‘THE PLEASURES OF HOPE’
Campbell was now at his wit’s end about a profession. With whatever
intention he had gone to the University, he had at last become alive to
the stern fact that the University had done nothing for him in regard to a
livelihood. ‘What,’ he wanted to know, ‘have all these academical honours
procured for me?’ He was dissatisfied with himself for his admitted lack
of resource; he was dissatisfied with his friends for their apathetic
indifference. But something had clearly to be done, and after sundry
ineffectual efforts to reach a solid standing ground, he again turned his
attention to the law. ‘That is the line which he means to pursue,’ wrote
his sister Elizabeth, ‘and what I think nature has just fitted him for. He
is a fine public speaker and I have no doubt will make a figure at the
Bar.’ His idea now was to combine law with literature. Let him once get
into a lawyer’s office and he would have no fear of working his way
without the expense of entrance fees. He would write for the leading
periodicals and establish a magazine. He had, besides, one or two
translations from the classics nearly ready for the press, and for these
surely some publisher, he told himself, would be willing to pay.
In this optimistic mood he went off to Edinburgh, the home of literature
and law, where he arrived in May, 1797. His old pupil, Lord Cunninghame,
was now preparing for the Bar, and to him Campbell applied for aid in
finding employment. The employment was found, not in a law office--for
Campbell had no regular training as a law clerk to recommend him--but in
the Register House, where the University honours’ man was set to the
humble tasks of a copying clerk. A few weeks of extract making proved
enough for him, and he threw up the situation for one slightly more
comfortable, though not much better as to pay, in the office of a Mr Bain
Whytt. There he remained, sucking sustenance through a quill, until Dr
Anderson brought him forth to put him on the road to renown.
Campbell was introduced to Anderson by Mr Hugh Park, then a teacher in
Glasgow, who had roused an interest in the poetical clerk by showing a
copy of the elegy written in Mull. Miss Anderson was present at the first
meeting, and Beattie subsequently obtained from her some recollections of
the occasion. She remarked specially upon Campbell’s good looks. His face,
she said, was beautiful, and ‘the pensive air which hung so gracefully
over his youthful features gave a melancholy interest to his manner which
was extremely touching.’ This description, it may be observed, is in part
corroborated from other quarters. The Rev. 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. Unfortunately
there is no portrait of him at this early age.
Dr Anderson took a fervent interest in the pensive youth. He knew
everybody worth knowing, and through him Campbell soon found his way into
the best literary society of the capital. Scott, Jeffrey, Dugald Stewart,
Lord Brougham, Henry Mackenzie, the ‘Man of Feeling,’ George Thomson, the
correspondent of Burns--these and others, in addition to the friends he
had made on former visits, were now or later among the circle of his
acquaintances. At a private house he met that ‘pompous ass,’ the Earl of
Buchan, and apparently had the bad manners to quiz him upon his oddities.
It was at this time, too, that he was introduced to John Leyden, with whom
he afterwards so notoriously fell out. There are two explanations of the
quarrel. According to the first, Leyden had spread a report that, in
despair at his prospects, Campbell was seen one day rushing frantically
along Princes Street on the way to destroy himself. This foolish story was
revived after Campbell’s death; very likely it was quite unfounded. The
other version of the affair is to the effect that Campbell, by his
association with certain infidel youths who had started a publication
called the _Clerical Review_, allowed it to be inferred that some of his
intimate friends, including Anderson and Leyden, were in sympathy with the
unsettling tendencies of the new journal. There was no reason why anybody
should draw such an inference; and, in any case, the explanation is
unsatisfactory inasmuch as the quarrel was evidently of Campbell’s, not of
Leyden’s making. Whatever be the solution--and it is not a matter of
importance--there was certainly no love lost between Leyden and his
somewhat prim junior. Campbell seldom mentions Leyden’s name without a
sneer. In a letter of 1803 he says: ‘London has been visited in one month
by John Leyden and the influenza. They are both raging with great
violence.’ And again--the versatile Borderer had just taken a surgeon’s
diploma--‘Leyden has gone at last to diminish the population of India.’
Nevertheless, as we shall learn later on, Campbell knew very well how to
value the critical opinion of John Leyden--when it was in his favour.
But Dr Anderson did more for Campbell than present him to his literary
circle. Campbell, though he proclaimed his dislike of another tutorship,
had expressed his willingness to accept almost any kind of literary work.
