AN awed, awkward youth, Francis had yet, before the age of eighteen,
experience enough to know how futile for him was the study of medicine.
A career in medicine, a career in anything, made no appeal to one who
saw himself a man spoiled for the world. Home from his daily lectures,
he would, not seldom, shut himself up in his room. His cloister was
solitude, and in that painful sanctuary he hid himself from success. He
made a pretence of study, and for six years was a medical student.
He had been seven years at Ushaw when he left in July 1877. The
photographs of the time show him to have arrived at the most robust
and perhaps most normal period of his life. But awaiting him at home
were the traps of personality. There the opportunity to be himself
set on foot and gave courage to all the essential peculiarities of
his character. If he had evaded at Ushaw the claims of the community,
he now evaded them much more. Although he resumed his play and
make-believe with his sisters, he was growing further and further apart
from a good understanding with any of his fellow-creatures. Holding
himself little bounden to his duties, he soon started on a career of
evasion and silence. After a pause of some more months he was examined,
and passed with distinction in Greek, for admission as a student of
medicine to Owens College. For six years he studied or attempted to
study in Manchester, making the journey from Ashton-under-Lyne under
the compulsion of the family eye. But once round the corner he was safe
from the too strict inquiry by a father never stern. The hours of
his actual attendance at lectures were comparatively few. "I hated my
scientific and medical studies, and learned them badly. Now even that
bad and reluctant knowledge has grown priceless to me," he wrote in
after life.
The Manchester of his studies had little hold of him, and keeps few
memories of him. In the wide but mean street leading to Owens College
you may, it is true, picture him making a late and lingering way to
work, or entering the cook-shops which even then had initiated him in
the consumption of bad food (but he long remembered the excellence of
one underground restaurant for modest commercial classes), or nervously
awaiting the offer of the bookseller for some volume superfluous to a
truant student's needs. The thoroughfare is so busy as to disregard
the abstracted walk and expression of an eccentric wayfarer. Francis
soon learned the art of being lonely in a multitude, and would only
occasionally perceive one of the passers who turned and looked after
him. Boys provoked to jeer at him he met to his own satisfaction,
sometimes with a complete disregard, sometimes with a threatening
show of anger. He would congratulate himself upon his tactics, not
knowing that he, a young man, was more timid and abashed than any
seven-year-old rough of the pavement. The college building, oppressive
and awesome in its arches, halls, and corridors, is difficult to
reconcile with the timidity with which Francis faced it. Your footsteps
"hullo!" at you in the passages, and must ring with self assurance or
with carelessness if they are not to echo and exaggerate your doubtful
mood. Laughter, the ungentle laughter of medical students--whither,
asked Stevenson, go all unpleasant medical students, whence come all
worthy doctors?--swings down on you or bars you from a corner that you
must needs pass. Among the sheltering cases of the deserted museum
there is more room for the would-be solitary. Silent mineralogies,
fragments, fossils, tell the poet more than the boisterous tongues of
the young men. Yorkshire delivered up to the museum a vast saurian and
other creatures of the past of whom we hear in the "Anthem of Earth."
Those were years of anything but the making of a doctor. To have
conformed so little to the style of the medical student promised
little for the expected practitioner. He would even leave his father's
reputable doorstep with untied laces, dragging their length on the
pavement past the windows of curious and critical neighbours. He did
not work, and his idleness was all unlike the idleness proper to his
class. He read poetry in the public library. One sort of idleness, an
idleness that gave business to his thoughts for all his life, took him
to the museums and galleries. In an essay of the 'nineties he remembers
"The statue which thralled my youth in a passion such
as feminine mortality was skill-less to instigate.
Nor at this let any boggle; for _she_ was a goddess.
Statue I have called her; but indeed she was a bust,
a head, a face--and who that saw that face could have
thought to regard further? She stood nameless in the
gallery of sculptural casts which she strangely deigned
to inhabit; but I have since learned that men call her
the Vatican Melpomene. Rightly stood she nameless,
for Melpomene she never was: never went words of hers
from bronzèd lyre in tragic order; never through _her_
enspelled lips moaned any syllables of woe. Rather,
with her leaf-twined locks, she seems some strayed
Bacchante, indissolubly filmed in secular reverie. The
expression which gave her divinity resistless I have
always suspected for an accident of the cast; since
in frequent engravings of her prototype I never met
any such aspect. The secret of this indecipherable
significance, I slowly discerned, lurked in the
singularly diverse set of the two corners of the
mouth; so that her profile wholly shifted its meaning
according as it was viewed from the right or left.
In one corner of her mouth the little languorous
firstling of a smile had gone to sleep; as if she had
fallen a-dream, and forgotten that it was there. The
other had drooped, as of its own listless weight, into
a something which guessed at sadness; guessed, but
so as indolent lids are easily grieved by the prick
of the slate-blue dawn. And on the full countenance
these two expressions blended to a single expression
inexpressible; as if pensiveness had played the Maenad,
and now her arms grew heavy under the cymbals. Thither
each evening, as twilight fell, I stole to meditate
and worship the baffling mysteries of her meaning: as
twilight fell, and the blank noon surceased arrest upon
her life, and in the vaguening countenance the eyes
broke out from their day-long ambuscade. Eyes of violet
blue, drowsed-amorous, which surveyed me not, but
looked ever beyond, where a spell enfixed them,
Waiting for something, not for me.
