But there it was, and it expressed itself most clearly in the rhetoric, which was the passion of all good Victorians. It was a time of long speeches and long books. Carlyle and Ruskin preached the value of silence in unnumbered volumes. Gladstone solved the problem of packing the minimum of sense into the maximum of words. Even the men of science, with the single exception of Darwin, were rhetoricians as well as patient observers of the truth. Fifty years ago the meetings of the British Association were well-advertised opportunities of eloquence. The sound of Professor Tyndall's peroration at Belfast still echoes in the ears of the devout. 'If unsatisfied, the human mind,' thus he spoke, 'with the yearning of a pilgrim for his distant home, will still turn to the mystery from which it has emerged, . . . then, casting aside all the restrictions of materialism, I would affirm this to be a field for the noblest exercise of what, in contrast with the knowing faculties, may be called the creative faculties of man. Here, however, I touch a theme too great for me to handle, but which will assuredly be handled by the loftiest minds when you and I, like streaks of morning cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of the past.' Is that science, or is it oratory? We do not know; we do know that it is a characteristic piece of Victorianism.

Thus the Victorian Age was an age of fret and ferment. Not only were men curious about their souls; they were prepared to fight about their souls. Theology flew at the throat of science. Nonconformity was alert to do battle against the Established Church. These impulses were apparent even in the great. But the great were great in spite of them. The tendencies of the age marked and did not spoil their work. Even though

they adopted the prevailing fashions, as women adopted the crinoline, they kept their genius separate and alive. Easily they rose above their environment, and they are judged not by the standard of a time, but by the standard of all time. The characteristics of the Victorians overlaid them superficially. That which gave them immortality was something which went back very far into the past.

And by this accident of great men the Victorian Age will be ever memorable. It was not responsible for them; it held them under no debt; on the other hand, they repaid their nurture a hundred fold. Tennyson, for instance, the greatest poet who wrote when Victoria was on the throne, owed nothing to his contemporaries save a set of unimportant opinions. To them he seemed a man with a 'message.' The philosophers, the theologians, and the men of science all claimed him for their own. They were sure that his one and only purpose was to interpret for them their little creeds. When he published In Memoriam, an undiscerning critic declared that the author had made a definite step towards the unification of the highest religion and philosophy with the progressive science of the day.' Then the politicians laid hold of him, and, until the publication of Maud, were convinced that his supreme aim was to interpret the creed of middleclass Liberalism. They looked to him to give shape and substance to their own vague hopes of freedom. And their vague hopes are all forgotten. What remains to us is the exquisite poet, alive always to the sights and sounds of nature, quick to transmute into words what he saw and heard the poet of 'Tithonus' and Enone,' of 'Lucretius' and 'Vastness,' the poet who takes his place with the greatest of all the ages, with Shake

speare and Donne, and Crashaw and Milton, and Pope and Wordsworth and Keats. Even the Idylls of the King, moss-grown as they may seem to-day with the sentiment of the Victorian Age, will reveal their beauties afresh to the coming generation, which will care not a jot about the battle of science and theology. Even The Princess will presently be purged of its middle-class liberalism, and when the dross is laid bare, the gold will be valued at its proper worth as pure and flawless.

Tennyson was the poet of the Victorians. Charles Dickens was their writer of prose. Let us forget for a moment the wonderful phantasmagoria which was his world. Let us put out of our minds the amazing men and women whom he created out of the vast fertility of his mind and brain, and let us remember that he wrote English as few have ever written it. He was a true master of the English phrase, of the English epithet, of the English word. He had lapses into blank verse that is true; but when he chose, what Poe said of Tennyson may be said with equal truth of him: 'So perfect is his rhythmical sense that he seems to see with his ear.' He was so simple that the delicate mysteries and harmonies of human character sometimes escaped him. If you compare his work with that of Balzac, his great contemporary, you might think that now and again he writes like a child, but always like a child of genius. Where Balzac plants his feet upon the rock of reality, Dickens is in fairyland. And yet in fairy land he gathers the truth. In a single caricature he will assemble the threads of universal experience. Crummles is

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the actor of all time; Podsnap, as he was never young, will never grow old; Pecksniff resumes in his own person the hypocrisies of all the ages. Dickens's touch with his own age, his sermons and his theses, will fade away as surely as the philosophy of Tennyson will fade away, and there will be left behind the prose of a man of genius, the fun and fancy of the eternal child. If there is a better story in the range of English literature than Great Expectations we do not know it. And where between Shakespeare and Charles Dickens shall you find his like?

