"Lochiel's Warning" (Thomas Campbell)

The Clan Cameron grave marker at Drumossie Moor (Culloden)

[Image source: http://jackdeighton.co.uk/tag/culloden ]



Proud Cumberland prances, insulting the slain,
And their hoof-beaten bosoms are trod to the plain.
But hark! through the fast-flashing lightning of war,
What steed to the desert flies frantic and far?
'Tis thine, Oh Glenullin! whose bride shall await,
Like a love-lighted watch-fire, all night at the gate.
A steed comes at morning: no rider is there;
But its bridle is red with the sign of despair.

(from Lochiel's Warning , by Thomas Campbell)


I've been threatening for ages to write a post about Scott's A Legend of Montrose, which I read while we were on our travels through France and Spain back in September. This is an offshoot.

Scott  always prefixes his chapters with poetical epigraphs. Ann Radcliffe seems to have initiated this practice; Fennimore Cooper did it too.  In Scott's later novels he often made up the epigraphs himself (and palmed them off as Old Play or similar). But in his early days the epigraphs are an enriching dialogue with other material.

Chapters 6 and 7 of the Legend are both headed by highly pertinent quotations from "Lochiel's Warning" by Thomas Campbell: in relation to highland uprisings, and to foreseeing the future. More distantly, these epigraphs hint that the uprising in Scott's book is doomed to end badly.

Campbell is a poet I often seem to cross paths with. He had a happy knack for encapsulating an idea in a memorable line, in this case (re "the second sight"):


                    And coming events cast their shadow before.


Campbell was a contemporary of Scott's and they were both based in Edinburgh for a few years around 1800-1810 so I suppose they knew each other fairly well.* "Lochiel's Warning" is an exciting recitation-piece that Campbell wrote in 1801 and I should think it was highly influential on Scott's own narrative poems. Campbell, in his turn, was much taken with Scott's brilliant ballad of "Cadyow Castle", written in the same year.

*Yes, they did. According to Scott and his Circle (Scottish National Portrait Gallery booklet, by R.E. Hutchison) Scott "was one of the first to recognize and welcome Campbell when he came to Edinburgh and they remained life-long friends".

In a note about "the second-sight" in The Lady of the Lake (1810), Scott writes: "The exquisitely beautiful poem of Lochiel will at once occur to the recollection of every reader". 

Campbell's contemporaries lamented his early loss of poetical powers; his poems subsequent to 1809 were not admired. Scott himself said: "Thomas Campbell's afraid of the author of The Pleasures of Hope"* - i.e. the splendid poem with which Campbell had burst onto the scene in 1799.

*John Wilson et al, Noctes Ambrosianae ,Vol ii Page 67.

In his Journal (29th June 1826), Scott pondered further: "I wonder often how Tom Campbell with so much real genius, has not maintained a greater figure in the public eye than he has done of late -- somehow he wants audacity, fears the public, and what is worse, fears the shadow of his own reputation. He is a great corrector too, which succeeds as ill in composition as in education. Many a clever boy is flogged into a dunce, and many an original composition corrected in mediocrity. Tom ought to have done a great deal more; his youthful promise was great."

*

"Lochiel's Warning" is a dialogue between a prophetic seer and the historic figure of Donald Cameron of Lochiel. The poem transforms into mythical terms something that was actually true. The "Gentle Lochiel", like many of the other chieftains who agreed out of loyalty to follow Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745, sensed that this ill-judged enterprise would be bound to end in calamity. Contrary to the hints of the poem, Lochiel didn't die on the field of Culloden but he was badly wounded and fled to France, dying two years later without ever returning to Scotland.

The Battle of Culloden, 16th April 1746, was the last pitched battle on British soil. Around 2,000 highlanders and 300 government troops were killed.  It led on to brutal reprisals by "Butcher" Cumberland. The name of Culloden was long and resentfully remembered.

