RENUNCIATION is the better part of possession: Francis states
very clearly that compulsion must have no hand in it if it is to
be profitable. He writes under the heading, "A distraught maiden
complaineth against enforced virginity"--
Cold is the snow of the thawless valleys,
Chill as death is the lily's chalice,
Only she who _seeks_ the valleys
Groweth roses amid the snow.
And he reiterated that spiritual experiences do not endure without
from time to time falling back upon their base for supplies, "the
confirmation and assurance of the body."[59] That the lines of
communication were cut was a pressing grief. I have seen the sense
of isolation come up against him, hold him, and shake him. At such
times he would be within sight of children, and though no angels
then "snatched them from him by the hair," he could be conscious
that he was less near them than their relatives. His praises of
domestic relationships ring with the note of one whose comprehension
is sharpened by the desire of things out of reach. In an incomplete
"Ballad of Judgement" a man, marvelling at his rewards in Heaven,
asks:--
O when did I give thee drink erewhile
Or when embrace Thine unseen feet?
What gifts Thee give for my Lord Christ's smile,
Who am a guest here most unmeet?
and the answer comes:--
When thou kissedst thy wife and children sweet,
(Their eyes are fair in My sight as thine)
I felt the embraces on My feet
(Lovely their locks in thy sight, and Mine).
Other verses of the same unpublished ballad, though imperfect, enforce
the idea:--
If a toy but gladden his little brothers
(A touch in caress to a child's hair given)
Young Jesus' hands are filled with prayers
(Sweep into music all strings of Heaven).
and further that
. . . for his sweet-kissed wife
God kissed him on his blissful mouth.
Allegories of a happy road from bodily to heavenly experience fill many
a more complex passage; here it is given with Chap-book directness.
Elsewhere he closely regrets his loneliness, and repudiates the merit
of its heroism in this epitaph on the writer of "Love in Dian's Lap":--
_Here lies one who could only be heroic._
How little, in the sifted judgement, seems
That swelling sound of vanity! Still 'tis proved
To be heroic is an easier thing
Than to be just and good. If any be
(As are how many daily ones!) who love
With love unlofty through no lofty days
Their little simple wives, and consecrate
Dull deeds with undulled justice: such poor livers,
Though they as little look to be admired
As thou look'st to admire, are of more prizeful rate
Than he who worshipped with unmortal love
A nigh unmortal woman, and knew to take
The pricking air of snowy sacrifice.
Being without the occasional "confirmation," he yearned for it; without
that particular chance of being daily just and good, he saw in it the
sum of life's purpose. And when he was threatened with the approach of
too close affection, he grew alarmed, crying:--
Of pleasantness I have not any art
In this grief-erudite heart.
* * * * *
O Sweet! no flowers have withered on my hair,
For none have wreathed them there;
And not to me, as unto others' lots,
Fell flowerful youth, but such the thorns that bare
Still faithful to my hair.
O sweet! for me pluck no forget-me-nots,
But scoop for me the Lethe water dull
Which yields the sole elixir that can bless--
Utter forgetfulness--
And I shall know that thou art pitiful.
Another form of his painful, elaborate, and even disingenuous attitude
towards happiness was distrust. "All life long he had been learning how
to be wretched," he quotes from Hawthorne, "and now, with the lesson
thoroughly at heart, he could with difficulty comprehend his little
airy happiness"; then, continuing in his own verse:--
In a mortal garden they set the poet
With mortal maiden and mortal child;
* * * * *
In a mortal garden they set the poet;
As a trapped bird he breathed wild.
He had smiled in sorrow: not now he smiled.
* * * * *
But into the garden pacing slowly,
Came a lady with eyes inhuman. . . .
And the sad slow mouth of him smiled again,
This lady I know, and she is real,
I know this lady, and she is Pain!
