Ernest Dowson: Lyric Lives 019288476X, 9780192884763

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Ernest Dowson

Ernest Dowson Lyric Lives R O BERT STA R K

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Robert Stark 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2023941133 ISBN 9780192884763 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192884763.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

For Arthur McGregor Stark

Acknowledgements This manuscript was begun in Uppsala as the global novel coronavirus pandemic began, and completed in Mie, Japan as it continued, drawing extensively upon manuscript holdings in the United States and Great Britain. It could not have been completed without the generous open research initiatives of several leading private and public libraries, and the kind assistance of many dedicated research librarians working under immensely trying circumstances: thank you for supporting this work. For permission to quote from Dowson’s fair-copy manuscript notebook, the so-called Flower Notebook (MA 1480), and related holograph material, and to reproduce ‘Claire: la Lune!’ here, I must thank the Morgan Library and Museum, New York: gaining access to this material—a gift of C. Waller Barrett, 1953—was a revelation. I am delighted to acknowledge the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tolden Foundations, for providing access to Dowson’s authorial proof of Decorations: In Verse and Prose, and for permission to reproduce its title page here. I am immensely obliged to Princeton University Library for providing liberal remote access to their Ernest Dowson Collection and to the J. Harlin O’Connell Collection on English Artists, 1825–1952, and for permission to cite therefrom. My thanks are also due to the British Library Board for permission to quote from Add MS 45135, and to reproduce the image of Dowson as a Child from page 8. Thanks, also, to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, for access to, and permission to cite from, Dowson’s unpublished letters. I gladly acknowledge the Bibliothèque nationale de France for permission to reproduce the photograph of William Theodore Peters; the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research for permission to reproduce the photograph of Lillie Langtry; and the Agence Photographique de la Réunion des musées nationaux for permission to reproduce Un dimanche, enfants de Marie by Henri Guinier. I am especially obliged to Prior John Babeau of St Hugh’s Charterhouse for the virtual hospitality and patient explanations, for allowing me to cite the Chronicle of St Hugh’s, and to reproduce Antoine Sublet’s mural, Le martyr de religieux sous Henri VIII, installed on the south wall of the Fathers’ Chapterhouse. I wish to acknowledge the support of Nobunari Ito, Dean of the Faculty of Education at Mie University, for granting research leave to pursue this project outside of the university teaching term. Tom Clayton and Jad Adams both read versions of Ch. 1 early in the evolution of this project: I am indebted to their erudition, and appreciative of their encouragement. It appeared in Victorian Poetry 61.1 (2023)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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and is republished by permission of West Virginia University Press. As the book took shape, Joseph Bristow and several anonymous reviewers offered stimulating and generative readings of sample materials from which, I hope, the accomplished monograph derives substantial nourishment (my opening parallel is only the most conspicuous leaning upon this spirited and wise counsel). I am very much obliged to Jack McNichol at Oxford University Press, and Michelle Houston at Edinburgh University Press, for soliciting such helpful readings; and to Jack for supporting the project in every conceivable way. Emma Varley has, likewise, been a superb cicerone throughout the book production process; Aimee Wright and Raja Dharmaraj have also been brilliant to work with in this regard. Thank you. I would also like to acknowledge the crucial early support of Jacqueline Norton and Karen Raith. The Verlaine translation given in epigraph was made in collaboration with Seb Doubinsky: a most excellent comrade all ways. Special thanks to Shaune Larder, Craig Sower, and Mas Hirayama; to Matthew Schum, Jean-Christophe Paquin, Gerald MacLean, Adrian Harding, Jerry Holt, and Željka Švrljuga; and, particularly, to Katie White. Three extraordinary teachers gifted me the capacity to read lyric poetry with absorption and occasional discernment: Tom Clayton, Peter Firchow, and Brian Goldberg. I am more appreciative of their example and kindness each passing year. Tom and Brian know best what obstacles to completion a title such as this must overcome: without their guidance and forbearance Ernest Dowson: Lyric Lives would never have edged out of the shadows (the fault, however, is my own). Most of all, I want to thank Marta Sánchez Salvà, whose sympathetic intelligence and boundless camaraderie transformed this freakish and dawdling renaissance into a daily adventure.

Contents List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Muses’ Sterner Laws

x xi

1

1. The Right Type of Girl

31

2. Love (In the Shade)

54

3. The All-Absorbing Subject

78

4. Still Point of the Turning World

104

5. Dowson’s Lunatic Asylum

127

6. The Reign of Reverie

154

7. Betwixt the Bounds of Life and Death

180

8. The End of All the Songs

207

Afterlives: In Epilogue

232

Bibliography Index

238 248

List of Illustrations I.1. Ernest Dowson as a Child. Sam Smith Mss. © British Library Board Add MS 45135.

25

1.1. ‘Mrs Langtry in “As in a Looking-Glass”’. Photograph by B. J. Falk, 1887. Reproduced by permission from the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Madison WI.

35

1.2. Titlepage, Love’s Aftermath: Poems in Verse and Prose. Dowson’s authorial proof of Decorations: In Verse and Prose. Reproduced by permission of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tolden Foundations.

42

1.3. ‘Claire: la Lune!’ The Flower Notebook. Reproduced by permission of The Morgan Library & Museum, MA 1480. Gift of C. Waller Barrett, 1953.

49

3.1. Henri Jules Guinier, Un dimanche, enfants de Marie. Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille. Reproduced by permission of the Agence Photographique de la Réunion des musées nationaux. Photo © PBA, Lille, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Jacques Quecq d’Henripret.

87

4.1. ‘Carthusian Monks, Cowfold Monastery’. Depicting the monks’ spatiamentum, or weekly community walk. Postcard. Postmarked July 1906. Unknown artist.

106

4.2. Antoine Sublet, Le Martyr de religieux sous Henri VIII (1888–1891), oil painting on mounted canvas; with Christ on the Cross (1883), oil on canvas. St Hugh’s Chapterhouse, Cowfold, Sussex. Reproduced by courtesy of Prior John Babeau.

112

5.1. Eustace Frederick Calland, Portrait de M. Peters. Armand Dayot and Photo-Club de Paris, Première Exposition d’A rt Photographique (Paris, 1894), 60r. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Peters is pictured wearing his admired ‘Renaissance Cloak’.

138

List of Abbreviations AR CM CP D Dil. E F L LA

NCE NL P PM RC S SS V W YB

Dowson and Arthur Moore, Adrian Rome. Methuen, 1899. Dowson and Arthur Moore, A Comedy of Masks. 3 vols. Heinemann, 1893. Collected Poems, edited by R. K. R. Thornton with Caroline Dowson. Birmingham University Press, 2003. Decorations: In Verse and Prose. Smithers, 1899. Dilemmas: Stories and Studies in Sentiment. Elkin Mathews, 1895. In Cynara’s Shadow: Collected Essays on Ernest Dowson, edited by Alice Condé and Jessica Gossling. Peter Lang, 2019. The Flower Notebook, MA 1480. The Morgan Library and Museum, New York. The Letters of Ernest Dowson, edited by Desmond Flower and Henry Maas. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1967. Love’s Aftermath: Poems in Verse and Prose, proof of Decorations: In Verse and Prose (1899), marked for Dowson. Unnumbered. Berg Collection, New York Public Library. The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd edn, edited by Thomas Carson and Joann Cerrito. Thomson Gale, 2002. New Letters from Ernest Dowson, edited by Desmond Flower. Whittington, 1984. The Poems of Ernest Dowson, edited by Mark Longaker. Pennsylvania University Press, 1962. The Pierrot of the Minute, A Dramatic Phantasy in One Act. Smithers, 1897. The Book of the Rhymers’ Club. Elkin Mathews, 1892. The Stories of Ernest Dowson, edited by Mark Longaker. Pennsylvania University Press, 1947. Add MS 45135, British Library, presented by Samuel Smith. Verses. Smithers, 1896. The Poetical Works of Ernest Dowson, edited by Desmond Flower. Cassell, 1934. The Yellow Book, edited by Henry Harland. (Elkin Mathews and) Lane, 1894–7.

Caprice O Poet! Faux poor-man and faux rich, man of truth Whose wealth and penury still front untruth, How, then, do you want us to trust your heart? Snaky hoodlum at times, or Sumptuous Sir, From the expectant green light to solemn swart Your cloak ever shows some jokey ware: A button is missing. A piece of thread curls. Whence comes This stain? and this—maladroit or most welcome— That sniggers and sobs on the cloth, in the wool? A knot snarled and finely-tied; a shoe shiny and dull. In short, a man to hang himself upon the lantern-post Or stroll under the stars, as the saying goes. Scrounger, but not like that; singular man, solely true. Poet—say—if your words be untrue You aint, and to hell with your words! Ill-stars Attend those, demented, who never lusted for The moon that heats the womanless and destitute, Ah! Death! to cradle hearts unfortunate. Poor tumbled hearts, too nice, too proud, certain, For irony flourishes on pretty lips; you ascertain Heart-wounds more pierced than a practice target, Puny Jesus-hearts! How execrable. Go, Poet, among men distinctly veritable: Die saved, but don’t starve yet. Paul Verlaine

Remember, if you can, Not him who lingers, but that other man, Who loved and sang, and had a beating heart, — ‘In Tempore Senectutis’ (1892)

Introduction The Muses’ Sterner Laws

Poor Legendary Poet At the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Maxwell Scott of The Shinbone Star tears up and burns the editorial he has been working on, whose happenings are relived in the course of the film: ‘This is the West, Sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’¹ Scott knows instinctively what passes for saleable copy, and is mindful that truth, laid bare so long after the fact, would only damage Ransom Stoddard’s reputation. So, when James Stewart’s character finally departs Shinbone upon the apex of his political ascent—including appointments as State Governor, Senator, British Ambassador, and Vice-Presidential nominee—the ironic last words of the film pose a more existential dilemma, even, than Lee Marvin’s droll summons to a pointless showdown in the street. ‘Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance’, he is merrily informed. Ranse has been mistaken for this man his whole career, even assuming, briefly, he was that man himself. If he aspires to a political future, he will have to go on allowing such well-intended congratulations to stand, uncorrected. But Ranse has just come from the funeral of Tom Doniphon, the true titular character and disremembered local hero, played by John Wayne: he winces at the misnomer. Held so long to ransom by legend, will he forego his Junction City connection with the eastbound express, and apparent destiny, settle in Shinbone as threatened, come clean?² I begin this book at the other end of the line; far east of Shinbone; eccentric, in some ways, of institutionalized literary studies; at the valance of liberty, so to speak. Retaining confidence in fact, having pieced together an obliterate, disregarded story, I intend to use my copy; not to swell a reputation but to acknowledge a dispossession. For the lives of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde, men who ‘stood in symbolic relation to the art and culture of [their] age’, have not been so completely sensationalized by their acquaintances and initial critics, nor has their work ¹ The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, directed by John Ford, featuring John Wayne, James Stewart, Vera Miles, and Lee Marvin (Paramount, 1962). ² In the original tale, Ransome Foster ‘could have got rid of the weight of that affair long ago . . . by telling the truth’; but he ‘owe[d] . . . too much’ to Bert Barricune, ‘his Nemesis, his lifelong enemy and the man who made him great’, to ever tell the truth (Dorothy M. Johnson, Indian Country [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996], 106, 104).

Ernest Dowson. Robert Stark, Oxford University Press. © Robert Stark (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192884763.003.0001

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ERNEST DOWSON

been so thoroughly collapsed into the cults of their respective personalities, as has been the life and work of Ernest Christopher Dowson (2 August 1867–23 February 1900), the object of the present study.³ Like that of Ransom Stoddard, Dowson’s case reveals the blinding, obfuscatory power of unhinged, professional gossip, howsoever inspiring the original deeds, however civic-minded their approval or censure. Dowson’s posthumous career, that once seemed relatively assured, has puttered into dotage, and stands on the precipice of irrelevance and oblivion. This book aims to usher the once pre-eminent poète maudit off the legendary locomotive, if only to resume his minor, but dignified and decorous, place in the parish chronicle. What stands to be gained depends on whether we have collectively retained some use for sustained, empirical, textual, and biographical criticism, which may seem, at this hermeneutic juncture, unworldly. Like John Ford, I have shot in black and white, when Technicolor, and astounding special effects, are available and expected. My washed-out cast will seem sprier for their austere framing and sympathetic shadows, perhaps, but this is not a conservative choice. An unsophisticated book is wanted because, in Dowson’s case, the facts are straightforward; they have been neglected and distorted, but may yet prove generative, of insights into his life and work, and into the fascinating epoch in which he strived and wrought. An empirical, chronological treatment stands a fighting chance of dispelling the mythopoeic haze, of undoing the cumulative dilapidation of more than a century of sensational commentary. Well-intended journalism once served Dowson’s reputation admirably; it now does humiliating disservice to his work. Marion Plarr (daughter of Dowson’s confidante, Victor) may have first appreciated that the decisive part of his posterity was the wholesale fabrication of a literary life. Written when the cult of Dowson’s personality was at its zenith—in the 1930s and 1940s he was regarded almost as the equal of Keats, and his poems were apparently bawled out by undergraduates at wee hours in the streets of England’s most venerable university towns—Cynara: The Story of Ernest and Adelaide (1933) blatantly fictionalized what everyone then took to be the salient aspects of Dowson’s life and work: his thwarted amorous relations with Ellen Adelaide Mary Foltinowicz, the eleven-year-old child he first encountered as a twenty-twoyear-old man about town, and fell precipitously in love with. Plarr’s novel is not more inept than what has sometimes passed for Dowson criticism. It has the merit of insinuating (however inadvertently) that secondary commentary—her father’s important memoir of Dowson, for example—is inevitably misrepresentational. To state this perfectly obvious fact so plainly was an affront to Dowson’s serious critics because they were essentially engaged in the same spurious confabulation. Plarr’s

³ Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert HartDavis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 729.

INTRODUCTION: THE MUSES’ STERNER L AWS

3

fictive approach was, nevertheless, a well-established way of responding to Decadent writing. ‘To organize the fragments of someone else’s life into intelligible and probably parts, in order to translate the whole into a story: what impertinence!’, wrote Mallarmé, of Rimbaud: ‘A ll I can do is push to the limits this kind of misdeed’.⁴ Plarr’s novel also extends Dowson’s own effort to write vie romancée, in his strangely contrived short fiction and two collaborative novels written with Arthur Moore. Indeed, Dowson’s whole oeuvre is best understood as a kind of ‘Decadent life writing’, situated on a spectrum including biography, memoir, and imaginary portraiture, and defined by what Crowell and Murray call that genre’s ‘speculative, sensual, experimental’ orientation.⁵ ‘Because they depend on and refer to life’, Potolsky adds, such ‘forms highlight the way art modifies its “rough material”’.⁶ By extension, the secondary literature which Dowson’s life and work gives rise to in the early twentieth century, of which Cynara is exemplary, can, for want of a better term, be called Decadent criticism. Plarr’s title calls attention to the hermeneutic difficulty posed by Dowson’s lyric corpus by repeating his most famous classical allusion, to Horace and thence to Sappho. As critics periodically remark, Cynara means ‘artichoke’ in Latin, hardly a dignified emblem of the beloved. Artichokes are a species of thistle: the edible part of the plant consists of flower buds which are yet to bloom. Artichoke flowers are astonishing, extraterrestrial detonations of colour, matching Dowson’s description of ‘Lunar roses pale and blue’ in ‘A Requiem’.⁷ As they are cultivated for human consumption, artichokes are seldom permitted to flower; buds and bracts are stripped away, prematurely, to get at the succulent centre. The spatiotemporal axes of Dowson’s pre-eminent symbol proclaim a distal poiesis of doomed anticipation. More so, even, than the allusive writing of his contemporaries, his lyrics consist of tightly woven, organic networks of inflorescence. He is guarded and disingenuous about the personal circumstances which inform them. Their dense intertextualities and self-similarities are often their most distinctive, as they are, in Potolsky’s terms (whose work is seminal in this regard), their most Decadent, features. ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae’, certainly, is structured and presented in this fashion: meaning and truth do palpably exist, and are obtainable, but they are enfolded in allusive nutritional strata; extra-articulations that ⁴ Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, translated by Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 71. ⁵ Ellen Crowell and Alex Murray, ‘Writing Decadent Lives and Letters’, Decadence: A Literary History, edited by Alex Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 378. ⁶ Matthew Potolsky, ‘Decadence and Realism’, Victorian Literature and Culture 49.4 (winter 2021): 571. ⁷ Dowson’s poems are short and readily available; as editors invariably follow the text of Verses (1896), Decorations: In Verse and Prose (1899), and editorial precedent when canonical texts are unavailable, I will offer no verse citation except a title, unless disambiguation is required. Similarly, prose citations are keyed in principle to Dilemmas: Stories and Studies in Sentiment (1895), and to the first published editions of subsequently appearing stories and novels. Line numbers are included for The Pierrot of the Minute, A Dramatic Phantasy in One Act (1897). Dowson’s translations—the first of which appeared relatively late, in 1894—are omitted from this study.

4

ERNEST DOWSON

may, finally, be inseparable from the primary lyrical designation, the genii of the poem. Dowson’s beloved isn’t likened to an artichoke unwittingly or for nothing. The eccentric symbol governs his extensively layered, reticulated approach to making lyrical sense. But the figure also describes the epistemology and hermeneutic structure of the secondary material which arose to champion that work, and which culminated in what John Gawsworth termed the ‘Dowson Legend’, a ‘mélange of lurid half-truths’ masquerading as literary criticism that introduces (and proleptically dismisses) Dowson as a drunkard, a debauchee, and a latent paedophile.⁸ The etymology is instructive: legends were originally readings, stories that were read.⁹ Inverting the Shinbone adage, they become fact by being printed. The cumulative effect of such pseudo-criticism—journalism, really, wherein each new bract becomes an increasingly extrinsic outgrowth of the vegetable structure, always more removed from the succulent kernel of the text—is to perpetrate a heavy-duty swindle like that which transforms Ransom Stoddard into The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Two pernicious aspects of this mechanism must be identified at the outset of this inquiry: first, a stubborn observer effect comes to govern the reception of Dowson’s work. The more authority is invested in the legend, the less fathomable become all datapoints which do not adequate to myth, no matter how intrinsically knowable they are. Dowson’s relationship with Decadent tradition; his love of France and its culture; his Catholicism; his long battle with tuberculosis; and abandonment of creative writing—to take only the most vital facets of his vibrant text-life—are obscured in consequence. Second, an unshakeable dogma has arisen that makes Dowson’s writing ‘so essentially poetic’ that it surrenders its ‘fragile . . . hold on outward things’.¹⁰ If this judgement is fundamentally correct on a stylistic level, it has been taken wildly out of context to imply that Dowson’s canon amounts to one prolonged abstraction without human interest. Symons meant nothing of the sort, and wrote in the same essay that People will complain, probably, in his verses, of what will seem to them the factitious melancholy, the factitious idealism, and (peeping through at a few rare moments) the factitious suggestions of riot. They will see only a literary affectation where in truth there is as poignant a note of personal sincerity as in the more explicit and arranged confessions of less admirable poets. Yes, in these few, evasive, immaterial snatches of song, I find, implied for the most part, hidden away ⁸ John Gawsworth, ‘The Dowson Legend’, Essays by Divers Hands 17 (1938): 93–123; Nick Freeman, ‘“The Harem of Words”: Attenuation and Excess in Decadent Poetry’, Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle, edited by Jason David Hall and Alex Murray (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 95. ⁹ ‘Legend, n.’ All subsequent definitions are from the Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edition online (Oxford University Press). https://www.oed.com. Accessed Dec. 2022. ¹⁰ Arthur Symons, ‘A Literary Causerie: On a Book of Verses’, Savoy 4 (Aug. 1896), 91.

INTRODUCTION: THE MUSES’ STERNER L AWS

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like a secret, all the fever and turmoil and the unattained dreams of a life which has itself had much of the swift, disastrous, and suicidal energy of genius. (93)

Life there surely is in Dowson’s verse, ‘fever and turmoil’, but ‘implied for the most part, hidden away like a secret’. Yeats concurred: ‘one feels the pressure of his life behind every line as if he were a character in a play of Shakespeare’s’.¹¹ The mistaken notion that his verse is ethereal and vapid results from a gradual failure to appreciate its essential verisimilitude, and from Longaker’s authoritative and apparently unassailable reading of ‘Non sum qualis’, which, balking at the identification of the addressee with Foltinowicz, concludes that the poem ‘result[s]’ from ‘a feeling of deviation from an ideal of love [not] from an attachment to a child’.¹² The famous allusion then becomes an inert cypher: ‘if Cynara is not Adelaide then she is “in Horace” or else “She isn’t anybody”’, Longaker says (82; quoting Marion Plarr, 51). This has become the normative reading of the lyric, banishing any thought that Dowson might have had a real, live, lover in mind when he drafted it. His whole canon is then presumed to operate on the same inane basis. Stated in once conventional terms, Dowson’s densely networked texts epitomize a structuralist ideal of language, maximally intensified for lyrical expression. They wear a Saussurean connectedness conspicuously upon their sleeves. Dowson may not be more allusive than other poets, but his writing is more self-similar, and he endeavours to make a salient fact of this. Linda Dowling recognizes that Dowson’s mature style is achieved by severely limiting what we may call his verbal palette, and by frequent repetition of lines, half-lines, and words, most notably in the poetic forms like the villanelle, where repetition is, as it were, written into the form. Dowson’s ‘wine, women and song’ are thus not so much synecdochical of a larger world as, along with a few other master-words—‘vanity,’ ‘child,’ ‘gray,’ ‘roses,’ ‘tired,’ ‘weep’—constitutive of the only world there is. Indeed, we may say of Dowson what Geoffrey Hartman has said of Valéry, namely, that his reduction of poetic symbols to a very few confers upon them the power of abstract variables whose meaning resides in a system—a system, moreover, that is largely indifferent to the usual responsibilities of representation.¹³ ¹¹ W. B. Yeats, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, edited by Allan Wade (London: Hart-Davis, 1954), 548. ¹² Longaker, Ernest Dowson (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), 83. Dowson’s short fiction then becomes ‘chaste, restrained records of suffering, of devotion to an ideal’ (S, 8). As Potolsky reminds us, ‘Verisimilitude was a key term in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critical theory and described a very different way of thinking about the reality of fiction. Stressing rule, order, and convention above mere reflection, the doctrine argues that art should be probable and lifelike but never imitate life directly’ (Potolsky, ‘Decadence and Realism’, 568). ¹³ Linda C. Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siecle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 205–6. To claim, however, that Dowson’s achievement ‘is reached through parsimony rather than expropriation’ diminishes the importance of allusivity and self-similarity in his writing (204).

