The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson by Ernest Dowson et al

E >> Ernest Dowson et al >> The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11

E-text prepared by the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

THE POEMS AND PROSE

OF

ERNEST DOWSON

with a MEMOIR by ARTHUR SYMONS

CONTENTS

MEMOIR. By Arthur Symons

POEMS

IN PREFACE: FOR ADELAIDE

A CORONAL

VERSES:

Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration
Villanelle of Sunset
My Lady April
To One in Bedlam
Ad Domnulam Suam
Amor Umbratilis
Amor Profanus
Villanelle of Marguerites
Yvonne of Brittany
Benedictio Domini
Growth
Ad Manus Puellae
Flos Lunae
Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae
Vanitas
Exile
Spleen
O Mors! quam amara est memoria tua homini pacem
habenti in substantiis suis
"You would have understood me, had you waited"
April Love
Vain Hope
Vain Resolves
A Requiem
Beata Solitudo
Terre Promise
Autumnal
In Tempore Senectutis
Villanelle of his Lady's Treasures
Gray Nights
Vesperal
The Garden of Shadow
Soli cantare periti Arcades
On the Birth of a Friend's Child
Extreme Unction
Amantium Irae
Impenitentia Ultima
A Valediction
Sapientia Lunae
"Cease smiling, Dear! a little while be sad"
Seraphita
Epigram
Quid non speremus, Amantes?
Chanson sans Paroles

THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE

DECORATIONS:

Beyond
De Amore
The Dead Child
Carthusians
The Three Witches
Villanelle of the Poet's Road
Villanelle of Acheron
Saint Germain-en-Laye
After Paul Verlaine-I
After Paul Verlaine-II
After Paul Verlaine-III
After Paul Verlaine-IV
To his Mistress
Jadis
In a Breton Cemetery
To William Theodore Peters on his Renaissance Cloak
The Sea-Change
Dregs
A Song
Breton Afternoon
Venite Descendamus
Transition
Exchanges
To a Lady asking Foolish Questions
Rondeau
Moritura
Libera Me
To a Lost Love
Wisdom
In Spring
A Last Word

PROSE

THE DIARY OF A SUCCESSFUL MAN
A CASE OF CONSCIENCE
AN ORCHESTRAL VIOLIN
SOUVENIRS OF AN EGOIST
THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS

ERNEST DOWSON was born in 1867 at Lea, in Kent, England. Most of his life
was spent in France. He died February 21, 1900.

The poems in this volume were published at varying intervals from his
Oxford days at Queens College to the time of his death. The prose works
here included were published in 1886, 1890, 1892 and in 1893.

ERNEST DOWSON

I

The death of Ernest Dowson will mean very little to the world at large,
but it will mean a great deal to the few people who care passionately for
poetry. A little book of verses, the manuscript of another, a one-act play
in verse, a few short stories, two novels written in collaboration, some
translations from the French, done for money; that is all that was left by
a man who was undoubtedly a man of genius, not a great poet, but a poet,
one of the very few writers of our generation to whom that name can be
applied in its most intimate sense. People will complain, probably, in his
verses, of what will seem to them the factitious melancholy, the factitious
idealism, and (peeping through at a few rare moments) the factitious
suggestions of riot. They will see only a literary affectation, where
in truth there is as genuine a note of personal sincerity as in the
more explicit and arranged confessions of less admirable poets. Yes, in
these few evasive, immaterial snatches of song, I find, implied for the
most part, hidden away like a secret, all the fever and turmoil and the
unattained dreams of a life which had itself so much of the swift,
disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius.

