CHAPTER IX: AT MONASTERY GATES

* * * * * * *

By 1889 Rossetti had become an absorbing interest, but Coleridge, in what F. T. calls his Pre-Rossettian days, "had been my favourite poet." Before Coleridge, Shelley.

An early poem not elsewhere printed, written on the anniversary of Rossetti's death, illustrates the closeness of his affection—

This was the day that great, sad heart,That great, sad heart did beat no more,Which nursed so long its Southern flameAmid our vapours dull and frore.. . . . .Through voice of art and voice of songHe uttered one same truth abroad,—Through voice of art and voice of song—That Love below a pilgrim trod:He said, through women's eyes, "How long!Love's other half's with God!". . . . .He taught our English art to gazeOn Nature with a learner's eyes:That hills which look into the heavenHave their fair bases on the earth;God paints His most angelic huesOn vapours of a terrene birth.May God his locks with glories twine,Be kind to all he wrought amiss!May God his locks with glories twine,And give him back his Beatrice.This day the sad heart ceased to pine,I trust his lady's beats at his,And two beat in a single bliss.

Of all Thompson's lines the second of the sunset-image—

Day's dying dragon lies drooping his crest,Panting red pants into the West,

has been found the most ludicrous. No critic hesitated in condemning it, and your reader most often splitsthe line with a laugh, thinking the while of Hope Brothers. But the poet thought upon his own thought and upheld his line in face of the query marks confidently balanced on the margin of his proofs; he remembered Coleridge's—

As if this earth in fast, thick pants were breathing.

"Red" or "thick," there is little for the parodist to choose between them. Much closer borrowing from Coleridge, in which he pronounces the words and rhymes of his master but keeps his voice ringing high with personality, is found at the close of "To my Godchild." It is easy to know with what keen recognition he must have read Coleridge's "Ne Plus Ultra." He borrowed its weakest lines because he dared not borrow the strongest; they would not have become more famous on his hands. Coleridge's poem ends:—

Reveal'd to none of all the Angelic State,Save to the Lampads Seven[31]That watched the Throne of Heaven!

Thompson's ending is

Pass the crystalline sea, the Lampads seven:—Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.

We have seen an ending; here is a borrowed opening:—

Like a lone Arab, old and blind,Some caravan had left behind,Who sits beside a ruin'd well,Where the shy sand-asps bask and swell;And now he hangs his aged head aslantAnd listens for a human sound—in vain, &c.

It develops into an allegory of illusion: the poet sitsdesolate, and, thinking Love visits him, is deceived. Just thus is Thompson's passage beginning—

As an Arab journeyethThrough a sand of Ayaman,Lean Thirst, lolling its cracked tongue, &c. . . .

The staging, the characters, are the same. Perhaps curiosity in opium-eating led him early and impressionably to the study of Coleridge. "The Pains of Sleep" brings their experiences cheek to cheek—haggard cheek to haggard cheek. Thompson wrote a prose tale embodying the same terror of dreams and dream-existence. Both used humorous verse and conversation for a means of escape. They laughed to forget, and punned, not so much to laugh, as to be distracted in the exercise. One of them did the talking much better than the other; but their tongues moved to the same command, their voices ran on from the same fear. Even "Love dies, Love dies, Love dies—Ah! Love is dead" is the reflection of a page of Coleridge's commonplaces.

These are casual likenesses, found on the penetrable levels of resemblance, comparable to the coincidence of the after-collegiate enlisting of the two men, the Bowles connexion, or the Strand experience. But Francis Thompson, as it happens, has been explicit on the subject of the unreachable quality of Coleridge:—

"No other poet, perhaps, except Spenser has been an initial influence, a generative influence, on so many poets. Having with that mild Elizabethan much affinity, it is natural that he should be a 'poets' poet' in the rarer sense—the sense of fecundating other poets. As with Spenser, it is not that other poets have made him their model, have reproduced essentials of his style (accidents no great poet will consciously perpetuate). The progeny are sufficiently unlike the parent. It is that he hasincited the very sprouting in them of the laurel-bough, has been to them a fostering sun of song. Such a primary influence he was to Rossetti—Rossetti, whose model was far more Keats than Coleridge. Such he was to Coventry Patmore, in whose work one might trace many masters rather than Coleridge." ("Such he was to me," F. T., a reviewer in a public print, refrained from adding.) "'I did not try to imitate his style,' said that great singer. 'I can hardly explainhowhe influenced me: he was rather an ideal of perfect style than a model to imitate; but in some indescribable way he did influence my development more than any other poet.' No poet, indeed, has been senseless enough to imitate the inimitable. One might as well try to paint air as to catch a style so void of all manner that it is visible, like air, only in its results. . . . Imitation has no foothold; it would tread on glass."[32]

F. T. noted in theAcademy, November 20, 1897, the direct coincidence of Browning's

Its sad in sweet, its sweet in sad,

and Crashaw's

Sweetness so sad, sadness so sweet.