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ERNEST DOWSON

While this line of inquiry has been thoughtfully pursued—by Weiner, Freeman, and most systematically, by Potolsky—Dowling’s intervention has not been widely appreciated.¹⁴ Moreover, if Dowson’s verse is strictly matrixed, its reception is, too. In general, his writing has been poorly served by a facile assumption that it is incompatible with informed theoretical criticism. This may ‘yield now and then to simple appreciation’, as Swann avows, but must not be permitted to fall into abeyance.¹⁵ Where professional criticism has proven unequal to Dowson’s parsimonious challenge, this is largely because of the obduracy of its own selfpropelled, autotelic myths, and the unacknowledged sensibilities served by its orotund legends, not—and this is my major, unspoken contention—not because of any irredeemable literary demerit. If Dowson and his work appear unsuited to our times, this is mainly because it has been presented to twenty-first-century readers in degenerate terms, by journalists whose interests are well served by literary tittle-tattle, not truth. Herein lies the significance of this study for readers who will never care for Dowson’s writing, whatever may be pleaded for it. For more than a century, it has been afforded a grudging canonical allowance, while being stifled in the service of a dubious cult of personality, which renders it Decadent at all costs. Dowson employed the word just once in print, at the end of ‘Transition’, where a distinct prosodic emphasis on the second syllable restricts its scope to solar declension.¹⁶ He is, properly, an ‘æsthetic’ poet; not in Pater’s sense, exactly, but in a sense devolved from Pater. His absorbing biography has been vulgarized until it became a lurid fable. Otherwise discerning readers have contentedly abjured the evidence of his poems and stories—in an era that feted close reading, no less—in order that Dowson should appear irremediably drunk, drug-addled, and depraved, the better to serve as foil to his distinguished inheritors. In default of a critical account of Decadence, this is not surprising. Dowson became the minor example which established a Modernist majority: he would have to be invented if he did not exist. Indeed, he was invested with the status of exemplary poète maudit—by W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound especially—expressly to perform this function.¹⁷ Yet as Marion Plarr realized, the implied poet-lover of Verses, like the belligerent and doomed ¹⁴ See Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, ‘Sight and Sound in the Poetic World of Ernest Dowson’, NineteenthCentury Literature 60.4 (Mar. 2006): 481–509; Nick Freeman, ‘Harem of Words’, 83–99; Matthew Potolsky, The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). ¹⁵ Thomas B. Swann, Preface, Ernest Dowson (New York: Twaine, 1964). ¹⁶ Dowson’s correspondence makes no reference to Decadence as such. ¹⁷ Modernism must ‘disavow . . . any connection to the Decadents’, and ‘discredit’ them, ‘in order to promote Modernist originality and newness’ (Kirsten MacLeod, Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing, and the Fin de Siècle [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006], 153). The 1890s are therefore ‘the most misunderstood decade of the entire Victorian Age’, as a direct result of ‘propaganda by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Roger Fry and others, who postulated an autonomous poetic revolution emerging phoenix-like from the ashes of the nineteenth century’ (Chris Snodgrass, ‘The Poetry of the 1890s’, A Companion to Victorian Poetry, edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison [Oxford: Blackwell, 2002], 321).

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poetaster of The Trembling of the Veil or the lewd debauchee of ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’, was already a dead ringer, an allusion, as feigned as ‘Cynara’ herself. The other cornerstone of the ‘Dowson Legend’, the authorial and critical promotion of Foltinowicz to become the co-original force of his writing, is also a canard: Dowson did not write extensively about her, in verse.¹⁸ Her ascent to the critically unassailable position of ‘muse’, the virtual collaborator in Dowson’s whole imaginative enterprise, must serve as a warning about the propensity of well-intentioned academic discourse towards self-propulsion and sovereignty, to falsify reality in the service of ideology. On this point, Edward Said still speaks with greatest force and clarity. The miniscule mythopoeias of the ‘Dowson Legend’ have little obviously in common with the world-shaping metanarratives of orientalism, but they exemplify the same epistemological dearth of construction. The cardinal error of the ‘Dowson Legend’ is structural: the author’s supposed creative fealty to Foltinowicz serves ‘as both the starting and the end point . . . of analysis’, bestowing upon the discourse its ‘special cogency’.¹⁹ As Said says of orientalism, it amounts ‘after all [to] a system for citing works and authors’ (23). In all such configurations, truth ‘becomes a function of learned judgement, not of the material itself, which in time seems to owe even its existence’ to the legendizing critical establishment (67). Scholarship is thus reduced to conspiracy theory, in the etymological sense of that term. This is the impasse to which Dowson scholarship has been brought, led by the author himself: the mythopoeias which he instigated have become truistic and hegemonic, while the confirmation biases of their adherents have grossly streamlined his canon, to the point of inanity. Decadent poetics has engendered Decadent criticism: debauched in the etymological sense, it has ‘draw[n] away from the workshop, from [its] work or duty’, been led astray by phony enticements, become extravagant, deviant, self-indulgent.²⁰ The ‘Dowson Legend’ is injurious not only to Foltinowicz and the other girl friends whom Dowson writes for and about, but ultimately to the durability of his writing. We must inquire why generations of critics have been so eager to cast the author as a hidebound muse-poet obsessed with a single, female child, when the evidence so often contradicts his assertion of the fact. We must also ask, following Said, more disturbing questions about whom the legends serve. Jad Adams notes how ‘Dowson’s bourgeois friends . . . lived to tell tales of him’, and hints that some, among them Edgar Jepson, Robert Sherard, and Victor Plarr, lived in part

¹⁸ Cf. Longaker, 78–9. Less than 20 per cent of Dowson’s extant verse might conceivably speak to or about Foltinowicz, but the actual percentage is probably lower; the same cannot be said of his short prose. ¹⁹ Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1991), 45, 9. ²⁰ ‘Debauch, v.’ ‘While the writing of Decadent lives may have become over the course of the twentieth century more reliable’, Crowell and Murray suggest, ‘it arguably became less Decadent . . . seem[ing] ever further away from the imaginative recasting of lives’ (Decadence, 391–2). Dowson Studies has so far proven resilient to this trend.

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by telling tales about him.²¹ This is true, to a lesser degree, of Pound and Yeats, who authored two Urtexts of the legend, and defined their personal and artistic success in relation to Dowson’s supposedly moribund example. ‘I understood him too well’, says Yeats, ‘for I had been like him but for the appetite that made me search out strong condiments’.²² Plarr observed—or was it Pound himself ?—that Dowson was ‘a kind of classical myth’ to the arch-Modernist, ‘just as the ancients are a myth to us all’.²³ A faltering line of occasional critics and biographers, stickler and contrarian, from Symons down to each contributor to the fine recent volume, In Cynara’s Shadow, which admirably shifts the discursive terrain of Dowson Studies, but does little to dislodge its underlying mistakes and assumptions, must be included among the direct and indirect inheritors of the ‘Dowson Legend’, a guild of small beer beneficiaries that now includes the present author.

The Arrangement of Life As Gawsworth established in his seminal essay, the defining aberrations of Dowson Studies originate in its foundational works, by the likes of Edgar Jepson, Ernest Rhys, Vincent O’Sullivan, W. R. Thomas, Frank Harris, Victor and Marion Plarr, Thomas Swann, Richard Le Gallienne, Grant Richards, Gertrude Atherton, Bernard Muddiman, Arthur Symons, Yeats, and Pound. These are all retrospective interventions, works of memoir catering largely to fashionable interest in their subject, itself confected by predecessor texts, while hazarding only vague and occasional critical surmise. They share the ‘speculative, sensual, experimental’ qualities of what Crowell and Murray call Decadent life writing (Decadence, 378). At its inception, Dowson Studies is stridently intuitive, even by the standard of an emerging, professional literary criticism. It can be termed Decadent, not because directed at a putatively Decadent author, or works, but because its hermeneutic strategies, epistemological structures, and forensic manner (in the etymological sense of belonging to the forum) are themselves Decadent. By accident or design these works reproduce many of the hallmarks of Decadent style, much as New Criticism reflects the priorities of High Modernist style. Predicated upon an inoperative distinction between scholarship and invention— between Victor Plarr’s documentary memoir and Marion Plarr’s make-believe ²¹ Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London: Tauris, 2000), 176. ²² W. B. Yeats, The Autobiography of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 208. Yeats was pursuing a relationship with eighteen-year-old Iseult Gonne when he resumed work on his autobiography in 1915. See Ch. 6, Things Fall Apart. ²³ Victor Plarr, Ernest Dowson 1888–1897: Reminiscences, Unpublished Letters and Marginalia (London: Elkin Mathews, 1914), 28. Pound contributed anonymously to Plarr’s memoir (James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism [London: Oxford University Press, 1988], 166).

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amusements, for instance—Decadent criticism cannot openly acknowledge its own self-interested premises, ad hominem hypotheses, and dicey projections; its biases and unempirical tendencies go largely unexamined. Another perplexing feature of Decadent criticism is its naivety about the selffashioning that fin de siècle authors habitually engage in. By a fashionable project of adjectival cross-pollination, the avant-garde had steadily eroded the traditional distinction between life and art, rendering life artificial, factitious, and insincere, while art, meanwhile, came alive, as Wilde illustrated with a sportive parable. As in The Picture of Dorian Gray, life was thus reconfigured into the quintessential objet d’art; living became the ultimate artwork.²⁴ This was the enabling conceit of Paterian aesthetics, and its culminating heresy. It undermined the presumed authenticity of experience, and subverted the traditional, mimetic basis of art. Dowson took this conceit at least as far its most enthusiastic adherents, Wilde, Symons, and Stenbock. Like his contemporaries, he did not clearly differentiate between life and art, but strove, on the contrary, to confound them. They are parallel provinces in his conception, as valid and primordial as each other. He passed autobiography off as fiction and refashioned expressive lyrics into masquerade, innovations made possible by the a priori bulldozing of the customary referential fields of these respective genres. Every artist utilizes experience, of course, but Dowson came to rely instrumentally upon his stories and poems to secure the private and domestic comforts he desired, to administer his life not just according to, but by means of, his writing. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, when it was already fashionable to treat one’s affairs with mannered circumspection and conscious construction, Dowson took this habit to extremes. His correspondence demonstrates wary, yet concerted, stage management of circumstance and intimate experience on every page. Erotic entanglements, matrimonial aspirations and disappointments, religious and spiritual awakenings, penury, disease, the suicide of both parents: this is the material out of which Dowson spins his variegated epistolary personae—or which he reserves and omits, to the same purpose. His letters are candid and vivacious, but selectively and ingeniously so. Life-altering events are choreographed to accommodate publishing prospects, and vice versa. Silences and reticences are as telling as blatant autobiography, so that Dowson’s intimate history admits a listless prosody. Finally, an all-encompassing vie romancée results which conforms in many respects to the prescribed career path of the poète maudit. As Thornton puts it, Dowson’s ‘source of inspiration was as often art as life and from art came

²⁴ As Dorian puts it, ‘Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation’ (Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Robert Mighall [London: Penguin Classics, 2000], 125; cf. ‘The Critic as Artist’, Intentions, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde [New York: Doubleday, 1923], 5: 125).

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the pattern for his life, his love and his poetry. Those who complain of reading the poems in terms of the life seem to forget that the life is Dowson’s creation too.’²⁵ Much as reportage is held to be the first draft of history, Dowson’s correspondence is the first draft of his canon. It sifts happenstance, selectively resolving the manifold fabulae of actuality into language and sjuzhet, into character and cadence, setting and symbol, etc. His letters routinely include character studies, synopses, publishing schemes, and provisionally completed lyrics. Their collection and publication by Desmond Flower and Henry Maas (in 1967, supplemented by Flower in 1984) are impeccable rejoinders to the Decadent criticism that established Dowson’s notoriety in the early twentieth century. They chiefly demonstrate that any distinction between his guarded private life, and his strategic, artisanal administration of that same lived experience, in verse and prose, is somewhat arbitrary. The intermediation of Dowson’s life and work is so deep-seated, in fact, that we must reject the dichotomy at the outset of this inquiry to understand his writing or his life at all. Instead, the object of this investigation is Dowson’s full-spectrum art-life, his total, literary-experiential production—comprising his acknowledged canon; his correspondence; those vital episodes, whether loudly proclaimed or secreted away, deemed essential to his received autobiography; and, indeed, the mythopoeia he courted in extension of his authorial persona. This confabulated life writ large, this vie romancée, is derivative of, and immanent within, the artist’s pedestrian life, as it is coterminous with his canonical text-life. My approach centres on an imaginary construct, then, but aspires to empirical knowledge concerning that imaginary object, hence my resolutely textual presentation. Paradoxical as it may appear, this method preserves Dowson’s aesthetic reticulations of self as the principal locus of inquiry. Lyric Lives is neither a work of biography nor of autotelic criticism, then, but an attempt to grapple with Dowson’s vie romancée in intrinsic and comprehensive terms, as an exemplary instance of fin de siècle self-fashioning. That life ought to be treated aesthetically appeared axiomatic to Dowson. He concurred with Symons: ‘the making of one’s life into art is after all the first duty and privilege of every man’.²⁶ This onus governs his lyric verse and sole dramatic phantasy, no less than his fiction. Dowson spoke consistently about the ‘autobiographical manner’ of the latter (L, 152). For anyone familiar with his character (as his literary acquaintances and implied first readers were), or the contours of his biography (feigned or actual, as later readers are capable of becoming), its gimmicky self-portraiture may be its most distinguishing feature. For Longaker,

²⁵ R. K. R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma (London: Arnold, 1983), 84. ²⁶ Arthur Symons, Studies in Prose and Verse (London: Dent, 1904), 290.

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this amounts to ‘a sort of self-deliverance’.²⁷ Each story features a transparently self-modelled protagonist, and all but one—Mallory in ‘Countess Marie of the Angels’—is an approximately Decadent artist or man of letters. Sometimes, the author signs his self-portraits with a quibble on his name, now inextricably associated with Wilde, which calls attention to the personal interpolation involved in these productions (Dil., 39; Savoy 2, 176). Dowson also peopled his prose with travesties of school chums and associates.²⁸ These caricatures are vacuous and benign, ordinarily, but his debonair novelistic disposition was capable of being ruffled in this gentlemanly pursuit, as his characterization of a rival suitor as a ‘paralytic imbecile’ with ‘the intelligence of a rabbit’ implies.²⁹ When it came to female characters, Dowson acknowledged the sinister, parasitic, side of his fictionalizing process. ‘I hope you have not put me into your novel’, one retorts; another bristles that his ‘women’ are not ‘quite just’ (AR, 294; Dil., 78). ‘Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures’ is implicitly scathing about the poet’s embezzlement of the beloved’s essence. In practice and in principle, then, Dowson’s dramatis personae are expropriated from his acquaintance, and transported to another ‘blessed fictive world’—he reserved the phrase from Henry James—where they become recoverable allusions in the roman-à-clef mode (AR, 64). In respect of their material deduction, Dowson habitually referred to his short prose works as études, or studies, a sense promoted with the subtitle of Dilemmas.³⁰ For Longaker, this is a formal and generic marker, as, indeed, it became in Dowson’s employ; but the author first encountered the idea in the works of James—Daisy Miller: A Study was an enduring favourite—where ‘study’ announces a distinct, categorical approach to human personality, bolsters narrative interest, and regulates the formal arrangement. As an introduction to Dowson’s fictional project, Longaker’s remarks remain indispensable. Taking his lead from the Daily Chronicle, which observed Dowson’s underlying ‘conception of life as “a series of moments and emotions” and of certain crises arising therefrom which have an artistic interest of their own largely independent of the longer “story” of which they form a part’, Longaker suggests that Dowson’s short writings are not short stories in the usual sense of the term. Stories they can hardly be called: they illustrate a form which is virtually a genre unto itself. ‘Studies in Sentiment,’ the subtitle which Dowson gave to the collection Dilemmas, is perhaps ²⁷ S, 5. ‘A ll of Dowson’s narratives tempt the reader who is fairly familiar with the facts of his life to autobiographical interpretation’, thinks Longaker (119). As in the stories, ‘the best passages in the novels are those in which the authors tried to make articulate through their characters their own sentiments concerning art and life’ (S, 5). ²⁸ See Longaker, 126–7; L, 286 n, 291; Adams, 66. ²⁹ Savoy 2, 179, 177. This may well lampoon Augustus Noelte, the tailor who would eventually marry Foltinowicz. ³⁰ See L, 18–19, 33, 45, 47, 48, 113, 115, 119, 122, 152, 162, 358, 363, 370, 372.

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ERNEST DOWSON as expressive a label for his short prose pieces as any that can be produced. They show little integration of character, setting, and plot in order to attain a unity of effect. In fact, they are devoid of real plot, of dramatic developments, and stirring action. Furthermore, the characters are generally vague. His men and women are figures rather than characters . . . They are rarely exhibited in the full career of action. The action is either in the past or implied for the future; the present rarely comes into bold relief. Most of the space is taken up by a flash-back into the past, leaving the present without action save the results of events in the past. All the tales are subdued in color, like paintings in grisaille, even when springtime in Brittany provides the setting. They are chaste, restrained records of suffering, of devotion to an ideal, and unselfishness, with nothing of the yarn-spinner’s gusto, and with little on which the reader can take a firm grasp. (S, 8)

Framed in this way, Dowson’s fiction emerges as a coherent, systematic, experimental body of work, intent upon something other than mimesis. At the same time, his habitual preference for études establishes a commitment to psychological realism and asserts a literary pedigree which (as the Daily Mail implies) is predicated upon the epistemology of the Aesthetic Movement. While it remained in progress, Dowson and Moore’s final novel was most plainspoken about this working method.³¹ ‘The Arrangement of Life’, as Adrian Rome was known throughout its drafting process, contends that ‘the fulness of one’s life, the fineness of one’s impressions, the multiplicity of one’s sensations’, are ‘the rough material out of which grew magnificently the ultimate achievement of one’s art’.³² This is an aesthetic trope.³³ From the Old French (‘arengier, < à to + rangier’), meaning to rank, in the sense of ‘draw[ing] up in ranks or in lines of battle’, arrangement is ‘a rare word’ in English ‘until modern times’, and is not attested in the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, or Pope (‘arrange, v’.). It seems to have been borne into the language on a Romantic tide, to accommodate prevailing ideas about aesthetic form and treatment. Dowson employed the term not only of his own artistic endeavours, but also as a critical judgement; of the Hobby Horse, for instance, ‘an admirably arranged review’ (L, 237). This modern, formal sense— meaning ‘to put (the parts of a thing) into proper or requisite order; to adjust’ or ‘dispose’—coincides with the development of a musical sense, meaning ‘to adapt (a composition) for instruments or voices for which it was not originally written’ (‘arrange, v. sense 2 and 3’). As the musical corollary suggests, an arrangement is

³¹ Decorations, Verses (from the turn of the poetic line), and ‘Masquerade’ (or A Comedy of Masks) also grant a certain priority to reality; they are ancillary, second-order phenomena: embellishments, responses, disguises. ³² AR, 44; cf. CM, 1: 66. ³³ ‘Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms’, says Vivian in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (Wilde, Intentions, 27; cf. Potolsky, ‘Decadence and Realism’, 569).

