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“THEODORIC,” unintentionally perhaps, on the part of the
author, inclined much more in style to the modern taste in poetry than the “Pleasures of Hope.” The romantic
school succeeded in tempering the formality of the classic, but by this term must not be
understood that prevailing flood of diluted rhyme which has been since misnamed poetry,
seeming in its admirers’ view more excellent in proportion to the meanness of the
subject and the
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After all, it must be admitted that about those works of genius which are
of a lasting character, there hangs an impenetrable mystery as to the composition. They
must be taken as they appear at long intervals, and as they present themselves. The
mechanical utilitarians of the hour must continue to feel astonished that literary works
like the “Pleasures of
Hope,” or “Childe
Harold,” cannot be produced with the rapidity of manufactures; that one such
work is tantamount to the history of a life; that a deathless name shall continue to be
allied with humble circumstances; that literary “manufactures” cannot give a
lease of remembrance beyond the class of the material to which they belong; that the
mechanical mark upon such works stamps a deterioration upon their character, not to be
changed by the caprice
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Allusions in “Theodoric” are many of them borrowed from the author himself. Thus for the line in the “Pleasures of Hope”—
“The wolf’s long howl on Oonalaska’s shore—” |
“The wolf’s long howl in dismal discord join’d.” |
The concluding portion of “Theodoric” is not worthy of the commencement.
It is always
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“No, no,” he replied; “a love-story. I have only borrowed the name.”
Theodoric was, of course, reviewed in the “Quarterly,” then under the editorship of
Mr. Coleridge. The diatribe was marked by all
the virulence that an obscure individual, suddenly elevated to an office he had not the
capacity to fill, could pour out. His incompetence for his post, his displacement in due
time fully proved. The splenetic feeling of the party the review advocated, was fully
displayed on the occasion. The Whig was denounced in the “Quarterly,” and the Tory in the “Edinburgh Review scandal and falsehood being unsparingly used
by both; but in “flinging dirt,” the “Quarterly” had the advantage. Gifford
was no more, but Wilson Croker still continued to
violate in its pages the maxim of Jonathan Wild,
under a new editor, that mischief should be husbanded, being too precious a commodity to be
wasted. The uncle of Mr.
Coleridge had lectured against the “Pleasures of Hope” in times gone past. This,
perhaps, moved the editor upon the occasion. Even the unfortunate hero of the poem was
christened Macbeth in the review. I remarked to
Campbell, that Croker and
the editor had no doubt held a consultation on the subject. The poet smiled, but it was
easy to see, that while trying to bear it heroically, he
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“Here,” said Campbell, “are a dozen copies of a ‘Letter to the Editor of the Quarterly,’ sent me from Edinburgh; I know not by whom written; it is pleasant to have unknown defenders.”
The poet gave me a copy. Time has exhibited the vanity of the mock thunder of the review, and the allusions to it would not have been made but as it may operate as a lesson to literary men, whose works are abused from party motives, and to the public of the value of anonymous criticism. The following is an extract from the close of the pamphlet on a review marked by singular dishonesty and virulence. After remarking on Mr. Coleridge’s disqualification for his office, the writer proceeds, referring to Campbell’s popularity.
