CHAPTER XV: CHARACTERISTICS

Before mine own elect stood I,And said to Death:—'Not these shall die.'I issued mandate royally.I bade Decay:—'Avoid and fly;For I am fatal unto thee.'I sprinkled a few drops of verse,And said to Ruin, 'Quit thy hearse':To my loved, 'Pale not, come with me;I will escort thee down the years,With me thou walk'st immortally.'

These vaunting rhymes were written that he might go on to declare his undoing, being now stripped of his songs. It was true, of course, that he lost, not the poetry, but the functions of the poet. In exquisite lines he begs his muses to stay their flight, and his exquisitelines belie the convention that they have flown, that the shrines of his heart are empty.

In Mr. Wilfred Whitten's obituary notice of Thompson there is report at first hand of the poet's satisfaction in that his poetry was immortal. He quotes:—

The sleep-flower sways in the wheat its head,Heavy with dreams, as that with bread;The goodly grain and the sun-flushed sleeperThe reaper reaps, and Time the reaper.I hang 'mid men my needless head,And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread:The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeperTime shall reap, but after the reaperThe world shall gleam of me, me the sleeper!

And he adds: "When Francis Thompson wrote these verses, he did not indulge a fitful or exalted hope; he expressed the quiet faith of his post-poetic years. Thompson knew that above the grey London tumult, in which he fared so ill, he had hung a golden bell whose tones would one day possess men's ears. He believed that his name would be symphonised on their lips with Milton and Dryden and Keats. This he told me himself in words too quiet, obscure, and long ago for record. But he knew that Time would reap first."

Thepoet is important, present, manifest to the poet. His poetry is an addition to his state, which yet is complete without it. The state of poetry, the state of the poet, has superfluity escaping into song. It is this superfluity that makes, not the poet, but the poetry-book. If Thompson had only written of his experiences as a poet, he would have written fine poetry; when he wrote of the poet's songs he made songs, when he wrote of the poet's communings with God and Nature he made more songs, and, to make songs, need never have written directly of God and Nature. In one sense his descriptions of the poet's throes are out of all proportion to their product. He tells you so often of his Song, that it might be complained he had no time for singing. He will compose a poem to show he is Muse-forsaken, or to establish the fact that his lady is immortal only in his verse; it hardly matters whether he wrote otherwise of her or not. He will tell you, with supremest diction, that his poppy and he lie safe in leavèd rhyme. The great bulk of his poetry is about his poetry—that is, you might read his three volumes and think they were but prefaces to thirty-three. Really they are the index not to forty-eight other volumes, but to the forty-eight years of the poet's existence—to the Poet, that is.

"The more a man gives his life to poetry, the less poetry he writes," was Thompson's own experience.

This harping upon himself is notable. His preoccupation is poetry—and the poet. It is not a matter ofselfishness but of difference.New Poemsmeets with many objections on this score, for sharp distinctions within the species are always resented. The presence of the man is resented, and the presence of the poet, or prophet, is resented. But that he has his own place in creation he knows well enough. Isaiah knew it; and when one of his kind says—

This dread Theology aloneIs mine,Most native and my own;And ever with victorious toilWhen I have madeOf the deific peaks dim escalade,My soul with anguish and recoilDoth like a city in an earthquake rock,. . . . .With deeper menace than for other men,

he is proclaiming a family egoism that can no more be "pooh-poohed" than a racial pigment or tribal distinction, the stature of the pygmies or the stripe of the zebra. The tribal segregation of the spirit is distrusted, however, because it defies scientific classification. It is known as madness, saintliness, obscurity, affectation, "nerves," mania, fanaticism, conceit, according to its symptoms in a Blake, or a Jacopone da Todi; all its kinds are labelled, but it is never brought to exact order. The variousness of degree in the poetic character is a necessity of the case. The poet makes the difference because he makes his own world, his own scope, his own experience. If he is one of a tribe, he is always the head of it—a chief, like every other, with a tent as large as the sky, as large as the horizon which his own intellectual stature may command.