It did not come within his scope as a reviewer to mention the doubly direct coincidence (or something nearer) of his own:

At all the sadness in the sweet,The sweetness in the sad.

Coleridge and the other poets to whom Coleridge had guided him; Shelley and, in prose, de Quincey, are prominent in his early reading. To go to de Quincey's "Daughter of Lebanon" for the pedigree of "The Houndof Heaven" is like going to the grocer's for the seeds, in coloured packets, of the passion flower. But the Victorian tassels of the earlier piece do not hide its lessons—"to suffer that God should give by seeming to refuse"—and pursuit is the theme common to both, and common to writers of most ages. De Quincey did no more than hand it on. From St. Augustine's "Thou wast driving me on with Thy good, so that I could not be at rest until Thou wast manifest to the eye of my soul"; to Meister Eckhart's "He who will escape Him only runs to His bosom; for all corners are open to him," and so on, the idea is the same, though less elaborated and dramatic than in "The Hound."

In the "Mistress of Vision" the scenery and the lady are Shelleyan; one marvels that Thompson's teaching comes from those illusive lips. Thus would it have been written had such thoughts gained desired expression through Shelley. The thoughts are Francis Thompson's; the mode the other's. Mr. Beacock refers one to passages of the "Witch of Atlas," but the likeness is too elusively general to be caught in particular verses, and such things as the borrowing of "blosmy" are nothing more than clues, like the fragmentary débris of a paper-chase, to the whereabouts of an influence.

An early book of transcription contains a deal of Donne and Stevenson (includingFather Damienand poems), a touch of Andrew Lang, more of Blunt, a little Meredith; much Rossetti and Cowley, some Suckling, the inevitable Browne, and a Theodore Watts. Drayton, too, is met in the Thompsonian verses: "Hear, my Muses, I demand," &c., so that when Mr. Chesterton says that the shortest way of describing the Victorian age is to say that Francis Thompson stood outside it, he might have gone on, with a little access of wilfulness, to say that the seventeenth century was best described by saying that in it was Francis Thompson.

Marvell he had not read till after his first books—"JustCrashaw and a little Cowley—and I had formed my style before I knew Cowley, whom I really did curiously resemble; though none perceived it, because none had read Cowley."

The Crashaw descent may be traced by way of Coleridge, who said of certain lines of the "Hymn to St. Teresa" that "They were ever present in my mind whilst writing the second part of 'Christabel'; if, indeed, by some process of the mind, they did not suggest the first thought of the whole poem." Crashaw's Romanism did not interfere with Coleridge's pleasure, though in reading Herbert, whom he found "delicious," and at a time when he could note "that he was comparatively but little known," he paused over inquiries as to the exactness of that author's conformity to Protestantism. Coleridge was much taken with Herbert's "The Flower," a poem "especially affecting"—and naturally, to a poet. It is easy to suppose that Francis gave it particular attention on S. T. C.'s recommendation, and that he had in his mind the lines

I once more smell the dew and rainAnd relish versing

when, conscious of the wings "Of coming songs that lift my hair and stir it," he praises the

Giver of spring, and song, and every young new thing!

Herbert, welcoming a return of grace in his heart, writes:—

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and cleanAre Thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring.

Thompson, in "From the Night of Forebeing," writes:—

From sky to sod,The world's unfolded blossom smells of God.

Closer still is the resemblance, noted by Mr. Beacock, between Herbert's

Only thy grace, which with these elements comes,Knoweth the ready way,And hath the privie keyOp'ning the soul's most subtile rooms;While those to spirits refin'd, at doore attendDespatches from their friend,

and Thompson's

Its keys are at the cincture hung of God.

