WHY JAMES THOMSON DID NOT KILL HIMSELF.

TAXES THOMSON, the author of "The City of Dreadful Night," the only English poet of Despair, the " Dante in delirium," as we called him fifteen years ago, and should call him again if we were reviewing his writings, did not, perhaps, quite touch the possible low-water mark of pessimistic feeling. He never desired to destroy either the world of which he thought so badly, or the hopeless race which inhabits it, and declined, on reflection, even to destroy himself. He admitted fully and repeatedly that the logical outcome of all his philosophy was suicide, Death, the "divinely tender," being the only true comforter, but maintained that for him personally there was a deterring reason. He was a poet ; and though he felt that his songs were not only mournful, but " undivine," he could not bear to cease to sing. In some unpublished lines which Mr. Salt has included in the painstaking though not attractive biography which he has just published,* the poet describes this feeling at length in two most striking stanzas :— " Songs in the Desert ! songs of husky breath

And undivine Despair ; Songs that are Dirges, but for Life, not Death, Songs that infect the air ;

• London: Reeves and Turner. 1989.

Have sweetened bitterly my food and wine, The heart corroded and the Dead Sea brine.

So potent is the Word, the Lord of Life, And so tenacious Art, Whose instinct urges to perpetual strife With Death, Love's counterpart ; The magic of their music, might, and light Can keep one living in his own despite."

The poet had, therefore, a reason for living, a source of joy, though painful and half-despised joy; and it is, of course, possible to conceive of a man who never felt even that. There might be, as regards feeling, a depth below even Mr. Thomson.

We hardly think, however, that there could be in thought a pessimistic depth below his, and we rise from his biography with a sense of surprise almost stronger than the pain it is impossible

to avoid. One sees no reason, except an abnormal natural im- pulse, for his unconquerable and sincere despair. He was not the victim of any painful disease. He had not to face exceptional poverty, for though the son of a drinking sailor who died in want, and educated by charity, he had for years a salary as school- master in a regiment, he earned bread always by his writings, and he enjoyed among a circle which gradually expanded a high repute. Indeed, he would, but for his own habits, in later life have become a fairly prosperous man. Moreover, he did not belong to the whining tribe. He must have had a root of weakness in him, for after his best work was done. and his fame began to be established, he fought his despair with alcohol, and, if we may trust a hint in his own poetry, and another in Mr. Salt's Life of him, with opium, and it is only the weak who do that ; but he had none of the ordinary characteristics of the weakling. He did not whine, he did not beg, he did not plunge into vice, he did not grow envious or savage. He liked his friends and adhered to them, he recognised that there were good people in the world, he behaved himself as other men, and he acknowledged kindness fully, yet with self-respect. Indeed, nothing is more remark- able about him, his origin and surroundings considered, than that he had not only thoroughly cultivated himself, so that the note of culture as well as of knowledge is in all his letters, but that, to judge solely by his correspondence, he had developed in himself what we must describe, for want of a better expres- sion, as unusual gentlemanliness of thought. Witness this little paragraph from a letter of thanks to Rossetti, who had presented him with a valuable book :—

" 240 Vauxhall Bridge Road, S.W., March 2, 1872. "DEAR Snz,—I have to thank you for your very kind letter of the 25th ult., and for your too liberal offer of a copy of your com- plete edition of Shelley. While I do not like to refuse the honour of this gift from you, I must really protest against your attacking me suddenly with so valuable a present on such insignificant and unintentional provocation. It is one among the works of our higher literature which during the last three or four years I have put off reading, waiting for more settled leisure to study them as they ought to be studied. I will do my best to profit by it, and should any notes occur to me which I can think worth your attention, will submit them to you frankly."

