Victorian Poetic Theory and Criticism
Amy Levy, “James Thompson: A Minor Poet” (1883)
Reading Questions
- How might Amy Levy’s identity as a Jewish woman poet in late-Victorian England shape the way she interprets James Thomson’s life and work?
- Why does Levy open with the claim that Thomson was “only a poet of wonderful originality and power” whose death “created but little stir”? What tone does this establish?
- What kinds of obstacles (poverty, class, circumstance) does Levy emphasize in Thomson’s life, and how does she connect these disadvantages to his art?
- Levy describes Thomson as “a great human soul, horribly vital and sensitive in all its pains.” How is this description both sympathetic and tragic?
- Levy names The City of Dreadful Night as Thomson’s masterpiece and connects it with “Weltschmerz” and pessimism. How does she explain the poem’s significance?
- What symbols or episodes from the poem does Levy highlight (for example, the graves of Faith, Hope, and Love, or the cathedral preacher), and what do they reveal about Thomson’s worldview?
- Levy insists that the poem’s value is not in isolated lines but in its total conception. What does she mean by this, and how does it affect the way we should read the poem?
- Levy contrasts Thomson with “minor bards” and “bepraised versifiers.” What does she suggest about the reasons Thomson went unrecognized in his time?
- How does Levy balance criticism of Thomson’s “roughness,” lack of polish, or even vulgarity with admiration for his earnestness and originality?
- Why does Levy include George Eliot’s letter to Thomson, which addressed him as a “fellow-poet”? What weight does this carry in her argument?
- How does Levy position Thomson within a larger tradition of poets such as Homer, Milton, Heine, Leopardi, and Grillparzer? What effect does this have?
- Levy emphasizes Thomson’s “cry for life”—for love, warmth, recognition—over the detached beauty of art. How might this emphasis reflect her own values as a writer?
- In what ways is Levy’s essay not only about Thomson but also about the challenges of being an outsider poet in Victorian literary culture?
A few months ago there died very miserably in London a poet called James Thomson. He was neither the idol of a literary clique nor the darling of society’s drawing-rooms; he was only a poet of wonderful originality and power, and his death created but little stir.
There is nothing very remarkable in this; Homer, we know, had to beg his bread; contemporary cavaliers held Milton not too highly; and I claim for James Thomson the genius of a Homer or a Milton. He is distinctly what in our loose phraseology we call a minor poet; no prophet, standing above and outside things, to whom all sides of a truth (more or less foreshortened, certainly) are visible; but a passionately subjective being, with intense eyes fixed on one side of the solid polygon of truth, and realising that one side with a fervour and intensity to which the philosopher with his birdseye view rarely attains.
Had circumstances been otherwise, I cannot say what night have been the development of nature so large and strong; with due allowance of sunshine, who knows what fruits might ahve ripened on a soil so rich and deep? But James Thomson was a poor Scotchman, of humble origin, of straightened means, with every social disadvantage. From first to last, his life was a bitter and sordid struggle; the Fates had given him to fight one of the dreariest, weariest fights in which man has ever drawn sword. The Fates were cruel; but the result of their cruelty is a product so moving, so wonderful, so unique, that we do not cry out against the; rather are we dumb before the horrible complexity of their workings.
The city of Dreadful Night, his masterpiece, as it is a poem quite unique in our literature, stands forth as the very sign and symbol of that attitude of mind which we call Weltschmerz, Pessimism, what you will; i.e., the almost perfect expression of a form of mental suffering which I can convey by not other means than by the use of a very awkward figure–by calling it “grey pain,” “the insufferable inane” which makes a man long for the “positive pain.” Most of us at some time or other of our lives have wandered in the City of Dreadful Night; the shadowy forms, the dim streets, the monotonous tones are familiar to us; but to those who have never trod its streets, the poet’s words can be little else that “a tale of little meaning tho’ the words are strong.”
If any cares for the weak words here written,
If must be someone desolate, fate-smitten . . . .
Yes, here and there some weary wanderer
In that same city of tremendous night,
Will understand the speech, and feel a stir
Of fellowship in all disatrous flight.