Mr. Beacock has also pointed out the resemblance between Southwell's

Did Christ manure thy heart to breed him briers?Or doth it need this unaccustom'd soyleWith hellish dung to fertile heaven's desires?

and Thompson's

Whether man's heart or life it be which yieldsThee harvest, must Thy harvest-fieldsBe dunged with rotten death?

Remembering his own acknowledgment—"just Crashaw and a little Cowley"—one may turn to Mr. Garvin's equally accurate summing up in theBookman, March 1897:—

"He is an argonaut of literature, far travelled in the realm of gold, and he has in a strange degree the assimilative mind that takes suggestions as a cat takes milk. . . . 'The Daisy' was strangely Wordsworthian. But 'Dream-Tryst' was like Shelley, and had that strange ethereal poignancy. There was the 'Dead Cardinal of Westminster,' with its stanzas of shuddering beauty upon the prescience of death. There was the resplendent 'Judgment in Heaven,' with the trenchant Elizabethan apothegm of its epilogue. The 'Corymbus for Autumn' was an overwhelming improvisation of wild and exorbitant fantasy. To be familiar with it is to repent of having ever reproached it for a splendidpedantry and a monstrous ambition. On the whole, if Mr. Thompson had stopped at his first volume we should have judged him more akin in stature and temperament to Marlowe than to any other great figure in English poetry. It seemed to reveal the same 'high astounding terms,' the same vast imagery; the sameamour de l'impossible;the soul striking the sublime stars, the intolerable passion for beauty. But Mr. Thompson did not stop there. After the publication of his second volume, when it became clear that the 'Hound of Heaven' and 'Sister Songs' should be read together as a strict lyrical sequence, there was no longer any comparison possible except the highest, the inevitable comparison with even Shakespeare's Sonnets. The Sonnets are the greatest soliloquy in literature. The 'Hound of Heaven' and 'Sister Songs' together are the second greatest; and there is no third. In each case it is rather consciousness imaged in the magic mirror of poetry than explicit autobiography. As to Mr. Francis Thompson, what strange indentures bound him to the Muse we cannot tell. We are permitted to guess some strict and sad apprenticeship paid with bitter bread and unimaginable dreams, some ultimate deliverance of song. It is only possible to realise all the beauty of Mr. Thompson's work when it is read as a lyrical sequence related to Shakespeare's Sonnets on the side of poetry, and to de Quincey'sOpium Eateron the side of prose."

To a certain extent Thompson states his own case in treating of Mangan's liberties with his Irish originals:—

"They are outrageous, or would be outrageous were the success not so complete. But poetry is a rootedly immoral art, in which success excuses well-nigh everything. That in the soldier is flat blasphemy which in the captain, the master of his craft, is but commendable daring. Exactly as a great poet may plagiarise to his heart's content, because he plagiarises well, so the truly poetical translator may reindite a foreign poem and call it a translation."

And in reviewing Henley'sBurnshe writes, again with the braggart touch of one who may have gone the same rascally road:—

"Spartan law holds good in literature, where to steal is honourable, provided it be done with skill and dexterity: wherefore Mercury was the patron both of thieves and poets."

Touching a more serious aspect of the case, he writes with Patmore in his mind:—

"There are some truths so true, that upon everyone who sees them clearly they force almost the same mode of expression; they create their own formulas."

It might not have been guessed that the author of "Horatius" had the means wherewith to lend to the wealthy; but Macaulay's lines "On the Battle of Naseby"—

Oh! wherefore come ye forth, in triumph from the North,With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red?And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout?And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye tread?Oh! evil was the root, and bitter was the fruit,And crimson was the juice of the vintage that we trod;For we trampled on the throng of the haughty and the strong,Who sate in the high places, and slew the saints of God!—

supply the model for the ecclesiastical ballad "The Veteran of Heaven" which begins—

O Captain of the wars, whence won Ye so great scars?In what fight did Ye smite, and what manner was the foe?Was it on a day of rout they compassed Thee about,Or gat Ye these adornings when Ye wrought their overthrow?

"I am disposed to put in a good word for Macaulay's ballads," F. T. has said.

A fair thought, a keen observation, a neat phrase are seldom strictly preserved. If accident does not take two or more writers to the same hill, show them the same sunset, and charge their minds with the same words, plagiarism will serve the purpose. Evenif Cowley's rare wit had remained in manuscript unseen, its turns would not have been for many centuries entirely his own. Literature will out. To one or the other, to plagiarism or accident, is due a likeness between Thompson's

So fearfully the sun doth sound,Clanging up beyond Cathay;For the great earthquaking sunrise rolling up beyond Cathay,

and Mr. Kipling's "And the sun came up like thunder out of China, 'cross the Bay."