Ernest Christopher Dowson was born at The Grove, Belmont Hill, Lee, Kent,
on August 2nd, 1867; he died at 26 Sandhurst Gardens, Catford, S.E., on
Friday morning, February 23, 1900, and was buried in the Roman Catholic
part of the Lewisham Cemetery on February 27. His great-uncle was Alfred
Domett, Browning's "Waring," at one time Prime Minister of New Zealand, and
author of "Ranolf and Amohia," and other poems. His father, who had himself
a taste for literature, lived a good deal in France and on the Riviera, on
account of the delicacy of his health, and Ernest had a somewhat irregular
education, chiefly out of England, before he entered Queen's College,
Oxford. He left in 1887 without taking a degree, and came to London, where
he lived for several years, often revisiting France, which was always his
favourite country. Latterly, until the last year of his life, he lived
almost entirely in Paris, Brittany, and Normandy. Never robust, and always
reckless with himself, his health had been steadily getting worse for some
years, and when he came back to London he looked, as indeed he was, a dying
man. Morbidly shy, with a sensitive independence which shrank from any
sort of obligation, he would not communicate with his relatives, who would
gladly have helped him, or with any of the really large number of attached
friends whom he had in London; and, as his disease weakened him more and
more, he hid himself away in his miserable lodgings, refused to see a
doctor, let himself half starve, and was found one day in a Bodega with
only a few shillings in his pocket, and so weak as to be hardly able to
walk, by a friend, himself in some difficulties, who immediately took him
back to the bricklayer's cottage in a muddy outskirt of Catford, where he
was himself living, and there generously looked after him for the last six
weeks of his life.

He did not realise that he was going to die; and was full of projects for
the future, when the L600 which was to come to him from the sale of some
property should have given him a fresh chance in the world; began to read
Dickens, whom he had never read before, with singular zest; and, on the
last day of his life, sat up talking eagerly till five in the morning. At
the very moment of his death he did not know that he was dying. He tried to
cough, could not cough, and the heart quietly stopped.

II

I cannot remember my first meeting with Ernest Dowson. It may have been in
1891, at one of the meetings of the Rhymers' Club, in an upper room of the
"Cheshire Cheese," where long clay pipes lay in slim heaps on the wooden
tables, between tankards of ale; and young poets, then very young, recited
their own verses to one another with a desperate and ineffectual attempt
to get into key with the Latin Quarter, Though few of us were, as a matter
of fact, Anglo-Saxon, we could not help feeling that we were in London,
and the atmosphere of London is not the atmosphere of movements or of
societies. In Paris it is the most natural thing in the world to meet and
discuss literature, ideas, one's own and one another's work; and it can be
done without pretentiousness or constraint, because, to the Latin mind,
art, ideas, one's work and the work of one's friends, are definite and
important things, which it would never occur to any one to take anything
but seriously. In England art has to be protected not only against the
world, but against one's self and one's fellow artist, by a kind of
affected modesty which is the Englishman's natural pose, half pride and
half self-distrust. So this brave venture of the Rhymers' Club, though it
lasted for two or three years, and produced two little books of verse which
will some day be literary curiosities, was not quite a satisfactory kind of
_cenacle_. Dowson, who enjoyed the real thing so much in Paris, did not, I
think, go very often; but his contributions to the first book of the club
were at once the most delicate and the most distinguished poems which it
contained. Was it, after all, at one of these meetings that I first saw
him, or was it, perhaps, at another haunt of some of us at that time, a
semi-literary tavern near Leicester Square, chosen for its convenient
position between two stage-doors? It was at the time when one or two of us
sincerely worshipped the ballet; Dowson, alas! never. I could never get him
to see that charm in harmonious and coloured movement, like bright shadows
seen through the floating gauze of the music, which held me night after
night at the two theatres which alone seemed to me to give an amusing
colour to one's dreams. Neither the stage nor the stage-door had any
attraction for him; but he came to the tavern because it was a tavern, and
because he could meet his friends there. Even before that time I have a
vague impression of having met him, I forget where, certainly at night; and
of having been struck, even then, by a look and manner of pathetic charm, a
sort of Keats-like face, the face of a demoralised Keats, and by something
curious in the contrast of a manner exquisitely refined, with an appearance
generally somewhat dilapidated. That impression was only accentuated
later on, when I came to know him, and the manner of his life, much more
intimately.

