In part his was but a share in the general welcome then accorded to the poets. Davidson was being hailed with intense zest; Norman Gale himself, singing amid applause, offered congratulations and a review to F. T. Only with the appearance of Sister Songs and New Poems was he roundly and viciously abused. But already round the standard of "An Old Fogey" (Andrew Lang), raised in the Contemporary Review, February 1894, à propos of "The Young Men," there was a considerable gathering. From the press cuttings of the year a good crop may be got of such sentences as:—
"I must agree with Mr. L.'s judgment of Mr. Francis Thompson. His faults are fundamental. Though he uses the treasure of the Temple, he is not a religious poet. The note of a true spiritual passion never once sounds in his book. . . . He owes much to the perseverance of Mr. and Mrs. Meynell and the Catholics whom they influence."[28]
It fell to a critic on the Westminster Gazette to do the out and out "slating." Leading off with quotations from "A Judgment in Heaven," he asks "Is it poetry? is it sense? is it English?" His case, with such phrases as "Supportlessly congest" well to the fore, was good. Quoting "To My God-child" as a happier example, he concluded, "This, too, is somewhat wild, but it means something."
"The poet of a small Catholic clique" was a description given by one of the two or three writers who constituted the opposition to his claims to a great place in English literature. They all made a common discovery—Francis Thompson was a Catholic.
"We had," said the Weekly Register, "Mr. de Vere, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, Mrs. Hamilton King, Mr. Coventry Patmore, to name no others. We need not then have awaited Mr. Thompson's arrival to undermine the Press of England in the interests of 'Sectarianism'!"
It came to pass that this poet of fewest friends was charged not only with log-rolling, but with belonging to a "clique" that had its headquarters at Palace Court. The fact was that his few friends were even shyer than his friends' friends of praising him publicly. One young reviewer (the "Vernon" already mentioned) came at the stroke of morning's eight to shout through their bedroom doors his new discovered joy—a poem in Merry England by F. T. "I know at last," was his loud confidence, "that there is a poet who may worthily take a place as Shakespeare's second." But in the papers this critic's notices were very halting: his praises did not call through the press as they did through the keyhole. The "clique" is proved in his notice the most unprofitable and unfriendly of companies. In Henley's National Observer he writes:—
"Mr. Francis Thompson is a young poet of considerable parts, whose present danger lies in the possibility of his spoiling. Having recently put forth to the world a book of poems, modest enough in bulk, he was presently attacked by a most formidable conspiracy of adulation. . . . Few writers of really distinguished quality have been introduced to the world under the shelter of such a farrago of nonsense."
This writer, almost the only personal friend of Thompson's on the literary press, does not confine his strictures to the alleged "promoters" of Poems. He points to passages, ungainly and ugly, which explain why the book as a whole "proves repellent to the majority of readers"; but
"Let him take heart, then, and sedulously pursue a path of most ascetic improvement. A word, too, in his ear; let him not use the universe quite so irresponsibly for a playground. To toss the stars about, 'to swing the earth,' &c., is just a little cheap."