The Lady Pain figures, in one sense, in "Love in Dian's Lap." His only
real love was itself a thing most strictly circumscribed; it existed
only to be checked:--
"I yielded to the insistent commands of my conscience
and uprooted my heart--as I supposed. Later, the
renewed presence of the beloved lady renewed the love I
thought deracinated. For a while I swung vacillant. I
thought I owed it to her whom I loved more than my love
of her finally to unroot that love, to pluck away the
last fibres of it, that I might be beyond treachery to
my resolved duty. And at this second effort I finished
what the first had left incomplete. The initial agony
had really been decisive, and to complete the process
needed only resolution. But it left that lady still the
first, the one veritable, full-orbed, and apocalyptic
love of my life. Through her was shewn me the uttermost
of what love could be--the possible divinities and
celestial prophecies of it. None other could have
taught them quite thus, for none other had in her the
like unconscious latencies of utter spirituality.
Surely she will one day realise them, as by her sweet,
humble, and stainless life she has deserved to do."
Of one consolation he writes to her:--
"The concluding words of your letter, 'friend and
child,' reminded me of some lines written at the time
I was composing "Amphicypellon." They were written
hastily to relieve an outburst of emotion; and, not
thinking there was any poetry in them worthy of
you, I never showed them you. But when I read those
concluding words of your letter, I resolved to
transcribe them that you might see you could not have
addressed me more according to my wish."
These verses were:--
Whence comes the consummation of all peace,
And dignity past fools to comprehend,
In that dear favour she for me decrees,
Sealed by the daily-dullèd name of Friend,--
Debased with what alloy,
And each knave's cheapened toy.
This from her mouth doth sweet with sweetness mend,
This in her presence is its own white end.
Fame counts past fame
The splendour of this name;
This is calm deep of unperturbed joy.
Now, Friend, short sweet outsweetening sharpest woes!
In wintry cold a little, little flame--
So much to me that little!--here I close
This errant song. O pardon its much blame!
Now my grey day grows bright
A little ere the night;
Let after-livers who may love my name,
And gauge the price I paid for dear-bought fame,
Know that at end,
Pain was well paid, sweet Friend,
Pain was well paid which brought me to your sight.
Pain he proclaimed a pleasure. Why, then, did he call his pains a
sacrifice? "Delight has taken Pain to her heart" was the sum of St.
Francis's teaching on a subject dear to the guest at the Franciscan
monastery-gates. He himself wrote a commentary on St. Francis:
"Pain, which came to man as a penalty, remains with
him as a consecration; his ignominy, by a Divine
ingenuity, he is enabled to make his exaltation. Man,
shrinking from pain, is a child shuddering on the verge
of the water, and crying, 'It is so cold!' How many
among us, after repeated lessonings of experience, are
never able to comprehend that there is no special love
without special pain? To such St. Francis reveals that
the Supreme Love is itself full of Supreme Pain. It is
fire, it is torture; his human weakness accuses himself
of rashness in provoking it, even while his soul
demands more pain, if it be necessary for more Love. So
he revealed to one of his companions that the pain of
his stigmata was agonising, but was accompanied by a
sweetness so intense as made it ecstatic to him. Such
is the preaching of his words and example to an age
which understands it not. Pain is. Pain is inevadible.
Pain may be made the instrument of joy. It is the angel
with the fiery sword guarding the gates of the lost
Eden. The flaming sword which pricked man from Paradise
must wave him back."
The something awry, the disordering of sympathy, the distorting
perspective, is hard to name. Perhaps loneliness, perhaps disease,
perhaps his poetry, perhaps the devil. But it was there--a distemper,
with his own discomfort for its worst symptom. Like the child that
meditates upon the sweet it sucks, while it watches the progress of a
squabbling world in the back-yard, he could be above the control of his
environment; but the sweet once sucked, the poetry gone, he heard and
saw and felt, and was sad and sore.
To each a separate loveliness,
Environed by Thy sole caress.
O Christ the Just, and can it be
I am made for love, no love for me?
Of two loves, one at least be mine;
Love of earth, though I repine,
I have not, nor, O just Christ, Thine!
Can life miss, doubly sacrificed,
Kiss of maid and kiss of Christ?
Ah, can I, doubly-wretched, miss
Maid's kiss, and Thy perfect kiss?
Not all kisses, woe is me!
Are kissed true and holily.
