Chapter XVII Last Things
Francis’s health often dismayed him, and his terrors both in regard to sicknesses and politics covered many pages of threatening letters. The mere streets became more and more an oppression. Even Elgin Avenue grew (in 1900) as ugly to him as it always is to men less happily indifferent. At such times he could write to W. M. in the strain of the following letter:—
“I designed to call in on Wednesday, but was sick with a horrible journey on the underground. To-day, though better, I am still not well. I hope I may manage to-morrow. I have been full of worry, depression, and unconquerable forebodings. The other day, as I was walking outside my lodgings, steeped in ominous thoughts, a tiny child began to sing beside me in her baby voice, over and over repeating:—
‘O danger, O danger
O danger is coming near!’
My heart sank, and I almost trembled with fear.”
He prophesied of war, and was tormented whole days by complications in the East, and the notion of a Yellow invasion. And even West Kensington, when small-pox was announced there, seemed to come marching on him, a Birnam forest of bricks. It was illness, with fear for a symptom. “Disaster was, and is, drawing downwards.... There are storm-clouds over the whole horizon, and I feel my private fate involved. I am oppressed with fatality,” he writes in one letter (1900), and on the next page is involved in jokes which were heavy, not with fatality. Other letters contain complaints of dreams akin to Coleridge’s:—
“A most miserable fortnight of torpid, despondent days, and affrightful nights, dreams having been in part the worst realities of my life.”
On the engagement in 1903 of Monica of “The Poppy,” of “Monica Thought Dying,” and of Sister Songs, Francis wrote to her:—
“28 Elgin Avenue,
Saturday.
“Dear Monica,—I would have answered you long since if I had not been so worried with work that I do not know how to get through it. Having got rid of my poem, I have taken a little rest from work, to which I had no right, and my neuralgia seems happily to have got better—though I am almost afraid to say so, for I still feel very weak and jaded, so that it might easily return. Therefore I take this moment to write to you.
“Most warmly and sincerely I congratulate you, dear Monica, on what is the greatest event in a woman’s life—or a man’s, to my thinking.... Extend to him, if he will allow me, the affection which you once—so long since—purchased with a poppy in that Friston field. ‘Keep it,’ you said (though you have doubtless forgotten what you said) ‘as long as you live.’ I have kept it, and with it I keep you, my dearest. I do not say or show much, for I am an old man compared with you, and no companion for your young life. But never, my dear, doubt I love you. And if I have the chance to show it, I will do.
“I am ill at saying all I doubtless should say to a young girl on her engagement. I have no experience in it, my Monica. I can only say I love you; and if there is any kind and tender thing I should have said, believe it is in my heart, though it be not here.—My dear, your true friend,
Francis Thompson.”
At her bidding, he went, on her marriage day, to the Church of St. Mary-of-the-Angels in Bayswater. He had never, in all probability, failed a tryst before by coming to it too early, but to all her commands he was obedient, and his mistake was but the symptom of his anxiety to be present. The poppy that she picked and gave him, with “Keep it as long as you live,” was found in the leaves of his own copy of Poems—the only volume of his own works that he kept by him. So were all her injunctions observed. Having gone too early to Church, he left too early, and wrote:—
“Westbourne Grove, 12.30 P.M.
Wednesday, June 14, 1903.
“Dearest Monica,—You were a prophetess (though you needed not to be a sibyl) to foretell my tricks and manners. I reached the church just ten minutes after twelve, to find vacancy, as you had forewarned me. A young lady that might have been yourself approached the church by the back entrance, just as I came away; but on inspection she had no trace of poppy-land. There must have been other nuptial couples about, I think.
“It seems but the other day, my dearest sister (may I not call you so? For you are all to me as younger sisters and brothers—to me, who have long ceased practically to have any sisters of my own, so completely am I sundered from them), that you were a child with me at Friston, and I myself still very much of a child. Now the time is come I foresaw then—
Knowing well, when some few days are over,
You vanish from me to another.
“You may pardon me if I feel a little sadness, even while I am glad for your gladness, my very dear.
“I was designing to call in to-night, till I learned from you that you would be occupied with your wedding-party. Then I hoped I might have got to you last night instead, but could not manage it. So, to my sorrow, I must be content only to write. Had I known before, I would have called in on Sunday, at all costs, rather than defer it to (as it turns out) the impossible Wednesday.
“I shall be with you all, at any rate, in spirit.—Yours ever dearly, my dear,
Francis Thompson.”
A few years before his death his manner had changed. His platitudes, now, were merely a means of getting through an evening without making a demonstration of the trouble he was in. That his ills might not be exposed he kept covering them up with talk, as constantly as a mother tucks in a child restless in fever. The man who always takes laudanum is always in need of it, and when he is in need he is ill. He is too ill to think, too uncomfortable to meditate or be wise.