A wind got up frae off the sea.It blew the stars as clear could be.It blew in the een of a' the three,And the mune was shining clearly!

sang Stevenson's Highlander years before Thompson wrote

And a great wind blew all the stars to flare.

But in neither case is Thompson, though the dates are against him, proved a thief.

Of a review of hisPoemsin theSt. James's Gazette:—

"I only deprecate in it the implied comparison to Dante, and the to-me-bewildering comparison to Matthew Arnold. 'Tis not merely that I have studied no poet less; it is that I should have thought we were in the sharpest contrast. His characteristic fineness lies in that very form and restraint to which I so seldom attain: his characteristic drawback in the lack of that full stream which I am seldom without. The one needs and becomes strict banks—for he could not fill wider ones; the other too readily overflows all banks. But these are casual specks on an appreciative article—an article as unusually appreciative as that in theChronicle."

"French poetry—all modern European poetry—may in the ultimate analysis be found derivable from the Latin hymn," says anEdinburghreviewer (January 1911). Francis Thompson in that case was familiar with the remote ancestry of his house. He helped himself from the hymns.

Of the prose of the Vulgate he wrote in a review of a paper by Dr. Barry on St. Jerome's revision:—

"No tongue can say so much in so little. And literary diffuseness is tamed in our Vulgate not only by the terser influence of the rustic Latin, but by the needs begotten of Hebrew brevity. Nor to any unprejudiced ear can this Vulgate Latin be unmusical. For such an ear the authority of John Addington Symonds (though Dr. Barry adduces that authority) is not needed to certify its fine variety of new movement. 'Surge, propera, amica mea, columba mea, formosa mea, et veni;' that and the whole passage which follows, or that preceding strain closing in—'Fulcite me floribus, stipate me malis, quia amore langueo': could prose have more impassioned loveliness of melody? Compare it even with the beautiful corresponding English of the Authorised (Protestant) Version; the advantage in music is not to the English, but to the soft and wooing fall of these deliciously lapsing syllables. Classic prose, could it even have forgotten its self-conscious living-up to foreign models, had never the heart of passion for movement such as this, or as the queenly wail of theLamentations—'Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo! facta est quasi vidua domina gentium!'"If the Vulgate be the fountain-source, the rivers are numerous—and neglected. How many outside the ranks of ecclesiastics ever open the Breviary, with its Scriptural collocations over which has presided a wonderful symbolic insight, illuminating them by passages from the Fathers and significant prayers? The officesof the Church are suggested poetry—that of the Assumption, for example, the 'Little Office,' and almost all those of Our Lady. The very arrangement of the liturgical year is a suggested epic, based as it is on a deep parallel between the evolution of the seasons and that of the Christian soul of the human race."

"If the Vulgate be the fountain-source, the rivers are numerous—and neglected. How many outside the ranks of ecclesiastics ever open the Breviary, with its Scriptural collocations over which has presided a wonderful symbolic insight, illuminating them by passages from the Fathers and significant prayers? The officesof the Church are suggested poetry—that of the Assumption, for example, the 'Little Office,' and almost all those of Our Lady. The very arrangement of the liturgical year is a suggested epic, based as it is on a deep parallel between the evolution of the seasons and that of the Christian soul of the human race."

And further on:—

"It is a pedant who cannot see in St. Augustine one of the great minds of the world, master of a great style. Some flights in theConfessionsare almost lyric, such as the beautiful 'Sero te amavi,' or the magnificent discourse on memory. The last books especially of theCity of Godwould sometimes be no wise incongruous beside theParadisoof Dante. St. Bernard's prose rises at times into a beauty which is essentially that of penetratingly ethereal poetry: not for nothing has Dante exalted him in theParadiso;not for nothing does such a man exalt such men. In them is the meat and milk and honey of religion; and did we read them our souls would be larger-boned."

