I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light.
--VAUGHAN.
I look to you to crush all this false mysticism.
--C. P. to F. T.
POEMS of "Sight and Insight," the first section of the new book, were
to have been called "Mystical Poems." But the word mystical was, in
the event, abandoned. As Catholic and thinker, he feared association
with a label which means anything from mystification to "refined and
luxurious indolence"--Mr. Edward Thomas's phrase for Maeterlinck's
"Serres Chaudes." Unlike Thompson, the modern mystic shirks the rigid
necessities of mental deportment. Like the swimmer who discards half
his nimble faculties with his tweeds and lies, without swiftness or
horizon, beating the water with heels shaped for boots and the road,
the modern mystic fancies himself a better man out of his element than
in it.
Even while the false mystic hopes to keep vacuity at arm's length,
shadows press closely. His school is of shadows as the other of Light.
Maeterlinck, on Mr. Arthur Symons's page of approval, is bidden take
his place in the gloomy company. "He has realised how immeasurable is
the darkness out of which he has just stepped, and the darkness into
which we are about to pass. And he has realised how the thought and
sense of that twofold darkness invades the little space of light,
in which, for a moment, we move; the depth in which they shadow our
steps, even in that moment's partial escape." The difference is not of
words only; or if of words only, loose thinking or slack experience is
abroad. The whole school of Catholic mystics insists, in opposition,
upon the exterior radiance trailing clouds of glory as they come into a
world that is in the shadow, whether of God's or of a sinister hand.
Apart altogether from Maeterlinck's merits, his commentator's
insistence illustrates the temper of the 'nineties. It is mainly the
artistic value of his mystic's sense of mystery that appeals to Mr.
Symons. The void, like the sheet-iron which makes stage thunder, has
specific uses; chunks out of the abyss make his scenery; for his most
effective dialogue he borrows largely from silence. Did he fight his
way into the midst of mystery; did he cleave it with revelation, or
morality, its artistic uses would be gone. Darkness is the stronghold
of such interesting emotions as terror--"fear shivers through these
plays." "The mystic, let it be remembered, has nothing in common with
the moralist," asserts Mr. Symons; on the contrary, Francis Thompson's
nearest exponent used the definition, "Mysticism is morality carried to
the nth power."
Thompson's wariness about the word marks his respect for it. Joan,
the hearer of voices, required a clear head when she stood her trial
among the Theologians. Nor was the poet beguiled into the unorthodox.
Compared with Meredith's philosophy--an illumination, it is true,
but such illumination as candles give in his own draughty woods of
Westermain--Thompson's authority is steady as the sheltered lamp of the
sanctuary.
The mysticism that Thompson sought to avoid was obscuration, a
thickening of the mental atmosphere by stray gleams, like the
thickening of the air in a dusty room into which a sun-ray slants
obliquely. The mysteries offer an excuse for confused thinking; the men
and women who discover the doctrine of unity are lost in the jungle of
its simplicity. The name of God, and the titles of His attributes must
set the generations groping somewhat blindly if they carry no lantern
of authority, or if the names of God and His attributes are too often
taken into the babelling languages of empirics, or too anxiously conned.
"It is easy for a man to know God if he does not force himself to
define Him" is a saying that covers much of a poet's reticence. For
Thompson religion was never confusion; his mysteries blurred none of
the common issues; they were packed as carefully as another man's title
deeds; they were, he would have claimed, tied with red tape, cut from
the cloth of the College of Cardinals.
"He is," said Patmore, "of all men I have known most naturally a
Catholic. My Catholicism was acquired, his inherent."
Thompson carried his demand for clarity of thought and intention, if
not always of diction, to great lengths:--
"A little common-sense," he once wrote at a time of
slight misunderstanding, "is the best remedy--and I
at least mean to have it"--a brave vaunt for a poet,
but one which he made over and over again in regard
to various aspects of the poetic character. "There
is something wanting in genius when it does not show
a clear and strong vein of common-sense. . . . Dante,
indeed, is a perfect rebuke to those who suppose that
mystical genius, at any rate, must be dissociated from
common-sense. Every such poet should be able to give
a clear and logical prose résumé of his teaching, as
terse as a page of scholastic philosophy."
If portions of _New Poems_ prove difficult and mysterious, we must
go to Patmore for the defence: "A systematic philosopher, should he
condescend to read the following notes (_Rod, Root and Flower_), will
probably say, with a little girl of mine to whom I showed the stars for
the first time, 'How untidy the sky is!'"
Mysticism, as F. T. knew it, "is morality carried to the nth power."
Mysticism--"rational mysticism"--has been defined as "an endeavour
to find God at first hand, experimentally, in the soul herself
independently of all historical and philosophical presuppositions."
But at the same time Von Hügel condemns the mysticism that is
self-sufficient; the constitutional and traditional factors are
essential to the Church. And the religion of the Church is not,
firstly, an affair between the God and the man, but an affair between
God and Man; is not an affair of the heart, but an affair of Love; not
an affair of the brain, but of Mind.
That "to the Poet life is full of visions, to the Mystic it is one
vision"[45] was the double rule of Francis Thompson's practice. Having
regarded the visions and set them down, he would, in another capacity,
call them in. The Vision enfolded them all. Thus, not long after it
was written, he cancels even the "Orient Ode,"[46] and recants "his
bright sciential idolatry," even though he had religiously adapted it
to the greater glory of God before it was half confessed. "The Anthem
of Earth" and the "Ode to the Setting Sun" would also come under the
censorship of his anxious orthodoxy, to be in part condemned. What
profiteth it a man, he asks in effect, if he gain the whole sun but
lose the true Orient--Christ?
He came, even to the point of silence in certain moods, to feel the
futility of all writings save such as were explicitly a confession
of faith; and also of faithfulness to the institutional side of
religion--the Church and the organised means of grace. "The sanity
of his mysticism," says one commentator, "is the great value to the
present generation. A high individual experiencing of purgation,
illumination, and union, a quiet constancy in the corporate life, and
discipleship as well as leadership; what combination more needed than
this for our 'uncourageous day'?"
The poet is a priest who has no menial and earthly service. He has no
parish to reconcile with paradise, no spire that must reach heaven
from suburban foundations. The priest puts his very hand to the task
of uniting the rational and communal factors of religion with the
mystical. The altar-rail is the sudden and meagre boundary line between
two worlds; he holds in his hand a Birmingham monstrance, and the
monstrance holds the Host. He has no time to shake the dust of the
street from his shoes before he treads the sanctuary. His symbolism is
put to the wear and tear of daily use. As a middle-man in the commerce
of souls, as the servant of the rational sides of the Church, tried by
the forlorn circumstances of never-ceasing work, he may find himself
shut out from the more purely mystical regions of his communion. To
correct or amplify his religious experience, there are the enclosed
Orders, the contemplatives of the Church. But to them, too, there must
be complementary religious experience. They notch off the sum or score
of the Church's experience, so that it may never be allowed to recede.