The poet is conscious of his status as the "maker"—the maker who presumes upon the common advantage of being made in the likeness of God, and gives point to the likeness. It is plainly stated by F. T. in "CarmenGenesis" and in an unpublished note written in support of the poem:—

Poet! still, still thou dost rehearse,In the greatfiatof thy Verse,Creation's primal plot;And what thy Maker in the wholeWorked, little maker, in thy soulThou work'st, and men know not.Thine intellect, a luminous voice,Compulsive moved above the noiseOf thy still fluctuous sense;And Song, a water-child like Earth,Stands with feet sea-washed, a wild birthAmid their subsidence.

And in prose repetition of the "Poet or Maker":—

"In the beginning, at the great mandate of light, the sea suddenly disglutted the earth: and still in the microcosm of the poetic, themakingmind, Creation imitates her august and remembered origins. Still, at the luminous compulsion of the poet's intellect, from the subsidence of his fluctuant senses emerges the express and founded consistence of the poem; confessing, by manifold tokens, its twofold parentage, quickened with intellectual light, and freshened with the humidities of feeling. Of generations it shall endure the spiritual treading and to generations afford its fruits, aterra firmawhich may scarce wear out before the prototypal earth itself. This is the function of the maker since God first imagined: though poetry's Book of Genesis is yet unwritten which might be written, and its Moses is desired and is late. An art not unworthy the Seraphic Order and the handling of Saints. For the poet is an Elias, that when he comes makes all things new. It is a converse, alas, and lamentable truth, that the false poet makes even new things old."

Of the Poet's powers of Creation or Transfiguration Wordsworth held an advanced estimate:—

"The objects of the poet's thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of men are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is immortal as the heart of man. If the labours of the men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will sleep then no more than at present. . . . If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man."

Pride of poetry, when Francis was forgetful of pride of pain, crops up in a hundred places; he writes, for instance, of Davidson's "The Testament of an Empire Builder":—

"We still lament that here, as in the preceding poems of the series, there is far too much metrical dialectic, argument in verse, which is a thing anti-poetic. Poetry should proclaim, poetry isdogmatic;when it stoops to argue, it loses its august privilege and becomes, at the best, a K.C. in cloth of gold."

It was easily perceived he was not candidly and fully himself in common conversation. He was as much shut within his repetitions as the last little Chinese box is shut within a series of Chinese boxes. Lift all the lids and you find emptiness in the last. Francis insisted on your putting all the little boxes back again, fitting the right lid on each, for, having made his point, he seldom failed to prove it backwards. Had he been of another age and race, he would have had an hermitage and been sought by those who wished instruction—the instruction that is not seldom done in silence. But whowas ready to listen to Francis's silences in London? It is possible that if a child had sought him in Kensington Gardens, as he sat oblivious of the sparrows and the leaves and the nursemaids, and had asked for knowledge, revelation might have followed. We know that in the study at Lymington Patmore came to the conclusion that his visitor's prose was better than his poetry, his talk better than his prose. The windows of that Lymington study were thrown open to the ample airs of Heaven; in London lodgings the east winds made the noise outside, and Thompson's talk about the weather filled the air within. The Eastern must have communion, even the communion of silence, before he lights the lamp of common knowledge; Plato needed the magnetism of listeners and learners. Francis needed none but the absent, perhaps the unborn, reader. The shares he issued were all deferred shares.

And every stanza was an act of faith; every stanza a declaration of good-will. It is optimism that compels the poet to give the superfluity of his inner song to the world. He knows, perhaps against all common-sense, that the world will some day be fit for it. He launches the utmost treasures of his rare estate upon the nondescript audience. The pessimist either ceases writing (what is the use?), or, if he writes, cannot always be trusted to give his best to a posterity he despises. But Francis gave out no secrets unless he had wrapt them in poetry. He bore them secretly, and set them free only when he had decked them in imagery. He was too busy making clothes against their birth for other companionship. Also, he was shy of his own inability to be communicative and shy of his own ardent emotions towards his friends:—

"I know how it must tax you," he wrote to A. M., "to endure me; for you are a friend, a mother; while I, over and above these, am a lover—spiritual as light, andunearthly as the love of one's angelic dreams, if you will—but yet a lover; and even a seraph enamoured must be a trying guardian angel to have to do with."

And again:—

"I am unhappy when I am out of your sight, but you, of course, can have no such feeling in reference to me. Now my sense of this inspires me with a continual timidity about inflicting my society on you in any way, unless you in some way signify a desire for it."

