When he reached Hamburg he found a letter awaiting him from Richardson announcing that a ‘blessed double edition’ of ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ had been thrown off, thus entitling him to £50, according to the understanding with Mundell. Relieved of all his pecuniary anxiety in this unexpected fashion, Campbell resolved to remain abroad for the winter. He took up his quarters at Altona, a town near Hamburg, which he describes as the pleasantest place in all Germany. His letters begin to show a more cheerful spirit. He has the prospect of ‘useful and agreeable acquaintance, and a winter of useful activity,’ and his portfolio, hitherto a chaos, is soon to be filled with ‘monsters and wonders sufficient to match the pages of Bruce himself.’ One of the new acquaintances promised to prove of substantial advantage to him. A gentleman of family preparing for a tour along the lower Danube, required a travelling companion, and having been introduced to Campbell, he offered him £100 a year to accompany him and direct his studies. There was to be nothing like a formal tutorship; the poet was merely to make himself a ‘respectable friend and useful companion.’ Campbell professed to be at this time, like Burns, sorely touchable on the score of independence, but a man who has to content himself, as Campbell had now to do, with two meals a day, must find it convenient to swallow his pride occasionally; and Campbell, after a great deal of epistolary fuss about it, accepted the gentleman’s offer.
Unfortunately the agreement was never carried out. Beattie’s curt intimation is that ‘sudden and important changes’ took place in the views and circumstances of the anticipated patron. We get, however, an inkling of the real state of the case from a letter of Campbell’s to Dr Anderson, written from London some months later—a letter which does equal honour to the poet’s kind-heartedness and modesty. Speaking of his well-intentioned friend he says:
That valuable and high-spirited young man was humbled—after a struggle which concealed misfortunes—to reveal his situation and in sickness to receive assistance from one whose advancement and re-establishment in life he had planned but a few weeks before, when no reverse of fortune was dreaded. His situation required more than my resources were adequate to impart, but still it prevented his feelings being deeply wounded by addressing strangers. I did not regret my own share of the hardships, but I acknowledge that in those days of darkness and distress I had hardly spirit to write a single letter. I have often left the sick-bed of my friend for a room of my own which wanted the heat of a fire in the month of January, and on the borders of Denmark.
The failure of this enterprise was obviously a great disappointment to Campbell. The prospects of the tour had seemed to him peculiarly enticing, and he never ceased to deplore the necessity which led to its being abandoned.
Another acquaintance made at this time happily bore some fruit. A certain Anthony M’Cann, ‘a brave United Irishman,’ had, with other unfortunate fellow-countrymen who were engaged in the Rebellion of 1798, taken refuge on the banks of the Elbe. Campbell fell in with him and his fellow exiles, and passed a good part of his leisure in their society. The literary result was that pathetic if somewhat overrated song, ‘The Exile of Erin,’ which Campbell wrote after one evening finding Tony M’Cann more than usually depressed. Many years later an absurd claim to the authorship of this song was raised on behalf of an Irishman named Nugent, whose sister swore to having seen it in her brother’s handwriting before the date of Campbell’s continental visit. Campbell was naturally pained by the accusation, but he produced irrefragable proofs of his title to the song; and although the charge of plagiarism was revived after his death, there is not the slightest ground for doubting his authorship. The subject is fully dealt with by Beattie, but to discuss it nowadays would be altogether superfluous.
Before leaving home, Campbell had entered into an agreement with Mr Perry of the Morning Chronicle to send him something for his columns, and ‘The Exile of Erin’ was published by him on the 28th of January 1801. In a prefatory note the author expressed the hope that the song might induce Parliament to ‘extend their benevolence to those unfortunate men, whom delusion and error have doomed to exile, but who sigh for a return to their native homes.’ Campbell’s sympathy with the Irish exiles appears to have been as strong as his sympathy with the Poles. He adopted as his seal a shamrock with the motto ‘Erin-go-Bragh,’ and his enthusiasm was so flamboyant that on his arrival in Edinburgh he was actually in some danger of being imprisoned for conspiring with General Moreau in Austria and with the Irish in Hamburg to land a French army in Ireland! Campbell might well be astonished at the idea of ‘a boy like me’ conspiring against the British Empire. Subsequently he made valiant efforts to obtain leave for M’Cann to return home. These efforts were unsuccessful, but he lived to see the exile established in Hamburg, through a fortunate marriage, as one of its wealthiest citizens.
