ON days when London is cracked and bleared with cold, and passengers
on the black pavement are grey and purple and mean in their distress,
whipped by the East Wind and chivied by the draughts of the gutters;
when lamp-posts and telegraph poles and the harsh sides of the houses
ache together and shiver, Thompson would be the most forlorn and
shrivelled figure in the open. It always seemed to be a necessity
of his to be out in rough weather. I have never known him to stay
in on its account; and at times when even riches lack confidence,
and an universal scourge of cold and ugliness lashes the town, he
was about. Even within, beside a fire, he was a weathercock of a
man. The distress of his hands, and the veering of his hair from
the comparative orderliness of other times would instantly proclaim
an East wind. It was written all over him, and, though come to the
shelter of four walls, the tails of his coat seemed still to be
fluttering. One thought of him when East winds blew as the Pope of
Chesterfield's description--". . . his poor body a mere Pandora's box,
containing all the ills that ever afflicted humanity." Sensitive beyond
endurance, Francis yet made nought of his pains so long as the keener
sensitiveness of his conscience was undisturbed. Of all men the least
fit to endure physical suffering, he endured it forgetfully and even
light-heartedly unless, his spiritual assent being thwarted, he felt
the chills of estrangement from God.
He was not more comfortable in the sun, and against the particular
heat of 1906 he had particular ill-will. "Most people expatiate on the
excellence of this summer, though the angry and malignant sun is as
unlike the true summer sun as the heat of fever to the heat of youth."
It was his habit to go forth in August in an ulster--threadbare,
perhaps--but his own fever alone explains his distress.
_Sister Songs_ opens with a complaint against the spring season of
1891:--
Shrewd winds and shrill,--were these the speech of May?
A ragged, slag-grey sky--invested so,
Mary's spoilt nursling, wert thou wont to go?
"To my Godchild" opens in the same manner. The early months, drenched
with icy rain, had meant misery and dumbness. Breaking of silence came
with the breaking of the frost, and the poetry which returned with the
warm weather is full of acknowledgments. It is something more than the
small-talk of his verse; it is, like the dedications of the eighteenth
century, a formal obeisance to a patron--"Sun-god and song-god."
The Spring found him happiest. The May of his poems is the May known
to the Londoner. After deploring, in the proem of _Sister Songs_, the
lateness of the season, it is suddenly upon him. He discovered it
for certain round a street corner not far from his lodgings in Elgin
Avenue--
Mark yonder how the long laburnum drips
Its jocund spilth of fire, its honey of wild flame.
That is the signal best known to the Londoner. Most of the details of
his description in _Sister Songs_, from the stars to Covent Garden
clock, are metropolitan. From his high room, down steep stairs, a faded
oilcloth at his feet, the coiling patterns of a varnished wall-paper at
his restricted elbow; through the muffled light and air of the hall,
and past the broken stucco of the front steps, he would emerge on a
morning of good fortune, to see, not a dismal street of other lodgings
exactly like his own, but
A garden of enchanting
In visionary May,
Swayless for the spirit's haunting,
Thrice threefold walled with emerald from our mortal mornings grey.
We may imagine that St. Francis cared not overmuch for the look of the
Assisi streets; it is doubtful whether Francis of Kilburn cared at all
about the aspect of Kilburn. The gayest thoroughfare caught his eye no
more than the most dismal--and Brondesbury is not gay. To "And your
new lodging, Francis, what of it?" he would give a good account of the
rights and lefts that led there, but he would make no picture of it for
you, having none himself. I do not suppose he found the soot and stucco
architecture of Elgin Avenue any more or less entertaining than the red
brick of Palace Court, and, while he might describe Oxford Street as
"stony-hearted," I doubt if he could have described to the satisfaction
of a builder the nature of its exterior stone. Manchester could hardly
do less than blind the civic eye. Certainly Francis was no observer,
and had retained the ignorance, rather than the innocence, of his
Vision.
