FRANCIS THOMPSON
The wave of Catholicism which swept over the art world of the closing
years of the nineteenth century reached its poetic fulness in the
work of Francis Thompson. Contemporary with him were Ernest Dowson,
Lionel Johnson and John Gray, and, although each was inspired by the
same spiritual forces to reassert in song their faith in traditional
Christianity, none of them had his bigness of vision. Few poets,
indeed, of any time, have surpassed his technical skill or the
prodigality of his literary inventiveness; but, beyond that, the spirit
of the hour breathed into his verse a new avowal of mysticism, and it
informed his orthodoxy with so sweet and beautiful a sense of life that
those who were old in the convention of Rome must have marvelled at the
beauty of their inheritance.
Francis Thompson, product as he is of the poetic impulsion of the
Nineties, cannot be located there, as one can locate so many of the
poets of the time. He is not estranged from neighbouring decades, like
Ernest Dowson and John Gray, by a fortuitous decadence of mood, but
rather does he partake of the endless current of the years and of the
eternal normalities. Those who care to discover obvious resemblances
among poets have compared him, fittingly enough, with Crashaw, Vaughan
and Herbert, and other seventeenth-century mystical singers, and
sometimes as though he had been influenced by them. Yet it is known
that he resembled such poets before he had made himself acquainted
with their works. Francis Thompson is, of course, just one more
manifestation of the eternal mystery of faith, and in his greatness he
is of no time and all time. Those resemblances with the past have no
more to do with the average magnificence of his genius and his work
than the minor novelties of thought and expression which may remind
us of his corporeal moment. To the latter I must refer, and with more
excuse than that demanded by the scope of this book, for there is much
in his life and art which links him with, without confining him to, his
period.
[Illustration: FRANCIS THOMPSON (LIFE MASK, 1905)
_From the Photograph by Sherril Schell_]
The son of a doctor, Francis Thompson was born at Preston on 18th
December 1859. His father and mother, and two paternal uncles,
were converts to the Roman Catholic religion; both uncles were
associated with letters, one as professor of English literature at
the Catholic University, Dublin, and later as sub-editor of _The
Dublin Review_, and author of several devotional tracts, and the
other as the author of a volume of poems. Francis was educated in the
Catholic faith, and sent to Ushaw College with some idea of ultimate
priesthood; but that intention must have been abandoned, for at the age
of seventeen he was a reluctant student of medicine at Owens College,
Manchester. Six years were devoted to this work when, repeated attempts
to take a degree proving abortive, a medical career was abandoned.
He expressed no desire to live by writing, although he was an ardent
student of literature, with a particular affection for Æschylus,
William Blake and De Quincey. Several unsuccessful attempts were made
by him to earn a living in various employments, but in 1885, stung by
his father’s reproaches, Thompson left Preston and walked to London.
For three years he lived unknown, generally in degrees of poverty
and destitution. He was employed variously and at odd times; once as
a bootmaker’s assistant in Leicester Square, again as a publisher’s
“collector.” In 1888 he sent two poems, “The Passion of Mary” and
“Dream Tryst,” and a prose essay, “Paganism Old and New,” copied out
on ragged scraps of paper, to _Merry England_. This act proved
a turning-point in his career, for the editor, Wilfrid Meynell,
recognising the extraordinary quality of the work submitted to him, not
only published it, but sought out the author, who had given the vague
address of Charing Cross Post Office; and, having found him, became
his lifelong friend and, in course of time, his literary executor and
the far-seeing guardian of his fame.
So poor was Francis Thompson during his early London days that even
writing materials were beyond his means, and some old half-used
account-books, given to him by the Leicester Square bootmaker, were a
windfall, enabling him to translate to more enduring form something
of the richness of his mind. But he was not a writer in the ordinary
sense. His desire to harvest his dreams was intermittent at best,
and, in after years, friendly editors were at great pains to extract
commissioned work from him. At the same time he did make some attempt
at publicity, as the sending of manuscripts to Mr Wilfrid Meynell
would prove. The results were not, however, always so fortunate, for
in the following year his essay on “Shelley” was rejected by _The
Dublin Review_. Nearly twenty years later the essay was discovered
among the poet’s papers by his literary executor, and, as we know,
_The Dublin Review_ was enabled to make amends. During his own
life Thompson published three volumes: _Poems_ (1893), _Sister
Songs_ (1895) and _New Poems_ (1897). He contributed poems and
reviews to several publications, notably to _The Academy_, under
the editorship of Lewis Hind, who was one of the earliest to give
practical recognition to his genius.
