CHAPTER VIII
CLOSING YEARS

Some time just before the expiration of his Rectorship at Glasgow in 1829, Campbell changed his residence from Seymour Street to Middle Scotland Yard, where he furnished on such a grand scale that he had to mortgage a prospective edition of his poems to pay the bill. In connection with this change there were hints of a second marriage—hints which continued to be whispered about for many a day, to Campbell’s evident annoyance. He declared that there was no foundation for the report, that it was ‘the baseless fabric of a vision’; yet we are assured by Beattie that he took his new house at the suggestion of ‘an amiable and accomplished friend deeply interested in his welfare, and destined, as he fondly imagined, to restore him to the happiness of married life.’ Who the amiable lady was we are not told; nor is anything said as to why the engagement fell through. The presumption is that Campbell changed his mind, and did not want to have the matter discussed.

At this time a suitable marriage would certainly have been no act of madness, for Campbell was clearly feeling himself more than usually lonesome. Indeed, it was with the avowed object of mitigating his forlorn condition that he established the Literary Union, a social club over which he presided till he finally left London in 1843. The burden of work and removal had again thrown him into a wretched state of health, and in September (1829) he writes to say that he is doing next to nothing apart from the New Monthly. Protracted study exhausts him, and he dare not take wine, which is the only reviving stimulus left. Starvation alone alleviates his distress: a hearty meal means an agony of suffering; therefore he stints himself at table, and loses flesh daily.

So the beginning of 1830 found him. His friend Sir Thomas Lawrence had just died, and although he was profoundly ignorant of the technique of art, and had even a limited appreciation of pictures and painting, he boldly undertook to write the artist’s life. He set to the work in a comically serious fashion. He had a printed notice sent to his friends and fastened to the door of his study, intimating his desire to be left undisturbed till the book was finished. These notices—for Campbell issued them regularly—were the subject of much merriment among his acquaintances. It was an announcement of the kind that drew from Hook the jest about Campbell having been safely delivered of a couplet. In the present case the ruse apparently did not answer, for in a week or two he fled to the country. He seems to have spent a good deal of time over the Life, but nothing ever came of his labours. Colburn insisted on having the book in a few months, and Campbell, declaring that he could ‘get no materials,’ petulantly threw it aside.

This was in December 1830. By that time Campbell had severed his connection with the New Monthly. Colburn had parted with Redding in October, and the editor’s difficulties were in consequence greatly increased. He went out of town, and in his absence an attack on his old friend, Dr Glennie of Dulwich, was inadvertently passed by Redding’s successor, Mr S. C. Hall. Campbell does not explicitly say that this incident was the cause of his resignation, but as he mentions interminable scrapes and threatened law-suits, we may safely assume that it was. At any rate he said good-bye to Colburn in no amiable mood. Colburn had a bill of £700 against him, partly for books and partly for the expense of the current unsold edition of his poems. How was he to discharge such a debt? The difficulty was temporarily met by an agreement with Cochrane, the publisher, whereby the latter was to pay the £700 in return for Campbell’s undertaking the editorship of a new venture, to be called The Metropolitan Magazine, and for two hundred unsold copies of his poems in Colburn’s hands. Unluckily, Cochrane could not make up the £700, and Campbell, in order to satisfy Colburn, had to stake the rent of his house and sell off his poems at such price as they would bring. At the close of 1830 he went into lodgings, and instead of settling down, as he had hoped, to enjoy a kind of mild otium cum dignitate, he had perforce to resume his seat on the thorny cushion of the editorial chair. When he left the New Monthly, Redding asked him, ‘What about the reduced finances?’ ‘Devil take the finances,’ said he; ‘it is something to be free if a man has but a shirt and a carpet bag.’ His soreness of heart at having to sell his liberty again may thus be imagined.