It is left to the poet to prophesy or spy upon the increase of Wisdom
and the multiplication of the Word.
He, too, in so far as he writes, is circumscribed by the uses of the
world. The priest's ministry in infinitudes is bounded by his parish;
the poet's by his language. And if religion is rightly defined as
something more than communion between the man and the Almighty, as
being besides the communion between man and man, and the sum of Mankind
and the Almighty, then the poet is the immediate servant of God and Man.
Transfiguration is for Thompson the most familiar of mysteries. Good
faith needs no Burning Bush. Or, rather, for the faithful every bush is
alight. For this faithful poet the seasons were full of the promise of
Resurrection. In spring he calls
Hark to the _Jubilate_ of the bird
For them that found the dying way to life!
The rebirth of the earth after winter is the figure of the future life:
Thou wak'st, O Earth,
And work'st from change to change and birth to birth
Creation old as hope, and new as sight.
and--
All the springs are flash-lights of one Spring.
In the same poem he is seen at his daily business, the routine work of
co-ordinating and synthesising. Light--the light of the sun--is also
Light to the sentient closeness of the breast,
Light to the secret chambers of the brain!
Arguments that go from heaven downwards are the commonplaces of his
poetry; that he was ready to prove the sum of his wisdom from earth
upwards is told in a passage of his prose:--
"If the Trinity were not revealed, I should
nevertheless be induced to suspect the existence of
such a master-key by the trinities through which
expounds itself the spirit of man. Such a trinity is
the trinity of beauty--Poetry, Art, Music. Although
its office is to create beauty I call it the trinity of
beauty, because it is the property of earthly as of the
heavenly beauty to create everything to its own image
and likeness. Painting is the eye of Passion, Poetry
is the voice of Passion, Music is the throbbing of her
heart. For all beauty is passionate, though it be a
passionless passion. . . . Absolutely are these three the
distinct manifestations of a single essence."
He had found another analogy in Pico della Mirandola, whom he thus
renders:--
"'The universe consists of three worlds--the
earthly, the heavenly (the sun and stars), and the
super-heavenly (the governing Divine influences). The
same phenomena belong to each, but each have different
grades of manifestation. Thus the physical element of
fire exists in the earthly sphere; the warmth of the
sun in the heavenly; and a seraphic, spiritual fire in
the empyrean; the first burns, the second quickens,
the third loves.' Says Pico 'In addition to these
three worlds (the macrocosm), there is a fourth (the
microcosm) containing all embraced within them. This
is Man, in whom are included a body formed of the
elements, a heavenly spirit, reason, an angelic soul,
and a resemblance to God.'"
* * * * *
"There is one reason for human confusion which is
nearly always ignored. The world--the universe--is
a fallen world. . . . That _should_ be precisely the
function of poetry--to see and restore the Divine
idea of things, freed from the disfiguring accidents
of their Fall--that is what the Ideal really is, or
_should_ be. . . . But of how many poets can this truly be
said? That gift also is among the countless gifts we
waste and pervert; and surely not the least heavy we
must render is the account of its stewardship."
"To be the poet of the return to Nature," Thompson continues, "is
somewhat; but I would be the poet of the return to God." He was the
accuser of Nature. He did not say
By Grace divine,
Not otherwise, Oh Nature! are we thine,
but rather that by divine Grace Nature may be Man's, that he can go
through it to his desire. Shut the gates of it and it is a cruel and
obdurate abundance of clay, of earthworks.
"Nature has no heart. . . . Did I go up to yonder hill," he writes,
"and behold at my feet the spacious amphitheatre of hill-girt wood and
mead, overhead the mighty aerial _velarium_, I should feel that my
human sadness was a higher and deeper and wider thing than all." "The
Hound of Heaven" is full of the inadequacy of Nature. She "speaks by
silences"; the sea is salt unwittingly and unregretfully. F. T. quotes
Coleridge, who, he says, speaks "not as Wordsworth had taught him to
speak, but from his own bitter experience":--
O Lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone doth Nature live;
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
* * * * *
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The glory and the joy whose fountains are within.
It is at this point that F. T. strides from his fellows. He is not
content with others' praise or overblame of Nature. She is dumb and
hopeless, a confusion to thought. She tangles Meredith's verse and
leaves Shelley drowned in body, stifled among clouds. Thompson draws
away from the Pantheist and the Pagan. Coleridge's words are true of
Nature's relation to ourselves--"not the truth with regard to Nature
absolutely. Absolute Nature lives not in our life, nor yet is lifeless,
but lives in the life of God; and in so far, and so far merely, as man
himself lives in that life, does he come into sympathy with Nature, and
Nature with him. She is God's daughter who stretches her hand only to
her Father's friends. Not Shelley, not Wordsworth himself, ever drew so
close to the heart of Nature as did the Seraph of Assisi, who was close
to the Heart of God."
There, again, the complete reasonableness and sincerity of his poetry
is put to the test of his prose. It is as if another and most essential
witness vouched for the wisdom of "The Hound of Heaven"--a witness who,
after focussing the different vision of a different art upon the same
experience, swore to the same truth. He continues:--
"Yet higher, yet further let us go. Is this daughter of
God mortal? can her foot not pass the grave? Is Nature,
as men tell us,
. . . a fold
Of Heaven and earth across His Face,
which we must rend to behold that Face? Do our eyes
indeed close for ever on the beauty of earth when
they open on the beauty of Heaven? I think not so;
I would fain beguile even death itself with a sweet
fantasy. . . . I believe that in Heaven is earth. Plato's
doctrine of Ideals, as I conceive, laid its hand upon
the very breast of truth, yet missed her breathing. For
beauty--such is my faith--is beauty for eternity."
The faith of "In Heaven is Earth" is but a tentative expression of his
later gospel. At first he had been alarmed at the theory--in the form
in which it had reached him--of the survival of earthly love in Heaven.
He had not then read Patmore or Swedenborg. Even the tentative belief
is timidly qualified:--
"Earthly beauty is but heavenly beauty taking to
itself flesh. . . . Within the Spirit Who is Heaven lies
Earth; for within Him rests the great conception of
Creation. . . .