[ll. 26-27, 29-32]
The poet recognizes his own limits. These limits, it may be objected, are very narrow. He dwells on a view of things which is morbid, nay false, which does not exist for the perfectly healthy human being.
But philosophy teaches us that all thins are as real as one another, and as unreal.
ὁρῶ γὰρ ἡμᾶς οὐδὲν ὄντας ἄλλο πλὴν
εἴδωλ᾽ ὅσοιπερ ζῶμεν ἢ κούφην σκιάν.
The fact that such a state of mind exists is enough; it is one of the phenomena of our world, as true, as false, as worthy, as unworthy of consideration as any other:
For life is but a dream, whose shapes return,
Some frequently, some seldom, some by night,
Some by day, some night and day; we learn,
While all things change and many vanish quite,
In their recurrence with recurrent changes
A certain seeming order; where this ranges
We count things real.
[ll. 57-63]
The city, with its dark lagoon, its waste of glistening marshes, its boundary where “rolls the shipless sea’s unrest” [l. 77], its vase unruined streets where the lamps always burn tho’ there is no light in the houses, rises before us, a picture distinct, real in itself, real in the force of its symbolic meaning. The wanderer goes down into the city; all is dim and shadowy; the dismal inhabitants, whose faces are “like to tragic masks of stone” [l. 95], are few and far between, holding little intercourse with one another, communing each man with himself, “for their woe / Broods maddening inwardly and scorns to wreak / Itself abroad” [ll. 107-09]. The wanderer follows in the footsteps of one sad being who appears to be walking with some intent, and presently stands successively before the spots where Faith and Hope and Love have died. Then the perplexed question escapes him: “When Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed, Can life still live? [ll. 155-56].
The answer is a striking example of the wonderful blending of sound and meaning of outward and inward sense, which marks the poem.
As one whom his intense thought overpowers,
He answered coldly; “Take a watch, erase
The signs and figures of the circling hours:
Detach the hands, remove the dial face;
The works proceed until run down; altho’
Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go.”
[[ll. 157-62]
The wanderer passes on, leaving his guide pursuing the self-same dismal round, and makes his way to a spacious square (the insistence on the great size of the city is noteworthy) where a man is standing alone and declaiming aloud with mighty gestures.
“No hope can have no fear” [ll. 217ff.] is the text of the speech; the lonely soul can go on its way indifferent, hardened, through the glooms and terrors of this world; it is only when love comes that death and the fear of death can move and sway us. I quote one of the earlier verses of this tragic recital:
As I came through the desert thus it was
As I cam through the desert, eyes of fire
Glared at me, throbbing with a starved desire:
The hoarse, and heavy, and carnivorous breath
Was hot upon me from deep jaws of death;
Sharp claws, swift talons, fleshless fingers cold
Plucked at me from the bushes, tried to hold:
But I strode on austere,
No hope could have no fear.
[[ll. 218-26]
The wanderer goes on his way finding everywhere the same brooding shadow of nameless horror. Hell itself is eagerly sought, a much desired goal, as a refuge from the void agony of the city. He makes his way into a vast cathedral where a preacher is addressing the shadowy multitude with words of good cheer. Yes, here in the City of Dreadful Night these are good tidings that he brings: there is no God; no “fiend with names Divine” made and tortured us; “we bow down to the universal laws”;’ there is no life beyond the grave, and each man is free to end his life at will [ll. 724ff.].
Silence follows the speaker’s words; then suddenly breaks forth a shrill and terrible cry:
In all eternity I had one chance,
One few years’ term of racious human life,
The splendour of the intellect’s advance,
The sweetness of the home with babes and wife.
The social pleasures with their genial wit,
The fascination of the worlds of art,
The glories the worlds of nature lit
By large imagination’s glowing heart . . .
All the sublime prerogatives of man. . . .
This chance was never offered me before,
For me the infinite Past is blank and dumb.
This chance recurreth never, never more,
Blank, blank for me, the infinite to-come:
And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,
A mockery, a delusion.
[ll. 807-14, 819, 823-28]
There is no mistaking such writing as this; it goes to the very heart of things; it is for all time and all humanity.
