CLOSING YEARS
Some time just before the expiration of his Rectorship at Glasgow in 1829,
Campbell changed his residence from Seymour Street to Middle Scotland
Yard, where he furnished on such a grand scale that he had to mortgage a
prospective edition of his poems to pay the bill. In connection with this
change there were hints of a second marriage--hints which continued to be
whispered about for many a day, to Campbell’s evident annoyance. He
declared that there was no foundation for the report, that it was ‘the
baseless fabric of a vision’; yet we are assured by Beattie that he took
his new house at the suggestion of ‘an amiable and accomplished friend
deeply interested in his welfare, and destined, as he fondly imagined, to
restore him to the happiness of married life.’ Who the amiable lady was we
are not told; nor is anything said as to why the engagement fell through.
The presumption is that Campbell changed his mind, and did not want to
have the matter discussed.
At this time a suitable marriage would certainly have been no act of
madness, for Campbell was clearly feeling himself more than usually
lonesome. Indeed, it was with the avowed object of mitigating his forlorn
condition that he established the Literary Union, a social club over which
he presided till he finally left London in 1843. The burden of work and
removal had again thrown him into a wretched state of health, and in
September (1829) he writes to say that he is doing next to nothing apart
from the _New Monthly_. Protracted study exhausts him, and he dare not
take wine, which is the only reviving stimulus left. Starvation alone
alleviates his distress: a hearty meal means an agony of suffering;
therefore he stints himself at table, and loses flesh daily.
So the beginning of 1830 found him. His friend Sir Thomas Lawrence had
just died, and although he was profoundly ignorant of the technique of
art, and had even a limited appreciation of pictures and painting, he
boldly undertook to write the artist’s life. He set to the work in a
comically serious fashion. He had a printed notice sent to his friends and
fastened to the door of his study, intimating his desire to be left
undisturbed till the book was finished. These notices--for Campbell issued
them regularly--were the subject of much merriment among his
acquaintances. It was an announcement of the kind that drew from Hook the
jest about Campbell having been safely delivered of a couplet. In the
present case the ruse apparently did not answer, for in a week or two he
fled to the country. He seems to have spent a good deal of time over the
Life, but nothing ever came of his labours. Colburn insisted on having the
book in a few months, and Campbell, declaring that he could ‘get no
materials,’ petulantly threw it aside.
This was in December 1830. By that time Campbell had severed his
connection with the _New Monthly_. Colburn had parted with Redding in
October, and the editor’s difficulties were in consequence greatly
increased. He went out of town, and in his absence an attack on his old
friend, Dr Glennie of Dulwich, was inadvertently passed by Redding’s
successor, Mr S. C. Hall. Campbell does not explicitly say that this
incident was the cause of his resignation, but as he mentions interminable
scrapes and threatened law-suits, we may safely assume that it was. At any
rate he said good-bye to Colburn in no amiable mood. Colburn had a bill
of £700 against him, partly for books and partly for the expense of the
current unsold edition of his poems. How was he to discharge such a debt?
The difficulty was temporarily met by an agreement with Cochrane, the
publisher, whereby the latter was to pay the £700 in return for Campbell’s
undertaking the editorship of a new venture, to be called _The
Metropolitan Magazine_, and for two hundred unsold copies of his poems in
Colburn’s hands. Unluckily, Cochrane could not make up the £700, and
Campbell, in order to satisfy Colburn, had to stake the rent of his house
and sell off his poems at such price as they would bring. At the close of
1830 he went into lodgings, and instead of settling down, as he had hoped,
to enjoy a kind of mild _otium cum dignitate_, he had perforce to resume
his seat on the thorny cushion of the editorial chair. When he left the
_New Monthly_, Redding asked him, ‘What about the reduced finances?’
‘Devil take the finances,’ said he; ‘it is something to be free if a man
has but a shirt and a carpet bag.’ His soreness of heart at having to sell
his liberty again may thus be imagined.
Campbell’s connection with the _Metropolitan Magazine_ proved anything but
agreeable. True, things went smoothly enough for a time. In the autumn he
felt himself ten inches taller because he had got a third share in the
property. The share cost him £500, and he had to borrow the money from
Rogers, for whose security--though Rogers generously declined any
security--he insured his life and pledged his library and house furniture.
