Francis Thompson, a poet of high thinking, "of celestial vision," and
of imaginings that found literary images of answering splendour, died
in London in the winter of 1907. His life--always a fragile
one--doubtless owed its prolongation to "man's unconquerable mind," in
him so invincible through all vicissitude that he seemed to add a new
significance to Wordsworth's phrase. To his mortal frame was denied the
vitality that informs his verse. Howbeit, his verse was himself; he
lived every line of it, fulfilling to the last letter his own
description of the poet, piteous yet proud:
He lives detachèd days;
He serveth not for praise;
For gold
He is not sold.
He asketh not world's eyes;
Nor to world's ears he cries--
Saith, "These
Shut, if ye please!"
To this aloof moth of a man science was nearly as absorbing an interest
as was the mysticism that some thought had eaten him up; and, to give a
light example of his actuality, he who had scarce handled a bat since
he left Ushaw College, knew every famous score of the last quarter of
a century, and left among his papers cricket-verses, trivial yet
tragic. One such verse acquaints us incidentally with his Lancashire
lineage:
It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though my own red roses there may blow;
It is little I repair to the matches of the Southron folk,
Though the red roses crest the caps, I know.
For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,
And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host
As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro.
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!
Born at Preston in 1859, the son of a doctor afterwards in practice at
Ashton-under-Lyne, he inherited no literary traditions. He had, to be
sure, an uncle, an Oxford convert to Catholicism from the ranks of the
Anglican clergy, whose name appears on the title page of _Tracts_
which, perhaps because for their own Times, seem assuredly for no
other. The seven years Francis Thompson passed at Ushaw--a college near
Durham, which then possessed few literary traditions besides those of
Lingard, Waterton and Wiseman, but can now boast Lafcadio Hearn's as
well as Thompson's own--were, no doubt, influential for him; for a
certain individualism, still lingering in outstanding seats of
learning, gave him a lucky freedom to follow his own bent--the ample
reading of the classics. After Ushaw he went to Owens College, to
qualify for his father's profession; in his preliminary examination
distinguishing himself in Greek. His attempts to translate dead
language into living dated back to these days; though of the list of
words, which some who were amused and others who were irritated put
down to his own inventing, many were made familiar to him in his
intercourse with Milton, with Shelley, with Shakspere--his most vital
companions. If these poets went, like Alexander, as far as Chaos, and
if Thompson hazarded one step more, as Emerson said Goethe did,
Thompson too swung himself safely back again. In Manchester,
Literature, if not Melancholy, had already marked him for her own; and
it was his _Religio Medici_ rather than his _Materia Medica_ that he
put under his pillow, perhaps the lump of it suggesting to him his
after image about the poet's dreaming:
The hardest pang whereon
He lays his mutinous head may be a Jacob's stone.
A definite reminiscence of the dissecting-room at Manchester may
certainly be discovered in his allusion (in _An Anthem of Earth_) to
the heart as
_Arras'd in purple_ like the house of kings,
the regal heart that comes at last
To stall the grey rat, and the carrion-worm
Statelily lodge.
Possibly the sorrow of filial duty unperformed--a sorrow deeper with
him than is common among such predestined delinquents--aggravated the
bodily ailments which already beset him; and drastic indeed were the
remedies he himself prescribed. "Physician, heal thyself": the dire
taunt took flesh, as it were, in Francis Thompson, and his plight was
visible to all men. Himself he could not save. Biography strangely
repeats itself, not in common mental experience only, but also in
uncovenanted details of fact and incident. Like De Quincey, whose
writings he took into his blood, Thompson had a nervous illness in
Manchester; like De Quincey he went to London, and knew Oxford Street
for a stony-hearted stepmother; his wealth, like De Quincey's once, lay
in two volumes, for he carried Æschylus in one pocket, Blake in the
other; and the parallel might, if to profit, be further outdrawn.
To most incongruous modes of making a living he now put his hand. His
assistantship in a shop near Leicester Square would have fitted him for
the production of a record of _Adventures among Boots_; and later, as a
"collector" for a bookseller he must often have bent beneath the sack,
which, if heavy, so he might comfort himself, was at least heavy with
books. Of these things he spoke with a matter-of-fact, all-accepting,
simplicity when, a little later, some verses he sent to a magazine
brought him believers, who sought until they found him. After a course
of medical treatment, he went to Storrington. That beautiful Sussex
village has now its fixed place on the map of English literature. For
there it was that Francis Thompson discovered his possibilities as a
poet. On its common he met the village child, whom he calls "Daisy," in
the verses that are so named. And it was characteristic of this poet
that from the ordinary episodes of ordinary days he made his "golden
musics." When he saw the sunset at Storrington, the resulting Ode was
dotted with local landmarks--the cross, for instance, casting its
shadow in the monastery garden. The children of the family in London,
into which he was received, were the subjects of _Poppy_, _The Making
of Viola_, _To Monica Thought Dying_, _To my Godchild_--all in the
first book of _Poems_; while two of their number have a noble heritage
in _Sister Songs_. Constant to the end, when he died some newly
pencilled lines were found, addressed "To Olivia," a yet younger
sister, recalling the strains of fifteen years before:
I fear to love you, Sweet, because
Love's the ambassador of loss.
To their mother likewise were addressed the poems of Fair Love,
labelled _Love in Dian's Lap_, of which Coventry Patmore said that
"Laura might have been proud"; hers also were many of the _New Poems_.
