Produced by Al Haines [Illustration: Cover] REGINALD BATEMAN TEACHER AND SOLDIER A MEMORIAL VOLUME OF SELECTIONS FROM HIS LECTURES AND OTHER WRITINGS PRINTED FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN, SASKATOON, CANADA AND PUBLISHED FOR THE UNIVERSITY BY HENRY SOTHERAN AND CO. LONDON 1922 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN. CHISWICK PRESS : CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND GRIGGS (PRINTERS), LTD. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON. PREFATORY NOTE The purpose of this volume is to commemorate the life and death of Reginald John Godfrey Bateman, first Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. It was felt by the Governors and Faculty of the University that his friends and old students would value a representative selection from the lectures delivered by him within the University and to the outside public. Included in the selection are a few poems which were found among his papers. The lectures and essays which are published here, being written for popular audiences or literary gatherings inside the University, were never intended by their author for publication as the original and considered critical work of a Professor of English; doubtless, if such had been his purpose, much that is printed here, originally hurriedly prepared during the busy rush of a college session, would have been altered and recast. While originality was one of Professor Bateman's most marked qualities, the members of the committee entrusted with the preparation of this volume for the press have not, in every case, regarded originality of thought as a necessary qualification for inclusion. In making their selection they have rather been guided by the desire to give to his friends and old students what, whether original in thought or not, appeared to be in treatment and presentation most characteristic of the man and teacher. War--and herein lies its greatest tragedy--always takes heavy toll of the promise and latent greatness of a nation, its youth and vigorous young manhood. Like many others who risked all and gave all in the Great War, Reginald Bateman was cut off in his prime. He was born in Ireland some thirty-eight years ago. His schooldays were spent under Dr. Biggs, often called the Irish Arnold, at Portora Royal School, perhaps the greatest of Irish public schools, with a tradition of scholarship which is centuries old. On leaving school he entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated with the Highest Honours in Modern Literature. In college his activities and interests were wide, and he was an outstanding example of the student who combines with distinction in scholarship, prominence in athletics and a broad and human outlook on life. In this as in other respects he was a worthy representative of the spirit of his University. After a few years' experience of teaching in Ireland, he was appointed to the chair of English at the University of Saskatchewan, being one of the original four professors who, with President Murray, launched the University on its educational career in 1909. When a peaceful and unsuspecting world was plunged, in August 1914, into the horrors of the most stupendous war in its history, Professor Bateman quickly decided that his place was in the fighting line, and he enlisted in the 28th Battalion in September 1914, in company with another professor and many members of our student body. His ability to handle men, quickly became apparent; he soon won his sergeant's stripes, and went to France with that rank. In 1916 he was recalled to Canada to take command of the Saskatchewan Company of the Western Universities' Battalion. He proceeded to England with the rank of major, and in 1917 reverted to the rank of lieutenant in order to get again to France, where he was wounded in action. He was holding the rank of captain in the 46th Battalion when he was killed on the 3rd of September 1918. He had taken part in the fighting toward the end of August when the Canadians made the first breach in the Hindenburg Line. The major of his battalion has written that on the 2nd of September Captain Bateman gallantly led his company into action. Dury was taken that day, and near that place on the night of September 3rd he was killed by a shell at the Regimental Headquarters, which were being held in a chalk quarry. On the 4th of September the chaplain of the regiment gathered together a party who, "amid the roar of guns and scream of shells paid their last respects to a very gallant comrade and one of the best loved men in the Battalion." Those who served under him as an officer bear witness that he had won not only the men's implicit confidence by qualities of leadership of the highest order, but also their very great affection by his personal qualities. The affection and respect which were the University's tribute to his character were also the tribute of his comrades in circumstances where a man's soul is stripped of all pretences in the constant presence of death, and where the dread arbitrament of war must reveal the good or evil that may lie hidden beneath the conventionalities of ordinary life. Strong in body and fearless in spirit, Reginald Bateman possessed that courage which is neither the product of discipline and rigorous training, nor the mere animal quality which (to quote an early writer on the war) "is our inheritance from a past in which men fought each one for himself that they might survive," but that finer quality of courage which will face the most appalling horrors because it has a vision of the future and a faith in the destiny of mankind. If Professor Bateman had survived, his career as a soldier would have been but a glorious