And I was content. Content; for by such tenure of
unnoticedness I knew that I held my privilege to
worship: had she beheld me, she would have denied,
have contemned my gaze. Between us, now, are years and
tears; but the years waste her not, and the tears wet
her not; neither misses she me or any man. There, I
think, she is standing yet; there, I think, she will
stand for ever: the divinity of an accident, awaiting a
divine thing impossible, which can never come to her,
and she knows this not. For I reject the vain fable
that the ambrosial creature is really an unspiritual
compound of lime, which the gross ignorant call plaster
of Paris. If Paris indeed had to do with her, it was he
of Ida. And for him, perchance, she waits."
Here already was the artist, the actor in unreal realities. Already he
had been thrice in love--with the heroines of Selous' Shakespeare, with
a doll, with a statue.
Before he knew that his lot was to be more chipped and filled with
blanks than the ladies of the Parthenon, he had set about furnishing
the gaps with complementing fragments of fancy. He was winning
consolation prizes before any races had been lost. "No youth expects
to get a heroine of romance for a mistress," he avers, but I doubt
if many youths court woodcut and wax on that account. They look for
their heroines in living replica; Francis, the artist, went to book
and toy-box. And he went walking often to the accompaniment of his
father's talk of buds, and trees, and flowers. Mr. J. Saxon Mills, his
neighbour, writes:--
"Some few may remember him when, a good many years
ago, he used to take his walks up Stalybridge Road,
and in the semi-rural outskirts of Ashton. They will
recall the quick short step, the sudden and apparently
causeless hesitation or full stop, then the old quick
pace again, the continued muttered soliloquy, the
frail and slight figure. Such was the poet during
his studentship at Owens College. An intellectual
temperament less adapted to the career of a doctor and
surgeon could not be imagined. To such a profession,
however, Frank was destined by a careful and practical
father."
Besides the public galleries, the libraries, and the roads, he had
the cricket-field. From the writing of his own and his sister's
heroes' scores upon the sands at Colwyn Bay, he and she had taken to
back-garden practice of the game. At school he had not played, but
neither had he lost his enthusiasm there. Returning from Ushaw, he
would, his sister tells me, go to a friend's garden and play for hours
by himself, and bowl for hours at the net, which meant that he had,
after each delivery, to retrieve his own ball. He was much at the
Old Trafford ground, and there he stored memories that would topple
out one over another in his talk at the end of his life. The most
historic of the matches he witnessed was that between Lancashire and
Gloucestershire in 1878. His sister remembers it, and he celebrates it
in the following poem, written in the clear but tragic light that his
devotion to the game shed upon the distant scene of whites and greens:--
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!
It is Glo'ster coming North, the irresistible,
The Shire of the Graces, long ago!
It is Gloucestershire up North, the irresistible,
And new-risen Lancashire the foe!
A Shire so young that has scarce impressed its traces,
Ah, how shall it stand before all resistless Graces?
O, little red rose, their bats are as maces
To beat thee down, this summer long ago!
This day of seventy-eight they are come up North against thee,
This day of seventy-eight, long ago!
The champion of the centuries, he cometh up against thee,
With his brethren, every one a famous foe!
The long-whiskered Doctor, that laugheth rules to scorn,
While the bowler, pitched against him, bans the day that he was born;
And G. F. with his science makes the fairest length forlorn;
They are come from the West to work thee woe!
Nor did Francis's cloistered sister forget. On reading Mr. E. V.
Lucas's criticisms on her brother's cricket verses (_Cornhill
Magazine_, 1907) she wrote to me:--"The article stirred up many old
memories, thank God. I can remember seven names out of the Lancashire
XI of that match." For thirty years she remembered the seven jolly
cricketers, with the seven joyful mysteries of the Rosary, to keep her
young.
Francis in 1900 could draw up the whole of the Lancs. XI and name eight
of the other XI, with a guess at a ninth man. Mr. E. V. Lucas knows all
about the match. "It was an historic contest, for the two counties had
never met before, and was played on July 25, 26, 27, 1878, when the
poet was eighteen. The fame of the Graces was such that 16,000 people
were present on the Saturday, the third day--of whom, by the way, 2000
did not pay but took the ground by storm. The result was a draw a
little in Lancashire's favour. It was eminently Hornby's and Barlow's
match. In the first innings the amateur made only five, but Barlow went
right through it, his wicket falling last for 40. In the second innings
Hornby was at his best, making with incredible dash 100 out of 156
while he was in, Barlow supporting him while he made eighty of them.
The note-book in which these verses are written contains numberless
variations upon several of the lines. 'O my Hornby and my Barlow long
ago!' becomes in one case 'O my Monkey and Stone-Waller long ago!'
Monkey was, of course, Mr. Hornby's nickname. 'First he runs you out of
breath,' said the professional, possibly Barlow himself, 'then he runs
you out, and then he gives you a sovereign!' A brave summary!"
