POETICAL WORK AND PROSE BOOKMAKING
In 1804 Sydenham was a country village so primitive in its arrangements
that its water was brought on carts, and cost two shillings a barrel. It
had a common upon which the matter-of-fact Matilda thought she might keep
pigs, and a lovely country, still untouched by the hand of the
jerry-builder, lay all around it. ‘I have,’ says Campbell, describing his
situation, ‘a whole field to expatiate over undisturbed: none of your
hedged roads and London out-of-town villages about me, but “ample space
(_sic_) and verge enough” to compose a whole tragedy unmolested.’ The
house, which he had leased for twenty-one years at an annual rent of forty
guineas, consisted of six rooms, with an attic storey which he converted
into a working ‘den’ for himself. Altogether it was a charming home for a
literary man, and Campbell ought to have been contented and happy. His
London friends came to see him on Sundays, and among his neighbours he
found many sincere friends, notwithstanding Lockhart’s superfine sneers
about ‘suburban blue-stockings, weary wives, idle widows, and involuntary
nuns.’
Unhappily, the old moodiness and discontent returned upon him. He had
work, but work which he despised. He was fairly paid, but though Mrs
Campbell was a ‘notable economist,’ there was always apparently some
difficulty in getting the financial belt to meet. Campbell himself was, as
we have learned, hopelessly incapable in money matters; indeed, he
affirmed that he was usually ready to shoot himself when he came to the
subject of cash accounts. He had settled at Sydenham with his nose just
above water. Currie had advanced him £55, and Gregory Watt, his early
college friend, who died about this time, had left him a legacy of £100;
but the furnishing and the flitting had swallowed it all up, and a ‘Judaic
loan’ besides. His main source of income at this date was from the quarto
edition of his poems, and the sale of that was beginning to flag. It is
true he had his four guineas a week from the _Star_; but out of this he
had to pay for a conveyance to take him to town daily. We must remember,
besides, that he had two establishments to provide for, his mother’s at
Edinburgh, as well as his own at Sydenham; and in those times, when war
prices ruled, the cost of living was excessively high. But all this does
not quite explain the perpetual trouble about money--does not explain how
it should have been necessary for Lady Holland to send a ‘munificent
present’ to save him from a debtor’s lodging in the King’s Bench.
Campbell was not the man to bear poverty in uncomplaining silence. His
letters of this period are filled with plaints, whinings, regrets,
implicit accusations against Providence of dealing unfairly with one who
had been made for so much better things. He chafes at the necessity for
yoking himself to the irksome tasks of the literary drudge, tasks that
require little more than the labour of penmanship. He deplores that his
Helicon has dried up; he has no poetry in his brain, he tells Scott, and
inspiration is a stranger to him from extreme apprehension about the
future. The only art now left to him, he sadly confesses, is the art of
sitting for so many hours a day at his desk.
The result of all this work and worry and disappointment was soon seen on
his health. His anxiety to be up in the morning kept him awake at night,
and he became a victim to insomnia. He sought relief in laudanum, which,
while procuring him sleep, only increased his constitutional tendency to
mope. He began to think he was dying, and even wished himself dead. There
is something, he remarked to Richardson in 1805, in one’s internal
sensations that tells more certainly of disorder than the diagnosis of the
doctors, and those sensations he was undoubtedly conscious of feeling. The
thought of the consummation comforted him rather than otherwise, though he
shuddered at the ‘dreadful and melancholy idea’ of leaving his wife and
family unprovided for--‘as it is not impossible they may soon be.’ Of
course things were not nearly so bad as this. Campbell was certainly not
well, and his financial affairs, thanks mainly to his own mismanagement,
were not in a prosperous state; but his ailments and embarrassments were
clearly aggravated by his morbid imagination. It was nothing more serious
than a case of liver and _amour propre_. If, like Scott after the great
crash, he had cheerfully and resolutely confronted his circumstances, the
ailments and embarrassments, if they had not vanished entirely, would
infallibly have assumed a less threatening aspect. But that, after all, is
only to say that Thomas Campbell should have been--not Thomas Campbell but
somebody else.
