CHAPTER IV CONTINENTAL TRAVELS

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Campbell’s intention had been to proceed from Harwich after a week’s visit to London, but, on mature reflection, he decided that the ‘modern Babel’ must wait. Some months later he realised that he had made a mistake. ‘It is a sad want not to be able to tell foreigners anything of London,’ he then wrote; ‘I have blushed for shame when the ladies asked me questions about it.’ This, however, was a point he had not foreseen, and his immediate reasons for delaying the London visit were both frank and amusing. On the eve of his departure he explains to Thomson that he had resisted the seductions of the great city because his finances were not equal to both London and Germany, and Germany he would on no account forego. Moreover, he knew his own nature too well. New sights and new acquaintances would have dismissed the little industry he possessed, and would have soon reduced him to the fettered state of a bookseller’s fag. There was still another consideration. He was not fitted for shining in a London company just yet. When he had added to the number of his books, he might think of making his debÛt, but for the present he would not run the risk of ridicule on account of his northern brogue and his ‘braw Scotch boos.’ And then comes this curious announcement: ‘In reality my fixed intention on returning from Germany is to set up a course of lectures on the Belles Lettres. I had some thoughts of lecturing in Edinburgh, but cannot think of remaining any longer in one place. If London should not offer encouragement, I mean to try Dublin. I think this a respectable profession, as the showman of the bear and monkey said when he gave his name to the commissioners of the income tax as an “itinerant lecturer on natural history.”’ The last sentence suggests—though it is impossible to be sure, for Campbell’s jokes were rather heavy-handed—that he threw out this idea in jest. If he was serious, it is another indication of his habit of easily adopting new professions, of which we may learn more in the sequel.

Campbell had a cordial reception from the British residents in Hamburg. He met Klopstock, and presented him with a copy of ‘The Pleasures of Hope.’ He describes the poet as ‘a mild, civil old man,’ one of the first really great men in the world of letters he ever knew, and adds that his only intercourse with him was in Latin, with which language he made his way tolerably well among the French and Germans, and still better among the Hungarians. How long he remained in Hamburg is not certain: as we shall see presently, he had arrived at Ratisbon in time to witness the startling military events of July. The political excitement was now at its height. Several of the Bavarian towns were in the hands of the French, and the upper valley of the Danube was under military government. ‘Everything here,’ says Campbell, writing soon after his arrival, ‘is whisper, surmise, and suspense. If war breaks out, the bridge over the Danube is expected to be blown up. You may guess what a devil of a splutter twenty-four large arches will make flying miles high in the air and coming down like falling planets to crush the town!… Ratisbon will be shivered to atoms; and as no warning is expected, the inhabitants may be buried under the ruins.’

To be thus plunged, as it were, into the thick of the fray was hardly a pleasant experience for the British pilgrim. The richest fields of Europe desolated by contending troops; peasants driven from their homes to starve and beg in the streets; horses dying of hunger, and men dying of their wounds—such were the ‘dreadful novelties’ that Campbell had come from Edinburgh to see. He describes the whole thing very vividly in letters to his eldest brother. The following refers particularly to the action which gave the French possession of Ratisbon. He says:

I got down to the seat of war some weeks before the summer armistice, and indulged in what you call the criminal curiosity of witnessing blood and desolation. Never shall time efface from my memory the recollection of that hour of astonishment when I stood with the good monks of St James’ to overlook a charge of Klenau’s cavalry upon the French under Grenier. We saw the fire given and returned, and heard distinctly the sound of French pas de charge collecting the lines to attack in close column. After three hours awaiting the issue of a severe action, a park of artillery was opened just beneath the walls of the monastery, and several drivers that were stationed there to convey the wounded in spring waggons were killed in our sight.

In some notes relating to the same period he remarks that, in point of impressions, this formed the most important epoch in his life; but he adds that his recollections of seeing men strewn dead on the field, or what was worse, seeing them dying, were so horrible, that he studiously endeavoured to banish them from his memory.