I think I may date my first impression of what one calls "the real man"
(as if it were more real than the poet of the disembodied verses!) from an
evening in which he first introduced me to those charming supper-houses,
open all night through, the cabmen's shelters. I had been talking over
another vagabond poet, Lord Rochester, with a charming and sympathetic
descendant of that poet, and somewhat late at night we had come upon Dowson
and another man wandering aimlessly and excitedly about the streets. He
invited us to supper, we did not quite realise where, and the cabman came
in with us, as we were welcomed, cordially and without comment, at a little
place near the Langham; and, I recollect, very hospitably entertained. The
cooking differs, as I found in time, in these supper-houses, but there the
rasher was excellent and the cups admirably clean. Dowson was known there,
and I used to think he was always at his best in a cabmen's shelter.
Without a certain sordidness in his surroundings he was never quite
comfortable, never quite himself; and at those places you are obliged to
drink nothing stronger than coffee or tea. I liked to see him occasionally,
for a change, drinking nothing stronger than coffee or tea. At Oxford, I
believe, his favourite form of intoxication had been haschisch; afterwards
he gave up this somewhat elaborate experiment in visionary sensations for
readier means of oblivion; but he returned to it, I remember, for at least
one afternoon, in a company of which I had been the gatherer and of which I
was the host. I remember him sitting a little anxiously, with his chin on
his breast, awaiting the magic, half-shy in the midst of a bright company
of young people whom he had only seen across the footlights. The experience
was not a very successful one; it ended in what should have been its first
symptom, immoderate laughter.

Always, perhaps, a little consciously, but at least always sincerely, in
search of new sensations, my friend found what was for him the supreme
sensation in a very passionate and tender adoration of the most escaping of
all ideals, the ideal of youth. Cherished, as I imagine, first only in the
abstract, this search after the immature, the ripening graces which time
can only spoil in the ripening, found itself at the journey's end, as some
of his friends thought, a little prematurely. I was never of their opinion.
I only saw twice, and for a few moments only, the young girl to whom most
of his verses were to be written, and whose presence in his life may be
held to account for much of that astonishing contrast between the broad
outlines of his life and work. The situation seemed to me of the most
exquisite and appropriate impossibility. The daughter of a refugee, I
believe of good family, reduced to keeping a humble restaurant in a foreign
quarter of London, she listened to his verses, smiled charmingly, under her
mother's eyes, on his two years' courtship, and at the end of two years
married the waiter instead. Did she ever realise more than the obvious part
of what was being offered to her, in this shy and eager devotion? Did it
ever mean very much to her to have made and to have killed a poet? She had,
at all events, the gift of evoking, and, in its way, of retaining, all that
was most delicate, sensitive, shy, typically poetic, in a nature which I
can only compare to a weedy garden, its grass trodden down by many feet,
but with one small, carefully tended flowerbed, luminous with lilies. I
used to think, sometimes, of Verlaine and his "girl-wife," the one really
profound passion, certainly, of that passionate career; the charming,
child-like creature, to whom he looked back, at the end of his life, with
an unchanged tenderness and disappointment: "Vous n'avez rien compris a ma
simplicite," as he lamented. In the case of Dowson, however, there was a
sort of virginal devotion, as to a Madonna; and I think, had things gone
happily, to a conventionally happy ending, he would have felt (dare I say?)
that his ideal had been spoilt.

But, for the good fortune of poets, things rarely do go happily with them,
or to conventionally happy endings. He used to dine every night at the
little restaurant, and I can always see the picture, which I have so often
seen through the window in passing: the narrow room with the rough tables,
for the most part empty, except in the innermost corner, where Dowson would
sit with that singularly sweet and singularly pathetic smile on his lips (a
smile which seemed afraid of its right to be there, as if always dreading a
rebuff), playing his invariable after-dinner game of cards. Friends would
come in during the hour before closing time; and the girl, her game of
cards finished, would quietly disappear, leaving him with hardly more than
the desire to kill another night as swiftly as possible.