interlude in his life's work. During the years spent by him at the University, his character and attainments had made him an outstanding figure, and gave promise of a future even richer in achievement. Intellectually, he was a signal example of the union of great ability and imagination with the modesty of a fine spirit and a sane and penetrating outlook on life. He was possessed of a breadth of outlook that gave him clear insight in literary matters. His judgments were always just, because based on essentials, while his humanity enabled him to couple with the minutiae of scholarship a catholicity of interpretation and a sanity of criticism which is not always found in those who are most deeply versed in their subject. The respect of his colleagues and of his students is definite proof of his great ability as a teacher. It was manifest to all that he gave himself wholeheartedly to his work with that enjoyment and appreciation which are essential characteristics of a true teacher. The loss that the University in general has sustained by Professor Bateman's death finds its counterpart in the personal sorrow of his friends. Those who were privileged to know him well are left immeasurably poorer by his death but enriched by a memory that will always remain with them. For "his story lives on woven into the stuff of other men's lives." His wide human interests brought him into sympathetic touch with many phases of life and gave him strength and tolerance. His true manliness, sincerity of character, and sociable nature endeared him to all. He was a delightful comrade, and many of his colleagues must remember some flash of true humour which lit up the prosaic tenor of an ordinary conversation or of some inordinately dull Faculty Meeting. The students of the University too shared in his friendship. His never-flagging interest in their activities, whether literary, musical, or athletic, will always be remembered. The University of Saskatchewan lost in the Great War many of its finest spirits, and its losses reached their culmination in the death of Reginald Bateman. Upon such sacrifices The gods themselves throw incense. CONTENTS PART I REGINALD BATEMAN--STUDENT AND TEACHER Francis Thompson Milton To the Memory of Dr. Biggs The Teaching of English My Last Duchess Christmas Shopping Realism in Wordsworth and Browning Synge--a Fragment Dickens and Thackeray Pessimism Brains and Intellect The Eternal Silence PART II REGINALD BATEMAN--SOLDIER The War In the Trenches On the Death of a Comrade [Illustration: Reginald Bateman] PART I REGINALD BATEMAN STUDENT AND TEACHER 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. What one looks for, then, first of all in a new poet is the grand style, the authentic note, the phrases stamped with the tool of the eternal graver. In the search for it, one's only guide is instinct, an instinct formed by constant study of what is admittedly the best. And the search for this distinction of style is doomed so often to be disappointed that even a line or a phrase which seems to possess it is gladly welcomed. But in Thompson's case the inspiration is not confined to occasional flashes. No matter where I opened his book, almost every line seemed to me to bear the hall-mark of great poetry. Take even the six lines of the dedication of _New Poems_ to Coventry Patmore; you find, I think, that they ring true, that they have the great utterance. Lo, my book thinks to look Time's leaguer down, Under the banner of your spread renown! Or if these levies of impuissant rhyme Fall to the overthrow of assaulting Time, Yet this one page shall find oblivious shame, Armed with your crested and prevailing Name. In reading Thompson's poems one has neither, as in the case of most moderns, to adjust oneself to a completely new and perhaps freakish style, nor to reconcile oneself to a more or less obvious imitation of our greatest recent poets. Thompson is not at all modern; to one familiar with seventeenth century English literature he comes like an old friend; and yet he is no imitator; he is absolutely individual. If a student of literature were given the poems without being told the author, he would probably get the impression that some forgotten poet of the seventeenth century had been re-discovered. For Thompson's poems do not smack of the nineteenth century; they have few echoes of Tennyson or Browning or Swinburne or any nineteenth century poet except, perhaps, Shelley; they have rather a strong flavour of our elder poetry, and while rich, perhaps over-rich, in imagery, give one an impression of close-knit, sinewy strength very different from the milk-and-watery mildness or the sensuous lusciousness of much modern verse. This effect is enhanced by their vocabulary, which contains many words strange to the modern ear, and which takes one back to Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, Cowley, and Crashaw. The _Ode to the Setting Sun_ and the _Anthem of Earth_ illustrate to some extent another very prominent characteristic of Thompson, that he is a daring and successful experimenter in metre and language. He does not follow slavishly in the beaten track of other poets; he frames metrical moulds for himself to suit the quality of his own glowing thought. The poems are full of new and difficult metres, handled with perfect mastery; they are full of experiments with language which most modern poets would not dare to make, but which in Thompson nearly always seem to justify themselves. Perhaps the most striking thing about Thompson's poetry is the quality of his imagery. A great poet must be rich in imagery, for it is the imagery of poetry that discloses to us its hidden soul. Thompson's imagery at once astonishes