THE PHILOSOPHY OF "THE HOUND OF

HEAVEN."

Francis Thompson's life and work is yet another example of the principle of dying to live. The hard facts of the workaday world ground him as the outsider is ground who goes foolishly within reach of the factory wheel-web or the whirr of its mighty machinery. He had not the gift whereby we get things done: the gift whereby you and I see that a certain work is for to-day and that to-day must see that certain work through. The time he should have spent in earning sixpences and shillings he devoted to the seeing of visions and the dreaming of dreams. So much the worse for him, the singer; so much the better for us, the readers of his song. He had to go down into the depths that his song might live, but now his song goes on its way singing to you and to me, and to those who are to come after us forever.

Too much one side of his nature was stimulated, perhaps, so that he could not see the need of the passing hour. But in its stead, he saw the things that are shut out from duller minds. His spirit loved to soar in the sun, and even in the sun's unclouded rays, its eye was not abashed. The remorseless inquisition of each star came to him in the dark night of London, when he was alone, and the too, too powerful world was against him and it tried him in its bitter tests, but, at the last, it gave him vision. So he saw what other men could see not, and his ear was keen to detect things to which the other ears were deaf:

Yea, in the night, my soul, my daughter,

Cry clinging heaven by the hems;

And lo, Christ walking on the waters,
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames.

The material world was a thin veil for such a one, to shut out the spirit world that lurks beyond, but that for most men, alas, too rarely peeps through. Arguments are for the philoso

pher: syllogisms for the man of logic; tests and experiments for the scientist: but for the poet are feelings, emotions, and ardours, and of all these Francis Thompson had his fill. What we of to-day read in the pages of Billot and Satolli, and what long ago was written and fixed forever by the Angelic Doctor in spacious forms that at once satisfy our mind and allow room for the obsequium rationale of our faith came to him too, but clothed in quite other guise. Analyse it, and reduce it to its ultimate and you have but the same thing in "The Hound of Heaven" that heads an articulus or furnishes forth a quaestio in the "Summa "; but turn aside from your analysis, and meet the poet on his own terms, as he is entitled to be met, and all is different. Before you had the coal, meet indeed, for the furnace, but in dead lumps; now you have the vivid heat that glows and lightens your eyes by its rich reflections, while it warms your heart with its healthy flame. The ideas before were lying down in the sleep of cold logic: now they are abroad in the world, they march up the hillside, they feel the force of the breeze, they bound with vigour and they thrill with joy. Such life is contagious: the ideas are no longer dead: they go forth conquering and to conquer, for it is the voice of the Angel of the Schools, and it sings with the finest rapture of Shakespearean song.

Yet its idea is one that, to the unwitting reader, might seem old and merely earth-born. An Edinburgh Reviewer in a most appreciative article, when the poem was published, thought he found the same idea in Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and all the herd, who practiced the proud aloofness of the Stoic School. The things of the world lured them, they beckoned them with affectionate looks and called to them with appealing gestures to come; but the spirit of these men was strong, and their soul steeled against the charms of earth, and it was theirs to keep themselves unspotted by the world. Matthew Arnold has preached the panegyric of them all in his graceful quatrain:

We do not ask who pined unseen,

Who were on action hurled,

Whose one boast is that all have been
Unspotted by the world.

These are a noble band as they stand, lonely, aside from the onward rush of history; the world is better, too, that such men as they have lived, for they with their mortifications and denials are a constant rebuke to the Epicurean tribe, whose one poor wish is to gather the rosebuds, while they may, and to suck the sweetness of the passing hour. Yet of that kind is not Francis Thompson: he will not walk in their company; his antecedents are different: in another school he learned his lesson, and the lesson itself is different far.

