The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson | Page 5

it is the one unwearying
torture. Dowson had exquisite sensibility, he vibrated in harmony with
every delicate emotion; but he had no outlook, he had not the escape of
intellect. His only escape, then, was to plunge into the crowd, to fancy
that he lost sight of himself as he disappeared from the sight of others.
The more he soiled himself at that gross contact, the further would he
seem to be from what beckoned to him in one vain illusion after
another vain illusion, in the delicate places of the world. Seeing himself
moving to the sound of lutes, in some courtly disguise, down an alley
of Watteau's Versailles, while he touched finger-tips with a divine
creature in rose-leaf silks, what was there left for him, as the dream
obstinately refused to realise itself, but a blind flight into some Teniers
kitchen, where boors are making merry, without thought of yesterday
or to-morrow? There, perhaps, in that ferment of animal life, he could
forget life as he dreamed it, with too faint hold upon his dreams to
make dreams come true.
For, there is not a dream which may not come true, if we have the
energy which makes, or chooses, our own fate. We can always, in this
world, get what we want, if we will it intensely and persistently enough.
Whether we shall get it sooner or later is the concern of fate; but we
shall get it. It may come when we have no longer any use for it, when
we have gone on willing it out of habit, or so as not to confess that we
have failed. But it will come. So few people succeed greatly because so
few people can conceive a great end, and work towards that end
without deviating and without tiring. But we all know that the man who
works for money day and night gets rich; and the man who works day
and night for no matter what kind of material power, gets the power. It
is the same with the deeper, more spiritual, as it seems vaguer issues,
which make for happiness and every intangible success. It is only the
dreams of those light sleepers who dream faintly that do not come true.

We get out of life, all of us, what we bring to it; that, and that only, is
what it can teach us. There are men whom Dowson's experiences would
have made great men, or great writers; for him they did very little. Love
and regret, with here and there the suggestion of an uncomforting
pleasure snatched by the way, are all that he has to sing of; and he
could have sung of them at much less "expense of spirit," and, one
fancies, without the "waste of shame" at all. Think what Villon got
directly out of his own life, what Verlaine, what Musset, what Byron,
got directly out of their own lives! It requires a strong man to "sin
strongly" and profit by it. To Dowson the tragedy of his own life could
only have resulted in an elegy. "I have flung roses, roses, riotously with
the throng," he confesses in his most beautiful poem; but it was as one
who flings roses in a dream, as he passes with shut eyes through an
unsubstantial throng. The depths into which he plunged were always
waters of oblivion, and he returned forgetting them. He is always a very
ghostly lover, wandering in a land of perpetual twilight, as he holds a
whispered colloque sentimental with the ghost of an old love:
"Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé,
Deux spectres ont évoqué le
passé."
It was, indeed, almost a literal unconsciousness, as of one who leads
two lives, severed from one another as completely as sleep is from
waking. Thus we get in his work very little of the personal appeal of
those to whom riotous living, misery, a cross destiny, have been of so
real a value. And it is important to draw this distinction, if only for the
benefit of those young men who are convinced that the first step
towards genius is disorder. Dowson is precisely one of the people who
are pointed out as confirming this theory. And yet Dowson was
precisely one of those who owed least to circumstances; and, in
succumbing to them, he did no more than succumb to the destructive
forces which, shut up within him, pulled down the house of life upon
his own head.
A soul "unspotted from the world," in a body which one sees visibly
soiling under one's eyes; that improbability is what all who knew him
saw in Dowson, as his youthful physical grace gave way year by year,

and the personal charm underlying it remained unchanged. There never
was a simpler or more