He must have been conscious, too, and was conscious, of his considerable powers, and was by no means left wholly with-

out his meed of appreciation. Yet almost from the first, certainly from the time when his powers matured, his whole system of thought became unalterably and, so far as we can judge from his poems and letters, sincerely pessimistic. He believed man to be the unhappy subject of an inexorable Necessity which was practically hostile, to be incapable of great improvement, always miserable, and destined to remain so as long as fate permitted his useless existence to endure. All human convictions as to the supernatural were, in his judgment, pure illusions, efforts to escape, as he put it in " The City of Dreadful Night," from the granite Sphinx, indestruc- tible, unchangeable, and pitiless, at whose feet man, his last garment of illusion torn from him, must fall at last, a heap of tortured clay. His fate is the ghastliest conceivable by the imagination :—

" The world rolls round for ever like a mill ;

It grinds out death and life and good and ill; It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.

While air of Space and Time's full river flow, The mill must blindly whirl unresting so : It may be wearing out, but who can know ?

Man might know one thing were his sight less dim ; That it whirls not to suit his petty whim, That it is quite indifferent to him.

Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith ?

It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath, Then grinds him back into eternal death."

This was no mere flash of poetic thought or momentary imagination ; if external evidence can prove anything, it was the innermost conviction of a man of strong will, sound brain, industrious habits, and powers which, if not so great as his biographer fancies, were far above those allotted to the majority of mankind.

As there was nothing in James Thomson's surroundings to account for the depth of gloom which enveloped and, as it were, poisoned his clear mind, and powerful though creaking imagination, so there was nothing in what we may call the religious side of his philosophy. Necessitarianism, though fatal to moral responsibility, and therefore to spiritual effort, is not necessarily fatal either to happiness or to joy. It is probable that to most Northern Europeans, and especially to most Englishmen, endeavour has become so :ustinetive that to feel it useless is positive pain, that they must either tear at the eternal prison-bars, or at least fret themselves because of them ; but there is nothing in the doctrine of Necessity in se to extinguish hope. Your destiny may be happiness. Improvement may be Necessity's first law. The world may be advancing under its blind impelling force to- wards the realisation of the optimist's dream, when pain shall be but a recollection of the historian, and science shall have so done its perfected work that man shall be released from the great whip of hunger, and though effort shall not cease, it shall always be voluntary effort. Nay, the Asiatic fatalist, be he Mahommedan, Hindoo, or Turanian, though he does not believe that, and neither hopes for nor wishes for the endless change which Western men call progress, still finds in the fatalism which has become part of his intellectual being a source of happiness and strength. Why strive, when effort is nugatory ? Why feel remorse or repining, when you have no responsibility ? Why shrink, when all is inevitable, no more to be avoided than the flight of time ? Death ! it is the lot of all. Torture ! how many minutes can that last ? Famine ! what is that but death P Submit, and in submis- sion, which involves, of course, self-suppression, find a new source, if not of joy, at least of the calm which, to Fatalist as to Stoic, is its all-sufficing substitute ; or if you cannot reach those heights, take what there is,—wine, perfume. splendour, the love of woman, and the sweetness of the air. There never was necessitarian yet more convinced than Omar Khayyam ; and to the clear intellect and joyous nature of the Persian denier, James Thomson's gloom, gloom only deepened by wine, would have seemed simply silly. Few Asiatic fatalists are now quite like Omar Khayyam, for he was born before his race had exhausted its springs of energy ; but in them all is the capacity for submission which precludes such depth of rebellious gloom, of appealing misery, as must unconsciously have been in Thomson's heart. There, as we would venture to suggest, is his secret, and that of all the European fatalists who hold this world to be under immutable law, and yet a place of woe alone. Their conviction of Destiny is not perfect. They all complain, they all rebel, they all appeal— sometimes with sobs, like Leopardi; sometimes with screams, like Shelley in " Queen Mab ;" sometimes with ironic laughter, like Heine ; sometimes with heart-breaking sighs, like James Thom- son—to the Something which they feel, but do not believe, could make even Destiny deflect from its inevitable course. An inner sense that his songs were an appeal—for if a dirge is not an appeal, a dirge is a misery uselessly inflicted on fellow-victims —kept James Thomson alive, in spite of the logic which, as he admits, said to him inexorably,—" Make an end." He would not, he said, make an end, because he felt the impulse to sing ; and all his song was protest, useless and feeble unless addressed, consciously or unconsciously, to Something that could hear. That a man, a sane man, should sing to a glacier to stop its secular descent,—is that even thinkable