Alexander Balfour's 'Campbell; or, The Scottish Probationer' 1819

 

Oliver and Boyd, first edition - 1819

I am minded of Walter Scott's Wandering Willie's Tale (1824) - not so much for its content but for its title. Alexander Balfour's Campbell could easily have been entitled Weary Willie's Tale, or even Wimpish Willie's Tale. Over its three volumes, we have to experience almost a melancholic monologue, as it is couched in the first person.

William Campbell, true to form throughout his autobiography, tells the reader in his first sentence that, having spent the greater part of a long life in unremitted, but generally ineffectual endeavours to be useful to myself and others, he is therefore anxious that my errors and misfortunes should be recorded pro bono publico.  Well, he certainly does just that. Son of a plain, honest Scottish farmer, born in 1746 between the Tay and the Grampians, he suffers an old maid's kindergarten; a mediocre parish school with an indolent teacher; studies for an MA at university; and returns home to preach occasionally for the clergymen in the neighbourhood. Prospects brighten when he is employed to teach the children of a Mr and Mrs B. The eldest, Miss Maria B., was 17 and possessed a form and features capable of inspiring the admirers of female beauty with adoration; but these were only the ornaments of a casket, which contained a jewel of the brightest lustre and inestimable value. In fact, unhappily, she will inadvertently ruin his life. They fall in love, but his conscience means he leaves the family. Then disaster strikes: Miss B dies of consumption. For the next forty years his life is blighted; his only solace is that one day he will join her, when we shall meet to part no more.   

He has an unsuccessful dalliance with a Miss Burton; he is ejected from two livings, one for being too conservative, the other for being too radical!; he  loans a travelling player 5 guineas, who much later turns out to be Mr. Belfield, a young farmer of some standing and who not only repays Campbell the money, but sets him up in a small cottage on his land. However, eventually his long-time friends and patrons- Belfield and his wife Anna - both die, the latter with consumption having pined away after the death of their only child, the former subsequently in a boating accident in Ireland, trying and failing to rescue the daughter of another friend from drowning. One paragraph summed up Campbell's recurring self-pity: the interest which I took in the unhappy state of my friends, and indelible impression which their miseries left on my mind, have inclined me to dwell upon the gloomy subject till it has probably become tiresome [too true!]: but the garrulity of old age is proverbial; and grief, after having settled down to chronic melancholy, often become loquacious.

Further misery follows. when the man who looked after his slender savings went bankrupt, as did the Glaswegian who had employed him to educate his offspring. Again I became a solitary and friendless wanderer on the land that gave me birth.

Throughout, there is his fixation with Maria B., who had died at the age of 21, his first and only love, which borders on the unbalanced. His final visitation to her grave finds him stretched out on the turf above her grave throughout a cold night, oblivious to all but her seraphic spirit. Previously, Campbell intones: Beloved Maria B., thou hast fled to the chambers of light, and left me to wander alone, like a stranger on the dreary heath, in a moonless night! Who cares for me? or why should I linger behind thee? I am like a tree that has been left alone in the field; its buds blighted by the frost, and its branches broken by the storm; its trunk drooping in decay...Pull yourself together man. It's a wonder you have any friends.

On his final retirement from occasional teaching, he has recourse to the poems of Campbell, Crabbe, and Walter Scott; to which a friend in Edinburgh has kindly added Waverley, Guy Mannering, Tales of My Landlord, and Byron's Poems. Interestingly, Campbell (and the author?) muses that if not that there is so much manual labour in novel-writing, I find it, at present, the easiest of all literary subjects. This is a novel-reading age, and the appetite still grows with what it feeds on: quantity and not quality, is required. It is quite unnecessary, either to study nature in drawing characters, or probability in the adventures. In fact, there are too many ridiculous coincidences scattered throughout the author's own tale. Campbell meeting up with long-lost acquaintances at roadside inns, whether separated wives from friends made much earlier or characters linked to totally different circumstances and surroundings.

In the penultimate page of his final chapter, looking back in 1816 aged three score and ten, he is still wallowing in melancholia and self pity: From the refined enjoyments and delicate endearments of domestic felicity, I have ever been excluded; and, for years past, no one has participated in my pleasures, or sympathised in my sorrows. I constitute no link in the chain of social life; and there is not a fellow mortal who has an interest in my existence. On his death, the sexton will press down the turf upon my head...and before the next Sunday, when the company meet on the same spot, I shall be forgotten. O misery me. He conveniently forgets a recent offer of help from his long-time friend. Elizabeth Maitland (once Miss Burton) but, as she wrote, foolish modesty and false delicacy have been your foibles through life. He has previously quoted Shakespeare's Jaques in As You Like It -

...it is a melancholy

Of mine own, compounded of many simples,

Extracted from many objects; and, indeed,

The sundry contemplation of my travels,

In which my often rumination wraps me

In a most humorous sadness.

And again, after passing a sleepless night, he viewed myself, at present, as nearly a useless being - a drone in the public hive...

 

At one point, the narrative is merely a travelogue, detailing the countryside around Perth, Dunkeld and Killicrankie, which is followed by one of the many insertions of verse into the text. The flow of the autobiographical narrative is punctured by several other characters relating their history to Campbell: in Volume I these are a man who swindled Campbell with forged banknotes, which takes up pages 116 to 131; Mr Belfield's story on pages 260 to 290; Roger, Mr. Belfield's grieve,   reminiscences in Volume II pages 52-76; Dr. Stanley pages 172-185. 

So, an interesting but uneven in quality tale. It felt that the author was striving to find material to reach the allotted three-volume requirement. In fact, the last volume is 65 pages shorter than the first. I am not a great fan of gobbets of verse being inserted into prose - by all means start chapters with such extracts (e.g. Scott and others). I am still mildly bewildered that such a self-pitying and melancholic man could have reached 70 years of age. He appeared to have suffered from a form of PTSD, occasioned by Maria B's untimely death. I know it's only a fiction, but I wish he had snapped out of it!