“Let us measure the altitude of your own. Who are you? A
nephew of Coleridge the poet,—not his
son, who is said to be a genius; but high
talents are not hereditary, either collaterally or directly. To say that this or that
person could swear to your being clever, is saying nothing, for
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About that time, Campbell was
surprised by a call from a friend of Brant, or
Brandt, the Indian chief whom he had charged with such atrocities
in his “Gertrude.” Some
travellers, and among them Lieutenant Hall, of the
dragoons, had, in visiting America, made mention in their published tours of an Indian
chief having held the rank of colonel in the British service in America. Brant was the only son of the chief whom
Campbell denounced as the destroyer of the village of Wyoming,
upon the banks of the Susquehanna, where now stands the town of Wilksbarre. It appeared
that Brandt had settled in Canada under the protection of his British
allies: that he had accustomed his people, the Mohawks, to farming; had built a church, and
translated one of the Gospels into the Mohawk language. His grave was found by
Lieutenant Hall (so his travels stated) under the walls of the church he had
erected. He left behind him a son and daughter. The British government had erected a large
house for the chief, near Burlington, on Lake Erie. His son was a fine young man, of
gentlemanly manners and appearance, who spoke and wrote English well, dressed in the
English fashion, and was a lieutenant in the English service. His sister would not have
disgraced the circles of fashion in Europe; her face and person were fine and
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This much had been known in Europe, though until this unexpected event
relative to young Brant (as the Indian name should
be spelled) Campbell had not any other knowledge of
the chief than he might have gleaned from the “History of the
Destruction of Wyoming by the English and Indians in 1778,” and that
history, in some points, appears to have been exceedingly erroneous. The inhabitants were
nearly all massacred, of three hundred men only four escaping. The commanders on both sides
are said to have been named Butler. Brant, the Mohawk chief, was many miles from the spot when the battle took
place. Campbell, with a poet’s licence and haste, had taken the
current account of this battle, in which Brant was represented as a
monster, whereas he was an Indian of singularly civilised habits. All this became known to
him for a fact by young Brant coming to England. A friend first
announced such an event, and that the young Indian chief had documents which would
incontestably prove his father’s innocence. Campbell stated that
he had, as poets had done from time immemorial, drawn upon imagination for the larger part
of the incidents in the poem, taking the name of
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* He has paid the debt of nature as well as the poet. The following is from an American paper, the date of which I have unfortunately missed:— “At the Mohawk village, near Brantford, John Brant, Esq., chief of the Mohawk tribe of Indians, and son of the gallant chieftain who distinguished himself so nobly in the revolutionary and late wars. Mr. Brant was an ac- |
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In the letter which he wrote to Brant, and published, he says that he “took the liberty of a versifier to run away from fact into fancy, like a schoolboy who never dreams that he is a truant when he rambles on a holiday from school. It seems, however, that I falsely represented Wyoming”—(Campbell alludes here to the Canadian newspapers)—“as a terrestrial paradise. It was not so, say the Canadian papers, because it contained a great number of Tories; and, undoubtedly, that cause goes far to account for the fact. Earthly paradises, however, are not lasting things, and Tempe and Arcadia may have their drawbacks on happiness as well as Wyoming. I must, nevertheless, still believe, that it was a flourishing colony, and that its destruction furnished a just warning to human beings against war and revenge. But the whole catastrophe is affirmed in a Canadian newspaper to have been nothing more than a fair battle. If this be the fact, let accredited signatures come forward to attest it, and vindicate the innocence and honourableness of the whole transaction, as your father’s character has
complished gentleman, and died sincerely regretted by a numerous circle of acquaintances of the first respectability.” |
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There was a note subjoined to the letter thus addressed to Brant, which slightly noticed his own feelings about
hostile criticism, and the submission of his work to the censorship of friends. I
believe,—from something like the best part of thirty years’ closer intimacy
with Campbell, for the best part of that time, than
any other man,—I believe that what he states is strictly correct. Except in early
life, when he submitted to the kind advice and critical judgment of Dr. Anderson the manuscript copy of the “Pleasures of Hope,” he consulted
nobody in the composition of his poems. In solitude and silence he conceived and composed
them. He was a proud man in this sense; he would have thought it an insult to his own
understanding to consult this individual or that, who might be among his friends, and to
take their judgment in preference to his own, after his former efforts had been crowned
with great success. He might have read the manuscript to a friend or two before he put it
into the printer’s
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Campbell says, I have no doubt with the most perfect
truth,—“Nor did I ever lean on the taste of others with that miserable
distrust of my own judgment which the anecdote conveys,” referring to a
statement from which Washington Irving, in a
biographical notice prefixed to an American edition of “Gertrude of Wyoming,” infers that he did. In
regard to criticism, he was too proud to exhibit what he felt, though “as far as
authors
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Still Campbell could not forgive any who made a blow at him, where the result would not admit of being interpreted but to his disadvantage. He felt, then, that he had the worst of the matter at issue, the criticism being no party or personal matter, and that he was, in consequence, so far injured. This it must be confessed he never forgot. He did not care what spleen or party feeling or malevolence might do; these unjust attacks his own position and consciousness of merit might repel, but real justice in an attack struck home, and he never got over his antipathy to its author.
Hazlitt had justice on his side, when he said of
Campbell, that though he loved popularity,
self-respect was the primary law—the condition on which it was to be obtained. He
never tolerated the remarks made by this writer, although it cannot be denied that
Hazlitt has commended his poetry in the highest terms; he has given the poet all but
boundless praise. “Campbell,” he says
“excels chiefly in sentiment and imagery. The story moves slow, and is
mechanically conducted, and rather resembles a Scotch canal carried over lengthened
aqueducts, and with a number of locks in it, than one of those rivers
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“Like angel visits, few and far between,” |
“Like angel visits, short and far between.” |
This feeling exhibited itself in numberless instances; even while speaking in terms of praise of the essays of that writer, Campbell vented his ire upon the man. He declared that Hazlitt had been a means of irritating John Scott to such a degree, that it was one cause of his going out in the duel where he fell: that Hazlitt; was a dangerous man.
