Chapter XII: Francis Thompson

The wave of Catholicism which swept over the art world of the closing years of the nineteenth century reached its poetic fulness in the work of Francis Thompson. Contemporary with him were Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and John Gray, and, although each was inspired by the same spiritual forces to reassert in song their faith in traditional Christianity, none of them had his bigness of vision. Few poets, indeed, of any time, have surpassed his technical skill or the prodigality of his literary inventiveness; but, beyond that, the spirit of the hour breathed into his verse a new avowal of mysticism, and it informed his orthodoxy with so sweet and beautiful a sense of life that those who were old in the convention of Rome must have marvelled at the beauty of their inheritance.

Francis Thompson, product as he is of the poetic impulsion of the Nineties, cannot be located there, as one can locate so many of the poets of the time. He is not estranged from neighbouring decades, like Ernest Dowson and John Gray, by a fortuitous decadence of mood, but rather does he partake of the endless current of the years and of the eternal normalities. Those who care to discover obvious resemblances among poets have compared him, fittingly enough, with Crashaw, Vaughan and Herbert, and other seventeenth-century mystical singers, and sometimes as though he had been influenced by them. Yet it is known that he resembled such poets before he had made himself acquainted with their works. Francis Thompson is, of course, just one more manifestation of the eternal mystery of faith, and in his greatness he is of no time and all time. Those resemblances with the past have no more to do with the average magnificence of his genius and his work than the minor novelties of thought and expression which may remind us of his corporeal moment. To the latter I must refer, and with more excuse than that demanded by the scope of this book, for there is much in his life and art which links him with, without confining him to, his period.

_From the Photograph by Sherril Schell_]

The son of a doctor, Francis Thompson was born at Preston on 18th December 1859. His father and mother, and two paternal uncles, were converts to the Roman Catholic religion; both uncles were associated with letters, one as professor of English literature at the Catholic University, Dublin, and later as sub-editor of _The Dublin Review_, and author of several devotional tracts, and the other as the author of a volume of poems. Francis was educated in the Catholic faith, and sent to Ushaw College with some idea of ultimate priesthood; but that intention must have been abandoned, for at the age of seventeen he was a reluctant student of medicine at Owens College, Manchester. Six years were devoted to this work when, repeated attempts to take a degree proving abortive, a medical career was abandoned. He expressed no desire to live by writing, although he was an ardent student of literature, with a particular affection for Æschylus, William Blake and De Quincey. Several unsuccessful attempts were made by him to earn a living in various employments, but in 1885, stung by his father’s reproaches, Thompson left Preston and walked to London. For three years he lived unknown, generally in degrees of poverty and destitution. He was employed variously and at odd times; once as a bootmaker’s assistant in Leicester Square, again as a publisher’s “collector.” In 1888 he sent two poems, “The Passion of Mary” and “Dream Tryst,” and a prose essay, “Paganism Old and New,” copied out on ragged scraps of paper, to _Merry England_. This act proved a turning-point in his career, for the editor, Wilfrid Meynell, recognising the extraordinary quality of the work submitted to him, not only published it, but sought out the author, who had given the vague address of Charing Cross Post Office; and, having found him, became his lifelong friend and, in course of time, his literary executor and the far-seeing guardian of his fame.

So poor was Francis Thompson during his early London days that even writing materials were beyond his means, and some old half-used account-books, given to him by the Leicester Square bootmaker, were a windfall, enabling him to translate to more enduring form something of the richness of his mind. But he was not a writer in the ordinary sense. His desire to harvest his dreams was intermittent at best, and, in after years, friendly editors were at great pains to extract commissioned work from him. At the same time he did make some attempt at publicity, as the sending of manuscripts to Mr Wilfrid Meynell would prove. The results were not, however, always so fortunate, for in the following year his essay on “Shelley” was rejected by _The Dublin Review_. Nearly twenty years later the essay was discovered among the poet’s papers by his literary executor, and, as we know, _The Dublin Review_ was enabled to make amends. During his own life Thompson published three volumes: _Poems_ (1893), _Sister Songs_ (1895) and _New Poems_ (1897). He contributed poems and reviews to several publications, notably to _The Academy_, under the editorship of Lewis Hind, who was one of the earliest to give practical recognition to his genius.

