"Look for me in the nurseries of heaven."
MERRY ENGLAND, & magazine that bore the interesting device, "We shall try to revive in our own hearts and in the hearts of others, the enthusiasm of the Christian Faith," was edited by a genial and remarkable man. Wilfred Meynell had, no doubt, a temperate and gracefully romantic soul, but he was fundamentally what he claimed to be, a revivalist concerned with the nineteenth century and the problem of spiritual restoration which Catholics thought so intimate a part of it. The excuse for beginning an essay on Francis Thompson with the name of Meynell is simply that without the latter's influence there would have been no poet of the "Sister Songs." Thompson, it is true, accepted the friendly editor's largesse with diffidence and repaid a hundred fold; for when on April 18, 1888, the derelict author who had been responsible for "Paganism Old and New" tiptoed warily into the office of Merry England, that journal assumed immortality, though it has long since ceased publication. This wretch whose bodily destitution could scarcely have been more complete, this wanderer of the streets who reeked of laudanum and whose face was already set for the death-mask, had indeed inherited the "enthusiasm of the Christian Faith," and would do as much to revive it as any other man.
Mr. Meynell anticipated very little of Thompson's story, something of which is now known everywhere. Born at Preston, Lancashire, on December 16, 1859, Francis was the son of a benevolent doctor whose medicine had a kindly habit of getting into the hands of people who could not pay for it. He and his family were sincerely religious converts. It is to be doubted whether either father or mother understood at all their strange, solitary child. Ought one to expect of earnest, workaday parents that they shall immediately divine genius in a boy who reads Shakespeare and Scott in solitude when not busy at make-believe with his sisters; whose indolence is quite extraordinary; who, when sent to Ushaw (1870) manages somehow to keep himself unspotted from the rougher world of boydom, suffering meanwhile indescribable agony from affronts to which a normal lad would respond with a grimace; who is finally counseled to quell his aspirations to the priesthood because of his "absent-mindedness"?
The fact is that Francis Thompson was already a contemplative, an initiate into the small band of those whose intellect bids them sit with Mary, whether the final object of their intent be truly God or merely nature. But Francis was the disciple of saints, not of Walter Pater. It is interesting, though useless, to speculate on what would have become of him had the spiritual directors of Ushaw, too much concerned with the vineyard, guided him to some mystic commuity that would have received him with joy. Might not the poet have turned saint and have written glowing volumes, which would trace for a world so little accustomed to them the adventures of the lover's pilgrimage? Doubtless the Providence which led him had prepared the poet's darker night of pain, at the end of which would come the poet's ecstacy and the coveted release.
Surely there can be nothing more surprising in fiction than Francis Thompson's rather indifferent acquiescence in his father's plans for making a physician of him. A man less fitted for wielding the pestle never lived. In 1877, however, he entered Owens College, Manchester, and began that study of death which, had he not already been somewhat aloof from the world, must have crushed him. There were, it happens, several doors to freedom: literature, music, and cricket, all from the spectator's point of view. During the six years spent in Manchester he learned the speech of Coleridge and tasted laudanum. Thompson must then have fancied himself at the bottom of life, but the downward movement had only begun. After definitely abandoning the study of medicine and all other practical schemes which a patient father could think of, he went off alone to London and began on the cobblestones that existence of comatose misery which has seemed to most persons either terribly romantic or romantically terrible. It was, of course, neither. The simple fact is that Thompson, through no personal fault, had missed the vocation after which his nature yearned. This dreary waiting for a sign in London, this hunger and cold and opium-muddled dreaming, were merely the humdrum daily business of one who was an outcast from the regal enterprise that had no room for him. These things, especially the laudanum, left scars which never healed; but deep battle-wounds seldom do anything else.
