TO him who had during that last week fathomed the abysses of
Manchester, the "unfathomable abyss" of London was hardly more black.
It might be supposed that the city of Manchester was as good as another
in which to be destitute; poverty in modern streets is a mean and dirty
business at its best as at its worst. But in London a staggering part
is played on a great stage haunted with great presences. There is a
literary grandiloquence about the capital's rags that Manchester's do
not own: for the time it takes for the fraying of a pair of cuffs, we
may suppose, this glamour has effect. It was something to tread the
pavements of Oxford Street, something to despair, if despair one must,
where Chatterton despaired; fitting, in a poetic sense, as Francis had
discovered when he wrote "In no Strange Land," to have your Christ
walking on the dark waters of the Thames, and to rear your Jacob's
ladder from Charing Cross.
But if there is a ghostly companionship in the capital, it was
mightily empty of the real solace of friendly presences. "The only
fostering soil for genius" Lamb called the Metropolis. But Francis
did not so regard it. The writing of the first poems and prose, the
whole acceptance of a vocation, were undertaken in complete isolation.
It was a hard soil, bare as the pavement. There were no allurements
of companionship, no excitements or encouragements of example and
emulation. He knew no laughing bookseller in St. Martin's Court. A
poet, he knew no poet, save a formidable uncle, in the flesh; no
writer, save the reputed "noted authors" whom he came to serve with
slippers at a shop in Panton Street. Without friends or courage,
Francis found no better job than that of a "collector" of books. Thus
his first efforts for a livelihood in London were made with a sackful
of literature upon his shoulders, the day's "orders" of a general
bookseller. His journeys would be laborious and slowly accomplished,
and his turn in all probability the last served at the wholesale
counters where he called out the list. Unlike his fellow-collectors,
he would have an additional stock in his private pocket--his own
library--and his interest would be in this rather than in the bundle on
his back; he might bend under works on cookery, sport, Methodism, and
social reform, but Blake and Aeschylus would buoy him up.
That he found no work commensurate with his attainments is but another
item in the whole sequence of circumstances that liken his case to de
Quincey's. De Quincey tells of difficulties imagined and real that kept
him from applying to the friends of his father for assistance. Another
mode of livelihood, "that of turning any talents or knowledge that I
might possess to a lucrative use--I now feel half inclined to join my
reader in wondering why I overlooked it. As a corrector of Greek proofs
(if in no other way), I might surely have gained enough for my slender
wants. . . . But why talk of my qualifications? Qualified or not, where
could I obtain such an office? For it must not be forgotten that even
a diabolic appointment requires interest. Towards _that_ I must first
of all have an introduction to some respectable publisher; and this I
had no means of obtaining. To say the truth, however, it had never once
occurred to me to think of literary labours as a source of profit."
With arguments as lengthy as those, Francis would often expound
excellent reasons for not doing that which it had never occurred to him
to undertake. The truth was that he came to London that he might exist
and no more.
A desire of observing the town was de Quincey's excuse for his
wanderings over London. Francis made no such plea, but wandered
the same gait. Market-place and an occasional theatre; door-step
consolation and porch shelter; the absorption in the things of the
spirit and the stifling of the interruptions of material things with
opium; the momentary fears of bodily privation, succumbing to fortunate
forgetfulness and numbness, the intellectual realisation of the
awfulness of their surroundings tempered by physical indifference; and
the admixture with this same physical indifference of an extreme bodily
frailty and susceptibility to suffering--all the contradictions found
in the one man are confirmed in the other. That each was befriended by
an unfortunate girl of the streets was a continuation of the duality
of contradictions. Two outcast women were to these two outcast men the
sole ambassadors of the world's gentleness and generosity. More of
Francis's "brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing" will be set down on a
later page.
He was quick to lose his "book-collecting," slow to find other work. He
liked the Guildhall Library better than "situations," and while he had
seven shillings a week from home, he managed to be there a good deal.
He spoke of having clung to outward respectability, and told that on
the streets rags are no necessary accompaniment to destitution. But his
rags came quickly enough; within a few weeks he was below the standards
set by the employers of casual labour. He now began to learn something
of his companions, of their slang, of their ways and means. It was not
always amongst the lowest grades of the poor that he met the people
he could most dislike. He notes that the street-outcast is generally
opposed to Atheism; that he is often nameless, often kind, always
honest with his fellows ("only once did any one try to cheat me").
