IN 1893 Messrs. Elkin Mathews and John Lane published _Poems_, a square
book in brown boards with gold circles and a frontispiece by Laurence
Housman. The poet viewed it with pleasure, and elsewhere the praise and
blame it received were both wholehearted:--
"Many thanks for the copies. The book is indeed
beautifully got up," he writes. "I have to thank you
for the _Chronicle_ and to thank Mr. Le Gallienne for
his article. Such unselfish enthusiasm in a young
poet for the work of a brother poet is as rare as it
is graceful in these times, when most _littérateurs_
have adopted the French author's maxim: 'There are no
writers of genius except myself and a few friends--and
I am not certain about my friends.'"
And later:--
"I have read in the _Register_ with great surprise that
the first edition is exhausted. I am even more glad for
my publisher's sake than for my own. The _St. James's_
article, as unusually appreciative as that of the
_Chronicle_, I am very pleased with."
Recurring, in another letter to W. M., to Mr. Le Gallienne's
_Chronicle_ article, he writes:--
"When the first whirl of language is over (was it not a
sin of my own former prose when I waxed enthusiastic?)
he settles down to appreciation which is at the same
time criticism. Will it be believed, however, that
after deprecating superlatives I am actually disposed
to rank myself higher than Mr. Le Gallienne's final
sentence might seem to imply. I absolutely think that
my poetry is 'greater' than any work by a new poet
which has appeared _since Rossetti_. Unless, indeed,
the greater work to which the critic referred was
Mrs. Meynell's. I frankly admit that her poetry has
exquisite unclamorous qualities beside which all the
fireworks of my own are much less enduring things.
Otherwise, I will not vail my crest to Henley, or
Robert Bridges, or even William Watson. For the rest I
have nothing but warm and surprised gratitude for your
untiring efforts on my behalf. I am very pleased with
all the letters you have sent me, particularly Vincent
O'Sullivan's from Oxford. Am I going to found a school
there?
"The minor versifier has at any rate the asterisks
in a 'Judgment in Heaven' which he can catch on to.
There he can have the latest device in poetry, the
whole apparatus procurable at my printer's. I have not
forgotten that it was Le Gallienne's admiration for
the specimen sent to Lane which finally decided the
publication of my book; and I should indeed be sorry to
know that I had repaid him by wounding his feelings.
F. T."
In part his was but a share in the general welcome then accorded to
the poets. Davidson was being hailed with intense zest; Norman Gale
himself, singing amid applause, offered congratulations and a review
to F. T. Only with the appearance of _Sister Songs_ and _New Poems_
was he roundly and viciously abused. But already round the standard
of "An Old Fogey" (Andrew Lang), raised in the _Contemporary Review_,
February 1894, _à propos_ of "The Young Men," there was a considerable
gathering. From the press cuttings of the year a good crop may be got
of such sentences as:--
"I must agree with Mr. L.'s judgment of Mr. Francis
Thompson. His faults are fundamental. Though he uses
the treasure of the Temple, he is not a religious poet.
The note of a true spiritual passion never once sounds
in his book. . . . He owes much to the perseverance
of Mr. and Mrs. Meynell and the Catholics whom they
influence."[28]
It fell to a critic on the _Westminster Gazette_ to do the out and out
"slating." Leading off with quotations from "A Judgment in Heaven," he
asks "Is it poetry? is it sense? is it English?" His case, with such
phrases as "Supportlessly congest" well to the fore, was good. Quoting
"To My God-child" as a happier example, he concluded, "This, too, is
somewhat wild, but it means something."
"The poet of a small Catholic clique" was a description given by one
of the two or three writers who constituted the opposition to his
claims to a great place in English literature. They all made a common
discovery--Francis Thompson was a Catholic.
"We had," said the _Weekly Register_, "Mr. de Vere,
Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, Mrs. Hamilton King, Mr. Coventry
Patmore, to name no others. We need not then have
awaited Mr. Thompson's arrival to undermine the Press
of England in the interests of 'Sectarianism'!"
