Chapter XI: Patmore's Death and "new Poems"

IN July, 1896, the year of his death, Patmore made an offer of service memorable from a man, called arrogant and harsh, to a man who might well, in personal matters, have stirred his prejudices:--

"You were looking so unwell when we parted, that, not
having heard from you, I am somewhat alarmed. Pray let
me have a post-card.

"If, at any time, you find yourself seriously ill, and
do not find the attendance, food, &c., sufficiently
good, tell me and I will go to Pantasaph to take care
of you for any time you might find me useful. It would
be a great pleasure and honour to serve you in any way."

Thompson answered:--

". . . You have been most generously kind to me; and I
can truly say that I never yet fell from any friend who
did not first fall from me. I thank you for the great
honour you have done me by your offer to come up and
look after me if I needed nursing. Fortunately it has
not come to that yet.

"I have not seen Meredith's article[51]--I am so
entirely cut off from the outside world."

When the Laureateship fell vacant Patmore wrote to the _Saturday Review_ proposing my mother's name. Francis wrote to him:--

"I think your _Saturday_ letter very felicitously put.
But alas! small are the chances of any government
acting on it. I fear the compliment to 'journalism'
points too surely to Edwin Arnold. I have not received
the Selections.[52] A. M. has only once in my life
sent me a book of hers--her essays. I should indeed
like to see the book. The selections in themselves must
possess a peculiar interest for me; and the Preface I
am most eager to read."

The appointment made, Francis again wrote to the point:--

"What a pity you could not uphold the dignity of the
Laureateship in the eyes of Europe."

Patmore died in November, 1896. To Mrs. Patmore Francis wrote:--

"I am shocked and overcome to hear of your--and
my--bereavement; there has passed away the greatest
genius of the century, and from me a friend whose like
I shall not see again; one so close to my own soul that
the distance of years between us was hardly felt, nor
could the distance of miles separate us. I had a letter
from him but last Monday, and was hoping that I might
shortly see him again. Now my hope is turned suddenly
into mourning.

"The irrevocableness of such a grief is mocked by many
words; these few words least wrong it. My friend is
dead, and I had but one such friend.--Yours in all
sympathy of sorrow,

FRANCIS THOMPSON."

At the same time he wrote to Palace Court:--

"CRECCAS COTTAGE, PANTASAPH.

"DEAR WILFRID,--I send you my lodging account for the
last two months.

"Of nothing can I write just now. You know what friends
we had been these last two years. And I heard from
him but the Monday before his death. There is no more
to say, because there is too much more to say. Yours
always,

FRANCIS THOMPSON."

"_P.S._--I am fearful about the _Athenæum_ project. I
told Coventry I had altered the sub-title to prevent
identification, lest the poem[53] should offend his
friends; and since he did not dispute it, I conclude
he took my view that it might give displeasure. To
dwell on the harsher side of his character now has an
ungracious air."

Of the same poem he wrote again to W. M.:--

"I am sorry I could not wire the correction in time. I
did not see your letter till too late on Thursday to do
anything. I would rather have had the phrase altered,
and hope Mrs. Meynell may have taken on herself to do
so, since it only affected the poem temporarily. In my
book I shall retain the original phrase, which Coventry
would have objected to have altered in permanent
record. He accepted and justified my use of the phrase,
in a poem drawing only an aspect of his character. But
where it was connected with him as a funeral poem, I
would certainly have wished it replaced by something
else. About all things I trust soon to have personal
talk with you. Always yours affectionately,

FRANCIS THOMPSON."

The high-pitched phrases of the obituary poems confess the strain he put upon himself to publish his grief. He dropped into private prose while he was at the task. "Age alone will grasp in some dim measure what must have been the unmanifested powers of a mind from which could go forth this starry manifestation; and what 'silence full of wonders' interspaced his opulent frugality of speech." "It remains a personal (and wonderful) memory that to me sometimes, athwart the shifting clouds of converse, was revealed by glimpses the direct vision of that oceanic vast of intellect." "The basic silence of our love" and the "under-silence of love" are other phrases that tell of something not to be expressed in the obituary column. There are scraps, also, of private verse which tell his sorrow:--

O how I miss you any casual day!
And as I walk
Turn, in the customed way,
Towards you with the talk
Which who but you should hear?
And know the intercepting day
Betwixt me and your only listening ear;
And no man ever more my tongue shall hear,
And dumb amid an alien folk I stray.

He grieved for Patmore as a wife grieves for the husband who dies before the birth of her child. "This latest, highest, of my work," he says of a portion of _New Poems_, "is now born dumb. It had been sung into his sole ears. Now there is none who speaks its language." His loss made a visit to his friends in London desirable.

