THE _Morning Post_ reviewer dwelt on his "incomprehensible sentiments
and unknown words," and even his friends had before publication
warned him that his meanings were lost in the "foam and roar of his
phraseology."
Lionel Johnson was hardly more candid than some others when he said of
Francis Thompson that he had done more to harm the English language
than the worst American newspapers: _corruptio optimi pessima_. And Mr.
Gosse saw him as the defiler of the purity of the English language.
But he was no very hardened coiner of words to be thus taken aback by
objections:--
"By the way, I see Blackburn has queried (on MS. of
_Sister Songs_) 'lovesome.' Is there no such word? I
never made a doubt that there was. It is at any rate
according to analogy. If it is an error, then 'lovely'
must be substituted throughout, which differs somewhat
in _nuance_ of meaning."
He meets Mr. Archer's complaint by quoting Campion's "Cold age deafs
not there our ears," and Shakespeare's "Beastly dumbed by him," and
Keats' "Nighing to that mournful place":--
"In all this I am a born rebel, founding myself on
observed fact before I start to learn theory of
theorisers, systems of system-mongers. I doubt me but
English verbs are, or were, commonly suggested and
derived from adjectives; and had I time and a British
Museum ticket would resolve the matter for myself.
Anyway I have coined nought to the like; I mistrust not
but your same 'dumbed' is all Archer has against me
in this quarrel, and all he shall advance against me
whereon to build such charge, nor shall he find another
like verb in ought of verse I have written, search he
like a lantern of Diogenes. The word lay to my hand and
was a right lusty and well-pithed word, close grained
and forcible as a cudgel, wherefore I used it; and
surely I would have used a dozen such had they served
my turn."
In another case his defence is ready; thus did he consider the weight,
rarity, and character of a word or phrase:--
"Of 'nervure'; I should not, in a like passage, use
_cuticle_ of the skin of a flower or leaf: because
it is a _streaky_ word--its two _K_ sounds and
mouse-shrewd _u_ make it like a wire tweaked by a
plectrum. The _u_ of nervure is not only unaccented,
therefore unprominent in sound, but the soft _v_ and
_n_ quite alter its effect from that it has when
combined with k's and parchment-tight t's."
"'In nescientness, in nescientness,'" complained A.
T. Q. C. in the _Speaker_, June 5 and May 29, 1897,
"puts me at once into a frame of mind unfavourable to
thorough enjoyment of what follows. . . . Undoubtedly
the eulogies of his friends have been at once so
precipitate and defiant as to lead us to suspect that
he is being shielded from frank criticism; that his are
not the rare and most desirable friends, who love none
the less for their courage to detect faults and point
them out; and that, by consequence, he is not being
given a fair chance of correcting his excesses. . . .
'_Monstrance_,' '_vaultages_,' '_arcane_,'
'_sciential_,' '_coerule_,' '_intemperably_,'
'_englut_' (past participle), '_most strainedest_'
(double superlative)--these and the like are not easily
allowed by anyone possessing a sense of the history of
the language."
"Monstrance" is not the only word in that list that shows how hastily
the critics fell foul of him, and those who think that Shakespeare
bears some part in "the history of the language" may take "Most
stillest" for a fair precedent of a double superlative.
Mr. E. K. Chambers, reviewing _Sister Songs_ in 1895, wrote:--
"He showers out obsolete words, or at will coins
new ones, with a profusion that at times becomes
extravagant and grotesque. . . . His freaks of
speech rarely prove anything but ugly linguistic
monstrosities."
"The obsolete 'riped,'" "the rare 'heavened,'" "impitiable,"
"saddenedly," "anticipatedly," "immeditatably"--with these the critics
were wroth. Parodies appeared in the _Saturday Review_--"Latinate
Vocabules"--and in the _Westminster Gazette_. While "monstrance" was
found to have the suspect ring of a coined word, many of the words
he did coin (according to Mr. Beacock's Concordance they number
130 odd) passed unnoticed. They include plain-going utilitarian
feminine forms such as _auxiliatrix_, _consortress_; plurals such as
_innocences_, _translucencies_; adjectives with the prefix _un_, such
as _undelirious_; verbs with the suffix _less_, such as _rebukeless_
and _delimitless_; a number of substantives called into use as verbs,
_e.g._ _mænadize_, _empillared_, _chaplet_; and a less comfortable
group of adverbs, such as _supportlessly_, _predilectedly_, and the
unsustainable _tamelessly_, meaning untamably. (Browning's "abashless"
is of the same class.)
He did not, like Rossetti, go to the glossaries; but "Nares," of
which he never possessed a copy, contains his credentials. Thus
_shard_ is Shakespearian. Drayton has _shawm_. "_Soilure_" is in
"Troilus and Cressida"; "with drunken _spilth_ of wine" in "Timon of
Athens." "_Swart_," "_swink_," "_targe_," "_amerce_," "_avouch_,"
"_assoile_" are all of common acceptance; "_bruit_," "_eld_,"
"_empery_," "_immediacy_," "_ostent_," "_threne_," "_incarnadine_,"
and "_troublous_" are all Shakespearian, and more. "_To gloom_,"
according to precedent, is a verb, and so are "_to englut_," and "_to
fantasy_"; "_lustyhed_" is Drayton's and Spenser's. "_Rondure_" is
common; "_rampire_" is in Dryden even; "_to port_" and "_ported_," and,
of course, "_natheless_" are accepted. "_Crystalline_," being Cowley's
if for no other reason, would be ready to his tongue; "_devirginate_,"
which has the sound of one of his own prolongations, is Donne's;
"_adamantean_" he would probably have coined, if Milton had not done
so before him. "_Temerarious_" came to him as naturally as to Sir
Thomas Browne. "_Femineity_" is Browning's, and "_devisal_" Patmore's,
in their modern usage. "_Immures_" as a substantive still annoys his
readers, but only before they find it in "Troilus and Cressida."