Not all clasps; there be embraces
Add a shame-tip to the daisies.
These if, O dear Christ, I have known
Let all my loveless lips atone.
In a letter to A. M.:--
". . . I have suffered from reticence all my life:
the opening out of hearts and minds, where there is
confidence, puts an end to so much secret trouble that
would grow monstrous if it were brooded over."
And in his verse:--
. . . The once accursèd star which me did teach
To make of silence my familiar.
And again, from Elgin Avenue:--
"DEAR MRS. MEYNELL,--I have been musing a little on the
theme mentioned between us this afternoon; and some
frequent thoughts have returned to me--or, I should
say, recollections of frequent experience. (The theme I
mean is the difficulty of communicating oneself. By the
way, R. L. S.'s theme is more distinct from yours than
I quite realised this afternoon. His is sincerity of
intercourse, yours is rather adequacy of intercourse,
and the two, though they may overlap and react on each
other, are far from identical.)
"But the thoughts of which I speak (they are but one
or two) are as useless to myself as pebbles would be
to a savage, who had neither skill to polish them nor
knowledge whether they were worth the polishing. So
I am moved to send them to the lapidary. If anything
should appear in them worth the saying, how glad I
would be that it should find in you a sayer. But it is
a more possible chance that poor thoughts of mine may,
by a beautiful caprice of nature, stir subtle thoughts
in you. When branches are so thickly laden as yours, a
child's pebble may bring down the fruit.
"First, then, there is one obstacle to communication
which exists little, if at all, for the generality,
but is omnipresent with the sensitive and meditative
who are destitute of nimble blood. I mean the slow
and indeterminate beginnings of their thought. For
example, such a person is looking at a landscape. Her
(suffer me to use the feminine pronoun--it takes the
chill off the egotism of the thing, to assume even by
way of speech, that in analysing my own experience
I am analysing yours) companion asks her, 'What are
you thinking of?' A child under such circumstances
(to illustrate by an extreme antithesis) would need
no questioning. Its vivid, positive thoughts and
sensations have to themselves a glib and unpremeditated
voice. But she? She is hardly thinking: she is feeling.
Yet 'feeling' is too determinate and distinctive a
term: nay, her state is too sub-intellectual for the
term to be adequate. It is sensoriness instinct with
mind; it is mind subdued to sensoriness. She feels
in her brain. She thinks at her periphery. It is
blended twilight of intellect and sensation; it is
the crepuscular of thought. It is a state whose one
possible utterance would be music. Thought in this
subtle stage cannot pass into words because it lacks
the detail; as the voice, without division, cannot
pass into speech; as a smooth and even crystal has no
brilliance. To that 'What are you thinking of?' she
can only answer 'Nothing' or 'Nothing in particular,'
and not unlikely, her companion, seeing that she was
full of apparent thought, is discouraged at what seems
her unsympathetic reticence. Yet she longed to utter
herself, and envied the people who, at a moment's
notice, can take a rough pull of their thoughts. If
one could answer, 'Stay a while, till my thoughts have
mounted sufficiently to burst their dykes.'--But no: by
that time his interest would have faded, and her words
would find him listless. She towers so high to stoop on
her quarry, that the spectator loses sight of her, and
thinks she has lost sight of _it_. And the habit so
engendered makes one slow of speech apart from slowness
of thought. One cannot at the first signal _mobilise_
one's words. How one wonders at the men, who, with an
infinitely smaller vocabulary, have it always on a
war-footing, and can instantly concentrate on a given
subject.
"Another point is that power of communication in
oneself is conditioned by power of receptiveness in
others. The one is never perfect; neither, therefore,
can the other be. For entire self-revelation to
another, we require to feel that even the weak or
foolish impulsive things we may let drop, will be
received without chill,--nay, even with sympathy,
because the utterer is loved. That priceless 'other's'
principle must be (to parody Terence without an attempt
at metre) _Tuus sum, nil tuum mî alienum puto_. But
such an 'other' is not among men--no, nor women either.
The perfectest human sympathy is only the least
imperfect.
