One man who knew Thomson even at the end and saw this side of him, that I only caught a glimpse of, wrote:
"I am far from saying that Thomson did not find any happiness in life. His wit and broad fun vied with his varied information and gift of a happy talk in making him a prince of good fellows; and he least of all would be suspected of harboring the worm in his jovial heart.
"But these were the glints of sunshine that made life tolerable; the eversmouldering fire of unassuageable grief and inextinguishable despair burned the core out of that great heart when the curtain of night hid the play-acting scenes of the day."
After getting to know him fairly well, I met Thomson once by chance coming out of a public house, and I soon found that he was beyond intelligent speech.
I turned away too hastily. Yet I cherish more than almost any other memory the memory of my casual meetings with him.
Thomson's essays, especially on the poets, are far and away the best in English. His view of Tennyson shows the sureness of his judgment, the width of his impartiality:
"Scarcely any other artist in verse of the same rank has ever lived on such scanty revenues of thought (both pure and applied or mixed) as Tennyson…
He is continually petty… A great school of the poets is dying out: it will die decently, elegantly, in the full odor of respectability, with our Laureate."
Thomson wrote better of Meredith than even Meredith could write of him:
"His name and various passages in his works reveal Welsh blood, more swift and fiery and imaginative than the English… So with his conversation. The speeches do not follow one another mechanically, adjusted like a smooth pavement for easy walking; they leap and break, resilient and resurgent, like running foam-crested sea-waves, impelled and repelled and crossed by under-currents and great tides and broad breezes; in their restless agitations you must divine the immense life abounding beneath and around and above them."
Here is what he says of Browning:
"Robert Browning, a really great thinker, a true and splendid genius, though his vigorous and restless talents often overpower and run away with his genius so that some of his creations are left but half-redeemed from chaos."
And then he selects for highest praise his Lazarus in the Epistle of Karshish, an Arab Physician.
Thomson's portrait of Heine gives a better picture of Thomson himself than any one else has given:
In all moods, tender, imaginative, fantastic, humorous, ironical, cynical; in anguish and horror, in weariness and revulsion, longing back to enjoyment, and longing forward to painless rest; through the doleful days, and the dreadful immeasurable sleepless nights, this intense and luminous spirit was enchained and constrained to look down into the vast black void, which undermines our seemingly solid existence… and the power of the spell on him, as the power of his spell on us, is increased by the fact that he, thus in Deathin- Life brooding on Death and Life, was no ascetic spiritualist, no selftorturing eremite or hypochondriac monk, but by nature a joyous heathen of richest blood, a Greek, a Persian, as he often proudly proclaimed, a lusty lover of this world and life, an enthusiastic apostle of the rehabilitation of the flesh.
I want finally to put Thomson with the great masters of the nineteenth century. I always think of Blake first as the earliest prophet-seer, then of Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats; but Thomson and Browning stand with these. His friend and biographer, Bertram Dobell, the poet, says nobly of Thomson that he "was one of the finest and rarest spirits that has ever worn the vestments of mortality." Think of Thomson's final word, which I would put in the forefront of every English Bible, if I could: "England and France are so proudly in the van of civilization that it is impossible for a great poet to live greatly to old age in either of them."
I am not sure that this is true of France; I am quite certain it is profoundly true of England.
Tennyson and Thomson-between these poles you can find England: the one man, supremely endowed with genius for words but the mind of a sentimental schoolboy, was ruined by too great adulation and too many rewards; the other, of far higher mental endowment, bred as a charity orphan, was gradually disheartened by neglect and finally broken by the universal indifference that kept him a pauper.
I know that this judgment will not be accepted readily in England; the English would much rather blame a great man than take any shame to themselves for maltreating him. But one proof occurs to me: in the nineties, more than fifteen years after Thomson's death, H. D. Traill, one of the first journalists and men of letters of the time, wrote an article in the Nineteenth Century on English poets of the Victorian era. He gave a list of sixty-six who were able to speak "the veritable and authentic language of the poet"; he puts Tennyson as the first, mentions even a Mrs. Graham Thomson; but omits James Thomson altogether. Yet, of the two, Tennyson and Thomson-the lord and the outcast-it was the outcast orphan alone that reached the heights.
There is no such handicap to genius as praise and money.
O wretched Earth! God sends thee age by age, In pity of thy wild perpetual moan, The saint, the bard, the hero, and the sage:
But still the lofty life is led alone,
The singer sings as in a tongue unknown, The sage's wisdom lamps his single urn;
Thou wilt not heed or imitate or learn.
CHAPTER IX
London in the nineties! How far away and long ago it all seems, and how shall I describe it? London, to me, is like a woman with wet, draggled dirty skirts (it's always raining in London), and at first you turn from her in disgust, but soon you discover that she has glorious eyes lighting up her pale, wet face. The historic houses, such as Marlborough House, Landsdowne House, Devonshire House and Cadogan House, and a hundred others, are her eyes; and they are simply wonderful treasure-houses of past centuries, with records of each age in gorgeous pictures and books, in tapestries and table silver-all the accessories of good taste and comfortable living. And if you admire her eyes and tell her so passionately one mid-summer evening, when the sunshine is a golden mist, she will give you her lips and take you to her heart; and you will find in her spirit depths undreamed of, passionate devotions, smiling self-sacrifice and loving, gentle attendance till your eyes dim at the sweet memory of her. And ever afterwards you, the alien and outcast and pariah of this all-hating world, will have a soft heart for London.
You will find magic and mystery in her fogs, as Whistler did; and in her gardens some June morning you will wake and find her temperate warmth of desire more enchanting than any tropic heat. London draws me more than any capital, and I have been in most of them, but the sameness of her squares, the destitution of her docks, and, above all, her wretched climate, appall me; and as I grow older I prefer Paris, Berlin or Vienna, where life's contrasts are not so hideous.
Marriage did not mean as much to me as other happenings in my life, and my wife was not, by any means, so important to me or to my mental growth as some of my friends, notably John Addington Symonds, Francis Adams, Grant Allen, and Harold Frederic. In the first ten years of my London life, friends meant more to me than any other influence, and notably such companions as these, who excited me intellectually.
I never could understand why these men did not do some great and evermemorable work. Symonds was a classic of the best, and master of an excellent prose; knew Italian and French, too, rarely well, and was a student born. He had no hindering English prejudices, regarded sex as lightly as Anatole France himself, and yet he did not write a single masterpiece. Why?