It was not easy to befriend such a man as Francis Thompson. For years
he had taken opium, which set up a paralysis of the social will and
made him tragically indifferent to the most elementary amenities of
life. His friends induced him, especially when he was too ill to resist
their kind offices, to leave the estranged city ways, and thus there
are oases in his sordid outer life--in hospitals; at the house of
Wilfrid and Alice Meynell; at Storrington, in Sussex, where he wrote
most of the poems in his first volume; and, later, near the Franciscan
monastery at Pantasaph, North Wales, where he wrote the greater part
of those in his last. After this he did little work of first quality.
His own soul, rather than the world, made fateful and fatal demands of
him. This strange being, with brain of wondrous imagery and cleanest
thoughts, this gentle poetic genius, voluntarily, it would seem,
chose destitution and desolation as his lot--if one dare apply such
terms to a being whose inner life was so rich with vision. But opium
and privation are exacting mistresses and eventually they wrecked his
never-too-robust body. Unfamiliar and unkempt, this wayward child of
the magical soul, this decadent Shelley who “dabbled his fingers in
the day-fall,” preferred to haunt the Embankment, the cavernous arches
of Charing Cross and the bleak and dusty colonnades of Covent Garden,
like any lonely and friendless human outcast, until disease drove him
to take shelter in a hospital at St John’s Wood, where he died, on 13th
November 1907.
Among the many eloquent and whole-hearted tributes to his memory, that
by Wilfred Whitten stands out for its vivid word portraiture of the man
in his latter days. Mr Whitten first met Francis Thompson at the office
of _The Academy_, Chancery Lane, in 1897, “the year in which, with
his _New Poems_, he took farewell of poetry and began,” he says,
“to look on life as so much dead lift, so much needless postscript to
his finished epistle. Thompson came frequently to the office to receive
books for review, and to bring in his ‘copy.’ Every visit meant a talk,
which was never curtailed by Thompson. This singer, who had soared to
themes too dazzling for all but the rarest minds; this poet of the
broken wing and the renounced lyre had not become moody or taciturn. At
his best he was a fluent talker, who talked straight from his knowledge
and convictions, yet never for victory. He weighed his words, and would
not hurt a controversial fly. On great subjects he was slow or silent;
on trifles he became grotesquely tedious. This dreamer seemed to be
surprised into a kind of exhilaration at finding himself in contact
with small realities. And then the fountains of memory would be broken
up, or some quaint corner of his _amour propre_ would be touched.
He would explain nine times what was clear, and talk about snuff or
indigestion or the posting of a letter until the room swam round us.”
Following this comes a picture of the poet as he appeared in his
pilgrimage through the London streets: “A stranger figure than
Thompson’s was not to be seen in London. Gentle in looks, half-wild in
externals, his face worn by pain and the fierce reactions of laudanum,
his hair and straggling beard neglected, he had yet a distinction
and an aloofness of bearing that marked him in the crowd; and when
he opened his lips he spoke as a gentleman and a scholar. A cleaner
mind, a more naïvely courteous manner, were not to be found. It was
impossible and unnecessary to think always of the tragic side of his
life. He still had to live and work, in his fashion, and his entries
and exits became our most cheerful institution. His great brown cape,
which he would wear on the hottest days, his disastrous hat, and his
dozen neglects and makeshifts 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.”
Stranger or more inspired being has never before slipped through the
indifferent metropolitan throng, transmuting, by his indifference to
earthly things, tragic moments into joyous conquests.
Having mentioned the difficulties of friendly intention towards such a
man, it is necessary to quote here a more recent tribute to Thompson’s
earliest friend, Wilfrid Meynell, contributed in a letter to _The
Nation_ by Lewis Hind, in reply to a poem “To Francis Thompson,” by
William H. Davies. There were lines in this poem, such as “No window
kept a light for thee,” and “No pilot thought thee worth his pains,”
which might have led the ill-informed to imagine Thompson a friendless
and neglected genius. The contrary is made quite clear for all time:
“Now [says Lewis Hind] it is a matter of history that there
was a man who, through sheer love of great verse, and through
kindness, piloted Francis Thompson all the years of his London
life from the late eighties until his death. That man was
Wilfrid Meynell. There was a window always alight for the
poet--the window of the Meynell home. And if this is not made
very clear in the forthcoming _Life of Francis Thompson_,
by Everard Meynell, the reason will be the family shrinking
from making their good deeds known. I speak from knowledge.
