AS F. T. grew busier with journalism, and was helped to bread by it, he
grew peevish with his prose, as other men do with a servant:--
"Prose is clay; poetry the white, molten metal. It
is plastic, not merely to gross touch, but to the
lightest breath, a wish, a half-talent, an unconscious
feather-passage of emotional suggestion. The most
instantaneously perfect of all media for expression.
Instant and easy as the snap of a camera, perfect as
star in pool to star above, natural as breathing of
sweet air, or drinking of rain-fresh odours; where
prose asks a certain effort and conscious shaping. But
prose can be put in shafts (to its slow spoiling);
verse, alack! hears no man's bidding, but serves when
it lists,--even when it consents to lay aside its
wings."
"Poetry _simple_ or synthetic; prose analytic."
* * * * *
"It might almost be erected into a rule that a great poet is, if he
pleases, also a master of prose," he writes in one of several studies
of "The Prose of Poets"--including Sir Philip Sidney's, Shakespeare's,
Ben Jonson's, and Goldsmith's, first published in the _Academy_.
[Illustration: _Photograph by Sherril Schell_
_Emery Walker Ph. sc._
_The Life Mask 1905_]
At times the every-day difficulties of journalism seemed
insurmountable. Then would he write desperately to W. M. of the
necessity for cowardice on his part and a return to a mode of life that
had no responsibilities:--
"Things have become impossible. B---- did not outright
refuse me an advance on my poem, but told me to call
again and 'talk it over.' . . . The only thing is for
me to relieve you of my burthen--at any rate for the
present--and go back whence I came. There will be no
danger in my present time of life and outworn strength
that I should share poor Coventry's complaint (that of
outliving his ambition to live). . . . For the reverse of
the medal, you have Ghosh who has just been promised
£220 odd for a series of tales.
". . . For the present, at any rate, good-bye, you
dearest ones. If for longer--
Why, then, this parting was well made.
"--Yours ever and whatever comes,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
During the years when such despairs were common W. M.'s favours were
forced upon a spasmodically reluctant poet, whose earnings seemed never
at best to leave him a margin for incidental expenses:--
"To have to talk of money-matters to you is itself a
misery, a sordidness. How much worse in its way all
this must press on you is comprehensible to anyone.
We are no longer as we were ten years ago. You have
grown-up children to launch in life. . . ."
For W. M. there was never a doubt of the honour and pleasure of his
position. If Francis's rent fell sometimes in arrears, it was not
because there was any falling-away in willingness, but because it had
taken its place among the many liabilities of the master of a large
household, and had to wait among them for its turn to be met.
After a desperate letter foretelling the end, a little conversation
with my father would correct his despair, and he could return to his
landlady with the most obvious remedy, or some suggestion equally
efficacious:--
"You are right. Mrs. Maries has given way, on the
understanding that you will make some arrangement with
her before the end of the month."
Again, to W. M.:--
". . . As for poetry, I am despondent when I am without
a poetical fit, yet when I have one I am miserable on
account of my prose. I came lately across a letter
of Keats' (penned in the præ-Endymion days), which
might almost word for word be written by myself about
myself. It expresses exactly one of the things which
trouble me, and make me sometimes despair of my
career. 'I find' (he says) 'I find I cannot do without
poetry--without eternal poetry; half the day will not
do--the whole of it. I began with a little, but habit
has made me a leviathan. I had become all in a tremble
from not having written anything of late: the sonnet
over-leaf did me good; I slept the better last night
for it: this morning, however, I am nearly as bad
again.' I, too, have been 'all in a tremble' because I
had written nothing of late. I am constantly expecting
to wake up some morning and find that my Dæmon has
abandoned me. I hardly think I _could_ be very vain
of my literary gift; for I so keenly feel that it is
beyond my power to command, and may at any moment be
taken from me."
This nervousness for his muse, like to Rossetti's for his sight, came
upon him more hardly in later years.
* * * * *
Misrepresentation--it is easy to trace its origin--was busy before his
death. The word went round that the streets had put a worse slur than
hunger, nakedness, and loneliness upon him. In 1906 a pamphlet reached
him from the University Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, in which he read
that he "had been raised out of the depths":
"No optimism of intent can overlook the fact of
his having fallen, and no euphemism of expression
need endeavour to cloak it. Down those few terrible
years he let himself go with the winds of fancy, and
threw himself on the swelling wave of every passion,
desiring only to live to the full with a purpose of
mind apparently like that of his contemporary, Oscar
Wilde, but in circumstances now vastly different from
those the brilliant young Oxford dandy knew. He said,
'I will eat of all the fruits in the Garden of Life,'
and in the very satisfaction of his desire found its
insatiableness."
