. 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 seance." It had
something akin to the madness of poor Christopher Smart when he fell
into the habit of dropping on his knees and praying in the crowded
London streets. There was incongruity, verging on the indecent, in
this intrusion of religion into art, as if an archangel were to attend
an afternoon te