There were, however, scenes of peace as well as of war. Some Hamburg friends had given him letters of introduction to the venerable Abbot Arbuthnot, of the Benedictine Scots College, under whose protection it was believed that he would have special opportunities for study and observation; and the hospitality of the monks now ‘amused’ him, as he puts it, into such tranquillity as was possible in that perilous time. The ‘splendour and sublimity’ of the Catholic Church service, notably the music, also affected him with all the attraction of novelty. But these things were at best only alleviations. Campbell had already begun to suffer from Johnson’s demon of hypochondria, and when the novelty of his surroundings had worn off, he felt himself in the worst imaginable plight of the stranger in a strange land. The following programme of his day’s doings affords a hint of his wretchedness:

I rise at seven—thanks to the flies that forbid me to sleep—and after returning thanks to God for prolonging my miserable existence at Ratisbon, I put on a pair of boots and pantaloons, and study with open windows, and half-naked, till ten o’clock. I then chew a crust of bread, and eat a plum for breakfast. At 11 my parlez-vous-FranÇais steps in with his formal periwig and still more formal bow. I chatter a jargon of Latin and French to him—for he has no English—and study again from 12 till 1: dine and read English or Greek till 2, and then take an afternoon walk. Under a burning sun I then expose my feeble carcase in a walk round the cursed walls, or traverse the wood where the Rothmantels or ‘Red Cloaks’ and Hussars amused us at cut-and-thrust before the city was taken. Sometimes I venture to the heights where the last kick-up was seen, when the poor Austrians were driven across the Danube. The Convent I seldom visit: we always get upon politics, and that is a cursed subject.

So indeed it seemed. It was, however, Campbell’s own fault. The brotherhood of the Schotten Kirche[2] had welcomed him very heartily on his arrival; but they were Jacobites, and he was so indiscreet as to make open avowal of his Republican opinions. The result was unpleasant enough. One of the monks denounced him for his political heresies; others regarded him with ill-concealed suspicion and distrust. A countryman of his own, who bore the conventual name of Father Boniface, had recommended him to an unsuitable lodging at the house of a friend, and Campbell complained that he had been robbed there. Father Boniface met the complaint with abuse, and ‘spoke to me once or twice,’ says Campbell, ‘in a manner rather strange.’ One night the Father dogged him into the refectory and attacked him with the most blackguardly scurrility. ‘I never,’ writes Campbell, ‘found myself so completely carried away by indignation. I flew at the scoundrel and would have soon rewarded his insolence had not the others interposed.’ After an experience like this, it was only natural that he should declaim against the ‘lazy, loathsome, ignorant, ill-bred’ monks, whose society he had at first found so agreeable! The only one for whom he entertained a lasting regard was Dr Arbuthnot, whom he describes as ‘the most commanding figure he ever beheld,’ and to whom he unmistakably alludes in ‘The Ritter Bann,’ one of his later poems.

Being unable either to advance or retreat, and not knowing what to do with himself amid the gloom and excitement caused by the presence of two hostile armies, Campbell appears to have sunk into something like blank despair. ‘Oh, God!’ he exclaims in a letter, ‘when the dull dusk of evening comes on, when the melancholy bell calls to vespers, I find myself a poor solitary being, dumb from the want of heart to speak, and deaf to all that is said from a want of interest to hear.’ About the future he feels an insecurity and a dread which baffle all his efforts to form a scheme or resolution. Low-minded people suspect him, and debate about his character, and wonder what he can be doing in Ratisbon. He cannot settle himself to literary work of any kind. He sits down resolved to compose in spite of uncertainty and uneasiness, and looks helplessly for hours together at the paper before him.