Meanwhile she and the mother knew that the fragile young man who dined
there so quietly every day way apt to be quite another sort of person after
he had been three hours outside. It was only when his life seemed to have
been irretrievably ruined that Dowson quite deliberately abandoned himself
to that craving for drink, which was doubtless lying in wait for him in his
blood, as consumption was also; it was only latterly, when he had no longer
any interest in life, that he really wished to die. But I have never known
him when he could resist either the desire or the consequences of drink.
Sober, he was the most gentle, in manner the most gentlemanly of men;
unselfish to a fault, to the extent of weakness; a delightful companion,
charm itself. Under the influence of drink, he became almost literally
insane, certainly quite irresponsible. He fell into furious and unreasoning
passions; a vocabulary unknown to him at other times sprang up like a
whirlwind; he seemed always about to commit some act of absurd violence.
Along with that forgetfulness came other memories. As long as he was
conscious of himself, there was but one woman for him in the world, and for
her he had an infinite tenderness and an infinite respect. When that face
faded from him, he saw all the other faces, and he saw no more difference
than between sheep and sheep. Indeed, that curious love of the sordid, so
common an affectation of the modern decadent, and with him so genuine, grew
upon him, and dragged him into more and more sorry corners of a life which
was never exactly "gay" to him. His father, when he died, left him in
possession of an old dock, where for a time he lived in a mouldering house,
in that squalid part of the East End which he came to know so well, and
to feel so strangely at home in. He drank the poisonous liquors of those
pot-houses which swarm about the docks; he drifted about in whatever
company came in his way; he let heedlessness develop into a curious
disregard of personal tidiness. In Paris, Les Halles took the place of the
docks. At Dieppe, where I saw so much, of him one summer, he discovered
strange, squalid haunts about the harbour, where he made friends with
amazing innkeepers, and got into rows with the fishermen who came in to
drink after midnight. At Brussels, where I was with him at the time of the
Kermesse, he flung himself into all that riotous Flemish life, with a zest
for what was most sordidly riotous in it. It was his own way of escape from
life.

To Dowson, as to all those who have not been "content to ask unlikely
gifts in vain," nature, life, destiny, whatever one chooses to call it,
that power which is strength to the strong, presented itself as a barrier
against which all one's strength only served to dash one to more hopeless
ruin. He was not a dreamer; destiny passes by the dreamer, sparing him
because he clamours for nothing. He was a child, clamouring for so many
things, all impossible. With a body too weak for ordinary existence, he
desired all the enchantments of all the senses. With a soul too shy to tell
its own secret, except in exquisite evasions, he desired the boundless
confidence of love. He sang one tune, over and over, and no one listened
to him. He had only to form the most simple wish, and it was denied him.
He gave way to ill-luck, not knowing that he was giving way to his own
weakness, and he tried to escape from the consciousness of things as they
were at the best, by voluntarily choosing to accept them at their worst.
For with him it was always voluntary. He was never quite without money; he
had a little money of his own, and he had for many years a weekly allowance
from a publisher, in return for translations from the French, or, if he
chose to do it, original work. He was unhappy, and he dared not think.
To unhappy men, thought, if it can be set at work on abstract questions,
is the only substitute for happiness; if it has not strength to overleap
the barrier which shuts one in upon oneself, it is the one unwearying
torture. Dowson had exquisite sensibility, he vibrated in harmony with
every delicate emotion; but he had no outlook, he had not the escape of
intellect. His only escape, then, was to plunge into the crowd, to fancy
that he lost sight of himself as he disappeared from the sight of others.
The more he soiled himself at that gross contact, the further would he seem
to be from what beckoned to him in one vain illusion after another vain
illusion, in the delicate places of the world. Seeing himself moving to
the sound of lutes, in some courtly disguise, down an alley of Watteau's
Versailles, while he touched finger-tips with a divine creature in
rose-leaf silks, what was there left for him, as the dream obstinately
refused to realise itself, but a blind flight into some Teniers kitchen,
where boors are making merry, without thought of yesterday or to-morrow?
There, perhaps, in that ferment of animal life, he could forget life as he
dreamed it, with too faint hold upon his dreams to make dreams come true.

For, there is not a dream which may not come true, if we have the energy
which makes, or chooses, our own fate. We can always, in this world, get
what we want, if we will it intensely and persistently enough. Whether we
shall get it sooner or later is the concern of fate; but we shall get it.
It may come when we have no longer any use for it, when we have gone on
willing it out of habit, or so as not to confess that we have failed. But
it will come. So few people succeed greatly because so few people can
conceive a great end, and work towards that end without deviating and
without tiring. But we all know that the man who works for money day and
night gets rich; and the man who works day and night for no matter what
kind of material power, gets the power. It is the same with the deeper,
more spiritual, as it seems vaguer issues, which make for happiness and
every intangible success. It is only the dreams of those light sleepers who
dream faintly that do not come true.

