Thomas Campbell

“ Thomas Campbell has not written many purely erotic poems—he prefers the shorter or longer love-story in verse to the personal outburst—but some of the few are as tender in tone as Moore's or Keats's. And, strange to say, he becomes warmer, tenderer, less restrained in expression as time passes. It is as an old man that he writes his most amatory verse. To the remonstrance of conscience, that Platonic friendship should content him at his years, he answers by a challenge to Plato himself in the skies to look into the eyes of a certain lady "and try to be Platonic." ”

“ Seeing how affected he was, the audience called out ‘No farewell.’ Kemble, however, spoke the customary address. A banquet was given him on Friday, 27 June, with Lord Holland in the chair. Very many people of distinction were present, and the well-known ode of Thomas Campbell was recited by Young. An asthmatic affection which had long disturbed him compelled him to retire to Toulouse, where he remained for some years. He was in London in 1820, after the death, 2 Oct., of Thomas Harris, and assigned his share of Covent Garden to his brother Charles. ”

“ RECOLLECTIONS OF THOMAS CAMPBELL.
In his intercourse with society, Campbell was a shrewd observer of those often contradictory elements of which it is composed. Adverting to the absurd and ludicrous, he had the art or talent of heightening their effect by touches peculiarly his own; while the quiet gravity with which he related his personal anecdotes or adventures, added greatly to the charm, and often threw his unsuspecting hearers into uncontrollable fits of laughter. Nor was [Pg 346] the pathos with which he dilated on some tale of human misery less captivating ”

“ Of the poetry of Thomas Campbell, "The Pleasures of Hope" is one of the most finished epics in the language; it [Pg 261] is alike faultless in respect of conception and versification. His lyrics are equally sustained in power of thought and loftiness of diction; they have been more frequently quoted than the poems of any other modern author, and are translated into various European languages. Few men evinced more jealousy in regard to their reputation; he was keenly sensitive to criticism, and fastidious in judging of his own composition. ”

“ Who pleased her Ronald, ne’er displeased his wife.
His sense, ’tis true, compared with Norman’s son,
Was commonplace—his tales too long outspun:
Yet Allan Campbell’s sympathizing mind
Had held large intercourse with human kind;
Seen much, and gaily, graphically drew
The men of every country, clime, and hue;
Nor ever stooped, though soldier-like his strain,
To ribaldry of mirth or oath profane.
All went harmonious till the guest began
To talk about his kindred, chief and clan,
And, with his own biography engrossed,
Marked not the changed demeanour of each host ”

“ It was Sir Thomas. His sympathy had broken his sleep in the morning, though it had not disturbed it at night. He began in his abrupt way:
"Madam, I have been watching for you. I heard you leave the house. Madam, I feel almost ashamed to lift up my eyes to you; while we have all been wishing and talking, you alone have been acting. We are all obliged to you, madam; there is not a creature here with a heart in them to whom you have not given comfort!"
Miss Campbell tried to escape from the honest overflowings of the old man's feelings. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thomas Campbell having been chosen lord rector of the university of Glasgow, made his inaugural speech on the 12th of April, 1827, wherein are the following estimable remarks on desultory attainments:—
“In comparing small learned acquisitions with none at all, it appears to me to be equally absurd to consider a little learning valueless, or even dangerous, as some will have it, as to talk of a little virtue, a little wealth, or health, or cheerfulness, or a little of any other blessing under heaven, being worthless or dangerous. ”

“ When he beholds the ring that Waldegrave’s Julia wore.
XX.
“And I, the eagle of my tribe, [38] have rushed
With this lorn dove.”—A sage’s self-command
Had quelled the tears from Albert’s heart that gushed;
But yet his cheek—his agitated hand—
That showered upon the stranger of the land
No common boon, in grief but ill beguiled
A soul that was not wont to be unmanned;
“And stay,” he cried, “dear pilgrim of the wild,
Preserver of my old, my boon companion’s child!—
XXI.
“Child of a race whose name my bosom warms,
On earth’s remotest bounds how welcome here? ”