Still we should do wrong to blame this Reviewer, who has praised our poet. He saw the good that was in Francis Thompson, in so far as it fitted into his own world view, and, if he failed to see the other richer good, let us not ascribe to ill-will, what flowed but from the limits of the man's view-point. Both turned aside from the world: the Stoics and the mystics, such as Thompson. Both, day and night, lived their lives apart; the lust of the flesh, and lust of the eyes, and the pride of life failed to secure dominion over them. Along the radiant flow of "The Hound of Heaven" the reader's eye caught the flash of this doctrine of renunciation; he was charmed by the imagery, the wondrous power of metaphor; and the magic simile, in which the like and the likened-to so blended and so lit each other up, appealed to him; but he missed the full import of the poem. He saw the sun-starts on the surface of the poem; but he did not see the deep full rush of the waters down below. He is the scientist whose theory gives you the explanation of only a part of the facts. It explains in some way, the renunciation constraining him day and night of the first stanza; the turning from human love of the second; the rejection of nature's charms in the third; and it is on the strength of that, that Thompson is set down as some Stoic seeker after the inner light, some one who has but discovered once again the Ethic of these old pagans.

But, at once, that splendid and insistent refrain that ever sounds and resounds across the course of the poem rises to reject such a hypothesis and to refuse to fit into it. If Thompson were but proclaiming a gospel of denial, a mere asceticism, why

introduce the Hound? Why repeat the refrain at each pause, as it were, in the pursuit? Why labour so wisely and so well to convey the idea of a chase in which a quarry is being hounded down? Why but because the asceticism is less than half the story? It is an instrument, it is a means, it is a weapon, but it is handled, wielded and used by some higher power and to achieve some higher end.

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The angels keep their ancient places:

Turn but a stone, and start a wing: 'Tis we, 'tis our estranged faces

That miss the many-splendoured thing.

It is because this poem does not present you with any mere attenuated theory of Ethics, any hand-to-mouth doctrine of dayby-day usefulness, but embraces in its scope the windswept margent of the world," and thunders with its fists at the very "gateways of the stars" that such a view as that of the writer in the Edinburgh Review is too shallow to hold it, and leaves what is best and deepest and most original unexplained. The refrain on that Stoic view is a mere artificial and useless excresence on the buildings: on the catholic view, it is almost the electricity, which illuminates its every inch. The visible shows of things had their call on Thompson: he loved them with the poet's love as he lingered over them with the poet's eye; but the visible things were to him a symbol, aye and far more than a symbol; for him they were as the lantern, into which he peered that he might see the light which it contained. The poet, in his own fine phrase, "saw through the lamp, Beauty, the light, God." With that light extinguished, the lamp would be to him a dark, forbidding thing that gave no brightness to the eye and no guidance to the footsteps. This idea of the omnipresence of God was to him worked into his childhood thought: it was sown as a seed, in that early mind, and it was to bloom and blossom into more splendid flower, for the fierce and glaring rays of adversity whereby it was ripened and matured. The child and the common person learns that idea and it goes into one compartment of the mind, to be retained, in truth, for reference, but to be only poorly realized in daily life; but, when

the poet and the mystic gets it, with it, he colors all his seeing, he uses it as a torch that throws light in the darkness, and he reinforces with it the dimness of daily sight. That is why in "The Hound of Heaven," we find every move of the world, every tress of nature's hair, made to be a sign as it is an action of that God" in whom," as St. Paul says, "we live and move and have our being." It is the hand of God that closes to the "little casement" of human affection, whose opening drew the poet's heart aside; it is God's angel that plucked the winsome children from him by the hair; it is God's claim on all the powers of nature that made them fall away from the poet when he would not allow them to lead him to God.

"Yea, faileth now even dream

The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist,

Even the linked fantasies in whose blossomy twist
I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,
Are yielding; cords of all too weak account

For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed."

That is the great idea that comes as a shock to the modern unbelieving mind; it is the spirit of the ages of Faith rising up in opposition to the corrupt and wicked generation that asks for a sign. It is a spiritual world-view over against a material world-view. It is theism, but theism not as it is compressed and withered and robbed of sap between the pages of a book, but theism as a fragrant flower in the garden of life shedding the odour of Sanctity over those who dwell therein.

We have said that the poet loved the universe, yea loved it as it is loved by little children. He loved the Dawn and the Eve, and he appealed to them, as kindred spirits; he knew "all the swift importings on the wilful face of the skies"; he knew how the young eyes of children grow "sudden fair." But none of these things could by themselves fill his hungry heart; one by one, they fell from him and left him in want and misery because he had looked to them alone.

Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;

Let her, if she would owe me,

Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
The breasts o' her tenderness;

Never did any milk of hers once bless

My thirsting mouth.