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THE LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON
[Illustration: _Francis Thompson in 1894_
_Emery Walker Ph. sc._]
THE LIFE OF FRANCIS THOMPSON
by
EVERARD MEYNELL
Burns & Oates Ltd
28 Orchard Street
London W
1913
_To
Grazia_
The Author's thanks are here tendered to Mother Austin of the
Presentation Convent, Manchester, the Poet's sister; to Perceval Lucas
and Father Austin Richmond for the fruits of research work; to Mrs.
Coventry Patmore and Lewis Hind for letters and memories; and to many
other kind helpers.
Contents
_Chapter_ _Page_
I. The Child 1
II. The Boy 15
III. Manchester and Medicine 35
IV. London Streets 61
V. The Discovery 85
VI. Literary Beginnings 111
VII. "Poems" 135
VIII. Of Words; of Origins; of Metre 152
IX. At Monastery Gates 180
X. Mysticism and Imagination 198
XI. Patmore's Death, and "New Poems" 233
XII. Friends and Opinions 245
XIII. The Londoner 272
XIV. Communion and Excommunion 291
XV. Characteristics 308
XVI. The Closing Years 316
XVII. Last Things 339
Index 353
Illustrations
Francis Thompson in 1895 _Frontispiece_
His Birthplace _Facing page_ 4
Francis, his Sisters and their Dolls, 1870 " " 12
St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw " " 26
Francis Thompson in 1875 " " 34
Francis Thompson in 1877 " " 54
No. 47 Palace Court " " 134
Cast of the Poet's Hand " " 144
His Parents " " 186
"Mr. Thompson of Fleet Street" " " 256
(_Drawn by_ Everard Meynell, 1903)
The Life Mask, 1905 " " 316
Francis Thompson in 1907 " " 328
(_Drawn by the_ Hon. Neville Lytton)
The Memorial at Owens College " " 344
The Life of Francis Thompson
CHAPTER I: THE CHILD
"I WAS born in 1858 or 1859 (I never could remember and don't care
which) at Preston in Lancashire. Residing there, my mother more than
once pointed out to me, as we passed it, the house wherein I was born;
and it seemed to me disappointingly like any other house."
The 16th of December 1859 was the day, 7 Winckley Street, a box of
a house in a narrow road, the place of Francis Joseph Thompson's
birth. He was the second son of Charles Thompson and his wife, Mary
Turner Morton.[1] Charles Thompson's father (the poet's grandfather)
was Robert Thompson, Surveyor of Taxes successively at Oakham in
Rutlandshire, Bath, and Salisbury; he married Mary Costall, the
daughter of a surgeon, at Oakham in 1812, and died at Tunbridge Wells
in 1853. Charles, born in 1823, married Mary Morton in 1857.
Having first practised at Bristol and later been house-surgeon in
the Homeopathic Dispensary in Manchester, he set up a practice in
Winckley Street shortly after his marriage. Like his wife, his sisters,
and the majority of his brothers, Dr. Thompson was a convert to the
Catholic Church; but, unlike his brothers, he never committed himself
to authorship, and is remembered only in the many good opinions of
those who knew him. For his patients he had something of the pastoral
feeling; his rounds were his diocese, and in the statistics of kindness
which no man keeps--in deference perhaps to the thoroughness of the
Recording Angel--his name is thought worthy to figure largely. Though
he attended as many patients as the most successful members of his
profession, his fees were smaller and fewer. He stood, like his clients
of the poorer quarters, in fear of the Creator firstly, and of death
secondly; and so it happened that, having ministered to mother and
child, he would pour out the waters of baptism over infants who made as
if to leave the world as soon as they had entered it. This much of his
kindness will serve as a preface to the story of the part which, forced
to a seeming severity, he played in the career of his son.
The verses of two of Charles Thompson's brothers (Francis's uncles[2])
supply no clue, not even a plebeian one, to the origin of Francis's
muse. Edward Healy Thompson's sonnets and John Costall Thompson's
_Vision of Liberty_ show that not a dozen such rhyming uncles could
endow a birth with poetry. Eugenists must accept an inexplicable hitch
in the prosaic unfolding of the Thompson birth-roll. While there can be
no chart made of Francis's intellectual lineage, it is not surprising
that an occasional phrase in his uncle's _Vision of Liberty and other
Poems_, privately printed in 1848, bears some resemblance to his form
and diction.
