THE discovery that a man cannot, with any permanence, live by himself
was made after his experience in London and at Storrington. He had
returned to my father's neighbourhood resolved, not only to be a poet,
but to meet the social labours of journalism. This, the elbowing with
other workers at a close-packed table in the private room where, every
Thursday, my father produced with superhuman effort a fresh number of
his _Weekly Register_, meant, much more than a visit to a Cardinal, a
return to the humanities. He fell, with much talk, right into the thick
of it. He was put to small tasks as much that he might be put out of
train for talk as for the use he was. But no device was good enough
to do that; set him to write and there would be endless conversation
on nibs and paper, of what was advisable to write, what to ignore, of
his readers' alleged susceptibilities, and his care for the paper's
circulation. In the end after a hard day there might, or might not,
be a "par" to show, or some doggerel not to show. To this last order
belongs a later attempt to describe the frenzied atmosphere of work:--
In short, with a papal
Election for staple,
Were our inkpot a tun
And our pen like a Maypole,
We'd never be done
With leader, leaderette, pad, comment, and citing,
Nor I with this blighting
Frenzy for jingles and jangles in-_iting_,
And writing
And inditing
And exciting
And biting
My pencil, inviting
Inspiration and plighting
My hair into elf-locks most wild, and affrighting,
And _Registering_, and daying and nighting;
Our readers
Delighting
With leaders
That Whiteing
Might envy before he found work more requiting.
The instant demands of the "busy day" he never learnt to supply, nor
was he put at all seriously to the task of learning. He was too tedious
a pupil for hurried masters. On one busy day, when his platitudes had
been so long chanted that they had got written into the manuscripts
of his distracted audience, he was put in charge of a visitor who
could match all commonplaces with tumultuously brilliant talk. But it
was Thompson's day. With numbers on his side--his repetitions came
in hordes fit to annihilate opposition--he plodded through a long
afternoon in another room with the silent saviour of the workers. To
the dinner table he came with the bright eye of enthusiasm; "I have
never known G---- more brilliant," he explained in all honesty.
At times he would be sent for short visits to Crawley, whence he
writes:--
"I began a letter to you last Wednesday, but it never
got finished in consequence of the devotion with
which I have since been working at a short article.
Now that I feel on my feet again, I am longing to be
back amongst you all. Touchstone, with the slightest
alteration, voices my feelings about country life:
'Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good
life; but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it
is naught. In respect that it is solitary, I like it
very well; but in respect that it is private, it is a
very vile life. Now in respect it is in the fields,
it pleaseth me well; but in respect it is not in the
city, it is tedious.' I hope, nevertheless, that I
shall not see you long after I return. For I hope that
before the season gets too late you will yourself
make your escape from that infectious web of sewer
rats called London. I know how ill you were before I
left; and it is disgusting to think that here am I,
like the fat reed that rots itself in ease on Lethe
wharf, while you are hung up body and soul for the
benefit of the villainous blubber-brained public. . . .
The _Register_ gave me a 'turn,' by the way, last week.
My eyes strayed carelessly across the announcements
of deaths, and suddenly saw--'Monica Mary.' My heart
stood still, I think. Of course the next second I knew
it must be some other Monica Mary, not she who walks
among the poppies--and the restaurants. How, unwell
as you must be, you have managed to make such good
work of the _Register_ and of _Merry England_ I don't
understand. _M. E._, in particular, is an excellent
number. There is not a poor article in it--except my
own, which is dull enough to please a bishop. B.'s
article I think the best of his that I have seen. It
is really very good, allowing for the fact that it is
essentially imitative writing. B., in fact, has made to
himself a pair of breeches from Mrs. Meynell's cast-off
petticoats. But it is cleverly done, and I did not
think B. had been tailor enough to do it. There are
really felicitous things in the article, though the art
of them _has_ been caught from her. For instance, the
bit about the crops 'bearing their sheaves of spires,'
the transformation of the sheep-bells, the weeds
putting on 'the solistic immortality of sculpture,'
&c. At bottom, doubtless, he has not much to say. But
he has said it so well--that it is a pity someone else
could have said it so much better."
Or, like as not, instead of to the country, he would be sent forth on
some expedition with the children to whom he bore himself as a sweet
and eager, though not from their point of view an exciting, companion.