by its ingenuity and captivates by its beauty. In the former quality he rivals Cowley and Crashaw, in the latter he is far beyond them. One critic remarked that Thompson must surely be Crashaw born again, but born greater. If Thompson's imagery has a fault, it is that there is too much of it; he himself recognized this fault and endeavoured to correct it. Alice Meynell remarked that many poets could be furnished with imagery, not from the abundance of Thompson's, but from its super-abundance. Here are a few samples, chosen almost at random, of the quality of Thompson's imagery: And now my heart is as a broken fount, Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever From the dank thoughts that shiver Upon the sighful branches of my mind. Under my ruined passions fallen and sere The wild dreams stir, like little radiant girls, Whom in the moulted plumage of the year, Their comrades sweet have buried to the curls. In a more commonplace style of imagery, but still splendidly handled, is the following from _Sister Songs_: Or may this treasure-galleon of my verse, Fraught with its golden passion, oared with cadent rhyme, Set with a towering press of fantasies, Drop safely down the time, Leaving mine isled self behind it far, Soon to be sunken in the abysm of seas, (As down the years the splendour voyages From some long-ruined and night-submerged star). The foregoing extracts impress one also with another noteworthy and very important quality of Thompson's verse--its remarkable metrical effects. Watts-Dunton rightly says that in addition to intellectual and emotional life, great poetry must have rhythmic life. Unless the rhythm of any metrical passage is so vivid, so natural, and so free that it seems as though it could live, if need were, by its rhythm alone, that passage, according to Watts-Dunton, has no right to exist as poetry. One sign by which one may know that poetry possesses rhythmic life is that passages of it will sing themselves in one's head for days after reading them. Arnold Bennett tells us that after reading _Sister Songs_ he went about for days repeating such passages as: The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine, Moves all the labouring surges of the world. After reading Thompson first, I went about for days repeating over and over again passages from his poems, not for their meaning, for the meaning in many cases was not clear, but just for the sound and beat of them, such passages as: On Ararat there grew a vine... or I am Daniel's mystic mountain... Everyone knows Kipling's picture of sunrise in _Mandalay_: An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay. This is commonplace beside Thompson's version of the same thought in _The Mistress of Vision_: East, ah, east of Himalay Dwell the nations underground; Hiding from the shock of Day, For the sun's uprising sound: Dare not issue from the ground At the tumults of the Day, So fearfully the sun doth sound, Clanging up beyond Cathay, For the great earth-quaking sunrise rolling up beyond Cathay. Lastly, Thompson's poetry impresses one with a sense of sublimity, in the strict, literal meaning of the word, which is _upliftedness_. Thompson seems always uplifted to a high level of inspiration; his wing seems never to flag nor his voice to tire. The reason for this consistent loftiness of Thompson's poetry is probably that to Thompson the writing of poetry was an act of worship, and that the main spring of his inspiration is religious enthusiasm. He never wrote except when he felt that he must write. He was only, he says, the conduit-pipe through which flowed the divine utterance. Speaking of poets he says: We speak a lesson taught we know not how, And what it is that from us flows The hearer better than the utterer knows. In every line of Thompson's verse one finds evidence of "the vision and the faculty divine," and when after his brief period of song that vision faded and that faculty failed, he wrote no more. Thompson wrote because he must write. Like Keats he was haunted perpetually by an image of the ideal Beauty, to which he was ever striving to attain. Poetry sometimes seems to him his curse, and not his blessing. Deaf is he to the world's tongue; He scorneth for his song The loud Shouts of the crowd. He measureth world's pleasure World's ease, as Saints might measure; For hire Just love entire. He asks, not grudging pain; And knows his asking vain, And cries Love, love, and dies, In guerdon of long duty Unowned by Love or Beauty; And goes-- Tell, tell who knows. Francis Thompson was accustomed to crest all his manuscripts with the sign of the cross; and just as all his verse may be said to have been written under the inspiration of the cross, so his life may be said to have been lived under its shadow. The Hand that wrought out his destiny must have placed over its finished work the sign of mingled shame and glory, of suffering and triumph. Life was too strong for Thompson; it crushed him beneath its hurrying feet; it stunned him with its tumults; it withheld from him the love for which his soul craved; but out of the defeat of his life rose the triumph of his verse. It seems that Thompson sank to the lowest depths of life's misery that he might rise to its highest pinnacle of inspiration. It was when pitiless London had almost crushed the life out of him, and when his eyes were blinded with pain to the things around him, that the heavenly vision was clearest. On the day when he, "poor thief of song," was nailed to his bitterest cross, he heard most clearly a voice saying, "To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise." 