Other Lancashire heroes and other worship were here recorded:--
Sons, who have sucked stern nature forth
From the milk of our firm-breasted north!
Stubborn and stark, in whatever field,
Stand, Sons of the Red Rose, who may not yield!
Gone is Pattison's lovely style,
Not the name of him lingers awhile.
O Lancashire Red Rose, O Lancashire Red Rose!
The men who fostered thee, no man knows.
Many bow to thy present shows,
But greater far have I seen thee, my Rose!
Thy batting Steels, D. G., H. B.,
Dost thou forget? And him, A. G.,
Bat superb, of slows the prince,
Father of all slow bowlers since?
Yet, though Sugg, Eccles, Ward, Tyldesley play
The part of a great, a vanished day,
By this may ye know, and long may ye know,
Our Rose; it is greatest when hope is low.
The Lancashire Red Rose, O the Lancashire Red Rose!
We love the hue on her cheek that shows:
And it never shall blanch, come the world as foes,
For dipt in our hearts is the Lancashire Red Rose!
Vernon Royle, says the sister, was one of them; nor did the brother
forget him. I quote from his review of Ranjitsinhji's _Jubilee Book of
Cricket_ (_The Academy_, September 4, 1897):--
"'From what one hears,' Prince Ranjitsinhji says,
'Vernon Royle must have been a magnificent fielder.' He
was. A ball for which hardly another cover-point would
think of trying he flashed upon, and with a single
action stopped it and returned it to the wicket. So
placed that only a single stump was visible to him,
he would throw that down with unfailing accuracy,
and without the slightest pause for aim. One of the
members of the Australian team in Royle's era, playing
against Lancashire, shaped to start for a hit wide
of cover-point. 'No, no!' cried his partner, 'the
policeman is there!' There were no short runs anywhere
in the neighbourhood of Royle. He simply terrorised the
batsmen. In addition to his swiftness and sureness, his
style was a miracle of grace. Slender and symmetrical,
he moved with the lightness of a young roe, the
flexuous elegance of a leopard. . . . To be a fielder like
Vernon Royle is as much worth any youth's endeavours
as to be a batsman like Ranjitsinhji or a bowler like
Richardson."
The cricket verses are all lamentations for the dead. I doubt if he
was ever so happy as when mourning his heroes. To decorate his boyish
memories of the departed with rhymed requiems and mature rhythms was
one of his few luxuries. The note-books were full of fragments:--
He that flashed from wicket to wicket
Like flash of a lighted powder-train;
Where is that thunderbolt of cricket?
And where are the peers of Charlemain?
With this, with this, for an undersong,--
"But where are the peers of Charlemain?"
He had projects beyond cricket verses and reviewing. At a late London
period he proposed to write his cricket memories, gravely justifying
his connoisseurship and his qualifications:--
"For several years, living within distance of the O. T.
Ground, where successively played each year the chief
cricketers of England, where the chief cricketers of
Australia played in their periodic visits, and where
one of the three Australian test-matches was latterly
decided, I saw all the great cricketers of that day,
and it was a very rich day. Naturally, I have a few
things to say about cricket now and then. . . . Thousands
of others have the same basis, but it happens that
I have what they have not--some trained faculty of
expression. The few remarks that follow carefully avoid
the province of purely technical criticism, which is
rightly engrossed by those who are themselves great
cricketers. The only technical criticism worth having
in poetry is that of poets, and the same is true of
cricket."
Of the true historian of the game he writes: "Nyren--at once the
Herodotus and Homer of cricket--an epic writer if ever there was one."
His Lancastrian ardour had suffered no diminution when, after an
absence from the north and from cricket fields of twenty years, he and
I talked cricket. There was a well-established understanding between us
that he was for the red rose, I for the white. It was make-believe, but
served during many seasons and in many letters. More chivalrous than a
knight of Arthur in rivalry he would write thus:--
"Well done, Yorkshire! your county is coming up hand
over hand I see by the placards. I said how it would
be, so I am not surprised. Our tail is not plucky. Love
to all, dear Ev.
F.T."
That was about a match lost by Lancashire in 1905. The year before,
Thompson's fellow-lodgers, with an eye to comedy as much as to cricket,
had persuaded him to meet them at a cricket-net near Wormwood Scrubbs.
Of seven men and boys who met there, six had made some compromise with
the conventional costume of the game; they could boast a flannelled
leg, soft collar, or at least a stud unfastened in deference to a
splendid sun; and they were active, and their shadows on the green
quite playful. But he was dingy from boot laces to hat band. Timorously
excited and wonderfully intent upon all the preparations, he stiffly
waited his turn to bat. When it came he remembered he had no pads on
and stayed to strap them with fingers so weak that they were hurt by
the buckle with which they fumbled. And then, supremely grave, he
batted for the first time since he had faced his sister's bowling on
the sands of Colwyn Bay.
I was never at Lord's or the Oval with him, in spite of many plans,
and he himself passed the turnstile on very few occasions. But he was
always thinking of the cricket he would see, and always for some good
reason postponing the day, as for instance in a note written in 1905:--
"I did not go to Lord's. Could not get there before
lunch; and getting a paper at Baker Street saw
Lancashire had collapsed and Middlesex were in again.
