»
THE LIFE OF
FRANCIS THOMPSON
First published, October 1913.
Second impression, December 1913.
New edition, uniform with Francis Thompson's " Works"
February 1916.
THE LIFE OF
FRANCIS THOMPSON
BY EVERARD MEYNELL
BURNS ftf GATES LTD
28 Orchard St
London
W
Printed in England
To
Grazia
second time
1916
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 . . . . . . > > i
II. The Boy . . . . . . . . 15
III. Manchester and Medicine .... 35
IV. London Streets . . . . . .61
V. The Discovery .85
VI. Literary Beginnings . . . . . in
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. . .-' v . . . 339
Index . . $ ; . . . . 353
vii
THE LIFE OF FRANCIS
THOMPSON
CHAPTER I: THE CHILD
"W~ WAS born in 1858 or 1859 (I never could remember
and don't care which) at Preston in Lancashire.
JL 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 i6th 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 grand-
father) was Robert Thompson, Surveyor of Taxes suc-
cessively 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 1857.2
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
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.
* A pedigree of Thompson's family, compiled by Mr. Perceval Lucas, is
printed in The Pedigree Register for March 1913 (vol. ii. pp. 353-357).
A
The Child
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,
it is conjectured, figures 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 l) 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.
1 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.
The Writing Uncles
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 li Sweet Calne in Wiltshire " from
July 1838 to January 1840, and had for neighbour there
the friend of Lamb and Wordsworth, to whom Cole-
ridge, 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
3
The Child
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 re-
hearsed 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.1 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.
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 admit-
tance to a convent and failing through ill health to take
final vows, is that she is unfit 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.
1 At the Convent of the Holy Child, St. Leonard's-on-Sea.
4
Family Likenesses
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 thought-
lessness for mundane concerns that goes with some
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 know-
ing 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 in-
habit 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
5
The Child
to be the child Francis : " It is to have a spirit yet stream-
ing 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 every-
thing, 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 anticipa-
tions— 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 Cole-
ridge: their three ages of discretion kept company.
6
He reaches the Age of Discretion
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 loneli-
ness, 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 child-
hood are not joyful. The " long tragedy of early ex-
periences " 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 con-
cealment, not expression, of myself. Expression I
reserved for my pen. My tongue was tenaciously disci-
plined 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 allu-
sions to its beginnings, he wrote of the tl 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
7
The Child
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 responsi-
bility, 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 play-
ing 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 objec-
tivity 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 in-
justice was awakened early. He lost the prize— a
clockwork mouse, no less I—offered by his governess.
8
He has Plevna by Heart
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 ; child-
hood was an easier role. Brothers would have told
him it was bad form to care for dolls. He writes, in
"The Fourth Order of Humanity," that he was "with-
held even in childhood from the youthful male's con-
tempt 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 pre-
judice ; in the matter of dolls, I essayed to confound
it. By eloquence and fine diplomacy I wrung from
9
The Child
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 ex-
cellencies 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 — especi-
ally 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 con-
fined 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
10
He reads Shakespeare
that sense of trance, of dream-like dimness, the moon-
light 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 indepen-
dent of all notes. So, in truth, was it with the play as a
whole. So, again, I profoundly experienced the atmos-
pheric 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
ii
The Child
childish introduction to the supreme poet.1 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 Caesar '
as drv — though they diplomatically refrained from say-
ing so. Comparing the pictures of mediaeval 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)."
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 attract-
ing 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.
x A photograph (now missing), taken at the age of eleven or twelve, shows
Jrancis 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 !
12
He beholds the Ocean
He adds, " I do not know whether the image is alto-
gether 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 Ulver stone, 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 child-
hood. 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
13
The Child
Tryst " one is employed. He was eleven, older by two
years than Dante smitten with love in Florence, when
he met the Lucide 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.1
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 Vitae, 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.
1 "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 class-
mate 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.
An article by Dr. Mann and Fr. Adam Wilkinson in the
Ushaw Magazine provides first impressions of the new
boy : —
" Canon Henry Gillow — the Prefect of that time in the Semi-
nary— assigned him his bedplace, and gave to him two ministering
angels in the guise of play-fellows. Then, for initiation, a whin-
bush probably occupied his undivided attention, and he would
emerge from it with a variant on his patronymic appellation !
15
The Boy
' 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."
In the Ushaw Magazine 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 shared a thousand patchwork meals with him.
Fires he always haunted, and his clothes were burnt on
sundry occasions, as they were before the class-room
fire. But of the piracy what shall we say ? Although
he never lost that habit of the collar, and never shook
off the crumbs of those tarts, he forgot the way to be a
pirate. A good picture of his person is to be had
from his friendly schoolfellows' recollections ; for his
16
Grief and the Child
mood we must go to his own. In writing of Shelley
he builds up a poet's boyhood from a poet's own
experience : —
" 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, dechirants (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 :
17 B
The Boy
the sorrow should be estimated by its proportion to
the sorrower ; a gash is as painful to one as an amputa-
tion to another. Pour a puddle into a thimble, or an
Atlantic into Etna ; both thimble and mountain over-
flow. 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 impres-
sions of school he could not write lightly, as a normal
boy would of those then normal experiences :
"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 pro-
vocative 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 sensitivenesses that were to mark, and even to
make, the future poet were already at work within him.
Already at Ushaw, as so often in his later years, he was
safest and happiest alone, and hardly can his school-
18
Teasing, and a Punishment
fellows recognise Thompson's painful memories as being
conceivably based on actual experience. 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 fellowmen, and I do
not suspect them of ever having done a living creature
an intentional hurt. Teasing, at best, is an ignorant
occupation ; at worst, not calculated to live in the
memory. Nor does your normal boy, of Ushaw or any
other school, admit that wrong is done him by the rod.
His school-days are happy ; the cane is only an incon-
venience 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 does not fit the
generalisation. The school-boy's account of the punish-
ment of the boy at school illustrates the difference be-
tween the two ; for the one it is fit matter for an anecdote,
for Francis it was an episode never to be alluded to. A
contemporary writes : " Some old Ushaw men may
wonder whether, in his passage through the Seminary,
Francis 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."
19
The Boy
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." x Such is
Lafcadio Hearn's "The boy stood on the bloody floor
where many oft had stood," conned by his class-mates
at Ushaw. But Francis 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. I am reluctant and
ashamed to be less brave on the poet's behalf — to be out
of the joke; and yet, remembering him for what he was,
I find it difficult to put a better face on it.
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 school-
fellow 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
1 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 han the Boy.
2O
Henry Patmore
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 Pat-
more 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. He arrived in
Ushaw in 1863, a boy of thirteen, but unlike Thompson,
mixed a strong rebelliousness with his nervousness, and
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 close
to 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 bitter-
ness 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 un-»
21
The Boy
confined 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
F. T.'s " Heaven and I wept together."
Hearn's own words, in a letter to Krehbiel, the
musician, show a rather 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 con-
sciousness 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 (ha4 ajnd. cruel as I used
22
Lafcadio Hearn
to imagine it) is founded on the best experience of man under
civilisation ; and I understand lots of things I used to think super-
stitious bosh, and now think solid wisdom."
When an enthusiastic critic said, at the time Thomp-
son'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 : t( 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
regime of rescue than to shiver unobserved on the
Embankment, or starve, with no invitation or punc-
tuality 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 pavement, a torture insufficient to curb the
spirit.
Dr. Carroll, Bishop of Shrewsbury, Fr. Adam Wilkin-
son, 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
23
The Boy
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 ap-
pearance 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 un-
doing, 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 vaca-
tion of 1874 he automatically changes his surroundings, going from
24
Ushaw Recreations
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 : —
" 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, de-
claiming "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 speci-
men of the stuff that put him head of his English
class. The piece took the ears of his schoolfellows;
25
The Boy
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.1 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 "1'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
1 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 loth. 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."
26
The Greek of Dreams
skit in Latin rhyme, bidding farewell to work before the vacation,
and beginning :
Nunc relinquemus in oblivium
Caesarem 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 after-
noons, 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 de-
pression 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 read-
27
The Boy
ing, 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 I
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, mv
28 ' J
The First Verses
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 I 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 I
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.
29
The Boy
The schoolboy's invocation is : —
And thou, 0 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, 0 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 ob-
server, 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
30
Thoughts of the Priesthood
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 ist 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 con-
gregation ; 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 be-
trayed 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 Tatlock 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
The Boy
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 con-
versations 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 candle-
light," 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
32
The Disappointment
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
I 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. ft 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 disappoint-
ment 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
33 C
The Boy
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.
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.
34
CHAPTER III: MANCHESTER AND
MEDICINE
A 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 Man-
chester, 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
35
Manchester and Medicine
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, some-
times with a threatening show of anger. He would con-
gratulate 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 ex-
aggerate 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,
36
The Doctor's Son
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 practi-
tioner. 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 bronzed 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
my 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
profile wholly shifted its meaning according
37
Manchester and Medicine
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 con-
temned 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.
38
Cricket
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
tl 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 prac-
tical 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 wit-
nessed was that between Lancashire and Gloucestershire
in 1878. His sister remembers it, and he celebrates it
39
Manchester and Medicine
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 : —
0 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 ?