It came to pass that this poet of fewest friends was charged not
only with log-rolling, but with belonging to a "clique" that had its
headquarters at Palace Court. The fact was that his few friends were
even shyer than his friends' friends of praising him publicly. One
young reviewer (the "Vernon" already mentioned) came at the stroke of
morning's eight to shout through their bedroom doors his new discovered
joy--a poem in _Merry England_ by F. T. "I know at last," was his
loud confidence, "that there is a poet who may worthily take a place
as Shakespeare's second." But in the papers this critic's notices
were very halting: his praises did not call through the press as they
did through the keyhole. The "clique" is proved in his notice the
most unprofitable and unfriendly of companies. In Henley's _National
Observer_ he writes:--
"Mr. Francis Thompson is a young poet of considerable
parts, whose present danger lies in the possibility
of his spoiling. Having recently put forth to the
world a book of poems, modest enough in bulk, he was
presently attacked by a most formidable conspiracy of
adulation. . . . Few writers of really distinguished
quality have been introduced to the world under the
shelter of such a farrago of nonsense."
This writer, almost the only personal friend of Thompson's on the
literary press, does not confine his strictures to the alleged
"promoters" of _Poems_. He points to passages, ungainly and ugly, which
explain why the book as a whole "proves repellent to the majority of
readers"; but
"Let him take heart, then, and sedulously pursue a path
of most ascetic improvement. A word, too, in his ear;
let him not use the universe quite so irresponsibly for
a playground. To toss the stars about, 'to swing the
earth,' &c., is just a little cheap."
The same friend had his say in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the
_Tablet_, so that there was indeed one "conspirator" among his
reviewers. With all such things Francis was well pleased; he enjoyed
the smart of them, and cut them out and pasted them in a scrap-book
along with the panegyrics:--
"In regard to Vernon," he wrote, "I am quite satisfied
with his articles. You must consider that he and I have
in the past exhorted each other to a Spartan virtue
of criticism when one deals with a friend--if one
thinks a friend can stand it. In taking placidly such
unflinching candours there is a glow of self-approving
delight akin to that afforded by taking the discipline,
or breaking the ice to wash, or getting up in the
morning, or any other unnatural act which makes one
feel blessedly above one's neighbours."
Another of his friends thought such treatment salutary: Coventry
Patmore to A. M., February 3, 1894:--
"Lang is a clever donkey. It will do F. T. nothing but
good to be a little attacked."
Coventry Patmore's own article in the _Fortnightly_, July, 1894,
was written before he and Thompson had met. It was easy for even
frequent callers at Palace Court to miss F. T., since he never kept
appointments. At this time A. M. wrote to F. T.:--
"I have been much disappointed at not having the
opportunity of introducing you to Coventry Patmore. He
wished so much to see you. If you knew the splendid
praises he crowned you with!
"He wants to review your book. He would have done so in
the paper he calls the 'Twopenny Damn'[29] (don't be
shocked), if it had not died. As it is, he will do it
somewhere."
As a matter of fact the critics knew neither the poet nor his address.
Even his occasional editors, among whom was Mr. Henry Newbolt, were for
their convenience saved direct communication with him. He knew nobody;
and those who knew everybody did not know him. Mr. Yeats wrote at his
death to W. M.:--
"Now I regret that I never met him, except once for a
few minutes. There seems to be some strange power in
the forms of excess that dissolves, as it were, the
external will, to make the character malleable to the
internal will. An extreme idealism of the imagination
seems to be incompatible in almost all with a perfectly
harmonious relation to the mechanics of life."
Another of the circle of his unacquaintance, Mr. Norman Gale, writing
as an anthologist, for permission to quote, says to the poet:--
"Let me take this opportunity of congratulating you
from my heart on the success of your book. I have said
what I thought of it in print. I was candid."
That, at least, does not betoken the log-roller. If Thompson was
one of "a group"--it was a day of groups--it was composed of cowled
friars and the deaf Welsh hills. When from Mr. Hugh Chisholm, then
the assistant editor of the _St. James's Gazette_, and the writer of
an appreciative notice in that paper, came a request, reinforcing his
printed admiration, for an autograph copy of the "Daisy" the compliment
was made through a third person, and such personalities as his review
contained were not based on an acquaintance with the poet. Another
stranger, Mr. John Davidson, wrote, I believe, the _Speaker's_ praises,
but disclaimed any responsibilities for his reviews when asked, in
later years, if a passage from his article might be quoted--he never
meant anything said in reviews, was his afterthought about them.