At this time, after his return from Pantasaph, his days were mostly
spent at Palace Court and nights passed in the region which at first
by accident and later by habit was his own. When, many years before,
he came from Storrington, he was lodged at Fernhead Road, Paddington,
and afterwards at various houses in Elgin Avenue with Landlady Maries,
the wife of my father's printer. Faithful to the northern town, his
last lodging was at 128 Brondesbury Road, Kilburn. At the junction of
Elgin Avenue and Chippenham Road is the "Skiddaw" public-house, by
whose parlour-fire he often spent nocturnal hours in preference to
the hearths of the critics. Mr. Pile, the tobacconist next door, is
remembered for the support that he gave to Francis's tremulous claims
to a place next the fire. Francis seldom failed to receive kindness
at the hands of rougher men; his constant courtesy of speech and his
humility were to the liking of a class quick to know a gentle man.
From the whispered hints of Mr. Pile it was understood that the frail,
shabby man of many platitudes and an abstracted eye was privileged.
From the situation of his lodgings it came about that the Edgware Road
was his Rambla, his Via dei Palazzi, his Rue de Rivoli; and at the
end of it, the site of Tyburn Tree. No local allusion, however, finds
place in his "To the English Martyrs," which is another sign of his
aloofness. But when he writes of the Tree that--
The shadow lies on England now
Of the deathly-fruited bough,
Cold and black with malison
Lies between the land and sun;
Putting out the sun, the bough
Shades England now,
his voice rose from the frozen and fogged pavement that marks the very
spot.
Browning, too, knew, and far better, the "cheap jewellery and servants'
underclothing" of the Edgware Road. Unlike Browning, F. T. had no eye
for values. And among night-caps, he would never have known that they
were cotton, and hardly that they were red. As soon as say whether
jewellery or clothing was cheap, he could have argued with Browning
on the vintages. A connoisseur in his books by right of imagination,
his connoisseurship would not have passed muster in the shops; it was
nailed to the counter. His waggon of wares ran smoothly enough in
starry traces; but hitched to cart-horses in Edgware Road he could
not have driven it ten yards. Perhaps when Patmore, a collector of
rubies and sapphires, drew specimen stones from his waistcoat,
Thompson was thrilled with the real presence; but not so much as by the
love of immaterial jewels. Not even Meredith's burgundy could teach
him--who had written of grapes against the sun without ever entering a
vineyard--anything of wine-merchant's wine. Before Hedges and Butler
were in partnership, before the _chateaux_ were a-building, his own
cellar had been laid down.
His inattention in the Edgware Road was out and out; one marvels that
he ever turned the right corner, and not at all that he was knocked
down by a cab. But instinctively his eyes would open in fair presences;
the things that made poetry struck through his closed lids, as daylight
through a sleeper's. But inattention in the Edgware Road made the place
blank as a railway tunnel. He could look upon the raiment of his sitter
in "Love in Dian's Lap," and pay his compliments, but never a word had
he for the bonnets of mistress or maid upon the highway. Riding in an
omnibus he would not know whether Polaire or a Sister of Charity were
at his side.
He was constantly alone; and, often as I have met him in the streets
of London, I have seldom surprised him in a conscious moment. He would
walk past, looking straight before him, and if he was always late for
his appointments, and took longer, by several hours, to get home at
night than the average man, it was because he would retrace his steps,
and go to and fro upon a certain beat as if indefinitely postponing the
evil moment when he would have to confine himself for food, or sleep.
The lamps of the town bring moths from the dark fields. They had no
attraction for him. I never heard him talking of the beauty of London.
There is no pleasure in his lines, which like others here quoted are
put forward, not as poetry, but as biography--
The blear and blurred eyes of the lamps
Against the damps,
or in the commentary on a London dawn from another note-book:--
The dreary scream of stable cocks
Comes ghastly through the dark,
The salty blues of day
Slant on the dreary park;
The houses' massèd fumes
Against the heartless light
Hold the black ooze of night.