Of the dedication he had previously written to Patmore:--

"The book (A. M.'s _The Colour of Life_) is dedicated
to you, and just a fortnight ago I sent to London
a volume of poems--the product of the last three
years--which I had also (knowing nothing then of her
intention, or even that she had a book on the point of
appearing) taken the liberty of dedicating to you."

That dedication to Patmore runs:--

Lo, my book thinks to look Time's leaguer down,
Under the banner of your spread renown!
Or if these levies of impuissant rhyme
Fall to the overthrow of assaulting Time,
Yet this one page shall fend oblivion's shame
Armed with your crested and prevailing name.

The tribute is handsomely conceived without any of the insincerity that cowered behind the handsomeness of eighteenth century dedications. It was an occasion for setting forth the humility which was a very real part of Thompson's character. In a printed note the author explains:--

"This dedication was written while the dear friend and
great Poet to whom it was addressed yet lived. It is
left as he saw it--the last verses of mine that were
ever to pass under his eye."

To Francis, Mrs. Patmore wrote just before the publication of the book:--

"In to-day's _Register_ I see that you have decided
to retain the dedication of the poems you are now
bringing out to my husband. I cannot resist thanking
you and also letting you know how much pleasure the
mark of your friendship gave him before he died. He was
also looking forward to your visit to him with great
delight."

Before the publication of _New Poems_ a preface was written and cancelled, and a dozen titles mooted and rejected. In one MS. the name _Poems, partly mystical_ is followed by an Introduction:--

"This book represents the work of the three years
which have elapsed since my first volume was prepared
for the press, my second volume having been a poem of
comparatively early date. The first section exhibits
mysticism in a limited and varying degree. I feel my
instrument yet too imperfect to profane by it the
higher ranges. Much is transcendental rather than truly
mystic. The opening poem ("The Mistress of Vision")
is a fantasy with no more than an illusive tinge of
psychic significance. And of the other poems some are
as much science as mysticism! but it is the science of
the Future, not the science of the scientist."

And since the science of the Future is the science of the Past, the outlook on the universe of the "Orient Ode," for instance, is nearer the outlook of Ecclesiastes than of, say, Professor Norman Lockyer. The "Orient Ode," on its scientific side, must wait at least fifty years for understanding. For there was never yet poet, beyond a certain range of insight, who could not have told the scientists what they will be teaching a hundred years hence. Science is a Caliban, only fit to hew wood and draw water for Prospero; and it is time Ariel were released from his imprisonment by the materialistic Sycorax."[54] In a letter to Patmore, he had written:--

"The bits of science that crop up in your essays remind
me of little devils dancing among rose trees."

The list of possible titles insists upon his regard for one aspect of his later work:--_Songs of the Inner Life_; _Odes and other Poems_; _New Things and Old_; _Songs of a Sun-worshipper_; _Music of the Future_; _Night before Light_; _At the Orient Gates_; _The Dawn before the Day-Star_. In the event _New Poems_ was chosen; and on the eve of publication, F. T. writes to W. M.:--

"Herewith I send the book. Now, if Alice and you, after
you have read it in proof, say 'this is bad poetry,'
I will cut out half the book; but not half a line to
please a publisher's whim for little books and big
margins. I was cabined and confined over my first book;
with my spurs won, I should be at liberty to make the
book comprehensive. It will be a book as long as the
_Unknown Eros_, for if the _Unknown Eros_ has about
twenty more poems, none of them are so long as one
half-dozen of mine. Treated in the sumptuous style, it
would make a book about the size of Rossetti's first
volume; but there is no reason why it should be got up
more than just well and simply. I believe it will be
my last volume of poetry--in any case my last for some
years--and I am determined to make it complete, that I
may feel all my work worth anything is on record for
posterity, if I die. . . . I have sacrificed something to
the levity of the critics. I have put a whole section
of the lightest poems I ever wrote after the first
terribly trying section, to soothe the critics' gums.
If they are decent to the measure of their slight aim,
that is all I care for; they aimed little at poetry.
That they are true to girl-nature I have a woman's
certificate, besides the fact that I studied them--with
one exception--from an actual original. . . . Again I have
put a batch of four 'simple' poems at the opening of
the miscellaneous section to catch the critical eye,
though their importance is not such as to give them
a place so prominent. So I have done what artifice
could do to lighten a very stern, sober, and difficult
volume. 'Tis more varied in range than my former work;
and by my arrangement I have done my best to emphasize
and press into service this, the solitary redeeming
fact from the popular standpoint.

"From the higher standpoint I have gained, I think, in
art and chastity of style; but have greatly lost in
fire and glow. 'Tis time that I was silent. This book
carries me quite as far as my dwindling strength will
allow; and if I wrote further in poetry, I should write
down my own fame."

