In the ordinary intercourse and business of daily life, Francis Thompson was not only deficient, he was impossible. The practice of the elementary habits of order and method, which to other men are the necessities and commonplaces of daily life, was to Thompson an insurmountable difficulty. His life is one long record of broken promises, unkept appointments, and other trials of the patience and tempers of all who had to do with him. He would keep an appointment anywhere from an hour or more to two or three days late, and be full of contrition, excuses, and explanations. The inherent sweetness and loveableness of the man atoned for much, but still we cannot but praise the Meynells for their unwavering kindness to this difficult genius. Wilfrid Meynell had to act continually as a buffer between Thompson and irate landladies, impatient editors, exasperated publishers, and disappointed interviewers. He had to see that the poet's rent was paid, and that he had the wherewithal to clothe and feed himself.
Thompson's incurable shabbiness and eccentricities made it difficult to introduce him into polite society, even if he had been capable of arriving in time for any social function; and though a brilliant talker when tête-à-tête with a sympathetic listener, in ordinary conversation he was more remarkable for the futility of his endless repetitions than for anything else. And yet he was never uncouth or awkward. His manners were gentle; his speech was that of a polished gentleman; his worn face could light up with beautiful ardour, and his frail body never lost its essential dignity. His laugh, too, was always ready at the slightest pleasantry.
He made a wildly picturesque figure as he wandered through the London streets in these latter days, generally completely unconscious of his surroundings, and with a continual muttered soliloquy. With his old brown cape, which he wore in the hottest weather, "his disastrous hat," his old satchel for review books slung over his shoulder, and his wild worn face, he looked like some picturesque pedlar who had just stepped out of a romance of the Middle Ages. In all the countless times that Everard Meynell met Thompson in the streets of London he never once surprised him in a conscious moment. That Thompson ever took the right turning or found his way home safely is a fact for which his friends could offer no adequate explanation. Mr. Lewis Hind, editor of The Academy while Thompson was a contributor, says: "In memory I see him one miserable November afternoon, communing with the Seraphim and frolicking with the young-eyed Cherubim in Chancery Lane. The roads were ankle-deep in slush; a thin icy rain was falling; the yellow fog enwrapped the pedestrians squelching down the lane, and going through them in a narrow path, I saw Francis Thompson, wet and mud-spattered. But he was not unhappy. What is a day of unpleasant weather to one who lives in eternity? His lips were moving, his head was raised, for above the roof of the Chancery Lane Safe Deposit Company, in the murk of the fog, he saw beatific visions."
Thompson's affection for his few friends was perhaps the brightest spot in this latter part of his life. For the rest, the record of it is mainly one of loneliness and poverty. He ate at poor tables of boarding-house or restaurant fare, he lived in comfortless rooms rendered more comfortless still by his untidiness, he had no possessions, not even books. All that he left at his death was a tin box of rubbish, "pipes that would not draw, pens that would not write, unopened letters, a lamp without a wick."
It would not be right to regard Thompson as an entirely unhappy man. I should think his hours of joy were at least as many as his hours of sorrow, and as intense. One observer speaks of him thus: "He gave me the impression of concealing within him two inexhaustible reservoirs of sorrow and joy; ebullitions from each appear in his poetry; but in his talks with me he rarely drew except from the fountain of joy." He practised in his life the "stark doctrine of renunciation" which alone can lead man to the higher levels of inspiration, and which he has stated for us in The Mistress of Vision. In this poem the "Land of Luthany" represents for Thompson the poet's supreme vision.
Thompson's worst trial was not being able to write poetry. For the last six years the consolations of poetry, as well as the pains of poetry, were denied him. After the volume of 1897 his Muse deserted him, and he would not sing without inspiration. With the exception of a few occasional pieces, he wrote, in these later years, nothing but prose, prose as fine in its way as his poetry.
In November 1907 Thompson's rare spirit was set free from the fetters of his worthless body. "He left to those who loved him," said Meynell, "the memory of an unique personality and to English poetry an imperishable name."
I shall conclude with a very brief review of Thompson's work. Francis Thompson's writings are not remarkable for their bulk. Three fair-sized volumes hold them all. What is remarkable about them is the consistently high quality of both prose and poetry; they both possess the stamp of distinction, the master-touch, the great utterance.
Of the prose perhaps the finest thing is the Essay on Shelley, but Thompson seemed incapable of writing anything that was not fine. Within certain limits he seems to me to be a critic of the very highest calibre. A complete and sound literary theory could be put together from his critical essays.
The poetry was published in three volumes during Thompson's lifetime. We saw that it was the first volume of 1893 that took the literary world by storm, and justly so. It is nearly all magnificent. Besides The Hound of Heaven, by general consent the greatest religious poem and one of the greatest odes in the language, and The Dead Cardinal of Westminster, it contains a series of love-poems of the very highest quality addressed to Alice Meynell, some exquisite verses on children, and many other gems. Thompson's love-poems are among the finest in our language, but are not, of course, love-poems in the ordinary sense of the word. They express, as one critic said, "a sort of sublimated enthusiasm for the beauty of womanhood," and their enthusiasm was linked to Thompson's religion by being for him an earthly type of his adoration of the Virgin Mother, the crown and pinnacle of idealized womanhood.