A servant-maid destroyed John's autobiography--an unkind accident,
since it left his career to be summed up by a relative in seven words:
"An utter failure in life and literature." Gladstone and Sir Henry
Taylor at one time interested themselves in his work, but neither
so keenly nor so persistently as to secure his good fame with an
exacting brother. Yet Edward Healy Thompson (born 1813, educated at
Oakham and Emmanuel College, Cambridge) is duller in verse than John
Costall. He never saw, or never used, even a second-rate vision. Before
his conversion to Catholicism he was curate in the parish of Elia's
"Sweet Calne in Wiltshire" from July 1838 to January 1840, and had for
neighbour there the friend of Lamb and Wordsworth, to whom Coleridge,
before a meeting, had written--
My heart has thanked thee, Bowles, for those soft strains
Whose sadness soothes the life with murmuring
Of wild bees in the sunny showers of Spring.
But sweet Calne had its harsher properties: its human bees murmured
in wrath, and had stings. Incumbent and curate both held a poet in
disrespect. Coleridge and Francis Thompson, in whom may be traced in
common the spoliations of opium, are linked by the coincidence that
they were condemned by those Wiltshire associates--Coleridge by the
rector in terms of high contempt, and Francis by the curate, who wrote
in later days to warn Francis's London friends that he must be avoided
as the writer of "erotic verse." Edward Healy Thompson afterwards
admitted Francis's genius, but found no hereditary explanation of it
in Francis's parents or any member of the family. On the other hand,
Miss Agnes Martin, a cousin of Francis, writes: "From his father he
inherited his passion for religion, and, from what I know of his
poetry, I find he has expressed thoughts and yearnings habitual to
other members of his father's family." It was Francis's custom to
speak of his mother as if it were from her at least as much as from
his father that he derived certain mental and physical characteristics.
Born in Manchester in 1822, she was daughter of Joseph Morton and
Harriet Sigley. Her father, a clerk in the bank of Messrs. Jones, Lloyd
and Co., was afterwards secretary to the newly-founded Manchester
Assurance Co., and later lost money in a personal business enterprise.
In 1851 her family left Manchester for Chelsea, and there in 1854 she
was living with people who befriended her desire, frowned upon by her
family, of becoming a Catholic. She became engaged to the son of the
house, but he died, and before the close of the year she was received
into the Church. In how far she was cast out by her own people I do not
know, but to some degree she rehearsed the part to be played, after
her death, in her own household by her own son. She set out to make
a living, and took a position as governess at Sale, near Manchester,
having failed--as he failed in his Ushaw days--in an attempt to enter
the Religious Life.[3] In the following year, while still in the
neighbourhood of Manchester, she met her future husband. She died
December 19, 1880, at Stamford Street, Ashton-under-Lyne. Dr. Thompson
married as his second wife Anne Richardson, in 1887.
[Illustration: The Poet's Birthplace
_No. 7, Winckley Street, Preston_]
The paternal relative (a cousin once removed) who finds in Francis
thoughts and yearnings habitual to other members of his father's
family, is better able to note them than he was. She tracks them in a
girl (never seen by Francis) whose tragedy, since seeking admittance
to a convent and failing to take final vows, is that she is not
physically fit for the only life tolerable to her. She recognises the
family mannerism in a relative who is famous in the suburban street
of his choice for reciting the Psalms in a mighty voice in his sleep,
so that no rest visits the guest new to the household noises. She
sees the family characters in Francis's niece who is about to end her
noviciate and take vows in a Canadian community. She notes them in the
two aunts, the sisters of Charles Thompson, who as Sister Mary of St.
