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Title: The Life of Francis Thompson
Author: Meynell, Everard
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Life of Francis Thompson" ***
THE LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON
[Illustration: _Francis Thompson in 1894_
_Emery Walker Ph. sc._]
THE LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON
by
EVERARD MEYNELL
Burns & Oates Ltd
28 Orchard Street
London W
1913
_To
Grazia_
The Author's thanks are here tendered to Mother Austin of the
Presentation Convent, Manchester, the Poet's sister; to Perceval Lucas
and Father Austin Richmond for the fruits of research work; to Mrs.
Coventry Patmore and Lewis Hind for letters and memories; and to many
other kind helpers.
Contents
_Chapter_ _Page_
I. The Child 1
II. The Boy 15
III. Manchester and Medicine 35
IV. London Streets 61
V. The Discovery 85
VI. Literary Beginnings 111
VII. "Poems" 135
VIII. Of Words; of Origins; of Metre 152
IX. At Monastery Gates 180
X. Mysticism and Imagination 198
XI. Patmore's Death, and "New Poems" 233
XII. Friends and Opinions 245
XIII. The Londoner 272
XIV. Communion and Excommunion 291
XV. Characteristics 308
XVI. The Closing Years 316
XVII. Last Things 339
Index 353
Illustrations
Francis Thompson in 1895 _Frontispiece_
His Birthplace _Facing page_ 4
Francis, his Sisters and their Dolls, 1870 " " 12
St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw " " 26
Francis Thompson in 1875 " " 34
Francis Thompson in 1877 " " 54
No. 47 Palace Court " " 134
Cast of the Poet's Hand " " 144
His Parents " " 186
"Mr. Thompson of Fleet Street" " " 256
(_Drawn by_ Everard Meynell, 1903)
The Life Mask, 1905 " " 316
Francis Thompson in 1907 " " 328
(_Drawn by the_ Hon. Neville Lytton)
The Memorial at Owens College " " 344
The Life of Francis Thompson
CHAPTER I: THE CHILD
"I WAS born in 1858 or 1859 (I never could remember and don't care
which) at Preston in Lancashire. Residing there, my mother more than
once pointed out to me, as we passed it, the house wherein I was born;
and it seemed to me disappointingly like any other house."
The 16th of December 1859 was the day, 7 Winckley Street, a box of
a house in a narrow road, the place of Francis Joseph Thompson's
birth. He was the second son of Charles Thompson and his wife, Mary
Turner Morton.[1] Charles Thompson's father (the poet's grandfather)
was Robert Thompson, Surveyor of Taxes successively at Oakham in
Rutlandshire, Bath, and Salisbury; he married Mary Costall, the
daughter of a surgeon, at Oakham in 1812, and died at Tunbridge Wells
in 1853. Charles, born in 1823, married Mary Morton in 1857.
Having first practised at Bristol and later been house-surgeon in
the Homeopathic Dispensary in Manchester, he set up a practice in
Winckley Street shortly after his marriage. Like his wife, his sisters,
and the majority of his brothers, Dr. Thompson was a convert to the
Catholic Church; but, unlike his brothers, he never committed himself
to authorship, and is remembered only in the many good opinions of
those who knew him. For his patients he had something of the pastoral
feeling; his rounds were his diocese, and in the statistics of kindness
which no man keeps--in deference perhaps to the thoroughness of the
Recording Angel--his name is thought worthy to figure largely. Though
he attended as many patients as the most successful members of his
profession, his fees were smaller and fewer. He stood, like his clients
of the poorer quarters, in fear of the Creator firstly, and of death
secondly; and so it happened that, having ministered to mother and
child, he would pour out the waters of baptism over infants who made as
if to leave the world as soon as they had entered it. This much of his
kindness will serve as a preface to the story of the part which, forced
to a seeming severity, he played in the career of his son.
The verses of two of Charles Thompson's brothers (Francis's uncles[2])
supply no clue, not even a plebeian one, to the origin of Francis's
muse. Edward Healy Thompson's sonnets and John Costall Thompson's
_Vision of Liberty_ show that not a dozen such rhyming uncles could
endow a birth with poetry. Eugenists must accept an inexplicable hitch
in the prosaic unfolding of the Thompson birth-roll. While there can be
no chart made of Francis's intellectual lineage, it is not surprising
that an occasional phrase in his uncle's _Vision of Liberty and other
Poems_, privately printed in 1848, bears some resemblance to his form
and diction.
A servant-maid destroyed John's autobiography--an unkind accident,
since it left his career to be summed up by a relative in seven words:
"An utter failure in life and literature." Gladstone and Sir Henry
Taylor at one time interested themselves in his work, but neither
so keenly nor so persistently as to secure his good fame with an
exacting brother. Yet Edward Healy Thompson (born 1813, educated at
Oakham and Emmanuel College, Cambridge) is duller in verse than John
Costall. He never saw, or never used, even a second-rate vision. Before
his conversion to Catholicism he was curate in the parish of Elia's
"Sweet Calne in Wiltshire" from July 1838 to January 1840, and had for
neighbour there the friend of Lamb and Wordsworth, to whom Coleridge,
before a meeting, had written--
My heart has thanked thee, Bowles, for those soft strains
Whose sadness soothes the life with murmuring
Of wild bees in the sunny showers of Spring.
But sweet Calne had its harsher properties: its human bees murmured
in wrath, and had stings. Incumbent and curate both held a poet in
disrespect. Coleridge and Francis Thompson, in whom may be traced in
common the spoliations of opium, are linked by the coincidence that
they were condemned by those Wiltshire associates--Coleridge by the
rector in terms of high contempt, and Francis by the curate, who wrote
in later days to warn Francis's London friends that he must be avoided
as the writer of "erotic verse." Edward Healy Thompson afterwards
admitted Francis's genius, but found no hereditary explanation of it
in Francis's parents or any member of the family. On the other hand,
Miss Agnes Martin, a cousin of Francis, writes: "From his father he
inherited his passion for religion, and, from what I know of his
poetry, I find he has expressed thoughts and yearnings habitual to
other members of his father's family." It was Francis's custom to
speak of his mother as if it were from her at least as much as from
his father that he derived certain mental and physical characteristics.
Born in Manchester in 1822, she was daughter of Joseph Morton and
Harriet Sigley. Her father, a clerk in the bank of Messrs. Jones, Lloyd
and Co., was afterwards secretary to the newly-founded Manchester
Assurance Co., and later lost money in a personal business enterprise.
In 1851 her family left Manchester for Chelsea, and there in 1854 she
was living with people who befriended her desire, frowned upon by her
family, of becoming a Catholic. She became engaged to the son of the
house, but he died, and before the close of the year she was received
into the Church. In how far she was cast out by her own people I do not
know, but to some degree she rehearsed the part to be played, after
her death, in her own household by her own son. She set out to make
a living, and took a position as governess at Sale, near Manchester,
having failed--as he failed in his Ushaw days--in an attempt to enter
the Religious Life.[3] In the following year, while still in the
neighbourhood of Manchester, she met her future husband. She died
December 19, 1880, at Stamford Street, Ashton-under-Lyne. Dr. Thompson
married as his second wife Anne Richardson, in 1887.
[Illustration: The Poet's Birthplace
_No. 7, Winckley Street, Preston_]
The paternal relative (a cousin once removed) who finds in Francis
thoughts and yearnings habitual to other members of his father's
family, is better able to note them than he was. She tracks them in a
girl (never seen by Francis) whose tragedy, since seeking admittance
to a convent and failing to take final vows, is that she is not
physically fit for the only life tolerable to her. She recognises the
family mannerism in a relative who is famous in the suburban street
of his choice for reciting the Psalms in a mighty voice in his sleep,
so that no rest visits the guest new to the household noises. She
sees the family characters in Francis's niece who is about to end her
noviciate and take vows in a Canadian community. She notes them in the
two aunts, the sisters of Charles Thompson, who as Sister Mary of St.
Jane Frances de Chantal of the Order of the Good Shepherd, and Sister
Mary Ignatius of the Order of Mercy, lived and died as nuns; of a third
aunt nothing is known, but in a dozen other cases the inclination
for a spiritual life or a disinclination for all the pleasures or
successes of any other is apparent. She notes the same carelessness for
worldly prosperity, the thoughtlessness for mundane concerns that goes
with certain trains of spiritual speculation. In a family singularly
scattered the family trait is for ever reappearing. The aloofness or
vagueness that led Francis to lose himself in London was responsible
for many lost addresses. As Francis wandered alone in the Strand,
without knowing that he had relatives in Church Court within a stone's
throw of his stony and uncovered bed, so do the brothers and sisters
of the present generation inhabit London and its suburbs unknown to
one another, but without real alienation or unkindness. She, the
cousin here cited, has herself wished to enter a convent and failed,
and knowing much of the family needs and inclinations, does not doubt
that Francis's life-long trouble was that he failed in the attempt to
be a priest. There is nothing to throw substantial discredit on such a
reading of his career.
From Winckley Street, associated with none of Francis's conscious
experiences of existence, the family moved to Winckley Square and to
Lathom Street, Preston, and in 1864 to Ashton-under-Lyne, where they
remained until Francis's flight to London twenty-one years later.
* * * * *
"KNOW you what it is to be a child?" asks Thompson in his essay on
Shelley; the answer tells us what it was to be the child Francis: "It
is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to
believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is
to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it
is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into
loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy
godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count
yourself the king of infinite space; it is
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour;
it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor
petition that it be commuted into death. When we become conscious in
dreaming that we dream, the dream is on the point of breaking; when
we become conscious in living that we live, the ill dream is but
just beginning." Francis was early alive. In a note-book he says:
"Yes, childhood is tragic to me. And then critics complain that I do
not write 'simply' about it. O fools! as if there was anything more
complex, held closer to the heart of mystery, than its contemplation."
He forgot perhaps that even fools have experienced the dereliction and
despair which catches at all children at some time or another. It is
improbable that he suffered, but possible that he remembered, more than
other children.
Having attended for two months the school of the Nuns of the Cross and
the Passion--a name full of anticipations--he reached, in the cold
phrase that admits to first Confession and Communion, the "age of
discretion." At seven years he was reading poetry, and, overwhelmed by
feelings of which he knew not the meaning, had found his way to the
heart of Shakespeare and Coleridge: their three ages of discretion kept
company. Already seeking the highway and the highway's seclusion, he
would carry his book to the stairs, where, away from the constraint
of chairs and tables and the unemotional flatness of the floor, his
sister Mary remembers him. It is on that household highway, where the
voices and noises of the house, and the footsteps of passengers on the
pavement beyond the dark front door, come and pass quickly into other
regions, that the child meditates and learns. There he may contract
the habit of loneliness, populate his fancy with the creatures of
fear; and gather about him a company of thoughts that will be his
intimates until the end. And all the thronging personages of the boy's
imagination are perhaps darkly arrayed against him. The crowd will be
of tremors rather than of smiles, of secret rather than open-handed
truths; the lessons learnt in that steep college of childhood are not
joyful. The "long tragedy of early experiences" of which he spoke was
a tragedy adventured upon alone. With his mother and his sisters,
their toys, his books, and his own inventions he was happy. He would
give entertainments to a more or less patient and tolerant audience of
sisters; conjuror's tricks, and a model theatre on whose stage he would
dangle marionettes, were the favourite performances, to one of which he
was beholden for amusement and occupation till the end of his life. His
early experience of the tragedy cannot be traced to the nursery. It was
not there he built his barricade, or became in his own words "expert in
concealment, not expression, of myself. Expression I reserved for my
pen. My tongue was tenaciously disciplined in silence." There befell
some share of accidental alarm. In a note-book that he had by him
towards the end of his life and in which there are many allusions to
its beginnings, he wrote of the "world-wide desolation and terror of
for the first time, realising that the mother can lose you, or you her,
and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her." Such a
feeling he compares to that of first fearing yourself to be without God.
His toys he never quite relinquished; among the few possessions at
his death was a cardboard theatre, wonderfully contrived, seeing
that his fingers never learnt the ordinary tricks of usefulness, and
with this his play was very earnest, as is attested in a note-book
query--"Sylvia's hairs shall work the figures(?)." That he was
content with his childhood, its toys, and even its troubles, he has
particularly asserted. "I did not want responsibility, did not want to
be a man. Toys I could surrender, with chagrin, so I had my great toy
of imagination whereby the world became to me my box of toys." It is
remembered by a visitor to the Thompson household that at meal times
the father would call upon the children to come out of their rooms.
But they, for answer, would lock their doors against the dinner hour:
they were playing with the toy theatre. Francis went on playing all his
life; his sister has kept her heart young in a convent. And there is no
discontent in this particular memory of early loneliness:--
"There is a sense in which I have always been and even now remain
a child. But in another sense I never was a child, never shared
children's thoughts, ways, tastes, manner of life, and outlook of life.
I played, but my sport was solitary sport, even when I played with my
sisters; from the time I began to read (about my sixth year) the game
often (I think) meant one thing to me and another (quite another) to
them--my side of the game was part of a dream-scheme invisible to them.
And from boys, with their hard practical objectivity of play, I was
tenfold wider apart than from girls with their partial capacity and
habit of make-believe."
Crosses he also experienced, and the sense of injustice was awakened
early. He lost the prize--a clockwork mouse, no less!--offered by his
governess. Although first in lessons, his brisker, punctual-footed
sisters and governess would have to wait many times during a walk
for him to come up with them. And so the mouse went to a sister. "I
remembered the prize," she writes, "but had forgotten the reason of my
luck. But Francis _never_ forgot it; he could never see the justice of
it, he said--and no wonder!" His tremulous, sudden "not ready!" jerked
out at the beginning of a game of cards, is still heard in the same
sister's memory, and also the leverage of calls and knockings that
was required to get him from the house for church or a train; and his
unrecognising progress in the street. Every detail of the boy recalls
the man to one who had to get him forth from his chamber when he was
a grown traveller, and has often seen him oblivious in the streets,
and has heard his imperative appeals for "ten minutes more" in all the
small businesses of his later life. His toys he could surrender, but he
played the same games without them. As a youth during the Russo-Turkish
war he built a city of chairs with a plank for drawbridge; "Plevna,"
his father said, would be found written in his heart for the interest
he had in the siege. If Plevna was written there, then so was
Ladysmith. He had no plank drawbridge during the Boer war, but he was
none the less excited on that account.
He knew little of the technique of being a boy; childhood was an
easier rôle. Brothers would have told him it was bad form to care
for dolls. He writes, in "The Fourth Order of Humanity," that he was
"withheld even in childhood from the youthful male's contempt for
these short-lived parasites of the nursery. I questioned, with wounded
feelings, the straitened feminine intolerance which said to the boy:
'Thou shalt not hold a baby; thou shalt not possess a doll.' In the
matter of babies, I was hopeless to shake the illiberal prejudice;
in the matter of dolls, I essayed to confound it. By eloquence and
fine diplomacy I wrung from my sisters a concession of dolls;
whence I date my knowledge of the kind. But ineluctable sex declared
itself. I dramatized them, I fell in love with them; I did not father
them; intolerance was justified of her children. One in particular
I selected, one with surpassing fairness crowned, and bowed before
the fourteen inches of her skirt. She was beautiful. She was one of
Shakespeare's heroines. She was an amity of inter-removed miracles;
all wrangling excellencies at pact in one sole doll; the frontiers
of jealous virtues marched in her, yet trespassed not against her
peace; and her gracious gift of silence I have not known in woman. I
desired for her some worthy name; and asked of my mother: Who was the
fairest among living women? Laughingly was I answered that I was a hard
questioner, but that perhaps the Empress of the French bore the bell
for beauty. Hence, accordingly, my Princess of puppetdom received her
style; and at this hour, though she has long since vanished to some
realm where all sawdust is wiped for ever from dolls' wounds, I cannot
hear that name but the Past touches me with a rigid agglomeration of
small china fingers."
A housemaid remembers Francis on the top of the ladder in the
book-cupboard, oblivious of her call to meals. Of this early reading he
writes:--
"I read certain poetry--Shakespeare, Scott, the
two chief poems of Coleridge, the ballads of
Macaulay--mainly for its dramatic or narrative power.
No doubt--especially in the case of Shakespeare,
and (to a less extent) Coleridge--I had a certain
sublatent, subconscious, elementary sense of poetry
as I read. But this was, for the more part, scarce
explicit; and was largely confined to the atmosphere,
the exhalation of the work. To give some concrete
instance of what I mean. In the 'Midsummer Night's
Dream' I experienced profoundly that sense of trance,
of dream-like dimness, the moonlight glimmer and
sleep-walking enchantment, embodied in that wonderful
fairy epilogue 'Now the cat' &c., and suggested by
Shakespeare in the lines, 'These things seem small
and undistinguishable, like far off mountains turned
into clouds.' I did indeed, as I read the last words
of Puck, feel as if I were waking from a dream and
rub my mental eyes. No doubt the sense of the lines
'These things' &c., was quickened (it may be created--I
will not at this distance say) by an excellent note
on them in the edition I read. But the effect on me
of the close was beyond and independent of all notes.
So, in truth, was it with the play as a whole. So,
again, I profoundly experienced the atmospheric effect
of 'Macbeth,' 'Lear,' 'The Tempest,' 'Coriolanus,' of
all the plays in various degree. Never again have I
sensed so exquisitely, so virginally, the _aura_ of
the plays as I sensed it then. Less often I may have
drunk the effluence of particular passages, as in the
case already instanced. But never, in any individual
passage, did I sense the poetry of the poetry, the
poetry as poetry. To express it differently, I was over
young to have awakened to the poetry of words, the
beauty of language which is the true flower of poetry,
the sense of magic in diction, of words suddenly
becoming a marvel and quick with a preternatural life.
It is the opening of the eyes to that wonder which
signalises the puberty of poetry. I was, in fact, as a
child, where most men remain all their lives. Nay, they
are not so far, for my elemental perception, my dawn
before sunrise, had a passion and prophetic intensity
which they (with rare exceptions) lack. It was not
stunted, it was only nascent."
Another recollection:--
"I understood love in Shakespeare and Scott, which I
connected with the lovely, long-tressed women of F.
C. Selous' illustrations to Cassell's Shakespeare,
my childish introduction to the supreme poet.[4]
Those girls of floating hair I loved; and admired the
long-haired, beautiful youths whom I met in these
pictures, and the illustrations of early English
History. Shakespeare I had already tried to read for
the benefit of my sisters and the servants; but both
kicked against 'Julius Cæsar' as dry--though they
diplomatically refrained from saying so. Comparing the
pictures of mediæval women with the crinolined and
chignoned girls of my own day, I embraced the fatal but
undoubting conviction that beauty expired somewhere
about the time of Henry VIII. I believe I connected
that awful catastrophe with the Reformation (merely
because, from the pictures, and to my taste, they
seemed to have taken place about the same time)."
[Illustration:
_Emery Walker Ph. sc._
_Francis, his sisters, and their dolls_
_1870_
("_The Fourth Order of Humanity_")]
He "first beheld the ocean" at Colwyn Bay when he was five years
old. It was there that the Thompsons spent their holidays, several
excursions there during a year keeping them in touch with the sea.
Its sunsets are still remembered by Mother Austin, his sister, in her
convent in black Manchester, where her skies are for the most part
locked behind bricks or otherwise tampered with. Remembered by this
sister as particularly attracting Francis is "the phosphorescence on
the crest of the waves at dusk." Her memory is good, for I find in a
long mislaid note-book the following verse of an early epithalamium:--
The mighty waters of his soul
Beat on her strand and break in fire;
Her spirit's shore, on which they roll,
Bursts into answering desire
From all its trembling depths together,
Till their encountering souls illume
The nuptial curtaining of gloom.
He adds, "I do not know whether the image is altogether clear to the
ordinary reader, as it was in my own mind. Anyone, however, who has
ever seen on a dark night a phosphorescent sea breaking in long billows
of light on the viewless beach, while, as the hidden pools and recessed
waters of the strand are stirred by the onrush, they respond through
the darkness in swarms of jewel-like flashes, will understand the image
at once."
The sea was there, and Francis bathed, timidly and always with the
consecrated medal that was still round his neck when he died. He would
not strip it from its place, and his sister, only less pious, would
laugh at his anxiety concerning it. On the beach brother and sister
would score Hornby's centuries. That was the chief use and joy of the
sands to the enthusiasts; the whole series of triumphs would be thus
shiftingly writ in full particularity. To Colwyn Bay he went before
Ushaw, during the holidays and after he left college, and he went
also to Kent's Bank, near Ulverstone, to Holyhead and New Brighton,
so that it may be wondered why his poetry harbours so few seas.
Topographically, his verse is very bare of allusion. The chapter of
his childhood must close without the benefits of such witness, unless,
as indeed it should be, the whole body of his poetry is taken as the
evidence of his teeming experiences. Only in a nonsense verse found
in his note-book (where doggerel keeps close, as the grave-digger to
Hamlet, to the exquisite fragments of his poetry, so that strings of
puns must be disentangled from chains of images) does he confess the
place-names of his childhood. Runs the doggerel:--
All along the gliding Lyne
They told the nymphs of mislaid wine,
And only by the mooney Med
They found it had got in the driver's head.
But even early experiences are rare. In "Dream Tryst" one is employed.
He was eleven, older by two years than Dante smitten with love in
Florence, when he met the Lucidé of that poem in Ashton-under-Lyne. She
was a school-friend of his sister, and tells me she had no knowledge of
Francis's admiration.[5]
It may not be supposed that Francis was too busy collecting lore of
Hornby's centuries or other boyish excitements to be moved by nature;
he tells little of his early childhood's experiences because he was
moved only to meditative dumbness, whereas later, when he knew he was
a poet, each experience, however fleeting, smote upon his heart as a
hammer on an anvil, and the words flew from each immediate stroke.
He was too full of emotional adventures when he was sent, after his
trials, to Storrington and Pantasaph to need to ransack the unmeaning
confusion of his early impressions. Childhood proper was snatched
from him when he became a schoolboy. His childhood he had called the
true Paradisus Vitæ, and he would have combated the convention that
school-days are the happiest of one's life. In an essay on his own
childhood it had been his intention to include an account of his first
year at Ushaw for the sake of contrast with his home existence, telling
of the "refugium or sanctuary of fairy-tales, and dream of flying to
the fairies for shelter" that he made there.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Their first child, a son, lived only one day, and of the three
daughters whose births followed Francis's, one, Helen, died in infancy.
Of the other two, the elder, Mary, is a nun in Manchester, the other,
Margaret Richardson, wife and mother in Canada.
[2] Edward Healy Thompson married Harriet Diana, daughter of Nicolson
Calvert, sometime M.P. for Hertford, by Frances, co-heir of the 1st
and last Viscount Pery. Another uncle of the poet was the Rev. Henry
Thompson, who was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford; took clerical
duty at Kirk Hammerton and at Greatham (Hants); published a sermon
(1850) entitled _The New Birth by Water and the Spirit_; married Julia,
daughter of Sir William Yea, Bart. A daughter by this union, Charlotte
Anne Hechstetter Yea Thompson, married (1869) Ralph Abercrombie
Cameron, elder son of the Rev. Alexander Cameron by Charlotte, daughter
of the Hon. Edward Rice, D.D., Dean of Gloucester. A fourth uncle of
the poet, James Thompson, lost his life in South Africa.
[3] At the Convent of the Holy Child, St. Leonard's-on-Sea.
[4] A photograph (now missing), taken at the age of eleven or twelve,
shows Francis with a small bust of Shakespeare--the treasured
gift of his mother. In all the early photographs he conforms to
one early description--"a boy known for his piety, obedience, and
truthfulness"--and he is tidy, too!
[5] "Dream Tryst" was afterwards alluded to by Mr. Edward Healy
Thompson as "erotic"--a poem, explained Francis, "addressed to a child.
Nay, hardly that--to the memory only of a child known but once when I
was eleven years old."
CHAPTER II: THE BOY
IN 1870, after the summer vacation, Francis was sent to Ushaw College,
four miles from Durham. By the kind fate that has kept many memories of
him alive, his journey thither is remembered by Bishop Casartelli, who
wrote to my father at the time of the poet's death:--
"I doubt if I ever saw F. Thompson since his boyhood.
I well remember taking him up to Ushaw as a timid,
shrinking little boy when he was first sent to college
in the late sixties; and how the other boys in the
carriage teased and frightened him--for 'tis their
nature to--and how the bag of jam tarts in his pocket
got hopelessly squashed in the process! I never thought
there were the germs of divine poesy in him then.
Strange that about the same time (but I think earlier)
my classmate at Ushaw was the future Lafcadio Hearn--in
those days he was 'Jack' or 'Paddy' Hearn; I never
heard the Greek forename till the days of his fame."
Timid his journey must have been, for all the crises of his life were
timidly and doubtfully encountered. Dr. Mann gives some account of the
event and of his first impressions of the new boy:--
"Canon Henry Gillow--the Prefect of that time in the
Seminary--assigned him his bedplace, and gave to him
two ministering angels in the guise of play-fellows.
Then, for initiation, a whinbush probably occupied his
undivided attention, and he would emerge from it with a
variant on his patronymic appellation! 'Tommy' was he
then known to those amongst whom he lived for the next
seven years.
"His mode of procedure along the ambulacrum was quite
his own, and you might know at the furthest point from
him that you had 'Tommy' in perspective. He sidled
along the wall, and every now and then he would hitch
up the collar of his coat as though it were slipping
off his none too thickly covered shoulder-blades. He
early evinced a love for books, and many an hour, when
his schoolfellows were far afield, would he spend
in the well-stocked juvenile library. His tastes
were not as ours. Of history he was very fond, and
particularly of wars and battles. Having read much of
Cooper, Marryat, Ballantyne, he sought to put some of
their episodes into the concrete, and he organised a
piratical band."
Another impression comes from Father George Phillips:--
"I was his master in Lower Figures, and remember him
very well as a delicate-looking boy with a somewhat
pinched expression of face, very quiet and unobtrusive,
and perhaps a little melancholy. He always showed
himself a good boy, and, I think, gave no one any
trouble."
From Dr. Mann's description, too, you get glimpses of the man. Those
shoulder-blades were always ill-covered. The plucking-up of the coat
behind was, after the lighting of matches, always the most familiar
action of the man we remember; while the tragedy of the tarts seems
strangely familiar to one who later had a thousand meals with him.
Fires he always haunted, and his clothes were burnt on sundry
occasions, as we are told they were before the class-room fire. But of
the piracy what shall we say? Why, if he did not lose that habit of
the collar and never shook off the crumbs of those tarts, why did he
forget the way to be a pirate? There was no rollick in Francis, and his
own talk of his childhood showed him to have always been a youth of
most undaring exploits. A good picture of his person is to be had from
his schoolfellows' recollections; for his mood we must go to his own
recollections. In writing of Shelley he builds up a poet's boyhood from
his own experience; there is no speculation here:--
"Now Shelley never could have been a man, for he never
was a boy," is the argument. "And the reason lay in
the persecution which overclouded his school-days. Of
that persecution's effect upon him he has left us, in
'The Revolt of Islam,' a picture which to many or most
people very probably seems a poetical exaggeration;
partly because Shelley appears to have escaped physical
brutality, partly because adults are inclined to smile
tenderly at childish sorrows which are not caused by
physical suffering. That he escaped for the most part
bodily violence is nothing to the purpose. It is the
petty malignant annoyance recurring hour by hour,
day by day, month by month, until its accumulation
becomes an agony; it is this which is the most terrible
weapon that boys have against their fellow boy, who
is powerless to shun it because, unlike the man, he
has virtually no privacy. His is the torture which
the ancients used, when they anointed their victim
with honey and exposed him naked to the restless fever
of the flies. He is a little St. Sebastian, sinking
under the incessant flight of shafts which skilfully
avoid the vital parts. We do not, therefore, suspect
Shelley of exaggeration: he was, no doubt, in terrible
misery. Those who think otherwise must forget their
own past. Most people, we suppose, _must_ forget what
they were like when they were children: otherwise
they would know that the griefs of their childhood
were passionate abandonment, _déchirants_ (to use a
characteristically favourite phrase of modern French
literature) as the griefs of their maturity. Children's
griefs are little, certainly; but so is the child, so
is its endurance, so is its field of vision, while its
nervous impressionability is keener than ours. Grief is
a matter of relativity: the sorrow should be estimated
by its proportion to the sorrower; a gash is as painful
to one as an amputation to another. Pour a puddle into
a thimble, or an Atlantic into Etna; both thimble and
mountain overflow. Adult fools! would not the angels
smile at _our_ griefs, were not angels too wise to
smile at them? So beset, the child fled into the tower
of his own soul, and raised the drawbridge. He threw
out a reserve, encysted in which he grew to maturity
unaffected by the intercourses that modify the maturity
of others into the thing we call a man."
When he recalls in a note-book his own first impressions of school he
could not write as a boy, or of boys:
"The malignity of my tormentors was more
heart-lacerating than the pain itself. It seemed to
me--virginal to the world's ferocity--a hideous thing
that strangers should dislike me, should delight and
triumph in pain to me, though I had done them no ill
and bore them no malice; that malice should be without
provocative malice. _That_ seemed to me dreadful, and
a veritable demoniac revelation. Fresh from my tender
home, and my circle of just-judging friends, these
malignant school-mates who danced round me with mocking
evil distortion of laughter--God's good laughter,
gift of all things that look back the sun--were to me
devilish apparitions of a hate now first known; hate
for hate's sake, cruelty for cruelty's sake. And as
such they live in my memory, testimonies to the murky
aboriginal demon in man."
The word "reserve" is written large across the history of the schoolboy
and the man; that he laid it aside in his poetry and with the rare
friend only made its habitual observance the more marked. He was
safest and happiest alone at Ushaw, and little would his schoolfellows
understand the distresses of his mind there. One at least I know who
could not recognise Thompson's painful memories as being conceivably
based on actual experience. Teasing, at best, is an ignorant
occupation; at worst, not meant to inflict lasting wrong.
I have in mind two gay and gentle men, once his class-fellows, who
are unfailingly merry at the mention of college hardships; they are
now priests, whose profession and desires are to do kindness to their
fellow-men, and I do not suspect them of ever having done a living
creature an intentional hurt. Thompson's poetry they can understand,
but not his unhappiness at school.
Nor does your normal boy, of Ushaw or any other school, admit that
wrong is done him by the rod. The rod bears blossoms, says the
schoolboy grown up; and the convention which makes men call their
school-days the happiest of their lives likewise makes them smile at
the punishments in the prefect's study. For the average schoolboy this
attitude is perhaps an honest one. His school-days are happy; the cane
is only an inconvenience to be avoided, or, if impossible of avoidance,
to be grimaced at and tolerated. But every boy at school is not a
school-boy, and the boy at school has to suffer generalisations about
the school-boy and the rod. The commonweal spells some individual's
woe, and doubtless the discipline proper for the normal child was
hard for the abnormal. The boy at school, unlike the school-boy, is
not brave, or, if he is brave, his courage is of a tragic quality
that should not be required of him. The schoolboy's account of the
punishment of the boy at school illustrates the difference between the
two; for the one it is fit matter for an anecdote, for Francis it was
an episode never to be alluded to. Dr. Mann writes:--
"Some old Ushaw men may wonder whether, in his passage
through the Seminary, he ever fell into the hands of
retributive justice. To the best of his schoolfellows'
recollections he did. It fell on a certain day during
our drilling-hour that Sergeant Railton dropt into
confidential tones, and we had grouped round him to
drink in his memories of the Indian Mutiny. 'Tommy,'
who scented a battle from afar, was with us. All went
well until the steps of authority were heard coming
round the corner near the music rooms, and with
well-simulated sternness our Sergeant ordered us back
into our ranks. 'Tommy,' who, doubtless, was already
making pictures of Lucknow or Cawnpore on his mental
canvas, was last to dress up, and was summarily taken
off to Dr. Wilkinson's Court of Petty Sessions, where,
without privilege of jury or advocate, he paid his
penalty. He was indignant, naturally, not to say sore,
over this treatment."
Such is the gallant and approved vein of school reminiscence, of which
one of the classics is the jest about the Rev. James Boyer, the terror
of Christ's Hospital: "It was lucky the cherubim who took him to Heaven
were nothing but wings and faces, or he would infallibly have flogged
them by the way."[6]
But Francis was neither cheerful, nor mock-heroic, like Lafcadio Hearn,
whose "The boy stood on the bloody floor where many oft had stood" was
conned by his class-mates at Ushaw. Nor did a sense of the grotesque
assuage the sense of injury, as in the Daumier drawing of a small boy's
agonised contortions under the stroke of a wooden spoon upon the palm
of the hand. He did not join his past school-mates in the brave bursts
and claps of laughter and winking silences that I have known break in
upon the narration of ancient floggings. Says Lamb, in describing Mr.
Bird's blister-raising ferule, "The idea of a rod is accompanied with
something of the ludicrous": with Francis's school-mates it provokes a
gaiety almost beyond the requirements of priestly light-heartedness. I
am reluctant and ashamed to be less brave on the poet's behalf--to be
out of the joke; and yet I find it difficult to put a better face on
it. To remember Thompson's own extreme gentleness is to be intolerant
of a small but over-early injury.
Being no observer, Francis failed to find the friends he might
have found at Ushaw. Vernon Blackburn was his friend, but not till
after-life. Henry Patmore, son of the poet, in a class above him, was
as little known to him as he to Henry Patmore. Those who remember
Francis as a shy and unusual boy, remember Henry Patmore--"Skinny"
Patmore--in much the same terms. These two unusual boys had no more
than the acquaintance of sight that is common in a school of over
three hundred strong. Another schoolfellow was Mr. Augustine Watts,
who married Gertrude Patmore, Henry's sister. It was from Ushaw, where
he went in 1870 (Thompson's year), that Henry Patmore wrote to his
step-mother:--
"I will begin by telling you I am very happy. I have
been much happier during these last two or three months
than ever before. . . . My bump of poetry is developing
rapidly. For now poetry seems to me to be the noblest
and greatest thing, after religion, on earth. . . . But
what I mean by the development of my poetic bump is
that I can now see the poetry in Milton, Wordsworth,
Papa, and Dante as I never could till quite lately; and
I really think that being able to enjoy poetry is a new
source of happiness added to my life."
At Ushaw, then, were two readers in the conspiracy of spacious song.
But Francis wrote no tidings of happiness home. Of schoolboys in
general Henry Patmore wrote, and, in writing, disproved his belief:--
"It is quite sickening, after reading the 'Apologia,'
to turn to those around me and to myself, and see how
very frivolous and aimless and selfish our lives are;
how we go on living from day to day for the day, as if
we were animals put here to make the best of our time,
and then 'go off the hooks' to make way for others. Of
course, grown-up people often live for God, but I think
nearly all my 'compeers' here (myself included) are
animals."
Paddy Hearn (referred to before)--the Lafcadio of later life--was an
older schoolfellow. College can be all things to all boys; some may
find there a genial scene and cordial entertainment; others unfriendly
and frightening surroundings. The case of Lafcadio Hearn, who arrived
in Ushaw in 1863, a boy of thirteen, is not comparable to Thompson's,
for Hearn mixed a strong rebelliousness with his nervousness; and
he was neither unhappy nor unpopular, although peculiar, and even
"undesirable" from the principal's point of view. Sent there, like
Thompson, that he might discover if his inclination lay in the
direction of the priesthood, like Thompson he drifted, after Ushaw, to
London, and suffered there. The circumstances are strangely like those
of Francis's case. But the invitation of the road and sea maintained
Lafcadio's spirits. He endured his poverty mostly near the docks: "When
the city roars around you, and your heart is full of the bitterness
of the struggle for life, there comes to you at long intervals in the
dingy garret or the crowded street some memory of white breakers and
vast stretches of wrinkled sand, and far fluttering breezes that seem
to whisper 'come.'" Thereafter the scope of his thought and action,
with murder-case reporting in New York, with his unconfined sympathies
for rebel blood, and contempt for "Anglo-Saxon prudery," might most
easily be described as the opposite of Thompson's. A closer observer
marks something more remarkable than dissimilarity. His Japanese
biographer says of him that "he laughed with the flowers and the
birds, and cried with the dying trees"--words which have an accidental
likeness to "Heaven and I wept together."
Hearn's own words, in a letter to Krehbeil, the musician, show a much
more deeply-rooted likeness. He says:--
"What you say about the disinclination to work for
years upon a theme for pure love's sake touches me,
because I have felt that despair so long and so often.
And yet I believe that all the world's art-work--all
that is eternal--was thus wrought. And I also believe
that no work made perfect for the pure love of art
can perish, save by strange and rare accident. Yet
the hardest of all sacrifices for the artist is this
sacrifice to art, this trampling of self underfoot. It
is the supreme test for admission into the ranks of
the eternal priests. It is the bitter and fruitless
sacrifice which the artist's soul is bound to make.
But without the sacrifice, can we hope for the grace
of heaven? What is the reward? the consciousness of
inspiration only? I think art gives a new faith. I
think, all jesting aside, that could I create something
I felt to be sublime, I should feel also that the
Unknowable had selected me for a mouthpiece, for a
medium of utterance, in the holy cycling of its eternal
purpose, and I should know the pride of the prophet
that has seen the face of God."
Thompson's "The conduit running wine of song" exactly matches the last
of Hearn's sentences. Is that the Ushaw spirit? Probably Hearn was too
little in touch with the school to have taken away such aspirations,
even had they been in the air. But it is noteworthy that when the time
came for him to choose a school for his own son he wrote:--
"What shall I do with him? I am beginning to think that
really much of the ecclesiastical education (bad and
cruel as I used to imagine it) is founded on the best
experience of man under civilisation; and I understand
lots of things I used to think superstitious bosh, and
now think solid wisdom."
When an enthusiastic critic said, at the time Thompson's first book was
published, that Ushaw would be chiefly remembered in the future for her
connexion with the poet, Ushaw smiled, counting the host of canons of
the Church whom she had reared, her bishops, her archbishops, and her
cardinals. Ushaw remembered, too, Cardinal Wiseman's saying: "Ushaw's
sons are known not by words, but by deeds." But a few college friends
did their best to keep Francis in sight during his early years in
London, and if they did not help him, it was because he effectively hid
himself among his adversities. It would have been more pain to brook
the conditions of assistance, more impossible to follow a régime of
rescue than to shiver unobserved on the Embankment, or starve, with no
invitation or punctuality to observe save the long and silent appeals
of an empty stomach, in the Strand. He had privacies to keep intact,
aloofness that made a law to him, and these he never abused, even in
a doss-house. "What right have you to ask me that question?" he said
to the gentleman who accosted him in the street, asking him if he were
saved. He had then been fifteen nights upon the streets, a torture
insufficient to curb the spirit.
Dr. Carroll, Bishop of Shrewsbury, Fr. Adam Wilkinson, and Dr. Mann
were of the few who remembered or sought to renew acquaintance. It is
said that Bishop Carroll, when he came to London, would search "with
unaccustomed glance" the ranks of the sandwich-men for his face. And
when later the poet had a friend, and was to be found at his house,
Bishop Carroll sought him there in London, and at Pantasaph from time
to time, and had the poet, if not in his diocese, almost within his
fold. We have Dr. Mann's record of a visit to London and a meal with
Francis at Palace Court, but I know of no other meeting with a college
friend. Thompson had never been a schoolboy, nor did he grow into an
"old boy."
Applicable to him are the words of Hawthorne, of which he was
fond:--"Lingering always so near his childhood, he had sympathies with
children, and kept his heart the fresher thereby like a reservoir into
which rivulets are flowing, not far from the fountain-head."
The distractions of his imagination were the most pertinent to his
needs at Ushaw. Some scraps from his class compositions and his
note-books do not sufficiently illustrate the sway that literature
already held in his heart and brain, for they are but exercises in
expression, stiff words on parade, rather than the natural swinging
publication of his thoughts. A writer in the Ushaw magazine lends us
some knowledge of his literary and other recreations:--
"He never fretted his hour upon the stage when our
annual 'Sem play' delighted the senior house. A pity
that was, for such an appearance might have helped to
remove some of the awkward shyness which characterised
him to the end. His recreation, as a rule, did not
assume a vigorous form, though in the racquet houses
he showed that at hand-ball he attained a proficiency
above the average. At 'cat' his services were at times
enlisted to make up the full complement of players.
But here his muse was his undoing, for a ball sharply
sent out in his direction would find him absent. He
does not therefore figure as a party-game player. He
seldom handled a bat or trundled a ball. Most of his
leisure hours were spent in our small reading-room
amongst the shades of dead and gone authors. It says
a good deal for his perseverance and patience that
he sometimes read and wrote when all around him was
strife and turmoil of miniature battle. Thompson would
be there, and pause was given to his dreamings; he was
rudely brought down from his own peculiar empyrean.
After the vacation of 1874 he automatically changes
his surroundings, going from Seminary to College.
The master who had then care of him exerted much
influence over him; he was a man of reading and a rare
discriminating taste. In Grammar Francis had a still
larger selection of books, and many of his beloved
poets were well represented."
Books that were not school-books compelled his attention in other
places and at other times. It is remembered that
"He would deliberately take up his seat opposite Mr. F.
S., who presided at the cross-table near the door, and,
after erecting a pile of books in front of him, would
devote his whole soul to a volume of poetry. But Mr.
F. S. was not of a restless, suspicious nature. Or it
may be that he saw out of his spectacles more than we
supposed, and of set purpose did not interfere with the
broodings of genius."
Glimpses of Francis in the social life of the college are few. He was
not so social but that somebody else sang his songs for him. Dr. Mann
describes a picnic:--
[Illustration: St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw
_in Francis Thompson's time_]
"After regaling ourselves at Cornsay with tea, coffee,
and toast, we did not leave the board till the old
songs had been sung. I remember only the refrain. The
first verse told of the virtues of our President (Dr.
Tate), the second of the Vice (Dr. Gillow), the third
of the Procurator (Mr. Croskell), and so on, each verse
ending with--
Fill up your glass, here's to the ass
Who fancies his coffee is wine in a glass."
Somebody else, too, recited his prose for him, declaiming "The Storming
of the Bridge of Lodi" amid applause in the Hall on a College-Speaking
Day. It is the fourteen year essay of a schoolboy, and a fair specimen
of the stuff that put him head of his English class. The piece took
the ears of his schoolfellows; it was recited by his particular class
friend in the school debating-room, and thence, having been heard
by the class-master of elocution, was promoted to the Hall, in the
company of passages from Macaulay and Gibbon.[7] For such warlike
enterprises in prose and a certain occasional straightening of the back
and assumption of soldierly bearing the name of "Tommy" was sometimes
abandoned for "l'homme militaire."
Another witness, in the _Ushaw Magazine_ of March 1894, remembers
Francis on one occasion himself speaking his composition, but it is
said by some that he never put such a trial upon his courage:--
"During his later years at College his literary
gifts were well known. He declaimed some of his own
compositions--written in a clear, rich, vigorous
prose--at the public exhibitions in the Hall for the
'speaking playday.' His verse we never heard, except a
skit in Latin rhyme, bidding farewell to work before
the vacation, and beginning:
Nunc relinquemus in oblivium
Cæsarem et Titum Livium.
We have, however, a vivid recollection of him as he was
accustomed to come into the Reading-room, on the long
dim half-playday afternoons, with a thick manuscript
book under his arm, and there sit reading and copying
poetry, nervously running one hand through his hair."
While Dr. Whiteside (later Archbishop of Liverpool) was Minor
Professor at the College he had charge of Francis's dormitory. One
night after lights were out he heard the sound of strictly forbidden
talk. Searching for the offender, he found Francis reciting Latin
poetry in his sleep. The Minor Professor awakened him and told him he
was disturbing the dormitory. Ten minutes later he heard more noise,
and found Francis, again asleep, reciting Greek poetry! I doubt if
Francis's Greek, save in dream or anecdote, was fluent enough to waken
his fellows.
The habit of humorous verse was already on him, and argues that he was
light-hearted at school, even as the note-books, filled at the time
of his greatest depression in after years, argue that he never wholly
lacked relief. His joke showed his independence; he was not under the
thumb of his distresses. He could put them aside, or accept, or forget,
or forbid, or do to them whatever may have been the armouring process.
Of all the essays, in verse or prose, of his Ushaw days, the verses
aimed at an invalid master had caught out of the future the most
characteristic note. I can hear him say his "Lamente Forre Stephanon"
in the deep tremulous voice that he affected for reading, and it hardly
comes amiss from the mature tongue:--
Come listen to mie roundelaie,
Come droppe the brinie tear with me.
Forre Stephanon is gone awaye,
And long away perchance wille be!
Our friendde hee is sicke,
Gone to takke physicke,
Al in the infirmarie.
Swart was hys dresse as the blacke, blacke nyghte
Whenne the moon dothe not lyghte uppe the waye,
And hys voice was hoarse as the gruffe Northe winde
Whenne he swirleth the snowe awaye.
Our friendde hee is sicke,
Gone to takke physicke,
Al in the infirmarie.
Eyn hee hadde lyke to a hawke,
Soothe I saye, so sharpe was hee
That hee e'en mought see you talke
Whenne you talkynge did not bee.
Our friendde hee is sick,
Gone to takke physicke,
Al in the infirmarie.
We ne'er schalle see hys lyke agenne,
We ne'er agenne hys lyke schalle see,
Searche amonge al Englyshe menne,
You ne'er will fynde the lyke of hee.
Our friendde hee is sicke,
Gone to takke physicke,
Al in the infirmarie.
A copy of the verses fell into the hands of Stephanon, without ill
effects; his mighty laugh is still raised when he remembers them. The
resolve to be a poet is in some of the college verses; the word has not
been made poetry, but the spirit is willing and anxious. "Yet, my Soul,
we have a treasure not the banded world can take," was the stuff to
fill the manuscript book he clutched in recreation hours:--
Think, my Soul, how we were happy with it in the days of yore,
When upon the golden mountains we saw throned the mighty Sun,
When the gracious Moon at night-time taught us deep and mystic lore,
And the holy, wise old forests spoke to us and us alone.
Yes, I loved them! And not least I loved to look on Ocean's face,
When he lay in peace sublime and evening's shades were stealing on,
When his child, the King of Light, from Heaven stooped to his embrace,
And his locks were tangled with the golden tresses of the Sun.
And much more; in that last he is feeling his way toward the line, to
be written in maturity, "Tangle the tresses of a phantom wind." He was
already on nodding terms with nodding laburnum:--
The laden laburnum stoops
In clusters gold as thy hair,
The maiden lily droops
The fairest where all are fair,
The thick-massed fuchsias show
In red and in white--thy hue!
In a pendant cloud they spread and glow
Of crimson, and white, and blue,
In hanging showers they droop their flowers
Of crimson and white, and crimson and blue.
Pan was not yet done to death, nor did Francis know that he, of all
poets, would most searchingly chase the god from his lairs, and give
over the forests of poetry to Him of the Rood, proving
the Crucifix may be
Carven from the laurel-tree.
The schoolboy's invocation is:--
And thou, O Pan, whose dwelling must be sought
Deep in some vast grown forest, where the trees
Are wet with cold large dew drops in the breeze,
Where hangs dark moss in rain-steeped tresses long,
Aid me, O aid, to body forth in song
A scene as fair as thou in all thy days
Hast gazed upon, or ever yet wilt gaze.
Of Ushaw walks, another recreation fit for Francis, a companion
writes: "In all weathers we tramped the roads, and it must have been
at these times (for after he left college he saw little of meadows and
hedgerows), that he unconsciously imbibed his wonderful knowledge of
the flowers of the field."
It was sowing-time and the soil rich, but an observer, in the exact
sense, Francis never was. He would make any layman appear a botanist
with easy questions about the commonplaces of the hedges, and a
flowered dinner-table in London always kept him wondering, fork in
air, as to kinds and names. On the other hand, he was essentially an
observer: let him see but one sunset and the daily mystery of that
going down would companion him for a life-time; let him see but one
daisy, and all his paths would be strewn with white and gold. He had
the inner eye, which when it lifts heavy lashes lets in immutable
memories.
And of Religion: more pressing than the invitation to the northern road
would be the invitation to Ushaw's Chapel. His lessons in ceremonial
were not the least he was taught. Eton could have given him his Latin,
but his Liturgy was more important. His singing-gown was a vestment,
and he learnt its fashioning at college. He learnt the hymns of the
Church and became her hymn-writer; he learnt his way in the missal, and
came to write his meditation in "The Hound of Heaven." A priest, who
was his schoolfellow, writes:
"No Ushaw man need be told how eagerly all, both young
and old, hailed the coming of the 1st of May. For that
day, in the Seminary, was erected a colossal altar at
the end of the ambulacrum nearest the belfry, fitted
and adorned by loving zeal. Before this, after solemn
procession from St. Aloysius', with lighted tapers, all
assembled, Professors and students, and sang a Marian
hymn. In the College no less solemnity was observed.
At a quarter past nine the whole house, from President
downwards, assembled in the ante-chapel before our
favourite statue. A hymn, selected and practised with
great care, was sung in alternate verses by the choir
in harmony, and the whole house in unison. 'Dignare me
laudare, te, Virgo Sacrata,' was intoned by the Cantor;
'Da mihi virtutem contra hostes tuos' thundered back
the whole congregation; and the priest, robed already
for Benediction, sang the prayer 'Concede, misericors
Deus,' etc. Singing Our Lady's _Magnificat_, we filed
into St. Cuthbert's, and then, as in the Seminary,
Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament followed. For
thirty-one days, excepting Sundays and holy days, this
inspiring ceremonial took place--its memory can never
be effaced."
Although it is somewhere affirmed that Francis betrayed no singular
piety, we know how devout was his young heart. It was intended for him
that he should enter the Church, and he studied for the priesthood.
Letters written to his parents by those who had him under observation
go to make the history of the case; on September 6, 1871, Father
Yatlock wrote:--
"I am sure, dear Mrs. Thompson, that it will be a
pleasure and a consolation to you and Dr. Thompson that
Frank gives the greatest satisfaction in every way; and
I sincerely trust, as you said the other evening, that
he will become one day a good and holy priest."
But at the last his ghostly advisers found him unfitted. They held his
absent-mindedness to be too grave a disability, and in his nineteenth
year he was advised to relinquish all idea of the priesthood. In June
1877 the President wrote a letter proving the good will, a quality that
may easily collapse before a silent, strange, evasive child, which was
felt for Francis.
The President wrote:--
"With regard to Frank, I can well appreciate the
regret and disappointment which you and his mother
must feel. Frank has always been a great favourite of
mine ever since he came as a child to the Seminary. He
has always been a remarkably docile and obedient boy,
and certainly one of the cleverest boys in his class.
Still, his strong, nervous timidity has increased
to such an extent that I have been most reluctantly
compelled to concur in the opinion of his Director
and others that it is not the holy will of God that
he should go on for the Priesthood. It is only after
much thought, and after some long and confidential
conversations with Frank himself, that I have come to
this conclusion: and most unwillingly, for I feel, as I
said, a very strong regard and affection for your boy.
I earnestly pray God to bless him, and to enable you to
bear for His sake the disappointment this has caused. I
quite agree with you in thinking that it is quite time
that he should begin to prepare for some other career.
If he can shake off a natural _indolence_ which has
always been an obstacle with him, he has ability to
succeed in any career."
Indolence is one name of many for the abstraction of Francis's mind
and the inactivities of his body. He was not of the stuff to "break
ice in his basin by candlelight," and no doves fluttered against his
lodging window to wake him in summer, but he was not indolent in the
struggle against indolence. Not a life-time of mornings spent in bed
killed the desire to be up and doing. In the trembling hand of his last
months he wrote out in big capitals on pages torn from exercise books
such texts as were calculated to frighten him into his clothes. "Thou
wilt not lie a-bed when the last trump blows"; "Thy sleep with the
worms will be long enough," and so on. They were ineffectual. His was
a long series of broken trysts--trysts with the sunrise, trysts with
Sunday mass, obligatory but impossible; trysts with friends. Whether
it was indolence or, as he explained it, an insurmountable series of
detaining accidents, it is certain that he, captain of his soul, was
not captain of his hours. They played him false at every stroke of the
clock, mutinied with such cunning that he would keep an appointment in
all good faith six hours after it was past. Dismayed, he would emerge
from his room upon a household preparing for dinner, when he had lain
listening to sounds he thought betokened breakfast. He was always
behindhand with punctual eve, and in trouble with strict noon.
And yet there were the makings of the parish priest, or the hint of
them, in his demeanour. "Is that the Frank Thompson I quarrelled about
with my neighbouring bishop?" asked Cardinal Vaughan (then Bishop of
Salford) when many years later he heard the name of the poet from my
father; "each of us wanted him for his own diocese."
The ritual of the Church ordered his unorderly life; he was priestly
in that he preached her faith and practised her austerities.
Nature he ignored till she spoke the language of religion; and he,
though secretly much engrossed in his own spiritual welfare, was,
priest-like, audible at his prayers--or poetry. His muse was obedient
and circumspect as the voice that proclaims the rubrics. He was often
merely in Roman orders, so to say, when the critics accused him of
breaking the laws of English and common-sense. At the same time he
failed signally in the practical service of his fellows. His rhymes
were the only alms he gave; but annoyances he seemed at times to
distribute as lavishly as St. Anthony his loaves.
Having done no wrong, he bore home a disappointment for his parents.
It is no light thing to have a son, destined for the sheltered
rallying-place of the Church, thrust back into a world he had been well
rid of. Nor did his indifference as to his prospects (the disguise,
perhaps, of his own disappointment) inspire them with confidence. I
have already mentioned that it is thought by many persons well-versed
in the spiritual affairs of the family that his failure in the Seminary
was with him an acute and lasting grief.
[Illustration: _Emery Walter Ph. sc._
_Francis Thompson in 1875_]
On the other hand, he was from his childhood a prophet in his own
strange land, and it is probable that while his family were solicitous
for him to enter the Church, he recognised the justice of his
confessor's opinion. The "A.M.D.G." inscribed in his exercise books was
none the less the perfect dedication. "To the Greater Glory of God" was
already his pen's motto. He saw "all the world for cell," and he made
much of the pains he thought necessary for his poetry.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Lamb's jest was perhaps remembered when F. T. wrote: "If a boy were
let into Heaven, he would chase the little angels to pluck the feathers
out of their wings"--a justification of Boyer rather than the Boy.
[7] Prowess in English was officially reported. From Father Nowlan,
a friend of the family, to Doctor Thompson, Easter, 1872:--"You will
be anxious to hear how Frank has passed at the last examinations.
They have been very satisfactory indeed--second in Latin and first in
English. His master was speaking to me about him yesterday, and said
that his English composition was the best production from a lad of his
age which he had ever seen in this seminary. His improvement in Latin
is also remarkable, and his steady improvement in this subject will
depend in a great measure upon a cure of that absent-mindedness which
certainly, at the very outset, threatened to prove a great obstacle to
his application to study. This, I am happy to tell you, has disappeared
in a great measure, and in a little time we may be quite sure of its
entire disappearance."
To the late Monsignor Corbishly I am indebted for the following record
of the place Francis held in the compositions set three times a year:--
"In Latin he was first six times, second three times, and twice he was
third. The lowest place was 6th, except when he composed in so-called
Latin verse, when he got 23rd. His muse could not get going in a dead
language. In Greek his place ran from 2nd to 10th. In French, average
place about 8th. In English, 1st sixteen times; of his Arithmetic,
Algebra, and Geometry the less said the better. He was a good, quiet,
shy lad. Physically, a weakling: he had a halting way of walking, and
gave the impression that physical existence would be rather a struggle
for him. He did practically nothing at the games. Haec habeo quae dicam
de nostro poeta praeclarissimo."
CHAPTER III: MANCHESTER AND MEDICINE
AN awed, awkward youth, Francis had yet, before the age of eighteen,
experience enough to know how futile for him was the study of medicine.
A career in medicine, a career in anything, made no appeal to one who
saw himself a man spoiled for the world. Home from his daily lectures,
he would, not seldom, shut himself up in his room. His cloister was
solitude, and in that painful sanctuary he hid himself from success. He
made a pretence of study, and for six years was a medical student.
He had been seven years at Ushaw when he left in July 1877. The
photographs of the time show him to have arrived at the most robust
and perhaps most normal period of his life. But awaiting him at home
were the traps of personality. There the opportunity to be himself
set on foot and gave courage to all the essential peculiarities of
his character. If he had evaded at Ushaw the claims of the community,
he now evaded them much more. Although he resumed his play and
make-believe with his sisters, he was growing further and further apart
from a good understanding with any of his fellow-creatures. Holding
himself little bounden to his duties, he soon started on a career of
evasion and silence. After a pause of some more months he was examined,
and passed with distinction in Greek, for admission as a student of
medicine to Owens College. For six years he studied or attempted to
study in Manchester, making the journey from Ashton-under-Lyne under
the compulsion of the family eye. But once round the corner he was safe
from the too strict inquiry by a father never stern. The hours of
his actual attendance at lectures were comparatively few. "I hated my
scientific and medical studies, and learned them badly. Now even that
bad and reluctant knowledge has grown priceless to me," he wrote in
after life.
The Manchester of his studies had little hold of him, and keeps few
memories of him. In the wide but mean street leading to Owens College
you may, it is true, picture him making a late and lingering way to
work, or entering the cook-shops which even then had initiated him in
the consumption of bad food (but he long remembered the excellence of
one underground restaurant for modest commercial classes), or nervously
awaiting the offer of the bookseller for some volume superfluous to a
truant student's needs. The thoroughfare is so busy as to disregard
the abstracted walk and expression of an eccentric wayfarer. Francis
soon learned the art of being lonely in a multitude, and would only
occasionally perceive one of the passers who turned and looked after
him. Boys provoked to jeer at him he met to his own satisfaction,
sometimes with a complete disregard, sometimes with a threatening
show of anger. He would congratulate himself upon his tactics, not
knowing that he, a young man, was more timid and abashed than any
seven-year-old rough of the pavement. The college building, oppressive
and awesome in its arches, halls, and corridors, is difficult to
reconcile with the timidity with which Francis faced it. Your footsteps
"hullo!" at you in the passages, and must ring with self assurance or
with carelessness if they are not to echo and exaggerate your doubtful
mood. Laughter, the ungentle laughter of medical students--whither,
asked Stevenson, go all unpleasant medical students, whence come all
worthy doctors?--swings down on you or bars you from a corner that you
must needs pass. Among the sheltering cases of the deserted museum
there is more room for the would-be solitary. Silent mineralogies,
fragments, fossils, tell the poet more than the boisterous tongues of
the young men. Yorkshire delivered up to the museum a vast saurian and
other creatures of the past of whom we hear in the "Anthem of Earth."
Those were years of anything but the making of a doctor. To have
conformed so little to the style of the medical student promised
little for the expected practitioner. He would even leave his father's
reputable doorstep with untied laces, dragging their length on the
pavement past the windows of curious and critical neighbours. He did
not work, and his idleness was all unlike the idleness proper to his
class. He read poetry in the public library. One sort of idleness, an
idleness that gave business to his thoughts for all his life, took him
to the museums and galleries. In an essay of the 'nineties he remembers
"The statue which thralled my youth in a passion such
as feminine mortality was skill-less to instigate.
Nor at this let any boggle; for _she_ was a goddess.
Statue I have called her; but indeed she was a bust,
a head, a face--and who that saw that face could have
thought to regard further? She stood nameless in the
gallery of sculptural casts which she strangely deigned
to inhabit; but I have since learned that men call her
the Vatican Melpomene. Rightly stood she nameless,
for Melpomene she never was: never went words of hers
from bronzèd lyre in tragic order; never through _her_
enspelled lips moaned any syllables of woe. Rather,
with her leaf-twined locks, she seems some strayed
Bacchante, indissolubly filmed in secular reverie. The
expression which gave her divinity resistless I have
always suspected for an accident of the cast; since
in frequent engravings of her prototype I never met
any such aspect. The secret of this indecipherable
significance, I slowly discerned, lurked in the
singularly diverse set of the two corners of the
mouth; so that her profile wholly shifted its meaning
according as it was viewed from the right or left.
In one corner of her mouth the little languorous
firstling of a smile had gone to sleep; as if she had
fallen a-dream, and forgotten that it was there. The
other had drooped, as of its own listless weight, into
a something which guessed at sadness; guessed, but
so as indolent lids are easily grieved by the prick
of the slate-blue dawn. And on the full countenance
these two expressions blended to a single expression
inexpressible; as if pensiveness had played the Maenad,
and now her arms grew heavy under the cymbals. Thither
each evening, as twilight fell, I stole to meditate
and worship the baffling mysteries of her meaning: as
twilight fell, and the blank noon surceased arrest upon
her life, and in the vaguening countenance the eyes
broke out from their day-long ambuscade. Eyes of violet
blue, drowsed-amorous, which surveyed me not, but
looked ever beyond, where a spell enfixed them,
Waiting for something, not for me.
And I was content. Content; for by such tenure of
unnoticedness I knew that I held my privilege to
worship: had she beheld me, she would have denied,
have contemned my gaze. Between us, now, are years and
tears; but the years waste her not, and the tears wet
her not; neither misses she me or any man. There, I
think, she is standing yet; there, I think, she will
stand for ever: the divinity of an accident, awaiting a
divine thing impossible, which can never come to her,
and she knows this not. For I reject the vain fable
that the ambrosial creature is really an unspiritual
compound of lime, which the gross ignorant call plaster
of Paris. If Paris indeed had to do with her, it was he
of Ida. And for him, perchance, she waits."
Here already was the artist, the actor in unreal realities. Already he
had been thrice in love--with the heroines of Selous' Shakespeare, with
a doll, with a statue.
Before he knew that his lot was to be more chipped and filled with
blanks than the ladies of the Parthenon, he had set about furnishing
the gaps with complementing fragments of fancy. He was winning
consolation prizes before any races had been lost. "No youth expects
to get a heroine of romance for a mistress," he avers, but I doubt
if many youths court woodcut and wax on that account. They look for
their heroines in living replica; Francis, the artist, went to book
and toy-box. And he went walking often to the accompaniment of his
father's talk of buds, and trees, and flowers. Mr. J. Saxon Mills, his
neighbour, writes:--
"Some few may remember him when, a good many years
ago, he used to take his walks up Stalybridge Road,
and in the semi-rural outskirts of Ashton. They will
recall the quick short step, the sudden and apparently
causeless hesitation or full stop, then the old quick
pace again, the continued muttered soliloquy, the
frail and slight figure. Such was the poet during
his studentship at Owens College. An intellectual
temperament less adapted to the career of a doctor and
surgeon could not be imagined. To such a profession,
however, Frank was destined by a careful and practical
father."
Besides the public galleries, the libraries, and the roads, he had
the cricket-field. From the writing of his own and his sister's
heroes' scores upon the sands at Colwyn Bay, he and she had taken to
back-garden practice of the game. At school he had not played, but
neither had he lost his enthusiasm there. Returning from Ushaw, he
would, his sister tells me, go to a friend's garden and play for hours
by himself, and bowl for hours at the net, which meant that he had,
after each delivery, to retrieve his own ball. He was much at the
Old Trafford ground, and there he stored memories that would topple
out one over another in his talk at the end of his life. The most
historic of the matches he witnessed was that between Lancashire and
Gloucestershire in 1878. His sister remembers it, and he celebrates it
in the following poem, written in the clear but tragic light that his
devotion to the game shed upon the distant scene of whites and greens:--
It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though my own red roses there may blow;
It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.
For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro:--
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!
It is Glo'ster coming North, the irresistible,
The Shire of the Graces, long ago!
It is Gloucestershire up North, the irresistible,
And new-risen Lancashire the foe!
A Shire so young that has scarce impressed its traces,
Ah, how shall it stand before all resistless Graces?
O, little red rose, their bats are as maces
To beat thee down, this summer long ago!
This day of seventy-eight they are come up North against thee,
This day of seventy-eight, long ago!
The champion of the centuries, he cometh up against thee,
With his brethren, every one a famous foe!
The long-whiskered Doctor, that laugheth rules to scorn,
While the bowler, pitched against him, bans the day that he was born;
And G. F. with his science makes the fairest length forlorn;
They are come from the West to work thee woe!
Nor did Francis's cloistered sister forget. On reading Mr. E. V.
Lucas's criticisms on her brother's cricket verses (_Cornhill
Magazine_, 1907) she wrote to me:--"The article stirred up many old
memories, thank God. I can remember seven names out of the Lancashire
XI of that match." For thirty years she remembered the seven jolly
cricketers, with the seven joyful mysteries of the Rosary, to keep her
young.
Francis in 1900 could draw up the whole of the Lancs. XI and name eight
of the other XI, with a guess at a ninth man. Mr. E. V. Lucas knows all
about the match. "It was an historic contest, for the two counties had
never met before, and was played on July 25, 26, 27, 1878, when the
poet was eighteen. The fame of the Graces was such that 16,000 people
were present on the Saturday, the third day--of whom, by the way, 2000
did not pay but took the ground by storm. The result was a draw a
little in Lancashire's favour. It was eminently Hornby's and Barlow's
match. In the first innings the amateur made only five, but Barlow went
right through it, his wicket falling last for 40. In the second innings
Hornby was at his best, making with incredible dash 100 out of 156
while he was in, Barlow supporting him while he made eighty of them.
The note-book in which these verses are written contains numberless
variations upon several of the lines. 'O my Hornby and my Barlow long
ago!' becomes in one case 'O my Monkey and Stone-Waller long ago!'
Monkey was, of course, Mr. Hornby's nickname. 'First he runs you out of
breath,' said the professional, possibly Barlow himself, 'then he runs
you out, and then he gives you a sovereign!' A brave summary!"
Other Lancashire heroes and other worship were here recorded:--
Sons, who have sucked stern nature forth
From the milk of our firm-breasted north!
Stubborn and stark, in whatever field,
Stand, Sons of the Red Rose, who may not yield!
Gone is Pattison's lovely style,
Not the name of him lingers awhile.
O Lancashire Red Rose, O Lancashire Red Rose!
The men who fostered thee, no man knows.
Many bow to thy present shows,
But greater far have I seen thee, my Rose!
Thy batting Steels, D. G., H. B.,
Dost thou forget? And him, A. G.,
Bat superb, of slows the prince,
Father of all slow bowlers since?
Yet, though Sugg, Eccles, Ward, Tyldesley play
The part of a great, a vanished day,
By this may ye know, and long may ye know,
Our Rose; it is greatest when hope is low.
The Lancashire Red Rose, O the Lancashire Red Rose!
We love the hue on her cheek that shows:
And it never shall blanch, come the world as foes,
For dipt in our hearts is the Lancashire Red Rose!
Vernon Royle, says the sister, was one of them; nor did the brother
forget him. I quote from his review of Ranjitsinhji's _Jubilee Book of
Cricket_ (_The Academy_, September 4, 1897):--
"'From what one hears,' Prince Ranjitsinhji says,
'Vernon Royle must have been a magnificent fielder.' He
was. A ball for which hardly another cover-point would
think of trying he flashed upon, and with a single
action stopped it and returned it to the wicket. So
placed that only a single stump was visible to him,
he would throw that down with unfailing accuracy,
and without the slightest pause for aim. One of the
members of the Australian team in Royle's era, playing
against Lancashire, shaped to start for a hit wide
of cover-point. 'No, no!' cried his partner, 'the
policeman is there!' There were no short runs anywhere
in the neighbourhood of Royle. He simply terrorised the
batsmen. In addition to his swiftness and sureness, his
style was a miracle of grace. Slender and symmetrical,
he moved with the lightness of a young roe, the
flexuous elegance of a leopard. . . . To be a fielder like
Vernon Royle is as much worth any youth's endeavours
as to be a batsman like Ranjitsinhji or a bowler like
Richardson."
The cricket verses are all lamentations for the dead. I doubt if he
was ever so happy as when mourning his heroes. To decorate his boyish
memories of the departed with rhymed requiems and mature rhythms was
one of his few luxuries. The note-books were full of fragments:--
He that flashed from wicket to wicket
Like flash of a lighted powder-train;
Where is that thunderbolt of cricket?
And where are the peers of Charlemain?
With this, with this, for an undersong,--
"But where are the peers of Charlemain?"
He had projects beyond cricket verses and reviewing. At a late London
period he proposed to write his cricket memories, gravely justifying
his connoisseurship and his qualifications:--
"For several years, living within distance of the O. T.
Ground, where successively played each year the chief
cricketers of England, where the chief cricketers of
Australia played in their periodic visits, and where
one of the three Australian test-matches was latterly
decided, I saw all the great cricketers of that day,
and it was a very rich day. Naturally, I have a few
things to say about cricket now and then. . . . Thousands
of others have the same basis, but it happens that
I have what they have not--some trained faculty of
expression. The few remarks that follow carefully avoid
the province of purely technical criticism, which is
rightly engrossed by those who are themselves great
cricketers. The only technical criticism worth having
in poetry is that of poets, and the same is true of
cricket."
Of the true historian of the game he writes: "Nyren--at once the
Herodotus and Homer of cricket--an epic writer if ever there was one."
His Lancastrian ardour had suffered no diminution when, after an
absence from the north and from cricket fields of twenty years, he and
I talked cricket. There was a well-established understanding between us
that he was for the red rose, I for the white. It was make-believe, but
served during many seasons and in many letters. More chivalrous than a
knight of Arthur in rivalry he would write thus:--
"Well done, Yorkshire! your county is coming up hand
over hand I see by the placards. I said how it would
be, so I am not surprised. Our tail is not plucky. Love
to all, dear Ev.
F.T."
That was about a match lost by Lancashire in 1905. The year before,
Thompson's fellow-lodgers, with an eye to comedy as much as to cricket,
had persuaded him to meet them at a cricket-net near Wormwood Scrubbs.
Of seven men and boys who met there, six had made some compromise with
the conventional costume of the game; they could boast a flannelled
leg, soft collar, or at least a stud unfastened in deference to a
splendid sun; and they were active, and their shadows on the green
quite playful. But he was dingy from boot laces to hat band. Timorously
excited and wonderfully intent upon all the preparations, he stiffly
waited his turn to bat. When it came he remembered he had no pads on
and stayed to strap them with fingers so weak that they were hurt by
the buckle with which they fumbled. And then, supremely grave, he
batted for the first time since he had faced his sister's bowling on
the sands of Colwyn Bay.
I was never at Lord's or the Oval with him, in spite of many plans,
and he himself passed the turnstile on very few occasions. But he was
always thinking of the cricket he would see, and always for some good
reason postponing the day, as for instance in a note written in 1905:--
"I did not go to Lord's. Could not get there before
lunch; and getting a paper at Baker Street saw
Lancashire had collapsed and Middlesex were in again.
So turned back without getting my ticket--luckily kept
from another disappointing day."
Mr. E. V. Lucas has written of the incongruity of Thompson's appearance
and his enthusiasm:--
"If ever a figure seemed to say, 'Take me anywhere in
the world so long as it is not to a cricket match,'
that figure was Francis Thompson's. And his eye
supported it. His eye had no brightness: it swung
laboriously upon its object; whereas the enthusiasts
of St. John's Wood dart their glances like birds. But
Francis Thompson was born to baffle the glib inference."
It was his unpromising figure that, making its way late at night from
Granville Place to Brondesbury, would pass through St. John's Wood and
be stirred with thoughts of the game. Had his mutterings reached the
ear of the policeman on the Lord's beat, it would have been known that
they were not always so tragically engendered as his mien suggested.
The following lines he wrote out for me and posted in the early hours
after such a journey:--
The little Red Rose shall be pale at last.
What made it red but the June Wind's sigh?
And Brearley's ball that he bowls so fast?
It shall sink in the dust of the late July!