He would require to be indeed an enthusiastic biographer who should write
with any zest of Campbell’s literary labours during these years. Great
writers have often enough been great hacks, but seldom has a man of
Campbell’s poetical promise descended to such dull drudgery as that to
which he had now betaken himself. He continued to toil at the ‘Annals’; he
wrote papers for the _Philosophical Magazine_, he translated foreign
correspondence for the _Star_, and, in brief, gave himself up almost
entirely to the ‘inglorious employment’ of anonymous writing and
compilation. He wrote on every imaginable subject, including even
agriculture, on the knowledge of which he says he was more than once
complimented by farmers, though Lockhart cruelly remarks that he probably
could not tell barley from lavender. Politics, too, he tried, but therein
was found wanting. He had no real acquaintance with the political
questions of the time, nor did he possess the journalistic faculty in any
degree. Before he finally left the _Morning Chronicle_, his connection
with which had continued, he was doing little but writing pieces to fill
up the poets’ corner, and even these were sometimes so poor that Perry
declined to insert them.
What Campbell always wanted--what indeed he made no secret of wanting--was
some project which would mean light labour and long returns. Early in 1806
he had become acquainted with John Murray, the publisher, at whose
literary parties he was afterwards a frequent guest, and the possibilities
of the connection had at once presented themselves. The first hint of
these possibilities is revealed in some correspondence which now took
place about a new journal that Murray evidently intended Campbell to edit.
The details of the scheme were being discussed when there was some talk
about an _Athenæum_ being started, and Campbell pleads with Murray not to
be discouraged by the beat of the rival’s drum. ‘Supposing,’ he exclaims,
‘we had an hundred _Athenæums_ to confront us, is it not worth our while
to make a great effort?’ The correspondence certainly shows that Campbell
was anxious enough to make the effort; but the proposal dropped entirely
out of sight, and he had to set his brains to work in the evolution of
other schemes.
Several ideas occurred to him. He thought of translating a ‘tolerable
poem,’ French or German, of from six to ten thousand lines, and he begged
Scott to advise him about the choice. He cogitated upon a collection of
Irish music, but found that Moore had anticipated him. He had considerable
correspondence with Scott and others about the proposed ‘Specimens of the
British Poets,’ in which project Scott and he had, unknown to each other,
coincided, but that too had to be given up, at any rate for the present.
This scheme, as Lockhart tells us, was first suggested by Scott to
Constable, who heartily supported it. By and by it was discovered that
Cadell & Davies and some other London publishers had a similar plan on
foot, and were now, after having failed with Sir James Mackintosh,
negotiating with Campbell about the biographical introductions. Scott
proposed that the Edinburgh and London houses should join hands in the
venture, and that the editorial duties should be divided between himself
and Campbell. To this both Cadell and Campbell readily assented, but the
design as originally sketched ultimately fell to the ground, because the
booksellers declined to admit certain works upon which the editors
insisted.
Such, in brief, is the history of the undertaking which was to have united
in one ‘superb work’ the names of Scott and Campbell. It is unnecessary to
dwell further on it, unless, perhaps, to note that Campbell’s notoriously
rabid opinions of publishers seem to have had their origin in the
negotiations. Everybody has heard how he once toasted Napoleon because he
had ordered a bookseller to be shot! The booksellers, he remarks to Scott,
are the greatest ravens on earth, liberal enough as booksellers go, but
still ‘ravens, croakers, suckers of innocent blood and living men’s
brains.’ They ‘pledge one another in authors’ skulls, the publisher always
taking the lion’s share.’ Dependence upon these ‘cunning ones’ he finds to
be so humiliating--they are so prone to insult all but the prosperous and
independent--that he secretly determines to have in future as little to do
with them as possible. He is no match for them: they know the low state of
his finances, and take advantage of him accordingly. Murray is ‘a very
excellent and gentleman-like man--albeit a bookseller--the only gentleman,
except Constable, in the trade.’ And much more to the same effect. There
was really nothing in the correspondence about the ‘Specimens’ which
should have led Campbell thus to traduce a body of men upon whom he was so
dependent, and by whom, with hardly a single exception, he was always
honourably and even generously treated. He asked too much for his
work--£1000 was his figure--the booksellers thought they could not afford
so much, and they said so. It was Campbell himself who was at fault. He
took absurdly high ground--boasted, in fact, of taking high ground--and
talked of £1000 as quite a perquisite. In short, he had as little personal
justification for libelling the booksellers as Byron had for comparing
them with Barabbas.
