THE TRUTH OF MIDNIGHT.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 858, 2 July 1910, Page 9

THE TRUTH OF MIDNIGHT.

This is the title given by the London "Nation" to an article on James Thomoon, author of "The City or Dreadful Night," apropos of the publication of a critical and biographical . study, "The Laureate of Pessimism/' written by Mr. Bertram Dobell, the editor of Thomson's works. It is twenty'-eight years sincc Tliomsou, broken by poverty, despair, and drink, died in a London hospital, after half a century of agon-, iseri existence.

Only (sa.vs the "Nation") a biographer of supreme senilis coukl create for us a living portrait of the fierce and miserable spirit that built for itself an Inferno, in Mid-Victorian England. The son of a ship's mate and a nativo of Port-Glasgow, Thomson sprang from the r,ome racial stock' and the same social stratum \rhicli produced a Burns and a Tannahill. . His education, indeed, was more studied, and academic than (heirs. He was trained to earn a secure. if meagre, living as an army schoolmaster, and .lie found leisure to master the whole: range of European literature, and became, in 'the process, a notable Gorman and Italian scholar. Ti-.vca events alone stand out in his early years—the death of his first love, hi-; ii.eeting with the young dragoon w.'.cr afterwards became the famous Jiiaulaugh, and his dismissal from the army for his share in a drunken escajjaue. In his own reading of his career, it was the loss of his girl sweetheart Silioti Laid the foundation '/i his pessimism. His nom do plume (Bvssche Vanalis) claimed affiliation first to Shelley ami then tu Novalis. in whose spiritual bis.'ory a like bereavement had a like olTcct. And, indeed. one is startled to come, amid the blackest gloom that broads'ever his collected work, upon some, happy fragment which reveals the

simple ciffections, the tended and reverent attitude towards women, that 110 happy love was destined to reward. Tho portrait of "The Sleepor" and the pretty, miniature, yi "Up the lliver," of the "little straw hat with tho streaming blue ribbons" are the -work of a man .who understood, ill air his wanderings among metaphysical sorrows and nightmare despairs, tho simple happiness and tho common human joys, liradlaiigh loom.? up in Thomson's career with more than the significance wl|ich Godwin had in SJiolley's. Godwill still stood in a respectable and well-eonnected line of rationalists. His •wo# the revolt of philosophy, a scepticism which still affected the grand manner, and avoided the applause of mobs. Bradlaugh's was a proletarian Atheism, conceived iii barrack-rooms and propagated at street corners. The revolt which Thomson sang was a democratic protest against the supremo Autocrat. Ho was content to bury his greatest work iu the obseuro free-thought weeklies, which were the typical product of this period. One mijlht read his more dignified writings with their opuient vocabulary, their easy rhythms, their accent of educated speech,' and attribute them to a scholar born to leisure. But his consciousness of class leaps up insurgent and contemptuous in "Sunday at Hamp'stcnd".:—" '

Oili Sunday we're Lord and Lady With ten times the love and glee Of, those pale and languid rich ones Who are always and never free." It speaks with a furious Republi-can-malicc-111 the neat, lyrical epigrams' oi ''L'Ancieu Kesinic." It tells of tho narrow life'• of privation which is the lot of the intellectual born in an alien caste, in that most.movina of his lesser poems, where the decrepit furnishings of a poor man's garret gossip over the suicide's bed. The whole phaso of thought belongs, to-that, last sterile period in tho history of tho European proletariat, before Socialism had given it something like a .constructive purpose, religion had broadened, and a now. optimistic' faith was-beginning to stir, m the. souls of men. While Thomson was comforting a broken heart with classical lines and cheap whisky, Karl -Marx was working away in the British Museum at the theory which was to give the 'working class a hope of conquest and a vision of eventual, though material, good. These philosophic comforts were nothing to Thomson. He saw in history only the records of futile revolt and hopes, forlorn, and his world staggered, oil, sure only to repeat its sodden-miseries. His Atheism lacks tho calmness of certainty. It is not so much..a denial as a defiance. Its mood is neither contempt nor dogmatism. It is tho outrageous anger of the underdog.