"Then again, when we _can_ communicate ourselves
by words, it may often become a sensible effort to
a sensitive person through the mere dead weight of
language, the gross actualities of speech:--exactly
as to delicate _you_ a lovely scene loses half its
attraction, if it must be reached by the fatigue of
walking to it.
"Finally, I think there is the fact that, in what
concerns their veritable spirit, all mortals are
feminine. In the mysteries of that inner _Bona Dea_,
speech is male, and may not enter. We feel that we
could only admit to them the soft silence of sight. But
then--we cannot say: 'Draw aside my flesh and see.'
Would we could!
"That reminds me of what you alluded to about the
inefficiency of the eyes. I am so glad you mean to
touch on that. I see much about the superior eloquence
of eyes, &c. But it always seems to me they have just
the eloquence of a foreign tongue, in which we catch
only enough significance, from the speaker's tone and
the casual sound of some half-familiar word to make us
pained and desperate that we can comprehend no more.
There is a turn in Seneca--
Illi mors gravis incubat,
Qui, nimis notus omnibus,
Ignotus moritur sibi.
'On him death lies heavy, who, too known of all, dies
unknown to himself'--'Too known of all!'--with myself
I am but too intimate; and I profess that I find him a
dull boy, a very barren fellow. Your Delphic oracles
notwithstanding, a man's self is the most unprofitable
acquaintance he can make; let him shun such scurvy
companions. But, 'nimis notus omnibus!' If this were
the most likely terror death could yield, O Lucius
Annæus!--who is known to _one_? In that _Mare Clausum_
of our being, sealed by the conventing powers of birth
and death, with life and time acceding signatories,
what alien trafficker has plied? Far heavier, _Luci
mi_, death weighs on him, who dies too known of
himself, and too little of any man. I have bored you, I
feel, unpardonably. Repentantly your Francis Thompson.
But my repentance does not extend to suppressing the
letter, you observe. A most human fashion of penitence!"
But though "too little known of any man," the poet has faith in the
reader's understanding greater than the reader's faith in his meanings.
As for the reader, the best probe for seeming obscurity is faith. Let
an example be taken from the parish priest who read "The Hound of
Heaven" six times before he understood. Faith in divine meanings, and
many blindfolded readings, are better beginnings than explanations.
Sign articles with your master-poets; sit, idly perhaps, in their
workshops, and one day you find yourself promoted from apprentice to
partner. Their obscurities are your limitations, your limitations their
obscurities, and you and they must have it out between you. And even
at the moment when the Poet is most obscure, he is most plain with
you, most intimate, most dependent on your personal understanding and
acceptance. Then most of all does he give you his confidence, have
faith in your faith; then, most of all, does the anchor of his meaning
need the clutch of your understanding, the kite of his fancy need the
tail of your comprehension. He is riding such waves and flying in such
winds of thought that he were lost without you--
We speak a lesson taught we know not how,
And what it is that from us flows
The hearer better than the utterer knows.
And his confession of his dependence on you as his colleague makes a
laureate of you. See that you be a Wordsworth rather than a Nathaniel
Pye among readers.
The silence in which he was most unhappy was a silence in poetry.
Comparing his case to the earth's life in winter, "tearless beneath the
frost-scorched sod," he writes:--
My lips have drought, and crack,
By laving music long unvisited.
Beneath the austere and macerating rime
Draws back constricted in their icy urns
The genial flame of Earth, and there
With torment and with tension does prepare
The lush disclosures of the vernal time.
His second period of melancholy was the more severe; he thought he
saw in it, against all his convictions in regard to the rhythm or
the resurrections of life, the signs of his poetry's final death. He
suffered the torment and the tension in preparation for what he was
convinced would be still-born song.
The depression first came upon him with the publication of _New Poems_--
"Though my aims are unfulfilled, my place insecure,
many things warn me that with this volume I am probably
closing my brief poetic career."
He had already written of himself as one
Whose gaze too early fell
Upon her ruinous eyes and ineludible.
* * * * *
And first of her embrace
She was not coy, and gracious were her ways,
That I forgot all Virgins to adore.