During his residence at Altona, Campbell, when not engaged in composition, seems to have busied himself chiefly in trying to plumb the depths of German philosophy. He says—and he is ‘almost ashamed to confess it’—that for twelve consecutive weeks he did nothing but study Kant. Distrusting his own imperfect acquaintance with German, he took a disciple of the master through his philosophy, but found nothing to reward the labour. His metaphysics, he remarked, were mere innovations upon the received meaning of words, and conveyed no more instruction than the writings of Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas. Of German philosophy in general Campbell entertained a very poor opinion. The language in his view was much richer in the field of Belles Lettres; and he claimed to have got more good from reading Schiller, Wieland, and Bürger than from any of the severer studies which he undertook at this time. Wieland he regarded with especial favour: he could not conceive ‘a more perfect poet.’ Of Goethe and Lessing, strangely enough, he makes practically no mention.
These details about Campbell’s doings are gathered mainly from his letters to Richardson. He was still looking forward eagerly to the arrival of his friend; and when he wrote it was generally with the object of keeping his enthusiasm awake by glowing descriptions of Hungary, which he characterised as a ‘poetical paradise,’ the country ‘worthy of our best research,’ all the rest of Germany being only so much ‘vulgar knowledge.’ Campbell’s well-laid schemes were, however, destined to be upset, and in a way which he evidently never anticipated. A great political crisis was at hand. England had determined to detach Denmark from the coalition by force of arms, and on the 12th of March the British fleet left Yarmouth Roads for the Sound. Altona being on the Danish shore was no longer eligible as a residence for English subjects, and Campbell, having already had more than enough of the pomp and circumstance of war, resolved to return home. He took a berth in the Royal George, bound for Leith, and the vessel dropped slowly down the river to Gluckstadt, in front of the Danish batteries. The passage proved very tedious, and in the end, instead of getting to Leith, the Royal George was spied by a Danish privateer and chased into Yarmouth. This was early in April, and on the 7th of the month Campbell arrived in London, where, through the good graces of Perry, he was at once made free of the best literary society of the day.
In connection with the continental sojourn thus hurriedly terminated, it remains now to consider the literary product of the nine months’ absence from home. Like many another poet, Campbell will be remembered, if he is remembered at all, by his shorter pieces; and it is interesting to note that of these the best were written or at any rate conceived on alien soil. The ‘Exile of Erin’ has already been mentioned. ‘Hohenlinden’ did not appear until 1802, but there is every reason for believing that it was at least outlined shortly after the date of the occurrences which it so vividly pictures. Galt tells an amusing story of its rejection by a Greenock newspaper as not being ‘up to the editor’s standard’; but it took the fancy of Sir Walter Scott. When Washington Irving was at Abbotsford in 1817, Scott observed to him: ‘And there’s that glorious little poem, too, of “Hohenlinden”; after he [Campbell] had written it he did not seem to think much of it, but considered some of it d—d drum and trumpet lines. I got him to recite it to me, and I believe that the delight I felt and expressed had an effect in inducing him to print it.’ The anecdote related by Scott in connection with Leyden is well-known. Campbell and Leyden, as we have seen, had quarrelled. When Scott repeated ‘Hohenlinden’ to Leyden, the latter said: ‘Dash it, man, tell the fellow I hate him, but, dash it, he has written the finest verses that have been published these fifty years.’ Scott did not fail to deliver the message. ‘Tell Leyden,’ said Campbell, ‘that I detest him, but that I know the value of his critical approbation.’
Curiously enough, Carlyle, quoting in 1814 a poem of Leyden’s on the victory of Wellington at Assaye, remarks that ‘if there is anything in existence that surpasses this it must be “Hohenlinden”—but what’s like “Hohenlinden”?’ Leyden’s verses in truth read somewhat tamely, but Carlyle’s criticism of poetry was not to be depended upon, especially at this early date, when he preferred Campbell to either Byron or Scott. His impassioned liking for ‘Hohenlinden’ was, however, well justified by its merits. It has been described as the only representation of a modern battle which possesses either interest or sublimity. Sublimity is a word of which we are not particularly fond in these days, perhaps because it was so freely used by critics a hundred years ago. We prefer simplicity; and it is surely the simplicity of ‘Hohenlinden’ which mainly accounts for its effect. Each stanza is a picture—not a finished etching, but rather an ‘impression’; no delicate shades of colour, but broad strokes of red and black on white. No word is wasted, no scene is elaborated; and if what is depicted is all pretty obvious—well, blood is red, and gunpowder is sulphurous, and there is little room for invention. To call it great art would be absurd; it is excellent scene-painting.