Defeated in his design for the British poets, Campbell now went about
whimpering that he had no hopes of an agreeable undertaking, unless Scott
could hit upon some plan which would admit of their joining hands in the
editorship. Longman & Rees had engaged him to edit a small collection of
specimens of Scottish poetry, with a glossary and notices of two or three
lives, but that he regarded as ‘a most pitiful thing.’ Scott had no
suggestion to make, and Campbell, fretting over his prospects and his
frustrated hopes--or as Beattie hints, neglecting his food--again fell
ill. A second son, whom he named Alison, after his old Edinburgh friend,
had been born to him in June 1805, but the jubilation over the event was
short-lived. He became, in fact, more moody and disconsolate than ever. He
described himself as a wreck, and looked forward to his sleepless nights
being ‘quieted soon and everlastingly.’ Even the daily journey to town
proved too much for him, and he took a temporary lodging in Pimlico, going
to Sydenham only on Sundays. By and by he recovered himself a little.
Medical skill did something, but improved finances did more. In a letter
to Scott, dated October 2, 1805, we find this curt but pregnant
postscript: ‘His Majesty has been pleased to confer a pension of £200 a
year upon me. GOD SAVE THE KING.’ Campbell says the ‘bountiful allowance’
was obtained through several influences, but he mentions Charles Fox (who
liked him because he was ‘so right about Virgil’), Lord Holland and Lord
Minto as being specially active in the matter.
It was insinuated that the pension came as a reward for writing a series
of newspaper articles in defence of the Grenville administration, but this
was certainly not the case. Campbell was no political writer, no
‘scribbler for a party.’ Among his many faults it cannot be laid to his
charge that he sold his principles for pay. In 1824, mercenary as he was,
he declined £100 a year from a certain society because to take the money
meant ‘canting and time-serving.’ We need therefore have no hesitation in
accepting his assurance that he received the present grant ‘purely and
exclusively as an act of literary patronage.’ There is perhaps a suspicion
of the _poseur_ in his palaver about the ‘mortification’ which his pride
had suffered in the matter, but beyond that, there seems to be no reason
for casting doubts on his political honesty.
The new accession of fortune was not princely, but it must have helped
Campbell very considerably. Deducting office fees, duties, etc., the
allowance amounted to something like £168 per annum, and that sum he
enjoyed for close upon forty years. He says that his physicians--who were
surely Job’s comforters all--told him he must regard it as the only
barrier between him and premature dissolution; and he speaks about making
it ‘do’ in the cheapest corner of England. His friends, however, were by
this time thoroughly alive to the necessity, which indeed should never
have existed, of doing something to put his finances on a satisfactory
basis, and to this end the publication of another subscription edition of
his poems was arranged. Campbell indulged in his usual idle talk about
‘mortification’ at having again to ask support in this way, but his
friends wisely kept the matter in their own hands and paid no heed to his
maunderings.
At the same time some impatience was not unnaturally being felt with
Campbell. Francis Horner, a judicious acquaintance upon whom he afterwards
wrote an unfinished elegy, was giving himself no end of trouble over the
new edition, and this is the way he writes to Richardson. Speaking of a
permanent fund as a motive to economy he says:
You must teach him [Campbell] to consider this subscription as an
exertion which cannot with propriety, nor even perhaps with success,
be tried another time; and that from this time he must look forward
to a plan of income and expense wholly depending upon himself and
most strictly adjusted. He gets four guineas a week for translating
foreign gazettes at the _Star_ office; it is not quite the best
employment for a man of genius, but it occupies him only four hours
of the morning, and the payment ought to go a great length in
defraying his annual expenses. You will be able to convey to
Campbell these views of his situation and others that will easily
occur to you: none of _us_ are entitled to use so much freedom with
him.
One can read a good deal between the lines here. Campbell, as he mildly
puts it himself, was never ‘over head and ears in love with working’; he
preferred his friends to work for him. Some years before this he looked to
them to get him a Government situation, ‘unshackled by conditional
service’; and even now, with his pension running, and much as he prated
about his pride, he ‘trusts in God’ that it will be followed up by an
appointment of ‘some emolument’ in one of the Government offices. It was
clearly an object with him to have his affairs made easy by outsiders. Nor
was this all. There is no doubt that he had, temporarily at least, given
way to convivial habits which his well-wishers could not but regard with
regret. He admits as much himself, and Beattie only seeks to hide the fact
by speaking in his solemn, periphrastic way about ‘the social pleasures of
the evening’ and a ‘too-easy compliance’ with the solicitations of
company. In these circumstances, it was only natural that Campbell’s
friends should desire to impress upon him the necessity of guiding his
affairs with greater circumspection so as to depend more upon himself.
Meanwhile they went on collecting subscribers’ names for the new edition,
and Campbell returned to Sydenham to continue his work on the ‘Annals’ and
think about something less irksome and more remunerative.