He never went sight-seeing; the town was the dun background of his
own visions, but certain actualities were etched vividly or heavily
massed upon his mental canvas. Certain things he knew more completely
than the practised desultory observer, and when, in 1897, he was asked
by Messrs. Constable for a book on London, he could at once fetch out
of the studio of his memory a great number of pictures that had been
stored there, their faces to the wall. Although "my London book" and
the work on it made for several months his password to late meals at
our house, he never wrote it. His letters to Mr. William Hyde, whose
drawings were to make half the book, were, as it proved, Francis's only
contribution to the scheme:--
"47 PALACE COURT, W.
"DEAR MR. HYDE,--I regret to have delayed my answer
to your letter so long. Firstly, I was occupied by
unavoidable business; secondly, when I was free to
consider your notes, it took me some time really to
master them, and consider my plan in relation to them.
In the first place, I do not design a consecutive
narrative of any kind. I do not design to treat
either topography or the life of London, for both of
which I am utterly unqualified. My design is to give
impressions of London, such as present themselves to a
wanderer through its streets. I intend to divide the
book into parts, which--by way of provisional title--I
might describe as Fair London and Terrible London. For
Fair London, the plates you have already done will
supply sufficient material in the way of illustration.
The other part will consist of studies of London under
its darker aspects--weird, sordid, and gloomy--being
drawn from its appearance rather than its life. Under
this section would come some of the plates already
done; and I have marked others among your notes, any
of which would fall into my ideas. Since the darker
aspect of London is particularly evident to a houseless
wanderer, it is my idea to include in this section a
description of the aspect of London from midnight to
early dawn--for which my own experiences furnish me
with material. I intend to take my wanderer through
the Strand, Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square, perhaps
part of Piccadilly, the Embankment, Blackfriars Bridge,
&c., bringing him round to Fleet Street opposite St.
Paul's at dawn; and to describe the night effects
and the effects of gradual dawn in the streets. You
can see for yourself that some of your suggested
drawings would be embraced in this, perhaps some of
those already done--for example, "Coffee Stall, early
morning"; the "houseless wanderer sleeping in the
streets" and even the "Factory at Night," since I have
in my mind such a factory across Westminster. Also, as
regards the general section, I have in my mind a bridge
near a railway station, with long shafts of electric
lights, mingled with other lights, utilitarian, and a
river; which suggests sufficiently your goods depôt
with electric light effects. In the same section I
should dwell on such a neighbourhood as New Cut. Your
suggestion as to this or Clare Market will therefore be
certain to come _à propos_, whether by night or day;
though I think night exhibits such neighbourhoods most
impressively and characteristically. And I intend to
describe a night fire; and the effects of vistas of
lamps in such a neighbourhood as Pall Mall. Locality,
you will see, is unimportant. It is _effect_ I wish
to dwell on; the _character_--of horror, sombreness,
weirdness, or beauty--of various scenes. My own mind
turns especially towards the gloomier majesties and
suggestiveness of London, because I have seen it most
peculiarly under those aspects."
The book was written, but, as Francis's copy was never produced, by
another author.
Thompson's landladies were his faithful, patient, and puzzled friends.
He disliked their food, broke their rules, burnt their curtains, but
seldom rebuked them. They, on their part, found in him none of the
virtue of a good lodger. Notwithstanding, they showed a gentleness of
regard and manner that did credit to their liberality. I have known
them show an unwillingness to lose him quite out of proportion to
his value as a lodger, and he showed himself more reluctant to move
away from them than was always consistent with their excellence as
landladies. Of one of these he was genuinely fond, and her feeling for
him she sought to explain when she said, "I can sympathise with him,
you know, having a son in the profession myself."
It was she who sought to mend his unsociable ways by subtle attacks
upon his solitude, saying, "It's very nice for Mr. Thompson; he's got
the trains at the back every half hour and more, when he's in his
bedroom. But then the trains, when all's said, aren't the same as the
company he could get downstairs. Many a time I've asked him to have his
bit of lunch in with me and the other 'mental'--O yes, she's a mental
case, as I may have told you." On a few occasions she did entice him to
her table, but more often he was content with the conversation of the
District Railway engines at the bottom of the garden. His own comment
on the trains was among the random manuscripts found in that same
bedroom:--
The very demon of the scene,
The screaming horror of the train,
Rushes its iron and ruthless way amain,
A pauseless black Necessity,
Along its iron and predestined path.
