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 classmate 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. Dr. Mann gives some account of the
event and of his first impressions of the new boy:--
"Canon Henry Gillow--the Prefect of that time in the
Seminary--assigned him his bedplace, and gave to him
two ministering angels in the guise of play-fellows.
Then, for initiation, a whinbush probably occupied his
undivided attention, and he would emerge from it with a
variant on his patronymic appellation! '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."
From Dr. Mann's 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 had a thousand meals with him.
Fires he always haunted, and his clothes were burnt on sundry
occasions, as we are told they were before the class-room fire. But of
the piracy what shall we say? Why, if he did not lose that habit of
the collar and never shook off the crumbs of those tarts, why did he
forget the way to be a pirate? There was no rollick in Francis, and his
own talk of his childhood showed him to have always been a youth of
most undaring exploits. A good picture of his person is to be had from
his schoolfellows' recollections; for his mood we must go to his own
recollections. In writing of Shelley he builds up a poet's boyhood from
his own experience; there is no speculation here:--
"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, _déchirants_ (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: the sorrow should be estimated
by its proportion to the sorrower; a gash is as painful
to one as an amputation to another. Pour a puddle into
a thimble, or an Atlantic into Etna; both thimble and
mountain overflow. 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 impressions of school he
could not write as a boy, or of boys:
"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
provocative 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 word "reserve" is written large across the history of the schoolboy
and the man; that he laid it aside in his poetry and with the rare
friend only made its habitual observance the more marked. He was
safest and happiest alone at Ushaw, and little would his schoolfellows
understand the distresses of his mind there. One at least I know who
could not recognise Thompson's painful memories as being conceivably
based on actual experience. Teasing, at best, is an ignorant
occupation; at worst, not meant to inflict lasting wrong.
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
fellow-men, and I do not suspect them of ever having done a living
creature an intentional hurt. Thompson's poetry they can understand,
but not his unhappiness at school.
Nor does your normal boy, of Ushaw or any other school, admit that
wrong is done him by the rod. The rod bears blossoms, says the
schoolboy grown up; and the convention which makes men call their
school-days the happiest of their lives likewise makes them smile at
the punishments in the prefect's study. For the average schoolboy this
attitude is perhaps an honest one. His school-days are happy; the cane
is only an inconvenience 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 has to suffer generalisations about
the school-boy and the rod. The commonweal spells some individual's
woe, and doubtless the discipline proper for the normal child was
hard for the abnormal. The boy at school, unlike the school-boy, is
not brave, or, if he is brave, his courage is of a tragic quality
that should not be required of him. The schoolboy's account of the
punishment of the boy at school illustrates the difference between the
two; for the one it is fit matter for an anecdote, for Francis it was
an episode never to be alluded to. Dr. Mann writes:--
"Some old Ushaw men may wonder whether, in his passage
through the Seminary, he 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."
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."[6]
But Francis was neither cheerful, nor mock-heroic, like Lafcadio Hearn,
whose "The boy stood on the bloody floor where many oft had stood" was
conned by his class-mates at Ushaw. Nor did a sense of the grotesque
assuage the sense of injury, as in the Daumier drawing of a small boy's
agonised contortions under the stroke of a wooden spoon upon the palm
of the hand. He 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. Says Lamb, in describing Mr.
Bird's blister-raising ferule, "The idea of a rod is accompanied with
something of the ludicrous": with Francis's school-mates it provokes a
gaiety almost beyond the requirements of priestly light-heartedness. I
am reluctant and ashamed to be less brave on the poet's behalf--to be
out of the joke; and yet I find it difficult to put a better face on
it. To remember Thompson's own extreme gentleness is to be intolerant
of a small but over-early injury.
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 schoolfellow 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
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 Patmore 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. College can be all things to all boys; some may
find there a genial scene and cordial entertainment; others unfriendly
and frightening surroundings. The case of Lafcadio Hearn, who arrived
in Ushaw in 1863, a boy of thirteen, is not comparable to Thompson's,
for Hearn mixed a strong rebelliousness with his nervousness; and
he 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 like 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 bitterness
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 unconfined 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 "Heaven and I wept together."
Hearn's own words, in a letter to Krehbeil, the musician, show a much
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 consciousness 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 (bad and
cruel as I used to imagine it) is founded on the best
experience of man under civilisation; and I understand
lots of things I used to think superstitious bosh, and
now think solid wisdom."
When an enthusiastic critic said, at the time Thompson'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: "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 régime of
rescue than to shiver unobserved on the Embankment, or starve, with no
invitation or punctuality 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 streets, a torture
insufficient to curb the spirit.
Dr. Carroll, Bishop of Shrewsbury, Fr. Adam Wilkinson, 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, 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 appearance 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 undoing, 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 vacation of 1874 he automatically changes
his surroundings, going from 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:--
[Illustration: St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw
_in Francis Thompson's time_]
"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, declaiming "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 specimen
of the stuff that put him head of his English class. The piece took
the ears of his schoolfellows; 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.[7] 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 "l'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
skit in Latin rhyme, bidding farewell to work before
the vacation, and beginning:
Nunc relinquemus in oblivium
Cæsarem 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 afternoons, 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 depression 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 reading, 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!
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, my 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! 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!
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.
The schoolboy's invocation is:--
And thou, O 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, O 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 observer, 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 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 1st 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 congregation; 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 betrayed 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
Yatlock 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 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
conversations 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 candlelight," 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
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 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. "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 disappointment 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 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.
[Illustration: _Emery Walter Ph. sc._
_Francis Thompson in 1875_]
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] 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 than the Boy.
[7] 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 10th. 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."