destitution and asked where the hundred francs had gone. She said she had distributed them among famishing mothers and children of her acquaintance; and, as inquiry proved that this was perfectly true, Victor Hugo sent her another hundred francs, on condition that she spend it on her own necessities. This she absolutely refused to do, saying that she would rather not have it at all, so Madame Meurice gave her carte blanche to do as she pleased with it. This obstinate woman was no other than Louise Michel, the Communist, who had already suffered imprisonment and expatriation for her unselfish creed.
I have said nothing about the sex life of either Hugo or Tennyson. That of Hugo is fairly well known, whereas Tennyson's is unknown, even his intimate friends asserting that they knew nothing certainly. I should not think he had ever gone deeply into life anywhere. He was put upon a pedestal too early; he was too fortunate in every way, too highly rewarded. The sacred guides are never so well received; they get prison and hemlock, or the cross, as their reward.
Whenever I recall Tennyson's death and the unmeasured glorification of him in the English press, I am compelled to think of poor James Thomson and his end.
The poet of The City of Dreadful Night died ten years before Tennyson, died in miserable poverty and almost unappreciated; yet, in my opinion, he was as gifted a poet as Tennyson, and far wiser; intellectually, indeed, one of the greatest, a master of prose as well as verse. His life and fate throw a sinister light on English conditions.
In every respect he comes nearer to ideal wisdom than any other modern English poet.
While Tennyson lauds the Crimean War, Thomson condemns it as 'a mere selfish haggle, badly begun and meanly finished.' He refers to the more recent exploits of English jingoism as 'purely iniquitous, battue-wars against tribes of ill-armed savages.' He showed sympathy for all the struggling nationalism of his time, for Italy and Poland and even for the Basques, who had supported the Carlist cause in '73. Here are his words:
'Such was the loyalty of these people, far more noble than ours; for they were giving freely of their substance and their lives, whereas we give chiefly snobbish cringing and insincere adulation, and our rich give the money of the nation in large part wrung from the poor.'
Unlike Tennyson, he was devoted to the cause of the people, and fought against every form of privilege and capitalism.
Every Englishman should read his satirical essay on Bumbledom. He points out that though there is more liberty in England than on the continent in matters affecting political discussion, 'the reverse is true as regards questions of morals and sociology, for here the power of Bumble's purse rules our socalled free press and free institutions with a hand heavier than that of any Continental despot.'
Thomson knew that there were worse faults of democracy than 'political inequalities.' 'Bumble,' he says, 'imposes death by starvation.'
He tells us in a letter that he used to read and 'hugely admired Byron when about fifteen, but when I was sixteen I fell under the domination of Shelley, to whom I have been loyal ever since'-from Byron to Shelley in a year!
Thomson is really the only Englishman who stands with Heine and Leopardi as a great modern master, and his translations of their poems are the best in English. And Thomson was kindlier and sweeter in all his personal relations than either of them. Even Heine at times distresses one by the contempt he shows for the greatest, such as Goethe. We have no such apology to make for Thomson. He was the most gifted of all his English contemporaries, and he praises the wisest of them enthusiastically. He almost reached perfection, but alas, he sometimes drank too much, is the accusation brought against him, and by Englishmen.
There is the famous reply to a similar accusation brought against General Grant in the Civil War by his detractors. 'Tell me what drink he uses,' said Lincoln, 'and I will send it to the rest of our generals, and then perhaps they, too, will win victories like Grant.'
No wonder Thomson let himself drink too much; he could find no market for his work in England, nothing but poverty and neglect. He told me, with that rare power of laughing at himself, which only high genius possesses, that he failed in spite of good resolutions. 'You see,' he said, 'the resolutions were made when I was sober, but after the first glass one is not quite the same who made the resolution, and after the second glass one is still more unlike. If you have been badly nourished, it needs a drink or two, or three, to bring you to your full vigor, and then one glass more for good fellowship and you're lost!'
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.
