Among Famous Books Part 12

Yet for Francis Thompson all this glory of the sun is but a symbol. The world where his spirit dwells is beyond the sun, and in nature it displays itself to man but brokenly. In the b.l.o.o.d.y fires of sunset, in the exquisite white artistry of the snow-flake, this supernatural world is but showing us a few of its miracles, by which the miracles of Christian faith are daily and hourly matched for sheer wonder and beauty. The idealist claims as his inheritance all those things in which the pagan finds his G.o.ds, and views them as the revelations of the Master Spirit.

It is difficult to write about Thompson's poetry without writing mainly about himself. In _The Hound of Heaven_, as in much else that he has written, there is abundance of his own experience, and indeed his poems often remind us of the sorrows of Teufelsdrockh. That, however, is not the purpose of this lecture; and, beyond a few notes of a general kind, we shall leave him to reveal himself. Except for Mr. Meynell's illuminative and all too short introduction to his volume of _Thompson's Selected Poems_, there are as yet only scattered articles in magazines to tell his strange and most pathetic story. His writings are few, comprising three short books of poetry, his prose _Essay on Sh.e.l.ley_, and a _Life of St. Ignatius_, which is full of interest and almost overloaded with information, but which may be discounted from the list of his permanent contributions to literature or to thought. Yet that small output is enough to establish him among the supreme poets of our land.

Apart from its poetic power and spiritual vision, his was an acute and vivid mind. On things political and social he could express himself in little casual flashes whose shrewd and trenchant incisiveness challenge comparison with Mr. Chesterton's own asides. His acquaintance with science seems to have been extensive, and at times he surprises us with allusions and metaphors of an unusually technical kind, which he somehow renders intelligible even to the non-scientific reader. These are doubly illuminative, casting spiritual light on the material world, and strengthening with material fact the tenuous thoughts of the spiritual.

The words which he used of Sh.e.l.ley are, in this respect, applicable to himself. "To Sh.e.l.ley's ethereal vision the most rarefied mental or spiritual music traced its beautiful corresponding forms on the sand of outward things."

His style and choice of words are an achievement in themselves, as distinctive as those of Thomas Carlyle. They, and the att.i.tude of mind with which they are congruous, have already set a fashion in our poetry, and some of its results are excellent. In _Rose and Vine_, and in other poems of Mrs. Rachel Annand Taylor, we have the same blend of power and beauty, the same wildness in the use of words, and the same languor and strangeness as if we had entered some foreign and wonderfully coloured world. In _Ignatius_ the style and diction are quite simple, ordinary, and straightforward, but that biography is decidedly the least effective of his works. It would seem that here as elsewhere among really great writings the style is the natural and necessary expression of the individual mind and imagination. The _Life of Sh.e.l.ley_, which is certainly one of the masterpieces of English prose, has found for its expression a style quite unique and distinctive, in which there are constant reminders of other stylists, yet no imitation of any. The poetry is drugged, and as we read his poems through in the order of their publication, we feel the power of the poppy more and more. At last the hand seems to lose its power and the will its control, though in flashes of sheer flame the imagination shows wild and beautiful as ever.

His gorgeousness is beyond that of the Orient. The eccentric and arresting words that constantly amaze the ear, bring with them a sense of things occult yet dazzling, as if we were a.s.sisting at some mystic rite, in a ritual which demanded language choice and strange.

Something of this may be due to narcotics, and to the depressing tragedy of his life. More of it is due to Sh.e.l.ley, Keats, and Swinburne. But these do not explain the style, nor the thoughts which clothed themselves in it. Both style and thoughts are native to the man. What he borrows he first makes his own, and thus establishes his right to borrow--a right very rarely to be conceded. Much that he has learned from Sh.e.l.ley he pa.s.ses on to his readers, but before they receive it, it has become, not Sh.e.l.ley's, but Francis Thompson's. To stick a lotos-flower in our b.u.t.tonhole--harris-cloth or broadcloth, it does not matter--is an impertinent folly that makes a guy of the wearer. But this man's raiment is his own, not that of other men, and Sh.e.l.ley himself would willingly have put his own flowers there.