_New Poems_ found the critics, in 1897, more hostile than before. Perhaps the _Saturday Review_ was the most severe:--

"He has been, from the first, unfortunate in being
shielded from sincere criticism. He has been persuaded
by his friends that he is a genius, divinely inspired,
whose wildest utterances are his best. . . . In no
poet of reputation is it (order) more strikingly
absent than in Mr. Thompson. Beautiful fancy, sonorous
and picturesque diction we find here, indeed, but no
motive power. These odes begin on one key, are shifted
to another, take up a fresh subject, drop it, and, at
length, as if merely wearied of their aimless flight,
drop suddenly, and cease in the air."

"These, and the rest, are nonsense-verses," the same writer says of "The Mistress of Vision," but finds elsewhere "a touch of genuine sublimity." The former _British Review_ picks out several examples of "his barbarous jargon" (a phrase also used by Horne of Meredith's "Song of Queen Theodolinda") and prescribes for him Ben Jonson's pill for the poetaster and that he be shaken free of "the praises with which his friends now mislead him." The _Literary World_ also sees need of doctoring, saying, "Nothing can be stronger than his language, nothing weaker than the impression it leaves on the mind. . . . It is like a dictionary of obsolete English suffering from a fierce fit of delirium tremens." _The Critic_, of New York, takes Thompson's ignorance of religion and symbolism for granted; the _Times_ finds fault with both his poetry and Catholicism; the _Morning Post_ is unfavourable; the _Daily Chronicle_, the _Speaker_, and the _Guardian_ all begin severely but leave scolding before they ended to give generous praise. The _Sheffield Daily Telegraph_ was handsome. The poet's obscurity was the chief cause of displeasure, since from thinking a man's meanings difficult it is fatally easy to go on to say he is meaningless. The case they make is startlingly good; one reaches for one's Thompson from the shelves to see if he is in truth so great as one had thought before spending an hour with his early critics. If one pauses before quoting them, it is not for fear of dealing unkindly with them. They are convincing; only the Thompson of scraps they condemn is not the Thompson we know by the book. When the _Pall Mall_ says

"There is a terrible poem called 'The Anthem of Earth'
without form and void, rhymeless and the work of a
mediæval and pedantic Walt Whitman,"

the point may be conceded, as between that particular critic and his particular Thompson; it is even possible to share with the _Pall Mall_ its "deep-rooted irritability" when one has to contemplate on its pages tortuous and steep passages torn from their text.

Against the adverse may be set many good criticisms. Mr. Richard Whiteing wrote finely in the _Daily News_, for he cleared the hurdle of initial distaste--"It is idle to throw the book to the other end of the room. You have to pick it up again." He hates such "outrageous conceits" as "The world's unfolded blossom smells of God"; or "Soul fully blest to feel God whistle thee at heel." It is the old hatred, probably, of overhearing the "little language" of lovers or whispered prayers. But Mr. Whiteing admits that "to put him in order might only be to spoil him. He must have his way."

In the _Speaker_, Sir A. T. Quiller-Couch, after commenting, as usual, on the precipitate and defiant eulogies of the poet's "friends," continued:--

". . . On the other hand, to be stung into denying that
he is a poet, and an extraordinarily fine one, is to
lose one's head just as wildly and less pardonably. . . .
Of 'The Mistress of Vision,' I can only say that it
recalls, after many days, the wonder and delight with
which as a boy I first read 'Kubla Khan.'"

The _Daily Chronicle_, where Mr. Le Gallienne had given place to Mr. Archer, on a first reading, recognised "a man of imagination all compact, a seer and singer of rare genius"; the _Athenæum_ "a singular mastery of verse"; the _Edinburgh_, with ponderous speed, "a great poet," and the _Academy_ and _Bookman_ gave handsome welcomes. Notwithstanding these, the impression on public and poet was discouraging. The book sold badly, and soon died, so that for the first half of the year in 1901 it brought in six shillings' worth of royalties: four copies had been sold. During the first half of 1902 the book found five buyers.

F. T. so far felt depressed by the bulk of adverse criticism as to write his thanks to one of the few kindly reviewers of the new book. He got in answer, June 7, 1897:--

"I simply expressed (very inadequately) the pleasure
your work had given me, without the least thought as
to what anyone else thought or might think. That,
however, is not strictly true. Your letter reminds me
that I read some extracts to a friend, and then said,
'This is not work which can possibly be _popular_ in
the wide sense; but it is work that will be read and
treasured centuries hence by those who really care for
poetry.' This comes back to me as you speak of the
reaction. I assure you no conceivable reaction can
wipe out or overlay such work as yours. It is firm
based on the rock of absolute beauty; and this I say
all the more confidently because it does not happen to
appeal to my own speculative, or even my own literary,
prejudices.--Yours very truly,

WILLIAM ARCHER."

