J. Cuthbert Hadden

“ England was at war with France; France was at war with Austria, and Russia had formed a coalition with Sweden and Denmark against England. In short, Europe was at the time in such a state of military unrest that no one knew what a day or an hour might bring forth. But Campbell, living at home at ease, thought very lightly of the hazards of war. He was tired of his ‘dully sluggardised’ existence, without definite aim or ambition; and so, in the beginning of June, he walked down to Leith, and, with a sheaf of introductions in his pocket, set sail for Hamburg. ”

“ Among the novelists he specially extolled Smollett and Fielding. To the latter he says he never did justice in his youth, but shortly before his death he wrote that he had come to ‘venerate’ him, and to regard him as the better philosopher of the two, the truer painter of life. All this shows no exceptional critical discernment; and Sydney Smith was no less happy in his phrase than usual when he said that Campbell’s mind had ‘rolled over’ a large field. A rolling stone gathers no moss. But that is more than Smith could have meant.
And now what, it must be asked, is Campbell’s place as a poet? ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In poets youth, when not a virtue, is at least an extenuating circumstance. Campbell was very young when he wrote ‘The Pleasures of Hope.’ At an age when an Englishman is midway in his University course, and perhaps thinking of competing for the Newdigate, Campbell had finished his college career, won all the possible honours, and got himself accepted at his own valuation as ‘demnition clever.’ He was only a boy, a clever boy, with boyish enthusiasms, boyish crudities of thought, and, it must be confessed, a boyish weakness for fine-sounding words. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He does not appear to have been a particularly industrious student. He had certainly an ambition to excel, and he was invariably at the top of his class; but he made progress rather by fits and [16] starts than by steady, laborious plodding. In this respect, of course, he was only like a great many more celebrities who have been dunces in the schoolroom. Not that Campbell was in any sense a dunce. He was especially enamoured of the classics; so much so, indeed, that, as Beattie gravely certifies, he ‘could declaim with great fluency at the evening fireside in the language of Greece and Rome’ ”

“ Lockhart’s apology for him is that, chained so fast to the dreary tasks of compilation, he could not be expected to have a stock of pleasantry for a copious correspondence. But none of the brilliant letter-writers can be suspected of having kept a choice vintage of epistolary [149] Falernian in carefully sealed bottles. A man’s individuality expresses itself in his letters as naturally as a fountain flows. The truth is that Campbell was too reserved, or too artificial, or both, to make a good letter-writer. ”

“ A gentleman of family preparing for a tour along the lower Danube, required a travelling companion, and having been introduced to Campbell, he offered him £100 a year to accompany him and direct his studies. There was to be nothing like a formal tutorship; the poet was merely to make himself a ‘respectable friend and useful companion.’ Campbell professed to be at this time, like Burns, sorely touchable on the score of independence, but a man who has to content himself, as Campbell had now to do, with two meals a day, must find it convenient to swallow his pride occasionally ”

“ This is not exactly a case of mons 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. ”

“ At Greenock they spent a long evening on the quay, ‘for economy’s sake,’ and distinguished themselves by saving [28] a boy from drowning. Campbell thought it pretty hard that two such heroes should go supperless to bed; so they repaired to the inn, ate—according to their own account—dish after dish of beefsteaks, and drank tankards of ale that set them both singing and reciting poetry like mad minstrels of the olden time. Next day, leaving their trunks to be sent by land to Inverary, they crossed the Firth of Clyde to Argyllshire, the jolliest boys in the whole world. ”

“ When Mrs Campbell died he exclaimed, as if he had doubted the fact before, ‘There must be a God; that is evident; there must be an all-powerful, inscrutable God.’ Again, when speaking of the sufferings of the Poles, he remarked: ‘There is a Supreme Judge, and in another world there will be rewards and punishments.’ But we are not justified in forming any conclusion about his settled religious convictions from emotional outbursts resulting from special circumstances and in the shadow of the tomb. ”

“ Adam Smith contended that it was the duty of a poet to write like a gentleman. If as a student Campbell had always written like a gentleman, there would have been less of that posthumous resentment of which his biographer complains. Nevertheless, his popularity as a playful wit must have been very pleasant to him at the time. ‘What’s Tom Campbell been saying?’ was a common exclamation among the students as they gathered of mornings round the stove in the Logic classroom. ”

“ If a poet’s place depends on the extent to which he is read, then Campbell has no place, or almost none. He is not read, save by school-children for examinations. Milton and many another, it might be said, are in the same case; but there is a difference. Milton will always remain a supreme model, or at least a suggestive fount of inspiration; and the lover of poetry can be sure of never turning to him without some pleasure, some gain. [155] But Campbell’s pages are not turned to by the lover of poetry for solace or refreshment, for inspiration or guidance. ”

“ Much of the success of the poem was no doubt due to the circumstance that it touched with such sympathy on the burning questions of the hour. If, as Stevenson remarks, the poet is to speak efficaciously, he must say what is already in his hearer’s mind. This Campbell did, as perhaps no English poet had done before. The French Revolution, the partition of Poland, the abolition of negro-slavery—these had set the passion for freedom burning in many breasts, and ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ gave at once vigorous and feeling expression to the doctrine of the universal brotherhood of man. ”

“ As for books, Campbell will always manage to carry enough in his pockets for evening amusement; but Richardson must ‘bring, for God’s sake, Shakespeare and a few British classics.’ A striking idea occurs to him in one of his sportive moods. ‘Without degrading our characters in the least, we might have some articles from Britain and dispose of them to immense advantage. The merchants here are greedy and blind to their interests: they sell little because they sell so high. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Campbell had already begun to suffer from Johnson’s demon of hypochondria, and when the novelty of his surroundings had worn off, he felt himself in the worst imaginable plight of the stranger in a strange land. The following programme of his day’s doings affords a hint of his wretchedness:
I rise at seven—thanks to the flies that forbid me to sleep—and after returning thanks to God for prolonging my miserable existence at Ratisbon, I put on a pair of boots and pantaloons, and study with open windows, and half-naked, till ten o’clock. ”

“ 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 point [80] of 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. ”

“ 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 of [129] even average ability ever produced a worse biography. The Quarterly called 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. ”