may, by every sound critical standard, safely be applied. One of these
is the "Dark Angel," a masterly study of the psychology of temptation,
written in stanzas that glow with feeling, that are the direct and
passionate utterance of the poet's soul, and yet are as polished and
accurate as if their author's only purpose had been to make a thing of
beauty. The other is "Te Martyrum Candidatus," a poem which may without
question be given its place in any anthology which contains "Burning
Babe," "The Kings," and Crashaw's "Hymn to St. Teresa." It has seemed to
me that these brave and beautiful lines, which have for their
inspiration the love of God, and echo with their chiming syllables the
hoof-beats of horses bearing knights to God's battles, might serve as a
fitting epitaph for the accomplished scholar, the true poet, the noble
and kindly Catholic gentleman who wrote them.
SWINBURNE AND FRANCIS THOMPSON
I feel a certain diffidence in approaching the subject of Francis
Thompson before such an audience as this. For I know that there are many
among you who could teach me much about that great poet, the modern
laureate of the Catholic Church. I suppose that many of you have studied
the profound philosophy of "From the Night of Forebeing," "The Mistress
of Vision" and "The Hound of Heaven," have curiously examined the
beautiful verbal intricacies of "Sister Songs" and "The Orient Ode," and
are familiar with the triumphs and the tragedies of Francis Thompson's
brief life.
But there may be some among you to whom Francis Thompson is little more
than a name. To such let me say that Francis Thompson was born of
Catholic parents in Lancashire, England, in 1859, that he died,
fortified by the last rites of the Church he loved, at the age of
forty-eight, that most of his life was spent in poverty and ill-health,
that he was subject to terrible and persistent temptations, but remained
faithful to the Church, and made in the Church's honor some of the
greatest poems in the English language. I compare him to a contemporary
poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne, chiefly because Swinburne was the poet
of Paganism as Francis Thompson was the poet of Catholicity, because
their careers present interesting resemblances as well as interesting
contrasts, and because both are what is called "Victorian" poets.
Now, in this connection let me ask you if you ever seriously considered
the advantages of living in a Republic, of living, for example, in the
United States of America instead of in England? There is, for example,
the recurrent excitement of changing the president once every four
years, of having every so often a new chief executive on whom to vent
your enthusiastic affection or your enthusiastic loathing. A president
is a wonderful safety-valve for the pent-up feelings of a nation. The
suffrage, the right to vote, must be a golden privilege indeed,
otherwise so many members of the wiser sex would not pursue it with such
zeal and devotion.
But the advantage of living in a Republic to which I desire particularly
to call your attention this afternoon is the advantage of escaping from
the custom of calling periods of artistic and literary endeavor after
the sovereigns who happened to rule during them. You never hear James
Whitcomb Riley or Edwin Markham spoken of as Wilsonian poets. But you do
hear Ben Jonson called an Elizabethan poet, which is just as absurd. You
never hear Bryant and Whittier called poets of the Lincoln period. But
you do hear such utterly dissimilar poets as Algernon Charles Swinburne
and Francis Thompson spoken of as Victorian poets.
Why is this? Why is the Elizabethan era? Why should the age that glowed
with the deathless flames of Shakespeare's genius, that echoed with Ben
Jonson's lyric laughter, that was pierced by the poignant music of
Robert Southwell, the martyred Jesuit poet, be named after Elizabeth,
the persecutor of the saints, the vain and selfish and cruel woman who
then occupied England's throne, to England's lasting shame?
And why are we to-day considering, in Swinburne and Francis Thompson,
two Victorian poets? Why Victorian? Of course, Queen Victoria was a good
wife and mother, a noble gentlewoman. I think that we all like
everything that we know about Queen Victoria except perhaps her
politics.
But why should the name of this estimable woman be used to designate the
intellectual and spiritual life of the time during which she ruled, a
life from which she was as remote as was the Queen of Sheba? Why should
we give the placid name Victorian to that time of violent sin and
violent virtue, of passionate infidelity and passionate faith, that time
which produced the Darwinian theory, and the Oxford Movement, which
produced the cruel reign of dogmatic science and the Catholic
renascence, which produced the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne and
the poetry of Francis Thompson?