So turned back without getting my ticket--luckily kept
from another disappointing day."
Mr. E. V. Lucas has written of the incongruity of Thompson's appearance
and his enthusiasm:--
"If ever a figure seemed to say, 'Take me anywhere in
the world so long as it is not to a cricket match,'
that figure was Francis Thompson's. And his eye
supported it. His eye had no brightness: it swung
laboriously upon its object; whereas the enthusiasts
of St. John's Wood dart their glances like birds. But
Francis Thompson was born to baffle the glib inference."
It was his unpromising figure that, making its way late at night from
Granville Place to Brondesbury, would pass through St. John's Wood and
be stirred with thoughts of the game. Had his mutterings reached the
ear of the policeman on the Lord's beat, it would have been known that
they were not always so tragically engendered as his mien suggested.
The following lines he wrote out for me and posted in the early hours
after such a journey:--
The little Red Rose shall be pale at last.
What made it red but the June Wind's sigh?
And Brearley's ball that he bowls so fast?
It shall sink in the dust of the late July!
The pride of the North shall droop at last;
What made her proud but the Tyl-des-lie?
An Austral ball shall be bowled full fast,
And baffle his bat and pass it by.
The Rose once wounded shall snap at last.
_The Rose long bleeding it shall not die._
This song is secret. Mine ear it passed
In a wind from the field of Le-bone-Marie.
At the end of two years at Owens College he went to London for the
first time, staying with his cousin, Mr. May, in Tregunter Road,
Fulham.[8] The trials of examination were partly compensated for by a
visit to the opera.
In 1879 Francis fell ill, and did not recover until after a long
bout of fever. He looks stricken and thin in photographs taken at
his recovery, and it is probably at this time that he first tasted
laudanum. It was at this time too, during his early courses at Owens
College, that Mrs. Thompson, without any known cause or purpose, gave
her son a copy of _The Confessions of an English Opium Eater_.[9]
It was a last gift, for she died December 19, 1880. Apart from the
immediate consequences of this momentous introduction, fraught with
suggestions and sympathies for which there was a gaping readiness
in the young man, it greatly serves in the understanding of the
opium-eater in general, of the Manchester opium-eater in particular,
and of Francis Thompson, to make or renew acquaintance with de Quincey.
Indeed if there is one favour that must be asked by the biographer of
Francis Thompson, it is that his readers should also be readers of the
_Confessions_, for, without the mighty initiation of that masterly
prose, the gateways into the strange and tortuous landscape of dreams
can hardly be forced, nor half the thickets and valleys be conquered,
of the poet's intellectual history. As a sight of the pictures of
Tintoretto would serve to make known, to one entirely ignorant of the
style, the possibilities and achievements of the Venetian School;
would serve to make known, not Titian, but the possibility of a
Titian, so the style of de Quincey, the habit of his mind, the manner
of his confessing, his concealments and sincerities, his association
of passion and idleness, his fretfulness and his habit of presaging
dole, his manner of complaining of being cold a-bed, his bulletins,
his conscious style and repetitions, serve to bring the personality
of Thompson to the memory of those who knew him and into the ken of
those who did not. For the family likeness, for the school manner,
there are passages, too, in the history of Coleridge that will be
found suggestive and explanatory. In knowing these cousins of the
habit, you come, as you cannot come by any single and uncorroborated
experience, into very convincing touch with him whom you are seeking.
If, apart from the special significance of Francis's communion with
de Quincey, these two are linked, and in them the family likeness is
apparent, what of the likeness and the linking when we find how strong
was the allegiance sworn by Francis to the spirit of de Quincey;
when we track allusions and words and mannerisms in the "Anthem of
Earth" back to the _Confessions_; when coincidence of actualities as
well as the coincidence of intellect, such as the two flights from
Manchester and the two lives in the streets of London, clashed upon the
attention of the young man who was withdrawn from the companionship of
contemporaries?
De Quincey, like Francis, had spent much time in the Manchester
library. There both made their vocabularies robust and rare from the
same Elizabethans, both fattened to the marrow the bones of their
English from Sir Thomas Browne. And both stumbled headlong down a
precipice of despondency. De Quincey has said many things on his own
behalf, in that despondency and in the recourse to opium, that may well
be said on Thompson's.
It happened as if in giving Francis the _Confessions_ Mrs. Thompson
had found for him a guardian, a spokesman, as if she had borne to him
an elder brother. For Francis's feeling for de Quincey soon came to
be that of a younger for an elder brother who has braved a hazardous
road, shown the way, conquered, and left it strewn with consolations
and palliations. From de Quincey he received the passport, the royal
introduction set forth in Sir Walter Raleigh-like language ringing with
at least the assurance of its own stateliness and power:--
"O just, subtle, and all-conquering opium! that to the
hearts of rich and poor alike, for the wounds that will
never heal and for the pangs of grief that 'tempt the
spirit to rebel,' bringest an assuaging balm:--eloquent
opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the
purposes of wrath, pleadest effectually for relenting
pity, and through one night's heavenly sleep callest
back to the guilty man the visions of his infancy, and
hands washed pure from blood;--O just and righteous
opium! that to the chancery of dreams summonest for
the triumphs of despairing innocence false witnesses,
confoundest perjury, and dost reverse the sentences
of unrighteous judges; then buildest upon the bosom
of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the
brain, cities and temples, beyond the art of Phidias
and Praxiteles--beyond the splendours of Babylon and
Hekatòmpylos; and, 'from the anarchy of dreaming sleep'
cullest into sunny light the faces of long-buried
beauties, and the blessed household countenances,
cleansed from the 'dishonours of the grave.' Thou only
givest those gifts to man; and thou hast the keys to
Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty opium!"
