their respective tasks. In course of time the Lilliputian parlour was brightened by a new arrival. The poet’s first child, Thomas Telford—so called in compliment to the engineer, who afterwards paid for it in a handsome legacy—was born on July 1st, 1804. In notifying Currie of the event he grows quite eloquent over the ‘little inestimable accession’ to his happiness, and asserts his belief that ‘lovelier babe was never smiled upon by the light of heaven.’ In view of what occurred later, the following reads somewhat pathetically: ‘Oh that I were sure he would live to the days when I could take him on my knee and feel the strong plumpness of childhood waxing into vigorous youth! My poor boy! shall I have the ecstacy of teaching him thoughts, and knowledge, and reciprocity of love to me? It is bold to venture into futurity so far. At present his lovely little face is a comfort to me.’ Well was it for Thomas Campbell that the future of his boy lay only in his imagination!
In the meantime, having begun to give hostages to fortune, he felt that he must make still greater efforts towards securing a settled income. This year he had been offered a lucrative professorship in the Universityof Wilna, but although he declared his readiness to take any situation that offered certain support, he hesitated about the offer because of the decided way in which he had spoken against Russia in ‘The Pleasures of Hope.’ He had no fancy for being sent to Siberia, and so, after carefully considering the matter, he declined to go to Wilna. It was at this time that, under the feeling of his responsibility as a parent, he conceived the idea of his ‘Specimens of the British Poets.’ He desired to haul in from the bookselling tribe as many engagements as possible, of such a kind as would cost little labour and bring in a big profit. The ‘Specimens,’ he thought, would answer to that description; and he suggests to Currie that some Liverpool bookseller might embark £500 in the undertaking and make £1000. Find the man, he says, in effect, to Currie. Although Currie should ruin him by the undertaking, it would only be ruining a bookseller, and doing a benefit to a friend! That was one way in which Campbell proposed to meet his increased responsibilities. Another way was by removing his residence to the suburbs. At Pimlico, visitors, as he expresses it, haunted him like fiends and ate up his time like moths. To escape them, as well as to be out of the reach of ‘family interference’ (this was rather ungracious after the father-in-law’s furnishing!), he took a house at Sydenham, and in the November of 1804 he was ‘safe at last in hisdulce domum.’
In 1804 Sydenham was a country village so primitive in its arrangements that its water was brought on carts, and cost two shillings a barrel. It had a common upon which the matter-of-fact Matilda thought she might keep pigs, and a lovely country, still untouched by the hand of the jerry-builder, lay all around it. ‘I have,’ says Campbell, describing his situation, ‘a whole field to expatiate over undisturbed: none of your hedged roads and London out-of-town villages about me, but “ample space (sic) and verge enough” to compose a whole tragedy unmolested.’ The house, which he had leased for twenty-one years at an annual rent of forty guineas, consisted of six rooms, with an attic storey which he converted into a working ‘den’ for himself. Altogether it was a charming home for a literary man, and Campbell ought to have been contented and happy. His London friends came to see him on Sundays, and among his neighbours he found many sincere friends, notwithstanding Lockhart’s superfine sneers about ‘suburban blue-stockings, weary wives, idle widows, and involuntary nuns.’
Unhappily, the old moodiness and discontent returned upon him. He had work, but work which he despised. He was fairly paid, but though Mrs Campbell was a ‘notable economist,’ there was always apparently some difficulty in getting the financial belt to meet. Campbell himself was, as we have learned, hopelessly incapable in money matters; indeed, he affirmed that hewas usually ready to shoot himself when he came to the subject of cash accounts. He had settled at Sydenham with his nose just above water. Currie had advanced him £55, and Gregory Watt, his early college friend, who died about this time, had left him a legacy of £100; but the furnishing and the flitting had swallowed it all up, and a ‘Judaic loan’ besides. His main source of income at this date was from the quarto edition of his poems, and the sale of that was beginning to flag. It is true he had his four guineas a week from theStar; but out of this he had to pay for a conveyance to take him to town daily. We must remember, besides, that he had two establishments to provide for, his mother’s at Edinburgh, as well as his own at Sydenham; and in those times, when war prices ruled, the cost of living was excessively high. But all this does not quite explain the perpetual trouble about money—does not explain how it should have been necessary for Lady Holland to send a ‘munificent present’ to save him from a debtor’s lodging in the King’s Bench.
