‘Gertrude,’ as has more than once been pointed out, was the first poem of any length by a British writer the scene of which was laid in America, and in it Campbell is the first European to introduce his readers to the romance of the virgin forests and Red Indian warriors. The subject may have occurred to him when transcribing a passage in his own ‘Annals,’ in which reference is made to the massacre of Wyoming, although there is possibly something in Beattie’s suggestion that he got the idea from reading Lafontaine’s story of ‘Barneck and Saldorf,’ published in 1804. Campbell, however, as we know, had a keen personal interest in America. His father had lived there; three of his brothers were there now. ‘If I were not a Scotsman,’ he once remarked, ‘I should like to be an American.’ No doubt the scenery of Pennsylvania had been often described to him in letters from the other side.
But these are points that do not greatly concern us now. Nor is it necessary to enter into any minute criticism of the poem. Campbell himself preferred it to ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ (‘I mean,’ he said, ‘to ground my claims to future notice on it’), while Hazlitt regarded it as his ‘principal performance.’ With neither opinion does the popular verdict agree. Perhaps it may be that while ‘Gertrude’ is, as Lockhart said, a more equal and better sustained effort than ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ it contains fewer passages which bear detaching from the context. For one thing the poet had a story to tell in ‘Gertrude,’ and he was eminently unskilled in the management of poetic narrative. ‘I was always,’ he remarks to Scott, ‘a dead bad hand at telling a story.’ In ‘Gertrude’ he cannot keep to his story; the construction of the entire poem is loose and incoherent. Even the love scenes, which, as Hazlitt says, breathe a balmy voluptuousness of sentiment, are generally broken off in the middle. Then he was unwise in adopting the Spenserian stanza. It was quite alien to his style; even Thomson, living long before the romantic revival, managed it more sympathetically than Campbell. The necessities of the rhyme led Campbell to invert his sentences unduly, to tag his lines for the mere sake of the rhyme, and to use affected archaisms with a quite extraordinary clumsiness. Anything more unlike the sweet, easy, graceful compactness of Spenser could scarcely be imagined.
Nor are the characters of the poem altogether successful; indeed, with the single exception of the Indian, they are mere shadows. Gertrude herself makes a pretty portrait; but as Hazlitt has remarked, she cannot for a moment compare with Wordsworth’s Ruth, the true infant of the woods and child-nature. Brant, again, who so warmly espoused the cause of the Mohawks during the War of the American Revolution, is but a faint reality. Campbell fancied that he had drawn a true picture of the partisan, but as Brant’s son afterwards proved to him, the picture was purely imaginary. The main function of the Indian chief is apparently to give local colour to the poem, though it must be allowed that he stands out boldly among its other characters. Hazlitt comments upon his erratic appearances, remarking that he vanishes and comes back, after long intervals, in the nick of time, without any known reason but the convenience of the author and the astonishment of the reader. On the other hand, the death-song of the savage which closes the poem, is one of the best things that the author ever wrote.
Byron declared that ‘Gertrude’ was notoriously full of grossly false scenery; that it had ‘no more locality with Pennsylvania than with Penmanmaur.’ But that was an obvious exaggeration. There is better ground for the complaint about Campbell’s errors in natural history as exhibited in the poem—about his having conferred on Pennsylvania the aloe and the palm, the flamingo and the panther. The probability is that he knew as much about natural history as Goldsmith, whose friends declared that he could not tell the difference between any two sorts of barndoor fowl until they had been cooked. Once in the New Monthly, when a contributor spoke of the rarity of seeing the cuckoo, Campbell added a correcting note to say that he had himself ‘seen whole fields blue with cuckoos’! But even Shakespeare has lions in the forest of Arden, and Goldsmith makes the tiger howl in North America. There is no need to insist upon absolute accuracy in such matters. One would gladly notice instead the real merits of the poem, which, however, are not so readily discovered. Hazlitt spoke enthusiastically of passages of so rare and ripe a beauty that they exceed all praise. But we have changed our poetical point of view since Hazlitt’s day; and the most that can now be said for ‘Gertrude,’ is that it is a third-rate poem containing a few first-rate lines. It is practically dead, and can never be called back to life.
‘Gertrude’ was favourably received by the public, and particularly by the Whig party, to whose leaders Campbell was personally known, and with most of whom he was closely intimate. It was edited in America by Washington Irving in 1810, and was highly praised on the other side—a fact which at least suggests that its local scenery was not so false as Byron declared it to be. The first edition was a quarto; a second in 12mo was called for within the year. The quarto edition included some of the better known short pieces, such as ‘Ye Mariners,’ ‘The Battle of the Baltic,’ ‘Lochiel,’ ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter,’ and ‘Glenara,’ the latter founded on a wild and romantic story of which Joanna Baillie afterwards made use in her ‘Family Legend.’ The second edition contained the once-familiar ‘O’Connor’s Child,’ a rather touching piece suggested by the flower popularly known as ‘Love Lies Bleeding.’ Many years after this—in 1836—the Dublin people desired to give Campbell a public dinner as the author of ‘O’Connor’s Child’ and ‘The Exile of Erin,’ but Campbell never set foot on the Emerald Isle.
CHAPTER VII
LECTURES AND TRAVELS
Having got ‘Gertrude’ off his hands, Campbell returned to his literary carpentering. He was now in his thirty-third year, and had produced the two long poems and the short pieces upon which his fame, such as it is, rests. Were it not for his lines on ‘The Last Man,’ it would have been much better for his reputation had he never again put pen to paper. It was a remark of Scott’s that he had broken out at once, like the Irish rebels, a hundred thousand strong. But unfortunately he had no sustaining power; he could not keep up the attack. His imaginative faculty, never robust, decayed much earlier than that of any other poet who ever gave like promise; and we have the sorry spectacle of a man still under forty living in the shadow of a reputation made when he was little more than out of his teens.