Before the “Spirits of
the Age” appeared in a volume, Hazlitt had made known
the incident respecting the line from Blair.
Campbell never referred to that circumstance in
our conversation about Hazlitt’s contributions, as
might’be judged he would not, since it would thus induce a suspicion of the cause of
his antipathy, at least, so I imagined—but I was wrong. A paper on Milton’s “Comus,” which I had written, and in
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Still his prejudices were insurmountable even
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To show where this distasteful feeling had its origin, it happened that
in some of Hazlitt’s lectures, his remarks had
excited the notice and called forth the comment of a countryman, Thomas Pringle. This was as early as 1818.
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It is thus seen how much the poet really felt while affecting not to feel about what was in itself of trivial importance. If Hazlitt really pointed out critical errors, the statement of that fact was surely not blameable in one who owed the poet nothing; if the criticism were erroneous, it could do no mischief to a reputation so firmly fixed upon an elevated basis as that of Campbell.
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Now as with Hazlitt, so with
Coleridge, though in a less degree, for
Coleridge spoke of the style of poetry, and did not criticise the
individual. He attacked all works of a peculiar class. Campbell ever showed a great distaste afterwards towards
Coleridge. Indeed, speaking of his better days, he was no lover of
the Lake School of poets generally. He was no believer in their theories, theories
delivered with no small mixture of conceit and self-assumption.
Campbell thought that while doing good in untrammelling writers
from superfluous and custom-ridden rules, they, on the other hand, went too far, and
substituted licentiousness in place of wholesome freedom, when they scorned to discipline
their verse, and advocated its running wild without curb or rein. He contended that
painstaking in composition and careful finish were necessary to ensure endurance in poetry,
and that poetical composition requires pruning and judicious management to bear good fruit
fully as much as the espalier of the garden. Coleridge, for paradox,
and talking’s sake perhaps, denied the existence of Homer. What did Coleridge know about
Homer more than other people, when he thus flatly asserted this,
of which he could have no competent knowledge? He would have entered upon a denial of his
own identity if he had nothing else to talk about, that people would
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The poem of “The Last Man” was written in 1824, and first published in the “New Monthly Magazine.” He imagined that Byron had taken the idea from him in the poem entitled “Darkness,” beginning—
“I had a dream, it was not all a dream.” |
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No one will regret that both Campbell and Byron wrote upon the same subject: their poems are both exquisitely beautiful, and yet bear little resemblance to each other. They speak how various are the phases of genius, and yet how perfect each may be in itself.
I found the image in an obscure printed poem, the date of which was 1811; the lines were as follow, and I took them to Campbell, who had clung to the opinion that the idea was primitive with himself; he could not gainsay a work with the date affixed:
“Thus when creation’s destined course is run,
And shrinking nature views the expiring sun,
|
MEMOIRS OF THOMAS CAMPBELL. | 303 |
Some awful sage, the last of human race,
Faith in his soul and courage in his face,
Unmoved shall brave the moment of affright
When chaos reassumes the crown of night.”
|
“You are right,” said Campbell, “the idea is not original with me. I thought it had been, for I never met with it before. Foscolo has said rightly enough, that original ideas are few, the modes of putting them are countless, and there I suppose lies the novelty.”
Not only does the above show that the idea was not original, and most probably spontaneously produced in each case, but a further confirmation of this probability is furnished in a note which I received since the poet’s decease, from Dr. Dickson, of Hertford Street, Mayfair, who on seeing the foregoing remarks previously published, wrote me that he always imagined Campbell had borrowed the idea from Bishop Horne; a circumstance no way likely, as he was no sermon reader, save in an extraordinary case, and had not got Home in his library. The extract thus transmitted, runs as follows; it is from Horne’s sermon, “The Death of the Old Year.”
“For not only friends die and years expire, and we ourselves
shall do the same, but the world itself approaches to its end. It likewise must die.
Once already has it suffered a watery death; it is
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“Let us reflect upon this occasion on the vanity and transient glory of the habitable world, &c.”
The quotation is here continued, the passage being taken from Dr. T. Burnett’s “Sacred Theory of the Earth,” Book III. Chap. xii.