At length the hand which had led Thompson so strangely astray, and as near the abyss as even Saint Teresa was allowed to venture, drew him from the seething streets to the one place for which he was now suited. "Enthusiasm for the Christian Faith"! What had this waif who had
"Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour In night's slow-wheeled car"
to do with such a venture? Everything. No more stalwart crusader, not Richard or Godfrey, had ever ridden for the Christian cause than this vagrant troubadour whose body seemed scarcely less material than his soul. That at least was firmly knit, had served its long campaign. The strength which leaped within him, the voice fresh and resonant in an age well used to voices, came from seclusion encrusted with the wealth of the past: the imagery of the Elizabethan poets, the Catholic outlook, the ritual of the Church, and the agelong aspect of the firmament and its God. The singer was eager for the song, and there came marvelous days when melodies formed in the dark opened to the morning; when praise seemed void to those who understood the music and empty to those who did not. What, indeed, was a lover of his time to make of these verses which flaunted it, which spoke a language that only forgotten poets understood? There was disaparagement enough, excessive neglect.
Gradually, however, the note of praise increased and was sustained. Many a young poet, like Walter de la Mare or Richard le Gallienne, walked the streets oblivious of everything except the haunting stanzas of "The Hound of Heaven." Even the doubting critics came to see the genius in their midst and believed, though they were sorely tried. Today there is no Francis Thompson controversy for the lover of poetry. He is "comparable only to Shakespeare," "the greatest product of English Catholicism during the nineteenth century" -- an enthusiastic remark surely -- a master more adored than Browning or Shelley, and raised to a dizzy pinnacle from which only his real emninence can prevent a disastrous fall. "Sister Songs" are in everybody's hands; there is even a staid American scientist who has taken to reading the breviary because of certain rhythms in "Sight and Insight."
It is inevitable that shadows should fall on the picture. The poetic heat, repressed so long, could not outlive the poet's fragile fire. Thompson stalwartly refused to write mediocre poems when his powers were inadequate for great ones, and so the bulk of his verse is small. There remained, however, many things to say, and these he put with great care into prose which, less regal than his poetry, remained a faithful companion until the end. Generally it served the kindly office of criticism, and, with the exception of the "Shelley" has scarcely been recognized for what it is worth. The Shelley essay is, of course, a poet's prose at its supreme best; but are not the Olympian papers on Coleridge, Crashaw, and Landor also among the original, certain literary productions of their kind? Again, Thompson put his entire personality into a life of Saint Ignatius Loyola. Surely no one has done, or is likely to do, this task with so much understanding and reverently fervent art; nevertheless, it is not very easy to get a copy of the book. In short, the fame of the poet has made men forget the writer of prose. Thompson's genius, so remarkably intuitive and so daringly individual, cannot, however, be understood unless one remembers that he began with an essay -- "Paganism, Old and New" -- and ended with a biography -- "St. Ignatius Loyola." Since his death no one has doubted the inspiration of his poetry; there is no reason either for refusing homage to his prose.
Extensive critical appreciation of Francis Thompson's poetry has made quite clear its divergent excellencies. The impassioned melody following with surprising ease the curves of a rigidly conceived structure (like a group of colored sails on the strong sea); the vividness of the imagery, intricate and satisfying as a ritual; the vitality of the imagination which shapes the poet's idea: all of these good qualities have been emphasized. We have learned to accept the most formidable of his Latinisms with some relish, and traces of the older poets -- Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Crashaw -- in his verse have been duly pointed out and forgiven. The ode structure of the great poems is considered a sign of artistic mastery as baffling as is Shakespeare's in the triumphant Elizabethan blank verse. Interesting studies have been made of the method and motive of individual poems -- studies which are useful, too, because Thompson believed that poetry ought to be popular. Neither does anyone doubt the authenticity of his vision, although there is often considerable vagueness about the actual import of that There underlies all of Thompson's poetry the intuition that the beauty of earth is in some way the reflection of the beauty of heaven; earth's beauty fragile and soon decayed, material for the constant synthesis of birth and death. The Cross is dissolution's presage of the Resurrection hope. Thus, in the "Ode to the Setting Sun," the poet says:
"Thou art of Him a type memorial. Like Him thou hang'st in dreadful pomp of blood Upon the Western rood,"
and Christian mysticism advances far beyond the idealism of Plato. The "Hound of Heaven," gazing from behind His tumultuous windows, knows that the man who is temporarily appeased with the mere reflections of His countenance will never remain satisfied, and slowly, steadfastly draws him in. Again, the comparison drawn in the "Orient Ode" between day and the Benediction service, is a poet's attempt to grasp, with nature's help, the mystery of the Incarnation:
"O Salutaris Hostia Quae coeli pandis ostium, Through breached ramparts, a Divine assaulter, art thou come" --
manifests a daring application of exalted liturgy to an interpretation of nature. These few examples deal with cardinal points; but the Christian mystic's understanding of the world is upheld everywhere in Thompson's poetry.