Nevertheless, since his were the words of a fellow-poet, I give them:--
"Here are dominion--domination over language, and a
sincerity as of Robert Burns. . . . We must turn from
Mr. Thompson, the latest, and perhaps the greatest,
of English Roman Catholic poets of post-Reformation
times, to the exalted Puritan voice that sang 'At a
Solemn Music' for a strain combining in like manner
intensity and magnificence." . . . (Of "_Her Portrait_.")
"A description, masterful and overmastering, in which
a constant interchange of symbol between earthly and
heavenly beauty pulses like day and night."
With the publication of _Sister Songs_ in 1895 the same charge was
renewed; the _Realm_ felt
"sorry for Mr. Thompson to think that he had been
spoiled by indiscreet flatterers. He ought not to run
away with the idea that anything he chooses to write is
poetry."
"The frenzied pæans of his admirers by profession" were the words of
a leading critic, and might well have stirred a desire in Francis to
explain that he neither knew nor could profit his reviewers. When
one journal became more explicit in its charges he went so far as to
compose, but not to despatch, a reply made principally on somebody
else's behalf:--
"My business is," he wrote, "as one of the--I suppose
I should say shameful--seven pilloried by your critic,
to give my private witness for Mr. Le Gallienne. The
_gravamen_ of the charge against him is not that he
praised too effusively; it is the far more heinous
accusation of log-rolling--in other words, of praising
in return for favours received, or favours which it
was understood were to come. Here, then, are the facts
in my own case. When my book appeared it was reviewed
by Mr. Le Gallienne in terms no less generous than
those used by him recently in the _Weekly Sun_. When
his first review appeared Mr. Le Gallienne and myself
were totally unacquainted and unconnected. Before the
second, printed in the _Weekly Sun_, we had met once
casually. And this is the whole extent of my personal
acquaintance or communication with one who is accused
of praising me because he is my friend. Nor does the
meanness anonymously attributed to Mr. Le Gallienne
end here. He is accused of praising me not only as
a friend but as one whom I praise in return. Allow
me then to say that I have never before or since his
review of my poems written a line about him in any
quarter."
His reserve in public did not mean that he was so little contentious
that he never smote his foes in private. He was full of unspoken
arguments, like the man you see talking to himself, or smiling as he
walks, and of whom you may be sure that he is confounding or dismissing
an opponent. The solitary man is full of good answers, but they belong
to an interview from which, over soon, he is speeding; for his triumph,
generally, is the sad one of putting together a repartee or clinching
an argument--too late. So it was with Thompson. He thought out his
brisk repartees purely for his own satisfaction and at leisure, and
would have blushed to answer his belittlers in the open. But in the
mental "ring," in the note-book, he occasionally triumphed:--
"I need hardly say I have not escaped the accusation of
belonging to a 'Mutual Admiration Society.' There are
few writers, I fancy, but have at one time or another
been surprised by the experience. For it is often an
odd surprise. I myself, for example, am a recluse;
with one or two intimate friends whom I see and one
or two whom I don't. If in the latter case you deny
the intimacy you fail to grasp that I am a recluse. I
saw them ten years ago--there's intimacy. I might see
them again next week, or year--why then, there's more
intimacy. And I don't need to see them at all--go to,
would you desire better intimacy? The chapter of my
intimate friends is as of the snakes in Ireland. My
intimate friends I do, past question, encounter of odd
times--if that constitute the acquaintance, it is the
limit of mine. But speculative assumption, as it is
without knowledge, so cannot have knowledge of its own
incongruity.
"Nor is the reciprocal admiration of small men
necessarily foolish: it is foolish only when it admires
what each wishes to be, not what he is. For my part I
have known in true literary men generosity united with
unflinching plainness of speech. They love literature
too much, that they should bring into her presence less
than severe truth, within the scope and compass of
their conception."
If Thompson had been scolded for his Catholic friends, his Catholic
friends were to be scolded for their Thompson, but on a different
score. In the _American Ecclesiastical Review_, for June 1898, Canon
Sheehan, author of _The Triumph of Failure_, wrote:--
"For the present he will write no more poetry. Why?