Of his early acquaintance with the Bible he writes:—

"The Bible as an influence from the literary standpoint has a late but important date in my life. As a child I read it, but for its historical interest. Nevertheless, even then I was greatly, though vaguely, impressed by the mysterious imagery, the cloudy grandeurs, of the Apocalypse. Deeply uncomprehended, it was, of course, the pageantry of an appalling dream; insurgent darkness, with wild lights flashing through it; terrible phantasms, insupportably revealed against profound light, and in a moment no more; on the earth hurryings to and fro, like insects of the earth at a sudden candle; unknown voices uttering out of darkness darkened anddisastrous speech; and all this in motion and turmoil, like the sands of a fretted pool. Such is the Apocalypse as it inscribes itself on the verges of my childish memories. In early youth it again drew me to itself, giving to my mind a permanent and shaping direction. In maturer years Ecclesiastes (casually opened during a week of solitude in the Fens) masterfully affected a temperament in key with its basic melancholy. But not till quite later years did the Bible as a whole become an influence. Then, however, it came with decisive power. But not as it had influenced most writers. My style, being already formed, could receive no evident impress from it: its vocabulary had come to me through the great writers of our language. In the first place its influence was mystical; it revealed to me a whole scheme of existence, and lit up life like a lantern."

"Assumpta Maria" is "vamped" from the office of Our Lady; he had no notion of concealing its origin, but rather sought to point it out. The prayer to the Virgin is itself a confession—

Remember me, poor Thief of Song!

He wrote in 1893, with an enclosure of poems, including the "Assumpta Maria":—

"They are almost entirely taken from the Office of the Assumption, some from the Canticle, a few images from the heathen mythology. Some very beautiful images are from a hymn by St. Nerses the Armenian, rendered inCarmina Mariana. You will perceive therefore the reason of the motto from Cowley: 'Thou needst not make new songs, but say the old.'"

It is at the close of the poem that Francis calls himself "poor Thief of Song." The theme put honesty out of reach. It has been treated too often. Even Donne's"Immensity cloistered in the dear womb" is part of "the great conspiracy" of Marian Song.

The lines most in question in St. Nerses's hymn, thus rendered in English by W. H. Kent, are—

Dwelling-place of light, be gladsome;Temple, where the true Sun dwelleth;Throne of God, rejoice, thou bearestHim, the Word of the Almighty . . . .Home of him whom none may compass;Hostel, where the sun finds resting . . . .Daniel's great Stone-bearing Mountain;Solomon's fair Hill of Incense;Fountain sealed for him that keeps it;Garden closed for him that plants.

"I remember," Francis writes, "Father Anselm's expression of comical surprise at a passage in 'Her Portrait,' where I had employed the terms of Canon Law relating to ecclesiastical property. Why, he said, here's a whole page ofDe Contractibusin poetry. His surprise was increased when I remarked that I had never read any work on the subject. . . . I said I got the terms where any one else could get them—from English history.

"Equal was the surprise of another person at finding a whole passage of Anna Kingsford in my poetry. It was a passage describing the earth'saura, really remarkably like a passage in a book I had not at the time read."

In all these cases he is an imitator by choice—independent in taking only what suits him and depending only where he will. In one case he was an imitator not by choice but by compulsion, a slavish follower. There was no more choice for him in following Patmore than for a son born like his father. Such a poem as "By Reason of Thy Law" was born of theUnknown Erosodes.

* * * * * * *

Here are quoted various sentences from F. T.'s note-books, letters, and published prose bearing on metre, or allied subjects.

Of the learning of poets:—

"I have studied and practised metre with arduous love since I was sixteen; reviewed poets and poetasters this twenty years or more, and never yet impeached one of such a matter as infraction or ignorance of academic metrical rule. For I know they don'tdoit—either poet or poetaster. Poetasters least of all men, because they are your metrical Tybalts and fight by the book—one, two, and the third in your bosom; poets because they have the law in their members, assimilated by eager obedience from their practised youth; their liberty is such liberty won by absorption of law, and is kept in its orbit by their sensitive feodality to the invisible—the hidden—sun of inspiration. 'They do not wrong but with just cause': such faults as they may commit in metre belong not to this elementary class. I have criticised poets' metre, but ever in the broader and larger things where blemish accused them not of ignorance or the carelessness that comes of inattention to rule. I repeat, they don't do those things, and my study of metre, poetry, and poets early taught me that."And he cites an unjustified attack on Stephen Phillips as a case in point.

And he cites an unjustified attack on Stephen Phillips as a case in point.