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not just a haphazard reshuffling of ‘rough material’, but a transformational aesthetic undertaking. It tends towards verisimilitude, under the direction of the artist’s manifold capabilities and overall sensibility (including any pertinent inspirational factors). Dowson still thought of the writer’s task in these terms at the end of his career, when he wrote to Smithers that he had ‘been at’ Decorations ‘very hard for the last three days, my chief difficulty being the arrangement’.³⁴ He then borrowed the French word redigeant to explain his exertions (L, 414). According to Littré, the primary senses are: to compile, or put in order; to reduce to the essential or most pithy form; to impose order and sequence.³⁵ From the outset of their collaboration, Dowson and Moore organized their compositional responsibilities to make the most of their backgrounds, in dry docking and fine art respectively (see L, 152). Work on their second novel commenced in the summer of 1892 and, before long, Dowson was engaged by William Theodore Peters to write The Pierrot of the Minute. Discerning an opportunity to leverage this experience in real time, the collaborators settled on the Ku¨nstlerroman form. Their draft title announces the novel’s core thematic preoccupation and underlying plot device: Rome’s ironical undoing stems from his uncritical acceptance of the aesthetical doctrine that a writer must subordinate every vital interest to the exclusive advantage of their art.³⁶ The novel finally presents a rebuttal of this view, not an endorsement, and pillories the Decadent mania to aestheticize life at all costs. Dowson grew increasingly scathing about this Manicheanism, which came to feature in several Yeatsian epitaphs upon him and his ‘tragic generation’ (notably ‘The Choice’). He tried, with astonishing cynicism, so to arrange his own domestic circumstances, but the marriage of convenience he surreptitiously prepared, progressively confided to his friends and eventually to his intended herself, and which he publicly advertised to his small coterie of readers, was ultimately declined, and his refusal proved devastating. Dowson learned his lesson. Suspicious of making art the be-all and end-all of human endeavour, he recoiled from the aesthete’s prerogative, finding it barren at last, a dead end, and abandoned art altogether. The observational and administrative facets of Dowson’s art are fundamental, but they should not be taken to imply that he was content simply to watch and describe the characters he met and the incidents which befell him. As Potolsky

³⁴ Letter to Leonard Smithers, c. June 1899, reproduced in Leonard Smithers and the 1890s: The Booth Collection of Books Published by Leonard Smithers (London: Philips Sale Catalogue, June 1996; cited in James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 245, 397 n. 72. On the ‘arranging’ of Verses, see Longaker, 200. ³⁵ ‘Rédiger, v.’ Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française. https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/ content/dictionnaires-dautrefois. Accessed 6 Dec. 2020. ³⁶ This imperative is kept in view (AR, 41–2, 61, 120, 235–6, 240). Dowson also wonders: ‘had life been too much arranged for’ Mallory and Marie Angèle? ‘Had it been happier, perhaps, for him, for her, if they had been less acquiescent to circumstance[?]’ (Savoy 2, 175).

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cautions, the fin de siècle critique of realism favours verisimilitude over reflexive mimesis, reserving a decisive role for the modifying redactions of form and style. In this view, ‘true artists’ are ‘the undisputed masters of their materials—aristocrats of word and design. Selecting and ordering the disparate elements they encounter in life and nature, artists find unity and a kind of heroism in what would otherwise be a mess of competing forces’ (Potolsky, ‘Decadence and Realism’, 577). As a disciple of Émile Zola, moreover, Dowson could hardly accept the role of haphazard stenographer.³⁷ For Zola, on the contrary, the artist must ‘instigate’ and ‘call forth’ the very ‘observation[s]’ they wish to make; novels become ‘experimental’ by ‘vary[ing] or alter[ing] . . . natural phenomenon’ so exquisitely as to facilitate a thorough investigation of ‘the passionate and intellectual life’.³⁸ As he explains, The idea of experiment carries with it the idea of modification. We start, indeed, from the true facts, which are our indestructible basis; but to show the mechanism of these facts it is necessary for us to produce and direct the phenomena; this is our share of invention, here is the genius of the book. (11)

Would-be experimental novelists, like Dowson and Moore, must aspire to being ‘the examining magistrates of men and their passions’ (10). Accordingly, their task is not to ‘interpose’ but rather ‘to test . . . personal sentiment . . . by observation and experiment’; to ‘analyz[e] anger and love’ in particular, ‘discovering exactly how such passions work in the human being’ (53–4). Dowson rose to this challenge: his études are made with the (often stated) intention of comprehending and, in a sense, mastering, the personalities that aroused his problematical devotion; assaying the passions which attended them; and resolving the quandaries which resulted from them.³⁹ But Dowson went much further than Zola prescribed: his experiments were never confined to the page, but exercised upon live and unsuspecting subjects in the real world. Prospero-like, he contrived actual circumstances to yield palpable outcomes, not just psychological insight. He conspired with Moore to exploit a series of ‘specimen’ girl friends for their mutual edification and titillation, as we shall see in Ch. 1 (L, 45). At first, they were kept in the dark about these designs, but as Dowson found it easier to place his writing, their enlightenment ³⁷ W. R. Thomas and Dowson once contemplated sending Zola ‘an anonymous letter of thanks, “from two Oxford undergraduates”’ (W. R. Thomas, ‘Ernest Dowson at Oxford’, Nineteenth Century and After [Apr. 1928], 563). ³⁸ Émile Zola, The Experimental Novel, and Other Essays, translated by Belle M. Sherman (New York: Haskell, 1964), 7, 6, 2. ³⁹ ‘It was impossible not to be interested’ in Michael Garth, says the narrator of ‘The Statute of Limitations’: ‘A s our acquaintance advanced, it took (his character I mean) more and more the aspect of a difficult problem in psychology, that I was passionately interested in solving: to study it was my recreation’ (Dil., 125; cf. 133).

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became desirable. Increasingly, his scenarios held up cracked mirrors to their object—invariably Foltinowicz by this time—ensuring that his furtive desires and stratagems fed back into actuality, in ways he could anticipate and calculate upon. Dowson used his études to steamroller his acknowledged beloved into acquiescence. By 1894 he had so systematically eroded the distinction between life and art that his readers, and subjects, came to resent their non-consensual co-optation into his vie romancée. The illusion that the artist could exert material control over life by verisimilar means was intoxicating, however, and Dowson was increasingly unmanned by the power of the thaumaturgical conceit.

Primitive of Eve From the beginning of his career, Dowson grasped that his cynicism and ambition—to say nothing more, for the moment, of his misanthropy and misogyny—were out of key with prevailing assumptions about how poetry ought to be written in the tradition of Keats and, specifically, with the ubiquitous popular notion that lyric poetry must arise under the aegis of amatory inspiration. When he presented his first collection to the public in 1896, he therefore took care that it should overtly comport with these traditional and broadly held convictions about romantic genius, by ensconcing Foltinowicz as the muse-figure for whom ‘all [his] work is made . . . in the first place’ (V, ix). Dowson’s acquaintances found his choice of dedicatee risible because of her humble social station. Her exaltation became gossip worthy, and then notorious. Symons called attention to ‘the young girl to whom most of his verses were to be written’ in his review of Verses, which became the standard introduction to Dowson’s canon.⁴⁰ Dowson read the article and did not correct it on this point. Subsequent accounts of his writing life take it for granted that, in the words of his most reliable critics, Flower and Maas, ‘Adelaide was the inspiration of almost all of Dowson’s best work’ (L, 128). Gawsworth surveyed early subscribers to this doxological view in ‘The Dowson Legend’. In its latest incarnation, the doctrine maintains that, as Condé and Gossling assert, Foltinowicz ‘was to become his lifelong muse’, or his ‘living muse’.⁴¹ For very dogmatic readers, her mythical hegemony extends even to the centrepiece of fin de siècle erotic verse, ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae’, where the addressee is presumed to be Foltinowicz in negligible disguise, despite authoritative opposition from Gawsworth, Longaker, and Dowson’s Oxford classmate Samuel Smith.⁴² ⁴⁰ Symons, ‘On a Book of Verses’, 92. ⁴¹ E, 101, 3; cf. 98, 102. In the same volume, one contributor discovers proof of Foltinowicz’s inspirational effect precisely where it is lacking, where ‘the perennial object of [Dowson’s] attention, is here present in her absence’ (27). ⁴² Longaker credits Gawsworth with correcting this vulgar misreading of the poem, and cites Smith’s elucidation with approval: ‘The incongruity of it! One has merely to glance at the poem to ask oneself

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The idée fixe has become foundational to Dowson Studies. The author’s now legendary infatuation has so completely displaced biographical and textual criticism that the title of Condé and Gossling’s recent volume of essays is unfortunately apt (its incisive gathering notwithstanding): scholarship of Dowson’s life and work remains sullenly In Cynara’s Shadow. Nor has it substantially benefited from the recent resurgence of Decadence Studies, where Dowson barely merits a footnote. The finest poet of this hapless confederacy is admitted into fashionable company only as an uncouth, slightly suspect name on its guestlist of personalities or proclivities; dismissed as a node on the Decadent network at best, as passé context at worst. Rather than accepting Foltinowicz as the incontrovertible genius of Dowson’s creativity, as the author asserts, Lyric Lives will consider how and when the identification arose, explore its implications for Dowson’s vie romancée, and its impact upon his reception. Dowson’s conception of an embodied muse, which still confines our understanding of his articulated writing-life, is not merely the result of a specific logic of late-Romantic inspiration—what I call his museology—but, equally, a function of the arrangement and presentation of his published volumes. In marking this distinction, I follow Levy, who suggests that ‘poetic inspiration works solely on the author whereas the muse, like the poem, is actually formulated by both the reader and the poet working together’.⁴³ Dowson’s case offers the starkest possible demonstration of this thesis. His legendary muse is, on balance, a figment of Dowson’s stipulation of her co-authorial contribution, and the uncritical repetition of this as the singular fact of his verse, much more than a direct, perceptible influence upon his writing. Dowson scrupulously avoided the word ‘muse’ in writing for publication; his authorial project is nevertheless governed by an idiosyncratic appreciation of the muse’s operations in imagination, language, and form, ideas that substantially derive from Pater.⁴⁴ As such, Dowson’s museology is part of a conscious effort of aesthetic filiation, and among the most Decadent aspects of his work. Dowson’s views about artistic inspiration establish a locus in his fascination with young girls, who first supply the circumstantial imagery and provoke the sentiment of occasional lyrics, but soon dominate his imaginative life. This attachment claims symbolical and even spiritual provenance, but Dowson occasionally acknowledges a dangerous, proto-erotic magnetism too, from which implied speakers and fictive doppelga¨ngers perceptibly recoil. Dowson’s poems and stories are not personal confessions, however, and it would be rash to presume, in advance of more detailed examination, that such feelings nakedly coincide with the author’s own. Still, on a textual level, his vie romancée is ever vigilant to the inexorable what a child of twelve, whom the poet had known for hardly more than a year, could possibly be doing dans cette galère’ (82–3). ⁴³ Gayle A. Levy, Refiguring the Muse (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 21. ⁴⁴ V, 43 and AR, 68, 167, 301 provide the exceptions.

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growth of the young girls it studies with such absorption, and frequently haunted by the dread certitude that they must shed their presumptive innocence to become autonomous sexual beings. A ‘paradoxical sexuality’ thus comes to define Dowson’s muse-figures, Roth explains.⁴⁵ Foltinowicz merely ‘embodied a preconceived ideal for Dowson . . . that was artistically, philosophically, and erotically productive’ for him (164). Indeed, wrenching Foltinowicz from her young personhood into language and myth is partly the collateral result of a besotted devotion erected upon a dubious, Decadent museology. Dowson’s serial dedication to an embodied, adolescent muse is already evident in the first cache of nineteen lyrics copied into his holograph notebook some time in 1886, and persists in his final prose poems, composed in 1896 or 1897.⁴⁶ The grandiloquent contention of ‘In Preface: For Adelaide’—‘To you, who are my verses . . . this and all my work is made for you in the first place’—may be correct, but only in an abstract, transpersonal sense (V, ix). ‘A Mosaic’, which introduces Dowson’s canon in 1886, flaunts a prototypical configuration of his distinctive muse-figure in one of several refrains: ‘She came, my Love, as a child to me’ (F, 2). This provocative declaration marries childish innocence and sensual allure, somewhat as in Bob Dylan’s well-known song, where the love interest ‘makes love just like a woman’, but ‘breaks like a little girl’.⁴⁷ Captivated, as in the song, by the ‘paradoxical sexuality’ of the beloved, Dowson’s speaker is less periphrastic and blunter than the Nobel Laureate. While there is no crescendo of appreciative similes, Dowson’s ‘as’ can be read figuratively, or literally—in which case his ‘Love’ takes the form, and appears in the person of, ‘a child’. A lewd, poetic sense, which dates to the early seventeenth century and was retained in contemporary slang, cannot be completely ruled out (‘come, v. sense 22’; cf. L, 162). Such effrontery may explain why several of these poems languished in Dowson’s poetry drawer until published by Flower in 1934. The outstanding portion of Dowson’s juvenilia, his sonnets ‘Of a Little Girl’, also appears in this first cache of verse. The manuscript of the fourth lyric in the sequence—which became Dowson’s first literary success when it appeared in London Society in November 1886—bears the earliest date of any of Dowson’s known compositions: in 1885 he was just seventeen or eighteen (F, 14). ‘Of a Little Girl’ traces the fluctuating appreciations of an older, male speaker for a younger, female child. The trajectory of the relationship is unambiguous, as Roth explains:

⁴⁵ Christine Roth, ‘Ernest Dowson and the Duality of Late-Victorian Girlhood: “Her Double Perversity”’, English Literature in Translation, 1880–1920 45.2 (2002): 164. ⁴⁶ The complex ownership history of the so-called Flower Notebook merits more thorough investigation than this appellation allows. See Ch. 7 at n. 42. ⁴⁷ Bob Dylan, ‘Just Like a Woman’, The Lyrics 1961–2012 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 202.

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ERNEST DOWSON The girl changes from saviour to victim and judge, forcing the reader to ask how the speaker has betrayed the child. The speaker’s unworthiness becomes lifeweariness and desolation in the Epilogue, and the sexual, pagan images are no longer ambiguous; the intangible, ethereal child-love is consummated. (166)

In fact, the drama and shock of the sequence hinges upon a single word: a sensual ambivalence grows incrementally, until the poet-speaker finally admits ‘lust’— whether incidentally, or for the ‘little girl’ of the sonnets herself, is not specified—in the comparative safety of the Epilogue. Some traumatic event has irrevocably sundered them, requiring a profuse, but nebulous, apology (see F, 16–17). Writing in a different context, Hassett suggests that ‘the word lust signals a break from the traditional notion of the courtly lover, whose love, if illicit, is nonetheless pure. While lust is synonymous with desire, it implies transgression, excess, and lack of control’.⁴⁸ A very respectable rondeau in this first cache of verse—the first love poem in Dowson’s canon, in the ordinary sense—adds to the impression that the eroticism of the sonnet sequence is not wholly submersible (F, 7–8). Dowson’s juvenilia are distraught by adult sexuality; even although it may not be directed towards the object of the sonnets at all, as Roth presumes, we must inquire what Dowson means by ‘little girl’ more exactly. Her age is left unspoken, partly on generic grounds (Dowson made the tender ages of his fictional lovelings quite clear). The word ‘child’ (like ‘maid’ and ‘maiden’) is a constant reminder that the subject and addressee is young.⁴⁹ It occurs, with variants, in all but two of the sonnets (VI and VIII, the Epilogue, which finally admits ‘lust’). These careful modulations flex the sequence with implied plot, dramatic interest, and narrative complexity. Such a dénouement may even be implicit in what Ohi terms ‘the logic of innocence itself, which comprises—is even constituted by—its ruin’.⁵⁰ But even the term ‘child’ was ambiguous in late Victorian England. In the very year when Dowson began these sonnets, The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 altered the age of female consent from thirteen to sixteen.⁵¹ He had just turned eighteen. His subject and addressee—whoever she is, and if she exists at all—may well encroach upon this legally ambiguous threshold, in fact or in the implied timeline of the sequence. The reverse is even conceivable: a little enough girl could reach the age of majority in 1885 only for new legislation to restore her childish legal status.

⁴⁸ Joseph M. Hassett, W. B. Yeats and the Muses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 194. ⁴⁹ F, 2, 5, 7. ‘Child’ and ‘maiden’ offer distinct semantic possibilities, and the latter calls more explicit attention to the girl’s virginity, which is potentially at stake in several of these lyrics (‘maiden, n. and adj., sense A. 2a’). ⁵⁰ Kevin Ohi, Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 10. ⁵¹ See Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone (eds.), The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the AngloAmerican Girl, 1830–1915 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 3.

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Dowson’s earliest poems must therefore be read in the context of the legal and moral ambiguities surrounding sexual consent in the 1880s. Qualms about permissible and impermissible matches are routine in his correspondence, where he establishes the age of prospective partners forensically, with satisfaction or trepidation, as the case may be. Dowson’s relationship with the girl he calls ‘Lena’ is instructive in this regard: he does not know her age as he commences the relationship, but is subsequently delighted to learn she is sixteen (L, 62). On another occasion, Dowson swerves away from a promising seduction in explicit consideration of the new law (116). His descriptions of girlfriends routinely emphasize their adult appearance and proportions, as if to establish alibis. As Bates points out, The Criminal Law Amendment Act limited opportunities for blackmail by ‘precocious’ girls by incorporating a clause that exonerated men of any age who had ‘reasonable cause’ to believe that a girl aged 13–15 was over the age of 16; any girl who looked older than her age was therefore not automatically protected by the law.⁵²

Dowson was mandated by the new law, and disciplined by the public debate surrounding its passage, to prudently observe the actual and apparent age of the girls or young women he was interested in. That a corresponding tension between innocence and sexuality should emerge as a definitional characteristic of his muse-figures is hardly surprising.⁵³ On each occasion Dowson is known to have actively pursued a sexual or romantic relationship, social class is an equally decisive consideration. ‘If upper-class girls were supposed to be the embodiment of purity, their working-class counterparts were acknowledged to be sexual beings at puberty’, Nelson avers; Roth amplifies the point: Working-class girls were defined and considered sexually available (or unavailable) according to the shifting age of consent. Their sexuality and sexual availability were negotiable issues that fell outside the unspoken spiritual and cultural restraints sheltering their middle-class counterparts from physical ‘corruption.’ (160)

Assuming his habit of courting working-class girls is already established in 1885, the addressee ‘Of a Little Girl’ might practically be a ‘child’ and sexually available at the same time. As we shall see in Ch. 1, Dowson liked to present himself as a stringent, categorical thinker. His interest in girls and young women, which is highly ⁵² Victoria Bates, ‘The Legacy of 1885: Girls and the Age of Sexual Consent’, History and Policy, 8 Sept. 2015. https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-legacy-of-1885-girls-andthe-age-of-sexual-consent. ⁵³ Indeed, Dowson was thinking of studying law at this time, as he did briefly in 1888 (NL, 1, 4).

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contingent on age and class, takes this affectation to such an extreme that he once remarked that ‘it is astonishing how pretty & delicate the children of the proletariate [sic] are when you consider their atrocious after-growth’ (L, 25). But he is drawn more irresistibly therefore to whatever in experience defied his rigid, taxonomical way of knowing. Adolescent girlhood stymied his inflexible epistemology, and forced a reckoning with his authentic, but unlegislated, feelings and desires. The special appeal of an adolescent muse may finally rest on the unique epistemological challenge they pose to the fin de siècle savant, and their concomitant promise of disclosing unsearchable secrets. This discerning and productive line of criticism has inadvertently contributed to a facile popular consensus that Dowson was a latent paedophile. He was not: the claim is unwarrantable, by the sonnets, or otherwise. At the same time, these interventions do ascertain for the first time what precise combination of placid ideality and sexual frisson catalysed Dowson’s imagination. The question of his imaginative relationship with adolescent women may have been inversely posed, however: while Dowson undoubtedly gravitated towards adolescent muse-figures, the category of ‘adolescence’ also become available and convenient at this historical juncture, to describe, legislate, and police inspirational female bodies at the very age they become sexually and proprietarily available to male desire.⁵⁴ Having fetishized the mutable and protean aspects of feminine musedom for so long, in other words, it was perhaps inevitable that a concept should arise to name and bind this rarefied object of heteronormative male genius. A muse need not conform to this type, as Sarah Parker has shown, yet for a succession of celebrated male authors in the last decades of the nineteenth century, ‘she’ became quintessentially ‘adolescent’.⁵⁵ Novalis’ affection for Sophie von Ku¨hn, Lewis Carroll’s attachment to Alice Liddell, thus appeared exemplary museological compacts to Dowson.⁵⁶ He gravitated toward poets like Plarr and Charles Sayle, who shared his extreme regard for young girls, attributed to their purported capacity to inspire moral and humanistic rejuvenation, and celebrated for their inspirational effect on creativity; men whom he termed ‘properly [the] worshipper[s] & devout follower[s] of the most excellent cult of la Fillette’ (L, 164). This is special pleading: girls were sexualized by the most chaste devotee of this prurient sect, if only because they were defined in advance precisely by their ‘paradoxical sexuality’. Wilde’s later quip

⁵⁴ While the English word originates in the fifteenth century, MacLeod views the adolescent girl as ‘a new category . . . of identity [that] developed late in the nineteenth century, perhaps partly due to the Criminal Amendment Act, which created a grey area between thirteen and sixteen’ (Kirsten MacLeod, ‘M. P. Shiel and the Love of Pubescent Girls: The Other “Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name”’, English Literature in Translation, 1880–1920 51.4 [2008]: 362). For Rodgers, ‘the adolescent girl in the late Victorian period may be a teenager, but she may also be younger or a good deal older than this’ (Beth Rodgers, Adolescent Girlhood and Literary Culture at the Fin de Siècle: Daughters of Today [New York: Palgrave, 2016], 9). ⁵⁵ Sarah Parker, The Lesbian Muse and Poetic Identity, 1889–1930 (London: Routledge, 2014), 2. ⁵⁶ F, 10; CP, 216 n.

