Part 16 (1/2)

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_Appreciations of Francis Thompson_

_”Such p.r.o.nouncements proved at least that a poet, who had no friend save such as his published poems gained for him, could count on an immediate recognition for high merit. For these tributes, and many more of like welcoming, placed him instantly out of range of the common casualties of criticism.”--From the_ ”NOTE ON FRANCIS THOMPSON” (p. xii).

_As the writer of the ”Note” has not attempted a critical estimate of the poetry, some of these Appreciations, forming a part of the poet's life-history and even of the literary history of his time, are here reproduced._

Mr Francis Thompson is a writer whom it is impossible that any qualified judge should deny to be a ”new poet.” And while most poets of his quality have usually to wait a quarter of a century or more for adequate recognition, this poet is pretty sure of a wide and immediate acknowledgement.... We find that in these poems profound thought, far-fetched splendour of imagery, and nimble-witted discernment of those a.n.a.logies which are the roots of the poet's language, abound ...

qualities which ought to place him in the permanent ranks of fame, with COWLEY and with CRASHAW.... _The Hound of Heaven_ has so great and pa.s.sionate and such a metre-creating motive, that we are carried over all obstructions of the rhythmical current, and are compelled to p.r.o.nounce it, at the end, one of the very few ”great” odes of which the language can boast. In a lesser degree this metre-making pa.s.sion prevails in the seven remarkable pieces called _Love in Dian's Lap_, poems of which LAURA might have been proud, and LUCRETIA not ashamed, to have had addressed to her. The main region of MR THOMPSON'S poetry is the inexhaustible and hitherto almost unworked mine of Catholic philosophy. Not but that he knows better than to make his religion the direct subject of any of his poems, unless it presents itself to him as a human pa.s.sion, and the most human of pa.s.sions, as it does in the splendid ode just noticed, in which G.o.d's long pursuit and final conquest of the resisting soul is described in a torrent of as humanly impressive verse as was ever inspired by a natural affection. MR THOMPSON places himself, by these poems, in the front rank of the pioneers of the movement which, if it be not checked, as in the history of the world it has once or twice been checked before, by premature formulation and by popular and profane perversion, must end in creating a ”new heaven and a new earth.”--COVENTRY PATMORE, in _The Fortnightly Review._

It is not only the religious ecstasy of CRASHAW that they recall; for all the daringly fantastic imagery, all the love-lyrical hyperbole, all that strange mixture and artifice, of spontaneous pa.s.sion and studied conceit, which were so characteristic of the age of CRASHAW, are with the same astonis.h.i.+ng fidelity reproduced. Where, unless, perhaps, in here and there a sonnet of ROSSETTI'S, has this sort of sublimated enthusiasm for the bodily and spiritual beauty of womanhood found such expression as in _Love in Dian's Lap_ between the age of the Stuarts and our own? To realize the full extent to which the religious, or semi-religious, emotions--now ecstatic, now awe-stricken--dominate and colour the entire fabric of these strange poems, they must be read throughout. In the lines _To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster_ we see them at their subtlest; and in the very powerful piece, _The Hound of Heaven_--a poem setting forth the pursuit of the human soul by divine grace--they are at their most intense.... That minority who can recognize the essentials under the accidents of poetry, and who feel that it is to poetic Form alone, and not to forms, that eternity belongs, will agree that, alike in wealth and dignity of imagination, in depth and subtlety of thought, and in magic and mastery of language, a new poet of the first rank is to be welcomed in the author of this volume.--H. D. TRAILL, in _The Nineteenth Century_.

The first thing to be done, and by far the most important, is to recognize that we are here face to face with a poet of the first order, a man of imagination all compact, a seer and singer of rare genius. He revels indeed in ”orgiac imageries,” and revelry implies excess. But when excess is an excess of strength, the debauch a debauch of beauty, who can condemn or even regret it? Would we had a few more poets who could exceed in such imagery as this! It is no minor Caroline singer he recalls, but the Jacobean SHAKESPEARE.--_The Daily Chronicle._