Of "Heard on the Mountain," a translation from Hugo inNew Poems—a metrical experiment:—

"That splendid fourteen-syllable metre of Chapman, to which Mr. Kipling has given a new vitality, I have here treated after the manner of Drydenian rhyming heroics; not only with the occasional triplet, but also the occasional Alexandrine, represented by a line of eight accents. Students of metre will see the analogy to be strict, theline of eight being merely the carrying to completion of the catalectic line of seven, as the Alexandrine is merely the filling out of the catalectic line of five accents."

Of "The Ode to the Setting Sun":—

"An ode I have thought not unworthy of preservation, though it was my first published poem of any importance. In view of the considerable resemblance between the final stanza and a well-known stanza in Mr. Davidson's 'Ballad of a Nun,' it is right to state that 'The Ode to the Setting Sun' was published as long ago as 1889. The poem has some interest to me in view of the frequent statement that I modelled the metre of 'The Hound of Heaven' on the ode metre of Mr. Patmore. 'The Ode to the Setting Sun' was published before I had seen any of Mr. Patmore's work; and a comparison of the two poems will therefore show exactly the extent to which the later poem was affected by that great poet's practice. The ode metre ofNew Poemsis, with this exception, completely based on the principles which Mr. Patmore may virtually be said to have discovered."

Of accent and quantity:—

"The classic poets are careful to keep up an interchange between accent and quantity, an approach and recession, just as is the case with the great English poets. Yet with all the lover-like coquetry between the two elements, they are careful that they shall never wed—again as with the great English poets. But (and here lies the difference) the position of the two elements isexactly reversed. It is quantity which gives the law—is the masculine element—in classic verse; it is accent in English. In English, quantity takes the feminine or subordinate place, as accent does in classic verse. In both it is bad metre definitely to unite the two."

Sending poetry from Pantasaph, October 1894, he writes to A. M.:—

"My dear lady, . . . . the long poem, ('The Anthem of Earth') was written only as an exercise in blank verse; indeed, as you will see, I have transferred to it whole passages from my prose articles. So it is solely for your judgment on the metre that I send it. It is my first serious attempt to handle that form, and it is not likely that I have succeeded all at once; especially as I have not confined myself to the strict limits of the metre, but have laid my hand at one clash among all the licences with which the Elizabethans build up their harmonies. The question is whether individual passages succeed sufficiently to justify the belief that I might reach mastery with practice, or whether I fail in such a fashion as to suggest native inaptitude for the metre. M—— thinks the poem a failure. Being a mistress of numerous metre, she counts all her feet; though her chosen method is the dactylic, since she uses her fingers for the purpose. It is well known that by this profound and exhaustive method of practical study, you may qualify yourself to sit in judgment on Shakespeare's metre, if he should submit his MS. to you from the Shades. I confess my practice is so slovenly that if anyone should assure me that my lines had eleven syllables apiece, I should be obliged to allow I had never counted them. We poor devils who write by ear have a long way to go before we attain to the scientific company of poets like M——, who has her verses at her fingers' ends.—F. T."

To the same purpose are notes on Henley's "Voluntaries":—

"They are in so-called 'irregular' lyric metre, ebbing and flowing with the motion itself. Irregular it is not, though the law is concealed. Only a most delicate response to the behests of inspiration can make suchverse successful. As some persons have an instinctive sense of orientation by which they know the quarter of the East, so the poet with this gift has a subtle sense of hidden metrical law, and in his most seeming-vagrant metres revolves always (so to speak) round a felt though invisible centre of obedience."

The immethodical exactitude of his method is further suggested in his note-book:—

"Temporal variations of metre responsive to the emotions, like the fluctuations of human respiration, which also varies indefinitely, under the passage of changeful emotions, and yet keeps an approximate temporal uniformity."

Here he evidently alludes particularly to the ode metre of "The Unknown Eros," for which Patmore claimed that the length of line was controlled by its emotional significance. On this subject another note must directly bear. It is to the effect that the matter forces the metre; that the poet is the servant, not master, of his theme, and that he must write in such metre as it dictates.

Again he writes:—

"Every great poet makes accepted metre a quite new metre, imparts to it a totally new movement, impresses his own individuality upon it."

And again:—

"All verse is rhythmic; but in the graver and more subtle forms the rhythm is veiled and claustral; it not only avoids obtruding itself, but seeks to withdraw itself from notice."