But the concern turned out to be a bubble, and Campbell suffered agonies
of suspense about his money. He got it back in the long run, and it was
returned to Rogers. But this was only the beginning of his troubles. At
the request of Captain Chamier, one of the proprietors, he continued in
the editorship, but the magazine passed through many vicissitudes. When
it came into the hands of his old friend Captain Marryat, Campbell wanted
to cut connection with it entirely, and was prevailed upon to remain only
by Marryat promising to relieve him of the correspondence. Shortly after
this, Marryat offered the editorship to Moore who, however, declined to
supplant Campbell, and so joined the staff merely as a contributor.
Campbell presently reported that ‘we go on in very good heart.’ But these
conditions did not last. Campbell found that he could not work comfortably
under Marryat--who was just about to give the magazine a swing with his
‘Peter Simple’--and he threw up the editorship, which in point of fact he
had held only in name. He seems to have left everything to his sub-editor.
He seldom examined a manuscript unless it came from one of his friends;
nor did he give by his contributions--nine short pieces of verse--anything
like value for the money he received. His editorship, in short, was purely
ornamental.
But it is necessary to retrace our steps. Just after taking on the
_Metropolitan_ in 1831, Campbell fixed upon a quiet residence at St
Leonard’s which he now used as an occasional retreat from the bustle of
London. We hear of him strolling with complacent pride on the beach while
the band played ‘The Campbells are Comin’’ and ‘Ye Mariners of England.’
He tells his sister that refined female society had become of great
consequence to him, and that he found it concentrated here. He had no
pressing engagements, and accordingly had written more verses than he had
done for many years within the same time. His ‘Lines on the View from St
Leonards,’ published first in the _Metropolitan_, were well-known, though
they are now forgotten. A visit to one of the paper mills at Maidstone in
July 1831 was made to inquire about the price of paper for an edition of
‘The Pleasures of Hope’ which Turner had promised to illustrate. Campbell
had a little joke with the manager at the mills. ‘I am a paper-stainer,’
he said, and then he explained that he stained with author’s ink, after
which the manager became ‘intensely disdainful.’ At Stoke, near Bakewell,
whither he had gone to see Mrs Arkwright, a daughter of Stephen Kemble, he
heard Chevalier Neukomm play the organ. This, he says, was as great an era
in his sensations as when he first beheld the Belvidere Apollo. In the
music he imagined that he heard his dead Alison speaking to him from
heaven, and when he could listen no longer he slipped out to the
churchyard, where he ‘gave way to almost convulsive sensations.’ Some
years later he met Neukomm again, and at his request turned a part of the
Book of Job--the ‘sublime text’ of which he often extolled--into verse for
an oratorio. The effort appears as a ‘fragment’ in his works, and Neukomm
is said to have composed the music, though no mention of such an oratorio
is made in any of the biographical notices of the composer.
We come now to an important episode in the life of Campbell--an episode
which for long engaged almost his sole attention. His interest in the
cause of Poland had already been strikingly expressed in ‘The Pleasures of
Hope.’ It was an interest which, as his friend Dr Madden puts it, had all
the strength of a passion, all the fervour of patriotism. Poland was his
idol. ‘He wrote for it, he worked for it, he sold his literary labour for
it; he used his influence with all persons of eminence in political life
of his acquaintance in favour of it; and, when it was lost, in favour of
those brave defenders of it who had survived its fall. He threw himself
heart and soul into the cause; he identified all his feelings, nay, his
very being with it.’ The names of Czartoryski and Niemeiewitz were never
off his lips. A tale of a distressed Pole was his greeting to friends when
they met; a subscription the chorus of his song. In fact, he was quite mad
on the subject, as mad as ever Byron was about Greece, or Boswell about
Corsica.
What roused him first was the fall of Warsaw, by the news of which he was
so affected that Madden feared for his life or his reason. He began very
practically by subscribing £100 to the Warsaw Hospital Fund, ‘a mighty sum
for a poor poet,’ as he says in an unpublished letter. He had written some
‘Lines on Poland’ for the _Metropolitan_, and these, along with the Lines
on St Leonards, he proposed to publish in a _brochure_, by which he
expected to raise £50 more. The number of exiles in London gradually
increased. Many of them were starving. Campbell constituted himself their
guardian, appealed urgently for money on their behalf, and subsequently,
early in 1831, founded a Polish Association with the object of relieving
distress and distributing literature calculated to arouse public sympathy
on the matter.