The combination of these two names may strike you as unusual. You know
that Swinburne was what is called a Pagan, that he hated all forms of
Christianity and especially the Catholic Church. You know also that
Francis Thompson was the Church's poet-laureate, the greatest Catholic
poet of modern times. And you wonder why Swinburne and Francis Thompson
should be mentioned in the same breath.
Well, great as are the differences between these poets, the resemblances
are striking. It is true that when Swinburne was at the height of his
fame, Francis Thompson was running errands and holding horses in the
London streets, his genius practically unknown. Yet he was famous before
Swinburne's death, and there are other points of contact beside that of
time between this militant pagan and this militant Christian.
In the first place, both were poets. Both had genuine talent, and both
had a strong desire to do the work of the poet, that is, to find beauty
and to bind beauty with a chain of linked rhyme.
Now the poet's search for beauty often is difficult, and it was
especially difficult in London in the latter days of the nineteenth
century. All the poets were seeking for beauty, but the scientists had
been industriously trying to drive beauty out of the world. Of course,
they had not succeeded, any more than the French Atheist succeeded a few
years ago in carrying out his blasphemous threat of putting out that
light in the heavens. But they had thrown a veil over the face of
beauty, and made beauty hard to see except for those who looked with the
strong eyes of faith.
How the poets worried! Where had beauty flown? Browning thought that
beauty was in humanity. So he searched for beauty in humanity, and in
his search made many interesting and noble poems. Tennyson, that
magnificent artist in words, thought that beauty was somewhere in
evolution. And he at last descended to the most supine of intellectual
attitudes, his philosophy being merely that somehow good would be the
final goal of all, that everything would come out all right in the end.
And he uttered the most absurd statement ever made by any poet in the
history of the world when he said "There lies more faith in honest
doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds."
All the poets were seeking after beauty. When Swinburne, full of Greek
and Latin and talent and conceit, left Oxford University to begin a
military career, he was seeking for beauty. And when Francis Thompson
was selling matches and shoestrings in the London gutters, he was
seeking for beauty.
Swinburne knew that the life around him was dull and materialistic. The
scientists had said that the old ethical and spiritual values were dead.
There could be no beauty in religion, for the scientists had killed
religion, putting up in its place their own artificial dogma. Beauty and
light had gone out of life.
So Swinburne decided, logically enough, that since beauty was not in his
own land and age, he must seek it in the ages that had gone before. So
he wrote not of modern scientific, dull, Victorian London, but of
ancient Venice, of ancient Rome, of ancient Greece. He lamented the
departure of Venus and Apollo and Dionysus and all the old gods and
goddesses, and the loss of the glories of the spacious classic days.
But Swinburne failed. Musical as are his rhymes and rhythms, lofty as
was his imagination, he failed. He failed to write convincingly of
medieval Rome and ancient Venice because he could not understand what
made these cities beautiful and great--their faith. He failed to write
convincingly of ancient Greece because he could never be that rare and
in its way splendid thing, an honest pagan.
No one can be a real pagan nowadays. Swinburne is not to be blamed
because he failed to be a real pagan, but because he tried to be a
pagan. The ancient Greeks who lived before the time of Christ were brave
and simple men, their chief virtues were courage, patriotism, obedience
to the law, democracy and zeal for art. These virtues were in time taken
over and multiplied by the Catholic Church, which has preserved all of
pagan culture that deserved preservation. Swinburne rejected these
virtues, probably thinking them to be Christian innovations, and the
pagans of whom he wrote were sensual, decadent things, like the
degenerate Greeks who lived in the days of Roman supremacy. And
Swinburne finally reached his true level in the poem in which he speaks
by the mouth of Julian the Apostate, the poor maniac who rejected
Christianity and struggled vainly to restore the worship of the
legendary gods of his heathen ancestors.
Francis Thompson, like Swinburne, sought for beauty. And Francis
Thompson found beauty. Francis Thompson found beauty because he knew
where to look. He found beauty in prosaic scientific modern London, he
found beauty in the city streets. He found beauty right around the
corner, in a certain little Church around the corner which is also the
big Church around the world. He found beauty where she is and always
will be, in the Catholic faith.