Campbell’s letters of this period make indeed most doleful reading. They are addressed, for the most part, to John Richardson, a young Edinburgh lawyer who enjoyed familiar intercourse with Scott and other dii majores of the capital. Richardson had promised to join him in Germany, and when Campbell is not voicing his woes, he is planning schemes for Richardson and himself when at length they are free to start on a tour. With economy he thinks they might visit every corner of Germany, travel three thousand miles, stop at convenient stages for a few days at a time, and be ‘masters of all the geographical knowledge worth learning’ for £30 a-piece. They will require nothing in the way of baggage but ‘a stick fitted as an umbrella—a nice contrivance very common here—with a fine Holland shirt in one pocket, our stockings and silk breeches in the other, and a few cravats wrapped in clean paper in the crowns of our hats.’ At country inns they can have bed and supper for half-a-crown, coffee for sixpence, and bread and beer for twopence. As for books, Campbell will always manage to carry enough in his pockets for evening amusement; but Richardson must ‘bring, for God’s sake, Shakespeare and a few British classics.’ A striking idea occurs to him in one of his sportive moods. ‘Without degrading our characters in the least, we might have some articles from Britain and dispose of them to immense advantage. The merchants here are greedy and blind to their interests: they sell little because they sell so high. Their general profit is two hundred per cent.’ The spectacle of Thomas Campbell hawking British goods round the German Empire would have been sufficiently diverting; but of course it was only another of his ponderous pleasantries.

Nevertheless, there was good reason for his being anxious about making a little money. His funds were fast giving out, and at present he did not quite see how he was to replenish his purse. He makes constant complaint about the uncertainty of remittances, and in one letter strikes his hand on his ‘sad heart’ as he thinks of himself starving far from home and friends. However, matters mended a little for a time: his spirits revived, he found himself able to work again; and the armistice having been renewed, he made various interesting excursions into the interior, getting as far as Munich, and returning by the valley of the Iser. ‘I remember,’ he says, speaking of these excursions in a letter quoted by Washington Irving, ‘I remember how little I valued the art of painting before I got into the heart of such impressive scenes; but in Germany I would have given anything to have possessed an art capable of conveying ideas inaccessible to speech and writing. Some particular scenes were indeed rather overcharged with that degree of the terrific which oversteps the sublime; and I own my flesh yet creeps at the recollection of spring-waggons and hospitals. But the sight of Ingolstadt in ruins or Hohenlinden covered with fire, seven miles in circumference, were spectacles never to be forgotten.’

The reference to Hohenlinden here is somewhat puzzling. According to Beattie, Campbell left Ratisbon in the beginning of October, and went by way of Leipsic to Altona, where he remained until his return to England. He was certainly at Altona in the beginning of November, for his letters then begin to date from thence. But the battle of Hohenlinden was not fought until the 3rd of December, and it is therefore clear that Campbell, unless he made a journey of which we have no trace, could not have seen Hohenlinden ‘covered with fire.’ Beattie suggests that in the passage just quoted Hohenlinden may be a slip for Landshut on the Iser, Leipheim, near Gunzberg, or Donauwert, where battles and conflagrations took place during the summer campaign, the effects of which Campbell may have witnessed after his arrival on the Danube. He says that he often heard the poet refer to ‘the sight of Ingolstadt in ruins,’ but he never once heard him describe the field of Hohenlinden. Of course if he visited Munich at the time mentioned he may have made a cursory survey of the village; but until after the battle, travellers never thought of going out of their way to see Hohenlinden. It is a pity that there should be any dubiety upon this matter, for our interest in Campbell’s stirring lines would have been heightened by the knowledge that he had been an eye-witness of the events which they describe.