One landlady's memories of him are supported by the carpet in his
room, which is worn in a circle round his table. All night long he
would walk round and round; in the morning he would go to bed. There
was, she observed, a delicate precision in his manner that forbade all
familiarity. His prayers, pronounced as if he were preaching, she often
heard.
An interior glimpse comes from a fellow-lodger:--
"I will tell you things as I remember them at the Elgin
Avenue establishment. There was a Bengali, who showed
me how to play poker; there was a convert parson,
a dramatic critic, and a man who acted. I seem to
remember playing cards with them better than anything.
It was generally then that Thompson would come in at
the front door, and call down the kitchen-stairs for
his porridge and beer. Coming into the room, he would
talk of something he had seen or read; or of food,
cricket, or clothes. He wished he had bought a suit
in a shop-window, because he had given more for those
he wore. I fancy he was not exactly rich; I suppose
none of us were. He would eat; then walk up and down
the room talking at any ear that might be listening
or at none; then he would write under the gas-jet. He
would leave as he came. I don't suppose he ever gave
me a look, and I had no idea he was a great man. But I
_remember_ him; though for the rest, I only know they
existed."
Mr. Wilfred Whitten tells of the rare--perhaps the only--occasion on
which F. T. dined in a restaurant with a friend, after the common
fashion:--
"Some seven years since we dined together at the Vienna
Café. You remember how, in the one conversation which
Boswell felt himself powerless to report, Johnson 'ran
over the grand scale of human knowledge.' Thus it was
that night. Thompson called up the masters of poetry,
and their mighty lines. I shall never forget his
repeating this, from 'Comus,' as one of the things in
all English verse that he relished--
Not that nepenthe which the wife of Thone
In Egypt gave to Jove-born Helena.
These words fell on my ear like the music of all
poetry, and I turned to see Thompson's eyes humid with
a vast understanding. He dealt in these great names
and antiquities. The arts, the rites, the mysteries,
and the sciences of eld gave him their secrets and
their secret words. But I think he loved the pomp of
facts only that he might transmute it into the pomp of
dreams, and where his dreams ended let his poetry tell."
Mr. Whitten's, like Patmore's, is the testimony of one who knew him
familiarly enough to know his better sort of talk. The impressions
of those who met him once or twice generally agree with Mr. William
Hyde's:--
"I remember that he was so shy and nervous that I felt
anxious not to say anything that would increase his
diffidence. The tragedy of his aspect was obvious. Of
the glorious moments he must have lived in when the
soul was master very few external traces could be seen,
save his eyes."
Which were his churches; where the roof to his piety? When the
cross-roads did not make his transept and the shops his aisle, he made
shift with thin modern Gothic, with rigid varnished bench and Belgian
Madonnas. His altars were decked with brass vases and huddled bunches
of the disconcerting flowers of commerce. Being a late and irregular
comer, he would often find the charwoman dryly banging her broom
among the chairs. In the Harrow Road, between a printing-shop and a
tobacconist's, was the church nearest the lodging of several years.
To St. Mary of the Angels, Bayswater, he also went upon occasion.
There was a friend, a second Mezzofanti for languages, with the
language of poetry, in addition, very familiarly known; and there,
too, were other friends. At Lymington he would quite naturally become
a more timely church-goer. At the foot of the steep High Street,
past shuttered town-hall and boarded shops, and along a resounding
passage, was the little church attended by Coventry Patmore. Here, in
a Roman camp as formidable as Cæsar's, but uncatalogued save in the
Catholic Directories, these two followed the Mass. The Church at such
moments had no need of architects. Her son, St. Francis of Assisi,
had cathedrals and towers at hand, but put them to no use; Francis
Thompson had none at hand and was no poorer. He seemed the last person
on earth to have noted if the candlesticks came not from Cellini, but
Birmingham; if the altar-rails were soapstone travesties of antiquity.