He inflicted his society on nobody. What he did inflict was the unaccomplished proxy of himself. Of the manner of his detachment he writes:—

"I do not know but, by myself, I live pretty well as much in the past and future as in the present, which seems a very little patch between the two. It has been more or less a habit through life, and during the last fifteen years, from the widened vantage of survey then gained, it has come to dominate my mental outlook. So that you might almost say, putting it hyperbolically, I view all mundane happenings with the Fall for one terminus and the Millennium for the other. If I want to gauge the significance of a contemporary event of any mark, I dump it down as near as I can, in its proximate place between these boundaries. There it takes up very little room."

His very backwardness was benevolent; his eye, often pre-occupied, was never indifferent; neither careless nor trivial, it never sought an easy exchange of confidences, nor made friends by suggestion of either tact or intelligence. He was a man who, if he entered not into much intercourse, did not stand aloof through contempt or active disinclination, but for other friendlier reasons.He was a man to be observed, not to observe; to be seen, not to see. Neither he nor his room-mates would, as a rule, be at great pains to come together; but, even if you held no talk with him, he was sufficiently interesting or endearing to take your eye.

It was after an evening divided between silence and explanations that, wondering how well he covered the fires of his imagination, one went to the door to help with hat and coat. Some final repetition, unblushingly proclaimed with "As I have said before," would still longer delay his return to himself; but once he had begun to go down the flights of steps in Granville Place, where we had taken a flat, he would find himself face to face again with the realities of life that he chose to keep private, and be loudly talking to himself in a style more meaningful and threatening than any speech of his in company. Then the hall door would be slammed; and still in the silent street, past puzzled policemen, he would stride away in fierce agitation, but less solitary than when he sat among us. But a certain sweetness went with him; he did not need to talk to stimulate that grateful mood of charity and peace that some know only when they can actually do works of mercy with their tongues and eyes. His gentle eye proved that not all his silent thoughts were troubled; and often his gaze would climb to some invisible and fair peak of contemplation, resting there content in silence. Sometimes he was obviously happy in small-talk and his companionships, but that was when commonplaces were not used solely as a shelter from the inconvenience of thoughts not commonplace. Even his halfpenny paper, as he read it over in his tea-shop, was a root of happiness. He was fair game for the journalist of Lower Grub Street. Here is a random list of the things he cut from theDaily Mail:"Maria Blume's Will," "Insurance of Domestic Servants," "Help for the Householder," "MikadoAirs on Japanese Warship—AmusingScenes," "Freaks of Weather: Startling Changes of Temperature," "The Milk Peril, What hinders Reform," and "Joy," a poem by Mr. Sturge Moore—with a little more margin to it, and straighter scissors-work.

AsF. 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."

"Poetrysimpleor 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 theAcademy.

The Life Mask 1905 Emery Walker Ph. sc.Photograph by Sherril Schell

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 tocall 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."

". . . 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 mostobvious 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 Icouldbe 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 theTimeswere 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 theMercure de Francethat "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 nofioretticonnected with his name, and the weeds were taken for granted. The heavy remorsefulness of his muse seemed, to such as are unfamiliar with theconfiteorof the saints, to mark a more real repentance, and therefore real misconduct, than does the ordinary, facilepeccaviof 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 theDublin 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."

ToThe Nation, November 23, 1907, W. M. wrote his protest:—

"I see in theTimesa 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 butan 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 theDaily 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 theAcademy, 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 theAthenæum, 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 myconsolation 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 theTimesaware that somebody loves his life less because Thompson is dead."

"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 theDaily 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 theAcademy, 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 theAthenæum, 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 myconsolation 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 theTimesaware 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 beneficentambush 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. Twoor 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 powersWhich of themselves our minds impress;That we may feed this mind of oursIn 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."

"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 wallspeak 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 newAthenæumdodge 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 3A.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 tomake 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'stoo 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.

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 aDaily Mailphoto. 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 fellowwasthe 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 theAcademysupplements, 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 thepre-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 tomak 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 hisconfrère. 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 isintellectorunderstanding(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."

"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 isintellectorunderstanding(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 ofbulletin prose, so that his needs and ailments sometimes came recorded in doggerel:—

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