Now this was exactly the method of the mediaeval artist. By means of a highly intricate coordination the builder of the Gothic cathedral brought all nature round the table of Divine sacrifice. The mighty pillars of the nave, with their clamorous commingling of arches and the leaf-like forms of their delicate galleries -- what were these but the forest rendered mute and immobile for the sheltering of the Host? Flaming windows, crowded with figures, reproduced all the colours of the sky and ocean illumined by the sun, as these saints had been inspired by their Sun. Outside, marvelous groups of statuary gathered virgins and heroes, children and labourers, flowers and fruits, and the pageants of all seasons under the protecting shadows of majestic spires, themselves encrusted with symbolic forms. Under all, in the midst of all, there lay the Cross, and upon it the Corporal Presence for whose sake this monument had been fashioned: real and living, lending all things a new and startling beauty by the terrible joy of His marriage of life and death.
But Francis Thompson was a master of mediaeval art as well as of mediaeval doctrine, and his work takes on an added beauty when considered in this manner. "Sister Songs" are radiant, charming façades, miracles of spring -- with here and there a touch of autumn -- driving up graceful pinnacles into the sky, but, though reaching far, never quite attempting the audacity of a spire. Does not the poet himself say:
"I faint, I sicken, darkens all my sight, As, poised upon this unprevisioned height, I lift into its place The upmost aery traceried pinnacle. So: it is builded, the high tenement, -- God grant! -- to mine intent: Most like a palace of the Occident, Upthrusting, toppling maze on maze, Its mounded blaze, And washed by the sunset's rosy waves, Whose sea drinks rarer hue from those rare walls it laves."
There is grave, sweet seriousness in his handiwork, though occasionally it grows flamboyant, as in the riotous "Corymbus for Autumn." Here he is master of a maze of imagery that crowds into every available place, turning the somber stone of diction into lace whose counterpart one must seek at Lincoln or Saint Maclou. But the stern outline of the cathedral itself has long been drawn and its interior made ready. All that stands without, even the "giant arches of the years" and the "labyrinthine ways," are not the Beauty upon whose service the artist is bent. And kneeling in humble prayer before the tabernacle of the "Hound of Heaven" he hears the words,
"Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, Save Me, save only Me?"
These are the selfsame words which inspired the master of Gothic stone, who brought together all things that make earth goodly as a sign of his relinquishment of them to Him.
Such was the edifice into which Thompson set windows and placed statues, tender at times, like the "Little Jesus;" again, terrible in aspect, like "The Veteran of Heaven," and human finally in the tearful image of her of whom he sang in "The House of Sorrows." He celebrated the coming of music and light into the temple he had reared, by the "Ode to the Setting Sun"; and at the mortuary Mass read there for the "Dead Cardinal," he did not forget his own, the artist's "Dies Irae":
"Good friend, I pray thee send Some high gold embassage To teach my unripe age. Tell Lest my feet walk hell."
Thompson is also the brother of the mediaeval artist by reason of his use of imagery. Here there is question not so much of untrammeled imaginative power as of the transfiguration of the commonplace. Long ago Alice Meynell pointed out one of the secrets of Thompson's power -- the likening of great things to small ones -- which the attentive reader will soon discover for himself. For example in the "Mistress of Vision" we are told:
"The sun which lit that garden wholly, Low and vibrant visible, Tempered glory woke; And it seemed solely Like a silver thurible Solemnly swung, slowly, Fuming clouds of golden fire, for a cloud of incense smoke."