Anderson accordingly introduced him to Mundell, the publisher, and the
result was an offer of twenty guineas for an abridged edition of Bryan
Edwards’ ‘West Indies.’ This was not only Campbell’s first undertaking for
the press, but the first of his many pieces of literary task-work. He was
now anticipating very much the later experience of Carlyle, who also tried
the law in Edinburgh, and became a bookseller’s hack when that ‘bog-pool
of disgust’ proved impossible. But there the parallel ends.
Campbell went back to Glasgow, walking the distance as usual, to finish
his abridgment. His mind was still exercised about the future. Anything in
the law beyond the most laborious plodding he had seen to be quite out of
his reach. ‘I have fairly tried the business of an attorney,’ he wrote,
‘and upon my conscience it is the most accursed of all professions. Such
meanness, such toil, such contemptible modes of peculation were never
moulded into one profession… It is true there are many emoluments; but I
declare to God that I can hardly spend with a safe conscience the little
sum I made during my residence in Edinburgh.’ This, of course, is not to
be taken seriously: it is merely the petulant cry of a spoilt and
conceited youth. Campbell confessed afterwards that at this time fame was
everything to him. So far as at present appeared he was as likely to
achieve fame as to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, and when he miscalled
the lawyers as rogues and vagabonds he was only giving voice to his
chagrin.
But youth is not easily dismayed. It was at this moment that, having saved
a little money, Campbell gaily proposed to start a magazine. He invited
some of his college familiars to join with him, declaring that he would
undertake, if need be, three-fourths of the letter-press himself. ‘We
shall,’ he remarked, ‘set all the magazine scribblers at defiance--nay,
hold them even in profound contempt.’ But his friends were not so sanguine
about sharing the favours of a ‘discerning public,’ and the magazine
project, like so many other projects, fell to the ground. It shows the
desperate frame of mind into which Campbell had sunk, that, in spite of
his recent ‘malediction upon the law and all its branches,’ he still
professed himself an amateur of the Bar. He tells Anderson that his
leisure hours are employed on Godwin and the ‘Corpus Juris.’ The latter he
had always regarded as a somniferous volume, but now he finds that there
is something really amusing as well as improving in the book. It certainly
does not seem a suitable work for stimulating the imagination of a poet,
but Campbell was only playing with circumstances after all. Even yet he
may have had some idea that the ‘Corpus Juris’ would prove professionally
useful.
In the meantime he went on with his abridgment, and wrote a few verses.
Among the latter was ‘The Wounded Hussar,’ a lyric suggested by an
incident in one of the recent battles on the Danube. This ballad, now
entirely forgotten, attained an extraordinary popularity. It had been
published only a few weeks when all Glasgow was ringing with it.
Subsequently it found its way to London, where it was sung on the streets
and encored in the theatres. It seemed as if the fame for which the author
hungered was to be his at last, but curiously enough, in this case he
would have none of it. ‘That accursed song,’ he would say, and forbid his
friends to mention ‘The Wounded Hussar’ again in his presence. About this
time also he wrote his ‘Lines on revisiting Cathcart,’ besides a ‘Dirge of
Wallace,’ which he sensibly excluded from his collected works as being too
rhapsodical, though it was often printed against his wish in the Galignani
editions.
Having finished his work for Mundell, Campbell returned to Edinburgh in
the autumn of 1797. What his plans now were is not very clear, though from
the fact that he spoke to his parents about following him when his
circumstances permitted, it is evident that he had made up his mind to
reside permanently in the capital. At present his prospects were as gloomy
as ever. Mundell had promised him some employment for the winter, and a
further slight engagement on a contemplated geographical work seemed
probable. At the best, however, these were but feeble supports; the
booksellers--who, he enquired, could depend on _them_? Some time before
this he had, as we have seen, tried medicine and surgery and failed; now,
as a sort of forlorn hope, he again betook himself to the study of
chemistry and anatomy. That, too, was soon abandoned, and he fell back
once more on the _dernier resort_ of a tutorship. By and by his younger
brother Robert sent him a pressing invitation to come out to Virginia, and
he decided to quit Scotland in the spring of 1798. But here again his
design was defeated; his elder brother in Demerara wisely interposed his
experienced advice against it, and Campbell’s oft-expressed desire to see
the land of Washington was never realised.
In all these shifting plans and projects one discerns thus early what
proved the chief defect in Campbell’s character--that irresolution and
that caprice which were so largely to blame for many of the vexations and
disappointments of his later life. No doubt to some extent his friends
were responsible for his unsteadiness of purpose. He was the Benjamin of
his family, petted and pampered, applauded for his little clevernesses,
and encouraged in his belief that he had been cut out for something great.