The pride of the North shall droop at last;
What made her proud but the Tyl-des-lie?
An Austral ball shall be bowled full fast,
And baffle his bat and pass it by.
The Rose once wounded shall snap at last.
_The Rose long bleeding it shall not die._
This song is secret. Mine ear it passed
In a wind from the field of Le-bone-Marie.
At the end of two years at Owens College he went to London for the
first time, staying with his cousin, Mr. May, in Tregunter Road,
Fulham.[8] The trials of examination were partly compensated for by a
visit to the opera.
In 1879 Francis fell ill, and did not recover until after a long
bout of fever. He looks stricken and thin in photographs taken at
his recovery, and it is probably at this time that he first tasted
laudanum. It was at this time too, during his early courses at Owens
College, that Mrs. Thompson, without any known cause or purpose, gave
her son a copy of _The Confessions of an English Opium Eater_.[9]
It was a last gift, for she died December 19, 1880. Apart from the
immediate consequences of this momentous introduction, fraught with
suggestions and sympathies for which there was a gaping readiness
in the young man, it greatly serves in the understanding of the
opium-eater in general, of the Manchester opium-eater in particular,
and of Francis Thompson, to make or renew acquaintance with de Quincey.
Indeed if there is one favour that must be asked by the biographer of
Francis Thompson, it is that his readers should also be readers of the
_Confessions_, for, without the mighty initiation of that masterly
prose, the gateways into the strange and tortuous landscape of dreams
can hardly be forced, nor half the thickets and valleys be conquered,
of the poet's intellectual history. As a sight of the pictures of
Tintoretto would serve to make known, to one entirely ignorant of the
style, the possibilities and achievements of the Venetian School;
would serve to make known, not Titian, but the possibility of a
Titian, so the style of de Quincey, the habit of his mind, the manner
of his confessing, his concealments and sincerities, his association
of passion and idleness, his fretfulness and his habit of presaging
dole, his manner of complaining of being cold a-bed, his bulletins,
his conscious style and repetitions, serve to bring the personality
of Thompson to the memory of those who knew him and into the ken of
those who did not. For the family likeness, for the school manner,
there are passages, too, in the history of Coleridge that will be
found suggestive and explanatory. In knowing these cousins of the
habit, you come, as you cannot come by any single and uncorroborated
experience, into very convincing touch with him whom you are seeking.
If, apart from the special significance of Francis's communion with
de Quincey, these two are linked, and in them the family likeness is
apparent, what of the likeness and the linking when we find how strong
was the allegiance sworn by Francis to the spirit of de Quincey;
when we track allusions and words and mannerisms in the "Anthem of
Earth" back to the _Confessions_; when coincidence of actualities as
well as the coincidence of intellect, such as the two flights from
Manchester and the two lives in the streets of London, clashed upon the
attention of the young man who was withdrawn from the companionship of
contemporaries?
De Quincey, like Francis, had spent much time in the Manchester
library. There both made their vocabularies robust and rare from the
same Elizabethans, both fattened to the marrow the bones of their
English from Sir Thomas Browne. And both stumbled headlong down a
precipice of despondency. De Quincey has said many things on his own
behalf, in that despondency and in the recourse to opium, that may well
be said on Thompson's.
It happened as if in giving Francis the _Confessions_ Mrs. Thompson
had found for him a guardian, a spokesman, as if she had borne to him
an elder brother. For Francis's feeling for de Quincey soon came to
be that of a younger for an elder brother who has braved a hazardous
road, shown the way, conquered, and left it strewn with consolations
and palliations. From de Quincey he received the passport, the royal
introduction set forth in Sir Walter Raleigh-like language ringing with
at least the assurance of its own stateliness and power:--
"O just, subtle, and all-conquering opium! that to the
hearts of rich and poor alike, for the wounds that will
never heal and for the pangs of grief that 'tempt the
spirit to rebel,' bringest an assuaging balm:--eloquent
opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the
purposes of wrath, pleadest effectually for relenting
pity, and through one night's heavenly sleep callest
back to the guilty man the visions of his infancy, and
hands washed pure from blood;--O just and righteous
opium! that to the chancery of dreams summonest for
the triumphs of despairing innocence false witnesses,
confoundest perjury, and dost reverse the sentences
of unrighteous judges; then buildest upon the bosom
of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the
brain, cities and temples, beyond the art of Phidias
and Praxiteles--beyond the splendours of Babylon and
Hekatòmpylos; and, 'from the anarchy of dreaming sleep'
cullest into sunny light the faces of long-buried
beauties, and the blessed household countenances,
cleansed from the 'dishonours of the grave.' Thou only
givest those gifts to man; and thou hast the keys to
Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty opium!"
Opium indeed was in the air of Manchester, the cotton-spinners being
much addicted to its use. And it called aloud to Francis in these
words of de Quincey. Damnable things become reasonable or tolerable in
a city. It harbours such a multitude of distresses, such a conflict
of right and wrong--the purposes of nature stand confused, instincts
go haltingly along the streets, conscience and reasonings are stunned
between stone walls. In one thing, then, did Francis mishear the
edict of lawfulness. He took opium--a very pitiful and, surely, very
excusable misunderstanding. Constitutionally he was a target for the
temptation of the drug; doubly a target when set up in the mis-fitting
guise of a medical student, and sent about his work in the middle of
the city of Manchester, long, according to de Quincey, a dingy den of
opium, with every facility of access, and all the pains that were de
Quincey's excuse. He took opium at the hands of de Quincey and his
mother. That she, "giver of life, death, peace, distress," should thus
have confirmed and renewed her gifts was a strange thing to befall.
From her copy of the _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_ he learnt
a new existence at her hands. That the life that opium conserved in
him triumphed over the death that opium dealt out to him shall be part
argument of this book. On the one hand, it staved off the assaults of
tuberculosis; it gave him the wavering strength that made life just
possible for him, whether on the streets or through all those other
distresses and discomforts that it was his character deeply to resent
but not to remove by any normal courses; if it could threaten physical
degradation he was able by conquest to tower in moral and mental glory.
It made doctoring or any sober course of life even more impractical
than it was already rendered by native incapacities, and to his failure
in such careers we owe his poetry. On the other hand, it dealt with him
remorselessly as it dealt with Coleridge and all its consumers. It put
him in such constant strife with his own conscience that he had ever to
hide himself from himself, and for concealment he fled to that which
made him ashamed, until it was as if the fig-leaf were of necessity
plucked from the Tree of the Fall. It killed in him the capacity for
acknowledging those duties to his family and friends which, had his
heart not been in shackles, he would have owned with no ordinary ardour.
It is on account of a hundred passages of the _Confessions_ that the
friendship was established. What solace of companionship must Francis
have discovered when de Quincey told him, "But alas! my eye is quick to
value the logic of evil chances. Prophet of evil I ever am to myself;
forced for ever into sorrowful auguries that I have no power to hide
from my own heart, no, not through one night's solitary dreams." Here
was a boon though sorrowful companion. For here was one who could
translate his distresses into a brave art; one who could extract
good writing out of his disabilities. Doubtless it was he who first
showed to Francis the profitableness of bitter experiences, and that,
if gallant prose might come of weakness, poetry might be sown in the
fields of failure, and the crown of thorns be turned to the chaplet of
laurel. As it serves us in following the friendship that Francis had
imagined for himself, a passage in which no immediate relation to him
can be traced may perhaps be pardoned on this page. It is necessary
inasmuch as it shows the equal ground trodden by the two men; they were
going the same road, the stride of their thoughts was equal. It occurs
in the part of the _Confessions_ telling of the eve of de Quincey's
flight from school. Evening prayers are being said, and with nerves
highly strung by the responsibilities of the morrow there comes to de
Quincey the higher meanings and motives of the school devotions. He
feels how "the marvellous magnetism of Christianity" has gathered into
her service the wonders of nature, and builded her temple with the
bricks of Creation:--
"Flowers, for example, that are so pathetic in their
beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their colouring
as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of
years been the heritage of children--honoured as the
jewellery of God only by _them_--when suddenly the
voice of Christianity, countersigning the voice of
infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the
Hebrew throne, although founded by God Himself, and
pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed
like one of these. Winds again, hurricanes, the eternal
breathings, soft or loud, of Æolian power, wherefore
had they, raving or sleeping, escaped all moral arrest
and detention? Simply because vain it were to offer
a nest for the reception of some new moral birth
whilst no religion is yet moving amongst men that can
furnish such a birth. Vain is the image that should
illustrate a heavenly sentiment, if the sentiment is
yet unborn. Then, first, when it had become necessary
to the purposes of a spiritual religion that the spirit
of man, as the fountain of all religion, should in
some commensurate reflex image have its grandeur and
its mysteriousness emblazoned, suddenly the pomp and
mysterious paths of winds and tempests, blowing whither
they list, and from what fountains no man knows, are
cited from darkness and neglect, to give and to receive
reciprocally an impassioned glorification, where the
lower mystery enshrines and illustrates the higher.
Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what
is _that_? It is the sun going to his rest. Call for
the grandest of all human sentiments, what is _that_?
It is that man should forget his anger before he lies
down to sleep. And these two grandeurs, the mighty
sentiment and the mighty spectacle, are by Christianity
married together."
Is that, then, a Manchester school of thought, or no more than an
accident? These two men, singularly conscious of nature's liturgy, one
of whom wrote this passage, and the other of "pontifical death," had
both been forced to dodge the cotton warehouses that they might see
their sunsets; both had to fly from the normal liturgy of life and be
estranged from themselves and their fellow-creatures by those qualities
and sensitivenesses of the intellect which best enabled them to see in
themselves and in their fellow-men the symbols and instruments of the
Almighty.
Very like de Quincey's repudiation of guilt would have been Francis's:--
"Infirmity and misery do not, of necessity, imply
guilt. They approach, or recede from, the shades of
that dark alliance in proportion of the probable
motives and prospects of the offender, and to the
palliations, known or secret, of the offence; in
proportion as the temptations to it were potent from
the first, and as the resistance to it, in act or in
effort, were earnest to the last."
Through what complication of persuasion by weakness and pain, impulse
and even reason, the other Manchester boy passed may be guessed at
through the more palpable screen of de Quincey's prose. De Quincey
published his offences and defences, prosecuted, summed up, and
reported in his own case; and it was upon his ruling that Francis built
up his own subtler arguments, advanced and judged _in camera_.
Unlike de Quincey, he had no burning desire to justify himself; his
own private excuse he had no desire to strengthen with the written and
published word, or by seeking the corroborating content of others. He
was consistently silent and secret on the point, and, if his silence
did not avail to hide his secret, he was still silent in the manner
of the lover who stole a kiss in the "Angel in the House": we knew
that he knew we knew about his drug. His pleading was not before man's
tribunal, but before the higher courts of conscience and of poetry.
During his first experiences of the opium he had not the consolatory
knowledge of his genius, for it was only in later years when he was
delivered of his poetry and beheld it emerge unmarred by his former
surrender to the drug, that he found peace of mind.
De Quincey, while he averred that the object of his confessions "was
to emblazon the power of opium--not over bodily disease and pain, but
over the grander and more shadowy world of dreams," did nevertheless
owe his initial experience of the drug to the prompting and searching
of frantic toothache. Nor was his object merely an emblazoning. On one
page it is denunciation of an intolerable burden--the "accursed chain";
on another his motive seemed to him to be to give to opium-eaters
the consolation and encouragement of the knowledge that the habit may
be put off, "without greater suffering than an ordinary resolution
may support, and by a pretty rapid course of descent." He sets up his
admirable argument in the midst of contradictions: he is positive
of his own attitude even while he does not know which way to face,
whether towards dreams, or towards the harsher fields of actuality.
Under the generalship of his prose his reader may be marshalled into
toleration and acceptance, or sent hurrying away from the contemplation
of a dreadful enemy. De Quincey's two minds are apparent, too, in the
history of his case. At times he turned upon himself and mastered the
habit to which at others he was obedient, and even reverent.
How weak the prop, as weak as broken poppies; its very praises fade on
the page, like water thrown on sand, in the setting forth. De Quincey
writes that the opium-eater never finishes his work, that Coleridge's
contributions to literature were made in spite of opium, that it killed
him as a poet, that the leaving off of this--his mighty opium--creates
a new heaven and a new earth.
"Opium, the saving of my life," is one of Thompson's own most rare
allusions to it. For de Quincey he never abated his old ardour of
respect. The heat of his partisanship may be sufficiently measured
in a letter, dated 1900, in which he falls upon some critic of his
Manchester master:--
"Read the essay on D. Q.--read--read, and if you ever
meet the writer, kick him till he roar at the squeak
of a boot and snuffle at the whiff of a leather shop
for the rest of his life! Yet canst thou not kick to
the measure of his deserts, wert thou Polypheme with
earthquake on thy feet. Shall such monstrous fellows
live and publish their villainous mismeasurement of
great literature, and be hailed 'sane critics' by the
muddy clappers-on of mediocrity? I am whipped out of my
patience that I cannot call these scullions in good
print 'ass unparalleled,' but must mince and fine my
phrases to a smooth and customed censure."
Only those who know how well his mental matched his physical inability
in assault and battery can be certain of the utter artifice of this
exercise in petulance. He could be angry only when his anger was
safely out of range of giving pain. He would kick in the closet of his
note-books, but would ever be nearer kissing when his action came to
be communicated. And even in his note-books he would seldom indulge
personal spite; his unkind entries are sheathed in blanks, so that no
accident of perusal could hurt the feelings of the censured.
[Illustration: _Francis Thompson in 1877_]
It has been doubted whether he actually "sat" for his medical
examination, but considering how little bold he was among strangers
and in a strange town, it is unlikely that on this first occasion he
summoned enough courage to play truant. In all probability he was
conducted to the place of examination, but one can only conjecture his
behaviour as he was more than usually silent on his return. "I have not
passed" is all the information he vouchsafed when, some little time
after, he is supposed to have received notice of his failure. Two years
more of pretended study followed, with some real reading at home in
the evenings. It was Francis's quickness of intelligence during these
extra hours of more congenial research that enabled him to appear in
conversation with his father as one moderately well equipped in the
knowledge of medicine. But after Francis again visited London in 1882,
after four years in all of study, and again returned with the formula
of "I have not passed," his father called upon the authorities at Owens
College, and learnt that Francis's non-attendances were far in advance
of his attendances. During two more years of preparation he read less
and less at home. He would come in late in the evening, declaring
that a professor or a lecturer had taken him to give him extra
instruction, and not till some time afterwards was it discovered that
the house he visited was the home of a musician, and the instruction
that of listening to music performed upon the piano. Of music he was
extremely fond: his interest in it would be passionate or else totally
obscured when, in later years, there was music going forward in his
presence.
Calling it his chief recreation, he continued for years without it.
For Berlioz he kept the excited enthusiasm of a child, childish memory
doing the trick. He would often tell of music (Berlioz, Beethoven,
Chopin) heard in Manchester, where he attended concerts with his
mother. He himself could no more than strike a sequence of chords
upon the piano, which he would do with so much earnestness that I, as
a child, was impressed by his performance. In listening to music his
emotion was equally manifest. Standing at the piano, he would gaze at
the performer, his body wavering to and fro in tremulous pleasure; or,
as often, he would not heed at all.
It was decided that his third attempt upon the profession of medicine
should be made at Glasgow, where degrees were more easily, if less
honourably, to be obtained. But the examination, if indeed it was
actually accepted, was approached with no endeavour or even anxiety,
except on the father's part, for success. Indeed, failure must have
been very frankly courted by Francis, whose main fault was that he
had not the courage openly to dispute his father's decision in regard
to a career. Never once did he intimate that his heart was set on
poetry, although from sixteen, as he afterwards said, he studied and
practised metre; it is not unlikely that to have been told to go and
make a business of literature would have been more irksome to him than
passing the years in the evasion of medicine. His secret absorption
in his own interests was, after all, not uncomfortably circumstanced
during all these years, for it is certain that literature was a
second life to Francis which could be lived alone most happily. After
failure in Glasgow, Francis met with a severe show of impatience and
disappointment from his father. Many trials had been tolerated at
the son's hands, hundreds of pounds had been expended, and the son's
future was less secure than ever. Dr. Thompson determined on such
courses as he thought would compel Francis to some undertaking of the
responsibilities of life.
No little money had been spent on examination fees to examiners who
probably had no papers to examine; on dissecting fees which did not
once compel Francis's presence at the dissecting-table. He was already
spending money on opium.
After many leniencies, such as accepting Francis's own account of his
studies at Owens College and all his excuses for absences from home in
the evening, Dr. Thompson put Francis to such obviously uncongenial
tasks as were to be found in the establishment of a surgical instrument
maker, whom he served for two weeks only, and as the purveyor of an
encyclopædia.
At neither of these businesses did Francis succeed; it took him two
months to read the encyclopædia, and then he discarded it, unsold.
Nor was there any possibility of success. In reviewing his prospects
at this time his father warned him, among other things, that he would
have to enlist if he found no other means of support. Without a word,
Francis went, like Coleridge, for a soldier. With what hopes or
intentions it is difficult to conceive, but obviously still with that
desire of obeying, so far as he was able, his father's instructions. It
seems he did not suffer himself merely to be measured by the recruiting
examiners, but also to be marched and drilled in the attempt to expand
his chest to the necessary inches. He spoke in later years of the
weariness it was to march, and of the barrack yard, and even maintained
that his upright bearing had been learnt at that time. But as his
upright bearing is exactly the upright bearing of a brave figure (his
sister's), stiffer than the starched gear about her face and throat in
the habit and convent of her order in Manchester, it does not follow
that Francis's recruiting counts for very much. He returned from it
late one night, silent as when he returned from the examinations in
London and Glasgow. I do not think he even told the family as much as
he told my father in later years--that he was not "Private Thompson"
only because he failed to pass the army physical examination.
On the second Sunday (day of rest and the turmoil bred of rest) in
November, 1885, Francis was forced to find time for the discussion of
his prospects with his father, and with it he found a certain energy
of failure and despair. His demeanour gave rise to the notion in his
family that he was in the habit of drinking. His father taxed him
with it, but was mystified by Francis's strenuous denials; opium, not
alcohol, was the cause of his flushes. Here was yet another point of
difficulty and trial.
The next day (Monday, November 9, 1885), his sister found on her
dressing-table a note from Francis saying that he had gone to London.
It was a hopeless note; his mood was hopeless. He later described his
flight thus: "The peculiarity in my case is that I made the journey to
the Capital without hope, and with the gloomiest forebodings, in the
desperate spirit of an _enfant perdu_." But in hopelessness, as in all
his moods, he hesitated. He did not want to leave home. "To stay under
happy parental supervision, to work because I must, but to make my
delight of the exercise of the imagination" was his ambition. Parental
supervision had not prevented the shutting of his door. So closely did
he fasten it that he had never told his father of his exercises, or
his sisters, who, according to an uncle, eschewed poetry as if it were
a snare; "both have character, but both are very reserved, indeed
impenetrable." Small wonder there had been silence in the house, save
about cricket and wars. "What does one want with a tongue when one has
silence?"
For a week he lingered in Manchester, living on the proceeds of the
sale of his books and other possessions. It had been his habit to
obey the command of the drug by the disposal of his books and medical
instruments. His microscope had gone, and been replaced--no light
task for his father--and now, at the crisis, he had to go bare even
of poetry books. Ninety-five would he sell, but to the remnant of a
library he would cling with a persistence that defied even the terrific
imp of the laudanum bottle.
For a week Francis hesitated and then wrote home, dating his letter
from the Post Office, for his fare to London. It was sent, and he
made the journey. Whatever its discouragement, it must yet have been
something added to the little sum of hopefulness to leave Manchester.
London, of conjectural disaster, drew him from the Manchester of tried
and proved failure. His luggage, scanty enough in itself, was weighted
with no regrets. He was going to new possibilities. But he carried
Blake and Aeschylus in his pocket. Thus had de Quincey gone, content
with the same bodily starvation and mental food--"carrying a small
parcel with some articles of dress under my arm; a favourite English
poet in one pocket, and an odd volume, containing one-half of Canter's
_Euripides_ in the other."
Of the father and the fugitive the poet's uncle afterwards wrote to my
father:--
"He has been a great trouble and sorrow to his father
from his want of ballast. He started with every
advantage, but has come to nothing. At last he went to
London, where he seems to have led a sort of Bohemian
life. There does not appear to have been anything of
what is usually termed immorality; but he was never
to be depended on, and I fear he indulged in drink.
As his father expresses it in a letter to me this
morning, he likes to lead a dawdling, sauntering sort
of life. . . . There was nothing in his home life to
lead him to divulge himself, no encouragement and no
sympathy with his ambitions. His sisters, who might
have been of use in expounding him--if I may use such a
phrase--have so little of the poetical element in them
that they seem on principle to have eschewed all poetry
as if it were a temptation and a snare. . . . This I
believe to be the key to, and so far an excuse for,
his deceitful proceedings and his apparent callousness
and ingratitude. I wish I were in a position to help
him pecuniarily, but at present I am not. However, I
can show him sympathy and approbation. It is years
since any communication took place between us, and
in my last letter I ventured to give him some advice
as to his hypercritical tendencies, and he never
wrote to me again. So I suspect he did not relish my
animadversions."
Another Manchester letter from a close friend of his family runs:--
"To begin with, young Thompson was not brought up
amongst 'gallipots'; no son could have been more kindly
or more generously treated, and it was not until this
genius was gone utterly to the bad that his father
lost sight of him. He was most carefully educated, and
no young man has ever had a better or a kinder mother
or father. I don't think Dr. Thompson is destitute
of the poetic imagination, and I think he might have
been excused if he did not perceive at once that
poetry which differs from all which has delighted the
world for three thousand years was, of all poetry,
the most to be admired. . . . The way in which you have
compared the coming of Frank Thompson to the Messiah is
approaching the profane."
But Francis had another opinion of the poetic influence of his home;
and to see his sister and read in her eyes the new and more explicit
version of the household spirituality, is to credit his own view. His
statement that "the spirit of such poems as 'The Making of Viola'
and 'The Judgement in Heaven' is no mere mediæval imitation, but the
natural temper of my Catholic training in a simple provincial home" is
easily believed. It is not generally understood, he says, that the
"irreverence" (so called) of mediæval poetry and drama is not merely
primitive but Catholic. He quotes, as quite within his comprehension,
the remark of Miss L. that, if she saw Our Lord, the first thing she
would be impelled to do would be to put her arms about Him--a remark
prompted by a hostile comment on a Christ and St. Francis (in statuary)
with their arms about each other.
The father's own comment, when he found his son welcomed as a poet,
was: "If the lad had but told me!" Mr. J. Saxon Mills says:--
"The doctor was even more amused than gratified at
seeing his son's name suddenly coupled with those of
Shelley or Keats or Tennyson. He admitted, moreover,
that Frank's productions were quite beyond his own
comprehension, and I am not sure that the worthy doctor
regarded the greenest of poetic laurels as a fair
exchange for a thriving medical practice."
FOOTNOTES:
[8] It pleases the idle mind of the present writer to find that Francis
visited Tregunter Road when my mother, who was years later to be the
lady of "Love in Dian's Lap," was staying there, unknown to him.
[9] His uncle, Edward Healy Thompson, afterwards remembered that _The
Opium Eater_ was his favourite book at home: "We had often said his
experiences would surpass those of de Quincey."
At the same time the family noted other influences; it was a tradition
of theirs that "On the 3rd Sunday of September, 1885, Fr. Richardson
of St. Mary's, Ashton-under Lyne, delivered a sermon on 'Our Lady of
Sorrows,' which, Francis hearing, was the subject of his meditation,
and, two years later, of his poem 'The Passion of Mary.' It is thought
that he did not make any notes on the sermon in church, but in the
drawing-room at home in Stamford Street he made use that same night of
pencil and paper."
CHAPTER IV: LONDON STREETS
TO him who had during that last week fathomed the abysses of
Manchester, the "unfathomable abyss" of London was hardly more black.
It might be supposed that the city of Manchester was as good as another
in which to be destitute; poverty in modern streets is a mean and dirty
business at its best as at its worst. But in London a staggering part
is played on a great stage haunted with great presences. There is a
literary grandiloquence about the capital's rags that Manchester's do
not own: for the time it takes for the fraying of a pair of cuffs, we
may suppose, this glamour has effect. It was something to tread the
pavements of Oxford Street, something to despair, if despair one must,
where Chatterton despaired; fitting, in a poetic sense, as Francis had
discovered when he wrote "In no Strange Land," to have your Christ
walking on the dark waters of the Thames, and to rear your Jacob's
ladder from Charing Cross.
But if there is a ghostly companionship in the capital, it was
mightily empty of the real solace of friendly presences. "The only
fostering soil for genius" Lamb called the Metropolis. But Francis
did not so regard it. The writing of the first poems and prose, the
whole acceptance of a vocation, were undertaken in complete isolation.
It was a hard soil, bare as the pavement. There were no allurements
of companionship, no excitements or encouragements of example and
emulation. He knew no laughing bookseller in St. Martin's Court. A
poet, he knew no poet, save a formidable uncle, in the flesh; no
writer, save the reputed "noted authors" whom he came to serve with
slippers at a shop in Panton Street. Without friends or courage,
Francis found no better job than that of a "collector" of books. Thus
his first efforts for a livelihood in London were made with a sackful
of literature upon his shoulders, the day's "orders" of a general
bookseller. His journeys would be laborious and slowly accomplished,
and his turn in all probability the last served at the wholesale
counters where he called out the list. Unlike his fellow-collectors,
he would have an additional stock in his private pocket--his own
library--and his interest would be in this rather than in the bundle on
his back; he might bend under works on cookery, sport, Methodism, and
social reform, but Blake and Aeschylus would buoy him up.
That he found no work commensurate with his attainments is but another
item in the whole sequence of circumstances that liken his case to de
Quincey's. De Quincey tells of difficulties imagined and real that kept
him from applying to the friends of his father for assistance. Another
mode of livelihood, "that of turning any talents or knowledge that I
might possess to a lucrative use--I now feel half inclined to join my
reader in wondering why I overlooked it. As a corrector of Greek proofs
(if in no other way), I might surely have gained enough for my slender
wants. . . . But why talk of my qualifications? Qualified or not, where
could I obtain such an office? For it must not be forgotten that even
a diabolic appointment requires interest. Towards _that_ I must first
of all have an introduction to some respectable publisher; and this I
had no means of obtaining. To say the truth, however, it had never once
occurred to me to think of literary labours as a source of profit."
With arguments as lengthy as those, Francis would often expound
excellent reasons for not doing that which it had never occurred to him
to undertake. The truth was that he came to London that he might exist
and no more.
A desire of observing the town was de Quincey's excuse for his
wanderings over London. Francis made no such plea, but wandered
the same gait. Market-place and an occasional theatre; door-step
consolation and porch shelter; the absorption in the things of the
spirit and the stifling of the interruptions of material things with
opium; the momentary fears of bodily privation, succumbing to fortunate
forgetfulness and numbness, the intellectual realisation of the
awfulness of their surroundings tempered by physical indifference; and
the admixture with this same physical indifference of an extreme bodily
frailty and susceptibility to suffering--all the contradictions found
in the one man are confirmed in the other. That each was befriended by
an unfortunate girl of the streets was a continuation of the duality
of contradictions. Two outcast women were to these two outcast men the
sole ambassadors of the world's gentleness and generosity. More of
Francis's "brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing" will be set down on a
later page.
He was quick to lose his "book-collecting," slow to find other work. He
liked the Guildhall Library better than "situations," and while he had
seven shillings a week from home, he managed to be there a good deal.
He spoke of having clung to outward respectability, and told that on
the streets rags are no necessary accompaniment to destitution. But his
rags came quickly enough; within a few weeks he was below the standards
set by the employers of casual labour. He now began to learn something
of his companions, of their slang, of their ways and means. It was not
always amongst the lowest grades of the poor that he met the people
he could most dislike. He notes that the street-outcast is generally
opposed to Atheism; that he is often nameless, often kind, always
honest with his fellows ("only once did any one try to cheat me").
Generosity he noticed particularly in the readiness of beggars to pay
each other's lodgings. Once a policeman aided him, but that aid was
unexpected and unrepeated. Of the men he met at common lodging-houses,
or in whose company he slept in archways, or with whom he entered into
partnership in the business of fetching cabs or selling matches, he
names but very few: "The actor, poor Kelsall, 'Newcastle,'" is one
entry in a note-book. The murderer to whom he makes several allusions,
he disguises under the initials D. I. From one friend he had practical
lessons in the arts of confinement, so that he could say to his editor
in later years, when a review-book was lost: "You can either let me
replace it, or put me in gaol. I know how to pick oakum." But there
were some companions to disgust him: "Their conversation is impossible
of report. If you want to know it (and you are every way a gainer by
not knowing it, while you lose what can never be regained by knowing
it) go to Rabelais and his like, where you will find a very faint image
of it. Nearer you may get by reading 'Westminster Drolleries' and other
eighteenth century collections of swine-trough hoggery. For naked
bestiality you must go to the modern _bête humaine_." He learnt enough
of their slang to be amused at the unreality of language put into the
mouths of the thieves of fiction; and in any case the foulness of the
real thing is irreproducible. He learned, too, of the workhouse, of
homes of refuge; that prison is held to be no disgrace; and above all,
as month succeeded month, that death is surprisingly slow on a shilling
a day.
His bed was made according to his fortune. If he had no money, it was
the Embankment; if he had a shilling, he could choose his lodging; if
he had fourpence, he was obliged to tramp to Blackfriars. Something
of his manner of spending his money he told me: "No, Evie, you do not
spend your penny on a mug of tea. That will be gone very quickly.
You spend it, Evie, not on a mug of tea; not, I say, on a _mug_ of
tea, but on the tea itself. You buy a pennyworth and make it with the
boiling water from the common kettle in the doss-house. You get several
cups that way instead of one." It was at lodging-houses that he would
lie watching the beetles crawling on the ceiling--that was the exchange
he made for "the abashless inquisition of each star" of the nights when
he had no pennies and so no bed; and it is the image he used afterwards
in a Tom-o'-Bedlam's song:--
As a burst and blood-blown insect
Cleaves to the wall it dies on,
The smearéd sun
Doth clot upon
A heaven without horizon.[10]
In a common lodging-house he met and had talk with the man who was
supposed by the group about the fire to be a murderer uncaught. And
when it was not in a common lodging-house, it was at a Shelter or
Refuge that he would lie in one of the oblong boxes without lids,
containing a mattress and a leathern apron or coverlet, that are the
fashion, he says, in all Refuges. The time came when for a week his
only earning was sixpence got for holding a horse's head. That was
after he had made an attempt to establish himself with a boot-black
stand, and failed because of the interference of the police, who moved
him on at the request of the shopkeeper at his chosen street-corner.
His way home in later years was always northwards, along the Edgware
Road. It is a thoroughfare that keeps late hours, crossing the highway
between Paddington and King's Cross; it makes southwards towards
Victoria and the town; it has its music-halls, and, after they are
closed, its coffee-stalls, tiny centres of distressed humanity waiting
for the dawn. They are the pickets set up against the enemy Night, in
a campaign which, on the whole, is less sullenly undertaken than the
campaign of the day. There is much companionship along the pavements
in the night watches: the regiment of the poor falls into some sort of
rank, and whether a man's business is merely to keep moving till the
park-gates are opened in the morning, or to reach some distant lodging,
some favourite shelter, or a point of vantage for the coming day, he
need never be companionless on this road. And seldom, unless he be very
new to the manner of life or very old, does the poor man not fall in
with the conviviality that is within his reach. Be he so stupid that he
has failed in the meanest ambitions, yet he will be able to establish
himself in this society, and be a man of affairs among beggars.
Every man, and every woman however grossly she has fallen, acquires a
certain aptitude in the University of the Last Resort. Some sort of
shrewdness, entirely above the scullery pitch, has become a necessity
by the time the pavement is the Home. And even the poet came, like the
outcast ostler, or matchmaker, or scullery-maid, to possess a small
share of this lower-worldliness. When it was a matter, during the day,
of collecting coppers sufficient for the day and spending them in the
pinched markets of poverty, he had perforce to be alive to the world
about him. Later on, when there was no necessity, I could observe in
him a certain flickering pride of experience: occasionally he would
exert himself to show that he knew how to pass the time of day with a
man upon the street, how to invest in a pipe, a kettle, or in oddments
of cheap food. Ordering his meal at a coffee-house, he would pretend to
a certain acumen in the matter of dishes or of waitresses, adjusting
his tie and his expression. But who can ever have been deceived
that here was any one save a timorous defaulter in the matter of
_savoir-faire_? Not, certainly, an A.B.C. girl or an observant tramp.
Among the miracles is that of The Golden Halfpennies. They came to
him on a day when he had not even the penny to invest in matches that
might bring him interest on his money. He was, he told me, walking,
vacant with desperation, along a crowded pavement, when he heard the
clink of a coin and saw something bright rolling towards the gutter.
He stooped, picked it up, looked around, found no claimant, and put
into his waistcoat pocket, as he affirmed with the many repetitions
that characterised his anecdotes, a bright new halfpenny. He proceeded
some distance on his way, pondering the things he could or could not
procure with his money, when it struck him that the other direction
would lead him to a shop with such wares as he had decided on. As he
neared the place where he had found the first coin he saw another
glittering in the road. This, too, he picked up, and again thought he
held a halfpenny. But looking closer he discovered it to be golden and
a sovereign, and only after much persuasion of his senses would he
believe the first-found one to be likewise gold. "That was a sovereign
too, Evie; I looked and I saw it was a sovereign too!" he ended, with
rising voice and tremulous laughter. One who heard him tell his tale
held strictly that he should have delivered the money to the nearest
police-station to await the inquiry of its owner; but that, surely,
were an ill economy, to look after the farthings of scrupulousness at
the cost of the pounds of Providence. Thompson, half suspicious of a
miracle, made a shrewd guess that no angel would apply at Marlborough
Street.
At another time he did have scruples. One of the Rothschilds, buying a
paper from him at the Piccadilly end of Park Lane, put a florin into
his hand. "I was worried," said Francis, "lest he thought it was a
penny, and tried to catch him up in the street crowd. But he was gone,
and it worried me." Years later the news of that Rothschild's death was
read out at a meal at our house in Palace Court. Francis heard, and
dropped his spoon, aghast. "Then I can never repay him!" he cried.
For a time a few shillings might have been his each week for the
fetching; but he did not fetch them. An allowance, sufficient to lodge
and feed him, and insufficient to do either fully, was sent to him by
his father at a reading-room called, it is thought, the "Clarendon," in
the Strand. The more he needed it the greater worry would it seem to
collect it. Fear lest it were not there; fear lest he should be refused
it because of his rags, and, finally, an illusory certainty--the
certainty of dejection--that it had been discontinued, prevented him,
until at last, through his default, it did really cease.
He had the words of the Proverb by heart--"Give me neither poverty
nor riches; feed me with the food convenient for me"--but he would
rather say his prayer in the street than ask for his allowance in the
"Clarendon." He was willing to starve both ways: he wrote out for his
comfort: "Even in the night-time of the soul wisdom remains."
In addition to the allowance there were relatives and friends to whom
Francis might have gone, if assistance in his need had been part of
his scheme. Besides those with whom he stayed during his examinations
in London, there was a Catholic relative who had an establishment for
stationery off the Strand (he was not asked for so much as a pencil),
and who died in Church Passage, Chancery Lane, about 1891; his paternal
grandmother, then an old lady, lived in City Road, and Edward Healy
Thompson had resided in Hinde Street, Manchester Square, and made many
town friends.
The time came when he had no lodging; when the nights were an agony
of prevented sleep, and the days long blanks of half-warmth and
half-ease. After seven nights and days of this kind he is deep immersed
in insensibility. Pain, its own narcotic, throbs to painlessness.
Touch and sight and hearing are brokenly and dimly experienced, save
when some unknown touch switches on the lights of full consciousness.
Sensation is still painful, but disjointedly, impotently. When a cart
jolts by the noise of its wheels comes to him long after--or before--he
troubles to move out of reach of the shafts--the yell of the driver
seems to have no part in the incident. He knows not if it came from
that or from another quarter. He sees things pass as silently as the
figures on a cinematograph screen; one set of nerves, out of time and
on another plane, respond to things heard. The boys now running at
one end of the alley, in front of him, are behind him the next, and
their cries seem to come from any quarter and at random. Is it that
they move too quickly for him or that he unknowingly is wheeling about
in his walk, or that London herself spins round him? For hours he has
stood in one place, or paced one patch of pavement, as if his feet were
trapped in the lines between the stones. He remembers that, as a child,
he had made rules, treading only on the spaces, or only on the line
of the pattern; now they make much stricter bounds. He is tied to the
few slabs of stone that fill the space beneath his archway. It seems
dreadfully perilous to move beyond them, and he sways within their
territory as if they edged a precipice. And then, he knows not how or
why, his weakness has passed, and he is drifting along the streets,
not wearily, but with dreadful ease, with no hope of having sufficient
resolution to halt. Time matters as little to him as the names of the
streets, and the very faces of the clocks present, to his thinking,
not pictures of time and motion, but stationary, dead countenances.
Noting that the hands of one have moved, he wonders at it only because
its view of the passage of time is so laughably at variance with his
own. Had it marked a minute since he had last looked, or a whole day,
he would not have been surprised, but the foolish half-hour it told of
is absurd. His time leaped or paused, while the clock went with lying
regularity. The street-names, too, deceived him; they were unfamiliar
in most familiar places; or they showed well-known names on impossible
corners. He seemed to be spinning, like a falling leaf, and tossed by
unseen winds of direction. Oxford Street was short and narrow; Wardour
Street big enough to hold the tribes of Israel, and the houses of it
as high, he guessed, though he dared not lift his head to see, as the
divided waves of the Red Sea. Out of confusion came a voice, "Is your
soul saved?" It broke in upon his half-consciousness as the school
gong wakes the boy. The mantle of protecting delirium fell away; the
voice broke in upon his privacy, threatening his reserves, seeking the
confidences of the confessional. "What right have you to ask me that
question?" he replied.
To one who had spent a fortnight of nights on the streets, Mr. McMaster
and family, standing forth against the comfortable background of
shop, workrooms, and parlour, should have loomed large. But what the
rescued man thought worth telling of the incident of rescue was that
in Wardour Street some one approached and asked him, in the resented
voice of the intruder, if his soul were saved, and that he, clothed
in the regimentals of the ragged, and with as much military sternness
of voice and gesture as might be, made answer. Nothing seemed so
important to him as the rebuff he imagined he had administered to a
stranger threatening his privacy. He also recounted that the other then
said: "If you won't let me save your soul, let me save your body,"
and a compact was made on terms agreeable to his dignity. But it is
probable that it was entered upon with greater zest by Mr. McMaster
the enthusiast, churchwarden, and bootmaker, than by the indifferent
poet, to whom it seemed to matter little whether he were rescued or not
rescued. Francis was as little eager for this help as he was, two years
later, for my father's.
Francis recounted little more than the reproof and the fact that his
new master was kind to him. But did he forget, do you think, the least
detail of the shop in Panton Street,[11] or his companions there? Did
he forget Mr. McMaster the elder, or Mr. McMaster the brother, or the
nieces, or the assistants, or Lucy? It is because he could not forget
that one must accept his account of the first encounter. The rescuer
remembers it as happening in the Strand, but Thompson, who says Wardour
Street, seems the surer witness.
Before taking him into his employ at his bootmaker's shop, No.
14 Panton Street, Mr. McMaster wrote in August, 1886, to the
Superintendent of Police at Ashton-under-Lyne asking if Francis Joseph
was, as he stated, the son of a Dr. Charles Thompson of that place.
Finding this to be the case, he secured a lodging for Francis in
Southampton Row, clothed him, and with some hope, at first, set him to
work. It was rather later that he communicated with Francis's father,
who had been absent from Ashton on a holiday.
I learn that Mr. McMaster was much interested in assisting the
unfortunate. If he says "Thompson was my only failure," it means that
he was careful and useful in the rescuing of young men, particular in
awarding his charity, and strict in enforcing reform. The men he cared
for learned the trade of boot-making, possibly, and had been known to
sing in the choir of St. Martin's Church, or to do other reputable
deeds. They were civil-spoken men, or learnt to be, and tidy, whereas
Francis would raise his voice, Mr. McMaster remembers--would shout, as
his only breach of good manners--in medical and other arguments; was a
Catholic, and therefore not a church-goer in the ordinary sense, and
was, of course, incapable of work. How did Mr. McMaster succeed so well
with his only failure? It is to his exceeding credit that he accepted
Francis on the terms that were inevitable in accepting a waif subject
to accidents and unpunctual. Francis would discuss literature and
medicine, or be silent, or write, always in sight of the hammering and
sewing group in the workroom behind the shop. In the delivery of goods
and the general running of messages he did ill the duties of a boy of
twelve. And yet he was liked, and respected as well as pitied. His
dignity and gentleness gave him the name of a gentleman among friends
where the title is a talisman.
It did not take long to discover that Francis could neither make boots
nor sell them. He ran messages, and still in the make-believe of
earning his food and lodging and the five shillings a week that were
his wages, put up the shutters, as H. M. Stanley, whose back still
ached with the memory when he came to write his autobiography, had done
as a boy. It is incredible, to one who knew the hours Francis favoured,
that he was present at their taking down.
His master has interesting memories. He remembers the meeting in the
street; he remembers that he was informed immediately that Francis
was a Catholic, and he remembers the crucifix upon the wall of the
bedroom in Southampton Row, and the medal round the collarless neck.
"I knew he was of another belief--not a bit of difference! I am a
Church of England man myself--Churchwarden, and on the Council--an
average Church of England man, I trust. But not a bit of difference!"
he repeats, and has it too that Francis "said his Mass--always said his
Mass--at night." About Sunday church-goings he is uncertain, having the
impression that Francis no longer held with the priests of his Church.
"There was something between him and the priests. Perhaps I ought
not to tell you (I take it you are Catholics), but I fancy there was
something." Mr. McMaster's narrative is here interrupted, not by the
poet's shout, but by the poet's record of his habit of prayer. Francis
writes, in a note to the following poem, composed years later: "It was
my practice from the time I left college to pray for the lady whom I
was destined to love--the unknown She. It is curious that even then
I did not dream of praying for her whom I was destined to marry; and
yet not curious: for already I previsioned that with me it would be to
love, not to be loved."
With dawn and children risen would he run,
Which knew not the fool's wisdom to be sad,
He that had childhood sometimes to be glad,
Before her window with the co-mate sun.
At night his angel's wing before the Throne
Dropped (and God smiled) the unnamed name of Her:
Nor did she feel her destinate poet's prayer
Asperse her from her angel's pinion.
So strangely near! So far, that ere they meet,
The boy shall traverse with his bloody feet
The mired and hungered ways, three sullen years,
Of the fell city: and those feet shall ooze
Crueller blood through ruinous avenues
Of shattered youth, made plashy with his tears!
As full of love as scant of poetry;
Ah! in the verses but the sender see,
And in the sender, but his heart, lady!
Mr. McMaster continues:--"Mr. Thompson was a great talker. I remember
him asking me questions. My father, a University man--or rather a
Scottish College man . . . would talk to him, very interested." And his
employer lent him books and discussed them, and had, as he remembers
it, some hand in the making of an author. It was in his shop and on his
paper that Thompson wrote continually. Bulwer Lytton was devoured, then
as in later years, and Francis took Mr. McMaster's Iliad even as far
as Southampton Row along with Josephus and Huxley. "My Josephus and my
Huxley," remembers his friend, who recalls, too, that he was "always
reading the _Standard Book of British Poetry_." Francis did not know
then that the "little obscure room in my father's poor house," where
Traherne learnt, as a child of four, to be a poet, was also at the back
of a shoemaker's. Children were of the Panton Street household, and Mr.
McMaster remembers Francis's awed but gentle ways with them. A niece,
called Rosie Violet or Rosebud by the family, and Flower or Little
Flower, as Mr. McMaster remembers, by Francis, was his particular
friend, and used to take his tea to him and walk with him in the park.
That there was "another lady who helped him" may be an allusion to the
friendship of the streets.
After rather more than three months' service in the shop, it was
arranged that Francis should go home for the Christmas of 1886. There
is not much to tell of his home-coming. Other members of the Thompson
family were adepts, like Francis, in reserve, and it was practised
rigorously during his holiday. It was known that he had suffered; and
his sufferings, or the occasion of them, were no more to be spoken of
than misdeeds that had had their punishment. He volunteered no account
of himself and was asked for none, it being supposed that he had found
a settled though humble way of life which allowed the past to fall back
into the past. From his sister I learn that he filled his place in the
family saddened, perhaps, but yet much as he had filled it before he
left it: affection was there, on his side and on hers.
On his return from Manchester, where he lingered--or was
delayed--longer than had been expected, the shop was even less well
served than before. He returned as from a bout of drinking, and with
no regard for the things around him. He had periodic visitations of
much more than customary uselessness; they were such as Mr. McMaster
observed in their approach. He would grow very restless and flushed,
and then retire into an equally disconcerting satisfaction and peace
of mind. These, of course, were the workings of opium, although Mr.
McMaster mistook them, as Dr. Thompson had done previously, for those
of alcohol. "There were accidents," says Mr. McMaster, with some
horror of details. It seems Francis had let the shutter slip on a
certain evening of delirium, and, it is gathered, a foot--the foot
of a customer, no less--had been hurt. Whatever the immediate cause,
Francis had to leave Panton Street in the middle of January 1887.
Mr. McMaster stands an example. His charity was of such exceptional
fortune as commends mankind to daily good works lest great benefits be
left unperformed, lest our omissions starve a Francis Thompson. The
persuasion of "Ye did it unto Me" may be varied by "Perhaps ye did it
unto a Poet."
Before he left, Francis had sent manuscripts, Mr. McMaster avers, to
more than one magazine; for the discarded McMaster account-books had
all the while been as freely covered with poetry and prose as had
been the bulky business folios of Mme. Corot, Marchande de Modes,
with Jean Baptiste Camille's landscapes of pen and ink. But Francis
left Panton Street unanswered; he left Panton Street for less kindly
thoroughfares. Nor did he ever return, though immediately after his
dismissal he came to be in desperate need of any charity. How little he
felt himself bounden by the ties of gratitude or kindly feeling, both
of which he felt strongly in an inactive manner, is shown in this as
in all his negotiations with his family and friends. He never forgot a
kindness or an injury (nor failed to forgive either). Both meant too
much to him. If he neglected the obligations of gratitude, he also,
by a hard habit of constraint and a close conscience, kept his tongue
consistently innocent of recriminations, so that I have never heard
him use really hard words of any man. Mr. McMaster was never told till
after his assistant's death that Francis came to find success as a
writer of books and a journalist. That Francis was fond of him might be
gathered in the few words in which he mentioned him no less than in Mr.
McMaster's own account, and in his brother's, who says that Francis's
eyes would follow the boot-maker round the room with a persistence that
made him, seemingly, entirely like a fawn. "I can only compare him to a
fawn," declared the brother; and he "not the only one to notice it!"
As he stood on the threshold of the shop--"Still, as I turned inwards
to the echoing chambers, or outwards to the wild, wild night, I saw
London extending her visionary gate to receive me, like some dreadful
mouth of Acheron" (de Quincey's words became his own by right of
succession)--he was in no mood to fight for existence. He gave
himself to Covent Garden, the archways and more desperate straits--"a
flood-tide of disaster"--than he had known before.
Jane Eyre, while she felt the vulture, hunger, sinking beak and talons
in her side, knew that solitude was no solitude, rest no rest, and
instinct kept her roaming round the village and its store of food,
even while she dared not ask for it. But that you are in a city of
larders, and that you sleep in Covent Garden, the pulse of London's
kitchens, does not scare the vulture; it is a town-bird, a cockney like
the sparrow. I know that Thompson suffered hunger; so much he told me.
But he found no simile for his pain, and perhaps Charlotte Brontë, in
that she did find one, was as deeply scarred. Misery is a bottle-imp
which you may put to your lips without going through the swing-doors of
experience. Francis came back through them with a light heart, while
Charlotte Brontë's was heavy with inexperience. Many of the horrors of
the street Francis knew only in later years, when the bandages with
which nature covers the eyes of those whom she condemns were removed.
He had walked the battlefield among bullets and not known that one
nestled in his heart, another in his brain, another in his flesh; only
twenty years later did he grow weak with their poison, and develop a
delirium of fear of the sights and sounds of London. It was in later
years that he wrote: "The very streets weigh upon me. Those horrible
streets, with their gangrenous multitude blackening ever into lower
mortifications of humanity. . . . These lads who have almost lost the
faculty of human speech: these girls whose very utterance is a hideous
blasphemy against the sacrosanctity of lover's language. . . . We lament
the smoke of London:--it were nothing without the fumes of congregated
evil."[12] It was later, too, that he wrote of
the places infamous to tell,
Where God wipes not the tears from any eyes.
There is more in the same strain of heated hate and distress, but I
quote no more, in the belief that it is far from illustrating his
mood when he was actually on the streets. He had realised what the
inexperienced does not, that "in suffering, intensity has not long
duration; long duration has not intensity," or again: "Beyond the
maximum point of a delicate nature you can no more get increase of
agony by increasing its suffering than you can get increase of tone
from a piano by stamping on it. It would be an executioner's trick of
God if he made the poet-nature not only capable of a pang where others
feel a prick, but of hell where others feel purgatory." One learns from
almost the same page of his contradictory notes that he knew suffering
beyond the range of other men's knowledge, but that, knowing it, he
also knew the narrow limits of suffering.
Above all things, he learnt that lack of the world's goods is small
lack, that to lose everything is no great loss--a proposition easily
proved by analogy to those who have gained everything and found it
small gain. While in the streets he had his tea to drink and his
murderer to think about. It was in retrospect that he beheld misery
incarnate in the outcast, and it was through the sheltering pane of a
window in a lodging that he saw:--
"A region whose hedgerows have set to brick, whose soil
is chilled to stone; where flowers are sold and women;
where the men wither and the stars; whose streets to
me on the most glittering day are black. For I unveil
their secret meanings. I read their human hieroglyphs.
I diagnose from a hundred occult signs the disease
which perturbs their populous pulses. Misery cries out
to me from the kerb-stone, despair passes me by in the
ways; I discern limbs laden with fetters impalpable,
but not imponderable; I hear the shaking of invisible
lashes, I see men dabbled with their own oozing life.
This contrast rises before me; and I ask myself whether
there be indeed an Ormuzd and an Ahriman, and whether
Ahriman be the stronger of the twain. From the claws of
the sphinx my eyes have risen to her countenance which
no eyes read.
"Because, therefore, I have these thoughts; and
because also I have knowledge, not indeed great or
wide, but within certain narrow limits more intimate
than most men's, of this life which is not a life;
to which food is as the fuel of hunger; sleep, our
common sleep, precious, costly, and fallible, as water
in a wilderness; in which men rob and women vend
themselves--for fourpence; because I have such thoughts
and such knowledge, I needed not the words of our great
Cardinal to read with painful sympathy the book just
put forward by a singular personality."[13]
Of the things he heard--and misery, he says, cries out from the
kerbstone--the laugh, not the cry, of the children familiar with all
evil was what appalled him most. Appalling, too, was the unuttered cry
of children who knew not how to cry nor why they had cause. Among the
notes are many jottings of a resolve to write on the young of the
town, but these were used only incidentally in essays or letters. Such
a one is found in the passage, of his study of Blessed John Baptist de
la Salle, in which he states the case for Free Education:--
"Think of it. If Christ stood amidst your London slums,
He could not say: 'Except ye become as one of _these_
little children.' Far better your children were cast
from the bridges of London, than they should become
as one of those little ones. Could they be gathered
together and educated in the truest sense of the
word; could the children of the nation at large be so
educated as to cut off future recruits to the ranks of
Darkest England; then it would need no astrology to
cast the horoscope of to-morrow. _La tête de l'homme
du peuple_, nay rather _de l'enfant du peuple_--around
_that_ sways the conflict. Who grasps the child grasps
the future."
He writes there at the high pressure of one who sees the tragedy and
must shout "Help!"
"Let those who are robust enough not to take injury
from the terrible directness with which things are
stated read the chapter entitled 'The Children of the
Lost.'[14] For it drives home a truth which I fear
the English public, with all its compassion for our
destitute children, scarcely realises, knows but in a
vague, general way; namely, that they are brought up in
sin from their cradles, that they know evil before they
know good, that the boys are ruffians and profligates,
the girls harlots, in the mother's womb. This, to me
the most nightmarish idea in all the nightmare of those
poor little lives, I have never been able to perceive
that people had any true grasp on. And having mentioned
it, though it is a subject very near my heart, I will
say no more; nor enforce it, as I might well do, from
my own sad knowledge."
To the juvenilia of the London period belongs a poem on an allied
problem of the streets:--
Hell's gates revolve upon her yet alive;
To her no Christ the beautiful is nigh:
The stony world has daffed His teaching by;
"Go!" saith it; "sin on still that you may thrive,
Let one sin be as queen for all the hive
Of sins to swarm around;"
* * * * *
The gates of Hell have shut her in alive.
It was not improbably written while he was befriended by the girl who,
having noticed his forlorn state, did all in her power to assist him.
A monastic segregation of the sexes is often the hard rule of the
outcast's road. Francis had no other friends among the women-folk or
children of London, and often passed months without having speech of
any save men. When he was again among friends and knew the children of
_Sister Songs_ he wrote:--
All vanished hopes, and all most hopeless bliss
Came with thee to my kiss.
And ah! so long myself had strayed afar
From child, and woman, and the boon earth's green,
And all wherewith life's face is fair beseen;
Journeying its journey bare
Five suns, except of the all-kissing sun
Unkissed of one;
Almost I had forgot
The healing harms,
And whitest witchery, a-lurk in that
Authentic cestus of two girdling arms.
This girl gave out of her scant and pitiable opulence, consisting of
a room, warmth, and food, and a cab thereto. When the streets were no
longer crowded with shameful possibilities she would think of the only
tryst that her heart regarded and, a sister of charity, would take
her beggar into her vehicle at the appointed place and cherish him
with an affection maidenly and motherly, and passionate in both these
capacities. Two outcasts, they sat marvelling that there were joys for
them to unbury and to share. Then, in a Chelsea room such as that of
Rossetti's poem would they sit:--
Your lamp, my Jenny, kept alight,
Like a wise virgin's, all one night!
And in the alcove coolly spread
Glimmers with dawn your empty bed.
Weakness and confidence, humility and reverence, were gifts unknown to
her except at his hands, and she repaid them with graces as lovely as a
child's, and as unhesitating as a saint's. In his address to a child,
in a later year, he remembers this poor girl's childishness:--
Forlorn, and faint, and stark
I had endured through watches of the dark
The abashless inquisition of each star,
Yea, was the outcast mark
Of all those heavenly passers' scrutiny;
Stood bound and helplessly
For Time to shoot his barbéd minutes at me;
Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour
In night's slow-wheeléd car;
Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length
From under those dread wheels; and, bled of strength,
I waited the inevitable last.
Then there came past
A child; like thee, a spring-flower; but a flower
Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring,
And through the city-streets blown withering.
She passed,--O brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing!
And of her own scant pittance did she give,
That I might eat and live:
Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive.
Therefore I kissed in thee
The heart of Childhood, so divine for me;
And her, through what sore ways
And what unchildish days.
Borne from me now, as then, a trackless fugitive.
Therefore I kissed in thee
Her, child! and innocency.
Her sacrifice was to fly from him: learning he had found friends, she
said that he must go to them and leave her. After his first interview
with my father he had taken her his news. "They will not understand our
friendship," she said, and then, "I always knew you were a genius."
And so she strangled the opportunity; she killed again the child, the
sister; the mother had come to life within her--she went away. Without
warning she went to unknown lodgings and was lost to him. In "the
mighty labyrinths of London" he lay in wait for her, nor would he leave
the streets, thinking that in doing so he would make a final severance.
Like de Quincey's Ann, she was sought, but never found, along the
pavements at the place where she had been used to find him.
With de Quincey Thompson could have said, "During some years I hoped
that she did live; and I suppose in the literal and unrhetorical use of
the word myriad, I must, on my visits to London, have looked at myriads
of female faces, in the hope of meeting Ann." And, again, that this
incident of friendship "more than any other, coloured, or (more truly I
should say) shaped, moulded and remoulded, composed and decomposed, the
great body of opium dreams." Pursuit and search have been matters of
much nocturnal and poetic moment; such was Patmore's recurring dream of
the dead whom--
I, dreaming, night by night seek now to see,
And, in a mortal sorrow, still pursue
Through sordid streets and lanes,
And houses brown and bare,
And many a haggard stair,
Ochrous with ancient stains,
And infamous doors, opening on hapless rooms,
In whose unhaunted glooms
Dead pauper generations, witless of the sun,
Their course have run.
As with de Quincey, so with Patmore, so with Francis. To the dream, or
sense, of pursuit, was added the suspicion of balking interference.
De Quincey says that throughout his dreams he was conscious "of some
shadowy malice which withdrew her, or attempted to withdraw her, from
restoration and from hope." And Patmore:--
And ofttimes my pursuit
Is check'd of its dear fruit
By things brimful of hate, my kith and kin,
Furious that I should keep
Their forfeit power to weep.
Pursuit circles after flight, and flight circles before pursuit, and
they go about and meet and are confounded--as when children play round
a tree--in the dreams that were common to de Quincey and Thompson, in
the "Daughter of Lebanon" of the one and "The Hound of Heaven" of the
other.
It was loyalty, the loyalty of one who knew what benefits he bestowed
in receiving the alms of his forlorn friend, rather than love, that
kept him so fast to his tryst with her that even when the chance
offered for him to leave the streets, he refused at first to do that
which would put an end to the possibility of their meetings. But he had
not yet loved, nor met her whom he was destined to love--the unknown
She for whom in Manchester he had prayed every night.
In an account of charities among the outcasts he quotes: "To be
nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history. The Canaanitish
woman lives more happily without a name than Herodias with one."
FOOTNOTES:
[10] There is some parallel for this image (Tom-o'-Bedlam's, be it
remembered) in Rossetti's--
But the sea stands spread
As one wall with the flat skies,
Where the lean black craft, like flies,
Seem well-nigh stagnated,
Soon to drop off dead.
[11] Here is a minor clue to the region of London best mapped out in
his mind. From the _Academy_, 1900, he tore Mr. Whitten's review of an
atlas of London, in which a comment is made on the restrictions of the
scale--three inches to the mile; so that "York Street, Covent Garden,
is merged in Tavistock Street; and Panton Street, Haymarket, and its
short continuation, Spur Street, are marked but not named." When
Francis does not dog de Quincey he is at the heel of Coleridge. Each
had gone for a soldier; both were accosted with friendship in London.
The Strand is remembered as the place where Coleridge was, as a youth,
once walking in abstraction with waving arms, to find himself with his
hand in a pedestrian's pocket and accused of attempted thieving. "I
thought, sir, I was swimming in the Hellespont," he explained, and made
a friend only less valuable than Mr. McMaster.
[12] Of the despoiling of the Lady Poverty he writes in an unpublished
poem:--
DEGRADED POOR
Lo, at the first, Lord, Satan took from Thee
Wealth, Beauty, Honour, World's Felicity.
Then didst Thou say: "Let be;
For with his leavings and neglects will I
Please Me, which he sets by,--
Of all disvalued, thence which all will leave Me,
And fair to none but Me, will not deceive Me."
My simple Lord! so deeming erringly,
Thou tookest Poverty;
Who, beautified with Thy Kiss, laved in Thy streams,
'Gan then to cast forth gleams,
That all men did admire
Her modest looks, her ragged sweet attire
In which the ribboned shoe could not compete
With her clear simple feet.
But Satan, envying Thee Thy one ewe-lamb,
With Wealth, World's Beauty and Felicity
Was not content, till last unthought-of she
Was his to damn.
Thine ingrate ignorant lamb
He won from Thee; kissed, spurned, and made of her
This thing which qualms the air--
Vile, terrible, old,
Whereat the red blood of the Day runs cold.
[13] F. T.'s review of Booth's _In Darkest England_.
[14] In Booth's _In Darkest England_.
CHAPTER V: THE DISCOVERY
A RALLY, probably the result of a gift from Manchester, came about
in the latter half of February 1887. I quote his own words: "With a
few shillings to give me breathing space, I began to decipher and
put together the half-obliterated manuscript of 'Paganism.' I came
simultaneously to my last page and my last halfpenny; and went forth to
drop the MS. in the letter-box of _Merry England_.[15] Next day I spent
the halfpenny on two boxes of matches, and began the struggle for life."
This was the covering letter to my father, its editor:--
"_Feb. 23rd, '87._--Dear Sir,--In enclosing the
accompanying article for your inspection I must ask
pardon for the soiled state of the manuscript. It is
due, not to slovenliness, but to the strange places
and circumstances under which it has been written.
For me, no less than Parolles, the dirty nurse
experience has something fouled. I enclose stamped
envelope for a reply, since I do not desire the return
of the manuscript, regarding your judgment of its
worthlessness as quite final. I can hardly expect
that where my prose fails my verse will succeed.
Nevertheless, on the principle of 'Yet will I try the
last,' I have added a few specimens of it, with the
off chance that one may be less poor than the rest.
Apologising very sincerely for any intrusion on your
valuable time, I remain yours with little hope,
FRANCIS THOMPSON.
Kindly address your rejection to the Charing Cross Post
Office."
Francis had more than remembered the existence of the magazine and its
editor. "I was myself virtually his pupil and his wife's long before
I knew him. He has in my opinion--an opinion of long standing--done
more than any man in these latter days to educate Catholic literary
opinion," he wrote to Manchester soon after his first appearance in the
magazine. He knew the target at which he aimed.
"Paganism Old and New" is written in the unharassed manner of a man
whose style, and cuffs, had been kept in order at the Savile Club.
But he had no backing of library and chef to give him the courage
of his fine sentences; he was the man selling matches in the gutter
and sharpening his pencil on the kerb-stone. The beauty of the
circumstances of Pagan life, its processional maidens, "shaking a most
divine dance from their feet," its theatres unroofed to the smokeless
sky--with these, he says, the advocates of a revived Paganism contrast
the conditions of to-day: "the cold formalities of an outworn worship;
our _ne plus ultra_ of pageantry, a Lord Mayor's show; the dryadless
woods regarded chiefly as potential timber; the grimy streets, the
grimy air, the disfiguring statues, the Stygian crowd; the temple to
the reigning goddess Gelasma, which mocks the name of theatre; last
and worst, the fatal degradation of popular perception which has gazed
so long on ugliness that it takes her to its bosom. In our capitals
the very heavens have lost their innocence. Aurora may rise over our
cities, but she has forgotten how to blush." From the pavement where
the East sweeps the soot in eddies round his ankles, he protests:
"Pagan Paganism was not poetical. No pagan eye ever visioned the nymphs
of Shelley." "In the name of all the Muses, what treason against Love
and Beauty!" he cries against Catullus, Propertius, and Ovid, for the
arid eroticism that was satisfied to write of love without tribute to
the colour of a lady's eyes. For contrast, he quotes Rossetti's--
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
Wordsworth's "Eyes like stars of twilight fair"; Collins's Pity "with
eyes of dewy light"; Shelley's "Thy sweet-child sleep, the filmy-eyed."
And of the fair love of Dante and other Christian poets he makes sweet
and loyal praises. He was the lover to write an essay in defence of
the social order that denied him love, sleep, pity, and the eyes of
any lady. It was the essay, too, of a man physically hungry. He supped
full, but with fancies.
* * * * *
Thompson's manuscripts, most uninviting in outward aspect, were
pigeon-holed, unread by a much-occupied editor for six months--were
then released, read, and estimated at their worth. The sanity of the
essay was proof enough of the genius of Thompson's inspiration against
the evidence in some of the poems of another inspiration--that of
drugs. My father and mother (the A. M. and W. M. of following pages)
decided to accept the essay and a poem, and to seek the author. To this
end my father wrote a letter addressed to Charing Cross Post Office,
stating the intention of printing some of the manuscript, and asking
Francis to call for a proof and to discuss the chances of future work.
To that letter came no reply and publication was postponed, but when at
last his letter was returned through the dead-letter office, he printed
the "Passion of Mary" as the best way of getting into communication
with the author. The poem appeared in _Merry England_ for April 1888,
and on the 14th my father received the following letter:--
"_April 14th, 1888._--DEAR SIR,--In the last days of
February or the first days of March, 1887 (my memory
fails me as to the exact date), I forwarded to you
for your magazine a prose article, "Paganism Old and
New" (or "Ancient and Modern," for I forget which
wording I adopted), and accompanied it by some pieces
of verse, on the chance that if the prose failed,
some of the verse might meet acceptance. I enclosed a
stamped envelope for a reply, since (as I said) I did
not desire the return of the manuscript. Imprudently,
perhaps, instead of forwarding the parcel through the
post, I dropped it with my own hand into the letter-box
of 43 Essex Street. There was consequently no stamp on
it, since I did not think a stamp would be necessary
under the circumstances. I asked you to address your
answer to the Charing Cross Post Office. To be brief,
from that day to this, no answer has ever come into
my hands. And yet, more than a twelve-month since
the forwarding of the manuscript, I am now informed
that one of the copies of verse which I submitted
to you (_i.e._ 'The Passion of Mary') is appearing
in this month's issue of _Merry England_. Such an
occurrence I can only explain to myself in one way,
viz., that some untoward accident cut off your means of
communicating with me. To suppose otherwise--to suppose
it intentional--would be to wrong your known honour
and courtesy. I have no doubt that your explanation,
when I receive it, will be entirely satisfactory to me.
I therefore enclose a stamped and addressed envelope
for an answer, hoping that you will recompense me for
my long delay by the favour of an early reply. In any
case, however long circumstances may possibly delay
your reply, it will be sure of reaching me at the
address I have now given.--I remain, yours faithfully,
FRANCIS JOSEPH THOMPSON.
"_P.S._--Doubtless, when I received no answer, I
ought to have written again. My excuse must be that a
flood-tide of misfortune rolled over me, leaving me no
leisure to occupy myself with what I regarded as an
attempt that had hopelessly failed. Hence my entire
subsequent silence."
To this my father answered with an explanation and a repetition of his
invitation to Francis to arrange for regular work, and despatched his
answer by a special messenger to the address given, a chemist's shop in
Drury Lane. The chemist's manner of accepting responsibility for the
safe delivery of the letter was discouraging. He said that Thompson
sometimes called for letters, but that he knew little of him. After
a few days during which nothing was heard my father went himself in
search. His obvious eagerness prompted a query from the man behind the
counter: "Are you a relative? he owes me three-and-ninepence." With
that paid and a promise of ten-and-sixpence if he produced the poet, he
agreed to do his best, and, many days after, my father, being in his
workroom, was told that Mr. Thompson wished to see him. "Show him up,"
he said, and was left alone.
Then the door opened, and a strange hand was thrust in. The door
closed, but Thompson had not entered. Again it opened, again it shut.
At the third attempt a waif of a man came in. No such figure had been
looked for; more ragged and unkempt than the average beggar, with no
shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in broken shoes, he found my
father at a loss for words. "You must have had access to many books
when you wrote that essay," was what he said. "That," said Thompson,
his shyness at once replaced by an acerbity that afterwards became one
of the most familiar of his never-to-be-resented mannerisms, "that
is precisely where the essay fails. I had no books by me at the time
save Aeschylus and Blake." There was little to be done for him at
that interview save the extraction of a promise to call again. He made
none of the confidences characteristic of a man seeking sympathy and
alms. He was secretive and with no eagerness for plans for his benefit,
and refused the offer of a small weekly sum that would enable him to
sleep in a bed and sit at a table. I know of no man, and can imagine
none, to whom another can so easily unburden himself of uneasiness and
formalities as to my father. To him the poor and the rich are, as the
fishes and the flames to St. Francis, his brothers and his friends at
sight, even if these are shy as fishes and sightless as flame. But the
impression of the visit on my father was of a meeting that did not
end in great usefulness--so much was indicated by a manner schooled
in concealments. But Francis came again, and again, and then to my
father's house in Kensington. Of the falsity of the impression given by
his manner, his poetry in the address to his host's little girl is the
proof:--
Yet is there more, whereat none guesseth, love!
Upon the ending of my deadly night
(Whereof thou hast not the surmise, and slight
Is all that any mortal knows thereof),
Thou wert to me that earnest of day's light,
When, like the back of a gold-mailéd saurian
Heaving its slow length from Nilotic slime,
The first long gleaming fissure runs Aurorian
Athwart the yet dun firmament of prime.
Stretched on the margin of the cruel sea
Whence they had rescued me,
With faint and painful pulses was I lying;
Not yet discerning well
If I had 'scaped, or were an icicle,
Whose thawing is its dying.
Like one who sweats before a despot's gate,
Summoned by some presaging scroll of fate,
And knows not whether kiss or dagger wait;
And all so sickened is his countenance
The courtiers buzz, "Lo, doomed!" and look at him askance:--
At fate's dread portal then
Even so stood I, I ken,
Even so stood I, between a joy and fear,
And said to mine own heart, "Now, if the end be here!"
In the last four lines is probably an instance of his habitual
appropriation of things seen for his poetic images. If the door of my
father's room is here promoted to a part in _Sister Songs_, it takes
its place with the clock of Covent Garden, the arrowy minute-hand
of which Mr. Shane Leslie has remarked as suggesting Thompson's
description of himself when he
Stood bound and helplessly
For Time to shoot his barbéd minutes at me.
In the continuation of the same passage is found another example:--
Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour
In night's slow-wheeléd car;
Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length
From under those dread wheels; and, bled of strength,
I waited the inevitable last.
Even before he was knocked down by a cab, as happened to him later, the
heavy traffic of Covent Garden, harassing the straggler in the gutter,
may well have been to him a type of danger and fears.
* * * * *
The idea of rescue came slowly and doubtfully to Francis, who was
far less ready than my father to believe that he was fitted for the
writing career. Their first talks were of books; of his history he
said nothing. He was willing to tell of the poets he had read in the
Guildhall Library, until the police, being, as he said, against him,
barred the entrance. He was willing, too, that anything he had written
should be published, and bring temporary wealth; but reluctant to
admit that he might become a worker and quit the streets--so fixedly
reluctant that some strong reason was conjectured. He would visit my
father, then living in Kensington, but it was long before he would
accept substantial hospitalities; coming in the evening or afternoon,
he would leave to return to his calling--literally a calling--of cabs.
That he was also during this time either parting with or searching
for his Ann is not unlikely. He took his reprieve as he had taken
his doom; he went frightened and brave at once, at war with peace,
at peace with war. With his hesitations, it was more than six months
later that he wrote anew for _Merry England_, in the November issue of
which appeared "Bunyan in the Light of Modern Criticism"; his three
previous appearances, in April, May, and June, with the "Passion of
Mary," "Dream Tryst," and "Paganism Old and New," having exhausted the
possible things among those first submitted. He was not an absentee
because he could not write better than the oldest hand the articles
exactly fitted for _Merry England_. The intention declared in an early
number of my father's magazine was to give voice to a renascence of
happiness; "We shall try to revive in our own hearts, and in the hearts
of others, the enthusiasm of the Christian Faith." This enthusiasm
was to inform essays on social problems and essays in literary and
artistic criticism, and an optimistic editor had told his contributors
to recover the humour, and good humour, of the Saints and Fathers.
"Paganism Old and New," in which it was sought to expose the fallacy of
searching for love of beauty and sweetness in the pagan mythology, and
to reveal the essential modernity, and even Christianity, of Keats' and
Shelley's pagan beauties, was a triumph of journalistic obedience and
appropriateness.
