ill. A second son, whom he named Alison, after his old Edinburgh friend,

had been born to him in June 1805, but the jubilation over the event was short-lived. He became, in fact, more moody and disconsolate than ever. He described himself as a wreck, and looked forward to his sleepless nights being ‘quieted soon and everlastingly.’ Even the daily journey to town proved too much for him, and he took a temporary lodging in Pimlico, going to Sydenham only on Sundays. By and by he recovered himself a little. Medical skill did something, but improved finances did more. In a letter to Scott, dated October 2, 1805, we find this curt but pregnant postscript: ‘His Majesty has been pleased to confer a pension of £200 a year upon me. GOD SAVE THE KING.’ Campbell says the ‘bountiful allowance’ was obtained through several influences, but he mentions Charles Fox (who liked him because he was ‘so right about Virgil’), Lord Holland and Lord Minto as being specially active in the matter.

It was insinuated that the pension came as a reward for writing a series of newspaper articles in defence of the Grenville administration, but this was certainly not the case. Campbell was no political writer, no ‘scribbler for a party.’ Among his many faults it cannot be laid to his charge that he sold his principles for pay. In 1824, mercenary as he was, he declined £100 a year from a certain society because to take the money meant ‘canting and time-serving.’ We need therefore have no hesitation in accepting his assurance that he received the present grant ‘purely and exclusively as an act of literary patronage.’ There is perhaps a suspicion of the _poseur_ in his palaver about the ‘mortification’ which his pride had suffered in the matter, but beyond that, there seems to be no reason for casting doubts on his political honesty.

The new accession of fortune was not princely, but it must have helped Campbell very considerably. Deducting office fees, duties, etc., the allowance amounted to something like £168 per annum, and that sum he enjoyed for close upon forty years. He says that his physicians--who were surely Job’s comforters all--told him he must regard it as the only barrier between him and premature dissolution; and he speaks about making it ‘do’ in the cheapest corner of England. His friends, however, were by this time thoroughly alive to the necessity, which indeed should never have existed, of doing something to put his finances on a satisfactory basis, and to this end the publication of another subscription edition of his poems was arranged. Campbell indulged in his usual idle talk about ‘mortification’ at having again to ask support in this way, but his friends wisely kept the matter in their own hands and paid no heed to his maunderings.

At the same time some impatience was not unnaturally being felt with Campbell. Francis Horner, a judicious acquaintance upon whom he afterwards wrote an unfinished elegy, was giving himself no end of trouble over the new edition, and this is the way he writes to Richardson. Speaking of a permanent fund as a motive to economy he says:

You must teach him [Campbell] to consider this subscription as an exertion which cannot with propriety, nor even perhaps with success, be tried another time; and that from this time he must look forward to a plan of income and expense wholly depending upon himself and most strictly adjusted. He gets four guineas a week for translating foreign gazettes at the _Star_ office; it is not quite the best employment for a man of genius, but it occupies him only four hours of the morning, and the payment ought to go a great length in defraying his annual expenses. You will be able to convey to Campbell these views of his situation and others that will easily occur to you: none of _us_ are entitled to use so much freedom with him.

One can read a good deal between the lines here. Campbell, as he mildly puts it himself, was never ‘over head and ears in love with working’; he preferred his friends to work for him. Some years before this he looked to them to get him a Government situation, ‘unshackled by conditional service’; and even now, with his pension running, and much as he prated about his pride, he ‘trusts in God’ that it will be followed up by an appointment of ‘some emolument’ in one of the Government offices. It was clearly an object with him to have his affairs made easy by outsiders. Nor was this all. There is no doubt that he had, temporarily at least, given way to convivial habits which his well-wishers could not but regard with regret. He admits as much himself, and Beattie only seeks to hide the fact by speaking in his solemn, periphrastic way about ‘the social pleasures of the evening’ and a ‘too-easy compliance’ with the solicitations of company. In these circumstances, it was only natural that Campbell’s friends should desire to impress upon him the necessity of guiding his affairs with greater circumspection so as to depend more upon himself. Meanwhile they went on collecting subscribers’ names for the new edition, and Campbell returned to Sydenham to continue his work on the ‘Annals’ and think about something less irksome and more remunerative.