Jane Frances de Chantal of the Order of the Good Shepherd, and Sister
Mary Ignatius of the Order of Mercy, lived and died as nuns; of a third
aunt nothing is known, but in a dozen other cases the inclination
for a spiritual life or a disinclination for all the pleasures or
successes of any other is apparent. She notes the same carelessness for
worldly prosperity, the thoughtlessness for mundane concerns that goes
with certain trains of spiritual speculation. In a family singularly
scattered the family trait is for ever reappearing. The aloofness or
vagueness that led Francis to lose himself in London was responsible
for many lost addresses. As Francis wandered alone in the Strand,
without knowing that he had relatives in Church Court within a stone's
throw of his stony and uncovered bed, so do the brothers and sisters
of the present generation inhabit London and its suburbs unknown to
one another, but without real alienation or unkindness. She, the
cousin here cited, has herself wished to enter a convent and failed,
and knowing much of the family needs and inclinations, does not doubt
that Francis's life-long trouble was that he failed in the attempt to
be a priest. There is nothing to throw substantial discredit on such a
reading of his career.
From Winckley Street, associated with none of Francis's conscious
experiences of existence, the family moved to Winckley Square and to
Lathom Street, Preston, and in 1864 to Ashton-under-Lyne, where they
remained until Francis's flight to London twenty-one years later.
* * * * *
"KNOW you what it is to be a child?" asks Thompson in his essay on
Shelley; the answer tells us what it was to be the child Francis: "It
is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to
believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is
to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it
is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into
loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy
godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count
yourself the king of infinite space; it is
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour;
it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor
petition that it be commuted into death. When we become conscious in
dreaming that we dream, the dream is on the point of breaking; when
we become conscious in living that we live, the ill dream is but
just beginning." Francis was early alive. In a note-book he says:
"Yes, childhood is tragic to me. And then critics complain that I do
not write 'simply' about it. O fools! as if there was anything more
complex, held closer to the heart of mystery, than its contemplation."
He forgot perhaps that even fools have experienced the dereliction and
despair which catches at all children at some time or another. It is
improbable that he suffered, but possible that he remembered, more than
other children.
Having attended for two months the school of the Nuns of the Cross and
the Passion--a name full of anticipations--he reached, in the cold
phrase that admits to first Confession and Communion, the "age of
discretion." At seven years he was reading poetry, and, overwhelmed by
feelings of which he knew not the meaning, had found his way to the
heart of Shakespeare and Coleridge: their three ages of discretion kept
company. Already seeking the highway and the highway's seclusion, he
would carry his book to the stairs, where, away from the constraint
of chairs and tables and the unemotional flatness of the floor, his
sister Mary remembers him. It is on that household highway, where the
voices and noises of the house, and the footsteps of passengers on the
pavement beyond the dark front door, come and pass quickly into other
regions, that the child meditates and learns. There he may contract
the habit of loneliness, populate his fancy with the creatures of
fear; and gather about him a company of thoughts that will be his
intimates until the end. And all the thronging personages of the boy's
imagination are perhaps darkly arrayed against him. The crowd will be
of tremors rather than of smiles, of secret rather than open-handed
truths; the lessons learnt in that steep college of childhood are not
joyful. The "long tragedy of early experiences" of which he spoke was
a tragedy adventured upon alone. With his mother and his sisters,
their toys, his books, and his own inventions he was happy. He would
give entertainments to a more or less patient and tolerant audience of
sisters; conjuror's tricks, and a model theatre on whose stage he would
dangle marionettes, were the favourite performances, to one of which he
was beholden for amusement and occupation till the end of his life. His
early experience of the tragedy cannot be traced to the nursery. It was
not there he built his barricade, or became in his own words "expert in
concealment, not expression, of myself. Expression I reserved for my
pen. My tongue was tenaciously disciplined in silence." There befell
some share of accidental alarm. In a note-book that he had by him
towards the end of his life and in which there are many allusions to
its beginnings, he wrote of the "world-wide desolation and terror of
for the first time, realising that the mother can lose you, or you her,
and your own abysmal loneliness and helplessness without her." Such a
feeling he compares to that of first fearing yourself to be without God.
