My Friends and Acquaintance
Thomas Campbell VI
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VI.
HIS PERSONAL CHARACTER AS MODIFIED BY THE POETICAL TEMPERAMENT.
The personal character of Campbell exhibited that true test and constant accompaniment of a high
degree of the poetical temperament when it stops short of the highest,—the power to
dispense with the world and society, without the power or the desire to shun or abandon
them. His mind was self-centred and self-dependent, yet social, and fond of the excitement
of external thoughts and things. The objective and the subjective contended too strongly
and too constantly within him to admit of his being a poet of the first order, in whom,
instead of contending, they balance and strengthen each other. But that very contention it
was which placed him in the highest rank of the second order; it would even have given him
the capacity of attaining the first place in that rank if he had also possessed the power
of sustaining his volition at the required pitch. ![]()
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But in this point of
his personal character and temperament lay Campbell’s great
deficiency as a poet. He had never sufficient control over himself, never sufficient
command of his intellectual condition and movements, to be sure he might not be tempted, at
a moment’s warning, to abandon the wide and populous solitude of his little study at
Sydenham, or the sweet society of his own “Gertrude of Wyoming,” while she was growing
there in all her ineffable beauty,* for the boisterous good-fellowship and noisy revelry of
his friend Tom Hill’s after-dinner-table, with
its anomalous olla-podrida of “larking” stockbrokers,laughing punsters,roaming
farce-writers, and riotous practical jokers. These were occasionally embellished and kept
in check, it is true, by the refined wit and elegant scholarship of a Moore and a Rogers,
the rich and racy humour of a Dubois, the easy and
gentlemanly pleasantry of a Horace Smith, the mild
and bland good-nature and good-fellowship of a Perry, &c. Still, even when any of these, or such as these, were present,
there ![]()
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must have been an unwholesome jumble of contradictions, which, like
the mixing of wines, defeated the appropriate effect of each, even when it did not turn all
to mischief.*
There is no doubt that Campbell liked
these anomalous orgies, though he could not but hate or despise many of their component
parts. It is true, also, that the alternative of solitude was indispensable to his love for
society; while the converse of the proposition would be anything but true. On the contrary,
the more he had courted and cultivated solitude, the more warmly she would have responded
to his love, till at length he might have fairly wedded her, and the world would have had
cause to bless the union, for the offspring it would have yielded. Whereas in weakly
alternating between solitude and society, he failed to serve either truly; though, during
the period of his health and vigour, he may be truly said to
* I am speaking here from conjecture merely, as regards
everything but the names of the guests; for though I afterwards became intimately
acquainted with Campbell’s worthy
neighbour and host of Sydenham, these famous meetings were at an end long before my
time. |
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have loved both, and it would have been very difficult for himself to
have determined which he loved best. The rest of the world, however—those of them, at
least, who took sufficient interest in him to “look into his deeds with thinking
eyes”—could have had no difficulty on this point. To them it must have been
obvious that there was about Campbell, when in any society but that of
a quiet and not ill-assorted tête-à-tête, or a
pleasant little dinner-party at his own house, an uneasy and ill-disguised restlessness and
want of repose, and an occasional absence, which plainly told that the home of his spirit
was elsewhere.
To sum up this speculation in a word—(for I am afraid the reader will not
accept it as anything more decisive, especially as coming from a mere
acquaintance)—Tom Campbell was a very good
fellow, and a very pleasant one withal; but he prevented Thomas
Campbell from being a great poet, though not from doing great things in
poetry.
There were, however, other small features in Campbell’s intellectual character, each of which would alone have
prevented him from ![]()
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attaining poetical greatness. His intense
self-consciousness (which the world ridiculously translated into personal vanity) would
alone have been sufficient for this; for it rendered him incapable of wholly escaping from
himself, while it prevented him from fully and fairly appreciating other states and stages
of being.
Another of these qualities was his extreme, and even finical,
fastidiousness. For though this quality of mind did not prevent him from originating high
thoughts, and great and noble imaginations, it wholly incapacitated him from reflecting
them in their height and greatness, by causing him to detect, with a morbid keenness and
microscopic power of vision, those inevitable defects of execution which a perfectly
natural and healthy intellectual vision would not have discovered. For what, after all, can
the best written poetry be, but a sort of cast from the sculptured
images of the poet’s mind? And what are the best casts of the finest sculpture when
placed beside the originals themselves? Nevertheless, for those who have never seen, and
never can see, the originals (and in that ![]()
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condition are all ordinary
mortals, as regards the original types of the poet’s creations) good casts are of
little less value and virtue than the original marbles themselves. But Campbell, in fastidiously scraping away from his casts all the little inequalities and defects left or made by
the necessary manipulation of the working, the joinings in the mould, and the air-bubbles
and impurities in the material of which the cast was formed, destroyed at the same time
much of the pure and natural contour and texture of the original, and with it that truth,
both of detail and of general effect, the presence of which forms so large an element in
our admiration of works of high art.