I should hardly like to intrude upon the privacy of
another's thoughts; but Francis Thompson, who, with
all his incongruities, ranks in English poetry with
Shelley, and _only_ beneath Shakespeare, has hardly
had any recognition in Catholic circles. If Francis
Thompson had been an Anglican or a Unitarian, his
praises would have been sung unto the ends of the
earth. He would have been the creator of a new school
of poetry. Disciples would have knelt at his feet.
But, being only a Catholic, he is allowed to retire,
and bury in silence one of the noblest imaginations
that have ever been given to Nature's select ones--her
poets. Only two Catholics--literary Catholics--have
noticed this surprising genius--Coventry Patmore and
Wilfrid Meynell. The vast bulk of our co-religionists
have not even heard his name, although it is already
bruited amongst the Immortals; and _the_ great Catholic
poet, for whose advent we have been straining our
vision, has passed beneath our eyes, sung his immortal
songs, and vanished."
Another view of the poet's attitude towards his reception comes from
Mrs. Blackburn at Pantasaph, 1894:--
"As for Francis, I hardly know what to say. I wish
he would show some kind of human elation at his
unprecedented success, but he seems to take it all in
a dull, mechanical way, which is distressing. It is
two months now since there has been any change in him.
He stays away for days together, and, although he has
promised to come to tea with me this afternoon, ten
to one I shan't see him. Bishop Carroll was here last
week, and saw Francis a good deal at the Monastery.
He told me he would ask him to come and stay a short
time with him at Stalybridge, and take him to see his
father. Francis seems so much to want to see his own
people again. It is odd to read all the well-merited
praise, and then realise how outside the pale of
humanity this great genius is, more irresponsible than
any child, with a child's fits of temper and want of
foresight and control. He isn't doing a stroke of work,
and stays in bed the best part of the day, and lately
he falls asleep when he comes to see me. No one can do
anything with him."
[Illustration: Cast of Francis Thompson's Hand]
It was this man who, nevertheless, was as near his public as it is
possible for a writer to be; he made his public. Nobody thought Mr. H.
D. Traill misjudged the chances of popularity when, on the publication
of _Poems_, he wrote to W. M.:--
"I quite agree with you in thinking him a remarkable
poet, but, if he is ever to become other than a
'poet's poet' or 'critic's poet'--if indeed it is
worth anyone's ambition to be other than that--it
will only be by working in a different manner. A
'public' to appreciate 'The Hound of Heaven' is to me
inconceivable."
Mr. William Archer, a splendid appreciator, expressed much the same
view. Yet in the three years after Thompson's death the separate
edition of "The Hound of Heaven" sold fifty thousand copies; and, apart
from anthologies, many more thousands were sold of the books containing
it.
The _Athenæum_ notice fell to Mr. Arthur Symons (3 Feb. 1894), moved
to note the worst, that "inchoate poem, 'A Judgment in Heaven,'" and
to remark the closeness of imitation of Mr. Patmore and Crashaw--"Can
a man serve two such masters?"--and other influences sharing "the
somewhat external quality of Mr. Thompson's inspiration." Mr. Symons
was equally careful to establish, coldly enough, his appreciation of
such importance as might be safely allowed the new poet. No doubt that
review, though W. M. labelled it favourable, made the generosity of
Mr. Le Gallienne and the splendid appreciation of Mr. Garvin doubly
valuable to send to Pantasaph.
* * * * *
F. T. to W. M.:--
"I think Traill's article excellent and kind. But the
_Athenæum_!-- Call you this dealing favourably with
a man? Heaven save me, then, from the unfavourable
dealers! Of course, he is right about the "To Monica
Thought Dying"; but that and one or two other poems
are not sufficient on which to base a charge of
making Mr. Patmore a model. It would have been well,
indeed, for the restraint and sanity of the poems if
I _had_ submitted somewhat to the influence of Mr.
Patmore's example. As for what Watson says, it is
not, like Symons', unfair. The sale of the book is
indeed astonishing. Let us hope that the league of the
weeklies will not materially damp it."