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about Smithers—which presents the publisher and pornographer as high ‘priest’ in the ‘cult’ of ‘Literature’, ‘the most learned erotomaniac in Europe’, who ‘loves first editions, especially of women: little girls [being] his passion’—relies on the shock of quibbling about what genteel persiflage has already mystified in paradox and euphemism.⁵⁷

Decadent Museology Opening his fair-copy manuscript notebook with a blunt tribute to an ambiguous, innocent-and-adult, child-love promises a furtive, marginal poetics. The artificial, nearly ekphrastic, emphasis of ‘A Mosaic’ also locates the ensuing lyrics in the context of the late-Romantic cult of Aestheticism in which Dowson ever staked his claim. Indeed, the inaugural phrase of his canon chimes with Wilde’s (later) appreciation of Paterian prose: ‘often far more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music’, it demonstrates that writing has finally become ‘a definite mode of composition . . . a form of elaborate design’.⁵⁸ For Hall and Murray, this ‘mosaic-like deliberateness of patterning or overwroughtness of expression’ is generalizable, and becomes a hallmark of Decadent style: ‘Pater’s emphasis on the intricacies of prose design, his complicated explorations of etymology, and his painstakingly elaborate punctuation combine to produce a work of exquisite artifice’, they aver, ‘where every element, however superficially distracting, has been selected with a purpose in mind’ (Decadent Poetics, 11, 12). Dowson is equally exacting. The qualitatively greater resources of verse—especially Dowson’s signature self-similarity—even permit an intensification of this mosaic-like pattern-work. If we wish to understand ‘the meaning and value of [his] decadence’, as Weir submits of Dowson’s contemporaries, ‘Pater emerges as the pivotal figure.’⁵⁹ The first utterance of what would become his oeuvre proclaims Dowson’s intention to write ‘æsthetic poetry’. It calls attention to the piecemeal craftsmanship that many readers remark, almost instinctively (and almost always in lieu of serious consideration). Of uncertain origin, the word ‘mosaic’ is related to ‘museum’ which is, in turn, traditionally thought of as ‘a place holy to the muses’ (‘mosaic, n. and adj., sense 1’). Dowson retains this association, however specious. His holograph notebook, into which he transcribed those poems he wished to preserve, amounts to a kind of museum. Verses (1896) and Decorations: In Verse and Prose (1899) are museums of analogous construction, consecrated to subtly divergent ends; a shrine, and a reliquary, perhaps, the final resting place of his poetic remains. These muse-haunted dwellings are adorned with fine objets d’art, tributary mosaic-work, ⁵⁷ Wilde, Letters, 924. ⁵⁸ Wilde, ‘Critic as Artist’, 126. ⁵⁹ David Weir, Decadence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 65.

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opulent tapestries. Dowson always prized ‘that power of weaving tapestries’ in a writer; ‘objective vignettes of periods and peoples [also] struck him as a tapestry’ (Plarr, 21). He was doubtlessly aware of Théodore de Banville’s characterization of the villanelle as ‘a braid of silver and gold threads, crossed with a third thread the colour of a rose’.⁶⁰ This decorative ideal supplies Dowson’s favoured meta-poetic symbols—the entwining of ‘A Coronal’, for instance—and provokes the ‘drifted rhyme’ that became his lyrical signature (V, 28). Not less than Smithers himself, Dowson was engaged in the design, manufacture, and collocation of beautiful things, engirding small parcels of as yet unlegislated reality. The term ‘museology’, which comprehends ‘the science or practice of organizing and managing museums; museum curation’, first appeared just as Dowson began writing and preserving verse (‘museology, n’.). The first instance logged in the OED dates approximately with ‘A Mosaic’, to 1885. Dowson’s museology will, by extension, acknowledge the overtly aesthetical and decorative facets of his craft—his fabrication and collection of objets d’art—as well as the values and assumptions which inform these manifestations. He is a patternist above all, integrating lyric elements, ‘arranging’ life. On a more instinctual level, Dowson’s museology rests on a lifelong entailment to the muses which animates his whole lyrical enterprise. He came fervently to believe that a variously embodied muse actually occasions his poems; determines their subject, tone, and tenor; and compels their formal perfection. This motive muse is tantamount to the incorporeal soul of the lyric, immanent in every part. As the genii of the poem, it sparks the originary coalescence of sundry impressions, snatches of language, and rhythm; it presides over their mingling, regulation, and actualization. The muse, in turn, effects a second-order pressurization upon the lyricist’s self-fashioning, since the lyric self is projected and maintained to entice, seduce, or placate the muse in the first place. The imaginary beloved effectively discloses how the imaginary poet must appear in public. Dowson’s museology therefore motivates and informs the reticulations of self described already. That extra-personal inspiration truly exists is its central tenet. Dowson’s boldest avowals are issued with Verses, in pseudo-dedication to ‘Adelaide . . . you, who are my verses’, and in contemporaneous remarks which counterfactually maintain that her identity with the poems ‘is very literarily true’ (V, ix; L, 358). This is only comprehensible if we regard Foltinowicz as a muse-figure on the established basis. Since life and literature are both highly networked, textual phenomena for Dowson, moreover, inspiration has, in addition to a quasi-mystical aspect, a very literal dimension, too. On this model, a poem is not so much drafted as draughted, in the etymological sense, from the material that informs

⁶⁰ Julie Kane and Amanda L. French, ‘Villanelle’, The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edn, edited by Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1521–2.

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it.⁶¹ Inspiration is therefore a process of particular absorption, whereby the imminent text imbibes the material out of which it will be constellated, under the aegis of the muse, and bears witness to these transports in the trace textualities it bears. These are rudimentary post-structuralist platitudes, of course, and Julia Kristeva’s well-known formulation of Bakhtin’s contention, that ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations’, has an aesthetical, Dowsonian ring.⁶² When he claims that Foltinowicz truly is his verse, Dowson means that his poems are in-spired in this material, almost pulmonary way, that he has draughted heavily upon her. If Decadent style is a disease, as contemporary commentators habitually supposed, it resembles Dowson’s own ‘specific disease’ in this regard, the respiratory malady tuberculosis (L, 321). As ‘Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures’ insists, moreover, the textual co-optation of Foltinowicz’s personhood, in public and without consent, was tantamount to a physical violation. Museological inspiration becomes an explicit thematic concern in Adrian Rome. Dowson and Moore intended their second novel for satire, ‘vindictive, savage, spleenful[,] libellous almost, to the last degree’, targeting themselves, principally, and by extension, the Decadent author, sacrificing life on the altar of aesthetic ambition (L, 293). As noted, the plot revolves around the protagonist’s cynical decision to pursue a marriage of convenience with Marion Brabant to further his literary career, while repudiating his primal attachment to Sylvia Drew, ‘a beautiful and charming girl, the only friend of his boyhood’ (AR, 126). Drew—her name acknowledges the roman-à-clef footing of all Dowson’s fiction—is largely modelled on Foltinowicz, but ‘shade[d] in’ somewhat variously (L, 151). She resembles Eve Sylvester, the love interest of A Comedy of Masks; derives, like her sister, from the original innamorati of the commedia dell’arte; and is bound to be reunited with her true lover in the end. Among the panoply of ‘girlish wom[e]n’ inhabiting Dowson’s prose, she is the pre-eminent muse-figure, the culmination of the series (Dil., 8). The novel establishes a primitive bond between artist and muse in pastoral terms. As the protagonist’s vocation calls him away from his poor, ineligible sweetheart, to Oxford and thence to London, it exposes an increasing rift in his personality. Enthralled by ‘the life of cities, and society’, the ‘pleasant cynicism’ of his friends, and his own ‘perversities’, which are supposed germane to the ‘modern artist’, Rome is nevertheless ‘two men’, and ‘that second part of him, primitively poetic’, will not be denied (AR, 73). He gradually discerns these two essential facets of his personality: the trivial, workaday self, with ‘all the accidents and factitious interest of his personal life’, and a second, more fundamental, ‘primitively poetic’ ⁶¹ See Robert Stark, Ezra Pound’s Early Verse and Lyric Tradition: A Jargoner’s Apprenticeship (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 166–71. ⁶² Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Art and Literature, translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 66.

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aspect, capable of being jolted into vivid relief despite his alienating metropolitan existence.⁶³ This same ‘double life’ became a fixture of the ‘Dowson Legend’ following Symons’ expanded remarks on Dowson’s life and work.⁶⁴ Lyric Lives is, in part, an attempt to run these sundered facets together, while retaining the author’s pluripotent personality, and insisting upon its manifold consanguinity with Dowson’s text-life. By reinstalling an author of flesh and blood at the heart of his vie romancée, and by ousting the legendary imposter of our collective, uncritical imagination, it aims to resuscitate Dowson’s small but illustrious oeuvre. The pun, in short, is intended. Adrian Rome affords its hero two principal means of accessing poetic knowledge: the memory of Sylvia, whose ‘image’ he always retains, and which ‘intrude[s]’ upon him inopportunely; and contact with nature, in its sublime, oceanic aspect (46; cf. 73). Both avenues are traditionally associated with vatic inspiration. The muses are, of course, acknowledged to be daughters of Mnemosyne, Titan goddess of memory. Love which is ‘Too sad to remember, | Too sweet to forget’, is Dowson’s quintessential theme (F, 36). His bittersweet musings will partly fulfil the muses’ original function, by serving as aides d’mémoire, but they are also quiescent bearers of trauma, strange cyphers of suffering. What the collaborators term ‘the ancient sea, so cosmic and original’ is no less enigmatic than the vagaries of Dowsonian remembrance (AR, 73). One early photograph shows the poet outfitted for a childhood boating adventure (see Fig. I.1). He was destined to become a professional dry docker like his father and remained an enthusiastic amateur sailor his whole life. Moore paid homage to him in these terms, as ‘the good-natured, good-looking idler, whose devotion to the river threatened to make him amphibious, and whose passion for scribbling verse bade fair to launch him adrift among the cockle-shell fleet of Minor Poets’.⁶⁵ Adrian Rome is also depicted thus. Instantly he becomes successful, he purchases a yacht: ‘It was the first thing I thought of ’, he protests, ‘I have always been immensely in love with the sea: and I determined to have a boat of my own’ (69). These correspondences help ensconce the novel in Dowson’s biography, and imply that it can be usefully read as Ku¨nstlerroman. They also hint that Rome’s theory of inspiration has Classical and Romantic antecedents, both of which are discernible in the passage now under consideration. ‘Certainly there was a huge cruelty about the sea’, he ruminates; ‘life, too’,

⁶³ Dowson entertained similar notions about the male self but held, with Lucas Malet, that women ‘are simplex creatures—therefore . . . more complicated’ (L, 60; cf. 22). ⁶⁴ ‘Living always that double life’, Symons supposes, Dowson ‘had his true and his false aspect, and the true life was the expression of that fresh, delicate, and uncontaminated nature which some of us knew in him, and which remains for us, untouched by the other, in every line that he wrote’ (Arthur Symons, ‘Ernest Dowson’, The Poems of Ernest Dowson [London: Lane, 1906], xxii). ⁶⁵ Arthur Moore, ‘Second Thoughts’, YB 3, 125.

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Fig. I.1 Ernest Dowson as a Child. Sam Smith Mss. © British Library Board Add MS 45135.

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ERNEST DOWSON was of that quality: it lay before him, perhaps as dark and formidable, certainly more unknown; with an equal fascination, it might be capable of cruelties as profound. Human conventions, and gimcrack laws of society, seemed but a fallible compass. Was it not rather to some high ideal passion, sacramental, and primitive of sex, that one should turn, as to a guiding star, across the sea of one’s limitations and one’s ignorance? At least there seemed in that notion, half mystical, of the complete loss of oneself in another human person, a nearest approach to that absolute for which one yearned always, and which seemed now more necessary in one’s utter loneliness with the waves and stars. (74–5)

This inspirational ‘fantasy’ is based on traditional ideas about alterity and ecstasy. Rome’s wholesale confusion of sexual and mystical experience also owes something to the courtly tradition of the troubadours.⁶⁶ A numinous, passionate, and ceremonial sense of devotion, plainly devolved from Pater, appeals to him, as his earlier credo must lead us to expect.⁶⁷ The third inspirational vector, the last and most important in Dowson’s distinctive museology, then, is religious. Possibly, such blatant reliance upon outmoded aesthetical platitudes is intended for satire; but Dowson cultivated the same pious epicureanism towards Foltinowicz as his courtship gathered apparent momentum in 1891 and 1892.⁶⁸ She was Roman Catholic, a fact that soon precipitated his own conversion. In preparation for this solemn undertaking Dowson became much better acquainted with the Marian tradition epitomized in the courtly love ideal of the troubadours, and was ultimately reconciled to the pre-eminent muse of Christendom.⁶⁹ His confessional writings often entreat Stella Maris, the traditional beacon of would-be converts, sinners, and sailors, in the last straight of his ‘Romeward’ journey (L, 172). Dowson’s culminating muse-figure therefore comes to resemble the traditional ‘guiding star’ of Catholic imaginative life, an ‘[in]fallible compass’, and safeguard against the wreck of his poet’s soul. As he also recognized, this positioned him as a starlover in the Sidneyan tradition: ‘Thou art my star, I thine astronomer’, Dowson’s Pierrot murmurs to the Moon Maiden (l. 240). His muse becomes ‘Sovereign of [his] joy, | Fair triumpher of annoy’; his ‘Star of heavenly fire’ and ‘lodestar of desire’.⁷⁰ Sidney’s astronomical muse orients the poet in a total sense, providing a sense of direction and purpose. She is a highly practical aid to the author’s endeavour; a navigational tool, even, absent which he is liable to drift and wreck. ⁶⁶ See Francine Prose, The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003), 14. ⁶⁷ AR, 44; cf. CM, 1: 66. ⁶⁸ See Ch. 3 and Ch. 6. ⁶⁹ See Parker, Lesbian Muse, 8. ⁷⁰ Philip Sydney [Sir], A Critical Edition of the Major Works, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 196.

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As Dowson puts it in ‘De Amore’, her aloofness permits the beloved to operate in this way: Is she not still a star, Deeply to be desired, worshipped afar, A beacon-light to aid From bitter-sweet delights, Love’s masquerade? (D, 2)

The rough seas and rocky shores on which the poet might come to ruin are, in this poem, the ordinary tribulations of romance in a factitious age, where relationships are neither magnetic nor true. Dowson’s ‘lodestar of desire’ ensures that the lovestruck author comes safely through these straits—but not unscathed. Simone de Beauvoir seized upon this same understanding of the muse in her groundbreaking study, The Second Sex, noting that Marian ‘exaltation of femininity’ tends to transform women into ‘the guiding star of poetry, the subject matter of the work of art’, as well as the ‘inspiration, critic, and public of the writer’.⁷¹ This all-encompassing formulation best approximates Dowson’s mature theory of museological inspiration, wherein girl friends become the stimuli, audience, and arbiters of his writing all at once. At root, then, Dowson’s museology is a late Romantic conception. Hence, on the one hand, his continual preference for a sylvan spirit of the woods to personify the muse herself and, on the other hand, a tendency to amalgamate the gamut of archetypal female roles, pressing them into grotesque apposition. Swinburne’s muse, by comparison, answers variously to ‘mistress and mother of pleasure’, ‘my sister, my spouse, and my mother’ and, of course, to ‘Our Lady of Pain’.⁷² The Decadent muse is presented as ‘“mother and harlot at once”, because she presides at the birth of a poem but “has whored with many before”’.⁷³ Dowson cleaved to the same paradoxical conformations. In one juvenile sonnet, Nature is pronounced to be that false, foul mother who to sate thy lust, Insatiate of misery doth consume ⁷¹ Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated by H. M. Parshley (New York: Everyman, 1993), 140. ⁷² Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon, edited by Kenneth Haynes (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 135, 127. ⁷³ Hassett, Yeats and the Muses, 110; citing Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 61–3. Still drawing on Bloom, Hassett adds that ‘the fusion of mother and harlot in the “wholeness of the poet’s imagination” is an instance of Freud’s remark that a “pressing desire in the unconscious for some irreplaceable thing often resolves itself into an endless series in actuality,” a pattern . . . “particularly prevalent in the love life of most poets”’ (110–11). Dowson’s imaginative life exemplifies this serial, compensatory trend.

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She may be source and succour, but Dowson’s muse is still a menacing archmalefactress. This is a standard Romantic trope, Parker suggests, which follows directly from the underlying conception of a feminized Mother Nature. If ‘the prospect of returning to the womb—of being devoured or annihilated by the Eternal Feminine—was a threatening one for the Romantic male poet’, Adrian Rome exploits this stock misgiving on a structural level (9). In Roman mythology, Rea Sylvia was a vestal virgin. Raped by Mars, she gave birth to Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome. Dowson and Moore appeal to this legend to endow their hero with a circular cosmogeny: violently conceived of Rea Sylvia, Rome is impelled to revisit this originary trauma by an irrepressible love for Sylvia Drew. It ends in disaster, of course, when he plunges into the depths of the Atlantic, persuaded that he can never possess her: ‘The sea that he loved had given him death; the sea that he had so loved; and the woman’ (AR, 361–2). By the Victorian fin de siècle, such Romantic banalities had been so heavily laundered through Baudelaire (‘À Une Madone’) and Swinburne (‘Dolores’) that they had been purged of all semblance of wholesome, organic metaphysic, become sinister and diabolic. Dowson’s muse is briefly configured as a Swinburnian anti-Madonna before his acquaintance with Foltinowicz prompts a return to a more chaste conception. But even here, as we have seen, Dowson’s miscreant, philogenitive suspicions are never far away. Like Rome, his writerly protagonists can scarcely countenance erotic attraction to a beautiful young woman without recoiling in hatred and disdain.⁷⁴ Rome fantasizes about a less threatening and more serviceable relationship in which his muse remains ‘primitive of sex’ in the obsolete, derivative sense, implying basis and origin. The peculiar phrase echoes an earlier description of Sylvia Drew, upon the threshold of becoming ‘a woman’, not a little girl, with whom one amicably philandered, but a woman, primitive of Eve, with a charm to him unsurpassed and unapproachable, for whom he had an absorbing passion; and it was heart for heart with them, and the worship of his whole body, henceforward, or nothing at all. (AR, 50–1)

Rome’s muse, he hastens to remind us, is descended of sin, born of lust. Her action upon the author is creaturely, sensual, and no mere abstraction. He reciprocates with erotic interest. ‘Primitive’ also registers Drew’s adolescence, however, and hints at the carnal knowledge she stands to obtain. ⁷⁴ Rome is most forthright about this revulsion: ‘Into his feelings for Miss Brabant, which was half admiration and half repulsion, an odd desire to subjugate had crept; to abase her pride, which at times clashed so stridently with his own’ (AR, 162; cf. 295–7). Richard Seefang, by contrast, is merely ‘uncertain whether he loved [Rosalind Lingard] or hated her most’ (Savoy 1, 52).

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She may be ‘innocent’, but she is ‘on the verge of knowing’, in Roth’s fine phrase (‘Ernest Dowson and the Duality of Late-Victorian Girlhood’, 159). Thus begins Rome’s dilemma: the prelapsarian idyll of the opening chapters must be shattered, alienating him from his ‘primitively poetic’ essence, turfing him out upon the insipid thoroughfares of commercial fin de siècle authorship. The really vital feature of Dowson’s theory of inspiration, which follows from its carnal and devotional features, is the intimate experience of alterity which it promises to enable. Dowson began to ‘experiment’ with pretty waitresses because he felt his ignorance of women very keenly. These bucolic trystings helped him overcome his inexperience and gave him ‘nerve in [his] composition’ (L, 231). Prior to this, Dowson thought of womankind as utterly alien and absolutely unknowable, and simple, interpersonal contact with any ‘belovèd’ whatsoever seemed elemental and mystical to him. In sex he discovered an archetypal concoction of ecstasy and fulfilment, just as ‘passion became a model for understanding inspiration’ in the medieval courtly tradition.⁷⁵ He learned that erotic intimacy urged him to expression, firing him with a need to communicate and commemorate. Urgently, pragmatically, it drove his creative process, activating language, tropes, tones, rhythms. Bonding with another person also attached Dowson to previously inaccessible literary currents and modalities. He obtained an implied audience, which automated the more abstruse considerations of his craft. Dowson found himself returning to the same experiences over and again, rediscovering and redeploying the same language even, re-rendering and re-cycling words in circuitous frenzies of circular inspiration, with only the ‘lodestar of his desire’ to steer and steady him. Such, anyway, may be counted among the practical usages of a muse. Dowson wanted companionship and camaraderie his whole life; not just the intimate society of women, which totally eluded him. His imaginative life is fundamentally collaborative in consequence. He always wrote as one of a band of conspirators—conspirators in good society and in modern Paris [or London], for no cause but their own, for their own ends and pleasures, but conspirators as devoted and unscrupulous as ever strutted on the stage of melodrama. [As a] chevalier of the will, of that volonté which . . . it always pleased [Balzac] to deify.⁷⁶

In this forgotten preface, Dowson contends that readers have taken Balzac’s ‘fiction, perhaps not without reason, for known history’; he purposes to elucidate ‘its allusions’, self-similarities, and ‘the scheme in which it has its place’ (1). I follow ⁷⁵ Prose, Lives of the Muses, 5. ⁷⁶ Translator’s preface, La Fille aux Yeux d’Or, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 2.