“ Lord Cunninghame draws a charming picture of the fireside politicians, with Campbell at their head, discussing the French Revolution, and defending their ultra-liberal opinions against the assaults of outsiders. For his age the poet probably took the world and the powers that be much too seriously; but his early political leanings are not without a certain significance in view of his after interest in the cause of liberty.
His last session at the University ended, Campbell, in June 1796, returned to Argyllshire, again as a tutor. This time his engagement was at Downie, near Lochgilphead. ”

“ And one was round her lover.
“Come back! come back!” he cried in grief,
“Across this stormy water:
And I’ll forgive your Highland chief,—
My daughter! O my daughter!”
Twas vain: the loud waves lash’d the shore,
Return or aid preventing:—
The waters wild went o’er his child,
And he was left lamenting.
Thomas Campbell
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Campbell had told Paul some time before that a poet should have only his muse for mistress; but it was easier to preach the precept than to practise it. It is in a letter to his friend Thomson that we first hear of this amourette. Speaking of a temporary brightening of his prospects, he says: ‘To console me still further (but Thomson, I challenge your secrecy by all our former friendship) , my evening walks are sometimes accompanied by one who, for a twelvemonth past, has won my purest but most ardent affection. ”

“ 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’ ”

“ Campbell has no need of my alliance, nor shall I presume to offer it; but I do hate that word "invariable." What is there of human, be it poetry, philosophy, wit, wisdom, science, power, glory, mind, matter, life, or death, which is "invariable?" Of course I put things divine out of the question. Of all arrogant baptisms of a book, this title to a pamphlet appears the most complacently conceited. It is Mr. Campbell's part to answer the contents of this performance, and especially to vindicate his own "Ship," which Mr. Bowles most triumphantly proclaims to have struck to his very first fire. ”

“ Campbell’s career at the University, allowing for certain differences of detail, was very much what it had been at the Grammar School. That is to say, he fought shy of drudgery, put on a spurt now and again, distinguished himself in the classics, wrote verse, and [23] indulged freely in the customary frolics of the typical student. He confessed in after life that he was much more inclined to sport than study ”

“ Campbell speaks of himself as living the life of a poor starling, caged in by rocks and seas from the haunts of man; as ‘lying dormant in a solitary nook of the world, where there is nothing to chase the spleen,’ and where the people ‘seem to moulder away in sluggishness and deplorable ignorance.’ Still, it was not quite so bad as Mull. For one thing, Inverary was comparatively near, and Hamilton Paul was there, as well as the adorable Caroline, to whose charms Paul, as appears from a [33] poetical tribute, had also succumbed. ”

“ 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 ”

“ After the productions of these great poets, the calm and unimpassioned Theodric fell flat on the public ear; in fact there is no comparison between it and the Pleasures of Hope.
As a lyric poet, Campbell, however, continued unrivalled, and would have held his own place in our literature if he had never written more than the Mariners of England and Hohenlinden. Nor did the Pleasures of Hope lose its hold on public favour; it has [xiii] retained it to this day, except in a certain clique of critics. There are passages in it which will ever have a strong hold on our sympathies ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Dr Wardlaw, who had been one of Campbell’s classfellows at Glasgow, said that though he was comparatively small in stature his features were handsome and prepossessing, and were characterised by an intelligent animation and a cheerful openness all the more noticeable that they gave place when he was not pleased to ‘a gravity approaching to sternness.’ Another friend speaks of him as an ardent, enthusiastic boy, much younger in appearance than in years. ”

“ The Campbells, as everybody knows, can claim an incredibly long descent. There is a Clan Campbell Society, the chairman of which declared some years ago that he possessed a pedigree carrying the family back to the year 420, and no doubt there are enthusiasts who can trace it to at least the time of the Flood. The poet was not particular about his pedigree, but the biographer of a Campbell would be doing less than justice to his subject if he denied him that ell of genealogy which Lockhart deemed the due of every man who glories in being a Scot. ”

“ 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 worth [131] dwelling upon in any detail. ”