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 £600 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.