His toys he never quite relinquished; among the few possessions at
his death was a cardboard theatre, wonderfully contrived, seeing
that his fingers never learnt the ordinary tricks of usefulness, and
with this his play was very earnest, as is attested in a note-book
query--"Sylvia's hairs shall work the figures(?)." That he was
content with his childhood, its toys, and even its troubles, he has
particularly asserted. "I did not want responsibility, did not want to
be a man. Toys I could surrender, with chagrin, so I had my great toy
of imagination whereby the world became to me my box of toys." It is
remembered by a visitor to the Thompson household that at meal times
the father would call upon the children to come out of their rooms.
But they, for answer, would lock their doors against the dinner hour:
they were playing with the toy theatre. Francis went on playing all his
life; his sister has kept her heart young in a convent. And there is no
discontent in this particular memory of early loneliness:--
"There is a sense in which I have always been and even now remain
a child. But in another sense I never was a child, never shared
children's thoughts, ways, tastes, manner of life, and outlook of life.
I played, but my sport was solitary sport, even when I played with my
sisters; from the time I began to read (about my sixth year) the game
often (I think) meant one thing to me and another (quite another) to
them--my side of the game was part of a dream-scheme invisible to them.
And from boys, with their hard practical objectivity of play, I was
tenfold wider apart than from girls with their partial capacity and
habit of make-believe."
Crosses he also experienced, and the sense of injustice was awakened
early. He lost the prize--a clockwork mouse, no less!--offered by his
governess. Although first in lessons, his brisker, punctual-footed
sisters and governess would have to wait many times during a walk
for him to come up with them. And so the mouse went to a sister. "I
remembered the prize," she writes, "but had forgotten the reason of my
luck. But Francis _never_ forgot it; he could never see the justice of
it, he said--and no wonder!" His tremulous, sudden "not ready!" jerked
out at the beginning of a game of cards, is still heard in the same
sister's memory, and also the leverage of calls and knockings that
was required to get him from the house for church or a train; and his
unrecognising progress in the street. Every detail of the boy recalls
the man to one who had to get him forth from his chamber when he was
a grown traveller, and has often seen him oblivious in the streets,
and has heard his imperative appeals for "ten minutes more" in all the
small businesses of his later life. His toys he could surrender, but he
played the same games without them. As a youth during the Russo-Turkish
war he built a city of chairs with a plank for drawbridge; "Plevna,"
his father said, would be found written in his heart for the interest
he had in the siege. If Plevna was written there, then so was
Ladysmith. He had no plank drawbridge during the Boer war, but he was
none the less excited on that account.
He knew little of the technique of being a boy; childhood was an
easier rôle. Brothers would have told him it was bad form to care
for dolls. He writes, in "The Fourth Order of Humanity," that he was
"withheld even in childhood from the youthful male's contempt for
these short-lived parasites of the nursery. I questioned, with wounded
feelings, the straitened feminine intolerance which said to the boy:
'Thou shalt not hold a baby; thou shalt not possess a doll.' In the
matter of babies, I was hopeless to shake the illiberal prejudice;
in the matter of dolls, I essayed to confound it. By eloquence and
fine diplomacy I wrung from my sisters a concession of dolls;
whence I date my knowledge of the kind. But ineluctable sex declared
itself. I dramatized them, I fell in love with them; I did not father
them; intolerance was justified of her children. One in particular
I selected, one with surpassing fairness crowned, and bowed before
the fourteen inches of her skirt. She was beautiful. She was one of
Shakespeare's heroines. She was an amity of inter-removed miracles;
all wrangling excellencies at pact in one sole doll; the frontiers
of jealous virtues marched in her, yet trespassed not against her
peace; and her gracious gift of silence I have not known in woman. I
desired for her some worthy name; and asked of my mother: Who was the
fairest among living women? Laughingly was I answered that I was a hard
questioner, but that perhaps the Empress of the French bore the bell
for beauty. Hence, accordingly, my Princess of puppetdom received her
style; and at this hour, though she has long since vanished to some
realm where all sawdust is wiped for ever from dolls' wounds, I cannot
hear that name but the Past touches me with a rigid agglomeration of
small china fingers."