Of this Association he was appointed chairman. The duties proved anything
but light. In June 1832 he writes that he has a heavy correspondence to
keep up, both with friends at home and with foreigners. He has letters in
French, German, and even Latin to write, and these afford him nothing like
a sinecure. There was also a monthly journal called _Polonia_ to edit;
besides which the German question--another and the same with the
Polish--involved him in much vexatious correspondence with the patriots of
the Fatherland. At this date he was constantly working from seven in the
morning till midnight; he even changed his dinner hour to two o’clock to
have a longer afternoon for his beloved Poles. It was impossible that such
a strain could last; and at length, in May 1833, he withdrew from the
Association as having become too arduous and exciting for his health. Thus
closed a part of his career which was as honourable to him as anything he
ever did, and upon which he looked back with feelings of sad pleasure.
His zeal was perhaps a little ill-regulated, but his sincerity and his
active practical efforts on behalf of many brave, unfortunate men bore the
impress of a noble and a generous nature. The Poles showed their gratitude
in many touching ways; and we have his own express declaration that only
once in his life did he experience anything at all like their warm-hearted
recognition of his services on their behalf.
During the whole of this distracted period Campbell had all but completely
forsaken his own proper business. He had, of course, continued to edit the
_Metropolitan_, and his random contributions to that journal must have
filled up some time, but from the fall of Warsaw in March 1831 to his
ceasing connection with the Polish Association in May 1833 his interests
were centred entirely on the affairs of the exiles. Even the agitation
about the Reform Bill had passed almost unheeded, though he was among
those who celebrated the passing of the Bill by dining with the Lord Mayor
at the Guildhall, on which occasion he remarked that the turtle soup
tasted as if it had already felt the beneficent effects of Reform. From
Glasgow had come in 1832 an appeal that he would allow himself to be
nominated as a candidate for Parliament, but he declined the honour
because a seat in the House would entail a life of ‘dreadful hardship,’
and cut up his literary occupation.
The only work of any note which he did while actively interested in the
Poles was the Life of Mrs Siddons. He finished the book, at the end of
1832, in one volume, but the ‘tyrant booksellers’ would not look at it
until he had expanded it into two volumes. It was at length published in
June 1834. Few words need be wasted over it. Mrs Siddons, of whom he
entertained an extravagantly high opinion, had entrusted him with what he
loftily termed the ‘sacred duty’ of writing her life, but he was
thoroughly unfitted for such a commission, and it is the simple truth that
no man of even average ability ever produced a worse biography. The
_Quarterly_ called it ‘an abuse of biography,’ and its author ‘the worst
theatrical historian we have ever had.’ It is full of the grossest
blunders, and some of its expressions are turgid and nonsensical beyond
belief. Thus of Mrs Pritchard we read that she ‘electrified the house with
disappointment,’ a statement upon which the _Quarterly_ remarked: ‘This,
we suppose, is what the philosophers call negative electricity.’ The thing
was rendered additionally absurd by the noise which Campbell had made
about the writing of the book. He talked about it and wrote about it to
everybody, as if it were to be the _magnum opus_ of his life. From this
the public and his friends naturally formed great expectations, and when
they found they had been deluded they covered Campbell with ridicule.
With the money which the publication of this wretched book brought him
Campbell now afforded himself a long break. He conceived the idea of a
classical pilgrimage in Italy as likely not only to benefit his health but
to furnish him with materials for a new poem. A change in the tide of his
affairs carried him however to Paris, and he never set eyes on the sunny
land. He arrived in the French capital in July, when the weather was so
hot that he told the Parisians their _beau climat_ was fit only for
devils. He was eagerly welcomed by many of the Polish exiles, who gave
him, what he did not dislike, a grand dinner, at which Prince Czartoryski
proclaimed him ‘the pleader, the champion, the zealous and unwearied
apostle of our holy cause.’ He heard Louis Philippe deliver his address to
the Peers and Deputies, and made a ‘dispassionate enquiry’ into the
characteristics of French beauty, which resulted in the conviction that
the French ladies have no beauty at all! He began work on a Geography of
Classical History, rising every morning with the sun, and studying for
twelve hours a day. Presently some French friends interested him in the
recent conquest and colonisation of Algiers, and, with his characteristic
caprice, he decided to go there at once and write a book on the colony.
