by Frank Harris
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.
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
Friends
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 b
een 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?
He was well-off, too, and gave himself to literature with single-hearted devotion, and yet never reached even Tennyson's place, or Swinburne's.
Grant Allen was in even closer sympathy with his age; learned, too, in science as in literature, and freer in mind than Symonds himself because born in Canada; and yet he could not get beyond The Woman Who Did. Why?
Again one asks, for it was a ridiculous book as a life's message. And Francis Adams was a larger man, perhaps, than either, though not so well equipped with learning; yet he, too, did nothing of enduring worth.
This fact made it gradually plain to me that intelligence and all round genial culture do not count for fame as much as some extraordinary endowment. It is, as Goethe said, "the extraordinary alone that lives." Swinburne was not comparable with Symonds in wisdom or understanding, or sweetness of character; and yet, because he had written ten pages of wonderful new verse music, he stands higher and is universally admired. The realization of this fact diminished for the first time in me that desire of fame which, so far, had been my driving power.
With these friends I was in constant touch for some important years without a shadow of misunderstanding or disagreement. Francis Adams was really my first good English friend: I met him in Hyde Park. I had been speaking there on socialism and the necessity of introducing some socialistic measures into English life when he came up and spoke to me, and we soon became friends.
Shortly afterwards, however, he went to Australia, and I did not see him again for some five years. When he came back our friendship was quickly renewed and I got him to write for me on the Fortnightly. He meant a great deal to me, though I was considerably his senior, for he was both frank and sympathetic.
When he came back from Australia he brought with him a wife, not particularly interesting, I thought, but he also brought back a certain weakness of lungs. I managed to help him to go to Egypt. I told him he should live in the desert above Assouan, or in some high place such as Davos Platz, but he did not take my advice and gradually grew worse. He came up the river with me one summer and in the winter stayed with me in London. I found that he was getting more and more hopeless. He spoke of suicide: I begged him not to let his thoughts wander in that direction, assured him that life would be greyer to me without him, and reminded him of his wife. He confessed to me he had tried to kill himself, but his courage had failed him. I told him that courage, like every other virtue, needed practice to become effective; and after he had left me that evening I wrote the little story, Eatin'
Crow, to show him what I meant. In the morning he read it in manuscript and said: "You may do bigger things, Frank, but you'll never do anything more perfect." He went back to his rooms at Margate, and suddenly I heard he had shot himself, after leaving me a message. His wife, too, wrote me that she had been arrested, so I went immediately to Margate and she told me the whole story.
He was going out for a drive with her when a hemorrhage came on. As he stepped into the carriage, he turned and came back to his room and told her that the blood was from his lungs and that he was dying. He gave her a message for me and then asked for his revolver. As the blood was pouring from his mouth she thought he was dying and bravely gave him the weapon.
He put it into his mouth and shot himself; the bullet went through his head into the ceiling. I saw the hole it had made.
In court Mrs. Adams told the whole truth, so the authorities thought she ought to be arrested as an accessory before the fact. But I pleaded with the magistrate, assured him that I knew of her great affection for her husband, and she was set free. I cannot tell here what I lost in Francis Adams-a sort of intellectual conscience and stimulus: the truest and wisest of friends.
Symonds came next in those early days. He had gone to Davos Platz with one lung destroyed and suffering from tuberculosis, but in the vivifying mountain air he quickly gained comparative health; and twice or thrice in summertime he came to London, and once stayed with me in my house in Kensington Gore for some memorable days. We were together every evening and talked the stars down the sky. In sex matters he viewed pederasty with the same tolerance as normal indulgence, and told me how surprised he had been by Whitman's passionate repudiation of abnormal desire.
He showed a certain sympathy with the vice which astonished me, and explained, if it did not justify, Swinburne's later gibe at him on account of his supposed liking for "blue-breeched gondoliers." But Symonds' sympathy was purely intellectual, and I always thought him one of the best of men- full of the milk of human kindness and far nearer ideal manhood than Swinburne or Tennyson.