It ends: "Bring back even the best age of Paganism, and you smite
beauty on the cheek. But you _cannot_ bring back then, the best age of
Paganism, the age when Paganism was a faith. None will again behold
Apollo in the forefront of the morning, or see Aphrodite in the upper
air loose the long lustre of her golden locks. But _you may_ bring
back--_dii avertant omen_--the Paganism of the days of Pliny, and
Statius, and Juvenal. . . . This is the Paganism which is formidable,
and not the antique lamp whose feeding oil is spent, whose light has
not outlasted the damps of its long sepulture." This he wrote, who
might have been exercising his knowledge of ignominy in a _Ventre de
Londres_ or at least in such a book as the memorable _Rowton House
Rhymes_.
The streets, somehow, had nurtured a poet and trained a journalist.
He had gone down into poverty so absolute that he was often without
pen and paper, and now emerged a pressman. Neither his happiness,
nor his tenderness, nor his sensibility had been marred, like his
constitution, by his experiences. To be the target of such pains as it
is the habit of the world to deplore as the extreme of disaster, and
yet to keep alive the young flame of his poetry; to be under compulsion
to watch the ignominies of the town, and yet never to be nor to think
himself ignominious; to establish the certitude of his virtue; to keep
flourishing an infinite tenderness and capability for delicacies and
_gentilezze_ of love--these were the triumphs of his immunity. A mother
not yet delivered of her child must be protected from all ills of mind
and body lest they do injury to the delicate and susceptible life
within her. Horrors must not be spoken in her presence; it has been
held fit that she should have pictures about her bed of fair infants
that her thoughts might instruct the features of the unborn child
in good-favouredness. How otherwise was the poet dealt with, whose
intellect was the womb of the word! The making of Viola, as he tells
it, is a sweeter business than the making of a poet--of the maker of
a "Making of Viola"--but not more natural and inevitable. Thompson's
muse rose intact, but trailing bloody insignia of battle; his spirit
rose from the penal waters fresh as Botticelli's Venus. It had not been
more marvellous if Sandro's lady, with cool cheeks, floating draperies,
and dry curls, had risen from a real unplumbed, salt, estranging sea,
instead of from the silly ripples of Florentine convention.
But physically he was battered; and his condition led my father to
prevail upon him, with much difficulty, to be examined by a doctor. "He
will not live," was the first verdict, "and you hasten his death by
denying his whims and opium." But the risk was taken, and Francis sent
to a private hospital.
Thus he alludes to the change within himself:--"Please accept my
warmest thanks for all your kindness and trouble on my behalf. I know
this is a very perfunctory looking letter; but until the first sharp
struggle is over, it is difficult for me to write in any other way."
De Quincey thought that opium killed Coleridge as a poet, that it was
the enemy of his authorship; that the leaving off of opium creates a
new heaven and a new earth. Thompson had now to experience such things
by the denial of the drug. Of his links with Coleridge A. M. writes in
the _Dublin Review_, January 1908:--
"Of his alienation from ordinary life, laudanum was
the sole cause, and, of laudanum, early and long
disease. Coleridge's fault was Thompson's--an evasion
of the daily dues of man to man. It was laudanum that
dissolved Coleridge's bond to wife and child, and piled
their unanswered letters by his bed of illusion and
shattering dreams; it was laudanum that held the hand
bound to open them, turning it half callous and half
timorous, as though insensibility should borrow of
sensibility its flight, its cowardice, and its closed
eyes; or rather the sensitive and loving man was acting
his own part, wearing a delusive likeness to himself,
while laudanum cared nothing for wife or child. It was
laudanum that sent Coleridge to take refuge on one
alien hearth when no fire was kindled to welcome him in
any home of his kindred. It was laudanum that was the
unspoken thing, the unnamed, in Coleridge's conscious
talk; other things he would confess, but not this,
which was the daily desire, the daily possession, and
the daily stealth. So it was also, in his own degree,
with this later sufferer. Francis Thompson was not like
Coleridge; he had not Coleridge's bond and obligations;
but the laudanum was alike in the wronged veins, the
altered blood, of both."
The renunciation of opium, not its indulgence, opened the doors of the
intellect. Opium killed the poet in Coleridge; the opium habit was
stifled at the birth of the poet in Thompson. His images came toppling
about his thoughts overflowingly during the pains of abstinence. This,
too, was de Quincey's experience, told when he was unwinding "the
accursed chain": "I protest to you I have a greater influx of thoughts
in one hour at present than in a whole year under the reign of opium.
It seems as though all the thoughts which had been frozen up for a
decade of years by opium had now, according to the old fable, been
thawed at once."
"The Ode to the Setting Sun" was written at midsummer in 1889, and on
receiving it, his editor, with my mother and a young friend, Mr. Vernon
Blackburn, straightway took the train to congratulate him on this first
conclusive sign of the splendour of his powers. For the poet had been
placed with the monks at Storrington Priory, and it was the music of
three wandering musicians heard in the village street that opened the
ode[16]:--
The wailful sweetness of the violin
Floats down the hushéd waters of the wind,
The heart-strings of the throbbing harp begin
To long in aching music. . . .
Thus by accident were the words of Sir Thomas Browne, an author beloved
of Francis--words quoted by de Quincey--again made good: "And even
that tavern music, which makes one merry, another mad, in me strikes a
deep fit of devotion."
After requests for boots and writing-pads--walking and writing made up
his days--he gives notice that with many misgivings he has fixed on
Shelley for the theme of a first _Dublin Review_ article:--
"I have done so principally because I remember more of
him than any other poet (though that is saying little).
Coleridge was always my favourite poet; but I early
recognised that to make him a model was like trying to
run up a window-pane, or to make clotted cream out of
moonlight, or to pack jelly-fish in hampers. So that
until I was twenty-two Shelley was more studied by me
than anyone else. At the same time I am exposed to
the danger of talking platitudes, because so much has
been written about Shelley of late years which I have
never read. I may have one or two questions to ask you
in relation to the subject as I go on. Thank you for
the American paper. Only the poet feels complimented.
Your criticisms on the _Merry England_ article were
(for once in a way) entirely anticipated by my own
impressions. Happy are they that hear their detractions
and can put them to mending. With regard to what you
say about the advantage of my being in a more booky
place than Storrington[17] I entirely agree. Nor need
you fear the opium. I have learned the advantage of
being without it for mental exercise; and (still more
important) I have learned to bear my fits of depression
without it. Personally I no longer fear it."
In a later letter:--"Shelley was sent off yesterday.
Herewith the few fugitive verses I spoke of. With
regard to the article, please take no notice of any
writing on the backs of the sheets, and disregard all
pencilled writing, either front or back. The opening is
carefully constructed so that, if you think advisable,
you can detach it, and leave the article to commence on
page 10."
His next runs:--
"Surprised about Shelley. Seemed to me dreadful trash
when I read it over before sending it. Shut my eyes
and ran to the post, or some demon might have set me
to work on picking it again. Don't see but what we can
easily draw the knife out of your heart by knocking out
the praise of Swinburne. Won't grieve you if we leave
in the disparaging part of the comparison, I hope? And
I daresay you are perfectly right about it."
Of this Shelley article nearly the whole history is told in a long
letter to his own and his family's friend, Dr. Carroll:--
"The article on Shelley which you asked about I
finished at last, with quite agonising pain and
elaboration. It might have been written in tears, and
is proportionately dear to me. I fear, however, that
it will not be accepted, or accepted only with such
modifications as will go to my heart. It has not been
inserted in the current issue of the _Dublin_--a fact
which looks ominous. First, you see, I prefaced it by
a fiery attack on Catholic Philistinism (exemplified
in Canon T----, though I was not aware about him at
the time I wrote the article), driven home with all
the rhetoric which I could muster. That is pretty sure
to be a stumbling-block. I consulted Mr. Meynell as to
its suppression, but he said 'Leave it in.' I suspect
that he thoroughly agrees with it. Secondly, it is
written at an almost incessant level of poetic prose,
and seethes with imagery like my poetry itself. Now the
sober, ponderous, ecclesiastical _Dublin_ confronted
with poetic prose must be considerably scared. The
editor probably cannot make up his mind whether it
is heavenly rhetoric or infernal nonsense. And in the
midst of my vexation at feeling what a thankless waste
of labour it is, I cannot help a sardonic grin at his
conjectured perplexity. Mr. Meynell's opinion was
'"Shelley" is splendid.'. . .
"There can now be no doubt that the _Dublin Review_
has rejected my article. Nothing has been heard of it
since it was sent. I only hope that they have not lost
the MS. That would be to lose the picked fruit of three
painful months--a quite irreparable loss. I am not
surprised, myself. What is an unlucky ecclesiastical
editor to do when confronted with something so _sui
generis_ as this--my friend's favourite passage, and
the only one which I can remember. I had been talking
of the 'Cloud,' and remarking that it displayed 'the
childish faculty of make-believe, raised to the nth
power.' In fact, I said, Shelley was the child, still
at play, though his play-things were larger. Then I
burst into prose poetry. 'The universe is his box
of toys. He dabbles his hands in the sunset. He is
gold-dusty with tumbling amid the stars. He makes
bright mischief with the moon. He teases into growling
the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the shaking of
its fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates
of heaven. He runs wild over the fields of ether. He
chases the rolling world. He gets between the feet of
the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient
Nature, and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred
wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his
poetry.' The editor sees at once that here is something
such as he has never encountered before. Personally, I
recollect nothing like it in English prose. In French
prose I could point to something not so dissimilar--in
Victor Hugo. But not in English. De Quincey is as
boldly poetical, and his strain far higher; but he is
poetical after quite another style. The editor feels
himself out of his latitude. He is probably a person of
only average literary taste--that is, he can tell the
literary hawk from the literary handsaw when the wind
is southerly. He feels that discretion is the better
part of valour. The thing may be very good, may be very
bad. But it is beyond or below comprehension. So he
rejects it. Twelve years hence (if he live so long) he
will feel uncomfortable should anyone allude to that
rejection. Unless he has lost the MS. In that case the
thing is gone for ever.
"I had a commission (through Mr. Meynell) to write an
article for the jubilee number of the _Tablet_; but the
editor would have nothing to do with it when it was
written. I had said that Cardinal Wiseman too often
wrote like a brilliant schoolboy (I _might_ have said
that, as regards his style, he seldom wrote like anyone
else); and I had been guilty of other sins of omission
and commission which were likely to bristle the hair of
the Canon T----s."
And later, to the same correspondent:--
"_August._--I have been re-reading what I said
regarding my rejected Shelley article, and I see
that you might possibly interpret my language as
referring to its _merit_. This would make my words read
arrogantly in the extreme. When I said that I knew
nothing just like it in the language, I was speaking of
its _kind_, its style. As to the _merit_ of that style,
I have ventured no opinion of my own, but simply given
you my friends' opinion. I am so poor a judge of my own
work, that they never pay any attention to what I think
about it. Please always bear this in mind. You may be
sure that in speaking about my own work I always follow
the same rule, to tell you merely what my friends say
as to its merit."
What little more remains to be told of the writing and the posthumous
publication of the Shelley article comes from W. M.:--
"It happened that Bishop (afterwards Cardinal) Vaughan,
who knew the poet's family well in Lancashire, and had
known Francis himself at Ushaw, met him in London at
our house, and out of this meeting and the Bishop's
wish to serve him, came the suggestion that he should
contribute a paper to the _Dublin Review_. That
venerable quarterly, founded by Cardinal Wiseman half
a century before, Bishop Vaughan now owned but did not
edit. It inherited ecclesiastical rather than literary
traditions; and a due consideration for these dictated
the opening passages of the Essay, since somewhat
curtailed. Hence proceeded the plea that Theology and
Literature might be reconciled--just such another
reconciliation as Art had been adjured to seal with
Nature at the end of the eighteenth century:
Go find her, kiss her, and be friends again!
And Thompson's plea had this added relevance--that the
choice of a subject, left to himself, had fallen upon
Shelley; perhaps a dubious choice. At any rate the
article was returned to him from the _Dublin_--one more
of those memorable rejections that go into the treasury
of all neglected writers' consolations, perhaps their
illusions. Thrown aside by its discouraged author, the
Essay[18] was found among his papers after his death.
His literary executor thought it right that the Review
for which it was originally designed should again have
the offer of it, since a new generation of readers
had arisen, and another editor, in days otherwise
regenerate. Thus it happened that this orphan among
Essays entered at last on a full inheritance of fame."
It appeared in the _Dublin_ dated July 1908, and for the first time
in a long life of seventy-two years the Review passed into a second
edition. Its reissue in separate form has for preface Mr. George
Wyndham's estimate of it as the most important contribution made to
English literature for twenty years.
* * * * *
From F. T. to W. M.:--
"The _Dublin_ article having been sent, I write to
ask you for more work, or directions as to work. I am
afraid, however, that even if there is room for it
the article will hardly be in time, and that through
my own fault. I miscalculated the date from Father
Driffield's letter, and seeing no newspapers, did
not discover my error till I came to post it. This
is something like a confession of failure, and I am
naturally chagrined about it. But I have one comfort
from the affair: I not only hope but think (though
until I see how I proceed with my next book I will not
speak decidedly) that it has broken me to harness. You
ask me to write frankly, and so I will tell you just
how I have found myself get on with my work. At first
I could not get on at all. I tried regularly enough
to settle myself to writing; but my brain would not
work. During the last four days I wrote at a pretty
uniform rate, and wrote so continuously as I have never
been able to write before--in fact, more continuously
than I mean to write again, except in an emergency
like this--I began to feel very shaken at the end of
it. But the valuable thing is that I was able to make
myself write when and for as long as I pleased. I want
some more work now, but if left to myself I may lose a
habit scarcely acquired. . . . The only two ideas in my
head both require books. The one is for an article on
Dryden, the other an old idea for an article on 'Idylls
of the King.' Very likely my idea with regard to the
latter has long been anticipated: so that to prevent
any possible waste of labour let me briefly explain
it. I have seen it objected to them that there are
only the slightest and most arbitrary narrative links
between them, and that they form no real sequence.
My idea is to show that they have not a narrative,
but a moral, sequence. (I have nothing to do with the
allegory.) Tennyson's idea has been to show the gradual
disruption of Arthur's court and realm through the
'little pitted speck in garnered fruit' of Guinevere's
sin, which 'rotting inward slowly moulders all.'
This he does by a series of separate pictures each
exhibiting in a progressive style the disintegrating
process. Each exhibits some definite development of
decaying virtue in court or kingdom. Viewed in this
light, they have a real relation to each other which is
that of their common relation to the central idea. It
is a _crescendo_ of moral laxity; and throughout, by
constant little side touches, he keeps before my mind
how all this is sprung from the daily visible sin of
the Queen's life. That is the idea: judge for yourself
if it is worth anything. If you have any work ready for
me, I should prefer to do that; I think I could now do
work not originated by myself."
He continues:--
"I gather from her last poem that Miss Tynan is no
longer with you, or I should have hardly sent you the
longer verses (the 'Sere of the Leaf'), for I feel
that I have taken a perhaps unwarrantable liberty in
apostrophising her, even in her poetical and therefore
public capacity. I can only plead that verse, like
'l'Amour' in Carmen's song--
est enfant de Bohème,
Qui n'a jamais, jamais connu de loi!
The thing would not write itself otherwise. She
happened to set the current of my thought, and I could
not quit the current."
Of this liberty Miss Tynan, one of the earliest of Francis's admiring
and admired, wrote to her poet:--
"I must thank you very much for associating my name
with your luxuriantly beautiful poem in the current
number (January 1891) of _Merry England_, and for
giving my words place on the golden and scarlet web
and woof of poetry. No one could fail to be proud and
grateful for such a distinction. I have been deeply
interested in your poetry since the first day I saw
your name to 'Dream Tryst.' I am sure I was one of the
first to write and ask, 'Who is Francis Thompson?'"
And again in 1892:--
" . . . You are too good to say you are indebted to me.
If I thought you were, I should begin to feel proud of
myself. I'd like to think better of my own work than I
do of some of my friends' work--Mr. Yeats is one, and
you are another--but I can't. My faculty of admiration
is too true and strong. . . . I hope you will write to
me again, and I look forward to meeting and knowing you
when I come to London. Your buying the 'Poppies' in
the circumstances was indeed a tribute. I am very glad
to know you are now lifted to a safer position, out of
danger of such poverty. I am very glad for you to be
the Meynells' friend." . . .
F. T. to W. M.:--
"DEAR MR. MEYNELL,--How good and kind and patient you
are with me! far more than I am with myself, for I am
often sick with the being that inhabits this villainous
mud-hut of a body. . . . I beguiled the four ill nights
I have spoken of, while the mental cloud was somewhat
lifted, by writing the verses [one set of these was
the 'Sere of the Leaf'] I herewith send you. If there
be no saving grace of poetry in them they are damned;
for I am painfully conscious that they display me, in
every respect, at my morally weakest. Indeed no one but
yourself--or, to be more accurate, yourselves--would
I have allowed to see them; for often verse written
as I write it is nothing less than a confessional far
more intimate than the sacerdotal one. _That_ touches
only your sins, and leaves in merciful darkness your
ignominious, if sinless, weaknesses. When the soul
goes forth, like Andersen's Emperor, thinking herself
clothed round with singing-robes, while in reality her
naked weakness is given defenceless to the visiting
wind, not every mother's son would you allow to gaze
on you at such a time. And the shorter of the two
pieces especially is such a self-revelation, I feel,
as even you have hardly had from me before. Something
in them may be explained to you, and perhaps a little
excused, by the newspaper cutting I forward. For some
inscrutable reason it has affected me as if I never
expected it. I knew of it beforehand; I thought I was
familiarised with the idea; yet when the newspaper
came as I sat at dinner, and I saw her name among so
many familiar names, I pushed away the remainder of my
dinner and--well, I will not say what I did. I have
been miserable ever since. The fact is my nerves want
taking up like an Atlantic cable, and recasing. I am
sometimes like a dispossessed hermit-crab, looking
about everywhere for a new shell, and quivering at
every touch. Figuratively speaking, if I prick my
finger I seem to feel it with my whole body." The shell
he had cast, with lamentations, was the encrustation of
disease, of opium, of street miseries.
In February 1890, having bidden good-bye at Storrington to Daisy "and
Daisy's sister-blossom or blossom-sister, Violet (there are nine
children in the family, the last four all flowers--Rose, Daisy, Lily,
and Violet)," he returned to London. In town the poetry was continued.
"Love in Dian's Lap" was written as he paced, in place of the Downs,
the library floor at Palace Court; and in Kensington Gardens, where
I have seen him at prayer as well as at poetry, he composed "Sister
Songs." Both were pencilled into penny exercise-books. His reiterated
"It's a penny exercise-book" is remembered by every member of the
household set to search for the mislaid first drafts of "Love in Dian's
Lap"--he himself too dismayed to look.
In this form "Sister Songs" (written at about the time of "The Hound of
Heaven," in 1891, but not published till 1895) was covertly handed as a
Christmas offering to his friends, or rather left with a note where it
would be seen by them:--
"DEAR MR. MEYNELL,--I leave with this on the
mantel-piece (in an exercise-book) the poem of which
I spoke. If intensity of labour could make it good,
good it would be. One way or the other, it will be an
effectual test of a theme on which I have never yet
written; if from it I have failed to draw poetry, then
I may as well take down my sign.--Always yours,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
Later, having recovered the manuscript to add to it the "Inscription"
he returned it with:--
"Before I talk of anything else, let me thank you _ab
imis medullis_ for the one happy Christmas I have had
for many a year. Herewith I send you my laggard poem.
I have been delayed partly through making some minor
corrections, but chiefly through having to transcribe
the 'Inscription' at the close of it."
He had watched the piling up of family presents before making his own,
and in the "Inscription" he tells:--
But one I marked who lingered still behind,
As for such souls no seemly gift had he:
He was not of their strain,
Nor worthy so bright beings to entertain,
Nor fit compeer for such high company;
Yet was he surely born to them in mind,
Their youngest nursling of the spirit's kind.
Last stole this one,
With timid glance, of watching eyes adread,
And dropped his frightened flower when all were gone;
And where the frail flower fell, it witheréd.
But yet methought those high souls smiled thereon;
As when a child, upstraining at your knees
Some fond and fancied nothings, says, "I give you these."
Of the first notion for this poem's title, "Amphicypellon," he wrote:--
"It refers to the αμφικυπελλον which Hephaestus,
in Homer, bears round to the gods when he acts as
cupbearer by way of joke. When Schliemann's things
from Troy were first exhibited at South Kensington,
I remember seeing among them a drinking-cup labelled
'Perhaps the _amphicypellon_ of Homer.' It was a
boat-shaped cup of plain gold, open at the top and
with a crescentic aperture at either extremity of the
rim, through which the wine could either be poured or
drunk. So that you could pour from either end, and (if
the cup were _brimmed_ with wine) two people could
have drunk from it at the same time, one at either
extremity. In a certain sense, therefore, it was a
double cup. And it had also two handles, one at either
of its boat-shaped sides, so that it was a two-handled
cup. You will see at once why I have applied the name
to my double poem."
Later this title was abandoned:--
"Let it be 'Sister Songs' as you suggest. But keep 'an
offering to two sisters' where it now is--on the title
page. 'Sister Songs' was my own first alteration of the
title, but was dropped I hardly know why."
One of his first articles after he left his always beloved Storrington
was the notice of General Booth's _In Darkest England_. Called
"Catholics in Darkest England," and signed "Francis Tancred," it
appeared in _Merry England_ for January 1891. Mr. Stead, in the _Review
of Reviews_, wrote:--
"Tancred sounds a bugle-blast which, it is hoped,
will ring through the Catholic ranks not only in
England, but in all Catholic Christendom. After
speaking highly of General Booth and his large,
daring, and comprehensive scheme, he points out that
it will of necessity lead to the proselytising of
neglected Catholics. He, therefore, cries aloud for
the creation of a Catholic Salvation Army, or rather,
for the utilisation of the Franciscans, Regulars and
Tertiaries, for the purpose of social salvation."
"Mr. Francis Tancred" received from Mr. Stead the following letter:--
"_January 12, 1891._
"DEAR SIR,--I beg to forward you herewith a copy
of the _Review of Reviews_, in which you will find
your admirable article quoted and briefly commented
upon. Permit me to say that I read your article with
sincere admiration and heartfelt sympathy, and that it
delighted the Salvation Army people at headquarters
more than anything that has appeared for a long time.
'That man can write said Bramwell Booth to me, and I
think he sincerely grudges your pen to the Catholic
Church.--I am, yours truly,
W. T. STEAD."[19]
Cardinal Manning[20] thereupon summoned Francis through my father, who
was the Cardinal's friend, and to this single meeting Francis alludes
in "To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster," a poem written, when, a year
later, 1892, Manning died. Of this, A. M. has written:--
"In 1892 his editor asked him for a poem on Cardinal
Manning, just dead, whom the poet had once visited;
surely never was a poem 'to order' so greatly and
originally inspired. I have alluded to days of deep
depression in Francis Thompson's life, and they
occurred now and then, with fairly cheerful intervals,
at this time. It was in the grief and terror of
such a day that he wrote 'To the dead Cardinal of
Westminster,' which is a poem rather on himself than
on the dead, an all but despairing presage of his own
decease, which, when sixteen years later it came,
brought no despair."
Claiming the ear of the dead, because the Cardinal asked the poet to go
often to him, he writes in a first version of the poem:--
I saw thee only once,
Although thy gentle tones
Said soft:--
"Come hither oft."
Therefore my spirit clings
Heaven's porter by the wings,
And holds
Its gated golds
Apart, with thee to press
A private business;
Whence
Deign me audience.
Your singer did not come
Back to that stern, bare home:[21]
He knew
Himself and you.
I saw, as seers do,
That you were even you;
And--why,
I too was I.
In that, as in "The Fallen Yew"--
"I take you to my inmost heart, my true!"
Ah fool! but there is one heart you
Shall never take him to!--
his theme is one that often pressed home upon him:--
"There is such goodwill to impart, and such goodwill to
receive, that each threatens to become the other, but
the law of individuality collects its secret strength;
you are you and I am I, and so we remain."
These concluding words are transcribed with a suppressed verse of "To
the Dead Cardinal of Westminster"--a verse suppressed, I imagine,
because its poetry was not approved rather than because it committed
its author to a too definite theory of Individualism. While he marks
the impenetrability of mind and mind, he writes hotly nevertheless of
the Political Economist's Individualism:--
"For diabolical this doctrine of Individualism is; it
is the outcome of the proud teaching which declares it
despicable for men to bow before their fellow-men. It
has meant, not that a man should be individual, but
that he should be independent. Now this I take to be an
altogether deadly lie. A man _should_ be individual,
but not independent. The very laws of Nature forbid
independence. . . . Independent, he puts forth no
influence; he is sterile as the sands of the desert.
For it is little less than an immutable ordinance
throughout the universe that without intercommunion
nothing is generated. The plant may reproduce on
itself, but if you would rise above mere vegetation, or
the lowest forms of animal life, there can be no true
hermaphroditism; aye, even in the realm of Mind, 'male
and female created He them.' There is but one thing
you can do for yourself; you can kill yourself. Though
you may try to live for yourself, you cannot, in any
permanence, live by yourself. You may rot by yourself,
if you will; but that is not doing, it is ceasing."
Afterwards he was to learn even more strictly from Patmore that the
unit of the world has two persons.
As in the realm of Mind, so in the Spiritual. What might seem the
culmination of secret Individualism, the Communion between Christ and
the Soul, is made universal in the Open Court of Catholicism. However
strict the segregation of Francis's spiritual experiences, they were,
save in some rare and awful moments of estrangement, offered to Christ,
through Christ to the Church, through the Church to the men from whose
intercourse he found himself debarred. Tolstoy's "every man in the
depths of his soul has something he alone comprehends, namely, his
attitude towards God" is a thought divinely expressed in the "Fallen
Yew," but it is only one aspect of the truth, as the single reflection
in a looking-glass is but a single aspect of the thing before it.
Second thoughts, like second mirrors, encircle and multiply the first
impression.[22]
FOOTNOTES:
[15] _Merry England_ was a magazine he had known in Manchester, and
noted especially during his Christmas holiday at home. His uncle,
Edward Healy Thompson, was already a contributor, and among others were
Cardinal Manning, Lionel Johnson, Hilaire Belloc, May Probyn, St. John
Adcock, Sir William Butler, Coulson Kernahan, Alice Corkran, Coventry
Patmore, W. H. Hudson, Katharine Tynan, J. G. Snead Cox, Aubrey de
Vere, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Father R. F. Clark, J. Eastwood Kidson, and
Bernard Whelan.
[16] He himself notes the circumstances of composition. "Mem.--'Ode to
Setting Sun' begun in the field of the Cross, and under shadow of the
Cross, at sunset; finished ascending and descending Jacob's Ladder (mid
or late noon?)" "The Song of the Hours" also was written at Storrington.
[17] The Shelley Essay bears signs of the booklessness of Storrington.
All the quotations were made from memory, and nearly all were
inaccurate.
[18] Also a Shelley "Selection," not published.
[19] There perished with Mr. Stead in the _Titanic_ disaster in 1912
a Catholic priest, who had, shortly before sailing, recommended "The
Hound of Heaven" (with the strangely significant line "Adown Titanic
glooms of chasméd fears") to a friend, as an antidote to decadent
poetry.
[20] At this time he met another Cardinal, then without his Hat, who
knew his people in Manchester. There were many pauses when the talk
turned to his home. Francis, untamable in shabbiness, even to the point
of rags, explained afterwards: "I did not like to dwell on the subject,
lest he should discover that I was in poor circumstances. You see he
corresponds with my father." But his father did, of course, already
know of his need. A letter, dated April 1892, from Bishop Carroll,
runs:--
"MY DEAR MR. MEYNELL,--Francis Thompson's father has agreed to give
me a small sum weekly (3_s._ 6_d._) for his son. I have consented to
forward it, and will do so monthly, adding a little myself. I now
enclose a cheque for 24_s._ It is not much, but it will help.--Ever
yours sincerely,
J. CARROLL."
[21] The old Archbishop's House in Carlisle Place.
[22] At this time he wrote to W. M. of an article in _Merry England_:--
"The Franciscan article is decidedly good. But I am getting a little
sick of this talk of 'individualism,' which only darkens counsel.
The writer seems to mean by it not at all what it means to me--and,
I think, to the Cardinal. What _he_ calls regulated individualism
many people would call Socialism. In fact, some Socialists claim the
Franciscans as a Catholic and religious experiment in the direction
of Socialism. It seems to me that you can juggle with words like
'individualism' to suit your own whims."
CHAPTER VI: LITERARY BEGINNINGS
THE discovery that a man cannot, with any permanence, live by himself
was made after his experience in London and at Storrington. He had
returned to my father's neighbourhood resolved, not only to be a poet,
but to meet the social labours of journalism. This, the elbowing with
other workers at a close-packed table in the private room where, every
Thursday, my father produced with superhuman effort a fresh number of
his _Weekly Register_, meant, much more than a visit to a Cardinal, a
return to the humanities. He fell, with much talk, right into the thick
of it. He was put to small tasks as much that he might be put out of
train for talk as for the use he was. But no device was good enough
to do that; set him to write and there would be endless conversation
on nibs and paper, of what was advisable to write, what to ignore, of
his readers' alleged susceptibilities, and his care for the paper's
circulation. In the end after a hard day there might, or might not,
be a "par" to show, or some doggerel not to show. To this last order
belongs a later attempt to describe the frenzied atmosphere of work:--
In short, with a papal
Election for staple,
Were our inkpot a tun
And our pen like a Maypole,
We'd never be done
With leader, leaderette, pad, comment, and citing,
Nor I with this blighting
Frenzy for jingles and jangles in-_iting_,
And writing
And inditing
And exciting
And biting
My pencil, inviting
Inspiration and plighting
My hair into elf-locks most wild, and affrighting,
And _Registering_, and daying and nighting;
Our readers
Delighting
With leaders
That Whiteing
Might envy before he found work more requiting.
The instant demands of the "busy day" he never learnt to supply, nor
was he put at all seriously to the task of learning. He was too tedious
a pupil for hurried masters. On one busy day, when his platitudes had
been so long chanted that they had got written into the manuscripts
of his distracted audience, he was put in charge of a visitor who
could match all commonplaces with tumultuously brilliant talk. But it
was Thompson's day. With numbers on his side--his repetitions came
in hordes fit to annihilate opposition--he plodded through a long
afternoon in another room with the silent saviour of the workers. To
the dinner table he came with the bright eye of enthusiasm; "I have
never known G---- more brilliant," he explained in all honesty.
At times he would be sent for short visits to Crawley, whence he
writes:--
"I began a letter to you last Wednesday, but it never
got finished in consequence of the devotion with
which I have since been working at a short article.
Now that I feel on my feet again, I am longing to be
back amongst you all. Touchstone, with the slightest
alteration, voices my feelings about country life:
'Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good
life; but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it
is naught. In respect that it is solitary, I like it
very well; but in respect that it is private, it is a
very vile life. Now in respect it is in the fields,
it pleaseth me well; but in respect it is not in the
city, it is tedious.' I hope, nevertheless, that I
shall not see you long after I return. For I hope that
before the season gets too late you will yourself
make your escape from that infectious web of sewer
rats called London. I know how ill you were before I
left; and it is disgusting to think that here am I,
like the fat reed that rots itself in ease on Lethe
wharf, while you are hung up body and soul for the
benefit of the villainous blubber-brained public. . . .
The _Register_ gave me a 'turn,' by the way, last week.
My eyes strayed carelessly across the announcements
of deaths, and suddenly saw--'Monica Mary.' My heart
stood still, I think. Of course the next second I knew
it must be some other Monica Mary, not she who walks
among the poppies--and the restaurants. How, unwell
as you must be, you have managed to make such good
work of the _Register_ and of _Merry England_ I don't
understand. _M. E._, in particular, is an excellent
number. There is not a poor article in it--except my
own, which is dull enough to please a bishop. B.'s
article I think the best of his that I have seen. It
is really very good, allowing for the fact that it is
essentially imitative writing. B., in fact, has made to
himself a pair of breeches from Mrs. Meynell's cast-off
petticoats. But it is cleverly done, and I did not
think B. had been tailor enough to do it. There are
really felicitous things in the article, though the art
of them _has_ been caught from her. For instance, the
bit about the crops 'bearing their sheaves of spires,'
the transformation of the sheep-bells, the weeds
putting on 'the solistic immortality of sculpture,'
&c. At bottom, doubtless, he has not much to say. But
he has said it so well--that it is a pity someone else
could have said it so much better."
Or, like as not, instead of to the country, he would be sent forth on
some expedition with the children to whom he bore himself as a sweet
and eager, though not from their point of view an exciting, companion.
He would concentrate on companionable things, and we have him writing
like the gravest sportsman and intentest child of skating in Kensington
Gardens in the winter of 1891:--
"DEAR MR. MEYNELL,--The discovery of what I have done
to my own skates leads me to ask you to warn Monica
next time she goes skating. If she wishes to preserve
her skates, do not let her climb in them the bank of
the Round Pond, where it is set with stones. Indeed,
she ought not to go on the bank in her skates at all;
it is most destructive to them. For which reason,
doubtless, I invariably do it myself. But you must make
her understand I am like certain saints--that man of
exalted piety, St. Simeon Stylites, for instance--to
be admired for my sublime virtues, but not recommended
for imitation. I forget how many feet of sublime virtue
St. Simeon had; mine defies arithmetic. Monica can
already skate backwards a little--I can't. She can do
the outside edge a little--I can't. It is true that her
mode of terminating the latter stroke is to sit down
rapidly on the ice; but this is a mere individualism
of technique. It is a mannerism which, as she advances
in her art, she will doubtless prune in favour of a
severer style; but all youthful artists have their
little luxuriances. Let me thank you for your kindness
in trusting the children to me. Or shall I say trusting
me to them? For on reflection, I have a haunting
suspicion that Monica managed the party with the same
energy she devotes to her skating. Do not infer hence
that she tyrannised over me. On the contrary, both she
and Cuckoo were most solicitously anxious lest I should
mar my own pleasure in attending to theirs. A needless
anxiety, since I desired nothing better than to play
with them."
Thus the fellowships he was learning at the work table were
supplemented by younger friendships. There was no angel to pluck them
from him by the hair; no printer's boy to pluck his sleeve when he
would attend elsewhere, save when he carried his work to Kensington
Gardens and admonitory nurse-maids doubted him:--
"The notice of Mr. Yeats is my absolute opinion: indeed
I have reined in a little of the warmth of language to
which I was disposed, lest my pleasure and surprise
should betray me into extreme praise. If the reviews
are not very brilliant, you must excuse me if you can,
for I myself am not very brilliant just now. Fact is,
the dearest child has made friends with me in the park;
and we have fallen in love with each other with an
instantaneous rapidity not unusual on my side, but a
good deal more unusual on the child's. I rather fancy
she thinks me one of the most admirable of mortals; and
I firmly believe her to be one of the most daintily
supernatural of fairies. And now I am in a fever lest
(after the usual manner of fairies) her kinsfolk should
steal her from me. Result--I haven't slept for two
nights, and I fear I shall not recover myself until
I am resolved whether my glimpses of her are to be
interdicted or not. Of course in some way she is sure
to vanish--elves always do, and my elves in particular."
For the New Year, 1890, he offered his compliments in the letter and
little fairy-tale that follow. They will be understood by everyone who
knew how my father tended the needs of others:--
"DEAR MR. MEYNELL,-- I have imagined at times that in
certain moments you may be inclined to have certain
thoughts, just as I myself have fits in which I see the
black side of everything. Will you pardon if I have
not surmised them truly, and pardon me also for what
is perhaps, I fear, the impertinence of sending you
the enclosed little bit? As a matter of fact it was
just an attempt to put into a sentence or two what I
was thinking this New Year's Eve; when I pondered on
the great work I discern you to have done, and still to
be doing. I hope that many a New Year to come will see
you spreading it; and wish I could be your right hand
in it; not the clog I am. On account of your services
to the Angelic Art in particular, I am sure the
angels must be rehearsing a special chorus for you in
Paradise. I thought so when I read Miss Probyn's poem.
May they sprinkle every stone in your house.--Ever most
truly your
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
The "enclosed little bit" was:--
"Within the mid girth of banyan was the banyan-spirit,
all an-ache with heavy heaving through the years; and
he was saddened, because he doubted to what end his
weary pain of them had been. For beyond his trunk the
banyan spirit looked not. While without, the great
grove hailed him sire; and from every bird nestling
among its thousand branches, Heaven's ear heard _his_
voice."
In 1891, at the birth of my brother Francis, he wrote to W. M.:--
"I hardly, I fear, gave you even commonplace thanks for
the favour you conferred on me in choosing me for your
little son's godfather. Even now I am utterly unable
to express to you what I feel regarding it; I can only
hope that you may comprehend without words. As for the
quietness with which I took it on Saturday--for the
premeditated of emotion in speech I have an instinctive
horror which, I think, you share sufficiently to
understand and excuse in me. Besides, the words which
one might use have been desiccated, fossilised, by
those amiable persons who not only use the heart as a
sleeve-ornament, but conspicuously label it--'This is a
Heart.' One can only, like Cordelia, speak by silence.
"Give my love to Monicella, and Cuckoo, and all the
children. As for F. M. M., I doubt the primitive egoism
is still too new in him for him to care a baby-rattle
about my love."
That he carried in his "copy" a day late mattered little; that he then
further delayed it by some accident seemed serious only to himself, and
he would write thus to W. M.:--
"I called at Palace Court on Friday, and, finding you
were gone, started to follow you. Unfortunately I fell
into composition on the way, and when I next became
conscious of matters sublunary, found myself wandering
about somewhere in the region of Smithfield Market, and
the time late in the afternoon. I am heartily sorry for
my failure to keep my appointment, and hope you will
forgive me. I thought I had disciplined myself out of
these aberrations, which makes me feel all the more
vexed about the matter.--Always your
F. T."
Or, still more distressed:--
"I don't know what I shall do, or what you shall do.
I haven't been able to write a line, through sheer
nervousness and fright. Confound Canon Carroll! It is
he who has put me into this state. I wish you had never
incumbered yourself with me. I am more in a condition
to sit down and go into hysterics like a girl than to
write anything. I know how vexed and impatient you
must feel to hear this from me, when you had expected
to have the thing from me this morning. Indeed I feel
that you have already done too much for me; and that
it would be better you should have nothing more to
do with me. You have already displayed a patience
and tenderness with me that my kindred would never
have displayed; and it is most unjust that I should
any longer be a burden to you. I think I am fit for
nothing: certainly not fit to be any longer the object
of your too great kindness. Please understand that I
entirely feel, and am perfectly resigned to the ending
of an experiment which even your sweetness would never
have burdened yourself with, if you could have foreseen
the consequences.
F. T."
With such fits my father made it his business to deal, and this he did
with a persuasiveness and love that I think no other man could have
summoned. But for his peculiar power F. T. would have returned to the
streets.[23]
At Friston, in Suffolk,
Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare,
And left the flushed print in a poppy there.
At Friston he was given the poppy and wrote the poem. I remember him as
measuring himself, on the borders of a marsh, against a thistle, the
fellow to that which stands six foot out of Sussex turf in "Daisy";
I see him with the poplars on the marshes, and associate him with a
picnic on the Broads among pine-cones and herons. I think it is he
I see coming in at the farm-gate dusty from a road still bright in
the dusk. But the recollections are elusive. His place in childish
memories is not defined, like that of Brin, the friend who hit a ball
over the farm roof, of the chicken pecking at the dining-room floor, a
sister's first steps, the boy who twisted the cows' tails as he drove
the cattle up from the pastures at night; and better remembered is
the hard old man who, stooping over his work in the vegetable garden,
suddenly rose up and threw a stone as big as a potato at a truant boy.
The boy and man, the cry of the one and the grunted curses of the
other, and their remorseless manner of settling again to work, were
things for a London child to marvel at. But the poet, himself as gentle
as children, is remembered, and remembered vaguely, as part of the
general gentle world. Others are remembered for competence, for large
authority, the freedom of their coming and going, their businesses,
affluence, dreariness, or laughter; they are the substantial people,
more substantial than the people of to-day.
There was a certain mightiness about them, like that of a mighty actor;
but Francis Thompson is not in the cast. Moreover, he is not among the
insufferable "supers" who held one's hand too long or whose aspect was
abhorrent to the fastidious eye of youth. In my earlier memories he is
as unsubstantial as the angel I knew to be at my shoulder. Looking back
I cannot see either clearly, but am not incredulous on that account.
But however insignificant he may have been in the injudicious view of a
boy, he was of consequence to the farm housewife, who could never bring
herself to call him anything but "Sir Francis."
There is more of Friston and the Monica of "The Poppy" in later
verses:--
In the land of flag-lilies,
Where burst in golden clangours
The joy-bells of the broom,
You were full of willy-nillies,
Pets, and bee-like angers:
Flaming like a dusky poppy,
In a wrathful bloom.
* * * * *
Yellow were the wheat-ways,
The poppies were most red;
And all your meet and feat ways,
Your sudden bee-like snarlings,
Ah, do you remember,
Darling of the darlings?
* * * * *
Now at one, and now at two,
Swift to pout and swift to woo,
The maid I knew:
Still I see the duskèd tresses--
But the old angers, old caresses?
Still your eyes are autumn thunders,
But where are _you_, child, you?
My father, before the idea of a published volume had taken shape, sewed
up into booklets a few copies of the poems already printed in _Merry
England_. One copy was sent by a common friend to Tennyson, who gave
thanks, through his son, thus briefly:--
"DEAR MR. SNEAD-COX,--Thanks for letting us see the
vigorous poems.--Yours truly,
HALLAM TENNYSON."
Browning, on the other hand, who was a visitor at Palace Court and on
whose ready sympathy for personal details my father would rely, wrote
at generous length:--
"ASOLO, VENETO, ITALIA, _Oct. 7, '89._
"DEAR MR. MEYNELL,--I hardly know how to apologise
to you, or explain to myself how there has occurred
such a delay in doing what I had an impulse to do as
soon as I read the very interesting papers written by
Mr. Thompson, and so kindly brought under my notice
by yourself. Both the Verse and Prose are indeed
remarkable--even without the particulars concerning
their author, for which I am indebted to your goodness.
It is altogether extraordinary that a young man so
naturally gifted should need incitement to do justice
to his own conspicuous ability by endeavouring to
emerge from so uncongenial a course of life as that
which you describe. Surely the least remunerating sort
of 'literary life' would offer advantages incompatible
with the hardest of all struggles for existence, such
as I take Mr. Thompson's to be. Pray assure him, if he
cares to know it, that I have a confident expectation
of his success, if he will but extricate himself--as
by a strenuous effort he may--from all that must now
embarrass him terribly. He can have no better friend
and adviser than yourself--except _himself_, if he
listens to the inner voice.
"Pray offer my best thanks to Mrs. Meynell for her
remembrance of me--who am, as she desires, profiting
by the quiet and beauty of this place--whence, however,
I shall soon depart for Venice, on my way homeward.[24]
I gather, from the absence of anything to the contrary
in your letter, that all is well with you--and so may
it continue! I do not forget your old kindliness,
though we are so much apart in London; and you must
account me always, dear Mr. Meynell, as yours cordially,
ROBERT BROWNING."
F. T. to W. M.:--
"I have received Mr. Sharp's new _Life of Browning_,
which reminds me to do what I have been intending to
do for a long time past; but whenever I wrote to you,
my mind was always occupied with something else which
put the subject out of my head. I had better do it now,
for even my unready pen will say better what I wish
to say than would my still more unready tongue. It
is simply that I wanted to tell you how deeply I was
moved by the reading of Browning's letter in _Merry
England_. When you first mentioned it to me you quoted
loosely a single sentence; and I answered, I think,
something to the effect that I was very pleased by
what he had said. So I was; pleased by what I thought
his kindliness, for (misled by the form in which you
had quoted the sentence from memory) I did not take it
more seriously than that. When I saw _Merry England_ I
perceived that the original sentence was insusceptible
of the interpretation which I had placed upon your
quotation of it. And the idea that in the closing days
of his life my writings should have been under his eye,
and he should have sent me praise and encouragement,
is one that I shall treasure to the closing days of
_my_ life. To say that I owe this to you is to say
little. I have already told you that long before I had
seen you, you exercised, unknown to myself, the most
decisive influence over my mental development when
without such an influence my mental development was
like to have utterly failed. And so to you I owe not
merely Browning's notice, but also that ever I should
have been worth his notice. The little flowers you sent
him were sprung from your own seed. I only hope that
the time may not be far distant when better and less
scanty flowers may repay the pains, and patience, and
tenderness of your gardening."
The poems as they appeared in _Merry England_ or in journals quoting
_Merry England_ found notable adherents. "The Making of Viola" was
re-printed by Miss Katharine Tynan in 1892 in a Dublin paper, to
which she contributed a London letter, and it was in that form that
Mr. Garvin, to be later the poet's inspiring critic and friend,
first chanced upon Thompson. A leader-writer on the _Newcastle Daily
Chronicle_, he found that "up in the north here, if one has a passion
for the finer letters, one must possess his insulated soul in silence."
After reading "The Making of Viola" ("I cannot tell you," he wrote
to W. M. from Newcastle, "what I think of the angelic ingenuousness
of that poem; it exercised over me an instant fascination from which
I never shall escape") he heard nothing more of Thompson till the
publication of _Poems_. His welcome of that volume is quoted in another
page. _Poems_ came to him while he was writing "leaders," and his
brother, already Thompson-mad, declaimed "The Hound of Heaven" beside
a desk where politics and poetry have fought hotly for the field, and
where they have been known to embrace as unexpectedly as Botticelli's
angels and shepherds. "I was obdurate and a little irritated when these
'snatches of Uranian antiphon' broke grandly through my comments on the
Russo-German commercial treaty, or Professor Garner's theories about
the garrulous gorilla." One marvels that the garrulous gorilla leader
was perfectly intelligible in next morning's _Chronicle_. Mr. Garvin's
readers could not guess that Thompson's poems were already beginning
"to swarm in his head like bees." He contrives to write about treaties,
or make them, so that half the world knows nothing of the winged muse
at his elbow. She herself may have sometimes thought him obdurate, for
she has never yet succeeded in marring a "leader." Letters from Mr.
Garvin, written ten years later, were kept among Francis's few valued
possessions. The two were to meet at Palace Court in 1894 and at many
other dates.
My father had also the satisfaction of printing several of the poems
("Daisy, A Song of Youth and Age" and "To my Godchild") in his
anthology, _The Child set in the Midst, by Modern Poets_, the first
book in which anything of F. T.'s had appeared. Thus to W. M. in his
preface fell the task of writing of him as one "who has eluded fame as
long as Shelley did, but cannot elude it longer. To most readers the
poems will come as the revelation of a new personality in poetry, the
last discovered of the Immortals."
Francis's own chronicle of the period is found in a letter to Canon
Carroll, a middle-man to whom he could write with somewhat less
difficulty than to his family:--
"A.D. 1890. Finished _August 12_. Begun, Heaven knows when.
[May 1890.]
"DEAR CANON,--I must beg your and everybody's pardon
for my long silence. The fact is that I have been
for months in a condition of acute mental misery,
frequently almost akin to mania, stifling the
production of everything except poetry, and rendering
me quite incapable of sane letter-writing. It has ended
in my return to London, and I am immensely relieved;
for the removal of the opium had quite destroyed my
power of bearing the almost unbroken solitude in which
I found myself. As for my prospects, unfortunately the
walls of the Protestant periodical press remain still
unshaken and to shake. I have done recently a review
of Lilly's _Century of Revolution_ for the _Register_,
which has, I fancy, appeared, but in some number which
I have not seen. Poor work, and I don't want to see it.
Also a review of Mr. Sharp's recent _Life of Browning_,
which may or may not appear in the _Register_--it is
only just finished. No doubt you saw in the famous
January _Merry England_ Browning's letter about me. It
is, I see, alluded to in Mr. Sharp's _Life_. Sharp's
book has been remarkably successful, no doubt because
it has come out just during the Browning boom, and has
no rival. But it is badly written, and therefore very
difficult to review. As for the verses published in
this month's _Merry England_, don't know why they were
published at all. Mr. Meynell told me himself that
he did not care particularly for them, because they
were too like a poem of Mrs. Browning's. (You will
find the poem--a poem on Pan making a pipe out of a
reed--where it first appeared, namely, in one of your
two old volumes of the _Cornhill Magazine_. There I
read it; and it is a great favourite of mine. The last
two stanzas, with their sudden deeply pathetic turn of
thought are most felicitous, I think.) The verses on
Father Perry in last month's _Merry England_, were the
first verses of mine that attracted any praise from
Catholic outsiders. An old priest wrote from Norwich
expressing his admiration; and Father Philip Fletcher
also praised them to Mr. Meynell.
"This must have been grateful to Mr. Meynell, for his
previous experience had been very different. Good Uncle
Edward (whom I shall write to after you, now that I
am taking up my arrears of correspondence) writing
about my first two little poems, liked 'The Passion of
Mary,' but used words about 'Dream Tryst' that usually
bear a not very pleasant signification. Who do you
think chose to put himself in a ferment about the
'Ode'? Canon T----! When the editor of the _Tablet_
was in Manchester, Canon T---- attacked him about the
article on me which appeared in that paper. What, he
asked, was the 'Ode' all about? He couldn't in the
least understand what it was all about. But even if
he had understood it, he was quite sure that it was
not a thing which ought to have appeared in a Catholic
magazine! And Mr. Meynell subsequently received an
anonymous letter, in which he was warned against
publishing anything more of mine, since it would be
found in the end that paganism was at the bottom of it.
This with regard to me, who began my literary career
with an elaborate indictment of the ruin which the
re-introduction of the pagan spirit must bring upon
poetry! As for the 'Song of the Hours,' to which you
referred, Mr. Meynell was greatly pleased with it;
but considered that while it avoided the violence of
diction which deformed the 'Ode,' it was not equal to
that in range of power.
* * * * *
"Since I wrote the foregoing pages a considerable time
has elapsed. How long, I do not know, for they were
written at intervals, and so were not dated. My health
has been consistently bad; though I have had, and have,
nothing definite the matter with me, except dyspepsia
and constant colds. My writing powers have deserted me,
and I have suffered failure after failure, till I have
been too despondent to have any heart for writing to
you. Much, no doubt, is due to this infernal weather.
Confined to the house and deprived of sunlight, I droop
like a moulting canary. It was not so when you knew
me; but my vital power has been terribly sapped since
then. Only air and exercise keep me going now. As to
the literary enterprises alluded to in the early part
of this letter, they have successively failed.
"The lines on Father Perry have taken hold of _Merry
England_ readers as nothing of mine has done. Mr.
Meynell had several letters from ecclesiastics
(including one from the head of a monastery--I forget
where or in what Order) expressing admiration of the
poem; and the sub-editor of the _Tablet_ had one from
some priest in Liverpool. I meant the thing merely
for a pretty, gracefully turned fancy; what the
Elizabethans would have called an excellent conceit.
That it is nothing more, I quite agree with Mr.
Blackburn, whose judgment I much value. In the first
place he generally represents Mrs. Meynell's judgment,
who is his guide and friend in everything--and such a
guide and friend no other young man in England has. In
the second place he has an excellent judgment of his
own. Of Mr. Meynell's opinion, I know merely that he
dropped me a post-card saying the poem was 'very fine.'
* * * * *
"Another very small poem on Shelley, Mrs. Meynell has
pronounced 'a little masterpiece.' The expression,
however, may have been hastily and inaccurately
reported by Mrs. Blackburn; I prefer to take it with
caution. Another poem, a sonnet, I have heard nothing
about; but I have never yet really succeeded with a
sonnet. I did a little minor work on the _Tablet_
during the editor's absence--part of the Chronicle of
the Week, and two or three of the Notes, including a
paragraph on Rudyard Kipling and a ferocious little
onslaught on the trashy abomination which Swinburne has
contributed to the _Fortnightly_. In last week's _Scots
Observer_ appeared an exquisite little poem by Mrs.
Meynell--the first she has written since her marriage.
A long silence, disastrous for literature! The poem
is a perfect miniature example of her most lovelily
tender work; and is, like all her best, of a signal
originality in its central idea no less than in its
development.
"Most women of genius--George Eliot, Charlotte
Brontë, and Mrs. Browning, who, indeed, alludes to
her husband's penetration in seeing beyond 'this mask
of me'--have been decidedly plain. That Mrs. Meynell
is not like them you may judge from 'Her Portrait.'
Nor will she attain any rapid notice like them. Her
work is of that subtly delicate order which--as with
Coleridge, for instance--needs to soak into men for a
generation or two before it gets adequate recognition.
Nevertheless it is something to have won the admiration
of men like Rossetti, Ruskin, and, shall I add, the
immortal Oscar Wilde? (A witty, paradoxical writer,
who, nevertheless, _meo judicio_, will do nothing
permanent because he is in earnest about nothing.)
Known or unknown, she cares as little as St. Francis
de Sales would have cared what might become of his
writings.
"At present my prose article is like a lady about whom
Mr. Blackburn told me--renowned for her malapropisms.
A friend met her in Paris, and was about to address
her when the lady put up her hand: 'Hush, don't
recognise me! I am travelling in embryo.' So is my
prose article. And now I think this letter should be
big enough to cover a multitude of sins of omission
in my correspondence. I see that you and a number of
our friends were at Ushaw for the Exhibition week.
The death of my old master, Mr. Formby, to which you
referred in your postcard, I saw in the _Register_. I
was deeply sorry. Wishing not to bring myself under
anyone's notice until I felt my position more assured,
I had abstained from following my first impulse, which
was to send him a copy of the magazine containing my
'Ode,' and accompanying it by a letter. Now I wish
I had pocketed pride, and done so. Not knowing my
circumstances, he may have thought I had forgotten him.
But I had not forgotten him, as I will venture to think
he had not forgotten me.
"With best love to my father, and to Polly when you
next may see her (Maggie, I suppose, will by this time
be beyond the reach of messages), I remain, yours
affectionately,
FRANCIS THOMPSON.
"_P.S._--My address is still that given at the
beginning of this letter, which is so enormous that I
shall have to send it in two envelopes. I am afraid
that you will have to read it by easy stages, unless
you subdivide labour by calling in your curate. By the
way, I spoke of my lines on Shelley as being risky for
a Catholic audience. Let me explain the reason, lest
you should suppose something worse. They are founded
on a letter given in Trelawny's _Recollections_--a
letter from Jane Williams to Shelley two days before
his death. The poem is put into the mouth of the dead
Shelley, and is supposed to be addressed by the poet's
spirit to Jane while his body is tossing on the waters
of Spezzia. Now Jane Williams was a married woman. I
have carefully avoided anything which might not be
addressed by one warm friend to another; but Catholic
readers (witness Canon T----) are apt to shy sometimes
at shadows. . . . When a poet writes love-verses to a
lady, and gives them to her husband for her, it is
surely evident that neither pistols nor the divorce
court are necessary. Now that is what Shelley did."
To Pantasaph in Wales, where he lodged at the gates of the Capuchin
Monastery, he went early in 1892. His first business was the passing of
_Poems_ for the press. Busy over the proof sheets, he writes in answer
to some suggestions of my father's as to the dedication:--
"I cannot consent to the withdrawal of _your_ name.
You have of course the right to refuse to accept the
dedication to yourself. But in that case I have the
right to withdraw the dedication altogether, as I
should certainly do. I should belie the truth and my
own feelings if I represented Mrs. Meynell as the sole
person to whom I owe what it has been given to me to
accomplish in poetry. Suffer this--the sole thing, as
unfortunate necessities of exclusion would have it,
which links this first, possibly this only volume, with
your name--suffer this to stand. I will feel deeply
hurt if you refuse me this gratification."
A slight difficulty in sight, he writes on the impulse:--
"I find Lane has already announced the poems in his
book-list, so I am bound to go through with them; else
I would let them go to the devil. I made myself ill
with over-study, and have been obliged to give my head
three weeks' entire rest. But I am much better again
now. Inwardly I suffer like old Nick; but the blessed
mountain air keeps up my body, and for the rest--my
Lady Pain and I are _au mieux_. I send you two or
three odd bits of verse; but I hardly think you will
find anything in them. . . . The country here is just
beginning to get beautiful, and I am feeling the first
quickening pulse of spring. Lord, it is good for me to
be here--very good. The clogged wheels in me are slowly
beginning to move."
The proofs reached him by way of Palace Court:--
"47 PALACE COURT, _July 19, 1893._
"MY DEAR FRANCIS,--I am very glad that Mr. Lane asked
me to send you the first pages of the book--your poems,
to which Wilfrid and I have so long looked forward.
It is a great happiness to me to do so. . . . I cannot
express to you how beautiful your poems are.--Always,
my dear child, your affectionate
ALICE MEYNELL."
And again, in August, my mother writes:--
"Here are your wonderful poems--most wonderful and
beautiful. It is a great event to me to send you these
proofs. You will, I trust, change the title, 'The Dead
of Westminster.' People will think of nothing but
Westminster Abbey. Please send me the revises, sixteen
pages at a time."
F. T. to A. M. concerning final suggestions made in proof by Coventry
Patmore and my parents:--
"DEAR MRS. MEYNELL,--I have received the finding of the
Court Martial over which you presided; to which the
undersigned begs to make answer, in form and manner
following--
"1. To the first indictment he pleadeth guilty, and
knows not how he omitted to alter the word, as had
been his own intention. He begs, therefore, that for
'soilured' may be substituted 'stealthwon.'
"2. In answer to the third indictment he submits
himself to the judgment of the court, and desires
that _Domus Tua_ shall be omitted, and the requisite
alteration made in the numbering of the poems.
"3. In regard to the second indictment, having already
considered the matter, he refuseth to submit himself to
the court, remaineth _en contumace_, and is prepared,
in token of his unalterable resolution, to suffer the
utmost rigours of the critics."
And he continues, all on account of a misprinted comma in a magazine:--
"Now I carry the war into the enemy's country.
"I do claim to wit that a foul and malicious
alteration has been committed on the body of our King
Phœbus' lieges, in a magazine bearing the style and
denomination of _Merry England_. And I hereby warn
you, that if the same outrage is extended to the same
unoffending poem in my volume, I shall hold you all and
severally responsible. Hereunder follow the details of
my accusation. There should be no fresh stanza and no
stop after 'fertilise.' The pause should come after
'impregnating' in the previous line; and then the next
lines run on (as in the corrected pages I returned on
Thursday):
For flowers that night-wings fertilise
Mock down the stars' unsteady eyes, &c.
"The meaning (which I must have perfectly clear) is
that flowers which are fertilised by night-insects
confront the moon and stars with a glance more
sleepless and steady than their own. Surely anyone who
knows a forest from a flower-pot is aware that flowers
which are fertilised by night-insects necessarily open
at night, and emit at night their odours by which those
insects are attracted. The lines unfortunately altered
are, in fact, explanatory of the image which has gone
before.
"But I sometimes wonder whether the best of you
Londoners do not regard nature as a fine piece of the
Newlyn School, kindly lent by the Almighty for public
exhibition. Few seem to realise that she is alive, has
almost as many ways as a woman, and is to be lived
with, not merely looked at. People are just as bad here
for that matter. I am sick of being told to go here and
to go there, because I shall have 'a splendid view.' I
protest against nature being regarded as on view. If a
man told me to take a three-quarter view of the woman
I loved because I should find her a fine composition,
I fear I should incline to kick him extremely, and ask
whether he thought her five feet odd of canvas. Having
companioned nature in her bed-chamber no less than her
presence room, what I write of her is not lightly to be
altered."[25]
He is a Gascon for boasting his knowledge of Nature's bed-chamber; but
he had some reason. In Wales he slept a night in the woods. Daring,
he entered. One night means much for such as hold eternity in an
hour. For Francis, any single sunrise opened a Day of Creation, and
any sunset awoke in him a comprehension of finality and death, of
rebirth and infinity. The increase and decrease of darkness, the lights
of diminishing and approaching day, were crowded into that single
performance.
"What you say of your night in the woods," writes Mrs.
Hamilton King, "is interesting. But it needed courage.
I should never expect to sleep in a wood at night. The
wood sleeps by day and wakes by night, and this grows
more and more terrible and true as you approach the
tropical forest, where no man alone can survive the
night. 'At night all the beasts of the forest do move,'
as the Psalmist says."
"In regard to the alterations I now enclose to you in the 'Fallen
Yew,' by the correction of two words I hope that I have removed the
obscurity, grammatical and otherwise. In 'Monica Thought Dying' I have
simply substituted 'eleven' for 'thirteen.' The word 'eleven' fits
the metre perfectly well without altering the rest of the line; since
the final 'e' is a natural elision. Most elisions are artificial and
conscious. Such is the elision of the 'a' in 'seraph,' whereby the line
in the 'Fallen Yew' _does_ scan, and so needs no alteration on that
score. But there are a few words wherein we make unconscious elision,
even in daily conversation. The final 'en' after a 'v' we always so
elide; and consequently it is the exception for a poet to count the
final 'en' in such words as 'heaven,' 'seven,' or 'eleven.'"
It is almost the rule that the author on the point of publishing should
flout his public:--
"As for 'immeditatably' it is in all respects the one and only right
word for the line; as regards the exact shade of meaning and feeling,
and as regards the rhythmical movement it gives to the line. So it must
absolutely and without any question stand--woe's me for the public! But
indeed, what is the public doing _dans cette galère_? I believe, it is
true, the public has an odd kind of prejudice that poems are written
for its benefit. It might as well suppose that when a woman loves,
she bears children for its benefit; or (in the case of the poem in
question) that when a man is hurt, he bleeds for its benefit."
But whether he will or not, he bleeds and writes for mankind. If he
stands by his "immeditatably," it is only because he knows that the
public will come to stand by it too. He chooses to be obstinate on
behalf of someone who waits for the word. In flouting his public, the
poet is like a man who, scattering sweets for children, tosses them
away only that they shall be recovered; or, hiding them, is distressed
if they are not found. Thompson put his sweets in difficult places; but
only that he and the others might have the keener recreation.
After more sheets had been corrected and returned to Palace Court, he
writes:--
"It seems to me that they read better than I had
expected--particularly the large additions to 'To a
Poet Breaking Silence,'[26] which were written at a
time when I was by no means very fit for poetry. Your
interest in the volume is very dear to me. I cannot say
I myself feel any elation about it. I am past the time
when such things brought me any elation.
"I have not either of your books,[27] and of course
should most greatly value them. I need not say how
deeply I rejoice at your success."
[Illustration: 47 PALACE COURT]
FOOTNOTES:
[23] In after years Francis wrote letters that seemed to supply no
possible opening for the comforter. Read to-day, their desperation
offers no outlet but a return to the streets. But no sooner did F. T.
come into my father's presence, than he was consoled, often without the
exchange of a word.
[24] Browning left Asolo at the end of October, and died in Venice
early in December.
[25] For all that, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, who walked over his own acres
with Thompson as his guest, wrote:--"He could not distinguish the oak
from the elm, nor did he know the name of the commonest flowers of the
field."
[26] The poem by which my mother broke silence was "Veni Creator."
[27] Among the things he wrote when A. M.'s book came to hand is this
of "Domus Angusta," an essay they had discussed before. "Never again
meditate the suppression of your gloomy passages. It is a most false
epithet for anything you could ever write. You might as well impeach of
gloominess my favourite bit in 'Timon,' with the majestic melancholy of
its cadence--
'My long sickness
Of wealth and living now begins to mend,
And nothing brings me all things.'
Both that passage and yours are poignant; both are deeply sad; while
yours has an added searchingness which makes it (in De Quincey's
phrase) veritably 'heart-shattering'; but how can you call 'gloomy'
what so nobly and resignedly faces the terror it evokes?"
CHAPTER VII: "POEMS"
IN 1893 Messrs. Elkin Mathews and John Lane published _Poems_, a square
book in brown boards with gold circles and a frontispiece by Laurence
Housman. The poet viewed it with pleasure, and elsewhere the praise and
blame it received were both wholehearted:--
"Many thanks for the copies. The book is indeed
beautifully got up," he writes. "I have to thank you
for the _Chronicle_ and to thank Mr. Le Gallienne for
his article. Such unselfish enthusiasm in a young
poet for the work of a brother poet is as rare as it
is graceful in these times, when most _littérateurs_
have adopted the French author's maxim: 'There are no
writers of genius except myself and a few friends--and
I am not certain about my friends.'"
And later:--
"I have read in the _Register_ with great surprise that
the first edition is exhausted. I am even more glad for
my publisher's sake than for my own. The _St. James's_
article, as unusually appreciative as that of the
_Chronicle_, I am very pleased with."
Recurring, in another letter to W. M., to Mr. Le Gallienne's
_Chronicle_ article, he writes:--
"When the first whirl of language is over (was it not a
sin of my own former prose when I waxed enthusiastic?)
he settles down to appreciation which is at the same
time criticism. Will it be believed, however, that
after deprecating superlatives I am actually disposed
to rank myself higher than Mr. Le Gallienne's final
sentence might seem to imply. I absolutely think that
my poetry is 'greater' than any work by a new poet
which has appeared _since Rossetti_. Unless, indeed,
the greater work to which the critic referred was
Mrs. Meynell's. I frankly admit that her poetry has
exquisite unclamorous qualities beside which all the
fireworks of my own are much less enduring things.
Otherwise, I will not vail my crest to Henley, or
Robert Bridges, or even William Watson. For the rest I
have nothing but warm and surprised gratitude for your
untiring efforts on my behalf. I am very pleased with
all the letters you have sent me, particularly Vincent
O'Sullivan's from Oxford. Am I going to found a school
there?
"The minor versifier has at any rate the asterisks
in a 'Judgment in Heaven' which he can catch on to.
There he can have the latest device in poetry, the
whole apparatus procurable at my printer's. I have not
forgotten that it was Le Gallienne's admiration for
the specimen sent to Lane which finally decided the
publication of my book; and I should indeed be sorry to
know that I had repaid him by wounding his feelings.
F. T."
In part his was but a share in the general welcome then accorded to
the poets. Davidson was being hailed with intense zest; Norman Gale
himself, singing amid applause, offered congratulations and a review
to F. T. Only with the appearance of _Sister Songs_ and _New Poems_
was he roundly and viciously abused. But already round the standard
of "An Old Fogey" (Andrew Lang), raised in the _Contemporary Review_,
February 1894, _à propos_ of "The Young Men," there was a considerable
gathering. From the press cuttings of the year a good crop may be got
of such sentences as:--
"I must agree with Mr. L.'s judgment of Mr. Francis
Thompson. His faults are fundamental. Though he uses
the treasure of the Temple, he is not a religious poet.
The note of a true spiritual passion never once sounds
in his book. . . . He owes much to the perseverance
of Mr. and Mrs. Meynell and the Catholics whom they
influence."[28]
It fell to a critic on the _Westminster Gazette_ to do the out and out
"slating." Leading off with quotations from "A Judgment in Heaven," he
asks "Is it poetry? is it sense? is it English?" His case, with such
phrases as "Supportlessly congest" well to the fore, was good. Quoting
"To My God-child" as a happier example, he concluded, "This, too, is
somewhat wild, but it means something."
"The poet of a small Catholic clique" was a description given by one
of the two or three writers who constituted the opposition to his
claims to a great place in English literature. They all made a common
discovery--Francis Thompson was a Catholic.
"We had," said the _Weekly Register_, "Mr. de Vere,
Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, Mrs. Hamilton King, Mr. Coventry
Patmore, to name no others. We need not then have
awaited Mr. Thompson's arrival to undermine the Press
of England in the interests of 'Sectarianism'!"
It came to pass that this poet of fewest friends was charged not
only with log-rolling, but with belonging to a "clique" that had its
headquarters at Palace Court. The fact was that his few friends were
even shyer than his friends' friends of praising him publicly. One
young reviewer (the "Vernon" already mentioned) came at the stroke of
morning's eight to shout through their bedroom doors his new discovered
joy--a poem in _Merry England_ by F. T. "I know at last," was his
loud confidence, "that there is a poet who may worthily take a place
as Shakespeare's second." But in the papers this critic's notices
were very halting: his praises did not call through the press as they
did through the keyhole. The "clique" is proved in his notice the
most unprofitable and unfriendly of companies. In Henley's _National
Observer_ he writes:--
"Mr. Francis Thompson is a young poet of considerable
parts, whose present danger lies in the possibility
of his spoiling. Having recently put forth to the
world a book of poems, modest enough in bulk, he was
presently attacked by a most formidable conspiracy of
adulation. . . . Few writers of really distinguished
quality have been introduced to the world under the
shelter of such a farrago of nonsense."
This writer, almost the only personal friend of Thompson's on the
literary press, does not confine his strictures to the alleged
"promoters" of _Poems_. He points to passages, ungainly and ugly, which
explain why the book as a whole "proves repellent to the majority of
readers"; but
"Let him take heart, then, and sedulously pursue a path
of most ascetic improvement. A word, too, in his ear;
let him not use the universe quite so irresponsibly for
a playground. To toss the stars about, 'to swing the
earth,' &c., is just a little cheap."
The same friend had his say in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the
_Tablet_, so that there was indeed one "conspirator" among his
reviewers. With all such things Francis was well pleased; he enjoyed
the smart of them, and cut them out and pasted them in a scrap-book
along with the panegyrics:--
"In regard to Vernon," he wrote, "I am quite satisfied
with his articles. You must consider that he and I have
in the past exhorted each other to a Spartan virtue
of criticism when one deals with a friend--if one
thinks a friend can stand it. In taking placidly such
unflinching candours there is a glow of self-approving
delight akin to that afforded by taking the discipline,
or breaking the ice to wash, or getting up in the
morning, or any other unnatural act which makes one
feel blessedly above one's neighbours."
Another of his friends thought such treatment salutary: Coventry
Patmore to A. M., February 3, 1894:--
"Lang is a clever donkey. It will do F. T. nothing but
good to be a little attacked."
Coventry Patmore's own article in the _Fortnightly_, July, 1894,
was written before he and Thompson had met. It was easy for even
frequent callers at Palace Court to miss F. T., since he never kept
appointments. At this time A. M. wrote to F. T.:--
"I have been much disappointed at not having the
opportunity of introducing you to Coventry Patmore. He
wished so much to see you. If you knew the splendid
praises he crowned you with!
"He wants to review your book. He would have done so in
the paper he calls the 'Twopenny Damn'[29] (don't be
shocked), if it had not died. As it is, he will do it
somewhere."
As a matter of fact the critics knew neither the poet nor his address.
Even his occasional editors, among whom was Mr. Henry Newbolt, were for
their convenience saved direct communication with him. He knew nobody;
and those who knew everybody did not know him. Mr. Yeats wrote at his
death to W. M.:--
"Now I regret that I never met him, except once for a
few minutes. There seems to be some strange power in
the forms of excess that dissolves, as it were, the
external will, to make the character malleable to the
internal will. An extreme idealism of the imagination
seems to be incompatible in almost all with a perfectly
harmonious relation to the mechanics of life."
Another of the circle of his unacquaintance, Mr. Norman Gale, writing
as an anthologist, for permission to quote, says to the poet:--
"Let me take this opportunity of congratulating you
from my heart on the success of your book. I have said
what I thought of it in print. I was candid."
