Explore "The Eighteen Nineties" by Holbrook Jackson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The wave of Catholicism which swept over the art world of the closing years of the nineteenth century reached its poetic fulness in the work of Francis Thompson. Contemporary with him were Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and John Gray, and, although each was inspired by the same spiritual forces to reassert in song their faith in traditional Christianity, none of them had his bigness of vision. Few poets, indeed, of any time, have surpassed his technical skill or the prodigality of his literary inventiveness; but, beyond that, the spirit of the hour breathed into his verse a new avowal of mysticism, and it informed his orthodoxy with so sweet and beautiful a sense of life that those who were old in the convention of Rome must have marvelled at the beauty of their inheritance.
Francis Thompson, product as he is of the poetic impulsion of the Nineties, cannot be located there, as one can locate so many of the poets of the time. He is not estranged from neighbouring decades, like Ernest Dowson and John Gray, by a fortuitous decadence of mood, but rather does he partake of the endless current of the years and of the eternal normalities. Those who care to discover obvious resemblances among poets have compared him, fittingly enough, with Crashaw, Vaughan and Herbert, and other seventeenth-century mystical singers, and sometimes as though he had been influenced by them. Yet it is known that he resembled such poets before he had made himself acquainted with their works. Francis Thompson is, of course, just one more manifestation of the eternal mystery of faith, and in his greatness he is of no time and all time. Those resemblances with the past have no more to do with the average magnificence of his genius and his work than the minor novelties of thought and expression which may remind us of his corporeal moment. To the latter I must refer, and with more excuse than that demanded by the scope of this book, for there is much in his life and art which links him with, without confining him to, his period.