Opium indeed was in the air of Manchester, the cotton-spinners being
much addicted to its use. And it called aloud to Francis in these
words of de Quincey. Damnable things become reasonable or tolerable in
a city. It harbours such a multitude of distresses, such a conflict
of right and wrong--the purposes of nature stand confused, instincts
go haltingly along the streets, conscience and reasonings are stunned
between stone walls. In one thing, then, did Francis mishear the
edict of lawfulness. He took opium--a very pitiful and, surely, very
excusable misunderstanding. Constitutionally he was a target for the
temptation of the drug; doubly a target when set up in the mis-fitting
guise of a medical student, and sent about his work in the middle of
the city of Manchester, long, according to de Quincey, a dingy den of
opium, with every facility of access, and all the pains that were de
Quincey's excuse. He took opium at the hands of de Quincey and his
mother. That she, "giver of life, death, peace, distress," should thus
have confirmed and renewed her gifts was a strange thing to befall.
From her copy of the _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_ he learnt
a new existence at her hands. That the life that opium conserved in
him triumphed over the death that opium dealt out to him shall be part
argument of this book. On the one hand, it staved off the assaults of
tuberculosis; it gave him the wavering strength that made life just
possible for him, whether on the streets or through all those other
distresses and discomforts that it was his character deeply to resent
but not to remove by any normal courses; if it could threaten physical
degradation he was able by conquest to tower in moral and mental glory.
It made doctoring or any sober course of life even more impractical
than it was already rendered by native incapacities, and to his failure
in such careers we owe his poetry. On the other hand, it dealt with him
remorselessly as it dealt with Coleridge and all its consumers. It put
him in such constant strife with his own conscience that he had ever to
hide himself from himself, and for concealment he fled to that which
made him ashamed, until it was as if the fig-leaf were of necessity
plucked from the Tree of the Fall. It killed in him the capacity for
acknowledging those duties to his family and friends which, had his
heart not been in shackles, he would have owned with no ordinary ardour.
It is on account of a hundred passages of the _Confessions_ that the
friendship was established. What solace of companionship must Francis
have discovered when de Quincey told him, "But alas! my eye is quick to
value the logic of evil chances. Prophet of evil I ever am to myself;
forced for ever into sorrowful auguries that I have no power to hide
from my own heart, no, not through one night's solitary dreams." Here
was a boon though sorrowful companion. For here was one who could
translate his distresses into a brave art; one who could extract
good writing out of his disabilities. Doubtless it was he who first
showed to Francis the profitableness of bitter experiences, and that,
if gallant prose might come of weakness, poetry might be sown in the
fields of failure, and the crown of thorns be turned to the chaplet of
laurel. As it serves us in following the friendship that Francis had
imagined for himself, a passage in which no immediate relation to him
can be traced may perhaps be pardoned on this page. It is necessary
inasmuch as it shows the equal ground trodden by the two men; they were
going the same road, the stride of their thoughts was equal. It occurs
in the part of the _Confessions_ telling of the eve of de Quincey's
flight from school. Evening prayers are being said, and with nerves
highly strung by the responsibilities of the morrow there comes to de
Quincey the higher meanings and motives of the school devotions. He
feels how "the marvellous magnetism of Christianity" has gathered into
her service the wonders of nature, and builded her temple with the
bricks of Creation:--
"Flowers, for example, that are so pathetic in their
beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their colouring
as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of
years been the heritage of children--honoured as the
jewellery of God only by _them_--when suddenly the
voice of Christianity, countersigning the voice of
infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the
Hebrew throne, although founded by God Himself, and
pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed
like one of these. Winds again, hurricanes, the eternal
breathings, soft or loud, of Æolian power, wherefore
had they, raving or sleeping, escaped all moral arrest
and detention? Simply because vain it were to offer
a nest for the reception of some new moral birth
whilst no religion is yet moving amongst men that can
furnish such a birth. Vain is the image that should
illustrate a heavenly sentiment, if the sentiment is
yet unborn. Then, first, when it had become necessary
to the purposes of a spiritual religion that the spirit
of man, as the fountain of all religion, should in
some commensurate reflex image have its grandeur and
its mysteriousness emblazoned, suddenly the pomp and
mysterious paths of winds and tempests, blowing whither
they list, and from what fountains no man knows, are
cited from darkness and neglect, to give and to receive
reciprocally an impassioned glorification, where the
lower mystery enshrines and illustrates the higher.
Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what
is _that_? It is the sun going to his rest. Call for
the grandest of all human sentiments, what is _that_?
It is that man should forget his anger before he lies
down to sleep. And these two grandeurs, the mighty
sentiment and the mighty spectacle, are by Christianity
married together."
Is that, then, a Manchester school of thought, or no more than an
accident? These two men, singularly conscious of nature's liturgy, one
of whom wrote this passage, and the other of "pontifical death," had
both been forced to dodge the cotton warehouses that they might see
their sunsets; both had to fly from the normal liturgy of life and be
estranged from themselves and their fellow-creatures by those qualities
and sensitivenesses of the intellect which best enabled them to see in
themselves and in their fellow-men the symbols and instruments of the
Almighty.
Very like de Quincey's repudiation of guilt would have been Francis's:--
"Infirmity and misery do not, of necessity, imply
guilt. They approach, or recede from, the shades of
that dark alliance in proportion of the probable
motives and prospects of the offender, and to the
palliations, known or secret, of the offence; in
proportion as the temptations to it were potent from
the first, and as the resistance to it, in act or in
effort, were earnest to the last."
Through what complication of persuasion by weakness and pain, impulse
and even reason, the other Manchester boy passed may be guessed at
through the more palpable screen of de Quincey's prose. De Quincey
published his offences and defences, prosecuted, summed up, and
reported in his own case; and it was upon his ruling that Francis built
up his own subtler arguments, advanced and judged _in camera_.
Unlike de Quincey, he had no burning desire to justify himself; his
own private excuse he had no desire to strengthen with the written and
published word, or by seeking the corroborating content of others. He
was consistently silent and secret on the point, and, if his silence
did not avail to hide his secret, he was still silent in the manner
of the lover who stole a kiss in the "Angel in the House": we knew
that he knew we knew about his drug. His pleading was not before man's
tribunal, but before the higher courts of conscience and of poetry.
During his first experiences of the opium he had not the consolatory
knowledge of his genius, for it was only in later years when he was
delivered of his poetry and beheld it emerge unmarred by his former
surrender to the drug, that he found peace of mind.
De Quincey, while he averred that the object of his confessions "was
to emblazon the power of opium--not over bodily disease and pain, but
over the grander and more shadowy world of dreams," did nevertheless
owe his initial experience of the drug to the prompting and searching
of frantic toothache. Nor was his object merely an emblazoning. On one
page it is denunciation of an intolerable burden--the "accursed chain";
on another his motive seemed to him to be to give to opium-eaters
the consolation and encouragement of the knowledge that the habit may
be put off, "without greater suffering than an ordinary resolution
may support, and by a pretty rapid course of descent." He sets up his
admirable argument in the midst of contradictions: he is positive
of his own attitude even while he does not know which way to face,
whether towards dreams, or towards the harsher fields of actuality.
Under the generalship of his prose his reader may be marshalled into
toleration and acceptance, or sent hurrying away from the contemplation
of a dreadful enemy. De Quincey's two minds are apparent, too, in the
history of his case. At times he turned upon himself and mastered the
habit to which at others he was obedient, and even reverent.
How weak the prop, as weak as broken poppies; its very praises fade on
the page, like water thrown on sand, in the setting forth. De Quincey
writes that the opium-eater never finishes his work, that Coleridge's
contributions to literature were made in spite of opium, that it killed
him as a poet, that the leaving off of this--his mighty opium--creates
a new heaven and a new earth.
"Opium, the saving of my life," is one of Thompson's own most rare
allusions to it. For de Quincey he never abated his old ardour of
respect. The heat of his partisanship may be sufficiently measured
in a letter, dated 1900, in which he falls upon some critic of his
Manchester master:--
"Read the essay on D. Q.--read--read, and if you ever
meet the writer, kick him till he roar at the squeak
of a boot and snuffle at the whiff of a leather shop
for the rest of his life! Yet canst thou not kick to
the measure of his deserts, wert thou Polypheme with
earthquake on thy feet. Shall such monstrous fellows
live and publish their villainous mismeasurement of
great literature, and be hailed 'sane critics' by the
muddy clappers-on of mediocrity? I am whipped out of my
patience that I cannot call these scullions in good
print 'ass unparalleled,' but must mince and fine my
phrases to a smooth and customed censure."
Only those who know how well his mental matched his physical inability
in assault and battery can be certain of the utter artifice of this
exercise in petulance. He could be angry only when his anger was
safely out of range of giving pain. He would kick in the closet of his
note-books, but would ever be nearer kissing when his action came to
be communicated. And even in his note-books he would seldom indulge
personal spite; his unkind entries are sheathed in blanks, so that no
accident of perusal could hurt the feelings of the censured.