Again, in a simpler poem, "New Year's Chimes," it is written:
"And a world with unapparent strings Knits the simulant world of things."
Mr. Meynell, in the "Life of Francis Thompson," comments thus upon certain of the poet's analogies: "The whole scale of comparisons is unexpected in the case of one who goes to the eating-house not only for his meals, but for his images; who finds nothing outrageous in naming the Milky Way a beaten yolk of stars; who takes the setting sun for a bee that stings the west to angry red."{1} Numberless additional examples might be given, some of them equally fantastic, others, like "the naming brazen bowl of the burnished sun" suggestive of the modern impressionist.
The sole artistic medium able and audacious enough to use such imagery unsparingly has been the ritual (and architecture) of the Church. In this alone one finds the highest and lowliest in that intimate conjunction which has been, from the human point of view, the motive force in Christendom. The Incarnation tells of nothing else, nor does the life and mission of the Saviour: it is written in the Magnificat, it is the fulfilment of the Domine, non sum dignus. Christ, in the parables, lent dignity to infinitesimal things like mustard seed. And just as the ritualist who first conceived the idea of representing Jesus by means of the wax candle, or the sculptor who in the dim regions of the catacombs modeled Him as a Fish carrying a basket of Bread through the waters, did so with all reverence and love, so our derelict poet fashioned for himself a comforting vision of heaven from the things he trod under his feet. With a surprising buoyancy of spirit he loved the dreams he drew, and if sometimes they closed in pain he knew that the artist must suffer, like St. Jerome or St. Monica, in expiation for the ugliness of the world.
The house of worship built, Thompson follows the guidance of Coventry Patmore, his friend, and is wrapped in mystical contemplation before the throne of God: the shadows thicken and the One Light burns in the midst of that universe of images; there descends upon the meditative worshipper "Sight and Insight," the end, the desideratum, the goal of mediaeval art. In this immaterial raiment the soul might best sever itself from the body, throw aside the train of the beauty of Earth. It is not pretended, of course, that Thompson consciously made any such disposition of his poetic faculties as has been suggested here; that it was made, however, in a marvelously complete way, that he did become the counterpart of the builder in the Ages of Faith, seems both evident and remarkable. He was the Gothic artist in verse, and two things are thereby made clear: that God did not disdain the services of one who was naturally a priest and a contemplative, but gave him the boon of an exalted mission as "the poet of the return to God," and that, in the ordinary sense, he had not sinned against the Light, but kept his soul bright as it had been in boyhood.
It is not easy, when one has reviewed the excellencies of Francis Thompson's poetry, to have patience for an examination of his short-comings. That his work was not free from faults is a platitude; but as Mr. John Macy, a critic quite different in temperament from his poet, suggests, they are always the sins of a Meister-singer. Elizabethan conceits are not always charming, and those in several poems, especially "Manus Animam Pinxit," show clearly a lack of inspiration. In certain stanzas of even the best poems the thought is spun out almost into thin air, grammatical constructions are mismanaged, and words too exclusively poetic usurp, for the mere sake of melody, the rightful places of homelier terms. It requires no master of the art to detect the flaw in such lines as these:
"The burning rhetoric, quenchless oratory, Of the magniloquent and all-suasive sky,"
when Thompson writes them; but they might serve lesser poets well. On the whole he proved a very conscientious workman, and the mystery of his rhythmic patterns will baffle all imitation not deeply erudite. The eager pilfering which Thompson graciously confessed was, of course, Shakespeare's privilege; but the suspicion that "the great earthquaking sunrise clanging past Cathay" is derived from Mr. Kipling, or that the Edinburgh reviewer of 1895 was right in finding traces of Cowley in "Sister Songs" does prove somewhat disconcerting. These blemishes and all others that may be cited do not, however, mar the supreme originality, the regal beauty, and the spiritual ecstasy of Francis Thompson's verse. He was the master-builder of song; among all the poets of later years, he is the one who guarded best the citadel of the soul.