Swinburne felt his lack of faith. He bitterly resented the veil that his
infidelity had put between himself and beauty. And therefore he attacked
faith, and railed with all the venom of a disappointed man against
Christ, his Saints and His Church.
Swinburne longed for the days of pagan license and revelry, when Pan and
Apollo dwelt with man. Francis Thompson knew that God was with man,
that no street was so humble, no house so poor as not to know the tread
of His feet. Instead of longing for a return of the old imaginary gods,
he saw the beauty of God evident in such harsh thoroughfares as Charing
Cross, and brooding even over the muddy waters of the Thames. He wrote:
THE KINGDOM OF GOD
The angels keep their ancient places,
Turn but a stone and start a wing,
'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces
That miss the many splendoured thing.
But when so sad thou canst not sadder
Cry:--and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross.
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry,--clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth but Thames!
A dangerous test of a poet's genius is to be found in his attitude
towards the simplest and smallest things. It is for this reason that any
poet of talent may safely write about a mountain or a waterfall or a
sunset, but only a very great poet should ever write about children.
The poets know this, and in spite of his paganism and sophistication
Swinburne often tried to prove his genius by making excursions into the
enchanted land of childhood. He wrote one poem which he considered a
very important achievement, reprinting it in many editions of his
poetry. And in that poem Swinburne did accomplish something well worthy
of accomplishment, he expressed an interesting and beautiful idea. Now
it would be absurd to take this poem of Swinburne's and compare it with
one of Francis Thompson's masterpieces, such as "The Hound of Heaven."
But it surely is fair to compare it to a poem by Francis Thompson on the
same theme.
You must consider how it is that a poet writes a poem. There are said to
be poets who are struck on the head by a great inspiration, and let that
inspiration trickle down through the shoulder and arm and out the end of
a pen upon a piece of paper. There are said to be such poets, although
in my rather extensive observation of poets I have never met one. The
usual method is for a poet to meditate on a subject, to set down on
paper all the most beautiful ideas which his subject suggests to him.
Well, let us imagine Swinburne confronted by the miracle of childhood.
Knowing that his reputation must stand or fall by this attempt, he
endeavors to record all the splendid emotions and noble comparisons
which childhood suggests to him. And what is the result? What is the
climax of thought in his poem? The climax is this: Swinburne says that
the baby about whom he is writing, who happens to be wearing a plush
cap, looks like a moss rose bud in its soft sheath.
This is a pleasant idea. Undoubtedly it pleased the baby's mother and
the baby herself when she grew up. But these are scarcely the words that
shall tremble on the lips of time.
Francis Thompson was great enough to do the obvious thing. When he was
drawing inspiration from the miracle of childhood, he did not think
about plush caps and moss roses. Instead, he did the most natural and
the most beautiful thing. He thought about the Infant Jesus. Childhood
to him suggested Him Who made childhood Divine. And in "Ex Ore
Infantium" he gave that thought immortal expression.
But in comparing the plush cap of the baby to a moss rose, Swinburne did
not think he had said the last word on the subject. As the result of
prolonged meditation on childhood, he produced another poem in which he
really did accomplish something remarkable. He found a rhyme for
"babe."
Now, I doubt if any of you know the rhyme for "babe," unless you happen
to be familiar with this poem of Swinburne's or with those of Chaucer,
who also used this word. There is such a word and Swinburne ingeniously
introduces it towards the end of his poem. He writes:
Babe, if rhyme be none
For that small sweet word,
Babe, the sweetest one
Ever heard,
Right it is and sweet
Rhyme should not keep true
Time with such a sweet
Thing as you ...
... None can tell in metre
Fit for ears on earth
What sweet star grew sweeter
At your birth.
Wisdom doubts what may be;
Hope with smile sublime
Trusts, but neither, baby
Knows the rhyme.
Wisdom lies down lonely;
Hope keeps watch from far;
None but one seer only
Sees the star.
Love alone, with yearning
Heart for astrolabe
Takes the star's height, burning
O'er the babe.