He would concentrate on companionable things, and we have him writing
like the gravest sportsman and intentest child of skating in Kensington
Gardens in the winter of 1891:--
"DEAR MR. MEYNELL,--The discovery of what I have done
to my own skates leads me to ask you to warn Monica
next time she goes skating. If she wishes to preserve
her skates, do not let her climb in them the bank of
the Round Pond, where it is set with stones. Indeed,
she ought not to go on the bank in her skates at all;
it is most destructive to them. For which reason,
doubtless, I invariably do it myself. But you must make
her understand I am like certain saints--that man of
exalted piety, St. Simeon Stylites, for instance--to
be admired for my sublime virtues, but not recommended
for imitation. I forget how many feet of sublime virtue
St. Simeon had; mine defies arithmetic. Monica can
already skate backwards a little--I can't. She can do
the outside edge a little--I can't. It is true that her
mode of terminating the latter stroke is to sit down
rapidly on the ice; but this is a mere individualism
of technique. It is a mannerism which, as she advances
in her art, she will doubtless prune in favour of a
severer style; but all youthful artists have their
little luxuriances. Let me thank you for your kindness
in trusting the children to me. Or shall I say trusting
me to them? For on reflection, I have a haunting
suspicion that Monica managed the party with the same
energy she devotes to her skating. Do not infer hence
that she tyrannised over me. On the contrary, both she
and Cuckoo were most solicitously anxious lest I should
mar my own pleasure in attending to theirs. A needless
anxiety, since I desired nothing better than to play
with them."
Thus the fellowships he was learning at the work table were
supplemented by younger friendships. There was no angel to pluck them
from him by the hair; no printer's boy to pluck his sleeve when he
would attend elsewhere, save when he carried his work to Kensington
Gardens and admonitory nurse-maids doubted him:--
"The notice of Mr. Yeats is my absolute opinion: indeed
I have reined in a little of the warmth of language to
which I was disposed, lest my pleasure and surprise
should betray me into extreme praise. If the reviews
are not very brilliant, you must excuse me if you can,
for I myself am not very brilliant just now. Fact is,
the dearest child has made friends with me in the park;
and we have fallen in love with each other with an
instantaneous rapidity not unusual on my side, but a
good deal more unusual on the child's. I rather fancy
she thinks me one of the most admirable of mortals; and
I firmly believe her to be one of the most daintily
supernatural of fairies. And now I am in a fever lest
(after the usual manner of fairies) her kinsfolk should
steal her from me. Result--I haven't slept for two
nights, and I fear I shall not recover myself until
I am resolved whether my glimpses of her are to be
interdicted or not. Of course in some way she is sure
to vanish--elves always do, and my elves in particular."
For the New Year, 1890, he offered his compliments in the letter and
little fairy-tale that follow. They will be understood by everyone who
knew how my father tended the needs of others:--
"DEAR MR. MEYNELL,-- I have imagined at times that in
certain moments you may be inclined to have certain
thoughts, just as I myself have fits in which I see the
black side of everything. Will you pardon if I have
not surmised them truly, and pardon me also for what
is perhaps, I fear, the impertinence of sending you
the enclosed little bit? As a matter of fact it was
just an attempt to put into a sentence or two what I
was thinking this New Year's Eve; when I pondered on
the great work I discern you to have done, and still to
be doing. I hope that many a New Year to come will see
you spreading it; and wish I could be your right hand
in it; not the clog I am. On account of your services
to the Angelic Art in particular, I am sure the
angels must be rehearsing a special chorus for you in
Paradise. I thought so when I read Miss Probyn's poem.
May they sprinkle every stone in your house.--Ever most
truly your
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
The "enclosed little bit" was:--
"Within the mid girth of banyan was the banyan-spirit,
all an-ache with heavy heaving through the years; and
he was saddened, because he doubted to what end his
weary pain of them had been. For beyond his trunk the
banyan spirit looked not. While without, the great
grove hailed him sire; and from every bird nestling
among its thousand branches, Heaven's ear heard _his_
voice."
In 1891, at the birth of my brother Francis, he wrote to W. M.:--
"I hardly, I fear, gave you even commonplace thanks for
the favour you conferred on me in choosing me for your
little son's godfather. Even now I am utterly unable
to express to you what I feel regarding it; I can only
hope that you may comprehend without words. As for the
quietness with which I took it on Saturday--for the
premeditated of emotion in speech I have an instinctive
horror which, I think, you share sufficiently to
understand and excuse in me. Besides, the words which
one might use have been desiccated, fossilised, by
those amiable persons who not only use the heart as a
sleeve-ornament, but conspicuously label it--'This is a
Heart.' One can only, like Cordelia, speak by silence.
"Give my love to Monicella, and Cuckoo, and all the
children. As for F. M. M., I doubt the primitive egoism
is still too new in him for him to care a baby-rattle
about my love."