That, at least, does not betoken the log-roller. If Thompson was
one of "a group"--it was a day of groups--it was composed of cowled
friars and the deaf Welsh hills. When from Mr. Hugh Chisholm, then
the assistant editor of the _St. James's Gazette_, and the writer of
an appreciative notice in that paper, came a request, reinforcing his
printed admiration, for an autograph copy of the "Daisy" the compliment
was made through a third person, and such personalities as his review
contained were not based on an acquaintance with the poet. Another
stranger, Mr. John Davidson, wrote, I believe, the _Speaker's_ praises,
but disclaimed any responsibilities for his reviews when asked, in
later years, if a passage from his article might be quoted--he never
meant anything said in reviews, was his afterthought about them.
Nevertheless, since his were the words of a fellow-poet, I give them:--
"Here are dominion--domination over language, and a
sincerity as of Robert Burns. . . . We must turn from
Mr. Thompson, the latest, and perhaps the greatest,
of English Roman Catholic poets of post-Reformation
times, to the exalted Puritan voice that sang 'At a
Solemn Music' for a strain combining in like manner
intensity and magnificence." . . . (Of "_Her Portrait_.")
"A description, masterful and overmastering, in which
a constant interchange of symbol between earthly and
heavenly beauty pulses like day and night."
With the publication of _Sister Songs_ in 1895 the same charge was
renewed; the _Realm_ felt
"sorry for Mr. Thompson to think that he had been
spoiled by indiscreet flatterers. He ought not to run
away with the idea that anything he chooses to write is
poetry."
"The frenzied pæans of his admirers by profession" were the words of
a leading critic, and might well have stirred a desire in Francis to
explain that he neither knew nor could profit his reviewers. When
one journal became more explicit in its charges he went so far as to
compose, but not to despatch, a reply made principally on somebody
else's behalf:--
"My business is," he wrote, "as one of the--I suppose
I should say shameful--seven pilloried by your critic,
to give my private witness for Mr. Le Gallienne. The
_gravamen_ of the charge against him is not that he
praised too effusively; it is the far more heinous
accusation of log-rolling--in other words, of praising
in return for favours received, or favours which it
was understood were to come. Here, then, are the facts
in my own case. When my book appeared it was reviewed
by Mr. Le Gallienne in terms no less generous than
those used by him recently in the _Weekly Sun_. When
his first review appeared Mr. Le Gallienne and myself
were totally unacquainted and unconnected. Before the
second, printed in the _Weekly Sun_, we had met once
casually. And this is the whole extent of my personal
acquaintance or communication with one who is accused
of praising me because he is my friend. Nor does the
meanness anonymously attributed to Mr. Le Gallienne
end here. He is accused of praising me not only as
a friend but as one whom I praise in return. Allow
me then to say that I have never before or since his
review of my poems written a line about him in any
quarter."
His reserve in public did not mean that he was so little contentious
that he never smote his foes in private. He was full of unspoken
arguments, like the man you see talking to himself, or smiling as he
walks, and of whom you may be sure that he is confounding or dismissing
an opponent. The solitary man is full of good answers, but they belong
to an interview from which, over soon, he is speeding; for his triumph,
generally, is the sad one of putting together a repartee or clinching
an argument--too late. So it was with Thompson. He thought out his
brisk repartees purely for his own satisfaction and at leisure, and
would have blushed to answer his belittlers in the open. But in the
mental "ring," in the note-book, he occasionally triumphed:--
"I need hardly say I have not escaped the accusation of
belonging to a 'Mutual Admiration Society.' There are
few writers, I fancy, but have at one time or another
been surprised by the experience. For it is often an
odd surprise. I myself, for example, am a recluse;
with one or two intimate friends whom I see and one
or two whom I don't. If in the latter case you deny
the intimacy you fail to grasp that I am a recluse. I
saw them ten years ago--there's intimacy. I might see
them again next week, or year--why then, there's more
intimacy. And I don't need to see them at all--go to,
would you desire better intimacy? The chapter of my
intimate friends is as of the snakes in Ireland. My
intimate friends I do, past question, encounter of odd
times--if that constitute the acquaintance, it is the
limit of mine. But speculative assumption, as it is
without knowledge, so cannot have knowledge of its own
incongruity.
"Nor is the reciprocal admiration of small men
necessarily foolish: it is foolish only when it admires
what each wishes to be, not what he is. For my part I
have known in true literary men generosity united with
unflinching plainness of speech. They love literature
too much, that they should bring into her presence less
than severe truth, within the scope and compass of
their conception."
If Thompson had been scolded for his Catholic friends, his Catholic
friends were to be scolded for their Thompson, but on a different
score. In the _American Ecclesiastical Review_, for June 1898, Canon
Sheehan, author of _The Triumph of Failure_, wrote:--
"For the present he will write no more poetry. Why?
I should hardly like to intrude upon the privacy of
another's thoughts; but Francis Thompson, who, with
all his incongruities, ranks in English poetry with
Shelley, and _only_ beneath Shakespeare, has hardly
had any recognition in Catholic circles. If Francis
Thompson had been an Anglican or a Unitarian, his
praises would have been sung unto the ends of the
earth. He would have been the creator of a new school
of poetry. Disciples would have knelt at his feet.
But, being only a Catholic, he is allowed to retire,
and bury in silence one of the noblest imaginations
that have ever been given to Nature's select ones--her
poets. Only two Catholics--literary Catholics--have
noticed this surprising genius--Coventry Patmore and
Wilfrid Meynell. The vast bulk of our co-religionists
have not even heard his name, although it is already
bruited amongst the Immortals; and _the_ great Catholic
poet, for whose advent we have been straining our
vision, has passed beneath our eyes, sung his immortal
songs, and vanished."
Another view of the poet's attitude towards his reception comes from
Mrs. Blackburn at Pantasaph, 1894:--
"As for Francis, I hardly know what to say. I wish
he would show some kind of human elation at his
unprecedented success, but he seems to take it all in
a dull, mechanical way, which is distressing. It is
two months now since there has been any change in him.
He stays away for days together, and, although he has
promised to come to tea with me this afternoon, ten
to one I shan't see him. Bishop Carroll was here last
week, and saw Francis a good deal at the Monastery.
He told me he would ask him to come and stay a short
time with him at Stalybridge, and take him to see his
father. Francis seems so much to want to see his own
people again. It is odd to read all the well-merited
praise, and then realise how outside the pale of
humanity this great genius is, more irresponsible than
any child, with a child's fits of temper and want of
foresight and control. He isn't doing a stroke of work,
and stays in bed the best part of the day, and lately
he falls asleep when he comes to see me. No one can do
anything with him."
[Illustration: Cast of Francis Thompson's Hand]
It was this man who, nevertheless, was as near his public as it is
possible for a writer to be; he made his public. Nobody thought Mr. H.
D. Traill misjudged the chances of popularity when, on the publication
of _Poems_, he wrote to W. M.:--
"I quite agree with you in thinking him a remarkable
poet, but, if he is ever to become other than a
'poet's poet' or 'critic's poet'--if indeed it is
worth anyone's ambition to be other than that--it
will only be by working in a different manner. A
'public' to appreciate 'The Hound of Heaven' is to me
inconceivable."
Mr. William Archer, a splendid appreciator, expressed much the same
view. Yet in the three years after Thompson's death the separate
edition of "The Hound of Heaven" sold fifty thousand copies; and, apart
from anthologies, many more thousands were sold of the books containing
it.
The _Athenæum_ notice fell to Mr. Arthur Symons (3 Feb. 1894), moved
to note the worst, that "inchoate poem, 'A Judgment in Heaven,'" and
to remark the closeness of imitation of Mr. Patmore and Crashaw--"Can
a man serve two such masters?"--and other influences sharing "the
somewhat external quality of Mr. Thompson's inspiration." Mr. Symons
was equally careful to establish, coldly enough, his appreciation of
such importance as might be safely allowed the new poet. No doubt that
review, though W. M. labelled it favourable, made the generosity of
Mr. Le Gallienne and the splendid appreciation of Mr. Garvin doubly
valuable to send to Pantasaph.
* * * * *
F. T. to W. M.:--
"I think Traill's article excellent and kind. But the
_Athenæum_!-- Call you this dealing favourably with
a man? Heaven save me, then, from the unfavourable
dealers! Of course, he is right about the "To Monica
Thought Dying"; but that and one or two other poems
are not sufficient on which to base a charge of
making Mr. Patmore a model. It would have been well,
indeed, for the restraint and sanity of the poems if
I _had_ submitted somewhat to the influence of Mr.
Patmore's example. As for what Watson says, it is
not, like Symons', unfair. The sale of the book is
indeed astonishing. Let us hope that the league of the
weeklies will not materially damp it."
When, with _Sister Songs_ in 1895, came a second batch of reviews, F.
T. wrote:--
"I should much like to see further notices of my book,
if you would not find it too much trouble. Lane has
sent me only Le Gallienne's in the _Star_.[30] From
another source I have had the _Daily Chronicle, St.
James's_ and _Manchester Guardian_. Lane speaks of
reviews in the _Realm_, _Saturday_, and _Athenæum_. If
the two latter are by Symons, as he says, I do not want
to see them. He is the only critic of mine that I think
downright unfair. . . . Coventry has sent me a poem
of Mrs. Meynell's from the _P. M. G._--'Why Wilt Thou
Chide?' No woman ever wrote a thing like that: and but
one man--Coventry himself."
From Patmore's article on _Poems_ in the _Fortnightly Review_, July
1894, which stands as the most important page in the history of the new
poet's reception:--
"Mr. Francis Thompson is a writer whom it is impossible
that any qualified judge should deny to be a 'new
poet,' one altogether distinct in character from that
of the several high-class mediocrities who, during
the past twenty years or so, have blazed into immense
circulation, and have deceived for a while many who
have seemed to be of the elect among critics. And,
unlike most poets of his quality, who have usually had
to wait a quarter of a century or more for adequate
recognition, this poet is pretty sure of a wide
and immediate acknowledgment. A singular and very
interesting history will convince thousands whom the
rumour of it may reach, that he is an 'extraordinary
person'; the heroic faith in and devotion to the
interests of his genius which, through long years, has
been shown by at least two friends, one of them a lady
not inferior in genius to his own; his recognition of
her helpfulness by a series of poems which St. John
of the Cross might have addressed to St. Theresa, and
which, had she not established by her own writings a
firm and original hold on fame, would have carried her
name to posterity in company with that of 'Mrs. Ann
Killigrew'; the very defects of his writing, which will
render manifest, by contrast, its beauties, thereby
ingratiating 'the crowd, incapable of perfectness';
his abundant and often unnecessary obscurities, which
will help his popularity, as Browning's did his, by
ministering to the vanity of such as profess to be able
to see through millstones, are all circumstances which
will probably do more for his immediate acceptance by
the literary public than qualities which ought to place
him, even should he do no more than he has done, in the
permanent ranks of fame, with Cowley and with Crashaw.
"Considering that these eighty-one pages of verse
are all that Mr. Thompson has done, there would seem
room for almost any hope of what he may do, but for
one circumstance which seems to limit expectancy. He
is, I believe, about thirty-five years old--an age at
which most poets have written as well as they have
ever written, and at which the faculty of 'taste,'
which is to a poet what chastity is to a woman, is
usually as perfect as it is likely ever to be. It was
Cowley's incorrigible defect of taste, rather than any
fault of the time, that was responsible for the cold
conglomerate of grit which constitutes the mass of his
writing, though he was occasionally capable of ardent
flights of pure and fluent verse; and it is by the
same shortcoming in Crashaw that we are continually
reminded that what he would have us accept for concrete
poetic passion is mainly an _intellectual_ ardour. The
phraseology of a perfectly poetic ardour is always
'simple, sensuous, and passionate,' and has a seemingly
unconscious _finish from within_, which no 'polish' can
produce. Mr. Thompson, as some critic has remarked, is
a 'greater Crashaw.' He has never, in the present book
of verses, done anything which approaches, in technical
beauty, to Crashaw's 'Music's Duel'; but then Crashaw
himself never did anything else approaching it; and,
for the rest of his work, it has all been equalled, if
not excelled, in its peculiar beauties, as well as its
peculiar defects, by this new poet. . . . Mr. Thompson's
poetry is 'spiritual' almost to a fault. He is always,
even in love, upon mountain heights of perception,
where it is difficult for even disciplined mortality to
breathe for long together. The lady whom he delights
to honour he would have to be too seraphic even for
a seraph. He rebukes her for wearing diamonds, as if
she would be a true woman if she did not delight in
diamonds, if she could get them; and as if she could
be truly seraphic were she not a woman. The crown of
stars of the _Regina Cœli_ is not more naturally
gratifying and becoming to her who, as St. Augustine
says, had no sin, 'except, perhaps, a little vanity,'
than the tiara of brilliants is to the _Regina Mundi_.
Mr. Thompson is a Titan among recent poets; but he
should not forget that a Titan may require and obtain
renovation of his strength by occasional acquaintance
with the earth, without which the heavens themselves
are weak and unstable. The tree Igdrasil, which has
its head in heaven and its roots in hell (the 'lower
parts of the earth'), is the image of the true man,
and eminently so of the poet, who is eminently man. In
proportion to the bright and divine heights to which
it ascends must be the obscure depths in which the
tree is rooted, and from which it draws the mystic sap
of its spiritual life. Since, however, Mr. Thompson's
spirituality is a real ardour of life, and not the
mere negation of life, which passes, with most people,
for spirituality, it seems somewhat ungracious to
complain of its predominance. It is the greatest and
noblest of defects, and shines rather as an eminent
virtue in a time when most other Igdrasils are hiding
their heads in hell and affronting heaven with their
indecorous roots."
In talk with F. T. he said:--
"I look to you to crush all this false mysticism. Crush
it; you can do it if you like; you are the man to do
it."
Although C. P. had seen the proofs he had not met F. T. before the
publication of _Poems_ or his criticism of it in the _Fortnightly_. The
proofs bear the marks of a critic intolerant of everything in which
he detected excess of diction or imagery. One short poem he struck
clean out, with the comment "It will do harm." He was the elder with
a system, the master who knew "the end and aim of poetry," but later,
speaking as with words fully weighed, he said in talk with F. T., "I am
not sure you may not be a greater poet than I am."
_Sister Songs_, published two years later, belongs to the same period
of composition as _Poems_. In all the poetry there is personal
revelation, his own experience being the invisible wind that moves
the cloudy pageant of his verse. But in _Sister Songs_ we see the
experience itself; he alludes to his nights in the streets, and can
here say with Donne: ". . . my verse, the strict map of my misery. . . ."
But not in the first place is it a poem of sad experience, an unfit
offering for little girls. It is what it would be--beautiful,
elaborate, innocent. The second part is addressed to Monica Meynell;
the first is a dance of words in honour of a younger sister--"For
homage unto Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways."
* * * * *
F. T. to W. M.:--
"I have been wondering what criticisms had appeared
on Mrs. Meynell. I have seen none, except the
_Fortnightly_ and the _Chronicle_. Coventry all abroad
about her poetry, Le Gallienne all abroad about her
prose. But the latter's notice of her poetry showed
real perception. Coventry was excellent with regard
to the side of her prose which he had seized; but
rather provoking for seizing it, since he has sent the
_Chronicle_ off after him on what is a false trail. The
side is there; but it is not the prominent side, and
certainly not the side most markedly characteristic of
her."
C. P. to F. T.:--
"LYMINGTON, _July 29, 1895_.
"MY DEAR THOMPSON,--I am glad you think as I do about
those 'wonderful verses' (A. M.'s). I have quoted your
words in a letter I have written to our Friend. They
will delight her greatly. . . .
"It is good news that you are writing prose. You know
how perfectly great I think what I have read of your
prose. After all, the greatest things must be said
in prose. Music is too weak to follow the highest
thought. I will try and go to Pantasaph as soon as I
have arranged some engagements which have come into the
foreground since I wrote to you.
"I hear that Traill and Henley (who abused your first
Book) are in raptures (should they not be written
_ruptures_?) with the last!
"When will the 'critics' understand the difference
between an ounce of diamond dust and a diamond that
weighs an ounce! These gentlemen have written almost
nothing about _Rod, Root, and Flower_. I suppose they
can make nothing of it. But Bell tells me it sells
fairly.--Yours ever,
COVENTRY PATMORE."
Thompson himself adopted the view that _Sister Songs_ lacked a proper
sequence of idea and incident, or rather that, to the unready reader,
it apparently lacked such sequence.
Mr. Arnold Bennett's "Don't say I didn't tell you," saved fortunately
from the flimsy pages of _Woman_, July 3, 1895, reads proudly now:--
"I declare that for three days after this book appeared
I read nothing else. I went about repeating snatches
of it--snatches such as--
The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
Moves all the labouring surges of the world.
My belief is that Francis Thompson has a richer natural
genius, a finer poetical equipment, than any poet save
Shakespeare. Show me the divinest glories of Shelley
and Keats, even of Tennyson, who wrote the 'Lotus
Eaters' and the songs in 'The Princess,' and I think I
can match them all out of this one book, this little
book that can be bought at an ordinary bookseller's
shop for an ordinary, prosaic crown. I fear that in
thus extolling Francis Thompson's work, I am grossly
outraging the canons of criticism. For the man is
alive, he gets up of a morning like common mortals,
not improbably he eats bacon for breakfast; and every
critic with an atom of discretion knows that a poet
must not be called great until he is either dead or
very old. Well, please yourself what you think. But, in
time to come, don't say I didn't tell you."
Mr. Arnold Bennett was to discover for himself the secret of large
sales: he did not negotiate them for his poet, who complained of "my
ill-starred volume--which has sold only 349 copies in twelve months."
Bad enough, of course; but poets of distinction have since then been
contented, or discontented, with the sale of thirty in the same
interval. _New Poems_ did much worse.
* * * * *
F. T. to W. M.:--
"Many thanks for the _Edinburgh_, which has indeed
pleased me. I did not expect such an enthusiastic
review of my work, and particularly of my last book,
from a periodical so conservative and slow-moving. I
am very gratified by what you say about Meredith. You
know, I think, that I hold him the most unquestionable
genius among living novelists. I have read five of his
novels: _Harry Richmond_, _Evan Harrington_, _Richard
Feverel_, _Diana of the Crossways_, _One of our
Conquerors_. Nothing beyond this."
In another letter he again mentions the _Edinburgh_ reviewer:--
"The writer shows not only taste, but what is nowadays
as rare, that acquaintance with the range of English
poetry, which ought to be a natural essential in the
equipment of any poetical critic. Even where he is
mistaken, he is intelligently mistaken. One remark
goes curiously home--that on the higher poetic rank
of metaphor as compared to simile. It has always been
a principle of my own; so much so, that I never use a
simile if I can use a metaphor. The observation on the
burden of the poem to Sylvia shows a metrical sense
unfortunately very unusual in our day."
FOOTNOTES:
[28] His work having appeared in a Catholic magazine, it was known to
the Catholic papers. Apart from the _Weekly Register_, where notices of
his periodical writings were printed, priority belongs to _The Tablet_,
which printed, September, 1889, and 19th July, 1890, serious notices
of the issues of _Merry England_ containing the "Ode to the Setting
Sun" and "The Hound of Heaven"; and to Miss Katharine Tynan, who quoted
the whole of "The Making of Viola" from _Merry England_, May, 1892, in
the _Irish Independent_ in the course of the same month. The Catholic
papers made no particular sign of welcome when the books themselves
were published, but it may be noted that the _Ave Maria_, Notre Dame,
Indiana, had praise for the much-abused extravagance of the opening of
the "Corymbus for Autumn." To the _Catholic World_, February, 1895,
Mr. Walter Lecky contributed many compliments and several biographical
inaccuracies. In the secular press of America F. T. fared less well.
_The New York Post_, 19th of January, 1898, found his work ". . . not
altogether hopeful, since his impulses are wayward, like his life."
_The Critic_, July, 1894, would by no means allow Browning's phrase,
"conspicuous abilities," to pass unchallenged.
[29] The _Anti-Jacobin_, edited by Mr. Frederick Greenwood.
[30] Of _Sister Songs_ Mr. Le Gallienne wrote:--
"Critics are continually asking a writer to be someone else than
himself, but happily Mr. Thompson seems to be one of those poets
who go their own way, oblivious of the cackle of Grub Street. . . .
Passion, in its ideal sense, has seldom found such an ecstatic, such a
magnificently prodigal expression. For the love that Mr. Thompson sings
is that love which never finds, nor can hope to find, 'its earthly
close.' It is the poet's love of love in the abstract, revealed to him
symbolically in the tender youth of two little girls, and taking the
form of a splendid fantastic gallantry of the spirit."
CHAPTER VIII: OF WORDS; OF ORIGINS; OF METRE
THE _Morning Post_ reviewer dwelt on his "incomprehensible sentiments
and unknown words," and even his friends had before publication
warned him that his meanings were lost in the "foam and roar of his
phraseology."
Lionel Johnson was hardly more candid than some others when he said of
Francis Thompson that he had done more to harm the English language
than the worst American newspapers: _corruptio optimi pessima_. And Mr.
Gosse saw him as the defiler of the purity of the English language.
But he was no very hardened coiner of words to be thus taken aback by
objections:--
"By the way, I see Blackburn has queried (on MS. of
_Sister Songs_) 'lovesome.' Is there no such word? I
never made a doubt that there was. It is at any rate
according to analogy. If it is an error, then 'lovely'
must be substituted throughout, which differs somewhat
in _nuance_ of meaning."
He meets Mr. Archer's complaint by quoting Campion's "Cold age deafs
not there our ears," and Shakespeare's "Beastly dumbed by him," and
Keats' "Nighing to that mournful place":--
"In all this I am a born rebel, founding myself on
observed fact before I start to learn theory of
theorisers, systems of system-mongers. I doubt me but
English verbs are, or were, commonly suggested and
derived from adjectives; and had I time and a British
Museum ticket would resolve the matter for myself.
Anyway I have coined nought to the like; I mistrust not
but your same 'dumbed' is all Archer has against me
in this quarrel, and all he shall advance against me
whereon to build such charge, nor shall he find another
like verb in ought of verse I have written, search he
like a lantern of Diogenes. The word lay to my hand and
was a right lusty and well-pithed word, close grained
and forcible as a cudgel, wherefore I used it; and
surely I would have used a dozen such had they served
my turn."
In another case his defence is ready; thus did he consider the weight,
rarity, and character of a word or phrase:--
"Of 'nervure'; I should not, in a like passage, use
_cuticle_ of the skin of a flower or leaf: because
it is a _streaky_ word--its two _K_ sounds and
mouse-shrewd _u_ make it like a wire tweaked by a
plectrum. The _u_ of nervure is not only unaccented,
therefore unprominent in sound, but the soft _v_ and
_n_ quite alter its effect from that it has when
combined with k's and parchment-tight t's."
"'In nescientness, in nescientness,'" complained A.
T. Q. C. in the _Speaker_, June 5 and May 29, 1897,
"puts me at once into a frame of mind unfavourable to
thorough enjoyment of what follows. . . . Undoubtedly
the eulogies of his friends have been at once so
precipitate and defiant as to lead us to suspect that
he is being shielded from frank criticism; that his are
not the rare and most desirable friends, who love none
the less for their courage to detect faults and point
them out; and that, by consequence, he is not being
given a fair chance of correcting his excesses. . . .
'_Monstrance_,' '_vaultages_,' '_arcane_,'
'_sciential_,' '_coerule_,' '_intemperably_,'
'_englut_' (past participle), '_most strainedest_'
(double superlative)--these and the like are not easily
allowed by anyone possessing a sense of the history of
the language."
"Monstrance" is not the only word in that list that shows how hastily
the critics fell foul of him, and those who think that Shakespeare
bears some part in "the history of the language" may take "Most
stillest" for a fair precedent of a double superlative.
Mr. E. K. Chambers, reviewing _Sister Songs_ in 1895, wrote:--
"He showers out obsolete words, or at will coins
new ones, with a profusion that at times becomes
extravagant and grotesque. . . . His freaks of
speech rarely prove anything but ugly linguistic
monstrosities."
"The obsolete 'riped,'" "the rare 'heavened,'" "impitiable,"
"saddenedly," "anticipatedly," "immeditatably"--with these the critics
were wroth. Parodies appeared in the _Saturday Review_--"Latinate
Vocabules"--and in the _Westminster Gazette_. While "monstrance" was
found to have the suspect ring of a coined word, many of the words
he did coin (according to Mr. Beacock's Concordance they number
130 odd) passed unnoticed. They include plain-going utilitarian
feminine forms such as _auxiliatrix_, _consortress_; plurals such as
_innocences_, _translucencies_; adjectives with the prefix _un_, such
as _undelirious_; verbs with the suffix _less_, such as _rebukeless_
and _delimitless_; a number of substantives called into use as verbs,
_e.g._ _mænadize_, _empillared_, _chaplet_; and a less comfortable
group of adverbs, such as _supportlessly_, _predilectedly_, and the
unsustainable _tamelessly_, meaning untamably. (Browning's "abashless"
is of the same class.)
He did not, like Rossetti, go to the glossaries; but "Nares," of
which he never possessed a copy, contains his credentials. Thus
_shard_ is Shakespearian. Drayton has _shawm_. "_Soilure_" is in
"Troilus and Cressida"; "with drunken _spilth_ of wine" in "Timon of
Athens." "_Swart_," "_swink_," "_targe_," "_amerce_," "_avouch_,"
"_assoile_" are all of common acceptance; "_bruit_," "_eld_,"
"_empery_," "_immediacy_," "_ostent_," "_threne_," "_incarnadine_,"
and "_troublous_" are all Shakespearian, and more. "_To gloom_,"
according to precedent, is a verb, and so are "_to englut_," and "_to
fantasy_"; "_lustyhed_" is Drayton's and Spenser's. "_Rondure_" is
common; "_rampire_" is in Dryden even; "_to port_" and "_ported_," and,
of course, "_natheless_" are accepted. "_Crystalline_," being Cowley's
if for no other reason, would be ready to his tongue; "_devirginate_,"
which has the sound of one of his own prolongations, is Donne's;
"_adamantean_" he would probably have coined, if Milton had not done
so before him. "_Temerarious_" came to him as naturally as to Sir
Thomas Browne. "_Femineity_" is Browning's, and "_devisal_" Patmore's,
in their modern usage. "_Immures_" as a substantive still annoys his
readers, but only before they find it in "Troilus and Cressida."
His Latinisms were frequent. Of these the only test to the point is
Dryden's: "If too many foreign words are poured in, it looks as if
they were designed, not to assist the natives, but to conquer them."
From a mature opinion of Sir Thomas Browne, a constant favourite,
that his "prose suffered neither from excess of Latinities nor from
insufficiency in the vulgar tongue," we learn that Thompson was careful
to observe the balance.
In answer to the common rebuke against F. T., A. M. in the _Nation_,
November 23, 1907, says:--
"Obviously there are Latinisms and Latinisms! Those
of Gibbon and Johnson, and of their time generally,
serve to hold passion well at arm's length; they are
the mediate and not the immediate utterance of human
feeling. But in F. T. the majestic Latin word is forged
hot on the anvil of the artificer. No Old English in
the making could be readier or closer."
His own rule of writing was, "That it is the infantries of language, so
to speak, which must make up the mass of a poet's forces; _i.e._ common
diction of the many in every age; the numerous terms of prose, apart
from special poetic diction."
In an early review Thompson writes:--
"We have spoken somewhat contemptuously of 'fine
language.' Let no one suppose from this that we have
any antipathy to literary splendour in itself, apart
from the subject on which it is exercised. Quite the
contrary. To write plainly on a fine subject is to set
a jewel in wood. Did our givers of literary advice only
realise this, we should hear less of the preposterous
maxim 'aim always at writing simply.' Conceive merely
Raleigh, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Milton, and
de Quincey rendered into 'simple English.' Their only
fit place would be the fire. The true abuse of 'fine
language' is rich diction applied to a plain subject,
or lofty words to weak ideas; like most devices in
writing this one also is excellent when employed as a
means, evil when sought as an end."
This is in an early essay: it is doubtful if later he would have so
precisely matched fine writing and good matter. In his own work the
finer meanings are not seldom put into the humbler words.
For his words he had no need to seek far; they were more naturally
remembered for use in the poetry of splendid artifice than the language
of the street. His search was not deliberate. In the offices of the
Church he found words to his hand, but he did not go to the offices on
their account. It is doubtful if he borrowed even a monosyllable from
a poet he did not love. Very rarely he made notes: "_Pleached_--an
invaluable word," is the only memorandum I have come across. He had
no list, like Rossetti's, of "stunning words for poetry," among them
"gonfalon," "virelay," "citole," and "shent." He was at no pains
to coin or collect, nor even to possess a theory. Bulwer Lytton's
wholesale condemnation of Latinisms, and professed preference for such
forms as _scatterling_ and _doomsman_ for "vagabond" and "executioner,"
were not the ways of a liberal master:--
"The labour, the art, the studious vocabulary," says
the writer in the _Nation_, November 23, 1907, "are
locked together within the strenuous grasp of the man's
sincerity. There is no dissociating, no disintegrating,
such poems as these; and Francis Thompson's heart
beats in the words '_roseal_,' '_cymars_,' '_frore_,'
'_amiced_,' '_lamped_,' and so forth."
Being led on in certain studies he became attached to the terms
specially connected with those studies. The process may be traced in
the case of his use of the names of extinct animals. Their discovery
he calls pure romance; "but the romance which lies in the new and
unimagined forms, hidden from the poets and tale-tellers of all
previous ages, and given up to eyes almost satiate with wonders, has
yet to find its writers. . . . Tennyson has seen its uses for large and
impressive allusion--
Nature brings not back the Mastodon,--
but Tennyson is almost alone even in the use of the theme. In an
occasional later and younger poet you may find mention of the
plesiosaure or other typical monster." Again, still reviewing Mr.
Seeley's _Dragons of the Air_, Thompson writes:--
"We have strayed, it seems, into the ancient forge and
workshop of Nature, where she is busy with her first
experiments. . . . We behold, cast off from her anvil,
in bewildering succession, shapes so fantastical,
grotesque, and terrible, as never peopled the
most lawless dreams of an Eastern haschish-eater;
apparitions of inter-twisted types and composite
phantasms, more and more strange than all the brute
gods of Egypt. We are among the rough drafts of a
creation."
The "occasional later and younger poet" was himself.
Of his partial acceptance of the criticism of the Press he makes sign
in a note he had intended printing in _New Poems_:--
"Of words I have coined or revived I have judged fit
to retain but few; and not more than two or three will
be found in this book. I shall also be found, I hope,
to have modified much the excessive loading both of
diction and imagery which disfigured my former work."
That the note was not printed must not strictly be taken to mean that
he repented of his repentance. But he was not easily brought to correct
or discard--the initial process of composition had been too careful
to be lightly tampered with. In A. M. he had a very stern critic for
such words as "tameless," but he was found less amenable than George
Meredith, who, accepting correction, altered two uses of words so
formed. This letter was written during the making of _Poems_:--
"PALACE COURT HOUSE, _Friday_.
"MY DEAR FRANCIS,--The Bible has 'unquenchable,' and
I don't think it could have 'quenchless.' Lowell has
'exhaustless' somewhere. I think one can strictly
hold 'less' to equal 'minus' or 'without,' and with
these the verb is impossible. I remember refusing to
be taught a setting of some words of Praed's that had
'tameless' for 'untamable,' so you see it is an old
objection with me.
"I must confess that 'dauntless' has taken a very firm
place in the language.
"Never has there been such a dance of words as in 'The
Making of Viola.' All other writers make their words
dance on the ground with a certain weight, but these
go in the blue sky. I have to unsay everything I said
in criticism of that lovely poem. I think the long
syllables make themselves valued in every case. But
I do not like three syllables in the course of the
poem--the three that give the iambic movement. I have
not made up my mind as to the alternative endings. They
are all so beautiful.--Ever most sincerely yours,
ALICE MEYNELL."
The suggestions as to metrical modifications he accepted. I print here
a letter of which, however, the interest for me is not etymological:
its interest is that he troubled to write at all to an inattentive
Yahoo of a friend:--
"Dear Ev., as to the note you asked the Latin _simplex_
is from _plecto_ (or rather its root) 'I entwine,'
and some root allied to the Greek 'together.' The
root-meaning is therefore 'twined together,' and it
primarily means that which has synthesis or unity
as opposed to that which is confused or perplexed
by lack of oneness. When Wordsworth (is it not?)
somewhere speaks of a being 'simple and unperplexed,'
consciously or unconsciously, he uses the word mainly
in this original sense, though few even thoughtful
folk explicitly so grasp it. It is degenerated in the
common mouth to the meaning almost of 'elementary.'
Milton, saying poetry should be simple, sensuous, and
passionate (is that the third word?), by _simple_
means synthetic--opposed to prose (especially,
doubtless, he had in mind philosophic prose), which is
analytic.--Yours,
F. T."
He never dropped the habit of words. One of the last letters he wrote,
dated from Rascals' Corner, Southwater, September 14, 1907, was written
when he had detected a random paragraph of A. M.'s in the _Daily
Chronicle_:--
"DEAR MRS. MEYNELL,--You might have added to the
_willow_ par. the Latin _salex_ and the Eng. _sallow_:
"Among the river sallows borne aloft
Or sinking, as the light wind lives or dies!
"The English, I should guess, may be from one of the
Romance tongues; if so all these modern forms are,
mediately or immediately, from the Latin. But it is
interesting to find the Latin and the Irish really
identical (if you neglect the inflectional endings in
the former)--salic and salagh. 'Tis but the difference
'twixt a plain and a guttural hard consonant--for
connective vowels are unstable endlessly. As for k and
g, you see, _e.g._, _reg_-o evolve _rec_-tum.
"Excuse this offhand note, but your paragraph
interested me.
"With warm love to yourself, Wilfrid, and all the
_quondam_ kids who are fast engaging themselves off the
face of my earth.--Yours ever, dear Mrs. Meynell,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
He watched with much interest his words creep into currency.
_Roseal_--"most beloved of my revivals"--which he had known only in
Lodge's _Glaucus and Scylla_, he saw reappear in Dowson and other
writers, and realised it was probably from Thompson and not from Lodge
that it had been learnt. In this he saw the sign--the only one, he
said--of his influence. He could hardly have expected that two years
after his death "labyrinthine" would be a word used not only in poetry
books, but on political platforms--by Mr. George Wyndham and his
less-versed opponents. Words that ten years earlier irked the reader in
poetry became, with a change of mood, acceptable in public speaking, so
that Mr. Asquith's use of "fuliginous" irked nobody.
The objection to a poet's range of phrase finds no support in the
dictionaries, whose abundance is a reproach to the restricted scope of
the modern tongue. Johnson is three parts made up of terms neglected or
discarded, for the reason, chiefly, that we are lazy and unlearned. The
coster-monger whose speech comprises fewer words each year, thinks the
parson a fop for the extent of his vocabulary, and the parson in his
turn is impatient with his poets. The curtailment of our speech goes on
apace, and if we love the poet--the Wordsworth of "Daffodils" or the
Thompson of "Daisy"--as a man of few words, we should admire him for
being at times a man of many.
* * * * *
By 1889 Rossetti had become an absorbing interest, but Coleridge, in
what F. T. calls his Pre-Rossettian days, "had been my favourite poet."
Before Coleridge, Shelley.
An early poem not elsewhere printed, written on the anniversary of
Rossetti's death, illustrates the closeness of his affection--
This was the day that great, sad heart,
That great, sad heart did beat no more,
Which nursed so long its Southern flame
Amid our vapours dull and frore.
* * * * *
Through voice of art and voice of song
He uttered one same truth abroad,--
Through voice of art and voice of song--
That Love below a pilgrim trod:
He said, through women's eyes, "How long!
Love's other half's with God!"
* * * * *
He taught our English art to gaze
On Nature with a learner's eyes:
That hills which look into the heaven
Have their fair bases on the earth;
God paints His most angelic hues
On vapours of a terrene birth.
May God his locks with glories twine,
Be kind to all he wrought amiss!
May God his locks with glories twine,
And give him back his Beatrice.
This day the sad heart ceased to pine,
I trust his lady's beats at his,
And two beat in a single bliss.
Of all Thompson's lines the second of the sunset-image--
Day's dying dragon lies drooping his crest,
Panting red pants into the West,
has been found the most ludicrous. No critic hesitated in condemning
it, and your reader most often splits the line with a laugh, thinking
the while of Hope Brothers. But the poet thought upon his own thought
and upheld his line in face of the query marks confidently balanced on
the margin of his proofs; he remembered Coleridge's--
As if this earth in fast, thick pants were breathing.
"Red" or "thick," there is little for the parodist to choose between
them. Much closer borrowing from Coleridge, in which he pronounces the
words and rhymes of his master but keeps his voice ringing high with
personality, is found at the close of "To my Godchild." It is easy
to know with what keen recognition he must have read Coleridge's "Ne
Plus Ultra." He borrowed its weakest lines because he dared not borrow
the strongest; they would not have become more famous on his hands.
Coleridge's poem ends:--
Reveal'd to none of all the Angelic State,
Save to the Lampads Seven[31]
That watched the Throne of Heaven!
Thompson's ending is
Pass the crystalline sea, the Lampads seven:--
Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.
We have seen an ending; here is a borrowed opening:--
Like a lone Arab, old and blind,
Some caravan had left behind,
Who sits beside a ruin'd well,
Where the shy sand-asps bask and swell;
And now he hangs his aged head aslant
And listens for a human sound--in vain, &c.
It develops into an allegory of illusion: the poet sits desolate, and,
thinking Love visits him, is deceived. Just thus is Thompson's passage
beginning--
As an Arab journeyeth
Through a sand of Ayaman,
Lean Thirst, lolling its cracked tongue, &c. . . .
The staging, the characters, are the same. Perhaps curiosity in
opium-eating led him early and impressionably to the study of
Coleridge. "The Pains of Sleep" brings their experiences cheek to
cheek--haggard cheek to haggard cheek. Thompson wrote a prose tale
embodying the same terror of dreams and dream-existence. Both used
humorous verse and conversation for a means of escape. They laughed to
forget, and punned, not so much to laugh, as to be distracted in the
exercise. One of them did the talking much better than the other; but
their tongues moved to the same command, their voices ran on from the
same fear. Even "Love dies, Love dies, Love dies--Ah! Love is dead" is
the reflection of a page of Coleridge's commonplaces.
These are casual likenesses, found on the penetrable levels of
resemblance, comparable to the coincidence of the after-collegiate
enlisting of the two men, the Bowles connexion, or the Strand
experience. But Francis Thompson, as it happens, has been explicit on
the subject of the unreachable quality of Coleridge:--
"No other poet, perhaps, except Spenser has been an
initial influence, a generative influence, on so many
poets. Having with that mild Elizabethan much affinity,
it is natural that he should be a 'poets' poet' in the
rarer sense--the sense of fecundating other poets. As
with Spenser, it is not that other poets have made him
their model, have reproduced essentials of his style
(accidents no great poet will consciously perpetuate).
The progeny are sufficiently unlike the parent. It is
that he has incited the very sprouting in them of the
laurel-bough, has been to them a fostering sun of song.
Such a primary influence he was to Rossetti--Rossetti,
whose model was far more Keats than Coleridge. Such he
was to Coventry Patmore, in whose work one might trace
many masters rather than Coleridge." ("Such he was to
me," F. T., a reviewer in a public print, refrained
from adding.) "'I did not try to imitate his style,'
said that great singer. 'I can hardly explain _how_ he
influenced me: he was rather an ideal of perfect style
than a model to imitate; but in some indescribable way
he did influence my development more than any other
poet.' No poet, indeed, has been senseless enough to
imitate the inimitable. One might as well try to paint
air as to catch a style so void of all manner that
it is visible, like air, only in its results. . . .
Imitation has no foothold; it would tread on glass."[32]
F. T. noted in the _Academy_, November 20, 1897, the direct coincidence
of Browning's
Its sad in sweet, its sweet in sad,
and Crashaw's
Sweetness so sad, sadness so sweet.
It did not come within his scope as a reviewer to mention the doubly
direct coincidence (or something nearer) of his own:
At all the sadness in the sweet,
The sweetness in the sad.
Coleridge and the other poets to whom Coleridge had guided him; Shelley
and, in prose, de Quincey, are prominent in his early reading. To go
to de Quincey's "Daughter of Lebanon" for the pedigree of "The Hound
of Heaven" is like going to the grocer's for the seeds, in coloured
packets, of the passion flower. But the Victorian tassels of the
earlier piece do not hide its lessons--"to suffer that God should give
by seeming to refuse"--and pursuit is the theme common to both, and
common to writers of most ages. De Quincey did no more than hand it on.
From St. Augustine's "Thou wast driving me on with Thy good, so that I
could not be at rest until Thou wast manifest to the eye of my soul";
to Meister Eckhart's "He who will escape Him only runs to His bosom;
for all corners are open to him," and so on, the idea is the same,
though less elaborated and dramatic than in "The Hound."
In the "Mistress of Vision" the scenery and the lady are Shelleyan; one
marvels that Thompson's teaching comes from those illusive lips. Thus
would it have been written had such thoughts gained desired expression
through Shelley. The thoughts are Francis Thompson's; the mode the
other's. Mr. Beacock refers one to passages of the "Witch of Atlas,"
but the likeness is too elusively general to be caught in particular
verses, and such things as the borrowing of "blosmy" are nothing more
than clues, like the fragmentary débris of a paper-chase, to the
whereabouts of an influence.
An early book of transcription contains a deal of Donne and Stevenson
(including _Father Damien_ and poems), a touch of Andrew Lang, more of
Blunt, a little Meredith; much Rossetti and Cowley, some Suckling, the
inevitable Browne, and a Theodore Watts. Drayton, too, is met in the
Thompsonian verses: "Hear, my Muses, I demand," &c., so that when Mr.
Chesterton says that the shortest way of describing the Victorian age
is to say that Francis Thompson stood outside it, he might have gone
on, with a little access of wilfulness, to say that the seventeenth
century was best described by saying that in it was Francis Thompson.
Marvell he had not read till after his first books--"Just Crashaw and
a little Cowley--and I had formed my style before I knew Cowley, whom I
really did curiously resemble; though none perceived it, because none
had read Cowley."
The Crashaw descent may be traced by way of Coleridge, who said of
certain lines of the "Hymn to St. Teresa" that "They were ever present
in my mind whilst writing the second part of 'Christabel'; if, indeed,
by some process of the mind, they did not suggest the first thought of
the whole poem." Crashaw's Romanism did not interfere with Coleridge's
pleasure, though in reading Herbert, whom he found "delicious," and
at a time when he could note "that he was comparatively but little
known," he paused over inquiries as to the exactness of that author's
conformity to Protestantism. Coleridge was much taken with Herbert's
"The Flower," a poem "especially affecting"--and naturally, to a poet.
It is easy to suppose that Francis gave it particular attention on S.
T. C.'s recommendation, and that he had in his mind the lines
I once more smell the dew and rain
And relish versing
when, conscious of the wings "Of coming songs that lift my hair and
stir it," he praises the
Giver of spring, and song, and every young new thing!
Herbert, welcoming a return of grace in his heart, writes:--
How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are Thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring.
Thompson, in "From the Night of Forebeing," writes:--
From sky to sod,
The world's unfolded blossom smells of God.
Closer still is the resemblance, noted by Mr. Beacock, between Herbert's
Only thy grace, which with these elements comes,
Knoweth the ready way,
And hath the privie key
Op'ning the soul's most subtile rooms;
While those to spirits refin'd, at doore attend
Despatches from their friend,
and Thompson's
Its keys are at the cincture hung of God.
Mr. Beacock has also pointed out the resemblance between Southwell's
Did Christ manure thy heart to breed him briers?
Or doth it need this unaccustom'd soyle
With hellish dung to fertile heaven's desires?
and Thompson's
Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest-fields
Be dunged with rotten death?
Remembering his own acknowledgment--"just Crashaw and a little
Cowley"--one may turn to Mr. Garvin's equally accurate summing up in
the _Bookman_, March 1897:--
"He is an argonaut of literature, far travelled in
the realm of gold, and he has in a strange degree the
assimilative mind that takes suggestions as a cat takes
milk. . . . 'The Daisy' was strangely Wordsworthian. But
'Dream-Tryst' was like Shelley, and had that strange
ethereal poignancy. There was the 'Dead Cardinal of
Westminster,' with its stanzas of shuddering beauty
upon the prescience of death. There was the resplendent
'Judgment in Heaven,' with the trenchant Elizabethan
apothegm of its epilogue. The 'Corymbus for Autumn' was
an overwhelming improvisation of wild and exorbitant
fantasy. To be familiar with it is to repent of having
ever reproached it for a splendid pedantry and a
monstrous ambition. On the whole, if Mr. Thompson had
stopped at his first volume we should have judged him
more akin in stature and temperament to Marlowe than to
any other great figure in English poetry. It seemed to
reveal the same 'high astounding terms,' the same vast
imagery; the same _amour de l'impossible_; the soul
striking the sublime stars, the intolerable passion for
beauty. But Mr. Thompson did not stop there. After the
publication of his second volume, when it became clear
that the 'Hound of Heaven' and 'Sister Songs' should be
read together as a strict lyrical sequence, there was
no longer any comparison possible except the highest,
the inevitable comparison with even Shakespeare's
Sonnets. The Sonnets are the greatest soliloquy
in literature. The 'Hound of Heaven' and 'Sister
Songs' together are the second greatest; and there
is no third. In each case it is rather consciousness
imaged in the magic mirror of poetry than explicit
autobiography. As to Mr. Francis Thompson, what strange
indentures bound him to the Muse we cannot tell. We are
permitted to guess some strict and sad apprenticeship
paid with bitter bread and unimaginable dreams, some
ultimate deliverance of song. It is only possible to
realise all the beauty of Mr. Thompson's work when it
is read as a lyrical sequence related to Shakespeare's
Sonnets on the side of poetry, and to de Quincey's
_Opium Eater_ on the side of prose."
To a certain extent Thompson states his own case in treating of
Mangan's liberties with his Irish originals:--
"They are outrageous, or would be outrageous were the
success not so complete. But poetry is a rootedly
immoral art, in which success excuses well-nigh
everything. That in the soldier is flat blasphemy
which in the captain, the master of his craft, is
but commendable daring. Exactly as a great poet
may plagiarise to his heart's content, because he
plagiarises well, so the truly poetical translator may
reindite a foreign poem and call it a translation."
And in reviewing Henley's _Burns_ he writes, again with the braggart
touch of one who may have gone the same rascally road:--
"Spartan law holds good in literature, where to steal
is honourable, provided it be done with skill and
dexterity: wherefore Mercury was the patron both of
thieves and poets."
Touching a more serious aspect of the case, he writes with Patmore in
his mind:--
"There are some truths so true, that upon everyone who
sees them clearly they force almost the same mode of
expression; they create their own formulas."
It might not have been guessed that the author of "Horatius" had the
means wherewith to lend to the wealthy; but Macaulay's lines "On the
Battle of Naseby"--
Oh! wherefore come ye forth, in triumph from the North,
With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red?
And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout?
And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye tread?
Oh! evil was the root, and bitter was the fruit,
And crimson was the juice of the vintage that we trod;
For we trampled on the throng of the haughty and the strong,
Who sate in the high places, and slew the saints of God!--
supply the model for the ecclesiastical ballad "The Veteran of Heaven"
which begins--
O Captain of the wars, whence won Ye so great scars?
In what fight did Ye smite, and what manner was the foe?
Was it on a day of rout they compassed Thee about,
Or gat Ye these adornings when Ye wrought their overthrow?
"I am disposed to put in a good word for Macaulay's ballads," F. T. has
said.
A fair thought, a keen observation, a neat phrase are seldom strictly
preserved. If accident does not take two or more writers to the same
hill, show them the same sunset, and charge their minds with the same
words, plagiarism will serve the purpose. Even if Cowley's rare wit
had remained in manuscript unseen, its turns would not have been for
many centuries entirely his own. Literature will out. To one or the
other, to plagiarism or accident, is due a likeness between Thompson's
So fearfully the sun doth sound,
Clanging up beyond Cathay;
For the great earthquaking sunrise rolling up beyond Cathay,
and Mr. Kipling's "And the sun came up like thunder out of China,
'cross the Bay."
A wind got up frae off the sea.
It blew the stars as clear could be.
It blew in the een of a' the three,
And the mune was shining clearly!
sang Stevenson's Highlander years before Thompson wrote
And a great wind blew all the stars to flare.
But in neither case is Thompson, though the dates are against him,
proved a thief.
Of a review of his _Poems_ in the _St. James's Gazette_:--
"I only deprecate in it the implied comparison to
Dante, and the to-me-bewildering comparison to Matthew
Arnold. 'Tis not merely that I have studied no poet
less; it is that I should have thought we were in the
sharpest contrast. His characteristic fineness lies
in that very form and restraint to which I so seldom
attain: his characteristic drawback in the lack of that
full stream which I am seldom without. The one needs
and becomes strict banks--for he could not fill wider
ones; the other too readily overflows all banks. But
these are casual specks on an appreciative article--an
article as unusually appreciative as that in the
_Chronicle_."
"French poetry--all modern European poetry--may in the ultimate
analysis be found derivable from the Latin hymn," says an _Edinburgh_
reviewer (January 1911). Francis Thompson in that case was familiar
with the remote ancestry of his house. He helped himself from the hymns.
Of the prose of the Vulgate he wrote in a review of a paper by Dr.
Barry on St. Jerome's revision:--
"No tongue can say so much in so little. And literary
diffuseness is tamed in our Vulgate not only by the
terser influence of the rustic Latin, but by the needs
begotten of Hebrew brevity. Nor to any unprejudiced ear
can this Vulgate Latin be unmusical. For such an ear
the authority of John Addington Symonds (though Dr.
Barry adduces that authority) is not needed to certify
its fine variety of new movement. '_Surge, propera,
amica mea, columba mea, formosa mea, et veni_;' that
and the whole passage which follows, or that preceding
strain closing in--'_Fulcite me floribus, stipate me
malis, quia amore langueo_': could prose have more
impassioned loveliness of melody? Compare it even with
the beautiful corresponding English of the Authorised
(Protestant) Version; the advantage in music is not to
the English, but to the soft and wooing fall of these
deliciously lapsing syllables. Classic prose, could
it even have forgotten its self-conscious living-up
to foreign models, had never the heart of passion for
movement such as this, or as the queenly wail of the
_Lamentations_--'_Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena
populo! facta est quasi vidua domina gentium!_'
"If the Vulgate be the fountain-source, the rivers
are numerous--and neglected. How many outside the
ranks of ecclesiastics ever open the Breviary, with
its Scriptural collocations over which has presided
a wonderful symbolic insight, illuminating them by
passages from the Fathers and significant prayers? The
offices of the Church are suggested poetry--that of
the Assumption, for example, the 'Little Office,' and
almost all those of Our Lady. The very arrangement of
the liturgical year is a suggested epic, based as it is
on a deep parallel between the evolution of the seasons
and that of the Christian soul of the human race."
And further on:--
"It is a pedant who cannot see in St. Augustine one
of the great minds of the world, master of a great
style. Some flights in the _Confessions_ are almost
lyric, such as the beautiful '_Sero te amavi_,' or
the magnificent discourse on memory. The last books
especially of the _City of God_ would sometimes be no
wise incongruous beside the _Paradiso_ of Dante. St.
Bernard's prose rises at times into a beauty which is
essentially that of penetratingly ethereal poetry: not
for nothing has Dante exalted him in the _Paradiso_;
not for nothing does such a man exalt such men. In them
is the meat and milk and honey of religion; and did we
read them our souls would be larger-boned."
Of his early acquaintance with the Bible he writes:--
"The Bible as an influence from the literary standpoint
has a late but important date in my life. As a child I
read it, but for its historical interest. Nevertheless,
even then I was greatly, though vaguely, impressed
by the mysterious imagery, the cloudy grandeurs, of
the Apocalypse. Deeply uncomprehended, it was, of
course, the pageantry of an appalling dream; insurgent
darkness, with wild lights flashing through it;
terrible phantasms, insupportably revealed against
profound light, and in a moment no more; on the earth
hurryings to and fro, like insects of the earth at a
sudden candle; unknown voices uttering out of darkness
darkened and disastrous speech; and all this in
motion and turmoil, like the sands of a fretted pool.
Such is the Apocalypse as it inscribes itself on the
verges of my childish memories. In early youth it
again drew me to itself, giving to my mind a permanent
and shaping direction. In maturer years Ecclesiastes
(casually opened during a week of solitude in the
Fens) masterfully affected a temperament in key with
its basic melancholy. But not till quite later years
did the Bible as a whole become an influence. Then,
however, it came with decisive power. But not as it
had influenced most writers. My style, being already
formed, could receive no evident impress from it: its
vocabulary had come to me through the great writers
of our language. In the first place its influence
was mystical; it revealed to me a whole scheme of
existence, and lit up life like a lantern."
"Assumpta Maria" is "vamped" from the office of Our Lady; he had no
notion of concealing its origin, but rather sought to point it out. The
prayer to the Virgin is itself a confession--
Remember me, poor Thief of Song!
He wrote in 1893, with an enclosure of poems, including the "Assumpta
Maria":--
"They are almost entirely taken from the Office of
the Assumption, some from the Canticle, a few images
from the heathen mythology. Some very beautiful images
are from a hymn by St. Nerses the Armenian, rendered
in _Carmina Mariana_. You will perceive therefore the
reason of the motto from Cowley: 'Thou needst not make
new songs, but say the old.'"
It is at the close of the poem that Francis calls himself "poor Thief
of Song." The theme put honesty out of reach. It has been treated too
often. Even Donne's "Immensity cloistered in the dear womb" is part of
"the great conspiracy" of Marian Song.
* * * * *
The lines most in question in St. Nerses's hymn, thus rendered in
English by W. H. Kent, are--
Dwelling-place of light, be gladsome;
Temple, where the true Sun dwelleth;
Throne of God, rejoice, thou bearest
Him, the Word of the Almighty . . .
Home of him whom none may compass;
Hostel, where the sun finds resting . . .
Daniel's great Stone-bearing Mountain;
Solomon's fair Hill of Incense;
Fountain sealed for him that keeps it;
Garden closed for him that plants.
"I remember," Francis writes, "Father Anselm's expression of comical
surprise at a passage in 'Her Portrait,' where I had employed the terms
of Canon Law relating to ecclesiastical property. Why, he said, here's
a whole page of _De Contractibus_ in poetry. His surprise was increased
when I remarked that I had never read any work on the subject. . . . I
said I got the terms where any one else could get them--from English
history.
"Equal was the surprise of another person at finding a whole passage of
Anna Kingsford in my poetry. It was a passage describing the earth's
_aura_, really remarkably like a passage in a book I had not at the
time read."
* * * * *
In all these cases he is an imitator by choice--independent in taking
only what suits him and depending only where he will. In one case he
was an imitator not by choice but by compulsion, a slavish follower.
There was no more choice for him in following Patmore than for a son
born like his father. Such a poem as "By Reason of Thy Law" was born of
the _Unknown Eros_ odes.
* * * * *
Here are quoted various sentences from F. T.'s note-books, letters, and
published prose bearing on metre, or allied subjects.
* * * * *
Of the learning of poets:--
"I have studied and practised metre with arduous love
since I was sixteen; reviewed poets and poetasters this
twenty years or more, and never yet impeached one of
such a matter as infraction or ignorance of academic
metrical rule. For I know they don't _do_ it--either
poet or poetaster. Poetasters least of all men,
because they are your metrical Tybalts and fight by
the book--one, two, and the third in your bosom; poets
because they have the law in their members, assimilated
by eager obedience from their practised youth; their
liberty is such liberty won by absorption of law, and
is kept in its orbit by their sensitive feodality to
the invisible--the hidden--sun of inspiration. 'They do
not wrong but with just cause': such faults as they may
commit in metre belong not to this elementary class. I
have criticised poets' metre, but ever in the broader
and larger things where blemish accused them not of
ignorance or the carelessness that comes of inattention
to rule. I repeat, they don't do those things, and my
study of metre, poetry, and poets early taught me that."
And he cites an unjustified attack on Stephen Phillips
as a case in point.
Of "Heard on the Mountain," a translation from Hugo in _New Poems_--a
metrical experiment:--
"That splendid fourteen-syllable metre of Chapman, to
which Mr. Kipling has given a new vitality, I have here
treated after the manner of Drydenian rhyming heroics;
not only with the occasional triplet, but also the
occasional Alexandrine, represented by a line of eight
accents. Students of metre will see the analogy to be
strict, the line of eight being merely the carrying
to completion of the catalectic line of seven, as the
Alexandrine is merely the filling out of the catalectic
line of five accents."
Of "The Ode to the Setting Sun":--
"An ode I have thought not unworthy of preservation,
though it was my first published poem of any
importance. In view of the considerable resemblance
between the final stanza and a well-known stanza in
Mr. Davidson's 'Ballad of a Nun,' it is right to state
that 'The Ode to the Setting Sun' was published as long
ago as 1889. The poem has some interest to me in view
of the frequent statement that I modelled the metre of
'The Hound of Heaven' on the ode metre of Mr. Patmore.
'The Ode to the Setting Sun' was published before I had
seen any of Mr. Patmore's work; and a comparison of the
two poems will therefore show exactly the extent to
which the later poem was affected by that great poet's
practice. The ode metre of _New Poems_ is, with this
exception, completely based on the principles which Mr.
Patmore may virtually be said to have discovered."
Of accent and quantity:--
"The classic poets are careful to keep up an
interchange between accent and quantity, an approach
and recession, just as is the case with the great
English poets. Yet with all the lover-like coquetry
between the two elements, they are careful that they
shall never wed--again as with the great English poets.
But (and here lies the difference) the position of the
two elements is _exactly reversed_. It is quantity
which gives the law--is the masculine element--in
classic verse; it is accent in English. In English,
quantity takes the feminine or subordinate place, as
accent does in classic verse. In both it is bad metre
definitely to unite the two."
Sending poetry from Pantasaph, October 1894, he writes to A. M.:--
"My dear lady, . . . the long poem, ('The Anthem of
Earth') was written only as an exercise in blank verse;
indeed, as you will see, I have transferred to it
whole passages from my prose articles. So it is solely
for your judgment on the metre that I send it. It is
my first serious attempt to handle that form, and
it is not likely that I have succeeded all at once;
especially as I have not confined myself to the strict
limits of the metre, but have laid my hand at one clash
among all the licences with which the Elizabethans
build up their harmonies. The question is whether
individual passages succeed sufficiently to justify the
belief that I might reach mastery with practice, or
whether I fail in such a fashion as to suggest native
inaptitude for the metre. M---- thinks the poem a
failure. Being a mistress of numerous metre, she counts
all her feet; though her chosen method is the dactylic,
since she uses her fingers for the purpose. It is well
known that by this profound and exhaustive method of
practical study, you may qualify yourself to sit in
judgment on Shakespeare's metre, if he should submit
his MS. to you from the Shades. I confess my practice
is so slovenly that if anyone should assure me that my
lines had eleven syllables apiece, I should be obliged
to allow I had never counted them. We poor devils who
write by ear have a long way to go before we attain to
the scientific company of poets like M----, who has her
verses at her fingers' ends.--F. T."
To the same purpose are notes on Henley's "Voluntaries":--
"They are in so-called 'irregular' lyric metre, ebbing
and flowing with the motion itself. Irregular it is
not, though the law is concealed. Only a most delicate
response to the behests of inspiration can make such
verse successful. As some persons have an instinctive
sense of orientation by which they know the quarter of
the East, so the poet with this gift has a subtle sense
of hidden metrical law, and in his most seeming-vagrant
metres revolves always (so to speak) round a felt
though invisible centre of obedience."
The immethodical exactitude of his method is further suggested in his
note-book:--
"Temporal variations of metre responsive to the
emotions, like the fluctuations of human respiration,
which also varies indefinitely, under the passage
of changeful emotions, and yet keeps an approximate
temporal uniformity."
Here he evidently alludes particularly to the ode metre of "The Unknown
Eros," for which Patmore claimed that the length of line was controlled
by its emotional significance. On this subject another note must
directly bear. It is to the effect that the matter forces the metre;
that the poet is the servant, not master, of his theme, and that he
must write in such metre as it dictates.
* * * * *
Again he writes:--
"Every great poet makes accepted metre a quite new
metre, imparts to it a totally new movement, impresses
his own individuality upon it."
And again:--
"All verse is rhythmic; but in the graver and more
subtle forms the rhythm is veiled and claustral; it not
only avoids obtruding itself, but seeks to withdraw
itself from notice."
And again:--
"Metrically Poe is the lineal projector of Swinburne,
and hence of modern metre at large--an influence most
disastrous and decadent, like nearly all his influence
on letters."[33]
His own choice among his metrical exercises was "The Making of Viola,"
of which a critic has said (the _Nation_, November 23, 1907) "that the
words seem never to alight, they so bound and rebound, and are so agile
with life."
In an early _Merry England_ article he writes of Crashaw:--
"His employment (in the 'Hymn to St. Teresa' and
its companion 'The Bleeding Heart') of those mixed
four-foot Iambics and Trochaics so often favoured by
modern poets, marks an era in the metre. Coleridge
(in the _Biographia Literaria_) adopts an excellent
expression to distinguish measures which follow the
changes of the sense from those which are regulated
by a pendulum-like beat or tune--however _new_ the
tune--overpowering all intrinsic variety. The former he
styles _numerous_ versification. Crashaw is beautifully
numerous, attaining the most delicate music by veering
pause and modulation--
Miser of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage.
We have said advisedly that the 'St. Teresa' marks an
era in metre. For Coleridge was largely indebted to it
and acknowledged his debt."
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Revelation iv, 5, " . . . there were seven lamps burning before
the Throne, which are the seven spirits of God."
[32] F. T. in the _Academy_, February 6, 1897.
[33] To this he recurs in a note on Tennyson:--"Tennyson too pictorial.
Picture verges on marches of sister-art, painting. Feminine; only not
so entirely so as Swinburne;--still has remnants of statelier mood and
time. Metre--beginning of degeneration completed in and by Swinburne."
CHAPTER IX: AT MONASTERY GATES
IN 1892 F. T. had gone to Pantasaph. He was quartered, at first, in
Bishop's House, at the monastery gates,[34] and the sandalled friars
looked after all his wants--from boots to dogma.
"Thompson is ever so much better," writes Fr. Marianus soon after the
poet's arrival. "He looks it too. He is less melancholy, in fact at
times quite lively." And they cared for him delicately:--
"There is only one little thing about which I have some
difficulty. I know Thompson must need now and again
some little things, but I don't like to ask him does he
need anything (though I have supplied him with paper,
ink, &c.), and I should feel grateful if you would
kindly write to Thompson and tell him to ask me for
anything he may want--that I am his procurator."
His own first letter from Wales:--
"_C'en est fait_, as regards the opium. . . . I am very
comfortable, thanks to your kindness and forethought.
Father Anselm seems to have taken a fancy to me--also
he is afraid of my being lonely--and comes to see me
every other day. He took me all over the Monastery
on Monday, and has just left me after a prolonged
discussion of the things which 'none of us know
anything about,' as Marianus says when he is getting
the worst of an argument."
Father Anselm, now Archbishop of Simla, was the one of the friars of
whom the poet spoke as his philosophical schoolmaster, and to whom he
was indebted for the awakening of new intellectual interests. Coventry
Patmore, too, as his correspondence testifies, knew how to appreciate
the hospitality and good talk of the friars. Both the poets contributed
to the _Annals_ of Father Anselm's editorship. Between the younger
poet and Father Anselm there sprang up a close friendship, which was
not without its influence upon Thompson's later work. During his
Guardianship at Crawley Father Anselm was responsible for the inception
of the Roger Bacon Society, whose meetings F. T. sometimes attended.
Father Alphonsus, whose death in 1911 deprived English Franciscans of
their Provincial, also had much intercourse with Francis Thompson. For
this priest, as he himself alleged, the odes of Coventry Patmore made a
new earth and a new Heaven.
It is not, perhaps, impertinent here and now to attribute to the
younger poet's association with the friars an allusion in one of the
most famous of his lines. "The bearded counsellors of God" has the
local colour if not of Paradise, at least of Pantasaph.[35]
"Poetry clung about the cowls of his Order," wrote Francis, in dealing
with the works of St. Francis and of Thomas of Celano. He had the
right companions, as far as any were admitted, for the new periods of
composition.
They, as he, had sacred commerce _cum Domina Paupertate_. These, his
companions, were once named by her "my Brothers and most dear Friends";
they, entertaining her on bread and water, had given her a couch upon
earth and the grass.
"When she asked for a pillow, they straightway brought
her a stone, and laid it under her Head. So, after she
had slept for a brief space in peace, she arose and
asked the Brothers to show her their Cloister. And
they, leading her to the Summit of a Hill, showed her
the wide World, saying: This is our Cloister, O Lady
Poverty. Thereupon she bade them all sit down together,
and opening her mouth she began to speak unto them
Words of Life."
Francis her poet heard, though at that time he was not come to the
hills about Pantasaph. He had himself found stones for pillows in
the market-place, and had written of one to whom he had half-likened
himself--
Anchorite, who didst dwell
With all the world for cell![36]
St. Francis himself had other words for the same thought:--"Meditate as
much while on this journey as if you were shut up in a hermitage or in
your cell, for wherever we are, wherever we go, we carry our cell with
us; Brother Body is our cell."
* * * * *
Of the grounds for a good understanding between the priests and the
poet there are hints in Richard de Bary's _Franciscan Days of Vigil_:--
"Francis Thompson was just then [1894] a favourite with
the Order, and there were keen discussions about his
mystical intuitions. In the spirit of the Franciscan
_Laudes Domini_, the Breviary Offices of the Seasons,
Thompson recalled them, and expounded the phases of
asceticism that ran with them in his poem, 'From the
Night of Forebeing.'
* * * * *
"The centre of interest in the household was the poet,
Francis Thompson, who spent the summer of that year
in a neighbouring cottage. Walks in the late evening
did not result in much conversation; but at evening
gatherings in my room the poet used often to join the
party, and argued with vigour and persuasiveness on
favourite topics. The Franciscans had learnt a kind of
art of drawing their mystical guest into conversation.
The way was to introduce a subtle contradiction to his
pet theories, which would in a moment produce a storm
of protesting eloquence."
They drew him also on one only occasion into more formal speech. Fr.
Anselm prevailed upon him to enter into the discussion that followed
a paper read by the Hon. W. Gibson, now Lord Ashbourne, at a meeting
of the Roger Bacon Society, held at the Monastery, Crawley, in January
1898.
In April, 1894, an observer writes to W. M.:--
"You will be glad to hear that Francis has written an
Ode which I hear is longer than anything he has done
yet. Also that the 'frenzy' being on him he has begun
another poem yesterday. No one sees him but Fr. Anselm,
to whom he comes every evening and whom he tells of his
work. He told him last night that since you had left he
seemed to have a return of all the old poetic power. Of
course he is flying over hill and dale and never to be
seen, but I am sure you will be as glad as I am at this
fresh development--especially as your and Alice's visit
has evidently called it forth."[37]
To the departed visitors the poet himself wrote:--
"BISHOP'S HOUSE, PANTASAPH.
"_Dearest Wilfrid and Alice_,--As you are together in
my thoughts, so let me join you together in this note.
I cannot express to you what deep happiness your visit
gave me; how dear it was to see your faces again. I
think 'the leaves fell from the day' indeed when your
train went out of the station; and I never heard the
birds with such sad voices.
"I send you herewith the poem I have been at work on.
It is very long, as you will see--as long, I think, as
Wordsworth's great ode. That would not matter--'so I
were equal with him in renown.' But as it is----!
"My fear is that thought in it has strangled poetic
impulse. However of all that you are better judges than
I.
"Does the dear Singer still refuse me her songs? My
health is better again, though unfortunately more
fluctuant than I could wish. Love to all the chicks.
With very best love to yourselves, dear ones,--Yours
ever,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
In another letter F. T. tells of his recurring powers of composition.
"Am overflowing with a sudden access of literary
impulse. I think I could write a book in three months,
if thoughts came down in such an endless avalanche
as they are doing at present. But the collecting and
recasting of my later poems for Lane blocks the way for
the next month, so that I can only write an essay in an
odd hour or two when I lie awake in bed."
He heralds the coming of his sacred poetry in "From the Night of
Forebeing"--
. . . The wings
Hear I not in prævenient winnowings
Of coming songs, that lift my hair and stir it?
* * * * *
That--but low breathe it, lest the Nemesis
Unchild me, vaunting this--
Is bliss, the hid, hugged, swaddled bliss!
O youngling Joy caressed,
That on my now first-mothered breast
Pliest the strange wonder of thine infant lip.
From the highlands of his poetry, from the glory of height in which he
wrote "The Dread of Height" and other poems of "Sight and Insight," he
looked down upon his former poetry:--
Therefore I do repent
That with religion vain,
And misconceivèd pain,
I have my music bent
To waste on bootless things its skiey-gendered rain.
The writing done, he is again cast down:--
"I should be very glad if you will send me the
_Edinburgh_. It would do me good; I never since I knew
you felt so low-hearted and empty of all belief in
myself. I could find it in my heart to pitch my book
into the fire; and I shall be thoroughly glad to get it
off to you, for my heart sinks at the sight or thought
of it. The one remaining poem which had stuck in my
gizzard at the last I succeeded in polishing off last
night, sitting up all night to do it; and I must start
on the preface as soon as this letter is off."
A neighbour's reminiscence is that given by Fr. David Bearne, S. J., in
_The Irish Monthly_, November 1908, who
"recalls two occasions on which I had the privilege
of chatting with the poet--once _tête-à-tête_ in the
delightful seclusion of the gardens at St. Beuno's
College, within sight of Snowdon and of the sea; once
in the thick of the pious crowd that throng each year
to Pantasaph for the Portiuncula. Of each occasion
I retain the happiest memories, though I cannot
recall the exact words of any single sentence that
he uttered. He knew me only as a Jesuit student of
theology, and though I longed to tell him how much I
loved his work, I failed to do so, partly from a sort
of reverential shyness, and partly because, though
he was no chatterer, he led the conversation. On one
occasion I know he had just been making a pilgrimage
to St. Winefride's Well. He spoke of it at length and
with great enthusiasm. But my own mind was occupied
with the man, rather than with what he said. . . . As men
commonly understand the word there was no 'fascination'
about Thompson. There was something better. There was
the _sancta simplicitas_ of the true poet and the real
child."
In 1893 his father was at Rhyl, and Francis sought him there, but
without invitation. He writes:--
"I went over on Monday--only to find that he had left
the previous Wednesday, after having been there for a
month, which things are strange."
To Dr. Thompson the strangeness would be in Francis's unwontedly
active desire to see him. It is probable that each exaggerated the
other's feeling of estrangement. When, in April 1896, Francis heard
that his father was dying, he went to Ashton, but too late. After the
funeral he writes:--
[Illustration: Charles Thompson Mary Turner Thompson
Francis Thompson's Parents]
"I never saw my father again, I cannot speak about it
at present. ---- ---- made it very bitter for me. It
has been nothing but ill-health and sorrow lately, but
I must not trouble you with these things. I saw my
sister looking the merest girl still, and sweeter than
ever. She did not look a day older than ten years ago.
She said I looked very changed and worn."[38]
At Downing he had neighbours in the Feilding family, and it was to
the monastery church that Lady Denbigh came to "make her soul" at the
penitential seasons of the year. This church her husband began to build
when he was an Anglican; then, changing his religion, he had changed
the dedication of his bricks and mortar. From a letter of the Hon.
Everard Feilding to W. M. after F. T.'s death:--
"Your letter reached me at a time when my mind, like
that, I think, of many others, was full of Francis
Thompson; and during the preceding three nights I had
been reading and re-reading aloud to two or three
friends certain of his poems which had specially
touched me, including the _Nocturn_, infinitely
pathetic from my knowledge, however slight, of the man.