The streets of Soho did reverberate
With drunken Highland men
Revenge for Culloden dead
The North had rose again
But it would turn out wrong

(From "The NWRA" by The Fall, 1980 Lyrics in full)

Mark E. Smith's lyric re-evokes the mythic motif of a northern rebellion that is foreseen as going wrong from the start. Despite the sardonic side-glance just quoted, the song is really about northern England rather than Scotland.

Indeed historically the two regions have often taken different sides, just as in Scotland the highlands and lowlands were often opposed to each other. As regards the most recent Rising of the North, most of Scotland and at least one Mr Cameron were on the other side. Whether this rising will "turn out wrong" too I don't know, but the spirit of doom-laden presentiment lives on.

Scanlon, Hanley, Hanley, Smith, Riley: The Fall on 24th October, 1980 (at the General Wolfe in Coventry) 

[Image source: http://thisthen.co.uk/bands/the-fall/general-wolfe/ . Photo by Mark Osborne.]


"The NWRA" appeared on the album Grotesque (After The Gramme), Smith's most coherent realization of northern existence.

I'm sure it's pure coincidence, but in another song on the album, "Impression of J. Temperance",
the monstrous birth is delivered by an overpaid vet whose name is Cameron.


*

According to Byron, the pipers played the "war-note of Lochiel" during the battle of Waterloo:

And wild and high the 'Cameron's gathering' rose,

   The war-note of Lochiel, which Albyn's hills

   Have heard, and heard, too, have her Saxon foes:

   How in the noon of night that pibroch thrills

   Savage and shrill!  But with the breath which fills

   Their mountain-pipe, so fill the mountaineers

   With the fierce native daring which instils

   The stirring memory of a thousand years,

And Evan's, Donald's fame rings in each clansman's ears.

(Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III, Stanza 26.) 

This was the 79th Regiment of Foot (Cameron Highlanders), one of just four regiments singled out by Wellington for mention in his Waterloo dispatch: "The troops of the 5th division, and those of the Brunswick corps, were long and severely engaged, and conducted themselves with the utmost gallantry. I must particularly mention the 28th, 42nd, 79th, and 92nd regiments, and the battalion of Hanoverians." Of the regiment's 675 soldiers, 103 were killed and 353 wounded. 

The march in question was the Piobaireachd Dhomhnuill Duibh (Pibroch of Donald Dubh), also known as the Cameron's Gathering, a tune that may go back to the fifteenth century. 

More details:

https://bagpipe.news/2020/05/04/pibroch-of-donald-dubh/

tis distance lends enchantment to the view

Thomas Campbell, again.

This well-known line appears near the start of The Pleasures of Hope (1799).

At summer eve, when Heaven's ethereal bow
Spans with bright arch the glittering hills below,
Why to yon mountain turns the musing eye,
Whose sunbright summit mingles with the sky?
Why do those cliffs of shadowy tint appear
More sweet than all the landscape smiling near?
'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.

(The Pleasures of Hope, Part I, lines 1-8.)

OK, so the quote is much more fertile when it's taken away from the context of that poem and can breathe and develop its powers on its own.

Along with Hazlitt's remark about how we think of natural creatures as species rather than as individuals, this is about the only bit of aesthetic philosophy that I've ever taken on board. In compensation, I do think about both of them extremely often.

This morning, for example, because (in the office): the sudden stink of decay alerted me to a brief resumption of my sense of smell, for the first time since before Xmas. Perhaps what assaulted my suddenly-restored sense was the smell of my own trainers. Soon afterwards, we trooped along to the canteen on a tea-break - such an assault of smells. The jar of tea-bags smelt. The hot water smelt. The fridge made me feel like retching, and so did the distinct, personal odours emanating from the mouths of each of my friends.

Five minutes later, the olfactory system had all shut down again; I couldn't smell anything at all. This Brobdingnagian enlargement of sensory data is too much, too up close. In the circumstances, I drank it all in with enthusiasm, but it was not "beauty". "Beauty" in our present state of culture seems to require a desensitizing filter. That's what I take from Campbell.