Yet there the soul shall enter which hath earned
That privilege by virtue. . . .
As one man is more able than his fellows to enter into
another's mind, so in proportion as each of us by
virtue has become kin to God, will he penetrate the
Supreme Spirit, and identify himself with the Divine
Ideals. There is the immortal Sicily, there the Elysian
Fields, there all visions, all fairness engirdled with
the Eternal Fair. This, my faith, is laid up in my
bosom."
His belief here lies close to Swedenborg, whose _Conjugial Love_ F. T.
borrowed from my shelves with an eagerness evinced for no other book
there.
At every turn he is the devoted, intentest, faithfullest interpreter
of the material world. All his "copy" awaited him in nature; his
translations from her tangible writings bear on every page the
_imprimatur_ of his faith. The generality of the revelation made to
them did not spoil his appetite nor blur his surprising genius for
detail.
His couplings of the great and the small, not always so sweetly
reasonable as that set between the flower and the star, sometimes need
apology. The whole scale of comparisons is unexpected in the case of
one who goes to the eating-house not only for his meals, but for his
images; who finds nothing outrageous in naming the Milky Way a beaten
yolk of stars; who takes the setting sun for a bee that stings the west
to angry red; and, when he would express the effect of an oppressive
sunset upon Tom o' Bedlam's eye, who casts about in the lumber-room
of memory which had been filled with oppressive images during nights
endured in a common lodging-house.
Even then he was only expressing, out of a set of accidental
impressions, the poet's unremitting desire to link up the sights and
sensations of the universe. Drummond of Hawthornden's
Night like a drunkard reels
Beyond the hills
may serve as a typical instance of such arbitrary simile.
From the note-books I take these unpublished lines:--
Dost thou perceive no God within the frog?
O poor, poor Soul!
Bristles and rankness only in the hog?
O wretched dole!
No wry'd beneficence in the fever's germ?
Nor any Heaven shut within the worm?
Dost shudder daintily
At words, in song, shaped so un-lovelily?
To school, to school!
For does it to thee seem
That God in an ill dream
Fashioned the twisted horrors of the standing pool?
Mr. Chesterton surmises the mountainous significance of minute
things. In _Tremendous Trifles_, like the lover who writes an ode
to his lady's eyebrow, or the professor who gives his life to the
study of the capillary glands, he delights in disproportion. When Mr.
Chesterton planned a volume of poems on the things in his pocket, but
desisted because the volume would have bulked too large, he was only
formulating, in a manner acceptable to the man who puts his hand in
his pocket for a halfpenny, the old "religio poetæ." The things of the
pocket constitute a pocket dictionary in more than two languages, a
book of synonyms, a lexicon filled with cross references, all based
upon the Word. The silly silver of men's purses is blessed, and every
mortal thing assists in immortal liturgy. St. Charles was of one mind
with those who sing the _Magnificat_ of trifles. When asked how he
would die, he answered: "Playing cards, as I now do, if it should
so chance." Whenever such an one dies he holds trumps. And like the
priest, the poet touches mysteries with his very hand; he makes daily
communion. "To some," says Patmore, "there is revealed a sacrament
greater than that of the Real Presence, a sacrament of the Manifest
Presence, which is, and is more than, the sum of all the sacraments."
And again we have Thompson's own
In thee, Queen, man is saturate in God.
The Psalmist is with him:--
"If I climb up into heaven thou art there, if I go down
into hell, thou art there also. If I take the wings of
the morning and remain in the uttermost parts of the
sea; even there also shall thy hand lead me and thy
right hand shall hold me. If I say peradventure the
darkness shall cover me: then shall my night be turned
into day; the darkness and light to thee are both
alike."
Thompson's own
. . . Nay, I affirm
Nature is whole in her least things exprest
is a splendid justification of the poet's dalliance with trifles.
Vaughan confines Eternity in the scope of a night, a ring--nay, a
couplet:--
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light.
In a couplet, or a letter, literature performs her miracles. Christina
Rossetti told Katharine Tynan that she never stepped on a scrap of
torn paper, but lifted it out of the mud lest perhaps it should have
the Holy Name written or printed upon it. That is an attitude towards
literature, towards words and the Word, not unlike Francis Thompson's.
In the "Orient Ode" he has addressed the sun:--
Not unto thee, great Image, not to thee
Did the wise heathen bend an idle knee;
And in an age of faith grown frore
If I too shall adore,
Be it accounted unto me
A bright sciential idolatry!
God has given thee visible thunders
To utter thine apocalypse of wonders;
And what want I of prophecy,
That at the sounding from thy station
Of thy flagrant trumpet, see
The seals that melt, the open revelation?
Or who a God-persuading angel needs,
That only heeds
The rhetoric of thy burning deeds?
* * * * *
Lo, of thy Magians I the least
Haste with my gold, my incenses and myrrhs,
To thy desired epiphany, from the spiced
Regions and odorous of Song's traded East.
Thou, for the life of all that live
The victim daily born and sacrificed;
To whom the pinion of this longing verse
Beats but with fire which first thyself did give,
To thee, O Sun--or is't perchance, to Christ?
Ay, if men say that on all high heaven's face
The saintly signs I trace
Which round my stolèd altars hold their solemn place,
Amen, amen! For oh, how could it be,--
When I with wingèd feet had run
Through all the windy earth about,
Quested its secret of the sun,
And heard what thing the stars together shout,--
I should not heed thereout
Consenting counsel won:--
"By this, O Singer, know we if thou see.
When men shall say to thee: Lo! Christ is here,
When men shall say to thee: Lo! Christ is there,
Believe them: yea, and this--then art thou seer,
When all thy crying clear
Is but: Lo here! lo there!--ah me, lo everywhere!"
Nature's shrines he had visited, but unavailingly:--
Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth.
He cries to the sun:--
I know not what strange passion bows my head
To thee, whose great command upon my veins
Proves thee a god for me not dead, not dead!
He cries it to the sun, but only in the prelude to an ode that ends
with the Cross.
His songs of Nature are:--
Sweet with wild wings that pass, that pass away.
All his wild things passed, that they might be garnered in heaven. The
chase of the "Hound of Heaven" ends in a divine embrace; like that
ending is the ending of all his verse.
Through the symbolism of the sun all things were brought into line.
Likened to the Host, with sky for monstrance; to the Christ, with the
sombre line of the horizon for Rood; to the Altar-Wafer, and signed
with the Cross; the Sun is to the Earth only what Christ is to the
Soul:--
Thou to thy spousal universe
Art Husband, she thy Wife and Church.
