Cyrus Redding: Literary Reminiscences and Memoirs of Thomas Campbell

AN unforeseen event took place in the year 1811, to which Campbell owed his introduction to Byron. A hostile epistolary communication had taken place, or one in a spirit which bordered upon hostile feeling, between Byron and Moore. The last, with the heat of his countrymen, was for settling the grievance with gunpowder, to prove his quarrel just. He did not ask himself whether Jeffrey was, or was not justified in vindicating truth and virtue, by censuring, as it was his duty to do, the gross licentiousness of

LITERARY REMINISCENCES AND

Little’s poems. He called out Jeffrey, and the wits of the day had their jokes about Chalk Farm, and the pistols and bullets. Byron, who then knew nothing of Moore personally, had a fling at the duellists in his attack on Jeffrey, and spoke about “Little’s leaden pistols.” Moore could not relish this, which he should have borne quietly, considering how much he was in the wrong on the score of morals. Having sought an explanation from Byron, Rogers had arranged the difference to the satisfaction of the disputants, who had never seen each other, but were about to meet the same day for the first time at the classical table of Rogers. Campbell chancing to call upon Rogers the same day, the dinner was to take place, received an invitation to meet Byron and Moore. Accordingly they all four met in this singular manner. Four names standing so high for poetical celebrity hardly ever before met in so unforeseen a manner, and certainly never at a more hospitable table. This year, too, Campbell made the acquaintance of Sir Thomas Lawrence.

His opening lectures, of which a brief analysis, as I have observed, may not be out of place, were devoted primarily to certain general remarks upon poetical composition. He entered at some length into a definition of its nature, and the mode in which poetry maintains its influence and advantages over painting and sculpture, notwithstanding the effects the last produce by immediate impression. He spoke of poetry as being the religion of nature, under a synonyme, and its object to delight the imagination, separating it from every pursuit of language. He exhibited how poetry, intermingled with other intellectual pursuits, had truth more strictly and directly for its object. Thus Shakspeare furnished texts for philosophy, and the apothegms of Bacon were orna-

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mented with figurative illustrations. The metaphysics of Locke exhibited poetical descriptions, and poetry was more or less diffused throughout moral sentiment. Cold imaginations had never been among the number of those which had influenced mankind, instancing the orator in appealing to human passions as indebted to the same pervading influence; and the historian, while dealing in fact, giving prominence to striking event and heroic character. He thus discriminated the limits which separated the labours of the muse from history, philosophy, and oratory. He explained how poetry produces its effect upon the human mind, by “views of the good and evil of existence thrown into large masses of light and shade”—how, on the sensibilities being modified by special exceptions and abatements, as in the necessary adherence of the historian to truth and impartiality, language ceased to be poetry, the very error of feeling being more poetical than its equilibrium.

He agreed with Dugald Stewart that the spring of all human activity and improvement is the faculty of imagination, and dwelt for a short time upon this part of the subject, including the effect of poetry on the interests of virtue.

There is nothing in prose which Campbell did, either in regard to writing, analysis, or a philosophical view of any subject he ever treated, better than this his opening lecture. It is, in all points, masterly. He concluded—

Classical poetry was censured for its deficiency in regard to the treatment of female character; but, of the specimens alluded to, Homer was by far the best, his descriptions or allusions to social existence, in the Odyssey particularly, being in many respects pleasing. All that Homer left was interesting, and his pictures of life in the Odyssey particularly so. The discovery of Ulysses by Penelope was dwelt upon; then the scenes most repulsive were cited; and the other works attributed to Homer were enumerated. This part of the poet’s fourth lecture was precise and learned. In it, too, Hesiod, the next poet of Greece after Homer, was noticed, and his works enumerated by the lecturer; the priority of date in their writings was given to Homer. The works of Hesiod were then described.

The lecturer was of opinion that Euripides had more of the modern conception of subjects of tragic interest than Æschylus or Sophocles, deducing the pathetic and terrible more from the direct agency of the human passions. The Greeks employed more of the resources of art to affect the imagination in the drama than is done in modern times. Ideal and general impressions of grace and grandeur were effects studied by the Greeks, yet their characters were remarkably intelligible. Athenian tragedy was more a feast to the imagination than a mirror to nature. The choral parts fatigue the moderns. The plot, though simpler than the modern, had terrific situations and terrible bursts of passion. The theatre was not an every-day entertainment, but was only opened at festivals. The plays lasted the entire day, every three tragedies being followed by a farce, until the judges awarded the prize to the successful candidate. Not merely literary men by profession, but public officers,

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and commanders of armies, were among the writers of Athenian plays. Of these there were two hundred and fifty of the first class; five hundred of the second; and a corresponding number of comedies.

