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.
And Dowson, in his verse (the "Verses" of 1896, "The Pierrot of the
Minute," a dramatic phantasy in one act, of 1897, the posthumous
volume "Decorations"), was the same scrupulous artist as in his prose,
and more felicitously at home there. He was quite Latin in his feeling
for youth, and death, and "the old age of roses," and the pathos of
our little hour in which to live and love; Latin in his elegance,
reticence, and simple grace in the treatment of these motives; Latin,
finally, in his sense of their sufficiency for the whole of one's
mental attitude. He used the commonplaces of poetry frankly, making
them his own by his belief in them: the Horatian Cynara or Neobule was
still the natural symbol for him when he wished to be most personal. I
remember his saying to me that his ideal of a line of verse was the
line of Poe:
"The viol, the violet, and the vine";
and the gracious, not remote or unreal beauty, which clings about such
words and such images as these, was always to him the true poetical
beauty. There never was a poet to whom verse came more naturally, for
the song's sake; his theories were all æsthetic, almost technical
ones, such as a theory, indicated by his preference for the line of
Poe, that the letter "v" was the most beautiful of the letters, and
could never be brought into verse too often. For any more abstract
theories he had neither tolerance nor need. Poetry as a philosophy did
not exist for him; it existed solely as the loveliest of the arts. He
loved the elegance of Horace, all that was most complex in the
simplicity of Poe, most birdlike in the human melodies of Verlaine. He
had the pure lyric gift, unweighted or unballasted by any other
quality of mind or emotion; and a song, for him, was music first, and
then whatever you please afterwards, so long as it suggested, never
told, some delicate sentiment, a sigh or a caress; finding words, at
times, as perfect as the words of a poem headed, "O Mors! quam amara
est memoria tua homini pacem habenti in substantiis suis."
There, surely, the music of silence speaks, if it has ever spoken. The
words seem to tremble back into the silence which their whisper has
interrupted, but not before they have created for us a mood, such a
mood as the Venetian Pastoral of Giorgione renders in painting.
Languid, half inarticulate, coming from the heart of a drowsy sorrow
very conscious of itself, and not less sorrowful because it sees its
own face looking mournfully back out of the water, the song seems to
have been made by some fastidious amateur of grief, and it has all the
sighs and tremors of the mood, wrought into a faultless strain of
music. Stepping out of a paradise in which pain becomes so lovely, he
can see the beauty which is the other side of madness, and, in a
sonnet, "To One in Bedlam," can create a more positive, a more
poignant mood, with fine subtlety.
Here, in the moment's intensity of this comradeship with madness,
observe how beautiful the whole thing becomes; how instinctively the
imagination of the poet turns what is sordid into a radiance, all
stars and flowers and the divine part of forgetfulness! It is a symbol
of the two sides of his own life: the side open to the street, and the
side turned away from it, where he could "hush and bless himself with
silence." No one ever worshipped beauty more devoutly, and just as we
see him here transfiguring a dreadful thing with beauty, so we shall
see, everywhere in his work, that he never admitted an emotion which
he could not so transfigure. He knew his limits only too well; he knew
that the deeper and graver things of life were for the most part
outside the circle of his magic; he passed them by, leaving much of
himself unexpressed, because he would not permit himself to express
nothing imperfectly, or according to anything but his own conception
of the dignity of poetry. In the lyric in which he has epitomised
himself and his whole life, a lyric which is certainly one of the
greatest lyrical poems of our time, "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub
regno Cynarae," he has for once said everything, and he has said it to
an intoxicating and perhaps immortal music.
Here, perpetuated by some unique energy of a temperament rarely so
much the master of itself, is the song of passion and the passions, at
their eternal war in the soul which they quicken or deaden, and in the
body which they break down between them. In the second book, the book
of "Decorations," there are a few pieces which repeat, only more
faintly, this very personal note. Dowson could never have developed;
he had already said, in his first book of verse, all that he had to
say. Had he lived, had he gone on writing, he could only have echoed
himself; and probably it would have been the less essential part of
himself; his obligation to Swinburne, always evident, increasing as
his own inspiration failed him. He was always without ambition,
writing to please his own fastidious taste, with a kind of proud
humility in his attitude towards the public, not expecting or
requiring recognition. He died obscure, having ceased to care even for
the delightful labour of writing. He died young, worn out by what was
never really life to him, leaving a little verse which has the pathos
of things too young and too frail ever to grow old.
ARTHUR SYMONS.
1900.