Long ago (it must have been about 1889), on the occasion of my
first meeting with Wilfrid Meynell (my initial call at that
hospitable house, drawn thither by an essay from Mrs Meynell’s
pen that made me eager to meet the author), Mr Meynell asked
me if I had ever heard of a Francis Thompson who had submitted
to him for _Merry England_ an astonishing poem from the
vague address of Charing Cross Post Office. Later, he tracked
the poet, and from that day until Thompson’s death Wilfrid
Meynell was pilot, friend, purse, anything, everything, to the
poet. From the material world Francis Thompson wanted nothing.
It did not interest him. It did not exist for him. His body,
that wretched structure ordained to house, as it best might,
his ardent spirit, he, shall I say, despised. Comfort, a home,
provision for the future were to him unrealities. His only
realities were spiritual; his only adventures were in the land
of visions. The Meynell household was his true parental home,
and he, a child in all worldly matters, was as incurious as a
child as to the whence and why of the necessaries of life. For a
time I was happily instrumental in relieving my friend, Wilfrid
Meynell, of the financial burden of piloting a poet. That was
during the days of my editorship of _The Academy_, when
for three or four years Thompson was our most valued and most
difficult contributor. I soon realised the folly of sending
him a cheque in payment of contributions. Either he would
never open the letter, or, likely enough, he would light his
obstreperous pipe with the cheque, apparently never dreaming
that it might be useful in paying his landlady. No; I sent him
no cheques after the first month. A cheque was despatched to his
landlady each week for board and lodging, and a few shillings
were placed in the poet’s hand, periodically, for pocket money,
which he accepted with detachment, his flow of conversation (it
was his wont often to talk about nothing at exasperating length)
uninterrupted. _The Academy_ would never have received his
fine ‘Ode on the Death of Cecil Rhodes’ (a commission: completed
in fifteen hours) had he not been in want that day of pocket
money--not for collars, not for cabs--for laudanum.”
Tragedy there was in the life of Francis Thompson, but there was
nothing pitiful. It was a life too deep for pathos. He was one of those
who were marked by the quickening spirit of the times for test of
tribulation. The search for reality in the Nineties produced many such
who were impelled by the unknown forces of the moment to follow life to
the very frontier of experience. Consciously or unconsciously, as we
have seen, men were experimenting with life, and it would seem also as
if life were experimenting with men. It was a revolution precipitated
by the Time Spirit. Francis Thompson represented the revolt against
the world. He did not, as many had done, defy the world; he denied
it, and, by placing his condition beneath contempt, he conquered it.
That, at least, was the effect of his curious life, and in that he was
unique even in a period of spiritual and intellectual insurrection and
suffering. The probability that he took to poverty as he took to opium,
as a sedative for the malady of spirit, does not invalidate this view,
and the record of his pilgrimage and his faith is actually epitomised
in the most popular and most remarkable of his poems, _The Hound of
Heaven_, a work which well might serve as a symbol of the spiritual
unrest of the whole nineteenth century. But whilst every thinker and
dreamer of the _fin de siècle_ decade was seeking a fuller life
through art, or experience, or sensation, or reform, or revolt, or
possessions, Francis Thompson was finding it in the negation of all
these. Whilst others acquired for themselves treasures of one kind or
another, or sought for themselves wonders and achievements of one kind
or another, he remained both poor and unmoved by his poverty. If mind
ever was kingdom to man, Francis Thompson’s mind a kingdom was to him;
nay, it was the kingdom of God.
In this great lyric the mystical idea of God as the Hound of Heaven
eternally pursuing the pilgrims of life until they return to Him is
autobiographical of a man and an age. What better epitome of the mind
of the modern world could be imagined than the opening stanza?
“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes, I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.”
There we have the whole desolation of man--the seeker who findeth not,
for what he seeks seeketh him; the hunter of God hunted by God--and
as the poem proceeds we see the eternal malady of the spirit, now
satiated, now insatiable, in the age-long quest for peace and joy in
things known and seen:
“To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.
But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
The long savannahs of the blue;
Or whether, Thunder-driven,
They clanged His chariot ’thwart a heaven
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o’ their feet:--
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.”
Francis Thompson took a delight in simple things which recalls
Wordsworth’s attitude and sometimes that poet’s accent, particularly
in the lines called “Daisy,” wherein, after the manner, also, of the
Nineties, he celebrates his meeting with Innocence in the person of a
young girl on the Sussex hills near Storrington:
“She looked a little wistfully,
Then went her sunshine way:--
The sea’s eye had a mist on it,
And the leaves fell from the day.