"Who is .the. most wretched in this dolorous place? ■ ■ . I think myself; yet I would rather bo ■ My miserable self than'He, than He who formed such creatures to His own .... disgrace." -

One suspects that under, all the furious words of denial there lurked in the secret places of Thomson's brain/some relic of belief, some cell so shaped by its Calviiiistie ancestry that it could riot deny. It hated, indeed, and, as the most exquisite. revenge which it could conceive against its Creator,, it formed its lips to a denial. The outcasts who wander in his limbo,'because they had 110 hope to leave behind them at the gates of Hell, were the men of that..Mid-Victorian age who' had not yet armed themselves .with the comforts of the new reading of history.. His work, as lie said himself, ijold-'.tho .'truth of -midnight." There was a dawii to some. •

A mood is worth the sonrrs it. sings. A creed is worth the cathedral it builds. And'it is this , mood and this creed which have given us the greatest _ poem of its generation. ' From the majesty of its title 'to the' bitter,.calm of its concluding stanza, "The,.City, of Dreadful Night" 'is. iinteed a great poem.. -Other poets have written nightmare, visions, and . there are occasional touches in Thomson's' work that remind us.- of Coleridge and ■ even of Poe and Baudelaire.- But this is nightmare that has become a system. Its dreams have tlie vastness and' rigidity of great architecture. The stone, have been painfully hewn;-its-filigree'.Gothic rests on firm foundations. If this is nightmare, it is- a Scotsman's .nightmare. It is lucid and logical ill its delirium, and cogent in its terrors. This is, indeed, no vision city of a rare insomnia. It is a dream that has grown into solidity by the repetition of its unsparing tormerit: !•

"But wheii a dream night after night is :,, brought Throughout a week, and such, weeks, few or many, - ' - Recur each year for several years, . . can any Discern that dream froin real life ia , ' aught?"

It is, indeed, an intellectual Hell, and lioihing in any medieval Inferno afflictsthe spirit like thi* steadiness and tlio reasonableness of its mere despair. In the old Hells, at least, there was action, multitude and motion, companionship and variety.' Here is nothing .but the. brooding inane, the mere recognition of .failure and emptiness. Its very modera- 1 tion is its most refined cruelty, and one rises from it with-Shelley's line on one's -lips,_ "Hell is a city, much like J/ondon." Critics have called the poem monotonous. But what a variety is thero in it of craftsmanship and. imagination! ' Its' versification can move with that easy, serpent-like insinuation that is a. sort of jointed and. acrobatic prose, the movement of Byron's "Don Juan:" It can rise to a stateliness \ that recalls "Adonais." It has its sections of coloured and romantic fresco-work, like the description of the haunted desert round, the city where one sees, as in some mad etchuig "by. Merj-on, '"enormous things . . . with savage cries arid clanking wings." It- has its sculpture gallery, where the imagery of nightmare grows of, a sudden, plastic-and austere, a thing 'no less horrible because of" the beauty of its perfect form. It can be epigrammatic like that haunting refrain:—,

" But I strode on austere, • No hope can have no fear." ; / - It has its episodes like the dialogues of the lost,souls, and the awful picture of the spirit which hud no hope to deposit as its entrance-fee to Hell. In every picture and every speech .-it- arrests. For it was the singularity of Thomson's 'genius that the white heat of its furnace of despair turned out its bronzes definite and firm. When he speaks, it is classical oratory. When he depicts, it is moulded sculpture. When "ho plans his city of nightmare, it has all the form and concrctencss which happier dreamers have given to their Cities of the Smi. Thero is 'in his visions nothing fantastic, no elusive veil, no gossamer outline, no fragrance of an opium cloud. Ho bite-s his picture,on perennial copper with the acid of- anger and pain. Such work can wait securely for the justice of time. Its masonry is not- of yeilding brick, its statuary is not of crumbling stone'.' It will outlive the age that produced it. It tells a truth that is true —at midnight.