Above and beyond the Victorians also stands Matthew Arnold, their sternest critic and wisest commentator, great in the wit and irony of his prose, great in the beauty of his verse. And Disraeli, the one imaginative statesman of his time, and the sole master in his kind-the political novel-he too transcends the age, whose fashions of speech and pose and costume he knew well how to exaggerate. If these are the greatest, how many were there who came not far behind them! Of the poets, Browning and Swinburne - this last a true Victorian in controversy; of the novelists, Thackeray and Trollope, and Wilkie Collins, and the sisters Brontë, any one of them fit to be the glory of an epoch; of the rhetoricians, Carlyle and Ruskin and Gladstone, supreme in verbiage if not in understanding. Here are but a few names which cast a lustre upon an age which is perhaps too near to us for a full appreciation, and upon which all the sneers of Mr. Strachey and others shall never avail to cast a lasting shadow.

ABOUT Francis Thompson in his lifetime there were disputations. He came, a major poet in a time of minor poets. The major themes were not generally appealing, unless one had religion. The themes were minor like the treatment. It was a very pleasant time of mainly small singers into which this new planet swung: and many a one was doubtful. We know from Thompson's Life that the reception of New Poems was very chilly. The enthusiasm for the Hound of Heaven and the Sister Songs had cooled. It was quite the correct thing for a critic to rap the poet sharply on the knuckles for his extravagant vocabulary, or to dismiss him with a shrug as an over-praised person and the poet of a coterie.

Perhaps it is not well for a poet when his way is made too smooth. The other essential poet contemporary with Francis Thompson, W. B. Yeats, - I can answer for it,-found no smoothness in the first steps of his road in his own country. But Mr. Yeats has the faculty of getting home on his self-constituted critics. After the surprise of the first onslaught, the poet, waking from his dreams, sent a shaft at his adversary which got him in a vital part. It was a rapier against a bludgeon, for I admit, or submit, that Mr. Yeats's adverse critics had no claim at all to be called critical.

It was Yeats's personality, certain mannerisms entirely genuine and unconscious, added to his terrible capacity for hitting back, that exasperated the plain man. The plain man was,

perhaps, never aware of Thompson at all. If he had been he would not have wanted to attack him, for the poet had a personality entirely disarming. He was appealingly humble with an occasional flash of arrogance. He was extremely human. His mustardcolored suit, his short clay pipe, the evening paper in which he studied the records of cricket, would have mollified the plain man. Never was one who sat on the heights so lowly, so simple, so eager to admire. About his human personality there was nothing of the white blackbird.

Lionel Johnson complained that he had sinned against the English language in those strange, magnificent, difficult words he loved to make use of. Probably the words annoyed the critics as much as Mr. Yeats's lovelock, or his odd mannerism of stopping short in the middle of a room and looking down at his feet if you happened to be introduced to him. When the Wanderings of Oisin, or Usheen, as Mr. Yeats prefers to call it now, first appeared, a red-haired Dublin journalist said, taking up the book from my table: 'This fellow thinks too much of himself, and I am going to slate him.' His criticism did not leave much unsaid. Well, doubless the critics, or a section of them, thought that the gorgeous and resounding vocabulary of Thompson's Odes pointed to the fact that the poet thought too much about himself. Whereas, dealing with mighty subjects, he was making new words or compositions of words to express his thoughts, as

though a painter of sunsets had made new mixings of scarlet and gold and rose and sapphire. But the sifting of Time has been quick in Thompson's case. Out of the clouds of doubt he has come sailing like the moon. Hardly anyone now would care to question his place in the galaxy.

One looks back now with an odd, sharp regret to the days when a meeting with Francis Thompson was a common, everyday matter. He was of the great talkers, and he would walk up and down the drawing room at Palace Court, clutching his dirty little pipe between his fingers while he poured out his flood of argument. Coventry Patmore thought his prose better than his poetry, and his talk better than either; but Patmore loved to startle: he was, perhaps, hardly in earnest in these opinions. I'm afraid that we used to poke fun at the poor poet, a fun which was perfectly aware that its object was a genius. He took the fun very well. I hope it kept well within limits. He had such queer, odd, unworldly ways that one had to poke fun at him. He had written one of his poems for me, The Fall of the Leaf. I had had at least one long, precious letter from him before I was married. He had been humbly and simply delighted with my praises of his poetry. But in those years, when we met constantly at Palace Court and he came to see me occasionally, I don't think I got any real personal touch with him. Perhaps I did not try. But looking back from this distance it seems to me that he was preoccupied with the Meynell family. There was one man and one woman and one family of children for him in the world, and all the rest were 'moving shadow-shapes that come and go. The Meynell children used to play tricks on him in a perfectly affectionate way. If he discovered

the tricks I think the real deliciousness of them was his unconsciousness he never resented them. I don't think he thought they could do wrong. Had he a sense of humor? I have no memory of anything which indicated its possession. He was the cause of humor in others. The childlikeness of his adoration for his friends made one smile while one applauded and appreciated.