His Latinisms were frequent. Of these the only test to the point is
Dryden's: "If too many foreign words are poured in, it looks as if
they were designed, not to assist the natives, but to conquer them."
From a mature opinion of Sir Thomas Browne, a constant favourite,
that his "prose suffered neither from excess of Latinities nor from
insufficiency in the vulgar tongue," we learn that Thompson was careful
to observe the balance.
In answer to the common rebuke against F. T., A. M. in the _Nation_,
November 23, 1907, says:--
"Obviously there are Latinisms and Latinisms! Those
of Gibbon and Johnson, and of their time generally,
serve to hold passion well at arm's length; they are
the mediate and not the immediate utterance of human
feeling. But in F. T. the majestic Latin word is forged
hot on the anvil of the artificer. No Old English in
the making could be readier or closer."
His own rule of writing was, "That it is the infantries of language, so
to speak, which must make up the mass of a poet's forces; _i.e._ common
diction of the many in every age; the numerous terms of prose, apart
from special poetic diction."
In an early review Thompson writes:--
"We have spoken somewhat contemptuously of 'fine
language.' Let no one suppose from this that we have
any antipathy to literary splendour in itself, apart
from the subject on which it is exercised. Quite the
contrary. To write plainly on a fine subject is to set
a jewel in wood. Did our givers of literary advice only
realise this, we should hear less of the preposterous
maxim 'aim always at writing simply.' Conceive merely
Raleigh, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Milton, and
de Quincey rendered into 'simple English.' Their only
fit place would be the fire. The true abuse of 'fine
language' is rich diction applied to a plain subject,
or lofty words to weak ideas; like most devices in
writing this one also is excellent when employed as a
means, evil when sought as an end."
This is in an early essay: it is doubtful if later he would have so
precisely matched fine writing and good matter. In his own work the
finer meanings are not seldom put into the humbler words.
For his words he had no need to seek far; they were more naturally
remembered for use in the poetry of splendid artifice than the language
of the street. His search was not deliberate. In the offices of the
Church he found words to his hand, but he did not go to the offices on
their account. It is doubtful if he borrowed even a monosyllable from
a poet he did not love. Very rarely he made notes: "_Pleached_--an
invaluable word," is the only memorandum I have come across. He had
no list, like Rossetti's, of "stunning words for poetry," among them
"gonfalon," "virelay," "citole," and "shent." He was at no pains
to coin or collect, nor even to possess a theory. Bulwer Lytton's
wholesale condemnation of Latinisms, and professed preference for such
forms as _scatterling_ and _doomsman_ for "vagabond" and "executioner,"
were not the ways of a liberal master:--
"The labour, the art, the studious vocabulary," says
the writer in the _Nation_, November 23, 1907, "are
locked together within the strenuous grasp of the man's
sincerity. There is no dissociating, no disintegrating,
such poems as these; and Francis Thompson's heart
beats in the words '_roseal_,' '_cymars_,' '_frore_,'
'_amiced_,' '_lamped_,' and so forth."
Being led on in certain studies he became attached to the terms
specially connected with those studies. The process may be traced in
the case of his use of the names of extinct animals. Their discovery
he calls pure romance; "but the romance which lies in the new and
unimagined forms, hidden from the poets and tale-tellers of all
previous ages, and given up to eyes almost satiate with wonders, has
yet to find its writers. . . . Tennyson has seen its uses for large and
impressive allusion--
Nature brings not back the Mastodon,--
but Tennyson is almost alone even in the use of the theme. In an
occasional later and younger poet you may find mention of the
plesiosaure or other typical monster." Again, still reviewing Mr.
Seeley's _Dragons of the Air_, Thompson writes:--
"We have strayed, it seems, into the ancient forge and
workshop of Nature, where she is busy with her first
experiments. . . . We behold, cast off from her anvil,
in bewildering succession, shapes so fantastical,
grotesque, and terrible, as never peopled the
most lawless dreams of an Eastern haschish-eater;
apparitions of inter-twisted types and composite
phantasms, more and more strange than all the brute
gods of Egypt. We are among the rough drafts of a
creation."
The "occasional later and younger poet" was himself.
Of his partial acceptance of the criticism of the Press he makes sign
in a note he had intended printing in _New Poems_:--
"Of words I have coined or revived I have judged fit
to retain but few; and not more than two or three will
be found in this book. I shall also be found, I hope,
to have modified much the excessive loading both of
diction and imagery which disfigured my former work."
That the note was not printed must not strictly be taken to mean that
he repented of his repentance. But he was not easily brought to correct
or discard--the initial process of composition had been too careful
to be lightly tampered with. In A. M. he had a very stern critic for
such words as "tameless," but he was found less amenable than George
Meredith, who, accepting correction, altered two uses of words so
formed. This letter was written during the making of _Poems_:--
"PALACE COURT HOUSE, _Friday_.