Whenever he postponed his dram, and spent his day instead with his friends, he would say an easy thing once, and finding it easy, would say it over and over again. While he spent an evening explaining that last August was hot, but this hotter, his cry really was, “Where is my laudanum?” Nor was his need only physical: his soul, too, was crying, “Where is my God, my Maker, Who giveth songs in the Night? Who teacheth us more than the beasts of the earth, and maketh us wiser than the fowls of Heaven?” I am told by a doctor that one of the greatest pains of relinquishing opium is the sense of the reason’s unfitness. Thought is thrown out of joint, and hurts like a dislocated shoulder.
“Nature,” says Emerson, “never spares the opium or nepenthe, but wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise.” And even for the bruises made by poppies she has her salve. Some redress, a rebate of the price paid, was made to Francis Thompson for the agony of the opium habit. That he seldom spoke of it meant that it was a thing too bitter to speak of; meant, too, that it was at times a thing too little to speak of, that Nature minimised its terrors. There is mercy for the slave of a bad habit: the more confirmed, the more often must there be periods during which its mastery is forgotten, even in its presence. The sorriest drunkard is not necessarily the drunkard oftenest sorry. The opium-eater is sometimes persuaded of his own invented theory of the causes of his weakness, of its uses and necessity. Francis, who would have loathed himself to the point of extinction, or redemption, if he had been an ordinary sinner, who would have found life with himself intolerable had he sullied life with common offences against the Law, was provided with some sort of protection against remorse for his own particular failing. Nature gave him poppies to set against poppies.
Periods of misery and dejection came to him, as to his fellows. With Coleridge he could in certain moods have written:—“The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when I am alone, the horrors that I have suffered from laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me.” And again in words very like de Quincey’s, Coleridge speaks of “fearful slavery,” of being “seduced to the accursed habit ignorantly.” From the starker visitations of remorse Coleridge, too, was justly sheltered. His son has said for him:—
“If my Father sought more from opium than the mere absence of pain, I feel assured it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams; but that the power of the medicine might keep down the agitations of his nervous system, like a strong hand grasping the strings of some shattered lyre.”
His own “my sole sensuality was not to be in pain” is sufficient for himself and for others.
F. T.’s comments on Coleridge’s case are valuable, since they rebound in his own direction:—
“Then came ill-health and opium. Laudanum by the wine-glassful and half-pint at a time soon reduced him to the journalist-lecturer and philosopher, who projected all things, executed nothing; only the eloquent tongue left. So he perished—the mightiest intellect of the day, and great was the fall thereof. There remain of him his poems, and a quantity of letters painful to read. They show him wordy, full of weak lamentation, deplorably feminine and strengthless.”
And again:—
“It is of the later Coleridge that we possess the most luminous descriptions. A slack, shambling man, flabby in face and form and character; womanly and unstayed of nature; torrentuous of golden talk, the poet submerged and feebly struggling in opium-darkened oceans of German philosophy, amid which he finally foundered, striving to the last to fish up gigantic projects from the bottom of a daily half-pint of laudanum. And over the wreck of that most piteous and terrible figure of all our literary history shines and will shine for ever the five-pointed star of his glorious youth; those poor five resplendent poems, for which he paid the devil’s price of a desolated life and unthinkably blasted powers.”
Even if Francis spilled brown laudanum on his paper as he wrote those superlatives, he did not fit the cap of disaster to two heads.
To the memory of
FRANCIS THOMPSON, POET
1859-1907
STUDENT OF OWENS COLLEGE
1877-1884
Whatso looks lovelily
Is but the rainbow on life’s weeping rain.
Why have we longings of immortal pain,
And all we long for mortal? Woe is me,
And all our chants but chaplet some decay,
As mine this vanishing—nay, vanished day.
In 1906 he again visited the monastery at Crawley, where his friends had offered him hospitality over many years, and helped him to keep an occasional feast. I take a sample at random of Prior Anselm’s courtesy:—
“Holy Saturday.
“Dear Francis,—The Alleluias have been sung, and I echo them to you, dearest friend, hoping they bring you joy and peace and blessings.”
Again:—
“Dear Francis,—Could you give me and the community the great pleasure of your company on the Feast of St. Anthony, when the Bishop of Southwark will assist? I do hope you will come, as it is the last feast I shall have before the Chapter, an event that may scatter us all to the four winds of heaven.”
And again:—
“The community and particularly myself would be delighted to have the pleasure of your company on Oct. 4th, the Feast of our holy Father St. Francis and your name-day. I am looking forward to some long talks. How I long for a return of the happy days at Pantasaph, when we discussed all things in heaven and on earth and in infernis.”