"Need I say that I am truly touched to hear that
Thompson should have thought my modest appreciation of
his work as anything more than the most natural thing
in the world? I only met him three times, each time
in the company of my friend Head,[39] who shared my
admiration. Our meeting came about in an absurd enough
wise. A ghost (possibly you have heard, or not
heard, of my taste for these creatures) was reported
active in the neighbourhood of Pantasaph, on my
brother's place in Wales. My own inclination supplied
the motive, and an idle week of Head's the occasion, of
a visit there, and we camped a few nights in a derelict
mansion, rejoicing in the appropriately ominous name of
Pickpocket Hall, in hopes of interviewing the spectre.
Needless to say, we failed. But we got the story of
the Irish monk; also the story of the practical nun,
who scented buried treasure which she hoped to unearth
to the profit of her community; and of the oldest
inhabitant; and, finally, of the Poet. The people at
the monastery had told us that Thompson had been a
witness, and we decided on a call; and at about five
one evening made our way to the tiny cottage where
he lodged, and asked for him. He was still in bed.
We returned at 6.30. He was _still_ in bed. So we
concocted a letter, suitable, as we imagined, to the
person who had written Thompson's poems, not quite
English, somewhat elided, and as inverted as we could
manage, ending with an invitation to breakfast at 9.30
that night and a conference with our hobgoblin. And
somewhat pleased with our effort, we retired to our
haunted mansion and awaited events. At 9.30 he came and
breakfasted while we supped. We said at once to one
another: 'This is not the man to whom we wrote that
letter.' For, instead of parables in polysyllables and
a riot of imagery, we found simplicity and modesty and
a manner which would have been almost commonplace if it
had not been so sincere. But the charm and interest of
his talk grew with the night, and it was already dawn
when, the ghost long since forgotten, we escorted him
back across the snow to his untimely lunch. He told us,
I remember, of his poetical development, and of how,
until recently, he had fancied that the end of poetry
was reached in the stringing together of ingenious
images, an art in which, he somewhat naïvely confessed,
he knew himself to excel; but that now he knew it
should reach further, and he hoped for an improvement
in his future work. _New Poems_ was subsequent to this
meeting. It was only in his account of the ghost,
which had 'charged his body like a battery so that he
felt thunderstorms in his hair,' that the imaginary
individual to whom we had addressed our letter revealed
himself.
"He dined with us twice afterwards, the second time
appearing an hour late, with his head tied up in an
appalling bandage, the result of having been knocked
down by a hansom, so that I took his arrival under the
circumstances as a compliment second only to your own
kind letter. For years I haven't seen him. A letter,
to ask him if he would renew acquaintance, has several
times trembled on the tip of my pen; but I was told he
had become inaccessible, and it never went, and now I
am very sorry."
Something of the Pantasaph ghost got into verse, which I take from a
note-book:--
More creatures lackey man
Than he has note of: through the ways of air
Angels go here and there
About his businesses: we tread the floor
Of a whole sea of spirits: evermore
Oozy with spirits ebbs the air and flows
Round us, and no man knows.
Spirits drift upon the populous breeze
And throng the twinkling leaves that twirl on summer trees.
In notes headed "Varia on Magic" he quotes the _Anatomy of
Melancholy_:--
"The air is not so full of flies in summer, as it is at
all times of invisible devils: this Paracelsus stiffly
maintains."
F. T. wrote to A. M. after the meeting:--
"Is it true that you are going to collect your
contributions to the papers during the last few years?
I sincerely hope so. . . . There was a Dr. Head, a member
of the Savile Club, over here last autumn with Everard
Feilding, who spoke with great enthusiasm of your
"Autolycus." He quoted a bit relating, I think, to
Angelica Kaufmann,[40] who spent a large number of
years in 'taking the plainness off paper.' The phrase
delighted him, as it did me who had not seen it. . . .
I passed a pleasant night with the two. We were
sleeping in a haunted house to interview the ghost;
but as he was a racing-man, he probably found our
conversation too literary to put off his incognito."
The friars helped him to another companion, Coventry Patmore, who as
a member of the Third Order, went in 1894 to stay at Pantasaph. There
Father Anselm, a bachelor of St. Francis, with the Lady Poverty first
among his feminine acquaintance, could meet the greatest of English
love-poets upon equal terms. It was to Fr. Anselm that Francis had lent
Patmore's _Religio Poetæ_ before trusting himself to review it, and
it was by the same friar that he was helped to appreciate Patmore's
trustworthiness as a witness to divine truths. By none save by a priest
of the Church would the poet of the Church have been satisfied that
he might lawfully accept, or attempt to accept, teaching that had
once seemed to him inimical to orthodoxy. _Religio Poetæ_, at first a
stumbling-block, was to become the corner-stone of his later poetry.
Two years before (in August 1892) he had said there were two points
in C.P.'s teaching--as to the nature of the union between God and man
in this world and the next, and the definition of the constitution of
Heaven--that he refused absolutely to accept. He went specially to
Crawley in 1892 to consult Fr. Cuthbert on these points. And he had at
first only unwillingly admitted Patmore's power over him. To a passage
of St. John (chap. xxi.) he adds a note that reveals his mood:--
"Amen, Amen, I say to thee; when thou wert younger, thou didst gird
thyself, and didst walk where thou wouldst. But when thou shalt be old,
thou shalt stretch forth thy hands and another shall gird thee, and
lead thee where thou wouldst not."
To this he adds: "Apply to spiritual maturity."
* * * * *
The barriers down, they quickly recognised cause for intimacy. It was
during Patmore's first visit that Francis made the discovery. He seems
at first hardly to have known it. Writing of it to A. M.:--
"Dear Lady, I thank you for your kind letter, though
it observed an impenitent silence on the subject of
your songs unsent. (That last phrase has a ring of the
only Lewis.)[41] I have had a charming visit from Mr.
Patmore. He bore himself towards me with a dignity and
magnanimity which are not of this age's stature. By
the way, he repeated to me two or three short poems
addressed to yourself. I hope there may be a series
of such songs. You would then have a triple tiara
indeed--crowned by yourself, by me, and highest crowned
by him."
But afterwards in the more vivid light of memory, he said:--
"Though never a word on either side directly touched or
explained the exceptional nature of the proposal, it
was well understood between us--by me no less than by
him--that it was no common or conventional friendship
he asked of me. Not therefore has he sought out my
Welsh hermitage; and scalpelled the fibres of me."
As a rule Francis found as much solitude among the Welsh mountains as
in the desolation of the Harrow Road, but now Patmore walked with him.
F. T. notes their common pleasure in the landscape, "particularly
beautiful--something to do with the light, Patmore thinks." To be in
common light is even better preparation for the communion of poets than
to be on common ground. Friar and seer between them enclosed him at
evening in the monastic parlour. Patmore writes:--
"Francis Thompson and all the Fathers spent two
hours last night in my room, and we had excellent
talk. Father Anselm, the Superior, and a profound
contemplative, said he had never read anything so fine
as the 'Precursor.' He and I had a long talk about
nuptial love, and he went all lengths with me in honour
of the marriage embrace. The Fathers help me to get
through my cigarettes, of which I should like to have
another consignment as soon as possible."
And again:--
"I spend part of my day with Francis Thompson, who is a
delightful companion, full of the best talk."
With the reading of _Religio Poetæ_ and the little book of St. Bernard
translations, Francis discovers their author to be "deeply perceptive
of the Scriptures' symbolic meanings, scouted by moderns; and his
instant intuitional use of the symbolic imagery gives his work the
quality of substantial poetry. In proportion to the height of their
sanctity the Saints are inevitable poets. Sanctity is essential song."
These essays moved Francis to the rare point of letter-writing:--
"THE MONASTERY, PANTASAPH, _June 15, '93_.
"DEAR SIR,--The esoteric essays--which I naturally
turned to first--could only have come from the
writer of _The Unknown Eros_. One alone I have
gracelessness--not to dispute--but to wish to extend.
It is that on the 'Precursor,' where I quite admit
the interpretation, but am inclined to stickle for an
interpretation which would cover and include your own.
Against one reprehensible habit of yours, however,
revealed in this book, I feel forced to utter a
protest. In a fragment of a projected article, which
has remained a fragment, I had written of 'poets born
with an instinctive sense of veritable correspondences
hidden from the multitude.' Then I went on thus: 'In
this, too, lies real distinction and fancy. Leigh
Hunt, interpreting Coleridge as shallowly as Charmian
interpreted the Soothsayer, said that fancy detected
outward analogies, but imagination inward ones. The
truth is that inward resemblance may be as superficial
as outward resemblance; and it is then the product
of fancy, or fantasy. When the resemblance is more
than a resemblance, when it is rooted in the hidden
nature of things, its discernment is the product of
imagination. This is the real distinction: fancy
detects resemblances, imagination identities.' Now if
you will return to your own _Religio Poetæ,_ you will
see of what I accuse you. Masters have privileges,
I admit, but I draw the line at looking over their
pupils' shoulders various odd leagues away.
"To be serious; your little book stands by a stream
of current literature like Cleopatra's Needle by the
dirt-eating Thames.
"I fear, alas! it will not receive the mysterious
hieroglyph of the British Artisan. I remain, yours
sincerely,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
And a little later, of his own "Orient Ode":--
"DEAR MR. PATMORE,--I shall either send you with this,
or later, a small poem of my own; not for its literary
merit, but because, without such a disclaimer, I fear
you would think I had been the first to find your book
'd----d good to steal from.' As a matter of fact,
it was written soon after Easter, and was suggested
by passages in the liturgies of Holy Saturday, some
of which--at rather appalling length--I have quoted
at the head of its two parts. That was done for the
sake of those who might cavil at its doctrines.
Indeed--with superfluous caution--I intended much of
it to be sealed; but your book has mainly broken the
seals I had put upon it. There is quite enough in it
of yours, without the additional presumption that I
had hastened to make immediate use of your last book.
As far as others are concerned, it must rest under
that imputation to which the frequent coincidence
in the selection of symbolism--as an example, the
basing of a whole passage on the symbolic meaning
of the _West_--very naturally leads. To yourself
such coincidence is explicable, it will not be to
'outsiders.'--Yours always,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
And later:--
"What I put forth as a bud he blew out and it
blossomed. The contact of our ideas was dynamic; he
reverberated my idea with such and so many echoes that
it returned to me greater than I gave it forth. He
opened it as you would open an oyster, or placed it
under a microscope, and showed me what it contained."
"CRECCAS COTTAGE, PANTASAPH, _Tuesday_.
"DEAR MR. PATMORE,--The poem, even if I am to take
your high and valued praises quite literally, has a
defect of which you must be conscious, though you have
courteously refrained from noticing it. It echoes your
own manner largely, in the metre, and even in some of
the diction--the latter a thing of which, I think, I
have seldom before rendered myself guilty.
"Now it is possible in rare cases--_e.g._ Keats'
'Hyperion'--for an echo to take on body enough to
survive as literature. But even should my poem so
survive it must rest under the drawback of being
no more distinctive Thompson than 'Hyperion' is
distinctive Keats.
"With regard to the other poem, I want to allude
particularly to your invaluable correction of my
misuse of the Western symbolism. On re-examination,
the whole passage discloses a confusion of thought
naturally causing a confusing of symbolism. My
attention was called to the point about Egyptian
worship by a footnote in Dr. Robert Clarke's 'Story
of a Conversion,' in _Merry England_[42]. I at once
perceived its symbolic significance, and asked myself
how it came that we reckoned our points of the compass
facing to the North. The only explanation I could
surmise was that it was a relic of Set-worship among
our Saxon ancestors. Do you mean that _historically_
men have prayed in three distinct periods to W., E.,
and N.?
* * * * *
Always yours,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
C. P. to F. T.:--
"LYMINGTON, HANTS, _September 10, '95._
"MY DEAR THOMPSON,--I hope I have not kept your Poem
too long. I have read it several times, and found
it quite intelligible enough for song which is also
prophecy. We are upon very much the same lines, but
you, I think, are more advanced than I am. 'Dieu et ma
Dame' is the legend of both of us, but at present Ma
Dame is too much for the balance, peace, and purity of
my religion. There is too much of heart-ache in it.
"I have ventured to affix a few notes of interrogation
to unusual modes of expression.
"I hear, from Mrs. Meynell, that Mr. Meynell is with
you. Please remember me very kindly to him.--Yours ever
truly,
COVENTRY PATMORE.
"_P.S._--The world has worshipped turning to the West,
to the East, and to the North. The 'New Eve' is the
South, and, when we turn thither, all things will be
renewed, and God will 'turn our captivity as Rivers in
the South,' and we shall know Him in the flesh 'from
sea to sea.'"
He later explains that the "South" is the symbol of Divine Womanhood.
The next letter from Patmore, dated a month later, is also of
symbolism:--
"I wish I could see and talk to you on the subject
of the symbolism you speak of. The Bible and all the
theologies are full of it, but it is too deep and
significant to get itself uttered in writing. The
Psalms especially are full of it. On the matter of
the 'North' note that verse: 'Promotion cometh not
from the South, nor the East, nor the West.' That is,
it cometh from the North. The North seems always to
signify the original Godhead, the 'Father'--or the
Devil. For the same symbol is used in the Bible and in
the mythologies for either extreme.[43] 'Water,' for
example, is constantly used for the sensible nature in
its extreme purity, as in the Blessed Virgin, or in its
extreme corruption. This honouring of the 'North' may
very likely have been at the bottom of the seeking of
the points of the compass from that quarter.
"I hope, some day, to see and have speech with you
on this and other matters. Meantime I will only hint
that the North represents the simple Divine virility,
the South the Divine womanhood,[44] the East their
synthesis in the Holy Spirit, and the West the pure
_natural_ womanhood 'full of grace.' I could give
you no end of proofs, but it would take me months to
collect them, from all I have read and forgotten."
This spacious correspondence, on things that will not "get themselves
uttered in writing," was, nevertheless, continued. F. T. writes:--
"You rather overlook the purport of my inquiry in
regard to the symbolic question. I wanted to know if
there had been any actual progressive development among
the nations with regard to the quarters in which they
worshipped--as an historic fact, apart from symbolic
meaning. But this is such a minor matter, and the
concluding hint of your letter contains so much of
value to me, that I am not sorry you misapprehended me.
Of course I am quite aware that it is impossible to
answer openly--indeed impossible to ask openly--deeper
matters in a letter. But that is not requisite in my
case. It is enough that my gaze should be set in the
necessary direction; the rest may be safely left to the
practised fixity of my looking. Indicative longings
such as you employed in your letter, you may safely
trust me to understand. With regard to what you say
about the symbolism of the North, I had substantially
discerned for myself. Indeed it formed part of a little
essay already written. It will be none the worse for
the corroboration of your remarks; there is always
something in your way of stating even what is already
to me a _res visa_, which adds sight to my seeing.
The quotation from the Psalms is new and grateful to
me. But I was aware of the thing to which it points.
Shakespeare speaks of 'The lordly monarch of the North'
(I was confusing it with a passage in _Comus_), and
Butler remarks--
Cardan believed great states depend
Upon the tip o' the Bear's tail's end.
"Set was given by the Egyptians the lordship of
temporal powers; and of course I am aware of the
esoteric meaning of this and of Cardan's saying--indeed
this was what I intended by my observation that
I surmised our Northern aspect in reckoning the
compass to be a relic of Set-worship among our Teuton
ancestors; though of course I was aware that Set, by
that name, was an Egyptian deity.
"Also I am familiar with the principle and significance
in this and mythological imagery generally. Indeed,
without the knowledge of this principle both
Scripture and the mythologies are full of baffling
contradictions. When I began seriously to consider
mythologies comparatively, I cut myself with the
broken reed on which all the 'scientific' students
fall back--this significance belongs to an earlier,
that to a later, development. But having eyes which
'scientific' students have not, I soon saw that fact
gave me the lie in all directions. And when I came to
make a comprehensive study of the Hebrew prophets, with
the Eastern mythologies in mind, I speedily discovered
the systematic use of the dual significance, and the
difficulty vanished."
From Coventry Patmore:--
"Thank you for your very interesting letter, which
shows me how extraordinarily alike are our methods of
and experience in contemplation. . . .
"God bless and help you to bear your crown of thorns,
and to prosper in the great, though possibly obscure,
career He seems to have marked out for you! My work,
such as it is, is done, and I am now only waiting,
somewhat impatiently, for death, and the fulfilment
of the promises of God, which include all that we
have ever desired here, in perfection beyond all
hope.--Yours,
C. P."
FOOTNOTES:
[34] Afterwards he lodged at the post-office, and finally in a cottage
on the hill behind the monastery.
[35] The Capuchins (Franciscans), are peculiar in aspect among
Religious Orders as bearded friars.
[36] This was written long before Mr. Montgomery Carmichael's
translation of _The Lady Poverty_ brought the thirteenth-century
writer's claim to the world as the Franciscan cloister to Thompson's
notice.
[37] "After Her Going" was written in these days.
[38] The mortuary card, preserved in F. T.'s prayer-book, runs:--
"Of your charity pray for the soul of Charles Thompson, M.R.C.S.,
L.S.A., who departed this life April 9th, 1896, aged 72, fortified by
the rites of Holy Church"--with the motto "The silent and wise man
shall be honoured."
[39] Dr. Henry Head, F.R.S.
[40] It was not Angelica, but Mrs. Delany.
[41] An allusion to Lewis Morris's _Songs Unsung_.
[42] On this subject, and the derivation of portions of Ecclesiastes,
he corresponded with Fr. Clarke. The contents of commonplace-books of
a somewhat early period suggest a taste for many kindred themes. In
one he has entered random "Varia on Magic," accounts of and comments
on many heresies, suspicions of the Masons, and fears of a Divine
Visitation upon the general wickedness in the shape of general war;
with these are important notes on Creation Myths, the Chaldean Genesis,
the Egyptian Crocodile, the Kabbalist Doctrine of the Pre-existence
of Souls; some symbols connected with the Incarnation, the Lotus, the
ritual of the funeral sacrifice, with transcriptions from the _Book
of Respirations_, the _Prayer to Ammon Ra, &c._; and _The meaning of
Easter_, a cutting scored with his own excursions into the etymology of
the word--from Ishtar, the Chaldæan goddess--"And Ishtar I take to be
Ashak Tar (or Tur) the Lady of the Light of the Way." But at the turn
of a few pages he is found enlarging and correcting. Still nearer his
real concern are the notes on varieties of the Cross symbol.
[43] In a poem "The Schoolmaster for God," which Francis thought
just not good enough to put into a volume, he represents Satan as
scaling the walls of God's garth, stealing the seed, and giving it
a clandestine growth, which grew to fruit that made men who ate it
an-hungered for God. And in this poem Satan is named "that Robber from
the North." Again, in one of the "Ecclesiastical Ballads," the Veteran
of Heaven declares, "The Prince I drave forth held the Mount of the
North."
[44] See F. T.'s poem "The Newer Eve," or "After Woman," with whom the
world should rise instead of fall.
CHAPTER X: MYSTICISM AND IMAGINATION
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light.
--VAUGHAN.
I look to you to crush all this false mysticism.
--C. P. to F. T.
POEMS of "Sight and Insight," the first section of the new book, were
to have been called "Mystical Poems." But the word mystical was, in
the event, abandoned. As Catholic and thinker, he feared association
with a label which means anything from mystification to "refined and
luxurious indolence"--Mr. Edward Thomas's phrase for Maeterlinck's
"Serres Chaudes." Unlike Thompson, the modern mystic shirks the rigid
necessities of mental deportment. Like the swimmer who discards half
his nimble faculties with his tweeds and lies, without swiftness or
horizon, beating the water with heels shaped for boots and the road,
the modern mystic fancies himself a better man out of his element than
in it.
Even while the false mystic hopes to keep vacuity at arm's length,
shadows press closely. His school is of shadows as the other of Light.
Maeterlinck, on Mr. Arthur Symons's page of approval, is bidden take
his place in the gloomy company. "He has realised how immeasurable is
the darkness out of which he has just stepped, and the darkness into
which we are about to pass. And he has realised how the thought and
sense of that twofold darkness invades the little space of light,
in which, for a moment, we move; the depth in which they shadow our
steps, even in that moment's partial escape." The difference is not of
words only; or if of words only, loose thinking or slack experience is
abroad. The whole school of Catholic mystics insists, in opposition,
upon the exterior radiance trailing clouds of glory as they come into a
world that is in the shadow, whether of God's or of a sinister hand.
Apart altogether from Maeterlinck's merits, his commentator's
insistence illustrates the temper of the 'nineties. It is mainly the
artistic value of his mystic's sense of mystery that appeals to Mr.
Symons. The void, like the sheet-iron which makes stage thunder, has
specific uses; chunks out of the abyss make his scenery; for his most
effective dialogue he borrows largely from silence. Did he fight his
way into the midst of mystery; did he cleave it with revelation, or
morality, its artistic uses would be gone. Darkness is the stronghold
of such interesting emotions as terror--"fear shivers through these
plays." "The mystic, let it be remembered, has nothing in common with
the moralist," asserts Mr. Symons; on the contrary, Francis Thompson's
nearest exponent used the definition, "Mysticism is morality carried to
the nth power."
Thompson's wariness about the word marks his respect for it. Joan,
the hearer of voices, required a clear head when she stood her trial
among the Theologians. Nor was the poet beguiled into the unorthodox.
Compared with Meredith's philosophy--an illumination, it is true,
but such illumination as candles give in his own draughty woods of
Westermain--Thompson's authority is steady as the sheltered lamp of the
sanctuary.
The mysticism that Thompson sought to avoid was obscuration, a
thickening of the mental atmosphere by stray gleams, like the
thickening of the air in a dusty room into which a sun-ray slants
obliquely. The mysteries offer an excuse for confused thinking; the men
and women who discover the doctrine of unity are lost in the jungle of
its simplicity. The name of God, and the titles of His attributes must
set the generations groping somewhat blindly if they carry no lantern
of authority, or if the names of God and His attributes are too often
taken into the babelling languages of empirics, or too anxiously conned.
"It is easy for a man to know God if he does not force himself to
define Him" is a saying that covers much of a poet's reticence. For
Thompson religion was never confusion; his mysteries blurred none of
the common issues; they were packed as carefully as another man's title
deeds; they were, he would have claimed, tied with red tape, cut from
the cloth of the College of Cardinals.
"He is," said Patmore, "of all men I have known most naturally a
Catholic. My Catholicism was acquired, his inherent."
Thompson carried his demand for clarity of thought and intention, if
not always of diction, to great lengths:--
"A little common-sense," he once wrote at a time of
slight misunderstanding, "is the best remedy--and I
at least mean to have it"--a brave vaunt for a poet,
but one which he made over and over again in regard
to various aspects of the poetic character. "There
is something wanting in genius when it does not show
a clear and strong vein of common-sense. . . . Dante,
indeed, is a perfect rebuke to those who suppose that
mystical genius, at any rate, must be dissociated from
common-sense. Every such poet should be able to give
a clear and logical prose résumé of his teaching, as
terse as a page of scholastic philosophy."
If portions of _New Poems_ prove difficult and mysterious, we must
go to Patmore for the defence: "A systematic philosopher, should he
condescend to read the following notes (_Rod, Root and Flower_), will
probably say, with a little girl of mine to whom I showed the stars for
the first time, 'How untidy the sky is!'"
Mysticism, as F. T. knew it, "is morality carried to the nth power."
Mysticism--"rational mysticism"--has been defined as "an endeavour
to find God at first hand, experimentally, in the soul herself
independently of all historical and philosophical presuppositions."
But at the same time Von Hügel condemns the mysticism that is
self-sufficient; the constitutional and traditional factors are
essential to the Church. And the religion of the Church is not,
firstly, an affair between the God and the man, but an affair between
God and Man; is not an affair of the heart, but an affair of Love; not
an affair of the brain, but of Mind.
That "to the Poet life is full of visions, to the Mystic it is one
vision"[45] was the double rule of Francis Thompson's practice. Having
regarded the visions and set them down, he would, in another capacity,
call them in. The Vision enfolded them all. Thus, not long after it
was written, he cancels even the "Orient Ode,"[46] and recants "his
bright sciential idolatry," even though he had religiously adapted it
to the greater glory of God before it was half confessed. "The Anthem
of Earth" and the "Ode to the Setting Sun" would also come under the
censorship of his anxious orthodoxy, to be in part condemned. What
profiteth it a man, he asks in effect, if he gain the whole sun but
lose the true Orient--Christ?
He came, even to the point of silence in certain moods, to feel the
futility of all writings save such as were explicitly a confession
of faith; and also of faithfulness to the institutional side of
religion--the Church and the organised means of grace. "The sanity
of his mysticism," says one commentator, "is the great value to the
present generation. A high individual experiencing of purgation,
illumination, and union, a quiet constancy in the corporate life, and
discipleship as well as leadership; what combination more needed than
this for our 'uncourageous day'?"
The poet is a priest who has no menial and earthly service. He has no
parish to reconcile with paradise, no spire that must reach heaven
from suburban foundations. The priest puts his very hand to the task
of uniting the rational and communal factors of religion with the
mystical. The altar-rail is the sudden and meagre boundary line between
two worlds; he holds in his hand a Birmingham monstrance, and the
monstrance holds the Host. He has no time to shake the dust of the
street from his shoes before he treads the sanctuary. His symbolism is
put to the wear and tear of daily use. As a middle-man in the commerce
of souls, as the servant of the rational sides of the Church, tried by
the forlorn circumstances of never-ceasing work, he may find himself
shut out from the more purely mystical regions of his communion. To
correct or amplify his religious experience, there are the enclosed
Orders, the contemplatives of the Church. But to them, too, there must
be complementary religious experience. They notch off the sum or score
of the Church's experience, so that it may never be allowed to recede.
It is left to the poet to prophesy or spy upon the increase of Wisdom
and the multiplication of the Word.
He, too, in so far as he writes, is circumscribed by the uses of the
world. The priest's ministry in infinitudes is bounded by his parish;
the poet's by his language. And if religion is rightly defined as
something more than communion between the man and the Almighty, as
being besides the communion between man and man, and the sum of Mankind
and the Almighty, then the poet is the immediate servant of God and Man.
Transfiguration is for Thompson the most familiar of mysteries. Good
faith needs no Burning Bush. Or, rather, for the faithful every bush is
alight. For this faithful poet the seasons were full of the promise of
Resurrection. In spring he calls
Hark to the _Jubilate_ of the bird
For them that found the dying way to life!
The rebirth of the earth after winter is the figure of the future life:
Thou wak'st, O Earth,
And work'st from change to change and birth to birth
Creation old as hope, and new as sight.
and--
All the springs are flash-lights of one Spring.
In the same poem he is seen at his daily business, the routine work of
co-ordinating and synthesising. Light--the light of the sun--is also
Light to the sentient closeness of the breast,
Light to the secret chambers of the brain!
Arguments that go from heaven downwards are the commonplaces of his
poetry; that he was ready to prove the sum of his wisdom from earth
upwards is told in a passage of his prose:--
"If the Trinity were not revealed, I should
nevertheless be induced to suspect the existence of
such a master-key by the trinities through which
expounds itself the spirit of man. Such a trinity is
the trinity of beauty--Poetry, Art, Music. Although
its office is to create beauty I call it the trinity of
beauty, because it is the property of earthly as of the
heavenly beauty to create everything to its own image
and likeness. Painting is the eye of Passion, Poetry
is the voice of Passion, Music is the throbbing of her
heart. For all beauty is passionate, though it be a
passionless passion. . . . Absolutely are these three the
distinct manifestations of a single essence."
He had found another analogy in Pico della Mirandola, whom he thus
renders:--
"'The universe consists of three worlds--the
earthly, the heavenly (the sun and stars), and the
super-heavenly (the governing Divine influences). The
same phenomena belong to each, but each have different
grades of manifestation. Thus the physical element of
fire exists in the earthly sphere; the warmth of the
sun in the heavenly; and a seraphic, spiritual fire in
the empyrean; the first burns, the second quickens,
the third loves.' Says Pico 'In addition to these
three worlds (the macrocosm), there is a fourth (the
microcosm) containing all embraced within them. This
is Man, in whom are included a body formed of the
elements, a heavenly spirit, reason, an angelic soul,
and a resemblance to God.'"
* * * * *
"There is one reason for human confusion which is
nearly always ignored. The world--the universe--is
a fallen world. . . . That _should_ be precisely the
function of poetry--to see and restore the Divine
idea of things, freed from the disfiguring accidents
of their Fall--that is what the Ideal really is, or
_should_ be. . . . But of how many poets can this truly be
said? That gift also is among the countless gifts we
waste and pervert; and surely not the least heavy we
must render is the account of its stewardship."
"To be the poet of the return to Nature," Thompson continues, "is
somewhat; but I would be the poet of the return to God." He was the
accuser of Nature. He did not say
By Grace divine,
Not otherwise, Oh Nature! are we thine,
but rather that by divine Grace Nature may be Man's, that he can go
through it to his desire. Shut the gates of it and it is a cruel and
obdurate abundance of clay, of earthworks.
"Nature has no heart. . . . Did I go up to yonder hill," he writes,
"and behold at my feet the spacious amphitheatre of hill-girt wood and
mead, overhead the mighty aerial _velarium_, I should feel that my
human sadness was a higher and deeper and wider thing than all." "The
Hound of Heaven" is full of the inadequacy of Nature. She "speaks by
silences"; the sea is salt unwittingly and unregretfully. F. T. quotes
Coleridge, who, he says, speaks "not as Wordsworth had taught him to
speak, but from his own bitter experience":--
O Lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth Nature live;
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
* * * * *
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The glory and the joy whose fountains are within.
It is at this point that F. T. strides from his fellows. He is not
content with others' praise or overblame of Nature. She is dumb and
hopeless, a confusion to thought. She tangles Meredith's verse and
leaves Shelley drowned in body, stifled among clouds. Thompson draws
away from the Pantheist and the Pagan. Coleridge's words are true of
Nature's relation to ourselves--"not the truth with regard to Nature
absolutely. Absolute Nature lives not in our life, nor yet is lifeless,
but lives in the life of God; and in so far, and so far merely, as man
himself lives in that life, does he come into sympathy with Nature, and
Nature with him. She is God's daughter who stretches her hand only to
her Father's friends. Not Shelley, not Wordsworth himself, ever drew so
close to the heart of Nature as did the Seraph of Assisi, who was close
to the Heart of God."
There, again, the complete reasonableness and sincerity of his poetry
is put to the test of his prose. It is as if another and most essential
witness vouched for the wisdom of "The Hound of Heaven"--a witness who,
after focussing the different vision of a different art upon the same
experience, swore to the same truth. He continues:--
"Yet higher, yet further let us go. Is this daughter of
God mortal? can her foot not pass the grave? Is Nature,
as men tell us,
. . . a fold
Of Heaven and earth across His Face,
which we must rend to behold that Face? Do our eyes
indeed close for ever on the beauty of earth when
they open on the beauty of Heaven? I think not so;
I would fain beguile even death itself with a sweet
fantasy. . . . I believe that in Heaven is earth. Plato's
doctrine of Ideals, as I conceive, laid its hand upon
the very breast of truth, yet missed her breathing. For
beauty--such is my faith--is beauty for eternity."
The faith of "In Heaven is Earth" is but a tentative expression of his
later gospel. At first he had been alarmed at the theory--in the form
in which it had reached him--of the survival of earthly love in Heaven.
He had not then read Patmore or Swedenborg. Even the tentative belief
is timidly qualified:--
"Earthly beauty is but heavenly beauty taking to
itself flesh. . . . Within the Spirit Who is Heaven lies
Earth; for within Him rests the great conception of
Creation. . . .
Yet there the soul shall enter which hath earned
That privilege by virtue. . . .
As one man is more able than his fellows to enter into
another's mind, so in proportion as each of us by
virtue has become kin to God, will he penetrate the
Supreme Spirit, and identify himself with the Divine
Ideals. There is the immortal Sicily, there the Elysian
Fields, there all visions, all fairness engirdled with
the Eternal Fair. This, my faith, is laid up in my
bosom."
His belief here lies close to Swedenborg, whose _Conjugial Love_ F. T.
borrowed from my shelves with an eagerness evinced for no other book
there.
At every turn he is the devoted, intentest, faithfullest interpreter
of the material world. All his "copy" awaited him in nature; his
translations from her tangible writings bear on every page the
_imprimatur_ of his faith. The generality of the revelation made to
them did not spoil his appetite nor blur his surprising genius for
detail.
His couplings of the great and the small, not always so sweetly
reasonable as that set between the flower and the star, sometimes need
apology. The whole scale of comparisons is unexpected in the case of
one who goes to the eating-house not only for his meals, but for his
images; who finds nothing outrageous in naming the Milky Way a beaten
yolk of stars; who takes the setting sun for a bee that stings the west
to angry red; and, when he would express the effect of an oppressive
sunset upon Tom o' Bedlam's eye, who casts about in the lumber-room
of memory which had been filled with oppressive images during nights
endured in a common lodging-house.
Even then he was only expressing, out of a set of accidental
impressions, the poet's unremitting desire to link up the sights and
sensations of the universe. Drummond of Hawthornden's
Night like a drunkard reels
Beyond the hills
may serve as a typical instance of such arbitrary simile.
From the note-books I take these unpublished lines:--
Dost thou perceive no God within the frog?
O poor, poor Soul!
Bristles and rankness only in the hog?
O wretched dole!
No wry'd beneficence in the fever's germ?
Nor any Heaven shut within the worm?
Dost shudder daintily
At words, in song, shaped so un-lovelily?
To school, to school!
For does it to thee seem
That God in an ill dream
Fashioned the twisted horrors of the standing pool?
Mr. Chesterton surmises the mountainous significance of minute
things. In _Tremendous Trifles_, like the lover who writes an ode
to his lady's eyebrow, or the professor who gives his life to the
study of the capillary glands, he delights in disproportion. When Mr.
Chesterton planned a volume of poems on the things in his pocket, but
desisted because the volume would have bulked too large, he was only
formulating, in a manner acceptable to the man who puts his hand in
his pocket for a halfpenny, the old "religio poetæ." The things of the
pocket constitute a pocket dictionary in more than two languages, a
book of synonyms, a lexicon filled with cross references, all based
upon the Word. The silly silver of men's purses is blessed, and every
mortal thing assists in immortal liturgy. St. Charles was of one mind
with those who sing the _Magnificat_ of trifles. When asked how he
would die, he answered: "Playing cards, as I now do, if it should
so chance." Whenever such an one dies he holds trumps. And like the
priest, the poet touches mysteries with his very hand; he makes daily
communion. "To some," says Patmore, "there is revealed a sacrament
greater than that of the Real Presence, a sacrament of the Manifest
Presence, which is, and is more than, the sum of all the sacraments."
And again we have Thompson's own
In thee, Queen, man is saturate in God.
The Psalmist is with him:--
"If I climb up into heaven thou art there, if I go down
into hell, thou art there also. If I take the wings of
the morning and remain in the uttermost parts of the
sea; even there also shall thy hand lead me and thy
right hand shall hold me. If I say peradventure the
darkness shall cover me: then shall my night be turned
into day; the darkness and light to thee are both
alike."
Thompson's own
. . . Nay, I affirm
Nature is whole in her least things exprest
is a splendid justification of the poet's dalliance with trifles.
Vaughan confines Eternity in the scope of a night, a ring--nay, a
couplet:--
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light.
In a couplet, or a letter, literature performs her miracles. Christina
Rossetti told Katharine Tynan that she never stepped on a scrap of
torn paper, but lifted it out of the mud lest perhaps it should have
the Holy Name written or printed upon it. That is an attitude towards
literature, towards words and the Word, not unlike Francis Thompson's.
In the "Orient Ode" he has addressed the sun:--
Not unto thee, great Image, not to thee
Did the wise heathen bend an idle knee;
And in an age of faith grown frore
If I too shall adore,
Be it accounted unto me
A bright sciential idolatry!
God has given thee visible thunders
To utter thine apocalypse of wonders;
And what want I of prophecy,
That at the sounding from thy station
Of thy flagrant trumpet, see
The seals that melt, the open revelation?
Or who a God-persuading angel needs,
That only heeds
The rhetoric of thy burning deeds?
* * * * *
Lo, of thy Magians I the least
Haste with my gold, my incenses and myrrhs,
To thy desired epiphany, from the spiced
Regions and odorous of Song's traded East.
Thou, for the life of all that live
The victim daily born and sacrificed;
To whom the pinion of this longing verse
Beats but with fire which first thyself did give,
To thee, O Sun--or is't perchance, to Christ?
Ay, if men say that on all high heaven's face
The saintly signs I trace
Which round my stolèd altars hold their solemn place,
Amen, amen! For oh, how could it be,--
When I with wingèd feet had run
Through all the windy earth about,
Quested its secret of the sun,
And heard what thing the stars together shout,--
I should not heed thereout
Consenting counsel won:--
"By this, O Singer, know we if thou see.
When men shall say to thee: Lo! Christ is here,
When men shall say to thee: Lo! Christ is there,
Believe them: yea, and this--then art thou seer,
When all thy crying clear
Is but: Lo here! lo there!--ah me, lo everywhere!"
Nature's shrines he had visited, but unavailingly:--
Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth.
He cries to the sun:--
I know not what strange passion bows my head
To thee, whose great command upon my veins
Proves thee a god for me not dead, not dead!
He cries it to the sun, but only in the prelude to an ode that ends
with the Cross.
His songs of Nature are:--
Sweet with wild wings that pass, that pass away.
All his wild things passed, that they might be garnered in heaven. The
chase of the "Hound of Heaven" ends in a divine embrace; like that
ending is the ending of all his verse.
Through the symbolism of the sun all things were brought into line.
Likened to the Host, with sky for monstrance; to the Christ, with the
sombre line of the horizon for Rood; to the Altar-Wafer, and signed
with the Cross; the Sun is to the Earth only what Christ is to the
Soul:--
Thou to thy spousal universe
Art Husband, she thy Wife and Church.
Thompson offers his inspiration--". . . to thee, O Sun,--or is't
perchance, to Christ?"[47]
He would not have his harmonies mistaken for the repetition of "fair
ancient flatteries." He takes the sun, at rising and at setting, as "a
type memorial"[48]:--
Like Him thou hang'st in dreadful pomp of blood
Upon thy Western rood;
And His stained brow did vail like thine to-night,
Yet lift once more Its light,
And, risen, again departed from our ball,
But when It set on earth arose in Heaven.
And in the After-Strain:--
Even so, O Cross! thine is the victory.
Thy roots are fast within our fairest fields;
Brightness may emanate in Heaven from thee,
Here thy dread symbol only shadow yields.
Of reapèd joys thou art the heavy sheaf
Which must be lifted, though the reaper groan;
Yea, we may cry till Heaven's great ear be deaf,
But we must bear thee, and must bear alone.
Vain were a Simon; of the Antipodes
Our night not borrows the superfluous day.
Yet woe to him that from his burden flees!
Crushed in the fall of what he cast away.[49]
He went farther: he made the sun the type of a church service:--
Lo, in the sanctuaried East,
Day, a dedicated priest
In all his robes pontifical exprest,
Lifteth slowly, lifteth sweetly,
From out its Orient tabernacle drawn,
Yon orbed sacrament confest
Which sprinkles benediction through the dawn;
And when the grave procession's ceased,
The earth with due illustrious rite
Blessed,--ere the frail fingers featly
Of twilight, violet-cassocked acolyte
His sacerdotal stoles unvest--
Sets, for high close of the mysterious feast,
The sun in august exposition meetly
Within the flaming monstrance of the West.
_O salutaris hostia,
Quae cæli pandis ostium!_
The Cross spread its arms across his world. It was never heavier on his
shoulder than when he copied out Donne's lines:--
Who can deny me power and liberty
To stretch mine arms and mine own cross to be?
Swim, and at every stroke thou art thy cross:
The mast and yard make one where seas do toss.
Look down, thou spiest our crosses in small things,
Look up, thou seest birds raised on crossed wings.
Donne had encouraged him in his own early search for its symbols. In a
prayer to the Blessed Virgin Thompson speaks of the general crucifixion
of man:--
O thou, who standest as thou hast ever stood
Beside the Cross, whenas it shall be said--
"It is consummated,"
Receive us, taken from the World's rough wood!
But Donne's image is the more immediate; and the "Veneration of
Images," of a living poet, in which man is addressed as--
Thou Rood of every day--
confirms both their guesses.
In his sunset Thompson found a symbol of the Crucifixion; in Paganism
his Calvary, and in Christianity an endless elaboration of Christ, so
that he turns and wonders at himself for standing at all in the mirk
of ordinary daylight:--
And though the cry of stars
Give tongue before His way
Goldenly, as I say,
And each, from wide Saturnus to hot Mars,
He calleth by its name,
Lest that its bright feet stray;
And thou have lore of all,--
But to thine own Sun's call
Thy path disorbed hath never wit to tame:
It profits not withal,
And my rede is but lame.
He regards his poetry, the poetry of unrevealed religion, of inquiry,
and of hasty worship, even as he writes it, with some disfavour. But
the prophetical portion of _New Poems_ shows a new assurance--
I have my music bent
To waste on bootless things its skiey-gendered rain:
Yet shall a wiser day
Fulfil more heavenly way,
And with approvèd music clear this slip,
I trust in God most sweet.
Meantime the silent lip,
Meantime the climbing feet.
He saw only one possible ending to all modes of poetry, that
"multitudinous-single thing":--
Loud the descant, and low the theme,
(_A million songs are as song of one_)
And the dream of the world is dream in dream,
But the one Is is, or nought could seem;
And the song runs round to the song begun.
This is the song the stars sing,
(_Tonèd all in time_)
Tintinnabulous, tuned to ring
A multitudinous-single thing
(_Rung all in rhyme_).
In "Form and Formalism" Thompson says:--
"No common aim can triumph, till it is crystallized in
an individual. Man himself must become incarnate in a
man before his cause can triumph. Thus the universal
Word became the individual Christ; that total God and
total man being particularised in a single symbol,
the cause of God and man might triumph. In Christ,
therefore, centres and is solved that supreme problem
of life--the marriage of the Unit with the Sum. In
Him is perfectly shown forth the All for one, and One
for all, which is the justificatory essence of that
substance we call Kingship. . . . When the new heavens
and the new earth, which multitudinous Titans are so
restlessly forging, at length stand visible to resting
man, it needs no prophecy to foretell that they will
be like the old, with head, and form, and hierarchic
memberment, as the six-foot bracken is like the bracken
at your knee. For out of all its disintegrations and
confusion earth emerges, like a strong though buffeted
swimmer, nearer to the unseen model and term of all
social growth; which is the civil constitution of
angeldom, and the Uranian statecraft of imperatorial
God."
. . . . . . .
"Ritual is poetry addressed to the eye," he notes. The corollary of
which supports his belief that poetry was an affair of ritual--or
images.
Imagination is the sense or science that discovers identities and
correspondences, while fancy takes a lower place because, said
Thompson, it discovers only likenesses. Imagination discerns similarity
rooted or enskied; it is the origin of the symbolism that may be traced
back to the heart of the truths and mysteries to which it supplies
the outward shows. Imagination is the spring; Symbolism is here the
manifestation of Imagination, is the identity-bearer, partaking of the
very essence of the Divinity. The Symbols of Divinity are Divine; flesh
is the Word made flesh; the Eucharist is the true Presence; and Christ
is Himself the Way to Christ. Thompson's poetry and theology abode by
the Image; it was no necessity of their nature to penetrate beyond the
barriers of expression and revelation. The go-betweens of others were
his essentials. Holding so grave an estimate of the functions of the
imagination, he found in poetry the highest human scope and motive.
* * * * *
Another writer has said--
"Imagination is as the water that reflects clouds out
of sight, or so near the sun that they may not be
viewed save in the darkening mirror."
And images enlarge and qualify; they create, too, in so far as they
bear and nourish thoughts that can only be expressed through them.
They belong, F. T. maintained, to the highest poetry, the poetry of
revelation and the intellect. In this idea he was confirmed; for its
sake he surmounted the opposition of the thinker in poetry to whom he
was most dutiful in admiration. "It is false," he declared with his
whole heart, "that highest or supremest poetry is stripped of figure.
Purely emotional poetry at its height is bare of imagery, not poetry of
supremest flight. . . . Supreme emotion is not supreme poetry." And yet
just in its own measure is the estimate he contested. It is set forth
by A. M. in the _Nation_, 23 Nov., 1907:--
"Imagery is not, it may be held, the last, or inmost,
word of poetry. There is a simplicity on the yonder
side. The simplicity of the hither side may be natural
and pleasing enough, though it may also be 'natural' as
is the village fool. But the simplicity of the further
poetry is a plainness within those splendid outer
courts of approach where imagery celebrates ritual and
ceremony. A few poems abide in that further place--a
further place, did we call it? It is far, indeed,
from the access of the suitor, but closest of all
things to the warm breast of the very Nurse. Francis
Thompson dealt almost altogether in imagery; and it
is because of this that his less sympathetic readers
accuse him of a lack of simplicity. And he himself, in
a manuscript note, says: 'Imagery is so far from being
"all fancy" (which is what people mean by saying it is
"all imagination") that the deepest truths--even in
the natural or physical order--are often adumbrated
only by images familiar, and yet conceived to be
purely fanciful analogies. . . .' No 'lack' was among his
faults. Where he might be charged or questioned was in
his commission, not in his omission--his commission
of the splendid fault of excess. How many poets might
be furnished, not from the abundance, but from the
overabundance, of his imagery, and the prunings and
the chastenings of his 'fancy.' The spoils of such a
correction as would have made a few of his odes more
'classical' might have been gathered up, a golden
armful, by poets who need have stooped for nothing
else, twelve basketsful of fragments, after the feeding
of a chosen multitude."
One is for the idea, the other for vision; one for the word, the other
for its conception.
"He stood at the very junction-lines of the visible and
invisible, and could shift the points as he willed,"
said F. T. of Shelley. And the lever was imagery; the
signals were images; the sleepers were images--all
the machinery that made and marked the way. It binds
the universe; it expresses "the underlying analogies,
the secret subterranean passages, between matter and
soul; the chromatic scales, whereat we dimly guess, by
which the Almighty modulates through all the keys of
creation."
That modulation through time, also, Thompson traces in the transition
from antiquity to the future, from Paganism to Christianity, from the
Old Law to the New:--
On Ararat there grew a vine;
When Asia from her bathing rose,
Our first sailor made a twine
Thereof for his prefiguring brows.
Canst divine
Where, upon our dusty earth, of that vine a cluster grows?
On Golgotha there grew a thorn
Round the long-prefigured Brows.
Mourn, O mourn!
For the vine have we the spine? Is this all the Heaven allows?
On Calvary was shook a spear;
Press the point into thy heart--
Joy and fear!
All the spines upon the thorn into curling tendrils start.
He had intended to show in an essay that symbolism is no arbitrary
convention. He bids himself expound its elements by leading examples,
and, had he done so, we should have known more of the geography of
that region where symbols and their principles are merged. "All things
linkèd are"; the daisy is the signature of the star; for the poet all
terrestrial minutiæ were signed, nay, scribbled all over with reference
marks and sealed with the likeness of larger things. From an old
commentator on St. Thomas Aquinas, F. T. copied:--
"The angelic intellect contains the things which
belong to universal nature, and those also which are
the principles of individuation, knowing by science
divinely infused, not only what belongs to universal
nature, but also individualities of things, inasmuch
as these all form multiplied representation of the one
Simple Essence of God."
The ancient school of Herbalists believed that natural remedies were
stamped with the likeness of the parts to which they would bring
healing, as walnuts, which, because they "have the perfect signature
of the head, are profitable to the brain." Poisons show something like
contrition by taking to themselves colours and odours plainly evil;
vipers, as proper scholars of the alphabet, wear V for venom on their
heads. The Herbalists took the narrowing road, from vision down to
practice. They pounded their discoveries to powder with the bald-head
pestle of literalness. The mortar of the herbalist is the chalice of
the poet. It is the difference again between illusion and imagination,
or, as Blake figured them, between Adam and Christ.
Blake's conception of the identity of and correspondence between the
Complete or Divine Mind and Humanity led him to further definitions
which are of weight in general consideration of the poetry of
imagination. Our world, he held, was a contraction of our mind from
the mind of God of which it is a part. To illusion--the perception and
acceptance of the erroneous deductions of the contracted personality,
or Adam--he gave the name Satan. Besides Perception (here I have
recourse verbatim to Mr. Edwin J. Ellis's invaluable disquisition):--
"Besides perception, always tempting us to error, by
leading through narrow to mistaken personality, there
is 'imagination,' always inviting us to truth. For this
Blake took the name of Saviour, or Humanity free from
Adam's narrowness and Satan's falseness."
Of the more purely literary aspect of imagery Thompson has written:--
"How beautiful a thing the frank toying with imagery
may be, let 'The Skylark' and 'The Cloud' witness. It
is only evil when the poet, on the straight way to a
fixed object, lags continually from the path to play.
This is commendable neither in poet nor errand-boy."
And again:--
"To sport with the tangles of Neæra's hair may be
trivial idleness or caressing tenderness, exactly
as your relation to Neæra is that of heartless
gallantry or love. So you may toy with imagery in mere
intellectual ingenuity, and then you might as well go
write acrostics; or you may toy with it in raptures,
and then you may write a 'Sensitive Plant.'"
In all the poetry belonging to the period of "The Mistress of Vision"
Patmore is the master of vision. He leads the way to "deific peaks" and
"conquered skies," the Virgil of a younger Dante.
Their thoughts chimed to the same stroke of metre and rhyme;[50] for
each of the mystical poems may be found suggestions in Patmore. For the
"Dread of Height" we find among "Aurea Dicta" the following:--
"'Searchers of Majesty shall be overwhelmed with
the glory.' Blissfully overwhelmed; ruined for this
world, yet even in this enriched beyond thought;
happy searchers, consumed by the thunder of divine
instructions and the lightning of divine perceptions,
but surviving as new creatures in the very flesh of the
destroyer."
And again:--
"The spirit of man is like a kite, which rises by means
of those very forces which seem to oppose its rise;
the tie that joins it to the earth, the opposing winds
of temptation, and the weight of earth-born affections
which it carries with it into the sky."
Patmore's "Hate pleasure, if only because this is the only means of
obtaining it" is the root paradox of the many found in the lines
beginning--"Lose, that the lost thou may'st receive," and the rest.
But go through the whole of the two poets, and even while recognising
the twin enterprises of imagination you will end in the enjoyment of
their dissimilarity. Patmore has quoted St. Paul--"Let each man abound
in his own sense," and has said himself:--
"When once he has got into the region of perception,
let him take care that his vision is his own, and not
fancy he can profit himself or others much by trying
to appropriate their peculiar variations of the common
theme."
Patmore may have given Thompson a metre and a score of thoughts, but
above everything else he gave him the freedom of his imagination.
Having led him to a point of vantage, he looked in the same direction,
but the revelation varied as the view varies to two men who walk along
a road towards the same sunset. They are a few paces apart; to one an
intervening tree may be black and sombre, to the other streaked with
fire. The height they reached may have been the same, but the dread of
height was to each a thing of his own.
* * * * *
From Patmore, August 1895:--
"I see, with joy, how nearly we are upon the same
lines, but our visions could not be true were they
quite the same; and no one can really see anything but
his own vision."
Again, in November of the same year:--
"It is always a great thing to me to receive a letter
from you. My heart goes forth to you as it goes to no
other man; for are we not singularly visited by a great
common delight and a great common sorrow? Is not this
to be one in Christ?"
Later:--
"You dissipate my solitude and melancholy as no other,
but one, can."
Again from Patmore:--
"In the manner of your verse you are gaining in
simplicity, which is a great thing. But I will speak
more of that bye-and-bye. In the matter, I think you
outstrip me. I am too concrete and intelligible. I fear
greatly lest what I have written may not do more harm
than good, by exposing Divine realities to profane
comprehensions, and by inflaming 'popular esotericism.'"
"The Mistress of Vision" is described by F. T. as "a phantasy with no
more than an illusive tinge of psychic significance." It is a masque in
which he and his Muse observe the formalities of dialogue, but before
the poem is finished the truth is out; as when, dawn breaking upon
dancing lovers, their steps cease, and for a moment their embrace is
real. So in the poem: the phantasy is not maintained; the masque is
up. Christ, before one is aware, is treading the land of Luthany, is
walking on the waters. Following, in carefully considered sequence, is
"Contemplation," and, afterward, the true fruits of _The Unknown Eros_.
"I felt my instrument yet too imperfect to profane by it the highest
ranges of mysticism," he had said, and, in "The Mistress of Vision,"
"The Dread of Height," and particularly in "The Orient Ode," something
is withheld. As the rood-screen shields the altar, language screens
revelation.
Although the spirit of reservation in the literature of religious
experience has apology in the saying that they who know God best do not
seek to define Him, that is not the leading argument for reticence.
Patmore said that in such matters the part is greater than the whole,
and in any case
"No great art, no really effective ethical teaching can
come from any but such as know immeasurably more than
they will attempt to communicate."
And, beyond that, they recognised truths "which it is not lawful to
utter," but knew that the poet may express them in ways that shade
them to the eye, or make them invisible as the too-bright disc of
the sun. Sufficient rays may pass through cloudy speech to diffuse
life-sufficing warmth. "See that thou tell no man" is an injunction of
which the poets keep the letter but break the spirit.
"Not only among the Hebrews," writes F. T. in a review
of a paper on St. Clement, "but among the Egyptians and
Greeks, prophecies and oracles were delivered under
enigmas. The Egyptian hieroglyphics, the apothegms of
the wise men of Greece, are instances of the practice
of throwing a kind of veil around important truths in
order that the curiosity of men may be aroused and
their diligence stimulated. All who treated of divine
things, whether Greeks or Barbarians, concealed the
principles. . . . Whatever has a veil of mystery thrown
around it, causes the truth to appear more grand and
awful."
St. Clement speaks of an _unwritten_ tradition of blessed doctrine,
handed down from SS. Peter, James, John, and Paul. St. Clement's own
account of these sacred doctrines is, he himself says, incomplete;
some he has forgotten, others he would be unwilling to allude to even
in speech, much more unwilling in writing, lest they who met them
should pervert them to their own injury, and he should thus be placing,
according to the proverb, a sword in the hand of a child.
We may suspect Patmore and Thompson of this mystical knowledge, since
they exercised St. Clement's caution. So does the Eastern teacher
of the day; and all of these conform in not being thinkers of the
scientific or material order. The Socratic definition of the true
philosopher "who in his meditations neither employs his sight nor any
of his senses, but a pure understanding alone," must, with Blake's
"Cultivate imagination to the point of vision," be printed on page 1 of
the first _First Reader_ in mysticism.
Thompson dwells also on St. Paul's unspoken message, which, designated
by the name of _wisdom_, he withheld from many of the Corinthians
because they were not fit to hear it. He communicated it to the
_spiritual_ not to the _animal_ man. Origen says that that which
St. Paul would have called _wisdom_ is found in the "Canticle of
Canticles." Thompson dwells further on the hidden meanings of the
Pentateuch, believing that there was "an inexhaustible treasure of
divine wisdom concealed under the letter of Holy Writ." Thompson
saw wise men whispering, and guessed that there were secrets; their
presence discovered, they were open secrets for such as he. "You have
but to direct my sight, and the intentness of my gaze will discover the
rest." Of the poet who is religious it may be said: "There hath drawn
near a man to a deep heart, that is, a secret heart." Look not at a
star if you wish to see it: avert your gaze and it is clearer to you.
So with the rockets and flashes of revelation. The Mass has secrets,
and so have children. It must be remembered that the greater part of F.
T.'s seeming reservations are only such as exist between the Church and
the outer world. For instance:--
"The personal embrace between Creator and creature is
so solely the secret and note of Catholicism, that its
language to the outer sects is unintelligible--the
strange bruit of inapprehensible myth."
During walks at Pantasaph and Lymington, Thompson penetrated on the one
hand to places where thought is singed and scorched, on the other to
healing regions of light; at one time deep in melancholy, at another
buoyantly content. A. M. observed that during certain drives with
Coventry Patmore he would sit looking at the floor of the carriage with
the harrowing expression that one gathers from Rossetti's "Wood Spurge."
Imagination is onerous. Christina Rossetti points to more than a
problem in artistry when she writes:--
"At first sight and apparently the easiest of all
conceptions to realise, I yet suppose that there may,
in the long run, be no conception more difficult for
ourselves to clench and retain than this of absolute
Unity; this oneness at all times, in all connexions,
for all purposes."
But once grasped it may never be relinquished. And it is a commonplace
of the mystics that contemplation is painful. St. John of the Cross's
warning of the desolation that follows the dwelling in the neutral
land between the temporal and the spiritual is one of many.
There is no escape. Conscience is another name for consciousness. "If
men understood clearly they would sin at every step, wherefore they
understand grossly, that sin may not be imputed to them," wrote F. T.,
half protesting against the disabilities of clear understanding. And
again:--
"Life is an Inkermann, fought in the mist. If men saw
clearly, they would despair to fight. Wherefore the
Almighty opens the eyes only of those whom He has led
by special ways of gradual inurement and preparation."
The futility of Francis's conversational repetition was a by-word;
but when he said a thing twice in verse or prose it probably mattered
more than most other things. "The Dread of Height" states the burden
of knowledge, and John ix. 41., quoted as the poem's motto, is made
to enforce it too:--"If ye were blind ye should have no sin; but now
ye say We see, your sin remaineth." What John said (in ix. 41, or
elsewhere) he would generally have thought sufficiently said. But in
this matter he repeats John, and then more than once repeats himself.
A man does not, because he is as conscious of his God as were the
disciples who really had Him on the road to Emmaus, find the road an
easy one. Bunyan holds good; the better way is the roughest. The more
excellent landscape is that which is seen against the sun. But it is
rigid in its splendours; every cock of hay, every clod, is a shadow. Is
the ear that hears "the winds their Maker magnify" happier than that
which can note only rattling of windows and the cracking of boughs?
During sound perhaps, not certainly during pauses in sound:--
"I never found any so religious and devout, that he had
not sometimes a withdrawing of grace. There was never
Saint so highly rapt and illuminated, who before or
after was not tempted. For he is not worthy of the high
contemplation of God who has not been troubled with
some tribulations for God's sake."
The commonplaces of the _Imitation_ are sound sense. "Thou visitest him
early in the morning; and suddenly Thou provest him."
I do think my tread,
Stirring the blossom in the meadow-grass,
Flickers the unwithering stars.
Such treading may be better than the asphalt of every day, but it is
not easy going.
Of futurity he wrote in a letter to A. M.:--
"You must know this thing of me already, having read
those Manning verses, which I do not like to read
again. You know that I believe in eternal punishment:
you know that when my dark hour is on me, this
individual terror is the most monstrous of all that
haunt me. But it is individual. For others--even if
the darker view were true, the fewness is relative
to the total mass of mankind, not absolute; while I
myself refuse to found upon so doubtful a thing as a
few scattered texts a tremendous prejudgment which has
behind it no consentaneous voice of the Church. And
I do firmly believe that none are lost who have not
wilfully closed their eyes to the known light: that
such as fall with constant striving, battling with
their temperament, or through ill-training circumstance
which shuts them from true light, &c.; that all these
shall taste of God's justice, which for them is better
than man's mercy. But if you would see the present
state of my convictions on the subject turn to the new
Epilogue of my 'Judgement in Heaven' (you will find it
in the wooden box)."
His correspondent has written:--
"As a thinker, Francis Thompson is profoundly
meditative, and, if pessimistic, then pessimistic with
submission and fear, not with revolt. His thought
must not be called gloomy, even when it is dark as
night, for in the darkness there is a sense of open and
heavenly air."
The most natural thing in the world (although at first he did not see
it, having been a seminarist, a person not always apt to be in the
secret) was that the singer of the Church--the Church that defined
the Immaculate Conception--should be a poet of woman-kind--one of
the Marians. Seminary training did not prepare him for a world of
women. A note on the Marriage of Cana, which proves, he avers, that
"much wine is needed before a man may go through with matrimony," is
characteristic of his schooling. In humour the schooling lasted when
all else had been outlived. His unpublished comedy "Man Proposes,
Woman Disposes" is full of ready-made gibes, and his "Dress,"
printed in the _Daily Mail_, is threadbare comic verse on a subject
he treated reverently enough when there was no joke to crack. It is
still, perhaps, as the seminarist that he notes: "In Burmah the monks
complain that women are natively incapable of any true understanding of
religion." But it is a later Thompson who adds the comment: "The heart
of woman is the citadel, the _ultimum refugium_ of true religiosity."
Genesis gives him the heading for several pages of a note-book devoted
to such subjects: "I will put enmity between thee and the woman."
_Rod, Root, and Flower_ set him to work in the same nursery-garden. His
note-books reflect Patmore's aphoristic habit. He himself defended or
denied the "fragmentary" nature of Patmore's book. "It might as well be
said that the heavens are fragmentary, because the stars are not linked
by golden chains. You are given the stars--the central and illuminative
suggestions; you are left to work out for yourself, by meditations, the
system of which they are the nodal points." This, it will be seen, is
his rewriting of Patmore's own comment on the book, quoted at p. 201.
I can do no more than bring together his scattered notes on Woman. He
himself could hardly have fitted them into any satisfactory sequence.
In a note-book I find:--
"The function of natural love is to create a craving
which it cannot satisfy. And then only has its water
been tasted in perfect purity, if it awakens an
insatiate thirst of wine."
His hope is made known in his poetry:--
The Woman I behold, whose vision seek
All eyes and know not; t'ward whom climb
The steps of the world, and beats all wing of rhyme.
And his prose:--
"When the federation of the world comes (as come
I believe it will) it can only be federation in
both government and religion of plenary and ordered
dominance. I see only two religions constant enough
to effect this: each based upon the past--which is
stability; each growing according to an interior
law--which is strength. Paganism and Christianism; the
religion of the Queen of Heaven who is Astarte, and of
the Queen of Heaven who is Mary." (Note by F. T.: "'We
offer sacrifice to the Queen of Heaven'" (Jer. xliv.
19).)
Once he turns the subject with a stock phrase of playfulness--
Daughter of the ancient Eve,
We know the gifts ye gave--and give.
Who knows the gifts which _you_ shall give,
Daughter of the newer Eve?
You, if my soul be augur, you
Shall--O what shall you not, Sweet, do?
But before he is through with the poem he is led to greater
explicitness, and, finally, to the solemn manner of concealment--
When to love _you_ is (O Christ's spouse!)
To love the beauty of His house;
Then come the Isaian days; the old
Shall dream; and our young men behold
Vision--yea, the vision of Thabor-mount,
Which none to other shall recount,
Because in all men's hearts shall be
The seeing and the prophecy.
For ended is the Mystery Play,
When Christ is life, and you the way;
When Egypt's spoils are Israel's right,
And Day fulfils the married arms of Night.
But here my lips are still.
Until
You and the hour shall be revealed,
This song is sung and sung not, and its words are sealed.
In thee, Queen, man is saturate with God.
Blest period
To God's redeeming sentence. So in thee
Mercy at length is uttered utterly.
In human passion, as in sun-worship, he relates everything to the
Deity. It is within forbidden degrees if it cannot be referred back to
Divine Love. His series "A Narrow Vessel," he describes as "being a
little dramatic sequence on the aspect of primitive girl-nature towards
a love beyond its capacities." Opening with a "rape of the lock," the
whole breadth of the centuries and of the human mind apart from Pope's,
the girl bemoans the gift of her hair:--
My lock the enforcèd steel did grate
To cut; its root-thrills came
Down to my bosom. It might sate
His lust for my poor shame.
Here is unwonted attention to the minutiæ of sensation; and the third
poem of the second series is the one that comes nearest in all
Thompson's work to the many love poems of the many modern poetry-books.
The likeness is startling. It is the only poem of his which the
illustrators of "Tennyson" of 1857 would have relished to put upon
wood. The girl was an actual girl named Maggie Bryan, of the Welsh
village; his photograph was long kept in her narrow room, and her
grave, made in the October following the poet's death, is near the
scene of that love-making that was so incongruous and timid that it had
little real existence in word or look. "Love Declared," the poem that
sinks to the commoner level of love-poetry, is fiction and reads like
it; the rest reality--only a little more than the reality.
But Thompson did not leave it at reality. No sooner has an unwary
reader, who, on other pages, had been clutching at his poet, made sure,
on this one, of his man than the creature of bone and muscle slips from
him. The sequence, it is confessed in the last poem, is written solely
in the interests of allegory. Here for once is actuality, one had said;
but only to learn that no actuality bulks so large for the poet himself
as the actuality of religious speculation. His own Pantasaph drama, a
thing that passed in the high-street, hemmed in by cottages, noted by
gossipers, with strong hill winds blowing in the faces of the actors,
was most personal to the hero for its allegorical meaning--
"How many," he asks, "have grasped the significance
of my sequence, _A Narrow Vessel_? Critics either
overlooked it altogether or adverted to it as trivial
and disconnected. One, who prized it, and wished
I had always written as humanly, grieved that the
epilogue turned it into an unreal allegory. He could
not understand that all human love was to me a symbol
of divine love; nay, that human love was in my eyes a
piteous failure unless as an image of the supreme Love
which gave meaning and reality to its seeming insanity.
The lesson of that sequence is just this. Woman
repels the great and pure love of man in proportion
to its purity. This is due to an instinct which she
lacks the habits and power to analyse, that the love
of the pure and lofty lover is so deep, so vast in its
withheld emotion, as her entire self would be unable
to pay back. Though she cast her whole self down that
eager gulf, it would disappear as a water-drop in the
ocean. And though the lover ask no more than her little
tremulous self may think fit to give, she feels that
so vast a love claims of right and equity her total
surrender. Though the lover be generously unexacting,
that wonderful gift, she feels, exacts no less than
all, and then she cannot with her entire potency and
abandonment of love adequate the hungry immensity
poured around it. So, with instinctive fear, she
recoils from a love which her all cannot equal. Though
the lover asks no more than she please to give, his
love asks her very being, demands a continual upward
strain. The narrow vessel dreads to crack under the
overflowing love which surges into it. She shrinks with
tremor; she turns to the lover whose shallow love has
nought to frighten her; she can halt where she pleases,
far short of total surrender. It is an easy beginning,
which seems to involve so little and involves--how
much! For she does not understand that once she begins
to love, her nature will not rest short of supreme
surrender (I assume an average nature capable of love),
and that she will end by wasting her whole self on
this thin soil, which will reject and anticipate it
(while) she recoiled with dislike and fear from the
great love which would have absorbed and repaid it an
hundred-fold. Now this is but the image and explanation
of the soul's attitude towards only God. The one is
illustrated by the other. Though God asks of the soul
but to love him what it may, and is ready to give an
increased love for a poor little, the soul feels that
this infinite love demands naturally its whole self,
that if it begin to love God it may not stop short of
all it has to yield. It is troubled, even if it did go
a brief way, on the upward path; it fears and recoils
from the whole great surrender, the constant effort
beyond itself which is sensibly laid on it. It falls
back with relieved contentment on some human love, a
love on its own plane, where somewhat short of total
surrender may go to requital, where no upward effort
is needful. And it ends by giving for the meanest, the
most unsufficing and half-hearted return, that utter
self-surrender and self-effacement which it denied
to God. Even (how rarely) if the return be such as
mortal may render, how empty and unsatiated it leaves
the soul. One always is less generous of love than
the other. Now this was the theme and meaning of my
sequence. It did not (as it should have done) follow on
to the facile welcome of a light love. But that was by
implication glanced at in the epilogue, which drew what
I have shown to be the real conclusion of the entire
study--even to the possible most tragic issue of all,
in the soul which has taken the kiss of the Spouse (so
to speak) only to fall away from Him, 'the heart where
good is well perceived and known, yet is not willed.'"
That sequence, he said, was written solely in the interests of
allegory. Obviously the episode was not sufficient unto itself. Only
once had he known love really sufficient for love poetry.
FOOTNOTES:
[45] Mr. Albert Cock in the _Dublin Review_.
[46] The ending of the "Orient Ode" seems, in the frank exultation of
its creed, to be unveiled and native pronouncement, as loud in its
faith as the last line of Patmore's "Faint yet Pursuing," where he ends
by "hearing the winds their Maker magnify."
[47] "The sun is the type of Christ, giving life with its proper blood
to the earth," is Mr. Edmund Gardner's concise statement of F. T.'s
meaning.
[48] F. T. had a theory of the solar existence that did not stop
short, with Science, at the measurement of gases and their density.
"It has," Mr. Ghosh tells me he said, "a life of its own, analogous
to the life of the heart, periodic in its manifestations and--," but
here Francis stopped. "To Western ears it will sound ridiculous," he
said, and was silent. In vain Mr. Sarath Kumar Ghosh asserted his own
Eastern aptitude for such speculation. Francis grimly repeated his
excommunication, and Mr. Ghosh, conscious of a frock-coat and a great
command of the English idiom, was half-convinced of its stness.
[49] Compare Donne's "No cross is so extreme, as to have none"--a
thought upon which many paradoxical couplets were turned in the
seventeenth century. But Donne goes a little further than his fellows.
He seems to have known that an image, bound up with its original, is
more than a likeness:--
Let crosses so take what hid Christ in thee;
And be His image, or not His, but He.
[50] "The metre in my present volume," wrote the author in a suppressed
preface to _New Poems_, "is completely based on the principles which
Mr. Patmore may be said virtually to have discovered."
CHAPTER XI: PATMORE'S DEATH AND "NEW POEMS"
IN July, 1896, the year of his death, Patmore made an offer of service
memorable from a man, called arrogant and harsh, to a man who might
well, in personal matters, have stirred his prejudices:--
"You were looking so unwell when we parted, that, not
having heard from you, I am somewhat alarmed. Pray let
me have a post-card.
"If, at any time, you find yourself seriously ill, and
do not find the attendance, food, &c., sufficiently
good, tell me and I will go to Pantasaph to take care
of you for any time you might find me useful. It would
be a great pleasure and honour to serve you in any way."
Thompson answered:--
". . . You have been most generously kind to me; and I
can truly say that I never yet fell from any friend who
did not first fall from me. I thank you for the great
honour you have done me by your offer to come up and
look after me if I needed nursing. Fortunately it has
not come to that yet.
"I have not seen Meredith's article[51]--I am so
entirely cut off from the outside world."
When the Laureateship fell vacant Patmore wrote to the _Saturday
Review_ proposing my mother's name. Francis wrote to him:--
"I think your _Saturday_ letter very felicitously put.
But alas! small are the chances of any government
acting on it. I fear the compliment to 'journalism'
points too surely to Edwin Arnold. I have not received
the Selections.[52] A. M. has only once in my life
sent me a book of hers--her essays. I should indeed
like to see the book. The selections in themselves must
possess a peculiar interest for me; and the Preface I
am most eager to read."
The appointment made, Francis again wrote to the point:--
"What a pity you could not uphold the dignity of the
Laureateship in the eyes of Europe."
Patmore died in November, 1896. To Mrs. Patmore Francis wrote:--
"I am shocked and overcome to hear of your--and
my--bereavement; there has passed away the greatest
genius of the century, and from me a friend whose like
I shall not see again; one so close to my own soul that
the distance of years between us was hardly felt, nor
could the distance of miles separate us. I had a letter
from him but last Monday, and was hoping that I might
shortly see him again. Now my hope is turned suddenly
into mourning.