The lecturer then proceeded to notice the site and form of the Dionysiac theatre of Athens, which Plato stated would contain thirty thousand spectators. He described the various parts of the building elaborately, and concluded his description by stating that every device known to the modern stage was practised by the Greeks. Returning again to Æschylus, the proper founder of Greek tragedy in the eighth, which the lecturer misdenominated the tenth lecture, he continued by noticing his birth, 525 years before Christ, and his parentage, but stated that nearly all known about him was obscure and perplexing. His decease at Gala, in Sicily, was certainly known. The crowning of the tragic poets was alluded to, and the drama in general described as highly national and mythological. The subjects generally chosen were described, and the repetition of new dramas upon the same subject. Æschylus was supposed to have composed his pieces in trilogies, quoting, in support of what he advanced, several eminent continental authorities. Æschylus merged the pathetic in the terrible. Only seven of his hun-

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dred dramas are extant. The “Prometheus Chained” was extolled by the lecturer, and examined in detail at some length. The least interesting of the great Greek poet’s dramas were, in the lecturer’s view, the “Suppliants,” and the “Persians.” The tragedy of “Agamemnon,” too, was cited by the lecturer, and its leading features described.

The character of Sophocles, as a poet, was the subject of the ninth lecture, after mention of the scanty information respecting him which has reached modern times, and which does not supply materials for the most meagre biography. It was ascertained that he was born B.C. 498, and at eight-and-twenty gained his first victory in the theatre—that at sixteen he was remarkable for his personal beauty, and led the band that danced around the trophy erected for the victory at Salamis. In a contest for the tragic crown with Æschylus, the prize was decreed to Sophocles. He became a general in the Athenian army; the principal incidents in his life were adverted to; many of his best tragedies were written after sixty years of age. The lecturer then entered upon the merits of his different works, and the difficulty of giving any idea of them in a translation. “Ajax,” “Philoctetes,” the “Electra”, “Œdipus at Coloneus,” and “Antigone,” were

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successively examined, and at considerable length; thus the ninth lecture concluded.

Euripides was the subject of Campbell’s tenth and last lecture. Here a singular instance of the lecturer’s absence of mind or inattention, occurs, in the fact that he proceeded to the conclusion of what he called his “twelfth lecture,” in the manuscript, without observing that he had delivered only ten. He talked of commencing his thirteenth with the poetry of Rome. It was observed to him that he claimed credit for more lectures than he should do, having skipped two numbers, and gone from the seventh to the ninth. He had, in fact, given the number of nine to his seventh, and made the last half of the ninth so given the last half of the seventh. He had never thought of looking back to the preceding numbers, and thus omitted numbers eight and nine altogether, thinking he had completed twelve when he had only finished ten—this was characteristic. He began it by a brief account of Euripides and his birth on the day of the victory of Salamis, but went into a variety of other matters connected with the drama, and with Athens itself. Little about this great poet was known, but it was certain that he applied himself early to painting, and studied rhetoric. The opinions of the lecturer’s friends, the two celebrated Schlegels,

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were quoted respecting the Greek dramatist. Euripides delineated life, not in the lofty ideal mode of Sophocles, but according to individual nature, its faults and fashions. The disquisition of the lecturer on the merits of Euripides was every way worthy of his acquaintance with the Greek muse and his critical acumen. Between Euripides and Sophocles the line of distinction was drawn with the hand of a master. He observed with great truth, that the difference between Euripides and his predecessors in tragedy, if they may be so called, was, that his genius triumphed more in partial than in collective effect, the Iphigenia in Aulis being a bright exception to this judgment. In the whole drama, in the entirety of the piece, he was not so perfect, but in insulated scenes he was greatly superior. He was considered the most tragic of poets in the sense of pathos. By dealing with human passions, and his mastership of the pathetic, he retains still an interest on the stage, while the other dramatic writers of his country cannot be reproduced with any effect. Campbell was of opinion that he left the drama of Greece less perfect than he found it, though dramatic poetry must still be deemed his debtor.

He thus considered the dramatic poetry of Greece, and broke off suddenly with Euripides. This was to be deplored, because a good part of what he gave was a charming addition to our stock of knowledge relative to Greece, in a very condensed form, the fruit of much research. The enthusiasm of Campbell on behalf of the Athenians made him throw his whole heart into his theme; and, accordingly, it was seen with what vigorous eloquence he set out on his task, and proceeded to a certain point in the same delightful manner. Next, at the termination of the sixth lecture, how a change ensued, which afforded a picture of the poet’s mental constitution. Everything he flew at was with a vigorous effort; sometimes he soared with the eagle in the glowing intensity of the noonday beam; but he soon began to slacken in his flight, and the pinions, just before so vigorous, became fatigued, and scarcely able to sustain him on the wing. His larger design, as to carrying out the lectures after the specimens, to which allusion will be made presently, fell to the ground. He never proceeded far with them, never even to complete the English poets, much

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less those of modern nations. This was his way—ardent in planning schemes too extensive for execution, through want of vigour and perseverance to carry them out. They were thus what the Germans would call “dream-songs.”