Before his departure to Crawley Francis wrote to me:—
“... I feel depressed at going away from you all—it seems like a breaking with my past, the beginning of I know not what change, or what doubtful future. Change as change is always hateful to me; yet my life has been changeful enough in various ways. And I have noticed these changes always come in shocks and crises after a prolonged period of monotony. In my youth I sighed against monotony, and wanted romance; now I dread romance. Romance is romantic only for the hearers and onlookers, not for the actors. It is hard to enter its gates (happily); but to repass them is impossible. Once step aside from the ways of ‘comfortable men,’ you cannot regain them. You will live and die under the law of the intolerable thing they call romance. Though it may return on you in cycles and crises, you are ever dreading its next manifestation. Nor need you be ‘romantic’ to others; the most terrible romances are inward, and the intolerableness of them is that they pass in silence.... One person told me that my own life was a beautiful romance. ‘Beautiful’ is not my standpoint. The sole beautiful romances are the Saints’, which are essentially inward. But I never meant to write all this.”
All this, and much unwritten trepidation, because he had to travel three-fourths of the railroad to Brighton! Of all places Sussex, he had said, was the place where he preferred to live; but the getting him there was as difficult as a journey to Siberia. And from Crawley he wrote:—
“I am a helpless waterlogged and dismasted vessel, drifting without power to guide my own course, and equally far from port whichever way I turn my eyes. I can only fling this bottle into the sea and leave you to discern my impotent and wrecked condition.”
The flung bottle was stamped and caught the post!
In the following year (1907) it became evident that F. T. was again in urgent need of change. He was thinner, even less punctual, more languorous when he fell into fits of abstraction; less precise when he would have assumed the pathetically alert step and speech by which he had been used to respond to introductions and the calls of the very unexacting establishment he still visited sometimes twice, sometimes thrice, and always once a week. He had grown listless and slow, and it was proposed he should go to the country. “Certainly, Wilfrid,” he responded, coming the next evening to explain it was impossible; his boots, which looked stronger than himself, would not travel, he said; the coat covering his insufficient shoulders was insufficient. Boots and shirts were bought. It was arranged that we should call for him the next day at eleven. Accordingly my father and I and a friend presented ourselves in a motor at his dwelling, prepared to wait his dressing-time. But he was already out; nor could his landlady, who had not seen him abroad at such an hour in all her experience, say why or where. When at last he came, he carried a paper bag with food purchased at a shop far distant. No gourmet could have been at greater pains to secure the particular pork-pie, and no other, that he wanted.
At first he and I had sleeping quarters in an independent pavilion among fern and young oaks, as guests of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt at Newbuildings. Breakfast and a log-fire used to be prepared for us by David, a genius among odd-men, who came through the dew before we were awake, and disturbed us with the fragrance of his toast and coffee. Francis would get up quite early, but at night he was late. I used to see him in his room, propped against pillows, with candles burning and his prayer-book in his hand far into the night; and his light would still be bright when the stars had begun to grow faint in the plantation.
Later, he was moved to David’s cottage, whence he was fetched every day to Newbuildings, half a mile away, for luncheon and tea. David and Mrs. David had gained the unwilling confidence of the invalid, and Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, adept in everything, himself saw that medical help was necessary. In September a doctor was consulted, but if no effective treatment followed it was probably because Francis’s evasions successfully prevented a satisfactory diagnosis.
To the care he received in Sussex there was no end. On September 6, 1907, a companion of Mr. Blunt wrote:—
“Mr. Blunt paid Mr. Thompson a long visit last evening, and I hear to-day that he is better. He told Mr. Blunt that he will stay here for the present. The doctor is going to see him again. Mr. Thompson liked him, which is something gained, and he is also pleased with David and his wife. Mr. Thompson has not come to-day, but we have sent twice, and the boy will enquire again this evening.”
His little tragedy at Newbuildings was a wasp-sting. Enmity had started some days before, when a wasp fell into his wine-glass. It got out and was staggering on the table when I came upon the scene. Francis stood still, watching with fire in his eye. “You drunken brute,” he said with loud severity. But no wasp, drunken or respectable, would he kill, though he could be bitter. The next day he was stung, and Mr. Wilfrid Blunt holds it of faith that for all that summer, after the poet’s malediction, no wasps buzzed in Sussex. “Sir, to leave things out of a book merely because people tell you they will not be believed, is meanness,” says Mr. Blunt in the words of Dr. Johnson. For all that (since a biographer’s unbelief must count for something) I do not here record the lesser miracles remembered by Mr. Blunt. But the following (an earlier experience) is of Francis’s own telling, in Health and Holiness:—
“In solitude a poet underwent profound sadness and suffered brief exultations of power: the wild miseries of a Berlioz gave place to accesses of half-pained delight. On a day when the skirts of a prolonged darkness were drawing off for him, he walked the garden, inhaling the keenly languorous relief of mental and bodily convalescence, the nerves sensitised by suffering. Passing in a reverie before an arum, he suddenly was aware of a minute white-stoled child sitting on the lily. For a second he viewed her with surprised delight, but no wonder; then returning to consciousness, he recognised the hallucination almost in the instant of her vanishing.”
