CHAPTER VIII The Poet as Mystic-Francis Thompson (1859-1907) The story of Francis Thompson is one of those true romances which are stranger than fiction. He was a Lancashire lad; and the rest of the external aspects of his life can be summed up in a few sentences. Too shy and feckless to make a priest-he had been born a Roman Catholic-he tried for a time to study medicine at Manchester and gave it up because his heart was not in it. Then he went in for a soldier and was refused because he had no physique. After that he went to London to try his luck, became an assistant in a boot and shoe shop, and afterwards a bookseller's messenger, and was a dead failure at both. Then he became a seller of newspapers and a caller of cabs. At this point, by what might seem a happy chance but was in reality a providential disposition, his genius was discovered and he fell into the hands of good friends, Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, who cherished him, and so far as his incurable eccentricity would permit, looked after him. Though he died at forty-eight-nineteen years after the Meynells had taken him to their hearts -he lived to write poetry which stands worthily in the company of immortal song. The story of his early struggles is one of singular pathos, and should be read in Everard Meynell's "Life of Francis Thompson." Door after door, not only of usefulness but of bare subsistence, shut in his face with a sort of brutal finality; and though he had weaknesses he might have overcome and habits he need never have contracted, one's pity for him never fails. He was cursed with a certain obstinate futility in affairs, a fact to some extent explained by the discovery that never more than a small part of the man dwelt in the concrete brick and mortar world. It was his happy lot, even amid his physical misery, to live and move among the stars. And looking at his life as a whole, pity becomes an impertinence. There is room only for wonderment and thankfulness. For out of the sweat and tears and privations of London streets, he drew the materials, if not the inspiration, of deathless song. His music is that of a soul which dragged the weariest depths of life and drank the last and bitterest dregs of its cup. There is blood and anguish and iron in it; though the song itself is in the heavens, it never loses the clinging undertone of the depths. This was a man drawn to the last edge of life, walking, as it were, helplessly upon the utmost precipice; but his extremity became his university; and the lore of that hard school is the richest knowledge of mortal man. God sent Francis Thompson to tramp the Strand in weariness and dereliction, that he might tell the world how one may see "the traffic of Jacob's ladder Pitched between heaven and Charing Cross; He sent him to wander forlornly on the Embankment through long, forsaken nights, that he might sing to a gross and clay-minded world a song of "Christ walking on the waters Not of Gennesaret but Thames." And at a later time, when he came to survey the hard and desperate road he had traveled, he saw that he had not been the sport of an ironic fate but a fugitive from the divine love. It is this acknowledgment that throughout his life had he but known it-he had been pursued by a love that would not let him go that he has sung in that imperishable ode called "The Hound of Heaven." The poem is not a fabric of arbitrary or groundless fancy, a pious fiction. It is the transcript of a living experience, the story of the lost sheep which the Shepherd went forth into the wilderness to seek, and sought until He found it. We call Thompson a mystic; but the word mystic covers many things. Here the word is used simply to describe one who is familiar with the unseen world, finds in everything that is a gate which opens on the invisible, and knows his way about the world of spiritual reality. To such a man the things that are unseen and eternal are the supreme realities, his meat and his drink; and it is of such things that Francis Thompson sings. This, however, must not be taken to mean that the poet was incapable of reasoned judgment upon men and things. His prose is full of profound and penetrating reflection-as it is also of unusual richness of style. His essay on Shelley was hailed as a literary event of the first importance when it appeared in the Dublin Review. Incidentally, it should be said that Thompson's essay on Shelley is also an extraordinary piece of self-revelation-as indeed, all good criticism should be. [Francis Thompson's work in poetry and prose is published in three large volumes, edited by Wilfrid Meynell. There is, however, a small and convenient volume available, "The Selected Poems of Francis Thompson."] DAILY READINGS Eighth Week, First Day In that hour came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And he called to him a little child, and set him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me: but whoso shall cause one of these little ones which believe on me to stumble, it is profitable for him that a great millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be sunk in the depth of the sea.-Matt. 18: 1-6. The first thing to be said about Francis Thompson is that he had the heart of a child; he had it and never lost it. In his essay on Shelley, he says: "Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches and mice into horses, and nothing into everything; for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space; it is "To see a world in a grain of sand And heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And in this passage, he was describing his own mind. Most men as they grow older lose the sensitiveness, the faith, the wonder of the child mind, and in their folly deem that they have become wise-forgetting how great things "are revealed unto babes." But Francis Thompson never lost this essential childlikeness and it is the clue to his own soul. It was because he remained in heart "a little child" that he saw so plainly the kingdom of God. His poems about and to children are in consequence full of genuine and unchanging charm. Perhaps the greatest experience in his life was his admission to the heart of the Meynell family, and it is to the children of that home that most of his child-poems are addressed. Probably he felt more at home in the company of children than anywhere else; and in the poem which he wrote to his godson, Francis Meynell, he gives us an example of the quaint humor which must have endeared him to all children: "And when, immortal mortal, droops your head, I sure shall keep a younger company. But this is, of course, much more than 'mere quaintness. It is the essential subsoil of Thompson's mind; and it is always natural for him to sing in this way: "Little Jesus, wast Thou shy Out of Heaven and just like me? ... Thou canst not have forgotten all That it feels like to be small: And Thou know'st I cannot pray And hear a child's tongue like Thy own; 1 Uranian, a word our poet frequently uses, simply means celestial. |