He worshipped—stern, uncompromising truth.
That he was a man of character and intelligence is clear from the fact that he numbered among his intimates such distinguished men as Adam Smith and Dr Thomas Reid, the successive occupants of the Moral Philosophy Chair at Glasgow. When Reid published his ‘Inquiry into the Human Mind,’ he gave a copy to Alexander Campbell, who read it and said he was edified by it. ‘I am glad you are pleased with it,’ remarked Reid; ‘there are now at least two men in Glasgow who understand my work—Alexander Campbell and myself.’ He had the saving grace of humour, too, this old Virginia trader, though, from a specimen given, it was apparently not of a very brilliant kind. Some of the boys were discussing the best colours for a new suit of clothes. ‘Lads,’ said the father, whose propensity for punning not even chagrin at the law’s delays could suppress, ‘lads, if you wish to get a lasting suit, get one like mine. I have a suit in the Court of Chancery which has lasted thirty years, and I think it will never wear out.’ The worthy man lived to the patriarchal age of ninety-one, dying in Edinburgh—whither he had retired with his household three years before—in 1801. In his last days ‘my son Thomas’ was the main theme of his conversation.
Alexander Campbell had not married until he reached his forty-sixth year, and then he chose the young sister of his partner, an energetic girl of twenty-one. It must have been from her that the son drew his poetic strain. She is spoken of as ‘an admirable manager and a clever woman,’ and, what is of more interest, ‘a person of much taste and refinement.’ She brought to the home the poetry in counterpoise to her husband’s philosophy. Like Leigh Hunt’s mother, she was ‘fond of music, and a gentle singer in her way’: her poet son, as we shall find, was also fond of music, sang a little, and was, in his earlier years at least, devoted to the flute. To her children she was certainly not over-indulgent; indeed she is said to have been ‘unnecessarily severe or even harsh’; but the mother of so large a family, with ordinary cares enhanced by the necessity for practising petty economies, would have been an angel if she had always been sweet and gracious. Between her and her youngest boy there seems to have been a particular affection, and when he began to make some stir in the world, no one was more elated with pardonable pride than she. There is a story told of her having asked a shopman to address a parcel to ‘Mrs Campbell, mother of the author of “The Pleasures of Hope.”’ She survived her husband for eleven years, and died in Edinburgh in 1812, at the age of seventy-six.
The house in which Campbell and his family resided at the time of the poet’s birth, was a little to the west of High Street near the foot of Balmanno Brae, and in the line of the present George Street. Beattie, writing in 1849, speaks of it as having long since disappeared under the march of civic improvement, and as a matter of fact it was demolished in 1794 when George Street was opened up. The Glasgow of 1777 was of course a very different place from what it is to-day—very different from what it was when Defoe could describe it as ‘one of the cleanest, most beautiful, and best-built cities of Great Britain’; when Smollett, himself a Glasgow youth, saw in it ‘one of the prettiest towns in Europe.’ In 1777 Glasgow was only laying the foundations of her commercial prosperity. She had, it is true, established her tobacco trade with the American plantations, and her sugar trade with the West Indies, but her character as the seat of an ancient Church and University had not been materially altered thereby.
Even in 1773, when Johnson, on his way back from the Hebrides, had a look round her sights, he found learning ‘an object of wide importance, and the habit of application much more general than in the neighbouring University of Edinburgh.’ Trade and letters still joined hands, so that Gibbon could not inappropriately speak of Glasgow as ‘the literary and commercial city,’ and one might still walk her streets without at every corner being ‘nosed,’ to use De Quincey’s phrase, by something which reminded him of ‘that detestable commerce.’ Whether Glasgow was altogether a meet nurse for a poetic child may perhaps be doubted. The time came when Campbell himself thought she was not. The town, said he, has ‘a cold, raw, wretchedly wet climate, the very nursery of sore throats and chest diseases.’ Redding once chaffed him about it. ‘Did you ever see Wapping on a drizzling, wet, spring day?’ he asked in reply. ‘That is just the appearance of Glasgow for three parts of the year.’ But Glasgow was not so bad as yet. She was still surrounded by the cornfields and the hedgerows and the orchards of Lanarkshire, her few streets practically within a stone’s throw of the Cathedral and the College.
The youngest of their family, the son of the father’s old age, Thomas Campbell was naturally thought much of by his parents. He had been baptized by, and indeed named after, Dr Thomas Reid, and the old Virginia merchant is said to have had a presentiment that he would in some way or other do honour to his name and country. What proud father has not thought the same? That he was regarded as a precocious child goes without saying. We are told that he uttered quaint, old-fashioned remarks which were ‘much too wise for his little curly head’; and he was of so inquisitive a turn—but then all children are inquisitive—that he found amusement and information in everything that fell in his way. A sister, nineteen years his senior, taught him his letters; and in 1785 he was handed over to the care of David Allison, the scholarly master of the Grammar School. Allison was a rigid disciplinarian of the good old type, who seems to have whipped the dead languages into his pupils with all the energy of Gil Blas’ master. Campbell remained under him for four years. He began his studies in such earnest that he made himself ill, and had to be removed to a cottage at Cathcart, where for six weeks he was nursed by an aged ‘webster’ and his wife.