Father Gerrard, who met him in Sussex, afterwards wrote:—
“Only a few weeks ago, I was chatting with Francis Thompson in his cosy retreat at Southwater, whither he had gone as the guest of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, to see if haply he might pull together his shattered frame. But the phthisis fiend had caught him in a tight grip. He was a dying man, and an old man, although only forty-eight years of age. Still, even in his extremity the characteristics of his life were manifest, a shrinking from fellowship, a keen perception and love of the Church, a ready and masterful power of language. I could not say that conversation with him was ever an easy thing, if by conversation one means unceasing talk. Besides talk there were thoughtful silences. Then, after the thought, came the outpouring of its rich expression. The doings of the outside world had little interest for him, but the messages which I had for him from his little circle of friends set him all aglow.”
He returned weaker than he went. In his extremity of feebleness any hurt seemed grievous to him. Upon an umbrella falling against him in the railway carriage, he turned to me with a tremulous: “I am the target of all disasters!” And when a busy-body of a fellow asked him, on account of his notable thinness: “Do you suffer with your chest, sir?” Thompson, who had but one lung, and that diseased, answered sharply, “No!” Even then he did not know the extent of his trouble.
In error he attributed all his ills to one cause. My father, seeing him on his return, said to him, “Francis, you are ill.” “Yes, Wilfrid,” he answered, “I am more ill than you think”; and then spoke a word from which both had refrained for ten years. “I am dying from laudanum poisoning.”
My father asked him if he were willing to go to the Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth. The fact that my sister—the Sylvia of Sister Songs—chanced at that moment to be lying ill there, led him to consider the institution without hostility, and the next day, my father having previously recommended him to the nuns, he went unreluctant to his death-bed. Consumption was the mortal disease, and he had grown grievously thin, and too weak to be allowed much less than his habitual doses of laudanum. Some little while before the hours at which these became due, the tax upon his remaining strength was very heavy; but only when in acutest need of the one medicine that could keep him alive (as, indeed, it had done over a long course of years) were the last days distressing for him. During most of them (he was in St. John and St. Elizabeth’s ten days) he was content with his surrounding, and knew Sister Michael, his most kind nurse.
His reading was divided between his prayer-book and Mr. W. W. Jacobs’ Many Cargoes, neither of which attested his realisation of the end. But he was not ignorant of it. When I last saw him he took my father’s hand and kept it within his own, chafing and patting it as if to make a last farewell. He died at dawn on November 13, 1907.
But, for all that friends were at hand, the nurse tender, and the priest punctual, his passing was solitary. His bedside was not one at which watchers share commingling cold, as when a widow’s burning fingers, holding those of her dead, are turned to inner ice; his going not as a child’s, which chills the house. The fires quenched were his own. It seemed to his friends as if it were a matter personal to himself; while their sorrow for their own loss was mixed almost with satisfaction at something ended in his favour, as if at last he had had his way in a transaction with a Second Party, who might have long and painfully delayed the issue.
Nothing improvident or improper, it seemed to those at hand, had happened in the hospital ward. Such were one’s feelings beside the tall window, among nuns who smiled happily because he had received the Sacraments. His features, when I went to make a drawing of him in the small mortuary that stood among the wintry garden-trees, were entirely peaceful, so that I, who had sometimes known them otherwise, fell into the mood of the cheerful lay-sister with the keys, who said: “I hear he had a very good death.” To the priest, who had seen him in communion with the Church and her saints at the moment which may be accounted the most solitary possible to the heart of man, no thought of especial loneliness was associated with his death.
He was too magnanimous to take one to his dead heart. Suffering alone, he escaped alone, and left none strictly bound on his account. He left his friends to be busy, not with his ashes, but his works. It was as if the winds that caught and checked his breath were those that blew his fame into conspicuous glows. He was laid to rest in St. Mary’s Cemetery, Kensal Green. In his coffin, W. M. records, were roses from Meredith’s garden, inscribed with Meredith’s testimony—“A true poet, one of the small band,” and violets went to the dead poet’s breast from the hand of my mother whose praises he had divinely sung.
“Devoted friends lament him,” wrote W. M., “no less for himself than for his singing. But let none be named the benefactor of him who gave to all more than any could give to him. He made all men his debtors, leaving to those who loved him the memory of his personality, and to English poetry an imperishable name.”
Footnotes
1 Their first child, a son, lived only one day, and of the three daughters whose births followed Francis’s, one, Helen, died in infancy. Of the other two, the elder, Mary, is a nun in Manchester, the other, Margaret Richardson, wife and mother in Canada.