Had he been alone in the world, and absolutely penniless, he would have
had to exert himself to some purpose. As it was, he never stuck at an
honest calling long enough to know what he could do at it; but having
tried many things perfunctorily, and failed in them, he at length derived
inspiration from his empty pocket, braced himself to what after all was
most congenial to him, and in a sense, like Silas Wegg, ‘dropped into
poetry.’
Speaking afterwards of this period, he says: ‘I lived in the Scottish
metropolis by instructing pupils in Greek and Latin. In that vocation I
made a comfortable livelihood as long as I was industrious. But “The
Pleasures of Hope” came over me. I took long walks about Arthur’s Seat,
conning over my own (as I thought) magnificent lines; and as my “Pleasures
of Hope” got on, my pupils fell off.’ Here we have the first intimation
that Campbell was actually working upon the poem by which he made his
grand entry on the stage of public life. But the subject had engaged his
thoughts long before this. So far back as 1795, when slaving as a tutor in
Mull, he had asked his friend Hamilton Paul to send him ‘some lines
consolatory to a hermit.’ Paul replied with a set of verses on ‘The
Pleasures of Solitude,’ adding: ‘We have now three “Pleasures” by
first-rate men of genius--“The Pleasures of Imagination,” “The Pleasures
of Memory,” and “The Pleasures of Solitude.” Let us cherish “The Pleasures
of Hope” that we may soon meet in _Alma Mater_.’
The subject thus playfully suggested dwelt in Campbell’s mind; and
although there is nothing to show that he at once began the composition of
the poem, there is every reason to believe that some parts of it had been
at least drafted during his two periods of exile in the Highlands. At any
rate, in his ‘dusky lodging’ in Rose Street he now set to work upon it in
earnest; and by the close of 1798 it was being shown to his private circle
as practically ready for the press. Campbell’s intention appears to have
been to publish it by subscription, and on that understanding a friend
gave him £15 to pay for the printing. Dr Anderson, however, intervened;
and after he had discussed the merits of the poem with Mundell, the latter
bought the entire copyright, as the note of agreement has it, ‘for two
hundred copies of the book in quires.’ This would mean something over £50,
the volume having been published at six shillings. At the time Campbell
probably thought the bargain fair enough, but he naturally took a
different view of the case after some thousands of copies of the poem had
been sold. It was, he said towards the end of his life, worth an annuity
of £200, but he added that he must not forget how for two or three years
the publishers gave him £50 for every new edition. When we recall the fact
that for ‘Paradise Lost’ Milton got exactly £10, we must regard Campbell
as having been unusually well paid.
After being subjected to a great deal of correction, mainly at the
instigation of Anderson, to whom it was dedicated, ‘The Pleasures of Hope’
was published on the 29th of April, 1799, when the poet was twenty-one
years and nine months old. It had been announced as in the press some time
before, and there was now a brisk demand for copies, four editions being
called for in the first year. So early a success had only a near parallel
in the case of Byron, who awoke to find himself famous at twenty-four. The
author, it was remarked, had suddenly emerged like a star from his
obscurity, and had thrown a brilliant light over the literary horizon of
his country. His poem was quoted as ‘an epitome of sound morals,
inculcating by lofty examples the practice of every domestic virtue, and
conveying the most instructive lessons in the most harmonious language.’
One critic said it gave fair promise of his rivalling some of the greatest
poets of modern times; another critic commended it for its sublimity of
conception, its boldness of imagery, its vigour of language and its
manliness of sentiment. And so they swelled the chorus, to the same tune
of extravagant eulogy.
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.
Moreover, the moment was favourable in that there were so few rivals in
the field. Burns had been dead for three years, and Rogers might now be
said to stand alone in the front rank. Crabbe, suffering under domestic
sorrow, had been all but silent since his ‘Village’ appeared in 1783;
Cowper was sunk in hopeless insanity. Neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge,
both older than Campbell, had secured a following; Scott had printed but a
few translations from the German. Byron was at school, Moore at college;
Hogg had not spoken, and Southey’s fame was still to make. There could
hardly have been a stronger case of the _felix opportunitate_.
It is not easy at this time of day to approach ‘The Pleasures of Hope’
without a want of sympathy, if not an absolute prejudice, resulting from a
whole century of poetical development. The ideals, the standards of
Campbell’s day, have wholly altered; were indeed passing away even in his
own time. The little volume of ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ published only a few
months before Campbell’s poem, sounded, as it has been expressed, the
clarion-call of the new poetry. The manner thus introduced by Wordsworth
and Coleridge completely changed the critical standpoint; and it is
perfectly safe to say that any poem which appeared to-day with the opening
line of ‘The Pleasures of Hope’--‘At summer eve, when heaven’s _ethereal
bow_‘--would meet with very severe treatment at the hands of the critics,
if indeed the critics condescended to notice it at all.