"MY DEAR FRANCIS,--The Bible has 'unquenchable,' and
I don't think it could have 'quenchless.' Lowell has
'exhaustless' somewhere. I think one can strictly
hold 'less' to equal 'minus' or 'without,' and with
these the verb is impossible. I remember refusing to
be taught a setting of some words of Praed's that had
'tameless' for 'untamable,' so you see it is an old
objection with me.
"I must confess that 'dauntless' has taken a very firm
place in the language.
"Never has there been such a dance of words as in 'The
Making of Viola.' All other writers make their words
dance on the ground with a certain weight, but these
go in the blue sky. I have to unsay everything I said
in criticism of that lovely poem. I think the long
syllables make themselves valued in every case. But
I do not like three syllables in the course of the
poem--the three that give the iambic movement. I have
not made up my mind as to the alternative endings. They
are all so beautiful.--Ever most sincerely yours,
ALICE MEYNELL."
The suggestions as to metrical modifications he accepted. I print here
a letter of which, however, the interest for me is not etymological:
its interest is that he troubled to write at all to an inattentive
Yahoo of a friend:--
"Dear Ev., as to the note you asked the Latin _simplex_
is from _plecto_ (or rather its root) 'I entwine,'
and some root allied to the Greek 'together.' The
root-meaning is therefore 'twined together,' and it
primarily means that which has synthesis or unity
as opposed to that which is confused or perplexed
by lack of oneness. When Wordsworth (is it not?)
somewhere speaks of a being 'simple and unperplexed,'
consciously or unconsciously, he uses the word mainly
in this original sense, though few even thoughtful
folk explicitly so grasp it. It is degenerated in the
common mouth to the meaning almost of 'elementary.'
Milton, saying poetry should be simple, sensuous, and
passionate (is that the third word?), by _simple_
means synthetic--opposed to prose (especially,
doubtless, he had in mind philosophic prose), which is
analytic.--Yours,
F. T."
He never dropped the habit of words. One of the last letters he wrote,
dated from Rascals' Corner, Southwater, September 14, 1907, was written
when he had detected a random paragraph of A. M.'s in the _Daily
Chronicle_:--
"DEAR MRS. MEYNELL,--You might have added to the
_willow_ par. the Latin _salex_ and the Eng. _sallow_:
"Among the river sallows borne aloft
Or sinking, as the light wind lives or dies!
"The English, I should guess, may be from one of the
Romance tongues; if so all these modern forms are,
mediately or immediately, from the Latin. But it is
interesting to find the Latin and the Irish really
identical (if you neglect the inflectional endings in
the former)--salic and salagh. 'Tis but the difference
'twixt a plain and a guttural hard consonant--for
connective vowels are unstable endlessly. As for k and
g, you see, _e.g._, _reg_-o evolve _rec_-tum.
"Excuse this offhand note, but your paragraph
interested me.
"With warm love to yourself, Wilfrid, and all the
_quondam_ kids who are fast engaging themselves off the
face of my earth.--Yours ever, dear Mrs. Meynell,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
He watched with much interest his words creep into currency.
_Roseal_--"most beloved of my revivals"--which he had known only in
Lodge's _Glaucus and Scylla_, he saw reappear in Dowson and other
writers, and realised it was probably from Thompson and not from Lodge
that it had been learnt. In this he saw the sign--the only one, he
said--of his influence. He could hardly have expected that two years
after his death "labyrinthine" would be a word used not only in poetry
books, but on political platforms--by Mr. George Wyndham and his
less-versed opponents. Words that ten years earlier irked the reader in
poetry became, with a change of mood, acceptable in public speaking, so
that Mr. Asquith's use of "fuliginous" irked nobody.
The objection to a poet's range of phrase finds no support in the
dictionaries, whose abundance is a reproach to the restricted scope of
the modern tongue. Johnson is three parts made up of terms neglected or
discarded, for the reason, chiefly, that we are lazy and unlearned. The
coster-monger whose speech comprises fewer words each year, thinks the
parson a fop for the extent of his vocabulary, and the parson in his
turn is impatient with his poets. The curtailment of our speech goes on
apace, and if we love the poet--the Wordsworth of "Daffodils" or the
Thompson of "Daisy"--as a man of few words, we should admire him for
being at times a man of many.
* * * * *
By 1889 Rossetti had become an absorbing interest, but Coleridge, in
what F. T. calls his Pre-Rossettian days, "had been my favourite poet."
Before Coleridge, Shelley.
An early poem not elsewhere printed, written on the anniversary of
Rossetti's death, illustrates the closeness of his affection--
This was the day that great, sad heart,
That great, sad heart did beat no more,
Which nursed so long its Southern flame
Amid our vapours dull and frore.
* * * * *
Through voice of art and voice of song
He uttered one same truth abroad,--
Through voice of art and voice of song--
That Love below a pilgrim trod:
He said, through women's eyes, "How long!
Love's other half's with God!"
* * * * *
He taught our English art to gaze
On Nature with a learner's eyes:
That hills which look into the heaven
Have their fair bases on the earth;
God paints His most angelic hues
On vapours of a terrene birth.
May God his locks with glories twine,
Be kind to all he wrought amiss!
May God his locks with glories twine,
And give him back his Beatrice.
This day the sad heart ceased to pine,
I trust his lady's beats at his,
And two beat in a single bliss.
