CONTINENTAL TRAVELS
Campbell’s intention had been to proceed from Harwich after a week’s visit
to London, but, on mature reflection, he decided that the ‘modern Babel’
must wait. Some months later he realised that he had made a mistake. ‘It
is a sad want not to be able to tell foreigners anything of London,’ he
then wrote; ‘I have blushed for shame when the ladies asked me questions
about it.’ This, however, was a point he had not foreseen, and his
immediate reasons for delaying the London visit were both frank and
amusing. On the eve of his departure he explains to Thomson that he had
resisted the seductions of the great city because his finances were not
equal to both London and Germany, and Germany he would on no account
forego. Moreover, he knew his own nature too well. New sights and new
acquaintances would have dismissed the little industry he possessed, and
would have soon reduced him to the fettered state of a bookseller’s fag.
There was still another consideration. He was not fitted for shining in a
London company just yet. When he had added to the number of his books, he
might think of making his _debût_, but for the present he would not run
the risk of ridicule on account of his northern brogue and his ‘braw
Scotch boos.’ And then comes this curious announcement: ‘In reality my
fixed intention on returning from Germany is to set up a course of
lectures on the _Belles Lettres_. I had some thoughts of lecturing in
Edinburgh, but cannot think of remaining any longer in one place. If
London should not offer encouragement, I mean to try Dublin. I think this
a respectable profession, as the showman of the bear and monkey said when
he gave his name to the commissioners of the income tax as an “itinerant
lecturer on natural history.”’ The last sentence suggests--though it is
impossible to be sure, for Campbell’s jokes were rather heavy-handed--that
he threw out this idea in jest. If he was serious, it is another
indication of his habit of easily adopting new professions, of which we
may learn more in the sequel.
Campbell had a cordial reception from the British residents in Hamburg. He
met Klopstock, and presented him with a copy of ‘The Pleasures of Hope.’
He describes the poet as ‘a mild, civil old man,’ one of the first really
great men in the world of letters he ever knew, and adds that his only
intercourse with him was in Latin, with which language he made his way
tolerably well among the French and Germans, and still better among the
Hungarians. How long he remained in Hamburg is not certain: as we shall
see presently, he had arrived at Ratisbon in time to witness the startling
military events of July. The political excitement was now at its height.
Several of the Bavarian towns were in the hands of the French, and the
upper valley of the Danube was under military government. ‘Everything
here,’ says Campbell, writing soon after his arrival, ‘is whisper,
surmise, and suspense. If war breaks out, the bridge over the Danube is
expected to be blown up. You may guess what a devil of a splutter
twenty-four large arches will make flying miles high in the air and coming
down like falling planets to crush the town!… Ratisbon will be shivered to
atoms; and as no warning is expected, the inhabitants may be buried under
the ruins.’
To be thus plunged, as it were, into the thick of the fray was hardly a
pleasant experience for the British pilgrim. The richest fields of Europe
desolated by contending troops; peasants driven from their homes to
starve and beg in the streets; horses dying of hunger, and men dying of
their wounds--such were the ‘dreadful novelties’ that Campbell had come
from Edinburgh to see. He describes the whole thing very vividly in
letters to his eldest brother. The following refers particularly to the
action which gave the French possession of Ratisbon. He says:
I got down to the seat of war some weeks before the summer
armistice, and indulged in what you call the criminal curiosity of
witnessing blood and desolation. Never shall time efface from my
memory the recollection of that hour of astonishment when I stood
with the good monks of St James’ to overlook a charge of Klenau’s
cavalry upon the French under Grenier. We saw the fire given and
returned, and heard distinctly the sound of French _pas de charge_
collecting the lines to attack in close column. After three hours
awaiting the issue of a severe action, a park of artillery was
opened just beneath the walls of the monastery, and several drivers
that were stationed there to convey the wounded in spring waggons
were killed in our sight.
In some notes relating to the same period he remarks that, in point of
impressions, this formed the most important epoch in his life; but he adds
that his recollections of seeing men strewn dead on the field, or what was
worse, seeing them dying, were so horrible, that he studiously endeavoured
to banish them from his memory.