2 Edward Healy Thompson married Harriet Diana, daughter of Nicolson Calvert, sometime M.P. for Hertford, by Frances, co-heir of the 1st and last Viscount Pery. Another uncle of the poet was the Rev. Henry Thompson, who was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford; took clerical duty at Kirk Hammerton and at Greatham (Hants); published a sermon (1850) entitled The New Birth by Water and the Spirit; married Julia, daughter of Sir William Yea, Bart. A daughter by this union, Charlotte Anne Hechstetter Yea Thompson, married (1869) Ralph Abercrombie Cameron, elder son of the Rev. Alexander Cameron by Charlotte, daughter of the Hon. Edward Rice, D.D., Dean of Gloucester. A fourth uncle of the poet, James Thompson, lost his life in South Africa.
3 At the Convent of the Holy Child, St. Leonard’s-on-Sea.
4 A photograph (now missing), taken at the age of eleven or twelve, shows Francis with a small bust of Shakespeare—the treasured gift of his mother. In all the early photographs he conforms to one early description—“a boy known for his piety, obedience, and truthfulness”—and he is tidy, too!
5 “Dream Tryst” was afterwards alluded to by Mr. Edward Healy Thompson as “erotic”—a poem, explained Francis, “addressed to a child. Nay, hardly that—to the memory only of a child known but once when I was eleven years old.”
6 Lamb’s jest was perhaps remembered when F. T. wrote: “If a boy were let into Heaven, he would chase the little angels to pluck the feathers out of their wings”—a justification of Boyer rather than the Boy.
7 Prowess in English was officially reported. From Father Nowlan, a friend of the family, to Doctor Thompson, Easter, 1872:—“You will be anxious to hear how Frank has passed at the last examinations. They have been very satisfactory indeed—second in Latin and first in English. His master was speaking to me about him yesterday, and said that his English composition was the best production from a lad of his age which he had ever seen in this seminary. His improvement in Latin is also remarkable, and his steady improvement in this subject will depend in a great measure upon a cure of that absent-mindedness which certainly, at the very outset, threatened to prove a great obstacle to his application to study. This, I am happy to tell you, has disappeared in a great measure, and in a little time we may be quite sure of its entire disappearance.”
To the late Monsignor Corbishly I am indebted for the following record of the place Francis held in the compositions set three times a year:—
“In Latin he was first six times, second three times, and twice he was third. The lowest place was 6th, except when he composed in so-called Latin verse, when he got 23rd. His muse could not get going in a dead language. In Greek his place ran from 2nd to 10th. In French, average place about 8th. In English, 1st sixteen times; of his Arithmetic, Algebra, and Geometry the less said the better. He was a good, quiet, shy lad. Physically, a weakling: he had a halting way of walking, and gave the impression that physical existence would be rather a struggle for him. He did practically nothing at the games. Haec habeo quae dicam de nostro poeta praeclarissimo.”
8 It pleases the idle mind of the present writer to find that Francis visited Tregunter Road when my mother, who was years later to be the lady of “Love in Dian’s Lap,” was staying there, unknown to him.
9 His uncle, Edward Healy Thompson, afterwards remembered that The Opium Eater was his favourite book at home: “We had often said his experiences would surpass those of de Quincey.”
At the same time the family noted other influences; it was a tradition of theirs that “On the 3rd Sunday of September, 1885, Fr. Richardson of St. Mary’s, Ashton-under Lyne, delivered a sermon on ‘Our Lady of Sorrows,’ which, Francis hearing, was the subject of his meditation, and, two years later, of his poem ‘The Passion of Mary.’ It is thought that he did not make any notes on the sermon in church, but in the drawing-room at home in Stamford Street he made use that same night of pencil and paper.”
10 There is some parallel for this image (Tom-o’-Bedlam’s, be it remembered) in Rossetti’s—
But the sea stands spread
As one wall with the flat skies,
Where the lean black craft, like flies,
Seem well-nigh stagnated,
Soon to drop off dead.
11 Here is a minor clue to the region of London best mapped out in his mind. From the Academy, 1900, he tore Mr. Whitten’s review of an atlas of London, in which a comment is made on the restrictions of the scale—three inches to the mile; so that “York Street, Covent Garden, is merged in Tavistock Street; and Panton Street, Haymarket, and its short continuation, Spur Street, are marked but not named.” When Francis does not dog de Quincey he is at the heel of Coleridge. Each had gone for a soldier; both were accosted with friendship in London. The Strand is remembered as the place where Coleridge was, as a youth, once walking in abstraction with waving arms, to find himself with his hand in a pedestrian’s pocket and accused of attempted thieving. “I thought, sir, I was swimming in the Hellespont,” he explained, and made a friend only less valuable than Mr. McMaster.