And again:—

"Metrically Poe is the lineal projector of Swinburne, and hence of modern metre at large—an influence most disastrous and decadent, like nearly all his influence on letters."[33]

His own choice among his metrical exercises was "The Making of Viola," of which a critic has said (theNation, November 23, 1907) "that the words seem never to alight, they so bound and rebound, and are so agile with life."

In an earlyMerry Englandarticle he writes of Crashaw:—

"His employment (in the 'Hymn to St. Teresa' and its companion 'The Bleeding Heart') of those mixed four-foot Iambics and Trochaics so often favoured by modern poets, marks an era in the metre. Coleridge (in theBiographia Literaria) adopts an excellent expression to distinguish measures which follow the changes of the sense from those which are regulated by a pendulum-like beat or tune—howevernewthe tune—overpowering all intrinsic variety. The former he stylesnumerousversification. Crashaw is beautifully numerous, attaining the most delicate music by veering pause and modulation—Miser of sound and syllable, no lessThan Midas of his coinage.We have said advisedly that the 'St. Teresa' marks an era in metre. For Coleridge was largely indebted to it and acknowledged his debt."

Miser of sound and syllable, no lessThan Midas of his coinage.

We have said advisedly that the 'St. Teresa' marks an era in metre. For Coleridge was largely indebted to it and acknowledged his debt."

In1892 F. T. had gone to Pantasaph. He was quartered, at first, in Bishop's House, at the monastery gates,[34]and the sandalled friars looked after all his wants—from boots to dogma.

"Thompson is ever so much better," writes Fr. Marianus soon after the poet's arrival. "He looks it too. He is less melancholy, in fact at times quite lively." And they cared for him delicately:—

"There is only one little thing about which I have some difficulty. I know Thompson must need now and again some little things, but I don't like to ask him does he need anything (though I have supplied him with paper, ink, &c.), and I should feel grateful if you would kindly write to Thompson and tell him to ask me for anything he may want—that I am his procurator."

His own first letter from Wales:—

"C'en est fait, as regards the opium. . . . I am very comfortable, thanks to your kindness and forethought. Father Anselm seems to have taken a fancy to me—also he is afraid of my being lonely—and comes to see me every other day. He took me all over the Monastery on Monday, and has just left me after a prolonged discussion of the things which 'none of us know anything about,' as Marianus says when he is getting the worst of an argument."

Father Anselm, now Archbishop of Simla, was the one of the friars of whom the poet spoke as his philosophicalschoolmaster, and to whom he was indebted for the awakening of new intellectual interests. Coventry Patmore, too, as his correspondence testifies, knew how to appreciate the hospitality and good talk of the friars. Both the poets contributed to theAnnalsof Father Anselm's editorship. Between the younger poet and Father Anselm there sprang up a close friendship, which was not without its influence upon Thompson's later work. During his Guardianship at Crawley Father Anselm was responsible for the inception of the Roger Bacon Society, whose meetings F. T. sometimes attended.

Father Alphonsus, whose death in 1911 deprived English Franciscans of their Provincial, also had much intercourse with Francis Thompson. For this priest, as he himself alleged, the odes of Coventry Patmore made a new earth and a new Heaven.

It is not, perhaps, impertinent here and now to attribute to the younger poet's association with the friars an allusion in one of the most famous of his lines. "The bearded counsellors of God" has the local colour if not of Paradise, at least of Pantasaph.[35]

"Poetry clung about the cowls of his Order," wrote Francis, in dealing with the works of St. Francis and of Thomas of Celano. He had the right companions, as far as any were admitted, for the new periods of composition.

They, as he, had sacred commercecum Domina Paupertate. These, his companions, were once named by her "my Brothers and most dear Friends"; they, entertaining her on bread and water, had given her a couch upon earth and the grass.

"When she asked for a pillow, they straightway brought her a stone, and laid it under her Head. So, after she had slept for a brief space in peace, she arose and asked the Brothers to showher their Cloister. And they, leading her to the Summit of a Hill, showed her the wide World, saying: This is our Cloister, O Lady Poverty. Thereupon she bade them all sit down together, and opening her mouth she began to speak unto them Words of Life."

Francis her poet heard, though at that time he was not come to the hills about Pantasaph. He had himself found stones for pillows in the market-place, and had written of one to whom he had half-likened himself—

Anchorite, who didst dwellWith all the world for cell![36]

St. Francis himself had other words for the same thought:—"Meditate as much while on this journey as if you were shut up in a hermitage or in your cell, for wherever we are, wherever we go, we carry our cell with us; Brother Body is our cell."

