Of this Association he was appointed chairman. The duties proved anything but light. In June 1832 he writes that he has a heavy correspondence to keep up, both with friends at home and with foreigners. He has letters in French, German, and even Latin to write, and these afford him nothing like a sinecure. There was also a monthly journal called Polonia to edit; besides which the German question—another and the same with the Polish—involved him in much vexatious correspondence with the patriots of the Fatherland. At this date he was constantly working from seven in the morning till midnight; he even changed his dinner hour to two o’clock to have a longer afternoon for his beloved Poles. It was impossible that such a strain could last; and at length, in May 1833, he withdrew from the Association as having become too arduous and exciting for his health. Thus closed a part of his career which was as honourable to him as anything he ever did, and upon which he looked back with feelings of sad pleasure. His zeal was perhaps a little ill-regulated, but his sincerity and his active practical efforts on behalf of many brave, unfortunate men bore the impress of a noble and a generous nature. The Poles showed their gratitude in many touching ways; and we have his own express declaration that only once in his life did he experience anything at all like their warm-hearted recognition of his services on their behalf.
During the whole of this distracted period Campbell had all but completely forsaken his own proper business. He had, of course, continued to edit the Metropolitan, and his random contributions to that journal must have filled up some time, but from the fall of Warsaw in March 1831 to his ceasing connection with the Polish Association in May 1833 his interests were centred entirely on the affairs of the exiles. Even the agitation about the Reform Bill had passed almost unheeded, though he was among those who celebrated the passing of the Bill by dining with the Lord Mayor at the Guildhall, on which occasion he remarked that the turtle soup tasted as if it had already felt the beneficent effects of Reform. From Glasgow had come in 1832 an appeal that he would allow himself to be nominated as a candidate for Parliament, but he declined the honour because a seat in the House would entail a life of ‘dreadful hardship,’ and cut up his literary occupation.
The only work of any note which he did while actively interested in the Poles was the Life of Mrs Siddons. He finished the book, at the end of 1832, in one volume, but the ‘tyrant booksellers’ would not look at it until he had expanded it into two volumes. It was at length published in June 1834. Few words need be wasted over it. Mrs Siddons, of whom he entertained an extravagantly high opinion, had entrusted him with what he loftily termed the ‘sacred duty’ of writing her life, but he was thoroughly unfitted for such a commission, and it is the simple truth that no man of even average ability ever produced a worse biography. The Quarterly called it ‘an abuse of biography,’ and its author ‘the worst theatrical historian we have ever had.’ It is full of the grossest blunders, and some of its expressions are turgid and nonsensical beyond belief. Thus of Mrs Pritchard we read that she ‘electrified the house with disappointment,’ a statement upon which the Quarterly remarked: ‘This, we suppose, is what the philosophers call negative electricity.’ The thing was rendered additionally absurd by the noise which Campbell had made about the writing of the book. He talked about it and wrote about it to everybody, as if it were to be the magnum opus of his life. From this the public and his friends naturally formed great expectations, and when they found they had been deluded they covered Campbell with ridicule.
With the money which the publication of this wretched book brought him Campbell now afforded himself a long break. He conceived the idea of a classical pilgrimage in Italy as likely not only to benefit his health but to furnish him with materials for a new poem. A change in the tide of his affairs carried him however to Paris, and he never set eyes on the sunny land. He arrived in the French capital in July, when the weather was so hot that he told the Parisians their beau climat was fit only for devils. He was eagerly welcomed by many of the Polish exiles, who gave him, what he did not dislike, a grand dinner, at which Prince Czartoryski proclaimed him ‘the pleader, the champion, the zealous and unwearied apostle of our holy cause.’ He heard Louis Philippe deliver his address to the Peers and Deputies, and made a ‘dispassionate enquiry’ into the characteristics of French beauty, which resulted in the conviction that the French ladies have no beauty at all! He began work on a Geography of Classical History, rising every morning with the sun, and studying for twelve hours a day. Presently some French friends interested him in the recent conquest and colonisation of Algiers, and, with his characteristic caprice, he decided to go there at once and write a book on the colony.
He landed in Algiers on the 18th of September (1834) to find Captain St Palais translating his poems for publication. ‘Prancing gloriously’ on an Arabian barb, he felt as if he had dropt into a new planet. The vegetation gave him ecstatic delight, and he was greatly elated when he discovered some ruins unmentioned by previous travellers. As usual he began to harass himself about money, but the announcement opportunely arrived that Telford had left him £1000, and he resolved to go on with his tour. He covered the entire coast from Bona to Oran, and penetrated as far as Mascara, seventy miles into the interior. For several nights he slept under the tents of the Arabs, and he made much of hearing a lion roar in his ‘native savage freedom.’ But all this, and a great deal more, may be read in his ‘Letters from the South,’ an informative and even lively work in two volumes, which appeared originally in the New Monthly. Campbell’s account of Algerian scenery is so glowingly eloquent that if unforeseen objects had not diverted his attention, the African tour would probably have formed the subject of a new poem. As it was, the tour remained poetically barren, save for some lines on a dead eagle and a jeu d’esprit written for the British Consul’s children.