Of all Thompson's lines the second of the sunset-image--
Day's dying dragon lies drooping his crest,
Panting red pants into the West,
has been found the most ludicrous. No critic hesitated in condemning
it, and your reader most often splits the line with a laugh, thinking
the while of Hope Brothers. But the poet thought upon his own thought
and upheld his line in face of the query marks confidently balanced on
the margin of his proofs; he remembered Coleridge's--
As if this earth in fast, thick pants were breathing.
"Red" or "thick," there is little for the parodist to choose between
them. Much closer borrowing from Coleridge, in which he pronounces the
words and rhymes of his master but keeps his voice ringing high with
personality, is found at the close of "To my Godchild." It is easy
to know with what keen recognition he must have read Coleridge's "Ne
Plus Ultra." He borrowed its weakest lines because he dared not borrow
the strongest; they would not have become more famous on his hands.
Coleridge's poem ends:--
Reveal'd to none of all the Angelic State,
Save to the Lampads Seven[31]
That watched the Throne of Heaven!
Thompson's ending is
Pass the crystalline sea, the Lampads seven:--
Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.
We have seen an ending; here is a borrowed opening:--
Like a lone Arab, old and blind,
Some caravan had left behind,
Who sits beside a ruin'd well,
Where the shy sand-asps bask and swell;
And now he hangs his aged head aslant
And listens for a human sound--in vain, &c.
It develops into an allegory of illusion: the poet sits desolate, and,
thinking Love visits him, is deceived. Just thus is Thompson's passage
beginning--
As an Arab journeyeth
Through a sand of Ayaman,
Lean Thirst, lolling its cracked tongue, &c. . . .
The staging, the characters, are the same. Perhaps curiosity in
opium-eating led him early and impressionably to the study of
Coleridge. "The Pains of Sleep" brings their experiences cheek to
cheek--haggard cheek to haggard cheek. Thompson wrote a prose tale
embodying the same terror of dreams and dream-existence. Both used
humorous verse and conversation for a means of escape. They laughed to
forget, and punned, not so much to laugh, as to be distracted in the
exercise. One of them did the talking much better than the other; but
their tongues moved to the same command, their voices ran on from the
same fear. Even "Love dies, Love dies, Love dies--Ah! Love is dead" is
the reflection of a page of Coleridge's commonplaces.
These are casual likenesses, found on the penetrable levels of
resemblance, comparable to the coincidence of the after-collegiate
enlisting of the two men, the Bowles connexion, or the Strand
experience. But Francis Thompson, as it happens, has been explicit on
the subject of the unreachable quality of Coleridge:--
"No other poet, perhaps, except Spenser has been an
initial influence, a generative influence, on so many
poets. Having with that mild Elizabethan much affinity,
it is natural that he should be a 'poets' poet' in the
rarer sense--the sense of fecundating other poets. As
with Spenser, it is not that other poets have made him
their model, have reproduced essentials of his style
(accidents no great poet will consciously perpetuate).
The progeny are sufficiently unlike the parent. It is
that he has incited the very sprouting in them of the
laurel-bough, has been to them a fostering sun of song.
Such a primary influence he was to Rossetti--Rossetti,
whose model was far more Keats than Coleridge. Such he
was to Coventry Patmore, in whose work one might trace
many masters rather than Coleridge." ("Such he was to
me," F. T., a reviewer in a public print, refrained
from adding.) "'I did not try to imitate his style,'
said that great singer. 'I can hardly explain _how_ he
influenced me: he was rather an ideal of perfect style
than a model to imitate; but in some indescribable way
he did influence my development more than any other
poet.' No poet, indeed, has been senseless enough to
imitate the inimitable. One might as well try to paint
air as to catch a style so void of all manner that
it is visible, like air, only in its results. . . .
Imitation has no foothold; it would tread on glass."[32]
F. T. noted in the _Academy_, November 20, 1897, the direct coincidence
of Browning's
Its sad in sweet, its sweet in sad,
and Crashaw's
Sweetness so sad, sadness so sweet.
It did not come within his scope as a reviewer to mention the doubly
direct coincidence (or something nearer) of his own:
At all the sadness in the sweet,
The sweetness in the sad.
Coleridge and the other poets to whom Coleridge had guided him; Shelley
and, in prose, de Quincey, are prominent in his early reading. To go
to de Quincey's "Daughter of Lebanon" for the pedigree of "The Hound
of Heaven" is like going to the grocer's for the seeds, in coloured
packets, of the passion flower. But the Victorian tassels of the
earlier piece do not hide its lessons--"to suffer that God should give
by seeming to refuse"--and pursuit is the theme common to both, and
common to writers of most ages. De Quincey did no more than hand it on.
From St. Augustine's "Thou wast driving me on with Thy good, so that I
could not be at rest until Thou wast manifest to the eye of my soul";
to Meister Eckhart's "He who will escape Him only runs to His bosom;
for all corners are open to him," and so on, the idea is the same,
though less elaborated and dramatic than in "The Hound."
In the "Mistress of Vision" the scenery and the lady are Shelleyan; one
marvels that Thompson's teaching comes from those illusive lips. Thus
would it have been written had such thoughts gained desired expression
through Shelley. The thoughts are Francis Thompson's; the mode the
other's. Mr. Beacock refers one to passages of the "Witch of Atlas,"
but the likeness is too elusively general to be caught in particular
verses, and such things as the borrowing of "blosmy" are nothing more
than clues, like the fragmentary débris of a paper-chase, to the
whereabouts of an influence.