Thompson offers his inspiration--". . . to thee, O Sun,--or is't
perchance, to Christ?"[47]
He would not have his harmonies mistaken for the repetition of "fair
ancient flatteries." He takes the sun, at rising and at setting, as "a
type memorial"[48]:--
Like Him thou hang'st in dreadful pomp of blood
Upon thy Western rood;
And His stained brow did vail like thine to-night,
Yet lift once more Its light,
And, risen, again departed from our ball,
But when It set on earth arose in Heaven.
And in the After-Strain:--
Even so, O Cross! thine is the victory.
Thy roots are fast within our fairest fields;
Brightness may emanate in Heaven from thee,
Here thy dread symbol only shadow yields.
Of reapèd joys thou art the heavy sheaf
Which must be lifted, though the reaper groan;
Yea, we may cry till Heaven's great ear be deaf,
But we must bear thee, and must bear alone.
Vain were a Simon; of the Antipodes
Our night not borrows the superfluous day.
Yet woe to him that from his burden flees!
Crushed in the fall of what he cast away.[49]
He went farther: he made the sun the type of a church service:--
Lo, in the sanctuaried East,
Day, a dedicated priest
In all his robes pontifical exprest,
Lifteth slowly, lifteth sweetly,
From out its Orient tabernacle drawn,
Yon orbed sacrament confest
Which sprinkles benediction through the dawn;
And when the grave procession's ceased,
The earth with due illustrious rite
Blessed,--ere the frail fingers featly
Of twilight, violet-cassocked acolyte
His sacerdotal stoles unvest--
Sets, for high close of the mysterious feast,
The sun in august exposition meetly
Within the flaming monstrance of the West.
_O salutaris hostia,
Quae cæli pandis ostium!_
The Cross spread its arms across his world. It was never heavier on his
shoulder than when he copied out Donne's lines:--
Who can deny me power and liberty
To stretch mine arms and mine own cross to be?
Swim, and at every stroke thou art thy cross:
The mast and yard make one where seas do toss.
Look down, thou spiest our crosses in small things,
Look up, thou seest birds raised on crossed wings.
Donne had encouraged him in his own early search for its symbols. In a
prayer to the Blessed Virgin Thompson speaks of the general crucifixion
of man:--
O thou, who standest as thou hast ever stood
Beside the Cross, whenas it shall be said--
"It is consummated,"
Receive us, taken from the World's rough wood!
But Donne's image is the more immediate; and the "Veneration of
Images," of a living poet, in which man is addressed as--
Thou Rood of every day--
confirms both their guesses.
In his sunset Thompson found a symbol of the Crucifixion; in Paganism
his Calvary, and in Christianity an endless elaboration of Christ, so
that he turns and wonders at himself for standing at all in the mirk
of ordinary daylight:--
And though the cry of stars
Give tongue before His way
Goldenly, as I say,
And each, from wide Saturnus to hot Mars,
He calleth by its name,
Lest that its bright feet stray;
And thou have lore of all,--
But to thine own Sun's call
Thy path disorbed hath never wit to tame:
It profits not withal,
And my rede is but lame.
He regards his poetry, the poetry of unrevealed religion, of inquiry,
and of hasty worship, even as he writes it, with some disfavour. But
the prophetical portion of _New Poems_ shows a new assurance--
I have my music bent
To waste on bootless things its skiey-gendered rain:
Yet shall a wiser day
Fulfil more heavenly way,
And with approvèd music clear this slip,
I trust in God most sweet.
Meantime the silent lip,
Meantime the climbing feet.
He saw only one possible ending to all modes of poetry, that
"multitudinous-single thing":--
Loud the descant, and low the theme,
(_A million songs are as song of one_)
And the dream of the world is dream in dream,
But the one Is is, or nought could seem;
And the song runs round to the song begun.
This is the song the stars sing,
(_Tonèd all in time_)
Tintinnabulous, tuned to ring
A multitudinous-single thing
(_Rung all in rhyme_).
In "Form and Formalism" Thompson says:--
"No common aim can triumph, till it is crystallized in
an individual. Man himself must become incarnate in a
man before his cause can triumph. Thus the universal
Word became the individual Christ; that total God and
total man being particularised in a single symbol,
the cause of God and man might triumph. In Christ,
therefore, centres and is solved that supreme problem
of life--the marriage of the Unit with the Sum. In
Him is perfectly shown forth the All for one, and One
for all, which is the justificatory essence of that
substance we call Kingship. . . . When the new heavens
and the new earth, which multitudinous Titans are so
restlessly forging, at length stand visible to resting
man, it needs no prophecy to foretell that they will
be like the old, with head, and form, and hierarchic
memberment, as the six-foot bracken is like the bracken
at your knee. For out of all its disintegrations and
confusion earth emerges, like a strong though buffeted
swimmer, nearer to the unseen model and term of all
social growth; which is the civil constitution of
angeldom, and the Uranian statecraft of imperatorial
God."
. . . . . . .
"Ritual is poetry addressed to the eye," he notes. The corollary of
which supports his belief that poetry was an affair of ritual--or
images.
Imagination is the sense or science that discovers identities and
correspondences, while fancy takes a lower place because, said
Thompson, it discovers only likenesses. Imagination discerns similarity
rooted or enskied; it is the origin of the symbolism that may be traced
back to the heart of the truths and mysteries to which it supplies
the outward shows. Imagination is the spring; Symbolism is here the
manifestation of Imagination, is the identity-bearer, partaking of the
very essence of the Divinity. The Symbols of Divinity are Divine; flesh
is the Word made flesh; the Eucharist is the true Presence; and Christ
is Himself the Way to Christ. Thompson's poetry and theology abode by
the Image; it was no necessity of their nature to penetrate beyond the
barriers of expression and revelation. The go-betweens of others were
his essentials. Holding so grave an estimate of the functions of the
imagination, he found in poetry the highest human scope and motive.
* * * * *
Another writer has said--
"Imagination is as the water that reflects clouds out
of sight, or so near the sun that they may not be
viewed save in the darkening mirror."
And images enlarge and qualify; they create, too, in so far as they
bear and nourish thoughts that can only be expressed through them.
They belong, F. T. maintained, to the highest poetry, the poetry of
revelation and the intellect. In this idea he was confirmed; for its
sake he surmounted the opposition of the thinker in poetry to whom he
was most dutiful in admiration. "It is false," he declared with his
whole heart, "that highest or supremest poetry is stripped of figure.