With gossip turning the pages, that reader found the proof of
Thompson's wrong-doing in "The Hound of Heaven."
I fled Him down the nights and down the days,
could only mean that the runaway was a criminal, and the Almighty
the policeman who hurries when he is sure of a crime. "The Hound of
Heaven," a study in the profound science of renunciation, was said to
be the work of a man who had "thrown himself on the swelling wave of
every passion." It mattered nothing that in the poem we read only that
the poet had "clung to the whistling mane of every wind," had turned
to children "very wistfully," had "troubled the gold gateway of the
stars." There is really nothing in it to support the blacker theory. A
better way to understand the poetry and know the poet is to believe the
poet and the poetry. This pamphleteer and the writer of the obituary
notice in the _Times_ were strangers, their knowledge was based on
hearsay. In face of such misunderstanding, at the time of his death it
was hardly surprising to read in the _Mercure de France_ that "he went
mad, and death happily put an end to his miseries." A Professor of
Romance Languages in Columbia University may be right in thinking that
Thompson does not ever sink so low as Verlaine, nor ever rise quite so
high, and that greater poets than Thompson, from Collins to Coleridge,
have often failed in the ode-forms, but he is inaccurate when he says
that, "like Verlaine, he is the poet of sin."
Since there was so little to go upon, it is hardly surprising that the
alien onlooker's conception of Francis Thompson was a misconception.
His poor living, his unknown lodging, his fugitive seclusion encouraged
the legend that he was still an outcast. Since this alien had never
heard him laugh, and to the ear's imagination it is easier to frame
a cry, the subject of the ready-made legend never even smiled; there
were no _fioretti_ connected with his name, and the weeds were taken
for granted. The heavy remorsefulness of his muse seemed, to such as
are unfamiliar with the _confiteor_ of the saints, to mark a more real
repentance, and therefore real misconduct, than does the ordinary,
facile _peccavi_ of modern poetry-books. We notice that at his death
the writers of the obituary notices who were ready with suggestions
of evil days were equally ready with the usual liberal condonation.
"No such condonation was called for--though by some it was offered--in
the case of Francis Thompson," wrote A. M. in the _Dublin Review_,
January 1908. "For, during many years of friendship, and almost daily
companionship, it was evident to solicitous eyes that he was one of the
most innocent of men."
* * * * *
To _The Nation_, November 23, 1907, W. M. wrote his protest:--
"I see in the _Times_ a paragraph about Francis
Thompson, against which I will ask you to let me make
appeal. It comes from 'A Correspondent,' who 'writes
to us'; and I am just such another, writing to you.
But I knew Thompson, and no pen but an alien's could
have written this to Printing House Square: 'There
are occasions on which the conventional expression of
regret becomes a mockery, and this is one of them.
What the world must regret is not the release of Mr.
Thompson, but the fact that the cravings of the body
from which he is released should have had power to
ruin one of the most remarkable and original of the
poetic geniuses of our time.' I know what the writer
insinuates. I know, too, that he has overshot his
mark. But the public will only too greedily infer from
his words that Thompson was a degraded man--he who
carried dignity amid all vicissitude; that he was a
debauchee--he who lived, as he sang, the votary of Fair
Love. Nor need I adopt in his regard the fine passage
in which Mr. Birrell defends Charles Lamb's 'drinking.'
For Mr. Francis Thompson did not 'drink.'
"The 'genius' of Francis Thompson was not 'ruined,' or
we should not have the evidence of it on every page
of three volumes, presenting together a body of best
poetry equal in size to that of most of our poets. But
it is true that Thompson's health was wretched from
first to last. It is true also that he doctored himself
disastrously with laudanum from almost the early days
of his medical studentship in Manchester. When he came
to the streets of London, the drug delivered him in a
manner from their horrors, and, besides, was, I think,
some palliation of the disease of which he finally
died--consumption. . . .
"Again, Thompson was an uncertain worker; but his
friendly editors did not hustle him. And they
could always count on him to keep time with even a
'commissioned' poem. The Odes on the Nineteenth Century
and on the Victorian Jubilee did not get late to the
editor of the _Daily Chronicle_; and even if they
had been late, nobody else could have sent them so
quickly, for nobody else could have sent them at all.
Every week, in the _Academy_, under Mr. Lewis Hind,
Thompson's articles made fine reading--his essay on
Emerson marking the high-water mark of that manner of
criticism; and I am certain that the editor of the
_Athenæum_, for whom he was in harness almost until
the last week of his life, and who treated him with a
consideration never to be forgotten by his friends, is
in sorrow that Thompson is dead.
