The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson | Page 7

were all æsthetic, almost technical ones,
such as a theory, indicated by his preference for the line of Poe, that the
letter "v" was the most beautiful of the letters, and could never be
brought into verse too often. For any more abstract theories he had
neither tolerance nor need. Poetry as a philosophy did not exist for him;
it existed solely as the loveliest of the arts. He loved the elegance of
Horace, all that was most complex in the simplicity of Poe, most
birdlike in the human melodies of Verlaine. He had the pure lyric gift,
unweighted or unballasted by any other quality of mind or emotion;
and a song, for him, was music first, and then whatever you please
afterwards, so long as it suggested, never told, some delicate sentiment,
a sigh or a caress; finding words, at times, as perfect as the words of a
poem headed, "O Mors! quam amara est memoria tua homini pacem
habenti in substantiis suis."
There, surely, the music of silence speaks, if it has ever spoken. The
words seem to tremble back into the silence which their whisper has
interrupted, but not before they have created for us a mood, such a
mood as the Venetian Pastoral of Giorgione renders in painting.
Languid, half inarticulate, coming from the heart of a drowsy sorrow
very conscious of itself, and not less sorrowful because it sees its own
face looking mournfully back out of the water, the song seems to have
been made by some fastidious amateur of grief, and it has all the sighs
and tremors of the mood, wrought into a faultless strain of music.
Stepping out of a paradise in which pain becomes so lovely, he can see
the beauty which is the other side of madness, and, in a sonnet, "To
One in Bedlam," can create a more positive, a more poignant mood,
with fine subtlety.
Here, in the moment's intensity of this comradeship with madness,
observe how beautiful the whole thing becomes; how instinctively the
imagination of the poet turns what is sordid into a radiance, all stars
and flowers and the divine part of forgetfulness! It is a symbol of the
two sides of his own life: the side open to the street, and the side turned
away from it, where he could "hush and bless himself with silence." No
one ever worshipped beauty more devoutly, and just as we see him here
transfiguring a dreadful thing with beauty, so we shall see, everywhere

in his work, that he never admitted an emotion which he could not so
transfigure. He knew his limits only too well; he knew that the deeper
and graver things of life were for the most part outside the circle of his
magic; he passed them by, leaving much of himself unexpressed,
because he would not permit himself to express nothing imperfectly, or
according to anything but his own conception of the dignity of poetry.
In the lyric in which he has epitomised himself and his whole life, a
lyric which is certainly one of the greatest lyrical poems of our time,
"Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae," he has for once said
everything, and he has said it to an intoxicating and perhaps immortal
music.
Here, perpetuated by some unique energy of a temperament rarely so
much the master of itself, is the song of passion and the passions, at
their eternal war in the soul which they quicken or deaden, and in the
body which they break down between them. In the second book, the
book of "Decorations," there are a few pieces which repeat, only more
faintly, this very personal note. Dowson could never have developed;
he had already said, in his first book of verse, all that he had to say.
Had he lived, had he gone on writing, he could only have echoed
himself; and probably it would have been the less essential part of
himself; his obligation to Swinburne, always evident, increasing as his
own inspiration failed him. He was always without ambition, writing to
please his own fastidious taste, with a kind of proud humility in his
attitude towards the public, not expecting or requiring recognition. He
died obscure, having ceased to care even for the delightful labour of
writing. He died young, worn out by what was never really life to him,
leaving a little verse which has the pathos of things too young and too
frail ever to grow old.
ARTHUR SYMONS.
1900.
THE POEMS OF ERNEST DOWSON
TO MISSIE (A. P.)
IN PREFACE: FOR ADELAIDE

To you, who are my verses, as on some very future day, if you ever
care to read them, you will understand, would it not be somewhat
trivial to dedicate any one verse, as I may do, in