And yet he had, at any rate in verse, his preferences. In "Gilded
Gold," he refers to
Degenerate worshippers who fall
In purpled kirtle and brocade
To 'parel the white Mother-Maid.
And he decides that her image as it stood arrayed
In vests of its self-substance wrought
To measure of the sculptor's thought
is "slurred by these added braveries."
It is doubtful whether he would have crossed the road to hear one
preacher in preference to another, or to hear any; it is certain that
he was as content to go to his prayers through a slit in a thin brick
wall as under the tympanum of Chartres. If instead of being a Londoner,
with the English climate, the disciplined and formal rows of benches,
to dishearten him, he had had his lodging near St. Mark's or St. John
Lateran, he might have become a more punctual church-goer.
Lionel Johnson, who couples Francis with the Martyr Southwell for
"devout audacity," has said the things that are to say of the sacred
poet's familiar attitude. He quotes the gentleman who confuted the
view that man's attitude towards God must necessarily be abject--"Not
abject! Certainly, it should be deferential, but not abject." Against
the deferential gentleman he ranges all saints and poets, "His
carollers and gay minstrels--His merry men."
And he had, besides a devotional familiarity, his own very strictly
observed devotional formalities. Every notebook from Ushaw days till
his death is dedicated with some such holy device as this:--
[Illustration: DEO IN QUO ET PER QUEM MEDITATIONES EJUS REMEDITO.]
He had his triumphs at the Vatican, his victories at Farm Street; a
Pope's messenger sought him in the Harrow Road with his Holiness's
thanks for his translation of a pontifical ode, and of course did
not find him. There is a legend that about this time he wrote an
"Ecclesiastical History"--no less!--put the MS. into the hands of
Cardinal Vaughan to beguile the way to Rome, and so lost it. The
disappearance of the book might pass for fact, but I find no line about
it among his papers, either before or after its alleged existence. His
habit was to herald any attempt with written notes and exhortations to
himself to begin, as thus:--"Mem. (ink in) I might, Deo Volente, one
day try my hand at a version of the Imit. in Biblical style, so far as
it is given to my power." Or "Revise Pastoral; and get buttons, if any
possible chance."
Francis himself did not doubt his position as a Churchman. The boast he
makes in "The Lily of the King" is more than any bishop would venture.
St. Francis, dining one day on broken bread, with a large stone for
table, cried out to his companion: "O brother Masseo, we are not worthy
so great a treasure." When he had repeated these words several times
his companion answered: "Father, how can you talk of treasure where
there is so much poverty, and indeed a lack of all things? For we have
neither cloth, nor knife, nor dish, nor table, nor house; neither have
we servant nor maid to wait upon us." Then said St. Francis: "And this
is why I look upon it as a great treasure, because man has no hand in
it, but all has been given us by Divine Providence, as we clearly see
in this bread of charity, in this beautiful table of stone, in this
clear fountain."
Did Francis Thompson mate so happy a Poverty? She whom he took in
marriage was a very shrew in comparison. In place of rocky platforms
she gave him the restaurant's doubtful table-cloth, or maybe he ate
from paper bags. Broken bread that is appetising in Umbria is heavy in
Soho; and Francis never drank from the clear stream. But for all that
I remember his asserting, with utmost conviction in his voice, the
excellence of the viands set before him in a shop in Westbourne Grove.
"Here, Ev., I get what I like," I can hear him say; "here the beef is
always good; excellent, Evie, excellent, I say."[57]
Both Francises said that happiness was stored in self-denial, but
Francis of Assisi was the quicker to make good his statement by
immediate happiness. The same desires, the same secret, the same grace
possessed two men wedded at least into the same family. The contrast
is between their two ladies rather than themselves. She whom the Saint
courted in the stony fields
Where clear
Through the thin trees the skies appear
In delicate spare soil and fen,
And slender landscape and austere
was not the modern maiden--
Ah! slattern, she neglects her hair,
Her gown, her shoes. She keeps no state
As once when her pure feet were bare--
with whom the poet of London kept company.