"Such, in brief, was my friend:--a moth of a man, who
has taken his unreturning flitting! No pen--least of
all, mine--can do justice to him: to his rectitude,
to his gentleness, to his genius. . . . If he had great
misfortunes, he bore them greatly; they were great
because everything about him was great. It is my
consolation now, amid tears for Thompson from eyes
that never thought to shed so many again, to know that
he knew and accepted his fate and mission, and that
he willingly 'learned in suffering what he taught in
song.' But I have spoken too much. I did not mean to
do more than make the writer in the _Times_ aware that
somebody loves his life less because Thompson is dead."
The argument of the poet's sanctity is in his poems; and it were
tiresome to take the oath in the discredited witness-box of biography
in denial of any particular accusation. But the circumstances that
made imputation of evil likely and credible form part of the literary
history of the period. The Mid-Victorian respectability which Patmore
lifted to Parnassus in the "Angel in the House," and which lifted
Tennyson to the Peerage, had given way to reaction. Swinburne's
showy metres had persuaded the young that bad morality could be good
art. Instead of Burns's heavy drinking and light loves, Verlaine and
absinthe served for a new argument to confound the squeamish. Verlaine
made a fashion, and his tragedy came easily, even to minor poets,
and was not altogether impious. The young men anxious to fall as he
fell were anxious also to share in the depths of his contrition. The
duet about commission of sin and contrition for sin had great vogue,
and accounts for a deal of the poetry of self-accusation, made, not
seldom, in regard to imaginary offences. Contrition was, after all, the
main force at work, and, in the naked, truthful, and intense moments
of death, this was the ruling passion. The reaction had, after all,
been merely a reaction, and not a little genius had been spilled in
barren soil. The Church and the Sacraments were at the service of men
who had fondly believed that their chief strength was in rebellion,
and that they had strayed into ways of loss and salvation peculiar to
themselves, but who ended by being sorry.
Religion seems always to be setting its beneficent ambush for those
who thought themselves most securely on another road; but in the case
of the victims of abnormal and distressful phases of experience there
was something more than the splendid accident of reconciliation and
forgiveness. One after another of the leaders of æsthetic disaffection
and disease confessed to an almost involuntary inclination to seek the
arms of the Church. The devil, prowling like a lion, might leap upon
them, "but the Lamb, He leapeth too." Christ's actual presence, His
miracles, His hand, were for the sick, the afflicted, the wrongdoer:
His inspiration to-day most often rests upon those intellectual sinners
who have seemed in their misfortune to be puffing out the light of the
world. And this was not only a death-bed reconciliation. What English
artist for fifty years has made a "Madonna and Child?" Aubrey Beardsley
made one. What poet had sung of the last sacraments? Ernest Dowson's
most beautiful verses are on the Extreme Unction. Lionel Johnson, whom
Thompson knew, had not been a rebel, and he did not seek a death-bed
reprieve. Nevertheless his name connects one form of failure with the
literary life of his day and with an ardent adherence to Religion.
Another type of a school that had set out to use bad language but
could say nothing finally but its prayers, is he who then sang in
company with Baudelaire, but whose poet, now he has become a priest, is
Jacopone da Todi. So, too, with Simeon Solomon, as his reputation and
his clothes became more ragged, who, as he grew "famous for his falls"
but otherwise obscure, found a co-ordinating central inspiration for
his work, and found it before the altars of the Carmelite Church in
Kensington. Francis may well have jostled elbows with him there, or on
the pavement.
The copper-plated Death of the sixteenth century is a caution no more
gruesome or extreme than the picture of these poets and painters in
their pains. Two or three to a lunatic asylum, one to death that
smelt of suicide, and three at least to death hastened by drink--that
is the hasty record of a certain group. Francis never met Wilde, the
wit who stumbled and gasped the dull man's daily words of repentance,
even before his audience was well aware of his jest; nor Beardsley
the artist who found death's quill at his heart before he had time to
destroy the drawings, which, in his agony, he learnt some devil rather
than himself had made. To the hospitals, asylums, and prisons of London
and Paris, to the Sanatorium of the Pacific or the Mediterranean, to
the slums, and to starvation, Literature contributed numbers out of all
proportion.
Francis knew none of them; but he had made a name in the 'nineties,
had lived in the streets (the last resort of several of them), had
died a Catholic (most damning evidence!), had written passionately
(the divinity of his passion was not noted): there was circumstantial
evidence enough. He was exalted: how should the obituary writers know
the exaltation was not feverish? His poetry he laid upon altar-steps;
was it for them to guess he had chased no satyrs from his cathedral
before he set himself to pray? His view of Dowson is characteristic:
". . . A frail and (in an artistic sense) faint minor
poet. . . . The major poet moulds, rather than is moulded
by, his environment. And it may be doubted whether the
most accomplished morbidity can survive the supreme
test of Time. In the long run Sanity endures; the
finest art goes under if it be perverse and perverted
art, though for a time it may create life under the
ribs of death."
