I
If Crashaw, Shelley, Donne, Marvell, Patmore and some other poets had
not existed, Francis Thompson would be a poet of remarkable novelty. Not
that originality, in the strictest sense, is always essential to the
making of a poet. There have been poets who have so absolutely lived in
another age, whose whole soul has been so completely absorbed by a
fashion of writing, perhaps a single writer, belonging to an earlier
century, that their work has been an actual reincarnation of this
particular time or writer. Chatterton, for instance, remains one of the
finest of English poets, entirely on account of poems which were so
deliberately imitative as to have been passed off as transcripts from
old manuscripts. Again, it is possible to be deftly and legitimately
eclectic, as was Milton, for example. Milton had, in an extraordinary
degree, the gift of assimilating all that he found, all that he
borrowed. Often, indeed, he improved his borrowed goods; but always he
worked them into the pattern of his own stuff, he made them part of
himself; and wisdom is justified of her children. Now Thompson, though
he affects certain periods, is not so absorbed in any one as to have
found his soul by losing it; nor is he a dainty borrower from all,
taking his good things wheresoever he finds them. Rather, he has been
impressed by certain styles, in themselves incompatible, indeed implying
the negation of one another--that of Crashaw, for instance, and that of
Patmore--and he has deliberately mixed them, against the very nature of
things. Thus his work, with all its splendors, has the impress of no
individuality; it is a splendor of rags and patches, a very masque of
anarchy. A new poet announces himself by his new way of seeing things,
his new way of feeling things; Thompson comes to us a cloudy visionary,
a rapturous sentimentalist, in whom emotion means colored words, and
sight the opportunity for a bedazzlement.
The opening section of the book _Love in Dian's_ Lap is an experiment in
Platonic love. The experiment is in itself interesting, though here
perhaps a little too deliberate; in its bloodless ecstasy it recalls
_Epipsychidion_, which is certainly one of the several models on which
it has been formed; it has, too, a finely extravagant courtliness, which
belongs to an older school of verse as here:--
Yet I have felt what terrors may consort
In women's cheeks, the Graces' soft resort;
My hand hath shook at gentle hands' access,
And trembled at the waving of a tress;
My blood known panic fear, and fled dismayed,
Where ladies' eyes have set their ambuscade.
The rustle of a robe hath been to me
The very rattle of love's musketry;
Although my heart hath beat the loud advance,
I have recoiled before a challenging glance,
Proved gay alarms where warlike ribbons dance.
And from it all, this knowledge have I got,--
The whole, that others have, is less than they have not;
All which makes other women noted fair,
Unnoted would remain and overshone in her.
Finer, in yet a different style, is the poem _To a Poet Breaking
Silence_, of which we may quote the opening lines:--
Too wearily had we and song
Been left to look and left to long,
Yea, song and we to long and look,
Since thine acquainted feet forsook
The mountain where the Muses hymn
For Sinai and the Seraphim.
Now in both the mountains' shine
Dress thy countenance, twice divine!
From Moses and the Muses draw
The Tables of thy double Law!
His rod-born fount and Castaly
Let the one rock bring forth for thee,
Renewing so from either spring
The songs that both thy countries sing:
Or we shall fear lest, heavened thus long,
Thou should'st forget thy native song,
And mar thy mortal melodies
With broken stammer of the skies.
Next after these poems of spiritual love come certain odes and lyrical
pieces: one _To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster_, modeled, as to form,
on Marvell's great ode: _A Judgment in Heaven_, in which we are
permitted to see the angels "as they pelted each other with handfuls of
stars"--the most clotted and inchoate poem in the volume; together with
_A Corymbus for Autumn_ and _The Hound of Heaven_ which are the finest
things Thompson has done. Here, with all his extravagance, which passes
from the sublime to the ridiculous with all the composure of a madman,
Thompson has grappled with splendid subjects splendidly. He can, it is
true, say:--
Against the red throb of the sunset-heart
I laid my own to beat;
but he can also say (with a solemn imagery which has its precise meaning
as well as its large utterance):--
I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
From the hid battlements of Eternity,
Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again;
But not ere him who summoneth
I first have seen, enwound
With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned;
His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.
Here, as ever, Thompson indulges in his passion for polysyllables--"the
splendent might of thy conflagrate fancies," for example; but forced
words are less out of place in poems which, in the best sense of the
word, are rhapsodies, than in poems such as those on children, which
fill the last section of the book, and in which one may read of "a
silvern segregation, globed complete," of "derelict trinkets of the
darling young," and so forth. The last piece of all, _To Monica Thought
Dying_, is written in downright imitation of Patmore; but how far is it,
in its straining after fine effects of sound, its straining after fine
effects of pathos, from the perfect justice of expression which Patmore
has found in such poems as _The Toys_ and _Poor Child!_ for an equally
perfect sentiment of the pathetic! That a writer who at his best is so
fiery and exuberant should ever take Patmore for a model, should really
try to catch even his tricks of expression, is very curious, and shows,
as much as any other single characteristic, the somewhat external
quality of Thompson's inspiration. A poet with an individuality to
express, seeking for an individual form of expression, could scarcely,
one fancies, have been drawn by any natural affinity so far away from
himself and his main habitudes. Grashaw and Patmore--we come back to the
old antagonism--can a man serve two such masters? Imagine Patmore
rewriting, according to his own standard of composition, _The Flaming
Heart_, or Crashaw treating in his own way the theme of _Deliciae
Sapientiae de Amore!_ Here and there, too, in Thompson's work, are
reminiscences of Rossetti; as here:--
Yea, in that ultimate heart's occult abode
To lie as in an oubliette of God.