He landed in Algiers on the 18th of September (1834) to find Captain St
Palais translating his poems for publication. ‘Prancing gloriously’ on an
Arabian barb, he felt as if he had dropt into a new planet. The vegetation
gave him ecstatic delight, and he was greatly elated when he discovered
some ruins unmentioned by previous travellers. As usual he began to harass
himself about money, but the announcement opportunely arrived that Telford
had left him £1000, and he resolved to go on with his tour. He covered the
entire coast from Bona to Oran, and penetrated as far as Mascara, seventy
miles into the interior. For several nights he slept under the tents of
the Arabs, and he made much of hearing a lion roar in his ‘native savage
freedom.’ But all this, and a great deal more, may be read in his ‘Letters
from the South,’ an informative and even lively work in two volumes, which
appeared originally in the _New Monthly_. Campbell’s account of Algerian
scenery is so glowingly eloquent that if unforeseen objects had not
diverted his attention, the African tour would probably have formed the
subject of a new poem. As it was, the tour remained poetically barren,
save for some lines on a dead eagle and a _jeu d’esprit_ written for the
British Consul’s children.
Campbell was back in Paris in May 1835, and after ‘a long and gracious
audience’ with Louis Philippe, he returned to London to tell more stories
than Tom Coryatt, and enjoy a temporary fame as an African traveller. The
tour seems, however, to have done him harm rather than good. Redding says
he was astonished at the change in his appearance. He looked a dozen years
older; he was in unusually low spirits, and he kept harping upon his
disordered constitution. From this date onwards the record of his career
is not worth dwelling upon in any detail. He suffered greatly from spells
of ill-health; he shifted fitfully from one residence to another; he
visited this place and that place; and with constant cackle about his busy
pen, did almost nothing. Under these circumstances the briefest summary of
the remaining years of his life will suffice.
Upon his return from Paris in 1835 he settled down at York Chambers, St
James’ Street, where he prepared his ‘Letters from the South’ and arranged
about the new edition of his poems to be illustrated by Turner. In May
1836 he started for Scotland, where he remained for four months, spending,
he says, the happiest time he had ever spent in the land of his fathers.
On former visits he had always been hurried and haunted by the necessity
of sending manuscripts or proofs to London; but now he was his own master.
At Glasgow he dined with the Campbell Club, and got over the function
‘very well,’ having left Professor Wilson and other choice spirits to
prolong the carousal into the small hours. _Apropos_, a story is told of
Wilson and Campbell which is too good to be missed. The poet’s cousin, Mr
Gray, had a bewitchingly pretty maid, who had set Campbell--so he
says--dreaming about the heroines of romance. The day after the dinner,
Wilson, with other members of the Club, called at the house while the Gray
family were absent. ‘I rang to get refreshment for them,’ says Campbell,
‘and fair Margaret brought it in. The Professor looked at her with so much
admiration that I told him in Latin to contain his raptures, and he did
so; but rose and walked round the room like a lion pacing his cage. Before
parting he said, “Cawmel, that might be your ain Gertrude. Could not you
just ring and get me a sight of that vision of beauty again?” “No, no,” I
told him, “get you gone, you Moral Philosophy loon, and give my best
respects to your wife and daughters.”’ As a set-off to this, it may be
recorded that Campbell was sadly dismayed at seeing so many of the
Glasgow ‘bonnie lassies’ going about with bare feet. ‘I am constantly,’ he
says, ‘preaching against this national disgrace to my countrymen. It is a
barbarism so unlike, so unworthy of, the otherwise civilised character of
the commonality, which is the most intelligent in Europe; and it is a
disgrace unpalliated by poverty in Glasgow, where the industrious are
exceedingly well-off.’ The Club dinner was followed by a meeting of the
Polish Association, at which Campbell gave a forty-five minutes’ speech
that, by his own report, caused quite a sensation. He went to hear his old
College chum, Dr Wardlaw, preach, and afterwards compared him with
Chalmers. Chalmers, he said, ‘carries his audience by storm, but Wardlaw
is a reasoning and well-informed person,’ a double-edged compliment to the
more famous divine which Campbell probably did not see.
After a trip to the Highlands--one result of which was his ‘Lines to Ben
Lomond,’ published shortly after in the _Scenic Annual_--he went to
Edinburgh, where, on the 5th of August, he was made a freeman and was
fêted like a prince. The Paisley Council and bailies, as he humorously
tells, refused him a like honour; they bestowed it on Wilson, who was an
inveterate Tory, and denied it to Campbell because he was a Whig.