Like the legend that seeks to give an evil or a sad account of men, is
the easier legend of their laziness. All who have known joy and written
vastly have been accused of inertia and despondency.
It is true that Francis was apprenticed to Idleness of wits, as well as
Industry; but, finding both hard masters, and Idleness (of the common
sort) the harder, he much sought to avoid it. As for his work (save in
poetry) he knew few moments at which he could with Coleridge declare a
happiness in difficulties, "feeling in resistance nothing but a joy and
a stimulus." With Coleridge's other mood ("drowsy, self-distrusting,
prone to rest, loathing his own self-promises, withering his own
hopes--his hopes, the vitality, the cohesion of his being") he was
acquainted. But not long; the meaning of his inactivity would burst on
him, until the thought of it was labour. But with Wordsworth he says:--
". . . for many days my brain worked with a dim and
undetermined sense of unknown modes of being,"
and for his reassurance he had at hand the same poet's
'Tis my faith that there are powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we may feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.
Francis construed his own defence into a hundred aphorisms. These two
are signed with his initials:--
"Where I find nothing done by me, much may have been
done in me," and
"For the things to-day done in you, will be done by you
to-morrow many things."
Lying abed, he was acutely aware of his duty to get up. It was a
conscious and laborious laziness, akin to Dr. Johnson's, whose great
bulk was shaken with almost daily repentance for its sloth. The
dictionary makes our shelves creak in protest at the notion held by
Johnson himself and his contemporaries that he was a lazy man; and the
pile of Thompson's papers, his letters, and the following placard he
pinned upon his bedroom wall speak of his large industries and his
girding at the spectre sloth:--
At the Last Trump thou wilt rise Betimes!
Up; for when thou wouldst not, thou wilt shortly sleep long.
The worm is even now weaving thy body its night-shift.
Love slept not a-saving thee. Love calls thee,
Rise, and seek Him early. Ask, and receive.
I leave unprinted other more piteous solicitations for what, virtually,
though he did not guess it, was the energy and health he could not
possess. Upon another sheet more worldly persuasions were set to urge
his waking eye. Of a printer's request for copy on an earlier day than
that usually covenanted he writes:--
"Remember the new _Athenæum_ dodge testifies against
you."
It was he who found time to be pleased with Brearley's bowling or merry
with the anticipation of the morrow; he, sitting in grey lodgings, who
crowded into the chilly ten minutes before 3 A.M. the writing of a long
letter to be posted, after anxieties with address and gum of which we
know nothing, and a stumbling journey down dark stairs, in a pillar
box still black in threatening dawn. There are few such journeys of my
own I can count to my credit, and few words I can remember, written or
spoken, to set against his thronging puns and his constant sequence of
"Yours ever." At any rate he was outdone at every turn--in kindness,
attentions, sallies, patience and wit--by one among his friends, my
father, who had to crowd his generosity to the poet between stretches
of persistent overwork, the real thronging anxieties that were at least
as pressing as Francis's imaginary ones. In reading a series of letters
Francis wrote to me in the last years, I am sorry to think how slovenly
must have been my response to his tenacious jesting. And it was he who
troubled to make his notes kind and acceptable, neat and long. One
marvels, among the mass of his journalism and letters, at the estimate
of him that passed undisputed during his life, as a man who misspent
his powers and wasted his minutes as he wasted his matches. If he was
unfortunate, he was also merry. Without excuse his biographer confesses
to the moodiness, the silence, the disorderliness that is imputed
to the poet. The consolation for all my family is the thought of my
father's incessant care for and good humour towards him.
Of the hours he kept there are many legends, all made according to
Greenwich time. But it is not expected of the lamp-lighter, or the
contract-winder of office clocks, or the milkman, that he should write
Thompson's poetry, or even read it, and yet we started with a wholly
illogical desire of constraining Francis, if not to fulfil their
duties, at least to be a party to their punctuality.
Mr. Orpen desired to paint him; sittings were even appointed; but not
till Mr. Neville Lytton found him under the same roof, at Newbuildings,
was his elusive likeness caught by an artist.