The prose of the lectures delivered by Campbell was characteristic. He elaborated and finished sentence after sentence with great care, and thus, perhaps, in some degree deprived his language of that ease which would have added to its attraction. It is not disjointed as the prose composition of some fastidious writers is often found to be under similar circumstances, but is as neat and even elegant as might be expected from one so careful as he was in his metrical composition.

Thus the muse of Campbell belonged to that order in genius which is unable to sustain long its intensity of action. As with the execution of his two longer poems, the “Pleasures of Hope,” “Gertrude of Wyoming,” and three or four of his noble odes, in regard to quantity and excellence, so it was with the duration of his power in working out the best things he was able to execute. His productions before the “Pleasures of Hope” were published, were not of much more moment than those published after that poem, his Odes, and “Gertrude of Wyoming,” of course taking into account his additional experience. The poetical works, therefore, upon which his well-earned fame reposes were published between 1799 and 1809, or in about ten years of a life extended to sixty-seven. It is evident that his poetical power decreased before middle life. The circumstances which attend upon the early or

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later development of genius are singular. Milton began at eighteen, and continued to sixty-four; Waller from eighteen to eighty, with no perceptible diminution of ability; Dryden from twenty-six to seventy; Pope from twelve to forty; Cowley from ten to forty-nine; “Campbell,” says Scott, “broke out at once, like the Irish rebels, a hundred thousand strong;” he might have added that, like theirs, his progressive power slackened in proportion to the ardour of the onset.

On the Odes of Campbell, panegyric has been exhausted. “Gertrude” is a gem of serene beauty, while it is no cunningly-devised tale, possesses little action, but it has imagery so exquisite, an adaptation of language so happy, and such a union of tenderness and elegance, on the mixed model of the classical and romantic school, that it is not easy to find the counterpart in all the extensive circle of our island poetry. The poet’s fame had gone all over the land, and, as far as that was concerned, he might have reposed upon his laurels in early life, but for the necessity, the res angusta domi.

Byron’s description of Campbell, in 1813, taken generally, is correct regarding the poet to about 1834, hardly later than the last year. “Campbell looks well—seems pleased, and dressed sprucely. A blue coat becomes him—so does his new wig. He really looked as if Apollo had sent him a birthday suit or a wedding garment, and was witty and lively.” Byron also alluded (in 1813) to Campbell’s “Lines on a Scene in Bavaria,” as being then in print, but not published; he styles them “perfectly magnificent, and equal to himself.”

Mrs. Grant, in one of her letters about the same date as that in which Campbell gave his lectures, says:—

“What has most interested me of late has been a visit from Campbell, the sweet bard of ‘Hope;’ you must know his enchanting ‘Gertrude,’ his ‘Exile of Erin,’ and other unequalled lyrics. I wish I could share with you the satisfaction I felt on seeing him cheerful, happy, and univer-

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sally welcomed and caressed in his dear ‘Queen of the North,’ from which he had been so long banished, by the necessity of seeking the bread that perisheth, elsewhere. He is one who has suffered much from neither understanding the world, nor being understood by it. He encountered every evil of poverty but that of being ashamed of his circumstances; in this respect he was nobly indifferent to opinion; and his good, gentle, patient little wife was so frugal, so simple, and so sweet-tempered, that she might have disarmed poverty of half its evils.”

Poverty is, after all, comparative, for at this time Campbell had his pension of about two hundred a-year. This was little enough, but it was a foundation upon which whatever the poet gained by his pen might be placed. Mrs. Grant probably alluded to some particular circumstance now forgotten. That any pressure of a pecuniary nature could have been more than temporary is scarcely probable, because at the peace of 1814 he went to France on a pleasure excursion, as I learned was the case the following year, just after the battle of Waterloo, when sojourning in Rouen for a few months, I found the poet had been there and had been honoured, by being enrolled a member of a literary society in that city; he was afterwards in Paris. That he lived with great frugality during

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Mrs. Campbell’s lifetime, is perfectly true, nor could any praise be too high for her conduct in domestic life, and her good management, proved by the change after her decease. Had there been any necessity for the most rigid economy, she well knew how to exercise with grace, that excellent system which can disguise narrowness of circumstances under scarcely any alteration in exterior appearance; a conduct not shown, save where magnanimity lifts the mind above the vulgarity of thinking and feeling which marks the insanity of fashion.

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Author: Redding, Cyrus, 1785-1870

Title: Literary Reminiscences and Memoirs of Thomas Campbell (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1860).

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