12 Of the despoiling of the Lady Poverty he writes in an unpublished poem:—
DEGRADED POOR
Lo, at the first, Lord, Satan took from Thee
Wealth, Beauty, Honour, World’s Felicity.
Then didst Thou say: “Let be;
For with his leavings and neglects will I
Please Me, which he sets by,—
Of all disvalued, thence which all will leave Me,
And fair to none but Me, will not deceive Me.”
My simple Lord! so deeming erringly,
Thou tookest Poverty;
Who, beautified with Thy Kiss, laved in Thy streams,
‘Gan then to cast forth gleams,
That all men did admire
Her modest looks, her ragged sweet attire
In which the ribboned shoe could not compete
With her clear simple feet.
But Satan, envying Thee Thy one ewe-lamb,
With Wealth, World’s Beauty and Felicity
Was not content, till last unthought-of she
Was his to damn.
Thine ingrate ignorant lamb
He won from Thee; kissed, spurned, and made of her
This thing which qualms the air—
Vile, terrible, old,
Whereat the red blood of the Day runs cold.
13 F. T.’s review of Booth’s In Darkest England.
14 In Booth’s In Darkest England.
15 Merry England was a magazine he had known in Manchester, and noted especially during his Christmas holiday at home. His uncle, Edward Healy Thompson, was already a contributor, and among others were Cardinal Manning, Lionel Johnson, Hilaire Belloc, May Probyn, St. John Adcock, Sir William Butler, Coulson Kernahan, Alice Corkran, Coventry Patmore, W. H. Hudson, Katharine Tynan, J. G. Snead Cox, Aubrey de Vere, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Father R. F. Clark, J. Eastwood Kidson, and Bernard Whelan.
16 He himself notes the circumstances of composition. “Mem.—‘Ode to Setting Sun’ begun in the field of the Cross, and under shadow of the Cross, at sunset; finished ascending and descending Jacob’s Ladder (mid or late noon?)” “The Song of the Hours” also was written at Storrington.
17 The Shelley Essay bears signs of the booklessness of Storrington. All the quotations were made from memory, and nearly all were inaccurate.
18 Also a Shelley “Selection,” not published.
19 There perished with Mr. Stead in the Titanic disaster in 1912 a Catholic priest, who had, shortly before sailing, recommended “The Hound of Heaven” (with the strangely significant line “Adown Titanic glooms of chasméd fears”) to a friend, as an antidote to decadent poetry.
20 At this time he met another Cardinal, then without his Hat, who knew his people in Manchester. There were many pauses when the talk turned to his home. Francis, untamable in shabbiness, even to the point of rags, explained afterwards: “I did not like to dwell on the subject, lest he should discover that I was in poor circumstances. You see he corresponds with my father.” But his father did, of course, already know of his need. A letter, dated April 1892, from Bishop Carroll, runs:—
“My dear Mr. Meynell,—Francis Thompson’s father has agreed to give me a small sum weekly (3s. 6d.) for his son. I have consented to forward it, and will do so monthly, adding a little myself. I now enclose a cheque for 24s. It is not much, but it will help.—Ever yours sincerely,
J. Carroll.”
21 The old Archbishop’s House in Carlisle Place.
22 At this time he wrote to W. M. of an article in Merry England:—
“The Franciscan article is decidedly good. But I am getting a little sick of this talk of ‘individualism,’ which only darkens counsel. The writer seems to mean by it not at all what it means to me—and, I think, to the Cardinal. What he calls regulated individualism many people would call Socialism. In fact, some Socialists claim the Franciscans as a Catholic and religious experiment in the direction of Socialism. It seems to me that you can juggle with words like ‘individualism’ to suit your own whims.”
23 In after years Francis wrote letters that seemed to supply no possible opening for the comforter. Read to-day, their desperation offers no outlet but a return to the streets. But no sooner did F. T. come into my father’s presence, than he was consoled, often without the exchange of a word.
24 Browning left Asolo at the end of October, and died in Venice early in December.
25 For all that, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, who walked over his own acres with Thompson as his guest, wrote:—“He could not distinguish the oak from the elm, nor did he know the name of the commonest flowers of the field.”
26 The poem by which my mother broke silence was “Veni Creator.”
27 Among the things he wrote when A. M.’s book came to hand is this of “Domus Angusta,” an essay they had discussed before. “Never again meditate the suppression of your gloomy passages. It is a most false epithet for anything you could ever write. You might as well impeach of gloominess my favourite bit in ‘Timon,’ with the majestic melancholy of its cadence—
‘My long sickness
Of wealth and living now begins to mend,
And nothing brings me all things.’
Both that passage and yours are poignant; both are deeply sad; while yours has an added searchingness which makes it (in De Quincey’s phrase) veritably ‘heart-shattering’; but how can you call ‘gloomy’ what so nobly and resignedly faces the terror it evokes?”
