Improvements. Clearly, if evil preponderated in the world, men and institutions would go from bad to worse. But it is undeniable that on the whole they go from bad to good, from good to better. The lease of life is longer to-day than ever it was, which means that the average standard of health is higher than ever it was. There is less disease, and consequently less suffering from that cause. Plagues no longer decimate whole continents. Surgery is both more skilful and more humane. Before the days of anaesthetics patients were doped with spirits; the wounded man-of-war sailor, when going under the surgeon’s knife, was given a piece of leather to chew after he had been liberally dosed with rum. The hours of labour are shorter. Children are treated with more kindness at home and in school, nor are they allowed to go so early to work. The Elizabethan father tyrannised over wife and children. Servants were physically chastised. The penal code was barbarous and exacting. Homes were dark and noisome. Travel was restricted. Food was neither so good nor so varied. The salted meat eaten during the winter months, with the drinking of ‘hot and rebellious liquors,’ bred impurity of the blood and affections of the skin. The pains of life were greater and more numerous, the pleasures vastly fewer. The development of laughter and a sense of humour shows that we take our pleasures less sadly than the folk of Froissart’s day. Man’s inhumanity to man is lessened by sweeter manners, purer laws, and if the increase of education and good taste has made us more sensitive to the minor pains of life, we go on eliminating these as well as the grosser and more palpable evils. Pessimism as a modern philosophy came too late in the day. To the extent that Schopenhauer’s teaching is not the outcome of personal hoggishness it is due to his study of Indian literature - the literature of a non-progressive Oriental people who in his day found little pleasure in life because they initiated no changes, made no movement towards making their lives more interesting. Why a finely tempered mind like Thomson’s turned to pessimism has been so far accounted for. He was commercially a failure. He makes one of the dim characters in ‘The City’ say:- And yet I asked no splendid dower, no spoil Of sway or fame or rank or even wealth; But homely love, with common food and health And nightly sleep to balance toil. It is not unlikely that that passage expresses poor Thomson’s own feeling. In spite of his philosophy as to the hopelessness of human effort to lighten human misery, he himself was comparatively energetic. Although he was not forty-eight at the time of his death, and much of his time had been spent in teaching and in clerical and secretarial work, his collected poems occupy over 800 pages in the fine two-volume edition published by Bertram Dobell. Exclusive of his work for ‘Cope’s Tobacco Plant’ (much of it merely intelligent compilation), he has left several volumes of essays and fantasies. So that for one who professed a belief in the futility of human effort, he was himself inconsistently industrious. His life was better than his philosophy. Thomson, to all appearance, had a large infusion of Celtic blood, as he clearly had of temperament. The Celt is not unhappy merely because he nurses a melancholy humour. He loves losing causes and leads forlorn hopes because he is moved by the beautiful and the good as he conceives them rather than by that which is prosaically safe and certain. The more risk the more excitement and interest. He is driven by feeling rather than reasoning. A certain cause ought to succeed. He will support it because it is right, will go out to fight and to fall with a greater degree of pleasure than the Saxon will feel in backing a comparatively sure thing, for the Saxon does not love risk for its own sake, and is never over sure. The middle course, the compromise that settles nothing, but averts strife - that is repugnant to the true Celt. When he sings it is of beauty and bravery and death, and the music is as plaintive as the words. But that does not mean that he is unhappy. Stalemate. Much of all pessimistic talk and writing arises from healthy weariness of the uneventfulness of life. The person who is always in one place, and living a humdrum or tiresomely hustling life at that, tends to become stale, and in the mood of stalemate everything is seen with a jaundiced eye. ‘What’s the good of anything?’ asks the Cockney song, and supplies its own answer ‘Why, nothing.’ No deeper feeling than a tired whimsy can have been behind the following outcry in ‘Vane’s Story’:- For I am infinitely tired With this old sphere we once admired, With this old earth we loved too well; Disgusted more than words can tell, And would not mind a change of Hell. The same old solid hills and leas, The same old stupid, patient trees, The same old ocean, blue and green, The same sky, cloudy or serene; The old two-dozen hours to run Between the settings of the sun, The old three hundred sixty-five Dull days to every year alive; Old stingy measure, weight and rule, No margin left to play the fool; The same old way of getting born Into it naked and forlorn, The same old way of creeping out Through death’s low door for lean and stout; Same men with the old hungry needs, Old toil, old care, old worthless treasures, Old gnawing sorrows, swindling pleasures; The cards are shuffled to and fro, The hands may vary somewhat so, The dirty pack’s the same we know, Played with long thousand years ago; Played with and lost with still by Man – Fate marked them ere the game began; I think the only thing that’s strange Is our illusion as to change. His Wit. That Thomson could be quietly jolly is amusingly shown in the following poem entitled ‘Aquatics (Kew),’ written in 1865, well within the period of his settled habit of mind:- Tommy Tucker came up to Kew, And he got in a boat - an outrigger too; O, but the pity, the pity! For Tommy had made up his mind to show His pals and the gals how well he could row. Would he were safe in the city! The thing like a cradle it rocked in the tide, And he like the blessed babby inside: O, but the pity, the pity! To hire out such shells, so light and so slim, Is cruel as murder, for Tommy can’t swim. Would he were safe in the city! And why should they stick out the rowlocks that way? He couldn’t keep both hands together in play: O, but the pity, the pity! He spluttered, missed water, and zig-zag’d the boat, Each pull made a lurch, brought his heart in his throat. Would he were safe in the city! The river was crowded behind and before, They chaffed, and they laughed, and they splashed, and they swore: O, but the pity, the pity! He twisted his neck to attend to some shout, A four-oared came rushing - CONFOUND YOU, LOOK OUT! Would he were safe in the city! They made him so nervous, those terrible men, That he could enough crabs for a supper of ten: O, but the pity, the pity! He crept back, a steamer came snorting astern, With hundreds on deck - it gave him a turn: Would he were safe in the city! A mass of strange faces that all stared and laughed, And the more Tommy flustered the more they all chaffed: O, but the pity, the pity! They passed him and roared out: ‘HEAD ON TO THE SWELL!’ But he thought he would rather keep out of it well: Would he were safe in the city! So it caught him broadside, and rolled him away, As a big dog rolls over a puppy in play: O, but the pity, the pity! It rolled him right over – ‘Good HEAVENS! HE’LL DROWN!’ For his arms they went up, and his head it went down. Would he were safe in the city! Three men dragged him out with a hook through his coat. He was blue in the face and he writhed at the throat: O, but the pity, the pity! They hung his head down, he was limp as a clout, But the water once in him refused to turn out: Would he were safe in the city! To the house by the bridge then they carried him in; He was taken upstairs and stripped to the skin: O, but the pity, the pity! They wrapt him in blankets, he gave a low moan, Then lay there as stark and cold as a stone: Would he were safe in the city! Then they forced down his throat neat brandy galore, He had taken the pledge, too, a fortnight before: O, but the pity, the pity! As it mixed with the water he woke in a fog, For his belly was full of most excellent grog: Would he were safe in the city! He got very sick, then felt better, he said, Though faintish, and nervous, and queer in his head: O, but the pity, the pity! He paid a big bill, and when it got dark Went off with no wish to continue the lark: Would he were safe in the city! His coat was stitched up, but had shrunk away half, And the legs of his trousers just reached to the calf: O, but the pity, the pity! No hat; they had stuck an old cap on his head; And his watch couldn’t tell him the time when he said: Thank God I am safe in the city! Equable. The quotations given show our poet as pessimist or as light humourist. But he had periods of equable serenity as well. In ‘Sunday up the River’ he appears to us as the great-hearted happy lover, who can give himself to the delights of a day with the Adorable She without any background of misgiving. He lives wholly in the present. I looked out into the morning, I looked out into the west: The soft blue eye of the quiet sky Still drooped in dreamy rest. The trees were still like cloud there, The clouds like mountains dim; The broad mist lay, a silver bay Whose tide was at the brim. I looked out into the morning, I looked out into the east: The flood of light upon the night Had silently increased; The sky was pale with