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." Dr. Thompson took Francis away from college and next set him to work with a surgical instrument maker. There he remained two weeks. His next attempt at work was as agent for a new encyclopaedia. This book it took him two months to read through, and he did not sell a single copy. His father then told him that he must enlist. Thompson obeyed without a word. He was rejected as physically unfit, but not before he had gone through a weary period of marching and drill in the endeavour to expand his chest to the necessary inches. Thompson once more returned home, as he did from each successive failure, saying simply, "I have not succeeded," and vouchsafing no explanation. There were apparently no confidences between Thompson and his father; Dr. Thompson knew nothing of his son's literary ambitions. His comment when later he found his son welcomed as a poet was: "If the lad had but told me!" but it is doubtful, as Mr. Mills says, "that the worthy doctor regarded the greenest of poetic laurels as a fair exchange for a thriving medical practice." This time Thompson's reception seems to have been unusually chilling, and in a hopeless mood he left home without saying good-bye, and started for London with no money but his fare, and with no baggage but a volume of Blake in one pocket and Aeschylus in another. Friendless, incompetent, aimless, he threw himself into the maw of the great city which has devoured so many poets, and soon plumbed the very depths of poverty and despair. For three years he drifted about London, sinking continually lower, and the astonishing thing is that he came through the ordeal alive. His feeble attempts at finding and doing "work" soon ceased, and then he knew what it meant to walk in rags and herd with the outcasts of the street, to sleep in a fourpenny doss-house, or, if he had no money, on the Embankment, to suffer hunger and pain and cold. An attempt to establish himself as a boot-black met with the usual ill-success that attended all Thompson's practical efforts, and the time came when, for a week, his only earning was sixpence for holding a horse's head. Later still, he was on the streets day and night successively for fifteen days, and sank into a kind of stupor, moving about in a sort of half-consciousness as in a walking nightmare. From this pitiable state he was rescued temporarily by a Mr. McMaster, a pious and kindly boot-maker who made a practice of assisting such unfortunates. He had designs on Thompson's soul, but when Thompson, even in his destitute condition, refused to allow his soul to be tampered with, McMaster wisely concluded that the next best thing was to save Thompson's body; and he did so. Thompson was taken into the shop, and proving hopeless at boot-making, was made errand-boy at five shillings a week. Here he got a chance to write, and covered the bootmaker's discarded account books with prose and poetry; and, according to McMaster, even submitted manuscripts to several magazines, but apparently without success. Opium, the effects of which were mistaken by McMaster for those of drink, lost Thompson this situation, and he was again thrown on the streets to sink even lower than before. It was at this time that he received the indelible impressions of the London streets which he recorded years after in his review of General Booth's _Darkest England_: "A region whose hedgerows have set to brick, whose soil is chilled to stone; where flowers are sold and women; where the men wither and the stars; whose streets to me on the most glittering day are black. For I unveil their secret meanings. I read their human hieroglyphs. I diagnose from a hundred occult signs the disease which perturbs their populous pulses. Misery cries out to me from the kerb-stone; despair passes me by in the ways; I discern limbs laden with fetters impalpable but not imponderable; I hear the shaking of invisible lashes; I see men dabbled with their own oozing life." It was at this time that Thompson, like De Quincey, was befriended by a girl of the streets, who noticed his forlorn condition and whose motherly instincts were roused by his helplessness. "Weakness and confidence, humility and reverence, were gifts unknown to her except at his hands, and she repaid them with graces as lovely as a child's, and as unhesitating as a saint's." When Thompson was finally rescued by Wilfrid Meynell, she fled from him, fearing that his friendship with her might prejudice his chances of better things. "They will not understand our friendship," she said, and then, "I always knew you were a genius." She changed her lodgings and Thompson sought her in vain. In _Sister Songs_, in a passage addressed to Sylvia (that is, little Madeline Meynell) he pays a beautiful tribute to the childishness of this girl. Once--in that nightmare-time which still doth haunt My dreams, a grim, unbidden visitant-- * * * * * I waited the inevitable last. Then there came past A child; like thee, a spring-flower; but a flower Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring, And through the city-streets blown withering. She passed,--O brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing! And of her own scant pittance did she give, That I might eat and live: Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive. Therefore I kissed in thee The heart of Childhood, so divine for me; And her, through what sore ways, And what unchildish days, Borne from me now, as then, a trackless fugitive. In February 1887 came the crisis of Thompson's fate. At that time Thompson scraped together a few shillings somehow and began to decipher and put together the half-obliterated manuscript of his article on _Paganism, Old and New_, written, I suppose, at McMaster's. "I came simultaneously to my last page