THE HOUND OF HEAVEN

When she lit her glimmering tapers
Round the day's dead sanctities Page 52]

THE HOUND OF HEAVEN

By FRANCIS THOMPSON

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
STELLA LANGDALE

NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1926

COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

INTRODUCTION

The Rev. Mark J. McNeal, S. J., who was one of the successors of Lafcadio Hearn in the chair of English Literature at the Tokyo Imperial University, in an interesting article recounts the following incident of his experience in that institution. "I was seated on the examining board with Professor Ichikawa, the dean of the English department... There entered the room a student whom I recognized as among the best in the class, a sharp young chap with big Mongolian eyes, and one who had never to my knowledge given any hint of even a leaning toward Christianity. I remembered, however, that his thesis submitted for a degree had been a study of Francis Thompson. Following the usual custom, I began to question him about his thesis.

"'Why did you choose Thompson?'

"'Well, he is quite a famous poet.'

"'What kind of poet is he?'

"'We might call him a mystic.'

"'Is he a mystic of the orthodox sort, like Cynewulf or Crashaw; or an unorthodox mystic, like Blake or Shelley?'

"'Oh, he's orthodox.'

"'Well, now, what do you consider his greatest production?'

"'Why, I should say "The Hound of Heaven."

"'Well, what on earth does Thompson mean by that Hound?'

"'He means God.'

"'But is not that a rather irreverent way for Thompson to be talking about God, calling Him a hound? What does he mean by comparing God to a hound?'

"'Well, he means the pursuit of God.'

"'Oh, I see, Thompson is pursuing God, is he?'

"'Oh, no. He is rather running away from God.'

"'Well, then, God is pursuing Thompson, is that it?'

"'Yes, that's it.'

Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears Page 45

'"But, see here; according to Thompson's belief God is everywhere, isn't He?'

"'Yes.'

"'Well, then, how can God be going after Thompson? Is it a physical pursuit?'

"'No. It is a moral pursuit.'

"'A moral pursuit! What's that? What is God after?'

"'He is after Thompson's love.'

"And then we, the Jesuit and the Buddhist, began to follow the windings and turnings of that wondrous poem, the most mystic and spiritual thing that has been written since St. Teresa laid down her pen. What the other member of the examining board thought of it all I never heard. But I think I acquired a satisfactory answer to that question so often put to me: Can the Japanese really grasp a spiritual truth? Do they really get at the meaning of Christianity? This, of a race that has produced more martyrs than any other nation since the fall of Rome and that kept the Faith for two centuries without a visible symbol or document!"

The incident supplies matter for other conclusions more germane to the subject of this essay. The late Bert Leston Taylor, a journalist whose journalism had a literary facet of critical brilliance, once declared that he could not perceive the excellence of Francis Thompson's poetry. When someone suggested that it might be that he was not spiritual enough, the retort was laconic and crushing, "Or, perhaps, not ecclesiastical enough." Like most good retorts Taylor's had more wit than truth. He was obsessed by the notion, prevalent among a certain class of literary critics, that Francis Thompson's fame was the artificially stimulated applause of a Catholic coterie, whose enthusiasm could hardly be shared by readers with no particular curiosity about Catholic ideas or modes of religion. It was probably this obsession which prompted that able critic, Mr. H. D. Traill, to write to Mr. Wilfrid Meynell when the "Hound of Heaven" first appeared: "I quite agree with you in thinking him a remarkable poet, but, if he is ever to become other than a 'poet's poet' or 'critic's poet'—if indeed it is worth anyone's ambition to be other than that—it will only be by working in a different manner. A 'public' to appreciate the 'Hound of Heaven' is to me inconceivable." Mr. William Archer, an experienced judge of popular likes, was of the same opinion. "Yet," Francis Thompson's biographer tells us, "in the three years after Thompson's death the separate edition of the 'Hound of Heaven' sold fifty thousand copies; and, apart from anthologies, many more thousands were sold of the books containing it." When the "Hound of Heaven" is selected for study, and explained in words of one syllable, by a young Japanese student in the Tokyo Imperial University almost thirty years after the poem was published, one can hardly maintain that it calls for certain ecclesiastical affiliations before it can be understood and felt, or that its "public" is necessarily circumscribed.

It must be owned indeed that Francis Thompson was a puzzle to his contemporaries of the nineties. He paid the usual penalty of vaulting originality. The decade is famous for its bold experiments and shining successes in the art of poetry. One might expect that a public, grown accustomed to exquisitely wrought novelties and eager to extend them a welcome, would have been preordained to recognize and hail the genius of Thompson. But it was not so. The estheticism of the nineties, for all its sweet and fragile flowers, was rooted in the dark passions of the flesh. Its language was the language of death and despair and annihilation and the Epicurean need of exhausting the hedonistic possibilities of life ere the final engulfing in darkness and silence. When the speech of Thompson, laden with religion and spirituality and Christian mystery, broke with golden turbulence upon the world of the nineties, the critics were abashed and knew not what to think of it. The effect was somewhat like that produced by Attwater, in Stevenson's "The Ebb-Tide," when he began suddenly to discourse on Divine Grace to the amazement of Herrick and his crew of scoundrels from the stolen Farallone. "Oh," exclaimed the unspeakable Huish, when they had recovered breath, "Oh, look 'ere, turn down the lights at once, and the Band of 'Ope will oblige! This ain't a spiritual séance." It had something akin to the madness of poor Christopher Smart when he fell into the habit of