Later F. T. met Mr. Archer casually at Mr. Doubleday's house in Westminster, and his poetry and portrait figured in Mr. Archer's _Poets of the Younger Generation_.

He was not put out of humour by small royalties:--

"DEAR WILFRID,--It strikes me that the cheque (2/11)
has a very unseemly tail, which would be much improved
by a piece grafted on to it, to give it a trifle
more handsome proportions. Perhaps the thing might
not be impossible to a patient operator (to speak
ex-medical-studently).--Yours ever,

F. T."

He could be tragic too. His interruption during a reading of "Othello" at our house is never to be forgotten. Desdemona was in death agony, when an emphatic voice proclaimed:--"Here's a go, Mrs. Meynell; I have lost my _Athenæum_ cheque." But he found it in another pocket.

If buffers had been needed between the unfavourable reception of _New Poems_ and the sensibility of the author they were supplied at this time by Mr. Garvin's splendid appreciation of his previous works, _Poems_ and _Sister Songs_, in the _Bookman_, March 1897:--

"Even with the greatest pages of _Sister Songs_
sounding in one's ears, one is sometimes tempted to
think the 'Hound of Heaven' Mr. Thompson's high-water
mark for unimaginable beauty and tremendous import--if
we do damnably iterate Mr. Thompson's tremendousness,
we cannot help it, he thrusts the word upon us. 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 (if we consider _Sister Songs_ as a sequence of
lyrics) 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 à Kempis. In _Sister Songs_ Mr.
Thompson has passed from agonies to exultations. Of
pure power he had not more to reveal. But _Sister
Songs_ has the very sense of Spring: there is some
lovely renaissance of spirit in the book, a melting
of snows and all dewy germinations of delight. What
rhythms are so lissome and persuasive as those of the
first part? In dainty and debonair invention it is
altogether incomparable. _Sister Songs_ opens with all
the lyrical _élan_ of Shelley perfectly married with
the full and definite vision, the pure and vivid phrase
of Keats. Thus in two of Mr. Thompson's many passages
on childhood--

Or if white-handed light
Draw thee yet dripping from the quiet pools,
Still lucencies and cools,
Of sleep, which all night mirror constellate dreams;

and again--

. . . bubbles from the calyces
Of the lovely thoughts that breathe,
Paving like water-flowers thy spirit's floor beneath.

"The second part of _Sister Songs_ is in a greater
mood. It is the high ritual of beauty, a very
apocalypse of poetry, and one should only labour the
futility of terms in attempting to praise it. The
primary things of poetry are newly and immortally
said. But Mr. Thompson's receptive mind is saturated
with modern thought, and he uses it in a singular way
to deepen the ancient interpretations. He touches
Darwinism, and it becomes transmutable in a lovely and
poignant lyric--

In pairing-time, we know, the bird
Kindles to its deepmost splendour,
And the tender
Voice is tenderest in its throat.

"May we not dare to say of this passage
(beginning--'Wild Dryad! all unconscious of thy tree'
in _Sister Songs_) that it almost arrives at that
ultimate thing, that 'one thought, one grace, one
wonder at the least,' which for Marlowe was beyond the
furthest reach of words, and which poets have been
seeking to declare from the beginning of song? Mr.
Thompson's poetry scarcely comes by way of the outward
eye at all. He scarcely depends upon occasions. In a
dungeon one imagines that he would be no less a poet.
The regal air, the prophetic ardours, the apocalyptic
vision, the supreme utterance--he has them all. A
rarer, more intense, more strictly predestinate genius
has never been known to poetry. To many this may well
appear the simple delirium of over-emphasis. The writer
signs for those others, nowise ashamed, who range after
Shakespeare's very Sonnets the poetry of a living poet,
Francis Thompson."

FOOTNOTES:

[51] "Mrs. Meynell's Essays" in the _National Review_, Aug. 1896.

[52] _Poetry of Pathos and Delight_, being selections made by Alice Meynell from the poetry of Coventry Patmore.

[53] "A Captain of Song," addressed to Patmore before his death, and at his death published in the _Athenæum_, December 5, 1896.

[54] "Many a bit of true seeing I have had to learn again, through science having sophisticated my eye, inward or outward. And many a bit I have preserved, to the avoidance of a world of trouble, by concerning myself no more than any child about the teachings of science. Especially is this the case in regard to light. I never lost the child's instinctive rightness of outlook upon light because I flung the scientific theories aside as so much baffling distortion of perspective. 'Here is cart for horse,' I felt rather than saw, and would nothing with them. . . . Though scientists in camp stand together against me, I would not challenge the consensus of the poets."