Nor did I greatly grieve
To bear through arid days
The pretty foil of her divine delays;
And one by one to cast
Life, love, and health,
Content, and wealth
Before her, thinking ever on her praise,
Until at last
Nought had I left she would be gracious for.
In "The Sere of the Leaf," an early poem written at the end of 1890,
and published in _Merry England_, January 1891, he answers Katharine
Tynan, a poet who had spoken of a full content:--
I know not equipoise, only purgatorial joys,
Grief's singing to the soul's instrument,
And forgetfulness which yet knoweth it doth forget;
But content--what is content?
He makes a like protest in the "Renegade Poet on the Poet":--
". . . Did we give in to that sad dog of a Robert Louis,
we must needs set down the poor useless poet as a
son of joy. But the title were an irony more mordant
than the title of the hapless ones to whom it likens
him--_Filles de joie_? O rather _filles d'amertume_.
And if the pleasure they so mournfully purvey were
lofty and purging, as it is abysmal and corrupting,
then would Mr. Stevenson's parallel be just; but
_then_, too, from ignoble victims they would become
noble ministrants. . . . Like his sad sisters, but with
that transfiguring difference, this poet, this son of
bitterness, sows in sorrow that men may reap in joy. He
serves his pleasure, say you, R. L. S.? 'Tis a strange
pleasure, if so it be."
Forsaken, his complaints were doubled. Of many lamentations for his
muse, the following lines to W. M. have a personal bearing:--
Ah, gone the days when for undying kindness
I still could render you undying song!
You yet can give, but I can give no more;
Fate, in her extreme blindness,
Has wrought me so great wrong.
I am left poor indeed;
Gone is my sole and amends-making store,
And I am needy with a double need.
Behold that I am like a fountained nymph,
Lacking her customed lymph,
The longing parched in stone upon her mouth,
Unwatered by its ancient plenty. She
(Remembering her irrevocable streams),
A Thirst made marble, sits perpetually
With sundered lips of still-memorial drouth.
"I shall never forget when he told me," writes Mr. Wilfred Whitten,
"under the mirrored ceiling of the Vienna Café that he would never
write poetry again."
At one time he would declare "Every great poem is a human sacrifice";
but at another:--
"It is usual to suppose that poets, because their
feelings are more delicate than other men's, must needs
suffer more terribly in the great calamities which
agonise all men. But, omitting from the comparison the
merely insensible, the idea may be questioned. The
delicate nature stops at a certain degree of agony, as
the delicate piano at a certain strength of touch."
And at another, in an early note-book:--
"The main function of poetry is to be a fruitful
stimulus. That is, to minister to those qualities in
us which are capable of increase. Otherwise, it is
a sterile luxury. Nor should it be made to minister
to qualities which are mischievous by much increase.
Sought mainly to provoke waning emotion, it is a
sterile luxury; sought mainly to stimulate crescent
emotion a pernicious luxury."
In view of these various accounts of the poetic function one must ask:
Were the sorrows necessary? were they real? One mistrusts the poet, to
whom joy must necessarily often come in the affirmation of distress.
One may argue that Thompson must have been happy on the score of his
poetry. As a poet, no doubt, he was; but not necessarily as a man. The
two states did not overlap. He says in a letter to a friend that he did
not realise that _Sister Songs_, so poor a thing, would give pleasure;
whereas in verse he speaks of sending it exultingly.
His "I have no poetry," like the communicant's "I am unworthy," is but
the prelude to the embrace. In the "To a Broom Branch at Twilight"
(_Merry England_, November 1891), he declares that there are songs in
the branches--
I and they are wild for clasping,
But you will not yield them me.
The thought that silence is the lair of sound was his own ample
consolation for other unproductive periods: but now as he grew ill and
really silent, he felt that silence could nurture only silence.
His pride faces his distress; they stare each other out of countenance.
It is certain that he often joined in George Herbert's address to
a Providence who has made man "the secretary of her praise," though
"beasts fain would sing," and "trees be tuning on their native lute":--
Man is the world's high-priest; he doth present
The sacrifice for all; while they below
Unto the service mutter an assent
Such as springs use that fall, and winds that blow.