An early book of transcription contains a deal of Donne and Stevenson
(including _Father Damien_ and poems), a touch of Andrew Lang, more of
Blunt, a little Meredith; much Rossetti and Cowley, some Suckling, the
inevitable Browne, and a Theodore Watts. Drayton, too, is met in the
Thompsonian verses: "Hear, my Muses, I demand," &c., so that when Mr.
Chesterton says that the shortest way of describing the Victorian age
is to say that Francis Thompson stood outside it, he might have gone
on, with a little access of wilfulness, to say that the seventeenth
century was best described by saying that in it was Francis Thompson.
Marvell he had not read till after his first books--"Just Crashaw and
a little Cowley--and I had formed my style before I knew Cowley, whom I
really did curiously resemble; though none perceived it, because none
had read Cowley."
The Crashaw descent may be traced by way of Coleridge, who said of
certain lines of the "Hymn to St. Teresa" that "They were ever present
in my mind whilst writing the second part of 'Christabel'; if, indeed,
by some process of the mind, they did not suggest the first thought of
the whole poem." Crashaw's Romanism did not interfere with Coleridge's
pleasure, though in reading Herbert, whom he found "delicious," and
at a time when he could note "that he was comparatively but little
known," he paused over inquiries as to the exactness of that author's
conformity to Protestantism. Coleridge was much taken with Herbert's
"The Flower," a poem "especially affecting"--and naturally, to a poet.
It is easy to suppose that Francis gave it particular attention on S.
T. C.'s recommendation, and that he had in his mind the lines
I once more smell the dew and rain
And relish versing
when, conscious of the wings "Of coming songs that lift my hair and
stir it," he praises the
Giver of spring, and song, and every young new thing!
Herbert, welcoming a return of grace in his heart, writes:--
How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are Thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring.
Thompson, in "From the Night of Forebeing," writes:--
From sky to sod,
The world's unfolded blossom smells of God.
Closer still is the resemblance, noted by Mr. Beacock, between Herbert's
Only thy grace, which with these elements comes,
Knoweth the ready way,
And hath the privie key
Op'ning the soul's most subtile rooms;
While those to spirits refin'd, at doore attend
Despatches from their friend,
and Thompson's
Its keys are at the cincture hung of God.
Mr. Beacock has also pointed out the resemblance between Southwell's
Did Christ manure thy heart to breed him briers?
Or doth it need this unaccustom'd soyle
With hellish dung to fertile heaven's desires?
and Thompson's
Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest-fields
Be dunged with rotten death?
Remembering his own acknowledgment--"just Crashaw and a little
Cowley"--one may turn to Mr. Garvin's equally accurate summing up in
the _Bookman_, March 1897:--
"He is an argonaut of literature, far travelled in
the realm of gold, and he has in a strange degree the
assimilative mind that takes suggestions as a cat takes
milk. . . . 'The Daisy' was strangely Wordsworthian. But
'Dream-Tryst' was like Shelley, and had that strange
ethereal poignancy. There was the 'Dead Cardinal of
Westminster,' with its stanzas of shuddering beauty
upon the prescience of death. There was the resplendent
'Judgment in Heaven,' with the trenchant Elizabethan
apothegm of its epilogue. The 'Corymbus for Autumn' was
an overwhelming improvisation of wild and exorbitant
fantasy. To be familiar with it is to repent of having
ever reproached it for a splendid pedantry and a
monstrous ambition. On the whole, if Mr. Thompson had
stopped at his first volume we should have judged him
more akin in stature and temperament to Marlowe than to
any other great figure in English poetry. It seemed to
reveal the same 'high astounding terms,' the same vast
imagery; the same _amour de l'impossible_; the soul
striking the sublime stars, the intolerable passion for
beauty. But Mr. Thompson did not stop there. After the
publication of his second volume, when it became clear
that the 'Hound of Heaven' and 'Sister Songs' should be
read together as a strict lyrical sequence, there was
no longer any comparison possible except the highest,
the inevitable comparison with even Shakespeare's
Sonnets. The Sonnets are the greatest soliloquy
in literature. The 'Hound of Heaven' and 'Sister
Songs' together are the second greatest; and there
is no third. In each case it is rather consciousness
imaged in the magic mirror of poetry than explicit
autobiography. As to Mr. Francis Thompson, what strange
indentures bound him to the Muse we cannot tell. We are
permitted to guess some strict and sad apprenticeship
paid with bitter bread and unimaginable dreams, some
ultimate deliverance of song. It is only possible to
realise all the beauty of Mr. Thompson's work when it
is read as a lyrical sequence related to Shakespeare's
Sonnets on the side of poetry, and to de Quincey's
_Opium Eater_ on the side of prose."
To a certain extent Thompson states his own case in treating of
Mangan's liberties with his Irish originals:--
"They are outrageous, or would be outrageous were the
success not so complete. But poetry is a rootedly
immoral art, in which success excuses well-nigh
everything. That in the soldier is flat blasphemy
which in the captain, the master of his craft, is
but commendable daring. Exactly as a great poet
may plagiarise to his heart's content, because he
plagiarises well, so the truly poetical translator may
reindite a foreign poem and call it a translation."
And in reviewing Henley's _Burns_ he writes, again with the braggart
touch of one who may have gone the same rascally road:--
"Spartan law holds good in literature, where to steal
is honourable, provided it be done with skill and
dexterity: wherefore Mercury was the patron both of
thieves and poets."