To look at, as it happens, he was something between a lamp-lighter and
a man of letters, but nearer the lamp-lighter; unless, seeing him stand
beneath a street gas-jet to write an overdue article, one noticed he
carried a pencil instead of a pole. Thus were the flares of Brown's
bookstalls in Bishop's Road used by him. On and on would he write until
the last shutter was closed and the gas turned down. Then dashing off
the final sentence, he would rush into the shop to sell his book, and
to the pillar-box with his article.
If he is to be sought for among the old masters, it is to El Greco
that one would go. He had the narrow head and ardent eye that served
that painter for Saint, Beggar, and Courtier. None other recalls his
presence to me, or creates an atmosphere in which he could have lived.
Rembrandt's was too rich and still, Tintoretto's too invigorating.
Titian recognised no such pallor, Giorgione no such slightness, and
Veronese no such shabbiness. For the Florentines, they were better
built; their poets' countenances were more established and secure, and
their excellent young men were less nervous and restless than he.
[Illustration: Francis Thompson
Drawn by the Hon. Neville Lytton 1907]
He alludes in a letter to a belief (principally, I believe, his own)
that he resembled two Personages:--
"DEAR EV.,--Character counts, even in cricket. This
morning I was looking at a _Daily Mail_ photo. of the
South African team for the coming cricket season. One
of the faces instantly caught my eye. 'Well!' said
I, 'if character count for anything in cricket, this
should be the bowler they say has the Bosanquet style.'
. . . Since Hall Caine is no Shakespeare, Plonplon no
soldier, _and neither the Tsar nor the Prince of Wales_
[_George V_] _are Thompsonian poets_, great was my
surprise when I found the fellow _was_ the Bosanquet
bowler."
Had he compared his own youthful photographs with those of the present
Prince of Wales he might perhaps have been confirmed in one of his
impressions.
The only faces he much pondered were the poets'. Round the walls of his
room he pinned the _Academy_ supplements, full-page reproductions from
the National Portrait Gallery; and with these was a reproduction given
him by Coventry Patmore of Sargent's drawing of A. M. The supplements
he liked all the better because they illustrated a favourite theory of
facial angles. On foreheads he set no value; but insisted that genius
was most often indicated by a protruding upper jaw. This did not mean
for him that thick lips had significance, but where the bony structure
from the base of the nose to the upper teeth was thrust forward,
as, notably, in Charlotte Brontë and Coventry Patmore, he found the
character that interested him.
Here is another letter, written in a bad light but copious good
spirits, before a visit to "the Serendipity Shop":--
"DEAR EV.,--This to remind you I shall be at the
shop, whereof the name is mystery which all men seek
to look into, and in the mouth of the young man
Aloysius doubtful is the explanation--yea, shuffleth
like one that halteth by reason of the gout; in the
forehead and forehand of the bland and infant day,
yet swaddled in the sable bands of the first hour and
the _pre-diluculum_. For the Wodensday, a kitten with
its eyes still sealed, is laid in the smoky basket of
night, awaiting the first homœopathic doses of the
morn's tinctured euphrasy (even as euphrasia once cured
an inflammation of my dim lid)."
Mr. Andrew Lang has complained of de Quincey's digressions; a further
sample of F. T.'s habitual guiltiness may be taken from one of the
slightest of his notes:--
"DEAR EV.,--I told your father I should come to-morrow,
but I send you a line to _mak siccar_--as the lover
of artistic completion said who revised Bruce's
murder of Red Comyn. It is interesting to see the
tentative beginnings of the James school in Bruce,
already at variance with the orthodox methods upheld
by his critical collaborator. The critic in question
considered that Bruce had left off too soon. But to
Bruce's taste evidently there was a suggestion in
the hinted tragedy of 'I doubt I have killed Red
Comyn' more truly effective than the obvious ending
substituted by his _confrère_. History, by the way, has
curiously failed to grasp the inner significance of
this affair.
"I am quite run down to-night." . . .
"I had never your lightness of heart," he writes,
forcing me to wonder what he thought of one for
making such poor use, in his behalf, of the imputed
characteristic; "nor was I ever without sad
overshadowings of the hurrying calamity. . . . 'The day
cometh, also the night'; but I was born in the shadow
of the winter solstice, when the nights are long. I
belong by nativity to the season of 'heavy Saturn.' Was
it also, I sometimes think, under Sagittarius? I am
not astronomer enough to know how far the precession
of the equinoxes had advanced in '58 or '59. Were
it so it would be curious, for Sagittarius, the
archer, is the Word. He is also Cheiron, the Centaur,
instructor of Achilles. The horse is _intellect_ or
_understanding_ (Pegasus = _winged intellect_). He
is the slayer of Taurus the Bull (natural truth and
natural or terrestrial power and generation, the fire
of unspiritualised sense), which sinks as he rises
above the horizon. Ephraim, a type or symbol of the
Word (as Judah of the Fathers and the Priesthood), was
an archer, or symbolised as such. (See Jacob's dying
and prophetic blessing of his sons, wherein each has a
symbol proper to his character and that of his tribe,
indicating his place as a type in the Old Church, and
in the foreshadowing of the New.) But this is very
idle chatter, and I don't know how I fell upon it when
my mind is serious enough, indeed. Perhaps the mind
wanders, tired with heavy brooding."