Grant Allen I have already told about: his influence with me only began when I began to write stories, and lived with me for some time longer.
This is even truer of Harold Frederic, who was, if I remember rightly, the correspondent of the New York Times. I met Harold Frederic first at Sir Charles Dilke's and we soon became close friends. I met Sir Edward Grey about the same time in the same house. Frederic had already written several volumes but none yet which corresponded to his ability, none which allowed one to take his measure.
I shall never forget one curious incident that occurred early in our friendship.
It took place at a dinner at Dilke's when Harold Frederic sat beside Cecil Rhodes, at that time little known in England.
When most of the guests had departed, Dilke, Frederic and myself came together in our usual way to talk over things.
"Well, Dilke," Frederic began, "that was the first dull dinner I've ever been at in your house. Who was the bloody fool you put me next to? I talked to him on a dozen subjects but could get absolutely nothing out of him."
Both Dilke and I laughed, and on our way home I told Frederic enough about Rhodes to make him modify his condemnation; but he always refused to believe in Rhodes's brains, and in time I came to think that Frederic was probably nearer right in his contemptuous estimate than Dilke or I in our appreciation.
All these years in the nineties Frederic was growing rapidly, but it was primarily the American in him which appealed to me from the first-a power of judging events and persons on their merits, heedless of position or apparent importance.
This was clearly shown to me by his attitude towards the Venezuelan question. Frederic had taught me to respect President Grover Cleveland who, he thought, was the ablest of American presidents in nearly a hundred years.
But Richard Olney was Secretary of State for foreign affairs and stood with him over the question of the boundaries of Venezuela. I am quite willing to admit that the English government was right in the attitude it took up. Lord Salisbury was about to impose demands on Venezuela by force of arms and Mr. Richard Olney plainly informed him that any such action would be a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Lord Salisbury had no difficulty in pointing out that this was giving an extension to the Monroe Doctrine that Monroe had never imagined. Mr. Olney retorted that the United States considered itself the best judge of the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine, and almost like a thunder clap on this came a statement from Grover Cleveland, backing up Mr. Olney and plai
nly stating that armed intervention by England would be regarded as "an unfriendly act" by the United States of America.
I was at that time owner and editor of the Saturday Review. I called on Harold Frederic and we both agreed that war was imminent. I wrote an article declaring that in case of war England would cease to exist as a power among the nations, and to run such a risk for a paltry boundary in Venezuela was so absurd as to be criminal stupidity. Lord Salisbury sent for me. He asked me to come and see him in Arlington Street, as he wanted to discuss the article with me. Of course I went next day, and found that he had protected himself by installing Lord Henry Manners, his secretary, almost between himself and me. He asked me how I had come to my belief in the enormous power of the United States in case of war.
"You don't seem to have a high opinion of Americans except as fighters," he said, "but you surely have an extravagant estimate of their fighting strength.
Our naval authorities think they could take Washington as they took it before and bombard New York into the bargain."
"Goodness!" I cried. "You frighten me for England when you talk like that."
"Explain yourself," he said. "Why do you feel so convinced of the power of America?"
"First of all," I said, "consider one thing. In the Civil War there were only about sixteen millions of people on the side of the South. Yet, in less than two years, the Southern Navy was wiped out of existence and the Northern Navy was stronger than all the navies of the world put together. In less than two years the Federals had invented every improvement in naval warfare which exists up to this moment. They used rams, big guns, heavy armor plating, and vessels cut down to the water edge so as to show no target and even torpedoes."
"Torpedoes!" exclaimed Lord Salisbury. "Surely you are mistaken."
"In '62 or '63," I replied, "a Southern battleship was blown up in Mobile harbor with a torpedo by Lieutenant Gushing. The Americans are crazy with the sense of the greatness of their country and the rapidity of its growth. In my opinion they would beat the world in arms today. They are the best organizers of labor in the world, and that is equivalent to being able to produce the best armies and navies."
