The sun., 1919-08-17

DOWsOn: Amateur of Grief

oil those disastrous beings, poelSJ
especially of those whose lives are lived
madly, inharmoniously and with no pat
tern. The chronicles of Villon, Verlaine,
Baudelaire, Gerond de Ncrval, Chatter
ton Poe and Ernest Dowson are the secret
escapes of those doomed to perpetual
sanity responsibility and righteousness.
All the world goes stunning in the IL
braries. Their hearts cry out to the vaga-
bond gods of rhyme and unreason, Take
lis with you, for we die of sanity" But
they do not see the other side of the pic
ture, summed up in that terrible cry OF
Mirabeau. "Great God! give me medic
crityr'
The "other side" comes out in all its
pathos and terror in Arthur Symons's
magnificent essay on Ernest Dowson,
which serves as preface to The Poems and
Prose Of Ernest DOtCson, volume IN the
Modern Library, published by Bonn q
Liveright. Symons has a mind that IL
subtle, delicate and lyrical at once. 1t Is
a shutup mind, thinkers mind, mind
that is at its supremest in nuance and
shadow 1t weaves rare stuffs on the loom
of exact words. 1t is a surgical mind,
Sitting the spirits Of poets and novellsts
into shreds, carving with TIE sureness Of
a master through the invisible organs OF
the brain and the heart.
Dowson comes to his pen naturally.
r. $500, o,aofoI Coz S1raopc IN urrito
about. Dowson lived so that Symons
could explain him. An "amateur Of
GRIEF Symons calls the poet in his per-
feet essay on that curious London night
hawk and idealizer of mattresses. In
Symons's pages one recalls the imaginary
portraits of Walter Pater. But it is no
imaginary portrait that the great English
critic poet has done of the author OF
Cvnara, or To One in Bedlcm
Dowson, who died when he was thirty
three, resembled Poe and Verlaine in that
love that both had for the sordid-angels
who feel the perpetual nostalgia for the
cutters. 1t is an evil thing for men
with tremendous poetieal imaginations to
be born on earth. In seeking for the
bright particular star of their psychic
origin they step into sewers. Dowson
was not as great a poet as either Poe or
Verlaine, but he had the melancholy
ironic imaginations and his will evapor-
ated in his visions.
Symons tells us that he never knew
an occasion on which he could resist the
call Of the glass. He was i'll at ease in
"refned surroundings" He loved the
sordid, the "Pentonville omnibus of
Ruskins sneer. Leo Halles. in Paris;
the waterside in Dieppe, where he was al
WAYS in a row with drunken sailors; the
docks of London, the all night cabman's
coffee house were his Versailles and his
Bayreuth "Seeing himself moving to the
sound of lutes in some courtly disguise,
down an alley of Watteau's Versailles.
while he touched fingertips with a divine
creature in rose leaf silks, what was there
left for him as the dream obstinately re-
fused to realize itself, but blind flight
into some Teniers kitchen, where Doors
are making merry without thought of yes
terday or tomorrow There perhaps
in that ferment of animal life he could
forget life as he dreamed it with two faint
a hold upon his dreams to make dreams
come true"
This "demoralized Keats" coughed his
life out in a bricklayer's cottage near
Catford in the year 1921, the same year
that another exquisite and mournful son
of the gods tossed himself away in his
eighteenth year into the Delaware River.
The paradox of Dowson, as of Verlaine
and Poe, was that his physical life no.
where influenced his poetry or his prose
Exquisite and virginia. verse of tenuous
material, sometimes echoing Swinburne,
sometimes Poe, sometimes Verlaine;
simple Francis Thompson, his writings
are for the amateurs of the beautiful, the