"He wants to review your book. He would have done so in the paper he calls the 'Twopenny Damn'[29] (don't be shocked), if it had not died. As it is, he will do it somewhere."
As a matter of fact the critics knew neither the poet nor his address. Even his occasional editors, among whom was Mr. Henry Newbolt, were for their convenience saved direct communication with him. He knew nobody; and those who knew everybody did not know him. Mr. Yeats wrote at his death to W. M.:--
"Now I regret that I never met him, except once for a few minutes. There seems to be some strange power in the forms of excess that dissolves, as it were, the external will, to make the character malleable to the internal will. An extreme idealism of the imagination seems to be incompatible in almost all with a perfectly harmonious relation to the mechanics of life."
Another of the circle of his unacquaintance, Mr. Norman Gale, writing as an anthologist, for permission to quote, says to the poet:--
"Let me take this opportunity of congratulating you from my heart on the success of your book. I have said what I thought of it in print. I was candid."
That, at least, does not betoken the log-roller. If Thompson was one of "a group"--it was a day of groups--it was composed of cowled friars and the deaf Welsh hills. When from Mr. Hugh Chisholm, then the assistant editor of the _St. James's Gazette_, and the writer of an appreciative notice in that paper, came a request, reinforcing his printed admiration, for an autograph copy of the "Daisy" the compliment was made through a third person, and such personalities as his review contained were not based on an acquaintance with the poet. Another stranger, Mr. John Davidson, wrote, I believe, the _Speaker's_ praises, but disclaimed any responsibilities for his reviews when asked, in later years, if a passage from his article might be quoted--he never meant anything said in reviews, was his afterthought about them. Nevertheless, since his were the words of a fellow-poet, I give them:--
"Here are dominion--domination over language, and a sincerity as of Robert Burns. . . . We must turn from Mr. Thompson, the latest, and perhaps the greatest, of English Roman Catholic poets of post-Reformation times, to the exalted Puritan voice that sang 'At a Solemn Music' for a strain combining in like manner intensity and magnificence." . . . (Of "_Her Portrait_.") "A description, masterful and overmastering, in which a constant interchange of symbol between earthly and heavenly beauty pulses like day and night."