It was at this juncture that Murray considerately came to his aid. Though
the original scheme of the British Poets had fallen through, Campbell had
by no means given up the idea of a work of the kind; and now, having
discussed the plan with Murray, it was arranged between them that the
undertaking should go on. Murray was naturally anxious that Scott’s name
should be connected with the editorship, but Scott, although he at first
agreed to co-operate, ultimately found it necessary to restrict himself to
works more exclusively his own, and Campbell was accordingly left to
proceed alone.
In the summer of 1807 his labours were interrupted by a visit to the Isle
of Wight. His old complaint had returned, and he was advised to try a
change of air and scene. He left London in the beginning of June, but the
change did not prove successful. The demon of insomnia still haunted him,
and the _ennui_ of the place became so intolerable that he was driven to
act as reader to the ladies in the boarding-house where he stayed! What,
he cries, must Siberia be when Ryde is so bad! By August he was at
Sydenham again, only to find his ‘abhorred sleeplessness returning fast
and inveterately.’ He had written very little poetry for some time, and
such as he did write--the tribute to Sir John Moore, for example--is, like
the Greek mentioned by Pallet, not worth repeating. He was now engaged
almost solely upon ‘Gertrude of Wyoming,’ but his head was ‘constantly
confused,’ and the poem was often laid aside for weeks at a time. Still,
the manuscript advanced, and by Christmas the greater part of it was
complete enough for reading to a private circle of friends.
‘Gertrude’ finally appeared, after a long process of polishing, alteration
and addition, in April 1809. Some time before its publication Campbell
wrote that he had no fear as to its reception; only let him have it out,
and, like Sterne, he cared not a curse what the critics might say. The
critics were in the main favourable. Jeffrey had already seen the proofs,
and had written a long letter to the author, pointing out certain
‘dangerous faults,’ but commending the poem for its ‘great beauty and
great tenderness and fancy’; and on the same day that the poem was
published, the _Edinburgh Review_ appeared with an article in which the
editor rejoiced ‘once more to see a polished and pathetic poem in the old
style of English pathos and poetry.’ Its merits, he said, ‘consist chiefly
in the feeling and tenderness of the whole delineation, and the taste and
delicacy with which all the subordinate parts are made to contribute to
the general effect.’ At the same time he found the story confused, some
passages were unintelligible, and there was a laborious effort at emphasis
and condensation which had led to ‘constraint and obscurity of the
diction.’ The _Quarterly_ reviewer, none other than Sir Walter Scott, was
more severe upon its blemishes. He complained of the ‘indistinctness’ of
the narrative, of the numerous blanks which were left to be filled up by
the imagination of the reader, of its occasional ambiguity and
abruptness. Its excellences were, however, generously admitted; and in
fact, on the whole, the _Quarterly_ said as much in its favour as could be
expected. In those days party spirit led to incredible freaks of literary
criticism; and it was only Scott’s magnanimity that could have allowed him
to forgive Campbell’s Whig politics for the sake of his poetry. Curiously
enough, considering their intimacy, Campbell did not know that Scott was
his reviewer, though he was not very wide of the mark when he spoke of the
writer as ‘a candid and sensible man,’ who ‘reviews like a gentleman, a
Christian, and a scholar.’ Of other contemporary criticisms we need not
speak. The poet’s friends were of course blindly eulogistic. Alison was
‘delighted and conquered,’ and Telford, with his characteristic bombast,
anticipated such applause from the public as would drive the author
frantic!
‘Gertrude,’ as has more than once been pointed out, was the first poem of
any length by a British writer the scene of which was laid in America, and
in it Campbell is the first European to introduce his readers to the
romance of the virgin forests and Red Indian warriors. The subject may
have occurred to him when transcribing a passage in his own ‘Annals,’ in
which reference is made to the massacre of Wyoming, although there is
possibly something in Beattie’s suggestion that he got the idea from
reading Lafontaine’s story of ‘Barneck and Saldorf,’ published in 1804.
Campbell, however, as we know, had a keen personal interest in America.
His father had lived there; three of his brothers were there now. ‘If I
were not a Scotsman,’ he once remarked, ‘I should like to be an American.’
No doubt the scenery of Pennsylvania had been often described to him in
letters from the other side.