When, with _Sister Songs_ in 1895, came a second batch of reviews, F.
T. wrote:--
"I should much like to see further notices of my book,
if you would not find it too much trouble. Lane has
sent me only Le Gallienne's in the _Star_.[30] From
another source I have had the _Daily Chronicle, St.
James's_ and _Manchester Guardian_. Lane speaks of
reviews in the _Realm_, _Saturday_, and _Athenæum_. If
the two latter are by Symons, as he says, I do not want
to see them. He is the only critic of mine that I think
downright unfair. . . . Coventry has sent me a poem
of Mrs. Meynell's from the _P. M. G._--'Why Wilt Thou
Chide?' No woman ever wrote a thing like that: and but
one man--Coventry himself."
From Patmore's article on _Poems_ in the _Fortnightly Review_, July
1894, which stands as the most important page in the history of the new
poet's reception:--
"Mr. Francis Thompson is a writer whom it is impossible
that any qualified judge should deny to be a 'new
poet,' one altogether distinct in character from that
of the several high-class mediocrities who, during
the past twenty years or so, have blazed into immense
circulation, and have deceived for a while many who
have seemed to be of the elect among critics. And,
unlike most poets of his quality, who have usually had
to wait a quarter of a century or more for adequate
recognition, this poet is pretty sure of a wide
and immediate acknowledgment. A singular and very
interesting history will convince thousands whom the
rumour of it may reach, that he is an 'extraordinary
person'; the heroic faith in and devotion to the
interests of his genius which, through long years, has
been shown by at least two friends, one of them a lady
not inferior in genius to his own; his recognition of
her helpfulness by a series of poems which St. John
of the Cross might have addressed to St. Theresa, and
which, had she not established by her own writings a
firm and original hold on fame, would have carried her
name to posterity in company with that of 'Mrs. Ann
Killigrew'; the very defects of his writing, which will
render manifest, by contrast, its beauties, thereby
ingratiating 'the crowd, incapable of perfectness';
his abundant and often unnecessary obscurities, which
will help his popularity, as Browning's did his, by
ministering to the vanity of such as profess to be able
to see through millstones, are all circumstances which
will probably do more for his immediate acceptance by
the literary public than qualities which ought to place
him, even should he do no more than he has done, in the
permanent ranks of fame, with Cowley and with Crashaw.
"Considering that these eighty-one pages of verse
are all that Mr. Thompson has done, there would seem
room for almost any hope of what he may do, but for
one circumstance which seems to limit expectancy. He
is, I believe, about thirty-five years old--an age at
which most poets have written as well as they have
ever written, and at which the faculty of 'taste,'
which is to a poet what chastity is to a woman, is
usually as perfect as it is likely ever to be. It was
Cowley's incorrigible defect of taste, rather than any
fault of the time, that was responsible for the cold
conglomerate of grit which constitutes the mass of his
writing, though he was occasionally capable of ardent
flights of pure and fluent verse; and it is by the
same shortcoming in Crashaw that we are continually
reminded that what he would have us accept for concrete
poetic passion is mainly an _intellectual_ ardour. The
phraseology of a perfectly poetic ardour is always
'simple, sensuous, and passionate,' and has a seemingly
unconscious _finish from within_, which no 'polish' can
produce. Mr. Thompson, as some critic has remarked, is
a 'greater Crashaw.' He has never, in the present book
of verses, done anything which approaches, in technical
beauty, to Crashaw's 'Music's Duel'; but then Crashaw
himself never did anything else approaching it; and,
for the rest of his work, it has all been equalled, if
not excelled, in its peculiar beauties, as well as its
peculiar defects, by this new poet. . . . Mr. Thompson's
poetry is 'spiritual' almost to a fault. He is always,
even in love, upon mountain heights of perception,
where it is difficult for even disciplined mortality to
breathe for long together. The lady whom he delights
to honour he would have to be too seraphic even for
a seraph. He rebukes her for wearing diamonds, as if
she would be a true woman if she did not delight in
diamonds, if she could get them; and as if she could
be truly seraphic were she not a woman. The crown of
stars of the _Regina Cœli_ is not more naturally
gratifying and becoming to her who, as St. Augustine
says, had no sin, 'except, perhaps, a little vanity,'
than the tiara of brilliants is to the _Regina Mundi_.