A volume of poetry has not appeared in QUEEN VICTORIA'S reign more authentic in greatness of utterance than this. In the rich and virile harmonies of his line, in strange and lovely vision, in fundamental meaning, he is possibly the first of Victorian poets, and at least is he of none the inferior.... In all sobriety do we believe him of all poets to be the most celestial in vision, the most august in faculty.... In a word, a new planet has swum into the ken of the watchers of the poetic skies. These are big words; but we have weighed them. For there is that in Mr FRANCIS THOMPSON'S poetry which discourages the flamboyant appreciations of the more facile impressionist, and gives him pause in his ready-made enthusiasms. It is patent on the first page that there is genius in this inspiration, and the great note in this utterance; but page after page reveals the rich and the strange, and the richer and the stranger in so many original moods and n.o.ble measures, that the reviewer feels the necessity of caution.... In nothing does THOMPSON appear more authentically a poet than in the fact that his sense of beauty is part of his religion. In this he is like Sh.e.l.lEY, except that Sh.e.l.lEY'S sense of beauty was his religion, and lived in an atmosphere of sensuousness, a sensuousness that has little of the grosser taints of earth about it indeed, but which is still sensuousness. Therefore, Sh.e.l.lEY wrote the glorious _Epipsychidion_; therefore, Mr THOMPSON writes _Her Portrait_, the longest and greatest poem in his book; and, speaking for ourselves, we shall say at once that _Epipsychidion_, long unique in the language, has at last found its parallel, perhaps its peer, in _Her Portrait_. Of this ”Her” of Mr THOMPSON'S we must say that she is the significance of his book. If his sense of beauty is part of his religion, his religion is that of a rapt Catholic, to whom the very heaven, with all that therein be, is open and palpable; his is the Catholicism of profound mysticism, and of the most universal temper.... It is perfectly safe to affirm that if Mr THOMPSON write no other line, by this volume alone he is as secure of remembrance as any poet of the century. His vocabulary is very great.... Mr THOMPSON'S first volume is no mere promise--it is itself among the great achievements of English poetry; it has reached the peak of Parna.s.sus at a bound.

He has actually accomplished the high thing in metaphysical poetry that DONNE and CRASHAW only dreamed of. His mysticism is infinitely more profound and significant than theirs, as his imagination is more impulsive, ardent, and beautiful. He is the great Platonist of English poetry. If Mr THOMPSON had never written anything after his first volume, there would be but one Stuart poet with whom the author of _Her Portrait_ could be compared for orchestral majesties of song, and that one MILTON.... He is an argonaut of literature, far travelled in the realms of gold, and he has in a strange degree the a.s.similative mind.... We do not think we forget any of the splendid things of an English anthology when we say that _The Hound of Heaven_ seems to us, on the whole, the most wonderful lyric in the language. It fingers all the stops of the spirit, and we hear now a thrilling and dolorous note of doom, and now the quiring of the spheres, and now the very pipes of Pan, but under all the still, sad music of humanity. It is the return of the nineteenth century to THOMAS A KEMPIS.--J. L. GARVIN, in _The Newcastle Chronicle_ and in _The Bookman_.

The fine frenzy, and the fine line: these are two root characteristics of Mr THOMPSON'S really remarkable poem. One has seldom seen poet more wildly abandoned to his rapture, more absorbed in the trance of his ecstasy. When the irresistible moment comes, he throws himself upon his mood as a glad swimmer gives himself to the waves, careless whither the strong tide carries him, knowing only the wild joy of the laughing waters and the rainbow spray. He shouts, as it were, for mere gladness, in the welter of wonderful words, and he dives swift and fearless to fetch his deep-sea fancies. When weak men venture on these vagaries they drown; but Mr THOMPSON is a strong swimmer. Hyperboles, which in other hands had seemed merely absurd, in his delight us as examples of that ”fine excess” which is one of the most enthralling of the many enchantments of poetry.... Indeed, Mr THOMPSON must simply be CRASHAW born again, but born greater. Though the conception, for example, of _The Hound of Heaven_--the case of a sinner fleeing from the love of Christ--is exactly in CRASHAW'S vein, yet it was not in his power to have suggested such tremendous speed and terror of flight as whirls through every line of Mr THOMPSON'S poem.--R. LE GALLIENNE, in _The Daily Chronicle_.

A new poet--and this time a major and not a minor one. On the section called _Love in Dian's Lap_, much might be said of its extraordinary conception and workmans.h.i.+p. The section is one long, beautiful song of praise, and even wors.h.i.+p, of one whom the poet calls his ”dear administress.” But surely never was woman wors.h.i.+pped with more utter chast.i.ty of pa.s.sion. Whether _Before her Portrait in Youth_, or regarding her as _A poet breaking silence_, or only reflecting on her wearing of a new dress, the Poet is so full of fine matter and so adoring in his expression of it, as to bring DANTE himself to mind.--_St. James's Gazette._

Here are dominion--domination over language, and a sincerity as of Robert Burns.... The epithet sublime has been sadly stained and distorted by comic writers, and there is a danger in applying it in its honest light without warning. This safeguard established, we have to say that in our opinion Mr THOMPSON'S poetry at its highest attains a sublimity unsurpa.s.sed by any Victorian poet--a sublimity which will stand the hideous test of extracts. In _Her Portrait_ a constant interchange of symbol between earthly and heavenly beauty pulses like day and night.--JOHN DAVIDSON, in _The Speaker_.