0, 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 Joys of Mary, to keep
her young.
4°
The Red Rose
Francis in 1900 could draw up the whole of the
Lanes. 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.
0 Lancashire Red Rose, 0 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 !
41
Manchester and Medicine
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!1
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."
42
Old Trafford
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 de-
parted 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
43
Manchester and Medicine
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 turn-
stile 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 : —
44
Lord's
" I did not go to Lord's. Could not get there before
lunch ; and getting a paper at Baker Street saw Lancas-
shire 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 en-
gendered 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
45
Manchester and Medicine
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.1 The trials of ex-
amination 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?' It was a last gift, for she died
December 19, 1880. Apart from the immediate conse-
quences 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.
1 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.
1 His uncle, Edward Healy Thompson, afterwards remembered that The
Opium Eater was his favourite book at home : " We had often said his ex-
periences 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, Ashtpn-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
btreet he made use that same night of pencil and paper."
46
A de Quincey Parallel
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 possi-
bility of a Titian, so the style of de Quincey, the habit
of his mind, the manner of his confessing, his conceal-
ments 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 com-
munion with de Quincey, these two are linked, and in
them the family likeness is apparent, what of the like-
ness 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 coinci-
dence of intellect, such as the two flights from Man-
chester and the two lives in the streets of London,
clashed upon the attention of the young man who
was withdrawn from the companionship of contem-
poraries ?
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
47
Manchester and Medicine
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 spokes-
man, 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 : —
" 0 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 re-
lenting 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 ; — 0 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 Hekatbmpylos ; 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, 0 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 toler-
able in a city. It harbours such a multitude of distresses,
48
The Confessions
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 con-
sumers. 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 neces-
sity plucked from the Tree of the Fall. It killed in him
49 D
Manchester and Medicine
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 Con-
fessions 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—
50
The School of Opium
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 ^Eolian 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 sensi-
tivenesses 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
51
Manchester and Medicine
proportion of the probable motives and prospects of the offender,
and to the palliations, known or secret, of the offence ; in pro-
portion 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, ad-
vanced 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 con-
science 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
52
" The Saving of my Life 5l
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 admir-
able 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 con-
templation 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 contribu-
tions 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
53
Manchester and Medicine
I cannot call these scullions in good print 'ass un-
paralleled/ 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.
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 un-
likely that on this first occasion he summoned enough
courage to play truant. In all probability he was con-
ducted 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 in-
formation 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 IQS§ at home.
54
The Examinations
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 per-
formance. 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 pro-
fession of medicine should be made at Glasgow, where
degrees were more easily, if less honourably, to be ob-
tained. 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
55
Manchester and Medicine
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 dis-
appointment 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 spend-
ing 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 encyclopaedia.
At neither of these businesses did Francis succeed ; it
took him two months to read the encyclopaedia, 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
56
He Enlists
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
57
Manchester and Medicine
character, but both are very reserved, indeed impene-
trable." 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 instru-
ments. 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. What-
ever its discouragement, it must yet have been some-
thing added to the little sum of hopefulness to leave Man-
chester. 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 after-
wards 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
58
His Father
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 pecu-
niarily, but at present I am not. However, I can show him sym-
pathy 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 animad-
versions."
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 ap-
proaching the profane."
But Francis had another opinion of the poetic in-
fluence 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 mediaeval
imitation, but the natural temper of my Catholic training
in a simple provincial home" is easily believed. It is
59
Manchester and Medicine
not generally understood, he says, that the lt irreverence "
(so called) of mediaeval poetry and drama is not merely
primitive but Catholic. He quotes, as quite within his
comprehension, the remark of a friend 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. ]. 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."
60
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 excite-
ments 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
61
London Streets
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 attain-
ments 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 turn-
ing 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 under-
62
He does Odd Jobs
take. 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 surround-
ings tempered by physical indifference ; and the admix-
ture with this same physical indifference of an extreme
bodily frailty and susceptibility to suffering — all the con-
tradictions 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 gentle-
ness 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 accompani-
ment 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 gener-
ally opposed to Atheism ; that he is often nameless,
often kind, always honest with his fellows (" only once
did anyone try to cheat me"). Generosity he noticed
63
London Streets
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 im-
possible 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 ' West-
minster Drolleries ' and other eighteenth century collec-
tions of swine-trough hoggery. For naked bestiality you
must go to the modern bete humatne." 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, Evi,
you do not spend your penny on a mug of tea. That
will be gone very quickly. You spend it, Evi, not on
64
Boot-black
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.1'
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 smeared sun
Doth clot upon
A heaven without horizon.1
In a common lodging-house he met and had tahVwith
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
1 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.
65 E
London Streets
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 com-
panionless 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 him-
self 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
66
Miracle of the Halfpennies
acumen in the matter of dishes or of waitresses, adjust-
ing 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 Half-
pennies. 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 claim-
ant, and put into his waistcoat pocket, as he affirmed
with the many repetitions that characterised his anec-
dotes, 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, Evi ; I looked and I saw it was a sove-
reign 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
London Streets
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 con-
venient 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.
68
Delirium
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 painless-
ness. 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 drift-
ing 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 counte-
69
London Streets
nances. 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, work-
rooms, and parlour, should have loomed large. But
what the rescued man thought worth telling of the in-
cident 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
70
Help at Hand
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 boot-
maker, 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,1 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
1 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.
71
London Streets
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 ordi-
nary 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 gentle-
ness 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,
72
The Outcast's Devotions
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 in-
terrupted, 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 sonnet, 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 !
73
London Streets
And with the sonnet he sent to my mother three lines :
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 de-
voured, 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 Tra-
herne 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.
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
74
He leaves the Boot-shop
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. What-
ever 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
75
London Streets
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 imme-
diately 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 succes-
sion)— 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
He returns to the Streets
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
Bronte, 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 Bronte'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 battle-
field 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." l It was later, too, that
he wrote of
the places infamous to tell,
Where God wipes not the tears from any eyes.
1 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
77
London Streets
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
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.
78
In Darkest London
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.
lt 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 wilder-
ness ; 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." 1
Of the things he heard — and misery, he says, cries out
from the kerbstone — the laugh, not the cry, of the chil-
dren 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
1 F. T.'s review of Booth's In Darkest England.
79
London Streets
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 tete de thomme du peuple, nay rather
de Fenfant 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.'1 For it drives home a truth which I fear the
English public, with all its compassion for our desti-
tute 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."
1 In Booth's In Darkest England.
80
His Friend
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,
81 F
London Streets
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 barbed minutes at me ;
Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour
In night's slow- wheeled 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, — 0 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.
82
" Swift and Trackless Fugitive "
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 oppor-
tunity ; 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.
83
London Streets
As with de Quincey, so with Patmore, so with Francis.
To the dream, or sense, of pursuit, was added the sus-
picion 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."
CHAPTER V: THE DISCOVERY
ANALLY, probably the result of a gift from Man-
chester, came about in the latter half of Feb-
ruary 1887. I quote his own words : " With a
few shillings to give me breathing space, I began to de-
cipher 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?* Next day I spent the half-
penny on two boxes of matches, and began the struggle
for life."
This was the covering letter to my father, its editor : —
" Feb. 2$rd, '87. — Dear Sir, — In enclosing the accom-
panying 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 judgement 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
1 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. Clarke, J. Eastwood Kidson, and
Bernard Whelan.
85
The Discovery
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 un-
harassed 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 pro-
cessional 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 degrada-
tion 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
86
Dead-letter Office
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 and diffi-
cult in outward aspect, were at first pigeon-holed by a
pre-occupied editor — 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
W. M. and A. 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 the author to call for a proof and
to discuss the chances of future work. To that letter
came no reply and publication was postponed. Then his
letter was returned through the dead-letter office, and the
editor could only print the " Passion of Mary" as a pos-
sible way of getting into communication with the author.
The Discovery
The poem appeared in Merry England 'for April 1888, and
on the i4th my father received the following letter : —
"April iafh} 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 circum-
stances. 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 ex-
plain 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.
88
The Chemist's Capture
" 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 dis-
couraging. 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
The Discovery
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 character-
istic 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-mailed 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
90
He Hesitates
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 pro-
moted 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 barbe*d 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-wheeled 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
The Discovery
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 after-
noon, 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 appear-
ances, 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 enthu-
siasm 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. " Pagan-
ism 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
92
Making of a Poet
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 Venire 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 busi-
ness 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 in-
93
The Discovery
signia 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 un-
plumbed, 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 per-
functory 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 illu-
sion 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 him-
self, 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 un-
94
He Renounces Opium
named, in Coleridge's conscious talk ; other things he would
mfess, but not this, which was the daily desire, the daily posses-
>ion, and the daily stealth. So it was also, in his own degree,
rith this later sufferer. Francis Thompson was not like Coleridge ;
ic 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
te doors of the intellect. Opium killed the poet in
)oleridge ; 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
>ne 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 mid-
summer 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
irst 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
>pened the ode l : —
The wailful sweetness of the violin
Floats down the hushed waters of the wind,
The heart-strings of the throbbing harp begin
To long in aching music. . . .