No doubt the little holiday had its influence at the time; it certainly had its influence in later life when, after a visit to the ‘green waving woods on the margin of Cart,’ he wrote his not unpleasing stanzas on this scene of his early youth. In any case he left the country cottage rather reluctantly, and returned to his lessons at the Grammar School. He does not appear to have been a particularly industrious student. He had certainly an ambition to excel, and he was invariably at the top of his class; but he made progress rather by fits and starts than by steady, laborious plodding. In this respect, of course, he was only like a great many more celebrities who have been dunces in the schoolroom. Not that Campbell was in any sense a dunce. He was especially enamoured of the classics; so much so, indeed, that, as Beattie gravely certifies, he ‘could declaim with great fluency at the evening fireside in the language of Greece and Rome’; and some of the translations which he made for Allison were considered good enough to be printed by the enthusiastic biographer. His love for Greek, in particular, was the subject of much remark, both then and afterwards. Redding says he could repeat thirty or forty Greek verses applicable to any subject that might be under discussion. Beattie, again, tells that Greek was his ‘pride and solace’ all through life; and there is good authority for saying that, even after he had made a name as a poet, he wished to be considered a Greek scholar first and a poet afterwards. That he was quite sincere in the matter may be gathered from the circumstance of his having in his last days given his niece a series of daily lessons in the language of Homer, ‘all in the Greek character and written with his own hand.’ Nevertheless, as a Grecian, the classical world can as well do without Thomas Campbell as the Principal at Louvain, in ‘The Vicar of Wakefield,’ found that he could do without Greek itself.
With all his enthusiasm for the classics, Campbell does not seem to have been anything less of a boy than his fellows at the Grammar School. He loved Greek, but he loved games too. There are tales of stone fights with the Shettleston urchins, such as Scott has described in his story of Green-breeks, and of strawberry raids in suburban gardens which for days afterwards made him restive under the pious literature prescribed by his father. That he was indeed a very boy is shown by at least one amusing anecdote. His mother had a cousin, an old bedridden lady, about whose frail tenure of life she felt much anxiety. Every morning she would send either Tom or his brother Daniel to ask ‘how Mrs Simpson was to-day.’ One day Tom wanted to go on a blackberry expedition; his mother wanted him to inquire, as usual, about ‘this deil of an auld wife that would neither die nor get better.’ Daniel suggested that there was no need to go: ‘just say that she’s better or worse.’ The boys continued to report in this way for weeks and months, but finding that an unfavourable bulletin only sent them back earlier next morning, they agreed that the old lady should get better. One day Tom announced that Mrs Simpson had quite recovered—and a few hours later the funeral invitation arrived! Campbell, in telling the story long after, says he was much less pained by the cuffing he received from his mother than by a few words from his father. The old man ‘never raised a hand to us, and I would advise all fathers who would have their children to love their memory to follow his example.’ The wisdom is not Solomonic, but that Campbell set much store by it is quite evident from the frequent reference which he makes in later life to his father’s sparing of the rod.
Meanwhile he was giving indication of his literary bent in the manner usual with youngsters. The ‘magic of nature,’ to quote his own words, had first ‘breathed on his mind’ during his six weeks in the country, and the result was a ‘Poem on the Seasons,’ in which the conventional expression of the obvious runs through some hundred lines or more. A year later, that is to say in 1788, he wrote an elegy ‘On the death of a favourite parrot,’ of which one can only remark that it will at least bear comparison with the reputed tribute of Master Samuel Johnson to his duck. Strange to say among the last things which Campbell wrote were some lines on a parrot, so that any one who is interested enough can make a critical comparison between his elegiac poems in youth and age.
But Campbell was doing better things than calling upon Melpomene, the queen of tears, to attend his ‘dirge of woe’ on account of poor Poll. Mr Allison was in the habit of prescribing translations from the classics into English, which might be either in prose or in verse, as his pupils thought fit. Campbell chose verse. He made translations from Anacreon, from Virgil, from Horace, and from other Greek and Latin writers, all with a fair measure of success, considering his years. Indeed these verse translations are much superior to his original efforts of the same and even of later date. Beattie, who saw the manuscripts, remarked upon the almost total absence of punctuation in them all. It seems that Campbell regarded the art of pointing as one of the mysteries, to which for many years he paid as little attention as if he had been an eighteenth century lawyer’s clerk. Even as late as ‘Theodoric’ (1824), he had to ask a literary friend to look after the punctuation in the proofs.