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his critical lead. The chapters which follow trace Dowson’s lifelong urge to conspire in all that he did: in real terms, with Arthur Moore, Victor Plarr, William Theodore Peters, and Leonard Smithers; implicitly with Walter Pater, Henry James, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and the writers of the French Décadent and Classical traditions. These generative—and fundamentally textual—relationships are strictly analogous to those which Dowson foisted upon various muses, and are necessary to him for the same reason. Although typically thought of as hopelessly vacillating, Dowson’s unrelenting conspiratorial drive, his sheer volonté as a ‘chevalier of the will’, is astonishing, and merits comparison with Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s, who wrote together as Michael Field. His museology must finally be grasped in its human and social dimensions, then; as an attempt, following Christopher Ricks’ luminous suggestion, to mitigate his loneliness. If allusion ‘act[s] as company, even as memorized poems have brought company and comfort to prisoners’, a muse, even a reluctant or sham muse, satisfies the urge— which is paradoxical in lyric poetry—to speak with, and on behalf of, someone else; it offers the heartening solace of conspiracy.⁷⁷ Dowson’s retreat into creative self-colloquy, and then silence, in the final phase of his active writing career, appears to signify the failure of his conspiratorial poesis wrought on a totally networked basis; in fact, it was about to go mainstream. Eliot, Pound, and Joyce each responded assertively to his unique synthesis of fin de siècle concerns into a clear and supple, ‘æsthetic’ verse style. A poet’s poet, he ‘kept the Muses’ sterner laws’, as Yeats acknowledged, And unrepenting faced [his] end, And therefore earned the right . . . . To troop with those the world’s forgot, And copy their proud steady gaze.⁷⁸

The legitimate revisionary prerogative of each succeeding generation notwithstanding, Dowson’s best writing has ‘earned the right’, at least, of consideration, whether we chart the expressive possibilities of English verse, or recount the various tales of our assorted human tribe. Though the world is apt to forget, Dowson’s singular contribution exceeds its small estate. Excerpt his once routinely anthologized lyrics, his fraught confessionals, and deft, symbolist incantations, and our whole inventive tradition is perceptibly altered, and neither looks, nor sounds, nor is the same. As professional criticism lurches with prestigious vim from one fashionable object to the next, it would do well to recall this simple test, and the cautions of legendary criticism. ⁷⁷ Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 271. ⁷⁸ W. B. Yeats, ‘The Grey Rock’, The Poems, edited by Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1992), 150.

1 The Right Type of Girl Aside from the innocuous sonnet ‘My Lady April’, Ernest Dowson selected only poems written after his first encounter with Adelaide Foltinowicz for inclusion in Verses (1896). His intention to dedicate the book to her required this editorial scruple. He deemed Foltinowicz so integral to his design that its first words posit her essential identity with the poems themselves: ‘To you who are my verses’, the volume begins, ‘In Preface: For Adelaide’.¹ He refers to her ten times in this ten-line English dedication, and a further eight times in French: you, you, you; votre, vos, vous, the passage reads, causing him to worry that it may seem ‘extravagant’ to hostile reviewers, ‘indiscreet’ to friends, and blameworthy to Foltinowicz herself (L, 358, 359, 360, 367). Being so ponderously entailed, it follows that Dowson then ditched nearly everything he had written before that day in mid-October 1889 when he discovered ‘a Polish Pot au Feu in Sherwood St, Glasshouse St. Soho’ where ‘it is cheap; the cuisine is fair; I am the whole clientele, and there is a little Polish demoiselle therein . . . whom it is a pleasure to sit & look at’ (114). Nothing has had so profound an effect on the poet’s reception, and widely fluctuating reputation, as this sweeping curatorial gesture. As I suggest in the introduction, it is a canard, nevertheless. Foltinowicz is notionally significant, she has a volitional importance for the manifestation of Dowson’s poetry, as a sort of silent partner, but she performs only a cameo in the performance. With his preface, Dowson diverts readers from the text of his poems, towards a superfluous figure who receives scant attention within his lyric corpus, but who becomes vital thereby to its mythopoeic reception. In fact, Dowson widely auditioned the role of muse: he courted a variety of young girls who might serve Literature in the same capacity, shaping these relationships into forms salubrious to his writing and convenient to his publishing designs. The most significant phase of this venture occurred in 1889 when Dowson had a roughly four-month affair with a girl he calls ‘Lena’. In the course of this relationship, he tries to ascertain what role an embodied muse might come to occupy in his fledgling art; he begins to establish the scope of her influence and the parameters of her operations. By examining the processes of material selection and literary transmutation at play in his writing at this time, we

¹ Dowson’s conception is not unusual: Gayle A. Levy maintains that ‘the “muse” of a given poem is the poem itself, and more precisely the matrix of the poem—the minimal word or idea that gives shape to the actualized poem’ (Refiguring the Muse [New York: Peter Lang, 1999], 20).

Ernest Dowson. Robert Stark, Oxford University Press. © Robert Stark (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192884763.003.0002

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can begin to parse the captious elision of his preface, and rescue some of his best work from misprision. Dowson’s nearly wholesale suppression of the love poems of his youth, despite many being successful in their own terms, has led critics to a series of ingrained mistakes about the actual content of Dowson’s writing, especially when it is taken to concern adolescent girls, and to a distortion of his broadly misogynistic attitude towards women. As Flower acknowledges, ‘the poems previously unpublished [in Dowson’s lifetime] were not discards, but were of a personal nature which he did not see fit to include in either Verses or Decorations’ (NL, i). The solution is inordinately simple: returning the poems to the sequence of their likely composition enables the kind of responsive biographical reading that Dowson effaced in the revision and curation of his canon, and that has been further obscured by the ‘Dowson Legend’. Dowson’s principal holograph manuscript is crucial to this undertaking. Although its contents have been surmisable for nearly ninety years, the so-called Flower Notebook has been severely neglected. It reveals the course of Dowson’s gradual investment in the adolescent women around him, first as prospective characters and subjects, subsequently as candidates to become the ‘guiding star’ of his poetry (AR, 74–5). The holograph notebook permits the reader to ascertain which poems belong to which period of Dowson’s life, and which belong to each period of his love life. Its span happily coincides with the time when Dowson met Foltinowicz: the impact of this relationship upon his writing can be minutely gauged and progressively traced—and finally dismissed where it is irrelevant.

‘Lena’ au lieu de C——e Dowson was twenty-one when he met ‘Lena’ in early March 1889. She was sixteen years old and worked as a waitress at the Horseshoe Bar in Charlotte Street. With the Criminal Amendment Act 1885, sixteen had become the age of majority; there is no doubt about ‘Lena[’s]’ legal status as a consenting adult. Hardly unusual, the affair does not demonstrate Dowson’s supposed ‘girl loving’ nor even, strictly, his preference for ‘adolescent’ girls, a nascent, ambiguous category at this time.² Dowson was five years older and keen to observe propriety: the objection he anticipated was, however, on account of ‘Lena[’s]’ working-class occupation—the very consideration that would have dispelled any ambiguity about her capacity to enter into a consensual sexual relationship—not due to their age difference (L, 67). Dowson found ‘Lena’ instantly attractive, and wrote that he ‘was simply miraculously fortunate in getting a look in the first day’ (49). He extols her as ‘all ² Catherine Robson, Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 187. See Introduction at n. 54.

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that is most fair & blonde’, distinguishing her from the other girls mentioned in his poetry.³ ‘Lena’ was invariably well-dressed when she was not working, and Dowson was often gratified to meet her ‘attired most daintily in the most perfect taste’ (53). As he got to know her, Dowson found ‘a certain youthful timidity which at first repelled advances & then gave way to exemplary graciousness’ in her demeanour, but also delighted in her ‘self-will’ and ‘great independence’ (49, 53). Most importantly, she was ‘both quick & receptive’, especially to literature, which became a staple topic of conversation between the two (51). Mesmerized by ‘Lena[’s]’ eyes, Dowson was provoked to a rapturous allusion to ‘Félise’: Those eyes the greenest of things blue The bluest of things grey. (55)

This is the first of many allusions with which he articulates his confused thoughts and feelings about ‘Lena’ using the words of Swinburne.⁴ Such a vivacious, intelligent, and attractive young woman would have held an enormous allure for the naturally taciturn aspiring novelist. From the start, he mythologized her. ‘Lena’ is not her real name, and by referring to her only within quotation marks, under an alias, Dowson counterfeits the person he became involved with, transporting her into an imagined Ku¨nstlerroman as a supporting character.⁵ The appellation was first intended as a pert allusion: his new romantic interest, we learn, ‘acquiesced in [his] announcement that [he] shd. call her “Lena” au lieu de C——e’ (45). Although commentators have failed to make the identification, the allusion was evidently too obvious to Arthur Moore, his correspondent, and to ‘Lena’ herself, to be worth specifying.⁶ The spur is probably the character of Lena Despard, from F. C. Philips’ 1885 novel, As in a Looking Glass.⁷ Immediately after their first assignation, Dowson proposed to Moore that the two friends ‘compare notes with mutual advantage & work our result when the disillusionment comes’, into ‘a novel à la Philips—or an étude Jamesiensis’ (45, 47). As in a Looking Glass had been adapted for the stage at least twice by the ³ L, 55. The ‘little girl’ of the sonnets has dark, gold-blonde hair, and Foltinowicz was a dusky brunette. ⁴ Dowson has marked ‘Green as green flame, blue-grey like skies’ (l. 94) in his undergraduate copy of ‘Félise’ (Nick Freeman, ‘“The Harem of Words”: Attenuation and Excess in Decadent Poetry’, Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle, edited by Jason David Hall and Alex Murray [New York: Palgrave, 2013], 91). ⁵ I follow Dowson’s practice of naming her in quotation marks to preserve a sense of her abduction to this private realm of literary fantasy, and to focus attention precisely upon the threshold of art and life. ⁶ Thornton alone speaks of ‘the episode with the barmaid, whom he insists on calling Lena rather than her real name’ (R. K. R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma [London: Arnold, 1983], 85). ⁷ Dowson subsequently read The Dean’s Daughter, remarking that ‘the ending is A1, & worthy of Stendhal himself ’; he attended a play of the same title shortly before first encountering ‘Lena’ (L, 166, 24).

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time of Dowson’s affair: he may not have seen Lillie Langtry in the 1887 production (see Fig. 1.1), but was well aware of Sarah Bernhardt’s appearance in Léna, Pierre Berton’s French adaptation.⁸ One week after its premiere on 16 April 1889, his romance with ‘Lena’ in full swing, Dowson declared that ‘I wish Sarah [Bernhardt] would come to England—as the Despard’, indicating that he thought of the part as an established role, sufficient to sustain a casual allusion (68). In the eponymous character, Dowson would have recognized a quintessential ‘adventuress’: at thirty-three years old, Lena Despard is a ‘woman with a past’, who ‘live[s] au jour le jour . . . and never bother[s] about the future’.⁹ She is an ‘arrant flirt’ and an unscrupulous seductress; ‘a woman of the world’ and ‘of pleasure’ (134). In short, she ‘knows what she is about’ (66). Dowson’s young friend need not have shared any of these traits to appreciate the flattery that the sobriquet implied, but she did share Despard’s love of fashion (L, 98) and the ‘petits théˆatres’ (Looking Glass, 86, 105), and she ‘acquiesced’ to the extent of signing telegrams with the nickname on occasion (L, 61, 65). Dowson also associates ‘Lena’ with another prototype: Mimi, the heroine of Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème. From an early age, he viewed this loose collection of sketches as a romantic guidebook. An early letter describes a date at the Bedford music hall with a ‘Miss [Agnes] Hazel of music-hall fame’; the subsequent Friday night’s entertainments ‘remind [him] of la “Vie de Bohême” more than any other episode [he had] been through’ (L, 17, 18). Dowson views these encounters as the very stuff of Decadent fiction. He came to acknowledge that ‘Lena’ was not precisely in Mimi’s mould, but continued to think of her in bohemian terms borrowed from Murger, supposing he could model characters upon her in turn. This ‘literary girl’ was not just plausibly well-read, but effectively constructed out of the literary material that Dowson brought to bear upon her (45). Even the obscuration of her real name with a dash in this letter, feigning verisimilitude and tact, is a novelistic affectation. As a character in Dowson’s correspondence, ‘Lena’ is a Decadent concoction. ‘Works are “decadent” not because they realize a doctrine or make use of certain styles and themes’, Potolsky contends, ‘but because they move within a recognizable network of canonical books, pervasive influences, recycled stories, erudite commentaries, and shared tastes’.¹⁰ Dowson translates the actual girl of his acquaintance into Decadent text in other ways. She becomes ‘Mdlle Lena’; her place of employment, a ‘Pot au Feu’ (L, 63 passim). Dowson refuses to allow that she works as a mere server: ‘no, don’t say “barmaid”—’, he entreats Moore, ‘grisette is better’ (45). This éspèce de type, as he calls it, derives from Mimi (141). Such mannerisms cast ‘Lena’ in a bohemian seduction fantasy with Dowson playing the insouciant artist-debaucher, ⁸ Dowson later reports that ‘the Jersey Lilium is a fine animal—I had not seen her before’ (L, 141). ⁹ F. C. Philips, As in a Looking Glass (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1886), 129, 47. ¹⁰ Matthew Potolsky, The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 5.

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Fig. 1.1 ‘Mrs Langtry in “As in a Looking-Glass”’. Photograph by B. J. Falk, 1887. Reproduced by permission from the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Madison WI.

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à la Murger. In his sumptuary imagination, the insignias of her working-class occupation advertise her sexual availability: ‘it was I think the blue pinafore which subdued me’, he acknowledges to Moore, returning fixedly to the same detail (49; cf. 46, 51, 55). He presents ‘Lena’ in what Roth describes as a ‘pastiche of innocence and corruption’: he can write of her in the same letter as both ‘extremely young & presumably innocent’, and also as ‘an amourette’, or ‘cocotte’.¹¹ Her youth argues the virginal purity of ‘an absolute child’; as a young member of the working classes, she is available to him in ways—intimate, as well as sexual—that other women were not, and that he had yet to experience.¹²

Fiat Experimentum At first, ‘Lena’ is not considered a serious romantic interest, but the object of what Dowson terms an ‘experiment’. He probably encountered the idea of seducing an unsuspecting young girl for personal advantage in Henry James’s fiction, where the term obtains a range of meanings, each of which emphasize the contingency of (erotic) experience and its role in forming practical knowledge.¹³ Often, the word ‘experiment’ is uttered euphemistically by James’s least scrupulous characters, to designate a ruse perpetrated by the powerful upon the comparatively naïve, as in The American, which Dowson was reading at the time of the affair.¹⁴ Dowson’s epistolary usage conforms to this pattern. The notion ultimately derives from French literature, however, and Dowson could doubtless point to vivid instances in the works of Choderlos de Laclos, Flaubert, and others.¹⁵ When French authors use the word ‘expérience’ in this special way, they mean something like a fling in which a woman typically serves as ‘the pretext for [a man] to experiment with his own feelings freely and always without risk, firing blanks’, as de Beauvoir wryly observes.¹⁶ In addition to the ordinary English sense of knowledge ¹¹ Christine Roth, ‘Ernest Dowson and the Duality of Late-Victorian Girlhood: “Her Double Perversity,” ’ English Literature in Translation, 1880–1920 45.2 (2002): 164; L, 55. ¹² L, 61. Dowson’s few relationships with women were superficial. He proposed to Foltinowicz because of ‘an immense desire for a particular feminine society . . . which promised a good deal, which I have never had’ (221). ¹³ ‘The Art of Fiction’ discusses James’s experiential aesthetic (Henry James, The Future of the Novel, edited by Leon Edel [New York: Vintage, 1956], 12, 13). ¹⁴ Henry James, The American, The Novels and Tales of Henry James: New York Edition (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1907), 2: 370; See also Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, edited by Philip Horne (London: Penguin, 2011), 10, 250, 321, 329 passim; Henry James, Collected Stories (New York: Everyman, 1999), 1: 12, 189, 201, 216, 487, 507 passim. ¹⁵ See Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons, translated by Helen Constantine (London: Penguin, 2007), 328, 330, 351, 350; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, translated by Eleanor Marx Aveling and Paul de Man, edited by Margaret Cohen (New York: Norton, 2005), 163. ¹⁶ Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, translated by H. M. Parshley (New York: Everyman, 1993), 217.

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acquired through long habit, French usage stresses the etymological and semantic connections between experience as an act of discovery (as an ‘acte d’éprouver, d’avoir éprouvé’) and as a deliberative attempt to find out how things are (‘tentative pour reconnaître comment une chose se passe’), as in the so-called hard sciences.¹⁷ Sometimes, the word is used for the experimental method itself. Émile Zola, whom Dowson revered, championed the view that novelists should approach their art in this manner, taking on the mantle of the ‘experimental moralist’ whose ‘provoked observation’ could ultimately ‘exhibit man living in social conditions produced by himself, which he modifies daily, and in the heart of which he himself experiences a continual transformation’.¹⁸ His recommendation that aspiring novelists must not merely observe the happenstance of life but speculatively manipulate it, in order to isolate and consider the true state of human relations, suggests and underpins Dowson’s relations with ‘Lena’ from first to last. Throughout the affair, he and Moore were in fact drafting a roman expérimental on Zola’s terms: the hero of The Passion of Dr Ludovicus even had his own ‘experiment’ on the go (L, 34, 72). The manuscript was completed and sent to publishers just as relations with ‘Lena’ began to unravel, but has not survived. Unable as yet to manage a Zolaesque ‘experiment’ in the imaginative realm, Dowson treats the actual relationship as a contrived test: it would reveal the nature of womankind to the disinterested, male ‘savant’, aided only by scepticism and confidence in his method (Experimental Novel, 8 passim). Dowson’s living ‘experiment’ begins with the adoption of this fastidious attitude towards expérience.¹⁹ He poses as a connoisseur of feminine rôles à la Murger, and plays Jamesian typologist, ‘infallible upon the names and the other attributes of all the cocottes’.²⁰ Dowson concludes that ‘if the experiment is to be made, this girl is the right one’; that

given the desirability of an amourette, this is the right type of girl. A girl in society is too much fettered & cramped—another sort of girl is always bringing you down suddenly to the most base material standpoint—but here you have the refinement of the mondaine with the independence of the cocotte—& conjoined the special, enchanting quality of the grisette. (L, 44, 55)

¹⁷ ‘Expérience’, Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française. https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/ content/dictionnaires-dautrefois. Accessed 6 Dec. 2020. ¹⁸ Émile Zola, The Experimental Novel, and Other Essays, translated by Belle M. Sherman (New York: Haskell, 1964), 29, 6, 21. For context, see Robert Pruett, ‘Dowson, French Literature, and the Catholic Image’, E, 172. ¹⁹ To preserve the literary pedigree, semantic scope, and callous chauvinism of Dowson’s undertaking, I employ the French word in what follows. ²⁰ James, The American, 41. On Dowson’s adherence to a Jamesian mode of taxonomic characterization, see ‘Apple Blossom in Brittany’, YB 3, 103.

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Thus assured that his ‘experiment’ is on reasonable grounds, and provided with the agreeable illusion of having had a choice in the matter, he transforms ‘Lena’ into a ‘specimen’ woman.²¹ The pseudonym disguises her like the anonymized subject in a psychological study. What exactly Dowson means by ‘experiment’ must be gleaned from his meticulous epistolary exegesis upon the course of this ‘curious liaison’ (63). Simply put, he proposed to cultivate a serviceable acquaintance with women in order to outfit his fiction with credible female characters and to write more plausibly about love. Dowson always doubted his capabilities in this regard: he conceded to Moore that ‘our ingénues are certainly our weakest creations’, and that ‘love-making is certainly not my specialty’ (161, 56). He even permits one of these ingénues a retort to the autobiographical hero: ‘are your women quite just?’ (Dil., 78). To remedy this want of expérience, Dowson began courting ‘Lena’ strenuously. He took her to the zoo (L, 46, 62) and attractions like the ‘Reptile House’ (62); they went boating in Greenwich (66); took daytrips to Buckhurst Hill (52, 67) and Stratford (67); but their favourite pursuit was ‘theatrizing’ (46). As these assignations accrued, he abandoned all pretensions to an ‘experiment’ in favour of a more refined pose: the affair became an ‘Episode’ instead (61, 72, 86 passim), a term borrowed once more from the gallant, Gallic world of James (in ‘An International Episode’ e.g.) to emphasize its basically literary purport. His increasing preference for the Greek word epeisodion demonstrates that he thought of the relationship as an enabling interlude in his literary story, a necessary adjunct to his strivings in verse and prose (66, 67, 81). By stringing such light-hearted idylls together, and analysing the emotions that arose in connection with them, Dowson supposed he could arrive directly at the roman à épisodes he contemplated with Moore. Having chanced upon the right ‘sort of girl’, only Dowson’s experimental method remained to be determined (51). He felt it had to involve a ‘spiritual’ attachment, ‘a liaison of the spirit which will have to be conducted chiefly on paper’, avoiding anything salacious (45, 48). Hanson notes the general ‘tendency of the decadents to displace sexuality onto textuality’, observing that ‘decadent eroticism . . . exists, for the most part, on paper’.²² Dowson’s ‘experiment’ is typical in this regard. He views it essentially as an opportunity for exercising a modern ‘critically spirit’, in which he ‘contemplates nothing gross’.²³ Adams takes this to mean that ‘Dowson

²¹ L, 45, following James, The Portrait of a Lady, 67, 73, 274. ²² Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 23. ²³ L, 72, 45. While he ‘doubt[s] . . . after all if our analytical habit is altogether a happy one’, since ‘one risk[s] missing some fine sensations by being too critically curious about the why & the wherefore of them’, Dowson maintains that ‘in sober moments this critical fastidious attitude is what chiefly makes life tolerable’, and that, in any case, ‘this is a hyper-critical age & we who are so intensely modern are not of it with impunity’ (44, 45).