Touching a more serious aspect of the case, he writes with Patmore in
his mind:--
"There are some truths so true, that upon everyone who
sees them clearly they force almost the same mode of
expression; they create their own formulas."
It might not have been guessed that the author of "Horatius" had the
means wherewith to lend to the wealthy; but Macaulay's lines "On the
Battle of Naseby"--
Oh! wherefore come ye forth, in triumph from the North,
With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red?
And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout?
And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye tread?
Oh! evil was the root, and bitter was the fruit,
And crimson was the juice of the vintage that we trod;
For we trampled on the throng of the haughty and the strong,
Who sate in the high places, and slew the saints of God!--
supply the model for the ecclesiastical ballad "The Veteran of Heaven"
which begins--
O Captain of the wars, whence won Ye so great scars?
In what fight did Ye smite, and what manner was the foe?
Was it on a day of rout they compassed Thee about,
Or gat Ye these adornings when Ye wrought their overthrow?
"I am disposed to put in a good word for Macaulay's ballads," F. T. has
said.
A fair thought, a keen observation, a neat phrase are seldom strictly
preserved. If accident does not take two or more writers to the same
hill, show them the same sunset, and charge their minds with the same
words, plagiarism will serve the purpose. Even if Cowley's rare wit
had remained in manuscript unseen, its turns would not have been for
many centuries entirely his own. Literature will out. To one or the
other, to plagiarism or accident, is due a likeness between Thompson's
So fearfully the sun doth sound,
Clanging up beyond Cathay;
For the great earthquaking sunrise rolling up beyond Cathay,
and Mr. Kipling's "And the sun came up like thunder out of China,
'cross the Bay."
A wind got up frae off the sea.
It blew the stars as clear could be.
It blew in the een of a' the three,
And the mune was shining clearly!
sang Stevenson's Highlander years before Thompson wrote
And a great wind blew all the stars to flare.
But in neither case is Thompson, though the dates are against him,
proved a thief.
Of a review of his _Poems_ in the _St. James's Gazette_:--
"I only deprecate in it the implied comparison to
Dante, and the to-me-bewildering comparison to Matthew
Arnold. 'Tis not merely that I have studied no poet
less; it is that I should have thought we were in the
sharpest contrast. His characteristic fineness lies
in that very form and restraint to which I so seldom
attain: his characteristic drawback in the lack of that
full stream which I am seldom without. The one needs
and becomes strict banks--for he could not fill wider
ones; the other too readily overflows all banks. But
these are casual specks on an appreciative article--an
article as unusually appreciative as that in the
_Chronicle_."
"French poetry--all modern European poetry--may in the ultimate
analysis be found derivable from the Latin hymn," says an _Edinburgh_
reviewer (January 1911). Francis Thompson in that case was familiar
with the remote ancestry of his house. He helped himself from the hymns.
Of the prose of the Vulgate he wrote in a review of a paper by Dr.
Barry on St. Jerome's revision:--
"No tongue can say so much in so little. And literary
diffuseness is tamed in our Vulgate not only by the
terser influence of the rustic Latin, but by the needs
begotten of Hebrew brevity. Nor to any unprejudiced ear
can this Vulgate Latin be unmusical. For such an ear
the authority of John Addington Symonds (though Dr.
Barry adduces that authority) is not needed to certify
its fine variety of new movement. '_Surge, propera,
amica mea, columba mea, formosa mea, et veni_;' that
and the whole passage which follows, or that preceding
strain closing in--'_Fulcite me floribus, stipate me
malis, quia amore langueo_': could prose have more
impassioned loveliness of melody? Compare it even with
the beautiful corresponding English of the Authorised
(Protestant) Version; the advantage in music is not to
the English, but to the soft and wooing fall of these
deliciously lapsing syllables. Classic prose, could
it even have forgotten its self-conscious living-up
to foreign models, had never the heart of passion for
movement such as this, or as the queenly wail of the
_Lamentations_--'_Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena
populo! facta est quasi vidua domina gentium!_'
"If the Vulgate be the fountain-source, the rivers
are numerous--and neglected. How many outside the
ranks of ecclesiastics ever open the Breviary, with
its Scriptural collocations over which has presided
a wonderful symbolic insight, illuminating them by
passages from the Fathers and significant prayers? The
offices of the Church are suggested poetry--that of
the Assumption, for example, the 'Little Office,' and
almost all those of Our Lady. The very arrangement of
the liturgical year is a suggested epic, based as it is
on a deep parallel between the evolution of the seasons
and that of the Christian soul of the human race."
And further on:--
"It is a pedant who cannot see in St. Augustine one
of the great minds of the world, master of a great
style. Some flights in the _Confessions_ are almost
lyric, such as the beautiful '_Sero te amavi_,' or
the magnificent discourse on memory. The last books
especially of the _City of God_ would sometimes be no
wise incongruous beside the _Paradiso_ of Dante. St.
Bernard's prose rises at times into a beauty which is
essentially that of penetratingly ethereal poetry: not
for nothing has Dante exalted him in the _Paradiso_;
not for nothing does such a man exalt such men. In them
is the meat and milk and honey of religion; and did we
read them our souls would be larger-boned."