A housemaid remembers Francis on the top of the ladder in the
book-cupboard, oblivious of her call to meals. Of this early reading he
writes:--
"I read certain poetry--Shakespeare, Scott, the
two chief poems of Coleridge, the ballads of
Macaulay--mainly for its dramatic or narrative power.
No doubt--especially in the case of Shakespeare,
and (to a less extent) Coleridge--I had a certain
sublatent, subconscious, elementary sense of poetry
as I read. But this was, for the more part, scarce
explicit; and was largely confined to the atmosphere,
the exhalation of the work. To give some concrete
instance of what I mean. In the 'Midsummer Night's
Dream' I experienced profoundly that sense of trance,
of dream-like dimness, the moonlight glimmer and
sleep-walking enchantment, embodied in that wonderful
fairy epilogue 'Now the cat' &c., and suggested by
Shakespeare in the lines, 'These things seem small
and undistinguishable, like far off mountains turned
into clouds.' I did indeed, as I read the last words
of Puck, feel as if I were waking from a dream and
rub my mental eyes. No doubt the sense of the lines
'These things' &c., was quickened (it may be created--I
will not at this distance say) by an excellent note
on them in the edition I read. But the effect on me
of the close was beyond and independent of all notes.
So, in truth, was it with the play as a whole. So,
again, I profoundly experienced the atmospheric effect
of 'Macbeth,' 'Lear,' 'The Tempest,' 'Coriolanus,' of
all the plays in various degree. Never again have I
sensed so exquisitely, so virginally, the _aura_ of
the plays as I sensed it then. Less often I may have
drunk the effluence of particular passages, as in the
case already instanced. But never, in any individual
passage, did I sense the poetry of the poetry, the
poetry as poetry. To express it differently, I was over
young to have awakened to the poetry of words, the
beauty of language which is the true flower of poetry,
the sense of magic in diction, of words suddenly
becoming a marvel and quick with a preternatural life.
It is the opening of the eyes to that wonder which
signalises the puberty of poetry. I was, in fact, as a
child, where most men remain all their lives. Nay, they
are not so far, for my elemental perception, my dawn
before sunrise, had a passion and prophetic intensity
which they (with rare exceptions) lack. It was not
stunted, it was only nascent."
Another recollection:--
"I understood love in Shakespeare and Scott, which I
connected with the lovely, long-tressed women of F.
C. Selous' illustrations to Cassell's Shakespeare,
my childish introduction to the supreme poet.[4]
Those girls of floating hair I loved; and admired the
long-haired, beautiful youths whom I met in these
pictures, and the illustrations of early English
History. Shakespeare I had already tried to read for
the benefit of my sisters and the servants; but both
kicked against 'Julius Cæsar' as dry--though they
diplomatically refrained from saying so. Comparing the
pictures of mediæval women with the crinolined and
chignoned girls of my own day, I embraced the fatal but
undoubting conviction that beauty expired somewhere
about the time of Henry VIII. I believe I connected
that awful catastrophe with the Reformation (merely
because, from the pictures, and to my taste, they
seemed to have taken place about the same time)."
[Illustration:
_Emery Walker Ph. sc._
_Francis, his sisters, and their dolls_
_1870_
("_The Fourth Order of Humanity_")]
He "first beheld the ocean" at Colwyn Bay when he was five years
old. It was there that the Thompsons spent their holidays, several
excursions there during a year keeping them in touch with the sea.
Its sunsets are still remembered by Mother Austin, his sister, in her
convent in black Manchester, where her skies are for the most part
locked behind bricks or otherwise tampered with. Remembered by this
sister as particularly attracting Francis is "the phosphorescence on
the crest of the waves at dusk." Her memory is good, for I find in a
long mislaid note-book the following verse of an early epithalamium:--
The mighty waters of his soul
Beat on her strand and break in fire;
Her spirit's shore, on which they roll,
Bursts into answering desire
From all its trembling depths together,
Till their encountering souls illume
The nuptial curtaining of gloom.
He adds, "I do not know whether the image is altogether clear to the
ordinary reader, as it was in my own mind. Anyone, however, who has
ever seen on a dark night a phosphorescent sea breaking in long billows
of light on the viewless beach, while, as the hidden pools and recessed
waters of the strand are stirred by the onrush, they respond through
the darkness in swarms of jewel-like flashes, will understand the image
at once."