'hus by accident were the words of Sir Thomas
Irowne, an author beloved of Francis — words quoted by
1 He himself notes the circumstances of composition. " Mem. — ' Ode to
string Sun ' begun in the field of the Cross, and under shadow of the Cross,
sunset; finished ascending and descending Jacob's Ladder (mid or late
noon ?) " " The Song of the Hours " also was written at Storrington.
95
The Discovery
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 Dubhn 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 Storrington1 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 re-
gard to the article, please take no notice of any writing
1 The Shelley Essay bears signs of the booklessness of Storrington. All
the quotations were made from memory, and nearly all were inaccurate.
96
At Storrington
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 elabora-
tion. It might have been written in tears, and is pro-
portionately dear to me. I fear, however, that it will
not be accepted, or accepted only with such modifica-
tions 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 sup-
pression, 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, pon-
derous, ecclesiastical Dublin confronted with poetic prose
must be considerably scared. The editor probably cannot
97 G
The Discovery
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 can-
not help a sardonic grin at his conjectured perplexity.
Mr. MeynelPs opinion was < " Shelley " is splendid.' . . .
11 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, my-
self. 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 remark-
ing 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
98
" Shelley ' is Rejected
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 compre-
hension. 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 ex-
treme. 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
99
The Discovery
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 Theo-
logy and Literature might be reconciled — just such another recon-
ciliation 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 l 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 re-
generate. 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
1 Also a Shelley " Selection," not published,
100
He Learns to Work
fault. I miscalculated the date from Father DrimekTs
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 pro-
ceed 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
4 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
101
The Discovery
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 apostro-
phising her, even in her poetical and therefore public
capacity. I can only plead that verse, like TAmour'
in Carmen's song —
est enfant de Boheme,
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
102
The Confessional of Verse
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 :—
" 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 four ill nights, 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 sacer-
dotal one. That touches only your sins, and leaves
in merciful darkness your ignominious, if sinless, weak-
nesses. When the soul goes forth, like Andersen's
Emperor, thinking herself clothed round with sing-
ing-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 ex-
plained 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
103
The Discovery
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 en-
crustation of disease, of opium, of street miseries.
In February 1890, having bidden good-bye at Stor-
rington 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
104
A Christmas Present
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 withered.
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, "Amphicy-
pellon," he wrote : —
ft It refers to the ajuL(f)tKV7re\\ov which Hephaestus, in
Homer, bears round to the gods when he acts as cup-
bearer by way of joke. When Schliemann's things from
Troy were first exhibited at South Kensington, I re-
member 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
105
The Discovery
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. l 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
1 06
Cardinal Manning
more than anything that has appeared for a long time. * That
man can write/ said Bramwell Booth to me, and I think he sin-
cerely grudges your pen to the Catholic Church. — I am, yours
truly, W. T. STEAD." l
Cardinal Manning2 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."
1 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
chasmed fears ") to a friend, as an antidote to decadent poetry.
2 At this time he met another Cardinal of the future ( Vaughan), 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 1 892, from Bishop Carroll, runs : —
" MY DEAR MR. MEYNELL, — Francis Thompson's father has agreed to
give me a small sum weekly (3-r. 6d.) 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^. It is not much, but it will help. — Ever yours sincerely,
J. CARROLL."
107
The Discovery
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 : *
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 good-
will 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 sup-
pressed 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
1 The old Archbishop's House in Carlisle Place.
108
Multitude and Solitude
hotly nevertheless of the Political Economist's In-
dividualism : —
" 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
109
The Discovery
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.1
1 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."
110
CHAPTER VI: LITERARY BEGINNINGS
THE discovery that a man cannot, with any per-
manence, 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 m-iting,
ill
Literary Beginnings
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
112
On the " Register ':
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 disgust-
ing 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 parti-
cular, 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 thatj 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."
113 H
Literary Beginnings
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 to my father like the gravest sportsman and in-
tentest child of skating in Kensington Gardens in the
winter of 1891 : —
" The discovery of what I have done to my own skates
leads me to ask you to warn Monica. 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 tyran-
nised 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."
114
In Kensington Gardens
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 instan-
taneous 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
Literary Beginnings
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 be-
yond 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
116
A Wandering Contributor
the heart as a sleeve-ornament, but conspicuously label
it — i 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 dis-
ciplined 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 im-
patient 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
117
Literary Beginnings
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.1
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,
1 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.
118
In the Land of Flag-lilies
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 remem-
bered 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 ?
119
Literary Beginnings
Now at one, and now at two,
Swift to pout and swift to woo,
The maid I knew :
Still I see the dusked 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 : —
" 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 could 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 en-
deavouring 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 him-
self— as by a strenuous effort he may — from all that must now
embarrass him terribly. He can have no better friend and ad-
viser than yourself — except himself, if he listens to the inner voice.
" Pray offer my best thanks to Mrs. Meynell for her remem-
120
Browning's Letter
brance 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.1 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 influ-
ence over my mental development when without such
1 *' Homenuard" Browning left Asolo at the end of October, and died in
Venice early in December.
121
Literary Beginnings
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 tender-
ness of your gardening."
The poems as they appeared in Merry Englana 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 gar-
rulous gorilla leader was perfectly intelligible in next
122
Enter Mr. Garvin
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
123
Literary Beginnings
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 admira-
tion ; 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
124
He writes to Manchester
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 publish-
ing 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-introduc-
tion 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 writ-
ing to you. Much, no doubt, is due to this infernal
weather. Confined to the house and deprived of sun-
light, 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.
Literary Beginnings
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, grace-
fully turned fancy ; what the Elizabethans would have
called an excellent conceit. That it is nothing more,
I quite agree with Mr. Blackburn, whose judgement I
much value. In the first place he generally represents
Mrs. Meynell's judgement, 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 judgement 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 Swin-
burne has contributed to the Fortnightly. In last
week's Scots Observer appeared an exquisite little poem 2
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 de-
velopment.
1 A Weekly Register and Pantasaph friend.
2 " Veni Creator."
126
Prose in Embryo
"Most women of genius — George Eliot, Charlotte
Bronte, 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,
meojudido, 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 mala-
propisms. A friend met her in Paris, and was about
to address her when the lady put up her hand : l 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 Exhibi-
tion 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
127
Literary Beginnings
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 dedi-
cation to yourself. But in that case I have the right
to withdraw the dedication altogether, as I should cer-
tainly do. I should belie the truth and my own feelings
if I represented Mrs. Meynell as the sole person to
128
,
The Clogged Wheels Move
whom I owe what it has been given to me to accom-
plish in poetry. Suffer this — the sole thing, as un-
fortunate 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
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 beauti-
ful. 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."
129 I
Literary Beginnings
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 —
" i. 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 him-
self 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 surfer 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 Phoebus'
lieges, in a magazine bearing the style and denomina-
tion 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.
130
A Boast of Intimacy
"The meaning (which I must have perfectly clear)
is that flowers which are fertilised by night-insects con-
front 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." l
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 Crea-
tion, 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
1 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."
Literary Beginnings
approaching day, were crowded into that single per-
formance.
" 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 galere ?
I believe, it is true, the public has an odd kind of pre-
judice that poems are written for its benefit. It might
as well suppose that when a woman loves, she bears chil-
dren for its benefit ; or (in the case of the poem in ques-
tion) that when a man is hurt, he bleeds for its benefit."
132
The Flouted Public
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 : —
tl It seems to me that they read better than I had
expected — particularly the large additions to ' To a
Poet Breaking Silence/ 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,1 and of course should
most greatly value them. I need not say how deeply
I rejoice at your success."
1 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 ? "
133
47 PALACE COURT
(Where many of F. T.'s poems were •written)
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 else-
where the praise and blame it received were both whole-
hearted : —
"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 litterateurs 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 Gal-
lienne's Chronicle article, he writes from Pantasaph : —
" When the first whirl of language is over (was it not
a sin of my own former prose when I waxed enthusi-
astic ?) he settles down to appreciation which is at the
135
" Poems "
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 l 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 for-
gotten that it was Le Gallienne's admiration for the
specimen sent to Lane which finally decided the publica-
tion 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,
Apropos 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 : —
136
He Reads the Reviews
" 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."1
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 descrip-
tion 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 dis-
covery— 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 ' 1 "
It came to pass that this poet of fewest friends was
1 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 I9th 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 compli-
ments and several biographical inaccuracies. In the secular press of America
F. T. fared less well. The New York Post, I9th 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.
137
"Poems"
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 Blackburn 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 com-
panies. 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 "con-
spirator" among his reviewers. With all such things
Francis was well pleased ; he enjoyed the smart of
138
The Clever Donkey
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 ' 1 (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 conveni-
ence saved direct communication with him. He knew
1 The Anti-Jacobin, edited by Mr. Frederick Greenwood.
139
" Poems "
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, rein-
forcing 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 any-
thing 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 sin-
cerity 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
140
Log* rolling
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 paeans 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 com-
pose, 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 accusa-
tion of log-rolling — in other words, of praising in return
for favours received, or favours which it was under-
stood 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.