Of his early acquaintance with the Bible he writes:--
"The Bible as an influence from the literary standpoint
has a late but important date in my life. As a child I
read it, but for its historical interest. Nevertheless,
even then I was greatly, though vaguely, impressed
by the mysterious imagery, the cloudy grandeurs, of
the Apocalypse. Deeply uncomprehended, it was, of
course, the pageantry of an appalling dream; insurgent
darkness, with wild lights flashing through it;
terrible phantasms, insupportably revealed against
profound light, and in a moment no more; on the earth
hurryings to and fro, like insects of the earth at a
sudden candle; unknown voices uttering out of darkness
darkened and disastrous speech; and all this in
motion and turmoil, like the sands of a fretted pool.
Such is the Apocalypse as it inscribes itself on the
verges of my childish memories. In early youth it
again drew me to itself, giving to my mind a permanent
and shaping direction. In maturer years Ecclesiastes
(casually opened during a week of solitude in the
Fens) masterfully affected a temperament in key with
its basic melancholy. But not till quite later years
did the Bible as a whole become an influence. Then,
however, it came with decisive power. But not as it
had influenced most writers. My style, being already
formed, could receive no evident impress from it: its
vocabulary had come to me through the great writers
of our language. In the first place its influence
was mystical; it revealed to me a whole scheme of
existence, and lit up life like a lantern."
"Assumpta Maria" is "vamped" from the office of Our Lady; he had no
notion of concealing its origin, but rather sought to point it out. The
prayer to the Virgin is itself a confession--
Remember me, poor Thief of Song!
He wrote in 1893, with an enclosure of poems, including the "Assumpta
Maria":--
"They are almost entirely taken from the Office of
the Assumption, some from the Canticle, a few images
from the heathen mythology. Some very beautiful images
are from a hymn by St. Nerses the Armenian, rendered
in _Carmina Mariana_. You will perceive therefore the
reason of the motto from Cowley: 'Thou needst not make
new songs, but say the old.'"
It is at the close of the poem that Francis calls himself "poor Thief
of Song." The theme put honesty out of reach. It has been treated too
often. Even Donne's "Immensity cloistered in the dear womb" is part of
"the great conspiracy" of Marian Song.
* * * * *
The lines most in question in St. Nerses's hymn, thus rendered in
English by W. H. Kent, are--
Dwelling-place of light, be gladsome;
Temple, where the true Sun dwelleth;
Throne of God, rejoice, thou bearest
Him, the Word of the Almighty . . .
Home of him whom none may compass;
Hostel, where the sun finds resting . . .
Daniel's great Stone-bearing Mountain;
Solomon's fair Hill of Incense;
Fountain sealed for him that keeps it;
Garden closed for him that plants.
"I remember," Francis writes, "Father Anselm's expression of comical
surprise at a passage in 'Her Portrait,' where I had employed the terms
of Canon Law relating to ecclesiastical property. Why, he said, here's
a whole page of _De Contractibus_ in poetry. His surprise was increased
when I remarked that I had never read any work on the subject. . . . I
said I got the terms where any one else could get them--from English
history.
"Equal was the surprise of another person at finding a whole passage of
Anna Kingsford in my poetry. It was a passage describing the earth's
_aura_, really remarkably like a passage in a book I had not at the
time read."
* * * * *
In all these cases he is an imitator by choice--independent in taking
only what suits him and depending only where he will. In one case he
was an imitator not by choice but by compulsion, a slavish follower.
There was no more choice for him in following Patmore than for a son
born like his father. Such a poem as "By Reason of Thy Law" was born of
the _Unknown Eros_ odes.
* * * * *
Here are quoted various sentences from F. T.'s note-books, letters, and
published prose bearing on metre, or allied subjects.
* * * * *
Of the learning of poets:--
"I have studied and practised metre with arduous love
since I was sixteen; reviewed poets and poetasters this
twenty years or more, and never yet impeached one of
such a matter as infraction or ignorance of academic
metrical rule. For I know they don't _do_ it--either
poet or poetaster. Poetasters least of all men,
because they are your metrical Tybalts and fight by
the book--one, two, and the third in your bosom; poets
because they have the law in their members, assimilated
by eager obedience from their practised youth; their
liberty is such liberty won by absorption of law, and
is kept in its orbit by their sensitive feodality to
the invisible--the hidden--sun of inspiration. 'They do
not wrong but with just cause': such faults as they may
commit in metre belong not to this elementary class. I
have criticised poets' metre, but ever in the broader
and larger things where blemish accused them not of
ignorance or the carelessness that comes of inattention
to rule. I repeat, they don't do those things, and my
study of metre, poetry, and poets early taught me that."
And he cites an unjustified attack on Stephen Phillips
as a case in point.
Of "Heard on the Mountain," a translation from Hugo in _New Poems_--a
metrical experiment:--
"That splendid fourteen-syllable metre of Chapman, to
which Mr. Kipling has given a new vitality, I have here
treated after the manner of Drydenian rhyming heroics;
not only with the occasional triplet, but also the
occasional Alexandrine, represented by a line of eight
accents. Students of metre will see the analogy to be
strict, the line of eight being merely the carrying
to completion of the catalectic line of seven, as the
Alexandrine is merely the filling out of the catalectic
line of five accents."
Of "The Ode to the Setting Sun":--
"An ode I have thought not unworthy of preservation,
though it was my first published poem of any
importance. In view of the considerable resemblance
between the final stanza and a well-known stanza in
Mr. Davidson's 'Ballad of a Nun,' it is right to state
that 'The Ode to the Setting Sun' was published as long
ago as 1889. The poem has some interest to me in view
of the frequent statement that I modelled the metre of
'The Hound of Heaven' on the ode metre of Mr. Patmore.