And the influence of Shelley is felt from the first line to the last.
Yet, in spite of all this, Thompson has something, unquestionably, of
"fine frenzy," not always quite under his own control; he amazes by his
audacity, and delights by the violence with which he would fain storm
Parnassus. His verse has generally fervor, a certain lyric glow, a
certain magnificence; it has abundant fancy, and its measure of swift
imagination. But the feast he spreads for us is a very Trimalchio's
feast--the heaped profusion, the vaunting prodigality, which brings a
surfeit; and, unlike Trimalchio, it could not be said of him _Omnia domi
nascuntur._
Verse, unless it is in some measure ecstasy, can not be poetry. But it
does not follow that in verse the most fervid ecstasy is the best
poetry. If, indeed, for "fervid" be substituted "fervidly expressed," it
is quite the contrary. Coventry Patmore has pointed out that the sign of
great art is peace, a peace which comes of the serene, angelic triumph
over mortal tumults, and those less essential raptures which are after
all flames of the earth's center. Francis Thompson has the ecstasy; but
unfortunately he has not realized that ecstasy, if it is to be
communicated from the soul to the soul, and not merely from the mouth to
the ear, must be whispered, not shouted.
If a man's style is the man--his innermost self, as we may suppose,
revealing itself in the very words he uses--Thompson, in a more special
sense than almost any other writer, is seen in his language. He is that
strange phenomenon, a verbal intelligence. He thinks in words, he
receives his emotions and sensations from words, and the rapture which
he certainly attains is a rapture of the disembodied word. It is not
that his verse is without meaning, that in taking care of the sound he
allows the sense (poor orphan!) to take care of itself. He has a
meaning, but that meaning, if it has not a purely verbal origin, is at
all events allowed to develop under the direct suggestion of the words
which present themselves to interpret it. His consciousness is dominated
by its own means of expression. And what is most curious of all is that,
while Thompson has a quite recognizable manner, he has not achieved a
really personal style. He has learned much, not always with wisdom, and
in crowding together Cowley, Crashaw, Donne, Patmore, to name but a few
of many, he has not remembered that to begin a poem in the manner of
Crashaw, and to end it in the manner of Patmore, is not the same thing
as fusing two alien substances into a single new substance. Styles he
has, but not style. This very possession by the word has, perhaps,
hindered him from attaining it. Fine style, the style in which every
word is perfect, rises beautifully out of a depth into which words have
never stretched down their roots. Intellect and emotion are the molders
of style. A profound thought, a profound emotion, speaks as if it were
unconscious of words; only when it speaks as if unconscious of words do
the supreme words issue from its lips. Ornament may come afterward: you
can not begin with ornament. Thompson, however, begins with ornament.
Unhappily, too, Thompson's verse is certainly fatiguing to read, and one
of the reasons why it is so fatiguing is that the thought that is in it
does not progress; it remains stationary. About the fragile life which
cries somewhere in its center he builds up walls of many colored bricks,
immuring his idea, hiding it, stifling it. How are we to read an ode of
many pages in which there is no development, not even movement? Stanza
is heaped upon stanza, page is piled upon page, and we end where we
began. The writer has said endless things about something but never the
thing itself. Poetry consists in saying the thing itself.
But this is not the only reason why it is fatiguing to read Thompson's
verse. To read it is too much like jolting in a springless cart over a
plowed field, about noontide, on a hot summer day. His lines, of which
this is typical,--
Pulp the globed weight of juiced Iberia's grape,
are so packed with words that each line detains the reader. Not merely
does Thompson prefer the line to the stanza or the paragraph, he prefers
the word to the line. He has failed to remember that while two and two
make four, four are not necessarily better than two--that because red is
brighter than gray, red is not necessarily the better color to use
whenever one wants to use a color. He hears the brass in the orchestra
sounding out loudly over the strings and he therefore suppresses the
strings. He has a bold and prolific fancy, and he pampers his fancy; yet
prodigality is not abundance, nor profusion taste. He is without
reticence, which he looks upon as stint or as penury. Having invited his
guests to his feast, he loads their plates with more than they can eat,
forcing it upon them under the impression that to do otherwise is to be
lacking in hospitality.
Yet, after all, the feast is there--Trimalchio's if you will, but
certainly not a Barmecide's. Thompson has a remarkable talent, he has a
singular mastery of verse, as the success of his books is not alone in
proving. Never has the seventeenth-century phrasing been so exactly
repeated as in some of his poems. Never have Patmore's odes been more
scrupulously rewritten, cadence for cadence; Thompson's fancy is
untiring, if sometimes it tires the reader; he has, not exactly at
command, but not beyond reach, an eager imagination. No one can cause a
more vaguely ardent feeling in the sympathetic reader, a feeling made up
of admiration and of astonishment in perhaps equal portions. There are
times when the fire in him bums clear through its enveloping veils of
smoke, and he writes passages of real splendor. Why then does he for the
most part wrap himself so willingly in the smoke?