But it is always the gay word that could best bear the scrutiny of the
poet himself if he were to pass the proofs of his own biography. In
writing of a life that has a superficial look of disaster and pain, his
biographer has a shamefaced feeling of dishonesty. Every other word is,
in a sense, a misrepresentation, and worse. The memory of his smile
shouts out to them, "You liars!"
* * * * *
There was always courtesy in his notes, mixed with haste and
complaints; and even he would weary of bulletin prose, so that his
needs and ailments sometimes came recorded in doggerel:--
I am aweary, weary, weary,
I am aweary waiting here!
Why tarries Everard? sore I fear he
Has forgotten my shirting-gear!
Ah, youth untender! why dost thou delay
With shirts to clothe me, an untimely tree
Unraimented when all the woods are green?
But thou delay not more: unboughten vests
Expect thy coming, shops with all their eyes
Wait at wide gaze, and I thy shepherd wait,
In Tennysonian numbers wooing haste. . . .
Of great value is A. M.'s corrective record of his laugh:--
"He has been unwarily named with Blake as one of
the unhappy poets. I will not say he was ever so
happy as Blake;--but few indeed, poets or others,
have had a life so happy as Blake's, or a death so
joyous; but I affirm of Francis Thompson that he had
natural good spirits, and was more mirthful than many
a man of cheerful, of social, or even of humorous
reputation. What darkness and oppression of spirit the
poet underwent was over and past some fifteen years
before he died. It is pleasant to remember Francis
Thompson's laugh, a laugh readier than a girl's,
and it is impossible to remember him, with any real
recall, and not to hear it in mind again. Nothing
irritable or peevish within him was discovered when
children had their laughter at him. It need hardly be
told what the children laughed at;--say, a habit of
stirring the contents of his cup with such violence
that his after-dinner coffee was shed into the saucer
or elsewhere--a habit which he often told us, at great
length, was hereditary."
His laugh it is difficult to keep alive: the legend of his extinguished
happiness is too strong. For laughter is commonly discredited; only Mr.
Chesterton, for example, persists in making the Almighty capable of
humour. While we are all ready to allow that thorns make a crown, we
hold that bells do no more than cap us--the cap and bells of folly. Who
ever spoke of a crown of bells?
The refutation of the charge against his industry lies in his published
work and in the pages of a hundred crowded note-books. The newspaper
Odes alone are sufficient evidence of his power to compel even his muse
to arduous and humble labours.
These Odes were pot-boiling journalism; their inspiration by the clock
and the column:--
"We have no doubt whatever that inspiration will not
fail you for so great a subject--the Jubilee! We must
have the copy by the afternoon of the 21st,"
wrote an encouraging editor (Mr. Massingham) on June 6, 1897. The
request was made on the strength of Mr. Massingham's admiration for
_New Poems_, and was not refused; the ode was written within three
weeks, and probably in the last three hours of them. From Mr. Garvin
came another letter:--
"_June 22, '97._
"DEAR FRANCIS THOMPSON,--I get the _Manchester
Guardian_ every day not merely by good hap, but because
it is the best daily in England. Whose is the ode? I
thought on the leisure of the opening and then saw. Hot
Jacobite as I am for England's one legitimate laureate
by native grace and right divine, I could not repress
the movement of natural pity for the respectable and
conscientious wearer of statutory bays, who tries so
hard to fly as if the _Times_ page were Salisbury
Downs and he a bustard. Every flap a stanza; thirty
flaps of the most desperate volatile intention; and no
forrarder to the empyrean, where the Thompsonian ode
sails with one supreme dominion through the azure deeps
of air--vital, radiant, lovely. I told you I was your
poor foster-brother of prose, in witness whereof is my
thought of England's dead, and other little thoughts;
in that the soul danced in me to the great pulse of
your ode.--Always yours,
LOUIS GARVIN."