Campbell’s connection with the Metropolitan Magazine proved anything but agreeable. True, things went smoothly enough for a time. In the autumn he felt himself ten inches taller because he had got a third share in the property. The share cost him £500, and he had to borrow the money from Rogers, for whose security—though Rogers generously declined any security—he insured his life and pledged his library and house furniture. But the concern turned out to be a bubble, and Campbell suffered agonies of suspense about his money. He got it back in the long run, and it was returned to Rogers. But this was only the beginning of his troubles. At the request of Captain Chamier, one of the proprietors, he continued in the editorship, but the magazine passed through many vicissitudes. When it came into the hands of his old friend Captain Marryat, Campbell wanted to cut connection with it entirely, and was prevailed upon to remain only by Marryat promising to relieve him of the correspondence. Shortly after this, Marryat offered the editorship to Moore who, however, declined to supplant Campbell, and so joined the staff merely as a contributor. Campbell presently reported that ‘we go on in very good heart.’ But these conditions did not last. Campbell found that he could not work comfortably under Marryat—who was just about to give the magazine a swing with his ‘Peter Simple’—and he threw up the editorship, which in point of fact he had held only in name. He seems to have left everything to his sub-editor. He seldom examined a manuscript unless it came from one of his friends; nor did he give by his contributions—nine short pieces of verse—anything like value for the money he received. His editorship, in short, was purely ornamental.

But it is necessary to retrace our steps. Just after taking on the Metropolitan in 1831, Campbell fixed upon a quiet residence at St Leonard’s which he now used as an occasional retreat from the bustle of London. We hear of him strolling with complacent pride on the beach while the band played ‘The Campbells are Comin’’ and ‘Ye Mariners of England.’ He tells his sister that refined female society had become of great consequence to him, and that he found it concentrated here. He had no pressing engagements, and accordingly had written more verses than he had done for many years within the same time. His ‘Lines on the View from St Leonards,’ published first in the Metropolitan, were well-known, though they are now forgotten. A visit to one of the paper mills at Maidstone in July 1831 was made to inquire about the price of paper for an edition of ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ which Turner had promised to illustrate. Campbell had a little joke with the manager at the mills. ‘I am a paper-stainer,’ he said, and then he explained that he stained with author’s ink, after which the manager became ‘intensely disdainful.’ At Stoke, near Bakewell, whither he had gone to see Mrs Arkwright, a daughter of Stephen Kemble, he heard Chevalier Neukomm play the organ. This, he says, was as great an era in his sensations as when he first beheld the Belvidere Apollo. In the music he imagined that he heard his dead Alison speaking to him from heaven, and when he could listen no longer he slipped out to the churchyard, where he ‘gave way to almost convulsive sensations.’ Some years later he met Neukomm again, and at his request turned a part of the Book of Job—the ‘sublime text’ of which he often extolled—into verse for an oratorio. The effort appears as a ‘fragment’ in his works, and Neukomm is said to have composed the music, though no mention of such an oratorio is made in any of the biographical notices of the composer.

We come now to an important episode in the life of Campbell—an episode which for long engaged almost his sole attention. His interest in the cause of Poland had already been strikingly expressed in ‘The Pleasures of Hope.’ It was an interest which, as his friend Dr Madden puts it, had all the strength of a passion, all the fervour of patriotism. Poland was his idol. ‘He wrote for it, he worked for it, he sold his literary labour for it; he used his influence with all persons of eminence in political life of his acquaintance in favour of it; and, when it was lost, in favour of those brave defenders of it who had survived its fall. He threw himself heart and soul into the cause; he identified all his feelings, nay, his very being with it.’ The names of Czartoryski and Niemeiewitz were never off his lips. A tale of a distressed Pole was his greeting to friends when they met; a subscription the chorus of his song. In fact, he was quite mad on the subject, as mad as ever Byron was about Greece, or Boswell about Corsica.

What roused him first was the fall of Warsaw, by the news of which he was so affected that Madden feared for his life or his reason. He began very practically by subscribing £100 to the Warsaw Hospital Fund, ‘a mighty sum for a poor poet,’ as he says in an unpublished letter. He had written some ‘Lines on Poland’ for the Metropolitan, and these, along with the Lines on St Leonards, he proposed to publish in a brochure, by which he expected to raise £50 more. The number of exiles in London gradually increased. Many of them were starving. Campbell constituted himself their guardian, appealed urgently for money on their behalf, and subsequently, early in 1831, founded a Polish Association with the object of relieving distress and distributing literature calculated to arouse public sympathy on the matter.