I will not attempt to follow further the course of the poem. The passage which closes it on Dürer’s “Melancholia” is worthy of its text; I can say no more.
The value of the poem does not lie in isolated passages, in pregnant lines which catch the fear and eye and linger in the memory; it is as a complete conception, as a marvellously truthful expression of what it is almost impossible to express at all, that we must value it. And the truthfulness is none the less that it has been expressed to a great extent by means of symbols; the nature of the subject is such that it is only by resorting to such means that it can be adequately represented. Mood, seen through the medium of such draughtsmanship and painter’s skill, is no longer a dream, a shadow which the sunbeam shall disperse but one side of a truth.
The City of Dreadful Night is always standing; ceaselessly one or other human soul visits and revisits the graves of Faith and Hope and Love; ceaselessly in the vast cathedral does the preacher give forth his good tidings to that shadowy congregation comma and ever and anon rises up the shrill sound of agonized protests from their midst.
From the aesthetic point of view this poem is the consummation of James Thompson’s art; but there is much work of his full of infinite possibilities and half frustrated fulfillment to which the student of human nature will turn with ever greater interest. For the nature of James Thompson was so wide and rich, his intellect so quick and far reaching, and there is, moreover, such great chastity of thought, such large nobleness about the man. Here is no mere poetic weakling kicking against the pricks, but a great human soul, horribly vital and sensitive in all its pans[1], struggling with a great agony.
From Homer downwards poets have received but sorry treatment at the hands of the Fates, and James Thompson’s life was a terribly hard one even for a poet. Here as a man of great powers, of great passions, hemmed in and thwarted on every side by circumstances petty in themselves, but, like Mercurtio’s wound, “enough.”[2] It was many years before he could publish the volume containing the City of Dreadful Night, for the prosaic reason of want of money. His considerable knowledge of Italian, German, and Spanish were acquired painfully and in after life, and yet he has caught the spirit of his spiritual kinsman Heine and of Leopardi,[3] as no other poet has succeeded in doing.
“Only once,” says one of his friends, “did I see Thompson smile with purely personal pleasure. It was when he received a letter beginning ‘dear fellow-poet,’ and signed ‘George Eliot.’ I never thought there was a spark of vanity in him till then.
“The talent,” says Emerson, “sucks the substance.” Such a talent as that of James Thomson must have been a heavy burden for any but the strongest to bear under the most favourable circumstances; and when we consider the dark and narrow circumstances of his lonely life we can only stand aghast. For, if one comes to think of it, it is appalling what infinite and exquisite anguish can be suffered by a single human being who is perhaps sitting quietly in his chair before us, or crosses our path in the sunny street and fields. The human organism is so complex; there are so many strings to vibrate to the touch of pain; the body and soul of man are such perfect pain conductors. And all through the work of James Thompson we hear one note, one cry, muffled sometimes, but always there a passionate hungry cry for life, for the things of this human, flesh and blood life; for love and praise, for mere sunlight and sun’s warmth.
No, this is not the highest utterance, the word of the great artist struggling towards completion; rather it is the under, coarser cry of the imperfect human being, crushed beneath the load which he is not formed to bear.
Statues and pictures and art may be grand,
But they are not the life for which they stand,
he sings; and Grillparzer, saddest of poets, whose substance the talent sucked like a very vampire, strikes the same note when he makes his Sappho say: “Und Leben ist ja doch des Lebens höchstes Ziel.”[4]
In the two groups of lyrics, Sunday at Hampstead and Sunday up the River, this intensely human side of the poet comes out in a marked degree; the verses, which show distinctly his kinship with Heine, are so full of sunshine and beauty and a most exquisite love. And here I would remark that as regards love James Thomson desired only the best. In youth he loved a woman. She died early, and he loved her memory till the end of his own life. There is a little poem called “mater Tenebrarum,” not very remarkable for artistic beauty, in which the poet lies sleepless on his bed at night “famished with an uttermost famine for love,” which is startling with excess of truth, absolutely rough with pain; we seems to see the blood and sweat on the page as we read.
