JAMES THOMSON

The attitude of forlorn despair which finds perpetual recurrence in the minds of certain types of human beings when they come to look beneath the surface of existence, has never, perhaps, been given more complete and final expression than in the poetry of James Thomson. There remains indeed nothing further to be said, for this unfortunate man has found it in him to curse the womb that bare him and the paps which he has sucked and to outface God and go down into the pit at last with his terrible avowals still unretracted.

James Thomson was born in 1834, of Scots parentage. His father was a sea-captain, and a man apparently as capable of holding his own against the storms of the Atlantic as was his son against those other more terrible gales that beat in upon him from eternity. For six days, we are told, the master of the good ship “Eliza Stewart” never left the bridge; stood there, in fact, until carried below broken and paralyzed; and up to the very last year of his tragic life his son may be said to have remained at his post with no less resolution.

James Thomson was trained to be an army school master. At the age of eighteen, while quartered at Ballincollig, in Cork, he fell in love with a young girl named Matilda Wella. After he had known her for two years she died; a calamity of which the full and bitter consciousness remained with Thomson for a quarter of a century. There is scarcely one of his poems that has not some allusion to this child, and in the end, when the awful history of his days was at last concluded, a lock of her hair was buried with him.

In Ireland, he also met Charles Bradlaugh who, having already got into trouble for his free-thinking views, had enlisted as a common trooper. When Bradlaugh was on sentry duty it was Thomson’s custom to walk by his side, and one gets an interesting picture of these two men who were destined to become so famous, discoursing philosophy under the summer stars.

In 1862, Thomson was expelled from the service for a slight breach of military discipline. For the next five years he lived in London in the house of Charles Bradlaugh, earning his livelihood as best he could by office work and journalism. This period was in all probability the happiest of his life. With his friend to satisfy his craving for companionship, and Hypatia and Alice Bradlaugh to satisfy his more sentimental affections, he would seem to have attained to some measure of contentment. In the evenings, he would tell stories to the children or sit smoking with their father, and on Sundays and holidays the whole party would often go out for excursions or perhaps walk together to the grave of Charles Lamb.

It was now that his poems began to appear in the National Reformer. Many of them are marred by that same tone of forced jocularity which spoils his letters. Now and again, however, they are excellent, as, for example, the one entitled “l’Ancien Régime,” the bitter, satyrical quality of which is altogether characteristic of his temper.

Thomson made at this time two expeditions out of England, one to America as the secretary to some mining corporation in Colorado, and one to Spain as a correspondent for the New York World. The latter enterprise proved a complete failure: sufficient copy was not forthcoming. Soon after his return a quarrel with Bradlaugh threw him once for all upon his own resources and he became for the rest of his life what is known as a “single-room bachelor” in the East End of London.

Closed up in one small room, as it were in a cage, he dragged out the rest of his life, day by day.

The publication in 1874, of his masterpiece “The City of Dreadful Night,” brought him into contact with several of the more discerning men of letters of the day. George Meredith, Philip Bourke Marston, W. M. Rossetti, Emerson and Longfellow all recognized its value. He sent copies of it to Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot, no comment, however, being evoked from the former old curmudgeon, though the ethical-minded novelist was considerate enough to write a letter to him in which she expressed the hope “that a mind informed with so much passionate energy would soon produce works with a wide embrace of human fellowship in them.”

Slowly the dull years passed by with penury, disappointment and insomnia as his three constant companions. At certain periods he would endeavour to drown in alcohol the misery of his weary and jaded mind, but it was only to return to his sordid surroundings, after the bout was over, in a fit of even greater depression. That people could ever think of time as passing swiftly was to James Thomson incomprehensible—

From his diaries we get a devastating insight into the dreariness of his life, into the agony that too often, alas! in this world besets an imaginative and sensitive nature submerged in commonplace surroundings. Day followed day in uneventful melancholy procession, and each was as like to each in its neutral tone as one dull English penny is to another. From his walks along the depressing streets of London, he would return to his lodging house, would open the dreary house-door and, passing through the tiny hall, smelling of today’s cooking, yesterday’s gas, and innumerable forgotten inmates, stumble up the dark stairway to be confronted at last by the same books, the same dirty and hateful litter that he had left so short a time before. It is no wonder that references to the weather play so important a part in these journals, references to the visibility or invisibility of sun or moon, those two free luminaries that moved above his head with so large and tranquil an assurance.

Bitter easterly. Some sun. Aftn. walk about Soho. (bought coal-scuttle; after three years!) Moon keen as crystal, sky pale and cloudless, stars few and dim, ground like iron, wind like a razor.

... Cold slight snow; fine morning, livid day. Snowing pretty heavily at night (9 p. m.). Picked just twenty-one sticks out of my grate, the rest being quite enough to light the fire.

Nov. 2nd, 1874. Forty years old to-day. Cold; third day of fog. Congenial natal weather.

It was at this time that James Thomson wrote that curious poem called “In the Room.”