Generosity he noticed particularly in the readiness of beggars to pay
each other's lodgings. Once a policeman aided him, but that aid was
unexpected and unrepeated. Of the men he met at common lodging-houses,
or in whose company he slept in archways, or with whom he entered into
partnership in the business of fetching cabs or selling matches, he
names but very few: "The actor, poor Kelsall, 'Newcastle,'" is one
entry in a note-book. The murderer to whom he makes several allusions,
he disguises under the initials D. I. From one friend he had practical
lessons in the arts of confinement, so that he could say to his editor
in later years, when a review-book was lost: "You can either let me
replace it, or put me in gaol. I know how to pick oakum." But there
were some companions to disgust him: "Their conversation is impossible
of report. If you want to know it (and you are every way a gainer by
not knowing it, while you lose what can never be regained by knowing
it) go to Rabelais and his like, where you will find a very faint image
of it. Nearer you may get by reading 'Westminster Drolleries' and other
eighteenth century collections of swine-trough hoggery. For naked
bestiality you must go to the modern _bête humaine_." He learnt enough
of their slang to be amused at the unreality of language put into the
mouths of the thieves of fiction; and in any case the foulness of the
real thing is irreproducible. He learned, too, of the workhouse, of
homes of refuge; that prison is held to be no disgrace; and above all,
as month succeeded month, that death is surprisingly slow on a shilling
a day.
His bed was made according to his fortune. If he had no money, it was
the Embankment; if he had a shilling, he could choose his lodging; if
he had fourpence, he was obliged to tramp to Blackfriars. Something
of his manner of spending his money he told me: "No, Evie, you do not
spend your penny on a mug of tea. That will be gone very quickly.
You spend it, Evie, not on a mug of tea; not, I say, on a _mug_ of
tea, but on the tea itself. You buy a pennyworth and make it with the
boiling water from the common kettle in the doss-house. You get several
cups that way instead of one." It was at lodging-houses that he would
lie watching the beetles crawling on the ceiling--that was the exchange
he made for "the abashless inquisition of each star" of the nights when
he had no pennies and so no bed; and it is the image he used afterwards
in a Tom-o'-Bedlam's song:--
As a burst and blood-blown insect
Cleaves to the wall it dies on,
The smearéd sun
Doth clot upon
A heaven without horizon.[10]
In a common lodging-house he met and had talk with the man who was
supposed by the group about the fire to be a murderer uncaught. And
when it was not in a common lodging-house, it was at a Shelter or
Refuge that he would lie in one of the oblong boxes without lids,
containing a mattress and a leathern apron or coverlet, that are the
fashion, he says, in all Refuges. The time came when for a week his
only earning was sixpence got for holding a horse's head. That was
after he had made an attempt to establish himself with a boot-black
stand, and failed because of the interference of the police, who moved
him on at the request of the shopkeeper at his chosen street-corner.
His way home in later years was always northwards, along the Edgware
Road. It is a thoroughfare that keeps late hours, crossing the highway
between Paddington and King's Cross; it makes southwards towards
Victoria and the town; it has its music-halls, and, after they are
closed, its coffee-stalls, tiny centres of distressed humanity waiting
for the dawn. They are the pickets set up against the enemy Night, in
a campaign which, on the whole, is less sullenly undertaken than the
campaign of the day. There is much companionship along the pavements
in the night watches: the regiment of the poor falls into some sort of
rank, and whether a man's business is merely to keep moving till the
park-gates are opened in the morning, or to reach some distant lodging,
some favourite shelter, or a point of vantage for the coming day, he
need never be companionless on this road. And seldom, unless he be very
new to the manner of life or very old, does the poor man not fall in
with the conviviality that is within his reach. Be he so stupid that he
has failed in the meanest ambitions, yet he will be able to establish
himself in this society, and be a man of affairs among beggars.
Every man, and every woman however grossly she has fallen, acquires a
certain aptitude in the University of the Last Resort. Some sort of
shrewdness, entirely above the scullery pitch, has become a necessity
by the time the pavement is the Home. And even the poet came, like the
outcast ostler, or matchmaker, or scullery-maid, to possess a small
share of this lower-worldliness. When it was a matter, during the day,
of collecting coppers sufficient for the day and spending them in the
pinched markets of poverty, he had perforce to be alive to the world
about him. Later on, when there was no necessity, I could observe in
him a certain flickering pride of experience: occasionally he would
exert himself to show that he knew how to pass the time of day with a
man upon the street, how to invest in a pipe, a kettle, or in oddments
of cheap food. Ordering his meal at a coffee-house, he would pretend to
a certain acumen in the matter of dishes or of waitresses, adjusting
his tie and his expression. But who can ever have been deceived
that here was any one save a timorous defaulter in the matter of
_savoir-faire_? Not, certainly, an A.B.C. girl or an observant tramp.
Among the miracles is that of The Golden Halfpennies. They came to
him on a day when he had not even the penny to invest in matches that
might bring him interest on his money. He was, he told me, walking,
vacant with desperation, along a crowded pavement, when he heard the
clink of a coin and saw something bright rolling towards the gutter.