But these are points that do not greatly concern us now. Nor is it
necessary to enter into any minute criticism of the poem. Campbell himself
preferred it to ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ (‘I mean,’ he said, ‘to ground my
claims to future notice on it’), while Hazlitt regarded it as his
‘principal performance.’ With neither opinion does the popular verdict
agree. Perhaps it may be that while ‘Gertrude’ is, as Lockhart said, a
more equal and better sustained effort than ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ it
contains fewer passages which bear detaching from the context. For one
thing the poet had a story to tell in ‘Gertrude,’ and he was eminently
unskilled in the management of poetic narrative. ‘I was always,’ he
remarks to Scott, ‘a dead bad hand at telling a story.’ In ‘Gertrude’ he
cannot keep to his story; the construction of the entire poem is loose and
incoherent. Even the love scenes, which, as Hazlitt says, breathe a balmy
voluptuousness of sentiment, are generally broken off in the middle. Then
he was unwise in adopting the Spenserian stanza. It was quite alien to his
style; even Thomson, living long before the romantic revival, managed it
more sympathetically than Campbell. The necessities of the rhyme led
Campbell to invert his sentences unduly, to tag his lines for the mere
sake of the rhyme, and to use affected archaisms with a quite
extraordinary clumsiness. Anything more unlike the sweet, easy, graceful
compactness of Spenser could scarcely be imagined.
Nor are the characters of the poem altogether successful; indeed, with the
single exception of the Indian, they are mere shadows. Gertrude herself
makes a pretty portrait; but as Hazlitt has remarked, she cannot for a
moment compare with Wordsworth’s Ruth, the true infant of the woods and
child-nature. Brant, again, who so warmly espoused the cause of the
Mohawks during the War of the American Revolution, is but a faint reality.
Campbell fancied that he had drawn a true picture of the partisan, but as
Brant’s son afterwards proved to him, the picture was purely imaginary.
The main function of the Indian chief is apparently to give local colour
to the poem, though it must be allowed that he stands out boldly among its
other characters. Hazlitt comments upon his erratic appearances, remarking
that he vanishes and comes back, after long intervals, in the nick of
time, without any known reason but the convenience of the author and the
astonishment of the reader. On the other hand, the death-song of the
savage which closes the poem, is one of the best things that the author
ever wrote.
Byron declared that ‘Gertrude’ was notoriously full of grossly false
scenery; that it had ‘no more locality with Pennsylvania than with
Penmanmaur.’ But that was an obvious exaggeration. There is better ground
for the complaint about Campbell’s errors in natural history as exhibited
in the poem--about his having conferred on Pennsylvania the aloe and the
palm, the flamingo and the panther. The probability is that he knew as
much about natural history as Goldsmith, whose friends declared that he
could not tell the difference between any two sorts of barndoor fowl until
they had been cooked. Once in the _New Monthly_, when a contributor spoke
of the rarity of seeing the cuckoo, Campbell added a correcting note to
say that he had himself ‘seen whole fields _blue_ with cuckoos’! But even
Shakespeare has lions in the forest of Arden, and Goldsmith makes the
tiger howl in North America. There is no need to insist upon absolute
accuracy in such matters. One would gladly notice instead the real merits
of the poem, which, however, are not so readily discovered. Hazlitt spoke
enthusiastically of passages of so rare and ripe a beauty that they exceed
all praise. But we have changed our poetical point of view since Hazlitt’s
day; and the most that can now be said for ‘Gertrude,’ is that it is a
third-rate poem containing a few first-rate lines. It is practically dead,
and can never be called back to life.
‘Gertrude’ was favourably received by the public, and particularly by the
Whig party, to whose leaders Campbell was personally known, and with most
of whom he was closely intimate. It was edited in America by Washington
Irving in 1810, and was highly praised on the other side--a fact which at
least suggests that its local scenery was not so false as Byron declared
it to be. The first edition was a quarto; a second in 12mo was called for
within the year. The quarto edition included some of the better known
short pieces, such as ‘Ye Mariners,’ ‘The Battle of the Baltic,’
‘Lochiel,’ ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter,’ and ‘Glenara,’ the latter founded on a
wild and romantic story of which Joanna Baillie afterwards made use in her
‘Family Legend.’ The second edition contained the once-familiar
‘O’Connor’s Child,’ a rather touching piece suggested by the flower
popularly known as ‘Love Lies Bleeding.’ Many years after this--in
1836--the Dublin people desired to give Campbell a public dinner as the
author of ‘O’Connor’s Child’ and ‘The Exile of Erin,’ but Campbell never
set foot on the Emerald Isle.