That he carried in his "copy" a day late mattered little; that he then
further delayed it by some accident seemed serious only to himself, and
he would write thus to W. M.:--
"I called at Palace Court on Friday, and, finding you
were gone, started to follow you. Unfortunately I fell
into composition on the way, and when I next became
conscious of matters sublunary, found myself wandering
about somewhere in the region of Smithfield Market, and
the time late in the afternoon. I am heartily sorry for
my failure to keep my appointment, and hope you will
forgive me. I thought I had disciplined myself out of
these aberrations, which makes me feel all the more
vexed about the matter.--Always your
F. T."
Or, still more distressed:--
"I don't know what I shall do, or what you shall do.
I haven't been able to write a line, through sheer
nervousness and fright. Confound Canon Carroll! It is
he who has put me into this state. I wish you had never
incumbered yourself with me. I am more in a condition
to sit down and go into hysterics like a girl than to
write anything. I know how vexed and impatient you
must feel to hear this from me, when you had expected
to have the thing from me this morning. Indeed I feel
that you have already done too much for me; and that
it would be better you should have nothing more to
do with me. You have already displayed a patience
and tenderness with me that my kindred would never
have displayed; and it is most unjust that I should
any longer be a burden to you. I think I am fit for
nothing: certainly not fit to be any longer the object
of your too great kindness. Please understand that I
entirely feel, and am perfectly resigned to the ending
of an experiment which even your sweetness would never
have burdened yourself with, if you could have foreseen
the consequences.
F. T."
With such fits my father made it his business to deal, and this he did
with a persuasiveness and love that I think no other man could have
summoned. But for his peculiar power F. T. would have returned to the
streets.[23]
At Friston, in Suffolk,
Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare,
And left the flushed print in a poppy there.
At Friston he was given the poppy and wrote the poem. I remember him as
measuring himself, on the borders of a marsh, against a thistle, the
fellow to that which stands six foot out of Sussex turf in "Daisy";
I see him with the poplars on the marshes, and associate him with a
picnic on the Broads among pine-cones and herons. I think it is he
I see coming in at the farm-gate dusty from a road still bright in
the dusk. But the recollections are elusive. His place in childish
memories is not defined, like that of Brin, the friend who hit a ball
over the farm roof, of the chicken pecking at the dining-room floor, a
sister's first steps, the boy who twisted the cows' tails as he drove
the cattle up from the pastures at night; and better remembered is
the hard old man who, stooping over his work in the vegetable garden,
suddenly rose up and threw a stone as big as a potato at a truant boy.
The boy and man, the cry of the one and the grunted curses of the
other, and their remorseless manner of settling again to work, were
things for a London child to marvel at. But the poet, himself as gentle
as children, is remembered, and remembered vaguely, as part of the
general gentle world. Others are remembered for competence, for large
authority, the freedom of their coming and going, their businesses,
affluence, dreariness, or laughter; they are the substantial people,
more substantial than the people of to-day.
There was a certain mightiness about them, like that of a mighty actor;
but Francis Thompson is not in the cast. Moreover, he is not among the
insufferable "supers" who held one's hand too long or whose aspect was
abhorrent to the fastidious eye of youth. In my earlier memories he is
as unsubstantial as the angel I knew to be at my shoulder. Looking back
I cannot see either clearly, but am not incredulous on that account.
But however insignificant he may have been in the injudicious view of a
boy, he was of consequence to the farm housewife, who could never bring
herself to call him anything but "Sir Francis."
There is more of Friston and the Monica of "The Poppy" in later
verses:--
In the land of flag-lilies,
Where burst in golden clangours
The joy-bells of the broom,
You were full of willy-nillies,
Pets, and bee-like angers:
Flaming like a dusky poppy,
In a wrathful bloom.
* * * * *
Yellow were the wheat-ways,
The poppies were most red;
And all your meet and feat ways,
Your sudden bee-like snarlings,
Ah, do you remember,
Darling of the darlings?
* * * * *
Now at one, and now at two,
Swift to pout and swift to woo,
The maid I knew:
Still I see the duskèd tresses--
But the old angers, old caresses?
Still your eyes are autumn thunders,
But where are _you_, child, you?
My father, before the idea of a published volume had taken shape, sewed
up into booklets a few copies of the poems already printed in _Merry
England_. One copy was sent by a common friend to Tennyson, who gave
thanks, through his son, thus briefly:--
"DEAR MR. SNEAD-COX,--Thanks for letting us see the
vigorous poems.--Yours truly,
HALLAM TENNYSON."