Those who stumble at the prodigality and licence of his style, and the unchartered daring of his imagination, will find a most curious and brilliant discussion of the whole subject in his _Essay on Sh.e.l.ley_, which may be summed up in the injunction that "in poetry, as in the Kingdom of G.o.d, we should not take thought too greatly wherewith we shall be clothed, but seek first--seek _first_, not seek _only_--the spirit, and all these things will be added unto us." He discusses his own style with an unexpected frankness. His view of the use of imagination is expressed in the suggestive and extraordinary words--"To sport with the tangles of Neaera's hair may be trivial idleness or caressing tenderness, exactly as your relation to Neraea is that of heartless gallantry or of love. So you may toy with imagery in mere intellectual ingenuity, and then you might as well go write acrostics; or you may toy with it in raptures, and then you may write a _Sensitive Plant_." If a man is pa.s.sionate, and pa.s.sion is choosing her own language in his work, he may be forgiven much. If he chooses strange words deliberately and in cold blood, there is no reason why we should forgive him anything.

So much has been necessary as an introduction, but our subject is neither the man Francis Thompson nor his poetry in general, but the one poem which is at once the most characteristic expression of his personality and of his poetic genius. _The Hound of Heaven_ has for its idea the chase of man by the celestial huntsman. G.o.d is out after the soul, pursuing it up and down the universe. G.o.d,--but G.o.d incarnate in Jesus Christ, whose love and death are here the embodiment and revelation of the whole ideal world. The hunted one flees, as men so constantly flee from the Highest, and seeks refuge in every possible form of earthly experience--at least in every clean and n.o.ble form, for there is nothing suggestive of low covert or the mire. It is simply the second-best as a refuge from the best that is depicted here--the earth at its pagan finest, in whose charm or homeliness the soul would fain hide itself from the spiritual pursuit. And the Great Huntsman is remorseless in his determination to win the soul for the very best of all. The soul longs for beauty, for interest, for comfort; and in the beautiful, various, comfortable life of the earth she finds them. The inner voice still tells of a n.o.bler heritage; but she understands and loves these earthly things, and would fain linger among them, shy of the further flight.

The whole conception of the poem is the counterpart of Browning's _Easter Day_, where the soul chooses and is allowed to choose the same regions of the lesser good and beauty for its home. In that poem the soul is permitted to devote itself for ever to the finest things that earth can give--life, literature, scientific knowledge, love. The permission sends it wild with joy, and having chosen, it settles down for ever to the earth-bound life. But eternity is too long for the earth and all that is upon it. It wears time out, and all the desire of our mortality ages and grows weary. The spirit, made for immortal thoughts and loves and life, finds itself the ghastly prisoner of that which is inevitably decaying; but its immortality postpones the decent and appropriate end to an eternal mockery and doom. At last, in the tremendous close, it wakens to the unspeakable blessedness of _not_ being satisfied with anything that earth can give, and so proves itself adequate for its own inheritance of immortality. In Thompson's poem the soul is never allowed, even in dream, to rest in lower things until satiety brings disillusion. The higher destiny is swift at her heels; and ever, just as she would nestle in some new covert, she is torn from it by the imperious Best of All that claims her for its own.

There is no obvious sequence of the phases of the poem, nor any logical order connecting them into a unity of experience. They may or may not be a rescript of Thompson's own inner life, but every detail might be placed in another order without the slightest loss to the meaning or the truth. The only guiding and unifying element is a purely artistic one--that of the Hound in full cry, and the unity of the poem is but that of a day's hunting. One would like to know what remote origin it is to which we owe the figure. Thompson was a Greek scholar, and some such legend as that of Actaeon may well have been in his mind. But the chase of dogs was a common horror in the Middle Ages, and many of the mediaeval fiends are dog-faced. In those days, when conscience had as yet received none of our modern soporifics, and men believed in h.e.l.l, many a guilty sinner knew well the baying of the h.e.l.l-hounds, masterless and b.l.o.o.d.y-fanged, that chased the souls of even good men up to the very gates of heaven. Conscience and remorse ran wild, and the Hound of h.e.l.l was a characteristic part of the machinery that made the tragedy of life so terrific in those old days. But here, by a _tour de force_ in which is summed up the entire transformation from ancient to modern thought, the h.e.l.l-hounds are transformed into the Hound of Heaven. That something or some one is out after the souls of men, no man who has understood his inner life can question for a moment. But here the great doctrine is proclaimed, that the Huntsman of the soul is Love and not Hate, eternal Good and not Evil. No matter what cries may freeze the soul with horror in the night, what echoes of the deep-voiced dogs upon the trail of memory and of conscience, it is G.o.d and not the devil that is pursuing.