Of an article on Browning Mr. Garvin had written:--
"DEAR FRANCIS THOMPSON,--Tell me by what native
instinct or faculty acquired you so easily avoid
henotheism in your critical writings. My poet of
the moment, as I am drawn to his centre and become
enveloped in his light, seems to absorb all the
radiance of all song. I know there are exterior suns,
but the poet only remembered bears up with difficulty
against him immediately contemplated. It is henotheism
exactly. But here you take the crabbed case of
Browning, you extricate him from the multitude of words
and you directly declare middle justice upon him, and
so he betakes him to his place. Yet if a word had been
said against a certain oleaginous obesity of optimism
that glistens upon the plump countenance of this
well-groomed poet in easy circumstances, mayhap it had
been well.
"But I went most willingly with you when you laid your
finger upon Browning's Elizabethan aptitude for the
dramatic form of motive analysis and critical comment.
And that not because of Browning. I have long had it
in my mind to say that I feel the same faculty to be
latent in you somewhere. I fancy very strongly that you
could handle the Elizabethan form better than anybody
else these two hundred years and fifty and a little
more. The Elizabethan spirit of course you have to that
degree. The point about Browning's manipulation of
character and circumstance is completely put. Don't you
wish, though, to take the other part--volition diving
at the imminent billow of life and buffeting a sea of
circumstance? Indefinite potentialities I feel sure you
have--especially of the drama that gives a separate
voice and name to all the sides of one's own numerous
personality.[61] I pine for the odes.--Always yours
affectionately (if I may be),
LOUIS GARVIN."
In a letter to his sister about the Jubilee Ode, Francis says:--
"Thereon forthwith followed the severe and most unhappy
cab accident about which I informed you. . . . I have
had a year of disasters. You will notice a new address
(39 Goldney-road, Harrow-road, N.W.) at the head of
this letter. I have been burned out of my former
lodgings. The curtain caught fire just after I had got
into bed, and I upset the lamp in trying to extinguish
it. My hands were badly blistered, and I sustained a
dreadful shock, besides having to walk the streets all
night. The room was quite burned out."
This letter he never posted, so that his sister writes out of her
unwearied solicitude two years later:--
"MY DEAR FRANK,--Doubtless you will be surprised to
receive a letter from me after so long a silence. But
the apparent negligence is not my fault, for I have
been trying for twelve months past to obtain your
address, and only succeeded about a fortnight ago. You
see, my dear brother, I have no one to give me any
information of you, and as _you_ never write to me the
consequence is I am utterly in the dark. My life is
very uneventful, therefore my letters to you must, I
know, be very uninteresting; but they must just show
you that you have still got a sister who loves you and
thinks of you and also prays much for your well-being
here and hereafter."
Later the old century was "sung on her way" in an ode appearing in the
_Academy_, at the beginning of 1901; and in the death of Cecil Rhodes
(March 26, 1902) his editor saw the occasion for another paper ode.
Mr. Hind describes the hasty manner of its composition, and when it
appeared in the _Academy_ for April 12, 1902, it bore the marks of a
trumped-up emotion's inspiration. In May 1902 Mr. Fisher, now of the
_Chronicle_, asked F. T. for a Peace Ode, to be pigeon-holed against
the conclusion of the South African War.
Very often F. T. would decide for an eight-hour day, and offer himself,
through my father, to the journals. Like most men who find work irksome
when they have it, and delay all commissions, he imagined, when he had
none, that the difficulty was in the getting. "The _Academy_ should
not and shall not have a monopoly of me," he writes, without any
provocation from the _Academy_. "Take this chance for me now." (W.
M. had mentioned the _Daily Chronicle_ as an opening) "Bite a cherry
while it bobs against your mouth." Nor were his reasons for complaint
against his journalistic fate always ungrounded. The _Academy_ demanded
no monopoly, being willing to accept his unpunctual copy whenever it
arrived, and in almost any quantity; but elsewhere minor reverses were
made the most of. F. T. writes:--
"I have just got home. The _Imperial and Colonial
Magazine_ asked me to submit 'one or two poems' of an
Imperialist nature. I sent them one, as you know. They
have rejected it. If the poem sent through you is also
rejected (as I expect) I shall give up. I cannot go on
here--or anywhere else--under these circumstances. Try
as I will, all doors are shut against me. If your poem
miscarries that is the end.--Yours ever,
F. T."
Thus were his fears communicated to the person who made them futile and
absurd. But Thompson would never forgo them.