There were, however, scenes of peace as well as of war. Some Hamburg
friends had given him letters of introduction to the venerable Abbot
Arbuthnot, of the Benedictine Scots College, under whose protection it was
believed that he would have special opportunities for study and
observation; and the hospitality of the monks now ‘amused’ him, as he puts
it, into such tranquillity as was possible in that perilous time. The
‘splendour and sublimity’ of the Catholic Church service, notably the
music, also affected him with all the attraction of novelty. But these
things were at best only alleviations. 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. I then chew a crust
of bread, and eat a plum for breakfast. At 11 my
_parlez-vous-Français_ steps in with his formal periwig and still
more formal bow. I chatter a jargon of Latin and French to him--for
he has no English--and study again from 12 till 1: dine and read
English or Greek till 2, and then take an afternoon walk. Under a
burning sun I then expose my feeble carcase in a walk round the
cursed walls, or traverse the wood where the Rothmantels or ‘Red
Cloaks’ and Hussars amused us at cut-and-thrust before the city was
taken. Sometimes I venture to the heights where the last kick-up was
seen, when the poor Austrians were driven across the Danube. The
Convent I seldom visit: we always get upon politics, and that is a
cursed subject.
So indeed it seemed. It was, however, Campbell’s own fault. The
brotherhood of the Schotten Kirche[2] had welcomed him very heartily on
his arrival; but they were Jacobites, and he was so indiscreet as to make
open avowal of his Republican opinions. The result was unpleasant enough.
One of the monks denounced him for his political heresies; others regarded
him with ill-concealed suspicion and distrust. A countryman of his own,
who bore the conventual name of Father Boniface, had recommended him to an
unsuitable lodging at the house of a friend, and Campbell complained that
he had been robbed there. Father Boniface met the complaint with abuse,
and ‘spoke to me once or twice,’ says Campbell, ‘in a manner rather
strange.’ One night the Father dogged him into the refectory and attacked
him with the most blackguardly scurrility. ‘I never,’ writes Campbell,
‘found myself so completely carried away by indignation. I flew at the
scoundrel and would have soon rewarded his insolence had not the others
interposed.’ After an experience like this, it was only natural that he
should declaim against the ‘lazy, loathsome, ignorant, ill-bred’ monks,
whose society he had at first found so agreeable! The only one for whom he
entertained a lasting regard was Dr Arbuthnot, whom he describes as ‘the
most commanding figure he ever beheld,’ and to whom he unmistakably
alludes in ‘The Ritter Bann,’ one of his later poems.
Being unable either to advance or retreat, and not knowing what to do with
himself amid the gloom and excitement caused by the presence of two
hostile armies, Campbell appears to have sunk into something like blank
despair. ‘Oh, God!’ he exclaims in a letter, ‘when the dull dusk of
evening comes on, when the melancholy bell calls to vespers, I find myself
a poor solitary being, dumb from the want of heart to speak, and deaf to
all that is said from a want of interest to hear.’ About the future he
feels an insecurity and a dread which baffle all his efforts to form a
scheme or resolution. Low-minded people suspect him, and debate about his
character, and wonder what he can be doing in Ratisbon. He cannot settle
himself to literary work of any kind. He sits down resolved to compose in
spite of uncertainty and uneasiness, and looks helplessly for hours
together at the paper before him.
Campbell’s letters of this period make indeed most doleful reading. They
are addressed, for the most part, to John Richardson, a young Edinburgh
lawyer who enjoyed familiar intercourse with Scott and other _dii
majores_ of the capital. Richardson had promised to join him in Germany,
and when Campbell is not voicing his woes, he is planning schemes for
Richardson and himself when at length they are free to start on a tour.
With economy he thinks they might visit every corner of Germany, travel
three thousand miles, stop at convenient stages for a few days at a time,
and be ‘masters of all the geographical knowledge worth learning’ for £30
a-piece. They will require nothing in the way of baggage but ‘a stick
fitted as an umbrella--a nice contrivance very common here--with a fine
Holland shirt in one pocket, our stockings and silk breeches in the other,
and a few cravats wrapped in clean paper in the crowns of our hats.’ At
country inns they can have bed and supper for half-a-crown, coffee for
sixpence, and bread and beer for twopence. 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. Their general profit is two hundred per cent.’
The spectacle of Thomas Campbell hawking British goods round the German
Empire would have been sufficiently diverting; but of course it was only
another of his ponderous pleasantries.