The poem, by a strange device of rhythm, keeps up the chase in the most vividly dramatic realism. The metre throughout is irregular, and the verses swing onward for the most part in long, sweeping lines. But five times, at intervals in the poem, the sweep is interrupted by a stanza of shorter lines, varied slightly but yet in essence the same--

"But with unhurrying chase, And unperturbed pace, Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, They beat--and a Voice beat More instant than the Feet-- All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."

By this device of rhythm the footfall of the Hound is heard in all the pauses of the poem. In the short and staccato measures you hear the patter of the little feet padding after the soul from the unseen distance behind. It is a daring use of the onomatopoeic device in poetry, and it is effective to a wonder, binding the whole poem into the unity of a single chase.

The first nine lines are the story of a soul subjective as yet and self-absorbed. The first covert in which it seeks to hide is its own life--the thoughts and tears and laughter, the hopes and fears of a man.

This is in most men's lives the first attempt at escape. The verses here give the inner landscape, the country of a soul's experience, with wonderful compression. Then comes the patter of the Hound's feet, and for the rest we are no longer in the thicket of the inner life, but in the open country of the outer world. This is but the constantly repeated transition which, as we have already seen, Browning ill.u.s.trates in his _Sordello_, the turning-point between the early introspective and the later dramatic periods.

Having gained the open country of the outward and objective world, the inevitable first thought is of love as a refuge from spiritual pursuit.

The story is shortly told in nine lines. The human and the divine love are rivals here; pagan _versus_ ideal affection. The hunted heart is not allowed to find refuge or solace in human love. The man knows that it is Love that follows him: yet it is the warm, red, earthly pa.s.sion that he craves for, and the divine pursuer seems cold, exacting, and austere.

Finding no refuge in human love from this "tremendous Lover," he seeks it next in a kind of imaginative materialism, half-scientific, half-fantastic. He appeals at "the gold gateways of the stars" and at "the pale ports o' the moon" for shelter. He seeks to hide beneath the vague and blossom-woven veil of far sky-s.p.a.ces, or, in l.u.s.t of swift motion, "clings to the whistling mane of every wind!" Here is a choice of paganism at its most modern and most impressive. The cosmic imagination, revelling in the limitless fields of time and s.p.a.ce, will surely be sufficient for a man's idealism, without any insistence upon further definition. Here are Carlyle's Eternities and Immensities--are they not enough? The answer is that these are but the servants of One mightier than they. Incorruptible and steadfast in their allegiance, they will neither offer pity nor will they allow peace to him who is not loyal to their Master. And the hunted soul is stung by a fever of restlessness that chases him back across "the long savannahs of the blue" to earth again, with the recurring patter of the little feet behind him.

Doubling upon the course, the quarry seeks the surest refuge to be found on earth. Children are still here, and in their simplicity and innocence there is surely a hiding-place that will suffice. Here is no danger of earthly pa.s.sion, no t.i.tanic stride among the vast things of the universe. Are they not the true idealists, the children? Are they not the authentic guardians of fairyland and of heaven? Francis Thompson is an authority here, and his love of children has expressed itself in much exquisite prose and poetry. "Know you what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of to-day. 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, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy G.o.dmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutsh.e.l.l and to count yourself the king of infinite s.p.a.ce." "To the last he [Sh.e.l.ley] was the enchanted child....

He is still at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch, and his playthings are those which the G.o.ds give their children.

