CHAPTER III
‘THE PLEASURES OF HOPE’
Campbell was now at his wit’s end about a profession. With whatever intention he had gone to the University, he had at last become alive to the stern fact that the University had done nothing for him in regard to a livelihood. ‘What,’ he wanted to know, ‘have all these academical honours procured for me?’ He was dissatisfied with himself for his admitted lack of resource; he was dissatisfied with his friends for their apathetic indifference. But something had clearly to be done, and after sundry ineffectual efforts to reach a solid standing ground, he again turned his attention to the law. ‘That is the line which he means to pursue,’ wrote his sister Elizabeth, ‘and what I think nature has just fitted him for. He is a fine public speaker and I have no doubt will make a figure at the Bar.’ His idea now was to combine law with literature. Let him once get into a lawyer’s office and he would have no fear of working his way without the expense of entrance fees. He would write for the leading periodicals and establish a magazine. He had, besides, one or two translations from the classics nearly ready for the press, and for these surely some publisher, he told himself, would be willing to pay.
In this optimistic mood he went off to Edinburgh, the home of literature and law, where he arrived in May, 1797. His old pupil, Lord Cunninghame, was now preparing for the Bar, and to him Campbell applied for aid in finding employment. The employment was found, not in a law office—for Campbell had no regular training as a law clerk to recommend him—but in the Register House, where the University honours’ man was set to the humble tasks of a copying clerk. A few weeks of extract making proved enough for him, and he threw up the situation for one slightly more comfortable, though not much better as to pay, in the office of a Mr Bain Whytt. There he remained, sucking sustenance through a quill, until Dr Anderson brought him forth to put him on the road to renown.
Campbell was introduced to Anderson by Mr Hugh Park, then a teacher in Glasgow, who had roused an interest in the poetical clerk by showing a copy of the elegy written in Mull. Miss Anderson was present at the first meeting, and Beattie subsequently obtained from her some recollections of the occasion. She remarked specially upon Campbell’s good looks. His face, she said, was beautiful, and ‘the pensive air which hung so gracefully over his youthful features gave a melancholy interest to his manner which was extremely touching.’ This description, it may be observed, is in part corroborated from other quarters. The Rev. Dr Wardlaw, who had been one of Campbell’s classfellows at Glasgow, said that though he was comparatively small in stature his features were handsome and prepossessing, and were characterised by an intelligent animation and a cheerful openness all the more noticeable that they gave place when he was not pleased to ‘a gravity approaching to sternness.’ Another friend speaks of him as an ardent, enthusiastic boy, much younger in appearance than in years. Unfortunately there is no portrait of him at this early age.
Dr Anderson took a fervent interest in the pensive youth. He knew everybody worth knowing, and through him Campbell soon found his way into the best literary society of the capital. Scott, Jeffrey, Dugald Stewart, Lord Brougham, Henry Mackenzie, the ‘Man of Feeling,’ George Thomson, the correspondent of Burns—these and others, in addition to the friends he had made on former visits, were now or later among the circle of his acquaintances. At a private house he met that ‘pompous ass,’ the Earl of Buchan, and apparently had the bad manners to quiz him upon his oddities. It was at this time, too, that he was introduced to John Leyden, with whom he afterwards so notoriously fell out. There are two explanations of the quarrel. According to the first, Leyden had spread a report that, in despair at his prospects, Campbell was seen one day rushing frantically along Princes Street on the way to destroy himself. This foolish story was revived after Campbell’s death; very likely it was quite unfounded. The other version of the affair is to the effect that Campbell, by his association with certain infidel youths who had started a publication called the Clerical Review, allowed it to be inferred that some of his intimate friends, including Anderson and Leyden, were in sympathy with the unsettling tendencies of the new journal. There was no reason why anybody should draw such an inference; and, in any case, the explanation is unsatisfactory inasmuch as the quarrel was evidently of Campbell’s, not of Leyden’s making. Whatever be the solution—and it is not a matter of importance—there was certainly no love lost between Leyden and his somewhat prim junior. Campbell seldom mentions Leyden’s name without a sneer. In a letter of 1803 he says: ‘London has been visited in one month by John Leyden and the influenza. They are both raging with great violence.’ And again—the versatile Borderer had just taken a surgeon’s diploma—‘Leyden has gone at last to diminish the population of India.’ Nevertheless, as we shall learn later on, Campbell knew very well how to value the critical opinion of John Leyden—when it was in his favour.
But Dr Anderson did more for Campbell than present him to his literary circle. Campbell, though he proclaimed his dislike of another tutorship, had expressed his willingness to accept almost any kind of literary work. Anderson accordingly introduced him to Mundell, the publisher, and the result was an offer of twenty guineas for an abridged edition of Bryan Edwards’ ‘West Indies.’ This was not only Campbell’s first undertaking for the press, but the first of his many pieces of literary task-work. He was now anticipating very much the later experience of Carlyle, who also tried the law in Edinburgh, and became a bookseller’s hack when that ‘bog-pool of disgust’ proved impossible. But there the parallel ends.
Campbell went back to Glasgow, walking the distance as usual, to finish his abridgment. His mind was still exercised about the future. Anything in the law beyond the most laborious plodding he had seen to be quite out of his reach. ‘I have fairly tried the business of an attorney,’ he wrote, ‘and upon my conscience it is the most accursed of all professions. Such meanness, such toil, such contemptible modes of peculation were never moulded into one profession… It is true there are many emoluments; but I declare to God that I can hardly spend with a safe conscience the little sum I made during my residence in Edinburgh.’ This, of course, is not to be taken seriously: it is merely the petulant cry of a spoilt and conceited youth. Campbell confessed afterwards that at this time fame was everything to him. So far as at present appeared he was as likely to achieve fame as to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, and when he miscalled the lawyers as rogues and vagabonds he was only giving voice to his chagrin.
But youth is not easily dismayed. It was at this moment that, having saved a little money, Campbell gaily proposed to start a magazine. He invited some of his college familiars to join with him, declaring that he would undertake, if need be, three-fourths of the letter-press himself. ‘We shall,’ he remarked, ‘set all the magazine scribblers at defiance—nay, hold them even in profound contempt.’ But his friends were not so sanguine about sharing the favours of a ‘discerning public,’ and the magazine project, like so many other projects, fell to the ground. It shows the desperate frame of mind into which Campbell had sunk, that, in spite of his recent ‘malediction upon the law and all its branches,’ he still professed himself an amateur of the Bar. He tells Anderson that his leisure hours are employed on Godwin and the ‘Corpus Juris.’ The latter he had always regarded as a somniferous volume, but now he finds that there is something really amusing as well as improving in the book. It certainly does not seem a suitable work for stimulating the imagination of a poet, but Campbell was only playing with circumstances after all. Even yet he may have had some idea that the ‘Corpus Juris’ would prove professionally useful.