* * * * *
At times when he was most ill and thin and cold and lonely, his
laugh, on joining friends, would outdo theirs for jollity, and with
the unjoyful appetite of a man whose every organ was out of order, he
offered a grace far longer than customary among the grateful and pious,
a grace so long that his meat would get cold while he muttered, so
long that he would sometimes seem to imagine it was at an end before
the rightful moment, and take up his knife and fork to start his meal,
only, on remembering an omission, to lay them down again until the end.
* * * * *
His sense of possession and privacy in possession of the beauties of
nature exceeds Traherne's, whose ecstasy in the belief that he owned
the world's treasuries was trebled by the thought that everybody else
owned them too. Thompson is more selfish:--
I start--
Thy secrets lie so bare!
* * * * *
With beautiful importunacy
All things plead, 'We are fair!' To me
The world's a morning haunt,
A bride whose zone no man hath slipt
But I, with baptism still bedript
Of the prime water's font.
On the other hand, let it be noted that all he left at his death was
a tin box of refuse--pipes that would not draw, unopened letters,
a spirit lamp without a wick, pens that would not write, a small
abundance that remained merely because he had neglected to throw it
away. The Prayer of Poverty had been half answered unto him:--
"Of thee, O Jesus, I ask to be signed with this
privilege; I long to be enriched with this treasure;
I beseech Thee, O most poor Jesus, that for Thy sake,
it may be the mark of me and mine to all Eternity, to
possess no thing our own under the sun; but to live in
penury so long as this vile body lasts."
That he was no snatcher of review-books is already noted. To the
Serendipity Shop--the venture of a friend in Westbourne Grove--he
would often go, but never with any curiosity as to the varied prints,
books, and autographs with which it was stocked. Some one thing would
catch his eye, and be discussed, but nobody I have known had less of
the mere passion for acquisition. He collected nothing, and presents
were acceptable to him but as the outward signs of kindliness: the
meaning having once reached him, he had little use for the means. At
no time did he possess a book-case, nor sufficient books to crowd the
slenderest shelf. A man less encumbered could hardly be discovered
in this work-a-day world. His inclination was to love the impersonal
riches--the free flames, uncaged air, water without the pitcher, and
the wandering winds. His authors were no less his own because he had
not put them on his shelf and clapped his autograph upon the fly-leaf.
Physical self-denial, disregard of personal luxuries, are but the
manifestations of a spiritual state, of the state recommended by
Christ: "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of
Heaven." For the Saint this state has its pressing calls. He puts his
virtue to the proof; he embraces the leper, he lectures the birds, he
is a man of action; his remotest and most spiritual experiences take
on actuality; the Passion puts its mark upon his hands, and feet, and
side. The poet, also pierced, has no credentials. A man of inaction,
he also renounces personal prides, ambitions, pleasures. The leper
would pass Thompson unnoticed, and he was too shy, too little a man of
the world, to preach to the practical sparrows of the Edgware Road.
Though nearly a Franciscan, and learned in the difficult arithmetic of
subtraction, he was necessarily not apt in the good works that marked
the Master.[58]
The seclusion which, despite the bond between reader and writer,
oppresses the poet, makes him impotent for actual good works. In a
world where many things are ripe for the doing, he remains unaware of
the duties of citizenship. On his behalf, as for the enclosed monk
or nun, it may be urged that retreat from all worldly operations,
even beneficent, is retreat from an entanglement of purposes and
cross-purposes, of paradoxical and slipshod good; from a field where
humility is vanity and strength goes to seed in abject poverty or
abject riches. This alone were insufficient reason for withdrawal.