Further, too much stress must not be laid on the fact, already referred
to, and always so carefully stated by the school editors, that the poem
met with a phenomenal success on its first appearance. In literature
popularity bears no strict proportion to merit. Neither Keats nor Shelley
nor Wordsworth was ever ‘popular’; of ‘The Christian,’ we are given to
understand, a hundred copies were sold for every one of ‘Richard Feverel.’
The popularity of ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ might easily have been foretold
by any one reading it before publication, not for any poetic excellence it
possessed--though it was not without poetic excellence--but because it
accorded so well with the prevalent moods and opinions of a large section
of the public at the time. Given certain vulgar ideas, the power of fluent
and forcible expression, and no great depth of thought or subtlety of
imagination, and the breath of popular applause may generally be counted
upon.
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. His poem was not the
spontaneous fruit of his imagination. There was no inward compulsion to
poetic utterance as in the case of other poets who wrote at an equally
early age. The clever boy was moping, without definite aims, when his
friend’s suggestion conjured up a vision of Thomas Campbell admitted to
the company of Mark Akenside and Samuel Rogers. True, these names were
not the brightest in the poetical galaxy, and it might perhaps have been
better for Campbell if he had schooled himself by a diligent study of
Milton and Spenser. But there was the goal, and there was the motive, and
he set about his poem.
Undoubtedly he made the most of what could easily have proved a barren
theme. The construction of the poem is certainly loose; part does not
follow part in any inevitable order. But in a didactic poem this is
perhaps an advantage, for, with all its defects, one can read ‘The
Pleasures of Hope’ without the fatigue that accompanies a reading of ‘The
Pleasures of Imagination.’ To analyse the poem would be superfluous. It
faithfully reflected the common thought of the time, and assuredly does
not, as Beattie said it did, give illumination to ‘every succeeding age.’
It will be sufficient to point out a few of its literary qualities with a
view to an appreciation of Campbell’s place as a poet.
And first it must be remarked that Campbell was subdued to the vicious
theory of a poetical diction. To him a rainbow was an ‘ethereal bow,’ a
musket a ‘glittering tube,’ a star a ‘pensile orb,’ a cottage a ‘rustic
dome.’ It was a principle with him and his school that the ordinary name
of a thing, the natural way of saying a thing, must necessarily be
unpoetic. This comes out equally in his letters. When he refers to a
railway train it is as ‘a chariot of fire.’ Instead of saying: ‘I went to
the club with his Lordship,’ he must say: ‘Thither with his Lordship I
accordingly repaired.’ When he wishes to speak of a thing being ‘changed’
into another, he says it is ‘transported to the identity of’ that other
thing. In ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ this characteristic was no doubt due in
some cases to the exigence of rhyme, which probably accounts also for the
so-called obscurity of certain of his lines. For he is not really obscure;
his stream is too shallow for obscurity. On that point it is curious to
note how even Wordsworth was misled. Perhaps it may be worth while to
quote what he says:
Campbell’s ‘Pleasures of Hope’ has been strangely overrated. Its
fine words and sounding lines please the generality of readers, who
never stop to ask themselves the meaning of a passage. The lines--
Where Andes, giant of the western star,
With meteor standard to the wind unfurled,
Looks from his throne of clouds o’er half the world,
are sheer nonsense--nothing more than a poetical indigestion. What
has a giant to do with a star? What is a meteor standard? But it is
useless to inquire what such stuff means. Once at my house Professor
Wilson, having spoken of these lines with great admiration, a very
sensible and accomplished lady, who happened to be present, begged
him to explain to her their meaning. He was extremely indignant, and
taking down ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ from a shelf, read the lines
aloud, and declared they were splendid. ‘Well, sir,’ said the lady,
‘but _what do they mean_?’ Dashing down the book on the floor, he
exclaimed in his broad Scotch accent, ‘I’ll be daumed if I can
tell.’
The explanation is, however, simple enough. Campbell obviously meant
‘firmament’ or ‘hemisphere,’ but wanting a rhyme to ‘afar,’ he put the
part for the whole, and said ‘western star.’ This is not exactly
obscurity; but for the fact that Campbell was always so careful to polish
his verse we should call it clumsiness.