Campbell had addressed to Jeffrey of the “Edinburgh Review,” the following letter upon the subject:—
“The criticisms in your review of my last volume of poems can form no proper subject for any printed animadversions of mine; but I hope the readers of this letter will excuse me for answering one of your observations, which relates rather to a matter of fact than to a matter of opinion.
“You say that my poem, the ‘Last Man,’ seems to have been
suggested by Lord Byron’s poem,
‘Darkness.’—Now the truth is, that fifteen, or it may be
more, years ago, I called on Lord Byron, who at that time
had lodgings near St. James’s Street; and we had a long and, to me, a
very memorable conversation, from which, I have not a doubt that his Lordship
imbibed those few ideas in the poem, ‘Darkness,’ which have any resemblance to mine in the ‘Last Man.’—I remember my saying to him,
that I thought the idea of a being witnessing the extinction of his species and
of the creation, and of his looking, under the fading eye of nature, at
desolate cities, ships floating at sea with the dead, would make a striking
subject for a poem.—I met those very ideas, many years afterwards, when I
read Lord Byron’s poem, ‘Darkness.’—It may be asked, why I did not then appeal
to Lord Byron about the originality of those few ideas? As
circumstances have turned out, I now wish that I had done so. Lord
Byron’s most attached friend has given me his opinion,
that if his Lordship had not forgotten the conversation, and was conscious of
using an idea which I had suggested to him, he did so, prepared to give me
credit for the suggestion whenever I should claim that credit. Had I taken this
view of the case, and had I also then
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“Had I foreseen events, I should have communicated with Lord Byron, during his lifetime, on this subject: but I could, no more than any one else, foreknow the loss of his mighty genius to the world.
“If it should be alleged that this declaration of mine implies a reflection on Lord Byron’s memory, I have to answer, that it by no means necessarily does so. His glory goes against the supposition that he was a conscious plagiary from me; and I am only affirming, what I feel to be true, that I could not be either consciously or unconsciously a plagiary from him. There are really not many ideas in the two pieces which are similar. But supposing my statement to be true, do I depreciate Lord Byron?—No!—He either thought my suggestions “fair game,” or forgot that it was not himself who had started them. A poor man easily remembers from what quarter he has received each of his few pieces of money or banknotes; but a rich man easily forgets where he got this or that coin or bank-note amidst his accumulated thousands!—In like manner, Lord Byron was the most likely person in the world to forget the sources of his ideas.
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“For the acceptance of what I have declared, I have nothing more to rely upon, than my own character and credibility. It would be attaching a ludicrous importance to this matter, for me to offer any stronger affirmation than my word of honour. How few or how many will believe that word, must depend on the common notions of my veracity; but supposing me conscious that this is truth, I ask if I have not a right to state it?
It has been stated how much Campbell was taken with political economy and doctrines that, however clear in themselves, and beneficial in their results to the nation, had not at that time the smallest chance of being adopted by the government. These principles became subjects of discussion at the poet’s almost daily. They were matured in minds hopeless of seeing any other benefit from them than that arising from the discussion of fifty other great and beneficial truths of a public character opposed to dominant interests. Not but that there were a few in parliament who, fully assenting to those doctrines, never expected to see them become the guides of our legislation. When, so long afterwards, Mr. Charles Pelham Villiers, to whom the merit primarily belongs of bringing forward in parliament, year after year, the repeal of the corn-laws, one of those great principles nobody expected to see carried out, until, like the slave-trade repeal, thirty or more sessions had been occupied in convincing unrighteous interests that the principle of justice was not extinct among mankind. For a time there were animated conversations about these doctrines pro and con.
“You are obstinate,” he would say. “You are blind at noonday.”
“But consider, Campbell, we cannot cultivate the ground under so much per quarter for wheat; how shall men with landed estates live? It is all very well for you poets. How shall we keep our incomes?”
“You must lower your rents,” he would reply. “We who have no landed estates, and are twenty to one in the community to you—we have a right to live also; our incomes may fall fifty per cent., and you won’t concern yourselves about us. We deny your assumptive superiority. What is your claim to exemption from the rest of the community?”
“But land is everything; all the nation has is based upon land.”
“Not upon landholders,” the poet would archly
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In this way Campbell would argue
the point pleasantly with Mr. C—— and Lord Dillon, and two or three others, who took the
anti-popular side of the question. In conversation he was lively at such times. The Scotch
accent was not discoverable, unless when he chose to adopt it for humour’s sake, and
this he would frequently do on such occasions as the above. I have often thought since upon
these discussions, and those times when “the wisdom of Parliament,” in
the
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