fervour, The distant trees were grey, The hill lines drawn like waves of dawn Dissolving in the day. I looked out into the morning; Looked east, looked west, with glee: O richest day of happy May, My love will spend with me! This happy poem is full of felicitous changes of rhythm and form, but all is joyous. In the full tide of his happiness he says as the lovers float in their boat:- Give a man a horse he ran ride. Give a man a boat he can sail, And his rank and wealth, his strength and health On sea nor shore shall fail. Give a man pipe he ran smoke, Give a man a book he can read; And his home is bright with a calm delight, Though the room be poor indeed. Give a man a girl he can love, As I, O my Love, love thee; And his heart is great with the pulse of fate, At home, on land, on sea. This beautiful poem is full of reaches of lyric joyousness like that, and leaves the reader with the feeling that in reasonably propitious circumstances the poet could have been steadily and quietly happy without necessarily losing the passionate energy which was the mainspring of his genius. An Uninspiring Time. The fifties and sixties or even the seventies of the last century were not a specially brilliant time. None of the great hopes now cherished by large masses of the people had any place in the national life of Thomson’s day. Politics took little stock of social legislation at all. The franchise had been granted to the urban householders by the Act of ’67; but it was done grudgingly, and the newly enfranchised had no very definite ends in view when they found themselves introduced to political power. Those versed in the political secrets of the time tell us of the difficulty Gladstone had, even in the middle eighties, in understanding what Mr. Chamberlain with his unauthorised programme could really be driving at. Leaping and bounding commercial prosperity, as measured in Budgets, with interludes of ‘a spirited foreign policy,’ represented the politics of the day. The social outlook of Thomson’s time was so arid that even a poet of the abounding virility and comfortable circumstances of William Morris felt bound to describe himself as ‘the idle singer of an empty day’ and to repudiate all idea of tilting at the social monsters of the time. Had Thomson lived another twenty years he might, like Morris, have found a purpose and a hope in life in spite of his temperamental bias. As it was, he had destroyed most of the illusions that made life worth living long before that sad day in June, 1882, when he died in the University Hospital, London, from internal hæmorrhage. He regarded his life as ‘one long defeat.’ His career raises the sorely vexed question, once again, of what is to be done, what CAN be done, with the typical poet. There is no certain answer. As the world grows older and the constituency increases of those who know great poetry when they see it, perhaps it will be possible for a poet to get at least as good a living as a professional footballer, it not as the direct result of the purchase of his poems, then by a pension from the State. Even then, it is extremely doubtful if a poet so unconventional as James Thomson would be accepted as a fit object for a pension. Poor ‘B. V.,’ he perhaps more than any of his brethren fulfils Carlyle’s figure of the poet as a man set on fire and sent down the river of life a blazing spectacle for the benefit of the on-lookers on the banks. Can it do any good to call attention to such work? Is the Book of Job or of Jeremiah or of Lamentations deserving of notice? As one of the really great poets of the nineteenth century Thomson commands notice from those who would see literature (and life) truly and see it whole. That he should have been mostly ignored by literary criticism up to now is not difficult to account for. His story is inexpressibly sad, as are his themes. But when allowance is made for the distastefulness of dwelling upon the tragedy of his life, it is still remarkable that those who have cared to write of Chatterton and Savage and Villon, of Poe and Burns and Byron and Keats and Shelley - all of them men of tragic lives, and Villon at least with a squalid career - should have fought shy of a great poet of our own day who committed no crime against anyone save himself. Perhaps it is because those others were overtaken by tragedy, while Thomson seemed to go out to meet it half way, and certainly in the end embraced it and made it his theme. Is it only another of Thomson’s pieces of ill luck that he should be denied even the posthumous fame to which his genius so richly entitles him? We must look upon all phases of thought be it only to reject them for clear reason. The life of James Thomson is one more proof of how sadly true it is Comments are closed.
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