Once he discovered, or was told, that I possessed, in common with Mrs. Meynell, a liability to a certain disagreeable form of headache which he called hemicranial headache. A doctor has assured me that it is the true migraine, well defined by the white flashing before the eyes which takes the form of fortification figures. It is nice to know that one has the true migraine. Well, my property in the headache being mentioned, Francis Thompson flashed round on me like a fortification figure. 'I never knew anyone but Mrs. Meynell to have that headache,' he said, almost truculently. Everyone assured him that I had: they had known it from long experience; whereupon he conceded ungraciously that Mrs. Hinkson might have some such headache, with an air of warning others off.

He never minded when Mrs. Meynell, arriving an hour late for lunch with him in her train, would come in with profuse apologies: 'Oh, dear K. T., I am so sorry. Francis would not get up, although the children have called him at intervals of five minutes ever since nine o'clock this morning.' He did not extenuate his habits. That calling at five-minute intervals was a teasing prank which the Meynell children thoroughly enjoyed. Mrs. Meynell with her air of:

Blank misgivings of a creature

Moving about in worlds not realized,

would shake her dear head over those pranks, although occasionally one would be rewarded by the fresh, delightful peal of laughter which one used to lie in wait for. When it was caught it repaid one for some failures. It was never missing for the sallies of a child like her godson, Toby, who is now in the Palestine campaign, after a year in the Struma Valley.

Francis Thompson was in fact a strayed angel. Behind his mustardcolored suit and his little dirty clay pipe it was:

...

Turn but a stone and start a wing. You can see it well enough in the portrait of him at the age of eighteen which is prefixed to the Selected Poems. He ought to have been caught into a mediæval monastery where he could have spent his life as a mystic among mystics, contemplating the Supreme Beauty. But perhaps in that case the poetry would have lost the human element learned through much suffering. Like Lionel Johnson he was a complex bundle of nerves. Like

him he seems to have come of a family which had little perception of his needs and his value to human kind. Having said this I am conscious of an injustice to Lionel Johnson's family, who, I imagine, were but aloof from their poet. With Thompson the matter was graver. Some of his family found a dangerous sensuality in the white fire of Dream-Tryst. Think of it! Was ever such profanation? Why, the poem might spring as a living fountain in the Courts of Paradise before the Face of the Most High. Could anything be purer?

The breaths of kissing night and day
Were mingled in the Eastern Heaven,
Throbbing with unheard melody
Shook Lyra all its star-chord seven,

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When Dusk shrunk cold and light trod shy,

And Dawn's gray eyes were troubled gray,

And souls went palely up the sky

And mine to Lucidé.

There was no change in her sweet eyes
Since last I saw those sweet eyes shine:
There was no change in her deep heart
Since last that deep heart knocked at
mine.

Her eyes were clear, her eyes were Hope's
Wherein did ever come and go
The sparkle of the fountain drops
From her sweet soul below.

The chambers in the house of dreams
Are fed with so divine an air,
That Time's hoar wings grow young therein
And they who walk there are most fair.
I joyed for me, I joyed for her,

Who with the Past must girt about
Where our last kiss still warms the air,
Nor can her eyes go out.

Curiously enough, the image of the first lines of this unearthly love song, so far removed from the things of sense, was the image of an Irish peasant who, being bidden to come. early to the hay-cutting, said: 'I'll be there when the night kisses the dawn.'

Dream-Tryst, The Hound of Heaven, and In No Strange Land: in these, if he had written nothing less, is warranted Francis Thompson's right to stand by Shelley in English poetry. That strange air of his in a world hung with mists and dreams! To his sickly body, racked with more pain than anyone guessed, opium brought her poppies. They never degraded the poet in any serious sense. His songs of experience are songs of innocence. As for the strange cloudy web which lies over his poetry veiling its splendor in mystery, why, Thompson ate opium that the sober world should rejoice in his dreams forever.