[Illustration: _Francis Thompson in 1877_]
It has been doubted whether he actually "sat" for his medical
examination, but considering how little bold he was among strangers
and in a strange town, it is unlikely that on this first occasion he
summoned enough courage to play truant. In all probability he was
conducted to the place of examination, but one can only conjecture his
behaviour as he was more than usually silent on his return. "I have not
passed" is all the information he vouchsafed when, some little time
after, he is supposed to have received notice of his failure. Two years
more of pretended study followed, with some real reading at home in
the evenings. It was Francis's quickness of intelligence during these
extra hours of more congenial research that enabled him to appear in
conversation with his father as one moderately well equipped in the
knowledge of medicine. But after Francis again visited London in 1882,
after four years in all of study, and again returned with the formula
of "I have not passed," his father called upon the authorities at Owens
College, and learnt that Francis's non-attendances were far in advance
of his attendances. During two more years of preparation he read less
and less at home. He would come in late in the evening, declaring
that a professor or a lecturer had taken him to give him extra
instruction, and not till some time afterwards was it discovered that
the house he visited was the home of a musician, and the instruction
that of listening to music performed upon the piano. Of music he was
extremely fond: his interest in it would be passionate or else totally
obscured when, in later years, there was music going forward in his
presence.
Calling it his chief recreation, he continued for years without it.
For Berlioz he kept the excited enthusiasm of a child, childish memory
doing the trick. He would often tell of music (Berlioz, Beethoven,
Chopin) heard in Manchester, where he attended concerts with his
mother. He himself could no more than strike a sequence of chords
upon the piano, which he would do with so much earnestness that I, as
a child, was impressed by his performance. In listening to music his
emotion was equally manifest. Standing at the piano, he would gaze at
the performer, his body wavering to and fro in tremulous pleasure; or,
as often, he would not heed at all.
It was decided that his third attempt upon the profession of medicine
should be made at Glasgow, where degrees were more easily, if less
honourably, to be obtained. But the examination, if indeed it was
actually accepted, was approached with no endeavour or even anxiety,
except on the father's part, for success. Indeed, failure must have
been very frankly courted by Francis, whose main fault was that he
had not the courage openly to dispute his father's decision in regard
to a career. Never once did he intimate that his heart was set on
poetry, although from sixteen, as he afterwards said, he studied and
practised metre; it is not unlikely that to have been told to go and
make a business of literature would have been more irksome to him than
passing the years in the evasion of medicine. His secret absorption
in his own interests was, after all, not uncomfortably circumstanced
during all these years, for it is certain that literature was a
second life to Francis which could be lived alone most happily. After
failure in Glasgow, Francis met with a severe show of impatience and
disappointment from his father. Many trials had been tolerated at
the son's hands, hundreds of pounds had been expended, and the son's
future was less secure than ever. Dr. Thompson determined on such
courses as he thought would compel Francis to some undertaking of the
responsibilities of life.
No little money had been spent on examination fees to examiners who
probably had no papers to examine; on dissecting fees which did not
once compel Francis's presence at the dissecting-table. He was already
spending money on opium.
After many leniencies, such as accepting Francis's own account of his
studies at Owens College and all his excuses for absences from home in
the evening, Dr. Thompson put Francis to such obviously uncongenial
tasks as were to be found in the establishment of a surgical instrument
maker, whom he served for two weeks only, and as the purveyor of an
encyclopædia.
At neither of these businesses did Francis succeed; it took him two
months to read the encyclopædia, and then he discarded it, unsold.
Nor was there any possibility of success. In reviewing his prospects
at this time his father warned him, among other things, that he would
have to enlist if he found no other means of support. Without a word,
Francis went, like Coleridge, for a soldier. With what hopes or
intentions it is difficult to conceive, but obviously still with that
desire of obeying, so far as he was able, his father's instructions. It
seems he did not suffer himself merely to be measured by the recruiting
examiners, but also to be marched and drilled in the attempt to expand
his chest to the necessary inches. He spoke in later years of the
weariness it was to march, and of the barrack yard, and even maintained
that his upright bearing had been learnt at that time. But as his
upright bearing is exactly the upright bearing of a brave figure (his
sister's), stiffer than the starched gear about her face and throat in
the habit and convent of her order in Manchester, it does not follow
that Francis's recruiting counts for very much. He returned from it
late one night, silent as when he returned from the examinations in
London and Glasgow. I do not think he even told the family as much as
he told my father in later years--that he was not "Private Thompson"
only because he failed to pass the army physical examination.
On the second Sunday (day of rest and the turmoil bred of rest) in
November, 1885, Francis was forced to find time for the discussion of
his prospects with his father, and with it he found a certain energy
of failure and despair. His demeanour gave rise to the notion in his
family that he was in the habit of drinking. His father taxed him
with it, but was mystified by Francis's strenuous denials; opium, not
alcohol, was the cause of his flushes. Here was yet another point of
difficulty and trial.
The next day (Monday, November 9, 1885), his sister found on her
dressing-table a note from Francis saying that he had gone to London.
It was a hopeless note; his mood was hopeless. He later described his
flight thus: "The peculiarity in my case is that I made the journey to
the Capital without hope, and with the gloomiest forebodings, in the
desperate spirit of an _enfant perdu_." But in hopelessness, as in all
his moods, he hesitated. He did not want to leave home. "To stay under
happy parental supervision, to work because I must, but to make my
delight of the exercise of the imagination" was his ambition. Parental
supervision had not prevented the shutting of his door. So closely did
he fasten it that he had never told his father of his exercises, or
his sisters, who, according to an uncle, eschewed poetry as if it were
a snare; "both have character, but both are very reserved, indeed
impenetrable." Small wonder there had been silence in the house, save
about cricket and wars. "What does one want with a tongue when one has
silence?"
