Having disposed of the ‘Specimens,’ he was free to look about for other work. At the beginning of 1820 he tells a friend that he has a new poem on the anvil, with several small ones lying by, and only waits until he has enough for a volume to publish them. He is to lecture again at the Royal Institution in the Spring, and as both his fellow-lecturers have been knighted, he thinks it not unlikely that he will be knighted too. On the whole he was in excellent spirits; and the necessity for unremitting toil having been removed, he began to arrange for a holiday. This time he decided to revisit Germany, and having let his house furnished for a year, and concluded his lecture course, he embarked with his family for Holland in the end of May.
Landing at Rotterdam, with the view of which from the Maas he was ‘much captivated,’ he proceeded by the Hague and Leyden to Haarlem, where he was ‘transported’ with the famous organ in the Cathedral. From Amsterdam he wrote to say that the faces of the people were as unromantic as the face of their country, but he was pleased to see their houses ‘so painted and cleaned’ that poverty could have no possible terrors for them. At Bonn he renewed his acquaintance with Schlegel, who on this occasion bored him sadly. Schlegel, it seems, was ludicrously fond of showing off his English. He thought he understood English politics, too, and pestered Campbell with his crude speculations about England’s impending bankruptcy and the misery of her lower orders. ‘I had no notion,’ says Campbell, ‘that a great man could ever grow so wearisome.’
Leaving his son, now in his sixteenth year, with Professor Kapp, who was to board and instruct him for £5 a month, he went to Frankfort, visiting on the way the Rolandseck, where he wrote his ‘Roland the Brave.’ At Frankfort he had daily lessons in German from a Carthusian monk, who was rather surprised at his strange plan of overcoming the difficulties of the language by dint of Greek. At Ratisbon he revived many memories. Of the twelve monks whom he had known at the Scots College in 1800, only two were now alive; but their successors were ‘very liberal of their beer, and it is by no means contemptible.’ When he got to Vienna—where he read Hebrew with a Jewish poet named Cohen—he found that his fame had preceded him. His arrival was publicly announced, translations of ‘Ye Mariners’ and the Kirnan ‘Lines’ appeared in one of the leading journals, and invitations showered in upon him from the best people in the capital. He met a large number of the Polish nobility, who crowded about him with affectionate zeal. He forgot all his sorrows listening to the organ in St Stephen’s. The theatres he found tiresome. The actors indeed were good, but what could they make of such a language? From Vienna he returned to Bonn through Bavaria. He was now impatient to be home; and, having transferred his son to the care of Dr Meyer, he bade farewell to his friends, and was in London by the end of November.
Before leaving for the Continent he had entered into an agreement with Colburn for editing the New Monthly Magazine for three years, from January 1821. He was to have £500 per annum, and was to furnish annually six contributions in prose and six in verse. Campbell had not shown any special fitness for the duties of an editor, but he knew the value of his own name, which, indeed, was probably the reason of Colburn’s applying to him. He had, as Patmore says, the most extensive and the most unquestioned reputation of the writers of the day, and the proprietor’s judgment was soon proved by the unprecedented popularity of the magazine. Campbell certainly showed some zeal at the start. He got together a very efficient staff of contributors, with Mr Cyrus Redding as his sub-editor. Moreover, in order to be near the office he decided to exchange his Sydenham house for one in town, and he took private lodgings in Margaret Street until a permanent residence could be found. There, shutting himself up from outside society, he ‘received and consulted with his friends, cultivated acquaintance with literary men of all parties, answered correspondents, pretended to read contributions, wrote new and revised old papers, and, in short, identified his own reputation and interests with those of the magazine.’ The New Monthly, for the time being, became the record of his literary life.
With all this show of work, Campbell, by every account, proved a very unsatisfactory editor, though no more unsatisfactory than Bulwer Lytton and Theodore Hook who succeeded him. Allowing for the probable exaggeration of his own importance as sub-editor, there is enough in Redding’s reminiscences to show that he found his position difficult enough. Campbell had so little acquaintance with periodical literature that he declares he never saw a number of the New Monthly until Colburn put one into his hands! He gave no attention to the topics of the day, and his knowledge of current literature was so limited that contributors often foisted on him articles which they had furtively abstracted from contemporary writers. Of method he had none. His papers lay about in hopeless confusion, and if he wanted to get rid of them for the time, he would jumble them into a heap, or cram them into a drawer. Articles sent by contributors would be placed over his books on the shelves, slip down behind and lie forgotten. He always shied at the perusal of manuscripts, and he kept the printer continually waiting for ‘copy.’ Talfourd says he would balance contending epithets for a fortnight, and stop the press for a week to determine the value of a comma. In short, he was the very worst imaginable kind of editor, especially from the contributor’s point of view. Nevertheless, he soon drew a strong brigade of writers around him—among them Hazlitt, Talfourd, Horace Smith, and Henry Roscoe—and placing implicit confidence in their work, he made his editorship a snug sinecure. ‘Tom Campbell,’ said Scott, ‘had much in his power. A man at the head of a magazine may do much for young men, but Campbell did nothing, more from indolence, I fancy, than disinclination or a bad heart.’ That was the true word; Campbell, to use the expressive term of his countrymen, simply could not be ‘fashed.’