As a corollary from that want of repose which marked Campbell’s intellectual character, there was a total
absence in him of that passion for the beauties of external nature, and that consequent
love of a country life, which have marked almost all great poets. His mind was of the true
metropolitan order, and his “retreat” at Sydenham was a retreat in the military
sense of the phrase—a movement called for by the exigencies of his position in the battle
of life. ![]()
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The solitude that was necessary to the health and growth of
his poetical temperament he could have created for himself in great cities, as well as he
could have found it in a desert; and he did so create it there till he “found
himself famous;” but when that happened, the defects of his idiosyncrasy came
out. He then ceased to feel any excitement apart from populous assemblies of men and
women—acknowledged no movement but in the march of human events from day to day—saw no
beauty but in the living human face—heard no music but in the speaking human voice—in
short, knew no salvation out of the pale of great cities. In fact, when once
Campbell was fairly recognised as the greatest of living English
poets, he was never so happy as when he was occupied in matters which a great poet would
have regarded as toys, or troubles—organising a club, or founding a university, or standing
forth as the saviour of an effete people that could not save itself.
It is true (as I have said) that Campbell sought his poetical inspiration in the solitude of his own
thoughts and contemplations, and ![]()
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found it there. But he sought it as a
duty and a task, though at the same time as a relief; and he found it in infinitely less
abundance and purity than he would have done had his habitual course of life been more
consonant with the requirements of that poetical temperament which he undoubtedly possessed
in a very high degree and a very pure form, and not a few of the results of which attain a
pitch of perfection that has never been surpassed.
While thus glancing at that feature of Campbell’s intellectual character which was ill-naturedly translated
into “personal vanity,” I must not omit to state that it was confined
exclusively to his intercourse with women, and also, I believe, to the latter years of his
life, after the death of his wife. But it grew upon him as he grew in years, and at length
became, or was deemed so by those who were his friends for their own sakes, the besetting
weakness of his life, and occasionally led him into positions somewhat undignified, it is
true, for his real friends and admirers to witness, or for his enemies (if he had any) to
point at and placard. Still, absolutely alone ![]()
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as
Campbell was, as regards family relationship, during the latter
years of his life, it was but a spurious philosophy, and a questionable friendship, that
would have debarred him from exercising, and thus keeping alive, those semblances of
sympathy which alone bound him to society, and stood him in stead of that poetical world in
which he had heretofore dwelt, but which had latterly slipt from under his feet,—leaving
nothing in its place but that childlike love of the beautiful, the bright, and the
unattainable, which, as it always precedes and heralds the growth of the poetical
temperament, not seldom, under one form or other, follows its decay, and strews flowers
upon its grave. During the whole period of the youth, the manhood, and the mature vigour of
his intellect, Campbell was essentially and emphatically a poet; never
attempting to blend that holy character and calling even with that of the sage or the
philosopher, still less with that of the mere worldling or the mere trifler. He never was
an ordinary man, pursuing the common aims and ends of men by the ordinary means. He stood
apart from the world and its ways, ![]()
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but without openly impugning or
repudiating them; never shunning society, yet never embracing it; never out of the world,
yet never truly in it; seeking and receiving nothing at its hands (in his intellectual
character I mean), yet ever ready to help, or advance, or do it good.
In all these things Campbell
exhibited the true and sure tests and characteristics of a born poet. How little reasonable
then, how little humane, to exact or expect from such a man, at the close of such a
career,—when he felt all these possessions slipping away from him, and leaving no mere
worldly equivalents in their place,—that he should relapse, or rather be transformed, into
a mere ordinary man, with the commonplace habits and associations of his time and
circumstances! The natural and therefore the fitting change was that which really happened
to him. Ceasing to be the Poet, he relapsed once more into the little child from which the
poet had emerged;—“pleased with the rattle” of hollow flattery;
“tickled with the straw” of real or pretended admiration; crying now
and then for the moon, till hushed to ![]()
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sleep by the fondlings of mock
affection or mercenary kindness; and then dreaming, childlike, (as not even the poet can
till he again becomes a child,) of the wonders and glories and virtues “Of that imperial palace whence he came.” |
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Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
Scottish poet and man of letters; author of
The Pleasures of Hope
(1799),
Gertrude of Wyoming (1808) and lyric odes. He edited the
New Monthly Magazine (1821-30).
Edward Dubois (1774-1850)
A student at Christ's Hospital who later contributed to the
Morning
Chronicle and was editor of the
Monthly Mirror in
conjunction with Theodore Hook; he was for a time editor of the
European
Magazine.
Thomas Hill (1760-1840)
English book-collector who entertained members of Leigh Hunt's circle at his cottage at
Sydenham in Kent. He was a proprietor of the
Monthly Mirror and
later a writer for the
Morning Chronicle. Charles Lamb described him
as “the wettest of dry salters.”
Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
Irish poet and biographer, author of the
Irish Melodies (1807-34),
The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), and
Lalla
Rookh (1817); he was Byron's close friend and designated biographer.
James Perry (1756-1821)
Whig journalist; founder and editor of the
European Magazine
(1782), editor of the
Morning Chronicle (1790-1821).
Samuel Rogers (1763-1855)
English poet, banker, and aesthete, author of the ever-popular
Pleasures of Memory (1792),
Columbus (1810),
Jaqueline (1814), and
Italy (1822-28).
Horace Smith (1779-1849)
English poet and novelist; with his brother James he wrote
Rejected
Addresses (1812) and
Horace in London (1813). Among his
novels was
Brambletye House (1826).
