I doubt whether any parodist has ever equalled the quite serious conclusion of 'The Ritter Bann’:· 'Such was the throb and mutual sob Of the Knight embracing Jane.' Here and there, in a homelier story, Campbell seems to be trying to imitate Wordsworth, as in the foolish 'Child and Hind' and the less foolish 'Napoleon and the British Sailor'; and once, in 'The Parrot of Mull: a Domestic Anecdote,' he seems to have almost caught the knack, and the piece might take its place, not unworthily, among Wordsworth's second-rate work in that kind. Another sort of work which Campbell attempted with much immediate success, and for which he is still remembered in the schoolroom, is a kind of pathetic ballad which appeals almost indecently to the emotions: I mean such pieces as 'The Exile of Erin,' 'The Harper,' 'The Wounded Hussar.' There is emotion in them, but the emotion, when it is not childish, is genteel. I scarcely know whether the misfortunes of 'poor dog Tray' or of the 'wounded hussar' are to be taken the less seriously; the latter, perhaps, by just the degree in which it aims at a more serious effect. 'And dim was that eye, once expressively beaming': it is of the soldier he speaks, not of the dog. But it is in a better poem, 'The Exile of Erin,' that we see most clearly the difference and the cause of the difference between Campbell's failures and successes in precisely what he could do best in the expression of patriotic feeling. "The Exile of Erin' is one of those many poems, written, often, by men who would have died for the convictions expressed in them, but written with so hackneyed and commonplace a putting of that passion into words that the thing comes to us lifeless, and stirs in us no more of a thrill than the casual streetsinger's 'Home, Sweet Home,' drawled out for pence and a supper. Conviction, it should always be remembered, personal sin cerity, though it is an important ingredient in the making of a patriotic or national poem, is but one ingredient among many; and there is one of these which is even more important: poetical impulse, which is a very different thing from personal impulse. I have no doubt that the personal impulse of "The Exile of Erin' was at least as sincere as that of 'Hohenlinden'; I should say it was probably much more deeply felt; but here the poetical energy lags behind the energy of conviction; the effort to be patriotic and to draw an affecting moral is undisguised; the result is a piece of artistic insincerity. In 'Hohenlinden' some wandering spark has alighted; the wind has carried it, and one knows not from whence; only, a whole beacon is ablaze. 'Hohenlinden' is a poem made wholly out of very obvious materials, and made within very narrow limits, to which it owes its intensity. Campbell had precisely that mastery of the obvious which makes rememberable lines, such as 'Distance lends enchantment to the view,' or 'Coming events cast their shadows before,' which we remember as we remember truisms, almost ashamed at doing so. They contain no poetic suggestion, they are no vital form of poetic speech; but they make statements to which verse lends a certain emphasis by its limiting form or enclosure. Very often Campbell uses this steady emphasis when no emphasis is needed, as in this kind of verse, for instance: 'I mark his proud but ravaged form, As stern he wraps his mantle round, This is merely meant for the picture of the friendless man, not a Byronic Corsair; and here the emphasis is above all a defect of the visual sense: he cannot see simply with the mind's eye. In such poems as the powerful and unpoetical 'Last Man' the emphasis is like a conscious rigidity of bearing on parade, a military earnestness of rhetoric. The lines march with feet keeping time with the drill-master; and the wonder and terror which should shake in the heart of the poem are frozen at the source. In the genuine success of 'Hohenlinden' every line is a separate emphasis, but all the emphasis is required by the subject, is in its place. The thud and brief repeated monotony of the metre give the very sound of cannonading; each line is like a crackle of musketry. What is obvious in it, even, comes well into a poem which depends on elements so simple for its success; indeed, its existence. The one fixed passion in Campbell's shifting soul seems to have been the passion for liberty. The dust from Kosciusko's grave, cast by a Polish patriot into the grave of Campbell in Westminster Abbey, was a last appropriate homage to one who had always been 'the sanguine friend of freedom.' He was the patriot of all oppressed countries, and his love for his own country was only part of that wider human enthusiasm. His love of England was quickened, or brought to poetic heat, by a love of the sea, and by a curiously vivid appreciation of the life and beauty of warships. In his controversy