 *

The remarks by Hazlitt are in the Lectures on the English Poets (1818), specifically the lecture on Thomson and Cowper, which Hazlitt concludes with an excursus (springing from Rousseau at Annecy) about love of Nature. He says:

"That which distinguishes this attachment from others is the transferable nature of our feelings with respect to physical objects; the associations connected with any one object extending to the whole class."

He gives an example about foreign-ness:

"I remember when I was abroad, the trees, and grass, and wet leaves, rustling in the walks of the Thuilleries, seemed to be as much English, to be as much the same trees and grass, that I had always been used to, as the sun shining over my head was the same sun which I saw in England; the faces only were foreign to me."

A closer botanist wouldn't perhaps experience that; Lucy Snowe in Villette, more sensitive to the distinction of a continental climate, restricts her sensation of "English-ness" to the moon. Still, Hazlitt is on to something.

"The same principle will also account for that feeling of littleness, vacuity, and perplexity, which a stranger feels on entering the streets of a populous city. Every individual he meets is a blow to his personal identity. Every face is a teazing, unanswered riddle. He feels the same wearisome sensation in walking from Oxford Street to Temple Bar, as a person would do who should be compelled to read through the first leaf of all the volumes in a library. But it is otherwise with respect to nature. A flock of sheep is not a contemptible, but a beautiful sight..."

"This nature is a kind of universal home, and every object it presents to us an old acquaintance with unaltered looks..."

If I'm always pondering Hazlitt's claim it's because I don't believe it to be wholly true or invariably true. I think Hazlitt's sense of the delightfull unvarying class of sheep is an accident of point of view; a shepherd would look at sheep differently. In that respect Hazlitt is himself a walking illustration of "Tis distance lends enchantment to the view".

As it happens, Hazlitt is fairly scathing about Thomas Campbell. That may be right, but when he notices these lines -

Some hamlet shade, to yield his sickly form
Health in the breeze, and shelter in the storm.

- notices them, in order to assert a failure in the antithesis (the shade brings shelter, but it does not bring health: the breeze does), I don't think most readers today will feel the force of that logic; I think they'd judge Campbell's lines to be rather improved by the failure of his antithesis; it makes them rangier, more comprehensive.

Oxford horse-chestnuts - St Leonards-on-Sea shingle

Yesterday evening, feeling gloomy, lonely and tired, I plunged into a book drawn randomly off the shelf; it was a selection of Gerard Manley Hopkins' Poetry and Prose. It was the prose I read, mainly; though before going off to sleep I read a little of the "Deutschland" and after the light was out listened for a while to my brain sponaneously constructing gibberish in Sprung rhythm, which it appeared to manage as sure-footedly as blank verse. But mostly I read the prose.

The most engaging piece, for me, was the early Platonic Dialogue on the Origin of Beauty, written 1865. This is unfinished, and it's basically a slow trainwreck, because it gets more and more bogged down in detail and ever less likely to successfully resist "de gustibus non est disputandum", which is what the Professor of Aesthetics is trying to do. But the early pages are enjoyable. He and his two pals begin with the horse-chestnut leaf, said to be at its most beautiful when it has seven leaflets, not six. (The Professor is working towards a fairly uninteresting insight about variety within uniformity.) The tree Aesculus hippocastanum has between 5 and 7 leaflets. You would expect Hopkins to be a close observer and he is, just as later in his journals writing about oak foliage. The only odd thing is when the Professor talks about Vesica Piscis (i.e. a lens shape), suggests that they are inferior to the Horse-Chestnut shape when it comes to making fans, then makes a fan of lime leaves to prove it. - But after all, lime leaves are unsymmetrically ovate/cordate, not lens-shaped at all! And of course it is not right to compare a (lime) leaf with a (chestnut) leaflet, but Hopkins seems to be unaware of this distinction.