141
" Poems "
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 dis-
missing 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 satis-
faction 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 inti-
mate 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
142
Inattention
knowledge, so cannot have knowledge of its own in-
congruity.
" Nor is the reciprocal admiration of small men neces-
sarily 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 un-
flinching 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 con-
ception."
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 Shake-
speare, 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 recep-
tion 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
"Poems"
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."
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 Athenceum 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
144
"Sister Songs"
inspiration." Mr. Symons was equally careful to estab-
lish, 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
Athenceum ! — 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.* From
another source I have had the Daily Chronicle, St. James's
and Manchester Guardian. Lane speaks of reviews in
i 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."
'
"Poems"
the Realm, Saturday, and Athenaum. 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 ad-
dressed 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 con-
trast, 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 minister-
ing to the vanity of such as profess to be able to see through mill-
stones, 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
146
Taste
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 con-
tinually 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
Cceli 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 occa-
sional 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
147
" Poems"
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 Fort-
148
"I Told You So"
nightly 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 percep-
tion. 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.
" 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, Roof,
and Flower. I suppose they can make nothing of it. But Bell
tells me it sells j^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
149
" Poems "
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 im-
probably 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 unques-
tionable 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."
150
The "Edinburgh" Reviewer
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 equip-
ment 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/'
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 publi-
cation 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 Cam-
pion's " Cold age deafs not there our ears," and Shakes-
peare'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
152
The Born Rebel
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
1 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 com-
bined 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 strainedesV
(double superlative) — these and the like are not easily allowed by
anyone possessing a sense of the history of the language."
153
Of Words ; Of Origins ; Of Metre
lt 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 lin-
guistic monstrosities."
" The obsolete < riped,' " " the rare ' heavened,' " " im-
pitiable," " saddenedly," "anticipatedly," " immeditat-
ably" — 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 auxiliatrixy 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. mcenadize, 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,"
154
The Latinisms
" 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 ob-
serve 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
155
Of Words ; Of Origins ; Of Metre
every age; the numerous terms of prose, apart from
special poetic diction/'
In an early review Thompson writes : —
lt 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
156
Rough Drafts of Creation
condemnation of Latinisms, and professed preference
for such forms as scatterling and doomsman for " vaga-
bond " 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 dis-
sociating, no disintegrating, such poems as these; and Francis
Thompson's heart beats in the words ' rosed/ ' cymars' ' frore,'
f amicedj ' 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."
157
Of Words ; Of Origins ; Of Metre
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."
158
The Habit of Words
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 uncon-
sciously, 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
159
Of Words ; Of Origins ; Of Metre
and a guttural hard consonant — for connective vowels
are unstable endlessly. As for k and g, you see, e.g.,
reg-Q evolve ra>tum.
" Excuse this offhand note, but your paragraph in-
terested 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 9.
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.
*******
1 60
At Rossetti's Death
By 1889 Rossetti had become an absorbing interest,
but Coleridge, in what F. T. calls his Pre-Rossettian days,
11 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, te How long !
Love's other half's with God ! "
He taught our English art to burn
With colours from diviner skies,
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
161 L
Of Words ; Of Origins ; Of Metre
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 con-
fidently balanced on the margin of his proofs ; he re-
membered 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 l
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 open-
ing :—
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
1 Revelation iv, 5, "... there were seven lamps burning before the
Throne, which are the seven spirits of God."
162
The Coleridge Influence
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 im-
pressionably 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 talk-
ing 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 sub-
ject 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 pro-
geny are sufficiently unlike the parent. It is that he has
163
Of Words ; Of Origins ; Of Metre
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 indescrib-
able 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. . . . Imita-
tion has no foothold ; it would tread on glass." 1
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
1 F. T. in the Academy, February 6, 1897.
'164
Various Authors
of Heaven " is like going to the grocer's for the seeds, in
coloured packets, of the passion flower. But the Vic-
torian tassels of the earlier piece do not hide its lessons —
"to surfer 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 debris 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
165
Of Words ; Of Origins ; Of Metre
Crashaw and a little Covvley — 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 Cole-
ridge, 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, 0 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.
166
Crashaw and a little Cowley
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 Words worthian. 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 * Judg-
ment in Heaven,' with the trenchant Elizabethan apothegm
of its epilogue. The ' Corymbus for Autumn ' was an overwhelm-
ing improvisation of wild and exorbitant fantasy. To be familiar
with it is to repent of having ever reproached it for a splendid
Of Words ; Of Origins ; Of Metre
pedantry and a monstrous ambition. On the whole, if Mr. Thomp-
son 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 V 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 ' to-
gether 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 deliver-
ance 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 every-
thing. 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
1 68
To Steal is Honourable
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
169
Of Words ; Of Origins ; Of Metre
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"
170
The Vulgate
" 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 : —
tl 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 un-
prejudiced 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 move-
ment. ' Surge, pr opera y arnica 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 ! '
41 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 won-
derful symbolic insight, illuminating them by passages
from the Fathers and significant prayers ? The offices
171
Of Words ; Of Origins ; Of Metre
of the Church are suggested poetry — that of the Assump-
tion, 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 amavij 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 stand-
point has a late but important date in my life. As a
child I read it, but for its historical interest. Neverthe-
less, 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 dark-
ness, 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
172
"Poor Thief of Song"
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, in-
cluding 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
Of Words ; Of Origins ; Of Metre
" Immensity cloistered in the dear womb " is part of
11 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 ex-
pression 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 rinding
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 — inde-
pendent 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.
174
Poets do not Err
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 ignor-
ance 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 occa-
sional Alexandrine, represented by a line of eight accents.
Students of metre will see the analogy to be strict, the
Of Words ; Of Origins ; Of Metre
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 preserva-
tion, though it was my first published poera 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."
176
Blank Verse
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 " Volun-
taries " : —
" 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
177 M
Of Words j Of Origins ; Of Metre
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,
Numerous Versification
and hence of modern metre at large — an influence most
disastrous and decadent, like nearly all his influence on
letters/' »
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
Crash aw : —
" 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 Ltteraria) 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 versi-
fication. 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."
1 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."
179
CHAPTER IX: AT MONASTERY GATES
IN 1892 F. T. had gone to Pantasaph. He was
quartered, at first, in Bishop's House, at the monas-
tery gates,1 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 diffi-
culty. 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 grate-
ful 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 : —
" Cen 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 discus-
sion 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
1 Afterwards he lodged at the post-office, and finally in a cottage on the
hill behind the monastery.
1 80
Franciscan Friends
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.1
" 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 com-
position.
They, as he, had sacred commerce cum Domina Pau-
pertate. 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
1 The Capuchins (Franciscans), are peculiar in aspect among Religious
Orders as bearded friars.
181
At Monastery Gates
her their Cloister. And they, leading her to the Summit of a Hill,
showed her the wide World, saying : This is our Cloister, 0 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 ! '
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 intui-
tions. 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 neighbour-
ing 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 persuasive-
ness on favourite topics. The Franciscans had learnt a kind of
1 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.
182
More Poetry
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 de-
velopment— especially as your and Alice's visit has evidently
called it forth." x
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 1
" My fear is that thought in it has strangled poetic im-
pulse. However of all that you are better judges than I.
1 " After Her Going " was written in these days.
183
At Monastery Gates
" Does the dear Singer still refuse me her songs ? My
health is better again, though unfortunately more fluc-
tuant 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 re-
casting of my later poems for Lane blocks the way for
the next month, so that 1 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 prsevenient 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 misconceived pain,
I have my music bent
To waste on bootless things its skiey-gendered rain.
184
Depression
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. ]., in The Irish Monthly, November 1908, who
" recalls two occasions on which I had the privilege of chatting
with the poet — once tete-d-tete 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 occu-
pied 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
185
At Monastery Gates
unwontedly active desire to see him. It is probable
that each exaggerated the other's feeling of estrange-
ment. When, in April 1896, Francis heard that his father
was dying, he went to Ashton, but too late. After the
funeral he writes : —
" 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." 1
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 any-
thing more than the most natural thing in the world ? I only
met him three times, each time in the company of my friend
Head,2 who shared my admiration. Our meeting came about in
an absurd enough wise. A ghost (possibly you have heard, or
1 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 gth, 1896, aged 72, fortified by the rites of
Holy Church" — with the motto "The silent and wise man shall be
honoured."
* Dr. Henry Head, F.R.S.
186
The Pantasaph Ghost
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 invi-
tation 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 :
1 This is not the man to whom we wrote that letter.' For, instead
of parables in polysyllables and a riot of imagery, we found sim-
plicity 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 naively 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,
At Monastery Gates
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."
F. T. wrote to A. M. after the meeting : —
"Is it true that you are going to collect your contri-
butions 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 " Auto-
lycus." He quoted a bit relating, I think, to Angelica
Kaufmann,1 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."
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."
1 It was not Angelica, but Mrs. Delany.
1 88
He is in Difficulties
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 Poetcz 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 Poeta, 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 constitu-
tion 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
189
At Monastery Gates
it observed an impenitent silence on the subject of your
songs unsent. (That last phrase has a ring of the only
Lewis.) l I have had a charming visit from Mr. Patmore.