Compare this, not with Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," but with
another poem on childhood, and from that poem decide which of the two
poets had the real inspiration. Compare it with Francis Thompson's poem
to his god-child. In this he imagines himself as having died, and he
imagines that the little boy has died too. So he gives the little boy a
kind of working plan of Heaven--he tells him where he may find him after
he goes to Heaven. He writes:
And when, immortal mortal, droops your head,
And you, the child of deathless song, are dead;
Then, as you search with unaccustomed glance
The ranks of Paradise for my countenance,
Turn not your tread along the Uranian sod,
Among the bearded counsellors of God;
For if in Eden as on earth are we
I sure shall keep a younger company:
Pass where beneath their ranged ganfalons
The starry cohorts shake their shielded suns,
The dreadful mass of their enridged spears;
Pass where majestical the Eternal peers
The stately choice of the great saintdom meet,--
A silvern congregation, globed complete
In sandalled shadow of the Triune feet:
Pass by where wait, your poet wayfarer,
Your cousin clusters, emulous to share
With you the roseal lightnings burning mid their hair;
Pass the crystalline sea, the Lampads Seven:--
Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.
I have said that Francis Thompson was great and simple enough to do the
obvious thing. Take the mere matter of how to act and what to say in
regard to a crucifix, for example. When that admirable poet Dante
Gabriel Rossetti was before a crucifix, or had it in mind as the theme
of a poem, he would admire the carving, and write a colorful romantic
ballad about the man who made it, the man who sold it, the people
through whose hands it had passed. The result would be a beautiful poem,
but it would be elaborate, artificial, the result of ingenious effort.
When Swinburne was before a crucifix, he was reminded of the false
delights for which he longed, and which he thought Christianity had
driven from the world. So he would rave and blaspheme against the
crucifix and all that it represented--producing verse that is
technically excellent, but artificial and unnatural. But when Francis
Thompson had a crucifix before him or in mind, he would do the simplest
and most natural thing in the world. He would say his prayers. And
because he was a genius he said them in words that are, as we use the
term of literature, immortal.
A NOTE ON THOMAS HARDY
Of Elizabeth-Jane who is the heroine of "The Mayor of Casterbridge," if
heroine this tale may be said to have, we learn that "she did not cease
to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom
such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the adult stage was she
whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional
episode in a general drama of pain." This is a rather Jacobean sentence,
in form not typical of Hardy, but in thought it is greatly significant.
It is likely that Hardy himself wondered at the happiness in which he
left Elizabeth-Jane, reassuring himself perhaps by the conviction that
her "unbroken tranquillity" was the exception which proved the rule her
youth had taught her.
For it cannot be denied that according to the Hardy philosophy, implicit
in his tales and explicit in his poems, sorrow is the rule and joy the
exception. In no other writing is he more clearly a fatalist than in
"The Mayor of Casterbridge"; in no other book does he urge more
unmistakably his belief that men and women are but helpless puppets in
the hands of mischievous fate, that good-will and courage and honesty
are brittle weapons for humanity's defense.
The evident fact that Thomas Hardy is a fatalist is responsible for the
common and absurd idea that he is a pagan. Now, there is no
philosophy--with the exception of the robust and joyous philosophy of
the Middle Ages--with which Hardy's philosophy contrasts more strongly
than it does with paganism, that is, with the pagan philosophy of the
spacious classic day. When we speak of a pagan of ancient Greece or a
pagan of ancient Rome we have in mind a brave patriotic man, with a
vivid sense of the responsibilities and privileges of citizenship, and
the habit of making the most of life, of enjoying to the full the years
allowed him on earth. This last characteristic rose from the pagan
fatalism, the belief that man should make sure of such visible and
tangible delights as were available, because there was no counting on
the possibility of happiness or even of existence after death. This was
the state of mind which succeeded the earlier romantic polytheism, and
was the natural successor of a religious system which attributed to the
gods power over mankind but neither love nor justice. So the typical
fatalism was materialistic; it was based, of course, upon despair, but
its manifestations were not desperate. Rather there was a general
conspiracy of joy, not dissimilar to that of a popular religious cult
which arose in the United States during the last half century. Disease
and sorrow and death were to be generally ignored; mankind was expected
to eat, drink and be merry, and good manners required silence as to the
explanatory "for to-morrow we die."
