Of great value is A. M.'s corrective record of his laugh:--
"He has been unwarily named with Blake as one of the unhappy poets. I will not say he was ever so happy as Blake;--but few indeed, poets or others, have had a life so happy as Blake's, or a death so joyous; but I affirm of Francis Thompson that he had natural good spirits, and was more mirthful than many a man of cheerful, of social, or even of humorous reputation. What darkness and oppression of spirit the poet underwent was over and past some fifteen years before he died. It is pleasant to remember Francis Thompson's laugh, a laugh readier than a girl's, and it is impossible to remember him, with any real recall, and not to hear it in mind again. Nothing irritable or peevish within him was discovered when children had their laughter at him. It need hardly be told what the children laughed at;--say, a habit of stirring the contents of his cup with such violence that his after-dinner coffee was shed into the saucer or elsewhere--a habit which he often told us, at great length, was hereditary."
His laugh it is difficult to keep alive: the legend of his extinguished happiness is too strong. For laughter is commonly discredited; only Mr. Chesterton, for example, persists in making the Almighty capable of humour. While we are all ready to allow that thorns make a crown, we hold that bells do no more than cap us--the cap and bells of folly. Who ever spoke of a crown of bells?
The refutation of the charge against his industry lies in his published work and in the pages of a hundred crowded note-books. The newspaper Odes alone are sufficient evidence of his power to compel even his muse to arduous and humble labours.
These Odes were pot-boiling journalism; their inspiration by the clock and the column:--
"We have no doubt whatever that inspiration will not fail you for so great a subject--the Jubilee! We must have the copy by the afternoon of the 21st,"
wrote an encouraging editor (Mr. Massingham) on June 6, 1897. The request was made on the strength of Mr. Massingham's admiration for _New Poems_, and was not refused; the ode was written within three weeks, and probably in the last three hours of them. From Mr. Garvin came another letter:--