The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson | Page 4

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,