He bore himself towards me with a dignity and magna-
nimity 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 friend-
ship 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."
1 An allusion to Lewis Morris's Songs Unsung.
IQO
Sanctity Essential Song
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 Poetce and the little book
of St. Bernard translations, Francis discovers their
author to be " deeply perceptive of the Scriptures' sym-
bolic 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 had 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 super-
ficial 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 :
detects resemblances, imagination identities.'
191
At Monastery Gates
you will return to your own Religio Poeta, 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 hiero-
glyph 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 ex-
plicable, it will not be to ' outsiders.' — Yours always,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
And later, in a note-book : —
"What I put forth as a bud he blew out and it
blossomed. The contact of our ideas was dynamic ;
192
Egyptian Worship
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 dis-
tinctive 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}- I at once perceived its symbolic significance,
1 On this subject, and the derivation of portions of Ecclesiastes, he corre-
sponded 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 Amman A'a, &>c. ; and The
meaning of Easter, a cutting scored with his own excursions into the etymo-
logy of the word — from Ishtar, the Chaldoean 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.
193 N
At Monastery Gates
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 intel-
ligible 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 sym-
bolism 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 '
194
The North
— or the Devil. For the same symbol is used in the Bible and
in the mythologies for either extreme.1 ' 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 woman-
hood,2 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
1 In a poem "The Schoolmaster for God," which P'rancis 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."
2 See F. T.'s poem "The Newer Eve," or " After Woman," with whom the
world should rise instead of fall.
195
At Monastery Gates
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 corrobora-
tion 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 com-
paratively, 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."
Perfection beyond Hope
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."
197
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 immeasur-
able 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 two-
198
Morality to the Nth Power
fold 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 com-
mentator'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 con-
trary, 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 Theo-
logians. Nor was the poet beguiled into the un-
orthodox. 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
199
Mysticism and Imagination
stray gleams, like the thickening of the air in a dusty
room into which a sun-ray slants obliquely. The mys-
teries 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 ac-
quired, 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 rdsume' of his teaching, as
terse as a page of scholastic philosophy."
200
A Recantation
If portions of New Poems prove difficult and myste-
rious, we must go to Patmore for the defence : " A sys-
tematic 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 Hugel 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 " x 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," 2 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 ?
1 Mr. Albert Cock in the Dublin Review.
9 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."
301
Mysticism and Imagination
He came, even to the point of silence in certain moods,
to feel the futility of all writings save such as were ex-
plicitly 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 purga-
tion, illumination, and union, a quiet constancy in the
corporate life, and discipleship as well as leadership ;
what combination more needed than this for our ' un-
courageous 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 him-
self shut out from the more purely mystical regions of
his communion. To correct or amplify his religious
experience, there are the enclosed Orders, the contempla-
tives 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.
202
The Master-Key
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, 0 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 neverthe-
less 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
203
Mysticism and Imagination
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 manifesta-
tions of a single essence."
He had found another analogy in Pico della Miran-
dola, 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 pheno-
mena 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 f 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 re-
semblance 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."
204
" Nature has no Heart "
"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 sad-
ness 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 un-
wittingly and unregretfully. F. T. quotes Coleridge,
who, he says, speaks "not as Wordsworth had taught
him to speak, but from his own bitter experience" : —
0 Lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth Nature live ;
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud !
1 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. Cole-
ridge'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
205
Mysticism and Imagination
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
206
The Image-maker
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 Con-
jugial 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
207
Mysticism and Imagination
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 ?
0 poor, poor Soul !
Bristles and rankness only in the hog ?
0 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 half-
penny, the old " religio poetae." 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
208
Words and the Word
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.
209 O
Mysticism and Imagination
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, 0 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 stolid altars hold their solemn place,
Amen, amen ! For oh, how could it be, —
When I with winged 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, 0 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 ! "
210
"A Type Memorial'3
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 ? " l
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 " 2 : —
Like Him thou hang'st in dreadful pomp of blood
Upon thy Western rood ;
1 " 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.
* 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
211
Mysticism and Imagination
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, 0 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 reaped 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, amd 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. 1
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,
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
justness.
1 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.
212
The Cross
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.
0 salutaris hostia,
Qua coeli 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 : —
0 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
{t 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
213
Mysticism and Imagination
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 approved 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,
( Toned all in time)
Tintinnabulous, tuned to ring
A multitudinous-single thing
(Rung all in rhyme).
214
The Unit and the Sum
In ll 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 sub-
stance 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 con-
fusion 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. Imagina-
tion is the spring ; Symbolism is here the manifes-
215
Mysticism and Imagination
tation 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 darken-
ing 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. main-
tained, 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
216
At the Junction-lines
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 Thomp-
son 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 say-
ing 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 com-
mission 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 arm-
ful, 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
217
Mysticism and Imagination
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, 0 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 linked are " ; the daisy is the signature of the
star ; for the poet all terrestrial minutiae were signed, nay,
scribbled all over with reference marks and sealed with
the likeness of larger things. From an old commen-
tator 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
218
Blake's Definitions
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 corre-
spondence between the Complete or Divine Mind and
Humanity led him to further definitions which are of
weight in general consideration of the poetry of imagi-
nation. 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 Thomp-
son 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 Neaera's hair may be
trivial idleness or caressing tenderness, exactly as your
relation to Neaera 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 ;
219
Mysticism and Imagination
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 ; l 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 per-
ceptions, 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 imagi-
nation you will end in the enjoyment of their dis-
similarity. 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."
1 " 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."
22O
To Each his Vision
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 direc-
tion, 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 in-
tervening 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
221
Mysticism and Imagination
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 care-
fully 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, lan-
guage 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 apo-
222
Reservation
thegms 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 i
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
223
Mysticism and Imagination
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 be-
tween 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 deso-
224
"Life is an Inkermann"
lation 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 gener-
ally 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
225 P
Mysticism and Imagination
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 un withering 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 wil-
fully closed their eyes to the known light : that such as
fall with constant striving, battling with their tempera-
ment, 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 'Judge-
ment 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
226
The Heart of Woman
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 school-
ing lasted when all else had been outlived. His unpub-
lished comedy " Man Proposes, Woman Disposes " is full
of ready-made gibes, and his " Dress," printed in a weekly
paper, 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 :
tl 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 aphor-
istic habit. He himself defended or denied the "frag-
mentary " 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.
227
Mysticism and Imagination
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 govern-
ment 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 — 0 what shall you not, Sweet, do ?
But before he is through with the poem he is led to
228
"A Narrow Vessel"
greater explicitness, and, finally, to the solemn manner of
concealment —
When to love you is (0 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 every-
thing 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 enforced 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 minutiae of sensa-
tion ; and the third poem of the second series is the one
229
Mysticism and Imagination
that comes nearest in all Thompson's work to the many
love poems of the many modern poetry-books. The like-
ness 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 actua-
lity 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 over-
looked it altogether or adverted to it as trivial and discon-
nected. 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
230
The Girl and the Allegory
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 gener-
ously 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
231
Mysticism and Imagination
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 unsurficing 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.
232
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.
tl I have not seen Meredith's article l — 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
1 "Mrs. Meynell's Essays" in the National Review, Aug. 1896.
233
Patmore's Death
Selections.1 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."
1 Poetry of Pathos and Delight, being selections made by Alice Meynell
from the poetry of Coventry Patmore.
234
" Oceanic Vast of Intellect"
" P.S. — I am fearful about the Athenczum project. I
told Coventry I had altered the sub-title to prevent
identification, lest the poem l 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 con-
fess 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
1 " A Captain of Song," addressed to Patmore before his death, and at
his death published in the Athenaum, December 5, 1896.
235
Patmore's Death
basic silence of our love" and the Bunder-silence of
love" are other phrases that tell of something not to
be expresssed in the obituary column. There are scraps,
also, of private verse which tell his sorrow : —
0 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.
236
A Dedication
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 pub-
lication 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 pre-
pared 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.
237
"New Poems"
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." 1 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 F. T.'s last
letter to W. M. before publication ran : —
" 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 compre-
hensive. It will be a book as long as the Unknown Eros,
for if the Unknown Eros has about twenty more poems,
1 " 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 Tightness of out-
look 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."
238
The Contents Table
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 deter-
mined 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 diffi-
cult 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
239
"New Poems"
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 else-
where "a touch of genuine sublimity." The former British
Review picks out several examples of "his barbarous
jargon " (a phrase, by the way, used by Home of Mere-
dith'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 start-
lingly good ; one reaches for one's Thompson from the
shelves to see if he is in truth so secure 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
240
"A Terrible Poem"
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 mediaeval 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 com-
menting, 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 Athen&um "a singular mastery of
verse " ; the Edinburgh, with ponderous speed, " a great
poet," and the Academy and Bookman gave handsome
241 Q
" New Poems "
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 specu-
lative, 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
242
Mr. Garvin to the Rescue
emphatic voice proclaimed : — " Here's a go, Mrs.
Meynell ; I have lost my Athenaum 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 a 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 llan 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.
243
"New Poems"
" 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 trans-
mutable 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."