28 His work having appeared in a Catholic magazine, it was known to the Catholic papers. Apart from the Weekly Register, where notices of his periodical writings were printed, priority belongs to The Tablet, which printed, September, 1889, and 19th July, 1890, serious notices of the issues of Merry England containing the “Ode to the Setting Sun” and “The Hound of Heaven”; and to Miss Katharine Tynan, who quoted the whole of “The Making of Viola” from Merry England, May, 1892, in the Irish Independent in the course of the same month. The Catholic papers made no particular sign of welcome when the books themselves were published, but it may be noted that the Ave Maria, Notre Dame, Indiana, had praise for the much-abused extravagance of the opening of the “Corymbus for Autumn.” To the Catholic World, February, 1895, Mr. Walter Lecky contributed many compliments and several biographical inaccuracies. In the secular press of America F. T. fared less well. The New York Post, 19th of January, 1898, found his work “... not altogether hopeful, since his impulses are wayward, like his life.” The Critic, July, 1894, would by no means allow Browning’s phrase, “conspicuous abilities,” to pass unchallenged.
29 The Anti-Jacobin, edited by Mr. Frederick Greenwood.
30 Of Sister Songs Mr. Le Gallienne wrote:—
“Critics are continually asking a writer to be someone else than himself, but happily Mr. Thompson seems to be one of those poets who go their own way, oblivious of the cackle of Grub Street.... Passion, in its ideal sense, has seldom found such an ecstatic, such a magnificently prodigal expression. For the love that Mr. Thompson sings is that love which never finds, nor can hope to find, ‘its earthly close.’ It is the poet’s love of love in the abstract, revealed to him symbolically in the tender youth of two little girls, and taking the form of a splendid fantastic gallantry of the spirit.”
31 Revelation iv, 5, “... there were seven lamps burning before the Throne, which are the seven spirits of God.”
32 F. T. in the Academy, February 6, 1897.
33 To this he recurs in a note on Tennyson:—“Tennyson too pictorial. Picture verges on marches of sister-art, painting. Feminine; only not so entirely so as Swinburne;—still has remnants of statelier mood and time. Metre—beginning of degeneration completed in and by Swinburne.”
34 Afterwards he lodged at the post-office, and finally in a cottage on the hill behind the monastery.
35 The Capuchins (Franciscans), are peculiar in aspect among Religious Orders as bearded friars.
36 This was written long before Mr. Montgomery Carmichael’s translation of The Lady Poverty brought the thirteenth-century writer’s claim to the world as the Franciscan cloister to Thompson’s notice.
37 “After Her Going” was written in these days.
38 The mortuary card, preserved in F. T.’s prayer-book, runs:—
“Of your charity pray for the soul of Charles Thompson, M.R.C.S., L.S.A., who departed this life April 9th, 1896, aged 72, fortified by the rites of Holy Church”—with the motto “The silent and wise man shall be honoured.”
39 Dr. Henry Head, F.R.S.
40 It was not Angelica, but Mrs. Delany.
41 An allusion to Lewis Morris’s Songs Unsung.
42 On this subject, and the derivation of portions of Ecclesiastes, he corresponded with Fr. Clarke. The contents of commonplace-books of a somewhat early period suggest a taste for many kindred themes. In one he has entered random “Varia on Magic,” accounts of and comments on many heresies, suspicions of the Masons, and fears of a Divine Visitation upon the general wickedness in the shape of general war; with these are important notes on Creation Myths, the Chaldean Genesis, the Egyptian Crocodile, the Kabbalist Doctrine of the Pre-existence of Souls; some symbols connected with the Incarnation, the Lotus, the ritual of the funeral sacrifice, with transcriptions from the Book of Respirations, the Prayer to Ammon Ra, &c.; and The meaning of Easter, a cutting scored with his own excursions into the etymology of the word—from Ishtar, the Chaldæan goddess—“And Ishtar I take to be Ashak Tar (or Tur) the Lady of the Light of the Way.” But at the turn of a few pages he is found enlarging and correcting. Still nearer his real concern are the notes on varieties of the Cross symbol.
43 In a poem “The Schoolmaster for God,” which Francis thought just not good enough to put into a volume, he represents Satan as scaling the walls of God’s garth, stealing the seed, and giving it a clandestine growth, which grew to fruit that made men who ate it an-hungered for God. And in this poem Satan is named “that Robber from the North.” Again, in one of the “Ecclesiastical Ballads,” the Veteran of Heaven declares, “The Prince I drave forth held the Mount of the North.”
