"Of warmth he was capable, especially in his younger days, but not of pathos or subtle suggestion. His general manner, it must be owned, was somewhat coldly grave. One of his odes is fine, with passages of absolute grandeur; some of his sonnets are only not among the best in that kind."
His appreciations were not ordered by papers committed to a policy of praise. On the contrary, he wrote: "My editors complain that I don't go for people—that I am too lenient." For all that, he knew the distress of the vapid verse that came his way, and he stopped to note it in rhyme:—
Of little poets, neither fool nor seer,
Aping the larger song, let all men hear
How weary is our heart these many days!
Of bards who, feeling half the thing they say,
Say twice the thing they feel, and in such way
Piece out a passion . . .
. . . . .
Of bards indignant in an easy chair
(Because just so great bards before them were)
Who yet can only bring
With all their toil
Their kettle of verse to sing,
But never boil,—
How weary is our heart these many days!
But the solace he had to the drudgery of reviewing was generally ancient. When he could set to and write a solid Academy page on the "clod-paced Drayton," note the sluggishness of "his thick-coming ideas in the strait pen of a defined stanza," chaff him for the room he needs to turn about in, and cry "hear, hear!" to his minor metres, he was doing lively work and was lively at it. Or when Samuel Daniel comes up for judgment, the critic is manifestly happy—happier than in the presence of Mr. Maurice Hewlett or Mr. Kipling. A review of an Elizabethan is touched with a quicker interest than that of the weightiest in contemporary literature. The evenness of his judgment, the unbiassed distribution of his attention makes for fairness, but somewhat spoils the current and local effectiveness. He enjoyed getting at Butler's wit more than getting at Oscar Wilde's. Hudibras was a book of the moment for him, whereas The Yellow Book was not. St. Francis de Sales might tempt him on a bookstall, but he never bought a new work. D'Annunzio and publishers' announcements did not catch his pennies; nor were his borrowings much more modern. The authors he had from my shelves were Swedenborg and Shakespeare, with W. W. Jacobs, in whose jolly company he spent a few of the last hours of his life.
CHAPTER XIII: THE LONDONER
On days when London is cracked and bleared with cold, and passengers on the black pavement are grey and purple and mean in their distress, whipped by the East Wind and chivied by the draughts of the gutters; when lamp-posts and telegraph poles and the harsh sides of the houses ache together and shiver, Thompson would be the most forlorn and shrivelled figure in the open. It always seemed to be a necessity of his to be out in rough weather. I have never known him to stay in on its account; and at times when even riches lack confidence, and an universal scourge of cold and ugliness lashes the town, he was about. Even within, beside a fire, he was a weathercock of a man. The distress of his hands, and the veering of his hair from the comparative orderliness of other times would instantly proclaim an East wind. It was written all over him, and, though come to the shelter of four walls, the tails of his coat seemed still to be fluttering. One thought of him when East winds blew as the Pope of Chesterfield's description—". . . his poor body a mere Pandora's box, containing all the ills that ever afflicted humanity." Sensitive beyond endurance, Francis yet made nought of his pains so long as the keener sensitiveness of his conscience was undisturbed. Of all men the least fit to endure physical suffering, he endured it forgetfully and even light-heartedly unless, his spiritual assent being thwarted, he felt the chills of estrangement from God.
He was not more comfortable in the sun, and against the particular heat of 1906 he had particular ill-will. "Most people expatiate on the excellence of this summer, though the angry and malignant sun is as unlike the true summer sun as the heat of fever to the heat of youth." It was his habit to go forth in August in an ulster—threadbare, perhaps—but his own fever alone explains his distress.
Sister Songs opens with a complaint against the spring season of 1891:—