Campbell was not the man to bear poverty in uncomplaining silence. His letters of this period are filled with plaints, whinings, regrets, implicit accusations against Providence of dealing unfairly with one who had been made for so much better things. He chafes at the necessity for yoking himself to the irksome tasks of the literary drudge, tasks that require little more than the labour of penmanship. He deplores that his Helicon has dried up; he has no poetry in his brain, he tells Scott, and inspiration is a stranger to him from extreme apprehension about the future. The only art now left to him, he sadly confesses, is the art of sitting for so many hours a day at his desk.
The result of all this work and worry and disappointment was soon seen on his health. His anxiety to be up in the morning kept him awake at night, and hebecame a victim to insomnia. He sought relief in laudanum, which, while procuring him sleep, only increased his constitutional tendency to mope. He began to think he was dying, and even wished himself dead. There is something, he remarked to Richardson in 1805, in one’s internal sensations that tells more certainly of disorder than the diagnosis of the doctors, and those sensations he was undoubtedly conscious of feeling. The thought of the consummation comforted him rather than otherwise, though he shuddered at the ‘dreadful and melancholy idea’ of leaving his wife and family unprovided for—‘as it is not impossible they may soon be.’ Of course things were not nearly so bad as this. Campbell was certainly not well, and his financial affairs, thanks mainly to his own mismanagement, were not in a prosperous state; but his ailments and embarrassments were clearly aggravated by his morbid imagination. It was nothing more serious than a case of liver andamour propre. If, like Scott after the great crash, he had cheerfully and resolutely confronted his circumstances, the ailments and embarrassments, if they had not vanished entirely, would infallibly have assumed a less threatening aspect. But that, after all, is only to say that Thomas Campbell should have been—not Thomas Campbell but somebody else.
He would require to be indeed an enthusiastic biographer who should write with any zest of Campbell’s literary labours during these years. Great writers have often enough been great hacks, but seldom has a man of Campbell’s poetical promise descended to such dull drudgery as that to which he had now betaken himself. He continued to toil at the ‘Annals’; he wrote papers for thePhilosophical Magazine, he translated foreign correspondence for theStar, and, in brief, gave himself up almost entirely to the ‘inglorious employment’ of anonymous writingand compilation. He wrote on every imaginable subject, including even agriculture, on the knowledge of which he says he was more than once complimented by farmers, though Lockhart cruelly remarks that he probably could not tell barley from lavender. Politics, too, he tried, but therein was found wanting. He had no real acquaintance with the political questions of the time, nor did he possess the journalistic faculty in any degree. Before he finally left theMorning Chronicle, his connection with which had continued, he was doing little but writing pieces to fill up the poets’ corner, and even these were sometimes so poor that Perry declined to insert them.
What Campbell always wanted—what indeed he made no secret of wanting—was some project which would mean light labour and long returns. Early in 1806 he had become acquainted with John Murray, the publisher, at whose literary parties he was afterwards a frequent guest, and the possibilities of the connection had at once presented themselves. The first hint of these possibilities is revealed in some correspondence which now took place about a new journal that Murray evidently intended Campbell to edit. The details of the scheme were being discussed when there was some talk about anAthenæumbeing started, and Campbell pleads with Murray not to be discouraged by the beat of the rival’s drum. ‘Supposing,’ he exclaims, ‘we had an hundredAthenæumsto confront us, is it not worth our while to make a great effort?’ The correspondence certainly shows that Campbell was anxious enough to make the effort; but the proposal dropped entirely out of sight, and he had to set his brains to work in the evolution of other schemes.
Several ideas occurred to him. He thought of translating a ‘tolerable poem,’ French or German, of from six to ten thousand lines, and he begged Scott to advise him about the choice. He cogitated upon a collectionof Irish music, but found that Moore had anticipated him. He had considerable correspondence with Scott and others about the proposed ‘Specimens of the British Poets,’ in which project Scott and he had, unknown to each other, coincided, but that too had to be given up, at any rate for the present. This scheme, as Lockhart tells us, was first suggested by Scott to Constable, who heartily supported it. By and by it was discovered that Cadell & Davies and some other London publishers had a similar plan on foot, and were now, after having failed with Sir James Mackintosh, negotiating with Campbell about the biographical introductions. Scott proposed that the Edinburgh and London houses should join hands in the venture, and that the editorial duties should be divided between himself and Campbell. To this both Cadell and Campbell readily assented, but the design as originally sketched ultimately fell to the ground, because the booksellers declined to admit certain works upon which the editors insisted.
