In poets youth, when not a virtue, is at least an extenuating circumstance. Campbell was very young when he wrote ‘The Pleasures of Hope.’ At an age when an Englishman is midway in his University course, and perhaps thinking of competing for the Newdigate, Campbell had finished his college career, won all the possible honours, and got himself accepted at his own valuation as ‘demnition clever.’ He was only a boy, a clever boy, with boyish enthusiasms, boyish crudities of thought, and, it must be confessed, a boyish weakness for fine-sounding words. His poem was not the spontaneous fruit of his imagination. There was no inward compulsion to poetic utterance as in the case of other poets who wrote at an equally early age. The clever boy was moping, without definite aims, when his friend’s suggestion conjured up a vision of Thomas Campbell admitted to the company of Mark Akenside and Samuel Rogers. True, these names were not the brightest in the poetical galaxy, and it might perhaps have been better for Campbell if he had schooled himself by a diligent study of Milton and Spenser. But there was the goal, and there was the motive, and he set about his poem.
Undoubtedly he made the most of what could easily have proved a barren theme. The construction of the poem is certainly loose; part does not follow part in any inevitable order. But in a didactic poem this is perhaps an advantage, for, with all its defects, one can read ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ without the fatigue that accompanies a reading of ‘The Pleasures of Imagination.’ To analyse the poem would be superfluous. It faithfully reflected the common thought of the time, and assuredly does not, as Beattie said it did, give illumination to ‘every succeeding age.’ It will be sufficient to point out a few of its literary qualities with a view to an appreciation of Campbell’s place as a poet.
And first it must be remarked that Campbell was subdued to the vicious theory of a poetical diction. To him a rainbow was an ‘ethereal bow,’ a musket a ‘glittering tube,’ a star a ‘pensile orb,’ a cottage a ‘rustic dome.’ It was a principle with him and his school that the ordinary name of a thing, the natural way of saying a thing, must necessarily be unpoetic. This comes out equally in his letters. When he refers to a railway train it is as ‘a chariot of fire.’ Instead of saying: ‘I went to the club with his Lordship,’ he must say: ‘Thither with his Lordship I accordingly repaired.’ When he wishes to speak of a thing being ‘changed’ into another, he says it is ‘transported to the identity of’ that other thing. In ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ this characteristic was no doubt due in some cases to the exigence of rhyme, which probably accounts also for the so-called obscurity of certain of his lines. For he is not really obscure; his stream is too shallow for obscurity. On that point it is curious to note how even Wordsworth was misled. Perhaps it may be worth while to quote what he says:
Campbell’s ‘Pleasures of Hope’ has been strangely overrated. Its fine words and sounding lines please the generality of readers, who never stop to ask themselves the meaning of a passage. The lines—
Where Andes, giant of the western star,
With meteor standard to the wind unfurled,
Looks from his throne of clouds o’er half the world,
are sheer nonsense—nothing more than a poetical indigestion. What has a giant to do with a star? What is a meteor standard? But it is useless to inquire what such stuff means. Once at my house Professor Wilson, having spoken of these lines with great admiration, a very sensible and accomplished lady, who happened to be present, begged him to explain to her their meaning. He was extremely indignant, and taking down ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ from a shelf, read the lines aloud, and declared they were splendid. ‘Well, sir,’ said the lady, ‘but what do they mean?’ Dashing down the book on the floor, he exclaimed in his broad Scotch accent, ‘I’ll be daumed if I can tell.’
The explanation is, however, simple enough. Campbell obviously meant ‘firmament’ or ‘hemisphere,’ but wanting a rhyme to ‘afar,’ he put the part for the whole, and said ‘western star.’ This is not exactly obscurity; but for the fact that Campbell was always so careful to polish his verse we should call it clumsiness.
In his management of the heroic couplet, Campbell was eminently successful. With the monosyllabic rhyme the lines naturally end rather monotonously with a snap as it were: enjambement is not frequent; the verse has nothing of that freedom and fluidity in which Chaucer and Keats are sworn brothers. But Campbell varies the position of the pause more frequently than Pope, and he actually excels Pope in respect of rhyme; for, with all his correctness, Pope was an indifferent rhymster. Apart from his imperfect rhymes, which are sufficiently numerous, one finds in Pope whole blocks of six or eight lines ending in intolerable assonances. Campbell is never guilty of this fault; and even in the smaller sin of harping over much on the same rhyme, he is no worse than Pope. Further, he is very deft in ‘suiting the sound to the sense.’ Many lines might be quoted which are full of such music as springs from a varied succession of vowel sounds linked by alliterative consonants. In bringing sounding names into his verse, too, he is as expert as Goldsmith himself. Oonalaska, Seriswattee, Kosciusko—these are names to conjure with. And if ‘rapture’ does duty too often for ardent emotion of all kinds, if ‘tumultuous’ comes too trippingly off the pen when an epithet is required—well, let us remember again that he was very young. The poem was at least a credit to his years. Vigour, variety, pleasant description, sincere rhetoric, youthful fervour and high spirits account in the main for its popularity. Its concrete illustrations, its little genre scenes, saved it from the fate of most didactic poems on abstract themes. The homely interior, the returned wanderer, the cradle, the faithful dog—these appealed to the average man; and the political allusions struck the right note for the times. But who reads it now?