His other indulgences seem to have been quite innocent. Hunt hints at his love of a good dinner, which indeed has been seen from his letters. He was almost as fond of the pipe as Tennyson, and he had even been known to chew tobacco when he found it inconvenient to smoke. He liked music, though he knew no more about the theory of the art than Scott. The national songs of his country specially appealed to him; and he was severe upon Dr Burney, the musical historian, because he had not done justice to the old English composers. He played the flute—how wonderfully flute-playing has gone out of fashion!—and could ‘strike in now and then with a solo.’ His early ‘vain little weak passion’ to have ‘a fine characteristic, manly voice’ was never realised, but with such voice as he had, he often gratified his friends in a Scots song or in his own ‘Exile of Erin.’ ‘The Marseillaise’ was his favourite air, and when on his deathbed he several times asked his niece to play it.
But Campbell gave himself very little time for recreation and social enjoyment. Most of his waking hours were spent in his study, where he dawdled unconscionably over the lightest of tasks. As a rule he attempted verse only when in the mood. He told George Thomson, who had asked him for some lyrics, that if he sat on purpose to write a song he felt sure it would be a failure. On the other hand, he sat down to produce prose with the clock-work regularity of Anthony Trollope. He wrote very slowly, and would often recast a whole piece out of sheer caprice, the second version being not seldom inferior to the first. Several of his friends speak of his practice of adding pencil lines to unruled paper for making transcripts of his verse. His habits of study were erratic and desultory. He could not fix his thoughts for any length of time; yet he always pretended to be prodigiously busy. Even the minutes necessary for shaving he grudged: a man, he said, might learn a language in the time given to the razor. Scott wondered that he did so little considering the number of years he devoted to literature. But the reason is plain: he did not know how to economise his time. His imagination was active enough, but it was ill-regulated and flighty, and his incapacity for protracted exertion led to the abandonment of many well-conceived designs. This instability, this restless, wayward irresolution, was the weak point in his character. He would start of a sudden into the country in order to be alone, and he would be back in London next day. He would arrange visits in eager anticipation of enjoyment, and when he arrived at his destination would ask to be immediately recalled on urgent editorial business! ‘There is something about me,’ he truly said, ‘that lacks strength in brushing against the world, and battling out the evil day.’ And he was right when he named himself ‘procrastination Tom.’
Campbell was not, in the usual sense of the term, a society man. He liked the company of ladies, especially when they were pretty, but ‘talking women’ he detested. Even Madame de Staël he disparaged because she was fond of showing off. For the ‘high gentry,’ to use his own words, he had an ‘unconquerable aversion.’ To retain their acquaintance, he said, meant a life of idleness, dressing, and attendance on their parties. He censured his own countrymen for their snobbish deference to the great, citing an instance of Scott having become painfully obsequious in a company when some unknown lordling arrived. Anything like formality, above all the idea of being invited out for other than a social and friendly object, made him silent and even morose. ‘They asked me to show me,’ he observed of a certain function; ‘I will never dine there again.’ Lockhart, writing of this phase of his character, says there was no reason why he should not have been attentive to persons vastly his superiors who had any sort of claim upon him; no reason why he should not have enjoyed, and profited largely by enjoying, ‘the calm contemplation of that grand spectacle denominated the upper world.’ As a society star, Lockhart is perhaps to be excused for not sympathising with the position. Campbell had his bread to make by his own industry, and he could not possibly fill his hours with forenoon calls and nightly levees. But more than that, he was not formed, either by habit or by mode of thinking, for the conventional round of social life. A man who puts his knife in the salt-cellar—as, according to Lady Morgan, Campbell once did at an aristocratic table—is not made for associating with the ‘high gentry.’ The ‘upper world’ may indeed be, as Lockhart says it is, ‘the best of theatres, the acting incomparably the first, the actresses the prettiest.’ But Campbell seems always to have felt as much out of place there as a country cousin would feel in a greenroom. Various references in his letters suggest that he was troubled with a nervous self-consciousness, the bourgeois suspicion that his ‘betters’ were laughing in their sleeve at him, and the natural result was gaucherie and sometimes incivility. But among his equals he was another man. Hunt tells of one great day at Sydenham—a specimen, no doubt, of many such days—when Theodore Hook came to dinner and amused the company with some extempore drollery about a piece of village gossip in which Campbell and a certain lady were concerned. Campbell enjoyed the fun immensely, and ‘having drunk a little more wine than usual,’ he suddenly took off his wig and dashed it at Hook’s head, exclaiming: ‘You dog! I’ll throw my laurels at you.’ Little wonder that one who thus mingled vanity with horse-play was not quite at home among duchesses!