Browning, on the other hand, who was a visitor at Palace Court and on
whose ready sympathy for personal details my father would rely, wrote
at generous length:--
"ASOLO, VENETO, ITALIA, _Oct. 7, '89._
"DEAR MR. MEYNELL,--I hardly know how to apologise
to you, or explain to myself how there has occurred
such a delay in doing what I had an impulse to do as
soon as I read the very interesting papers written by
Mr. Thompson, and so kindly brought under my notice
by yourself. Both the Verse and Prose are indeed
remarkable--even without the particulars concerning
their author, for which I am indebted to your goodness.
It is altogether extraordinary that a young man so
naturally gifted should need incitement to do justice
to his own conspicuous ability by endeavouring to
emerge from so uncongenial a course of life as that
which you describe. Surely the least remunerating sort
of 'literary life' would offer advantages incompatible
with the hardest of all struggles for existence, such
as I take Mr. Thompson's to be. Pray assure him, if he
cares to know it, that I have a confident expectation
of his success, if he will but extricate himself--as
by a strenuous effort he may--from all that must now
embarrass him terribly. He can have no better friend
and adviser than yourself--except _himself_, if he
listens to the inner voice.
"Pray offer my best thanks to Mrs. Meynell for her
remembrance of me--who am, as she desires, profiting
by the quiet and beauty of this place--whence, however,
I shall soon depart for Venice, on my way homeward.[24]
I gather, from the absence of anything to the contrary
in your letter, that all is well with you--and so may
it continue! I do not forget your old kindliness,
though we are so much apart in London; and you must
account me always, dear Mr. Meynell, as yours cordially,
ROBERT BROWNING."
F. T. to W. M.:--
"I have received Mr. Sharp's new _Life of Browning_,
which reminds me to do what I have been intending to
do for a long time past; but whenever I wrote to you,
my mind was always occupied with something else which
put the subject out of my head. I had better do it now,
for even my unready pen will say better what I wish
to say than would my still more unready tongue. It
is simply that I wanted to tell you how deeply I was
moved by the reading of Browning's letter in _Merry
England_. When you first mentioned it to me you quoted
loosely a single sentence; and I answered, I think,
something to the effect that I was very pleased by
what he had said. So I was; pleased by what I thought
his kindliness, for (misled by the form in which you
had quoted the sentence from memory) I did not take it
more seriously than that. When I saw _Merry England_ I
perceived that the original sentence was insusceptible
of the interpretation which I had placed upon your
quotation of it. And the idea that in the closing days
of his life my writings should have been under his eye,
and he should have sent me praise and encouragement,
is one that I shall treasure to the closing days of
_my_ life. To say that I owe this to you is to say
little. I have already told you that long before I had
seen you, you exercised, unknown to myself, the most
decisive influence over my mental development when
without such an influence my mental development was
like to have utterly failed. And so to you I owe not
merely Browning's notice, but also that ever I should
have been worth his notice. The little flowers you sent
him were sprung from your own seed. I only hope that
the time may not be far distant when better and less
scanty flowers may repay the pains, and patience, and
tenderness of your gardening."
The poems as they appeared in _Merry England_ or in journals quoting
_Merry England_ found notable adherents. "The Making of Viola" was
re-printed by Miss Katharine Tynan in 1892 in a Dublin paper, to
which she contributed a London letter, and it was in that form that
Mr. Garvin, to be later the poet's inspiring critic and friend,
first chanced upon Thompson. A leader-writer on the _Newcastle Daily
Chronicle_, he found that "up in the north here, if one has a passion
for the finer letters, one must possess his insulated soul in silence."
After reading "The Making of Viola" ("I cannot tell you," he wrote
to W. M. from Newcastle, "what I think of the angelic ingenuousness
of that poem; it exercised over me an instant fascination from which
I never shall escape") he heard nothing more of Thompson till the
publication of _Poems_. His welcome of that volume is quoted in another
page. _Poems_ came to him while he was writing "leaders," and his
brother, already Thompson-mad, declaimed "The Hound of Heaven" beside
a desk where politics and poetry have fought hotly for the field, and
where they have been known to embrace as unexpectedly as Botticelli's
angels and shepherds. "I was obdurate and a little irritated when these
'snatches of Uranian antiphon' broke grandly through my comments on the
Russo-German commercial treaty, or Professor Garner's theories about
the garrulous gorilla." One marvels that the garrulous gorilla leader
was perfectly intelligible in next morning's _Chronicle_. Mr. Garvin's
readers could not guess that Thompson's poems were already beginning
"to swarm in his head like bees." He contrives to write about treaties,
or make them, so that half the world knows nothing of the winged muse
at his elbow. She herself may have sometimes thought him obdurate, for
she has never yet succeeded in marring a "leader." Letters from Mr.
Garvin, written ten years later, were kept among Francis's few valued
possessions. The two were to meet at Palace Court in 1894 and at many
other dates.
My father had also the satisfaction of printing several of the poems
("Daisy, A Song of Youth and Age" and "To my Godchild") in his
anthology, _The Child set in the Midst, by Modern Poets_, the first
book in which anything of F. T.'s had appeared. Thus to W. M. in his
preface fell the task of writing of him as one "who has eluded fame as
long as Shelley did, but cannot elude it longer. To most readers the
poems will come as the revelation of a new personality in poetry, the
last discovered of the Immortals."
Francis's own chronicle of the period is found in a letter to Canon
Carroll, a middle-man to whom he could write with somewhat less
difficulty than to his family:--
"A.D. 1890. Finished _August 12_. Begun, Heaven knows when.
[May 1890.]
"DEAR CANON,--I must beg your and everybody's pardon
for my long silence. The fact is that I have been
for months in a condition of acute mental misery,
frequently almost akin to mania, stifling the
production of everything except poetry, and rendering
me quite incapable of sane letter-writing. It has ended
in my return to London, and I am immensely relieved;
for the removal of the opium had quite destroyed my
power of bearing the almost unbroken solitude in which
I found myself. As for my prospects, unfortunately the
walls of the Protestant periodical press remain still
unshaken and to shake. I have done recently a review
of Lilly's _Century of Revolution_ for the _Register_,
which has, I fancy, appeared, but in some number which
I have not seen. Poor work, and I don't want to see it.
Also a review of Mr. Sharp's recent _Life of Browning_,
which may or may not appear in the _Register_--it is
only just finished. No doubt you saw in the famous
January _Merry England_ Browning's letter about me. It
is, I see, alluded to in Mr. Sharp's _Life_. Sharp's
book has been remarkably successful, no doubt because
it has come out just during the Browning boom, and has
no rival. But it is badly written, and therefore very
difficult to review. As for the verses published in
this month's _Merry England_, don't know why they were
published at all. Mr. Meynell told me himself that
he did not care particularly for them, because they
were too like a poem of Mrs. Browning's. (You will
find the poem--a poem on Pan making a pipe out of a
reed--where it first appeared, namely, in one of your
two old volumes of the _Cornhill Magazine_. There I
read it; and it is a great favourite of mine. The last
two stanzas, with their sudden deeply pathetic turn of
thought are most felicitous, I think.) The verses on
Father Perry in last month's _Merry England_, were the
first verses of mine that attracted any praise from
Catholic outsiders. An old priest wrote from Norwich
expressing his admiration; and Father Philip Fletcher
also praised them to Mr. Meynell.
"This must have been grateful to Mr. Meynell, for his
previous experience had been very different. Good Uncle
Edward (whom I shall write to after you, now that I
am taking up my arrears of correspondence) writing
about my first two little poems, liked 'The Passion of
Mary,' but used words about 'Dream Tryst' that usually
bear a not very pleasant signification. Who do you
think chose to put himself in a ferment about the
'Ode'? Canon T----! When the editor of the _Tablet_
was in Manchester, Canon T---- attacked him about the
article on me which appeared in that paper. What, he
asked, was the 'Ode' all about? He couldn't in the
least understand what it was all about. But even if
he had understood it, he was quite sure that it was
not a thing which ought to have appeared in a Catholic
magazine! And Mr. Meynell subsequently received an
anonymous letter, in which he was warned against
publishing anything more of mine, since it would be
found in the end that paganism was at the bottom of it.
This with regard to me, who began my literary career
with an elaborate indictment of the ruin which the
re-introduction of the pagan spirit must bring upon
poetry! As for the 'Song of the Hours,' to which you
referred, Mr. Meynell was greatly pleased with it;
but considered that while it avoided the violence of
diction which deformed the 'Ode,' it was not equal to
that in range of power.
* * * * *
"Since I wrote the foregoing pages a considerable time
has elapsed. How long, I do not know, for they were
written at intervals, and so were not dated. My health
has been consistently bad; though I have had, and have,
nothing definite the matter with me, except dyspepsia
and constant colds. My writing powers have deserted me,
and I have suffered failure after failure, till I have
been too despondent to have any heart for writing to
you. Much, no doubt, is due to this infernal weather.
Confined to the house and deprived of sunlight, I droop
like a moulting canary. It was not so when you knew
me; but my vital power has been terribly sapped since
then. Only air and exercise keep me going now. As to
the literary enterprises alluded to in the early part
of this letter, they have successively failed.
"The lines on Father Perry have taken hold of _Merry
England_ readers as nothing of mine has done. Mr.
Meynell had several letters from ecclesiastics
(including one from the head of a monastery--I forget
where or in what Order) expressing admiration of the
poem; and the sub-editor of the _Tablet_ had one from
some priest in Liverpool. I meant the thing merely
for a pretty, gracefully turned fancy; what the
Elizabethans would have called an excellent conceit.
That it is nothing more, I quite agree with Mr.
Blackburn, whose judgment I much value. In the first
place he generally represents Mrs. Meynell's judgment,
who is his guide and friend in everything--and such a
guide and friend no other young man in England has. In
the second place he has an excellent judgment of his
own. Of Mr. Meynell's opinion, I know merely that he
dropped me a post-card saying the poem was 'very fine.'
* * * * *
"Another very small poem on Shelley, Mrs. Meynell has
pronounced 'a little masterpiece.' The expression,
however, may have been hastily and inaccurately
reported by Mrs. Blackburn; I prefer to take it with
caution. Another poem, a sonnet, I have heard nothing
about; but I have never yet really succeeded with a
sonnet. I did a little minor work on the _Tablet_
during the editor's absence--part of the Chronicle of
the Week, and two or three of the Notes, including a
paragraph on Rudyard Kipling and a ferocious little
onslaught on the trashy abomination which Swinburne has
contributed to the _Fortnightly_. In last week's _Scots
Observer_ appeared an exquisite little poem by Mrs.
Meynell--the first she has written since her marriage.
A long silence, disastrous for literature! The poem
is a perfect miniature example of her most lovelily
tender work; and is, like all her best, of a signal
originality in its central idea no less than in its
development.
"Most women of genius--George Eliot, Charlotte
Brontë, and Mrs. Browning, who, indeed, alludes to
her husband's penetration in seeing beyond 'this mask
of me'--have been decidedly plain. That Mrs. Meynell
is not like them you may judge from 'Her Portrait.'
Nor will she attain any rapid notice like them. Her
work is of that subtly delicate order which--as with
Coleridge, for instance--needs to soak into men for a
generation or two before it gets adequate recognition.
Nevertheless it is something to have won the admiration
of men like Rossetti, Ruskin, and, shall I add, the
immortal Oscar Wilde? (A witty, paradoxical writer,
who, nevertheless, _meo judicio_, will do nothing
permanent because he is in earnest about nothing.)
Known or unknown, she cares as little as St. Francis
de Sales would have cared what might become of his
writings.
"At present my prose article is like a lady about whom
Mr. Blackburn told me--renowned for her malapropisms.
A friend met her in Paris, and was about to address
her when the lady put up her hand: 'Hush, don't
recognise me! I am travelling in embryo.' So is my
prose article. And now I think this letter should be
big enough to cover a multitude of sins of omission
in my correspondence. I see that you and a number of
our friends were at Ushaw for the Exhibition week.
The death of my old master, Mr. Formby, to which you
referred in your postcard, I saw in the _Register_. I
was deeply sorry. Wishing not to bring myself under
anyone's notice until I felt my position more assured,
I had abstained from following my first impulse, which
was to send him a copy of the magazine containing my
'Ode,' and accompanying it by a letter. Now I wish
I had pocketed pride, and done so. Not knowing my
circumstances, he may have thought I had forgotten him.
But I had not forgotten him, as I will venture to think
he had not forgotten me.
"With best love to my father, and to Polly when you
next may see her (Maggie, I suppose, will by this time
be beyond the reach of messages), I remain, yours
affectionately,
FRANCIS THOMPSON.
"_P.S._--My address is still that given at the
beginning of this letter, which is so enormous that I
shall have to send it in two envelopes. I am afraid
that you will have to read it by easy stages, unless
you subdivide labour by calling in your curate. By the
way, I spoke of my lines on Shelley as being risky for
a Catholic audience. Let me explain the reason, lest
you should suppose something worse. They are founded
on a letter given in Trelawny's _Recollections_--a
letter from Jane Williams to Shelley two days before
his death. The poem is put into the mouth of the dead
Shelley, and is supposed to be addressed by the poet's
spirit to Jane while his body is tossing on the waters
of Spezzia. Now Jane Williams was a married woman. I
have carefully avoided anything which might not be
addressed by one warm friend to another; but Catholic
readers (witness Canon T----) are apt to shy sometimes
at shadows. . . . When a poet writes love-verses to a
lady, and gives them to her husband for her, it is
surely evident that neither pistols nor the divorce
court are necessary. Now that is what Shelley did."
