in place of
Et je me demandai pourquoi l'on est ici,
Quel peut être après tout le but de tout ceci.
What could be more significant than this heaping up of long and extravagant and sometimes feeble words, instead of the direct language of Hugo, who in this poem, though not without a certain rhetoric, says exactly what he wants to say, and when, as in the last two lines quoted, he thinks that an almost bald simplicity will be in place, sets down his thoughts in terms of an almost bald simplicity? In this translation, Thompson has betrayed himself; he has allowed his critics to see him at work, substituting what is roundabout for what is straight-forward; what is lengthy for what is brief; what is elaborated for what is simple. Has not a similar process gone on in his own mind—how far consciously one can not tell—during the writing of his original poems?
III
The news comes to me on a little black-edged card that Francis Thompson died at dawn on November 13, 1907. He was a Roman Catholic, and we are asked to pray for his soul. It was a light that death could not put out, a torch that no wind could blow out in the darkness. From us indeed it is now turned away, and that little corner of the world to which the poet gives light is darkened.
For Francis Thompson was one of the few poets now or lately living in whom there was some trace of that divine essence which we best symbolize by fire. Emptiness he had and extravagances, but he was a poet, and he had made of many influences a form of new beauty. Much of his speech, which has a heaped imagery unique in our time, seems to have learned its technique from an almost indiscriminate quarrying among old quarries, and is sometimes so closely copied from that which was fantastically precise in Crashaw, Donne, Vaughan, that we wonder why it was not a few centuries ago that some one said:
Life is a coquetry
Of Death, which wearies me,
Too sure
Of the armour;
A tiring-room where I
Death's divers garments try,
Till fit
Some fashion sit.
No one since that time, when "conceits" could convey poetical substance, has touched so daintily on plain words, giving by the touch some transfiguring novelty. If it was a style learned, it was a style perfectly acquired, and at times equal to its original.
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. The incense half obscures the offerings, and the dim figures of the saints painted on the windows. As he bows there in the chapel he seems to himself to be in "reverberant Eden-ways" or higher, at the throne of heaven, borne on "plumes night-tinctured, englobed and cinctured of saints." Passing beyond the world he finds strange shapes, full of pomp and wearing strange crowns; but they are without outline, and his words disguise, decorate, but do not reveal them.
When he chanted in his chapel of dreams, the airs were often airs which he had learned from Crashaw and 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 no where else; and people listened to the music, entranced as by a new magic.