We get out of life, all of us, what we bring to it; that, and that only, is
what it can teach us. There are men whom Dowson's experiences would have
made great men, or great writers; for him they did very little. Love and
regret, with here and there the suggestion of an uncomforting pleasure
snatched by the way, are all that he has to sing of; and he could have sung
of them at much less "expense of spirit," and, one fancies, without the
"waste of shame" at all. Think what Villon got directly out of his own
life, what Verlaine, what Musset, what Byron, got directly out of their
own lives! It requires a strong man to "sin strongly" and profit by it. To
Dowson the tragedy of his own life could only have resulted in an elegy. "I
have flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng," he confesses in his
most beautiful poem; but it was as one who flings roses in a dream, as he
passes with shut eyes through an unsubstantial throng. The depths into
which he plunged were always waters of oblivion, and he returned forgetting
them. He is always a very ghostly lover, wandering in a land of perpetual
twilight, as he holds a whispered _colloque sentimental_ with the ghost of
an old love:

"Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glace,
Deux spectres ont evoque le passe."

It was, indeed, almost a literal unconsciousness, as of one who leads two
lives, severed from one another as completely as sleep is from waking. Thus
we get in his work very little of the personal appeal of those to whom
riotous living, misery, a cross destiny, have been of so real a value. And
it is important to draw this distinction, if only for the benefit of those
young men who are convinced that the first step towards genius is disorder.
Dowson is precisely one of the people who are pointed out as confirming
this theory. And yet Dowson was precisely one of those who owed least to
circumstances; and, in succumbing to them, he did no more than succumb to
the destructive forces which, shut up within him, pulled down the house of
life upon his own head.

A soul "unspotted from the world," in a body which one sees visibly soiling
under one's eyes; that improbability is what all who knew him saw in
Dowson, as his youthful physical grace gave way year by year, and the
personal charm underlying it remained unchanged. There never was a simpler
or more attaching charm, because there never was a sweeter or more honest
nature. It was not because he ever said anything particularly clever
or particularly interesting, it was not because he gave you ideas, or
impressed you by any strength or originality, that you liked to be with
him; but because of a certain engaging quality, which seemed unconscious
of itself, which was never anxious to be or to do anything, which simply
existed, as perfume exists in a flower. Drink was like a heavy curtain,
blotting out everything of a sudden; when the curtain lifted, nothing had
changed. Living always that double life, he had his true and his false
aspect, and the true life was the expression of that fresh, delicate, and
uncontaminated nature which some of us knew in him, and which remains for
us, untouched by the other, in every line that he wrote.

III

Dowson was the only poet I ever knew who cared more for his prose than
his verse; but he was wrong, and it is not by his prose that he will
live, exquisite as that prose was at its best. He wrote two novels in
collaboration with Mr. Arthur Moore: "A Comedy of Masks," in 1893, and
"Adrian Rome," in 1899, both done under the influence of Mr. Henry James,
both interesting because they were personal studies, and studies of known
surroundings, rather than for their actual value as novels. A volume
of "Stories and Studies in Sentiment," called "Dilemmas," in which the
influence of Mr. Wedmore was felt in addition to the influence of Mr.
James, appeared in 1895. Several other short stories, among his best work
in prose, have not yet been reprinted from the _Savoy_. Some translations
from the French, done as hack-work, need not be mentioned here, though
they were never without some traces of his peculiar quality of charm in
language. The short stories were indeed rather "studies in sentiment"
than stories; studies of singular delicacy, but with only a faint hold on
life, so that perhaps the best of them was not unnaturally a study in the
approaches of death: "The Dying of Francis Donne." For the most part they
dealt with the same motives as the poems, hopeless and reverent love, the
ethics of renunciation, the disappointment of those who are too weak or too
unlucky to take what they desire. They have a sad and quiet beauty of their
own, the beauty of second thoughts and subdued emotions, of choice and
scholarly English, moving in the more fluid and reticent harmonies of prose
almost as daintily as if it were moving to the measure of verse. Dowson's
care over English prose was like that of a Frenchman writing his own
language with the respect which Frenchmen pay to French. Even English
things had to come to him through France, if he was to prize them very
highly; and there is a passage in "Dilemmas" which I have always thought
very characteristic of his own tastes, as it refers to an "infinitesimal
library, a few French novels, an Horace, and some well-thumbed volumes
of the modern English poets in the familiar edition of Tauchnitz." He
was Latin by all his affinities, and that very quality of slightness,
of parsimony almost in his dealings with life and the substance of art,
connects him with the artists of Latin races, who have always been so
fastidious in their rejection of mere nature, when it comes too nakedly or
too clamorously into sight and hearing, and so gratefully content with a
few choice things faultlessly done.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11