| THOMAS CAMPBELL. | 133 |
At the time of my first personal acquaintance with Campbell, he resided in Middle Scotland Yard, and my introduction to him, as before referred to, speedily led to an invitation to one of those pleasantly assorted little dinner-parties—half literary, half social—followed by a more miscellaneous assemblage in the evening, in which, at one time, he liked to indulge. But under his own roof, Campbell altogether repudiated that unrestrained “good fellow”-ship which he did not scruple to encourage and to act elsewhere.
Here is the first note I received from him in his private capacity, and almost the only one, except those of a similar kind; for our acquaintance (as I have said) never extended to anything like that intimacy which begets an epistolary correspondence.
| 134 | THOMAS CAMPBELL. |
“My dear Sir,—If you and Mrs. Patmore will favour me with your company to dinner, on Tuesday next, the first of June, you will meet, I trust, the Bard of Memory, and the present editor of the ‘Edinburgh Review,’ together with our friend ——. An American professor and his lady will complete the proposed symposium
Campbell was an excellent host for a small and
well-assorted literary dinner-party. He combined all the qualities proper to that difficult
office, without a single counteracting one; the highest intellectual position and
pretensions, without the smallest disposition to make them apparent—much less, to placard
them; a ready wit and a fine turn for social humour, without the slightest touch of that
vulgar waggery which, so often accompanies and neutralises these,
and is the bane of all the intellectual society into which it is allowed to intrude; a
graceful, easy, and well-bred manner and bearing, without any vestige of
| THOMAS CAMPBELL. | 135 |
There was but one little drawback from Campbell’s perfection as a host, and that did not show itself till that period of the evening when such drawbacks are tolerated, or, at least, used to be twenty years ago, when such toleration was sometimes needed. On returning from the after-dinner-table to the drawing-room, Campbell was apt to take his place beside the prettiest woman in the room, and thenceforth to be non est inventus for the rest of the evening and the company.
My personal intercourse with Campbell
did not (as I have said) extend beyond that of a pleasant acquaintanceship; nor do I
believe that the social intercourse enjoyed with him by any one of his (so-called) friends
did or could amount to much more; for, with all his amiable and attractive qualities, he
was evidently a man so entirely self-centred, so totally free from personal and
| 136 | THOMAS CAMPBELL. |
Campbell was, in this respect, the ideal of a poet—sympathizing with, and, as it were, capable of reproducing by and to his imagination effigies and incarnations of, all our human nature in all its phases of good or evil, of beauty and deformity; and (like a God) “seeing that all was good.” But, as a set off against this godlike gift, he was utterly unable to transfer or transfuse his affections, even for a single moment, to any of the actual types of our actual humanity that he found about him in the real world of flesh and blood.
It will, I think, be found to hold universally, that they who have
sympathized with mankind intensely and profoundly before they could possibly have had valid
human grounds for doing so, either from self-knowledge or from experience—in other words,
that they who have proved themselves to be poets before they were men in anything but
intuition and instinct—can never be men at
| THOMAS CAMPBELL. | 137 |
Of the only other truly great poets that
| 138 | THOMAS CAMPBELL. |
| THOMAS CAMPBELL. | 139 |
Let it be observed, too, that Campbell never for an instant prostituted his high and holy calling to the necessities of his worldly condition. The literary drudgery to which he submitted during the whole of his life included no line of verse. It is probably true that, from the time when his poetical taste and judgment became matured, nine-tenths even of the little poetry he did write consisted of
“Lines that dying he would wish to blot.” |
| 140 | THOMAS CAMPBELL. |
Returning to the personal results of the poetical temperament in Campbell, and their effects as seen in his intercourse with the world, I may remark, that if they prevented him from becoming the friend of any man, they made him the acquaintance and boon companion for the time being of all,—from the poet on his prophetic tripos and the prince on his throne, to the beggar in his rags and the infant in its native simplicity. Destitute himself of actual living sympathy with either, he nevertheless, or perhaps on that very account, attracted the sympathies of each and all, by reflecting the true image of themselves in the clear cold mirror of his impassible spirit.
The result of this was, that when Campbell was in good health and spirits, or was made so for the nonce by
those artificial means which during the latter part of his life were necessary to his
personal comfort, he was the most popular person in the world, whatever class of society he
frequented;
| THOMAS CAMPBELL. | 141 |
“Wondered with a foolish face of praise” |
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