Purely emotional poetry at its height is bare of imagery, not poetry of
supremest flight. . . . Supreme emotion is not supreme poetry." And yet
just in its own measure is the estimate he contested. It is set forth
by A. M. in the _Nation_, 23 Nov., 1907:--
"Imagery is not, it may be held, the last, or inmost,
word of poetry. There is a simplicity on the yonder
side. The simplicity of the hither side may be natural
and pleasing enough, though it may also be 'natural' as
is the village fool. But the simplicity of the further
poetry is a plainness within those splendid outer
courts of approach where imagery celebrates ritual and
ceremony. A few poems abide in that further place--a
further place, did we call it? It is far, indeed,
from the access of the suitor, but closest of all
things to the warm breast of the very Nurse. Francis
Thompson dealt almost altogether in imagery; and it
is because of this that his less sympathetic readers
accuse him of a lack of simplicity. And he himself, in
a manuscript note, says: 'Imagery is so far from being
"all fancy" (which is what people mean by saying it is
"all imagination") that the deepest truths--even in
the natural or physical order--are often adumbrated
only by images familiar, and yet conceived to be
purely fanciful analogies. . . .' No 'lack' was among his
faults. Where he might be charged or questioned was in
his commission, not in his omission--his commission
of the splendid fault of excess. How many poets might
be furnished, not from the abundance, but from the
overabundance, of his imagery, and the prunings and
the chastenings of his 'fancy.' The spoils of such a
correction as would have made a few of his odes more
'classical' might have been gathered up, a golden
armful, by poets who need have stooped for nothing
else, twelve basketsful of fragments, after the feeding
of a chosen multitude."
One is for the idea, the other for vision; one for the word, the other
for its conception.
"He stood at the very junction-lines of the visible and
invisible, and could shift the points as he willed,"
said F. T. of Shelley. And the lever was imagery; the
signals were images; the sleepers were images--all
the machinery that made and marked the way. It binds
the universe; it expresses "the underlying analogies,
the secret subterranean passages, between matter and
soul; the chromatic scales, whereat we dimly guess, by
which the Almighty modulates through all the keys of
creation."
That modulation through time, also, Thompson traces in the transition
from antiquity to the future, from Paganism to Christianity, from the
Old Law to the New:--
On Ararat there grew a vine;
When Asia from her bathing rose,
Our first sailor made a twine
Thereof for his prefiguring brows.
Canst divine
Where, upon our dusty earth, of that vine a cluster grows?
On Golgotha there grew a thorn
Round the long-prefigured Brows.
Mourn, O mourn!
For the vine have we the spine? Is this all the Heaven allows?
On Calvary was shook a spear;
Press the point into thy heart--
Joy and fear!
All the spines upon the thorn into curling tendrils start.
He had intended to show in an essay that symbolism is no arbitrary
convention. He bids himself expound its elements by leading examples,
and, had he done so, we should have known more of the geography of
that region where symbols and their principles are merged. "All things
linkèd are"; the daisy is the signature of the star; for the poet all
terrestrial minutiæ were signed, nay, scribbled all over with reference
marks and sealed with the likeness of larger things. From an old
commentator on St. Thomas Aquinas, F. T. copied:--
"The angelic intellect contains the things which
belong to universal nature, and those also which are
the principles of individuation, knowing by science
divinely infused, not only what belongs to universal
nature, but also individualities of things, inasmuch
as these all form multiplied representation of the one
Simple Essence of God."
The ancient school of Herbalists believed that natural remedies were
stamped with the likeness of the parts to which they would bring
healing, as walnuts, which, because they "have the perfect signature
of the head, are profitable to the brain." Poisons show something like
contrition by taking to themselves colours and odours plainly evil;
vipers, as proper scholars of the alphabet, wear V for venom on their
heads. The Herbalists took the narrowing road, from vision down to
practice. They pounded their discoveries to powder with the bald-head
pestle of literalness. The mortar of the herbalist is the chalice of
the poet. It is the difference again between illusion and imagination,
or, as Blake figured them, between Adam and Christ.
Blake's conception of the identity of and correspondence between the
Complete or Divine Mind and Humanity led him to further definitions
which are of weight in general consideration of the poetry of
imagination. Our world, he held, was a contraction of our mind from
the mind of God of which it is a part. To illusion--the perception and
acceptance of the erroneous deductions of the contracted personality,
or Adam--he gave the name Satan. Besides Perception (here I have
recourse verbatim to Mr. Edwin J. Ellis's invaluable disquisition):--
"Besides perception, always tempting us to error, by
leading through narrow to mistaken personality, there
is 'imagination,' always inviting us to truth. For this
Blake took the name of Saviour, or Humanity free from
Adam's narrowness and Satan's falseness."
Of the more purely literary aspect of imagery Thompson has written:--
"How beautiful a thing the frank toying with imagery
may be, let 'The Skylark' and 'The Cloud' witness. It
is only evil when the poet, on the straight way to a
fixed object, lags continually from the path to play.
This is commendable neither in poet nor errand-boy."
And again:--
"To sport with the tangles of Neæra's hair may be
trivial idleness or caressing tenderness, exactly
as your relation to Neæra is that of heartless
gallantry or love. So you may toy with imagery in mere
intellectual ingenuity, and then you might as well go
write acrostics; or you may toy with it in raptures,
and then you may write a 'Sensitive Plant.'"
In all the poetry belonging to the period of "The Mistress of Vision"
Patmore is the master of vision. He leads the way to "deific peaks" and
"conquered skies," the Virgil of a younger Dante.
Their thoughts chimed to the same stroke of metre and rhyme;[50] for
each of the mystical poems may be found suggestions in Patmore. For the
"Dread of Height" we find among "Aurea Dicta" the following:--
"'Searchers of Majesty shall be overwhelmed with
the glory.' Blissfully overwhelmed; ruined for this
world, yet even in this enriched beyond thought;
happy searchers, consumed by the thunder of divine
instructions and the lightning of divine perceptions,
but surviving as new creatures in the very flesh of the
destroyer."
And again:--
"The spirit of man is like a kite, which rises by means
of those very forces which seem to oppose its rise;
the tie that joins it to the earth, the opposing winds
of temptation, and the weight of earth-born affections
which it carries with it into the sky."
Patmore's "Hate pleasure, if only because this is the only means of
obtaining it" is the root paradox of the many found in the lines
beginning--"Lose, that the lost thou may'st receive," and the rest.