In his management of the heroic couplet, Campbell was eminently
successful. With the monosyllabic rhyme the lines naturally end rather
monotonously with a snap as it were: _enjambement_ is not frequent; the
verse has nothing of that freedom and fluidity in which Chaucer and Keats
are sworn brothers. But Campbell varies the position of the pause more
frequently than Pope, and he actually excels Pope in respect of rhyme;
for, with all his correctness, Pope was an indifferent rhymster. Apart
from his imperfect rhymes, which are sufficiently numerous, one finds in
Pope whole blocks of six or eight lines ending in intolerable assonances.
Campbell is never guilty of this fault; and even in the smaller sin of
harping over much on the same rhyme, he is no worse than Pope. Further, he
is very deft in ‘suiting the sound to the sense.’ Many lines might be
quoted which are full of such music as springs from a varied succession of
vowel sounds linked by alliterative consonants. In bringing sounding names
into his verse, too, he is as expert as Goldsmith himself. Oonalaska,
Seriswattee, Kosciusko--these are names to conjure with. And if ‘rapture’
does duty too often for ardent emotion of all kinds, if ‘tumultuous’ comes
too trippingly off the pen when an epithet is required--well, let us
remember again that he was very young. The poem was at least a credit to
his years. Vigour, variety, pleasant description, sincere rhetoric,
youthful fervour and high spirits account in the main for its popularity.
Its concrete illustrations, its little _genre_ scenes, saved it from the
fate of most didactic poems on abstract themes. The homely interior, the
returned wanderer, the cradle, the faithful dog--these appealed to the
average man; and the political allusions struck the right note for the
times. But who reads it now?
Before the publication of ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ Campbell was practically
a nonentity; after that event he became a literary lion. His experience
was that of Burns over again on a smaller scale; indeed some of the
distinguished men who had hailed Burns’ arrival in the capital were still
alive to give their acclamations to Campbell, whom they may not unlikely
have regarded as a possible successor. Scott invited him to dinner and
proposed his health amid a strong muster of his literary friends. Dr
Gregory--whose name has survived in connection with what Stevenson calls
‘our good old Scotch medicine’--discovered his poem on Mundell’s counter
fresh from the printer, and at once sought him out. Everybody wanted to
meet him; and invitations poured in upon him until, like Sterne after the
publication of ‘Tristram Shandy,’ he found himself deep in social
engagements for months ahead. How he bore it all we have no means of
knowing. Thirty years later he speaks of himself as being at this time ‘a
young, shrinking, bashful creature,’ though he is honest enough to add
that he had a very high opinion of himself and his powers. Probably the
right measure of his timidity was taken by the lady who described him as
‘swaggering about’ in a Suwarrow jacket.
With the exception of ‘Gilderoy,’ Campbell does not seem to have written
anything during the remainder of 1799. He conceived the idea of a poem on
‘the patriot Tell,’ but notwithstanding that the subject must have been
exactly to his liking he never utilised it. Another idea which occurred to
him also failed of fruition, although references continue to be made to it
in his correspondence for some time. This was a poem to be called ‘The
Queen of the North,’ in which--with Edinburgh as the _locale_--such themes
as the independence of Scotland and the achievements of her great men were
to be employed to revive the old spirit of freedom. In the meantime, while
these projects were passing through his mind, a new edition of ‘The
Pleasures of Hope’ had been called for, and with Mundell’s additional
payment of £50 in his pocket, Campbell decided to make a tour in Germany.
The objects to be gained by this pilgrimage were perfectly plain to him.
He would acquire another language, and he would enlarge his views of
society. In the conversation of his travelled friends he could detect the
advantages of intercourse with the foreigner, and in travelling, as they
had travelled, he hoped to rid himself of the imputation that
‘home-keeping youths have ever homely wits.’ In spite of his recent poetic
performance, he felt that he was still a raw youth, who would make but a
poor figure in a company of London wits; and although he expected to be
stared at for his awkwardness and ridiculed for his broken German, yet, to
be ‘uncaged from the insipid scenes of life,’ to ‘see the wonders of the
world abroad,’ to make first-hand acquaintance with that literature, so
prominently represented by Goethe, which was then rising like a star on
the intellectual world--all this he regarded as a compensation for greater
evils than his friends could suggest or his fears imagine.
For one must not forget that the contemplated tour was not without some
risks. The year 1800 was not exactly the time that one who valued above
all things his personal comfort, perhaps even his personal liberty, would
have chosen for a continental holiday. The long wars of the French
Revolution had been in progress for some time, and Napoleon had just begun
to make himself famous. 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.