244
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
245
Friends and Opinions
smooth his coat, and be most warily conscious of his
companion's eye, like a husband's, " microscopic 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 brisk 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 at-
mosphere 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 so much clean-cut ability. Meredith's method
was acceptance, whether of bird's song or Burgundy.
Thompson's method was of refusal because he was
not hardy enough for one or the other.
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 Thomp-
246
Meredith
son'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
247
Friends and Opinions
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
Nodes Ambrosiance ; 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.
248
"My Friend Hayes"
" 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 pro-
voked a smile — it was Thompson's way. But let it not be sup-
posed 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 im-
pression 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."
249
Friends and Opinions
From her invalid's couch Mrs. Hamilton King sent
Francis treasured messages of trust and commenda-
tion, 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 — to-
gether with Winifred Lucas — one of the few women
I ever desired particularly to meet ? She has a tempera-
ment 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, pub-
lished 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 sub-
sequently, 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 '
250
With Sick Children
—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 descrip-
tion 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
251
Friends and Opinions
Miss Agnes Tobin,1 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 re-
tained 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 some-
thing 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 d 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."
1 To this lady's "genius for friendship" the dedication of Mr. Joseph
Conrad's Under Western Eyes bears witness.
252
Mr. Whitten's Portrait
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 fare-
well 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 read-
ing 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 taci-
turn. 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
253
Friends and Opinions
pain and the fierce reactions of laudanum, his hair and straggling
beard neglected, he had yet a distinction and an aloofness of bear-
ing 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
naively courteous manner, were not to be found. It was impos-
sible 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
254
In Chancery Lane
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 con-
cern 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 inter-
course 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 de-
parted 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
255
Friends and Opinions
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 at y 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."
Of his editor, and to his editor, Thompson writes : —
" 39 GOLDNEY ROAD, HARROW ROAD,
Sunday Night.
11 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
256
Late Copy
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 over-
drawn 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 : —
" 1 6 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
257 R
Friends and Opinions
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.
lt 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 alter-
native 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 per-
severe. Besides, seeing how overcrowded the profession
is, it would be a pity for me to take the oakum out of
another man's fingers.
258
55
More " Academy
"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 * —
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."
1 William Watson's on the Coronation of Edward VII.
259
Friends and Opinions
" 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 Words-
worth, 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 de-
termined 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 ex-
cessive 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
260
The Reviewer
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 ex-
ceeded 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 im-
personal, and must expect to be treated as a mere name
at the head of so many printed pages ; it is the inevit-
able 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
261
Friends and Opinions
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.
t( 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
262
A Rejection
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 Steven-
son 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 intelli-
gence or his intellectual courage.
" To one point only must I take exception. The book is re-
ferred 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 unsus-
pected tolerance. F. T. reeked of so many things,
263
Friends and Opinions
besides Shelley, that Henley detested. The Burns
article itself, to which Henley makes allusion, says un-
compromising things of Burns : —
" Imagination and tenderness demand either the refine-
ment 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 journal-
istic souls. The escort still marvels at F. T.;s unpunctu-
ality. Francis owed neither his soul nor hours to any
264
He Visits Henley
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 Swin-
burne'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 audi-
ence 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 parti-
cular admiration— that in which Sergeant Troy thralls
265
Friends and Opinions
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 dis-
satisfied 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 lan-
guors,' 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."
266
Buny;
ran
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 Bowling's assault
upon The Pilgrims 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 ac-
corded 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
267
Friends and Opinions
" reviewer's " authors would be absurd. Rossetti's name
got into Thompson's criticisms from every quarter ; it
is in tl 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 Kil-
burn for the books he wanted. " Your own copies are
gone — gone from the shelves, and I've no way of pro-
curing 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 reluct-
ance 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.
Crowleyhe had reviewed before. "The Mother's Tragedy"
contains the il old vigour and boldness, the sinewy phrase
268
Contemporaries
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 con-
trasted with the sorrow of its earthly lot — this is a
familiar theme, yet Mrs. Shorter handles it with un-
familiar 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 teem-
ing 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 appro-
bation 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 ab-
solute grandeur ; some of his sonnets are only not
among the best in that kind."
His appreciations were not ordered by papers com-
mitted to a policy of praise. On the contrary, he wrote :
" My editors complain that I don't go for people — that
269
Friends and Opinions
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 denned 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
270
Last Books
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.
271
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, Thomp-
son 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 con-
fidence, 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 com-
parative 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 Chester-
field'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 con-
science 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,
272
Spring in Kilburn
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,
273 S
The Londoner
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 FernheadRoad, 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 Brondes-
bury 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
274
In the Edgware Road
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
275
The Londoner
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 enter-
ing a vineyard — anything of wine-merchant's wine. Be-
fore 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 be-
cause 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,
276
The London Book
or in the commentary on a London dawn from an-
other note-book : —
The dreary scream of stable cocks
Comes ghastly through the dark,
The slaty blues of day
Slant on the dreary park ;
The houses' massed 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 con-
sider 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 wander;
277
The Londoner
through its streets. I intend to divide the book into
parts, which — by way of provisional title — I might de-
scribe 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 depot 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 & propos, whether by night or day ;
though I think night exhibits such neighbourhoods
most impressively and characteristically. And I intend
278
The Landladies
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 espe-
cially towards the gloomier majesties and suggestive-
ness 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
279
The Londoner
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 Cafe.
You remember how, in the one conversation which Boswell felt
himself powerless to report, Johnson ' ran over the grand scale of
280
Milton and the Vienna Cafe
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 tran-
sept 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 ;
281
The Londoner
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
Caesar'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 soap-
stone 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
282 *
God's Merry Men
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 : —
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 trans-
lation 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 Church-
man. 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
283
The Londoner
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." l
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
1 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 pro-
claim 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!"
284
The Two Poverties
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
285
The Londoner
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 acquisi-
tion. He collected nothing, and presents were accept-
able 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
286
The Spoiled Priest
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.1
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 entangle-
ment of purposes and cross-purposes, of paradoxi-
cal 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 mission-
ary even if he never helps with gift or speech or touch
another man's distress. The prayers of the Trappist
1 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, m fair return.
287
The Londoner
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 con-
veniences 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
288
Crumbs of Actuality
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 in-
eludibly 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 environ-
ment 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 adjust-
ment of the scales. Yet the adjustment must be perfect.
One of his many analogies for the interlocking of our
complementary natures is as follows : —
tf Holiness is an oil which increases a hundred fold
the energies of the body, which is as the wick. Impor-
tant that this wick shall not needlessly be marred during
preparation through some toughening ascetic process
289 T
The Londoner
which must inflict certain injury. The flame is depen-
dent 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 haemorrhage of the stigmata.
290
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 com-
plaineth 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." * 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 compre-
hension is sharpened by the desire of things out of
1 " 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."
29I
Communion and Excommunion
reach. In an incomplete " Ballad of Judgement " a man,
marvelling at his rewards in Heaven, asks : —
0 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)
1 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 re-
pudiates 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
292
The Grief-Erudite Heart
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 pur-
pose. 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.
0 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.
0 sweet 1 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 dis-
ingenuous 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.
.•••••
293
Communion and Excommunion
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 con-
science 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 con-
294
Pain
eluding 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-dulled 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 I
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 ! '
295
\
Communion and Excommunion
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 instru-
ment 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.
0 Christ the Just, and can it be
1 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 ?
296
Reticence
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 con-
fidence, puts an end to so much secret trouble that
would grow monstrous if it were brooded over."
And in his verse : —
. . . The once accursed 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 1 mean is the difficulty of communicating one-
self. By the way, R. L. S.'s theme is more distinct from
yours than I quite realised this afternoon. His is sin-
cerity of intercourse, yours is rather adequacy of inter-
course, 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.
297
Communion and Excommunion
" 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 in-
determinate 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 think-
ing 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
298
Least Imperfect Sympathy
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, niltuum
mi 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 lan-
guage, 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
299
Communion and Excommunion
pained and desperate that we can comprehend no more.
There is a turn in Seneca —
Uli 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 un-
profitable 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 Annaeus ! — 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 signa-
tories, 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 ex-
ample 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 work-
shops, and one day you find yourself promoted from
apprentice to partner. Their obscurities are your limita-
tions, your limitations their obscurities, and you and
they must have it out between you. And even at the
300
Hearer and Utterer
moment when the Poet is most obscure, he is most plain
with you, most intimate, most dependent on your per-
sonal 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 publica-
tion of New Poems —
"Though my aims are unfulfilled, my place insecure,
many things warn me that with this volume I am pro-
bably closing my brief poetic career,"
301
Communion and Excommunion
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 damertume. 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.
302
"Needy with a Double Need"
. . . 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 Cafe 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 deli-
cate piano at a certain strength of touch."
303
Communion and Excommunion
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
304
" Curse of Destinate Verse '
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 may also be
set this of F. T.'s 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 predes-
tinate 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 contem-
poraries 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
305 U
Communion and Excommunion
verse.1 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
1 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."
306
His Confidence
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."
307
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 leaved 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 preoccu-
pation is poetry — and the poet. It is not a matter of
308
The Maker
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 dis-
tinction, 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
309
Characteristics
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 ; con-
fessing, 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/'
310
Pride of Poetry
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
Characteristics
was ready to listen to Francis's silences in London?