The armistice which had been renewed at Hohenlinden on the 28th of September was for forty-five days. As the time for its termination approached Campbell thought it wise, in view of a resumption of hostilities, to secure his passports, and escape from Ratisbon. There was another determining point: his funds were now almost exhausted, and he wanted to be nearer home. He decided to go to Hamburg, whence, if remittances did not arrive, he could take passage for Leith. Of his journey from Ratisbon we hear practically nothing, though in one of his letters he gives an indication of his route by mentioning such towns as Nuremberg, Bamberg, Weimar, Jena, Leipsic, Halle, Brunswick, and Lunenburg. In his previous journey to Ratisbon in July he seems to have followed the course of the Elbe to Dresden, and thence proceeded through Zwickau, Bayreuth, and Amberg to the seat of war on the Danube; so that now he was, as he says, ‘master of all to be seen’ in a very considerable part of the country.

When he reached Hamburg he found a letter awaiting him from Richardson announcing that a ‘blessed double edition’ of ‘The Pleasures of Hope’ had been thrown off, thus entitling him to £50, according to the understanding with Mundell. Relieved of all his pecuniary anxiety in this unexpected fashion, Campbell resolved to remain abroad for the winter. He took up his quarters at Altona, a town near Hamburg, which he describes as the pleasantest place in all Germany. His letters begin to show a more cheerful spirit. He has the prospect of ‘useful and agreeable acquaintance, and a winter of useful activity,’ and his portfolio, hitherto a chaos, is soon to be filled with ‘monsters and wonders sufficient to match the pages of Bruce himself.’ One of the new acquaintances promised to prove of substantial advantage to him. A gentleman of family preparing for a tour along the lower Danube, required a travelling companion, and having been introduced to Campbell, he offered him £100 a year to accompany him and direct his studies. There was to be nothing like a formal tutorship; the poet was merely to make himself a ‘respectable friend and useful companion.’ Campbell professed to be at this time, like Burns, sorely touchable on the score of independence, but a man who has to content himself, as Campbell had now to do, with two meals a day, must find it convenient to swallow his pride occasionally; and Campbell, after a great deal of epistolary fuss about it, accepted the gentleman’s offer.

Unfortunately the agreement was never carried out. Beattie’s curt intimation is that ‘sudden and important changes’ took place in the views and circumstances of the anticipated patron. We get, however, an inkling of the real state of the case from a letter of Campbell’s to Dr Anderson, written from London some months later—a letter which does equal honour to the poet’s kind-heartedness and modesty. Speaking of his well-intentioned friend he says:

That valuable and high-spirited young man was humbled—after a struggle which concealed misfortunes—to reveal his situation and in sickness to receive assistance from one whose advancement and re-establishment in life he had planned but a few weeks before, when no reverse of fortune was dreaded. His situation required more than my resources were adequate to impart, but still it prevented his feelings being deeply wounded by addressing strangers. I did not regret my own share of the hardships, but I acknowledge that in those days of darkness and distress I had hardly spirit to write a single letter. I have often left the sick-bed of my friend for a room of my own which wanted the heat of a fire in the month of January, and on the borders of Denmark.

The failure of this enterprise was obviously a great disappointment to Campbell. The prospects of the tour had seemed to him peculiarly enticing, and he never ceased to deplore the necessity which led to its being abandoned.

Another acquaintance made at this time happily bore some fruit. A certain Anthony M’Cann, ‘a brave United Irishman,’ had, with other unfortunate fellow-countrymen who were engaged in the Rebellion of 1798, taken refuge on the banks of the Elbe. Campbell fell in with him and his fellow exiles, and passed a good part of his leisure in their society. The literary result was that pathetic if somewhat overrated song, ‘The Exile of Erin,’ which Campbell wrote after one evening finding Tony M’Cann more than usually depressed. Many years later an absurd claim to the authorship of this song was raised on behalf of an Irishman named Nugent, whose sister swore to having seen it in her brother’s handwriting before the date of Campbell’s continental visit. Campbell was naturally pained by the accusation, but he produced irrefragable proofs of his title to the song; and although the charge of plagiarism was revived after his death, there is not the slightest ground for doubting his authorship. The subject is fully dealt with by Beattie, but to discuss it nowadays would be altogether superfluous.

Before leaving home, Campbell had entered into an agreement with Mr Perry of the Morning Chronicle to send him something for his columns, and ‘The Exile of Erin’ was published by him on the 28th of January 1801. In a prefatory note the author expressed the hope that the song might induce Parliament to ‘extend their benevolence to those unfortunate men, whom delusion and error have doomed to exile, but who sigh for a return to their native homes.’ Campbell’s sympathy with the Irish exiles appears to have been as strong as his sympathy with the Poles. He adopted as his seal a shamrock with the motto ‘Erin-go-Bragh,’ and his enthusiasm was so flamboyant that on his arrival in Edinburgh he was actually in some danger of being imprisoned for conspiring with General Moreau in Austria and with the Irish in Hamburg to land a French army in Ireland! Campbell might well be astonished at the idea of ‘a boy like me’ conspiring against the British Empire. Subsequently he made valiant efforts to obtain leave for M’Cann to return home. These efforts were unsuccessful, but he lived to see the exile established in Hamburg, through a fortunate marriage, as one of its wealthiest citizens.

During his residence at Altona, Campbell, when not engaged in composition, seems to have busied himself chiefly in trying to plumb the depths of German philosophy. He says—and he is ‘almost ashamed to confess it’—that for twelve consecutive weeks he did nothing but study Kant. Distrusting his own imperfect acquaintance with German, he took a disciple of the master through his philosophy, but found nothing to reward the labour. His metaphysics, he remarked, were mere innovations upon the received meaning of words, and conveyed no more instruction than the writings of Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas. Of German philosophy in general Campbell entertained a very poor opinion. The language in his view was much richer in the field of Belles Lettres; and he claimed to have got more good from reading Schiller, Wieland, and BÜrger than from any of the severer studies which he undertook at this time. Wieland he regarded with especial favour: he could not conceive ‘a more perfect poet.’ Of Goethe and Lessing, strangely enough, he makes practically no mention.

These details about Campbell’s doings are gathered mainly from his letters to Richardson. He was still looking forward eagerly to the arrival of his friend; and when he wrote it was generally with the object of keeping his enthusiasm awake by glowing descriptions of Hungary, which he characterised as a ‘poetical paradise,’ the country ‘worthy of our best research,’ all the rest of Germany being only so much ‘vulgar knowledge.’ Campbell’s well-laid schemes were, however, destined to be upset, and in a way which he evidently never anticipated. A great political crisis was at hand. England had determined to detach Denmark from the coalition by force of arms, and on the 12th of March the British fleet left Yarmouth Roads for the Sound. Altona being on the Danish shore was no longer eligible as a residence for English subjects, and Campbell, having already had more than enough of the pomp and circumstance of war, resolved to return home. He took a berth in the Royal George, bound for Leith, and the vessel dropped slowly down the river to Gluckstadt, in front of the Danish batteries. The passage proved very tedious, and in the end, instead of getting to Leith, the Royal George was spied by a Danish privateer and chased into Yarmouth. This was early in April, and on the 7th of the month Campbell arrived in London, where, through the good graces of Perry, he was at once made free of the best literary society of the day.

In connection with the continental sojourn thus hurriedly terminated, it remains now to consider the literary product of the nine months’ absence from home. Like many another poet, Campbell will be remembered, if he is remembered at all, by his shorter pieces; and it is interesting to note that of these the best were written or at any rate conceived on alien soil. The ‘Exile of Erin’ has already been mentioned. ‘Hohenlinden’ did not appear until 1802, but there is every reason for believing that it was at least outlined shortly after the date of the occurrences which it so vividly pictures. Galt tells an amusing story of its rejection by a Greenock newspaper as not being ‘up to the editor’s standard’; but it took the fancy of Sir Walter Scott. When Washington Irving was at Abbotsford in 1817, Scott observed to him: ‘And there’s that glorious little poem, too, of “Hohenlinden”; after he [Campbell] had written it he did not seem to think much of it, but considered some of it d—d drum and trumpet lines. I got him to recite it to me, and I believe that the delight I felt and expressed had an effect in inducing him to print it.’ The anecdote related by Scott in connection with Leyden is well-known. Campbell and Leyden, as we have seen, had quarrelled. When Scott repeated ‘Hohenlinden’ to Leyden, the latter said: ‘Dash it, man, tell the fellow I hate him, but, dash it, he has written the finest verses that have been published these fifty years.’ Scott did not fail to deliver the message. ‘Tell Leyden,’ said Campbell, ‘that I detest him, but that I know the value of his critical approbation.’

Curiously enough, Carlyle, quoting in 1814 a poem of Leyden’s on the victory of Wellington at Assaye, remarks that ‘if there is anything in existence that surpasses this it must be “Hohenlinden”—but what’s like “Hohenlinden”?’ Leyden’s verses in truth read somewhat tamely, but Carlyle’s criticism of poetry was not to be depended upon, especially at this early date, when he preferred Campbell to either Byron or Scott. His impassioned liking for ‘Hohenlinden’ was, however, well justified by its merits. It has been described as the only representation of a modern battle which possesses either interest or sublimity. Sublimity is a word of which we are not particularly fond in these days, perhaps because it was so freely used by critics a hundred years ago. We prefer simplicity; and it is surely the simplicity of ‘Hohenlinden’ which mainly accounts for its effect. Each stanza is a picture—not a finished etching, but rather an ‘impression’; no delicate shades of colour, but broad strokes of red and black on white. No word is wasted, no scene is elaborated; and if what is depicted is all pretty obvious—well, blood is red, and gunpowder is sulphurous, and there is little room for invention. To call it great art would be absurd; it is excellent scene-painting.

Next to ‘Hohenlinden’ among the pieces of this period must be placed ‘Ye Mariners of England’ and ‘The Soldier’s Dream.’ The first was written at Altona when rumours of England’s intention to break up the coalition began to spread. It was printed by Perry above the signature of ‘Amator PatriÆ,’ with an intimation that it was avowedly an imitation of the seventeenth century sea-song, ‘Ye Mariners of England,’ which Campbell used to sing at musical soirees in Edinburgh. It is one of the most stirring of his war pieces. ‘The Soldier’s Dream,’ beginning ‘Our bugles sang truce,’ was not given to the public until the spring of 1804, but it is generally believed to have been written at Altona, and in any case it was inspired by the events which the poet witnessed during his residence at Ratisbon. Several other pieces were composed or revised at this time, but they are of little importance. Byron declared that the ‘Lines on leaving a Scene in Bavaria’ were ‘perfectly magnificent,’ but the praise is grotesquely extravagant. The lines certainly bear traces of genuine feeling, but the piece as a whole is obscure and unfinished.

The famous ‘Battle of the Baltic’ was not published until 1809, but as it was suggested to Campbell by the sight of the Danish batteries as he sailed past them on his way home from Hamburg, it will be convenient to deal with it here. The subject of the poem is known in history as the Battle of Copenhagen, which was fought on the 2nd of April 1801. Campbell sent a first draft of it to Scott in 1805. This draft consisted of twenty-seven stanzas, while the published version has only eight. It has been remarked that if the original form had been adhered to, ‘The Battle of the Baltic’ might have become a popular ballad for a time and then been forgotten, whereas, in its condensed form, it is one of the finest and most enduring war-songs in the language. Its metre, which the Edinburgh Review thought ‘strange and unfortunate,’ is really one of its merits. The lines of unequal length relieve it of monotony; the sharp, short final line of each stanza being indeed an excellent invention. The poem has defects in plenty, which have been often enough pointed out: not a stanza would pass muster to-day; but it would be ungracious to criticise too severely one of the few vigorous battle pieces we have.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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