with Bowles, as to the place of nature and of art in poetry, his most effective argument was drawn from a warship. "Those who have ever witnessed the spectacle of the launching of a ship of the line will perhaps forgive me for adding this to the examples of the sublime objects of artificial life. Of that spectacle I can never forget the impression, and of having witnessed it reflected from the faces of ten thousand spectators. . . . It was not a vulgar joy, but an affecting national solemnity.' Something of this 'mental transport,' as he elsewhere describes it, this sense of the beauty and grandeur of the actual circumstances of sea-fighting, came, along with the patriotic fervour, into his two naval odes, 'Ye Mariners of England' and 'The Battle of the Baltic,' his two really great poems. 'Ye Mariners of England' has a finer poetic substance than 'Hohenlinden' and a more original metrical scheme, here, as there, curiously well adapted to its subject. The heavy pauses and loud rushes: 'And sweep through the deep,' with its checked flow and onset; 'When the stormy winds do blow,' twice repeated, with a vehement motion, and an exultation as of wind and water: conscious art has here, for once, caught hands with a fiercer impulse, and wrought better than it knew. Even here, however, the impulse is on the wane before the last stanza is over; and that last stanza has been made for logic's sake rather than for any more intimate need. And even in 'The Battle of the Baltic,' where Campbell reaches his highest height, there are flaws, weaknesses, trifling perhaps, but evident here and there; touches of false poetising, like the line in the last stanza: 'And the mermaid's song condoles.' But the manliness, haughty solemnity, the blithe courage and confidence of the poem, and also the invention of the metre (an afterthought, as we know, introduced when the poem was cut down from twenty-seven stanzas of six lines each into eight stanzas of nine) are things unique in English. The structure, with its long line moving slowly to the pause, at which the three heavily weighted, yet, as it were, proudly prancing syllables fall over and are matched by the three syllables which make the last line, the whole rhythmical scheme, unlike anything that had been done before, has left its mark upon whatever in that line has been done finely since: upon Browning in 'Hervé Riel,' upon Tennyson in 'The Revenge.' And if any one thinks that this kind of masterpiece is hardly more than the natural outcome of a fervid patriotic impulse, let him turn to others of Campbell's poems full of an even lustier spirit of patriotism, to poems as bad as the 'Stanzas on the Threatened Invasion,' 1803, or as comparatively good as 'Men of England,' and he will see just how far the personal impulse will carry a poet of uncertain technique in the absence of adequate poetic impulse and adequate poetic technique. In much of Campbell's work there is a kind of shallow elegance, a turn of phrase which is neat, but hardly worth doing at all if it is done no better. Read the little complimentary verses to ladies, and think of Lovelace; read "The BeechTree's Petition,' with its nice feeling and words without atmosphere, and think of Marvell's garden-verses, in which every line has perfume and radiance. The work is so neat, so rounded and polished; like waxen flowers under glass shades; no nearer to nature or art. In the 'Valedictory Stanzas to Kemble' there is a definition of 'taste,' which shows us something of Campbell's theory and aim in art: 'Taste, like the silent dial's power, That, when supernal light is given, Can measure inspiration's hour, And tell its height in heaven.' And he defines the mind of the actor as 'at once ennobled and correct.' Always labouring to be 'at once ennobled and correct,' Campbell is never visited by any poetic inspiration, except in those few poems in which he has not been more sincere, or chosen better, than usual, but has been more lucky, and able to carry an uncertain technique further. That, and not emotion, or sincerity, or anything else, is what distinguishes what is good from what is bad in his work, even in those poems which have given our literature its greatest war-songs. MOORE as a poet is the Irishman as the Englishman imagines him to be, and he represents a part of the Irish temperament; 1 (1) Odes from Anacreon, 1800. (2) The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Little, 1801. (3) Epistles, Odes, and other Poems, 1806. (4) Irish Melodies, with Music by Sir James Stevenson, i, 1807; ii, 1807; iii, 1810; iv, 1811; v, 1813; vi, 1815; vii, 1818; viii, 1821; ix, 1824; x, 1834. (5) Corruption and Intolerance, 1808. (6) The Sceptic. (7) Intercepted Letters, or The Two-penny Post Bag, 1813. (8) Sacred Songs, 1816, 1824. (9) Lalla Rookh, 1817. (10) National Airs, 1818, 1826. (11) The Fudge |