44 See F. T.’s poem “The Newer Eve,” or “After Woman,” with whom the world should rise instead of fall.
45 Mr. Albert Cock in the Dublin Review.
46 The ending of the “Orient Ode” seems, in the frank exultation of its creed, to be unveiled and native pronouncement, as loud in its faith as the last line of Patmore’s “Faint yet Pursuing,” where he ends by “hearing the winds their Maker magnify.”
47 “The sun is the type of Christ, giving life with its proper blood to the earth,” is Mr. Edmund Gardner’s concise statement of F. T.’s meaning.
48 F. T. had a theory of the solar existence that did not stop short, with Science, at the measurement of gases and their density. “It has,” Mr. Ghosh tells me he said, “a life of its own, analogous to the life of the heart, periodic in its manifestations and—,” but here Francis stopped. “To Western ears it will sound ridiculous,” he said, and was silent. In vain Mr. Sarath Kumar Ghosh asserted his own Eastern aptitude for such speculation. Francis grimly repeated his excommunication, and Mr. Ghosh, conscious of a frock-coat and a great command of the English idiom, was half-convinced of its stness.
49 Compare Donne’s “No cross is so extreme, as to have none”—a thought upon which many paradoxical couplets were turned in the seventeenth century. But Donne goes a little further than his fellows. He seems to have known that an image, bound up with its original, is more than a likeness:—
Let crosses so take what hid Christ in thee;
And be His image, or not His, but He.
50 “The metre in my present volume,” wrote the author in a suppressed preface to New Poems, “is completely based on the principles which Mr. Patmore may be said virtually to have discovered.”
51 “Mrs. Meynell’s Essays” in the National Review, Aug. 1896.
52 Poetry of Pathos and Delight, being selections made by Alice Meynell from the poetry of Coventry Patmore.
53 “A Captain of Song,” addressed to Patmore before his death, and at his death published in the Athenæum, December 5, 1896.
54 “Many a bit of true seeing I have had to learn again, through science having sophisticated my eye, inward or outward. And many a bit I have preserved, to the avoidance of a world of trouble, by concerning myself no more than any child about the teachings of science. Especially is this the case in regard to light. I never lost the child’s instinctive rightness of outlook upon light because I flung the scientific theories aside as so much baffling distortion of perspective. ‘Here is cart for horse,’ I felt rather than saw, and would nothing with them.... Though scientists in camp stand together against me, I would not challenge the consensus of the poets.”
55 To this lady’s “genius for friendship” the dedication of Mr. Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes bears witness.
56 William Watson’s on the Coronation of Edward VII.
57 It may also be observed in passing that, while he was more experienced in privation than were any of his friends, Francis could be fastidious. It is still told of him in Sussex, where a clever cook attended his invalided appetite, that he would make great demonstrations at the mere sight of a dish he disapproved. Laying down his knife and fork this frank guest would proclaim against one of the several viands. “Miss Laurence, I hate mutton!” The piled-up emphasis of his voice made such a sentence tremendously effective. “Wilfrid,” he once said to my father, “Wilfrid, the Palace Court food is shocking!”
58 There were exceptions to this habitual carelessness; in 1898 he asked his sister for prayers that a friend might join the Church. She gave them and begged his, for her own purposes, in fair return.
59 “Bodily being is the analogy of the soul’s being; our temporal is our only clue to our spiritual life”; our fleshly senses the only medium for our divine experience. We are the symbols of ourselves. To such thoughts he adds disjointed notes in confirmation from the ancient mythologies: “Bird-heads to gods with man-bodies.”—“Zeus = Sky.”
60 With nothing that he has to say of another poet is it so impossible to agree as with his own estimate of the relative importance of the sections of New Poems—
“Creccas Cottage, Pantasaph, November 1896.
“My dear Doubleday,—I regret that I cannot consent to the omission of the translations. If anything is to be left out, it must be the section Ultima, not the translations. I said at Pantasaph that I would keep these, whatever I left out. They were held over from my first book, and I will not hold them over again. I regard the ‘Heard on the Mountain’ as a feat in diction and metre; and in this respect Coventry Patmore agrees with me. But I do not at all mind leaving out the section Ultima.—Yours,
F. T.”
61 Note by F. T.: “That is not drama, but lyric.”
62 This play was again unfavourably received when, in 1903, he submitted it to T. P.’s Weekly. It is thus set forth on his MS. title page:
NAPOLEON JUDGES
A Tragedy in Two Scenes
Dramatis Personæ.
Napoleon.
General Augereau.
Madame Lebrun (an opera-dancer, Augereau’s Mistress).
President of the Court Martial.
A French Deserter.
Officers. Soldiers.
Place.—Augereau’s Camp. Time.—The Italian Campaign of 1796. During the first scene Napoleon is absent from Augereau’s Camp.
Of another class is a modern comedy, full of laboriously smart give and take, called “Man Proposes, but Woman Disposes. Un Conte sans Raconteur. In Two Scenes.”