Hopkins was passionately interested in his own apprehensions of nature, and yet he never seems to have been interested in learning the botanical words (like ovate or cordate) that would have made things clearer for him. Instead he preferred to be at the forefront of his own research with its own terms, fretty quains and all the rest. The same perversity comes out in later life when he firecely asserts, (but with suspicious repetition) that he doesn't care about not being able to read much or write much or publish anything at all.

The dialogue moves on to oak trees:

"We were speaking of the chestnut-trees, of their unsymmetrical growth. Now is the oak an unsymmetrical tree?"

"Very much so; O quite a rugged boldly-irregular tree: and this I should say was one of the things which make us invest it with certain qualities it has in poetry and in popular and national sentiment," said Hanbury.

"Very observant. You mean of course when it grows at liberty, rather than when influenced by confinement, cutting and so forth."

"Yes: what I say will of course be truest of the tree when uninfluenced by man."

"Very good. Now have you ever noticed that when the oak has grown to its full stature uninfluenced, the outline of its head is drawn by a long curve, I should think it would be that of a parabola, which, if you look at the tree from a little way off, is of almost mathematical correctness?"

This matter of being uninfluenced by man is almost the wrong way round. Before man, almost every oak tree was confined in dense woodland. It is the standard tree, carefully preserved in the isolation of parkland, that develops the parabola. Yet the parabola is part of nature, of course. (The horse-chestnut illustrates this even better. The few wild populations, in the Balkans, look very different from the handsome tree we are familiar with - small, tough, and crowded. Like other tree species, notably the Monterey Cypress, it seems to have ended up becoming trapped and hanging on in an ecological niche that doesn't really suit it.)

The other thing that stood out for me, reading Hopkins' letters, is mention of Campbell, alongside Milton, as one of the two masters of style - an idea that Arnold originated, I think. This is (presumably?) the Romantic Poet Thomas Campbell (1777-1844), who regarded the following as his best poem. Well, I like this poem too, but that's because of the feeling of excitement that comes with the thought of striding beneath the Marina in that blessed spot, scene of such significance to my own life.

Lines On The View From St. Leonard's

by Thomas Campbell

Hail to thy face and odours, glorious Sea!
'Twere thanklessness in me to bless thee not,
Great beauteous Being! in whose breath and smile
My heart beats calmer, and my very mind
Inhales salubrious thoughts. How welcomer
Thy murmurs than the murmurs of the world!
Though like the world thou fluctuatest, thy din
To me is peace, thy restlessness repose.
Ev'n gladly I exchange yon spring-green lanes
With all the darling field-flowers in their prime,
And gardens haunted by the nightingale's
Long trills and gushing ecstasies of song,
For these wild headlands, and the sea-mew's clang --

With thee beneath my windows, pleasant Sea,
I long not to o'erlook earth's fairest glades
And green savannahs -- Earth has not a plain
So boundless or so beautiful as thine;
The eagle's vision cannot take it in:
The lightning's wing, too weak to sweep its space,
Sinks half-way o'er it like a wearied bird:
It is the mirror of the stars, where all
Their hosts within the concave firmament,
Gay marching to the music of the spheres,
Can see themselves at once.

Nor on the stage
Of rural landscape are there lights and shades
Of more harmonious dance and play than thine.
How vividly this moment brightens forth,
Between gray parallel and leaden breadths,
A belt of hues that stripes thee many a league,
Flush'd like the rainbow, or the ringdove's neck,
And giving to the glancing sea-bird's wing
The semblance of a meteor.