"The irrevocableness of such a grief is mocked by many
words; these few words least wrong it. My friend is
dead, and I had but one such friend.--Yours in all
sympathy of sorrow,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
At the same time he wrote to Palace Court:--
"CRECCAS COTTAGE, PANTASAPH.
"DEAR WILFRID,--I send you my lodging account for the
last two months.
"Of nothing can I write just now. You know what friends
we had been these last two years. And I heard from
him but the Monday before his death. There is no more
to say, because there is too much more to say. Yours
always,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
"_P.S._--I am fearful about the _Athenæum_ project. I
told Coventry I had altered the sub-title to prevent
identification, lest the poem[53] should offend his
friends; and since he did not dispute it, I conclude
he took my view that it might give displeasure. To
dwell on the harsher side of his character now has an
ungracious air."
Of the same poem he wrote again to W. M.:--
"I am sorry I could not wire the correction in time. I
did not see your letter till too late on Thursday to do
anything. I would rather have had the phrase altered,
and hope Mrs. Meynell may have taken on herself to do
so, since it only affected the poem temporarily. In my
book I shall retain the original phrase, which Coventry
would have objected to have altered in permanent
record. He accepted and justified my use of the phrase,
in a poem drawing only an aspect of his character. But
where it was connected with him as a funeral poem, I
would certainly have wished it replaced by something
else. About all things I trust soon to have personal
talk with you. Always yours affectionately,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
The high-pitched phrases of the obituary poems confess the strain he
put upon himself to publish his grief. He dropped into private prose
while he was at the task. "Age alone will grasp in some dim measure
what must have been the unmanifested powers of a mind from which could
go forth this starry manifestation; and what 'silence full of wonders'
interspaced his opulent frugality of speech." "It remains a personal
(and wonderful) memory that to me sometimes, athwart the shifting
clouds of converse, was revealed by glimpses the direct vision of that
oceanic vast of intellect." "The basic silence of our love" and the
"under-silence of love" are other phrases that tell of something not to
be expressed in the obituary column. There are scraps, also, of private
verse which tell his sorrow:--
O how I miss you any casual day!
And as I walk
Turn, in the customed way,
Towards you with the talk
Which who but you should hear?
And know the intercepting day
Betwixt me and your only listening ear;
And no man ever more my tongue shall hear,
And dumb amid an alien folk I stray.
He grieved for Patmore as a wife grieves for the husband who dies
before the birth of her child. "This latest, highest, of my work," he
says of a portion of _New Poems_, "is now born dumb. It had been sung
into his sole ears. Now there is none who speaks its language." His
loss made a visit to his friends in London desirable.
Of the dedication he had previously written to Patmore:--
"The book (A. M.'s _The Colour of Life_) is dedicated
to you, and just a fortnight ago I sent to London
a volume of poems--the product of the last three
years--which I had also (knowing nothing then of her
intention, or even that she had a book on the point of
appearing) taken the liberty of dedicating to you."
That dedication to Patmore runs:--
Lo, my book thinks to look Time's leaguer down,
Under the banner of your spread renown!
Or if these levies of impuissant rhyme
Fall to the overthrow of assaulting Time,
Yet this one page shall fend oblivion's shame
Armed with your crested and prevailing name.
The tribute is handsomely conceived without any of the insincerity that
cowered behind the handsomeness of eighteenth century dedications. It
was an occasion for setting forth the humility which was a very real
part of Thompson's character. In a printed note the author explains:--
"This dedication was written while the dear friend and
great Poet to whom it was addressed yet lived. It is
left as he saw it--the last verses of mine that were
ever to pass under his eye."
To Francis, Mrs. Patmore wrote just before the publication of the
book:--
"In to-day's _Register_ I see that you have decided
to retain the dedication of the poems you are now
bringing out to my husband. I cannot resist thanking
you and also letting you know how much pleasure the
mark of your friendship gave him before he died. He was
also looking forward to your visit to him with great
delight."
Before the publication of _New Poems_ a preface was written and
cancelled, and a dozen titles mooted and rejected. In one MS. the name
_Poems, partly mystical_ is followed by an Introduction:--
"This book represents the work of the three years
which have elapsed since my first volume was prepared
for the press, my second volume having been a poem of
comparatively early date. The first section exhibits
mysticism in a limited and varying degree. I feel my
instrument yet too imperfect to profane by it the
higher ranges. Much is transcendental rather than truly
mystic. The opening poem ("The Mistress of Vision")
is a fantasy with no more than an illusive tinge of
psychic significance. And of the other poems some are
as much science as mysticism! but it is the science of
the Future, not the science of the scientist."
And since the science of the Future is the science of the Past, the
outlook on the universe of the "Orient Ode," for instance, is nearer
the outlook of Ecclesiastes than of, say, Professor Norman Lockyer. The
"Orient Ode," on its scientific side, must wait at least fifty years
for understanding. For there was never yet poet, beyond a certain range
of insight, who could not have told the scientists what they will be
teaching a hundred years hence. Science is a Caliban, only fit to hew
wood and draw water for Prospero; and it is time Ariel were released
from his imprisonment by the materialistic Sycorax."[54] In a letter to
Patmore, he had written:--
"The bits of science that crop up in your essays remind
me of little devils dancing among rose trees."
The list of possible titles insists upon his regard for one aspect of
his later work:--_Songs of the Inner Life_; _Odes and other Poems_;
_New Things and Old_; _Songs of a Sun-worshipper_; _Music of the
Future_; _Night before Light_; _At the Orient Gates_; _The Dawn before
the Day-Star_. In the event _New Poems_ was chosen; and on the eve of
publication, F. T. writes to W. M.:--
"Herewith I send the book. Now, if Alice and you, after
you have read it in proof, say 'this is bad poetry,'
I will cut out half the book; but not half a line to
please a publisher's whim for little books and big
margins. I was cabined and confined over my first book;
with my spurs won, I should be at liberty to make the
book comprehensive. It will be a book as long as the
_Unknown Eros_, for if the _Unknown Eros_ has about
twenty more poems, none of them are so long as one
half-dozen of mine. Treated in the sumptuous style, it
would make a book about the size of Rossetti's first
volume; but there is no reason why it should be got up
more than just well and simply. I believe it will be
my last volume of poetry--in any case my last for some
years--and I am determined to make it complete, that I
may feel all my work worth anything is on record for
posterity, if I die. . . . I have sacrificed something to
the levity of the critics. I have put a whole section
of the lightest poems I ever wrote after the first
terribly trying section, to soothe the critics' gums.
If they are decent to the measure of their slight aim,
that is all I care for; they aimed little at poetry.
That they are true to girl-nature I have a woman's
certificate, besides the fact that I studied them--with
one exception--from an actual original. . . . Again I have
put a batch of four 'simple' poems at the opening of
the miscellaneous section to catch the critical eye,
though their importance is not such as to give them
a place so prominent. So I have done what artifice
could do to lighten a very stern, sober, and difficult
volume. 'Tis more varied in range than my former work;
and by my arrangement I have done my best to emphasize
and press into service this, the solitary redeeming
fact from the popular standpoint.
"From the higher standpoint I have gained, I think, in
art and chastity of style; but have greatly lost in
fire and glow. 'Tis time that I was silent. This book
carries me quite as far as my dwindling strength will
allow; and if I wrote further in poetry, I should write
down my own fame."
_New Poems_ found the critics, in 1897, more hostile than before.
Perhaps the _Saturday Review_ was the most severe:--
"He has been, from the first, unfortunate in being
shielded from sincere criticism. He has been persuaded
by his friends that he is a genius, divinely inspired,
whose wildest utterances are his best. . . . In no
poet of reputation is it (order) more strikingly
absent than in Mr. Thompson. Beautiful fancy, sonorous
and picturesque diction we find here, indeed, but no
motive power. These odes begin on one key, are shifted
to another, take up a fresh subject, drop it, and, at
length, as if merely wearied of their aimless flight,
drop suddenly, and cease in the air."
"These, and the rest, are nonsense-verses," the same writer says of
"The Mistress of Vision," but finds elsewhere "a touch of genuine
sublimity." The former _British Review_ picks out several examples of
"his barbarous jargon" (a phrase also used by Horne of Meredith's "Song
of Queen Theodolinda") and prescribes for him Ben Jonson's pill for
the poetaster and that he be shaken free of "the praises with which
his friends now mislead him." The _Literary World_ also sees need of
doctoring, saying, "Nothing can be stronger than his language, nothing
weaker than the impression it leaves on the mind. . . . It is like a
dictionary of obsolete English suffering from a fierce fit of delirium
tremens." _The Critic_, of New York, takes Thompson's ignorance of
religion and symbolism for granted; the _Times_ finds fault with both
his poetry and Catholicism; the _Morning Post_ is unfavourable; the
_Daily Chronicle_, the _Speaker_, and the _Guardian_ all begin severely
but leave scolding before they ended to give generous praise. The
_Sheffield Daily Telegraph_ was handsome. The poet's obscurity was
the chief cause of displeasure, since from thinking a man's meanings
difficult it is fatally easy to go on to say he is meaningless. The
case they make is startlingly good; one reaches for one's Thompson
from the shelves to see if he is in truth so great as one had thought
before spending an hour with his early critics. If one pauses before
quoting them, it is not for fear of dealing unkindly with them. They
are convincing; only the Thompson of scraps they condemn is not the
Thompson we know by the book. When the _Pall Mall_ says
"There is a terrible poem called 'The Anthem of Earth'
without form and void, rhymeless and the work of a
mediæval and pedantic Walt Whitman,"
the point may be conceded, as between that particular critic and his
particular Thompson; it is even possible to share with the _Pall Mall_
its "deep-rooted irritability" when one has to contemplate on its pages
tortuous and steep passages torn from their text.
Against the adverse may be set many good criticisms. Mr. Richard
Whiteing wrote finely in the _Daily News_, for he cleared the hurdle
of initial distaste--"It is idle to throw the book to the other end
of the room. You have to pick it up again." He hates such "outrageous
conceits" as "The world's unfolded blossom smells of God"; or "Soul
fully blest to feel God whistle thee at heel." It is the old hatred,
probably, of overhearing the "little language" of lovers or whispered
prayers. But Mr. Whiteing admits that "to put him in order might only
be to spoil him. He must have his way."
In the _Speaker_, Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch, after commenting, as usual,
on the precipitate and defiant eulogies of the poet's "friends,"
continued:--
". . . On the other hand, to be stung into denying that
he is a poet, and an extraordinarily fine one, is to
lose one's head just as wildly and less pardonably. . . .
Of 'The Mistress of Vision,' I can only say that it
recalls, after many days, the wonder and delight with
which as a boy I first read 'Kubla Khan.'"
The _Daily Chronicle_, where Mr. Le Gallienne had given place to
Mr. Archer, on a first reading, recognised "a man of imagination
all compact, a seer and singer of rare genius"; the _Athenæum_ "a
singular mastery of verse"; the _Edinburgh_, with ponderous speed,
"a great poet," and the _Academy_ and _Bookman_ gave handsome
welcomes. Notwithstanding these, the impression on public and poet
was discouraging. The book sold badly, and soon died, so that for the
first half of the year in 1901 it brought in six shillings' worth of
royalties: four copies had been sold. During the first half of 1902 the
book found five buyers.
F. T. so far felt depressed by the bulk of adverse criticism as to
write his thanks to one of the few kindly reviewers of the new book. He
got in answer, June 7, 1897:--
"I simply expressed (very inadequately) the pleasure
your work had given me, without the least thought as
to what anyone else thought or might think. That,
however, is not strictly true. Your letter reminds me
that I read some extracts to a friend, and then said,
'This is not work which can possibly be _popular_ in
the wide sense; but it is work that will be read and
treasured centuries hence by those who really care for
poetry.' This comes back to me as you speak of the
reaction. I assure you no conceivable reaction can
wipe out or overlay such work as yours. It is firm
based on the rock of absolute beauty; and this I say
all the more confidently because it does not happen to
appeal to my own speculative, or even my own literary,
prejudices.--Yours very truly,
WILLIAM ARCHER."
Later F. T. met Mr. Archer casually at Mr. Doubleday's house in
Westminster, and his poetry and portrait figured in Mr. Archer's _Poets
of the Younger Generation_.
He was not put out of humour by small royalties:--
"DEAR WILFRID,--It strikes me that the cheque (2/11)
has a very unseemly tail, which would be much improved
by a piece grafted on to it, to give it a trifle
more handsome proportions. Perhaps the thing might
not be impossible to a patient operator (to speak
ex-medical-studently).--Yours ever,
F. T."
He could be tragic too. His interruption during a reading of "Othello"
at our house is never to be forgotten. Desdemona was in death agony,
when an emphatic voice proclaimed:--"Here's a go, Mrs. Meynell; I have
lost my _Athenæum_ cheque." But he found it in another pocket.
If buffers had been needed between the unfavourable reception of _New
Poems_ and the sensibility of the author they were supplied at this
time by Mr. Garvin's splendid appreciation of his previous works,
_Poems_ and _Sister Songs_, in the _Bookman_, March 1897:--
"Even with the greatest pages of _Sister Songs_
sounding in one's ears, one is sometimes tempted to
think the 'Hound of Heaven' Mr. Thompson's high-water
mark for unimaginable beauty and tremendous import--if
we do damnably iterate Mr. Thompson's tremendousness,
we cannot help it, he thrusts the word upon us. We
do not think we forget any of the splendid things of
an English anthology when we say that the 'Hound of
Heaven' seems to us, on the whole, the most wonderful
lyric (if we consider _Sister Songs_ as a sequence of
lyrics) in the language. It fingers all the stops of
the spirit, and we hear now a thrilling and dolorous
note of doom and now the quiring of the spheres and
now the very pipes of Pan, but under all the still sad
music of humanity. It is the return of the nineteenth
century to Thomas à Kempis. In _Sister Songs_ Mr.
Thompson has passed from agonies to exultations. Of
pure power he had not more to reveal. But _Sister
Songs_ has the very sense of Spring: there is some
lovely renaissance of spirit in the book, a melting
of snows and all dewy germinations of delight. What
rhythms are so lissome and persuasive as those of the
first part? In dainty and debonair invention it is
altogether incomparable. _Sister Songs_ opens with all
the lyrical _élan_ of Shelley perfectly married with
the full and definite vision, the pure and vivid phrase
of Keats. Thus in two of Mr. Thompson's many passages
on childhood--
Or if white-handed light
Draw thee yet dripping from the quiet pools,
Still lucencies and cools,
Of sleep, which all night mirror constellate dreams;
and again--
. . . bubbles from the calyces
Of the lovely thoughts that breathe,
Paving like water-flowers thy spirit's floor beneath.
"The second part of _Sister Songs_ is in a greater
mood. It is the high ritual of beauty, a very
apocalypse of poetry, and one should only labour the
futility of terms in attempting to praise it. The
primary things of poetry are newly and immortally
said. But Mr. Thompson's receptive mind is saturated
with modern thought, and he uses it in a singular way
to deepen the ancient interpretations. He touches
Darwinism, and it becomes transmutable in a lovely and
poignant lyric--
In pairing-time, we know, the bird
Kindles to its deepmost splendour,
And the tender
Voice is tenderest in its throat.
"May we not dare to say of this passage
(beginning--'Wild Dryad! all unconscious of thy tree'
in _Sister Songs_) that it almost arrives at that
ultimate thing, that 'one thought, one grace, one
wonder at the least,' which for Marlowe was beyond the
furthest reach of words, and which poets have been
seeking to declare from the beginning of song? Mr.
Thompson's poetry scarcely comes by way of the outward
eye at all. He scarcely depends upon occasions. In a
dungeon one imagines that he would be no less a poet.
The regal air, the prophetic ardours, the apocalyptic
vision, the supreme utterance--he has them all. A
rarer, more intense, more strictly predestinate genius
has never been known to poetry. To many this may well
appear the simple delirium of over-emphasis. The writer
signs for those others, nowise ashamed, who range after
Shakespeare's very Sonnets the poetry of a living poet,
Francis Thompson."
FOOTNOTES:
[51] "Mrs. Meynell's Essays" in the _National Review_, Aug. 1896.
[52] _Poetry of Pathos and Delight_, being selections made by Alice
Meynell from the poetry of Coventry Patmore.
[53] "A Captain of Song," addressed to Patmore before his death, and at
his death published in the _Athenæum_, December 5, 1896.
[54] "Many a bit of true seeing I have had to learn again, through
science having sophisticated my eye, inward or outward. And many a
bit I have preserved, to the avoidance of a world of trouble, by
concerning myself no more than any child about the teachings of
science. Especially is this the case in regard to light. I never lost
the child's instinctive rightness of outlook upon light because I
flung the scientific theories aside as so much baffling distortion of
perspective. 'Here is cart for horse,' I felt rather than saw, and
would nothing with them. . . . Though scientists in camp stand together
against me, I would not challenge the consensus of the poets."
CHAPTER XII: FRIENDS AND OPINIONS
THE friends he found for distraction in London were few, his
acquaintances still fewer; thus his biographer, in falling back on such
slight records as would go unnoticed in a life more thickly peopled,
believes that they have at any rate the value of rarity.
But in any case the chapter of his meetings could be more than matched
with the chapter of his evasions. Thus ran the excuses:--
"Dear Wilfrid, I could not come in to tea with Blunt and Yeats, for
I had to go down to the _Academy_, and was back much too late. Had I
known on Thursday I would have altered my arrangements so as to accept
your invitation. I am very sorry to have missed this chance of meeting
Yeats, as I have long desired to do. You know I heartily admire his
work."
* * * * *
Meredith's invitations he could not permanently resist. At Box Hill
he spent a night in June 1896. Meredith had written to A. M., "You
and the poet will have Heaven's welcome to the elect. But the cottage
will be wounded if you desire not to sleep in it after having tried
its poor resources. Be kind." To dine and sleep and wake in that small
cottage was to be at very close quarters with nature and a man. With
birds at the window, trees bowing and rustling at the back door, and at
the front the vivid grass ready for his feet, Francis was thrust into
the presence of a showy bit of nature, and was hardly more easy than
if he had been thrust at the theatre into a box directly adjoining a
crowded stage. He would pull at his necktie, and smooth his coat, and
be most warily conscious of his companion's eye, microscopic, like a
husband's, for defect. The singing of Meredith's blackbirds would be no
less confusing than the stream of Meredith's talk; the nodding flowers
and the thousand shadows, the sunshine and the talker, were too strange
to him. For years he had evaded nature and an eye; here he was forced
to be seen and to see in the unclouded atmosphere of this garden on
a hill, and during a long drive. Talk and caviare for breakfast were
alike foreign to him, who never breakfasted even on toast. To be on
tremendously good terms with Nature for her own sake, with talk for
its own sake, with French literature, with the Celt, was Meredith's
triumph; Thompson was shy of all these.
Meredith's method was one of acceptance, of bird's song and of
Burgundy. Thompson's method was of refusal because he was not hardy
enough for one or the other. With that mixture of precision and
involved evasion that was his habit, Meredith praised "Love in Dian's
Lap," quoting the lines--
And on this lady's heart, looked you so deep,
Poor Poetry has rocked himself to sleep;
Upon the heavy blossom of her lips
Hangs the bee Musing; nigh her lids eclipse
Each half-occulted star beneath that lies;
And in the contemplation of those eyes,
Passionless passion, wild tranquillities.
The lady, too, was in the garden to hear.
In his written comments on _Poems_, Meredith had fastened on the
misprinted passages as if they were evidences of the wilfulness of the
poet, and he recalled these in talk, slow to relinquish an opportunity
for his golden chaff. With the _Edinburgh_ praise of Thompson he
proclaimed himself in agreement, writing (July 19, 1896) "I subscribe
to the words on Francis Thompson's verse." But he also called Thompson
turgid, on the eve of passing to the writing of his own ode on the
French Revolution; _Sister Songs_ he had called at first sight a
"voluntary."
He discovered no consecutive argument in _Sister Songs_; but for his
banter he found an immediate opening; he invented a landlady for
Thompson--Amelia Applejohn--to whom imaginary sonnets were addressed.
He told how Amelia was summoned to Thompson's room to listen to the
latest, rolling down her sleeves the while, and brushing the flour from
her elbows.
After Thompson's death, Meredith wrote to W. M.:--
"BOX HILL, _February 3, 1909._
"DEAR MR. MEYNELL,--The love of all the Meynells, let
all the Meynells know, is precious to me. And the book
of the poems (_Selected Poems_) was very welcome,
though a thought of the poet's broken life gives pain.
What he might further have done hangs at the closing
page. Your part in his history should help to comfort
you. What we have of him is mainly due to the Meynell
family.
"Our Portia I may suppose to be now in Italy, and Italy
seems to me her natural home. For me, I drag on,
counting more years and not knowing why. I have to have
an arm when I would walk. I am humiliated by requiring
at times a repetition of sentences. This is my state
of old age. But my religion of life is always to be
cheerful; though I see little of my friends, I live
with them.--Ever to be counted yours,
GEORGE MEREDITH."
One of the few occasions on which Francis entered a friend's house
(always excepting W. M.'s) in London was when, in December 1896, he
spent some weeks with Mr. and Mrs. Doubleday. Like a little boy, he
posted word to W. M., as to a father, across the few intervening miles
of London, of his safe arrival there, of his friend's kindness, and of
his admiration of Mrs. Doubleday's music making:--"Mrs. Doubleday is
very kind, and she is a simply exquisite pianist. Doubleday and I have
fraternised over music."
"My friend Alfred Hayes," he used to say, almost with ostentation. And
the phrase remains because he so rarely proclaimed or could proclaim a
relationship of the sort. That he paid a visit and wrote letters and
verses to Mr. Hayes were, even if he forgot to despatch one of the
letters, unusual marks of consideration. The visit planned, it followed
that he did not turn up in the expected way, so that his host, in his
anxiety, asked W. M. for news, and later wrote:--
"20 CARPENTER ROAD, EDGBASTON,
_October 13, 1896._
"DEAR MR. MEYNELL,--I am very sorry that, as all turned
out well, I wrote to you in some apprehension as to
Thompson. He turned up at the wrong railway-station and
performed some other singular feats, but those were
mere details, and we enjoyed his visit very much. I
hope it did him good in spite of the fact that owing
to its happening to be a very busy week for me at the
office, I was obliged to leave him a good deal to
his own devices, which consisted mainly in smoking
innumerable pipes over the books he found in my study.
The weather was so forbidding that we were only able to
make two excursions afield. I hope he will come again
in the summer when no infant daughter must again bar
the way.--Yours,
ALFRED HAYES."
Mr. Hayes gives me a reminiscence of his guest:--
"In the Autumn of the year 1896 Francis Thompson was
my guest for a week at Edgbaston. The evenings were
veritable _Noctes Ambrosianæ_; but though the general
impression of deep insight and opulent imagination,
of many a flash of inspiration and radiant turn of
speech, lingers as a precious recollection, the details
of his conversation have vanished, for the most part,
from memory, as completely as the precise hues and
cloud-shapes of the sunsets of those memorable days.
"One indelible impression, however, remains--his
amazing range of reading, the infallibility of his
literary memory, and the consequent wealth of allusion
he had at his command.
"At meals he would sit mostly silent, sometimes
quitting the table, his food half consumed, as if at
some imperious mandate, but somehow without leaving
behind him the slightest suspicion of discourtesy.
These sudden disappearances, whose cause I never
sought to discover, soon came to be expected, and only
provoked a smile--it was Thompson's way. But let it not
be supposed that he was uncouth or affected; his manner
was that of a great child; he was simply incapable of
pose or unkindness.
"His personal appearance is deeply engraved on the
tablets of my memory. He was a pathetic figure. His
form and face bore, only too clearly, the marks of
those grim years of tribulation of soul and torment
of body from which he had so recently been delivered.
His appearance smote me with deep pity, but even
deeper respect; and within a few hours he had won my
affection. I was struck, as were the few intimate
friends who once met him at my house, with a strange
other-worldliness about him, as if he were conscious
of making only a hasty sojourn on earth in the course
of an illimitable journey. . . . I remember how the
discoloured face would suddenly light up, and the dazed
eyes flash, in such moments of happy excitement, as
if a volcanic eruption of delight had broken through
the crust of his soul. He gave me the impression of
concealing within him two inexhaustible reservoirs of
sorrow and joy; ebullitions from each appear in his
poetry; but in his long talks with me he rarely drew
except from the fountain of joy."
Some time after this visit he wrote to Mr. Hayes of his journalism, his
book, and his desire to see his friend again:--
"I met Norman Gale, for a brief moment, at my
publishers', in January or thereabouts. I was charmed
with him. Alas, I am farther off from you than ever; it
is not likely that I can visit you again for an unknown
time to come. And I entertain such a happy recollection
of you, your dear wife, and your charming children! Let
us pray for the unexpected, which always happens, you
know!--Always yours, dear Hayes,
FRANCIS THOMPSON.
"I am very busy, or I would write at more length to
you. Believe me, that I do not forget you ever."
From her invalid's couch Mrs. Hamilton King sent Francis treasured
messages of trust and commendation, and, guessing his need, wrote
him many things that sounded bravely to one who accused himself of
something worse than futility in friendship:--
"It is true that everyone must live out his own life,
and I am not sure that it is good that another should
live it for him; but you at least have done much for
your friends. Coventry Patmore relied on you; and when
I last saw Mr. Wilfrid Meynell he told me that both
he and Mrs. Meynell felt themselves entirely your
debtors--your poetry was so much for them. And you may
have much more to do. I wish it were possible for you
to live nearer and within reach of your friends. . . .
It is a great consolation to feel that one has
ministered to the most sensitive and precious among
the children of God, and also it is a great joy and
privilege to me to have your friendship."
Between 1896 and 1900 he also had correspondence with one who was
especially his friend, Miss Katharine Douglas King, Mrs. Hamilton
King's daughter. Before meeting her he had written to W. M.:--
"Do you know that Miss K. Douglas King is--together with Winifred
Lucas--one of the few women I ever desired particularly to meet? She
has a temperament of genius heaped up and running over. I read through
all her _Merry England_ stories some months ago, and was startled by
their individual and impressive note."
Her book, _The Child who will never Grow Old_, published two years
later, bears on its first page his line, "The heart of Childhood, so
divine for me." Miss King played with the Palace Court children, and
worked among the poor children of the East End who often figure in her
stories. Francis once visited her and her charges at the hospital in
Leonard Square. Writing subsequently, Miss King says:--
"I count you as an old friend, but I know now I did
not really know you until Saturday. When you were by
your little 'genius's'--Harry's--bed, and the baby
boy Percy with the white shoes was at your knee, that
was to me a revelation! I think of you now with that
infant's serious, confiding face upturned to you.
It was all so natural. To some people a child is a
pretty ornamental _addition_. Your personality now
seems incomplete without the child as the natural and
exquisite finish to the whole man. Adieu, dear friend."
A later letter announces her impending marriage:--
"FOREST HALL, _April 1900._
"MY DEAR FRANCIS,--I have been wanting to write to
you for so long, and yet have not been able to find
time until now; and now I find it a little difficult,
because one feels reluctant to speak of one's own great
happiness to one whose life has been so sad and lonely
as yours, even though that one should be so firm and
true a friend as you have ever been to me. My marriage
is fixed for the early part of July. Although my new
home will be far away, we both hope that in time we may
come to live nearer London, and I hope that my marriage
will not bring me less, but more, in touch with my
friends, amongst whom, Francis, I hope that I may ever
count you as one of the first and nearest, and may God
bless you.--Believe me, Your always affectionately,
KATHARINE D. KING."
It was after this that he wrote the following description of his
friend:--
"There is no need of courage in the feminine woman,
and I love her for the fact. Yet my dear friend (now
removed by marriage) was a brave woman, and I loved
her for it against all my wont. Perhaps, because she
took me by surprise; perhaps because--who knows why?
She was not self-reliant with all her bravery, and I
suppose the combination made her real femininity the
more piquant. Perhaps it was rather her crystal truth
than the courage which (I think) came from it, not
caused it, that won me at sight. Truth--_integrity_ (or
_oneness_) _of nature_--is what calls to me."
In the matter of his close friendships, he wrote to Miss Agnes
Tobin,[55] a lover of his poetry and herself a translator of Petrarch's
sonnets:--
"Of what you say of me in relation to your spiritual
development I dare not trust myself to write, lest I
offend the modesty of words: it comes as a great prop
to a life very lonely of support."
Mrs. Vernon Blackburn is elsewhere named; but of other acquaintances
among women he had none, or only such as lasted during one or two
meetings. The Duchess of Sutherland's invitations were found retained
among his dusty papers like adventurous Sisters of Charity, stiff and
clean in the ragged company of a neglected correspondence, old pipes
and newspaper-cuttings.
The people he did not know yet counted for something in his history;
he has been associated with some he might have known, but did not, and
with others he could never have known. Oscar Wilde, on hearing some
of _Sister Songs_ read aloud, said, "Why can't I write poetry like
that? That is what I've wanted to do all my life." The two, however,
did not meet. In a letter from Mrs. Wilde, January 1895, I find, "I
so enjoyed Mr. Thompson's visit to me on Friday," and in another,
June 1894, "Oscar was quite charmed with the lines you read him of
Francis Thompson." "Of the living poets whose work I like, he is one
of the very few whom I like as well as their work," wrote Mr. Vincent
O'Sullivan after meeting him at about the same time.
Of the invitations he did not accept were those from Mrs. Louise
Chandler Moulton that he should sometimes go to her "for a quiet talk
_à deux_"; from Elliot and Fry that he should be photographed "in
his study"; from a _World_ writer that he should be interviewed as a
subject for one of the "Celebrities at Home."
In 1897 Mr. Lewis Hind found that the _Academy_ might welcome something
every week from Thompson, and wrote telling him so. Then he came into
touch, slowly as was his way, with the office staff. "I saw what I
concluded was Clarence Rook at the _Academy_ on Wednesday, but we did
not even exchange a look, for Hind did not introduce us. So I left
convinced that Hind meant to get out the _Academy_ by hook or by C.
Rook." From this time began his friendship with Mr. E. V. Lucas and Mr.
Wilfred Whitten. All these, along with the "management," learnt how to
smile on the trials provided by this contributor. Mr. Lucas is quoted
on an earlier page devoted to cricket. Mr. Whitten has written:--
"I first met Francis Thompson at the _Academy_ office
in Chancery Lane, in 1897, the year in which, with his
_New Poems_, he took farewell of poetry and began, I
fear, to look on life as so much dead lift, so much
needless postscript to his finished epistle. . . .
We gave Thompson as many books of theology, history,
biography, and, of course, poetry as he cared to
review. It was a usual thing, in reading the proofs,
for one of us to exclaim aloud on his splendid handling
of a subject demanding the best literary knowledge and
insight. Thompson came frequently to the office to
receive books for review, and to bring in his 'copy.'
Every visit meant a talk, which was never curtailed by
Thompson. This singer, who had soared to themes too
dazzling for all but the rarest minds; this poet of the
broken wing and the renounced lyre had not become moody
or taciturn. At his best he was a fluent talker, who
talked straight from his knowledge and convictions, yet
never for victory. He weighed his words, and would not
hurt a controversial fly. On great subjects he was slow
or silent; on trifles he became grotesquely tedious.
This dreamer seemed to be surprised into a kind of
exhilaration at finding himself in contact with small
realities. And then the fountains of memory would be
broken up, or some quaint corner of his _amour propre_
would be touched. He would explain nine times what
was clear, and talk about snuff or indigestion or the
posting of a letter until the room swam round us.
"A stranger figure than Thompson's was not to be seen
in London. Gentle in looks, half-wild in externals,
his face worn by pain and the fierce reactions of
laudanum, his hair and straggling beard neglected,
he had yet a distinction and an aloofness of bearing
that marked him in the crowd; and when he opened his
lips he spoke as a gentleman and a scholar. A cleaner
mind, a more naïvely courteous manner, were not to
be found. It was impossible and unnecessary to think
always of the tragic side of his life. He still had
to live and work in his fashion, and his entries
and exits became our most cheerful institution. His
great brown cape, which he would wear on the hottest
days, his disastrous hat, and his dozen neglects and
make-shifts were only the insignia of our 'Francis'
and of the ripest literary talent on the paper. No
money (and in his later years Thompson suffered more
from the possession of money than from the lack of it)
could keep him in a decent suit of clothes for long.
Yet he was never 'seedy.' From a newness too dazzling
to last, and seldom achieved at that, he passed at
once into a picturesque nondescript garb that was all
his own and made him resemble some weird pedlar or
packman in an etching by Ostade. This impression of him
was helped by the strange object--his fish-basket, we
called it--which he wore slung round his shoulders by a
strap. It had occurred to him that such a basket would
be a convenient receptacle for the books which he took
away for review, and he added this touch to an outward
appearance which already detached him from millions. . . .
He had ceased to make demands on life. He ear-marked
nothing for his own. As a reviewer, enjoying the run of
the office, he never pounced on a book; he waited, and
he accepted. Interested still in life, he was no longer
intrigued by it. He was free from both apathy and
desire. Unembittered, he kept his sweetness and sanity,
his dewy laughter, and his fluttering gratitude. In
such a man outward ruin could never be pitiable or
ridiculous, and, indeed, he never bowed his noble head
but in adoration. I think the secret of his strength
was this: that he had cast up his accounts with God and
man, and thereafter stood in the mud of earth with a
heart wrapt in such fire as touched Isaiah's lips."
He had no valet of whom to make a conquest; but a friendly editor, at
any rate, was at his feet, even when they were unpunctual. Mr. Lewis
Hind writes:--
"During the seven years that I edited the _Academy_,
I knew the poet intimately, seeing him two or three
times a week. It amused him to write articles, and to
know that his landlady was being paid, although such
matters were of no real importance to him; but the
weekly wage gave him pocket-money to buy the narcotics
of his choice, and that _was_ important.
"In memory I see him one miserable November afternoon
communing with the Seraphim, and frolicking with the
young-eyed Cherubim in Chancery Lane. The roads were
ankle-deep in slush; a thin, icy rain was falling; the
yellow fog enwrapped the pedestrians squelching down
the lane; and, going through them in a narrow-path, I
saw Francis Thompson, wet and mud-spattered. But he was
not unhappy. What is a day of unpleasant weather to one
who lives in eternity? His lips were moving, his head
was raised, his eyes were humid with emotion, for above
the roof of the Chancery Lane Safe Deposit Company, in
the murk of the fog, he saw beatific visions. They were
his reality, not the visible world.
"He was on his way to the office of the _Academy_
with the manuscript of a book review, and on his damp
back was slung the weather-worn satchel in which he
would carry away volumes for the ensuing week. A
Thompson article in _The Academy_ gave distinction to
the issue. What splendid prose it was! Reading the
proofs, we would declaim passages aloud for the mere
joy of giving utterance to his periods. He wrote a
series of articles on 'Poets as Prose Writers' which
must some day be recovered from the files; he wrote on
anything. I discovered that his interest in battles,
and the strategy of great commanders was as keen as his
concern with cricket. So the satchel was filled with
military memoirs, and retired generals ensconced in the
armchairs of service clubs wondered. Here was a man
who manipulated words as they manipulated men. Once or
twice in those seven years of our intercourse a flame
of his old poetic fire blazed out, and once I was able
to divert the flame into the pages of the _Academy_.
When Cecil Rhodes died I telegraphed to Thompson to
hasten to the office. That was on a Monday. He appeared
on the Tuesday. I asked him point blank if he would
write an ode on Cecil Rhodes for the next issue of
the paper, and without waiting for his refusal talked
Rhodes to him for half an hour, roused his enthusiasm,
and he departed with a half promise to deliver the ode
on Thursday morning. Thursday came and nearly passed.
I sent him three telegrams, but received no answer.
It was necessary to go to press at eight o'clock. At
half-past six he arrived, and proceeded to extract from
his pockets a dozen and more scraps of crumpled paper,
each containing a fragment of the ode. I pieced them
together, sent the blurred manuscript to the printers,
gave him money for his dinner, and exacted a promise
that he would return in an hour to read the proof. He
returned dazed and incoherent, read the proof standing
and swaying as he read, and murmured: 'It's all right.'
It was all right. I am prouder of having published
that ode than of anything else that the _Academy_ ever
contained. In 1904, when I resigned the editorship of
the _Academy_, we no longer met regularly; but I saw
Thompson at infrequent intervals at Mrs. Meynell's
house. He would come to dinner at any hour that suited
his mood, take his bite and sip, and pace the room with
a book in his hand, striking innumerable matches, never
keeping his pipe alight, rarely taking part in the
general conversation, but ever courteous and ever ready
to laugh at the slightest pleasantry."
[Illustration: "Mr Thompson of Fleet Street"
Drawn by Everard Meynell, 1903
Emery Walker Ph. sc.]
Of his editor, and to his editor, Thompson writes:--
"39 GOLDNEY ROAD, HARROW ROAD,
_Sunday Nigh.t_
"DEAR HIND,--Since I was betrayed so unfortunately into
putting a hasty definition into clumsy words, I beg to
be allowed to define my intended meaning--to define
my definition, in fact. I called you, I believe, 'a
man of the world with a taste for letters.' It would
be nearer my meaning if I had called you a man of
action with a love for letters--and art. Wilfrid Blunt,
Wyndham, &c., are examples of the class. I might also
say Henley. It is true that you no more than Henley
have ever been a man of action like Blunt or Wyndham.
Some more inclusive term is needed. The essential thing
is, that _life_ occupies the principal place in your
regard--not life as it should be lived, the ideal of
life in other words--but actual everyday life, 'life
as she _is_ lived.' This is foremost, letters or art
second. Raleigh and a host of the great Elizabethans
belonged to the same school. 'Man of action first' is
perhaps the nearest I can get to it. 'Man of the world'
is bungling because it bears so many significations.
Anyway, _now_, I hope, you have some idea of my
meaning. It was an antithesis between the pure thinker
and recluse, on one hand; the man interested in
action for its own sake, yet with a foothold in
letters, on the other.--Yours ever,
F. T."
Scruples in criticism, anxiety over ten shillings overdrawn from
the _Academy's_ cashier, and the imaginary coldness of his editor
in consequence, brought Mr. Wilfred Whitten letters a column long,
and though abbreviated (as most given in this book are), they are
sufficiently characteristic of a profuse manner:--
"DEAR HIND,--I muddled up the time altogether to-day.
How, I do not now understand. I started off soon
after 2. Thinking I had time for a letter to the
_Academy_ which it had been in my mind to write, I
delayed my journey to write it. When I was drawing to
a conclusion, I heard the clock strike 3 (as it seemed
to me). I thought I should soon be finished, so went on
to the end. A few minutes later, as it appeared, the
clock struck again, and I counted 4. Alarmed, I rushed
off--vexed that I should get in by half-past 4 instead
of half-past 3, as I intended--and finished the thing
in the train. I got to the _Academy_, and was struck
all of a heap. There was nobody there, and it was ten
past six! How I did it, I do not even now understand.
I will be with you in good time to-morrow. But that
cannot make amends to myself for such a _fiasco_ and
waste of time.--Yours,
F. T."
At other times his copy is late because he has no stamp; or, thinking
he has delivered an article, the next day he finds half of it still in
his pocket; but illness is his stand-by, his most robust excuse.
The two following letters tell of books lost on either side:--
"16 ELGIN AVENUE, W.
_November 2, 1897._
"MY DEAR HIND,--I will do as you wish about the
Crashaw. I think you are right, but in the absence of
any notification I kept to the stipulated length of two
columns.
"I received the letter you forwarded from Arthur Waugh;
but the book which should have accompanied it has not
been sent me. Will you please see what has become of
it, and have it forwarded at once. I am afraid it
may have got mixed with the books for review; and it
is a book I value, sent me as a gift by Waugh, in
recognition of my last 'Excursion.' Please let the
matter be looked into without delay.
"I am glad to hear that Wells has given you
well-deserved recognition in the _Saturday_.--Yours
sincerely,
FRANCIS THOMPSON.
"_P.S._--For fear of any confusion, I may add that
Waugh's book is a volume of 'Political Pamphlets,'
belonging to the same 'Library' as the volume noticed
in my last 'Excursion.'"
"DEAR HIND,--I regret exceedingly to find that the
Menpes was disposed of along with an accumulation
of back review books, nor can I get it back, for it
sold almost at once. I am very sorry it should have
happened; because it should not and would not have
been sold, had it not gone among others when I was
in a hurry, and my mind occupied only with the work
I had in hand. Of course, under such circumstances,
I hold myself responsible for replacing it as soon
as I can. Or if you cannot wait, I would suggest you
get the book and dock it out of my extra money. The
only alternative is for me to pick oakum (if they do
that in debtors' gaols). And I have not the talents
for oakum-picking. Though I enjoyed the distinguished
tuition of a burglar, who had gone through many
trials--and houses--in the pursuit of this little-known
art, I showed such mediocre capacity that the Master
did not encourage me to persevere. Besides, seeing how
overcrowded the profession is, it would be a pity for
me to take the oakum out of another man's fingers.
"Seriously, I am very upset that this should have
happened. I can think of nothing but what I have
suggested.--Yours sincerely,
F. THOMPSON."
"DEAR HIND,--I was taken sick on my way to the station,
not having been to bed all night, and having been
working a good part of to-day; and though I came on
as soon as I could pull myself together again, I was
too late. So I leave here the Dumas article, which I
brought with me, and will be down to-morrow morning,
when I am told you will be here.--Yours in haste,
F. THOMPSON.
"_P.S._--You had another very interesting article last
week; but I had qualms whether your art of artistic
romance, or of the Thing Seen, or the Thing which Ought
to have been Seen if it Wasn't, was taking me in again
with its realism more real than fact."
"DEAR HIND,--I was so unwell yesterday that I could
not come--neuralgia in the eye. I am the more sorry
because the Watson article was ready to bring with me,
as you desired. The acute pain drove it out of my head.
Nor could I see to write an explanation of my absence.
To-day, when I remembered the unsent article, I thought
it of course too late to be of use to you this week.
So, my eye being still weak, I decided to bring it
(not the eye) to-morrow, with personal explanation.
But getting your telegram I send it herewith. A really
fine Ode[56]--though close (in point of style) to
my 'Nineteenth Century' Ode in the _Academy_. Thorp
perceived it, without any 'lead' from me; so it is not
merely my own fancy. But it is, on the whole, a better
poem than the original. If all made such fine use of
the model, I would not mind imitation.--Yours in haste,
F. THOMPSON."
"16 ELGIN AVENUE, W.
_Monday._
"MY DEAR HIND,--I was taken very ill last week,
and was totally unable to get in my work for the
_Academy_. Having pulled round, I send you herewith the
Wordsworth, and trust to let you have the Fiona Macleod
in the course of to-morrow, or at any rate by Wednesday
morning by the latest.
"With regard to your request for articles on Shelley,
Browning, and Tennyson, I am sorry that, after careful
consideration, I must ask you to hand them over to
someone else. Considering the importance--the great
importance--of what I am asked to treat, I do not
feel that I could do justice either to my subject
or my own reputation within the limit of 1000 words
proposed. In the case of such minor men as Landor, or
even possibly Macaulay, I should not object to the
limitation--biographical details being omitted. But I
simply cannot pledge my name to a disposal of Tennyson
or Browning in about two columns. It would be a mere
clumsy spoiling of material which I might to greater
advantage use elsewhere. I could only undertake it on
the terms that the length of the article should be
determined by the organic exigencies of my treatment
alone. Of course I have never dreamed of anything
beyond five columns as what you could reasonably allow
me for important articles. If some have extended to
more, it has been the result of miscalculation, and
I should have quite acquiesced in your cutting such
excessive articles down.--Yours very sincerely,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
Of the ethics of reviewing he writes at length, to the Editor:--
"I regret that--in pressure of work and
ill-health--Miss Frances Power Cobbe's letter, which
you forwarded me, has not received the immediate
attention which it deserved. I regret that my review
should strike her as a personal attack. But I cannot
see that it exceeded the limits of impartial criticism.
Miss Power Cobbe seems to imply that I in some way
found Miss Shore's poems 'morally objectionable.' I
am unaware of any sentence which could create such an
impression. For the rest, I was necessarily unaware
of Miss Shore's personal circumstances. I was not
even aware of its being her first book of poems. When
a book comes before a reviewer for criticism, he
cannot be expected to know or take account of personal
matters--of anything outside the book itself. Many
things might plead that he should be very gentle with
the author, but he has no knowledge of them. The book
is an impersonal thing to him; and the author who
publishes a book becomes impersonal, and must expect
to be treated as a mere name at the head of so many
printed pages; it is the inevitable consequence of
publication.
"The critic can but register his impressions, coldly
impartial by his very function. Did he abstain from
the blame he thought just, because (for example) of
the writer's sex, it would be equivalent to abdicating
criticism where women are concerned, extending the
privileges of the drawing-room to the reviewing-column.
But women of literary power would be the first to
protest against the insincerity of 'letting them off'
because of their sex."
But it may be judged that reviewing is not always so strict a
business:--
"16 ELGIN AVENUE, W.
_Saturday._
"MY DEAR HIND,--I have been very unwell for the last
two or three weeks, or your urgent requests should
have been better attended to. The Dunlop article was
finished on Monday week, when I got your letter from
Henley, and consequently had partly to re-write it.
And unluckily an attack of sickness which confined me
to bed prevented my getting it in yesterday, although
it was actually done. But I trust I am now much better
all round, and shall be able to give the _Academy_
proper attention. It is cutting my own throat for
me to neglect it, and you may be sure I should not
wilfully keep you waiting as I have done the last two
or three weeks. I trust I have met Henley's wishes in
the article as it now stands. I had no notion, to begin
with, that there was so much to do over the book; and
so I had treated it slightly. I will call in on Monday,
in case you have anything you might wish to say in
regard to it.
"With much regrets for my delay (but really I have been
having a pretty beastly time of it)--Yours sincerely,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
This was no longer the Henley of the great time, when every issue of
the _Scots Observer_ contained a poem or essay fit to make a beginning
of fame for one of the "young men"; when this week the new cadences of
Mr. Kipling's "Barrack-Room Ballads" sent city readers swinging and
chanting back from their offices towards suburban sunset and supper.
Those contributors fronted a famous future, their organ observed of
all observers, their editor the instantaneous boisterous welcomer
of the talent that served his turn. All the precious persons of his
choice made the bluff figure of the chief the more defined. "I am the
Captain of my Soul" was his boast, but others knew him as the captain
of a newspaper staff. Famous for the young men he made his own, he is
here recalled for the young man he rejected. My father sent him a poem
by Francis Thompson which, consistently enough, he refused. Indocile,
he would probably still have resolution to refuse verses "reeking of
Shelley, whom I detest." It is proof of his perception that from the
first he knew the newcomer was no shipmate for the Captain Silver
of the literary weeklies. In the description of the lame pirate of
_Treasure Island_ the likening of his face to a ham suggests that the
image of the editor, more massive than those of any two contributors,
was before Stevenson as he wrote; pirate and editor had each a crutch,
and each threw it at an intruder. Thompson's words of Henley and his
last book impute to him, too, a Silver's grip:--
". . . We know exactly the best he has done, and resent
instinctively the slightest deflection from it. Well,
here there are such deflections--that is all which
can be said; and we feel them in exact proportion to
our love of the Henley who took us masterfully by the
throat of old. He still takes us by the throat, but
his grip is not compulsive. Yet now and again the old
mastery thrills us, and we remember. It is good to
remember."
And Henley on his side learnt to admire. Where the poet had failed,
the journalist writing about _The Centenary Burns_ had his strong
approval:--
"_March 7, 1897._
"DEAR HIND,--Thompson's article, which came in this
morning, is quite masterly throughout. The worst I can
say against it is, indeed, that it anticipates some
parts of my own terminal essay, so that I shall have to
quote it instead of writing out of my own stomach. All
manner of compliments to him, and a thousand thanks.
I know not which to admire the more: his critical
intelligence or his intellectual courage.
"To one point only must I take exception. The book
is referred to throughout as 'Mr. Henley's.' This
it is _not_; so, in justice to Henderson (who feels
the slight the more keenly because of the uncommon
brilliancy of the work) I must ask you to find room for
the protest herewith enclosed. . . .--Sincerely yours,
W. E. H."
Henley's half-capitulation shows a streak of unsuspected tolerance. F.
T. reeked of so many things, besides Shelley, that Henley detested.
The Burns article itself, to which Henley makes allusion, says
uncompromising things of Burns:--
"Imagination and tenderness demand either the
refinement of education or the refinement of pure and
sweet life. These things _might_ be in peasant song.
They are in the songs of the Dimbovitza, which are
higher as absolute poetry than anything within Burns'
compass. Not because these songs are the outcome of
greater genius, but because they are the outcome of a
healthier and sweeter rustic state; a state in which
the women were chaste and tender, the men brave and
sober. Burns could well have sung it had he known it."
Writing a year later, Henley, on the defensive, said:--
"MY DEAR HIND,--What a jackass is your F. Thompson! I
have never babbled the _Art for Art's Sake_ babble. If
I have, I'll eat the passage publicly. What I've said
is, the better the writer the better the poet: that, in
fact, good writing's better than bad. That is my only
formula, and that I'm no more likely to swallow than F.
T. is to write invariably well.--Yours ever sincerely,
W. E. HENLEY."
But Henley and Thompson were to make friends:--
"MY DEAR THOMPSON,--I saw Henley on Saturday. He
wants us to call on him next Friday afternoon. Will
you be here at three _sharp_? Henley said some very
nice things about you, and is quite anxious to meet
you. He also bids me say that he is looking forward
to your excursions on the Prophets. So do hurry
them up. He tells me that many of the lyrics in his
Anthology are from the Old Testament. This is _entre
nous_.--Sincerely yours,
LEWIS HIND."
His only encounter with the sage of Muswell Hill followed, but not at
three _sharp_. To his escort, Mr. E. V. Lucas and Mr. Hind, Henley was
the mighty overseer of men who had not found, save through him, their
journalistic souls. The escort still marvels at F. T.'s unpunctuality.
Francis owed neither his soul nor hours to any man, and was late. "I
have had no time to eat, Hind," was his gloomy beginning. Mr. Hind has
described what followed a meal at the station:--
"Suddenly he became rigid, his body swayed, and a film
came over his eyes. A minute or two passed; then he
recovered, lighted his pipe, and did not refer to the
episode. We arrived at Henley's house two hours late."
Doubtless his timorousness was as great as theirs, only his timeliness
was less. But it was he who fronted and appeased the wrathful master
with talk of "London Voluntaries" and Henley's influence. Instead of
reeking of Shelley he showed himself reeking of Henley, who was not
abhorrent. The escort were left well to the rear in flatteries no less
sincere than theirs. Thompson's admirations were always well set up
and bright-eyed because they were so well reasoned. No prepossessions,
whims, or sloths made up his opinion. No author was carelessly shelved
or unshelved; he did not put Swinburne aside although his angels and
Swinburne's never rested nor flew on the wing together. His attention
was widely inclusive. Often would he come with some cutting of
fugitive verse and tender it for what it was worth, reading it aloud
and expecting from his audience the controlled and properly adjusted
pleasure he himself experienced. So tolerant was he, that anybody's
complaint that there "was nothing in it," would cause him to reconsider
his cutting; the "anybody" of poetry or criticism was the recipient of
his constant courtesy. He was very slow--too slow for the short span
of his life to alter his allegiance to the literature that had ever
seriously contented him. The novels of Lord Lytton he read again at the
end of his life because he had early cared for them, and reasonably,
he found. So with Hardy; of one passage I remember him to have often
spoken with particular admiration--that in which Sergeant Troy thralls
a woman by sword play and the swinging of his flashing steel round and
round her person. So with Meredith, over whose novels I have found him
sitting in a Westbourne Grove confectioner's, with, I am sure, "review"
books unreviewed in his bag, and in his pocket telegrams from Hind. Of
Meredith's poetry his admiration was of the established sort that needs
no questioning. And Jacobs had his laugh, always readier than his tear,
for pathetic print is more liable to stand suspect on the page than
humorous. Whatever modern author he discussed it was his relish rather
than his distaste that flavoured his opinion.
Henley and he were amiable for an afternoon; but the difference between
them could hardly have been bridged for longer. The differences between
them were made up of crude difference of speech, of the actual lipping
of feelings and phrases. Thompson writes lightly in the following
note-book comment, but he is treading lightly because the ground
beneath quakes with radical conflict:--
"We are convinced Mr. H. has been misled by a false
report. It is the more probable because Spring, of late
years, has been flighty, and given rise to dissatisfied
comment. We are aware that C. P. has spoken of 'all
amorous May,' and yet another poet has gone so far
as to call the same lady 'wanton.' But 'the harlot
spring'--Captain, these be very bitter words. Why in
the name of wilfulness, why must poor Spring--of all
seasons, poor Spring--be a harlot? Even the author
of _Dolores_, with all his disrelish for 'lilies and
languors,' has not committed defloration of the poor
young maid--'the girl child Spring'; he leaves her as
he found her. If she escaped the dangerous society of
Mr. S. (whose verse would 'thaw the consecrated snow
that lies on Dian's lap') we cannot believe she should
later make this slip."
Of Henley's "fads, blindnesses, wilful crotchets" as also of his
critical prose, "the swift and restless brilliance of a leaping salmon
in the sunlight," F. T. wrote in the _Academy_ and brought, in doing
so, the thought to one's mind of his own dissimilarity.
Perhaps nowhere in all the thousand columns F. T. contributed to the
Press is a single wilful word. The unexpected must never be expected
of him. His views on the general literature of the past may be taken
for granted, or sought in their proper place. He will seldom be found
at variance with the accepted estimates. Perhaps only once does he
stand nearly alone. One of his earliest essays--"Bunyan in the Light
of Modern Criticism"--approved Mr. Richard Dowling's assault upon
_The Pilgrim's Progress_. Thompson could not tolerate the dulness and
insufficiency of Bunyan's descriptions:--
"In the account of the Valley of Despair he does
flicker into a meagre glimmer of description; but its
only effect is to leave the darkness of his fancy
visible, and he flickers feebly out again. The Mouth of
Hell is by the way; and, after his usual commonplace
manner of vision, he introduces this tremendous idea
with a dense flippancy, such as never surely was
accorded it before."
If he essayed other reversals of conventional opinion, he did so in
good faith. But one goes to his critical work, not for its consistent
good faith and sound sense, but for the few dominant, vital enthusiasms
that hold him and would have been written of, even if he had never
contributed to the papers. The "Shelley" has been quoted incidentally
in these pages; his "Crashaw," in its carefully critical tone, seems to
deny an admiration often obvious in Thompson's work. As a reviewer he
put by some of his impulsive affection. De Quincey and Patmore entered
into his life; to place them among the "reviewer's" authors would
be absurd. Rossetti's name got into Thompson's criticisms from every
quarter; it is in "Paganism Old and New," in the "Don Quixote," in
"Crashaw," and in a dozen other papers; it dogs de Quincey's in and out
of all the prose work.
He professed no learning, boasted no single proficiency. In a young
family that was finding its way about in journalism and painting and
other professions, he offered no unfriendly criticism, and seemed to
know of none. I wonderingly remember now how he let me help him in
an article on Hardy. At first there had been a difficulty about the
re-reading of the novels; "No, Wilfrid, it's no good. As I thought,
it's no good, Wilfrid," he had said after searching the shops of
Kilburn for the books he wanted. "Your own copies are gone--gone from
the shelves, and I've no way of procuring others." Even when supplied
with copies he needed help, and wrote, as I know from the printed
article, a thing of patchwork, with a centre-piece of his own well-knit
prose, and a beginning and end; the rest the bedraggled fringes, which
I recognise with reluctance as I read them now for my own.
His earlier admiration of Swinburne is restated with reserves in his
_Academy_ review of the collected works of that poet, of whom it was
rumoured that he disapproved of Thompson's liberties with the English
language. Many younger poets might have been made the happier had they
been aware whose was the pen that praised them in print. In _Hand in
Hand, Verses by a Mother and Daughter_, F. T. makes the discovery of a
sonnet with a last line that "is a touch of genius"--a sonnet by the
daughter, Mr. Rudyard Kipling's sister, and called "Love's Murderer."
Under the heading "Above Average," 1901, he deals with the books of Mr.
Aleister Crowley and Mr. Madison Cawein. Mr. Crowley he had reviewed
before. "The Mother's Tragedy" contains the "old vigour and boldness,
the sinewy phrase that draws the praise out of you." At less length
we read of Mr. Cawein, whose "strength lies in luxuriant descriptive
power. . . . Assuredly, in this single gift, Mr. Cawein shows very great
promise and no small accomplishment." He welcomes in the _Academy_ the
poetry of Mr. Sturge Moore, Mr. Alfred Noyes, and Lord Alfred Douglas;
and anticipating George Meredith, he praises Dora Sigerson Shorter for
her gifts of metrical narrative, adding: "Her ballads touch a deep and
poignant feeling. The unconsciousness of a child contrasted with the
sorrow of its earthly lot--this is a familiar theme, yet Mrs. Shorter
handles it with unfamiliar freshness and power." He pulls the ropes for
Mr. Newbolt's _Admirals All_; he ducks his head to Mr. Owen Seaman's
parodies. He gathers "the teeming felicities" from the _Studies in
Prose and Verse_ of Mr. Arthur Symons. F. T. was one of the few critics
who "lived by admiration." At the end of a day of reviewing he would
still have the spirit to cut occasional verses from his evening paper
and carry them for approbation to friends far quicker than he to shrug
fastidious shoulders.
Aubrey de Vere, a man mellow in ancient stateliness, he met at Palace
Court. The obituary notice of de Vere in the _Academy_ was written by
him. From the "Ode to the Daffodil" and "Autumnal Ode" he quotes enough
to justify, with reservation, a high admiration:--
"Of warmth he was capable, especially in his younger
days, but not of pathos or subtle suggestion. His
general manner, it must be owned, was somewhat coldly
grave. One of his odes is fine, with passages of
absolute grandeur; some of his sonnets are only not
among the best in that kind."
His appreciations were not ordered by papers committed to a policy of
praise. On the contrary, he wrote: "My editors complain that I don't
_go_ for people--that I am too lenient." For all that, he knew the
distress of the vapid verse that came his way, and he stopped to note
it in rhyme:--
Of little poets, neither fool nor seer,
Aping the larger song, let all men hear
How weary is our heart these many days!
Of bards who, feeling half the thing they say,
Say twice the thing they feel, and in such way
Piece out a passion . . .
* * * * *
Of bards indignant in an easy chair
(Because just so great bards before them were)
Who yet can only bring
With all their toil
Their kettle of verse to sing,
But never boil,--
How weary is our heart these many days!
But the solace he had to the drudgery of reviewing was generally
ancient. When he could set to and write a solid _Academy_ page on
the "clod-paced Drayton," note the sluggishness of "his thick-coming
ideas in the strait pen of a defined stanza," chaff him for the room
he needs to turn about in, and cry "hear, hear!" to his minor metres,
he was doing lively work and was lively at it. Or when Samuel Daniel
comes up for judgment, the critic is manifestly happy--happier than
in the presence of Mr. Maurice Hewlett or Mr. Kipling. A review of
an Elizabethan is touched with a quicker interest than that of the
weightiest in contemporary literature. The evenness of his judgment,
the unbiassed distribution of his attention makes for fairness, but
somewhat spoils the current and local effectiveness. He enjoyed getting
at Butler's wit more than getting at Oscar Wilde's. _Hudibras_ was a
book of the moment for him, whereas _The Yellow Book_ was not. St.
Francis de Sales might tempt him on a bookstall, but he never bought
a new work. D'Annunzio and publishers' announcements did not catch his
pennies; nor were his borrowings much more modern. The authors he had
from my shelves were Swedenborg and Shakespeare, with W. W. Jacobs, in
whose jolly company he spent a few of the last hours of his life.
FOOTNOTES:
[55] To this lady's "genius for friendship" the dedication of Mr.
Joseph Conrad's _Under Western Eyes_ bears witness.
[56] William Watson's on the Coronation of Edward VII.
CHAPTER XIII: THE LONDONER
ON days when London is cracked and bleared with cold, and passengers
on the black pavement are grey and purple and mean in their distress,
whipped by the East Wind and chivied by the draughts of the gutters;
when lamp-posts and telegraph poles and the harsh sides of the houses
ache together and shiver, Thompson would be the most forlorn and
shrivelled figure in the open. It always seemed to be a necessity
of his to be out in rough weather. I have never known him to stay
in on its account; and at times when even riches lack confidence,
and an universal scourge of cold and ugliness lashes the town, he
was about. Even within, beside a fire, he was a weathercock of a
man. The distress of his hands, and the veering of his hair from
the comparative orderliness of other times would instantly proclaim
an East wind. It was written all over him, and, though come to the
shelter of four walls, the tails of his coat seemed still to be
fluttering. One thought of him when East winds blew as the Pope of
Chesterfield's description--". . . his poor body a mere Pandora's box,
containing all the ills that ever afflicted humanity." Sensitive beyond
endurance, Francis yet made nought of his pains so long as the keener
sensitiveness of his conscience was undisturbed. Of all men the least
fit to endure physical suffering, he endured it forgetfully and even
light-heartedly unless, his spiritual assent being thwarted, he felt
the chills of estrangement from God.
He was not more comfortable in the sun, and against the particular
heat of 1906 he had particular ill-will. "Most people expatiate on the
excellence of this summer, though the angry and malignant sun is as
unlike the true summer sun as the heat of fever to the heat of youth."
It was his habit to go forth in August in an ulster--threadbare,
perhaps--but his own fever alone explains his distress.
_Sister Songs_ opens with a complaint against the spring season of
1891:--
Shrewd winds and shrill,--were these the speech of May?
A ragged, slag-grey sky--invested so,
Mary's spoilt nursling, wert thou wont to go?
"To my Godchild" opens in the same manner. The early months, drenched
with icy rain, had meant misery and dumbness. Breaking of silence came
with the breaking of the frost, and the poetry which returned with the
warm weather is full of acknowledgments. It is something more than the
small-talk of his verse; it is, like the dedications of the eighteenth
century, a formal obeisance to a patron--"Sun-god and song-god."
The Spring found him happiest. The May of his poems is the May known
to the Londoner. After deploring, in the proem of _Sister Songs_, the
lateness of the season, it is suddenly upon him. He discovered it
for certain round a street corner not far from his lodgings in Elgin
Avenue--
Mark yonder how the long laburnum drips
Its jocund spilth of fire, its honey of wild flame.
That is the signal best known to the Londoner. Most of the details of
his description in _Sister Songs_, from the stars to Covent Garden
clock, are metropolitan. From his high room, down steep stairs, a faded
oilcloth at his feet, the coiling patterns of a varnished wall-paper at
his restricted elbow; through the muffled light and air of the hall,
and past the broken stucco of the front steps, he would emerge on a
morning of good fortune, to see, not a dismal street of other lodgings
exactly like his own, but
A garden of enchanting
In visionary May,
Swayless for the spirit's haunting,
Thrice threefold walled with emerald from our mortal mornings grey.
We may imagine that St. Francis cared not overmuch for the look of the
Assisi streets; it is doubtful whether Francis of Kilburn cared at all
about the aspect of Kilburn. The gayest thoroughfare caught his eye no
more than the most dismal--and Brondesbury is not gay. To "And your
new lodging, Francis, what of it?" he would give a good account of the
rights and lefts that led there, but he would make no picture of it for
you, having none himself. I do not suppose he found the soot and stucco
architecture of Elgin Avenue any more or less entertaining than the red
brick of Palace Court, and, while he might describe Oxford Street as
"stony-hearted," I doubt if he could have described to the satisfaction
of a builder the nature of its exterior stone. Manchester could hardly
do less than blind the civic eye. Certainly Francis was no observer,
and had retained the ignorance, rather than the innocence, of his
Vision.
At this time, after his return from Pantasaph, his days were mostly
spent at Palace Court and nights passed in the region which at first
by accident and later by habit was his own. When, many years before,
he came from Storrington, he was lodged at Fernhead Road, Paddington,
and afterwards at various houses in Elgin Avenue with Landlady Maries,
the wife of my father's printer. Faithful to the northern town, his
last lodging was at 128 Brondesbury Road, Kilburn. At the junction of
Elgin Avenue and Chippenham Road is the "Skiddaw" public-house, by
whose parlour-fire he often spent nocturnal hours in preference to
the hearths of the critics. Mr. Pile, the tobacconist next door, is
remembered for the support that he gave to Francis's tremulous claims
to a place next the fire. Francis seldom failed to receive kindness
at the hands of rougher men; his constant courtesy of speech and his
humility were to the liking of a class quick to know a gentle man.
From the whispered hints of Mr. Pile it was understood that the frail,
shabby man of many platitudes and an abstracted eye was privileged.
From the situation of his lodgings it came about that the Edgware Road
was his Rambla, his Via dei Palazzi, his Rue de Rivoli; and at the
end of it, the site of Tyburn Tree. No local allusion, however, finds
place in his "To the English Martyrs," which is another sign of his
aloofness. But when he writes of the Tree that--
The shadow lies on England now
Of the deathly-fruited bough,
Cold and black with malison
Lies between the land and sun;
Putting out the sun, the bough
Shades England now,
his voice rose from the frozen and fogged pavement that marks the very
spot.
Browning, too, knew, and far better, the "cheap jewellery and servants'
underclothing" of the Edgware Road. Unlike Browning, F. T. had no eye
for values. And among night-caps, he would never have known that they
were cotton, and hardly that they were red. As soon as say whether
jewellery or clothing was cheap, he could have argued with Browning
on the vintages. A connoisseur in his books by right of imagination,
his connoisseurship would not have passed muster in the shops; it was
nailed to the counter. His waggon of wares ran smoothly enough in
starry traces; but hitched to cart-horses in Edgware Road he could
not have driven it ten yards. Perhaps when Patmore, a collector of
rubies and sapphires, drew specimen stones from his waistcoat,
Thompson was thrilled with the real presence; but not so much as by the
love of immaterial jewels. Not even Meredith's burgundy could teach
him--who had written of grapes against the sun without ever entering a
vineyard--anything of wine-merchant's wine. Before Hedges and Butler
were in partnership, before the _chateaux_ were a-building, his own
cellar had been laid down.
His inattention in the Edgware Road was out and out; one marvels that
he ever turned the right corner, and not at all that he was knocked
down by a cab. But instinctively his eyes would open in fair presences;
the things that made poetry struck through his closed lids, as daylight
through a sleeper's. But inattention in the Edgware Road made the place
blank as a railway tunnel. He could look upon the raiment of his sitter
in "Love in Dian's Lap," and pay his compliments, but never a word had
he for the bonnets of mistress or maid upon the highway. Riding in an
omnibus he would not know whether Polaire or a Sister of Charity were
at his side.
He was constantly alone; and, often as I have met him in the streets
of London, I have seldom surprised him in a conscious moment. He would
walk past, looking straight before him, and if he was always late for
his appointments, and took longer, by several hours, to get home at
night than the average man, it was because he would retrace his steps,
and go to and fro upon a certain beat as if indefinitely postponing the
evil moment when he would have to confine himself for food, or sleep.
The lamps of the town bring moths from the dark fields. They had no
attraction for him. I never heard him talking of the beauty of London.
There is no pleasure in his lines, which like others here quoted are
put forward, not as poetry, but as biography--
The blear and blurred eyes of the lamps
Against the damps,
or in the commentary on a London dawn from another note-book:--
The dreary scream of stable cocks
Comes ghastly through the dark,
The salty blues of day
Slant on the dreary park;
The houses' massèd fumes
Against the heartless light
Hold the black ooze of night.
He never went sight-seeing; the town was the dun background of his
own visions, but certain actualities were etched vividly or heavily
massed upon his mental canvas. Certain things he knew more completely
than the practised desultory observer, and when, in 1897, he was asked
by Messrs. Constable for a book on London, he could at once fetch out
of the studio of his memory a great number of pictures that had been
stored there, their faces to the wall. Although "my London book" and
the work on it made for several months his password to late meals at
our house, he never wrote it. His letters to Mr. William Hyde, whose
drawings were to make half the book, were, as it proved, Francis's only
contribution to the scheme:--
"47 PALACE COURT, W.
"DEAR MR. HYDE,--I regret to have delayed my answer
to your letter so long. Firstly, I was occupied by
unavoidable business; secondly, when I was free to
consider your notes, it took me some time really to
master them, and consider my plan in relation to them.
In the first place, I do not design a consecutive
narrative of any kind. I do not design to treat
either topography or the life of London, for both of
which I am utterly unqualified. My design is to give
impressions of London, such as present themselves to a
wanderer through its streets. I intend to divide the
book into parts, which--by way of provisional title--I
might describe as Fair London and Terrible London. For
Fair London, the plates you have already done will
supply sufficient material in the way of illustration.
The other part will consist of studies of London under
its darker aspects--weird, sordid, and gloomy--being
drawn from its appearance rather than its life. Under
this section would come some of the plates already
done; and I have marked others among your notes, any
of which would fall into my ideas. Since the darker
aspect of London is particularly evident to a houseless
wanderer, it is my idea to include in this section a
description of the aspect of London from midnight to
early dawn--for which my own experiences furnish me
with material. I intend to take my wanderer through
the Strand, Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square, perhaps
part of Piccadilly, the Embankment, Blackfriars Bridge,
&c., bringing him round to Fleet Street opposite St.
Paul's at dawn; and to describe the night effects
and the effects of gradual dawn in the streets. You
can see for yourself that some of your suggested
drawings would be embraced in this, perhaps some of
those already done--for example, "Coffee Stall, early
morning"; the "houseless wanderer sleeping in the
streets" and even the "Factory at Night," since I have
in my mind such a factory across Westminster. Also, as
regards the general section, I have in my mind a bridge
near a railway station, with long shafts of electric
lights, mingled with other lights, utilitarian, and a
river; which suggests sufficiently your goods depôt
with electric light effects. In the same section I
should dwell on such a neighbourhood as New Cut. Your
suggestion as to this or Clare Market will therefore be
certain to come _à propos_, whether by night or day;
though I think night exhibits such neighbourhoods most
impressively and characteristically. And I intend to
describe a night fire; and the effects of vistas of
lamps in such a neighbourhood as Pall Mall. Locality,
you will see, is unimportant. It is _effect_ I wish
to dwell on; the _character_--of horror, sombreness,
weirdness, or beauty--of various scenes. My own mind
turns especially towards the gloomier majesties and
suggestiveness of London, because I have seen it most
peculiarly under those aspects."
The book was written, but, as Francis's copy was never produced, by
another author.
Thompson's landladies were his faithful, patient, and puzzled friends.
He disliked their food, broke their rules, burnt their curtains, but
seldom rebuked them. They, on their part, found in him none of the
virtue of a good lodger. Notwithstanding, they showed a gentleness of
regard and manner that did credit to their liberality. I have known
them show an unwillingness to lose him quite out of proportion to
his value as a lodger, and he showed himself more reluctant to move
away from them than was always consistent with their excellence as
landladies. Of one of these he was genuinely fond, and her feeling for
him she sought to explain when she said, "I can sympathise with him,
you know, having a son in the profession myself."
It was she who sought to mend his unsociable ways by subtle attacks
upon his solitude, saying, "It's very nice for Mr. Thompson; he's got
the trains at the back every half hour and more, when he's in his
bedroom. But then the trains, when all's said, aren't the same as the
company he could get downstairs. Many a time I've asked him to have his
bit of lunch in with me and the other 'mental'--O yes, she's a mental
case, as I may have told you." On a few occasions she did entice him to
her table, but more often he was content with the conversation of the
District Railway engines at the bottom of the garden. His own comment
on the trains was among the random manuscripts found in that same
bedroom:--
The very demon of the scene,
The screaming horror of the train,
Rushes its iron and ruthless way amain,
A pauseless black Necessity,
Along its iron and predestined path.