Campbell was back in Paris in May 1835, and after ‘a long and gracious audience’ with Louis Philippe, he returned to London to tell more stories than Tom Coryatt, and enjoy a temporary fame as an African traveller. The tour seems, however, to have done him harm rather than good. Redding says he was astonished at the change in his appearance. He looked a dozen years older; he was in unusually low spirits, and he kept harping upon his disordered constitution. From this date onwards the record of his career is not worth dwelling upon in any detail. He suffered greatly from spells of ill-health; he shifted fitfully from one residence to another; he visited this place and that place; and with constant cackle about his busy pen, did almost nothing. Under these circumstances the briefest summary of the remaining years of his life will suffice.
Upon his return from Paris in 1835 he settled down at York Chambers, St James’ Street, where he prepared his ‘Letters from the South’ and arranged about the new edition of his poems to be illustrated by Turner. In May 1836 he started for Scotland, where he remained for four months, spending, he says, the happiest time he had ever spent in the land of his fathers. On former visits he had always been hurried and haunted by the necessity of sending manuscripts or proofs to London; but now he was his own master. At Glasgow he dined with the Campbell Club, and got over the function ‘very well,’ having left Professor Wilson and other choice spirits to prolong the carousal into the small hours. Apropos, a story is told of Wilson and Campbell which is too good to be missed. The poet’s cousin, Mr Gray, had a bewitchingly pretty maid, who had set Campbell—so he says—dreaming about the heroines of romance. The day after the dinner, Wilson, with other members of the Club, called at the house while the Gray family were absent. ‘I rang to get refreshment for them,’ says Campbell, ‘and fair Margaret brought it in. The Professor looked at her with so much admiration that I told him in Latin to contain his raptures, and he did so; but rose and walked round the room like a lion pacing his cage. Before parting he said, “Cawmel, that might be your ain Gertrude. Could not you just ring and get me a sight of that vision of beauty again?” “No, no,” I told him, “get you gone, you Moral Philosophy loon, and give my best respects to your wife and daughters.”’ As a set-off to this, it may be recorded that Campbell was sadly dismayed at seeing so many of the Glasgow ‘bonnie lassies’ going about with bare feet. ‘I am constantly,’ he says, ‘preaching against this national disgrace to my countrymen. It is a barbarism so unlike, so unworthy of, the otherwise civilised character of the commonality, which is the most intelligent in Europe; and it is a disgrace unpalliated by poverty in Glasgow, where the industrious are exceedingly well-off.’ The Club dinner was followed by a meeting of the Polish Association, at which Campbell gave a forty-five minutes’ speech that, by his own report, caused quite a sensation. He went to hear his old College chum, Dr Wardlaw, preach, and afterwards compared him with Chalmers. Chalmers, he said, ‘carries his audience by storm, but Wardlaw is a reasoning and well-informed person,’ a double-edged compliment to the more famous divine which Campbell probably did not see.
After a trip to the Highlands—one result of which was his ‘Lines to Ben Lomond,’ published shortly after in the Scenic Annual—he went to Edinburgh, where, on the 5th of August, he was made a freeman and was fêted like a prince. The Paisley Council and bailies, as he humorously tells, refused him a like honour; they bestowed it on Wilson, who was an inveterate Tory, and denied it to Campbell because he was a Whig. Nevertheless, Campbell, taking no offence, went to Paisley to the dinner, and Wilson and he spent a merry time at the races afterwards, Campbell being, indeed, so ‘prodigiously interested’ as to have an even £50 on one of the events!
Returning to London in October, he was back in Scotland again in the summer of 1837. There was a printers’ centenary festival in the capital in July, and nobody could be got to take the chair ‘because it was a three-and-sixpenny soirée.’ This roused Campbell’s democratic blood, and he immediately offered to fill the breach. ‘Delta’ proposed his health, and the audience got their hearts out by singing ‘Ye Mariners of England.’ Before the year ended he had again changed his residence. This time it was to ‘spacious chambers’ in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which, ignoring all the teachings of experience, he furnished so expensively that he had to undertake a new piece of hack work to cover the cost. The account of his difficulty with an Irish charwoman who sought to help him in arranging his books is at once amusing and pathetic. She understood, he says, neither Greek nor Latin, so that when he ordered her to bring such and such a volume of Athenæus or Fabricius she could only grunt like one of her native pigs. What did Campbell expect? Redding has a dreary picture of the disorder in which he found him one afternoon shortly after this. The rooms were in a state of extraordinary confusion. The breakfast things were still on the table, a coat was on one chair and a dressing-gown on another; pyramids of books were heaped on the floor, and papers lay scattered about in endless disarray. It was indeed a sad change from the neatness which had prevailed in Mrs Campbell’s time.
About this date the illustrated edition of his poems was published, and he found himself in some perplexity over the disposal of the drawings, for which he had paid Turner £550. He had been assured that Turner’s drawings were like banknotes, which would always bring their original price, but when he offered them for £300 no one would look at them, and Turner himself subsequently bought them for two hundred guineas. Of this illustrated edition two thousand five hundred copies went off within a twelvemonth; while of an edition on shorter paper the same number was sold in eleven months in Scotland alone. Those were happy days for poets!