Next to ‘Hohenlinden’ among the pieces of this period must be placed ‘Ye Mariners of England’ and ‘The Soldier’s Dream.’ The first was written at Altona when rumours of England’s intention to break up the coalition began to spread. It was printed by Perry above the signature of ‘Amator Patriæ,’ with an intimation that it was avowedly an imitation of the seventeenth century sea-song, ‘Ye Mariners of England,’ which Campbell used to sing at musical soirees in Edinburgh. It is one of the most stirring of his war pieces. ‘The Soldier’s Dream,’ beginning ‘Our bugles sang truce,’ was not given to the public until the spring of 1804, but it is generally believed to have been written at Altona, and in any case it was inspired by the events which the poet witnessed during his residence at Ratisbon. Several other pieces were composed or revised at this time, but they are of little importance. Byron declared that the ‘Lines on leaving a Scene in Bavaria’ were ‘perfectly magnificent,’ but the praise is grotesquely extravagant. The lines certainly bear traces of genuine feeling, but the piece as a whole is obscure and unfinished.
The famous ‘Battle of the Baltic’ was not published until 1809, but as it was suggested to Campbell by the sight of the Danish batteries as he sailed past them on his way home from Hamburg, it will be convenient to deal with it here. The subject of the poem is known in history as the Battle of Copenhagen, which was fought on the 2nd of April 1801. Campbell sent a first draft of it to Scott in 1805. This draft consisted of twenty-seven stanzas, while the published version has only eight. It has been remarked that if the original form had been adhered to, ‘The Battle of the Baltic’ might have become a popular ballad for a time and then been forgotten, whereas, in its condensed form, it is one of the finest and most enduring war-songs in the language. Its metre, which the Edinburgh Review thought ‘strange and unfortunate,’ is really one of its merits. The lines of unequal length relieve it of monotony; the sharp, short final line of each stanza being indeed an excellent invention. The poem has defects in plenty, which have been often enough pointed out: not a stanza would pass muster to-day; but it would be ungracious to criticise too severely one of the few vigorous battle pieces we have.
CHAPTER V
WANDERINGS—MARRIAGE—SETTLEMENT IN LONDON
During his sojourn on the Continent Campbell had suffered incredible hardships, hardships such as he hesitated to divulge even to his friends. Now he was to experience an agreeable change—a transition from ‘the tedium of cold and gloomy evenings, unconsoled by the comforts of life, and from the barbarity of savages (where an Englishman was not sure of his life) to the elegant society of London and pleasures of every description.’ He appears to have landed with little more than the Scotsman’s proverbial half-crown in his pocket, but Perry, a Scot like himself, proved the friend in need. ‘I will be all that you could wish me to be,’ he said, and he kept his word. Calling upon him one day, Campbell was shown a letter from Lord Holland, inviting him to dine at the King of Clubs, a survival of the institution where Johnson used to lay down his little senate laws. ‘Thither with his lordship,’ says Campbell, writing in 1837, ‘I accordingly repaired, and it was an era in my life. There I met, in all their glory and feather, Mackintosh, Rogers, the Smiths, Sydney, and others. In the retrospect of a long life I know no man whose acuteness of intellect gave me a higher idea of human nature than Mackintosh; and without disparaging his benevolence—for he had an excellent heart—I may say that I never saw a man who so reconciled me to hereditary aristocracy like the benignant Lord Holland.’ Of Lady Holland, Campbell had an equally high opinion. She was, he said, a ‘formidable woman, cleverer by several degrees than Buonaparte,’ whose name, it is interesting to note, occurs again and again in his letters.
Among the other friends he made at this time were Dr Burney and Sir John Moore, Mrs Inchbald and Mrs Barbauld, J. P. Kemble, and Mrs Siddons. From a man so notoriously proud and reserved as Kemble he says he looked for little notice; but Kemble’s behaviour at their first meeting undeceived him. ‘He spoke with me in another room, and, with a grace more enchanting than the favour itself, presented me with the freedom of Drury Lane Theatre. His manner was so expressive of dignified benevolence that I thought myself transported to the identity of Horatio, with my friend Hamlet giving me a welcome.’ Kemble’s condescending kindness he ill-requited in 1817 with a set of wordy, inflated ‘valedictory stanzas,’ in which he displayed all his poetical apparatus of ‘conscious bosoms,’ ‘classic dome,’ ‘supernal light,’ and so forth. Mrs Siddons he describes as a woman of the first order, who sang some airs of her own composition with incomparable sweetness. In Rogers he found ‘one of the most refined characters, whose manners and writing may be said to correspond.’ Everybody and everything, in fact, delighted him; the pains of the past were forgotten, and the future began to look brighter than it had ever done before.
Unfortunately, just as he had got into this happy state of mind, he was startled by the news of his father’s death. He had heard nothing of the old man’s illness, and bitterly reproached himself for having left him in his last days. It was, however, some comfort to him to learn that Dr Anderson had watched at his bedside, and, when all was over, had seen his remains laid reverently in the cemetery of St John’s Chapel. He died as he had lived, pious and placid, full of religious hope as of years. Campbell went home to console his mother and sisters, and to set their affairs in order. His father’s annuity from the Glasgow Merchants’ Society died with him; the sisters were good-looking but valetudinarian, and Campbell could only promise that if a new edition of ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ succeeded he would furnish a house in which they might keep boarders and teach school. Once in the house, he told them, they would have to trust in Providence.
The prospect certainly did not look promising, either for Campbell or his dependents. A thousand subscribers were required to make an edition of ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ safe and profitable, and as that number was not to be obtained in the north, Campbell was advised to go to London to canvass a larger public. Meanwhile he had to make both ends meet, and in default of precise information we must surmise that he turned out a deal of joyless, uncongenial work. Nor, with all his industry, did he succeed in relieving his straitened circumstances. The whole year was one of great privation, when the common necessaries of life were being sold at an exorbitant price, and ‘meal-mob’ rioters were parading the streets and breaking into the bakers’ shops. People who had much more substantial resources than Campbell felt the temporary embarrassment. What Campbell should have done it would not be easy to say; what he did do it would be quite easy to censure. In spite of all his fine friends, for all the lavish promises of Perry and others, he was misguided enough to borrow money—on ‘Judaic terms’—with, of course, the inevitable result. Beattie does not mention the sum borrowed, but he says it was nearly doubled by enormous interest, and could only be repaid by excessive application. Campbell was always notoriously careless in money matters, and even the concern he naturally felt as a devoted son and brother can hardly excuse the imprudence with which he added to his obligations at this period. But prudence, as Coleridge once pointed out, is not usually a plant of poetic growth.
In the midst of all his cares and anxieties, Campbell found some solace in the society of such literary and other friends as the Rev. Archibald Alison—the ‘Man of Taste’—Professor Dugald Stewart, Lord Jeffrey, Dr Anderson, and the family of Grahames, of whom the author of ‘The Sabbath’ was the best known member. The fact of his having been at the seat of war gave his conversation a peculiar interest, and his pilgrimage generally was regarded as a subject of no little curiosity. His old pupil, Lord Cunninghame, remarks upon the change which his continental visit had evidently effected in his view of public affairs and the accepted order of things at home. Whatever youthful, hot-headed Republican notions he may have indulged before he went abroad, we gather that he had come back considerably sobered down, and now he deigned to express—he was still very young!—a decided preference for the British Constitution.