And against the many contrary passages of Francis's may also be set his
on the poet's happiness:--
What bitterness was overpaid
By one full verse! world's love, world's pelf
I fillipped from me, and but prayed
Boon of my scantly yielded self.
Here the "curse of destinate verse" reads like a blessing. Yet,
strictly speaking, he found that unwritten predestinate verse means an
ill case:--
For ever the songs I sing are sad
With the songs I never sing.
His complaint is not against the verse that gets written, which even
when sad of origin is a boon: "Deep grief or pain, may, and has in my
case, found immediate outlet in poetry."
To his view of others on previous pages must be added his attitude
towards the author of "The Anthem of Earth," of "The Hound of Heaven,"
of "Shelley." One who went to the task of reviewing his contemporaries
heavy, not with distaste, but with pent-up potential admirations, who
had an appetite at once insatiable and fastidious for all literature,
must needs have enjoyed in relaxation the splendours of his own
verse.[60] But not merely as critic did Francis Thompson realise the
greatness of Thompson. The innermost chambers of his consciousness
buzzed with the certainty of his poetic gravity and significance. He
trusted the quality of the poetry within him as an ordinary man trusts
the beat of his pulse and counts upon it. There were anxieties of
composition and, of course, the ebb and flow of satisfaction in himself
and a final despair. But before that he had known that he was, and he
still knew that he had been, a poet. That is why he is so often the
laureate of his own verse--
Before mine own elect stood I,
And said to Death:--'Not these shall die.'
I issued mandate royally.
I bade Decay:--'Avoid and fly;
For I am fatal unto thee.'
I sprinkled a few drops of verse,
And said to Ruin, 'Quit thy hearse':
To my loved, 'Pale not, come with me;
I will escort thee down the years,
With me thou walk'st immortally.'
These vaunting rhymes were written that he might go on to declare his
undoing, being now stripped of his songs. It was true, of course, that
he lost, not the poetry, but the functions of the poet. In exquisite
lines he begs his muses to stay their flight, and his exquisite lines
belie the convention that they have flown, that the shrines of his
heart are empty.
In Mr. Wilfred Whitten's obituary notice of Thompson there is report at
first hand of the poet's satisfaction in that his poetry was immortal.
He quotes:--
The sleep-flower sways in the wheat its head,
Heavy with dreams, as that with bread;
The goodly grain and the sun-flushed sleeper
The reaper reaps, and Time the reaper.
I hang 'mid men my needless head,
And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread:
The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper
Time shall reap, but after the reaper
The world shall gleam of me, me the sleeper!
And he adds: "When Francis Thompson wrote these verses, he did not
indulge a fitful or exalted hope; he expressed the quiet faith of his
post-poetic years. Thompson knew that above the grey London tumult, in
which he fared so ill, he had hung a golden bell whose tones would one
day possess men's ears. He believed that his name would be symphonised
on their lips with Milton and Dryden and Keats. This he told me himself
in words too quiet, obscure, and long ago for record. But he knew that
Time would reap first."
FOOTNOTES:
[59] "Bodily being is the analogy of the soul's being; our temporal
is our only clue to our spiritual life"; our fleshly senses the only
medium for our divine experience. We are the symbols of ourselves. To
such thoughts he adds disjointed notes in confirmation from the ancient
mythologies: "Bird-heads to gods with man-bodies."--"Zeus = Sky."
[60] With nothing that he has to say of another poet is it so
impossible to agree as with his own estimate of the relative importance
of the sections of _New Poems_--
"CRECCAS COTTAGE, PANTASAPH, _November 1896._
"MY DEAR DOUBLEDAY,--I regret that I cannot consent to the omission of
the translations. If anything is to be left out, it must be the section
_Ultima_, not the translations. I said at Pantasaph that I would keep
these, whatever I left out. They were held over from my first book, and
I will not hold them over again. I regard the 'Heard on the Mountain'
as a feat in diction and metre; and in this respect Coventry Patmore
agrees with me. But I do not at all mind leaving out the section
_Ultima_.--Yours, F. T."