For a week he lingered in Manchester, living on the proceeds of the
sale of his books and other possessions. It had been his habit to
obey the command of the drug by the disposal of his books and medical
instruments. His microscope had gone, and been replaced--no light
task for his father--and now, at the crisis, he had to go bare even
of poetry books. Ninety-five would he sell, but to the remnant of a
library he would cling with a persistence that defied even the terrific
imp of the laudanum bottle.
For a week Francis hesitated and then wrote home, dating his letter
from the Post Office, for his fare to London. It was sent, and he
made the journey. Whatever its discouragement, it must yet have been
something added to the little sum of hopefulness to leave Manchester.
London, of conjectural disaster, drew him from the Manchester of tried
and proved failure. His luggage, scanty enough in itself, was weighted
with no regrets. He was going to new possibilities. But he carried
Blake and Aeschylus in his pocket. Thus had de Quincey gone, content
with the same bodily starvation and mental food--"carrying a small
parcel with some articles of dress under my arm; a favourite English
poet in one pocket, and an odd volume, containing one-half of Canter's
_Euripides_ in the other."
Of the father and the fugitive the poet's uncle afterwards wrote to my
father:--
"He has been a great trouble and sorrow to his father
from his want of ballast. He started with every
advantage, but has come to nothing. At last he went to
London, where he seems to have led a sort of Bohemian
life. There does not appear to have been anything of
what is usually termed immorality; but he was never
to be depended on, and I fear he indulged in drink.
As his father expresses it in a letter to me this
morning, he likes to lead a dawdling, sauntering sort
of life. . . . There was nothing in his home life to
lead him to divulge himself, no encouragement and no
sympathy with his ambitions. His sisters, who might
have been of use in expounding him--if I may use such a
phrase--have so little of the poetical element in them
that they seem on principle to have eschewed all poetry
as if it were a temptation and a snare. . . . This I
believe to be the key to, and so far an excuse for,
his deceitful proceedings and his apparent callousness
and ingratitude. I wish I were in a position to help
him pecuniarily, but at present I am not. However, I
can show him sympathy and approbation. It is years
since any communication took place between us, and
in my last letter I ventured to give him some advice
as to his hypercritical tendencies, and he never
wrote to me again. So I suspect he did not relish my
animadversions."
Another Manchester letter from a close friend of his family runs:--
"To begin with, young Thompson was not brought up
amongst 'gallipots'; no son could have been more kindly
or more generously treated, and it was not until this
genius was gone utterly to the bad that his father
lost sight of him. He was most carefully educated, and
no young man has ever had a better or a kinder mother
or father. I don't think Dr. Thompson is destitute
of the poetic imagination, and I think he might have
been excused if he did not perceive at once that
poetry which differs from all which has delighted the
world for three thousand years was, of all poetry,
the most to be admired. . . . The way in which you have
compared the coming of Frank Thompson to the Messiah is
approaching the profane."
But Francis had another opinion of the poetic influence of his home;
and to see his sister and read in her eyes the new and more explicit
version of the household spirituality, is to credit his own view. His
statement that "the spirit of such poems as 'The Making of Viola'
and 'The Judgement in Heaven' is no mere mediæval imitation, but the
natural temper of my Catholic training in a simple provincial home" is
easily believed. It is not generally understood, he says, that the
"irreverence" (so called) of mediæval poetry and drama is not merely
primitive but Catholic. He quotes, as quite within his comprehension,
the remark of Miss L. that, if she saw Our Lord, the first thing she
would be impelled to do would be to put her arms about Him--a remark
prompted by a hostile comment on a Christ and St. Francis (in statuary)
with their arms about each other.
The father's own comment, when he found his son welcomed as a poet,
was: "If the lad had but told me!" Mr. J. Saxon Mills says:--
"The doctor was even more amused than gratified at
seeing his son's name suddenly coupled with those of
Shelley or Keats or Tennyson. He admitted, moreover,
that Frank's productions were quite beyond his own
comprehension, and I am not sure that the worthy doctor
regarded the greenest of poetic laurels as a fair
exchange for a thriving medical practice."
FOOTNOTES:
[8] It pleases the idle mind of the present writer to find that Francis
visited Tregunter Road when my mother, who was years later to be the
lady of "Love in Dian's Lap," was staying there, unknown to him.
[9] His uncle, Edward Healy Thompson, afterwards remembered that _The
Opium Eater_ was his favourite book at home: "We had often said his
experiences would surpass those of de Quincey."
At the same time the family noted other influences; it was a tradition
of theirs that "On the 3rd Sunday of September, 1885, Fr. Richardson
of St. Mary's, Ashton-under Lyne, delivered a sermon on 'Our Lady of
Sorrows,' which, Francis hearing, was the subject of his meditation,
and, two years later, of his poem 'The Passion of Mary.' It is thought
that he did not make any notes on the sermon in church, but in the
drawing-room at home in Stamford Street he made use that same night of
pencil and paper."