The universe is his box of toys. 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 who could write thus, and who could melt our hearts with _To Monica Thought Dying_ and its refrain,

"A cup of chocolate, One farthing is the rate, You drink it through a straw, a straw, a straw"

--surely he must have had some wonderful right of entrance into the innocent fellowships of childhood. Still more intimate, daring in its incredible humility and simpleness, is his _Ex Ore Infantium_:--

"Little Jesus, wast Thou shy Once, and just as small as I?

And what did it feel like to be Out of Heaven, and just like me?...

Hadst Thou ever any toys, Like us little girls and boys?

And didst Thou play in Heaven with all The angels, that were not too tall?...

So, a little Child, come down And hear a child's tongue like Thy own; Take me by the hand and walk, And listen to my baby-talk."

But not even this refuge is open to the rebel soul.

"I turned me to them very wistfully; But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair With dawning answers there, Their angel plucked them from me by the hair."

Driven from the fairyland of childhood, he flees, as a last resort, to Nature. This time it is not in science that he seeks her, but in pure abandonment of his spirit to her changing moods. He will be one with cloud and sky and sea, will be the brother of the dawn and eventide.

"I was heavy with the even, When she lit her glimmering tapers Round the day's dead sanct.i.ties.

I laughed in the morning's eyes, I triumphed and I saddened with all weather."

Here again Francis Thompson is on familiar ground. If, like Mr.

Chesterton, he holds the key of fairyland, like him also he can retain through life his wonder at the gra.s.s. His nature-poetry is nearer Sh.e.l.ley than anything that has been written since Sh.e.l.ley died. In it

"The leaves dance, the leaves sing, The leaves dance in the breath of spring,"

or--

"The great-vanned Angel March Hath trumpeted His clangorous 'Sleep no more' to all the dead-- Beat his strong vans o'er earth and air and sea And they have heard; Hark to the _Jubilate_ of the bird."

These, and such exquisite detailed imagery as that of the poem _To a Snowflake_--the delicate silver filigree of verse--rank him among the most privileged of the ministrants in Nature's temple, standing very close to the shrine. Yet here again there is repulse for the flying soul. This fellowship, like that of the children, is indeed fair and sheltering, but it is not for him. It is as when sunset changes the glory from the landscape into the cold and dead aspect of suddenly fallen night. Nature, that seemed so alive and welcoming, is dead to him. Her austerity and aloofness change her face; she is not friend but stranger. Her language is another tongue from his--

"In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek,"

--and the padding of the feet is heard again.

Thus has he compa.s.sed the length and breadth of the universe in the vain attempt to flee from G.o.d. Now at last he finds himself at bay. G.o.d has been too much for him. Against his will, and wearied out with the vain endeavour to escape, he must face the pursuing Love at last.

"Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!

My harness piece by piece thou hast hewn from me, And smitten me to my knee.

I am defenceless utterly."

So, faced by ultimate destiny in the form of Divine Love at last, he remembers the omnipotence that once had seemed to dwell in him, when

"In the rash l.u.s.tihead of my young powers, I shook the pillaring hours And pulled my life upon me,"

and,

"The linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist."

All that is gone, and he is face to face with the grim demands of G.o.d.

There follows a protest against those demands. To him it appears that they are the call for sheer sacrifice and death. He had sought self-realisation in every lovely field that lay open to the earth. But now the trumpeter is sounding, "from the hid battlements of Eternity,"

the last word and final meaning of human life. His is a dread figure, "enwound with glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned." His demand is for death and sacrifice, calling the reluctant children of the green earth out from this pleasance to face the awful will of G.o.d.

It is the Cross that he has seen in nature and beyond it. Long ago it was set up in England, that same Cross, when Cynewulf sang his _Christ_.

On Judgment Day he saw it set on high, streaming with blood and flame together, amber and crimson, illuminating the Day of Doom. Thompson has found it, not on Calvary only, but everywhere in nature, and by _tour de force_ he blends the sunset with Golgotha and finds that the lips of Nature proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In the garden of the monastery there stands a cross, and the sun is setting over it.

"Thy straight Long beam lies steady on the Cross. Ah me!

What secret would thy radiant finger show?

Of thy bright mastership is this the key?

Is _this_ thy secret then, and is it woe?