But go through the whole of the two poets, and even while recognising
the twin enterprises of imagination you will end in the enjoyment of
their dissimilarity. Patmore has quoted St. Paul--"Let each man abound
in his own sense," and has said himself:--
"When once he has got into the region of perception,
let him take care that his vision is his own, and not
fancy he can profit himself or others much by trying
to appropriate their peculiar variations of the common
theme."
Patmore may have given Thompson a metre and a score of thoughts, but
above everything else he gave him the freedom of his imagination.
Having led him to a point of vantage, he looked in the same direction,
but the revelation varied as the view varies to two men who walk along
a road towards the same sunset. They are a few paces apart; to one an
intervening tree may be black and sombre, to the other streaked with
fire. The height they reached may have been the same, but the dread of
height was to each a thing of his own.
* * * * *
From Patmore, August 1895:--
"I see, with joy, how nearly we are upon the same
lines, but our visions could not be true were they
quite the same; and no one can really see anything but
his own vision."
Again, in November of the same year:--
"It is always a great thing to me to receive a letter
from you. My heart goes forth to you as it goes to no
other man; for are we not singularly visited by a great
common delight and a great common sorrow? Is not this
to be one in Christ?"
Later:--
"You dissipate my solitude and melancholy as no other,
but one, can."
Again from Patmore:--
"In the manner of your verse you are gaining in
simplicity, which is a great thing. But I will speak
more of that bye-and-bye. In the matter, I think you
outstrip me. I am too concrete and intelligible. I fear
greatly lest what I have written may not do more harm
than good, by exposing Divine realities to profane
comprehensions, and by inflaming 'popular esotericism.'"
"The Mistress of Vision" is described by F. T. as "a phantasy with no
more than an illusive tinge of psychic significance." It is a masque in
which he and his Muse observe the formalities of dialogue, but before
the poem is finished the truth is out; as when, dawn breaking upon
dancing lovers, their steps cease, and for a moment their embrace is
real. So in the poem: the phantasy is not maintained; the masque is
up. Christ, before one is aware, is treading the land of Luthany, is
walking on the waters. Following, in carefully considered sequence, is
"Contemplation," and, afterward, the true fruits of _The Unknown Eros_.
"I felt my instrument yet too imperfect to profane by it the highest
ranges of mysticism," he had said, and, in "The Mistress of Vision,"
"The Dread of Height," and particularly in "The Orient Ode," something
is withheld. As the rood-screen shields the altar, language screens
revelation.
Although the spirit of reservation in the literature of religious
experience has apology in the saying that they who know God best do not
seek to define Him, that is not the leading argument for reticence.
Patmore said that in such matters the part is greater than the whole,
and in any case
"No great art, no really effective ethical teaching can
come from any but such as know immeasurably more than
they will attempt to communicate."
And, beyond that, they recognised truths "which it is not lawful to
utter," but knew that the poet may express them in ways that shade
them to the eye, or make them invisible as the too-bright disc of
the sun. Sufficient rays may pass through cloudy speech to diffuse
life-sufficing warmth. "See that thou tell no man" is an injunction of
which the poets keep the letter but break the spirit.
"Not only among the Hebrews," writes F. T. in a review
of a paper on St. Clement, "but among the Egyptians and
Greeks, prophecies and oracles were delivered under
enigmas. The Egyptian hieroglyphics, the apothegms of
the wise men of Greece, are instances of the practice
of throwing a kind of veil around important truths in
order that the curiosity of men may be aroused and
their diligence stimulated. All who treated of divine
things, whether Greeks or Barbarians, concealed the
principles. . . . Whatever has a veil of mystery thrown
around it, causes the truth to appear more grand and
awful."
St. Clement speaks of an _unwritten_ tradition of blessed doctrine,
handed down from SS. Peter, James, John, and Paul. St. Clement's own
account of these sacred doctrines is, he himself says, incomplete;
some he has forgotten, others he would be unwilling to allude to even
in speech, much more unwilling in writing, lest they who met them
should pervert them to their own injury, and he should thus be placing,
according to the proverb, a sword in the hand of a child.
We may suspect Patmore and Thompson of this mystical knowledge, since
they exercised St. Clement's caution. So does the Eastern teacher
of the day; and all of these conform in not being thinkers of the
scientific or material order. The Socratic definition of the true
philosopher "who in his meditations neither employs his sight nor any
of his senses, but a pure understanding alone," must, with Blake's
"Cultivate imagination to the point of vision," be printed on page 1 of
the first _First Reader_ in mysticism.
Thompson dwells also on St. Paul's unspoken message, which, designated
by the name of _wisdom_, he withheld from many of the Corinthians
because they were not fit to hear it. He communicated it to the
_spiritual_ not to the _animal_ man. Origen says that that which
St. Paul would have called _wisdom_ is found in the "Canticle of
Canticles." Thompson dwells further on the hidden meanings of the
Pentateuch, believing that there was "an inexhaustible treasure of
divine wisdom concealed under the letter of Holy Writ." Thompson
saw wise men whispering, and guessed that there were secrets; their
presence discovered, they were open secrets for such as he. "You have
but to direct my sight, and the intentness of my gaze will discover the
rest." Of the poet who is religious it may be said: "There hath drawn
near a man to a deep heart, that is, a secret heart." Look not at a
star if you wish to see it: avert your gaze and it is clearer to you.
So with the rockets and flashes of revelation. The Mass has secrets,
and so have children. It must be remembered that the greater part of F.
T.'s seeming reservations are only such as exist between the Church and
the outer world. For instance:--
"The personal embrace between Creator and creature is
so solely the secret and note of Catholicism, that its
language to the outer sects is unintelligible--the
strange bruit of inapprehensible myth."
During walks at Pantasaph and Lymington, Thompson penetrated on the one
hand to places where thought is singed and scorched, on the other to
healing regions of light; at one time deep in melancholy, at another
buoyantly content. A. M. observed that during certain drives with
Coventry Patmore he would sit looking at the floor of the carriage with
the harrowing expression that one gathers from Rossetti's "Wood Spurge."
Imagination is onerous. Christina Rossetti points to more than a
problem in artistry when she writes:--
"At first sight and apparently the easiest of all
conceptions to realise, I yet suppose that there may,
in the long run, be no conception more difficult for
ourselves to clench and retain than this of absolute
Unity; this oneness at all times, in all connexions,
for all purposes."
But once grasped it may never be relinquished. And it is a commonplace
of the mystics that contemplation is painful. St. John of the Cross's
warning of the desolation that follows the dwelling in the neutral
land between the temporal and the spiritual is one of many.