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would not seduce [“Lena”] sexually for the sake of art’, but if he began with such scruples, he was soon in over his head, and readily acceded to Moore’s slogan, ‘fiat experimentum—in corpore tenerrimo’: to let the ‘experiment’ be made upon her tender body (Madder Music, 27; L, 47). The relationship possibly became sexual during the last week in March. On Sunday 24, Dowson was to meet her at ‘3.20–30 . . . outside the Horseshoe’ and ‘go down to Buckhurst Hill’ with her, where she would ‘spend the evening with her aunts’, after making ‘the most of the occasion’ in ‘the privacy of a first class compartment’ (L, 52, 53). Dowson was ‘the least little bit nervous’ about this rendezvous, and was glad to have a privy comrade in which to ‘confide all [his] fantasies’ (53, 55). He later reported that ‘I carried out my other programme successfully, & feel a good deal better thereby. In fact my mental & moral balance is now in large measure restored’ (53). He even boastfully inquires whether Moore’s parallel ‘experiment’ proceeds as expeditiously as his own (53). When ‘Lena[’s]’ next ‘epistlette’ arrived, she had, ‘I suppose it was the result of my Sunday exertions—for the first time dispensed with the formal Mr’ (57). Dowson had now obtained ‘a corroboration of [his] theory’ that women are ‘incapable of the defensible sensuality, wh[ich] is utterly without a ray of sentiment—so their sentiment is always a bit fleshly’ (60). Three days later, he writes to confirm ‘Lena[’s]’ age: ‘she will not be seventeen until the 30th May next! I am a little more easy in my mind than when I wrote you last—but still uncomfortable’ (62). The conversation at least had turned to sex (and placed their presumptive actions beyond the reach of the law, if not beyond suspicion). Then, the relationship hit a crisis: ‘Lena’ left her job, and Dowson feared she would turn to him for material support. He complains that, ‘sorry’ as he is about the matter, he has not ‘time or inclination to set up as a sheep dog’, and protests that ‘there can be only one dénouement’ to their relationship now (61). The following day, he is more remorseful about his role in the affair: look at it how I may, I am becoming more & more impelled to believe that I am responsible in this matter. I hope you credit the purity of my intentions [he implores Moore] because I am quite sure nobody else would. . . . I ask myself whether after all what I am doing may not be almost as unaesthetic as a vulgar seduction? . . . Absolutely I don’t know whether the episode hasn’t been the most essentially immoral thing I have ever done—& worse still the most vulgar. (64)

Dowson has compromised ‘Lena’. He now questions the moral and aesthetic basis of his conduct. Cling as he might to his chaste intentions, the ‘experiment’ had been tantamount to a ‘vulgar seduction’ all along.

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The Saddest Crop The romance dwindled. At the end of June, ‘the girl . . . bolted’, and Dowson never mentioned her again.²⁴ His first documentable love affair, begun in sport and condescension, ended in his being ‘notched . . . severely’ (L, 87). Then in August 1889, Dowson suddenly returned to verse composition with a flurry of regretful love lyrics in recursive French forms. Three of these poems are addressed to Hélène, a name that is phonetically, lexically, and semantically related to ‘Lena’.²⁵ Enclosing a ‘specimen’ to Moore, Dowson invites derision: ‘Despise me’, he says, ‘certainly emotion is the devil & one pays for it a great deal too dearly’ (101–2). The generalized despondency of his juvenilia becomes urgent in these new poems, as in the opening of ‘To Hélène’ (subtitled ‘A Rondeau’): Love’s aftermath! ywis I think the time is now That we must gather in, alone, apart, The bitterest saddest crop of all the crops that grow, Love’s aftermath. (F, 51)

The central conceit describes the morose after-growth of erotic attachment. The speaker is obliged to ‘gather’ a second woeful ‘crop’, now that his first ‘harvest’ is spent or shorn. Dowson’s figure derives from Pater, for whom the writings of Joachim du Bellay are ‘an aftermath, a wonderful later growth, the products of which have to the full that subtle and delicate sweetness which belongs to a refined and comely decadence’.²⁶ Turning thence to William Morris and the contemporary scene, he posits that ‘like some strange second flowering after date . . . æsthetic poetry is an afterthought’.²⁷ Dowson was attempting to write selfconsciously ‘æsthetic’ verse about his breakup. He had expected to do so, and had explained to Moore that ‘it is the “après” wh[ich] spoofs us. . . . the aftermath will be of a kind which will make all my former pessimism seem by comparison a rosy cheerfulness’ (L, 48). ‘Lena[’s]’ precipitate departure exploded Dowson’s ‘theory of episodes in the abstract’ (72). By undermining the aesthetic priority of his ‘experiment’, which would in principle transmute romance into fiction, she effectively ²⁴ L, 86. This was typical of Dowson: he later ‘dealt with the loss of Adelaide as he had dealt with the death of his parents—he did not mention it again, the subject was simply too painful’ (Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent [New York: Tauris, 2000], 143). ²⁵ Hélène’s identity has stymied critics. Longaker calls her ‘another of the poet’s abstractions—an earlier and lesser Cynara’ (P, 233 n.). Rowena Fowler says ‘she belongs, of course, in the sonnets of Ronsard’ (‘Ernest Dowson and the Classics’, The Yearbook of English Studies 3 [1973]: 251). ²⁶ Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry; the 1893 Text, edited by Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), xxiii. ²⁷ Walter Pater, ‘Æsthetic Poetry’, Appreciations, With an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1889), 213, 214. Dowson was still eager to purchase a copy of Appreciations on 1 June 1890 (L, 149).

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short circuits it, compelling a decisive turn to poesy. Critics often cite his apparent preference for his prose, but when he felt things keenly Dowson always turned to verse. This is a crucial poem in Dowson’s canon, because it appears first in Decorations as ‘Beyond’, where it invites an epigraphical reading. In proof, Dowson’s second collection of verse was titled Love’s Aftermath (see Fig. 1.2). It bears emphasizing, therefore, that the poem was written before Dowson met Foltinowicz, concerning a separate disappointment. The earliest draft is clear on this point: Ay sweet,—my sweet erewhile, the tears that start Cannot put back the dial: — this is, I trow, Our harvesting! Thy kisses chill my heart, Thy lips are cold, thy saddened eyes avow Our short, sweet love is done, we can but part Dumbly and sadly, reaping as we sow Love’s aftermath. (F, 51)

An ‘experiment’ of finite duration may aptly be described as a ‘short, sweet love’; a life-long infatuation cannot. From the letter mentioning it, ‘To Hélène’ can be dated to c.22 August 1889: it unambiguously sets down Dowson’s real impressions concerning the end of his affair with ‘Lena’ (L, 101–2). He anonymized the title, tempered the invective, and rendered the cooling of emotions mutual for Decorations, suggesting he became awkward about the affair, and needed the lyric to conform with a different narrative by 1899. In proof, Dowson cancelled an epigraph, from Propertius, which would have associated his new book with Foltinowicz once again (see Fig. 1.2). ‘Beyond’, or ‘To Hélène’ in disguise, stands in lieu of this epigraph in the published volume, before its division into verse and prose. It delicately cancels the association between Dowson and his supposed muse, without negating the mythopoeia governing the reception of Verses, so meticulously established in the preface to that volume, and without actually repudiating Foltinowicz herself. The speaker of this rondeau grumbles about his mistress’ sudden reserve, but he accepts much of the blame for the demise of their liaison. The biblical simile announces that the couple must reap what they have sewn (Gal. 6.7–9). This is the most frequent image in Dowson’s verse; it reveals his lasting ambivalence about the ‘experiment’, which failed, in part, because of his mannered, dandiacal approach. Other poems written at this time exhibit the same doleful recognition: several allude to ‘broken vows’ (F, 52, 55), leading to accusations of ‘deceit’ or ‘treachery’ (52, 47v), but returning nevertheless to the conviction that the lovers’ estrangement is ‘most meet’, just about saving them from acrimony (49). But

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Fig. 1.2 Titlepage, Love’s Aftermath: Poems in Verse and Prose. Dowson’s authorial proof of Decorations: In Verse and Prose. Reproduced by permission of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tolden Foundations.

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what really distinguishes these love poems from earlier lyrics is that they describe reciprocated, adult affection. ‘Rondeau | Hélène’ is the most poignant: You loved me once! I charge you, sweet, Leave me this last, one faith—in spite Of broken vows & time’s deceit, You loved me once! (F, 52)

The thought that he was once beloved, though perhaps illusory, comforts the speaker, and redeems his sweetheart’s ‘broken vows’. The language of the ‘experiment’, in the conceit of an interrogative process resulting in proof, for instance, confirms that ‘Lena’ is in fact what she always seemed to be. Rueing ‘that [she] should prove so light’, the speaker inscribes the name of his lost love etymologically in his commemorative text (my emphasis). Dowson always viewed ‘Lena’ as capricious. Like her namesake Lena Despard, like James’s heroines, she was ‘capable of anything—[was] impulse & imprudence personified’ (L, 53). Her supposedly erratic behaviour, which had once seemed novelesque, came to exasperate Dowson, and when she left him, he interpreted it in a sinister manner: She must be a most accomplished little liar—after all it’s one of the qualities of her sex—to have hoodwinked me so long. I grasp her attitude now which hitherto I confess puzzled me. There are depths of cynicism which one doesn’t easily realise. Do you remember the episode of Mdlle Niniche in ‘The American?’—. (86–7)

This is a slip: Dowson means the ‘dubious little damsel’ Noémie Nioche, who becomes a courtesan in James’s melodrama (American, 288). Adams believes that ‘this probably means [“Lena”] was more sexually experienced than she made out to be, and perhaps was already working as a prostitute, or simply had another man friend’ (28). Whether or not ‘Lena’ was promiscuous, Dowson’s chagrin at this turn of events is colossal: he laments having ‘made a fool of himself ’ and become ‘the victim of a tragicomedy for a fortnight’ (L, 88). The poems that follow are embarrassed, confessional poems. Where Dowson eventually published them, they have been revised and repurposed to disguise their melodramatic origin. He omitted them all from Verses, since he had another dedicatee in mind, but four are permitted to stand in Decorations, where their biographical associations are scrambled. Read in the sequence of composition, they divulge the tale of Dowson’s first romantic disappointment, establishing patterns that recur throughout his work. His steady choice of recursive French forms suggests that Dowson viewed them as a coherent suite to counterpoint ‘Of a Little Girl’. Several employ a unifying epithet, ‘sweet’, and in holograph each is numbered in pencil, instituting a sequence. One uncharacteristically flippant composition, ‘To

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His Mistress’, dwells upon the factitious aspects of the ‘experiment’, divulging the mutual fakery required to keep it up: There comes an end to summer, To spring showers and hoar rime; His mumming to each mummer Has somewhere end in time.

The ‘Mistress’ Dowson refers to in December 1889 is, still, ‘Lena’. Conceivably, he intends a lewd pun in the second line.²⁸ The final poem written in the immediate aftermath of this affair, ‘Rondel’, attests to a new interest: Dowson met Adelaide Foltinowicz in October, and he now compares the girls directly: Ah, dear child, in whose kiss, Is healing of my pain. Love me—I shall not miss Old loves that did but stain, Thy blue eyes teach me bliss, — I am not all in vain, Ah, dear child, in whose kiss Is healing of my pain.

These lines repudiate ‘Lena’ and confess the ‘stain’ of Dowson’s involvement with her. He evidently came to feel, with Dorian Gray, that his ‘experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes’.²⁹ The image of defilement may involve a quibble on ‘Lena[’s]’ real name, as we shall see. The child’s unaffected embrace rebukes the speaker’s narcissism, and soothes his bruised ego. This is the first poem in Dowson’s oeuvre that refers to Foltinowicz directly, but its comparison is too invidious to permit inclusion in Verses, where acknowledgement of his ‘Old loves’, in the double sense, would seem indelicate, even if renounced.³⁰ ²⁸ The single occurrence of the word ‘whore’ in Dowson’s correspondence suggests more frequent verbal use (L, 383). He was fond of sexual slang, like ‘tart’ or ‘pastry’, and the OED attributes to him the first use of ‘horizontale’ for sex worker (17, 35, 119, 18). ²⁹ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Robert Mighall (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 57. ³⁰ Robson opines that ‘Rondel’ ‘partake[s] of the same queasy-making metaphors that informed the hoary superstition that sex with a virgin was a cure for venereal disease’ (Men in Wonderland, 190). As n. 28 suggests, Dowson was not above this: he signed his first truly smitten letter about Foltinowicz with a coarse pun, calling it ‘purely ejaculatory’ (L, 162).

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An Old Passion The momentary confidence of ‘Rondel’ is misplaced, in any case: Dowson did not summarily forget ‘Lena’. This may have been his first love affair, and he was determined that it would inform his writing. Bearing the language and circumstances of his ‘experiment’ in mind yields surprising insights into Dowson’s subsequent writing. ‘Vanitas’ and ‘Spleen’ (dedicated to Arthur Symons in Verses) were likely composed almost two years later, around 20 March 1891. Dowson complained to Moore of the weather, of ‘pass[ing] the week, in a consuming ennui, tristesse, spleen, and nostalgia of everything’, but chiefly, we may infer, of his first affair: I was not sorrowful, but only tired Of everything that ever I desired. Her lips, her eyes, all day became to me The shadow of a shadow utterly. All day mine hunger for her heart became Oblivion, until the evening came, And left me sorrowful, inclined to weep, With all my memories that could not sleep. (L, 189; V, 22)

He has ‘been writing verses’, he says, ‘in the manner of the French “symbolists”: verses making for mere sound, & music, with just a suggestion of sense or hardly that; a vague Verlainesque emotion’, an apt description of all the best lyrics he composed that spring and summer (L, 189–90). On this occasion, Dowson was provoked by ‘a white, monstrous mist’ which ‘has come down over the river . . . obscuring everything’, a description echoed in l. 3 of the lyric, and moved to contemplate ‘the ships glid[ing] by in it like great, shameful moths’ (190). The adjective is telling. In ‘Spleen’, the very rain becomes ‘weary’.³¹ Dowson is left with ‘a sense of perfect desolation about—damp, decay dreariness [sic]: incapacity to meet all possible events: one’s mind grows weary as the river!’ (190). No manuscript of ‘Spleen’ is extant but, happily, Dowson revised his opinion of these ‘inferior verses’, which he deemed ‘not successful enough to send’.³² ‘To Cynara’ is another case in point. It survives only in Dowson’s holograph notebook, where it may have been copied onto the flypaper at any time. While it seems broadly suited to Dowson’s legendary infatuation with Foltinowicz, there are fundamental internal obstacles to any reading that makes this identification. ³¹ In a sense connected with Dowson’s chronic insomnia, the Old High German (‘wuarag drunk’) ´ and Old Norse etymology (‘órar fits of madness, ær-r mad, insane; the primary sense was perhaps “bewildered”, “stupefied”’) may be relevant (‘weary, adj.’ ). ³² L, 191, 190. See Robert Stark, ‘“Faithful . . . In My Fashion[ing]”: Shades of Association in Ernest Dowson’s Poetry’, Victorian Poetry 59.1 (spring 2021): 79–82.

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The speaker presumes that his addressee ‘shalt never see’ the ‘songs’ he offers with the first lines, which is contradicted by Dowson’s later provision of presentation copies for Foltinowicz (L, 366, 367). More basically, the poem establishes that ‘the wrong is old’. The speaker has ‘long time forgiven’ his mistress for her part in an unspecified dispute. Although it now seems improbable, he hopes that clemency might be reciprocated after so long. Evidently, he is no longer in touch with the addressee, a detail at odds with Dowson’s hovering around the Foltinowiczes’ restaurant into the spring of 1897. While ‘To Cynara’ cannot be securely dated, it was clearly not the first poem Dowson copied into his holograph notebook. Its distinctive verbal palette suggests it could be ancillary to his affair with ‘Lena’. The tone of tentative pleading recalls the ‘Hélène’ lyrics because the language overlaps: ‘Thou loved’st me once’ restates the rentrement of ‘Rondeau | Hélène’. The precious language (epitomized by ‘fain’) recalls the pre-Raphaelite diction of the ‘Lena’ poems, especially ‘Roundel | To Hélène’. The realization of personal culpability (‘I cannot reproach thee— | He reaps who sows’) echoes the biblical simile of ‘To Hélène’ or ‘Beyond’. This was the key finding of the ‘experiment’: that Dowson got what he deserved where ‘Lena’ was concerned. These verbal, syntactical, and imagistic resemblances argue that ‘To Cynara’ is contemporaneous with the other poems on the failure of this affair, or a belated envoy to them. Possibly, it appeared at one time on a missing page in the holograph notebook, and was later promoted to the flypaper when its epigraphical utility became clear. In this prominent position it governs Dowson’s pre-Verses canon as a whole. It effectively offers his residual body of unpublished work to someone other than Foltinowicz.³³ Dowson’s inscription of his holograph notebook ‘To Cynara’ contradicts his later assertions of fealty to Foltinowicz, and demands a reappraisal of his trajectory as a poet. It also licenses a reassessment of his most iconic poem. Wong’s illuminating essay on the Horatian impetus of ‘Non sum qualis’ does not consider how the same ‘ostentatious allusion’ operates in ‘To Cynara’.³⁴ Sporadic mention of Cinara (so-spelled in most translations) throughout the Odes make her an ‘impalpable’ presence, yielding only ‘momentary nostalgic glimpses which hint at the poet’s emotion’ (66). This is equally true of Dowson’s Cynara. Wong shows that Dowson’s target passage is retrospective; that Cinara is decidedly an old flame, summoned out of the dim past, ‘after so long a peace’ (61). She has abandoned Horace as surely as Cynara has absconded from Dowson, leaving both to ‘grieve again, over the wine’ (66). Following his exemplar, Dowson pleads that, despite the passage of time, he is

³³ The late, uncollected ‘Fantaisie Triste’ implies that a museological duel animated Dowson to the end of his productive life. See Ch. 8, Ghosts. ³⁴ Alex Wong, ‘“Non sum qualis”: Three Comparative Readings’, E, 59.

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still thy lover Fain of thee as of old Fain of thy lips and thy locks that did ever hover Twixt brown and gold.

His ‘passion for the right word’, and study of Swinburne, pay off here: ‘We are fain of thee still, we are fain, | O Sanguine and subtle Dolores, | Our Lady of Pain’, he had famously lamented.³⁵ Now she has rejected him, Dowson’s longing is only intensified. The central conceit explains why: in the Odes, Cinara is ‘“naughty” or “wanton”’ and her ‘frolicsome sex-appeal’ beguiles the speaker after many years (Wong, 66–7). He still thinks of her as ‘saucy’ (68). Far from entailing ‘sexlessness or perfect chastity’, Dowson’s allusion suits a poem about an ardent affair (67). His Cynara is, finally, one in a sequence of encoded figures which surreptitiously incorporate a young girl from his actual experience within his lyric corpus; a girl with whom he has enjoyed sexual relations and experienced an intimacy exceeding that which could be bought. The young girl with whom Dowson became sexually and emotionally involved in 1889, the one he called ‘Lena’ and wrote about as ‘Hélène’, is adequate to this notion. In ‘Non sum qualis’, the speaker has swapped a prostituted woman for a former sexual partner whom he cannot forget and to whom he purports still to be ‘faithful’. All Dowson’s writing about ‘Lena’ stresses just this point. The poem does not contrast its temporary companion with Foltinowicz, but with her. Dowson came to think of ‘Lena’ in promiscuous terms at best. When the truly beloved is suspected of loose living, too, a real point of comparison is established. Spending the night with a sex worker provokes the speaker’s recollection of the affair; his flight of fancy makes sense precisely because it juxtaposes two ephemeral liaisons. The pact enjoined in the last line of each stanza is ironic, then, since its sassily maintained fidelity asserts an idiosyncratic choice of similarly inconstant paramours. As Bristow perceives, ‘the only fidelity’ that the speaker’s ‘ignoble desire has ever known, even with Cynara, has been a transitory one that this poem ironically memorializes through its metrical perfection’.³⁶ Each lover in this ménage à trois is as treacherous as the other. There is something robust, even philosophical, about this even-handed cynicism, whose total effect is to ‘vituperate as strongly as [one] could wish against the monstrous division drawn between licensed & unlicensed lust’, debunking the sexual hypocrisy of the period, and unmasking the individual alibis and paradoxes on which it is founded.³⁷ Dowson asked Moore for criticism of the lyric, introducing it as ‘an experiment . . . in which at present my Muse is not quite at her ease’ (L, 184). The description is prosodically apt, as Wong ³⁵ L, 69, 30. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon, edited by Kenneth Haynes (London: Penguin, 2000), 125. ³⁶ Joseph Bristow, ‘How Decadent Poems Die’, Decadent Poetics, 32. ³⁷ L, 144; see Stark, ‘Shades of Association’, 84–5, 87–91.

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reveals.³⁸ To Moore, however, this language would have recalled Dowson’s ‘experiment’: he had confided his suspicions about ‘Lena’ at the time, concluding that the episode had ‘finished after the fashion which I foresaw’, leaving him ‘no heart left for anything not even for a debauch’ (87; my emphasis). His attitude towards such diversions had changed by 7 February 1891, when he composed ‘Non sum qualis’ in the Cock Tavern, near ‘Lena[’s]’ former workplace (see Longaker, 85–6). Its language and concerns suggest that Dowson remained preoccupied with her presumed promiscuity long after the relationship ended.