While things were proceeding thus in the editorial sanctum a painful crisis was approaching in Campbell’s domestic affairs. He had not long returned from the Continent when reports of his son began to give him uneasiness. Thomas, he says, talks of going to sea, which indicates that he is not disposed to do much good on land. Early in the spring of 1821 the youth turned up in London. He had been transferred from Bonn to Amiens, but disliking the place and the people, he had run away from his instructor. Campbell was greatly affected by his unexpected arrival, but Tony M’Cann, who was in the house, proposed to celebrate the event by killing the fatted calf! In the autumn the boy was sent to a school at Poplar, at a cost to his father of £120 per annum, but he had not been many weeks there when symptoms, the meaning of which had hitherto been mistaken, became so pronounced that he had to be removed to an asylum. It is a distressing subject, and there is no need to go into details. Young Campbell was ultimately placed under the care of Dr Matthew Allen at High Beech, Essex. There he chiefly remained until three months after his father’s death in 1844, when he was liberated by the verdict of a jury declaring him to be of sound mind. The taint of insanity clearly came from the mother’s side. One of her sisters had been deranged for many years before her death; and indeed it has been hinted that Mrs Campbell herself suffered from some ‘mental alienation’ during her last days. A writer in Hogg’s Weekly Instructor for April 12, 1845, expressly says so. He seems to have known Campbell, but his statement, so far as can be ascertained, is uncorroborated.
In 1822 Campbell removed to a small house of his own at 10 West Seymour Street—a ‘beautiful creation,’ with ‘the most amiable curtains, the sweetest of carpets, the most accomplished chairs, and a highly interesting set of tongs and fenders.’ Here he wrote one of his best things and one of his worst. ‘The Last Man’ was published in the New Monthly in 1823. Gilfillan calls it the most Christian of all Campbell’s strains. It is, in fact, one of the most striking of his shorter productions. The same idea was used by Byron in his ‘Darkness,’ and this led to some controversy as to which of the two poets had been guilty of stealing from the other. Campbell maintained that he had many years before mentioned to Byron his intention of writing the poem, and there is no reason to doubt his word. Of course the idea of one man, the last of his race, remaining when all else has been destroyed, is quite an obvious one; and in any case Campbell treated it in a manner altogether different from Byron, of whose daring misanthropy he was completely innocent.
It has been said that at West Seymour Street Campbell also wrote one of his worst poems. This was his ‘Theodric,’ not ‘Theodoric,’ as it is constantly mis-spelled. He seems to have been engaged on it early in 1823; but he confesses that so far from being in a poetic mood he is barely competent for the dull duty of editorship. It is well to remember this in judging the poem. He had begun it at a time when horrible dreams of his son being tortured by asylum attendants disturbed his rest; he had finished it with the obstreperous youth temporarily at home—outrageous, dogged, and disagreeable, ‘excessively anxious to convince us how very cordially he hates both his mother and me.’ He knew that ‘Theodric’ had faults, but he regarded these as so little detrimental that he believed when it recovered from the first buzz of criticism it would attain a steady popularity. It appeared in November 1824, but the popularity which Campbell anticipated never came to it. ‘I am very glad,’ he says, ‘that Jeffrey is going to review me, for I think he has the stuff in him to understand “Theodric.”’ But neither Jeffrey nor anybody else understood ‘Theodric’; certainly nobody appreciated it. The wits at Holland House disowned it; the Quarterly called it ‘an unworthy publication’; and friend joined foe in the chorus of condemnation. An anonymous punster referred to it as the ‘odd trick’ of the season; and its excessively overdone alliterations (such as ‘Heights browsed by the bounding bouquetin’) were made the subject of scornful hilarity. The poem, in truth, was a sad failure, and the universal censure with which it met was thoroughly deserved. Campbell had ‘attempted to imitate the natural simplicity and homely familiarity of the style of Crabbe and Wordsworth,’ and had only succeeded in becoming elaborately tame and feeble.
Just before the publication of ‘Theodric,’ he had paid a short visit to Cheltenham for his health’s sake; now he went to Lord Spencer’s at Althorp, ‘a most beautiful Castle of Indolence,’ tempted by the hope of seeing books which he could not see elsewhere. He really wanted to study, yet he capriciously complained that after breakfast the company, including his Lordship, went off to shoot and left him alone! In short, he was no sooner at Althorp than he wished himself home again.