If, therefore, as one critic after another declared, a poet had dropped
from the skies--those skies of light--of the Seventeenth Century, he
dropped very much upon the spot. "Mr Thompson must simply be Crashaw
born again, but born greater," declared the first of his reviewers; and
Mr Traill, in _The Nineteenth Century_, inquired: "Where, unless
perhaps here and there in a sonnet of Rossetti's, has this sort of
sublimated enthusiasm for the bodily and spiritual beauty of womanhood
found such expression between the age of the Stuarts and our own?" Mr
Traill added boldly his belief--daring then, though acceptable enough
now--that "alike in wealth and dignity of imagination, in depth and
subtlety of thought and in magic and mastery of language," England
possessed in this little volume the evidence of "a new poet of the
first rank." More expectedly, Coventry Patmore, in _The Fortnightly
Review_, hailed in the new-comer a disciple of their common master, the
Florentine Poet of Fair Love, and expressed the opinion that "Mr
Thompson's qualities ought to place him in the permanent ranks of
fame." The _Hound of Heaven_ was to Patmore "one of the very few
_great_ odes of which the language can boast."
Such pronouncements proved at least that a poet, who had no friend save
such as his published poems gained for him, could count on an immediate
recognition for high merit. For these tributes, and many more of like
welcoming, placed him instantly out of range of the common casualties
of criticism. And he had what poets of old to their great sorrow
lacked; he had trial by his peers; a kind fate gave him fellow poets
among his reviewers.
Perhaps a more convincing sign even than that of professional praise
was conveyed by the chance allusion he lighted on later in Lady
Burne-Jones's biography of her husband: "The winter's labour," she
says, "was cheered by the appearance of a small volume of poems by an
author whose name (Francis Thompson) was till then unknown to us. The
little book moved him to admiration and hope." And, speaking of _The
Hound of Heaven_, Burne-Jones himself said: "Since Gabriel's 'Blessed
Damozel' no mystical words have so touched me. Shall I ever forget how
I undressed and dressed again, and had to undress again--a thing I most
hate--because I could think of nothing else?"
_Sister Songs_, published in 1895--the poem of which Mr William Archer
has said that "Shelley would have adored it"--is a poem to read aloud;
for sound and sense herein celebrate their divine nuptials. One of the
high memories of the present writer is that of hearing it so read by Mr
George Wyndham at the hearthstone of Byron's granddaughter. The lines
therein that deal with sex, dormant in the child-girl, yielded the poet
perhaps his most amazing imagery. "Superabundance," murmured
some--surely a "fault" as happy as was ever son of Adam's. The charge
of obscurity brought against the poem was more apt; for who that did
not know of his days--and his nights--in the London streets, could
follow such a poignant piece of autobiography as this?
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 barbèd minutes at me;
Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour
In night's slow-wheelèd car;
Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length
From under those dread wheels; and, bled of strength,
I waited the inevitable last.
Then there came past
A child; like thee, a spring-flower; but a flower
Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring,
And through the city-streets blown withering.
She passed,--O brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing!--
And of her own scant pittance did she give,
That I might eat and live:
Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive.
And how shall that final episode be turned more explicitly? There are
still a few things left that cannot be uttered, or, if uttered, that
become the counterpart, even for the willing ear, of that "tenuity of
the bat's cry" reported to elude the common hearing. It is even as
Balzac, great talker himself, says, that everything (especially
theology I think) is the cheaper for being discussed. Yet this untold
story transcends the mere romance of De Quincey's Ann, and might,
indeed, for a moment, reverse Rossetti's just indictment of the life of
"Jenny"--"It makes a goblin of the sun." For this "flower fallen from
the budded coronal of Spring" took root and flourished, even in London
mire, and again the fragrant petals unfolded and the greenery grew.
In _New Poems_ Francis Thompson put forth in _The Mistress of Vision_
his stark gospel of renunciation. It is the last word of an asceticism
which he practised as well as preached--most strait in its abnegation
of everything but the beauty his verse, unlike his life, never could
renounce. Coventry Patmore, Thompson's true "Captain of Song," used to
say that the young poet's prose was even finer than his poetry, and his
talk better than both. This was a statement with the true Patmorean
touch of paradox. Any way, the talk had no reporter, and of his
prose--his "heroic prose," as it has been called--only one example
passed, during his life, into book form--the complaint made by Brother
Ass, the Body, against its rider, the Soul. This was published under
the title of _Health and Holiness_, accompanied by a Note from Father
Tyrrell. But his experiences in prose, as a reviewer, were wide as his
sympathies, and these were sanely universal. His articles in _The
Academy_, under Mr Lewis Hind's editorship, must choke up many a
scrapbook. Later, his contributions to _The Athenæum_ afforded him his
greatest scope and stimulant; and only with his death came the eclipse
of his powers. Editors forbore to be angry at his delays, for, after a
while of waiting, they got from him, at last, what none else could give
at all.
* * * * *
About ten weeks before the darkness fell on him the little flame of his
life began visibly to flicker. A change to the country was advised; and
he became the carefully tended guest of Mr Wilfrid Blunt--not many
miles from the Storrington of his early love, to which, however, not
wild arabs could any longer draw him. He was too weak for any travel,
save that which brought him back to London--better, he himself said,
but surely dying, as it seemed to solicitous eyes.
Ten days before his death he went as a private patient to the Hospital
of St John and St Elizabeth, in St John's Wood, and there, at the age
of forty-eight, on November 13, 1907, he passed away at dawn--the dawn
that was the death-hour in his _Dream Tryst_. He was laid to rest in St
Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green. In his coffin were roses from the garden
of Mr George Meredith, inscribed with Mr Meredith's testimony, "A true
poet, one of the small band"; and violets from kindred turf went to the
dead poet's breast from the hand of her whose praises he had divinely
sung. Devoted friends lament him, no less for himself than for his
singing. He made all men his debtors, leaving to those who loved him
the memory of a unique personality, and to English poetry an
imperishable name.