There is no escape. Conscience is another name for consciousness. "If
men understood clearly they would sin at every step, wherefore they
understand grossly, that sin may not be imputed to them," wrote F. T.,
half protesting against the disabilities of clear understanding. And
again:--
"Life is an Inkermann, fought in the mist. If men saw
clearly, they would despair to fight. Wherefore the
Almighty opens the eyes only of those whom He has led
by special ways of gradual inurement and preparation."
The futility of Francis's conversational repetition was a by-word;
but when he said a thing twice in verse or prose it probably mattered
more than most other things. "The Dread of Height" states the burden
of knowledge, and John ix. 41., quoted as the poem's motto, is made
to enforce it too:--"If ye were blind ye should have no sin; but now
ye say We see, your sin remaineth." What John said (in ix. 41, or
elsewhere) he would generally have thought sufficiently said. But in
this matter he repeats John, and then more than once repeats himself.
A man does not, because he is as conscious of his God as were the
disciples who really had Him on the road to Emmaus, find the road an
easy one. Bunyan holds good; the better way is the roughest. The more
excellent landscape is that which is seen against the sun. But it is
rigid in its splendours; every cock of hay, every clod, is a shadow. Is
the ear that hears "the winds their Maker magnify" happier than that
which can note only rattling of windows and the cracking of boughs?
During sound perhaps, not certainly during pauses in sound:--
"I never found any so religious and devout, that he had
not sometimes a withdrawing of grace. There was never
Saint so highly rapt and illuminated, who before or
after was not tempted. For he is not worthy of the high
contemplation of God who has not been troubled with
some tribulations for God's sake."
The commonplaces of the _Imitation_ are sound sense. "Thou visitest him
early in the morning; and suddenly Thou provest him."
I do think my tread,
Stirring the blossom in the meadow-grass,
Flickers the unwithering stars.
Such treading may be better than the asphalt of every day, but it is
not easy going.
Of futurity he wrote in a letter to A. M.:--
"You must know this thing of me already, having read
those Manning verses, which I do not like to read
again. You know that I believe in eternal punishment:
you know that when my dark hour is on me, this
individual terror is the most monstrous of all that
haunt me. But it is individual. For others--even if
the darker view were true, the fewness is relative
to the total mass of mankind, not absolute; while I
myself refuse to found upon so doubtful a thing as a
few scattered texts a tremendous prejudgment which has
behind it no consentaneous voice of the Church. And
I do firmly believe that none are lost who have not
wilfully closed their eyes to the known light: that
such as fall with constant striving, battling with
their temperament, or through ill-training circumstance
which shuts them from true light, &c.; that all these
shall taste of God's justice, which for them is better
than man's mercy. But if you would see the present
state of my convictions on the subject turn to the new
Epilogue of my 'Judgement in Heaven' (you will find it
in the wooden box)."
His correspondent has written:--
"As a thinker, Francis Thompson is profoundly
meditative, and, if pessimistic, then pessimistic with
submission and fear, not with revolt. His thought
must not be called gloomy, even when it is dark as
night, for in the darkness there is a sense of open and
heavenly air."
The most natural thing in the world (although at first he did not see
it, having been a seminarist, a person not always apt to be in the
secret) was that the singer of the Church--the Church that defined
the Immaculate Conception--should be a poet of woman-kind--one of
the Marians. Seminary training did not prepare him for a world of
women. A note on the Marriage of Cana, which proves, he avers, that
"much wine is needed before a man may go through with matrimony," is
characteristic of his schooling. In humour the schooling lasted when
all else had been outlived. His unpublished comedy "Man Proposes,
Woman Disposes" is full of ready-made gibes, and his "Dress,"
printed in the _Daily Mail_, is threadbare comic verse on a subject
he treated reverently enough when there was no joke to crack. It is
still, perhaps, as the seminarist that he notes: "In Burmah the monks
complain that women are natively incapable of any true understanding of
religion." But it is a later Thompson who adds the comment: "The heart
of woman is the citadel, the _ultimum refugium_ of true religiosity."
Genesis gives him the heading for several pages of a note-book devoted
to such subjects: "I will put enmity between thee and the woman."
_Rod, Root, and Flower_ set him to work in the same nursery-garden. His
note-books reflect Patmore's aphoristic habit. He himself defended or
denied the "fragmentary" nature of Patmore's book. "It might as well be
said that the heavens are fragmentary, because the stars are not linked
by golden chains. You are given the stars--the central and illuminative
suggestions; you are left to work out for yourself, by meditations, the
system of which they are the nodal points." This, it will be seen, is
his rewriting of Patmore's own comment on the book, quoted at p. 201.
I can do no more than bring together his scattered notes on Woman. He
himself could hardly have fitted them into any satisfactory sequence.
In a note-book I find:--
"The function of natural love is to create a craving
which it cannot satisfy. And then only has its water
been tasted in perfect purity, if it awakens an
insatiate thirst of wine."
His hope is made known in his poetry:--
The Woman I behold, whose vision seek
All eyes and know not; t'ward whom climb
The steps of the world, and beats all wing of rhyme.
And his prose:--
"When the federation of the world comes (as come
I believe it will) it can only be federation in
both government and religion of plenary and ordered
dominance. I see only two religions constant enough
to effect this: each based upon the past--which is
stability; each growing according to an interior
law--which is strength. Paganism and Christianism; the
religion of the Queen of Heaven who is Astarte, and of
the Queen of Heaven who is Mary." (Note by F. T.: "'We
offer sacrifice to the Queen of Heaven'" (Jer. xliv.
19).)
Once he turns the subject with a stock phrase of playfulness--
Daughter of the ancient Eve,
We know the gifts ye gave--and give.
Who knows the gifts which _you_ shall give,
Daughter of the newer Eve?
You, if my soul be augur, you
Shall--O what shall you not, Sweet, do?
But before he is through with the poem he is led to greater
explicitness, and, finally, to the solemn manner of concealment--
When to love _you_ is (O Christ's spouse!)
To love the beauty of His house;
Then come the Isaian days; the old
Shall dream; and our young men behold
Vision--yea, the vision of Thabor-mount,
Which none to other shall recount,
Because in all men's hearts shall be
The seeing and the prophecy.
For ended is the Mystery Play,
When Christ is life, and you the way;
When Egypt's spoils are Israel's right,
And Day fulfils the married arms of Night.
But here my lips are still.
Until
You and the hour shall be revealed,
This song is sung and sung not, and its words are sealed.
In thee, Queen, man is saturate with God.
Blest period
To God's redeeming sentence. So in thee
Mercy at length is uttered utterly.