One landlady's memories of him are supported by the carpet in his
room, which is worn in a circle round his table. All night long he
would walk round and round; in the morning he would go to bed. There
was, she observed, a delicate precision in his manner that forbade all
familiarity. His prayers, pronounced as if he were preaching, she often
heard.
An interior glimpse comes from a fellow-lodger:--
"I will tell you things as I remember them at the Elgin
Avenue establishment. There was a Bengali, who showed
me how to play poker; there was a convert parson,
a dramatic critic, and a man who acted. I seem to
remember playing cards with them better than anything.
It was generally then that Thompson would come in at
the front door, and call down the kitchen-stairs for
his porridge and beer. Coming into the room, he would
talk of something he had seen or read; or of food,
cricket, or clothes. He wished he had bought a suit
in a shop-window, because he had given more for those
he wore. I fancy he was not exactly rich; I suppose
none of us were. He would eat; then walk up and down
the room talking at any ear that might be listening
or at none; then he would write under the gas-jet. He
would leave as he came. I don't suppose he ever gave
me a look, and I had no idea he was a great man. But I
_remember_ him; though for the rest, I only know they
existed."
Mr. Wilfred Whitten tells of the rare--perhaps the only--occasion on
which F. T. dined in a restaurant with a friend, after the common
fashion:--
"Some seven years since we dined together at the Vienna
Café. You remember how, in the one conversation which
Boswell felt himself powerless to report, Johnson 'ran
over the grand scale of human knowledge.' Thus it was
that night. Thompson called up the masters of poetry,
and their mighty lines. I shall never forget his
repeating this, from 'Comus,' as one of the things in
all English verse that he relished--
Not that nepenthe which the wife of Thone
In Egypt gave to Jove-born Helena.
These words fell on my ear like the music of all
poetry, and I turned to see Thompson's eyes humid with
a vast understanding. He dealt in these great names
and antiquities. The arts, the rites, the mysteries,
and the sciences of eld gave him their secrets and
their secret words. But I think he loved the pomp of
facts only that he might transmute it into the pomp of
dreams, and where his dreams ended let his poetry tell."
Mr. Whitten's, like Patmore's, is the testimony of one who knew him
familiarly enough to know his better sort of talk. The impressions
of those who met him once or twice generally agree with Mr. William
Hyde's:--
"I remember that he was so shy and nervous that I felt
anxious not to say anything that would increase his
diffidence. The tragedy of his aspect was obvious. Of
the glorious moments he must have lived in when the
soul was master very few external traces could be seen,
save his eyes."
Which were his churches; where the roof to his piety? When the
cross-roads did not make his transept and the shops his aisle, he made
shift with thin modern Gothic, with rigid varnished bench and Belgian
Madonnas. His altars were decked with brass vases and huddled bunches
of the disconcerting flowers of commerce. Being a late and irregular
comer, he would often find the charwoman dryly banging her broom
among the chairs. In the Harrow Road, between a printing-shop and a
tobacconist's, was the church nearest the lodging of several years.
To St. Mary of the Angels, Bayswater, he also went upon occasion.
There was a friend, a second Mezzofanti for languages, with the
language of poetry, in addition, very familiarly known; and there,
too, were other friends. At Lymington he would quite naturally become
a more timely church-goer. At the foot of the steep High Street,
past shuttered town-hall and boarded shops, and along a resounding
passage, was the little church attended by Coventry Patmore. Here, in
a Roman camp as formidable as Cæsar's, but uncatalogued save in the
Catholic Directories, these two followed the Mass. The Church at such
moments had no need of architects. Her son, St. Francis of Assisi,
had cathedrals and towers at hand, but put them to no use; Francis
Thompson had none at hand and was no poorer. He seemed the last person
on earth to have noted if the candlesticks came not from Cellini, but
Birmingham; if the altar-rails were soapstone travesties of antiquity.
And yet he had, at any rate in verse, his preferences. In "Gilded
Gold," he refers to
Degenerate worshippers who fall
In purpled kirtle and brocade
To 'parel the white Mother-Maid.
And he decides that her image as it stood arrayed
In vests of its self-substance wrought
To measure of the sculptor's thought
is "slurred by these added braveries."
It is doubtful whether he would have crossed the road to hear one
preacher in preference to another, or to hear any; it is certain that
he was as content to go to his prayers through a slit in a thin brick
wall as under the tympanum of Chartres. If instead of being a Londoner,
with the English climate, the disciplined and formal rows of benches,
to dishearten him, he had had his lodging near St. Mark's or St. John
Lateran, he might have become a more punctual church-goer.
Lionel Johnson, who couples Francis with the Martyr Southwell for
"devout audacity," has said the things that are to say of the sacred
poet's familiar attitude. He quotes the gentleman who confuted the
view that man's attitude towards God must necessarily be abject--"Not
abject! Certainly, it should be deferential, but not abject." Against
the deferential gentleman he ranges all saints and poets, "His
carollers and gay minstrels--His merry men."
And he had, besides a devotional familiarity, his own very strictly
observed devotional formalities. Every notebook from Ushaw days till
his death is dedicated with some such holy device as this:--
[Illustration: DEO IN QUO ET PER QUEM MEDITATIONES EJUS REMEDITO.]
He had his triumphs at the Vatican, his victories at Farm Street; a
Pope's messenger sought him in the Harrow Road with his Holiness's
thanks for his translation of a pontifical ode, and of course did
not find him. There is a legend that about this time he wrote an
"Ecclesiastical History"--no less!--put the MS. into the hands of
Cardinal Vaughan to beguile the way to Rome, and so lost it. The
disappearance of the book might pass for fact, but I find no line about
it among his papers, either before or after its alleged existence. His
habit was to herald any attempt with written notes and exhortations to
himself to begin, as thus:--"Mem. (ink in) I might, Deo Volente, one
day try my hand at a version of the Imit. in Biblical style, so far as
it is given to my power." Or "Revise Pastoral; and get buttons, if any
possible chance."
Francis himself did not doubt his position as a Churchman. The boast he
makes in "The Lily of the King" is more than any bishop would venture.
St. Francis, dining one day on broken bread, with a large stone for
table, cried out to his companion: "O brother Masseo, we are not worthy
so great a treasure." When he had repeated these words several times
his companion answered: "Father, how can you talk of treasure where
there is so much poverty, and indeed a lack of all things? For we have
neither cloth, nor knife, nor dish, nor table, nor house; neither have
we servant nor maid to wait upon us." Then said St. Francis: "And this
is why I look upon it as a great treasure, because man has no hand in
it, but all has been given us by Divine Providence, as we clearly see
in this bread of charity, in this beautiful table of stone, in this
clear fountain."
Did Francis Thompson mate so happy a Poverty? She whom he took in
marriage was a very shrew in comparison. In place of rocky platforms
she gave him the restaurant's doubtful table-cloth, or maybe he ate
from paper bags. Broken bread that is appetising in Umbria is heavy in
Soho; and Francis never drank from the clear stream. But for all that
I remember his asserting, with utmost conviction in his voice, the
excellence of the viands set before him in a shop in Westbourne Grove.
"Here, Ev., I get what I like," I can hear him say; "here the beef is
always good; excellent, Evie, excellent, I say."[57]
Both Francises said that happiness was stored in self-denial, but
Francis of Assisi was the quicker to make good his statement by
immediate happiness. The same desires, the same secret, the same grace
possessed two men wedded at least into the same family. The contrast
is between their two ladies rather than themselves. She whom the Saint
courted in the stony fields
Where clear
Through the thin trees the skies appear
In delicate spare soil and fen,
And slender landscape and austere
was not the modern maiden--
Ah! slattern, she neglects her hair,
Her gown, her shoes. She keeps no state
As once when her pure feet were bare--
with whom the poet of London kept company.
* * * * *
At times when he was most ill and thin and cold and lonely, his
laugh, on joining friends, would outdo theirs for jollity, and with
the unjoyful appetite of a man whose every organ was out of order, he
offered a grace far longer than customary among the grateful and pious,
a grace so long that his meat would get cold while he muttered, so
long that he would sometimes seem to imagine it was at an end before
the rightful moment, and take up his knife and fork to start his meal,
only, on remembering an omission, to lay them down again until the end.
* * * * *
His sense of possession and privacy in possession of the beauties of
nature exceeds Traherne's, whose ecstasy in the belief that he owned
the world's treasuries was trebled by the thought that everybody else
owned them too. Thompson is more selfish:--
I start--
Thy secrets lie so bare!
* * * * *
With beautiful importunacy
All things plead, 'We are fair!' To me
The world's a morning haunt,
A bride whose zone no man hath slipt
But I, with baptism still bedript
Of the prime water's font.
On the other hand, let it be noted that all he left at his death was
a tin box of refuse--pipes that would not draw, unopened letters,
a spirit lamp without a wick, pens that would not write, a small
abundance that remained merely because he had neglected to throw it
away. The Prayer of Poverty had been half answered unto him:--
"Of thee, O Jesus, I ask to be signed with this
privilege; I long to be enriched with this treasure;
I beseech Thee, O most poor Jesus, that for Thy sake,
it may be the mark of me and mine to all Eternity, to
possess no thing our own under the sun; but to live in
penury so long as this vile body lasts."
That he was no snatcher of review-books is already noted. To the
Serendipity Shop--the venture of a friend in Westbourne Grove--he
would often go, but never with any curiosity as to the varied prints,
books, and autographs with which it was stocked. Some one thing would
catch his eye, and be discussed, but nobody I have known had less of
the mere passion for acquisition. He collected nothing, and presents
were acceptable to him but as the outward signs of kindliness: the
meaning having once reached him, he had little use for the means. At
no time did he possess a book-case, nor sufficient books to crowd the
slenderest shelf. A man less encumbered could hardly be discovered
in this work-a-day world. His inclination was to love the impersonal
riches--the free flames, uncaged air, water without the pitcher, and
the wandering winds. His authors were no less his own because he had
not put them on his shelf and clapped his autograph upon the fly-leaf.
Physical self-denial, disregard of personal luxuries, are but the
manifestations of a spiritual state, of the state recommended by
Christ: "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of
Heaven." For the Saint this state has its pressing calls. He puts his
virtue to the proof; he embraces the leper, he lectures the birds, he
is a man of action; his remotest and most spiritual experiences take
on actuality; the Passion puts its mark upon his hands, and feet, and
side. The poet, also pierced, has no credentials. A man of inaction,
he also renounces personal prides, ambitions, pleasures. The leper
would pass Thompson unnoticed, and he was too shy, too little a man of
the world, to preach to the practical sparrows of the Edgware Road.
Though nearly a Franciscan, and learned in the difficult arithmetic of
subtraction, he was necessarily not apt in the good works that marked
the Master.[58]
The seclusion which, despite the bond between reader and writer,
oppresses the poet, makes him impotent for actual good works. In a
world where many things are ripe for the doing, he remains unaware of
the duties of citizenship. On his behalf, as for the enclosed monk
or nun, it may be urged that retreat from all worldly operations,
even beneficent, is retreat from an entanglement of purposes and
cross-purposes, of paradoxical and slipshod good; from a field where
humility is vanity and strength goes to seed in abject poverty or
abject riches. This alone were insufficient reason for withdrawal.
There is a more positive motive. The poet's works are absolute good
works. He is a missionary even if he never helps with gift or speech
or touch another man's distress. The prayers of the Trappist neither
clothe the naked, nor feed the hungry, but are not, even if judged by
the laws of expediency, the less valuable. They preserve two joyful
possessions--the art of prayer and the standards of austerity. They
glorify God. So too does Poetry. Song, like Prayer, is for ever
re-stating and re-establishing the permanent values. Francis Thompson's
consciousness of Good and Evil is alone as profitable as the Bills of
half a dozen Ministries. And his consciousness of Good and Evil had
been less strong, had he known only the alloyed good and mitigated evil
of active life, instead of knowing, in contemplation, their primaries.
Something, as rigorous as the vows of a monk, bound him to his manner
of life. He misused all the conveniences of existence; sought no
shelter from cold, kept no easy hours, mismanaged his food, his work,
his rest. He was without the Silurist's daily ecstasies and special
Sunday "shoots of bliss: Heaven once a week." Thompson's Sundays were
as dreary as Kilburn and a missed Mass could make them, as dreary as
a sweated worker's. He knew, but neglected, as by a set purpose, the
domestic economy of felicity observed by his fellows--Herbert, Vaughan,
Crashaw, and Traherne--
That Light, that Sight, that Thought
Which in my Soul at first he wrought. . . .
My bliss
Consists in this;
My Duty too
In this I view.
It is a fountain or a spring
Refreshing me in everything.
As to health, if he was careless of it in himself and others, he is
excused by St. Bernard's description of God "as the final health."
"To our generation uncompromising fasts and severities
of conduct are found to be piteously alien; not
because, as rash censors say, we are too luxurious,
but because we are too intricate, nervous, devitalised.
We find our austerities ready-made. The east wind has
replaced the discipline, dyspepsia the hair-shirt. . . .
Merely to front existence is a surrender of self, a
choice of ineludibly rigorous abnegation."
Such is the main argument of _Health and Holiness_. But it is probable
that he generalised too liberally from his own disabilities. Tortures
were not invented and practised because a robuster past could make
light of them. The rack was always agonising, or it had never been
used. The sailor who bore his 300 lashes in 1812 probably felt them
as keenly as a sailor would feel them now. East winds penetrated
hair-shirts. Man was the same, save that in greater saintliness he was
ready to endure, and in greater cruelty was willing to inflict, more
pain.
Capitulation such as Thompson's to a sordid environment may mean too
great a severance from other things:--
"The perceptions of the spirit," as he confessed, "are
not indefinitely credible and sufficing without the
occasional confirmation and assurance of the body."
The confirmation made to him was fined down to the minimum. True, one
sunrise sufficed for five years of idolatry. He could strike a fair
balance for his spiritual load with a few crumbs of actuality. It would
seem that the greater the spiritual load the smaller the range of
corporeal experience necessary for the nice adjustment of the scales.
Yet the adjustment must be perfect. One of his many analogies for the
interlocking of our complementary natures is as follows:--
"Holiness is an oil which increases a hundred fold the
energies of the body, which is as the wick. Important
that this wick shall not needlessly be marred during
preparation through some toughening ascetic process
which must inflict certain injury. The flame is
dependent after all on the corporeal wick."
He argued, further, from Manning's longevity and energy, that the more
copious and pure the oil, the more persistently and brightly does the
wick burn. The energising potentialities of sanctity he illustrates
in the great works accomplished by St. Francis despite the constant
hæmorrhage of the stigmata.
FOOTNOTES:
[57] It may also be observed in passing that, while he was more
experienced in privation than were any of his friends, Francis could
be fastidious. It is still told of him in Sussex, where a clever
cook attended his invalided appetite, that he would make great
demonstrations at the mere sight of a dish he disapproved. Laying down
his knife and fork this frank guest would proclaim against one of the
several viands. "Miss Laurence, I _hate_ mutton!" The piled-up emphasis
of his voice made such a sentence tremendously effective. "Wilfrid," he
once said to my father, "Wilfrid, the Palace Court food is _shocking_!"
[58] There were exceptions to this habitual carelessness; in 1898 he
asked his sister for prayers that a friend might join the Church. She
gave them and begged his, for her own purposes, in fair return.
CHAPTER XIV: COMMUNION AND EXCOMMUNION
RENUNCIATION is the better part of possession: Francis states
very clearly that compulsion must have no hand in it if it is to
be profitable. He writes under the heading, "A distraught maiden
complaineth against enforced virginity"--
Cold is the snow of the thawless valleys,
Chill as death is the lily's chalice,
Only she who _seeks_ the valleys
Groweth roses amid the snow.
And he reiterated that spiritual experiences do not endure without
from time to time falling back upon their base for supplies, "the
confirmation and assurance of the body."[59] That the lines of
communication were cut was a pressing grief. I have seen the sense
of isolation come up against him, hold him, and shake him. At such
times he would be within sight of children, and though no angels
then "snatched them from him by the hair," he could be conscious
that he was less near them than their relatives. His praises of
domestic relationships ring with the note of one whose comprehension
is sharpened by the desire of things out of reach. In an incomplete
"Ballad of Judgement" a man, marvelling at his rewards in Heaven,
asks:--
O when did I give thee drink erewhile
Or when embrace Thine unseen feet?
What gifts Thee give for my Lord Christ's smile,
Who am a guest here most unmeet?
and the answer comes:--
When thou kissedst thy wife and children sweet,
(Their eyes are fair in My sight as thine)
I felt the embraces on My feet
(Lovely their locks in thy sight, and Mine).
Other verses of the same unpublished ballad, though imperfect, enforce
the idea:--
If a toy but gladden his little brothers
(A touch in caress to a child's hair given)
Young Jesus' hands are filled with prayers
(Sweep into music all strings of Heaven).
and further that
. . . for his sweet-kissed wife
God kissed him on his blissful mouth.
Allegories of a happy road from bodily to heavenly experience fill many
a more complex passage; here it is given with Chap-book directness.
Elsewhere he closely regrets his loneliness, and repudiates the merit
of its heroism in this epitaph on the writer of "Love in Dian's Lap":--
_Here lies one who could only be heroic._
How little, in the sifted judgement, seems
That swelling sound of vanity! Still 'tis proved
To be heroic is an easier thing
Than to be just and good. If any be
(As are how many daily ones!) who love
With love unlofty through no lofty days
Their little simple wives, and consecrate
Dull deeds with undulled justice: such poor livers,
Though they as little look to be admired
As thou look'st to admire, are of more prizeful rate
Than he who worshipped with unmortal love
A nigh unmortal woman, and knew to take
The pricking air of snowy sacrifice.
Being without the occasional "confirmation," he yearned for it; without
that particular chance of being daily just and good, he saw in it the
sum of life's purpose. And when he was threatened with the approach of
too close affection, he grew alarmed, crying:--
Of pleasantness I have not any art
In this grief-erudite heart.
* * * * *
O Sweet! no flowers have withered on my hair,
For none have wreathed them there;
And not to me, as unto others' lots,
Fell flowerful youth, but such the thorns that bare
Still faithful to my hair.
O sweet! for me pluck no forget-me-nots,
But scoop for me the Lethe water dull
Which yields the sole elixir that can bless--
Utter forgetfulness--
And I shall know that thou art pitiful.
Another form of his painful, elaborate, and even disingenuous attitude
towards happiness was distrust. "All life long he had been learning how
to be wretched," he quotes from Hawthorne, "and now, with the lesson
thoroughly at heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little
airy happiness"; then, continuing in his own verse:--
In a mortal garden they set the poet
With mortal maiden and mortal child;
* * * * *
In a mortal garden they set the poet;
As a trapped bird he breathed wild.
He had smiled in sorrow: not now he smiled.
* * * * *
But into the garden pacing slowly,
Came a lady with eyes inhuman. . . .
And the sad slow mouth of him smiled again,
This lady I know, and she is real,
I know this lady, and she is Pain!
The Lady Pain figures, in one sense, in "Love in Dian's Lap." His only
real love was itself a thing most strictly circumscribed; it existed
only to be checked:--
"I yielded to the insistent commands of my conscience
and uprooted my heart--as I supposed. Later, the
renewed presence of the beloved lady renewed the love I
thought deracinated. For a while I swung vacillant. I
thought I owed it to her whom I loved more than my love
of her finally to unroot that love, to pluck away the
last fibres of it, that I might be beyond treachery to
my resolved duty. And at this second effort I finished
what the first had left incomplete. The initial agony
had really been decisive, and to complete the process
needed only resolution. But it left that lady still the
first, the one veritable, full-orbed, and apocalyptic
love of my life. Through her was shewn me the uttermost
of what love could be--the possible divinities and
celestial prophecies of it. None other could have
taught them quite thus, for none other had in her the
like unconscious latencies of utter spirituality.
Surely she will one day realise them, as by her sweet,
humble, and stainless life she has deserved to do."
Of one consolation he writes to her:--
"The concluding words of your letter, 'friend and
child,' reminded me of some lines written at the time
I was composing "Amphicypellon." They were written
hastily to relieve an outburst of emotion; and, not
thinking there was any poetry in them worthy of
you, I never showed them you. But when I read those
concluding words of your letter, I resolved to
transcribe them that you might see you could not have
addressed me more according to my wish."
These verses were:--
Whence comes the consummation of all peace,
And dignity past fools to comprehend,
In that dear favour she for me decrees,
Sealed by the daily-dullèd name of Friend,--
Debased with what alloy,
And each knave's cheapened toy.
This from her mouth doth sweet with sweetness mend,
This in her presence is its own white end.
Fame counts past fame
The splendour of this name;
This is calm deep of unperturbed joy.
Now, Friend, short sweet outsweetening sharpest woes!
In wintry cold a little, little flame--
So much to me that little!--here I close
This errant song. O pardon its much blame!
Now my grey day grows bright
A little ere the night;
Let after-livers who may love my name,
And gauge the price I paid for dear-bought fame,
Know that at end,
Pain was well paid, sweet Friend,
Pain was well paid which brought me to your sight.
Pain he proclaimed a pleasure. Why, then, did he call his pains a
sacrifice? "Delight has taken Pain to her heart" was the sum of St.
Francis's teaching on a subject dear to the guest at the Franciscan
monastery-gates. He himself wrote a commentary on St. Francis:
"Pain, which came to man as a penalty, remains with
him as a consecration; his ignominy, by a Divine
ingenuity, he is enabled to make his exaltation. Man,
shrinking from pain, is a child shuddering on the verge
of the water, and crying, 'It is so cold!' How many
among us, after repeated lessonings of experience, are
never able to comprehend that there is no special love
without special pain? To such St. Francis reveals that
the Supreme Love is itself full of Supreme Pain. It is
fire, it is torture; his human weakness accuses himself
of rashness in provoking it, even while his soul
demands more pain, if it be necessary for more Love. So
he revealed to one of his companions that the pain of
his stigmata was agonising, but was accompanied by a
sweetness so intense as made it ecstatic to him. Such
is the preaching of his words and example to an age
which understands it not. Pain is. Pain is inevadible.
Pain may be made the instrument of joy. It is the angel
with the fiery sword guarding the gates of the lost
Eden. The flaming sword which pricked man from Paradise
must wave him back."
The something awry, the disordering of sympathy, the distorting
perspective, is hard to name. Perhaps loneliness, perhaps disease,
perhaps his poetry, perhaps the devil. But it was there--a distemper,
with his own discomfort for its worst symptom. Like the child that
meditates upon the sweet it sucks, while it watches the progress of a
squabbling world in the back-yard, he could be above the control of his
environment; but the sweet once sucked, the poetry gone, he heard and
saw and felt, and was sad and sore.
To each a separate loveliness,
Environed by Thy sole caress.
O Christ the Just, and can it be
I am made for love, no love for me?
Of two loves, one at least be mine;
Love of earth, though I repine,
I have not, nor, O just Christ, Thine!
Can life miss, doubly sacrificed,
Kiss of maid and kiss of Christ?
Ah, can I, doubly-wretched, miss
Maid's kiss, and Thy perfect kiss?
Not all kisses, woe is me!
Are kissed true and holily.
Not all clasps; there be embraces
Add a shame-tip to the daisies.
These if, O dear Christ, I have known
Let all my loveless lips atone.
In a letter to A. M.:--
". . . I have suffered from reticence all my life:
the opening out of hearts and minds, where there is
confidence, puts an end to so much secret trouble that
would grow monstrous if it were brooded over."
And in his verse:--
. . . The once accursèd star which me did teach
To make of silence my familiar.
And again, from Elgin Avenue:--
"DEAR MRS. MEYNELL,--I have been musing a little on the
theme mentioned between us this afternoon; and some
frequent thoughts have returned to me--or, I should
say, recollections of frequent experience. (The theme I
mean is the difficulty of communicating oneself. By the
way, R. L. S.'s theme is more distinct from yours than
I quite realised this afternoon. His is sincerity of
intercourse, yours is rather adequacy of intercourse,
and the two, though they may overlap and react on each
other, are far from identical.)
"But the thoughts of which I speak (they are but one
or two) are as useless to myself as pebbles would be
to a savage, who had neither skill to polish them nor
knowledge whether they were worth the polishing. So
I am moved to send them to the lapidary. If anything
should appear in them worth the saying, how glad I
would be that it should find in you a sayer. But it is
a more possible chance that poor thoughts of mine may,
by a beautiful caprice of nature, stir subtle thoughts
in you. When branches are so thickly laden as yours, a
child's pebble may bring down the fruit.
"First, then, there is one obstacle to communication
which exists little, if at all, for the generality,
but is omnipresent with the sensitive and meditative
who are destitute of nimble blood. I mean the slow
and indeterminate beginnings of their thought. For
example, such a person is looking at a landscape. Her
(suffer me to use the feminine pronoun--it takes the
chill off the egotism of the thing, to assume even by
way of speech, that in analysing my own experience
I am analysing yours) companion asks her, 'What are
you thinking of?' A child under such circumstances
(to illustrate by an extreme antithesis) would need
no questioning. Its vivid, positive thoughts and
sensations have to themselves a glib and unpremeditated
voice. But she? She is hardly thinking: she is feeling.
Yet 'feeling' is too determinate and distinctive a
term: nay, her state is too sub-intellectual for the
term to be adequate. It is sensoriness instinct with
mind; it is mind subdued to sensoriness. She feels
in her brain. She thinks at her periphery. It is
blended twilight of intellect and sensation; it is
the crepuscular of thought. It is a state whose one
possible utterance would be music. Thought in this
subtle stage cannot pass into words because it lacks
the detail; as the voice, without division, cannot
pass into speech; as a smooth and even crystal has no
brilliance. To that 'What are you thinking of?' she
can only answer 'Nothing' or 'Nothing in particular,'
and not unlikely, her companion, seeing that she was
full of apparent thought, is discouraged at what seems
her unsympathetic reticence. Yet she longed to utter
herself, and envied the people who, at a moment's
notice, can take a rough pull of their thoughts. If
one could answer, 'Stay a while, till my thoughts have
mounted sufficiently to burst their dykes.'--But no: by
that time his interest would have faded, and her words
would find him listless. She towers so high to stoop on
her quarry, that the spectator loses sight of her, and
thinks she has lost sight of _it_. And the habit so
engendered makes one slow of speech apart from slowness
of thought. One cannot at the first signal _mobilise_
one's words. How one wonders at the men, who, with an
infinitely smaller vocabulary, have it always on a
war-footing, and can instantly concentrate on a given
subject.
"Another point is that power of communication in
oneself is conditioned by power of receptiveness in
others. The one is never perfect; neither, therefore,
can the other be. For entire self-revelation to
another, we require to feel that even the weak or
foolish impulsive things we may let drop, will be
received without chill,--nay, even with sympathy,
because the utterer is loved. That priceless 'other's'
principle must be (to parody Terence without an attempt
at metre) _Tuus sum, nil tuum mî alienum puto_. But
such an 'other' is not among men--no, nor women either.
The perfectest human sympathy is only the least
imperfect.
"Then again, when we _can_ communicate ourselves
by words, it may often become a sensible effort to
a sensitive person through the mere dead weight of
language, the gross actualities of speech:--exactly
as to delicate _you_ a lovely scene loses half its
attraction, if it must be reached by the fatigue of
walking to it.
"Finally, I think there is the fact that, in what
concerns their veritable spirit, all mortals are
feminine. In the mysteries of that inner _Bona Dea_,
speech is male, and may not enter. We feel that we
could only admit to them the soft silence of sight. But
then--we cannot say: 'Draw aside my flesh and see.'
Would we could!
"That reminds me of what you alluded to about the
inefficiency of the eyes. I am so glad you mean to
touch on that. I see much about the superior eloquence
of eyes, &c. But it always seems to me they have just
the eloquence of a foreign tongue, in which we catch
only enough significance, from the speaker's tone and
the casual sound of some half-familiar word to make us
pained and desperate that we can comprehend no more.
There is a turn in Seneca--
Illi mors gravis incubat,
Qui, nimis notus omnibus,
Ignotus moritur sibi.
'On him death lies heavy, who, too known of all, dies
unknown to himself'--'Too known of all!'--with myself
I am but too intimate; and I profess that I find him a
dull boy, a very barren fellow. Your Delphic oracles
notwithstanding, a man's self is the most unprofitable
acquaintance he can make; let him shun such scurvy
companions. But, 'nimis notus omnibus!' If this were
the most likely terror death could yield, O Lucius
Annæus!--who is known to _one_? In that _Mare Clausum_
of our being, sealed by the conventing powers of birth
and death, with life and time acceding signatories,
what alien trafficker has plied? Far heavier, _Luci
mi_, death weighs on him, who dies too known of
himself, and too little of any man. I have bored you, I
feel, unpardonably. Repentantly your Francis Thompson.
But my repentance does not extend to suppressing the
letter, you observe. A most human fashion of penitence!"
But though "too little known of any man," the poet has faith in the
reader's understanding greater than the reader's faith in his meanings.
As for the reader, the best probe for seeming obscurity is faith. Let
an example be taken from the parish priest who read "The Hound of
Heaven" six times before he understood. Faith in divine meanings, and
many blindfolded readings, are better beginnings than explanations.
Sign articles with your master-poets; sit, idly perhaps, in their
workshops, and one day you find yourself promoted from apprentice to
partner. Their obscurities are your limitations, your limitations their
obscurities, and you and they must have it out between you. And even
at the moment when the Poet is most obscure, he is most plain with
you, most intimate, most dependent on your personal understanding and
acceptance. Then most of all does he give you his confidence, have
faith in your faith; then, most of all, does the anchor of his meaning
need the clutch of your understanding, the kite of his fancy need the
tail of your comprehension. He is riding such waves and flying in such
winds of thought that he were lost without you--
We speak a lesson taught we know not how,
And what it is that from us flows
The hearer better than the utterer knows.
And his confession of his dependence on you as his colleague makes a
laureate of you. See that you be a Wordsworth rather than a Nathaniel
Pye among readers.
The silence in which he was most unhappy was a silence in poetry.
Comparing his case to the earth's life in winter, "tearless beneath the
frost-scorched sod," he writes:--
My lips have drought, and crack,
By laving music long unvisited.
Beneath the austere and macerating rime
Draws back constricted in their icy urns
The genial flame of Earth, and there
With torment and with tension does prepare
The lush disclosures of the vernal time.
His second period of melancholy was the more severe; he thought he
saw in it, against all his convictions in regard to the rhythm or
the resurrections of life, the signs of his poetry's final death. He
suffered the torment and the tension in preparation for what he was
convinced would be still-born song.
The depression first came upon him with the publication of _New Poems_--
"Though my aims are unfulfilled, my place insecure,
many things warn me that with this volume I am probably
closing my brief poetic career."
He had already written of himself as one
Whose gaze too early fell
Upon her ruinous eyes and ineludible.
* * * * *
And first of her embrace
She was not coy, and gracious were her ways,
That I forgot all Virgins to adore.
Nor did I greatly grieve
To bear through arid days
The pretty foil of her divine delays;
And one by one to cast
Life, love, and health,
Content, and wealth
Before her, thinking ever on her praise,
Until at last
Nought had I left she would be gracious for.
In "The Sere of the Leaf," an early poem written at the end of 1890,
and published in _Merry England_, January 1891, he answers Katharine
Tynan, a poet who had spoken of a full content:--
I know not equipoise, only purgatorial joys,
Grief's singing to the soul's instrument,
And forgetfulness which yet knoweth it doth forget;
But content--what is content?
He makes a like protest in the "Renegade Poet on the Poet":--
". . . Did we give in to that sad dog of a Robert Louis,
we must needs set down the poor useless poet as a
son of joy. But the title were an irony more mordant
than the title of the hapless ones to whom it likens
him--_Filles de joie_? O rather _filles d'amertume_.
And if the pleasure they so mournfully purvey were
lofty and purging, as it is abysmal and corrupting,
then would Mr. Stevenson's parallel be just; but
_then_, too, from ignoble victims they would become
noble ministrants. . . . Like his sad sisters, but with
that transfiguring difference, this poet, this son of
bitterness, sows in sorrow that men may reap in joy. He
serves his pleasure, say you, R. L. S.? 'Tis a strange
pleasure, if so it be."
Forsaken, his complaints were doubled. Of many lamentations for his
muse, the following lines to W. M. have a personal bearing:--
Ah, gone the days when for undying kindness
I still could render you undying song!
You yet can give, but I can give no more;
Fate, in her extreme blindness,
Has wrought me so great wrong.
I am left poor indeed;
Gone is my sole and amends-making store,
And I am needy with a double need.
Behold that I am like a fountained nymph,
Lacking her customed lymph,
The longing parched in stone upon her mouth,
Unwatered by its ancient plenty. She
(Remembering her irrevocable streams),
A Thirst made marble, sits perpetually
With sundered lips of still-memorial drouth.
"I shall never forget when he told me," writes Mr. Wilfred Whitten,
"under the mirrored ceiling of the Vienna Café that he would never
write poetry again."
At one time he would declare "Every great poem is a human sacrifice";
but at another:--
"It is usual to suppose that poets, because their
feelings are more delicate than other men's, must needs
suffer more terribly in the great calamities which
agonise all men. But, omitting from the comparison the
merely insensible, the idea may be questioned. The
delicate nature stops at a certain degree of agony, as
the delicate piano at a certain strength of touch."
And at another, in an early note-book:--
"The main function of poetry is to be a fruitful
stimulus. That is, to minister to those qualities in
us which are capable of increase. Otherwise, it is
a sterile luxury. Nor should it be made to minister
to qualities which are mischievous by much increase.
Sought mainly to provoke waning emotion, it is a
sterile luxury; sought mainly to stimulate crescent
emotion a pernicious luxury."
In view of these various accounts of the poetic function one must ask:
Were the sorrows necessary? were they real? One mistrusts the poet, to
whom joy must necessarily often come in the affirmation of distress.
One may argue that Thompson must have been happy on the score of his
poetry. As a poet, no doubt, he was; but not necessarily as a man. The
two states did not overlap. He says in a letter to a friend that he did
not realise that _Sister Songs_, so poor a thing, would give pleasure;
whereas in verse he speaks of sending it exultingly.
His "I have no poetry," like the communicant's "I am unworthy," is but
the prelude to the embrace. In the "To a Broom Branch at Twilight"
(_Merry England_, November 1891), he declares that there are songs in
the branches--
I and they are wild for clasping,
But you will not yield them me.
The thought that silence is the lair of sound was his own ample
consolation for other unproductive periods: but now as he grew ill and
really silent, he felt that silence could nurture only silence.
His pride faces his distress; they stare each other out of countenance.
It is certain that he often joined in George Herbert's address to
a Providence who has made man "the secretary of her praise," though
"beasts fain would sing," and "trees be tuning on their native lute":--
Man is the world's high-priest; he doth present
The sacrifice for all; while they below
Unto the service mutter an assent
Such as springs use that fall, and winds that blow.
And against the many contrary passages of Francis's may also be set his
on the poet's happiness:--
What bitterness was overpaid
By one full verse! world's love, world's pelf
I fillipped from me, and but prayed
Boon of my scantly yielded self.
Here the "curse of destinate verse" reads like a blessing. Yet,
strictly speaking, he found that unwritten predestinate verse means an
ill case:--
For ever the songs I sing are sad
With the songs I never sing.
His complaint is not against the verse that gets written, which even
when sad of origin is a boon: "Deep grief or pain, may, and has in my
case, found immediate outlet in poetry."
To his view of others on previous pages must be added his attitude
towards the author of "The Anthem of Earth," of "The Hound of Heaven,"
of "Shelley." One who went to the task of reviewing his contemporaries
heavy, not with distaste, but with pent-up potential admirations, who
had an appetite at once insatiable and fastidious for all literature,
must needs have enjoyed in relaxation the splendours of his own
verse.[60] But not merely as critic did Francis Thompson realise the
greatness of Thompson. The innermost chambers of his consciousness
buzzed with the certainty of his poetic gravity and significance. He
trusted the quality of the poetry within him as an ordinary man trusts
the beat of his pulse and counts upon it. There were anxieties of
composition and, of course, the ebb and flow of satisfaction in himself
and a final despair. But before that he had known that he was, and he
still knew that he had been, a poet. That is why he is so often the
laureate of his own verse--
Before mine own elect stood I,
And said to Death:--'Not these shall die.'
I issued mandate royally.
I bade Decay:--'Avoid and fly;
For I am fatal unto thee.'
I sprinkled a few drops of verse,
And said to Ruin, 'Quit thy hearse':
To my loved, 'Pale not, come with me;
I will escort thee down the years,
With me thou walk'st immortally.'
These vaunting rhymes were written that he might go on to declare his
undoing, being now stripped of his songs. It was true, of course, that
he lost, not the poetry, but the functions of the poet. In exquisite
lines he begs his muses to stay their flight, and his exquisite lines
belie the convention that they have flown, that the shrines of his
heart are empty.
In Mr. Wilfred Whitten's obituary notice of Thompson there is report at
first hand of the poet's satisfaction in that his poetry was immortal.
He quotes:--
The sleep-flower sways in the wheat its head,
Heavy with dreams, as that with bread;
The goodly grain and the sun-flushed sleeper
The reaper reaps, and Time the reaper.
I hang 'mid men my needless head,
And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread:
The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper
Time shall reap, but after the reaper
The world shall gleam of me, me the sleeper!
And he adds: "When Francis Thompson wrote these verses, he did not
indulge a fitful or exalted hope; he expressed the quiet faith of his
post-poetic years. Thompson knew that above the grey London tumult, in
which he fared so ill, he had hung a golden bell whose tones would one
day possess men's ears. He believed that his name would be symphonised
on their lips with Milton and Dryden and Keats. This he told me himself
in words too quiet, obscure, and long ago for record. But he knew that
Time would reap first."
FOOTNOTES:
[59] "Bodily being is the analogy of the soul's being; our temporal
is our only clue to our spiritual life"; our fleshly senses the only
medium for our divine experience. We are the symbols of ourselves. To
such thoughts he adds disjointed notes in confirmation from the ancient
mythologies: "Bird-heads to gods with man-bodies."--"Zeus = Sky."
[60] With nothing that he has to say of another poet is it so
impossible to agree as with his own estimate of the relative importance
of the sections of _New Poems_--
"CRECCAS COTTAGE, PANTASAPH, _November 1896._
"MY DEAR DOUBLEDAY,--I regret that I cannot consent to the omission of
the translations. If anything is to be left out, it must be the section
_Ultima_, not the translations. I said at Pantasaph that I would keep
these, whatever I left out. They were held over from my first book, and
I will not hold them over again. I regard the 'Heard on the Mountain'
as a feat in diction and metre; and in this respect Coventry Patmore
agrees with me. But I do not at all mind leaving out the section
_Ultima_.--Yours, F. T."
CHAPTER XV: CHARACTERISTICS
THE poet is important, present, manifest to the poet. His poetry is an
addition to his state, which yet is complete without it. The state of
poetry, the state of the poet, has superfluity escaping into song. It
is this superfluity that makes, not the poet, but the poetry-book. If
Thompson had only written of his experiences as a poet, he would have
written fine poetry; when he wrote of the poet's songs he made songs,
when he wrote of the poet's communings with God and Nature he made more
songs, and, to make songs, need never have written directly of God and
Nature. In one sense his descriptions of the poet's throes are out of
all proportion to their product. He tells you so often of his Song,
that it might be complained he had no time for singing. He will compose
a poem to show he is Muse-forsaken, or to establish the fact that his
lady is immortal only in his verse; it hardly matters whether he wrote
otherwise of her or not. He will tell you, with supremest diction, that
his poppy and he lie safe in leavèd rhyme. The great bulk of his poetry
is about his poetry--that is, you might read his three volumes and
think they were but prefaces to thirty-three. Really they are the index
not to forty-eight other volumes, but to the forty-eight years of the
poet's existence--to the Poet, that is.
"The more a man gives his life to poetry, the less poetry he writes,"
was Thompson's own experience.
This harping upon himself is notable. His preoccupation is poetry--and
the poet. It is not a matter of selfishness but of difference. _New
Poems_ meets with many objections on this score, for sharp distinctions
within the species are always resented. The presence of the man is
resented, and the presence of the poet, or prophet, is resented. But
that he has his own place in creation he knows well enough. Isaiah knew
it; and when one of his kind says--
This dread Theology alone
Is mine,
Most native and my own;
And ever with victorious toil
When I have made
Of the deific peaks dim escalade,
My soul with anguish and recoil
Doth like a city in an earthquake rock,
* * * * *
With deeper menace than for other men,
he is proclaiming a family egoism that can no more be "pooh-poohed"
than a racial pigment or tribal distinction, the stature of the pygmies
or the stripe of the zebra. The tribal segregation of the spirit is
distrusted, however, because it defies scientific classification. It
is known as madness, saintliness, obscurity, affectation, "nerves,"
mania, fanaticism, conceit, according to its symptoms in a Blake, or a
Jacopone da Todi; all its kinds are labelled, but it is never brought
to exact order. The variousness of degree in the poetic character is
a necessity of the case. The poet makes the difference because he
makes his own world, his own scope, his own experience. If he is one
of a tribe, he is always the head of it--a chief, like every other,
with a tent as large as the sky, as large as the horizon which his own
intellectual stature may command.
The poet is conscious of his status as the "maker"--the maker who
presumes upon the common advantage of being made in the likeness of
God, and gives point to the likeness. It is plainly stated by F. T. in
"Carmen Genesis" and in an unpublished note written in support of the
poem:--
Poet! still, still thou dost rehearse,
In the great _fiat_ of thy Verse,
Creation's primal plot;
And what thy Maker in the whole
Worked, little maker, in thy soul
Thou work'st, and men know not.
Thine intellect, a luminous voice,
Compulsive moved above the noise
Of thy still fluctuous sense;
And Song, a water-child like Earth,
Stands with feet sea-washed, a wild birth
Amid their subsidence.
And in prose repetition of the "Poet or Maker":--
"In the beginning, at the great mandate of light, the
sea suddenly disglutted the earth: and still in the
microcosm of the poetic, the _making_ mind, Creation
imitates her august and remembered origins. Still,
at the luminous compulsion of the poet's intellect,
from the subsidence of his fluctuant senses emerges
the express and founded consistence of the poem;
confessing, by manifold tokens, its twofold parentage,
quickened with intellectual light, and freshened with
the humidities of feeling. Of generations it shall
endure the spiritual treading and to generations afford
its fruits, a _terra firma_ which may scarce wear
out before the prototypal earth itself. This is the
function of the maker since God first imagined: though
poetry's Book of Genesis is yet unwritten which might
be written, and its Moses is desired and is late. An
art not unworthy the Seraphic Order and the handling of
Saints. For the poet is an Elias, that when he comes
makes all things new. It is a converse, alas, and
lamentable truth, that the false poet makes even new
things old."
Of the Poet's powers of Creation or Transfiguration Wordsworth held an
advanced estimate:--
"The objects of the poet's thoughts are everywhere;
though the eyes and senses of men are, it is true,
his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever
he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to
move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all
knowledge--it is immortal as the heart of man. If
the labours of the men of science should ever create
any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our
condition, and in the impressions which we habitually
receive, the poet will sleep then no more than at
present. . . . If the time should ever come when what is
now called science, thus familiarised to men, shall
be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and
blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid
the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus
produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household
of man."
Pride of poetry, when Francis was forgetful of pride of pain, crops
up in a hundred places; he writes, for instance, of Davidson's "The
Testament of an Empire Builder":--
"We still lament that here, as in the preceding
poems of the series, there is far too much metrical
dialectic, argument in verse, which is a thing
anti-poetic. Poetry should proclaim, poetry is
_dogmatic_; when it stoops to argue, it loses its
august privilege and becomes, at the best, a K.C. in
cloth of gold."
It was easily perceived he was not candidly and fully himself in common
conversation. He was as much shut within his repetitions as the last
little Chinese box is shut within a series of Chinese boxes. Lift all
the lids and you find emptiness in the last. Francis insisted on your
putting all the little boxes back again, fitting the right lid on each,
for, having made his point, he seldom failed to prove it backwards. Had
he been of another age and race, he would have had an hermitage and
been sought by those who wished instruction--the instruction that is
not seldom done in silence. But who was ready to listen to Francis's
silences in London? It is possible that if a child had sought him in
Kensington Gardens, as he sat oblivious of the sparrows and the leaves
and the nursemaids, and had asked for knowledge, revelation might have
followed. We know that in the study at Lymington Patmore came to the
conclusion that his visitor's prose was better than his poetry, his
talk better than his prose. The windows of that Lymington study were
thrown open to the ample airs of Heaven; in London lodgings the east
winds made the noise outside, and Thompson's talk about the weather
filled the air within. The Eastern must have communion, even the
communion of silence, before he lights the lamp of common knowledge;
Plato needed the magnetism of listeners and learners. Francis needed
none but the absent, perhaps the unborn, reader. The shares he issued
were all deferred shares.
And every stanza was an act of faith; every stanza a declaration
of good-will. It is optimism that compels the poet to give the
superfluity of his inner song to the world. He knows, perhaps against
all common-sense, that the world will some day be fit for it. He
launches the utmost treasures of his rare estate upon the nondescript
audience. The pessimist either ceases writing (what is the use?), or,
if he writes, cannot always be trusted to give his best to a posterity
he despises. But Francis gave out no secrets unless he had wrapt them
in poetry. He bore them secretly, and set them free only when he had
decked them in imagery. He was too busy making clothes against their
birth for other companionship. Also, he was shy of his own inability
to be communicative and shy of his own ardent emotions towards his
friends:--
"I know how it must tax you," he wrote to A. M., "to
endure me; for you are a friend, a mother; while I,
over and above these, am a lover--spiritual as light,
and unearthly as the love of one's angelic dreams, if
you will--but yet a lover; and even a seraph enamoured
must be a trying guardian angel to have to do with."
And again:--
"I am unhappy when I am out of your sight, but you,
of course, can have no such feeling in reference to
me. Now my sense of this inspires me with a continual
timidity about inflicting my society on you in any way,
unless you in some way signify a desire for it."
He inflicted his society on nobody. What he did inflict was the
unaccomplished proxy of himself. Of the manner of his detachment he
writes:--
"I do not know but, by myself, I live pretty well as
much in the past and future as in the present, which
seems a very little patch between the two. It has been
more or less a habit through life, and during the last
fifteen years, from the widened vantage of survey then
gained, it has come to dominate my mental outlook. So
that you might almost say, putting it hyperbolically,
I view all mundane happenings with the Fall for one
terminus and the Millennium for the other. If I want to
gauge the significance of a contemporary event of any
mark, I dump it down as near as I can, in its proximate
place between these boundaries. There it takes up very
little room."
His very backwardness was benevolent; his eye, often pre-occupied,
was never indifferent; neither careless nor trivial, it never sought
an easy exchange of confidences, nor made friends by suggestion of
either tact or intelligence. He was a man who, if he entered not into
much intercourse, did not stand aloof through contempt or active
disinclination, but for other friendlier reasons. He was a man to be
observed, not to observe; to be seen, not to see. Neither he nor his
room-mates would, as a rule, be at great pains to come together; but,
even if you held no talk with him, he was sufficiently interesting or
endearing to take your eye.
It was after an evening divided between silence and explanations
that, wondering how well he covered the fires of his imagination, one
went to the door to help with hat and coat. Some final repetition,
unblushingly proclaimed with "As I have said before," would still
longer delay his return to himself; but once he had begun to go down
the flights of steps in Granville Place, where we had taken a flat, he
would find himself face to face again with the realities of life that
he chose to keep private, and be loudly talking to himself in a style
more meaningful and threatening than any speech of his in company.
Then the hall door would be slammed; and still in the silent street,
past puzzled policemen, he would stride away in fierce agitation, but
less solitary than when he sat among us. But a certain sweetness went
with him; he did not need to talk to stimulate that grateful mood of
charity and peace that some know only when they can actually do works
of mercy with their tongues and eyes. His gentle eye proved that not
all his silent thoughts were troubled; and often his gaze would climb
to some invisible and fair peak of contemplation, resting there content
in silence. Sometimes he was obviously happy in small-talk and his
companionships, but that was when commonplaces were not used solely
as a shelter from the inconvenience of thoughts not commonplace. Even
his halfpenny paper, as he read it over in his tea-shop, was a root of
happiness. He was fair game for the journalist of Lower Grub Street.
Here is a random list of the things he cut from the _Daily Mail_:
"Maria Blume's Will," "Insurance of Domestic Servants," "Help for the
Householder," "_Mikado_ Airs on Japanese Warship--Amusing Scenes,"
"Freaks of Weather: Startling Changes of Temperature," "The Milk Peril,
What hinders Reform," and "Joy," a poem by Mr. Sturge Moore--with a
little more margin to it, and straighter scissors-work.
CHAPTER XVI: THE CLOSING YEARS
AS F. T. grew busier with journalism, and was helped to bread by it, he
grew peevish with his prose, as other men do with a servant:--
"Prose is clay; poetry the white, molten metal. It
is plastic, not merely to gross touch, but to the
lightest breath, a wish, a half-talent, an unconscious
feather-passage of emotional suggestion. The most
instantaneously perfect of all media for expression.
Instant and easy as the snap of a camera, perfect as
star in pool to star above, natural as breathing of
sweet air, or drinking of rain-fresh odours; where
prose asks a certain effort and conscious shaping. But
prose can be put in shafts (to its slow spoiling);
verse, alack! hears no man's bidding, but serves when
it lists,--even when it consents to lay aside its
wings."
"Poetry _simple_ or synthetic; prose analytic."
* * * * *
"It might almost be erected into a rule that a great poet is, if he
pleases, also a master of prose," he writes in one of several studies
of "The Prose of Poets"--including Sir Philip Sidney's, Shakespeare's,
Ben Jonson's, and Goldsmith's, first published in the _Academy_.
[Illustration: _Photograph by Sherril Schell_
_Emery Walker Ph. sc._
_The Life Mask 1905_]
At times the every-day difficulties of journalism seemed
insurmountable. Then would he write desperately to W. M. of the
necessity for cowardice on his part and a return to a mode of life that
had no responsibilities:--
"Things have become impossible. B---- did not outright
refuse me an advance on my poem, but told me to call
again and 'talk it over.' . . . The only thing is for
me to relieve you of my burthen--at any rate for the
present--and go back whence I came. There will be no
danger in my present time of life and outworn strength
that I should share poor Coventry's complaint (that of
outliving his ambition to live). . . . For the reverse of
the medal, you have Ghosh who has just been promised
£220 odd for a series of tales.
". . . For the present, at any rate, good-bye, you
dearest ones. If for longer--
Why, then, this parting was well made.
"--Yours ever and whatever comes,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
During the years when such despairs were common W. M.'s favours were
forced upon a spasmodically reluctant poet, whose earnings seemed never
at best to leave him a margin for incidental expenses:--
"To have to talk of money-matters to you is itself a
misery, a sordidness. How much worse in its way all
this must press on you is comprehensible to anyone.
We are no longer as we were ten years ago. You have
grown-up children to launch in life. . . ."
For W. M. there was never a doubt of the honour and pleasure of his
position. If Francis's rent fell sometimes in arrears, it was not
because there was any falling-away in willingness, but because it had
taken its place among the many liabilities of the master of a large
household, and had to wait among them for its turn to be met.
After a desperate letter foretelling the end, a little conversation
with my father would correct his despair, and he could return to his
landlady with the most obvious remedy, or some suggestion equally
efficacious:--
"You are right. Mrs. Maries has given way, on the
understanding that you will make some arrangement with
her before the end of the month."
Again, to W. M.:--
". . . As for poetry, I am despondent when I am without
a poetical fit, yet when I have one I am miserable on
account of my prose. I came lately across a letter
of Keats' (penned in the præ-Endymion days), which
might almost word for word be written by myself about
myself. It expresses exactly one of the things which
trouble me, and make me sometimes despair of my
career. 'I find' (he says) 'I find I cannot do without
poetry--without eternal poetry; half the day will not
do--the whole of it. I began with a little, but habit
has made me a leviathan. I had become all in a tremble
from not having written anything of late: the sonnet
over-leaf did me good; I slept the better last night
for it: this morning, however, I am nearly as bad
again.' I, too, have been 'all in a tremble' because I
had written nothing of late. I am constantly expecting
to wake up some morning and find that my Dæmon has
abandoned me. I hardly think I _could_ be very vain
of my literary gift; for I so keenly feel that it is
beyond my power to command, and may at any moment be
taken from me."
This nervousness for his muse, like to Rossetti's for his sight, came
upon him more hardly in later years.
* * * * *
Misrepresentation--it is easy to trace its origin--was busy before his
death. The word went round that the streets had put a worse slur than
hunger, nakedness, and loneliness upon him. In 1906 a pamphlet reached
him from the University Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, in which he read
that he "had been raised out of the depths":
"No optimism of intent can overlook the fact of
his having fallen, and no euphemism of expression
need endeavour to cloak it. Down those few terrible
years he let himself go with the winds of fancy, and
threw himself on the swelling wave of every passion,
desiring only to live to the full with a purpose of
mind apparently like that of his contemporary, Oscar
Wilde, but in circumstances now vastly different from
those the brilliant young Oxford dandy knew. He said,
'I will eat of all the fruits in the Garden of Life,'
and in the very satisfaction of his desire found its
insatiableness."
With gossip turning the pages, that reader found the proof of
Thompson's wrong-doing in "The Hound of Heaven."
I fled Him down the nights and down the days,
could only mean that the runaway was a criminal, and the Almighty
the policeman who hurries when he is sure of a crime. "The Hound of
Heaven," a study in the profound science of renunciation, was said to
be the work of a man who had "thrown himself on the swelling wave of
every passion." It mattered nothing that in the poem we read only that
the poet had "clung to the whistling mane of every wind," had turned
to children "very wistfully," had "troubled the gold gateway of the
stars." There is really nothing in it to support the blacker theory. A
better way to understand the poetry and know the poet is to believe the
poet and the poetry. This pamphleteer and the writer of the obituary
notice in the _Times_ were strangers, their knowledge was based on
hearsay. In face of such misunderstanding, at the time of his death it
was hardly surprising to read in the _Mercure de France_ that "he went
mad, and death happily put an end to his miseries." A Professor of
Romance Languages in Columbia University may be right in thinking that
Thompson does not ever sink so low as Verlaine, nor ever rise quite so
high, and that greater poets than Thompson, from Collins to Coleridge,
have often failed in the ode-forms, but he is inaccurate when he says
that, "like Verlaine, he is the poet of sin."
Since there was so little to go upon, it is hardly surprising that the
alien onlooker's conception of Francis Thompson was a misconception.
His poor living, his unknown lodging, his fugitive seclusion encouraged
the legend that he was still an outcast. Since this alien had never
heard him laugh, and to the ear's imagination it is easier to frame
a cry, the subject of the ready-made legend never even smiled; there
were no _fioretti_ connected with his name, and the weeds were taken
for granted. The heavy remorsefulness of his muse seemed, to such as
are unfamiliar with the _confiteor_ of the saints, to mark a more real
repentance, and therefore real misconduct, than does the ordinary,
facile _peccavi_ of modern poetry-books. We notice that at his death
the writers of the obituary notices who were ready with suggestions
of evil days were equally ready with the usual liberal condonation.
"No such condonation was called for--though by some it was offered--in
the case of Francis Thompson," wrote A. M. in the _Dublin Review_,
January 1908. "For, during many years of friendship, and almost daily
companionship, it was evident to solicitous eyes that he was one of the
most innocent of men."
* * * * *
To _The Nation_, November 23, 1907, W. M. wrote his protest:--
"I see in the _Times_ a paragraph about Francis
Thompson, against which I will ask you to let me make
appeal. It comes from 'A Correspondent,' who 'writes
to us'; and I am just such another, writing to you.
But I knew Thompson, and no pen but an alien's could
have written this to Printing House Square: 'There
are occasions on which the conventional expression of
regret becomes a mockery, and this is one of them.
What the world must regret is not the release of Mr.
Thompson, but the fact that the cravings of the body
from which he is released should have had power to
ruin one of the most remarkable and original of the
poetic geniuses of our time.' I know what the writer
insinuates. I know, too, that he has overshot his
mark. But the public will only too greedily infer from
his words that Thompson was a degraded man--he who
carried dignity amid all vicissitude; that he was a
debauchee--he who lived, as he sang, the votary of Fair
Love. Nor need I adopt in his regard the fine passage
in which Mr. Birrell defends Charles Lamb's 'drinking.'
For Mr. Francis Thompson did not 'drink.'
"The 'genius' of Francis Thompson was not 'ruined,' or
we should not have the evidence of it on every page
of three volumes, presenting together a body of best
poetry equal in size to that of most of our poets. But
it is true that Thompson's health was wretched from
first to last. It is true also that he doctored himself
disastrously with laudanum from almost the early days
of his medical studentship in Manchester. When he came
to the streets of London, the drug delivered him in a
manner from their horrors, and, besides, was, I think,
some palliation of the disease of which he finally
died--consumption. . . .
"Again, Thompson was an uncertain worker; but his
friendly editors did not hustle him. And they
could always count on him to keep time with even a
'commissioned' poem. The Odes on the Nineteenth Century
and on the Victorian Jubilee did not get late to the
editor of the _Daily Chronicle_; and even if they
had been late, nobody else could have sent them so
quickly, for nobody else could have sent them at all.
Every week, in the _Academy_, under Mr. Lewis Hind,
Thompson's articles made fine reading--his essay on
Emerson marking the high-water mark of that manner of
criticism; and I am certain that the editor of the
_Athenæum_, for whom he was in harness almost until
the last week of his life, and who treated him with a
consideration never to be forgotten by his friends, is
in sorrow that Thompson is dead.
"Such, in brief, was my friend:--a moth of a man, who
has taken his unreturning flitting! No pen--least of
all, mine--can do justice to him: to his rectitude,
to his gentleness, to his genius. . . . If he had great
misfortunes, he bore them greatly; they were great
because everything about him was great. It is my
consolation now, amid tears for Thompson from eyes
that never thought to shed so many again, to know that
he knew and accepted his fate and mission, and that
he willingly 'learned in suffering what he taught in
song.' But I have spoken too much. I did not mean to
do more than make the writer in the _Times_ aware that
somebody loves his life less because Thompson is dead."
The argument of the poet's sanctity is in his poems; and it were
tiresome to take the oath in the discredited witness-box of biography
in denial of any particular accusation. But the circumstances that
made imputation of evil likely and credible form part of the literary
history of the period. The Mid-Victorian respectability which Patmore
lifted to Parnassus in the "Angel in the House," and which lifted
Tennyson to the Peerage, had given way to reaction. Swinburne's
showy metres had persuaded the young that bad morality could be good
art. Instead of Burns's heavy drinking and light loves, Verlaine and
absinthe served for a new argument to confound the squeamish. Verlaine
made a fashion, and his tragedy came easily, even to minor poets,
and was not altogether impious. The young men anxious to fall as he
fell were anxious also to share in the depths of his contrition. The
duet about commission of sin and contrition for sin had great vogue,
and accounts for a deal of the poetry of self-accusation, made, not
seldom, in regard to imaginary offences. Contrition was, after all, the
main force at work, and, in the naked, truthful, and intense moments
of death, this was the ruling passion. The reaction had, after all,
been merely a reaction, and not a little genius had been spilled in
barren soil. The Church and the Sacraments were at the service of men
who had fondly believed that their chief strength was in rebellion,
and that they had strayed into ways of loss and salvation peculiar to
themselves, but who ended by being sorry.
Religion seems always to be setting its beneficent ambush for those
who thought themselves most securely on another road; but in the case
of the victims of abnormal and distressful phases of experience there
was something more than the splendid accident of reconciliation and
forgiveness. One after another of the leaders of æsthetic disaffection
and disease confessed to an almost involuntary inclination to seek the
arms of the Church. The devil, prowling like a lion, might leap upon
them, "but the Lamb, He leapeth too." Christ's actual presence, His
miracles, His hand, were for the sick, the afflicted, the wrongdoer:
His inspiration to-day most often rests upon those intellectual sinners
who have seemed in their misfortune to be puffing out the light of the
world. And this was not only a death-bed reconciliation. What English
artist for fifty years has made a "Madonna and Child?" Aubrey Beardsley
made one. What poet had sung of the last sacraments? Ernest Dowson's
most beautiful verses are on the Extreme Unction. Lionel Johnson, whom
Thompson knew, had not been a rebel, and he did not seek a death-bed
reprieve. Nevertheless his name connects one form of failure with the
literary life of his day and with an ardent adherence to Religion.
Another type of a school that had set out to use bad language but
could say nothing finally but its prayers, is he who then sang in
company with Baudelaire, but whose poet, now he has become a priest, is
Jacopone da Todi. So, too, with Simeon Solomon, as his reputation and
his clothes became more ragged, who, as he grew "famous for his falls"
but otherwise obscure, found a co-ordinating central inspiration for
his work, and found it before the altars of the Carmelite Church in
Kensington. Francis may well have jostled elbows with him there, or on
the pavement.
The copper-plated Death of the sixteenth century is a caution no more
gruesome or extreme than the picture of these poets and painters in
their pains. Two or three to a lunatic asylum, one to death that
smelt of suicide, and three at least to death hastened by drink--that
is the hasty record of a certain group. Francis never met Wilde, the
wit who stumbled and gasped the dull man's daily words of repentance,
even before his audience was well aware of his jest; nor Beardsley
the artist who found death's quill at his heart before he had time to
destroy the drawings, which, in his agony, he learnt some devil rather
than himself had made. To the hospitals, asylums, and prisons of London
and Paris, to the Sanatorium of the Pacific or the Mediterranean, to
the slums, and to starvation, Literature contributed numbers out of all
proportion.
Francis knew none of them; but he had made a name in the 'nineties,
had lived in the streets (the last resort of several of them), had
died a Catholic (most damning evidence!), had written passionately
(the divinity of his passion was not noted): there was circumstantial
evidence enough. He was exalted: how should the obituary writers know
the exaltation was not feverish? His poetry he laid upon altar-steps;
was it for them to guess he had chased no satyrs from his cathedral
before he set himself to pray? His view of Dowson is characteristic:
". . . A frail and (in an artistic sense) faint minor
poet. . . . The major poet moulds, rather than is moulded
by, his environment. And it may be doubted whether the
most accomplished morbidity can survive the supreme
test of Time. In the long run Sanity endures; the
finest art goes under if it be perverse and perverted
art, though for a time it may create life under the
ribs of death."
Like the legend that seeks to give an evil or a sad account of men, is
the easier legend of their laziness. All who have known joy and written
vastly have been accused of inertia and despondency.
It is true that Francis was apprenticed to Idleness of wits, as well as
Industry; but, finding both hard masters, and Idleness (of the common
sort) the harder, he much sought to avoid it. As for his work (save in
poetry) he knew few moments at which he could with Coleridge declare a
happiness in difficulties, "feeling in resistance nothing but a joy and
a stimulus." With Coleridge's other mood ("drowsy, self-distrusting,
prone to rest, loathing his own self-promises, withering his own
hopes--his hopes, the vitality, the cohesion of his being") he was
acquainted. But not long; the meaning of his inactivity would burst on
him, until the thought of it was labour. But with Wordsworth he says:--
". . . for many days my brain worked with a dim and
undetermined sense of unknown modes of being,"
and for his reassurance he had at hand the same poet's
'Tis my faith that there are powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we may feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.
Francis construed his own defence into a hundred aphorisms. These two
are signed with his initials:--
"Where I find nothing done by me, much may have been
done in me," and
"For the things to-day done in you, will be done by you
to-morrow many things."
Lying abed, he was acutely aware of his duty to get up. It was a
conscious and laborious laziness, akin to Dr. Johnson's, whose great
bulk was shaken with almost daily repentance for its sloth. The
dictionary makes our shelves creak in protest at the notion held by
Johnson himself and his contemporaries that he was a lazy man; and the
pile of Thompson's papers, his letters, and the following placard he
pinned upon his bedroom wall speak of his large industries and his
girding at the spectre sloth:--
At the Last Trump thou wilt rise Betimes!
Up; for when thou wouldst not, thou wilt shortly sleep long.
The worm is even now weaving thy body its night-shift.
Love slept not a-saving thee. Love calls thee,
Rise, and seek Him early. Ask, and receive.
I leave unprinted other more piteous solicitations for what, virtually,
though he did not guess it, was the energy and health he could not
possess. Upon another sheet more worldly persuasions were set to urge
his waking eye. Of a printer's request for copy on an earlier day than
that usually covenanted he writes:--
"Remember the new _Athenæum_ dodge testifies against
you."
It was he who found time to be pleased with Brearley's bowling or merry
with the anticipation of the morrow; he, sitting in grey lodgings, who
crowded into the chilly ten minutes before 3 A.M. the writing of a long
letter to be posted, after anxieties with address and gum of which we
know nothing, and a stumbling journey down dark stairs, in a pillar
box still black in threatening dawn. There are few such journeys of my
own I can count to my credit, and few words I can remember, written or
spoken, to set against his thronging puns and his constant sequence of
"Yours ever." At any rate he was outdone at every turn--in kindness,
attentions, sallies, patience and wit--by one among his friends, my
father, who had to crowd his generosity to the poet between stretches
of persistent overwork, the real thronging anxieties that were at least
as pressing as Francis's imaginary ones. In reading a series of letters
Francis wrote to me in the last years, I am sorry to think how slovenly
must have been my response to his tenacious jesting. And it was he who
troubled to make his notes kind and acceptable, neat and long. One
marvels, among the mass of his journalism and letters, at the estimate
of him that passed undisputed during his life, as a man who misspent
his powers and wasted his minutes as he wasted his matches. If he was
unfortunate, he was also merry. Without excuse his biographer confesses
to the moodiness, the silence, the disorderliness that is imputed
to the poet. The consolation for all my family is the thought of my
father's incessant care for and good humour towards him.
Of the hours he kept there are many legends, all made according to
Greenwich time. But it is not expected of the lamp-lighter, or the
contract-winder of office clocks, or the milkman, that he should write
Thompson's poetry, or even read it, and yet we started with a wholly
illogical desire of constraining Francis, if not to fulfil their
duties, at least to be a party to their punctuality.
Mr. Orpen desired to paint him; sittings were even appointed; but not
till Mr. Neville Lytton found him under the same roof, at Newbuildings,
was his elusive likeness caught by an artist.
To look at, as it happens, he was something between a lamp-lighter and
a man of letters, but nearer the lamp-lighter; unless, seeing him stand
beneath a street gas-jet to write an overdue article, one noticed he
carried a pencil instead of a pole. Thus were the flares of Brown's
bookstalls in Bishop's Road used by him. On and on would he write until
the last shutter was closed and the gas turned down. Then dashing off
the final sentence, he would rush into the shop to sell his book, and
to the pillar-box with his article.
If he is to be sought for among the old masters, it is to El Greco
that one would go. He had the narrow head and ardent eye that served
that painter for Saint, Beggar, and Courtier. None other recalls his
presence to me, or creates an atmosphere in which he could have lived.
Rembrandt's was too rich and still, Tintoretto's too invigorating.
Titian recognised no such pallor, Giorgione no such slightness, and
Veronese no such shabbiness. For the Florentines, they were better
built; their poets' countenances were more established and secure, and
their excellent young men were less nervous and restless than he.
[Illustration: Francis Thompson
Drawn by the Hon. Neville Lytton 1907]
He alludes in a letter to a belief (principally, I believe, his own)
that he resembled two Personages:--
"DEAR EV.,--Character counts, even in cricket. This
morning I was looking at a _Daily Mail_ photo. of the
South African team for the coming cricket season. One
of the faces instantly caught my eye. 'Well!' said
I, 'if character count for anything in cricket, this
should be the bowler they say has the Bosanquet style.'
. . . Since Hall Caine is no Shakespeare, Plonplon no
soldier, _and neither the Tsar nor the Prince of Wales_
[_George V_] _are Thompsonian poets_, great was my
surprise when I found the fellow _was_ the Bosanquet
bowler."
Had he compared his own youthful photographs with those of the present
Prince of Wales he might perhaps have been confirmed in one of his
impressions.
The only faces he much pondered were the poets'. Round the walls of his
room he pinned the _Academy_ supplements, full-page reproductions from
the National Portrait Gallery; and with these was a reproduction given
him by Coventry Patmore of Sargent's drawing of A. M. The supplements
he liked all the better because they illustrated a favourite theory of
facial angles. On foreheads he set no value; but insisted that genius
was most often indicated by a protruding upper jaw. This did not mean
for him that thick lips had significance, but where the bony structure
from the base of the nose to the upper teeth was thrust forward,
as, notably, in Charlotte Brontë and Coventry Patmore, he found the
character that interested him.
Here is another letter, written in a bad light but copious good
spirits, before a visit to "the Serendipity Shop":--
"DEAR EV.,--This to remind you I shall be at the
shop, whereof the name is mystery which all men seek
to look into, and in the mouth of the young man
Aloysius doubtful is the explanation--yea, shuffleth
like one that halteth by reason of the gout; in the
forehead and forehand of the bland and infant day,
yet swaddled in the sable bands of the first hour and
the _pre-diluculum_. For the Wodensday, a kitten with
its eyes still sealed, is laid in the smoky basket of
night, awaiting the first homœopathic doses of the
morn's tinctured euphrasy (even as euphrasia once cured
an inflammation of my dim lid)."
Mr. Andrew Lang has complained of de Quincey's digressions; a further
sample of F. T.'s habitual guiltiness may be taken from one of the
slightest of his notes:--
"DEAR EV.,--I told your father I should come to-morrow,
but I send you a line to _mak siccar_--as the lover
of artistic completion said who revised Bruce's
murder of Red Comyn. It is interesting to see the
tentative beginnings of the James school in Bruce,
already at variance with the orthodox methods upheld
by his critical collaborator. The critic in question
considered that Bruce had left off too soon. But to
Bruce's taste evidently there was a suggestion in
the hinted tragedy of 'I doubt I have killed Red
Comyn' more truly effective than the obvious ending
substituted by his _confrère_. History, by the way, has
curiously failed to grasp the inner significance of
this affair.
"I am quite run down to-night." . . .
"I had never your lightness of heart," he writes,
forcing me to wonder what he thought of one for
making such poor use, in his behalf, of the imputed
characteristic; "nor was I ever without sad
overshadowings of the hurrying calamity. . . . 'The day
cometh, also the night'; but I was born in the shadow
of the winter solstice, when the nights are long. I
belong by nativity to the season of 'heavy Saturn.' Was
it also, I sometimes think, under Sagittarius? I am
not astronomer enough to know how far the precession
of the equinoxes had advanced in '58 or '59. Were
it so it would be curious, for Sagittarius, the
archer, is the Word. He is also Cheiron, the Centaur,
instructor of Achilles. The horse is _intellect_ or
_understanding_ (Pegasus = _winged intellect_). He
is the slayer of Taurus the Bull (natural truth and
natural or terrestrial power and generation, the fire
of unspiritualised sense), which sinks as he rises
above the horizon. Ephraim, a type or symbol of the
Word (as Judah of the Fathers and the Priesthood), was
an archer, or symbolised as such. (See Jacob's dying
and prophetic blessing of his sons, wherein each has a
symbol proper to his character and that of his tribe,
indicating his place as a type in the Old Church, and
in the foreshadowing of the New.) But this is very
idle chatter, and I don't know how I fell upon it when
my mind is serious enough, indeed. Perhaps the mind
wanders, tired with heavy brooding."
