Part 15 (1/2)

I have said that Aubrey Beardsley was the only true decadent of all the literary and artistic rebels of the eighteen-nineties. Certainly no intelligent person can call Ernest Dowson a decadent. It is true that there have been critics, such as Mr. Blakie Murdoch, who have tried to throw a halo of wickedness over this unfortunate young poet, to make him seem to be a sort of English Paul Verlaine. But Victor Plarr, who knew him intimately for many years, has told us that except for the tendency to drink too much, which was one of the causes of his death, Ernest Dowson was a simple, wholesome young man, who smoked large black cigars and was fond of playing practical jokes on his friends.

Ernest Dowson's religious poems have never seemed to me to be particularly convincing. I will read you one of the best of them and then tell you why it does not seem to me to ring true. It is called ”Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration.”

NUNS OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION

BY ERNEST DOWSON

Calm, sad, secure; behind high convent walls, These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray: And it is one with them when evening falls, And one with them the cold return of day.

These heed not time; their nights and days they make Into a long, returning rosary, Whereon their lives are threaded for Christ's sake: Meekness and vigilance and chast.i.ty.

A vowed patrol, in silent companies, Life-long they keep before the living Christ.

In the dim church, their prayers and penances Are fragrant incense to the Sacrificed.

Outside, the world is wild and pa.s.sionate; Man's weary laughter and his sick despair Entreat at their impenetrable gate: They heed no voices in their dream of prayer.

They saw the glory of the world displayed; They saw the bitter of it, and the sweet; They knew the roses of the world would fade, And be trod under by the hurrying feet.

Therefore they rather put away desire, And crossed their hands and came to sanctuary; And veiled their heads and put on coa.r.s.e attire: Because their comeliness was vanity.

And there they rest; they have serene insight Of the illuminating dawn to be: Mary's sweet Star dispels for them the night, The proper darkness of humanity.

Calm, sad, secure; with faces worn and mild: Surely their choice of vigil is the best?

Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild; But there, beside the altar, there, is rest.

Now, this is a very beautiful poem. But there is nothing in it which might not have been written by a Protestant. And there is one note in it which seems to me to be absolutely contrary to the Catholic idea of the religious life--and that is the note of melancholy. Ernest Dowson insists that the nuns are sad as well as calm and secure, he insists upon the fact that their faces are ”worn and mild.” Also he apparently thinks of the convent as a place of inaction, instead of as a place of ordered and energetic activity. Therefore, this poem, beautiful as it is, seems to me to be in no way Catholic in spirit or in expression.

But while I do not feel that the authenticity of Ernest Dowson's Catholicity can be proved by his deliberately religious poems, I do think that in nearly every poem which this so-called decadent wrote it is possible to find indications if not of piety, at least of normality, sanity, wholesomeness and virtue.

There are, and there have always been since sin first came into the world, genuine decadents. That is, there have been writers who have devoted all their energies and talents to the cause of evil, who have consistently and sincerely opposed Christian morality, and zealously endeavored to make the worst appear the better cause. But every poet who lays a lyric wreath at a heathen shrine, who sings the delights of immorality, or has.h.i.+sh, or suicide, or mayhem, is not a decadent: often he is merely weak-minded. The true decadent, to paraphrase a famous saying, wears his vices lightly, like a flower. He really succeeds in making vice seem picturesque and amusing and even attractive.

Now, this is exactly what Ernest Dowson never could do. He was a member, it will be remembered, of that little band of aesthetic poets which was called The Rhymers Club. With them he spent certain evenings at the Ches.h.i.+re Cheese, and there he drank absinthe. This is a significant and symbolic fact. Not in some ominous Parisian cellar, but beneath the beamed ceiling of a most British inn, still stained with smoke from the pipe of Dr. Samuel Johnson, among thick mutton chops and tankards of musty ale, in a cloud of sweet-scented steam that rose from the parted crust of the magnificent pigeon pie, Ernest Dowson drank absinthe.

There is splendid symbolism in Ernest Dowson's act of drinking absinthe in the Ches.h.i.+re Cheese. The wickedness in his poems and his prose sketches is always as affected and incongruous as is that pallid medicine in any honest tavern.

He tried hard to be pagan. In the manner of Mr. Swinburne, he exclaims: ”G.o.ddess the laughter-loving, Aphrodite, Aphrodite, befriend! Let me have peace of thee, truce of thee, golden one, send!” And not even Mr.

Swinburne ever wrote lines so absolutely unconvincing. He said ”I go where the wind blows, Chloe, and am not sorry at all.” And from this lyric no one can fail to get the impression that the poet was very sorry indeed.

Ernest Dowson was an accomplished artist in words, a delicate sensitive and graceful genius, but he was no more fitted to be a pagan than to be a policeman. And so, in his best known poems, he uses all the pagan properties, all the splendors of sin's pageantry, but his theme, his overmastering thoughts, is a soul-shaking lament for his stained faithfulness, for his treason to the Catholic ideal of chast.i.ty.

Ernest Dowson could not write poems that really were pagan. He was not a true decadent. And for this undoubtedly he now is thanking G.o.d. He had his foolish hours: he sometimes misused his gift of song. But--and this is the important thing about it--he did not know how to misuse it successfully. The real Ernest Dowson was not the picturesque vagabond about whom Mr. Blackie Murdoch has written, but the man who with all his heart praised ”meekness and vigilance and chast.i.ty,” who ”was faithful”

in his pathetic ineffective fas.h.i.+on, who knew at last the fidelity of his eternal Mother, who, in Katherine Bregy's beautiful words, ”laid his broken body in consecrated ground and followed his bruised soul, with her pitiful asperging prayers.”

In considering the eccentricities of ”The Savoy” and ”The Yellow Book,”

in considering all the literary and artistic artificialities of the eighteen-nineties, it seems to me that one real value of the cult of peac.o.c.ks and green carnations, of artificial paganism and sophisticated loveliness, is that it furnishes a splendidly contrasting background for the white genius of Lionel Johnson.

This aristocratic and wealthy young Oxford graduate might so easily have become an aesthete and nothing more! His environment, many of his friends.h.i.+ps, even his disciples.h.i.+p, as it may be called, to Walter Pater might naturally be expected to cause him to develop into a mere dilettante, interested only in delicate and superficial beauty, having, by way of moral code, an earnest desire to live up to his blue chine.

Instead, what was Lionel Johnson? He was a sound and accomplished scholar, writing Latin hymns that for their grace and authentic ecclesiastical style might stand beside those of Adam of St. Victor or of St. Bernard himself. Nor was he less deft in his manipulation of the style of the cla.s.sical authors, as many graceful lines show. And this, remember, was at a time when Latin was most absolutely a dead language to most young English poets, whose attention was given entirely to the picturesque attractions of the Parisian _argot_ beloved of the decadents.

The aesthetic movement of the eighteen-nineties was merely a search for beauty--merely a revolt against Victorian agnosticism and materialism.