It was not easy to befriend such a man as Francis Thompson. For years he had taken opium, which set up a paralysis of the social will and made him tragically indifferent to the most elementary amenities of life. His friends induced him, especially when he was too ill to resist their kind offices, to leave the estranged city ways, and thus there are oases in his sordid outer life--in hospitals; at the house of Wilfrid and Alice Meynell; at Storrington, in Sussex, where he wrote most of the poems in his first volume; and, later, near the Franciscan monastery at Pantasaph, North Wales, where he wrote the greater part of those in his last. After this he did little work of first quality. His own soul, rather than the world, made fateful and fatal demands of him. This strange being, with brain of wondrous imagery and cleanest thoughts, this gentle poetic genius, voluntarily, it would seem, chose destitution and desolation as his lot--if one dare apply such terms to a being whose inner life was so rich with vision. But opium and privation are exacting mistresses and eventually they wrecked his never-too-robust body. Unfamiliar and unkempt, this wayward child of the magical soul, this decadent Shelley who “dabbled his fingers in the day-fall,” preferred to haunt the Embankment, the cavernous arches of Charing Cross and the bleak and dusty colonnades of Covent Garden, like any lonely and friendless human outcast, until disease drove him to take shelter in a hospital at St John’s Wood, where he died, on 13th November 1907.

Among the many eloquent and whole-hearted tributes to his memory, that by Wilfred Whitten stands out for its vivid word portraiture of the man in his latter days. Mr Whitten first met Francis Thompson at the office of _The Academy_, Chancery Lane, in 1897, “the year in which, with his _New Poems_, he took farewell of poetry and began,” he says, “to look on life as so much dead lift, so much needless postscript to his finished epistle. Thompson came frequently to the office to receive books for review, and to bring in his ‘copy.’ Every visit meant a talk, which was never curtailed by Thompson. This singer, who had soared to themes too dazzling for all but the rarest minds; this poet of the broken wing and the renounced lyre had not become moody or taciturn. At his best he was a fluent talker, who talked straight from his knowledge and convictions, yet never for victory. He weighed his words, and would not hurt a controversial fly. On great subjects he was slow or silent; on trifles he became grotesquely tedious. This dreamer seemed to be surprised into a kind of exhilaration at finding himself in contact with small realities. And then the fountains of memory would be broken up, or some quaint corner of his _amour propre_ would be touched. He would explain nine times what was clear, and talk about snuff or indigestion or the posting of a letter until the room swam round us.”

Following this comes a picture of the poet as he appeared in his pilgrimage through the London streets: “A stranger figure than Thompson’s was not to be seen in London. Gentle in looks, half-wild in externals, his face worn by pain and the fierce reactions of laudanum, his hair and straggling beard neglected, he had yet a distinction and an aloofness of bearing that marked him in the crowd; and when he opened his lips he spoke as a gentleman and a scholar. A cleaner mind, a more naïvely courteous manner, were not to be found. It was impossible and unnecessary to think always of the tragic side of his life. He still had to live and work, in his fashion, and his entries and exits became our most cheerful institution. His great brown cape, which he would wear on the hottest days, his disastrous hat, and his dozen neglects and makeshifts were only the insignia of our ‘Francis’ and of the ripest literary talent on the paper. No money (and in his later years Thompson suffered more from the possession of money than from the lack of it) could keep him in a decent suit of clothes for long. Yet he was never ‘seedy.’ From a newness too dazzling to last, and seldom achieved at that, he passed at once into a picturesque nondescript garb that was all his own and made him resemble some weird pedlar or packman in an etching by Ostade. This impression of him was helped by the strange object--his fish-basket, we called it--which he wore slung round his shoulders by a strap. It had occurred to him that such a basket would be a convenient receptacle for the books which he took away for review, and he added this touch to an outward appearance which already detached him from millions.”

Stranger or more inspired being has never before slipped through the indifferent metropolitan throng, transmuting, by his indifference to earthly things, tragic moments into joyous conquests.

Having mentioned the difficulties of friendly intention towards such a man, it is necessary to quote here a more recent tribute to Thompson’s earliest friend, Wilfrid Meynell, contributed in a letter to _The Nation_ by Lewis Hind, in reply to a poem “To Francis Thompson,” by William H. Davies. There were lines in this poem, such as “No window kept a light for thee,” and “No pilot thought thee worth his pains,” which might have led the ill-informed to imagine Thompson a friendless and neglected genius. The contrary is made quite clear for all time:

“Now [says Lewis Hind] it is a matter of history that there
was a man who, through sheer love of great verse, and through
kindness, piloted Francis Thompson all the years of his London
life from the late eighties until his death. That man was
Wilfrid Meynell. There was a window always alight for the
poet--the window of the Meynell home. And if this is not made
very clear in the forthcoming _Life of Francis Thompson_,
by Everard Meynell, the reason will be the family shrinking
from making their good deeds known. I speak from knowledge.
Long ago (it must have been about 1889), on the occasion of my
first meeting with Wilfrid Meynell (my initial call at that
hospitable house, drawn thither by an essay from Mrs Meynell’s
pen that made me eager to meet the author), Mr Meynell asked
me if I had ever heard of a Francis Thompson who had submitted
to him for _Merry England_ an astonishing poem from the
vague address of Charing Cross Post Office. Later, he tracked
the poet, and from that day until Thompson’s death Wilfrid
Meynell was pilot, friend, purse, anything, everything, to the
poet. From the material world Francis Thompson wanted nothing.
It did not interest him. It did not exist for him. His body,
that wretched structure ordained to house, as it best might,
his ardent spirit, he, shall I say, despised. Comfort, a home,
provision for the future were to him unrealities. His only
realities were spiritual; his only adventures were in the land
of visions. The Meynell household was his true parental home,
and he, a child in all worldly matters, was as incurious as a
child as to the whence and why of the necessaries of life. For a
time I was happily instrumental in relieving my friend, Wilfrid
Meynell, of the financial burden of piloting a poet. That was
during the days of my editorship of _The Academy_, when
for three or four years Thompson was our most valued and most
difficult contributor. I soon realised the folly of sending
him a cheque in payment of contributions. Either he would
never open the letter, or, likely enough, he would light his
obstreperous pipe with the cheque, apparently never dreaming
that it might be useful in paying his landlady. No; I sent him
no cheques after the first month. A cheque was despatched to his
landlady each week for board and lodging, and a few shillings
were placed in the poet’s hand, periodically, for pocket money,
which he accepted with detachment, his flow of conversation (it
was his wont often to talk about nothing at exasperating length)
uninterrupted. _The Academy_ would never have received his
fine ‘Ode on the Death of Cecil Rhodes’ (a commission: completed
in fifteen hours) had he not been in want that day of pocket
money--not for collars, not for cabs--for laudanum.”

Tragedy there was in the life of Francis Thompson, but there was nothing pitiful. It was a life too deep for pathos. He was one of those who were marked by the quickening spirit of the times for test of tribulation. The search for reality in the Nineties produced many such who were impelled by the unknown forces of the moment to follow life to the very frontier of experience. Consciously or unconsciously, as we have seen, men were experimenting with life, and it would seem also as if life were experimenting with men. It was a revolution precipitated by the Time Spirit. Francis Thompson represented the revolt against the world. He did not, as many had done, defy the world; he denied it, and, by placing his condition beneath contempt, he conquered it. That, at least, was the effect of his curious life, and in that he was unique even in a period of spiritual and intellectual insurrection and suffering. The probability that he took to poverty as he took to opium, as a sedative for the malady of spirit, does not invalidate this view, and the record of his pilgrimage and his faith is actually epitomised in the most popular and most remarkable of his poems, _The Hound of Heaven_, a work which well might serve as a symbol of the spiritual unrest of the whole nineteenth century. But whilst every thinker and dreamer of the _fin de siècle_ decade was seeking a fuller life through art, or experience, or sensation, or reform, or revolt, or possessions, Francis Thompson was finding it in the negation of all these. Whilst others acquired for themselves treasures of one kind or another, or sought for themselves wonders and achievements of one kind or another, he remained both poor and unmoved by his poverty. If mind ever was kingdom to man, Francis Thompson’s mind a kingdom was to him; nay, it was the kingdom of God.

In this great lyric the mystical idea of God as the Hound of Heaven eternally pursuing the pilgrims of life until they return to Him is autobiographical of a man and an age. What better epitome of the mind of the modern world could be imagined than the opening stanza?

“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes, I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.”

There we have the whole desolation of man--the seeker who findeth not, for what he seeks seeketh him; the hunter of God hunted by God--and as the poem proceeds we see the eternal malady of the spirit, now satiated, now insatiable, in the age-long quest for peace and joy in things known and seen:

“To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.
But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
The long savannahs of the blue;
Or whether, Thunder-driven,
They clanged His chariot ’thwart a heaven
Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o’ their feet:--
Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.”

Francis Thompson took a delight in simple things which recalls Wordsworth’s attitude and sometimes that poet’s accent, particularly in the lines called “Daisy,” wherein, after the manner, also, of the Nineties, he celebrates his meeting with Innocence in the person of a young girl on the Sussex hills near Storrington:

“She looked a little wistfully,
Then went her sunshine way:--
The sea’s eye had a mist on it,
And the leaves fell from the day.