In human passion, as in sun-worship, he relates everything to the
Deity. It is within forbidden degrees if it cannot be referred back to
Divine Love. His series "A Narrow Vessel," he describes as "being a
little dramatic sequence on the aspect of primitive girl-nature towards
a love beyond its capacities." Opening with a "rape of the lock," the
whole breadth of the centuries and of the human mind apart from Pope's,
the girl bemoans the gift of her hair:--
My lock the enforcèd steel did grate
To cut; its root-thrills came
Down to my bosom. It might sate
His lust for my poor shame.
Here is unwonted attention to the minutiæ of sensation; and the third
poem of the second series is the one that comes nearest in all
Thompson's work to the many love poems of the many modern poetry-books.
The likeness is startling. It is the only poem of his which the
illustrators of "Tennyson" of 1857 would have relished to put upon
wood. The girl was an actual girl named Maggie Bryan, of the Welsh
village; his photograph was long kept in her narrow room, and her
grave, made in the October following the poet's death, is near the
scene of that love-making that was so incongruous and timid that it had
little real existence in word or look. "Love Declared," the poem that
sinks to the commoner level of love-poetry, is fiction and reads like
it; the rest reality--only a little more than the reality.
But Thompson did not leave it at reality. No sooner has an unwary
reader, who, on other pages, had been clutching at his poet, made sure,
on this one, of his man than the creature of bone and muscle slips from
him. The sequence, it is confessed in the last poem, is written solely
in the interests of allegory. Here for once is actuality, one had said;
but only to learn that no actuality bulks so large for the poet himself
as the actuality of religious speculation. His own Pantasaph drama, a
thing that passed in the high-street, hemmed in by cottages, noted by
gossipers, with strong hill winds blowing in the faces of the actors,
was most personal to the hero for its allegorical meaning--
"How many," he asks, "have grasped the significance
of my sequence, _A Narrow Vessel_? Critics either
overlooked it altogether or adverted to it as trivial
and disconnected. One, who prized it, and wished
I had always written as humanly, grieved that the
epilogue turned it into an unreal allegory. He could
not understand that all human love was to me a symbol
of divine love; nay, that human love was in my eyes a
piteous failure unless as an image of the supreme Love
which gave meaning and reality to its seeming insanity.
The lesson of that sequence is just this. Woman
repels the great and pure love of man in proportion
to its purity. This is due to an instinct which she
lacks the habits and power to analyse, that the love
of the pure and lofty lover is so deep, so vast in its
withheld emotion, as her entire self would be unable
to pay back. Though she cast her whole self down that
eager gulf, it would disappear as a water-drop in the
ocean. And though the lover ask no more than her little
tremulous self may think fit to give, she feels that
so vast a love claims of right and equity her total
surrender. Though the lover be generously unexacting,
that wonderful gift, she feels, exacts no less than
all, and then she cannot with her entire potency and
abandonment of love adequate the hungry immensity
poured around it. So, with instinctive fear, she
recoils from a love which her all cannot equal. Though
the lover asks no more than she please to give, his
love asks her very being, demands a continual upward
strain. The narrow vessel dreads to crack under the
overflowing love which surges into it. She shrinks with
tremor; she turns to the lover whose shallow love has
nought to frighten her; she can halt where she pleases,
far short of total surrender. It is an easy beginning,
which seems to involve so little and involves--how
much! For she does not understand that once she begins
to love, her nature will not rest short of supreme
surrender (I assume an average nature capable of love),
and that she will end by wasting her whole self on
this thin soil, which will reject and anticipate it
(while) she recoiled with dislike and fear from the
great love which would have absorbed and repaid it an
hundred-fold. Now this is but the image and explanation
of the soul's attitude towards only God. The one is
illustrated by the other. Though God asks of the soul
but to love him what it may, and is ready to give an
increased love for a poor little, the soul feels that
this infinite love demands naturally its whole self,
that if it begin to love God it may not stop short of
all it has to yield. It is troubled, even if it did go
a brief way, on the upward path; it fears and recoils
from the whole great surrender, the constant effort
beyond itself which is sensibly laid on it. It falls
back with relieved contentment on some human love, a
love on its own plane, where somewhat short of total
surrender may go to requital, where no upward effort
is needful. And it ends by giving for the meanest, the
most unsufficing and half-hearted return, that utter
self-surrender and self-effacement which it denied
to God. Even (how rarely) if the return be such as
mortal may render, how empty and unsatiated it leaves
the soul. One always is less generous of love than
the other. Now this was the theme and meaning of my
sequence. It did not (as it should have done) follow on
to the facile welcome of a light love. But that was by
implication glanced at in the epilogue, which drew what
I have shown to be the real conclusion of the entire
study--even to the possible most tragic issue of all,
in the soul which has taken the kiss of the Spouse (so
to speak) only to fall away from Him, 'the heart where
good is well perceived and known, yet is not willed.'"
That sequence, he said, was written solely in the interests of
allegory. Obviously the episode was not sufficient unto itself. Only
once had he known love really sufficient for love poetry.
FOOTNOTES:
[45] Mr. Albert Cock in the _Dublin Review_.
[46] The ending of the "Orient Ode" seems, in the frank exultation of
its creed, to be unveiled and native pronouncement, as loud in its
faith as the last line of Patmore's "Faint yet Pursuing," where he ends
by "hearing the winds their Maker magnify."
[47] "The sun is the type of Christ, giving life with its proper blood
to the earth," is Mr. Edmund Gardner's concise statement of F. T.'s
meaning.
[48] F. T. had a theory of the solar existence that did not stop
short, with Science, at the measurement of gases and their density.
"It has," Mr. Ghosh tells me he said, "a life of its own, analogous
to the life of the heart, periodic in its manifestations and--," but
here Francis stopped. "To Western ears it will sound ridiculous," he
said, and was silent. In vain Mr. Sarath Kumar Ghosh asserted his own
Eastern aptitude for such speculation. Francis grimly repeated his
excommunication, and Mr. Ghosh, conscious of a frock-coat and a great
command of the English idiom, was half-convinced of its stness.
[49] Compare Donne's "No cross is so extreme, as to have none"--a
thought upon which many paradoxical couplets were turned in the
seventeenth century. But Donne goes a little further than his fellows.
He seems to have known that an image, bound up with its original, is
more than a likeness:--
Let crosses so take what hid Christ in thee;
And be His image, or not His, but He.
[50] "The metre in my present volume," wrote the author in a suppressed
preface to _New Poems_, "is completely based on the principles which
Mr. Patmore may be said virtually to have discovered."