Nevertheless, there was good reason for his being anxious about making a
little money. His funds were fast giving out, and at present he did not
quite see how he was to replenish his purse. He makes constant complaint
about the uncertainty of remittances, and in one letter strikes his hand
on his ‘sad heart’ as he thinks of himself starving far from home and
friends. However, matters mended a little for a time: his spirits revived,
he found himself able to work again; and the armistice having been
renewed, he made various interesting excursions into the interior, getting
as far as Munich, and returning by the valley of the Iser. ‘I remember,’
he says, speaking of these excursions in a letter quoted by Washington
Irving, ‘I remember how little I valued the art of painting before I got
into the heart of such impressive scenes; but in Germany I would have
given anything to have possessed an art capable of conveying ideas
inaccessible to speech and writing. Some particular scenes were indeed
rather overcharged with that degree of the terrific which oversteps the
sublime; and I own my flesh yet creeps at the recollection of
spring-waggons and hospitals. But the sight of Ingolstadt in ruins or
Hohenlinden covered with fire, seven miles in circumference, were
spectacles never to be forgotten.’
The reference to Hohenlinden here is somewhat puzzling. According to
Beattie, Campbell left Ratisbon in the beginning of October, and went by
way of Leipsic to Altona, where he remained until his return to England.
He was certainly at Altona in the beginning of November, for his letters
then begin to date from thence. But the battle of Hohenlinden was not
fought until the 3rd of December, and it is therefore clear that Campbell,
unless he made a journey of which we have no trace, could not have seen
Hohenlinden ‘covered with fire.’ Beattie suggests that in the passage just
quoted Hohenlinden may be a slip for Landshut on the Iser, Leipheim, near
Gunzberg, or Donauwert, where battles and conflagrations took place during
the summer campaign, the effects of which Campbell may have witnessed
after his arrival on the Danube. He says that he often heard the poet
refer to ‘the sight of Ingolstadt in ruins,’ but he never once heard him
describe the field of Hohenlinden. Of course if he visited Munich at the
time mentioned he may have made a cursory survey of the village; but
until after the battle, travellers never thought of going out of their way
to see Hohenlinden. It is a pity that there should be any dubiety upon
this matter, for our interest in Campbell’s stirring lines would have been
heightened by the knowledge that he had been an eye-witness of the events
which they describe.
The armistice which had been renewed at Hohenlinden on the 28th of
September was for forty-five days. As the time for its termination
approached Campbell thought it wise, in view of a resumption of
hostilities, to secure his passports, and escape from Ratisbon. There was
another determining point: his funds were now almost exhausted, and he
wanted to be nearer home. He decided to go to Hamburg, whence, if
remittances did not arrive, he could take passage for Leith. Of his
journey from Ratisbon we hear practically nothing, though in one of his
letters he gives an indication of his route by mentioning such towns as
Nuremberg, Bamberg, Weimar, Jena, Leipsic, Halle, Brunswick, and
Lunenburg. In his previous journey to Ratisbon in July he seems to have
followed the course of the Elbe to Dresden, and thence proceeded through
Zwickau, Bayreuth, and Amberg to the seat of war on the Danube; so that
now he was, as he says, ‘master of all to be seen’ in a very considerable
part of the country.
When he reached Hamburg he found a letter awaiting him from Richardson
announcing that a ‘blessed double edition’ of ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ had
been thrown off, thus entitling him to £50, according to the understanding
with Mundell. Relieved of all his pecuniary anxiety in this unexpected
fashion, Campbell resolved to remain abroad for the winter. He took up his
quarters at Altona, a town near Hamburg, which he describes as the
pleasantest place in all Germany. His letters begin to show a more
cheerful spirit. He has the prospect of ‘useful and agreeable
acquaintance, and a winter of useful activity,’ and his portfolio,
hitherto a chaos, is soon to be filled with ‘monsters and wonders
sufficient to match the pages of Bruce himself.’ One of the new
acquaintances promised to prove of substantial advantage to him. 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;
and Campbell, after a great deal of epistolary fuss about it, accepted the
gentleman’s offer.
Unfortunately the agreement was never carried out. Beattie’s curt
intimation is that ‘sudden and important changes’ took place in the views
and circumstances of the anticipated patron. We get, however, an inkling
of the real state of the case from a letter of Campbell’s to Dr Anderson,
written from London some months later--a letter which does equal honour to
the poet’s kind-heartedness and modesty. Speaking of his well-intentioned
friend he says:
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 a
single 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 the _Morning Chronicle_ to 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 to
their 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 of _Belles 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 gathered mainly 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 the _Royal 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, the _Royal George_ was 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 outlined shortly 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 fought on 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 the _Edinburgh
Review_ thought ‘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.