Nevertheless, Campbell, taking no offence, went to Paisley to the dinner,
and Wilson and he spent a merry time at the races afterwards, Campbell
being, indeed, so ‘prodigiously interested’ as to have an even £50 on one
of the events!
Returning to London in October, he was back in Scotland again in the
summer of 1837. There was a printers’ centenary festival in the capital in
July, and nobody could be got to take the chair ‘because it was a
three-and-sixpenny _soirée_.’ This roused Campbell’s democratic blood, and
he immediately offered to fill the breach. ‘Delta’ proposed his health,
and the audience got their hearts out by singing ‘Ye Mariners of
England.’ Before the year ended he had again changed his residence. This
time it was to ‘spacious chambers’ in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which,
ignoring all the teachings of experience, he furnished so expensively that
he had to undertake a new piece of hack work to cover the cost. The
account of his difficulty with an Irish charwoman who sought to help him
in arranging his books is at once amusing and pathetic. She understood, he
says, neither Greek nor Latin, so that when he ordered her to bring such
and such a volume of Athenæus or Fabricius she could only grunt like one
of her native pigs. What did Campbell expect? Redding has a dreary picture
of the disorder in which he found him one afternoon shortly after this.
The rooms were in a state of extraordinary confusion. The breakfast things
were still on the table, a coat was on one chair and a dressing-gown on
another; pyramids of books were heaped on the floor, and papers lay
scattered about in endless disarray. It was indeed a sad change from the
neatness which had prevailed in Mrs Campbell’s time.
About this date the illustrated edition of his poems was published, and he
found himself in some perplexity over the disposal of the drawings, for
which he had paid Turner £550. He had been assured that Turner’s drawings
were like banknotes, which would always bring their original price, but
when he offered them for £300 no one would look at them, and Turner
himself subsequently bought them for two hundred guineas. Of this
illustrated edition two thousand five hundred copies went off within a
twelvemonth; while of an edition on shorter paper the same number was sold
in eleven months in Scotland alone. Those were happy days for poets!
At the close of this year (1837) the _Scenic Annual_ appeared, containing
four pieces of Campbell’s own, notably his ‘Cora Linn, or The Falls of
Clyde,’ which he had written while in Glasgow the previous summer.
Evidently he had some doubts about the dignity of accepting the editorship
of this work, which was issued by Colburn merely to use up some old
plates. ‘You will hear me much abused,’ he says, ‘but as I get £200 for
writing a sheet or two of paper it will take a deal of abuse to mount up
to that sum.’ One cannot help recalling how Scott scorned to write for the
_Keepsake_, but Scott’s ideas of self-respect were very different from
those of Campbell. In January 1838 Campbell intimates that he is busy on a
popular edition of Shakespeare for Moxon. Needless to say, it was a
good-for-nothing production. It is, however, a point in his favour that he
had the grace to be ashamed of it. He said he had done it hurriedly,
though with the right feeling. ‘What a glorious fellow Shakespeare must
have been!’ he exclaimed, when talking about the book. ‘Walter Scott was
fine, but had a worldly twist. Shakespeare must have been just the man to
live with.’ This hint at Scott’s worldliness is sufficiently amusing, to
say the least, in view of Campbell’s own sordid ambitions.
On the 10th of March he tells how he has been corresponding with the
Queen. He had got his poems and his ‘Letters from the South’ bound with as
much gilt as would have covered the Lord Mayor’s coach--the bill was
£6--and having sent the volumes to Windsor, they were, as such things
always are, ‘graciously accepted.’ For an avowed democrat Campbell made an
unaccountable outcry about this ‘honour,’ which produced nothing more
substantial than an autograph portrait of Her Majesty. In truth, with all
his good sense, he could be very foolish on occasion. He was one of the
spectators at the coronation of the Queen in Westminster Abbey this
year--later on he was presented at Court by the Duke of Argyll--and he
declares that she conducted herself so well during the long and fatiguing
ceremony, that he ‘shed tears many times.’ Why anyone should shed tears
because a royal lady behaves herself becomingly would have been a puzzle
for Lord Dundreary. But Campbell was given to blubbering on every
conceivable and inconceivable pretext. Once when he went to visit Mrs
Siddons he was ‘overcome, even to tears, by the whole meeting’; and we
hear of him crying like a child when drawing up some papers on behalf of
the despoiled Poles. What tears are ‘manly, sir, manly,’ as Fred Bayham
has it, may sometimes be difficult to decide, but there can be no question
about the unmanly character of much of Campbell’s snivelling.