Mr. Thompson is a Titan among recent poets; but he
should not forget that a Titan may require and obtain
renovation of his strength by occasional acquaintance
with the earth, without which the heavens themselves
are weak and unstable. The tree Igdrasil, which has
its head in heaven and its roots in hell (the 'lower
parts of the earth'), is the image of the true man,
and eminently so of the poet, who is eminently man. In
proportion to the bright and divine heights to which
it ascends must be the obscure depths in which the
tree is rooted, and from which it draws the mystic sap
of its spiritual life. Since, however, Mr. Thompson's
spirituality is a real ardour of life, and not the
mere negation of life, which passes, with most people,
for spirituality, it seems somewhat ungracious to
complain of its predominance. It is the greatest and
noblest of defects, and shines rather as an eminent
virtue in a time when most other Igdrasils are hiding
their heads in hell and affronting heaven with their
indecorous roots."
In talk with F. T. he said:--
"I look to you to crush all this false mysticism. Crush
it; you can do it if you like; you are the man to do
it."
Although C. P. had seen the proofs he had not met F. T. before the
publication of _Poems_ or his criticism of it in the _Fortnightly_. The
proofs bear the marks of a critic intolerant of everything in which
he detected excess of diction or imagery. One short poem he struck
clean out, with the comment "It will do harm." He was the elder with
a system, the master who knew "the end and aim of poetry," but later,
speaking as with words fully weighed, he said in talk with F. T., "I am
not sure you may not be a greater poet than I am."
_Sister Songs_, published two years later, belongs to the same period
of composition as _Poems_. In all the poetry there is personal
revelation, his own experience being the invisible wind that moves
the cloudy pageant of his verse. But in _Sister Songs_ we see the
experience itself; he alludes to his nights in the streets, and can
here say with Donne: ". . . my verse, the strict map of my misery. . . ."
But not in the first place is it a poem of sad experience, an unfit
offering for little girls. It is what it would be--beautiful,
elaborate, innocent. The second part is addressed to Monica Meynell;
the first is a dance of words in honour of a younger sister--"For
homage unto Sylvia, her sweet, feat ways."
* * * * *
F. T. to W. M.:--
"I have been wondering what criticisms had appeared
on Mrs. Meynell. I have seen none, except the
_Fortnightly_ and the _Chronicle_. Coventry all abroad
about her poetry, Le Gallienne all abroad about her
prose. But the latter's notice of her poetry showed
real perception. Coventry was excellent with regard
to the side of her prose which he had seized; but
rather provoking for seizing it, since he has sent the
_Chronicle_ off after him on what is a false trail. The
side is there; but it is not the prominent side, and
certainly not the side most markedly characteristic of
her."
C. P. to F. T.:--
"LYMINGTON, _July 29, 1895_.
"MY DEAR THOMPSON,--I am glad you think as I do about
those 'wonderful verses' (A. M.'s). I have quoted your
words in a letter I have written to our Friend. They
will delight her greatly. . . .
"It is good news that you are writing prose. You know
how perfectly great I think what I have read of your
prose. After all, the greatest things must be said
in prose. Music is too weak to follow the highest
thought. I will try and go to Pantasaph as soon as I
have arranged some engagements which have come into the
foreground since I wrote to you.
"I hear that Traill and Henley (who abused your first
Book) are in raptures (should they not be written
_ruptures_?) with the last!
"When will the 'critics' understand the difference
between an ounce of diamond dust and a diamond that
weighs an ounce! These gentlemen have written almost
nothing about _Rod, Root, and Flower_. I suppose they
can make nothing of it. But Bell tells me it sells
fairly.--Yours ever,
COVENTRY PATMORE."
Thompson himself adopted the view that _Sister Songs_ lacked a proper
sequence of idea and incident, or rather that, to the unready reader,
it apparently lacked such sequence.
Mr. Arnold Bennett's "Don't say I didn't tell you," saved fortunately
from the flimsy pages of _Woman_, July 3, 1895, reads proudly now:--
"I declare that for three days after this book appeared
I read nothing else. I went about repeating snatches
of it--snatches such as--
The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
Moves all the labouring surges of the world.