'The Ode to the Setting Sun' was published before I had
seen any of Mr. Patmore's work; and a comparison of the
two poems will therefore show exactly the extent to
which the later poem was affected by that great poet's
practice. The ode metre of _New Poems_ is, with this
exception, completely based on the principles which Mr.
Patmore may virtually be said to have discovered."
Of accent and quantity:--
"The classic poets are careful to keep up an
interchange between accent and quantity, an approach
and recession, just as is the case with the great
English poets. Yet with all the lover-like coquetry
between the two elements, they are careful that they
shall never wed--again as with the great English poets.
But (and here lies the difference) the position of the
two elements is _exactly reversed_. It is quantity
which gives the law--is the masculine element--in
classic verse; it is accent in English. In English,
quantity takes the feminine or subordinate place, as
accent does in classic verse. In both it is bad metre
definitely to unite the two."
Sending poetry from Pantasaph, October 1894, he writes to A. M.:--
"My dear lady, . . . the long poem, ('The Anthem of
Earth') was written only as an exercise in blank verse;
indeed, as you will see, I have transferred to it
whole passages from my prose articles. So it is solely
for your judgment on the metre that I send it. It is
my first serious attempt to handle that form, and
it is not likely that I have succeeded all at once;
especially as I have not confined myself to the strict
limits of the metre, but have laid my hand at one clash
among all the licences with which the Elizabethans
build up their harmonies. The question is whether
individual passages succeed sufficiently to justify the
belief that I might reach mastery with practice, or
whether I fail in such a fashion as to suggest native
inaptitude for the metre. M---- thinks the poem a
failure. Being a mistress of numerous metre, she counts
all her feet; though her chosen method is the dactylic,
since she uses her fingers for the purpose. It is well
known that by this profound and exhaustive method of
practical study, you may qualify yourself to sit in
judgment on Shakespeare's metre, if he should submit
his MS. to you from the Shades. I confess my practice
is so slovenly that if anyone should assure me that my
lines had eleven syllables apiece, I should be obliged
to allow I had never counted them. We poor devils who
write by ear have a long way to go before we attain to
the scientific company of poets like M----, who has her
verses at her fingers' ends.--F. T."
To the same purpose are notes on Henley's "Voluntaries":--
"They are in so-called 'irregular' lyric metre, ebbing
and flowing with the motion itself. Irregular it is
not, though the law is concealed. Only a most delicate
response to the behests of inspiration can make such
verse successful. As some persons have an instinctive
sense of orientation by which they know the quarter of
the East, so the poet with this gift has a subtle sense
of hidden metrical law, and in his most seeming-vagrant
metres revolves always (so to speak) round a felt
though invisible centre of obedience."
The immethodical exactitude of his method is further suggested in his
note-book:--
"Temporal variations of metre responsive to the
emotions, like the fluctuations of human respiration,
which also varies indefinitely, under the passage
of changeful emotions, and yet keeps an approximate
temporal uniformity."
Here he evidently alludes particularly to the ode metre of "The Unknown
Eros," for which Patmore claimed that the length of line was controlled
by its emotional significance. On this subject another note must
directly bear. It is to the effect that the matter forces the metre;
that the poet is the servant, not master, of his theme, and that he
must write in such metre as it dictates.
* * * * *
Again he writes:--
"Every great poet makes accepted metre a quite new
metre, imparts to it a totally new movement, impresses
his own individuality upon it."
And again:--
"All verse is rhythmic; but in the graver and more
subtle forms the rhythm is veiled and claustral; it not
only avoids obtruding itself, but seeks to withdraw
itself from notice."
And again:--
"Metrically Poe is the lineal projector of Swinburne,
and hence of modern metre at large--an influence most
disastrous and decadent, like nearly all his influence
on letters."[33]
His own choice among his metrical exercises was "The Making of Viola,"
of which a critic has said (the _Nation_, November 23, 1907) "that the
words seem never to alight, they so bound and rebound, and are so agile
with life."
In an early _Merry England_ article he writes of Crashaw:--
"His employment (in the 'Hymn to St. Teresa' and
its companion 'The Bleeding Heart') of those mixed
four-foot Iambics and Trochaics so often favoured by
modern poets, marks an era in the metre. Coleridge
(in the _Biographia Literaria_) adopts an excellent
expression to distinguish measures which follow the
changes of the sense from those which are regulated
by a pendulum-like beat or tune--however _new_ the
tune--overpowering all intrinsic variety. The former he
styles _numerous_ versification. Crashaw is beautifully
numerous, attaining the most delicate music by veering
pause and modulation--
Miser of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage.
We have said advisedly that the 'St. Teresa' marks an
era in metre. For Coleridge was largely indebted to it
and acknowledged his debt."
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Revelation iv, 5, " . . . there were seven lamps burning before
the Throne, which are the seven spirits of God."
[32] F. T. in the _Academy_, February 6, 1897.
[33] To this he recurs in a note on Tennyson:--"Tennyson too pictorial.
Picture verges on marches of sister-art, painting. Feminine; only not
so entirely so as Swinburne;--still has remnants of statelier mood and
time. Metre--beginning of degeneration completed in and by Swinburne."