In July he paid another visit to Scotland, this time in connection with
family affairs. Mrs Dugald Stewart died while he was in Edinburgh, and one
more link binding him to the past was broken. Returning to his lonely
chambers, he reports himself as working from six in the morning till
midnight, a treadmill business which he unblushingly admits to be due to
sheer avarice. ‘The money! the money!’ he exclaims; ‘the thought of
parting with it is _unthinkable_, and pounds sterling are to me “dear as
the ruddy drops that warm my heart.”’ He calls himself spendthrift--as
wretched and regular a miser as ever kept money in an old stocking; and
finds an excuse for himself only in the fact that he is getting more
interested in public charities. His principal literary work was now a Life
of Petrarch. Archdeacon Coxe had left a biography uncompleted, and
Campbell agreed to finish it for £200. He found it, however, so stupid
that he decided to write a Life of Petrarch himself, though he frankly
allowed that until quite recently he had something like an aversion to
Petrarch because of the monotony of his amatory sonnets, and his wild,
semi-insane passion for Laura. He had nothing but pity for a man who could
be in love for twenty years with a woman who was a wife and a prolific
mother to boot. The Life of Petrarch occupied him until the spring of
1840. It was a sorry performance, and may be dismissed without further
remark. Campbell had neither the sympathy with the Italian poet nor the
intimate knowledge of his life and work which were requisite in his
biographer, and the book is simply what he called it himself--a mere piece
of manufacture.
Very little of importance had happened while he was engaged on this
production. There were visits to Brighton and to Ramsgate in search of
health; and another link had been severed by the death of Alison, his
‘mind’s father.’ He had projected a small edition of his poems as a
resource for his closing years, and in November 1839 Moxon had thrown off
ten thousand copies in double column, to be sold at two shillings each. Of
original lyrical work nothing of any note was produced, the pieces
including ‘My Child Sweetheart,’ ‘Moonlight,’ and ‘The Parrot.’ In
September 1840 he was at Chatham for the launch of a couple of warships,
when he made a speech and wrote his lines on ‘The Launch of a First-rate.’
Campbell had a patriotic partiality for the navy, and liked to hear about
the exploits of seamen, but his speech on this occasion was a great deal
better than the verses which followed it.
Feeling more than ever the cheerlessness of his chambers, he now made
another expensive change of residence. He longed for the comforts of a
_home_, and with his niece, Margaret, the daughter of his deceased
brother, Alexander Campbell, whom he brought from Glasgow to superintend
his domestic arrangements, he leased the house No. 8 Victoria Square,
Pimlico, about which he spoke to everybody as a child speaks about a new
toy. He removed in the spring of 1841; but he had not been long in
occupation when he fell ill and went off suddenly to Wiesbaden. Beattie
says he would not abide strictly by regimen, and to his other complaints
was now added an attack of rheumatism. At Wiesbaden he met Hallam, the
historian, ‘a most excellent man, of great acuteness and of immense
research in reading,’ but no other notability seems to have crossed his
path. He benefited greatly by the waters and baths, and at Ems even
managed to write the ballad of ‘The Child and Hind,’ the story of which,
printed in a Wiesbaden paper, plagued him so that he could not help
rhyming. This piece was obviously meant as an imitation of the old ballad,
but it is as little successful as such imitations usually are.
Reaching London once more, he sat down contented--for the time being--at
his own fireside; and in November he writes of his intention to live now
as a gentleman poet. He was highly pleased with his niece. She was
‘well-principled and amiable,’ a ‘nice, comfortable housekeeper,’ and a
‘tolerable musician.’ Some people jeered at her for her scruples about
going to the play, but Campbell allowed nothing to be said in her hearing
that might alarm her pious feelings. He taught her French and Greek,
engaged the best masters for her general education, and spared no expense
in books. His affectionate feelings towards her are well expressed in the
lines beginning ‘Our friendship’s not a stream to dry,’ and a more
tangible token of his regard was shown at his death, when he left her
nearly the whole of his property.
He had now been busy for some time with ‘The Pilgrim of Glencoe,’ and the
poem was published, with other short pieces, in February 1842. It fell
still-born from the press. Some zealous admirer said it ought to have been
as good as a bill at sight, but alack! the bill was found to be
unnegotiable. The publisher made strenuous exertions to obtain a hearing
for the poem, but all to no purpose. The public would not be roused from
their indifference, and ‘The Pilgrim of Glencoe’ sunk at once into the
shades of oblivion.