A Somewhat Scandalous Heroine ‘Non sum qualis’ immediately follows ‘Flos Lunae’ in Verses. Both poems associate the women they address with the night, a conventional euphemism which Dowson employs with tact and lyricism. The culmination of his finest poem, the night is thine; And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea hungry for the lips of my desire,

represents the erotic reclamation of the carnal scene on behalf of the truly beloved, howsoever inconstant she may be. So, the ‘lamps expire’ and utter dark remains: Cynara’s shadow is cast, an insurgent afterimage in the magic lantern of the poet’s consciousness. The vespertine associations of ‘Flos Lunae’ are tamer, but more revealing. ‘Maid O maid of the lunar night’, an abandoned revision cries, sporting with a pun that fixes the essence of the beloved in her adolescence and in nocturnal dubiety (F, 79). To Moore, Dowson supplies an intriguing caption: ‘I send you the last vagary of my most modern Muse—of Montparnasse—or should I say Montmartre? Its obscurity, I may remark is designed’.³⁹ This conveys that his latest composition is stylistically ‘modern’, and aspires to ‘obscurity’, in the ‘vague, Verlainesque’ manner of his recent poems about ‘Lena’.⁴⁰ Dowson had trouble deciding what the final, public form of the title should be, and alternated between French and Latin versions. In his manuscript notebook, however, he was emphatic: the poem is ‘Claire: la Lune!’ (F, 79; see Fig. 1.3). His revisions effectively withhold the provenance of the poem from Moore, and from subsequent readers, although his allusion to Montmartre, which epitomized sexual debauchery for his contemporaries, may ensure that the sense comes partly through. ³⁸ A. T. Wong, ‘Dowson’s “Cynara” and the English Alexandrine’, English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 60.2 (2017): 210–34. ³⁹ L, 208. Contrast Dowson’s caveat to ‘Ad Domnulam Meam’: ‘A mere trifle—pardon it—who can have inspired it?’ (173). ⁴⁰ L, 189. ‘Flos Lunae’ in fact originates in Verlaine’s ‘Clair de Lune’; see Ch. 5, Phantasy in One Act.

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Fig. 1.3 ‘Claire: la Lune!’ The Flower Notebook. Reproduced by permission of The Morgan Library & Museum, MA 1480. Gift of C. Waller Barrett, 1953.

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‘Claire: la Lune!’ is dated 20 July 1891, in holograph; it is the only poem Dowson is known to have composed that summer. Critics usually suppose it concerns Foltinowicz, partly on the basis of a comment, ‘sometimes she drives me to despair by her coldness’, which antedates the poem (L, 278). For Alkalay-Gut, the poem ‘repeats Flaubert’s “Clair-de-lune” analogy of relationship cited in the “Preface” [to Verses]’ and, certainly, if made explicit, this echo would confer prominence upon the lyric, attaching it to Foltinowicz.⁴¹ But Dowson revised the title and resisted this association, and ‘Claire: la Lune!’ is not reducible to clair-de-lune anyway. There is no way of knowing if he met someone named Claire at this time, but Dowson’s only known, reciprocated love affair reached a conclusion two years previously. It was with a literary girl . . . with a certain amount of esprit: e.g. she reads Dickens etc, quotes Tennyson, says that when you have read one of R. Haggard’s novels you have read them all, & acquiesced in my announcement that I shd. call her ‘Lena’ au lieu de C——e, with the remark that you couldn’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. (L, 45)

Perhaps she also had an ear for a rhyme. After all, ‘Lena’ caused Dowson to ‘resume [his] acquaintance with Tennyson, so that [he] shall not be at a disadvantage in conversing with’ her; she impressed him with fine critical discrimination, keen imitation of Swinburne, and a literary facility that extended to alliteration and allusion.⁴² Such literary acumen is shared by Neobule, the subject of ‘A Requiem’. Unlike Dowson’s well-known allusions to famously beloved women, Neobule provides satirical cover to rebuke a lost love while maintaining sophisticated detachment. As Symons recognized, Dowson ‘used the common-places of poetry frankly, making them his own by his belief in them: the Horatian Cynara or Neobule was still the natural symbol for him when he wished to be most personal’.⁴³ Despite its veneer of unconcern, ‘A Requiem’ is among the most personal lyrics he published. Its antagonist derives from the embittered love lyrics of Archilochus, where she features as a castigated ex-lover, a ‘Ms Fickle’, much as ‘Lena’ appears in Dowson’s letters.⁴⁴ As his lyric begins, Neobule has ‘hid her golden face away’ from the speaker; the third stanza explains her withdrawal: Neobule, tired to death Of the flowers that I threw ⁴¹ Karen Alkalay-Gut, ‘Ernest Dowson and the Strategies of Decadent Desire’, Criticism 36.2 (spring 1994): 251. ⁴² L, 48–9, 51. Such qualities always captivated Dowson; see Adams, 82, 108. ⁴³ Arthur Symons, ‘Ernest Dowson’, The Poems of Ernest Dowson (London: Lane, 1906), xxv. ⁴⁴ Bret Mulligan et al., ‘Archilochus 196A (West). “The Cologne Epode.” ’ http://aoidoi.org. Accessed 14 Aug. 2020.

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On her flower-like, fair feet, Sighed for blossoms not so sweet, Lunar roses pale and blue, Lilies of the world beneath.

She is, plainly, ‘out of love’; the formulation echoes Swinburne once again.⁴⁵ Neobule has evidently scorned the speaker’s offering of ‘flowers’, objecting that they are overly saccharine, ‘sigh[ing]’ instead for less treacly ‘blossoms’. There is only one female acquaintance in his biography who may be supposed to have levelled such a discerning criticism at Dowson’s verse. ‘A Requiem’ may therefore reveal the impetus for Dowson’s crucial symbolist turn. Neobule’s sigh perhaps led him away from conventional treatment of love, as in the rondeaux, towards a fuller implementation of Verlainesque technique. Dowson’s reputation, such as it is, stands in some measure upon his achievement in this mode. Were it not for his eschewing sentimental subjects, a poem treating frankly of prostitution such as ‘Non sum qualis’ would hardly be possible. Something like Ford Maddox Ford’s hysterical reaction to Ezra Pound’s bookish third volume of verse, ‘Lena[’s]’ instinctive shrug may have shocked Dowson into modernity.⁴⁶ Dowson continues to draw upon this expérience extensively: his verse wallows in the emotional turmoil, his prose routinely ‘shade[s] in’ the typological roles inherited from French fiction with circumstances gleaned during the affair (L, 151). Thus ‘Lena’ appears as Rosalind Lingard, with whom Richard Seefang ‘had fallen in love . . . after three days’ acquaintance . . . had done so supremely, carried away by a strange hurricane of sensual fascination and spiritual rapture’.⁴⁷ Where else does Dowson speak so passionately and directly of erotic love? She features as Le[o]n[or]a Romanoff—heralded by Maurice Cristich with the ‘Dear child!’ refrain of the rondeaux, apostrophe and all—who grows up to scoff at the author-narrator’s inept depiction of women, as we have seen (Dil., 64). ‘Lena’ is the model for Kitty Crichton in A Comedy of Masks, whose address is given as Charlotte Street, the location of the Horseshoe Bar where she worked.⁴⁸ This had been Dowson’s intention all along. He found that intimacy could act like an accelerant upon his creative process, not just supply material upon which to draw, and that ⁴⁵ Swinburne, ‘The Ballad of Burdens’, 102, ll. 57–8. As Thornton shows, this lyric exerts an extensive influence upon Dowson’s oeuvre (88). He may pick up his epithet for ‘Lena’ from l. 45; the sepulchral conceit of ‘A Requiem’ from the penultimate stanza; and the ‘bought kisses’ of the sex worker who ineffectually displaces ‘Lena’ in ‘Non sum qualis’ from l. 9. ⁴⁶ See Ezra Pound, Selected Prose, 1909–1965, edited by William Cookson (New York: New Directions, 1973), 462. ⁴⁷ Savoy 4, 52. The lovers’ first encounter is transparently autobiographical: ‘Meeting her first at a sparsely-attended table d’hôte . . . he had promptly disliked her, thought her capricious and ill-tempered. Grudgingly, he had admitted that she was beautiful, but it was a beauty which repelled him in a girl of his own class, although he would have liked it well enough in women of less title to respect, with whom he was far too well acquainted’ (53). ⁴⁸ CM, 2: 160. Kitty is usually diminutive of Catherine, another possible solution to the crux, ‘“Lena” au lieu de C——e’ (L, 45).

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routinized contemplation of love and loss forced his hand as a writer in productive ways. He had discovered a muse. ‘Lena’—or Claire, if that is her real name—deserves her place in this story. Her refusal of Dowson’s already-antiquated expectations of female comportment made a formidable impression upon him and resulted in some of his best work, including the most arresting erotic poem of the era. Yeats once posited that ‘works of lyric genius, when the circumstances of their origin is known, gain a second beauty, passing as it were out of literature and becoming life’.⁴⁹ ‘Lena[’s]’ real presence in the life of Ernest Dowson, her actual influence on his writing, is of this order of significance, and even a necessarily imperfect account of the relationship can begin to reinfuse Dowson’s small canon with that ‘second beauty’ that begins with sober biographical criticism. Her near-total absence from Dowson scholarship serves the legend to the neglect of the text, and at the expense of the truth; it is emblematic of a broader critical tendency to deprive Dowson’s work of an organic connection to his life, and therefore to his times, which can alone sustain wider, long-term interest in it. In the mythopoeic haze surrounding Adelaide Foltinowicz, a phantom muse has aridified Dowson’s corpus; by displacing her, even slightly, with the image of this real woman, this ‘enigmatical and notorious . . . somewhat scandalous heroine’, it might be revived, by a sort of blood transfusion (Dil., 64). A scandal may be just what the ‘Dowson Legend’ requires. We might say of the cache of lyrics examined in this chapter what Laura Riding has said of The White Goddess: that it is ‘a literary machine designed for the seizure of the essence of [her] reality, out of the literary plunder remaining from the destruction of the personal fact of [her]’.⁵⁰ ‘Lena[’s]’ overthrow and annulment is egregious because it has been successful—her subaltern status cannot be rectified here—and because Dowson went on to replicate the ‘experiment’ with only minor adjustments to its ruthless machinery. Ultimately, general convictions about romantic genius—the virtual requirement that great lyric poetry must arise under amatory inspiration—has elided the misogynistic, misanthropic, and mercenary facets of Dowson’s project, which were evident to early defenders like Plarr, who wished to preserve his friend’s posthumous reputation, and realized that his cynicism and careerism were out of key with prevailing assumptions about how poetry ought to be written. For Plarr, the ‘reason for Ernest Dowson’s early production of exquisite poetry’ was the fact that ‘he was preparing to fall in love. He fell in love or fancied that he did’ (49–50). Harris is more direct. ‘Why, Dowson’, he declared, ‘love has made a poet of you!’ educing his amen: love ‘makes poets of us all’.⁵¹ Dowson grasped the incongruity as well his friends; he calculated that his ⁴⁹ W. B. Yeats, preface to Margot Ruddock, The Lemon Tree, quoted in Joseph M. Hassett, W. B. Yeats and the Muses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8. ⁵⁰ Laura (Riding) Jackson, The Word Woman and Other Related Writings, edited by Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark (New York: Persea, 1993), 209. ⁵¹ Frank Harris, Contemporary Portraits, Second Series (New York, 1919), 68.

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travails with ‘Lena’, were they known, might jeopardize his chances of a literary career, while he still cared for such a thing, and was careful to marginalize whatever in his small canon painted this ‘sweet shameful’ chapter of his biography in too lurid colours (Swinburne, 100, l. 2). Enter ‘Ernest Dowson’, the implied poetlover of Verses, doppelga¨nger by serial extension, as feigned as ‘Lena’, ‘Hélène’, or ‘Cynara’, as ‘Adelaide’, or ‘MISSIE (A. F.)’. Other notable self-reticulations include the maverick painter Oswyn in A Comedy of Masks and Adrian Rome; the various artistic alter egos of Dowson’s short prose studies; the critical personae Anatole de Montmartre (employed in seriocomic annotation of The Story of an African Farm) and Pierre de Lombard (his alias for The Critic); and Douzeuc (the Breton version of Dowson’s name). As Marion Plarr realized, ‘Ernest Dowson’ is above all a character, an allusion. With his odd preface, Dowson began crafting a chaste vie romancée to disguise the mortification of his fumbling first flame (L, 154).

2 Love (In the Shade) Une Petite Demoiselle of My Acquaintance On the morning of 16 October 1889, Dowson was reeling from another night ‘on the war path’ with his Oxford drinking pals. ‘D——’, he writes, ‘awfully weird feeling to feel [sic] as drunk as I do now at 11.30 AM. who have been binging cold water all the morning’ (L, 108). He had just departed Victor Plarr’s residence at Great Russell Street, having tried to sleep on ‘a horrible horsehair sofa, or on the floor’ at dawn, and was now contemplating breakfast.¹ The ‘Bingers’ had lately done the round of dubious Soho establishments, taking in ‘an exhibition in a purlieu of Leicester Square [that] so absolutely sickened [Dowson] with the feminine nudity that [his] debauchery hasn’t since extended beyond the bottle’ (L, 108). The adventure intensified the feelings of sexual revulsion which had oppressed him since ‘Lena’ jilted him in June. Commencing an epistle with cross and RIP insignia, he attempts to distract himself from his hangover: I’ve been kissing my hand aimlessly from the window to une petite demoiselle of my acquaintance—also par exemple a Minnie [Terry] & presque aussi gentille as her prototype. This has temporarily revived me. . . . there is nothing in the universe supportable save the novels of Hy. James, & the society of little girls. Music halls are all you say of them—the woman of Leicester Square is a beast— the Woman of Society is unmentionable—the Grisette is a fraud.—whisky is also a fraud & phiz a poison in addition. Nay—as I have remarked before—the idea of the little girl is the only one which doesn’t make for bloodiness. (108)

Signing off ‘Thine in consumption, general debility, delirium, enlargement of the liver, & tears | THE MOST WRETCHED BINGER | WHO EVER GAVE THE SHIFTER POINTS’, Dowson instructs Moore to purchase the plaque of Terry he had spotted, after all (108). ¹ Victor Plarr, Ernest Dowson 1888–1897: Reminiscences, Unpublished Letters and Marginalia (London: Elkin Mathews, 1914), 14. Dowson typically employed the official letterhead of C. Dowson & Son, Bridge Dock, Limehouse E., or added a shortened, handwritten return address in default of this. No actual writing location is implied. Dowson lived with his parents in Woodford at this time, and dined habitually in the West End.

Ernest Dowson. Robert Stark, Oxford University Press. © Robert Stark (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192884763.003.0003

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This woozy commentary is an inauspicious beginning for a grande passion. It nevertheless establishes the parameters of the most fateful relationship of Dowson’s life. His first concern is the demise of his relationship with ‘Lena’, whom he now denigrates, with the rest of womankind, as a faithless ‘fraud’. The ‘idea of the little girl’ alone escapes his ire. He does not name the young girl who precipitates this tirade, because her specific identity is unimportant. Whomever she is, she conforms to a preconceived ideal, the contemplation of which Dowson now finds salutary, rejuvenating. To prove his personal commitment to this notion, and suggest the pedigree of his current enthusiasm, Dowson cites his first indubitable poetic achievement: his sonnets ‘Of a Little Girl’. The unnamed youngster’s resemblance to Minnie Terry is also decisive. Dowson became obsessed with the child actor when his romance failed.² His relish of the comparison implies that we are dealing with the same petite demoiselle whom he will shortly introduce as Adelaide Foltinowicz, and that they were already passingly acquainted, presumably from the family restaurant. He made the same correlation a few weeks later: I am dining to-night with Samuel at a Polish Pot au Feu in Sherwood St, Glasshouse St. Soho. I discovered it. It is cheap; the cuisine is fair. I am the whole clientele, and there is a little Polish demoiselle therein (Minnie at 5st 7—no not quite that)—whom it is a pleasure to sit & look at. (114)

Foltinowicz is simply a ‘type’, a version of Minnie Terry. The likeness soon becomes a point of pride for Dowson (196, 206). Her most endearing feature is that she is an amiable distraction: from his hectic life, his erotic tribulations, and his hangovers. ‘Of a Little Girl’ had championed the tonic effects of children’s society. The first lyric, written in 1885 or 1886, outlines the doctrine: only love of a ‘little girl’ ‘is stingless and can calm | Life’s fitful fever with its healing balm.’ Now, with the renovated gusto of the lapsed believer, Dowson returns to his signature theme. The child who now interests him is a symbol rather than an individual, a palliative to allay his annoyance at the cruelty and vanity of adult affairs. Her naïve, generic utility is underscored by the steady application of the word as epithet in ‘Rondel’ and subsequent lyrics. Her ‘kiss’ is so innocent that it represents merely the ‘healing of [his] pain’.³ In Dowson’s correspondence, children are credited with such benign influence that they inoculate him against his propensity for debauchery. Returning ² Dowson first mentions Terry in Jan. 1889 (L, 27). He makes no mention of her while courting ‘Lena’; thereafter, his scattered memorabilia of her quickly grow into a ‘collection’ (142), testing the limit of his budget (112) and the tenacity of his friends (108–9, 132). When he subsequently measures the beauty or charm of other children by her standard (118, 136, 142, 148), Dowson subjects them to comparison not with Terry herself, who lived in the vicinity of Great Russell Street (92–3, 111), but with her commodified image. ³ See Robson, however, quoted in Ch. 1 at n. 30.

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to London from Bognor, for instance, he plans to proceed directly to visit Foltinowicz at the family restaurant, forewarning that ‘unless [it] has a soothing effect I am afraid I shall have to go on the heavy rampage for a week’ (L, 166). Having lately invested in his own copy of Marius the Epicurean, Dowson discovered a learned warrant for these convictions: I dine almost invariably in Poland now. The atmosphere of the place has the most cheering effect on me. The dear child becomes daily more kind & gracious. The other day she came & sat by me & conversed with great affability all the time I was there. She is really the most quaint & engaging little lady—& she can play the fiddle very prettily. Do you remember, par exemple, Pater’s note in ‘Marius’—to the effect that when one’s pain in life seems just a stupid, brutal outrage on us & one can seek refuge from it, at best, only in a mere ‘general sense of goodwill, somewhere, perhaps’—sometimes the discovery of that goodwill if it is only ‘in a not unfriendly animal may seem to have explained & actually justified the existence of our pain at all’. That is really almost true. Certainly the mere friendliness of a child has some such effect on me—seems to me at times to be not merely a set-off against one’s innumerable unliquidated claims against life but a quite final satisfaction of them. (137–8; cf. 134)

Dowson looks only for ‘mere friendliness’ from ‘the dear child’, but discovers in her rudimentary geniality a tonic and ‘an absolute end in itself ’. His delight in childhood is impersonal, but clearly gendered: Foltinowicz embodies an abstract idea, permitting its more vivid contemplation, a readier and more bounteous realization of the naïve sociability he craved. Her society also corrected Dowson’s tendency towards Schopenhauerian fatalism: Children certainly reconcile one—(at least in my case) more than anything else to one’s life but on the whole I am more & more convinced each day that there is nothing worth doing or having or saying. At least I can’t fix on any tangible object or aim in life which seems so desirable as the having got it finally over—& the remaining in perpetuo without desire or aim or consciousness whatsoever. . . . The value of contact with children is chiefly I think that it enables you at least for a time to consider with a sort of mellow melancholy what you would otherwise do with extreme bitterness & acrimony. (144–5)

Renouncing all desire in these remarks, anticipating death, when purposive activity and consciousness finally cease, and one is released from all that has most vehemently governed one’s life, Dowson finds stoic relief in the quiet contemplation of children. They prove that adult worries are vain, how easily spite will slip away into ‘a sort of mellow melancholy’ in their company, and furnish a sense of personal humility before the infinite. The same considerations inhabit

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the quintessential late-Victorian lyric on the vanity of taking one’s (love) affairs too seriously, ‘Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam’. It has not survived in manuscript, but Dowson employed the famous stanza—his own invention—on just one other occasion: for the anomalous ‘To Cynara’. If ‘Vitae summa brevis’ can be dated with the letter just quoted, to around the end of March 1890, its unique admixture of erotic turbulence and cool, stoic surrender evokes the waning heat of Dowson’s affair with ‘Lena’, and the new, restorative influence of Foltinowicz.⁴ Under such conditions, the speaker might well contemplate his own dissolution with ‘mellow melancholy’, sustained by the benign interaction of this ‘dear child’. This is one of the principal actions of a muse: to mould the poet’s attitude towards their subject, and to divulge the proper tone with which to speak of it. Foltinowicz first influences Dowson’s writing as an indirect pressure upon ‘the matrix of the poem’, in Levy’s terms (20).⁵ Dowson was not in love with Foltinowicz at this time. Had he been, he could not have discovered such abstruse consolation in her redemptive innocence. Greater intimacy developed over the summer: he took her to the theatre, as he had taken ‘Lena’, and was treated to an exhibition of ‘portraits of Adélaide in various periods of infancy’ one evening as he lingered in the restaurant (L, 147, 148). She was often made to retire before Dowson had finished dining and consorting: ‘Dormez bien et moi aussi’, she would say at these leave-takings (140). Dowson replied with ‘Villanelle of Sunset’: My white bird, seek thy nest, Thy drooping head down lay: . . . . Now are the flowers confest Of slumber: sleep, as they!

The curious figure invites her to nestle in his embrace, echoing the confessional appeal of contemporaneous lyrics including ‘To Cynara’ and ‘The Dead Child’, both of which plead for absolution for unspecified sins (as in the sonnets ‘Of a Little Girl’). The villanelle begins by contrasting the realms of ‘Man’s toil and children’s play’, but they are tellingly conjoined in the luxury of ‘sleep’ at last, which ‘rounds’ their days ‘with equal zest’. This is not the Big Sleep of ‘Vitae summa brevis’, but his infant companion’s fleeting innocence, at sunset, conjures thoughts of ⁴ It may be noted that ‘Vitae summa brevis’ expresses Dowson’s settled view of mortalitiy, however, and echoes abound throughout his early work, in the similar affective nominal agglomerations of several juvenile poems, and in his profession (under the alias of Anatole de Montmartre): ‘Let us shun emotion as we would hell, for which it is a synonym . . . the ideal State is to be without hate, or love, or hope, or fear, or desire—passionless’ (Plarr, 44). Plarr adds that ‘Of annihilation he writes as of “an everlasting conscious inanition . . . Surely annihilation is not horrible” though hell and heaven are horrible conceptions’ (44–5). ⁵ Gayle A. Levy, Refiguring the Muse (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 20.