He stooped, picked it up, looked around, found no claimant, and put
into his waistcoat pocket, as he affirmed with the many repetitions
that characterised his anecdotes, a bright new halfpenny. He proceeded
some distance on his way, pondering the things he could or could not
procure with his money, when it struck him that the other direction
would lead him to a shop with such wares as he had decided on. As he
neared the place where he had found the first coin he saw another
glittering in the road. This, too, he picked up, and again thought he
held a halfpenny. But looking closer he discovered it to be golden and
a sovereign, and only after much persuasion of his senses would he
believe the first-found one to be likewise gold. "That was a sovereign
too, Evie; I looked and I saw it was a sovereign too!" he ended, with
rising voice and tremulous laughter. One who heard him tell his tale
held strictly that he should have delivered the money to the nearest
police-station to await the inquiry of its owner; but that, surely,
were an ill economy, to look after the farthings of scrupulousness at
the cost of the pounds of Providence. Thompson, half suspicious of a
miracle, made a shrewd guess that no angel would apply at Marlborough
Street.
At another time he did have scruples. One of the Rothschilds, buying a
paper from him at the Piccadilly end of Park Lane, put a florin into
his hand. "I was worried," said Francis, "lest he thought it was a
penny, and tried to catch him up in the street crowd. But he was gone,
and it worried me." Years later the news of that Rothschild's death was
read out at a meal at our house in Palace Court. Francis heard, and
dropped his spoon, aghast. "Then I can never repay him!" he cried.
For a time a few shillings might have been his each week for the
fetching; but he did not fetch them. An allowance, sufficient to lodge
and feed him, and insufficient to do either fully, was sent to him by
his father at a reading-room called, it is thought, the "Clarendon," in
the Strand. The more he needed it the greater worry would it seem to
collect it. Fear lest it were not there; fear lest he should be refused
it because of his rags, and, finally, an illusory certainty--the
certainty of dejection--that it had been discontinued, prevented him,
until at last, through his default, it did really cease.
He had the words of the Proverb by heart--"Give me neither poverty
nor riches; feed me with the food convenient for me"--but he would
rather say his prayer in the street than ask for his allowance in the
"Clarendon." He was willing to starve both ways: he wrote out for his
comfort: "Even in the night-time of the soul wisdom remains."
In addition to the allowance there were relatives and friends to whom
Francis might have gone, if assistance in his need had been part of
his scheme. Besides those with whom he stayed during his examinations
in London, there was a Catholic relative who had an establishment for
stationery off the Strand (he was not asked for so much as a pencil),
and who died in Church Passage, Chancery Lane, about 1891; his paternal
grandmother, then an old lady, lived in City Road, and Edward Healy
Thompson had resided in Hinde Street, Manchester Square, and made many
town friends.
The time came when he had no lodging; when the nights were an agony
of prevented sleep, and the days long blanks of half-warmth and
half-ease. After seven nights and days of this kind he is deep immersed
in insensibility. Pain, its own narcotic, throbs to painlessness.
Touch and sight and hearing are brokenly and dimly experienced, save
when some unknown touch switches on the lights of full consciousness.
Sensation is still painful, but disjointedly, impotently. When a cart
jolts by the noise of its wheels comes to him long after--or before--he
troubles to move out of reach of the shafts--the yell of the driver
seems to have no part in the incident. He knows not if it came from
that or from another quarter. He sees things pass as silently as the
figures on a cinematograph screen; one set of nerves, out of time and
on another plane, respond to things heard. The boys now running at
one end of the alley, in front of him, are behind him the next, and
their cries seem to come from any quarter and at random. Is it that
they move too quickly for him or that he unknowingly is wheeling about
in his walk, or that London herself spins round him? For hours he has
stood in one place, or paced one patch of pavement, as if his feet were
trapped in the lines between the stones. He remembers that, as a child,
he had made rules, treading only on the spaces, or only on the line
of the pattern; now they make much stricter bounds. He is tied to the
few slabs of stone that fill the space beneath his archway. It seems
dreadfully perilous to move beyond them, and he sways within their
territory as if they edged a precipice. And then, he knows not how or
why, his weakness has passed, and he is drifting along the streets,
not wearily, but with dreadful ease, with no hope of having sufficient
resolution to halt. Time matters as little to him as the names of the
streets, and the very faces of the clocks present, to his thinking,
not pictures of time and motion, but stationary, dead countenances.
Noting that the hands of one have moved, he wonders at it only because
its view of the passage of time is so laughably at variance with his
own. Had it marked a minute since he had last looked, or a whole day,
he would not have been surprised, but the foolish half-hour it told of
is absurd. His time leaped or paused, while the clock went with lying
regularity. The street-names, too, deceived him; they were unfamiliar
in most familiar places; or they showed well-known names on impossible
corners. He seemed to be spinning, like a falling leaf, and tossed by
unseen winds of direction. Oxford Street was short and narrow; Wardour
Street big enough to hold the tribes of Israel, and the houses of it
as high, he guessed, though he dared not lift his head to see, as the
divided waves of the Red Sea. Out of confusion came a voice, "Is your
soul saved?" It broke in upon his half-consciousness as the school
gong wakes the boy. The mantle of protecting delirium fell away; the
voice broke in upon his privacy, threatening his reserves, seeking the
confidences of the confessional. "What right have you to ask me that
question?" he replied.
To one who had spent a fortnight of nights on the streets, Mr. McMaster
and family, standing forth against the comfortable background of
shop, workrooms, and parlour, should have loomed large. But what the
rescued man thought worth telling of the incident of rescue was that
in Wardour Street some one approached and asked him, in the resented
voice of the intruder, if his soul were saved, and that he, clothed
in the regimentals of the ragged, and with as much military sternness
of voice and gesture as might be, made answer. Nothing seemed so
important to him as the rebuff he imagined he had administered to a
stranger threatening his privacy. He also recounted that the other then
said: "If you won't let me save your soul, let me save your body,"
and a compact was made on terms agreeable to his dignity. But it is
probable that it was entered upon with greater zest by Mr. McMaster
the enthusiast, churchwarden, and bootmaker, than by the indifferent
poet, to whom it seemed to matter little whether he were rescued or not
rescued. Francis was as little eager for this help as he was, two years
later, for my father's.
Francis recounted little more than the reproof and the fact that his
new master was kind to him. But did he forget, do you think, the least
detail of the shop in Panton Street,[11] or his companions there? Did
he forget Mr. McMaster the elder, or Mr. McMaster the brother, or the
nieces, or the assistants, or Lucy? It is because he could not forget
that one must accept his account of the first encounter. The rescuer
remembers it as happening in the Strand, but Thompson, who says Wardour
Street, seems the surer witness.
Before taking him into his employ at his bootmaker's shop, No.
14 Panton Street, Mr. McMaster wrote in August, 1886, to the
Superintendent of Police at Ashton-under-Lyne asking if Francis Joseph
was, as he stated, the son of a Dr. Charles Thompson of that place.
Finding this to be the case, he secured a lodging for Francis in
Southampton Row, clothed him, and with some hope, at first, set him to
work. It was rather later that he communicated with Francis's father,
who had been absent from Ashton on a holiday.
I learn that Mr. McMaster was much interested in assisting the
unfortunate. If he says "Thompson was my only failure," it means that
he was careful and useful in the rescuing of young men, particular in
awarding his charity, and strict in enforcing reform. The men he cared
for learned the trade of boot-making, possibly, and had been known to
sing in the choir of St. Martin's Church, or to do other reputable
deeds. They were civil-spoken men, or learnt to be, and tidy, whereas
Francis would raise his voice, Mr. McMaster remembers--would shout, as
his only breach of good manners--in medical and other arguments; was a
Catholic, and therefore not a church-goer in the ordinary sense, and
was, of course, incapable of work. How did Mr. McMaster succeed so well
with his only failure? It is to his exceeding credit that he accepted
Francis on the terms that were inevitable in accepting a waif subject
to accidents and unpunctual. Francis would discuss literature and
medicine, or be silent, or write, always in sight of the hammering and
sewing group in the workroom behind the shop. In the delivery of goods
and the general running of messages he did ill the duties of a boy of
twelve. And yet he was liked, and respected as well as pitied. His
dignity and gentleness gave him the name of a gentleman among friends
where the title is a talisman.
It did not take long to discover that Francis could neither make boots
nor sell them. He ran messages, and still in the make-believe of
earning his food and lodging and the five shillings a week that were
his wages, put up the shutters, as H. M. Stanley, whose back still
ached with the memory when he came to write his autobiography, had done
as a boy. It is incredible, to one who knew the hours Francis favoured,
that he was present at their taking down.
His master has interesting memories. He remembers the meeting in the
street; he remembers that he was informed immediately that Francis
was a Catholic, and he remembers the crucifix upon the wall of the
bedroom in Southampton Row, and the medal round the collarless neck.
"I knew he was of another belief--not a bit of difference! I am a
Church of England man myself--Churchwarden, and on the Council--an
average Church of England man, I trust. But not a bit of difference!"
he repeats, and has it too that Francis "said his Mass--always said his
Mass--at night." About Sunday church-goings he is uncertain, having the
impression that Francis no longer held with the priests of his Church.
"There was something between him and the priests. Perhaps I ought
not to tell you (I take it you are Catholics), but I fancy there was
something." Mr. McMaster's narrative is here interrupted, not by the
poet's shout, but by the poet's record of his habit of prayer. Francis
writes, in a note to the following poem, composed years later: "It was
my practice from the time I left college to pray for the lady whom I
was destined to love--the unknown She. It is curious that even then
I did not dream of praying for her whom I was destined to marry; and
yet not curious: for already I previsioned that with me it would be to
love, not to be loved."
With dawn and children risen would he run,
Which knew not the fool's wisdom to be sad,
He that had childhood sometimes to be glad,
Before her window with the co-mate sun.
At night his angel's wing before the Throne
Dropped (and God smiled) the unnamed name of Her:
Nor did she feel her destinate poet's prayer
Asperse her from her angel's pinion.
So strangely near! So far, that ere they meet,
The boy shall traverse with his bloody feet
The mired and hungered ways, three sullen years,
Of the fell city: and those feet shall ooze
Crueller blood through ruinous avenues
Of shattered youth, made plashy with his tears!
As full of love as scant of poetry;
Ah! in the verses but the sender see,
And in the sender, but his heart, lady!
Mr. McMaster continues:--"Mr. Thompson was a great talker. I remember
him asking me questions. My father, a University man--or rather a
Scottish College man . . . would talk to him, very interested." And his
employer lent him books and discussed them, and had, as he remembers
it, some hand in the making of an author. It was in his shop and on his
paper that Thompson wrote continually. Bulwer Lytton was devoured, then
as in later years, and Francis took Mr. McMaster's Iliad even as far
as Southampton Row along with Josephus and Huxley. "My Josephus and my
Huxley," remembers his friend, who recalls, too, that he was "always
reading the _Standard Book of British Poetry_." Francis did not know
then that the "little obscure room in my father's poor house," where
Traherne learnt, as a child of four, to be a poet, was also at the back
of a shoemaker's. Children were of the Panton Street household, and Mr.
McMaster remembers Francis's awed but gentle ways with them. A niece,
called Rosie Violet or Rosebud by the family, and Flower or Little
Flower, as Mr. McMaster remembers, by Francis, was his particular
friend, and used to take his tea to him and walk with him in the park.
That there was "another lady who helped him" may be an allusion to the
friendship of the streets.
After rather more than three months' service in the shop, it was
arranged that Francis should go home for the Christmas of 1886. There
is not much to tell of his home-coming. Other members of the Thompson
family were adepts, like Francis, in reserve, and it was practised
rigorously during his holiday. It was known that he had suffered; and
his sufferings, or the occasion of them, were no more to be spoken of
than misdeeds that had had their punishment. He volunteered no account
of himself and was asked for none, it being supposed that he had found
a settled though humble way of life which allowed the past to fall back
into the past. From his sister I learn that he filled his place in the
family saddened, perhaps, but yet much as he had filled it before he
left it: affection was there, on his side and on hers.
On his return from Manchester, where he lingered--or was
delayed--longer than had been expected, the shop was even less well
served than before. He returned as from a bout of drinking, and with
no regard for the things around him. He had periodic visitations of
much more than customary uselessness; they were such as Mr. McMaster
observed in their approach. He would grow very restless and flushed,
and then retire into an equally disconcerting satisfaction and peace
of mind. These, of course, were the workings of opium, although Mr.
McMaster mistook them, as Dr. Thompson had done previously, for those
of alcohol. "There were accidents," says Mr. McMaster, with some
horror of details. It seems Francis had let the shutter slip on a
certain evening of delirium, and, it is gathered, a foot--the foot
of a customer, no less--had been hurt. Whatever the immediate cause,
Francis had to leave Panton Street in the middle of January 1887.
Mr. McMaster stands an example. His charity was of such exceptional
fortune as commends mankind to daily good works lest great benefits be
left unperformed, lest our omissions starve a Francis Thompson. The
persuasion of "Ye did it unto Me" may be varied by "Perhaps ye did it
unto a Poet."
Before he left, Francis had sent manuscripts, Mr. McMaster avers, to
more than one magazine; for the discarded McMaster account-books had
all the while been as freely covered with poetry and prose as had
been the bulky business folios of Mme. Corot, Marchande de Modes,
with Jean Baptiste Camille's landscapes of pen and ink. But Francis
left Panton Street unanswered; he left Panton Street for less kindly
thoroughfares. Nor did he ever return, though immediately after his
dismissal he came to be in desperate need of any charity. How little he
felt himself bounden by the ties of gratitude or kindly feeling, both
of which he felt strongly in an inactive manner, is shown in this as
in all his negotiations with his family and friends. He never forgot a
kindness or an injury (nor failed to forgive either). Both meant too
much to him. If he neglected the obligations of gratitude, he also,
by a hard habit of constraint and a close conscience, kept his tongue
consistently innocent of recriminations, so that I have never heard
him use really hard words of any man. Mr. McMaster was never told till
after his assistant's death that Francis came to find success as a
writer of books and a journalist. That Francis was fond of him might be
gathered in the few words in which he mentioned him no less than in Mr.
McMaster's own account, and in his brother's, who says that Francis's
eyes would follow the boot-maker round the room with a persistence that
made him, seemingly, entirely like a fawn. "I can only compare him to a
fawn," declared the brother; and he "not the only one to notice it!"
As he stood on the threshold of the shop--"Still, as I turned inwards
to the echoing chambers, or outwards to the wild, wild night, I saw
London extending her visionary gate to receive me, like some dreadful
mouth of Acheron" (de Quincey's words became his own by right of
succession)--he was in no mood to fight for existence. He gave
himself to Covent Garden, the archways and more desperate straits--"a
flood-tide of disaster"--than he had known before.
Jane Eyre, while she felt the vulture, hunger, sinking beak and talons
in her side, knew that solitude was no solitude, rest no rest, and
instinct kept her roaming round the village and its store of food,
even while she dared not ask for it. But that you are in a city of
larders, and that you sleep in Covent Garden, the pulse of London's
kitchens, does not scare the vulture; it is a town-bird, a cockney like
the sparrow. I know that Thompson suffered hunger; so much he told me.
But he found no simile for his pain, and perhaps Charlotte Brontë, in
that she did find one, was as deeply scarred. Misery is a bottle-imp
which you may put to your lips without going through the swing-doors of
experience. Francis came back through them with a light heart, while
Charlotte Brontë's was heavy with inexperience. Many of the horrors of
the street Francis knew only in later years, when the bandages with
which nature covers the eyes of those whom she condemns were removed.
He had walked the battlefield among bullets and not known that one
nestled in his heart, another in his brain, another in his flesh; only
twenty years later did he grow weak with their poison, and develop a
delirium of fear of the sights and sounds of London. It was in later
years that he wrote: "The very streets weigh upon me. Those horrible
streets, with their gangrenous multitude blackening ever into lower
mortifications of humanity. . . . These lads who have almost lost the
faculty of human speech: these girls whose very utterance is a hideous
blasphemy against the sacrosanctity of lover's language. . . . We lament
the smoke of London:--it were nothing without the fumes of congregated
evil."[12] It was later, too, that he wrote of
the places infamous to tell,
Where God wipes not the tears from any eyes.
There is more in the same strain of heated hate and distress, but I
quote no more, in the belief that it is far from illustrating his
mood when he was actually on the streets. He had realised what the
inexperienced does not, that "in suffering, intensity has not long
duration; long duration has not intensity," or again: "Beyond the
maximum point of a delicate nature you can no more get increase of
agony by increasing its suffering than you can get increase of tone
from a piano by stamping on it. It would be an executioner's trick of
God if he made the poet-nature not only capable of a pang where others
feel a prick, but of hell where others feel purgatory." One learns from
almost the same page of his contradictory notes that he knew suffering
beyond the range of other men's knowledge, but that, knowing it, he
also knew the narrow limits of suffering.
Above all things, he learnt that lack of the world's goods is small
lack, that to lose everything is no great loss--a proposition easily
proved by analogy to those who have gained everything and found it
small gain. While in the streets he had his tea to drink and his
murderer to think about. It was in retrospect that he beheld misery
incarnate in the outcast, and it was through the sheltering pane of a
window in a lodging that he saw:--
"A region whose hedgerows have set to brick, whose soil
is chilled to stone; where flowers are sold and women;
where the men wither and the stars; whose streets to
me on the most glittering day are black. For I unveil
their secret meanings. I read their human hieroglyphs.
I diagnose from a hundred occult signs the disease
which perturbs their populous pulses. Misery cries out
to me from the kerb-stone, despair passes me by in the
ways; I discern limbs laden with fetters impalpable,
but not imponderable; I hear the shaking of invisible
lashes, I see men dabbled with their own oozing life.
This contrast rises before me; and I ask myself whether
there be indeed an Ormuzd and an Ahriman, and whether
Ahriman be the stronger of the twain. From the claws of
the sphinx my eyes have risen to her countenance which
no eyes read.
"Because, therefore, I have these thoughts; and
because also I have knowledge, not indeed great or
wide, but within certain narrow limits more intimate
than most men's, of this life which is not a life;
to which food is as the fuel of hunger; sleep, our
common sleep, precious, costly, and fallible, as water
in a wilderness; in which men rob and women vend
themselves--for fourpence; because I have such thoughts
and such knowledge, I needed not the words of our great
Cardinal to read with painful sympathy the book just
put forward by a singular personality."[13]
Of the things he heard--and misery, he says, cries out from the
kerbstone--the laugh, not the cry, of the children familiar with all
evil was what appalled him most. Appalling, too, was the unuttered cry
of children who knew not how to cry nor why they had cause. Among the
notes are many jottings of a resolve to write on the young of the
town, but these were used only incidentally in essays or letters. Such
a one is found in the passage, of his study of Blessed John Baptist de
la Salle, in which he states the case for Free Education:--
"Think of it. If Christ stood amidst your London slums,
He could not say: 'Except ye become as one of _these_
little children.' Far better your children were cast
from the bridges of London, than they should become
as one of those little ones. Could they be gathered
together and educated in the truest sense of the
word; could the children of the nation at large be so
educated as to cut off future recruits to the ranks of
Darkest England; then it would need no astrology to
cast the horoscope of to-morrow. _La tête de l'homme
du peuple_, nay rather _de l'enfant du peuple_--around
_that_ sways the conflict. Who grasps the child grasps
the future."
He writes there at the high pressure of one who sees the tragedy and
must shout "Help!"
"Let those who are robust enough not to take injury
from the terrible directness with which things are
stated read the chapter entitled 'The Children of the
Lost.'[14] For it drives home a truth which I fear
the English public, with all its compassion for our
destitute children, scarcely realises, knows but in a
vague, general way; namely, that they are brought up in
sin from their cradles, that they know evil before they
know good, that the boys are ruffians and profligates,
the girls harlots, in the mother's womb. This, to me
the most nightmarish idea in all the nightmare of those
poor little lives, I have never been able to perceive
that people had any true grasp on. And having mentioned
it, though it is a subject very near my heart, I will
say no more; nor enforce it, as I might well do, from
my own sad knowledge."
To the juvenilia of the London period belongs a poem on an allied
problem of the streets:--
Hell's gates revolve upon her yet alive;
To her no Christ the beautiful is nigh:
The stony world has daffed His teaching by;
"Go!" saith it; "sin on still that you may thrive,
Let one sin be as queen for all the hive
Of sins to swarm around;"
* * * * *
The gates of Hell have shut her in alive.
It was not improbably written while he was befriended by the girl who,
having noticed his forlorn state, did all in her power to assist him.
A monastic segregation of the sexes is often the hard rule of the
outcast's road. Francis had no other friends among the women-folk or
children of London, and often passed months without having speech of
any save men. When he was again among friends and knew the children of
_Sister Songs_ he wrote:--
All vanished hopes, and all most hopeless bliss
Came with thee to my kiss.
And ah! so long myself had strayed afar
From child, and woman, and the boon earth's green,
And all wherewith life's face is fair beseen;
Journeying its journey bare
Five suns, except of the all-kissing sun
Unkissed of one;
Almost I had forgot
The healing harms,
And whitest witchery, a-lurk in that
Authentic cestus of two girdling arms.
This girl gave out of her scant and pitiable opulence, consisting of
a room, warmth, and food, and a cab thereto. When the streets were no
longer crowded with shameful possibilities she would think of the only
tryst that her heart regarded and, a sister of charity, would take
her beggar into her vehicle at the appointed place and cherish him
with an affection maidenly and motherly, and passionate in both these
capacities. Two outcasts, they sat marvelling that there were joys for
them to unbury and to share. Then, in a Chelsea room such as that of
Rossetti's poem would they sit:--
Your lamp, my Jenny, kept alight,
Like a wise virgin's, all one night!
And in the alcove coolly spread
Glimmers with dawn your empty bed.
Weakness and confidence, humility and reverence, were gifts unknown to
her except at his hands, and she repaid them with graces as lovely as a
child's, and as unhesitating as a saint's. In his address to a child,
in a later year, he remembers this poor girl's childishness:--
Forlorn, and faint, and stark
I had endured through watches of the dark
The abashless inquisition of each star,
Yea, was the outcast mark
Of all those heavenly passers' scrutiny;
Stood bound and helplessly
For Time to shoot his barbéd minutes at me;
Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour
In night's slow-wheeléd car;
Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length
From under those dread wheels; and, bled of strength,
I waited the inevitable last.
Then there came past
A child; like thee, a spring-flower; but a flower
Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring,
And through the city-streets blown withering.
She passed,--O brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing!
And of her own scant pittance did she give,
That I might eat and live:
Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive.
Therefore I kissed in thee
The heart of Childhood, so divine for me;
And her, through what sore ways
And what unchildish days.
Borne from me now, as then, a trackless fugitive.
Therefore I kissed in thee
Her, child! and innocency.
Her sacrifice was to fly from him: learning he had found friends, she
said that he must go to them and leave her. After his first interview
with my father he had taken her his news. "They will not understand our
friendship," she said, and then, "I always knew you were a genius."