Mighty Sea!
Cameleon-like thou changest, but there's love
In all thy change, and constant sympathy
With yonder Sky -- thy Mistress; from her brow
Thou tak'st thy moods and wear'st her colours on
Thy faithful bosom; morning's milky white,
Noon's sapphire, or the saffron glow of eve;
And all thy balmier hours, fair Element,
Have such divine complexion -- crisped smiles,
Luxuriant heavings and sweet whisperings,
That little is the wonder Love's own Queen
From thee of old was fabled to have sprung --
Creation's common! which no human power
Can parcel or inclose; the lordliest floods
And cataracts that the tiny hands of man
Can tame, conduct, or bound, are drops of dew
To thee that could'st subdue the Earth itself,
And brook'st commandment from the heavens
For marshalling thy waves --

Yet, potent Sea! alone
How placidly thy moist lips speak ev'n now
Along yon sparkling shingles. Who can be
So fanciless as to feel no gratitude
That power and grandeur can be so serene,
Soothing the home-bound navy's peaceful way,
And rocking ev'n the fisher's little bark
As gently as a mother rocks her child? --

The inhabitants of other worlds behold
Our orb more lucid for thy spacious share
On earth's rotundity; and is he not
A blind worm in the dust, great Deep, the mall
Who sees not or who seeing has no joy
In thy magnificence? What though thou art
Unconscious and material, thou canst reach
The inmost immaterial mind's recess,
And with thy tints and motion stir its chords
To music, like the light on Memnon's lyre!

The Spirit of the Universe in thee
Is visible; thou hast in thee the life --
The eternal, graceful, and majestic life
Of nature, and the natural human heart
Is therefore bound to thee with holy love.
Earth has her gorgeous towns; the earth-circling sea
Has spires and mansions more amusive still --
Men's volant homes that measure liquid space
On wheel or wing. The chariot of the land
With pain'd and panting steeds and clouds of dust
Has no sight-gladdening motion like these fair
Careerers with the foam beneath their bows,
Whose streaming ensigns charm the waves by day,
Whose carols and whose watch-bells cheer the night,
Moor'd as they cast the shadows of their masts
In long array, or hither flit and yond
Mysteriously with slow and crossing lights,
Like spirits on the darkness of the deep.

There is a magnet-like attraction in
These waters to the imaginative power
That links the viewless with the visible,
And pictures things unseen. To realms beyond
Yon highway of the world my fancy flies,
When by her tall and triple mast we know
Some noble voyager that has to woo
The trade-winds and to stem the ecliptic surge.
The coral groves -- the shores of conch and pearl,
Where she will cast her anchor and reflect
Her cabin-window lights on warmer waves,
And under planets brighter than our own:
The nights of palmy isles, that she will see
Lit boundless by the fire-fly -- all the smells
Of tropic fruits that will regale her -- all
The pomp of nature, and the inspiriting
Varieties of life she has to greet,
Come swarming o'er the meditative mind.

True, to the dream of Fancy, Ocean has
His darker tints; but where's the element
That chequers not its usefulness to man
With casual terror? Scathes not Earth sometimes
Her children with Tartarean fires, or shakes
Their shrieking cities, and, with one last clang
Of bells for their own ruin, strews them flat
As riddled ashes -- silent as the grave?
Walks not Contagion on the Air itself?
I should -- old Ocean's Saturnalian days
And roaring nights of revelry and sport
With wreck and human woe-be loth to sing;
For they are few, and all their ills weigh light
Against his sacred usefulness, that bids
Our pensile globe revolve in purer air.
Here Morn and Eve with blushing thanks receive
Their freshening dews, gay fluttering breezes cool
Their wings to fan the brow of fever'd climes,
And here the Spring dips down her emerald urn
For showers to glad the earth.

Old Ocean was
Infinity of ages ere we breathed
Existence -- and he will be beautiful
When all the living world that sees him now
Shall roll unconscious dust around the sun.
Quelling from age to age the vital throb
In human hearts, Death shall not subjugate
The pulse that swells in his stupendous breast,
Or interdict his minstrelsy to sound
In thundering concert with the quiring winds;
But long as Man to parent Nature owns
Instinctive homage, and in times beyond
The power of thought to reach, bard after bard
Shall sing thy glory, BEATIFIC SEA.