It was in recollection of some such mood, experienced as an outcast on the London streets, that he wrote the verses, The Kingdom of God, found in manuscript among his papers after his death, which illustrate as well as any other single poem the extraordinary inter-blending of the seen and the unseen in his poetry. His own words about Shelley apply with equal force to himself: "He stood at the very junction lines of the visible and invisible, and could shift the points as he willed."
Francis Thompson was born at Preston, Lancashire, in 1859, the son of Charles Thompson, a doctor, afterwards in practice at Ashton-under-Lyne. His literary genius cannot be explained on any theory of heredity. The fact that his father seemed absolutely (and almost culpably) blind to his son's artistic nature seems to me to account in large measure for the tragedy of Thompson's youth. Later, when the son became famous, no one was more surprised than Charles Thompson, but though the success of his son's poetry must have touched his pride, it did not penetrate to his intellect, for he confessed that he was quite unable to understand it. We must, then, acquit Charles Thompson of having any act or part in his son's literary attainments; and from all accounts, his mother was equally innocent of literary talent.
But, though the poet owed none of his genius to his parents, he owed them something more important, something which proved to be the very life-spring of that genius, namely, his religious enthusiasm. Thompson is first and last a religious poet. In him and his contemporary, Patmore, Roman Catholicism, which had for centuries, almost, in fact, since the days of Dante, relinquished to poets of other faiths the chief glories of song, found a voice. The mysteries of religion were Thompson's chief inspiration, the interpretation of them his highest task. His father and mother, and the majority of his uncles and aunts were converts to the Roman Catholic Church; but whereas their spirit of worship was dumb, in Thompson all that is best in Roman Catholicism is glorified in shining verse.
Thompson, however, is not a sectarian poet. He is too great for that. It is the spirit of universal religion that breathes in his verse. The poetry of the Victorian era, which for many years had been groping after religious faith, found with Thompson the note of absolute certainty. "The people that walked in darkness saw in him a great light." "To be the poet of the return to Patmore is somewhat," he said, "but I would be the poet of the return to God."
Thompson, a sensitive, delicate child, was brought up with his two sisters, and seems to have been remarkable in childhood chiefly for his gentleness and capacity for make-believe. At the age of eleven he left the shelter of his home for Ushaw, a Roman Catholic college near Durham, where he endured at first the same miseries as fall to the lot of most high-strung, sensitive boys, when exposed to the brutalities of a large English boarding school. His was the fate of Cowper and Shelley, and in Thompson's Essay on Shelley, which (leaving aside its magnificence as a piece of prose writing) is valuable less for its comments on Shelley than for the light which it throws on Thompson himself, the remarks on the persecution endured at school by Shelley are suggested by Thompson's own experiences. Probably none of either Thompson's teachers or schoolfellows perceived in him the tokens of future greatness. He passed through his school-days, as in the main he passed through life, with his true self hidden from all observers under an impenetrable reserve.
Thompson's father intended him for the priesthood, and to that end his studies were directed during the whole seven years of his stay at Ushaw. Probably the training he received, particularly his study of the Missal and hymns of the Church, had no small effect upon his later verse. Though he took a high place in his literary classes, particularly in English, and though his teachers thought highly of his ability, they became gradually convinced that his nervous timidity and constitutional indolence rendered him unfit for the priesthood. The principal of the college wrote to that effect to his father in 1877, while at the same time expressing his belief that if Thompson could shake off his natural indolence he had ability to succeed in any career.
Thompson therefore returned home in 1877, to the great disappointment of his parents. The indolence which proved his undoing was, says his biographer, Everard Meynell, only "one name of many for the abstractions of Thompson's mind and the inactivities of his body." Against this indolence he struggled nobly all his life. Not a lifetime of mornings spent in bed killed his desire to be up and doing. Even in the trembling hand of his last months he wrote out in big capitals on pages torn from exercise books such texts as were calculated to frighten him into his clothes. In the morning when he woke his eyes fell upon such words as these, "Thou wilt not he abed when the last trump blows," "Thy sleep with the worms will be long enough," and so on, but all in vain. Thompson's indolence was not a mental but a physical characteristic. His poor, disordered body refused exertion and was too sluggish for all Thompson's spiritual energy to rouse. Apparently, however, this indolence and absence of mind would have caused Thompson to fail in any regular profession, and perhaps his father is as much to be pitied as blamed for his next strenuous attempt to make Francis capable of earning his own livelihood.
After Thompson's failure at Ushaw, his father decided to prepare his son for his own profession, and sent him to take a medical course at Owen's College, Manchester. For the following six years Thompson pretended to study medicine. He made the journey from home to lectures every morning under compulsion, but once out of sight of the parental eye his day was his own, and was spent anywhere rather than at the lecture or in the dissecting room. He wandered about Manchester, an untidy, abstracted figure with trailing shoe-laces and careless dress, indifferent to passers-by, and muttering a continual soliloquy. He haunted the libraries, museums, and galleries of the city, and while his father thought his son was preparing himself to earn a competence as a respectable practising physician, the son was really equipping himself all unconsciously for the career which was to win him, not indeed a competence, but an undying name in English poetry. It was at this time, in poring over our sixteenth and seventeenth century writers, that Thompson acquired his wonderful vocabulary, which contains so many forgotten words that the critics later accused him of wholesale coinage, and which gives his verse that rich flavour of antiquity which is no small part of its charm.
At this time, too, Thompson made the acquaintance of De Quincey, "his very own De Quincey," a writer to whose career Thompson's in many respects bears an extraordinary resemblance. De Quincey naturally drew his attention to opium, with disastrous results. Opium-eating was in the air of Manchester, the cotton-spinners being much addicted to its use, and Thompson became a victim. With a short interval he was a user of opium to the end of his days. It is difficult to estimate the effect of the drug habit on Thompson's writings; personally, I doubt that it had any effect. It certainly had no direct effect, for we have his own solemn assurance that none of his published verse (except one poem, The Dream Tryst) was written under its influence. In fact, his first outburst of poetry came apparently as a result of his temporary breaking-off of the drug habit, after he had been rescued from the London streets; and during the few years of his poetic productiveness he seems to have freed himself from the influence of opium. Thompson thought too highly of poetry and of his mission as a poet to use opium as a stimulus to verse-making. In the latter years of his life he went back again to the drug as a relief from incessant physical weakness and misery, and who that has not suffered equally can blame him?
But though opium affected Thompson's genius little, if at all, it certainly affected his character, and made whatever was weak and slack, weaker and slacker. He proved a complete failure at Owen's College, and was given a trial at Glasgow with similar results. His father was in despair. Hundreds of pounds from his scanty income had been spent for lectures to which his son had not listened, for the fees of examiners who got no papers to examine, and for courses in dissection during which Francis had not been once to the dissecting table. Opium, however, cannot be blamed for Thompson's failure; he must have failed anyway; it only made his failure more complete and hopeless. On the other hand, it had undoubtedly in one way a beneficial physical effect. On this subject his biographer remarks: "It staved off the assaults of tuberculosis; it gave him the wavering strength that made life just possible for him, whether on the streets, or through all those other distresses and discomforts that it was his character deeply to resent, but not to remove by any normal courses."