No two authorities agree as to Campbell’s powers as a talker, but the truth would seem to be that he shone only at his own table or among his intimates, and even then, as already hinted, only when stimulated by wine. He was indeed too reserved to be quite successful as a conversationalist. One of his friends said he knew a great deal but was seldom in the mood to tell what he knew. He ‘trifled in his table-talk, and you might sound him about his contemporaries to very little purpose.’ As early as the year 1800 he remarked that he would always hide his emotions and personal feelings from the world at large, and although we come upon an occasional burst of confidence in his letters, he may be said to have kept up his reserve to the end. Madden called him ‘a most shivery person’ in the presence of strangers; Tennyson said he was a very brilliant talker in a tête-a-tête. According to an American admirer, he was quite commonplace unless when excited; Lockhart found him witty only when he had taken wine. Lytton was disappointed with him on such occasions as he met him in general society, but spoke of an evening at his house when Campbell led the conversation with the most sparkling talk he had ever heard. Nothing, he said, could equal ‘the riotous affluence of wit, of humour, of fancy’ that Campbell poured forth.
To this may be added a second quotation from Leigh Hunt, which will serve to bring out some other points. Hunt writes:
Those who knew Mr Campbell only as the author of ‘Gertrude of Wyoming’ and ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ would not have suspected him to be a merry companion overflowing with humour and anecdote, and anything but fastidious. Those Scotch poets have always something in reserve … I know but of one fault he had, besides an extreme cautiousness in his writings, and that one was national—a matter of words, and amply overpaid by a stream of conversation, lively, piquant, and liberal, not the less interesting for occasionally betraying an intimacy with pain, and for a high and somewhat overstrained tone of voice, like a man speaking with suspended breath, and in the habit of subduing his feelings. No man felt more kindly towards his fellow-creatures, or took less credit for it. When he indulged in doubt and sarcasm, and spoke contemptuously of things in general, he did it, partly, no doubt, out of actual dissatisfaction, but more perhaps than he suspected out of a fear of being thought weak and sensitive; which is a blind that the best men commonly practise. He professed to be hopeless and sarcastic, and took pains all the while to set up a University.
He seems to have had a very good opinion of his own powers as a talker, and apparently he sometimes failed from sheer over-anxiety to shine. At Holland House he used to set himself up against Sydney Smith. Of one visit he says: ‘I was determined I should make as many good jokes and speak as much as himself; and so I did, for though I was dressed at the dinner-table much like a barber’s clerk, I arrogated greatly, talked quizzically, metaphorically. Sydney said a few good things; I said many.’
This is, of course, all flummery, whether Campbell was really serious in his assertion or not. Whatever wit he may have shown on rare occasions, he was not, like Sydney Smith, naturally witty. As a writer his forte lay in the didactic and rhetorical, and when he attempted to move in a lighter step he became ridiculous. ‘There never was a man,’ says Redding, ‘who had less of the comic in his character than Campbell.’ Some of his friends aver that he often had fits of punning, but such of his puns as have survived do not lead us to believe that he can ever have been very successful in that most mechanical form of wit. ‘I have only one muse and you two, so you must be the better poet,’ he once said to Redding; the explanation being that Campbell’s house had one mews while Redding’s house had two. At another time Redding having complained that he could not get into his desk for his cash because he had lost the key, Campbell replied: ‘Never mind, if nothing better turns up you are sure of a post among the lack-keys.’ When Hazlitt published ‘The New Pygmalion’ he declared that the title ought to have been ‘Hogmalion’; and he told a friend that the East was the place to write books on chronology because it was the country of dates. These are specimens of Campbell’s puns, from which it will be gathered that humour was certainly not one of his endowments.
Nowhere does this lack of real humour come out more clearly than in his letters, which are plain and ponderous almost to the verge of boredom. There is nothing in them of that ever-glowing necessity of brain and blood which makes the letters of Scott and Byron, for example, so humanly interesting. He has no lightness like Walpole, no quiet whimsicality like Cowper, no sidelights on literature and life like Stevenson. Lockhart’s apology for him is that, chained so fast to the dreary tasks of compilation, he could not be expected to have a stock of pleasantry for a copious correspondence. But none of the brilliant letter-writers can be suspected of having kept a choice vintage of epistolary Falernian in carefully sealed bottles. A man’s individuality expresses itself in his letters as naturally as a fountain flows. The truth is that Campbell was too reserved, or too artificial, or both, to make a good letter-writer.