My belief is that Francis Thompson has a richer natural
genius, a finer poetical equipment, than any poet save
Shakespeare. Show me the divinest glories of Shelley
and Keats, even of Tennyson, who wrote the 'Lotus
Eaters' and the songs in 'The Princess,' and I think I
can match them all out of this one book, this little
book that can be bought at an ordinary bookseller's
shop for an ordinary, prosaic crown. I fear that in
thus extolling Francis Thompson's work, I am grossly
outraging the canons of criticism. For the man is
alive, he gets up of a morning like common mortals,
not improbably he eats bacon for breakfast; and every
critic with an atom of discretion knows that a poet
must not be called great until he is either dead or
very old. Well, please yourself what you think. But, in
time to come, don't say I didn't tell you."
Mr. Arnold Bennett was to discover for himself the secret of large
sales: he did not negotiate them for his poet, who complained of "my
ill-starred volume--which has sold only 349 copies in twelve months."
Bad enough, of course; but poets of distinction have since then been
contented, or discontented, with the sale of thirty in the same
interval. _New Poems_ did much worse.
* * * * *
F. T. to W. M.:--
"Many thanks for the _Edinburgh_, which has indeed
pleased me. I did not expect such an enthusiastic
review of my work, and particularly of my last book,
from a periodical so conservative and slow-moving. I
am very gratified by what you say about Meredith. You
know, I think, that I hold him the most unquestionable
genius among living novelists. I have read five of his
novels: _Harry Richmond_, _Evan Harrington_, _Richard
Feverel_, _Diana of the Crossways_, _One of our
Conquerors_. Nothing beyond this."
In another letter he again mentions the _Edinburgh_ reviewer:--
"The writer shows not only taste, but what is nowadays
as rare, that acquaintance with the range of English
poetry, which ought to be a natural essential in the
equipment of any poetical critic. Even where he is
mistaken, he is intelligently mistaken. One remark
goes curiously home--that on the higher poetic rank
of metaphor as compared to simile. It has always been
a principle of my own; so much so, that I never use a
simile if I can use a metaphor. The observation on the
burden of the poem to Sylvia shows a metrical sense
unfortunately very unusual in our day."
FOOTNOTES:
[28] His work having appeared in a Catholic magazine, it was known to
the Catholic papers. Apart from the _Weekly Register_, where notices of
his periodical writings were printed, priority belongs to _The Tablet_,
which printed, September, 1889, and 19th July, 1890, serious notices
of the issues of _Merry England_ containing the "Ode to the Setting
Sun" and "The Hound of Heaven"; and to Miss Katharine Tynan, who quoted
the whole of "The Making of Viola" from _Merry England_, May, 1892, in
the _Irish Independent_ in the course of the same month. The Catholic
papers made no particular sign of welcome when the books themselves
were published, but it may be noted that the _Ave Maria_, Notre Dame,
Indiana, had praise for the much-abused extravagance of the opening of
the "Corymbus for Autumn." To the _Catholic World_, February, 1895,
Mr. Walter Lecky contributed many compliments and several biographical
inaccuracies. In the secular press of America F. T. fared less well.
_The New York Post_, 19th of January, 1898, found his work ". . . not
altogether hopeful, since his impulses are wayward, like his life."
_The Critic_, July, 1894, would by no means allow Browning's phrase,
"conspicuous abilities," to pass unchallenged.
[29] The _Anti-Jacobin_, edited by Mr. Frederick Greenwood.
[30] Of _Sister Songs_ Mr. Le Gallienne wrote:--
"Critics are continually asking a writer to be someone else than
himself, but happily Mr. Thompson seems to be one of those poets
who go their own way, oblivious of the cackle of Grub Street. . . .
Passion, in its ideal sense, has seldom found such an ecstatic, such a
magnificently prodigal expression. For the love that Mr. Thompson sings
is that love which never finds, nor can hope to find, 'its earthly
close.' It is the poet's love of love in the abstract, revealed to him
symbolically in the tender youth of two little girls, and taking the
form of a splendid fantastic gallantry of the spirit."