It was at this juncture that Murray considerately came to his aid. Though the original scheme of the British Poets had fallen through, Campbell had by no means given up the idea of a work of the kind; and now, having discussed the plan with Murray, it was arranged between them that the undertaking should go on. Murray was naturally anxious that Scott’s name should be connected with the editorship, but Scott, although he at first agreed to co-operate, ultimately found it necessary to restrict himself to works more exclusively his own, and Campbell was accordingly left to proceed alone.

In the summer of 1807 his labours were interrupted by a visit to the Isle of Wight. His old complaint had returned, and he was advised to try a change of air and scene. He left London in the beginning of June, but the change did not prove successful. The demon of insomnia still haunted him, and the _ennui_ of the place became so intolerable that he was driven to act as reader to the ladies in the boarding-house where he stayed! What, he cries, must Siberia be when Ryde is so bad! By August he was at Sydenham again, only to find his ‘abhorred sleeplessness returning fast and inveterately.’ He had written very little poetry for some time, and such as he did write--the tribute to Sir John Moore, for example--is, like the Greek mentioned by Pallet, not worth repeating. He was now engaged almost solely upon ‘Gertrude of Wyoming,’ but his head was ‘constantly confused,’ and the poem was often laid aside for weeks at a time. Still, the manuscript advanced, and by Christmas the greater part of it was complete enough for reading to a private circle of friends.

‘Gertrude’ finally appeared, after a long process of polishing, alteration and addition, in April 1809. Some time before its publication Campbell wrote that he had no fear as to its reception; only let him have it out, and, like Sterne, he cared not a curse what the critics might say. The critics were in the main favourable. Jeffrey had already seen the proofs, and had written a long letter to the author, pointing out certain ‘dangerous faults,’ but commending the poem for its ‘great beauty and great tenderness and fancy’; and on the same day that the poem was published, the _Edinburgh Review_ appeared with an article in which the editor rejoiced ‘once more to see a polished and pathetic poem in the old style of English pathos and poetry.’ Its merits, he said, ‘consist chiefly in the feeling and tenderness of the whole delineation, and the taste and delicacy with which all the subordinate parts are made to contribute to the general effect.’ At the same time he found the story confused, some passages were unintelligible, and there was a laborious effort at emphasis and condensation which had led to ‘constraint and obscurity of the diction.’ The _Quarterly_ reviewer, none other than Sir Walter Scott, was more severe upon its blemishes. He complained of the ‘indistinctness’ of the narrative, of the numerous blanks which were left to be filled up by the imagination of the reader, of its occasional ambiguity and abruptness. Its excellences were, however, generously admitted; and in fact, on the whole, the _Quarterly_ said as much in its favour as could be expected. In those days party spirit led to incredible freaks of literary criticism; and it was only Scott’s magnanimity that could have allowed him to forgive Campbell’s Whig politics for the sake of his poetry. Curiously enough, considering their intimacy, Campbell did not know that Scott was his reviewer, though he was not very wide of the mark when he spoke of the writer as ‘a candid and sensible man,’ who ‘reviews like a gentleman, a Christian, and a scholar.’ Of other contemporary criticisms we need not speak. The poet’s friends were of course blindly eulogistic. Alison was ‘delighted and conquered,’ and Telford, with his characteristic bombast, anticipated such applause from the public as would drive the author frantic!

‘Gertrude,’ as has more than once been pointed out, was the first poem of any length by a British writer the scene of which was laid in America, and in it Campbell is the first European to introduce his readers to the romance of the virgin forests and Red Indian warriors. The subject may have occurred to him when transcribing a passage in his own ‘Annals,’ in which reference is made to the massacre of Wyoming, although there is possibly something in Beattie’s suggestion that he got the idea from reading Lafontaine’s story of ‘Barneck and Saldorf,’ published in 1804. Campbell, however, as we know, had a keen personal interest in America. His father had lived there; three of his brothers were there now. ‘If I were not a Scotsman,’ he once remarked, ‘I should like to be an American.’ No doubt the scenery of Pennsylvania had been often described to him in letters from the other side.