Campbell was manifestly unprepared for such a reverse. He had expected a
quick and profitable return from the book, and had entered into heavy
responsibilities, which now threatened his independence. One cannot help
remarking again upon the mystery of these continued money difficulties.
There was no reason why Campbell should be everlastingly in financial
straits. He had his pension, he had been uncommonly lucky in the matter of
legacies, he enjoyed property to the extent of £200 a year, and the
profits of his work besides. There ought now to have been less cause than
ever for pleading poverty. That there were difficulties is, however,
abundantly evident, from the fact that he precipitately resolved to
dispose of his house and retire to some retreat where he could live
cheaply and await the advances of old age. London, he protested, was no
longer the place for him. His friends, too, observed that his constitution
was visibly failing: he walked with a feeble step, and his face wore an
expression of languor and anxiety.
Under these disquieting conditions he made his will, and began to look
about for the ‘remote corner.’ In the meantime he was preparing still
another edition of his collected poems, which he intended to publish by
subscription. He says that for several years past the sale of his books
had been steadily going down, so that his poems, which had yielded him on
an average £500 per annum, would not now bring him much more than a tenth
of that amount. By keeping the book in his own hands he expected to make a
goodly sum. But the experiment failed. The subscriptions dribbled in only
at rare intervals, and some money having come to him from the death of his
eldest and only surviving sister in March 1843, as well as a little legacy
from Mr A’Becket, the new edition, like its predecessors, passed into the
hands of Mr Moxon. The volume was a handsome one of four hundred pages,
with fifty-six vignettes by leading artists. It had a not inconsiderable
sale, and brought a substantial addition to Campbell’s exchequer.
Unhappily he had neither health nor spirits to enjoy his improved
fortunes. He had outlived all his own family; he was getting more and more
depressed, more and more feeble. To leave London seemed ill-advised, but
he was determined upon it, and having made excursions to Brittany and
elsewhere in search of a place of retirement, he at length fixed on
Boulogne.[3] There he arrived with his niece in July 1843. Redding saw him
just before leaving and found him in good humour, though he appeared weak
and looked far older than he was. He had sold a thousand volumes from his
library, and injudiciously spent £500 on the purchase of an annuity,
because he dreaded that he might run through the principal. Boulogne
proved not uncongenial to his tastes--a gay place with many public
amusements, the Opera and the ‘Comedie,’ as well as concerts and races.
But he was never able to derive any pleasure from it. Even the books he
had brought from London were never placed on their shelves.
He had still some work which he intended doing, particularly a treatise on
ancient geography, but ‘incurable indolence’ overcame him, and he resigned
himself to the arm-chair. He complained of weakness, and felt a gradually
increasing disinclination for any kind of exertion. In March 1844 Beattie
received from him the last letter he ever wrote. A rapid decay of bodily
strength had set in, and he never rallied. He had frequently told Beattie,
his ‘kind, dear physician,’ that if he ever fell seriously ill care should
be taken to acquaint him with the fact. Beattie was accordingly summoned
to Boulogne, but his services were unavailing, except in so far as he
could make the closing days easier for the patient. When the end came, on
the 15th of June, it came peacefully, so peacefully that those who were
watching by the bedside hardly knew when the spirit had fled.
Thus died Thomas Campbell, the last of all his long family, ‘a lonely
hermit in the vale of years.’ There was a story that a representative of
the Glasgow Cemetery Company had waited on the poor enfeebled poet about a
year before his death to beg his body for their new cemetery. However this
may have been--and one would prefer not to believe the story--when
Campbell wrote his ‘Field Flowers’ it seems clear that he contemplated a
grave by the Clyde. Redding says: ‘He often spoke of our going down
together to visit the scenery, and of his preference for it as a last
resting-place.’ But the field-flowers, ‘earth’s cultur’less buds,’ were
not to bloom on his grave. His body was brought to England, and on the 3rd
of July was laid with great pomp in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster
Abbey, where a fine statue now marks his tomb. A deputation of Poles
attended, and as the coffin was lowered a handful of earth from the grave
of Kosciusko was scattered over the lid. It was a simple but touching
tribute. Two points struck his intimate friends when they read the
inscription on the coffin lid. He was described as LL.D., a distinction he
detested, and as ‘Author of “The Pleasures of Hope,”’ which he detested
too.