It is possible that if a child had sought him in Ken-
sington 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 nonde-
script 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
312
A Habit of Life
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
fc-ivial, it never sought an easy exchange of confidences,
nor made friends by suggestion of either tact or in-
telligence. 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.
313
Characteristics
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 interest-
ing 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 now lived) 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 inconveni-
ence of thoughts not commonplace. Even his half-
penny 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
Cuttings
— 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.
315
CHAPTER XVI: THE CLOSING YEARS
S 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 instantan-
eously 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 Jon-
son's, and Goldsmith's, first published in the Academy.
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 out-
right refuse me an advance on my poem, but told me to
316
Money Matters
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
317 /$¥-
/
The Closing Years
obvious remedy, or some suggestion equally effica-
cious : —
" 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 miser-
able on account of my prose. I came lately across a
letter of Keats' (penned in the prae-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 Daemon 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,
Misrepresentation
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 how 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 gate-
way 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 know-
ledge was based on hearsay. In face of such misunder-
standing, at the time of his death it was hardly sur-
prising to read in the Mercure de France that " he went
mad, and death happily put an end to his miseries."
319
The Closing Years
A Professor of Romance Languages in Columbia Uni-
versity 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 sur-
prising 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 imagina-
tion 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 condo-
nation 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
320
Misrepresentation
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 in-
sinuates. 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 him-
self 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 Athenaum,
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
321 X
The Closing Years
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 Thomp-
son 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 imputa-
tion 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 them-
selves, but who ended by being sorry.
Religion seems always to be setting its beneficent
322
A Certain Group
ambush for those who thought themselves most se-
curely 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 re-
conciliation and forgiveness. One after another of
the leaders of aesthetic disaffection and disease con-
fessed 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 intel-
lectual 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 Thomp-
son 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 in-
spiration 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 pave-
ment.
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
323
The Closing Years
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 Medi-
terranean, 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 en-
dures ; 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.
324
Idleness and Industry
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
325
The Closing Years
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 Athenceum 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
326
His Looks
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 consola-
tion 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
327
The Closing Years
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.
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 Bronte and Coventry Patmore, he found
the character that interested him.
328
His Letters
Here is another letter, written in a bad light but
copious good spirits, before a visit to "the Serendi-
pity 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 homoeo-
pathic 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 guilti-
ness 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 effec-
tive than the obvious ending substituted by his confrere.
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,
329
The Closing Years
forcing me to wonder what he thought of one for making
such poor use, in his behalf, of the imputed charac-
teristic ; " 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 some-
times 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 in-
tellecf). 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
330
His Laugh
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 un-
happy 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 Closing Years
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 inspira-
tion 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 2ist,"
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 pro-
bably in the last three hours of them. From Mr. Garvin
came another letter : —
" fune 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
332
The Newspaper Odes
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 multi-
tude 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 circum-
stances, 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.1 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 ex-
tinguish 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."
1 Note by F. T. : " That is not drama, but lyric."
333
The Closing Years
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 negli-
gence 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 infor-
mation 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 con-
clusion 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 mono-
poly, being willing to accept his unpunctual copy
whenever it arrived, and in almost any quantity; but
334
Journalistic Flurries
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 —
" I shall be greatly obliged if you can send me the articles you
kindly agreed to write for the Catholic Encyclopaedia in the letters
BandC"
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 to W. M. : —
" 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
335
The Closing Years
transferred his allegiance to the Athenaum. 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 com-
missioned. 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
Athenceum he did with success till within a month or
two of his death. Letters from Mr. Vernon Kendall
illustrate the courtesy of his editors : —
"ATHENAEUM 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 KENDALL."
And again : —
"ATHENAEUM OFFICE, March 14, 1906.
" DEAR MR. THOMPSON, — I was very glad to hear of your re-
covery, 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. KENDALL.'*
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
336
His Plays
be willing to do for us. I have always retained the utmost admira-
tion 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 : —
" I have summoned up pluck to send my little play *
to W. Archer, asking him whether it afforded any en-
couragement 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 Sault 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 break-
fast). 'Yes, but — get something more,' he said, and
alleged that I was looking shrunk with cold.
1 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 PERSONS
NAPOLEON.
GENERAL AUGEREAU.
MADAME LEBRUN (an opera-dancer, Augereatts 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."
337 Y
The Closing Years
"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."
338
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 : —
' 0 danger, 0 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 march-
ing on him, a Birnam forest of bricks. It was illness,
with fear for a symptom. " Disaster was, and is, draw-
ing 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
339
Last Things
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, Fran-
cis 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 for-
gotten 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."
340
He Quotes "The Poppy"
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 com-
pletely 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
Last Things
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 con-
stantly 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 re-
linquishing opium is the sense of the reason's unfitness.
Thought is thrown out of joint, and hurts like a dislo-
cated 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
342
Laudanum
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 visita-
tions 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.
343
Last Things
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 sub-
merged 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 cl
a desolated life and unthinkably blasted powers."
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."
344
At Crawley
Again : —
" 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 im-
possible. Once step aside from the ways of ' comfort-
able 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
345
Last Things
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 land-
lady, who had not seen him abroad at such an hour
in all her experience, say why or where. When at last
346
Her?Goes to Newbuildings
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 indepen-
dent 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 con-
sulted, but if no effective treatment followed it was pro-
bably 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
347
Last Things
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 convales-
cence, 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 South water, 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 per-
ception and love of the Church, a ready and masterful power of
348
In Hospital
language. I could not say that conversation with him was ever
an easy thing, if by conversation one means unceasing talk. Be-
sides 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 1 "
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
349
Last Things
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 at-
tested 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 comming-
ling 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 some-
times 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 lone-
liness was associated with his death.
He was too magnanimous to take one to his dead
heart. Suffering alone, he escaped alone, and left
350
Death
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 per-
sonality, and to English poetry an imperishable name."
351
Ind
ex
ABSENT-MINDEDNESS, Francis Thomp-
son's, 9, 26 «., 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 con-
nexion 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
Athcnceum, 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, Wm., 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; sym-
bolism in, 191, 194, 196; F. T.'s
reading of, 172-3 ; Apocalypse,
172-3 ; Canticles, 223 ; Ecclesiastes,
173. 193. 238 ; Genesis, 227 ; Penta-
teuch, 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 read-
ing 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
Bronte, 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; bis
diction, 47, 155-6
Browning, E. B., 124, 127
353
Index
Browning, R., on F. T., 120-2, 124,
137 n. ; William Sharp's Life of,
reviewed by F. T. , 121, 124 ; his ob-
scurity, 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 ol the,
192-6
Carlisle Place, 108
Carmen, 102
" Carmen Genesis, "2 85 -6, 309-10
Carmina Mariana, 173
Carroll, Dr. , late Bishop of Shrewsbury ,
24, 107 «., 117, 144; letters to, 97,
123
Casartelli, Dr., Bishop of Salford, 15
Catholic Encyclopaedia, 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 ana-
logies 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, in, 253,
311-12, 314, 342, 349
Cooper, T. Fenimore, 16
Corbishly, Monsignor, 26
Corporal Punishment, 19
" Corymbus for Autumn, A," 137 n.,
167
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, J79. 257, 267-8, 288
Crawley, 112, 181, 189,344-6
Cricket, 13, 39-45, 326, 328
Critic, 7^r(N.Y.), 137, 240
Cross, the, 6, 95 »., 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, i6or
167
Daniel, Samuel, 270
Dante, 14, 87, 170, 172, 200
Darwinism, 244
"Daughter of Lebanon" (De Quin-
cey'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
354
Index
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; other-
wise quoted, 133 ».
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 «.,
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
Dray ton, Michael, 154-5, J6S, 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
Encyclopaedia, an, 56
Enlistment, 56-7, 163
"Erotic" poet (!), F. T. asan, 3, 14*.,
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, Hon. 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, no«., 180-3
Freemasonry, 193 n.
Friston, Suffolk, 118-19, 34°-I
"From the Night of Forebeing," 166,
184
F. S.,25
GALE, Mr. Norman, 136, 140, 249
Gardner, Mr. Edmund, 211 n.
Garvin, Mr. J. L. , 122-3, I4S> x^7>
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 «., 317
Ghost, a, 186-7, J88
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 ; °n F- T., 149, 262-
4; meeting with, 264-6
Herbert, George, 166-7, 288, 3°S
" 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
355
Index
"Hound of Heaven, The," 84, 122
137 «., 144, 164-5, 176, 205-6, 211
3°o. 319
Housman, Mr. Laurence, 135
Hiigel, Baron von, 201
Hugo, Victor, 98, 175, 306 n.