However hollow may have been mirth of the pagan fatalists, it was at any
rate loud and general. And there can be no doubt that by a kind of
self-hypnosis these fatalists were able to give their joy a
convincingness and a continuity--they "were always drunken," in
Baudelaire's sense. Artificial and in essence tragic as was their state
of mind, he would be a false historian who pictured these pagan
fatalists as people obsessed with the idea of death and the unkindness
of the gods; as holding with anything like unanimity the belief that
"happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain."
But this is Hardy's dominant idea; it is a belief on which he insists
with a propagandist enthusiasm which sometimes mars the artistic value
of his work. No Scotch or English members of some stricter offshoot of
a strict Calvinistic sect ever was more firmly convinced that this earth
is a vale of tears, or more eager to spread this belief. Every writer, I
think, deals with the characters who are his creations as he imagines
God to deal with mankind. This is why literary criticism is closer to
theology than to any other science; this is why we cannot claim to
understand any writer unless we know what he thinks about God. And the
God of Hardy's belief, as indicated in his long succession of stories
and poems, is no more the remote, indifferent, sensuous, self-sufficient
Deity of the pagan fatalist than he is the loving and omnipotent Father
of true Christian belief. Instead he is the stern, avenging Deity of the
Hebrews, without pity, accessible to no intercessors, the Deity whom we
find to-day fearfully worshiped by adherents of the bleakest forms of
Puritanism. It would be a misnomer to call Hardy's philosophy a
Christian fatalism, but it is a fatalism which is the basis of the
religious systems of many who since 1517 have professed and called
themselves Christians.
I am frequently impressed, as I read Hardy, with what I may call the
evangelical cast of his mind. He is so intent on announcing his
discovery that mankind is fallible, unhappy, helpless, undesirable. The
people of Hardy's stories are so virtueless, for the most part, that the
reader can readily believe that Hardy is determined to show that they
deserve no pity from the extraordinary Deity who is also a creature of
Hardy's imagination, and that in his own way the novelist (like his
greatest Puritan predecessor in literature) is trying to "justify the
ways of God toward man." And "The Mayor of Casterbridge," with its
lovely pictures of Wessex hills and valleys and its most unlovely
pictures of Wessex men and women, irresistibly recalls lines from a
certain popular evangelical hymn--the lines which tell of a place "where
every prospect pleases and only man is vile."
Hardy is a true realist in that he reports faithfully the habits and
manners of people with whom he is familiar, and in that--unlike Mr.
Dreiser and other claimants to the title realist--he has humor and
admits it to his chronicles. Also he admits good impulses to the lives
he creates, although his philosophy seldom lets him cause these impulses
to be translated into successful action. He is poet enough to have a
sense of beauty and humor inherent in phrases. "But I know that 'a's a
banded teetotaler," says Solomon Longways, "and that if any of his men
be ever so little overtook by a drop he's down upon 'em as stern as the
Lord upon the jovial Jews." And what living poet could write a simpler
and more moving study of the immemorial subject, death, than Mother
Cuxsom's brief elegy on Mrs. Henchard? "Well, poor soul, she's helpless
to hinder that or anything now. And all her shining keys will be took
from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a' didn't wish
seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will all be as nothing."
A student of literary motives can easily trace the working of Hardy's
philosophy in this book--can see it guiding the novelist's pen, changing
his purposes, forcing him to deal harshly, sometimes, with characters
whom a writer must come to love as a father his children. Was not
Matthew Henchard's rehabilitation to be complete, and the tale to end
with a prosperous reunited family? Probably, but Thomas Hardy (unlike
Victor Hugo when he handled a similar plot in "Les Miserables") had his
monster theory to reckon with. So Elizabeth-Jane must be Newson's child,
Lucette must maleficently tangle lives, and Henchard must die in a
road-side hut. And even the goldfinch must starve in its paper-covered
cage.