The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson | Page 2

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.
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 _cénacle_.
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.