Such, in brief, is the history of the undertaking which was to have united in one ‘superb work’ the names of Scott and Campbell. It is unnecessary to dwell further on it, unless, perhaps, to note that Campbell’s notoriously rabid opinions of publishers seem to have had their origin in the negotiations. Everybody has heard how he once toasted Napoleon because he had ordered a bookseller to be shot! The booksellers, he remarks to Scott, are the greatest ravens on earth, liberal enough as booksellers go, but still ‘ravens, croakers, suckers of innocent blood and living men’s brains.’ They ‘pledge one another in authors’ skulls, the publisher always taking the lion’s share.’ Dependence upon these ‘cunning ones’ he finds to be so humiliating—they are so prone to insult all but the prosperous and independent—that he secretly determines to have in future as little to do with them as possible. He is no match for them: they know the low state of his finances, andtake advantage of him accordingly. Murray is ‘a very excellent and gentleman-like man—albeit a bookseller—the only gentleman, except Constable, in the trade.’ And much more to the same effect. There was really nothing in the correspondence about the ‘Specimens’ which should have led Campbell thus to traduce a body of men upon whom he was so dependent, and by whom, with hardly a single exception, he was always honourably and even generously treated. He asked too much for his work—£1000 was his figure—the booksellers thought they could not afford so much, and they said so. It was Campbell himself who was at fault. He took absurdly high ground—boasted, in fact, of taking high ground—and talked of £1000 as quite a perquisite. In short, he had as little personal justification for libelling the booksellers as Byron had for comparing them with Barabbas.
Defeated in his design for the British poets, Campbell now went about whimpering that he had no hopes of an agreeable undertaking, unless Scott could hit upon some plan which would admit of their joining hands in the editorship. Longman & Rees had engaged him to edit a small collection of specimens of Scottish poetry, with a glossary and notices of two or three lives, but that he regarded as ‘a most pitiful thing.’ Scott had no suggestion to make, and Campbell, fretting over his prospects and his frustrated hopes—or as Beattie hints, neglecting his food—again fell ill. A second son, whom he named Alison, after his old Edinburgh friend, had been born to him in June 1805, but the jubilation over the event was short-lived. He became, in fact, more moody and disconsolate than ever. He described himself as a wreck, and looked forward to his sleepless nights being ‘quieted soon and everlastingly.’ Even the daily journey to town proved too much for him, and he took a temporary lodging in Pimlico, going to Sydenham only on Sundays. By andby he recovered himself a little. Medical skill did something, but improved finances did more. In a letter to Scott, dated October 2, 1805, we find this curt but pregnant postscript: ‘His Majesty has been pleased to confer a pension of £200 a year upon me. GOD SAVE THE KING.’ Campbell says the ‘bountiful allowance’ was obtained through several influences, but he mentions Charles Fox (who liked him because he was ‘so right about Virgil’), Lord Holland and Lord Minto as being specially active in the matter.
It was insinuated that the pension came as a reward for writing a series of newspaper articles in defence of the Grenville administration, but this was certainly not the case. Campbell was no political writer, no ‘scribbler for a party.’ Among his many faults it cannot be laid to his charge that he sold his principles for pay. In 1824, mercenary as he was, he declined £100 a year from a certain society because to take the money meant ‘canting and time-serving.’ We need therefore have no hesitation in accepting his assurance that he received the present grant ‘purely and exclusively as an act of literary patronage.’ There is perhaps a suspicion of theposeurin his palaver about the ‘mortification’ which his pride had suffered in the matter, but beyond that, there seems to be no reason for casting doubts on his political honesty.
The new accession of fortune was not princely, but it must have helped Campbell very considerably. Deducting office fees, duties, etc., the allowance amounted to something like £168 per annum, and that sum he enjoyed for close upon forty years. He says that his physicians—who were surely Job’s comforters all—told him he must regard it as the only barrier between him and premature dissolution; and he speaks about making it ‘do’ in the cheapest corner of England. His friends, however, were by this time thoroughly alive to the necessity, which indeed should never haveexisted, of doing something to put his finances on a satisfactory basis, and to this end the publication of another subscription edition of his poems was arranged. Campbell indulged in his usual idle talk about ‘mortification’ at having again to ask support in this way, but his friends wisely kept the matter in their own hands and paid no heed to his maunderings.
At the same time some impatience was not unnaturally being felt with Campbell. Francis Horner, a judicious acquaintance upon whom he afterwards wrote an unfinished elegy, was giving himself no end of trouble over the new edition, and this is the way he writes to Richardson. Speaking of a permanent fund as a motive to economy he says: