| THOMAS CAMPBELL. | 113 |
I will here give two or three illustrative anecdotes of the
Campbell Editorship of the New Monthly, arising out of my own anonymous connexion with the
Magazine before I became personally acquainted with Campbell. Among my
first proffered contributions were the two first numbers of a series of papers, having for their object to
illustrate the birth, growth, and gradual development of the passion of Love, by means of
brief passages in the (supposed) life of the (supposed) writer; and, in order to go to the
root of the matter, and to show that, at one period of our lives at all events, the passion
is a purely intellectual one, uninfluenced by feelings of sex, the first story related to
two school-boys of nine or ten years of age, one of whom “wasted the
sweetness” of his nascent affection on “the desert air” of the
other’s utter
| 114 | THOMAS CAMPBELL. |
Here is the reply I received to my communication. The style is quite regal in point of form, and, like all the others that I received on similar occasions, it is in the hand-writing of Campbell himself:—
“To the writer of the articles entitled —— the Editor of
the ‘New Monthly
Magazine’s’ compliments. The Editor admires the
writer’s talents, and attaches not the slightest misconception to the
nature of the feelings described in the first number; but he thinks that many
persons, from ignorance, or prejudice, or ill-nature, may object to the
description of the attachment in the first number, and he declines accepting
it. He will, nevertheless, not
| THOMAS CAMPBELL. | 115 |
Now it is impossible to believe, in the face of this decision, that the
writer, who was excessively clear-sighted when he did take the trouble to look into
anything, could have read the paper in question—which was simply what I have described it
above. The probabilities are, that he never even saw it—that, being glanced at by the
worthy proprietor of the Magazine (through whose hands all communications for the Editor
passed), and found to relate throughout to two schoolboys, it was thought too simple food
for the intellectual appetites of grown-up readers, and was therefore, to prevent
accidents, intercepted on its way: a species of sifting which I believe everything
underwent before it reached the ordeal from which there was no appeal. If I am right in
this conjecture, the note I have given was probably the result of a suggestion from the
same quarter, born of some vague feeling, generated by that rapid bird’s-eye glance
which gathers its impres-
| 116 | THOMAS CAMPBELL. |
About the same time with the above, I commenced another series of papers in the Magazine, entitled “Letters from England.” They related to “everything in the world” connected with English life, literature, art, &c., and in order to give a little adventitious novelty and lightness to topics so hacknied, the letters were written ostensibly under the character of a Frenchman. But the disguise was so transparent, and so loosely worn, that it was difficult to conceive—nor was it desired by the wearer—that any one should be otherwise than wilfully deceived by it. Yet here is the editorial Introduction by which the series was ushered to the attention of the readers of the New Monthly.
“These letters are, we understand, the production of a
distinguished Frenchman, whose original MS. journal has been obligingly submitted to us
by a friend for publication. The editor admits them on account
| THOMAS CAMPBELL. | 117 |
Now this, like the note preceding it, may safely, I think, be attributed to a suggestion emanating from the imperium in imperio which the proprietor of the Magazine himself was wise enough to maintain in his own literary domain. As these letters were intended, after their appearance in the Magazine, to be reprinted as a substantive work,† and it was their publisher’s policy that they should (in the first instance, at least), be considered by the public as the bonâ fide productions of a foreigner, he probably took the preliminary precaution of “insinuating the
* Here the secret of non-perusal peeps out. “Seem to possess!” So that they may or they may not possess it, for anything he knows about them. † They were afterwards published by Mr. Colburn, in two volumes, under the title of “Letters on England.” |
| 118 | THOMAS CAMPBELL. |
The third anecdote I shall cite illustrative of Campbell’s editorship of the New Monthly relates to a series of papers entitled “The Months,”* which had for their object to note, for present recognition or future recollection, the various facts and incidents of country and of town life which mark the passage of each month respectively. I had accordingly noted, in connexion with the country life of April, the return of the shy and solitary cuckoo—so at least I had called it, and had particularly referred to its extreme rarity as an object of actual sight—a characteristic which Wordsworth has so
* Afterwards republished as a volume by Messrs. Whittaker, under the title of “Mirror of the Months.” |
| THOMAS CAMPBELL. | 119 |
I need scarcely add that these little blunders and oversights are noted merely as among the minor “Curiosities” of our periodical literature, and are by no means intended to call in question or disparage the general merits of a joint management that, taken altogether, raised the New Monthly Magazine to a pitch, not merely of popularity, but of actual desert, which had never before been attained by any work of a similar nature. In fact, the accession of Campbell’s name to the New Monthly may be fairly cited as marking an era in our Magazine literature.
Since the foregoing Recollections were
| 120 | THOMAS CAMPBELL. |
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