In the poem called “Our Ladies of Death,” the poet stands aloof from the strife; the weary nerves and muscles are for awhile relaxed; he looks around with the wide, sad gaze of deeper knowledge, and asks for nothing save perfect, dreamless rest. It is no longer the passionate rebel against fate, stung to agony by the thousand petty shafts of circumstance, who is speaking; for a moment a voice stronger and fuller issues from the weary lips. Only a few months ago the group gathered round James Thomson’s grave and heard these words, the utterance of him they mourned, read out in the dreary grave-yard.
Weary of erring in this desert life,
Weary of hoping hopes for ever vain,
Weary of struggling in all-sterile strife,
Weary of thought which maketh nothing plain,
I close my eyes and calm my panting breath,
And pray to thee, O ever-quite Death,
To come and soothe away my bitter pain.[5]
The rest, so long sought, so long desired, had come at last.
And for us, what is there for us to do now that the great agony is over? We read the books of the dead man, close them, and away. They are books over which one wrings the hands in despair. There is so much and yet so little. As we read them, the old question, the old plaint rises to our lips:
Who shall change with tears and thanksgivings
The mystery of the cruelty of things?
But there is another question, less vast and vague, though perhaps not much easier to answer, which must occur to us at the same time. How comes it that in a day like our own, when the shrill, small voices of a legion of bepraised versifiers are heard all around—how comes it that this man of such large powers, such truth, such force of passion and intellect, such originality, should have been entirely overlooked for the greater part of his life, and even at its close so scantily recognised? Certainly he lacked one graceful finish of our latter-day bards; the pretty modern-classical rick, the prettier ric of old-French forms were unknown to him. We know that the mingled odours of livery-stables and surgery, said to linger about Keats, have stunk in the nostrils of one fastidious critic.[6] James Thomson, says report, did not speak the Queen’s English with the precision that one would desire; it is certain that he began life as an army schoolmaster, and never rose to e anything higher than a commis-voyageur. And it is certain also that here and there in his verse (and very often in his prose) he breaks out into absolute vulgarity—into a nudity of expression which he has neither the wit nor the taste to drape in the garb of ancient Greece or mediaeval France.
Rough and unequal he certainly is, but that he understood the meaning of perfect work he has shown us in the few gem-like translations from Heine, and in some of his own lyrics, written in Heine’s vein. And the weird, powerful poem, “In the Room,” is almost perfect as it stands.
But even his warmest admirers cannot claim for James Thomason a light touch, a fine taste, a delicate wit. “When he laughs,” says one critic, “it is a guffaw.” To tell the truth, he is always terribly in earnest. The hot-house emotions of “culture” are entirely unknown to him, and I cannot help thinking that it is because of tis very earnestness, this absolute truthfulness of feeling and expression, that James Thomason will take a recognised place among our poets, when the mass of our minor bards shall have been consigned by a ruthless posterity to oblivion.
James Thomason, as we know, died miserably. Respectable people shook their heads over him in death, as they had done in life. It was not to be expected that they could feel much sorrow for a man who, it was averted, had drunk himself to death.
But his few friends speak of the genial and loving spirit; the wit, the chastity, the modesty and tenderness of the dead man. To us, who never say his face nor touched his living hand, his image stands out large and clear, unutterably tragic: the image of a great mind and a great soul thwarted in their development by circumstance; of a nature struggling with itself and Fate; of an existence doomed to bear a twofold burden.
- Editorial note: the proof copy used to transcribe this text is unclear at this moment, and a new copy has been requested to check this word for accuracy. 9.30.25 ↵
- Romeo and Juliet 3.1.96-97. ↵
- Heinrich Heine, German writer (1797-1856) and Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) ↵
- Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), Austrian poet and playwright. Levy is quoting Sappho: “Life is, after all, life’s highest aim.” ↵
- From Thomson’s “To Our Ladies of Death” ↵
- The editors of The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory (1999) speculate that Levy is referring to either John Gibson Lockhart or John Wilson Crocker, both of whom were scathingly critical of Romantic era poet John Keats (1362). ↵