The poet that Francis Thompson so magnificently proved himself to be left plenty of room for the humbler writer of prose. When the temple of his song had been built, during one brief, intensely creative period of power, the master grew weary and could no longer venture on the spires, among the bells. Dreams remained kind, but gradually became elusive guests. With prose Thompson felt at home always; the critic's hand is somehow firmer than the poet's, though it need not lack almost equal delicacy and strength. "Paganism, Old and New," which rescued him from the darkness, is Thompson's measure both as a writer and as an individual. It is quaint, semi-poetic, and despite its oddities, oddly powerful; but it bears the imprint of a strangely simple man. His mind was made up: he knew the story of the continuity of Christendom, and understood how fully it had drawn from the older Paganism which is dead forever. "Aurora may rise over our cities, but she has forgotten how to blush": the derelict who wrote thus had already come into his kingdom, and all that earth could give was the wreath for the brow of Her he craved. In later years his mysticism grew stronger, and he sharpened his wits on the golden sands of love. Essays and book reviews caught something of his thought, which disregarded occasionally the paths in which it strayed. At the end there came the "St. Ignatius Loyola," surely a noble tribute in which there is as much of the real Francis Thompson as one can find in "The Hound of Heaven."
His greatest achievement as a prose-writer is, of course, the "Shelley." It is not only an apology for that wayward poet, but also a defense of song. Thompson, pausing for a moment at the white heat of his own creative energy, rides to the rescue of a younger brother, gorgeous in the armour of regal imagery. Was insight in its highest intuitive form ever so thoroughly alive under jeweled garments of state? It is Shelley who keeps the tryst by the eternal proxy of genius; Shelley the audacious, the absurd, the spoiled poet, but after all, Shelley the boy. Or has Thompson made a tomb of prose in which the singer shall live -- a tomb of filigree marble rising from a floor of rich encaustic tile, delicately wrought, vibrant in every detail, surely the despair of the pedant?
"Coming to Shelley's poetry," says Thompson, "we peep over the wild mask of revolutionary metaphysics, and we see the winsome face of the child. Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than 'The Cloud,' and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs from the faculty of make-believe. The same thing is conspicuous, throughout his singing; it is the child's faculty of make believe raised to the nth power. He is still at play, save only that his playthings are those which the gods give their children. The universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall. He is gold dusty with tumblings amidst the stars. He makes bright mischief with the moon. The meteors muzzle their noses in his hand. He teases into growling the kenneled 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."{2}
Some reasonable objection might be made to the metrical strain of this prose; but the most noteworthy quality in Thompson's criticism is not the rhymthic verve of the language or its pell-mell imagery, but its shrewd knowledge of mechanics and no less uncanny divination of artistic motives. The critic's sight becomes a divining-rod poised over depths unsuspected before. Thompson was not always able to find the vein of gold, nor was his assaying infallible. But there is little poetic criticism in nineteenth century English literature to equal his. If one takes, for example, the temperately written "Crashaw," wherein admiration for the master is curbed by the disciple's inspection of his workmanship, one feels that here a mason is busy studying the mortar of a sturdy old wall. Crashaw had spoken, for instance, of the "curved" snowflakes; Thompson was perhaps the only modern to note the actual "curve" which had fascinated the older poet. Coleridge, so much of genius bound and gagged, is thus summed up: "the poet submerged and feebly struggling in opium-darkened oceans of German philosophy, amid which he finally floundered, striving to the last to fish up gigantic projects from the bottom of a half-daily pint of laudanum." What most readers have sensed in reading Milton, but few have known how to express is thus succinctly stated by Thompson: "Milton lacked, perhaps . . . a little poetic poverty of soul, a little detachment from his artistic richness. He could not forget, nor can we forget, that he was Milton." This is the consistent tenor of his criticism, which is always journalistic but never feeble or flitting; it is "creative" criticism, if you will, though not impressionistic in manner. For Thompson knows and obeys the canons of taste; his outlook upon literature is Elizabethan, and therefore warmly classical, while the windows of his judgment are face to face with nature gorgeous in spring. At the bottom of his driven mind lies the pearl of humour, beyond price. "This is commendable neither in poet nor errand-boy," says the "Shelley" with a twinkle not of this age, but gracious as Beaumont.
