FRANCIS THOMPSON
A paper given before the Faculty Club in 1913
The recent publication, April 1913, of the first collected edition of Francis Thompson's works, followed in August by an authentic biography of the poet, has focussed general attention upon the man and his work. Hitherto, if known to the general reader at all, he has been known mainly by one poem, The Hound of Heaven, and the majority of the reading public has not yet discovered that Thompson is the author of a large body of poetry fully worthy to rank with The Hound of Heaven in poetical quality. Even to the few who are familiar with his poetry, the story of his life, one of the most romantic in the annals of our literature, came as a revelation.
To the inner circle of literary people Thompson as a poet has been known for twenty years. With his first volume of poems, published 1893, Thompson, as one admirer expressed it, "reached the peak of Parnassus at a bound." The critics, usually so conservative in their estimate of a new poet, were not only favourable, but in most cases so far forgot themselves as to become enthusiastic. For parallels to the austere passion and purity of Thompson's love-poetry, to the richness and strangeness of his imagery, the splendour and luxuriance of his vocabulary, and the loftiness of his inspiration, they turned without apology to the greatest names of our literature.
From this unusually favourable first opinion there was naturally a reaction. Thompson's second volume of 1895, Sister Songs, and still more his third volume of 1897, New Poems, with its increased symbolism and mysticism, met with vicious abuse as well as generous praise. By 1907, however, the date of Thompson's death, his reputation was well established, and from that time to the present, the tide of criticism seems to have set strongly in his favour. To-day few critics would deny him to be the most remarkable of recent poets.
A fresh wave of interest was aroused last year when the complete and final edition of his works was published. This reawakened interest is likely to have the effect of passing his merit again under review, and we shall have some opportunity of judging whether he is to fade from the sight of men like a brilliant but unlasting meteor, whether he is to be like Keats and Shelley, the chosen poet of a small and select circle of readers, or whether, like Tennyson and Browning, he is to win the suffrages of the man on the street.
Personally, while I believe that Thompson will ultimately take a place among the greatest of our nineteenth century poets, I think it extremely unlikely that he will ever be popular. The atmosphere he lives in is too rare for the ordinary man to breathe with comfort. His emotions are too subtle, his passion too austere, his harmonies too refined to catch the ear of the crowd. A few of his poems, like The Hound of Heaven, which is already widely known, may become popular, but I can recall no other which seems to me likely to make an universal appeal.
Before passing to a sketch of Thompson's romantic career, let me dwell for a short while on the more striking qualities of his genius. My first impressions of Thompson have to do more with style than with subject matter. To the literary critic making the acquaintance of a new poet it matters less, perhaps, what the poet says than how he says it. Harmony, rhythm, language, technique—these things are of vital importance. It is true that we may often desire of our poets "more matter and less art," but on the other hand matter without art has never won the name of great poetry. There is a largeness and finality of utterance, an appearance of inevitability about the best work of the great masters, that is unmistakable. It is as if the Muse of Poetry herself had spoken and not a mere mortal man.
Last came and last did go
The Pilot of the Galilean lake.
Such words as these grow not upon mortal soil.