and my last halfpenny," says Thompson, "and went forth to drop the manuscript in the letter-box of the Catholic magazine, _Merrie England_. Next day I spent the halfpenny on two boxes of matches and began the struggle for life." Among all the important letters that have been posted since man became a letter-writing animal, that letter of Thompson's to the editor of _Merrie England_ holds, it seems to me, a prominent place. One trembles to think what might have happened if that manuscript had never reached the editor or been overlooked by him. In all probability Thompson would have died of starvation in the streets of London, and a poet who may prove to be one of the first in our literature would have gone "mute and inglorious" to an outcast's grave. But though it lay pigeon-holed for six months without receiving the attention of a busy editor, in due course the letter and accompanying manuscript were read. To no better man could Thompson have appealed than the editor of _Merrie England_, Wilfrid Meynell, a man whose hand was ever stretched out to help the unfortunate. At present, however, he knew nothing of Thompson except that his essay showed a master-hand. After some difficulty Meynell managed to get into communication with the author through a druggist to whom Thompson owed money for opium, and many days after, Mr. Meynell, in his workroom, was told that Mr. Thompson wished to see him. "Show him up," he said, and was left alone. What follows is told in the words of Everard Meynell: "Then the door opened and a strange hand was thrust in. The door closed but Thompson had not entered. Again it opened, again it shut. At the third attempt, a very waif of a man came in. No such figure had been looked for; more ragged and unkempt than the average beggar, with no shirt beneath his coat, and bare feet in broken shoes, he found my father at a loss for words." Wilfrid Meynell then, with immense patience and kindness, set about the task of rescuing Thompson. Thompson was not an easy man to rescue. Reserved and secretive by habit, he made no confidences and asked no favours. He did not seem at first to realize that salvation for him was possible, and that he could earn his living by writing. At any rate, it was only by the exercise of considerable tact and patience that Mr. Meynell succeeded in obtaining any of his confidence. Physically, Thompson had suffered severely in his long struggle with starvation. "He will not live," was the doctor's verdict, "and you hasten his death by denying his whims and opium." Meynell, however, took the risk and sent Thompson to a private hospital. The experiment succeeded. Thompson secured a fresh lease of life, and, for the time, renounced opium. All lovers of literature owe a debt of gratitude to Meynell for his astonishing kindness and unselfishness towards Thompson at this time and to the end of the poet's life. Few would have taken the trouble, amid the cares of a busy life, to look after Thompson, who in many ways was as incapable of managing his own affairs as a child. Meynell found him work, and for the remaining years of his life Thompson secured a scanty living by his pen. His poetry brought him little, but review work and occasional articles for such magazines as the _AthenÃ¦um_ gave him generally enough to live on, and anything that was lacking was supplied by Meynell. Soon after Thompson's rescue comes the extraordinary spectacle of the outburst of his poetic talent. Here was a man of letters of the first rank whose genius had blossomed fresh and fair from the filth of the London streets. His long proximity with vice and degradation of the worst kind had not cast even a shadow on the purity of Thompson's spirit; and his poetry rose from the slums of London as stainless as Venus from the ocean. The Meynells furnished Thompson with much of his poetic inspiration. Meynell had introduced Thompson to his own family. His wife, Alice Meynell, the poetess, became the saint of Thompson's adoration, two of the children, Monica and Madeline, were revelations to him of the beauty of girlhood; and he repaid the sheltering care and attention shown him by the family by conferring on them all he had to give, the best fruits of his genius. To Mrs. Meynell he addressed the beautiful poems of his first volume, entitled _Love in Dian's Lap_; to Monica Meynell several of the best poems in that volume; and to Monica and Madeline his second volume entitled _Sister Songs_. His affection for Wilfrid Meynell is expressed in a few lines entitled _To W. M._ O Tree of many branches! One thou hast Thou barest not, but graftedst on thee. Now Should all men's thunders break on thee, and leave Thee reft of bough and blossom, that one branch Shall cling to thee, my Father, Brother, Friend, Shall cling to thee unto the end of end. Thompson's verses were all he had to give in return for the Meynells' kindness, and to my mind they were a rich recompense for the continual trouble, anxiety, and petty annoyances which he dealt out to his friends with lavish hands. 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 _tÃªte-Ã -tÃªte_ 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. The second volume, published in 1895, consisted of one long poem in two parts, _Sister Songs_, addressed to the sisters Monica and Madeline Meynell. The first part seems to me to be spoiled by over-luxuriance, but the second is grand poetry. One short quotation must suffice: Eve no gentlier lays her cooling cheek On the burning brow of the sick earth, Sick with death, and sick with birth, Aeon to aeon, in secular fever twirled,
{'title': 'Reginald Bateman, Teacher and Soldier by Reginald Bateman', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}