NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 38, 28 September 1922, Page 26

NOTES

Shelley ' ;■-. '■■ "7 ' • . .-.y: That this is the year of Shelley's centenary must be our excuse for recalling to our readers one of the most wonderful and enchanting prose passages in the English language. . Search the polished pages of Pater from end to end, again your volumes of Wilde, 1 brush the dust from the covers of de Quincey, and you will find nothing in them to surpass this inspired - page from Francis Thompson's essay: '. "Coming to Shelley's poetry, .we peep over the wild 'mask of revolutionary metaphysics, and we see the winsome face of the child., Perhaps none of his poems is more purely and typically elleian than The \ Cloud, and it.is interesting to note how essentially it springs from the faculty of make-believe.: The same thing is conspicuous, though less purely conspicuous, throughout» his singing; it is the child's faculty of make-believe raised to the nth power.* He is still at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch, and his olaythings are those which the gods give their children. The universe is his .box of toys. 'He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall. He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars. He makes .bright mischief with the moon. The meteors muzzle their noses in his hand. He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the shaking of its fiery chain." He dances in and out of the gates of heaven: its floor is littered with his broken fancies. He runs wild over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He o-ets between the feet of the" horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient nature, - and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song." Thompson's Prose ' After reading that single extract which we" have just quoted nobody can have any doubt that Francis ■ Thompson could write prose better than most English writers. Yet, much as we hear of his poetry, we seldom or never find a word said in recommendation of his essays which are things of wonderful beauty and charm. Every one of them is like a stimulant, and in each you know that you are reading the sentences of a genius. The rhythm, the music, the imaginative power, the richness of fancy, the clearness that are always present in the best prose, and without which ; prose is not the best, are all in Thompson's pages, open, them where you will. Take this page, selected at random,, and ponder over it: , •; "A core of scornful and melancholy protest, set about with a pulp of satire, and outside all*a rind of burlesque- is Don Quixote. It never laughed . Spain's chivalry away.': Chivalry was no more in a country where it could be written. Where it could be thought an impeachment of- idealism, idealism had ceased to be. Against this very state of things its secret but lofty contempt is aimed. Herein lies '" its curious complexity. Outwardly Cervantes falls in with the waxing materialism of the day, and professes tp satirise everything that is chivalrous and ideal. Behind all that is subtle, suppressed, mordant satire of the material spirit in all its forms the. clownish materialism of the boor; the comfortable materialism of the boiirgeois; the pedantic materialism of the scholar and the mundane cleric; the idle, luxurious, _ arrogant materialism of the nobler—all agreeing in derisive conceit of superiority to the poor madman who still believes in grave, exalted, herioc ideas of life and i duty Finally, at the deepmost core of * the strange ',;■■■.• and wonderful satire, in which the hidden mockery is so - r opposite to the seeming mockery, lies a sympathy even \ to tears with all height and heroism insulated an 1 out of date, mad to the eyes of a purblind world; nay, a bitter confession that such nobility is, indeed, mad ;. ■'■ and phantasmal, in so much v as it imputes its •« own - - greatness to a.petty and clay-content society."; ....".';.

>' That is hot only good prose', hub it gives you the rationale of Don 'Quixote 'better, than you ever had .it before. '" ' ' , ' . X * '\ •- : : •' : '-. .'• /'■.' . '.: ■■ ' ■ - Where Thompson Stands ~'>.-*; ;Francis Thompson is as far above-the .poets of • f to-day as Napoleon . was above the British ?Gieherals engaged in the late war. But he is ( not': a ; popular poet; and there are many reasons for that. One is the same reason which explains why Shakspere's Sonnets are not popular, and never will be: they are too good, ; too lofty, too. beautiful for a people that (reads ; nothing but daily • papers and finds heaven- oh earth at a Picture Theatre. Probably another is because the poet was a Catholic. British i Fair Play makes it hard for a Catholic to get fair play in any of life in the Empire, and the better a man" and the .nobler his-work the more, likely is he to, become the victim,of the system. In-order to persuade those of our readers who still remain imbued ?, with 'the ideals of their environment that Thompson was a great poet', we will quote some Englishmen and Protestants for them; for it is the most unqualified witnesses that appeal to ignorant people: ' V . Arnold Bennett wrote:' "My belief is that Francis Thompson, has a richer natural genius, a finer poetical equipment, than any poet save Shakspere. Show me the divinest glories of Shelley, and Keats, even of Tennyson • ... and I think I can match them all out of this one book, this little book that can be bought at an ordinary bookseller's for an ordinary prosaic crown." / '.- . ' ."'':■■ Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote: "It was at Cambridge, in, the heipht of the summer term and in.%.. Fellow's Garden, that the revelation [of Thompson's, - "The Mistress of Vision"] came. I thought then in my enthusiasm that no such poem had been written or attempted since Coleridge, attempted and left off writing Etibia Khm. In a cooler hour I. think so yet; and were my age twentv-five- or s 6, it would delight me to swear to-it, riding to any man's drawbridge who" , shuts his gates against it, and blowing the horn of challenge. . . To me my admiration seemed too hot to last, but four or five years leave me unrepentant." ■:■■ (J. L. Garvin, who is ho.longer, an Irishman, wrote: ."Mr. Thompson's poetry scarcely comes by way of the outward eye at all. He scarcely depends upon occasions. , In .a dungeon, one imagines | that he would , be no less a poet. The regal airs, the prophetic ardors, the apocalyptic vision, the .supreme utterance^he has them all. A rarer, more, intense, more strictly predestinate genius has never been known to poetry. To many this may well appear the ' simple . delirium of over-emphasis. The writer signs for those others, nowise ashamed, who range after Shakspere's very Sonnets the poetry of a living poet, Francis Thompson." ' There* then you have what cultured, supercilious critics had to say of our poor Catholic poet t who had once sunk so low in misery that in one pathetic hour he was the object of a Magdalene-like charity on the part of an erring girl who walked the streets of London. It is ' of her he sings:. / ; • Then there came past }' A child thee, a flower; but a flower \v; Fallen from the budded, coronal of spring. v And through the city-streets blown withering. .{ ■-■■■. She passed— brave, sad, Jovingest,. tender thing !—■ And of her own, scant pittance she did give . r .; That I might eat and live: ;,'"/>■'-' -- ». ><•'„..■' '-- •;'-", Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive. v.,;: ! • .. ' Therefore I hissed in thee '•"--'.-; vr '■ v \-\\-.'?. . •';'--■■ ✓ The lueart of childhood, s& divine for me; ;. \. • ' - -And her, through what sore woys^C; ., . '•• •• \ , And what un<childish days, '■■■ 'j/:'-v;^-.■;•. ; ;:;.i:, j >. Borne me now, as then, a trackless fugitive. '• Therefore I kissed in thee ? V \?. •.{••*'"',' "' - : - ' Her, chilli and mnocency. ■'. > '< ;•.-;.;; 'r '-• .•.

;- , Do i not hesitate -in your charity. Never, mind tht small ; donation, the best you can do. 'Give what you can, God-will send it back to you withvinterest, which you mil receive in this world and the next. >* , j \ Vf ■'. .. V x '''.