The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson | Page 3

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 à
ma simplicité," 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