The afternoon has grown late and still the curtains of the apartment remain undrawn,

At last in the silent dimness the very furniture becomes articulate! The mirror, the cupboard and finally the bed, speak!

But envisage his release as he might in imaginative verse, James Thomson’s life still dragged on, dragged on, with all the horrible tenacity of some wretched animal whose spine is broken and yet does not die. His insomnia grew worse, but still he survived,

In his ghastly poem to insomnia he describes with intolerable vividness, the nerve-tortured state of one to whose brain even the solace of sleep is denied; as if he alone, James Thomson, ex-army schoolmaster, had been selected by some incredible and malign causality to bear the burden of an immortal consciousness when all other men had rest.

Towards the end of his life he was occupied in writing certain literary essays, selecting, curiously enough, amongst other writers no less a subject than Walt Whitman, whose poetry at that time was little known in England. There is something extremely affecting in this appreciation of the great American avoucher written by the hand of the man who of all others was the most unhappy. Might it really have been possible, had the two ever met, that the great, life-giving, life-accepting heart of Walt Whitman would have had vigour enough in its ample aplomb to fortify and sustain the darkened spirit of the London poet? At any rate, one experiences a strange sensation, as of miraculous help arriving suddenly in a situation of desperate need, when one comes upon a quotation of this kind in an article by Thomson:

It would be a mistake, however, to regard Thomson as a spiritual weakling. He was not that. Rather, like Dante’s proud Italian, damned for ever in the blackest abyss of Hell, he raises his hand in blasphemous imprecation against Almighty God. “Take it, God, for it is at thee that I aim it.”

“The City of Dreadful Night” contains passages of extraordinary and appalling power. But, as James Thomson himself declared, its appeal is likely always to be limited.

The conception of the poem, with its sombre imagery, is terrific. The world in which we live is likened to a vast, doomed city which lifts its “mass enorm” in the centre of an arid desert. The city is enveloped in a dim penumbra through the nebulous light of which street-lights burn obscurely. “Amidst the sounding solitudes,” “ranged mansions” overshadow everything, “still as tombs” where

Along the darkened sidewalks of this tremendous and awful metropolis, James Thomson makes his way, following close upon another figure “because he seemed to walk with an intent.”

How the reiteration of those famous lines beats in upon the brain after a while, like the regular trending, appalling in its heavy monotony, of hostile feet on a pavement outside one’s door:

In the resonant alleys along which they go they see

They glimpse a thousand evil things ominous and dreadful.

The thing looked up, and behold it was a man:

At last they draw near to a vast cathedral whose portentous sculptured mass, shadowed far up in the cold, limitless darkness of the night, overlooks a moonlit, cloistral lawn across the wide expanse of which dim crowds of wavering phantom citizens are hurrying. The two travellers enter with the throng, and there in the vast, hollow, many-aisled sanctuary, with tinted moonbeams slanting down through the high mullioned windows, they await the Preacher. Suddenly a voice goes echoing through the vaulted tracery.

As the years passed, James Thomson’s melancholy grew deeper and deeper. Dejected, poverty-stricken, unrecognized, he still tramped the streets, and still from his bed in his lodging house stared blankly into an ultimate void. In the beginning of the year 1882, something seems to have given way in him at last and, fully cognizant of what he was doing, he deliberately set about to drink himself to death. He was thrown out into the streets by his landlord. Again and again with a strange dogged determination he tried to force his way into the miserable abode which, after all, was the only home he knew. “I must have a roof over my head.”

Four months passed by and he was still alive. It is known that he spent some part of the time in jail; for the rest, he drifted about in the purlieus of Wapping-Old-Stairs and The Isle of Dogs. Most of his friends lost sight of him. A few of them saw him at rare intervals, and always from his finely moulded head, furrowed now with deep lines, his blue eyes looked out with abject defiance. On one occasion he was seen in a tavern, dressed in mud-stained, ragged clothes. He was wearing a pair of carpet slippers, through the broken soles of which his naked feet were clearly visible.

Then suddenly he appeared in the rooms of Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet. Although Marston could not see his guest there was something about his wild speech that filled the blind man with terrible misgivings. Fortunately, William Sharp, the critic, happened to come in later in the afternoon. He found Thomson lying on Marston’s bed, in a pool of blood, almost unconscious. He had the sick man conveyed to the London University Hospital where, it is said, he lay for a long time on the bare bench of the common waiting-room until the house physician found time to attend to him. What, exactly, were Thomson’s last words has never been divulged. It has been hinted that they were such as to cause even his friends to look askance. “I shall get out of here on Monday, even if it’s in my coffin” was one sentence shrieked out by the frenzied man who could not die. His words proved happily true. On the following Monday he, the atheist, theophobist, life hater, found rest at last for his “homeless mind,” in a good hour, under six feet of honest earth. No religious service was said over his grave. Free at length from

he was simply put under ground, “unhouseled, unanneal’d,” cursed alike by man and God, a renegade and outcast who had been denied everything in the world except genius.