When at the end of 1893 there appeared a little quarto volume of poems by FRANCIS THOMPSON, the English world of letters experienced an agreeable shock of surprise. It was as if a rocket had been sent up into a dark night. His poems have all the ”pomp and prodigality” of imagination for which Gray's frugal muse longed.--_The Spectator._

Words and cadences must have had an intoxication for him, the intoxication of the scholar; and ”cloudy trophies” were continually falling into his hands, and half through them, in his hurry to seize and brandish them. He swung a rare incense in a censer of gold, under the vault of a chapel where he had hung votive offerings. When he chanted in his chapel of dreams, the airs were often airs which he had learnt from CRASHAW and from PATMORE. They came to life again when he used them, and he made for himself a music which was part strangely familiar and part his own, almost bewilderingly. Such reed-notes and such orchestration of sound were heard nowhere else; and people listened to the music, entranced as by a new magic. The genius of FRANCIS THOMPSON was Oriental, exuberant in colour, woven into elaborate patterns, and went draped in old silk robes, that had survived many dynasties. The spectacle of him was an enchantment; he pa.s.sed like a wild vagabond of the mind, dazzling our sight. He had no message, but he dropt sentences by the way, cries of joy or pity, love of children, wors.h.i.+p of the Virgin and the Saints, and of those who were patron saints to him on earth; his voice was heard like a wandering music, which no one heeded for what it said, in a strange tongue, but which came troublingly into the mind, bringing it the solace of its old, recaptured melodies.--ARTHUR SYMONS, in _The Sat.u.r.day Review_.

To read Mr FRANCIS THOMPSON'S _Poems_, then, is like setting sail with DRAKE or HAWKINS in search of new worlds and golden spoils. He has the magnificent Elizabethan manner, the splendour of conception, the largeness of imagery.--KATHERINE TYNAN-HINKSON, in _The Bookman_.

As a matter of fact--such fact as one kisses the book to in a court of law--it was in a railway carriage on my way back to London that I first read Mr THOMPSON'S poem, _The Mistress of Vision_; but, in such truth as would pa.s.s anywhere but in a court of law, it was at Cambridge, in the height of the summer term and in a Fellows' Garden that the revelation first came. I thought then in my enthusiasm that no such poem had been written or attempted since COLERIDGE attempted, and left off writing, _Kubla Khan_. In a cooler hour I think so yet; and, were my age twenty-five or so, it would delight me to swear to it, riding to any man's drawbridge who shuts his gates against it, and blowing the horn of challenge. It is verily a wonderful poem; hung, like a fairy tale, in middle air--a sleeping palace of beauty set in a glade in the heart of the woods of Westermain, surprised there and recognized with a gasp as satisfying, and summarizing a thousand youthful longings after beauty. To me also my admiration seemed too hot to last; but four or five years leave me unrepentant. It seemed to me to be more likely to be a perishable joy, because I had once clutched at, and seemed to grasp, similar beauties in POE. Mr THOMPSON'S thought, always strong, often runs into phrases of exquisite sweetness and exquisite clarity.... The lines beginning:

”Firm is the man, and set beyond the cast Of fortune's game and the iniquitous hour,”

are worthy to be remembered beside DANIEL'S _Epistle to the Countess of c.u.mberland_.--Sir A. QUILLER COUCH (”Q”), in _The Daily News_.

Thompson's poetry is a ”wa.s.sail of orgiac imageries.” He is a poet's poet, like Sh.e.l.lEY and BLAKE. In order to follow him as he soars from image to image and symbol to symbol, you must have the rare wings of imagination.... THOMPSON mixes his metaphors so wisely that they illumine each other, strange light shooting out of their weltering chaos, like the radiance of phosph.o.r.escent waves. He troubles you with sudden pictures that flash out against the blackness. This gift of dreadful vision is not found in CRASHAW or in PATMORE, in DONNE or in HERBERT, and therefore it seems to me that THOMPSON is essentially more akin to BLAKE, COLERIDGE and ROSSETTI than to the ecclesiastical mystics. He is a twentieth-century mystic with a seventeenth-century manner.--JAMES DOUGLAS, in _The Morning Leader_.

Great poets are obscure for two opposite reasons; now, because they are talking about something too large for anyone to understand, and now, again, because they are talking about something too small for anyone to see. FRANCIS THOMPSON possessed both these infinities.... He was describing the evening earth with its mist and fume and fragrance, and represented the whole as rolling upwards like a smoke; then suddenly he called the whole ball of the earth a thurible, and said that some gigantic spirit swung it slowly before G.o.d. This is the case of the image too large for comprehension; another instance sticks in my mind of the image which is too small. In one of his poems he says that the abyss between the known and the unknown is bridged by ”Pontifical death.” There are about ten historical and theological puns in that one word. That a priest means a pontiff, that a pontiff means a bridge-maker, that death is certainly a bridge, that death may turn out after all to be a reconciling priest, that at least priest and bridges both attest to the fact that one thing can get separated from another thing--these ideas, and twenty more, are all tacitly concentrated in the word ”Pontifical.” In FRANCIS THOMPSON'S poetry, as in the poetry of the universe, you can work infinitely out and out, but yet infinitely in and in. These two infinities are the mark of greatness; and he was a great poet.--G. K. CHESTERTON, in _The Ill.u.s.trated London News_.