There is a more positive motive. The poet's works are absolute good
works. He is a missionary even if he never helps with gift or speech
or touch another man's distress. The prayers of the Trappist neither
clothe the naked, nor feed the hungry, but are not, even if judged by
the laws of expediency, the less valuable. They preserve two joyful
possessions--the art of prayer and the standards of austerity. They
glorify God. So too does Poetry. Song, like Prayer, is for ever
re-stating and re-establishing the permanent values. Francis Thompson's
consciousness of Good and Evil is alone as profitable as the Bills of
half a dozen Ministries. And his consciousness of Good and Evil had
been less strong, had he known only the alloyed good and mitigated evil
of active life, instead of knowing, in contemplation, their primaries.
Something, as rigorous as the vows of a monk, bound him to his manner
of life. He misused all the conveniences of existence; sought no
shelter from cold, kept no easy hours, mismanaged his food, his work,
his rest. He was without the Silurist's daily ecstasies and special
Sunday "shoots of bliss: Heaven once a week." Thompson's Sundays were
as dreary as Kilburn and a missed Mass could make them, as dreary as
a sweated worker's. He knew, but neglected, as by a set purpose, the
domestic economy of felicity observed by his fellows--Herbert, Vaughan,
Crashaw, and Traherne--
That Light, that Sight, that Thought
Which in my Soul at first he wrought. . . .
My bliss
Consists in this;
My Duty too
In this I view.
It is a fountain or a spring
Refreshing me in everything.
As to health, if he was careless of it in himself and others, he is
excused by St. Bernard's description of God "as the final health."
"To our generation uncompromising fasts and severities
of conduct are found to be piteously alien; not
because, as rash censors say, we are too luxurious,
but because we are too intricate, nervous, devitalised.
We find our austerities ready-made. The east wind has
replaced the discipline, dyspepsia the hair-shirt. . . .
Merely to front existence is a surrender of self, a
choice of ineludibly rigorous abnegation."
Such is the main argument of _Health and Holiness_. But it is probable
that he generalised too liberally from his own disabilities. Tortures
were not invented and practised because a robuster past could make
light of them. The rack was always agonising, or it had never been
used. The sailor who bore his 300 lashes in 1812 probably felt them
as keenly as a sailor would feel them now. East winds penetrated
hair-shirts. Man was the same, save that in greater saintliness he was
ready to endure, and in greater cruelty was willing to inflict, more
pain.
Capitulation such as Thompson's to a sordid environment may mean too
great a severance from other things:--
"The perceptions of the spirit," as he confessed, "are
not indefinitely credible and sufficing without the
occasional confirmation and assurance of the body."
The confirmation made to him was fined down to the minimum. True, one
sunrise sufficed for five years of idolatry. He could strike a fair
balance for his spiritual load with a few crumbs of actuality. It would
seem that the greater the spiritual load the smaller the range of
corporeal experience necessary for the nice adjustment of the scales.
Yet the adjustment must be perfect. One of his many analogies for the
interlocking of our complementary natures is as follows:--
"Holiness is an oil which increases a hundred fold the
energies of the body, which is as the wick. Important
that this wick shall not needlessly be marred during
preparation through some toughening ascetic process
which must inflict certain injury. The flame is
dependent after all on the corporeal wick."
He argued, further, from Manning's longevity and energy, that the more
copious and pure the oil, the more persistently and brightly does the
wick burn. The energising potentialities of sanctity he illustrates
in the great works accomplished by St. Francis despite the constant
hæmorrhage of the stigmata.
FOOTNOTES:
[57] It may also be observed in passing that, while he was more
experienced in privation than were any of his friends, Francis could
be fastidious. It is still told of him in Sussex, where a clever
cook attended his invalided appetite, that he would make great
demonstrations at the mere sight of a dish he disapproved. Laying down
his knife and fork this frank guest would proclaim against one of the
several viands. "Miss Laurence, I _hate_ mutton!" The piled-up emphasis
of his voice made such a sentence tremendously effective. "Wilfrid," he
once said to my father, "Wilfrid, the Palace Court food is _shocking_!"
[58] There were exceptions to this habitual carelessness; in 1898 he
asked his sister for prayers that a friend might join the Church. She
gave them and begged his, for her own purposes, in fair return.