Of the grounds for a good understanding between the priests and the poet there are hints in Richard de Bary'sFranciscan Days of Vigil:—

"Francis Thompson was just then [1894] a favourite with the Order, and there were keen discussions about his mystical intuitions. In the spirit of the FranciscanLaudes Domini, the Breviary Offices of the Seasons, Thompson recalled them, and expounded the phases of asceticism that ran with them in his poem, 'From the Night of Forebeing.'* * * * * * *"The centre of interest in the household was the poet, Francis Thompson, who spent the summer of that year in a neighbouring cottage. Walks in the late evening did not result in much conversation; but at evening gatherings in my room the poet used often to join the party, and argued with vigour and persuasiveness on favourite topics. The Franciscans had learnt a kind ofart of drawing their mystical guest into conversation. The way was to introduce a subtle contradiction to his pet theories, which would in a moment produce a storm of protesting eloquence."

* * * * * * *

"The centre of interest in the household was the poet, Francis Thompson, who spent the summer of that year in a neighbouring cottage. Walks in the late evening did not result in much conversation; but at evening gatherings in my room the poet used often to join the party, and argued with vigour and persuasiveness on favourite topics. The Franciscans had learnt a kind ofart of drawing their mystical guest into conversation. The way was to introduce a subtle contradiction to his pet theories, which would in a moment produce a storm of protesting eloquence."

They drew him also on one only occasion into more formal speech. Fr. Anselm prevailed upon him to enter into the discussion that followed a paper read by the Hon. W. Gibson, now Lord Ashbourne, at a meeting of the Roger Bacon Society, held at the Monastery, Crawley, in January 1898.

In April, 1894, an observer writes to W. M.:—

"You will be glad to hear that Francis has written an Ode which I hear is longer than anything he has done yet. Also that the 'frenzy' being on him he has begun another poem yesterday. No one sees him but Fr. Anselm, to whom he comes every evening and whom he tells of his work. He told him last night that since you had left he seemed to have a return of all the old poetic power. Of course he is flying over hill and dale and never to be seen, but I am sure you will be as glad as I am at this fresh development—especially as your and Alice's visit has evidently called it forth."[37]

To the departed visitors the poet himself wrote:—

"Bishop's House, Pantasaph."Dearest Wilfrid and Alice,—As you are together in my thoughts, so let me join you together in this note. I cannot express to you what deep happiness your visit gave me; how dear it was to see your faces again. I think 'the leaves fell from the day' indeed when your train went out of the station; and I never heard the birds with such sad voices."I send you herewith the poem I have been at work on. It is very long, as you will see—as long, I think, as Wordsworth's great ode. That would not matter—'so I were equal with him in renown.' But as it is——!"My fear is that thought in it has strangled poetic impulse. However of all that you are better judges than I."Does the dear Singer still refuse me her songs? My health is better again, though unfortunately more fluctuant than I could wish. Love to all the chicks. With very best love to yourselves, dear ones,—Yours ever,Francis Thompson."

"Bishop's House, Pantasaph.

"Dearest Wilfrid and Alice,—As you are together in my thoughts, so let me join you together in this note. I cannot express to you what deep happiness your visit gave me; how dear it was to see your faces again. I think 'the leaves fell from the day' indeed when your train went out of the station; and I never heard the birds with such sad voices.

"I send you herewith the poem I have been at work on. It is very long, as you will see—as long, I think, as Wordsworth's great ode. That would not matter—'so I were equal with him in renown.' But as it is——!

"My fear is that thought in it has strangled poetic impulse. However of all that you are better judges than I.

"Does the dear Singer still refuse me her songs? My health is better again, though unfortunately more fluctuant than I could wish. Love to all the chicks. With very best love to yourselves, dear ones,—Yours ever,

Francis Thompson."

In another letter F. T. tells of his recurring powers of composition.

"Am overflowing with a sudden access of literary impulse. I think I could write a book in three months, if thoughts came down in such an endless avalanche as they are doing at present. But the collecting and recasting of my later poems for Lane blocks the way for the next month, so that I can only write an essay in an odd hour or two when I lie awake in bed."

He heralds the coming of his sacred poetry in "From the Night of Forebeing"—

Back to Index Next