The sea was there, and Francis bathed, timidly and always with the
consecrated medal that was still round his neck when he died. He would
not strip it from its place, and his sister, only less pious, would
laugh at his anxiety concerning it. On the beach brother and sister
would score Hornby's centuries. That was the chief use and joy of the
sands to the enthusiasts; the whole series of triumphs would be thus
shiftingly writ in full particularity. To Colwyn Bay he went before
Ushaw, during the holidays and after he left college, and he went
also to Kent's Bank, near Ulverstone, to Holyhead and New Brighton,
so that it may be wondered why his poetry harbours so few seas.
Topographically, his verse is very bare of allusion. The chapter of
his childhood must close without the benefits of such witness, unless,
as indeed it should be, the whole body of his poetry is taken as the
evidence of his teeming experiences. Only in a nonsense verse found
in his note-book (where doggerel keeps close, as the grave-digger to
Hamlet, to the exquisite fragments of his poetry, so that strings of
puns must be disentangled from chains of images) does he confess the
place-names of his childhood. Runs the doggerel:--
All along the gliding Lyne
They told the nymphs of mislaid wine,
And only by the mooney Med
They found it had got in the driver's head.
But even early experiences are rare. In "Dream Tryst" one is employed.
He was eleven, older by two years than Dante smitten with love in
Florence, when he met the Lucidé of that poem in Ashton-under-Lyne. She
was a school-friend of his sister, and tells me she had no knowledge of
Francis's admiration.[5]
It may not be supposed that Francis was too busy collecting lore of
Hornby's centuries or other boyish excitements to be moved by nature;
he tells little of his early childhood's experiences because he was
moved only to meditative dumbness, whereas later, when he knew he was
a poet, each experience, however fleeting, smote upon his heart as a
hammer on an anvil, and the words flew from each immediate stroke.
He was too full of emotional adventures when he was sent, after his
trials, to Storrington and Pantasaph to need to ransack the unmeaning
confusion of his early impressions. Childhood proper was snatched
from him when he became a schoolboy. His childhood he had called the
true Paradisus Vitæ, and he would have combated the convention that
school-days are the happiest of one's life. In an essay on his own
childhood it had been his intention to include an account of his first
year at Ushaw for the sake of contrast with his home existence, telling
of the "refugium or sanctuary of fairy-tales, and dream of flying to
the fairies for shelter" that he made there.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Their first child, a son, lived only one day, and of the three
daughters whose births followed Francis's, one, Helen, died in infancy.
Of the other two, the elder, Mary, is a nun in Manchester, the other,
Margaret Richardson, wife and mother in Canada.
[2] Edward Healy Thompson married Harriet Diana, daughter of Nicolson
Calvert, sometime M.P. for Hertford, by Frances, co-heir of the 1st
and last Viscount Pery. Another uncle of the poet was the Rev. Henry
Thompson, who was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford; took clerical
duty at Kirk Hammerton and at Greatham (Hants); published a sermon
(1850) entitled _The New Birth by Water and the Spirit_; married Julia,
daughter of Sir William Yea, Bart. A daughter by this union, Charlotte
Anne Hechstetter Yea Thompson, married (1869) Ralph Abercrombie
Cameron, elder son of the Rev. Alexander Cameron by Charlotte, daughter
of the Hon. Edward Rice, D.D., Dean of Gloucester. A fourth uncle of
the poet, James Thompson, lost his life in South Africa.
[3] At the Convent of the Holy Child, St. Leonard's-on-Sea.
[4] A photograph (now missing), taken at the age of eleven or twelve,
shows Francis with a small bust of Shakespeare--the treasured
gift of his mother. In all the early photographs he conforms to
one early description--"a boy known for his piety, obedience, and
truthfulness"--and he is tidy, too!
[5] "Dream Tryst" was afterwards alluded to by Mr. Edward Healy
Thompson as "erotic"--a poem, explained Francis, "addressed to a child.
Nay, hardly that--to the memory only of a child known but once when I
was eleven years old."