Pale Melancholy
IT is singular that to-day, with our overwhelming problems, social, international, and inter-sexual, there is to be observed a spirit of hope and enthusiasm amongst us. In spite of the gross commercialization of our daily life, we come and go about our fixed affairs with no little sense of freedom, of having emerged from some cavernous journey into the open country and an inheritance of light. We look back on the last days of the magnificent and moral nineteenth century, and our memories are of fish-tail burners, cornices, stuffy rooms, black-kid gloves, and sepulchral Sunday streets. Inhibitions and prohibitions hedged us round, and the gate of family disapproval clanged heavily against any eccentricity of the individual.
Our younger generations to-day move in a convention to which all those things are unknown and meaningless. Mr. Noel Coward, perhaps, may care to use them as settings for his grim fairy tales in the latest revue ; but otherwise they do not exist. If we kick over the traces now, we fall on our backs for lack of something to resist us, and so present an amusing spectacle to our contemporaries.
It is difficult, therefore, to put ourselves into the minds of those figures of the Industrial Era who rebelled against the dreadful tyranny of the factory system and who broke through its double mesh, the warp of which was perverted Puritanism and thriftiness, and whose weft was the new scientific materialism. These rebels seem to us to have suffered from persecution manias and restrictive obsessions which are becoming more and more foreign to our nerves. The glom of Thomas Hardy is pathological now, a sickness due to this social darkness. He may have addressed the President of the Universe " in Aeschylean phrase," but we feel that this President wore a pot-hat and a frock-coat, owned innumerable smoke-belching chimney stacks, and was married to Mrs. Grundy.
Much beauty was created in the agonies of these rebels, and we are apt to neglect it Swinburne is at a discount, and James Thomson is altogether obscured. In his own words, he was a figure whose- " All too humble soul would arrogate
Unto itself some signalizing hate From the supremo indifference of fate."
That supreme indifference was what hurt these sensitive spirits. They were emerging from a domestic religion which, if at times terrifying, was at least personal. Since the enunciation of the doctrines of evolution and the survival of the fittest, that possibility of man's intercourse with an individual deity was vanishing. The result was a sense of betrayal, as though the universal law, by its ruthless economy of indifference to the unit, were guilty of some monstrous cheat. The protest against this treachery is the leading motive of James Thomson's genius.
" The world rolls round for ever like a mill ; It grinds out death and life and good and ill ; It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
" While air of Space and Time's full river flow, The mill must blindly whirl unresting so ; It may be wearing out, but who can know ?
Man might know one thing were his sight less dim ; That it whirls not to suit his pretty whim, That it is quite indifferent to him.
" Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith ? It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath, Then grinds him back into eternal death."
Thomson, the son of a sailor, was born at Glasgow in 1834. The father's early death left the family destitute, and the boy was saved from slum life in the East End of London by being sent to an orphanage. He showed great talent and was very handsome and agreeable, so that people befriended him instinctively. He left the orphanage to become a schoolmaster in the Army, and while he was stationed in Ireland fell in love with a girl of fourteen. He was then eighteen. In spite of the youth of the impassioned couple, the girl's parents did not object to the attachment, and the young poet returned to England a betrothed man. He had not been back long before the girl died ; one whom the gods loved. For a time his mind was submerged, and when he recovered sufficiently to take his place in the world, he never again allowed himself to be trapped by love. He remained unmarried, immersed in a melancholy so profound that one suspects his unhappy love affair to be only the occasion and not the cause of it. His nepenthe was alcohol, a drug whose influence grew as he became older and more hopeless of escape from the demon of unrest which haunted him. Intellectually he began as a deist, and an ardent worshipper of Shelley—who was then still an object of abhorrence. Later he came under the influence of Charles Bradlaugh, that more prosaic advocate of free- thoUght, who probably llased the poet's mind towards the depressing mechanistic metaphysics against which the poems are an outcry. Thomson did a considerable amount of criticism for Bradlaugh's paper the National Reformer, in which was published, as a serial, his great poem, " The City of Dreadful Night." As time past, his disease controlled him more and more, until at last he was a homeless outcast, his noble imagination and swift mind disappairing in a premature death, to be followed on June 3rd, 1882, by a final eclipse. His genius was verbose. That is to say, he was inspired, like Swinburne, by a mania for words and rhythm-shapes. I think that he is to be compared only with Swinburne - and Spenser in his extraordinary command of stanza forms, and his ability to shape an idea, and round off the expression of it, within the set limits of a stanza. This power is shown at its best throughout the various verses of " The City of Dreadful Night "
" When this poor tragic-farce has palled us long, Why actors and spectators do we stay ?- To fill our so short roles out right or wrong ; To see what shifts are yet in the dull play For our illusion ; to refrain from grieving Dear foolish friends by our untimely leaving : But those asleep at home, how blest are they I Yet it is but for one night after all : What matters one brief night of dreary pain ?
When after it the weary eyelids fall Upon the weary eyes and wasted brain • And all sad scenes and thoughts and feelings vanish In that sweet sleep no power can ever banish, That one blest sleep which never wakes again.
The beauty of his work, as this quotation shows, is not in the magic phrase or the apposite word and image. His force is cumulative, not to be felt by casual reading. His strength is in a larger imaginative gesture whereby he conjures up crowds and landscapes of a Dantesque grandeur, filling scene upon scene like a gathering cloud- city round a stormy sunset. He is tragic and sombre, his smouldering genius gradually fusing his depressing philosophy until it glows with a foreign beauty that has likeness not so much to the spirit of English thought as to the more picturesque genius of Leopardi, a poet who
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