Most important among Thompson's qualities, however, was the seer's hearkening to the heart-beat of Truth, the mystic's reading of a manifold script written to spell out the Word. He knew when to shut his eyes. As Patmore says in "Aurea Dicta," "Lovers put out the candles and draw the curtains, when they wish to see the goddess; and in the high Communion, the night of thought is the light of perception." The ordinary reasoning process counts for little in Thompson's mental operations; instead there is the flash of understanding traversing the distance between the outer world and its Core with a stately ease that must be purchased with pain. He served the two queens, Beauty and Truth, with his life. Of prose and poetry he made a continuous homage aux dames. This was a privilege inherited from the saints who, in paying tribute to God, have loved His vesture. From time immemorial, indeed, the idea that nature is a veil has been the inspiration of both poetry and thought. For Thompson, Coleridge had spoken truly: "Absolute nature lives not in our life, nor yet is lifeless, but lives in the life of God; and in so far, and so far merely, as man himself lives in that life, does he come into sympathy with Nature; and Nature with him. She is God's daughter who stretches her hand only to her father's friends." Later there came from Patmore the teaching of the universal sacrament of union, the sublime harmony of the Trinity envisaging itself in all the world's diversified conjugation, especially in matrimony. It was not given to Thompson to become so rapturously certain of this doctrine as his master was, nor had he any deep knowledge of woman. The whole of this exalted, unearthly teaching is controlled by a reverent observation of the disciplina arcani; this Thompson realized, and though it was part of his inspiration he would not have cared, perhaps, to have it publicly insisted on.
What shall we make in the end of this man who knew so little of the world's ways and yet understood it so well? His character was fascinatingly simple and though crowded with pain escaped moroseness. In reality one thinks of it as pervaded with penitential peace; his life is like a procession through bitter and suffering streets, dark with things that one sees in laudanum dreams, to the house of laughter. Thompson had wedded Poverty when she was no longer a lady, but the child was most beautiful song. Who can analyze a soul so patient, so reverent, so governed by the best instincts of childhood; a soul which lacked utterly the complexities which arise in a nature disturbed by the grapple of evil with good; a soul proudly conscious of its powers and lineage even in the throes of despair? The man who had not been vouchsafed the earlier priesthood, fulfilled the later ministry with quiet pomp. During the time of his visits at Panta-saph, where the Franciscans received him amiably, he indulged to the full that longing for monastic retreat with which he had been marked at birth; if in other surroundings he gratified the more ordinary desire for companionship, it was because kindness would repay charity. The laudanum which seems to stain his fingers, if not his soul, was after all the terrible key with which he could enter solitude when all other doors were closed.
There is no room here for mention of his personal peculiarities, which are all to be had for the asking from his biographer. The portrait which Lytton drew shortly before Thompson's death on November 13, 1907, is that of a prophet, visualizing "the dread future without dread"; so that after all he had nothing to regret in the manner of his life. As for his poetry, that is aere perennius.
BOOK NOTE
The Standard (Scribner) Edition of Francis Thompson's poetry and prose in three volumes is the desirable one. The Modern Library (Boni and Liveright) contains the "Poems" in convenient form. "The Life of Francis Thompson," by Everard Meynell, is the authoritative biography. See in addition, "Francis Thompson," by G.E. Beacock; "The Spirit of Francis Thompson," by a Sister of Notre Dame; "The Hound of Heaven," by F.P. LeBuffe, S.J.; and the "Shelbourne Essays," 7th Series, by P.E. More. A study of Thompson's prose has been prepared by Charles L. O'Donnell. The following essays in the Dublin Review are of interest: by A.C. Cock, vol. 14,9; by Alice Meynell, vol. 153; by William Barry, vol. 147. See also, Joyce Kilmer, "Works," vol. 3.
{1} Chap. X, page 207.
{2} Pp. 39-41.