THE HOUND OF HEAVEN

"The Hound of Heaven", the greatest religious poem of modern times and one of the greatest of all times, was produced under certain peculiar historical conditions, which accentuate its isolation. To begin with, the religious poem is a religious poem, not only in what we should call the real sense, but in what some would call the limited sense. The word "religion" is used in these days in an expansive or telescopic fashion, sometimes inevitable, sometimes nearly intolerable. It is used of various realms of emotion or spiritual speculation more or less lying on the borders of religion itself; it is applied to other things that have nothing to do with religion; it is applied to some things that are almost identical with irreligion. But the line between legitimate and illegitimate expansion of a word is so difficult to draw, that there is little to be gained by questioning it except that mere quarrel about a word that is called logomachy. There always are some confusions about a definition or exceptions to a rule. The great principle that Pigs is Pigs does not dispose entirely of the existence of pig-iron, or of cannibals calling a man a long pig. We all know the plain practical man, the sceptic in the crowd, the atheist on the soap-box, who boasts that he calls a spade a spade, and generally calls it a spyde. But even he may have to deal with the learned and sophisticated man, who will prove to him, that even in the case of the ace of spades which he planks down in playing poker, the spade is not really a spade; being derived from the Spanish espada, a sword. If once we begin to quibble and quarrel about what words ought to mean or can be made to mean we shall find ourselves in a mere world of words, most wearisome to those who are concerned with thoughts. For the latter it will be enough to realise that there certainly was and is a certain thing, to which our fathers found it more practical to attach and limit the name of religion; that they recognised that the thing had many forms, and that there were many religions; but that they were equally certain of what things were not religions, including much that modern moralists call a wider religious life. They recognised a Protestant religion and a Catholic religion, and probably thought one or other of them true; they recognised a Mohammedan religion, even if they thought it false; they recognised a Jewish religion, which had once been true and by a sort of treason had become false; and so on. But they did not recognise a religion of Humanity; or a "religion of the Life Force": or a religion of creative evolution; or a religion which has the object of ultimately producing a god who does not yet exist. And the distinction is better preserved by noting these examples than by an attempt to fix the elusive evasions of the verbal sophists of today.

What we mean when we say that "The Hound of Heaven" is a real religious poem is simply that it would make no sense if we supposed it to refer to any of these modern abstractions, or to anything but a personal Creator in relation to a personal creature. It may be, and indeed is, a generous and charitable mood to look out on all the multitudes of men with sympathy and social loyalty. But it was not the multitudes of men that were pursuing the hero of this poem "down the nights and down the days". It may be a good thing for men to look forward to mankind someday producing a superior being, thousands of years hence, who will be like a god compared with the common mass of men. But it was not some superior person born a thousand years hence, who drove the sinner in this story from refuge to refuge. He was not running away from the Life Force, from a mere summary of all natural vitality, which would be expressed equally in the pursued or the pursuer. For it requires quite as much Life Force to run away from anybody as to run after anybody. He was not swiftly escaping from a slow adaptive process called evolution, like a man pursued by a snail. He was not alarmed at a gradual biological transformation, by which a Hound of Heaven might be evolved out of a Hound of Hell. He was dealing with the direct individual relations of God and Man, and the story would be absolutely senseless to anybody who thought that the service of Man is a substitute for the service of God. This is where the practical habit of speech, among our religious ancestors of all religions, proves its validity and veracity. Francis Thompson was a Catholic, and a very Catholic Catholic. In some aspects of art, poetry and pomp, the Catholic is more akin to the pagan; in some aspects of philosophy and logic (though this is little understood), he has more sympathy with the sceptic or the agnostic. But in the solid central fact of the subject or subject-matter he is still something utterly separate from sceptics and even from pagans; and all Christians have their part in him. A perfectly simple and straightforward member of the Salvation Army knows what "The Hound of Heaven" is about, even if he knows it better without reading it, and would recognise its central theology as promptly as the Pope. But the mere humanist, the mere humanitarian, the universal aesthete, the patroniser of all religions, he will never know what it is about, for he has never been near enough to God to run away from Him.

Now the next point of interest is that this poem of purely personal religion, so directly devotional, so dogmatically orthodox, appeared at a time when it might least be expected, and at the end of an historical process that might have seemed to make it impossible. The nineteenth century had been, at least on the surface, one triumphal procession of progress, away from these theological relations, which were accounted narrow, towards ideals of brotherhood or natural living which seemed to be more and more broad. We might say that the poets had led the procession, for even at the beginning of the nineteenth century Shelley and Landor and Byron and Keats had moved in various ways towards a pantheistic paganism; and the tendency was continued by Victor Hugo in Europe and by Walt Whitman in America. There were, of course, continual cross-currents and confusions. Even an appeal to pantheism is something like an appeal to theism, and it was difficult to imitate the pagans without discovering, like St. Paul, that they were very religious. The contradiction came out quaintly in the case of Swinburne, who was always trying to prove that he was an atheist by invoking about ten different gods in a style exactly copied from the Old Testament.

Roughly speaking, however, I myself remember fairly well the curious cultural conditions in which the genius of Francis Thompson arose; for, though I was a boy at the time, a boy can sometimes absorb the atmosphere of a society, with the same subtle subconscious instinct with which a child can absorb the atmosphere of a house. I read all the minor poets; and it was specially an age of minor poets. The curious thing is that Francis Thompson was considered, criticised, appreciated or admired as one of the minor poets. I can remember Mr. Richard Le Gallienne, who is one of the survivors of that epoch, defending himself with spirit, but with a certain air of audacity, against the charge of fulsome exaggeration in saying that there was in the poems of this Mr. Thompson an Elizabethan richness and sometimes almost a Shakespearian splendour. Mr. Le Gallienne was quite right; but the main point is that his defence was a general defence of minor poets, and of this poet as a minor poet. It had hardly occurred to the world in general that Francis Thompson was a major poet; we might almost say a major prophet. There was in all that world of culture an atmosphere of paganism that had worn rather thin. But hardly anybody thought that the future of poetry could be anything but a future of paganism. It was then, in the slowly deepening silence, as in the poem of Coventry Patmore, that there was first heard, afar off, the baying of a hound.

That is the primary point about the work of Francis Thompson; even before its many-coloured pageant of images and words. The awakening of the domini canes, the Dogs of God, meant that the hunt was up once more; the hunt for the souls of men; and that religion of that realistic sort was anything but dead. In Patmore's poem the dog is "an old guard-hound"; and we may say, without irreverence, that the first impression or lesson was that there is life in the old dog yet. In any case, it was an event of history, as much as an event of literature, when personal religion returned suddenly with something of the power of Dante or the Dies Irae, after a century in which such religion had seemed to grow more weak and provincial, and more and more impersonal religions appeared to possess the future. And those who best understand the world know that the world is changed, and that the hunt will continue until the world turns to bay.