To Pantasaph in Wales, where he lodged at the gates of the Capuchin
Monastery, he went early in 1892. His first business was the passing of
_Poems_ for the press. Busy over the proof sheets, he writes in answer
to some suggestions of my father's as to the dedication:--
"I cannot consent to the withdrawal of _your_ name.
You have of course the right to refuse to accept the
dedication to yourself. But in that case I have the
right to withdraw the dedication altogether, as I
should certainly do. I should belie the truth and my
own feelings if I represented Mrs. Meynell as the sole
person to whom I owe what it has been given to me to
accomplish in poetry. Suffer this--the sole thing, as
unfortunate necessities of exclusion would have it,
which links this first, possibly this only volume, with
your name--suffer this to stand. I will feel deeply
hurt if you refuse me this gratification."
A slight difficulty in sight, he writes on the impulse:--
"I find Lane has already announced the poems in his
book-list, so I am bound to go through with them; else
I would let them go to the devil. I made myself ill
with over-study, and have been obliged to give my head
three weeks' entire rest. But I am much better again
now. Inwardly I suffer like old Nick; but the blessed
mountain air keeps up my body, and for the rest--my
Lady Pain and I are _au mieux_. I send you two or
three odd bits of verse; but I hardly think you will
find anything in them. . . . The country here is just
beginning to get beautiful, and I am feeling the first
quickening pulse of spring. Lord, it is good for me to
be here--very good. The clogged wheels in me are slowly
beginning to move."
The proofs reached him by way of Palace Court:--
"47 PALACE COURT, _July 19, 1893._
"MY DEAR FRANCIS,--I am very glad that Mr. Lane asked
me to send you the first pages of the book--your poems,
to which Wilfrid and I have so long looked forward.
It is a great happiness to me to do so. . . . I cannot
express to you how beautiful your poems are.--Always,
my dear child, your affectionate
ALICE MEYNELL."
And again, in August, my mother writes:--
"Here are your wonderful poems--most wonderful and
beautiful. It is a great event to me to send you these
proofs. You will, I trust, change the title, 'The Dead
of Westminster.' People will think of nothing but
Westminster Abbey. Please send me the revises, sixteen
pages at a time."
F. T. to A. M. concerning final suggestions made in proof by Coventry
Patmore and my parents:--
"DEAR MRS. MEYNELL,--I have received the finding of the
Court Martial over which you presided; to which the
undersigned begs to make answer, in form and manner
following--
"1. To the first indictment he pleadeth guilty, and
knows not how he omitted to alter the word, as had
been his own intention. He begs, therefore, that for
'soilured' may be substituted 'stealthwon.'
"2. In answer to the third indictment he submits
himself to the judgment of the court, and desires
that _Domus Tua_ shall be omitted, and the requisite
alteration made in the numbering of the poems.
"3. In regard to the second indictment, having already
considered the matter, he refuseth to submit himself to
the court, remaineth _en contumace_, and is prepared,
in token of his unalterable resolution, to suffer the
utmost rigours of the critics."
And he continues, all on account of a misprinted comma in a magazine:--
"Now I carry the war into the enemy's country.
"I do claim to wit that a foul and malicious
alteration has been committed on the body of our King
Phœbus' lieges, in a magazine bearing the style and
denomination of _Merry England_. And I hereby warn
you, that if the same outrage is extended to the same
unoffending poem in my volume, I shall hold you all and
severally responsible. Hereunder follow the details of
my accusation. There should be no fresh stanza and no
stop after 'fertilise.' The pause should come after
'impregnating' in the previous line; and then the next
lines run on (as in the corrected pages I returned on
Thursday):
For flowers that night-wings fertilise
Mock down the stars' unsteady eyes, &c.
"The meaning (which I must have perfectly clear) is
that flowers which are fertilised by night-insects
confront the moon and stars with a glance more
sleepless and steady than their own. Surely anyone who
knows a forest from a flower-pot is aware that flowers
which are fertilised by night-insects necessarily open
at night, and emit at night their odours by which those
insects are attracted. The lines unfortunately altered
are, in fact, explanatory of the image which has gone
before.