And so she strangled the opportunity; she killed again the child, the
sister; the mother had come to life within her--she went away. Without
warning she went to unknown lodgings and was lost to him. In "the
mighty labyrinths of London" he lay in wait for her, nor would he leave
the streets, thinking that in doing so he would make a final severance.
Like de Quincey's Ann, she was sought, but never found, along the
pavements at the place where she had been used to find him.
With de Quincey Thompson could have said, "During some years I hoped
that she did live; and I suppose in the literal and unrhetorical use of
the word myriad, I must, on my visits to London, have looked at myriads
of female faces, in the hope of meeting Ann." And, again, that this
incident of friendship "more than any other, coloured, or (more truly I
should say) shaped, moulded and remoulded, composed and decomposed, the
great body of opium dreams." Pursuit and search have been matters of
much nocturnal and poetic moment; such was Patmore's recurring dream of
the dead whom--
I, dreaming, night by night seek now to see,
And, in a mortal sorrow, still pursue
Through sordid streets and lanes,
And houses brown and bare,
And many a haggard stair,
Ochrous with ancient stains,
And infamous doors, opening on hapless rooms,
In whose unhaunted glooms
Dead pauper generations, witless of the sun,
Their course have run.
As with de Quincey, so with Patmore, so with Francis. To the dream, or
sense, of pursuit, was added the suspicion of balking interference.
De Quincey says that throughout his dreams he was conscious "of some
shadowy malice which withdrew her, or attempted to withdraw her, from
restoration and from hope." And Patmore:--
And ofttimes my pursuit
Is check'd of its dear fruit
By things brimful of hate, my kith and kin,
Furious that I should keep
Their forfeit power to weep.
Pursuit circles after flight, and flight circles before pursuit, and
they go about and meet and are confounded--as when children play round
a tree--in the dreams that were common to de Quincey and Thompson, in
the "Daughter of Lebanon" of the one and "The Hound of Heaven" of the
other.
It was loyalty, the loyalty of one who knew what benefits he bestowed
in receiving the alms of his forlorn friend, rather than love, that
kept him so fast to his tryst with her that even when the chance
offered for him to leave the streets, he refused at first to do that
which would put an end to the possibility of their meetings. But he had
not yet loved, nor met her whom he was destined to love--the unknown
She for whom in Manchester he had prayed every night.
In an account of charities among the outcasts he quotes: "To be
nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history. The Canaanitish
woman lives more happily without a name than Herodias with one."
FOOTNOTES:
[10] There is some parallel for this image (Tom-o'-Bedlam's, be it
remembered) in Rossetti's--
But the sea stands spread
As one wall with the flat skies,
Where the lean black craft, like flies,
Seem well-nigh stagnated,
Soon to drop off dead.
[11] Here is a minor clue to the region of London best mapped out in
his mind. From the _Academy_, 1900, he tore Mr. Whitten's review of an
atlas of London, in which a comment is made on the restrictions of the
scale--three inches to the mile; so that "York Street, Covent Garden,
is merged in Tavistock Street; and Panton Street, Haymarket, and its
short continuation, Spur Street, are marked but not named." When
Francis does not dog de Quincey he is at the heel of Coleridge. Each
had gone for a soldier; both were accosted with friendship in London.
The Strand is remembered as the place where Coleridge was, as a youth,
once walking in abstraction with waving arms, to find himself with his
hand in a pedestrian's pocket and accused of attempted thieving. "I
thought, sir, I was swimming in the Hellespont," he explained, and made
a friend only less valuable than Mr. McMaster.
[12] Of the despoiling of the Lady Poverty he writes in an unpublished
poem:--
DEGRADED POOR
Lo, at the first, Lord, Satan took from Thee
Wealth, Beauty, Honour, World's Felicity.
Then didst Thou say: "Let be;
For with his leavings and neglects will I
Please Me, which he sets by,--
Of all disvalued, thence which all will leave Me,
And fair to none but Me, will not deceive Me."
My simple Lord! so deeming erringly,
Thou tookest Poverty;
Who, beautified with Thy Kiss, laved in Thy streams,
'Gan then to cast forth gleams,
That all men did admire
Her modest looks, her ragged sweet attire
In which the ribboned shoe could not compete
With her clear simple feet.
But Satan, envying Thee Thy one ewe-lamb,
With Wealth, World's Beauty and Felicity
Was not content, till last unthought-of she
Was his to damn.
Thine ingrate ignorant lamb
He won from Thee; kissed, spurned, and made of her
This thing which qualms the air--
Vile, terrible, old,
Whereat the red blood of the Day runs cold.
[13] F. T.'s review of Booth's _In Darkest England_.
[14] In Booth's _In Darkest England_.