But these are points that do not greatly concern us now. Nor is it necessary to enter into any minute criticism of the poem. Campbell himself preferred it to ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ (‘I mean,’ he said, ‘to ground my claims to future notice on it’), while Hazlitt regarded it as his ‘principal performance.’ With neither opinion does the popular verdict agree. Perhaps it may be that while ‘Gertrude’ is, as Lockhart said, a more equal and better sustained effort than ‘The Pleasures of Hope,’ it contains fewer passages which bear detaching from the context. For one thing the poet had a story to tell in ‘Gertrude,’ and he was eminently unskilled in the management of poetic narrative. ‘I was always,’ he remarks to Scott, ‘a dead bad hand at telling a story.’ In ‘Gertrude’ he cannot keep to his story; the construction of the entire poem is loose and incoherent. Even the love scenes, which, as Hazlitt says, breathe a balmy voluptuousness of sentiment, are generally broken off in the middle. Then he was unwise in adopting the Spenserian stanza. It was quite alien to his style; even Thomson, living long before the romantic revival, managed it more sympathetically than Campbell. The necessities of the rhyme led Campbell to invert his sentences unduly, to tag his lines for the mere sake of the rhyme, and to use affected archaisms with a quite extraordinary clumsiness. Anything more unlike the sweet, easy, graceful compactness of Spenser could scarcely be imagined.

Nor are the characters of the poem altogether successful; indeed, with the single exception of the Indian, they are mere shadows. Gertrude herself makes a pretty portrait; but as Hazlitt has remarked, she cannot for a moment compare with Wordsworth’s Ruth, the true infant of the woods and child-nature. Brant, again, who so warmly espoused the cause of the Mohawks during the War of the American Revolution, is but a faint reality. Campbell fancied that he had drawn a true picture of the partisan, but as Brant’s son afterwards proved to him, the picture was purely imaginary. The main function of the Indian chief is apparently to give local colour to the poem, though it must be allowed that he stands out boldly among its other characters. Hazlitt comments upon his erratic appearances, remarking that he vanishes and comes back, after long intervals, in the nick of time, without any known reason but the convenience of the author and the astonishment of the reader. On the other hand, the death-song of the savage which closes the poem, is one of the best things that the author ever wrote.

Byron declared that ‘Gertrude’ was notoriously full of grossly false scenery; that it had ‘no more locality with Pennsylvania than with Penmanmaur.’ But that was an obvious exaggeration. There is better ground for the complaint about Campbell’s errors in natural history as exhibited in the poem--about his having conferred on Pennsylvania the aloe and the palm, the flamingo and the panther. The probability is that he knew as much about natural history as Goldsmith, whose friends declared that he could not tell the difference between any two sorts of barndoor fowl until they had been cooked. Once in the _New Monthly_, when a contributor spoke of the rarity of seeing the cuckoo, Campbell added a correcting note to say that he had himself ‘seen whole fields _blue_ with cuckoos’! But even Shakespeare has lions in the forest of Arden, and Goldsmith makes the tiger howl in North America. There is no need to insist upon absolute accuracy in such matters. One would gladly notice instead the real merits of the poem, which, however, are not so readily discovered. Hazlitt spoke enthusiastically of passages of so rare and ripe a beauty that they exceed all praise. But we have changed our poetical point of view since Hazlitt’s day; and the most that can now be said for ‘Gertrude,’ is that it is a third-rate poem containing a few first-rate lines. It is practically dead, and can never be called back to life.

‘Gertrude’ was favourably received by the public, and particularly by the Whig party, to whose leaders Campbell was personally known, and with most of whom he was closely intimate. It was edited in America by Washington Irving in 1810, and was highly praised on the other side--a fact which at least suggests that its local scenery was not so false as Byron declared it to be. The first edition was a quarto; a second in 12mo was called for within the year. The quarto edition included some of the better known short pieces, such as ‘Ye Mariners,’ ‘The Battle of the Baltic,’ ‘Lochiel,’ ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter,’ and ‘Glenara,’ the latter founded on a wild and romantic story of which Joanna Baillie afterwards made use in her ‘Family Legend.’ The second edition contained the once-familiar ‘O’Connor’s Child,’ a rather touching piece suggested by the flower popularly known as ‘Love Lies Bleeding.’ Many years after this--in 1836--the Dublin people desired to give Campbell a public dinner as the author of ‘O’Connor’s Child’ and ‘The Exile of Erin,’ but Campbell never set foot on the Emerald Isle.