WANDERINGS--MARRIAGE--SETTLEMENT IN LONDON
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 by several
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 set their 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 Coleridge once 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
make his 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 lay in 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 to _know_--as Tennyson, as Stevenson knew--when he has done a good
thing; when he does _not_ know, 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 life _gives 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.
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.
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 origin that 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 a
_tutor_.’ 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 an _enfant 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 bound his 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 in _Fraser’s
Magazine_ for 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 it probably 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.
Nothing is 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 lowly
breeding feels in their company something of what Burke calls proud
humility, or rather humble contempt. As for conversation with these
minions of _le 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 point
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. 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 that
Campbell 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. He dwells 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 with _The 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 University of
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 his _dulce
domum_.’