But it is always the gay word that could best bear the scrutiny of the
poet himself if he were to pass the proofs of his own biography. In
writing of a life that has a superficial look of disaster and pain, his
biographer has a shamefaced feeling of dishonesty. Every other word is,
in a sense, a misrepresentation, and worse. The memory of his smile
shouts out to them, "You liars!"
* * * * *
There was always courtesy in his notes, mixed with haste and
complaints; and even he would weary of bulletin prose, so that his
needs and ailments sometimes came recorded in doggerel:--
I am aweary, weary, weary,
I am aweary waiting here!
Why tarries Everard? sore I fear he
Has forgotten my shirting-gear!
Ah, youth untender! why dost thou delay
With shirts to clothe me, an untimely tree
Unraimented when all the woods are green?
But thou delay not more: unboughten vests
Expect thy coming, shops with all their eyes
Wait at wide gaze, and I thy shepherd wait,
In Tennysonian numbers wooing haste. . . .
Of great value is A. M.'s corrective record of his laugh:--
"He has been unwarily named with Blake as one of
the unhappy poets. I will not say he was ever so
happy as Blake;--but few indeed, poets or others,
have had a life so happy as Blake's, or a death so
joyous; but I affirm of Francis Thompson that he had
natural good spirits, and was more mirthful than many
a man of cheerful, of social, or even of humorous
reputation. What darkness and oppression of spirit the
poet underwent was over and past some fifteen years
before he died. It is pleasant to remember Francis
Thompson's laugh, a laugh readier than a girl's,
and it is impossible to remember him, with any real
recall, and not to hear it in mind again. Nothing
irritable or peevish within him was discovered when
children had their laughter at him. It need hardly be
told what the children laughed at;--say, a habit of
stirring the contents of his cup with such violence
that his after-dinner coffee was shed into the saucer
or elsewhere--a habit which he often told us, at great
length, was hereditary."
His laugh it is difficult to keep alive: the legend of his extinguished
happiness is too strong. For laughter is commonly discredited; only Mr.
Chesterton, for example, persists in making the Almighty capable of
humour. While we are all ready to allow that thorns make a crown, we
hold that bells do no more than cap us--the cap and bells of folly. Who
ever spoke of a crown of bells?
The refutation of the charge against his industry lies in his published
work and in the pages of a hundred crowded note-books. The newspaper
Odes alone are sufficient evidence of his power to compel even his muse
to arduous and humble labours.
These Odes were pot-boiling journalism; their inspiration by the clock
and the column:--
"We have no doubt whatever that inspiration will not
fail you for so great a subject--the Jubilee! We must
have the copy by the afternoon of the 21st,"
wrote an encouraging editor (Mr. Massingham) on June 6, 1897. The
request was made on the strength of Mr. Massingham's admiration for
_New Poems_, and was not refused; the ode was written within three
weeks, and probably in the last three hours of them. From Mr. Garvin
came another letter:--
"_June 22, '97._
"DEAR FRANCIS THOMPSON,--I get the _Manchester
Guardian_ every day not merely by good hap, but because
it is the best daily in England. Whose is the ode? I
thought on the leisure of the opening and then saw. Hot
Jacobite as I am for England's one legitimate laureate
by native grace and right divine, I could not repress
the movement of natural pity for the respectable and
conscientious wearer of statutory bays, who tries so
hard to fly as if the _Times_ page were Salisbury
Downs and he a bustard. Every flap a stanza; thirty
flaps of the most desperate volatile intention; and no
forrarder to the empyrean, where the Thompsonian ode
sails with one supreme dominion through the azure deeps
of air--vital, radiant, lovely. I told you I was your
poor foster-brother of prose, in witness whereof is my
thought of England's dead, and other little thoughts;
in that the soul danced in me to the great pulse of
your ode.--Always yours,
LOUIS GARVIN."
Of an article on Browning Mr. Garvin had written:--
"DEAR FRANCIS THOMPSON,--Tell me by what native
instinct or faculty acquired you so easily avoid
henotheism in your critical writings. My poet of
the moment, as I am drawn to his centre and become
enveloped in his light, seems to absorb all the
radiance of all song. I know there are exterior suns,
but the poet only remembered bears up with difficulty
against him immediately contemplated. It is henotheism
exactly. But here you take the crabbed case of
Browning, you extricate him from the multitude of words
and you directly declare middle justice upon him, and
so he betakes him to his place. Yet if a word had been
said against a certain oleaginous obesity of optimism
that glistens upon the plump countenance of this
well-groomed poet in easy circumstances, mayhap it had
been well.
"But I went most willingly with you when you laid your
finger upon Browning's Elizabethan aptitude for the
dramatic form of motive analysis and critical comment.
And that not because of Browning. I have long had it
in my mind to say that I feel the same faculty to be
latent in you somewhere. I fancy very strongly that you
could handle the Elizabethan form better than anybody
else these two hundred years and fifty and a little
more. The Elizabethan spirit of course you have to that
degree. The point about Browning's manipulation of
character and circumstance is completely put. Don't you
wish, though, to take the other part--volition diving
at the imminent billow of life and buffeting a sea of
circumstance? Indefinite potentialities I feel sure you
have--especially of the drama that gives a separate
voice and name to all the sides of one's own numerous
personality.[61] I pine for the odes.--Always yours
affectionately (if I may be),
LOUIS GARVIN."
In a letter to his sister about the Jubilee Ode, Francis says:--
"Thereon forthwith followed the severe and most unhappy
cab accident about which I informed you. . . . I have
had a year of disasters. You will notice a new address
(39 Goldney-road, Harrow-road, N.W.) at the head of
this letter. I have been burned out of my former
lodgings. The curtain caught fire just after I had got
into bed, and I upset the lamp in trying to extinguish
it. My hands were badly blistered, and I sustained a
dreadful shock, besides having to walk the streets all
night. The room was quite burned out."
This letter he never posted, so that his sister writes out of her
unwearied solicitude two years later:--
"MY DEAR FRANK,--Doubtless you will be surprised to
receive a letter from me after so long a silence. But
the apparent negligence is not my fault, for I have
been trying for twelve months past to obtain your
address, and only succeeded about a fortnight ago. You
see, my dear brother, I have no one to give me any
information of you, and as _you_ never write to me the
consequence is I am utterly in the dark. My life is
very uneventful, therefore my letters to you must, I
know, be very uninteresting; but they must just show
you that you have still got a sister who loves you and
thinks of you and also prays much for your well-being
here and hereafter."
Later the old century was "sung on her way" in an ode appearing in the
_Academy_, at the beginning of 1901; and in the death of Cecil Rhodes
(March 26, 1902) his editor saw the occasion for another paper ode.
Mr. Hind describes the hasty manner of its composition, and when it
appeared in the _Academy_ for April 12, 1902, it bore the marks of a
trumped-up emotion's inspiration. In May 1902 Mr. Fisher, now of the
_Chronicle_, asked F. T. for a Peace Ode, to be pigeon-holed against
the conclusion of the South African War.
Very often F. T. would decide for an eight-hour day, and offer himself,
through my father, to the journals. Like most men who find work irksome
when they have it, and delay all commissions, he imagined, when he had
none, that the difficulty was in the getting. "The _Academy_ should
not and shall not have a monopoly of me," he writes, without any
provocation from the _Academy_. "Take this chance for me now." (W.
M. had mentioned the _Daily Chronicle_ as an opening) "Bite a cherry
while it bobs against your mouth." Nor were his reasons for complaint
against his journalistic fate always ungrounded. The _Academy_ demanded
no monopoly, being willing to accept his unpunctual copy whenever it
arrived, and in almost any quantity; but elsewhere minor reverses were
made the most of. F. T. writes:--
"I have just got home. The _Imperial and Colonial
Magazine_ asked me to submit 'one or two poems' of an
Imperialist nature. I sent them one, as you know. They
have rejected it. If the poem sent through you is also
rejected (as I expect) I shall give up. I cannot go on
here--or anywhere else--under these circumstances. Try
as I will, all doors are shut against me. If your poem
miscarries that is the end.--Yours ever,
F. T."
Thus were his fears communicated to the person who made them futile and
absurd. But Thompson would never forgo them.
Commissions, however, when they came, were rejected in silence, or
accepted and neglected--
"DEAR SIR,--I shall be greatly obliged if you can send
me the articles you kindly agreed to write for the
Catholic Encyclopædia in the letters B and C"
is a note I find among his papers, and others came, were ignored and
lost. "Having done an article for the _Chronicle_," he writes, "I have
still seventeen volumes of poetry undone for it." When Mr. Hind left
the _Academy_ the poet was in some flurry and distress; having called
on the new editor, Mr. Teignmouth Shore, he writes:--
"The interview last Friday landed me on a doubtfully
hospitable Shore. All articles to be cut down to a
column. Immediate result, fifteen shillings for this
week. . . . Therefore am waiting most anxiously for your
return, when I may explain all the complexities of the
situation. At present most perplexed and anxious. Do
not cut short your holiday; yet I do need to see you."
He continued fitfully on the _Academy_, but gradually transferred his
allegiance to the _Athenæum_. In the meantime my father arranged that a
publishing house whose literary adviser he was should supply him with
work that could be done at any time and be paid for at any moment. _The
Life of St. Ignatius_ was commissioned. He delivered every few pages as
he finished them--three were passport to a pound--and, so final was his
method of composition, he neither desired nor needed to see a single
page of the manuscript again. The reviewing my father obtained for him
on the _Athenæum_ he did with success till within a month or two of his
death. Letters from Mr. Vernon Rendall illustrate the courtesy of his
editors:--
"ATHENÆUM OFFICE, _December 20, 1905._
"DEAR MR. THOMPSON,--I am very sorry to hear of
your illness, which may have been aggravated I fear
by our clerks. I will try to make them send things
correctly in future. Do not hurry now about anything
you have. You are sure to be in need of rest and
recreation--which, indeed, is supposed to be the fair
perquisite of all at this season.--Yours very truly,
VERNON RENDALL."
And again:--
"ATHENÆUM OFFICE, _March 14, 1906._
"DEAR MR. THOMPSON,--I was very glad to hear of your
recovery, and hope you will now enjoy established
health. We were clearly as much at fault as you in the
delay of the notices you mention. I quite agree with
you about Morris. Generally, I try to send you books
worth reading, and, tho' we never have too much space
to spare, I am sure that you know as well as anybody
the value of a book, and I hope you will not restrict
your notice of what you think really good.--Yours very
truly,
V. RENDALL."
And, later, from another office:--
"THE NATION, _April 9, 1907._
"DEAR MR. THOMPSON,--Mrs. Meynell will have sent you
a letter of mine about the beautiful poem ["The Fair
Inconstant"] which you wrote for us last week, and
about the more elaborate work, which, in continuance of
old _Daily Chronicle_ days, you might be willing to do
for us. I have always retained the utmost admiration
for your poetic genius, and regard with much warmth its
association with a paper like the _Nation_.--Yours very
truly,
H. W. MASSINGHAM."
Of another literary enterprise which, like his journalism, shews that
he could be diligent, he writes:--
"DEAR WILFRID,--I have summoned up pluck to send my
little play[62] (which Mrs. Meynell and you have
seen) to W. Archer, asking him whether it afforded
any encouragement to serious study of writing for the
stage. His answer is unfavourable--though he refrains
from a precise negative. This sets my mind at rest on
that matter. None the less, I wanted to read you one or
two bits from my chucked-up _Saul_, since they seemed
to me better than I knew."
"I never yet missed my Xmas wishes to you,
and it seems uglily ominous if I should do so now.
But I have been working desperately at a poem for the
_Academy_. . . . When I met Whitten this morning he looked
uneasy, repeatedly advised me to 'get something.'
I explained I already had 'got' some tea (with my
breakfast). 'Yes, but--get something more,' he said,
and alleged that I was looking shrunk with cold.
"Of course I will come in to-morrow night. Did I not,
you might be sure I was knocked off my legs altogether,
and I should feel that the world had gone off its
hinges. I have never missed seeing you at Christmas
save when I was at Pantasaph. Every happy wish to you,
dear Wilfrid, and may God be as kind to you as you have
ever been to me."
FOOTNOTES:
[61] Note by F. T.: "That is not drama, but lyric."
[62] This play was again unfavourably received when, in 1903, he
submitted it to _T. P.'s Weekly_. It is thus set forth on his MS. title
page:
NAPOLEON JUDGES
_A Tragedy in Two Scenes_
DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.
NAPOLEON.
GENERAL AUGEREAU.
MADAME LEBRUN (_an opera-dancer, Augereau's Mistress_).
PRESIDENT OF THE COURT MARTIAL.
A FRENCH DESERTER.
OFFICERS. SOLDIERS.
_Place._--Augereau's Camp. _Time._--The Italian Campaign of 1796.
During the first scene Napoleon is absent from Augereau's Camp.
Of another class is a modern comedy, full of laboriously smart give
and take, called "_Man Proposes, but Woman Disposes_. Un Conte sans
Raconteur. In Two Scenes."
CHAPTER XVII: LAST THINGS
FRANCIS'S health often dismayed him, and his terrors both in regard
to sicknesses and politics covered many pages of threatening letters.
The mere streets became more and more an oppression. Even Elgin Avenue
grew (in 1900) as ugly to him as it always is to men less happily
indifferent. At such times he could write to W. M. in the strain of the
following letter:--
"I designed to call in on Wednesday, but was sick
with a horrible journey on the underground. To-day,
though better, I am still not well. I hope I may manage
to-morrow. I have been full of worry, depression,
and unconquerable forebodings. The other day, as I
was walking outside my lodgings, steeped in ominous
thoughts, a tiny child began to sing beside me in her
baby voice, over and over repeating:--
'O danger, O danger
O danger is coming near!'
My heart sank, and I almost trembled with fear."
He prophesied of war, and was tormented whole days by complications
in the East, and the notion of a Yellow invasion. And even West
Kensington, when small-pox was announced there, seemed to come
marching on him, a Birnam forest of bricks. It was illness, with fear
for a symptom. "Disaster was, and is, drawing downwards. . . . There
are storm-clouds over the whole horizon, and I feel my private fate
involved. I am oppressed with fatality," he writes in one letter
(1900), and on the next page is involved in jokes which were heavy,
not with fatality. Other letters contain complaints of dreams akin to
Coleridge's:--
"A most miserable fortnight of torpid, despondent days,
and affrightful nights, dreams having been in part the
worst realities of my life."
On the engagement in 1903 of Monica of "The Poppy," of "Monica Thought
Dying," and of _Sister Songs_, Francis wrote to her:--
"28 ELGIN AVENUE, _Saturday._
"DEAR MONICA,--I would have answered you long since
if I had not been so worried with work that I do not
know how to get through it. Having got rid of my poem,
I have taken a little rest from work, to which I had
no right, and my neuralgia seems happily to have got
better--though I am almost afraid to say so, for I
still feel very weak and jaded, so that it might easily
return. Therefore I take this moment to write to you.
"Most warmly and sincerely I congratulate you, dear
Monica, on what is the greatest event in a woman's
life--or a man's, to my thinking. . . . Extend to him,
if he will allow me, the affection which you once--so
long since--purchased with a poppy in that Friston
field. 'Keep it,' you said (though you have doubtless
forgotten what you said) 'as long as you live.' I have
kept it, and with it I keep you, my dearest. I do not
say or show much, for I am an old man compared with
you, and no companion for your young life. But never,
my dear, doubt I love you. And if I have the chance to
show it, I will do.
"I am ill at saying all I doubtless should say to a
young girl on her engagement. I have no experience
in it, my Monica. I can only say I love you; and if
there is any kind and tender thing I should have said,
believe it is in my heart, though it be not here.--My
dear, your true friend,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
At her bidding, he went, on her marriage day, to the Church of St.
Mary-of-the-Angels in Bayswater. He had never, in all probability,
failed a tryst before by coming to it too early, but to all her
commands he was obedient, and his mistake was but the symptom of his
anxiety to be present. The poppy that she picked and gave him, with
"Keep it as long as you live," was found in the leaves of his own copy
of _Poems_--the only volume of his own works that he kept by him. So
were all her injunctions observed. Having gone too early to Church, he
left too early, and wrote:--
"WESTBOURNE GROVE, 12.30 P.M.
_Wednesday, June 14, 1903._
"DEAREST MONICA,--You were a prophetess (though you
needed not to be a sibyl) to foretell my tricks and
manners. I reached the church just ten minutes after
twelve, to find vacancy, as you had forewarned me. A
young lady that might have been yourself approached the
church by the back entrance, just as I came away; but
on inspection she had no trace of poppy-land. There
must have been other nuptial couples about, I think.
"It seems but the other day, my dearest sister
(may I not call you so? For you are all to me as
younger sisters and brothers--to me, who have long
ceased practically to have any sisters of my own, so
completely am I sundered from them), that you were a
child with me at Friston, and I myself still very much
of a child. Now the time is come I foresaw then--
Knowing well, when some few days are over,
You vanish from me to another.
"You may pardon me if I feel a little sadness, even
while I am glad for your gladness, my very dear.
"I was designing to call in to-night, till I learned
from you that you would be occupied with your
wedding-party. Then I hoped I might have got to you
last night instead, but could not manage it. So, to
my sorrow, I must be content only to write. Had I
known before, I would have called in on Sunday, at all
costs, rather than defer it to (as it turns out) the
impossible Wednesday.
"I shall be with you all, at any rate, in
spirit.--Yours ever dearly, my dear,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
A few years before his death his manner had changed. His platitudes,
now, were merely a means of getting through an evening without making
a demonstration of the trouble he was in. That his ills might not be
exposed he kept covering them up with talk, as constantly as a mother
tucks in a child restless in fever. The man who always takes laudanum
is always in need of it, and when he is in need he is ill. He is too
ill to think, too uncomfortable to meditate or be wise.
Whenever he postponed his dram, and spent his day instead with his
friends, he would say an easy thing once, and finding it easy, would
say it over and over again. While he spent an evening explaining that
last August was hot, but this hotter, his cry really was, "Where is my
laudanum?" Nor was his need only physical: his soul, too, was crying,
"Where is my God, my Maker, Who giveth songs in the Night? Who teacheth
us more than the beasts of the earth, and maketh us wiser than the
fowls of Heaven?" I am told by a doctor that one of the greatest pains
of relinquishing opium is the sense of the reason's unfitness. Thought
is thrown out of joint, and hurts like a dislocated shoulder.
"Nature," says Emerson, "never spares the opium or nepenthe, but
wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her
poppies plentifully on the bruise." And even for the bruises made by
poppies she has her salve. Some redress, a rebate of the price paid,
was made to Francis Thompson for the agony of the opium habit. That
he seldom spoke of it meant that it was a thing too bitter to speak
of; meant, too, that it was at times a thing too little to speak of,
that Nature minimised its terrors. There is mercy for the slave of a
bad habit: the more confirmed, the more often must there be periods
during which its mastery is forgotten, even in its presence. The
sorriest drunkard is not necessarily the drunkard oftenest sorry. The
opium-eater is sometimes persuaded of his own invented theory of the
causes of his weakness, of its uses and necessity. Francis, who would
have loathed himself to the point of extinction, or redemption, if he
had been an ordinary sinner, who would have found life with himself
intolerable had he sullied life with common offences against the Law,
was provided with some sort of protection against remorse for his own
particular failing. Nature gave him poppies to set against poppies.
Periods of misery and dejection came to him, as to his fellows. With
Coleridge he could in certain moods have written:--"The stimulus
of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when
I am alone, the horrors that I have suffered from laudanum, the
degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me." And again in
words very like de Quincey's, Coleridge speaks of "fearful slavery,"
of being "seduced to the accursed habit ignorantly." From the starker
visitations of remorse Coleridge, too, was justly sheltered. His son
has said for him:--
"If my Father sought more from opium than the mere
absence of pain, I feel assured it was not luxurious
sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive
dreams; but that the power of the medicine might keep
down the agitations of his nervous system, like a
strong hand grasping the strings of some shattered
lyre."
His own "my sole sensuality was not to be in pain" is sufficient for
himself and for others.
F. T.'s comments on Coleridge's case are valuable, since they rebound
in his own direction:--
"Then came ill-health and opium. Laudanum by the
wine-glassful and half-pint at a time soon reduced
him to the journalist-lecturer and philosopher, who
projected all things, executed nothing; only the
eloquent tongue left. So he perished--the mightiest
intellect of the day, and great was the fall thereof.
There remain of him his poems, and a quantity of
letters painful to read. They show him wordy, full of
weak lamentation, deplorably feminine and strengthless."
And again:--
"It is of the later Coleridge that we possess the most
luminous descriptions. A slack, shambling man, flabby
in face and form and character; womanly and unstayed of
nature; torrentuous of golden talk, the poet submerged
and feebly struggling in opium-darkened oceans of
German philosophy, amid which he finally foundered,
striving to the last to fish up gigantic projects from
the bottom of a daily half-pint of laudanum. And over
the wreck of that most piteous and terrible figure of
all our literary history shines and will shine for ever
the five-pointed star of his glorious youth; those poor
five resplendent poems, for which he paid the devil's
price of a desolated life and unthinkably blasted
powers."
[Illustration:
To the memory of
FRANCIS THOMPSON, POET
1859-1907
STUDENT OF OWENS COLLEGE
1877-1884
Whatso looks lovelily
Is but the rainbow on life's weeping rain.
Why have we longings of immortal pain,
And all we long for mortal? Woe is me,
And all our chants but chaplet some decay,
As mine this vanishing--nay, vanished day.
Memorial at Owens College, Manchester
_Carved by Eric Gill_]
Even if Francis spilled brown laudanum on his paper as he wrote those
superlatives, he did not fit the cap of disaster to two heads.
In 1906 he again visited the monastery at Crawley, where his friends
had offered him hospitality over many years, and helped him to keep
an occasional feast. I take a sample at random of Prior Anselm's
courtesy:--
"HOLY SATURDAY.
"DEAR FRANCIS,--The Alleluias have been sung, and I
echo them to you, dearest friend, hoping they bring you
joy and peace and blessings."
Again:--
"DEAR FRANCIS,--Could you give me and the community
the great pleasure of your company on the Feast of St.
Anthony, when the Bishop of Southwark will assist? I
do hope you will come, as it is the last feast I shall
have before the Chapter, an event that may scatter us
all to the four winds of heaven."
And again:--
"The community and particularly myself would be
delighted to have the pleasure of your company on Oct.
4th, the Feast of our holy Father St. Francis and your
name-day. I am looking forward to some long talks. How
I long for a return of the happy days at Pantasaph,
when we discussed all things in heaven and on earth and
in infernis."
Before his departure to Crawley Francis wrote to me:--
". . . I feel depressed at going away from you all--it
seems like a breaking with my past, the beginning of I
know not what change, or what doubtful future. Change
_as_ change is always hateful to me; yet my life has
been changeful enough in various ways. And I have
noticed these changes always come in shocks and crises
after a prolonged period of monotony. In my youth I
sighed against monotony, and wanted romance; now I
dread romance. Romance is romantic only for the hearers
and onlookers, not for the actors. It is hard to enter
its gates (happily); but to repass them is impossible.
Once step aside from the ways of 'comfortable men,'
you cannot regain them. You will live and die under
the law of the intolerable thing they call romance.
Though it may return on you in cycles and crises, you
are ever dreading its next manifestation. Nor need you
be 'romantic' to others; the most terrible romances
are inward, and the intolerableness of them is that
they pass in silence. . . . One person told me that my
own life was a beautiful romance. 'Beautiful' is not
my standpoint. The sole beautiful romances are the
Saints', which are essentially inward. But I never
meant to write all this."
All this, and much unwritten trepidation, because he had to travel
three-fourths of the railroad to Brighton! Of all places Sussex, he had
said, was the place where he preferred to live; but the getting him
there was as difficult as a journey to Siberia. And from Crawley he
wrote:--
"I am a helpless waterlogged and dismasted vessel,
drifting without power to guide my own course, and
equally far from port whichever way I turn my eyes. I
can only fling this bottle into the sea and leave you
to discern my impotent and wrecked condition."
The flung bottle was stamped and caught the post!
In the following year (1907) it became evident that F. T. was again
in urgent need of change. He was thinner, even less punctual, more
languorous when he fell into fits of abstraction; less precise when he
would have assumed the pathetically alert step and speech by which he
had been used to respond to introductions and the calls of the very
unexacting establishment he still visited sometimes twice, sometimes
thrice, and always once a week. He had grown listless and slow, and
it was proposed he should go to the country. "Certainly, Wilfrid,"
he responded, coming the next evening to explain it was impossible;
his boots, which looked stronger than himself, would not travel, he
said; the coat covering his insufficient shoulders was insufficient.
Boots and shirts were bought. It was arranged that we should call for
him the next day at eleven. Accordingly my father and I and a friend
presented ourselves in a motor at his dwelling, prepared to wait his
dressing-time. But he was already out; nor could his landlady, who
had not seen him abroad at such an hour in all her experience, say
why or where. When at last he came, he carried a paper bag with food
purchased at a shop far distant. No gourmet could have been at greater
pains to secure the particular pork-pie, and no other, that he wanted.
At first he and I had sleeping quarters in an independent pavilion
among fern and young oaks, as guests of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt at
Newbuildings. Breakfast and a log-fire used to be prepared for us by
David, a genius among odd-men, who came through the dew before we were
awake, and disturbed us with the fragrance of his toast and coffee.
Francis would get up quite early, but at night he was late. I used to
see him in his room, propped against pillows, with candles burning
and his prayer-book in his hand far into the night; and his light
would still be bright when the stars had begun to grow faint in the
plantation.
Later, he was moved to David's cottage, whence he was fetched every
day to Newbuildings, half a mile away, for luncheon and tea. David
and Mrs. David had gained the unwilling confidence of the invalid,
and Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, adept in everything, himself saw that medical
help was necessary. In September a doctor was consulted, but if no
effective treatment followed it was probably because Francis's evasions
successfully prevented a satisfactory diagnosis.
To the care he received in Sussex there was no end. On September 6,
1907, a companion of Mr. Blunt wrote:--
"Mr. Blunt paid Mr. Thompson a long visit last evening,
and I hear to-day that he is better. He told Mr. Blunt
that he will stay here for the present. The doctor is
going to see him again. Mr. Thompson liked him, which
is something gained, and he is also pleased with David
and his wife. Mr. Thompson has not come to-day, but we
have sent twice, and the boy will enquire again this
evening."
His little tragedy at Newbuildings was a wasp-sting. Enmity had started
some days before, when a wasp fell into his wine-glass. It got out
and was staggering on the table when I came upon the scene. Francis
stood still, watching with fire in his eye. "You _drunken_ brute," he
said with loud severity. But no wasp, drunken or respectable, would he
kill, though he could be bitter. The next day he was stung, and Mr.
Wilfrid Blunt holds it of faith that for all that summer, after the
poet's malediction, no wasps buzzed in Sussex. "Sir, to leave things
out of a book merely because people tell you they will not be believed,
is meanness," says Mr. Blunt in the words of Dr. Johnson. For all that
(since a biographer's unbelief must count for something) I do not here
record the lesser miracles remembered by Mr. Blunt. But the following
(an earlier experience) is of Francis's own telling, in _Health and
Holiness_:--
"In solitude a poet underwent profound sadness and
suffered brief exultations of power: the wild miseries
of a Berlioz gave place to accesses of half-pained
delight. On a day when the skirts of a prolonged
darkness were drawing off for him, he walked the
garden, inhaling the keenly languorous relief of
mental and bodily convalescence, the nerves sensitised
by suffering. Passing in a reverie before an arum,
he suddenly was aware of a minute white-stoled child
sitting on the lily. For a second he viewed her with
surprised delight, but no wonder; then returning to
consciousness, he recognised the hallucination almost
in the instant of her vanishing."
Father Gerrard, who met him in Sussex, afterwards wrote:--
"Only a few weeks ago, I was chatting with Francis
Thompson in his cosy retreat at Southwater, whither
he had gone as the guest of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, to see
if haply he might pull together his shattered frame.
But the phthisis fiend had caught him in a tight grip.
He was a dying man, and an old man, although only
forty-eight years of age. Still, even in his extremity
the characteristics of his life were manifest, a
shrinking from fellowship, a keen perception and
love of the Church, a ready and masterful power of
language. I could not say that conversation with him
was ever an easy thing, if by conversation one means
unceasing talk. Besides talk there were thoughtful
silences. Then, after the thought, came the outpouring
of its rich expression. The doings of the outside world
had little interest for him, but the messages which I
had for him from his little circle of friends set him
all aglow."
He returned weaker than he went. In his extremity of feebleness any
hurt seemed grievous to him. Upon an umbrella falling against him in
the railway carriage, he turned to me with a tremulous: "I am the
target of all disasters!" And when a busy-body of a fellow asked him,
on account of his notable thinness: "Do you suffer with your chest,
sir?" Thompson, who had but one lung, and that diseased, answered
sharply, "No!" Even then he did not know the extent of his trouble.
In error he attributed all his ills to one cause. My father, seeing him
on his return, said to him, "Francis, you are ill." "Yes, Wilfrid,"
he answered, "I am more ill than you think"; and then spoke a word
from which both had refrained for ten years. "I am dying from laudanum
poisoning."
My father asked him if he were willing to go to the Hospital of St.
John and St. Elizabeth. The fact that my sister--the Sylvia of _Sister
Songs_--chanced at that moment to be lying ill there, led him to
consider the institution without hostility, and the next day, my father
having previously recommended him to the nuns, he went unreluctant to
his death-bed. Consumption was the mortal disease, and he had grown
grievously thin, and too weak to be allowed much less than his habitual
doses of laudanum. Some little while before the hours at which these
became due, the tax upon his remaining strength was very heavy; but
only when in acutest need of the one medicine that could keep him alive
(as, indeed, it had done over a long course of years) were the last
days distressing for him. During most of them (he was in St. John and
St. Elizabeth's ten days) he was content with his surrounding, and
knew Sister Michael, his most kind nurse.
His reading was divided between his prayer-book and Mr. W. W. Jacobs'
_Many Cargoes_, neither of which attested his realisation of the end.
But he was not ignorant of it. When I last saw him he took my father's
hand and kept it within his own, chafing and patting it as if to make a
last farewell. He died at dawn on November 13, 1907.
But, for all that friends were at hand, the nurse tender, and the
priest punctual, his passing was solitary. His bedside was not one
at which watchers share commingling cold, as when a widow's burning
fingers, holding those of her dead, are turned to inner ice; his going
not as a child's, which chills the house. The fires quenched were
his own. It seemed to his friends as if it were a matter personal to
himself; while their sorrow for their own loss was mixed almost with
satisfaction at something ended in his favour, as if at last he had had
his way in a transaction with a Second Party, who might have long and
painfully delayed the issue.
Nothing improvident or improper, it seemed to those at hand, had
happened in the hospital ward. Such were one's feelings beside the
tall window, among nuns who smiled happily because he had received the
Sacraments. His features, when I went to make a drawing of him in the
small mortuary that stood among the wintry garden-trees, were entirely
peaceful, so that I, who had sometimes known them otherwise, fell into
the mood of the cheerful lay-sister with the keys, who said: "I hear he
had a very good death." To the priest, who had seen him in communion
with the Church and her saints at the moment which may be accounted
the most solitary possible to the heart of man, no thought of especial
loneliness was associated with his death.
He was too magnanimous to take one to his dead heart. Suffering alone,
he escaped alone, and left none strictly bound on his account. He left
his friends to be busy, not with his ashes, but his works. It was as
if the winds that caught and checked his breath were those that blew
his fame into conspicuous glows. He was laid to rest in St. Mary's
Cemetery, Kensal Green. In his coffin, W. M. records, were roses from
Meredith's garden, inscribed with Meredith's testimony--"A true poet,
one of the small band," and violets went to the dead poet's breast from
the hand of my mother whose praises he had divinely sung.
"Devoted friends lament him," wrote W. M., "no less for himself than
for his singing. But let none be named the benefactor of him who gave
to all more than any could give to him. He made all men his debtors,
leaving to those who loved him the memory of his personality, and to
English poetry an imperishable name."
Index
ABSENT-MINDEDNESS, Francis Thompson's, 9, 26 _n._, 31, 276
_Academy, The_, 71 _n._, 329;
articles by F. T. in, 42, 163-4, 255, 257, 259-64, 267-70, 316,
321, 332-3;
poems by F. T. in, 255, 259, 337;
F. T.'s connexion with, 245, 253-64, 334-5
Accent, 176
Acerbity, F. T.'s assumed, 89
Aeschylus, 58, 90
"After her Going," 183
"After Woman, The," 195, 228-9
Aloofness, F. T.'s, 8, 24, 35-6, 279-80
Alphonsus, Father, 181
"Amelia Applejohn," 247
_American Ecclesiastical Review_, 143
"Amphicypellon" (_Sister-Songs_), 105-106, 294
Ann (De Quincey's), 63, 83
Ann (Francis Thompson's), 63, 81-4, 92
Anger, F. T.'s incapacity for, 54, 141-2
Anselm, Fr. (now Archbishop of Simla), 174, 180-1, 183, 189-90;
letters to F. T., 344-5
"Anthem of Earth, An," 37, 47, 177, 201, 241;
alluded to, 157
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 218
Archer, Mr. William, 144, 152-3, 337;
quoted, 241;
letter to F. T., 242
Arnold, Matthew, F. T. on, 170
Arnold, Sir Edwin, 233
Ashbourne, Lord, 183
Ashton-under-Lyne, 5, 39, 71
Asquith, Mr., 160
"Assumpta Maria," 173-4
Astrology, 330
"Astronomer, A Dead," 124, 126
Athenæum, The, poem by F. T. in, 235;
reviews of F. T. in, 144-6, 241;
F. T.'s connexion with, 243, 326, 336
Augustine, St., quoted, 147, 165;
F. T. on, 172
Austin, Mr. Alfred, 332
_Ave Maria_ (Notre Dame, Indiana), 137 _n._
BALLANTYNE, R. M., 16
Barry, Rev. Canon, 171
Beacock, Mr., _Concordance to F. T._, 154, 165, 167
Beardsley, Aubrey, 323-4
Bearne, Fr. David, 185
Beauty, female, 10, 12
Bennett, Mr. Arnold, 149-50
Berlioz, 55, 348
Bernard, St., 172, 191, 288
Beuno's, St., College, 185
Bible, the, its diction, 158, 171;
symbolism in, 191, 194, 196;
F. T.'s reading of, 172-3;
Apocalypse, 172-3;
Canticles, 223;
Ecclesiastes, 173, 193, 238;
Genesis, 227;
Pentateuch, 223;
the Prophets, 196, 264;
Psalms, 194, 196, 209;
St. John, 189, 225
Blackburn, Mrs., 126, 143, 252
Blackburn, Vernon, 21, 95, 126-7, 138-9, 152
Blackfriars, 64, 278
Blake, 331;
quoted, 223;
F. T.'s reading of, 58, 90;
Mr. E. J. Ellis on, 219
Blunt, Mr. W. Scawen, 85 _n._, 137, 245, 347-8;
quoted, 131 _n._;
F. T. on, 256;
F. T.'s reading of, 165
_Bookman, The_, review of _New Poems_, 241;
Mr. Garvin's article in, on F. T., 167, 243
Bootblack, F. T. as a, 65
Booth, Mr. Bramwell, 107
Booth, "General," 79-80, 106
Bootmaker's assistant, F. T. as a, 71-5
Boys and boyhood, 17-19, 21
Breviary, the, 171-3, 182
Bridges, Mr. Robert, 136
"Brin," 118
_British Review_, 240
Broads, the Norfolk, 118, 173
Brondesbury, 45, 274
Brontë, Charlotte, 76-7, 127, 328
"Broom-branch at Twilight, A," 304
Browne, Sir Thomas, quoted, 84, 95-6;
F. T.'s reading of, 95, 165;
his diction, 47, 155-6
Browning, E. B., 124, 127
Browning, R., Browning on F. T., 120-2, 124, 137 _n._;
William Sharp's _Life_ of, reviewed by F. T., 121, 124;
his obscurity, 146;
his diction, 154-5;
his observation, 275
Bryan, Maggie, 230
Bunyan, 225
"Bunyan in the Light of Modern Criticism," 92, 267
Burns, Robert, F. T. compared with, 140;
F. T. on, 168, 263-4
Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, 188
Butler, Samuel (_Hudibras_), 196, 270
"By Reason of thy Law," 174
CAMPION, 152
Cancelled passages, 107-8
Canon Law in _Her Portrait_, 174
"Captain of Song, A," 235
Capuchins, 128, 140, 180-1
Cardan, 196
Cardinal points, symbolism of the, 192-6
Carlisle Place, 108
Carmen, 102
"Carmen Genesis," 285-6, 309-10
_Carmina Mariana_, 173
Carroll, Dr., late Bishop of Shrewsbury, 24, 107 _n._, 117, 144;
letters to, 97, 123
Casartelli, Dr., Bishop of Salford, 15
_Catholic Encyclopædia_, 335
_Catholic World_ (N.Y.), 137 _n._
Catholicism, F. T. on, 59-60, 224
"Catholics in Darkest England," 106
Cawein, Mr. Madison, 268-9
Chambers, Mr. E. K., 154
Chancery Lane, 253-4
Chapman, 175
Charing Cross, 61;
post office, 86-8
Charles Borromeo, St., 208-9
Chatterton, 61
Chelsea, 4, 82
Chesterfield, Lord, 272
Chesterton, Mr. G. K., 165, 208, 331
_Child set in the midst by Modern Poets, The_, 123
_Child who will never grow old, The_, 250
Children and Childhood. F. T.'s childhood, 5-14, 24, 98;
his child-likeness, 247, 249;
his ways with children, 74, 104, 114-17, 119, 251;
on the children of London, 79-82
Chisholm, Mr. Hugh, 140
Church, the, 202, 226, 322
Church Court (or Passage), Chancery Lane, 5, 68
"Clarendon" Reading Room, 68
Clarke, Fr. R. F., 85, 193
Clement, St., 222-3
Cobbe, Frances Power, 260-1
Cock, Mr. Albert, 201
Coleridge, F. T.'s early reading of, 10, 96, 161-2, 241;
affinities and analogies with F. T., 3, 47, 49, 56, 71 _n._,
94-5, 163, 241, 325, 340, 343-4;
and opium, 53;
as a poet, 127, 163-4;
quoted, 166, 179, 205
"Collecting" books, 62
Collins, 87
Colwyn Bay, 12-13, 44
Constable & Co., Messrs., 277
"Contemplation," 222
_Contemporary Review_, 136
Conversation, F. T.'s, 47, 62, 111, 253, 311-12, 314, 342, 349
Cooper, T. Fenimore, 16
Corbishly, Monsignor, 26
Corporal Punishment, 19-20
"Corymbus for Autumn, A," 137 _n._, 167
Courage, F. T.'s lack of active, 55, 62
Covent Garden, 76-7, 91, 273, 278
Cowley, 170;
F. T. compared to, 146-7;
diction, 155;
F. T.'s reading of, 165-7;
quoted, 173
Crashaw, F. T. and, 144, 146-7, 164, 166-7, 179, 257, 267-8, 288
Crawley, 112, 181, 189, 344-6
Cricket, 13, 39-45, 326, 328
_Critic, The_ (N.Y.), 137, 240
Cross, the, 6, 95 _n._, 193 _n._, 211-13
Crosskell, Canon Charles, Procurator of Ushaw, 26
Crowley, Mr. Aleister, 268
Cuthbert, Fr., 189
_Daily Chronicle_, reviews of F. T., 135, 145, 170, 240, 241;
review of Mrs. Meynell, 149;
paragraph by A. M., 159;
odes by F. T. in, 321, 333
_Daily Mail_, verse by F. T. in, 227;
F. T.'s reading of, 314-15, 328
_Daily News_, 241
"Daisy," 104, 118, 123, 140, 160, 167
Daniel, Samuel, 270
Dante, 14, 87, 170, 172, 200
Darwinism, 244
"Daughter of Lebanon" (De Quincey's), 84, 164
David, Mr. and Mrs., 347
Davidson, John, 136, 140-1, 176, 311
"Dead Cardinal of Westminster, To the," 107-8 (cancelled
stanzas), 129, 167, 226
de Bary, Mr. Richard, 182
Dedications to _Poems_ and _New Poems_, 128, 236-7
Denbigh, Lady, 186
Depression, F. T.'s fits of, 27, 47, 96, 185
De Quincey, affinities and analogies with F. T., 46-7, 50-2, 62-3,
76, 83-84, 95, 168, 329, 343;
F. T.'s reading of, 46-7, 50, 53-4, 98, 164-5, 267-8;
and opium, 48-9, 51-3, 95;
otherwise quoted, 133 _n._
Despairs and panics, 117-8, 316-7, 335
De Vere, Aubrey, 269
Diction, F. T.'s, 132-3, 148, 152-60, 193
Dimbovitza, The Bard of the, 264
Dolls, 9-10
"Domus Tua," 130, 148
Donne, 148, 155, 165, 173-4, 212 _n._, 213
Doubleday, Mr. and Mrs., 242, 247-8;
letter to Mr. Doubleday, 306 _n._
Douglas, Lord Alfred, 269
Dowling, Mr. Richard, 267
Dowson, Ernest, 160, 323-4
Drayton, Michael, 154-5, 165, 270
"Dread of Height, The," 220, 222, 225
"Dream Tryst," 13-14, 92, 102, 124, 167
"Dress" (verses in _Daily Mail_), 227
Driffield, Fr., 101
Drummond of Hawthornden, 208
Drury Lane, 89
Dryden, 101, 146, 155, 175, 307
_Dublin Review_, 94, 96-7, 100, 201
Dumas, 259
EARLY verse, 27-30
Ecclesiastical Ballads, 169, 195 _n._, 283
Eckhart, Meister, 165
Edgbaston, 248
Edgware Road, 65, 275, 287
_Edinburgh Review_, 150-1, 171, 185, 241, 246
Egoism, the poets', 308
Egyptian religion, 193-4, 196, 222-3
Elgin Avenue, 273-4, 280, 339
Eliot, George, 127
Elision, 132
Elizabethans, the, 177, 256, 270, 334
Embankment, Thames, 24, 278
Emerson, 321, 342
Encyclopædia, an, 56
Enlistment, 56-7, 163
"Erotic" poet(!), F. T. as an, 3, 14 _n._, 124
Esotericism, 191-6, 223-4
Eternal punishment, 226
Etymologies, 159-60
Eve, the New, 194-5
Exercise-books, 32, 34, 104
Extinct animals, 37, 157
FAILURES, F. T.'s successive, 32-4, 54-6, 57
Fairy Tales, 14, 103, 116
"Fallen Yew, The," 108, 109, 132
Fancy and imagination, 191
Feilding, Everard, 186-8
Fiona Macleod, 260
Fisher, Mr., 334
Fletcher, Fr. Philip, 124
"Form and Formalism," 215
Formby, Mr., 127
_Fortnightly Review_, 126, 139, 146-9
Francis, St., of Assisi, 60, _quoted_, 181-2, 283, 295;
F. T. on, 181, 295-6
Francis, St., of Sales, 127, 270
_Franciscan Days of Vigil_ (De Bary's) _quoted_, 182
Franciscans, the, 110 _n._, 180-3
Freemasonry, 193 _n._
Friston, Suffolk, 118-19, 340-1
"From the night of Forebeing," 166, 184
F. S., 25
GALE, Mr. Norman, 136, 140, 249
Gardner, Mr. Edmund, 211 _n._
Garvin, Mr. James, 122
Garvin, Mr. Louis, 122-3, 145, 167, 243;
letters to F. T., 332-3
Gentleness, F. T.'s extreme, 20, 119
Gerrard, Fr. T. J., 348
Ghosh, Mr. S. K., 211-12 _n._, 317
Ghost, a, 186-7, 188
Gibbon, 26
Gillow, Canon Henry, 15, 26
Glasgow, 55-6
Gloom, 133, 227
Golden Halfpennies, the, 67
Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 152
Granville Place, 45, 314
Greco, El, 327
_Guardian, The_, 240
Guildhall Library, London, 63, 91
HARDY, Mr. Thomas, 265-6, 268
Harrow Road, 190, 281
Head, Dr. Henry, 186-8
Hawthorne, _quoted_, 24, 293
Hayes, Mr. Alfred, 248-9
_Health and Holiness_, 288-90, 348
"Heard on the Mountain," 175, 306
Hearn, Lafcadio, 15, 20, 21-3
Henley, W. E., F. T. on, 136, 177-8, 256, 263, 266-7;
on F. T., 149, 262-4;
meeting with, 264-6
Herbert, George, 166-7, 283, 305
"Her Portrait," 127, 141, 174
Hind, C. Lewis, 253, 263-5, 321;
letters from F. T. to, 256-64;
letter to F. T. from, 264
Hinkson, Mrs., _see_ Tynan, Katharine
Holyhead, 13
Homer, 74, 105
Hospital, F. T. in, 94, 349-50
Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth, 349-50
"Hound of Heaven, The," 84, 122, 137 _n._, 144, 164-5, 176, 205-6,
211, 300, 319
Housman, Mr. Laurence, 135
Hügel, Baron von, 201
Hugo, Victor, 98, 175, 306 _n._
Humility, F. T.'s, 187, 237
Humorous verse, 13, 27-8, 111-12, 331
Hunt, Leigh, 191
Huxley, 74
Hyde, Mr. William, 277, 281;
letter from F. T. to, 277
"IDYLLS of the King," F. T. on the, 101
_Ignatius Loyola, Life of St._, 336
Illness and ill-health, 46, 94, 104, 125, 129, 257, 260, 272-3,
339, 349
Imagery, F. T.'s, 13, 91, 187, 207, 216;
F. T. on his own imagery, 97-8, 158;
F. T.'s imagery criticised, 148;
A. M. on imagery, 216-17;
F. T. on imagery in general, 151, 215-17, 219
Imagination, 191, 215-16
_Imperial and Colonial Magazine_, 335
Indifference to comfort, F. T.'s, 287, 288
Individualism, F. T. on, 108-10
Individuality, 108
Inexpertness, F. T.'s, 8, 75
Inobservance, F. T.'s, 274, 276
_Irish Monthly_, 185
JACOBS, Mr. W. W., 266, 271, 350
Jacopone da Todi, 309, 323
James, Henry, 329
Jerome, St., 171
Joan of Arc, 199
John, St., 225. _See also_ Bible
John, St., and St. Elizabeth, Hospital of, 283, 349-50
John of the Cross, St., 146, 224
Johnson, Dr., 325;
quoted, 348
Johnson, Lionel, 85, 323;
quoted, 152, 282
Josephus, 74
Joubert, quoted, 200 (222)
Journalism, 93, 111, 316, 334
"Judgment in Heaven, A," 59, 136, 137, 144, 167
KEATS, 92, 150, 152, 164, 193, 243, 307, 318
Kelsall, an actor, 64
Kempis, Thomas à, 225-6, 243, 283
Kensall Green, St. Mary's Cemetery, 351
Kensington Gardens, 104, 114-15
Kent, W. H., 174
Kent's Bank, near Alverstone, 13
Kilburn, 268, 274
King, Miss Katharine Douglas, 250-1;
letters to F. T. 250-1
King, Mrs. Hamilton, letters to F. T., 132, 250
Kingsford, Anna, 174
Kipling, Mr. Rudyard, 126, 170, 175, 262, 268, 270
L., Miss, 60
Laburnum, 29, 273
Ladysmith, siege of, 9
Lamb, Charles, 20, 61, 321
Landor, 260
Landladies, 274, 279-80, 317
Lane, Mr. John, 129, 135-6, 145, 184
Lang, Mr. Andrew, 136-7, 139, 165
Latin, 171
Latinisms, 33, 155-7
Laureateship, the, 233-4
Lecky, Mr. Walter, 137
Le Gallienne, Mr. Richard, 135-6, 141, 145, 149
Leo XIII., 283
Leonard Square, 250
Leslie, Mr. Shane, 91
Libraries, F. T. as a haunter of, 10, 16, 25, 27, 37, 47, 63
Light, 190, 238 _n._
Light-heartedness, F. T.'s, 27-8, 77
Lilly, W. S., _Century of Revolution_, 124
"Lily of the King, The," 283
_Literary World_, 240
Liturgy, the, 30-31, 33, 156, 171-4
Lockyer, Sir Norman, 238
Lodge, 160
Lodging-houses, 64-5
"Lodi, Storming of the Bridge, at," 26
Log-rolling, 138, 140-143
London, F. T. on, 77, 79, 277-9;
F. T. in, 46, 54, 61-93, 104, 236
Lord's, 44-5
Love and love-affairs, 11, 14, 38, 73-4, 230-2
"Love declared," 230
Lower-worldliness, F. T.'s, 64-7
Lucas, Mr. E. V., 41, 45, 253, 264
Lucas, Winifrid (Mrs. H. Le Bailly), 250
Lytton-Bulwer, 74, 157, 265
Lytton, Hon. Neville, 337
MACAULAY, 10, 26, 169, 260
Maeterlinck, 198-9
"Magic, Varia on," 188, 193
"Making of Viola, The," 59, 93, 122, 158, 179
"Man Proposes, Woman Disposes," 227, 337 _n._
Manchester, F. T. in, 35-6, 46-9, 51, 55, 58, 61, 75, 84, 274
_Manchester Guardian_, 145, 332
Mangan, 168
Mann, Rev. Horace K., 15-16, 19, 24, 26
Manning, Cardinal, 79, 85 _n._, 107-8, 111, 290
Marianus, Fr., 180
Maries, Mrs., 274, 318
Marlowe, 168, 244
Marryat, Captain, 16
Martin, Miss Agnes, 3, 4
"Martyrs, To the English," 275
Marvell, 165
Mary, the Blessed Virgin, 46 _n._, 172-3, 227, 228
Mary Ignatius, Sister (F. T.'s aunt), 5
Mary of St. J. F. de Chantal, Sister (F. T.'s aunt), 5
Mary of the Angels, St., Bayswater, 281, 341
Mary's, St., Cemetery, Kensal Green, 351
Massingham, Mr. H. W., letters to F. T., 332, 336-7
May, Mr. (F. T.'s cousin), 46
McMaster, Mr., 70-76
Medal, a consecrated, 13, 73
Medical student, F. T. as, 35-56
Melpomene, the Vatican, 37-8
_Mercure de France_, 319
Meredith, George, F. T.'s reading of, 150, 165, 266;
on A. M., 233;
F. T.'s meetings with, 245-7;
on F. T., 246-7, 351
_Merry England_, 85, 110, 113, 121, 193, 250;
poems by F. T. in, 87-8, 92, 95, 102, 107, 120, 122, 124, 126,
130-31, 137 _n._, 138, 304;
prose articles by F. T. in, 85, 92, 96, 106, 179
Metaphor and simile, 151
Metre, 151, 158-9, 175-9, 220
Meynell, Alice, on F. T., 94-5, 107, 126, 155, 157, 179, 216-17,
226-7, 320, 331;
F. T. on, 86, 113, 126-8, 133 _n._, 136, 146, 148-9, 216;
other references, 95, 120-1, 137, 183, 194, 224, 234, 238, 245-7,
250, 256, 336;
letters from F. T. to, 130-1, 133 _n._, 159, 177, 183, 188-9, 226,
297, 312, 313;
letters to F. T., 129, 139, 158
Meynell family, F. T. and the, 114, 116-7, 160, 184, 247, 268
Meynell, Mr. Wilfrid, F. T. and, 87, 89-92, 95, 97, 107, 111, 137,
143, 194, 247, 250, 262, 284 _n._, 303, 317, 327, 336, 349;
F. T. on, 86;
on F. T., 98-100, 123, 124-5, 320-2;
letters from F. T. to, 85, 88, 100, 103-4, 110 _n._, 114-17, 129,
135, 145-6, 180, 183, 234-5, 238, 242, 250, 316-18, 335, 337,
339;
other letters to, 58, 107 _n._, 120, 140, 183, 186-8, 247-8
Michael, Sister, 350
Mills, Mr. J. Saxon, 39, 60
Milton, 140, 155-6, 159, 196, 281, 307
Miracles, 67, 348
"Mistress of Vision, The," 165, 222, 237, 240-1
Monica Mary (Saleeby, _née_ Meynell), 113-14, 118-19, 148, 340-1;
letters to, 340-1
"Monica thought dying, To," 132, 145
"Monica, To, after nine years," 119
Moore, Mr. Sturge, 269, 315
_Morning Post_, 152, 240
Morris, Sir Lewis, 190
Moulton, Mrs. Louise Chandler, 252
Murderer, a ("D. I."), 64, 78
Music, F. T.'s love of, 55
Mysticism, true and false, 148, 198-9 221, 223, 237
Mythologies, 196
NAPOLEON JUDGES, 337 _n._
Nares' Glossary, 154
"Narrow Vessel, A," 229-32
_Nation, The_, 155, 157, 179, 216, 320, 336
_National Observer_, 138
_National Review_, 233
Nature, F. T. on, 30, 131-2, 205-7, 211
Nerses, St., the Armenian, 173-4
New Brighton, 13
_New Poems_ (1897), 187;
its reception, 136, 150, 239-43, 253, 308;
a cancelled preface, 158, 175-6, 185, 220, 237-8;
mysticism in, 201, 214, 238;
F. T. on, 236, 238-9, 301, 306;
dedication, 236-7
_New York Post_, 137
Newbolt, Mr. Henry, 139, 269
_Newcastle Daily Chronicle_, 122
"Nocturn," 186
Notebooks, F. T.'s, 27, 227;
_quoted_, 8, 12, 13, 18, 64, 78, 142, 175, 178, 188, 208, 228,
276-7, 283, 303-4
Nowlan, Fr., 26 _n._
Noyes, Mr. Alfred, 269
Nuns of the Cross and Passion, 6
Nyren, 43
ODES, occasional, 321, 332-4
Ode to the Setting Sun, 95, 95 _n._, 124-5, 127, 137 _n._, 176,
201, 211-12
"Old Fogey, An," (Andrew Lang, _soi-disant_), 136
Old Trafford cricket-ground, 39, 43
Opera, the, 46
Opium, F. T. and, 3, 46, 48-9, 51-3, 56-8, 63, 83, 87, 94-6, 104,
123, 163, 254-5, 321
"Orient Ode," 192, 201, 201 _n._, 210, 222, 238
Origen, 223
Orpen, Mr., 327
Ostade, 254
O'Sullivan, Mr. Vincent, 136, 252
Outcasts, 63-4, 74, 81-4
Owens College, Manchester, 35-6, 46, 54
Oxford Street, 61, 70, 274
PADDINGTON, 65, 274
Paganism, 125, 205, 228
"Paganism, Old and New," 85-7, 92, 125, 268
Pain, 69, 129, 294, 295
Palace Court, Kensington, F. T. at, 24, 68, 104, 117, 123, 271,
274, 284 _n._
_Pall Mall Gazette_, 138, 146, 241
Pan, 29-30, 124
Pantasaph, F. T. at, 24, 128-9, 131-2, 143-6, 148-9, 177, 180-97,
230, 233-236, 238-9
Pantheism, 205
Panton Street, 62, 71, 74-5
"Passion of Mary, The," 46 _n._, 87, 88, 92, 124
Passion, The, 6, 288
Parodies, 154, 331
Patmore, Coventry, 130, 143, 275, 282, 328;
F. T.'s friendship with, 146, 148-9, 189-90, 224, 233-6, 250, 312;
F. T.'s affinities with, 144-5, 174, 192-3, 220-1, 223, 267;
"irregular" metre of, 176-8, 193, 220;
quoted, 83-4, 139, 146-8, 164, 190-1, 198, 200, 201, 209, 220,
222, 266, 306 _n._, 312, 317;
_The Poetry of Pathos and Delight_, 234;
_Religio Poetæ_, 189, 191-2;
_Rod, Root and Flower_, 149, 192, 201, 220, 227;
translation of St. Bernard, 191;
_The Unknown Eros_, 181, 191, 222, 238;
letters to, 191-3, 195, 233, 236, 238;
letters from, 149, 194, 197, 221, 233
Patmore, Henry, 21
Paul, St., 220, 223
Perry, Fr. Stephen, 124, 126
Phillips, Fr. G. E., 16
Phillips, Mr. Stephen, 175
Pickpocket Hall, 187
Pico della Mirandola, 204
Pile, Mr., 274-5
Plagiarism, 168
Plevna, siege of, 9
Poe, 178
_Poems_ (1893), 122, 129, 135-48, 158, 170, 238, 243, 341
"Poet breaking Silence, To a," 126, 133
"Poets as Prose Writers," 255, 316
Politics, 335, 339
Pope, 229, 272
"Poppy, The," 118, 341
Portiuncula, the, 185
Poverty, fair and foul, 77-8 _n._, 181, 284-5
Prayer, 73, 84, 104, 280, 286, 287 _n._
Premonstratensians, 95
Preston, 1, 5
Priesthood, F. T. and the, 5, 31-2, 33, 73
Prison, 64, 258
Probyn, Miss May, 85, 116
Prose, F. T.'s, 97-8, 135, 149, 177, 206, 267, 310, 312
Puns, 13, 326
QUANTITY, 176
Quiller-Couch, Sir A. T., 153, 241
RABELAIS, 64
Railton, Sergeant, 19
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 48, 156, 256
Ranjitsinhji, Prince, 42
_Realm, The_, 141, 146
Reformation, the, 12
Refuges, 65
Religion, 30, 31, 33, 34. _See_ Catholicism, and Mysticism
Rendall, Mr. Vernon, letters to F. T., 336
"Renegade Poet on the Poet, A," 302
Reserve, F. T.'s, 7, 18, 32, 35, 74, 90, 297
"Retrospect" ("Sight and Insight"), 184, 214
_Review of Reviews_, 106
Reviews by F. T., 121, 124, 156-7, 168, 171, 175, 253-5, 260, 269
"Rhodes, Cecil, Ode on," 255-6, 335
Rhyl, 185
Richardson, Fr., 46 _n._
Richardson, Mrs. Margaret, _née_ Thompson (the poet's sister), 1,
128, 341
Roger Bacon Society, The, 181, 183
Rook, Mr. Clarence, 253
Rossetti, Christina, 209, 224
Rossetti, D. G., _quoted_, 65 _n._, 82, 87;
F. T.'s reading of, 161, 165, 268;
other references, 127, 136, 154, 156, 164, 224, 239, 318
Rothschild, 67-8
_Rowton House Rhymes_, 93
Ruskin, 127
S., F., 25
St. Beuno's College, 185
_St. James's Gazette_, 135, 140, 145, 170
St. John's Wood, 45
_Saturday Review_, 146, 154, 233, 239
Salle, Blessed J. B. de la, 80
"Saul," an unfinished drama, 338
Scholarship, F. T.'s, 26 _n._, 27, 35
Science, 36, 196, 237-8
_Scots Observer_, 126, 262
Scott, 10, 11
Sea, the, 12-13
Seaman, Mr. Owen, 269
Seeley's (Mr. H. C.), _Dragons of the Air_, 157
_Selected Poems_ (1908), 247
Self-appraisements, F. T.'s, 98, 131, 136, 158, 187, 306
Self-revelation in F. T.'s poetry, 103, 148
Selous, F. C., illustrations to Shakespeare, 11, 38
Seneca, 300
"Sere of the Leaf, The," 102-3, 302
Serendipity Shop, the, 286, 329
Set-worship, 194, 196
Seventeenth Century, 165
Shakespeare, 271;
F. T.'s early reading of, 6, 10-12, 38;
his metre, 177;
his diction, 154-5;
quotations from, or other allusions to, by F. T., 85, 112-13, 117,
133, 175, 196, 238;
F. T. compared with, 138, 143, 150, 168, 244
Sharp, William, 121, 124
"She, the unknown," 73, 84
Sheehan, Canon Patrick, 143
_Sheffield Daily Telegraph_, 240
Shelley, F. T's reading of, 87, 92, 96, 161, 164;
F. T. on, 206, 260;
Essay on, 96-100;
Essay on Shelley, _quoted_, 5-6, 17-18, 98, 217, 219;
F. T.'s "Shelley" poem, 126, 128;
his "Shelley" selection, 100 _n._;
F. T. compared with, 143, 150, 165, 167, 243, 262
Shelters, 65
Shore, Mr. W. Teignmouth, 335
Shore, Miss, 261
Shorter, Mrs. Dora Sigerson, 269
"Sight and Insight," 184, 198
Silence ("my familiar"), 7, 35, 58, 297
Simile and metaphor, 151
Simplicity, F. T.'s personal, 185, 187
"Sir Francis," 119
_Sister Songs_, its writing, 104-6, 152;
its reception, 136, 141, 145, 154, 243-244;
Meredith's epithet, 247;
Wilde's appreciation, 252;
F. T.'s feeling for it, 304;
its actuality, 273;
autobiographical, 81, 148, 168
Skating, 114
Smithfield Market, 117
Snead-Cox, Mr. J. G., 85, 120
Snowdon, 185
Socialism, 110 _n._
Socrates, 223
Solomon, Simeon, 323
"Song of the Hours," 95 _n._, 125
Sonnets, 73, 126
South African War, 9
South Kensington Museum, 105
Southampton Row, 71, 74
Southwater, 159, 349
Southwell, 167
_Speaker, The_, 140, 153, 240, 241
Spenser, 155, 163
Stalybridge, 39, 144
_Standard Book of British Poetry_, 74
_Star, The_, 145
Stead, W. T., 106-7
Stephanon, Lamente forre, 28-9
Stevenson, R. L., 165, 170, 297, 302
Storrington, 95-6, 111
Strand, the, 24, 71 _n._, 163, 278
Suckling, 165
Sun, the, and sun-worship, 210-12, 229, 238, 272-3
Sunrises and Sunsets, 131, 161, 290
Sussex, 346
Sutherland, the Duchess of, 252
Swedenborg, 206-7, 271
Swinburne, F. T's reading of, 97, 265, 268;
F. T. on, 126, 178-9, 266
"Sylvia," 8, 148, 151, 349
Symons, Arthur, 144-6, 198-9, 269
Symbolism, 193-6, 211, 215, 218
_Tablet, The_, 99, 125, 126, 137 _n._, 138
"Tancred, Francis" (pseudonym of F. T.), 106
Tate, Dr., President of Ushaw, 26, 32
Taylor, Jeremy, 156
Tennyson, 101, 120, 179 _n._, 230, 260
Terence, 299
Texts as stimulants, 32, 68, 325-6
Thames Embankment, 24, 64, 192, 278
Theresa, St., 146
Thomas à Kempis, 225-6, 243, 283
Thomas, Mr. Edward, 198
Thomas of Celano, 181
Thompson, Dr. Charles (F. T.'s father), 1, 2, 4, 36, 54-60, 71, 107
_n._, 127, 144, 185-6
Thompson, Edward Healy (F. T.'s uncle), 2, 3, 14 _n._, 46 _n._,
58-9, 61, 68, 85 _n._, 124
Thompson family, the, 1-5
THOMPSON, FRANCIS JOSEPH, birth, pedigree, parentage, 1-4;
his paternal uncles, 2, 3;
other relatives, 4, 5;
childhood, 6 _seq._;
home-life, 7-14, 35, 54-5, 57-60, 74-5;
early reading, 6, 10-12;
at the seaside, 12, 13;
cricket, 13, 39-45;
at Ushaw, 15-21, 24-32;
intention of the priesthood abandoned, 32-4;
a medical student at Owens College, Manchester, 35-46;
visits to London (1879 and 1882), 46, 54;
illness, 46;
reading de Quincey, 46;
taking opium, 48-53, 56;
fails in his exams., 54-6;
love of music, 55;
enlists, 56-7;
flight from home, 57,
to Manchester, 58,
to London, 58, 61;
odd jobs, 62-3;
an outcast, 63-4;
lodging-houses and refuges, 64-5;
pieces of good-luck, 67-8;
roofless nights, 69-70;
with Mr. McMaster (the bootmaker), 70-75;
a Christmas at home, 74-5;
"in darkest London," 76-80;
his "brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing," 81-4, 92;
a meeting with the editor of _Merry England_, 85-90;
the Meynell household, 90-2;
contributes to _Merry England_, 92, 120-6;
sent to a private hospital, 94;
renunciation of opium, 94-5;
at Storrington, 95;
writing poetry, 95;
the essay on Shelley, 96-100;
return to London, 104;
"The Hound of Heaven" and "Sister Songs," 104;
article on General Booth's _In Darkest England_, 106-7;
interview with Cardinal Manning, 107-8;
journalism, 111-12, 117, 253-70;
visits to Crawley, 112-13, 344-6;
in Kensington Gardens, 114-15;
at Friston, in Suffolk, 118-19;
at Pantasaph, 128-33, 140, 143-48, 177, 180-97, 230-39;
_Poems_ (1893), 128-48;
_Sister Songs_ (1895), 141, 145, 149-50;
friendship with Coventry Patmore, 139, 146-9, 189-97, 220-4,
233-4;
his critics, 152-61;
his congeners, 161-70, 174;
his father's death, 185-186;
his mysticism, 191-232;
his attitude to Nature, 205-8;
his religion, 224-7;
his attitude to women, 227-32;
a love-affair, 230;
death of Patmore, 234-7;
_New Poems_, 198, 201, 203, 236-43;
return to London, 245;
meeting with Meredith, 245-7;
other friends, 247-52;
writes for _The Academy_, 253-70, 334-6;
criticisms on and meeting with W. E. Henley, 262-7;
his catholic appreciation of modern literature, 265-6, 268-9;
but preference for the older writers, 270-271;
as a Londoner, 272-81, 284, 288;
his poverty, 284-7;
his loneliness, 291;
bereft of song, 301-4, 306-7;
was he happy or unhappy? 304-5, 329-33;
his personal appearance, 327-8;
writes for _The Athenæum_, 336;
a return to opium, 342;
visits to Sussex, 344-49;
returns to London, and goes into hospital, 349;
death, 350
Thompson, Francis Joseph, letters from, to Mother Austin (his sister
Mary), 333;
to Dr. Carroll, 97, 123;
to Mr. Doubleday, 306 _n._;
to Mr. C. L. Hind, 256-61;
to Mr. William Hyde, 277;
to Mrs. Meynell, 130, 132-3, 159, 177, 183, 188-9, 226, 297,
312-13;
to Everard Meynell, 44, 159, 328-31, 345;
to Wilfrid Meynell, 85, 88, 100, 103-5, 110 _n._, 112, 114-17,
129, 135, 145, 180, 183, 234-5, 238, 242, 250, 316-18,
334-5, 337-8;
to Coventry Patmore, 191-3, 195, 233-4, 236, 238;
to Mrs. Patmore, 234;
to Mrs. Saleeby (_née_ Monica Meynell), 340-341;
to Miss Agnes Tobin, 252
---- Letters to, from Father Anselm, 344-5;
from Mr. W. Archer, 242;
from Mother Austen (his sister Mary), 334;
from Mr. J. L. Garvin, 332-3;
from Mr. C. L. Hind, 264;
from Mrs. Hamilton King, 132, 250;
from Miss K. Douglas King, 250;
from Mr. H. W. Massingham, 332, 336;
from Mrs. Meynell, 129, 158;
from Coventry Patmore, 149, 194, 197, 221, 233;
from Mrs. Patmore, 237;
from Mr. Vernon Rendall, 336;
from W. T. Stead, 106;
from Mrs. Tynan Hinkson, 102
Thompson, Helen (F. T. s sister), 1 _n._
Thompson, John Costall (F. T.'s uncle), 2, 3
Thompson, Margaret (F. T.'s sister), 1, 128
Thompson, Mary (F. T.'s sister), "Mother Austin," a nun, 1 _n._, 7,
8, 12-14, 39-4, 57, 59, 75, 127, 186, 287 _n._, 341;
letter to, 333;
letter from, 334
Thompson, Mary Turner, _née_ Morton (F. T.'s mother), 1, 4, 7, 10,
46, 48-9
Thorp, Mr., 259
_Times, The_, 240, 319, 320
Timidity, F. T.'s, 13, 15, 32, 265
"To my Godchild," 123, 137, 162, 273
Tobin, Miss Agnes, 252
Tolstoy, 109
"Tommy," 15, 19, 27
"Tom o' Bedlam, 65, 207
Toys, F. T.'s, 8, 98
Traherne, 74, 285, 288
Traill, Mr. H. D., 144-5, 149
Tregunter Road, Fulham, 46
"Twopenny Damn, The," 139
Tyburn, 275
Tynan, Katharine (Mrs. Hinkson), 85 _n._, 102, 122, 137 _n._, 209,
302;
letters to F. T., 102
"ULTIMA," 306
University Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 318-9
Unpublished fragments of verse, 65, 81, 161, 188, 208, 213, 236,
270, 276-7, 280, 291-3, 295
Unpublished poems, 73-4, 77-8, 292-3, 296-7
Unpunctuality, F. T.'s, 9, 33, 72, 257, 264-5, 327
Unworldliness, F. T.'s, 5, 249, 287-8
Ushaw, F. T. at, 14, 34, 127
VAUGHAN, Henry, 198, 209, 288
Vaughan, Cardinal, 33, 99, 283
Verlaine, 320, 322
"Veteran of Heaven, The," 169, 195 _n._
Vienna Café, The, 280, 303
Vulgate, the, 171
WALES, F. T. in, 24, 128-32, 143-9, 177-97, 230-9
War, fears of a general, 193 _n._, 339-40
Wardour Street, 70
Watson, Mr. William, 136, 145, 259
Watts, Mr. Augustine, 21
Watts-Dunton, Mr. Theodore, 165
Waugh, Mr. Arthur, 258
_Weekly Register, The_, 111, 113, 124, 127, 135, 137
_Weekly Sun_, 141
Wells, Mr. H. G., 258
Westbourne Grove, 266, 284, 286
"Westminster Drolleries," 64
_Westminster Gazette_, 137, 154
Whiteing, Mr. Richard, 112, 241
Whiteside, Dr., Archbishop of Liverpool, 27
Whitten, Mr. Wilfred, 71 _n._, 257, 337;
his reminiscences of F. T., 253-4, 280-1, 303, 307
Wilde, Oscar, 127, 252
Wilkinson, Fr. Adam, 20, 24
Winefride's Well, St., 185
Wiseman, Cardinal, 23, 99, 100
Woman, F. T. on, 227-9, 231
_Woman_ on F. T., 149
Wordsworth, _quoted_, 311;
_quoted_ by F. T., 87, 159;
points of contact with F. T., 160, 167, 183, 325;
points of opposition, 205-6;
F. T.'s article on, 260
Wormwood Scrubbs, 44
Wyndham, Mr. George, 100, 160, 256
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
at Paul's Work, Edinburgh
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Obvious punctuation errors were corrected.
Varied hyphenation was retained.
Page 48, "fastastic" changed to "fantastic" (of the fantastic imagery)
Page 201-203, the final line on page 201 ends well before the edge
of the right margin. The next line on page 202 has no indentation. A
paragraph break was assumed and inserted at the line beginning (He
came, even to the point)
Page 211, originally, footnote 48, a word in the original was missing
its first two letters. "stness" was retained as no certain word could
be inferred from the text.
Page 213, "Quæ coeli" changed to "Quae cæli" (Quae cæli pandis ostium!)
Page 236, "expresssed" changed to "expressed" (expressed in the
obituary)
Page 328, "count" was left as printed for it was a quotation from a
letter and may well have been used as printed in the original letter.
(if character count for)
Page 354, "Portra it" changed to "Portrait" (Canon Law in _Her
Portrait_)
Page 357, "M'Master" changed to "McMaster" to match usage in text
(McMaster, Mr., 70-76)
Page 358, "Ranjitsinjhi" changed to "Ranjitsinhji" (Ranjitsinhji,
Prince, 42)
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Life of Francis Thompson" ***
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