"But I sometimes wonder whether the best of you
Londoners do not regard nature as a fine piece of the
Newlyn School, kindly lent by the Almighty for public
exhibition. Few seem to realise that she is alive, has
almost as many ways as a woman, and is to be lived
with, not merely looked at. People are just as bad here
for that matter. I am sick of being told to go here and
to go there, because I shall have 'a splendid view.' I
protest against nature being regarded as on view. If a
man told me to take a three-quarter view of the woman
I loved because I should find her a fine composition,
I fear I should incline to kick him extremely, and ask
whether he thought her five feet odd of canvas. Having
companioned nature in her bed-chamber no less than her
presence room, what I write of her is not lightly to be
altered."[25]
He is a Gascon for boasting his knowledge of Nature's bed-chamber; but
he had some reason. In Wales he slept a night in the woods. Daring,
he entered. One night means much for such as hold eternity in an
hour. For Francis, any single sunrise opened a Day of Creation, and
any sunset awoke in him a comprehension of finality and death, of
rebirth and infinity. The increase and decrease of darkness, the lights
of diminishing and approaching day, were crowded into that single
performance.
"What you say of your night in the woods," writes Mrs.
Hamilton King, "is interesting. But it needed courage.
I should never expect to sleep in a wood at night. The
wood sleeps by day and wakes by night, and this grows
more and more terrible and true as you approach the
tropical forest, where no man alone can survive the
night. 'At night all the beasts of the forest do move,'
as the Psalmist says."
"In regard to the alterations I now enclose to you in the 'Fallen
Yew,' by the correction of two words I hope that I have removed the
obscurity, grammatical and otherwise. In 'Monica Thought Dying' I have
simply substituted 'eleven' for 'thirteen.' The word 'eleven' fits
the metre perfectly well without altering the rest of the line; since
the final 'e' is a natural elision. Most elisions are artificial and
conscious. Such is the elision of the 'a' in 'seraph,' whereby the line
in the 'Fallen Yew' _does_ scan, and so needs no alteration on that
score. But there are a few words wherein we make unconscious elision,
even in daily conversation. The final 'en' after a 'v' we always so
elide; and consequently it is the exception for a poet to count the
final 'en' in such words as 'heaven,' 'seven,' or 'eleven.'"
It is almost the rule that the author on the point of publishing should
flout his public:--
"As for 'immeditatably' it is in all respects the one and only right
word for the line; as regards the exact shade of meaning and feeling,
and as regards the rhythmical movement it gives to the line. So it must
absolutely and without any question stand--woe's me for the public! But
indeed, what is the public doing _dans cette galère_? I believe, it is
true, the public has an odd kind of prejudice that poems are written
for its benefit. It might as well suppose that when a woman loves,
she bears children for its benefit; or (in the case of the poem in
question) that when a man is hurt, he bleeds for its benefit."
But whether he will or not, he bleeds and writes for mankind. If he
stands by his "immeditatably," it is only because he knows that the
public will come to stand by it too. He chooses to be obstinate on
behalf of someone who waits for the word. In flouting his public, the
poet is like a man who, scattering sweets for children, tosses them
away only that they shall be recovered; or, hiding them, is distressed
if they are not found. Thompson put his sweets in difficult places; but
only that he and the others might have the keener recreation.
After more sheets had been corrected and returned to Palace Court, he
writes:--
"It seems to me that they read better than I had
expected--particularly the large additions to 'To a
Poet Breaking Silence,'[26] which were written at a
time when I was by no means very fit for poetry. Your
interest in the volume is very dear to me. I cannot say
I myself feel any elation about it. I am past the time
when such things brought me any elation.
"I have not either of your books,[27] and of course
should most greatly value them. I need not say how
deeply I rejoice at your success."
[Illustration: 47 PALACE COURT]
FOOTNOTES:
[23] In after years Francis wrote letters that seemed to supply no
possible opening for the comforter. Read to-day, their desperation
offers no outlet but a return to the streets. But no sooner did F. T.
come into my father's presence, than he was consoled, often without the
exchange of a word.
[24] Browning left Asolo at the end of October, and died in Venice
early in December.
[25] For all that, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, who walked over his own acres
with Thompson as his guest, wrote:--"He could not distinguish the oak
from the elm, nor did he know the name of the commonest flowers of the
field."
[26] The poem by which my mother broke silence was "Veni Creator."
[27] Among the things he wrote when A. M.'s book came to hand is this
of "Domus Angusta," an essay they had discussed before. "Never again
meditate the suppression of your gloomy passages. It is a most false
epithet for anything you could ever write. You might as well impeach of
gloominess my favourite bit in 'Timon,' with the majestic melancholy of
its cadence--
'My long sickness
Of wealth and living now begins to mend,
And nothing brings me all things.'
Both that passage and yours are poignant; both are deeply sad; while
yours has an added searchingness which makes it (in De Quincey's
phrase) veritably 'heart-shattering'; but how can you call 'gloomy'
what so nobly and resignedly faces the terror it evokes?"