She went her unremembering way,
She went, and left in me
The pang of all the partings gone,
And partings yet to be.
She left me marvelling why my soul
Was sad that she was glad;
At all the sadness in the sweet,
The sweetness in the sad.”
Indeed, it would be easier to find resemblances between Francis
Thompson and poets so diverse as Wordsworth and Shelley than between
him and the mystic poets of the seventeenth century. He had the
quietism of Wordsworth and the exalted sensuousness of Shelley,
and he had the fundamental saintliness of both. A life of sordid
self-inflicted disaster could no more affect the strength and
cleanliness of his spirit than a life of passionate wilfulness could
touch the purity of the soul of Shelley. But there are definite points
of divergence between Thompson and the two earlier poets. He goes
further with Shelley than with Wordsworth: Thompson and Shelley were
more akin. The spirituality of Wordsworth was, ultimately, moral;
that of Shelley, mystic. Had the spirit of Wordsworth been reborn
in 1891 it might have been rationalistic and ethical: the pride of
Nonconformity. But the spirit of Shelley reborn at the same time might
have been--Francis Thompson. Shelley, it is true, sought an unknown God
in materialism, and some of his prose might easily have been inspired
by that Secular Society which post-dated him by half-a-century, but his
most rationalistic moment in song has all the passionate mysticism of
William Blake. The paganism of Shelley seems to span the years with
majestic courage until, weary of the endless show of things, it joins
forces with Thompson and Christianity.
The modern poet knew and understood Shelley as few have done. For him
no “bright but ineffectual angel,” this soaring creature of enraptured
song, but a child with the whole universe for toy-box: “He dabbles his
fingers in the day-fall. He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the
stars. He makes bright mischief with the moon. The meteors nuzzle their
noses in his hand. 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: its floor is littered with his broken fancies. 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 song.” And in this
description of Shelley, Thompson goes far towards describing himself,
but he did not stand “in the lap of patient Nature”; Francis Thompson,
childlike also, rested in the lap of God.
This kinship with Shelley in a common Pantheism is realised more than
elsewhere in Francis Thompson’s _Anthem of Earth_, a luxuriant
poem in which he retraces with depth and beauty, and an added richness,
the image he had summoned to his aid in the essay on his kin-poet:
“Then what wild Dionysia I, young Bacchanal,
Danced in thy lap! Ah for the gravity!
Then, O Earth, thou rang’st beneath me,
Rocked to Eastward, rocked to Westward,
Even with the shifted
Poise and footing of my thought!
I brake through thy doors of sunset,
Ran before the hooves of sunrise,
Shook thy matron tresses down in fancies
Wild and wilful
As a poet’s hand could twine them;
Caught in my fantasy’s crystal chalice
The Bow, as its cataract of colours
Plashed to thee downward;
Then when thy circuit swung to nightward,
Night the abhorrèd, night was a new dawning,
Celestial dawning
Over the ultimate marges of the soul;
Dusk grew turbulent with fire before me,
And like a windy arras waved with dreams.
Sleep I took not for my bedfellow,
Who could waken
To a revel, an inexhaustible
Wassail of orgiac imageries;
Then while I wore thy sore insignia
In a little joy, O Earth, in a little joy;
Loving thy beauty in all creatures born of thee,
Children, and the sweet-essenced body of women;
Feeling not yet upon my neck thy foot,
But breathing warm of thee as infants breathe
New from their mother’s morning bosom.”
Such earth-love is Pagan rather than Christian, yet it was not foreign
to the Christianity of Francis Thompson, whose orthodoxy did not
curtail his worship of Life in many of her manifestations--in the stars
and the winds, in the flowers and children, and in pure womanhood.
There was hardly anything abnormal about his taste, but everything
he worshipped became distinguished and strange by the wonder-maiden
imagery of his genius. The foregoing lines are richly diapered with
luxurious phrases. No other poet of his time possessed such jewelled
endowment, and few of any other time equal him in this gift. Nowhere in
English song are there poems so heavily freighted with decoration of
such magnificence; and no poems approaching, however remotely, their
regal splendour have the power of suggesting such absolute simplicity.
Sometimes his “wassail of orgiac imageries” becomes the light conceit
of his time, but never for long. Francis Thompson soared high above
literary flightiness. His very luxuriance of expression was austere; it
was not the young delight of a Keats in sheer physical beauty; it was
the transmutation of sense into spirit by the refinement of sense in
vision.