Humility, F. T.'s, 187, 237
Humorous verse, 13, 27-8, 111-12
33i
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, m, 316, 334
" Judgement in Heaven, A," 59, 106
137, 144- 167
KEATS, 92, 150, 152, 164, 193, 243,
307, 3*8
Kelsall, an actor, 64
Kempis, Thomas a, 225-6, 243, 283
Kensall Green, St. Mary's Cemetery,
35*
Kensington Gardens, 104, 114-1 e
Kent, Rev. W. H., 174
Kent's Bank, near Alverstone, 13
356
Kilburn, 268, 274
King, Miss Katharine Douglas, 250-1 •
letters to F. T. 250-1
King, Mrs. Hamilton, letters to F. T.,
132, 250
Kmgsford, Anna, 174
Kipling, Mr. Rudyard, 126, 170, i7C
262, 268, 270
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, i6c
Latin, 171
Latinisms, 33, 155-7
Laureateship, the, 233-4
Lecky, Mr. Walter, 137
Le Gallienne, Mr. Richard, 135-6, 141,
T4S. 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 I F. T.
in, 46, 54, 61-93, i°4. 236
Lord's, 44-5
Love and love-affairs, n, 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
.ytton-Bulwer, 74, 157, 265
/ytton, Hon. Neville, 337
VlACAULAY, 10, 26, 169, 260
Maeterlinck, 198-9
' Magic, Varia on," 188, 193
' Making of Viola, The," 59, 93, 122,
iSS, 179
' Man Proposes, Woman Disposes,'
227, 337 n.
Index
Manchester, F. T. in, 35-6, 46-9, 51,
55. 58, 61, 75, 84, 274
Manchester Guardian, 145, 332
Mangan, 168
Mann, Dr., 15, 23
Manning, Cardinal, 79, 85 »., 107-8,
in, 290
Marianus, Fr. , x8o
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 »., 172-3,
227, 228
Mary Ignatius, Sister (F. T.'s aunt),
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
M' Master, 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, no, 113, 121, 193,
250; poems by F. T. in, 87-8, 92,
95, 102, 107, 120, 122, 124, 126,
130-31, 137 »., 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 «., 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 «.,
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, xxi, 137. M3.
194, 247, 250, 262, 284 «., 303, 317,
327, 336, 3491 F- T- on. 86I on
F. T., 98-100, 123, 124-5, 32°-2;
letters from F. T. to, 85, 88, 100,
103-4, no«., XI4-I7. 129, 135, 145-
6, 180, 183, 234-5, 238, 242, 250,
316-18, 335, 337, 339; other letters
to, 58, 107 «., 120, 140, 183, x86-8,
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, nee Meynell),
113-14, 118-19, 148, 340-1 ; letters
to, 340-1
11 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 ».
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,
2X1
Nerses, St., the Armenian, 173-4
New Brighton, 13
New Poems (1897), 187 ; its reception,
136, 150, 239-43, 253, 308; a can-
celled 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, Sir Henry, 139, 269
Newcastle Daily Chronicle, 122
" Nocturn," 180
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 «., 124-
5, 127, 137 »., 176, 201, 211-12
" Old Fogey, An," (Andrew Lang, soi-
disant), 136
Old Trafford cricket-ground, 39, 43
Opera, the, 46
357
Z 2
Index
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, ^9> *74>
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 »., 312,
317 \The Poetry of Pathos and De-
light, 234 ; Religio Poetcz, 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), "a, 129, 135-48, 158,
170, 338, 243, 341
"Poet breaking Silence, To a," 126,
*33
" 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, i, 5
Priesthood, F. T. and the, 5, 31-2,
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
Ranjitsinjhi, Prince, 42
Realm, The, 141, 146
Reformation, the, 12
Refuges, 65
Religion, 30, 31, 33, 34. See Catho-
licism, and Mysticism
Rendall, Mr. Vernon, letters to F. T.,
" 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 ».
Richardson, Mrs. Margaret, ne'e
Thompson (the poet's sister), i, 128,
341
Roger Bacon Society, The, 181, 183
Rook, Mr. Clarence, 253
Rossetti, Christina, 209, 224
Rossetti, D. G., quoted, 65 »., 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
358
Index
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, n
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,
~, 187, 306
tion in F. T.'s poetry, 103,
136, 158, 187, 306
jlf-revelati<
Sel
148
Selous, F. C., illustrations to Shake-
speare, ii, 38
Seneca, 300
" Sere of the Leaf, The," 102-3, 3oa
Serendipity Shop, the, 286, 329
Set-worship, 194, 196
Seventeenth Century, 165
Shakespeare, 271 ; P. 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, JI7, 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, ico «. ; 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 ; auto-
biographical, 81, 148, 168
Skating, 114
Smithfield Market, 117
Snead-Cox, Mr. J. G., 85, 120
74
Snowdon, 185
Socialism, no ».
Socrates, 223
Solomon, Simeon, 323
" Song of the Hours," 95 n., 125
Sonnets, 73, 126
South African War, 9, 334
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,
Star, The, 145
Stead, W. T., 106-7
Stephanon, Lamente forre, 28-9
Stevenson, R. L., 165, 170, 297, 302
Storrington, 95-6, HI
Strand, the, 24, 71 »., 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, Mr. Arthur, 144-6, 198-9, 269
Symbolism, 193-6, 211, 215, 218
Tablet, The, 99, 125, 126, 137 «., 138
"Tancred, Francis" (pseudonym of
F.T.), 106
Tate, Dr., President of Ushaw, 26, 32
Taylor, Jeremy, 156
Tennyson, 101, 120, 179 »., 230, 260
Terence, 299
Texts as stimulants, 32, 68, 325-6
Thames Embankment, 24, 64, 192, 278
Theresa, St., 146
Thomas a Kempis, 225-6, 243, 283
Thomas, Mr. Edward, 198
Thomas of Celano, 181
Thompson, Dr. Charles (F. T.'s father),
I, 2, 4, 36, 54-60, 71, 107 n., 127,
144, 185-6
Thompson, Edward Healy (F. T.'s
uncle), 2, 3, i4«., 46 »., 58-9, 61,
68, 85 n., 124
Thompson family, the, 1-5
THOMPSON, FRANCIS JOSEPH, birth,
pedigree, parentage, 1-4 ; his pater-
nal uncles, 2, 3 ; other relatives, 4,
5 ; childhood, 6 seq. ; home-life, 7-
i4. 35. 54-5. 57-60, 74-5; early
reading, 6, 10-12 ; atthe seaside, 12,
13; cricket, 13, 39-45; at Ushaw,
15-21, 24-32 ; intention of the priest-
359
Index
hood abandoned, 32-4 ; a medical
student at Owens College, Man-
chester, 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 Man-
chester, 58, to London, 58, 61 ; odd
jobs, 62-3; an outcast, 63-4; lodg-
ing-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 1 tne 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 Car-
dinal Manning, 107-8 ; journalism,
IH-I2, 117, 253-70; visits to Craw-
ley, 112-13, 34<H>I m 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, 149-5°;
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 re-
ligion, 224-7 J 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 t 253-70, 334-6; criticisms
on and meeting with W. E. Henley,
262-7;. ms 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 1 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 Athenceum, 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 «. ; to Mr.
C. L. Hind, 256-61 ; to Mr. William
Hyde, 277 ; to Mrs. Meynell, 130,
I32~3. 159. *77. 183, 188-9, 226,
297, 312-13 ; to Everard Meynell,
44, 159, 328-31, 345; to Wilfrid
Meynell, 85, 88, 100, 103-5, no «.,
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
(nee Monica Meynell), 340-341 ; to
Miss Agnes Tobin, 252
Letters to, from Father Anselm,
344-5 ; from Mr. W. Archer, 242 ;
from Mother Austin (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),
i ».
Thompson, John Costall (F. T.'s
uncle), 2, 3
Thompson, Margaret (F. T.'s sister), i,
128
Thompson, Mary (F. T.'s sister),
" Mother Austin," a nun, i «., 7, 8,
12-14, 39-40. 57, 59, 75, 127, 186,
287 «., 341; letter to, 333; letter
from, 334
Thompson, Mary Turner, n'ee Morton
(F. T.'s mother), i, 4, 7, 10, 46,148-9
Thorp, Mr., 259
Times, The, 240, 319, 320
Timidity, F. T.'s, 13, 15, 32, 265
"To my Godchild," 123, 137, 162,
373
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, Fulnam, 46
" Twopenny Damn, The," 139
Tyburn, 275
Tynan, Katharine (Mrs. Hinkson),
8s«., 102,122, 137 »., 209, 302; letters
to F. T. , 102
360
Index
" ULTIMA," 306
University Press, Notre Dame, Ind.,
3l8~9
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 Cafe", 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 »., 339-40
Wardour Street, 70
Watson, Mr. William, 136, 145, 259
Watts, Mr. Augustine, 21
Watts-Dunton, Mr. Theodore, 165
Waugh, Mr. Arthur, 258
Wetkly Register, The, ixi, 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 Liver-
pool, 27
Whitten, Mr. Wilfred, 71 «., 257, 337 ;
his reminiscences of F. T., 253-4,
280-1, 303, 307
Wilde, Oscar, 127, 252
Wilkinson, Fr. Adam, 15, 23
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
withF. 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
YEATS, W. B., 103, 115, 140, 245
Printed by BALLANTYNB, HANSON
Edinburgh & London
Co
PR 5651 .M4 1916 SMC
Meynel 1 , Everard.
The life of Francis Thompson
47159470