CHAPTER VI
POETICAL WORK AND PROSE BOOKMAKING

In 1804 Sydenham was a country village so primitive in its arrangements that its water was brought on carts, and cost two shillings a barrel. It had a common upon which the matter-of-fact Matilda thought she might keep pigs, and a lovely country, still untouched by the hand of the jerry-builder, lay all around it. ‘I have,’ says Campbell, describing his situation, ‘a whole field to expatiate over undisturbed: none of your hedged roads and London out-of-town villages about me, but “ample space (sic) and verge enough” to compose a whole tragedy unmolested.’ The house, which he had leased for twenty-one years at an annual rent of forty guineas, consisted of six rooms, with an attic storey which he converted into a working ‘den’ for himself. Altogether it was a charming home for a literary man, and Campbell ought to have been contented and happy. His London friends came to see him on Sundays, and among his neighbours he found many sincere friends, notwithstanding Lockhart’s superfine sneers about ‘suburban blue-stockings, weary wives, idle widows, and involuntary nuns.’

Unhappily, the old moodiness and discontent returned upon him. He had work, but work which he despised. He was fairly paid, but though Mrs Campbell was a ‘notable economist,’ there was always apparently some difficulty in getting the financial belt to meet. Campbell himself was, as we have learned, hopelessly incapable in money matters; indeed, he affirmed that he was usually ready to shoot himself when he came to the subject of cash accounts. He had settled at Sydenham with his nose just above water. Currie had advanced him £55, and Gregory Watt, his early college friend, who died about this time, had left him a legacy of £100; but the furnishing and the flitting had swallowed it all up, and a ‘Judaic loan’ besides. His main source of income at this date was from the quarto edition of his poems, and the sale of that was beginning to flag. It is true he had his four guineas a week from the Star; but out of this he had to pay for a conveyance to take him to town daily. We must remember, besides, that he had two establishments to provide for, his mother’s at Edinburgh, as well as his own at Sydenham; and in those times, when war prices ruled, the cost of living was excessively high. But all this does not quite explain the perpetual trouble about money—does not explain how it should have been necessary for Lady Holland to send a ‘munificent present’ to save him from a debtor’s lodging in the King’s Bench.

Campbell was not the man to bear poverty in uncomplaining silence. His letters of this period are filled with plaints, whinings, regrets, implicit accusations against Providence of dealing unfairly with one who had been made for so much better things. He chafes at the necessity for yoking himself to the irksome tasks of the literary drudge, tasks that require little more than the labour of penmanship. He deplores that his Helicon has dried up; he has no poetry in his brain, he tells Scott, and inspiration is a stranger to him from extreme apprehension about the future. The only art now left to him, he sadly confesses, is the art of sitting for so many hours a day at his desk.

The result of all this work and worry and disappointment was soon seen on his health. His anxiety to be up in the morning kept him awake at night, and he became a victim to insomnia. He sought relief in laudanum, which, while procuring him sleep, only increased his constitutional tendency to mope. He began to think he was dying, and even wished himself dead. There is something, he remarked to Richardson in 1805, in one’s internal sensations that tells more certainly of disorder than the diagnosis of the doctors, and those sensations he was undoubtedly conscious of feeling. The thought of the consummation comforted him rather than otherwise, though he shuddered at the ‘dreadful and melancholy idea’ of leaving his wife and family unprovided for—‘as it is not impossible they may soon be.’ Of course things were not nearly so bad as this. Campbell was certainly not well, and his financial affairs, thanks mainly to his own mismanagement, were not in a prosperous state; but his ailments and embarrassments were clearly aggravated by his morbid imagination. It was nothing more serious than a case of liver and amour propre. If, like Scott after the great crash, he had cheerfully and resolutely confronted his circumstances, the ailments and embarrassments, if they had not vanished entirely, would infallibly have assumed a less threatening aspect. But that, after all, is only to say that Thomas Campbell should have been—not Thomas Campbell but somebody else.

He would require to be indeed an enthusiastic biographer who should write with any zest of Campbell’s literary labours during these years. Great writers have often enough been great hacks, but seldom has a man of Campbell’s poetical promise descended to such dull drudgery as that to which he had now betaken himself. He continued to toil at the ‘Annals’; he wrote papers for the Philosophical Magazine, he translated foreign correspondence for the Star, and, in brief, gave himself up almost entirely to the ‘inglorious employment’ of anonymous writing and compilation. He wrote on every imaginable subject, including even agriculture, on the knowledge of which he says he was more than once complimented by farmers, though Lockhart cruelly remarks that he probably could not tell barley from lavender. Politics, too, he tried, but therein was found wanting. He had no real acquaintance with the political questions of the time, nor did he possess the journalistic faculty in any degree. Before he finally left the Morning Chronicle, his connection with which had continued, he was doing little but writing pieces to fill up the poets’ corner, and even these were sometimes so poor that Perry declined to insert them.

What Campbell always wanted—what indeed he made no secret of wanting—was some project which would mean light labour and long returns. Early in 1806 he had become acquainted with John Murray, the publisher, at whose literary parties he was afterwards a frequent guest, and the possibilities of the connection had at once presented themselves. The first hint of these possibilities is revealed in some correspondence which now took place about a new journal that Murray evidently intended Campbell to edit. The details of the scheme were being discussed when there was some talk about an Athenæum being started, and Campbell pleads with Murray not to be discouraged by the beat of the rival’s drum. ‘Supposing,’ he exclaims, ‘we had an hundred Athenæums to confront us, is it not worth our while to make a great effort?’ The correspondence certainly shows that Campbell was anxious enough to make the effort; but the proposal dropped entirely out of sight, and he had to set his brains to work in the evolution of other schemes.

Several ideas occurred to him. He thought of translating a ‘tolerable poem,’ French or German, of from six to ten thousand lines, and he begged Scott to advise him about the choice. He cogitated upon a collection of Irish music, but found that Moore had anticipated him. He had considerable correspondence with Scott and others about the proposed ‘Specimens of the British Poets,’ in which project Scott and he had, unknown to each other, coincided, but that too had to be given up, at any rate for the present. This scheme, as Lockhart tells us, was first suggested by Scott to Constable, who heartily supported it. By and by it was discovered that Cadell & Davies and some other London publishers had a similar plan on foot, and were now, after having failed with Sir James Mackintosh, negotiating with Campbell about the biographical introductions. Scott proposed that the Edinburgh and London houses should join hands in the venture, and that the editorial duties should be divided between himself and Campbell. To this both Cadell and Campbell readily assented, but the design as originally sketched ultimately fell to the ground, because the booksellers declined to admit certain works upon which the editors insisted.