She went her unremembering way,
She went, and left in me
The pang of all the partings gone,
And partings yet to be.

She left me marvelling why my soul
Was sad that she was glad;
At all the sadness in the sweet,
The sweetness in the sad.”

Indeed, it would be easier to find resemblances between Francis Thompson and poets so diverse as Wordsworth and Shelley than between him and the mystic poets of the seventeenth century. He had the quietism of Wordsworth and the exalted sensuousness of Shelley, and he had the fundamental saintliness of both. A life of sordid self-inflicted disaster could no more affect the strength and cleanliness of his spirit than a life of passionate wilfulness could touch the purity of the soul of Shelley. But there are definite points of divergence between Thompson and the two earlier poets. He goes further with Shelley than with Wordsworth: Thompson and Shelley were more akin. The spirituality of Wordsworth was, ultimately, moral; that of Shelley, mystic. Had the spirit of Wordsworth been reborn in 1891 it might have been rationalistic and ethical: the pride of Nonconformity. But the spirit of Shelley reborn at the same time might have been--Francis Thompson. Shelley, it is true, sought an unknown God in materialism, and some of his prose might easily have been inspired by that Secular Society which post-dated him by half-a-century, but his most rationalistic moment in song has all the passionate mysticism of William Blake. The paganism of Shelley seems to span the years with majestic courage until, weary of the endless show of things, it joins forces with Thompson and Christianity.

The modern poet knew and understood Shelley as few have done. For him no “bright but ineffectual angel,” this soaring creature of enraptured song, but a child with the whole universe for toy-box: “He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall. He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright mischief with the moon. The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand. He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the shaking of its fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates of heaven: its floor is littered with his broken fancies. He runs wild over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets between the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient Nature, and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song.” And in this description of Shelley, Thompson goes far towards describing himself, but he did not stand “in the lap of patient Nature”; Francis Thompson, childlike also, rested in the lap of God.

This kinship with Shelley in a common Pantheism is realised more than elsewhere in Francis Thompson’s _Anthem of Earth_, a luxuriant poem in which he retraces with depth and beauty, and an added richness, the image he had summoned to his aid in the essay on his kin-poet:

“Then what wild Dionysia I, young Bacchanal,
Danced in thy lap! Ah for the gravity!
Then, O Earth, thou rang’st beneath me,
Rocked to Eastward, rocked to Westward,
Even with the shifted
Poise and footing of my thought!
I brake through thy doors of sunset,
Ran before the hooves of sunrise,
Shook thy matron tresses down in fancies
Wild and wilful
As a poet’s hand could twine them;
Caught in my fantasy’s crystal chalice
The Bow, as its cataract of colours
Plashed to thee downward;
Then when thy circuit swung to nightward,
Night the abhorrèd, night was a new dawning,
Celestial dawning
Over the ultimate marges of the soul;
Dusk grew turbulent with fire before me,
And like a windy arras waved with dreams.
Sleep I took not for my bedfellow,
Who could waken
To a revel, an inexhaustible
Wassail of orgiac imageries;
Then while I wore thy sore insignia
In a little joy, O Earth, in a little joy;
Loving thy beauty in all creatures born of thee,
Children, and the sweet-essenced body of women;
Feeling not yet upon my neck thy foot,
But breathing warm of thee as infants breathe
New from their mother’s morning bosom.”

Such earth-love is Pagan rather than Christian, yet it was not foreign to the Christianity of Francis Thompson, whose orthodoxy did not curtail his worship of Life in many of her manifestations--in the stars and the winds, in the flowers and children, and in pure womanhood. There was hardly anything abnormal about his taste, but everything he worshipped became distinguished and strange by the wonder-maiden imagery of his genius. The foregoing lines are richly diapered with luxurious phrases. No other poet of his time possessed such jewelled endowment, and few of any other time equal him in this gift. Nowhere in English song are there poems so heavily freighted with decoration of such magnificence; and no poems approaching, however remotely, their regal splendour have the power of suggesting such absolute simplicity. Sometimes his “wassail of orgiac imageries” becomes the light conceit of his time, but never for long. Francis Thompson soared high above literary flightiness. His very luxuriance of expression was austere; it was not the young delight of a Keats in sheer physical beauty; it was the transmutation of sense into spirit by the refinement of sense in vision.