Commissions, however, when they came, were rejected in silence, or
accepted and neglected--
"DEAR SIR,--I shall be greatly obliged if you can send
me the articles you kindly agreed to write for the
Catholic Encyclopædia in the letters B and C"
is a note I find among his papers, and others came, were ignored and
lost. "Having done an article for the _Chronicle_," he writes, "I have
still seventeen volumes of poetry undone for it." When Mr. Hind left
the _Academy_ the poet was in some flurry and distress; having called
on the new editor, Mr. Teignmouth Shore, he writes:--
"The interview last Friday landed me on a doubtfully
hospitable Shore. All articles to be cut down to a
column. Immediate result, fifteen shillings for this
week. . . . Therefore am waiting most anxiously for your
return, when I may explain all the complexities of the
situation. At present most perplexed and anxious. Do
not cut short your holiday; yet I do need to see you."
He continued fitfully on the _Academy_, but gradually transferred his
allegiance to the _Athenæum_. In the meantime my father arranged that a
publishing house whose literary adviser he was should supply him with
work that could be done at any time and be paid for at any moment. _The
Life of St. Ignatius_ was commissioned. He delivered every few pages as
he finished them--three were passport to a pound--and, so final was his
method of composition, he neither desired nor needed to see a single
page of the manuscript again. The reviewing my father obtained for him
on the _Athenæum_ he did with success till within a month or two of his
death. Letters from Mr. Vernon Rendall illustrate the courtesy of his
editors:--
"ATHENÆUM OFFICE, _December 20, 1905._
"DEAR MR. THOMPSON,--I am very sorry to hear of
your illness, which may have been aggravated I fear
by our clerks. I will try to make them send things
correctly in future. Do not hurry now about anything
you have. You are sure to be in need of rest and
recreation--which, indeed, is supposed to be the fair
perquisite of all at this season.--Yours very truly,
VERNON RENDALL."
And again:--
"ATHENÆUM OFFICE, _March 14, 1906._
"DEAR MR. THOMPSON,--I was very glad to hear of your
recovery, and hope you will now enjoy established
health. We were clearly as much at fault as you in the
delay of the notices you mention. I quite agree with
you about Morris. Generally, I try to send you books
worth reading, and, tho' we never have too much space
to spare, I am sure that you know as well as anybody
the value of a book, and I hope you will not restrict
your notice of what you think really good.--Yours very
truly,
V. RENDALL."
And, later, from another office:--
"THE NATION, _April 9, 1907._
"DEAR MR. THOMPSON,--Mrs. Meynell will have sent you
a letter of mine about the beautiful poem ["The Fair
Inconstant"] which you wrote for us last week, and
about the more elaborate work, which, in continuance of
old _Daily Chronicle_ days, you might be willing to do
for us. I have always retained the utmost admiration
for your poetic genius, and regard with much warmth its
association with a paper like the _Nation_.--Yours very
truly,
H. W. MASSINGHAM."
Of another literary enterprise which, like his journalism, shews that
he could be diligent, he writes:--
"DEAR WILFRID,--I have summoned up pluck to send my
little play[62] (which Mrs. Meynell and you have
seen) to W. Archer, asking him whether it afforded
any encouragement to serious study of writing for the
stage. His answer is unfavourable--though he refrains
from a precise negative. This sets my mind at rest on
that matter. None the less, I wanted to read you one or
two bits from my chucked-up _Saul_, since they seemed
to me better than I knew."
"I never yet missed my Xmas wishes to you,
and it seems uglily ominous if I should do so now.
But I have been working desperately at a poem for the
_Academy_. . . . When I met Whitten this morning he looked
uneasy, repeatedly advised me to 'get something.'
I explained I already had 'got' some tea (with my
breakfast). 'Yes, but--get something more,' he said,
and alleged that I was looking shrunk with cold.
"Of course I will come in to-morrow night. Did I not,
you might be sure I was knocked off my legs altogether,
and I should feel that the world had gone off its
hinges. I have never missed seeing you at Christmas
save when I was at Pantasaph. Every happy wish to you,
dear Wilfrid, and may God be as kind to you as you have
ever been to me."
FOOTNOTES:
[61] Note by F. T.: "That is not drama, but lyric."
[62] This play was again unfavourably received when, in 1903, he
submitted it to _T. P.'s Weekly_. It is thus set forth on his MS. title
page:
NAPOLEON JUDGES
_A Tragedy in Two Scenes_
DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.
NAPOLEON.
GENERAL AUGEREAU.
MADAME LEBRUN (_an opera-dancer, Augereau's Mistress_).
PRESIDENT OF THE COURT MARTIAL.
A FRENCH DESERTER.
OFFICERS. SOLDIERS.
_Place._--Augereau's Camp. _Time._--The Italian Campaign of 1796.
During the first scene Napoleon is absent from Augereau's Camp.
Of another class is a modern comedy, full of laboriously smart give
and take, called "_Man Proposes, but Woman Disposes_. Un Conte sans
Raconteur. In Two Scenes."