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this, too. Eve, as well as ‘eve[,] is manifest’. In the concluding quatrain, the speaker pledges his ‘tired flower’: ‘upon my breast, | I would wear thee always’. This final flourish charges the poem with chivalric undertones, stemming from the idiomatic phrase ‘to win and wear (a lady as one’s wife)’, which Dowson could have picked up from Shakespeare.⁶ In other words, he already imagines a future in which this affectionate allegiance will endure, and culminate in a conventional, matrimonial alliance. Broaching marriage in this cautious, knightly manner is exceedingly scrupulous, but readers are thereby confronted with the propriety of Dowson’s interest in the twelve-year-old girl from around eight months after their first meeting. His fondness intensified over the summer as he toured Brittany for the first time with A. C. Hillier, forging lasting associations between the landscape and these clandestine prospects (see L, 158). Foltinowicz was hop-picking in Kent upon his return to London, and Dowson felt her absence keenly: ‘I dine in Poland desolately & listen to extracts from her letters’, he complains: ‘It is very monotonous—but I hope when la chère petite comes back things will improve’ (160). His energy went into drafting scenes for A Comedy of Masks set in Brodonowski’s restaurant, modelled on ‘actual Poland’ (161–2). When she returned, Dowson’s elation was breathless: Missie came back all right looking rosy & prettier than ever & bringing a good scent of hops & roses with her. The effect of her entry was transfusing—we all with one accord became joyous . . . Die Kleine more entirely resembles a sunbeam than anything which I have ever come across. I am still mellow from the interlude. I could rhapsodize for many sheets but I will spare you. Only I feel it incumbent on me to let off a little of my exuberance on you on these rare carnivals of the spirit . . . Why the deuce does any one write anything but books about children! Quelle dommage that the world isn’t composed entirely of little girls from 6–12. (162)

Foltinowicz has reached the point of imminent graduation from the category of ‘little girl’, which Dowson may have upwardly revised to accommodate her.⁷ He is clearly enchanted, if not besotted, and playfully entertains the idea of hitching his star to her as a publishing author. Notably, his inspirational image is of a ‘sunbeam’ rather than a clair-de-lune, which Dowson persists in associating with erotic love, and with ‘Lena’. Although these remarks are made in jest, he had begun two prose studies focused on young girls, and modelled on Foltinowicz, already. ⁶ ‘Wear, v., sense 6b’, illustrated by 2 Hen. IV, Much Ado, and Cymb; Cf. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 1: 22. ⁷ ‘There are, as you say, still books, dogs, and little girls of seven years old’, Dowson remarks to Charles Sayle: ‘One begins to yawn over the books and the dogs die and, oh Sayle, Sayle—the little girls grow up, and become those very objectionable animals, women’ (NL, 4–5).

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Umbratilia Dowson was sensitive to any imputation of indecency in his relations with Foltinowicz. He struggled to acknowledge his complex feelings for her, perhaps even to himself. Beginning with ‘Villanelle of Sunset’, however, the lyrics in his holograph notebook are trained unremittingly upon his evolving attachment. These climacteric poems constitute Dowson’s most intense lyrical concentration upon Foltinowicz as a poetic subject, presenting a frank record of the tremendous agitation which her physical maturation provoked in him. With the scattering of poems of stasis and disappointment which follow in their wake, they constitute Dowson’s entire offering for her: the rest is legend. Flower and Maas describe a ‘sudden flowering of Dowson’s talent at this time’: each composition in this cache is accomplished, but not uniquely so (L, 125). Yet under the imperative of orienting his whole lyrical effort towards Foltinowicz in some way, Dowson achieves a sustained vision of an embodied poetic muse, as nowhere else in his canon. ‘Amor Umbratilis’, meaning love in the shade, or in private, was apparently the first of Dowson’s lyrics to ‘cause . . . London Readers to believe they had a poet in their midst’.⁸ The manner of love broached in this quiet lyric is only intelligible under the sign of literary allusion. In the target passage we read that Pater’s contemplative hero, Marius Aurelius, ‘lived much in the realm of the imagination’, becoming ‘an idealist, constructing the world for himself in great measure from within, by the exercise of meditative power’ (Marius, 1: 24–5). He learned to take ‘the individual for its standard of all things’, and developed ‘a certain incapacity wholly to accept other men’s valuations’ (25). As a result of this drastic idealism, Marius’ life appeared ‘so like the reading of a romance to him’ that his experience became self-alienated: Had the Romans a word for unworldly [he wonders]? The beautiful word umbratilis perhaps comes nearest to it; and, with that precise sense, might describe the spirit in which he prepared himself for the sacerdotal function hereditary in his family—the sort of mystic enjoyment he had in the abstinence, the strenuous self-control and ascêsis, which such preparation involved. (25)

Dowson cultivated the same intellectual sovereignty, especially on passionate questions. Identifying his complex feelings for Foltinowicz as ‘unworldly’ made them available to language and thought, and justified them in aesthetical terms. ‘Amor Umbratilis’ appeals to and expresses the ideal and propaedeutic facets of Dowson’s incipient devotion. It describes not categorically proscribed love, but shadowy, marginal love, neither ‘licensed’ nor ‘unlicensed’ (L, 144). As it assumes ⁸ Mark Longaker, Ernest Dowson (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), 80. The title, which Dowson asked Moore to furnish, was already settled when Johnson proposed ‘Umbratilia’ for the sequence of lyrics published together as ‘In Praise of Solitude’ (L, 167, 214).

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an unspoken and aspires to an unwritten form, ‘Amor Umbratilis’ is characterized by its self-effacing, vanishing quality. This is realized in the miniature drama presented in tableau in the lyric, featuring a diffident, retiring lover and a totally insensible beloved.⁹ He does not dare approach her, preferring to make a surreptitious, nearly void offering, ‘a gift of Silence’ though she ‘may not ever hear’. Such slender recourse must have seemed natural to the scorned lover of the ‘experiment’ and the furtive hoarder of ‘Poesie Schublade’, or drawer poetry, but it was required by Foltinowicz’s youth (L, 187). Dowson divulges just what he means in his preliminary character notes for Felix Martyr, when he suggests two ‘daughters, one marriageable, Diana,—the other in the shadow—Elsie (?) not yet grown up’ (93). ‘Amor Umbratilis’ is unambiguously, although inexplicitly, concerned with the love of underage girls in Dowson’s mind. It imagines the tender offices of ‘the most excellent cult of la Fillette’ (164). His Paterian euphemism connects the pristine tableau vivant arranged for the lyric with the vogue for amieenfants prevalent at Oxford in the 1880s.¹⁰ It also anticipates Alfred Douglas’ ‘love that dare[s] not speak its name’ by two years.¹¹ Both lyrics enable ‘their audiences to feel as if they were getting a peek at an exotic world otherwise off-limits to them’.¹² Dowson’s inaugural muse-poem for Foltinowicz embodies what Ohi describes as ‘an eroticism inseparable from the stylistic, figural, narrative, and aesthetic effects through which its appeal is announced’.¹³ It epitomizes his effort to write ‘æsthetic poetry’ on Pater’s model, in celebration of ‘the hiddenness of perfect things: a shrinking mysticism, a sentiment of diffidence . . . the fatality which seems to haunt any signal beauty, whether moral or physical, as if it were itself something illicit and isolating’ (Marius, 1: 93). Dowson came to attach great importance to this inspirational breakthrough, and a silent aesthetic governs much of his subsequent lyrical production. Since he repackages his reluctance to speak about his affection as a ‘gift’, Dowson may well appreciate that the English word derives from ‘payment for a wife’ (‘gift, n’.). He certainly understood that his prospects depended on his capacity to proceed with tact; that silence must be instrumental to his aim. Announcing his resolve to declare himself as soon as Foltinowicz ‘is come to years

⁹ For Kincaid, this is typical: erotic depictions of Victorian children ‘tend to freeze any movement, to create a kind of affective tableau, one in which the child always is (and always is fixed) but always is beyond reach. Change is thus arrested, made an object for contemplation, for tender regret, for sexual arousal’ (James Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture [New York: Routledge, 1992], 67). ¹⁰ See Christine Roth, ‘Ernest Dowson and the Duality of Late-Victorian Girlhood: “Her Double Perversity,” ’ English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 45.2 (2002): 163–4. ¹¹ Alfred Douglas [Lord], ‘Two Loves’, Poems / Poèmes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1896, 110). ‘Amor Umbratilis’ is dated 18 Sept. 1890 and appeared in The Century Guild Hobby Horse less than a month later; ‘Two Loves’ was composed in Sept. 1892 and appeared in The Chameleon in Dec. 1894. ¹² Roth, ‘Ernest Dowson and the Duality of Late-Victorian Girlhood’, 173. ¹³ Kevin Ohi, Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 4.

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of discretion’, he asks Plarr to give him his condolences ‘& let all then be tacendum’ (L, 222). When his suit failed, he refused to discuss the matter, stopped referring to Adelaide by name (as he had ceased speaking of ‘Lena’), and enjoined his friends to strict taboos concerning her.¹⁴ Dowson’s ‘gift of Silence’ was never withdrawn or reclaimed; he continued to subscribe to it, out of respect or because the failure of the relationship became an unbroachable trauma to him. Yet the obverse of this impeccable restraint was the eruption of Foltinowicz, in the very thinnest disguises, onto the pages of Dowson’s fiction. Her aesthetic fate mirrors that of her experimental predecessor. The imagined circumstances of ‘Amor Umbratilis’ draw inspiration from Marius’ stern preparations for spiritual independence, presenting the Dowsonian muse-poet as, above all, ‘one who offers sacrifices’ (‘sacerdotal, adj. and n.’ ). This persona presides over the climacteric lyrics that follow and endures throughout Dowson’s later writing, and its derivation represents a crucial step towards the realization of a distinct theory of museological inspiration. Opposite the sacerdotal poet-speaker—directly addressed and vaguely evoked, as though his eyes must remain averted—stands the beloved. This shadow-figure is identifiable as a muse because she is the subject and addressee, mediator, ultimate audience, and final arbiter of the poem, all at once.¹⁵ A docile, attendant role was foisted upon Dowson by the necessarily chaste relationship he wished to pursue. Foltinowicz’s young age demanded that any conventional fulfilment of desire must be discountenanced or postponed indefinitely. It became taboo in the original sense. Dowson had to reconcile himself to ‘the sort of mystic enjoyment’ Marius found in ‘abstinence’, ‘strenuous self-control and ascêsis’ (Marius, 1: 25). All such sublimations are germane to Decadent art, in Hanson’s view: ‘in chastity and priesthood [it] found a spiritualization of desire, a rebellion against nature and the instincts’ (7). Dowson had little trouble adapting to this regime, provided it did not interfere with his habitual erotic pursuits.¹⁶ The sacerdotal theme also explains an odd expression in the first and last stanza of ‘Amor Umbratilis’. Dowson wondered if ‘unobservant’ is ‘legitimate’ here (L, 167). The word approximately implies that the beloved does not heed the speaker or his ‘gift’; possibly that she fails to mark his words specifically, revealing the poet’s underlying predicament. ‘Feet’ cannot be described as observant or ‘unobservant’ in this way, however. Dowson’s archaic and ceremonial usage indicates, rather, that the addressee will adhere to her established course, not recking his attendance whatsoever. He may have witnessed Foltinowicz’s participation in the processions ¹⁴ W. R. Thomas says that ‘among his friends, the matter [of Dowson’s relationship with Foltinowicz] was known to be taboo in the best sense’ (Ernest Dowson at Oxford’, Nineteenth Century and After [Apr. 1928]: 565). ¹⁵ See Introduction at n. 71. ¹⁶ See Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (New York: Tauris, 2000), 81.

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of the Enfants de Marie already, so that her religious observance directs his usage.¹⁷ ‘I watch you pass and pass, | Serene and cold: I lay | My lips upon your trodden, daisied grass’, he says: his quaint show of obeisance is bound to go unacknowledged in this grand pageant, being so exorbitantly old fashioned, and laden with a symbolism that has gone out of the world. The fundamental ambiguity of the poem concerns the nature of the paradoxical ‘gift of Silence’ which the beloved ‘may not ever hear’. Once the provisional value of the word ‘may’ is recognized, some of the difficulty is eased: she might well accept and appreciate the unregarded ‘gift’, after all. It is not just a stifled utterance, then, but dormant speech. In the next line the ‘gift’ obtains physical presence, so that the speaker can ‘lay [it] down at [her] unobservant feet’; but here, too, we can only infer its nature from the floral offering it would replace. Flowers offered amorous Victorians the means of exchanging messages which could not be stated openly or aloud, but their furtive language is evidently too coarse for Dowson’s present purposes. This dual conceit implies that his ‘gift of Silence’ is not just a resolve to forego ardent declarations, but a poetic muzzling. He pledges to refrain from presenting his lyrics in homage to the beloved; but rather than appearing empty handed, he makes an extravagant present of his wordlessness, fastening it in this lyrical bow. Dowson’s climacteric poems commence with an overwhelming proviso, therefore: they are private, marginal utterances—asides really—that speak only on condition of their paradoxical disavowal of the speaker’s right of address. By the fact of their existence they do of course speak, but on the condition of not arriving within earshot. The peculiar interlocutory situation that Dowson finds himself in vis-à-vis Foltinowicz disposes him to push language towards saying and unsaying, speaking and stopping short of speech, making explicit and withholding. This capacity for remaining latently unsaid in its saying is a hallmark of Dowson’s mature style, epitomized by the equivocal un-dedication of Verses.¹⁸ His sparest verse poses fundamental semiological questions which go back to Plato, at least. In this tradition, Agamben reminds us, language has a ‘double structure of signification’, which simultaneously involves ‘memory and oblivion, unconcealment and concealment, alētheia and lēthē’.¹⁹ It has a flashing, revelatory quality, whose function ‘is not to shelter this or that truth, this or that remembrance, but to keep watch over the soul’s very openness’ (105). Dowson’s climacteric poems reveal, and revel in, the enigmatic silence that is the inverse of speech, its obliterate shadow-work; they negotiate thereby the personal and aesthetic potentialities of his relationship with Foltinowicz. Dowson pits the whole tradition of poésie pure against prevailing

¹⁷ See Ch. 3, Our Lady of France (and Soho). ¹⁸ See Ch. 8, Muse, Indedicate. ¹⁹ Giorgio Agamben, ‘Tradition of the Immemorial’, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 107, 105.

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scientific and utilitarian views of language, and shows what survives the century’s mania for dictionaries and lexicons.²⁰ Facing a veritable muse without a suitable donation, dumbstruck, the poetspeaker of ‘Amor Umbratilis’ gathers that his very silence constitutes a speech-act. Bestowing this meagre, self-effacing gift upon a mistress who may not care to recognize it will become a favourite motif in Dowson’s writing, but it arises for mundane reasons. It so happens that the poet-speaker has ‘no songs to sing, | That [she] should heed or know’; the wares he had formerly to hand are ‘unmeet’ for the child he would now address from the shadows, so he has figuratively thrown them away. The bounty he has amassed, ‘The garland I have gathered in my day: | My rosemary and rue’, is rendered obsolete, partly because it is freighted with remembrance and regret. Such ‘blossoms’ are redolent of Dowson’s earlier love poems, especially those concerning ‘Lena’. Only discarding them can he tentatively approach his new addressee, and at the significant cost of eliding his prior lyrical accomplishments. Hard as it is to imagine Dowson not sharing his poems with Foltinowicz, acknowledging any rival to his affection would seem to diminish his devotion. Grasping this immediately, he protests in ‘Rondel’ that he ‘shall not miss | Old loves that did but stain’. His climacteric poems also take a guarded approach to disclosing his prior attachments. ‘Discedam, explebo numeram’, which revisits the donative schema, or gifture, of ‘Amor Umbratilis’, is worth quoting slightly out of chronological sequence, as the bluntest of these lyrics. The octave begins: Because my life is an unworthy thing Outworn and mildewed, I am dismayed, I dare not bring give it thee, O child, O maid! Too late divined, too sweet for me to sing: Surely, my barren days I may not bring, But rather giftless come, lest any shade Or prescience of autumn should be laid Upon thy fair life in its blossoming. (F, 69)

This self-berating sonnet exposes the incongruities which attend the ascent of the adolescent girl to musedom. The poet’s urge to share his life and work with her is unmistakable, but outweighed by the conviction that his earlier ‘blossoms’ are discordant with her burgeoning ‘fair life’. He ‘dare not’ exhibit his writing, much less offer it to her in homage, lest it thwart her development. Dowson’s prior love poetry is not always explicit, but it does imply an entailment to various predecessors. He evidently felt, with Benedict Campion, ‘Non sum dignus, ²⁰ Stephanie Kuduk Weiner’s contention that ‘Dowson seeks to render poetry a medium of art rather than a representation of life’ should be understood in this sense (‘Sight and Sound in the Poetic World of Ernest Dowson’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 60.4 [Mar. 2006]: 482).

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non sum dignus . . . [c]onsider[ing] her youth, her inexperience’ (YB 3, 99). The caveats of line five urge caution but, plainly, the speaker would like nothing more than to present his dubious ‘gift’. Indeed, the sonnet turns on this point, affirming in the sestet that he would ‘give thee all, who stand aside, | Giving thee naught’, if this would aid his cause. For now, he concedes, she ought to abide ‘in daisied ways of innocence’, while he waits ‘until the harvest is all harvested’ (F, 69). The poem stands poised at the same pastoral junction as ‘Amor Umbratilis’: nearly five months after determining to withhold his writing and his past from Foltinowicz, Dowson remains convinced that he should keep his counsel, and let nature take its course until (as he put it in revision) her ‘tale of days is reckoned’. The title affirms as much: ‘I shall go, I shall fill up the number, I shall be given back to the darkness. Go, our glory, go. And I wish you better luck’ (CP, 221 n). The lines are spoken by the ghost Deiphobus as he returns to the underworld in Aeneid VI. Like him, Dowson’s speaker determines to ‘turn [his] life away’. The immediate result of this detour is described in ‘Non sum qualis’: just a week after complaining that his ‘life is an unworthy thing’ Dowson may be found commending the ‘bought red mouth’ of a sex worker. Nevertheless, a pledge of silent ascesis begins to distinguish those texts in which Foltinowicz becomes something more than an occasional theme. The poet-speaker’s service is menial, much less than he is capable of, but he insists on undertaking it, regardless. In the last stanza, the beloved has no choice in the matter: she ‘shall’ take ‘this one gift’, the quelled utterance of the provisionally silenced muse-poet. With a quirk of syntax, Dowson serves notice that his ‘gift’ also ‘cast[s]’ the beloved (aside)—the verb is revised to make the gesture more imperious—not because he wishes to, himself, but selflessly (he insists), for her benefit.²¹ The haughty tone establishes that severance is the speaker’s sole prerogative, and Dowson plainly understood that it was the generous and moral thing to do. For a time, he remained steadfast in this determination to relinquish his affection, but the texts he meanwhile composed show that his resolve was unequal to the obligation he perceived. About a month after broaching his ostensibly naïve affection in verse, Dowson composed a companion poem centred in his first image of awakened endearment for Foltinowicz. In draft, it begins:

Little lady of my heart, Just a little longer,

²¹ L, 167; cf. ‘Now, for a gentle comfort, let her take | Such music, for her sake, | As mourning love can play’ (Lionel Johnson, The Complete Poems of Lionel Johnson, edited by Iain Fletcher [London: Unicorn, 1953], 53).

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Love me: we will pass and part, Ere my this love grow stronger. I have loved thee, Child, too well, To do aught but leave thee. (F, 66)

The register remains that of ‘Villanelle of Sunset’, but the ‘Child’ has become still more intimately beloved, and is now imbued within the speaker, interiorized as the ‘Little lady of [his] heart’. ‘Little lady’ was one of Dowson’s nicknames for Foltinowicz.²² He first titled the poem accordingly, but ‘Ad Domnulae Meam’ became ‘Ad Domnulam Suam’ upon publication.²³ Dowson’s revision implies identity with the dedicatee of ‘A Coronal’—‘His Lady’—composed two days previously. The draft also shares a Paterian provenance with its companion poem: ‘On my return to Lorium’, Marius reads, ‘I found my little lady—domnulam meam—in a fever’ (Marius, 1: 221). Longaker observes that it derives further impetus from Horace: ‘Lalage is not old enough for your advances’, Dowson would have read, ‘Let her be a child a little longer. Have patience, she will come to you by-andby, and return the love greater than you ever gave to Pholoë or Chloris’ (151). Dowson’s text does not imply that his wait will be thus rewarded, but biding his time is the avowed tactic of ‘Discedam, explebo numeram’. Despite these complex intertextual reticulations, or because of them, Dowson calls this poem ‘the last vapourings of my Muse . . . a mere trifle’, adding meekly: ‘pardon it—who can have inspired it?’ (L, 173). This is the first time he associates Foltinowicz directly with his capacity for lyrical invention. The full force of Decadent tradition seems almost effortlessly to combine under her catalysing presence to produce the poem. Dowson’s umbratilia, his shadow-verse, suggests he knew that his burgeoning passion for Foltinowicz was outlandish, dangerous, and suspect. Propriety afforded little option but to sever the relation in due course. His refrain—in ‘Ad Domnulam Suam’—pleads vainly for the moment, in which her innocence might still be indulged and enjoyed. He intends to forestall any behaviour which might compromise her, or jeopardize his vow of silence concerning their intimacy: his ‘lips should never tell | Any tale, to grieve thee’, he pledges. Like its counterparts, the poem offers a striking example of what Ohi terms, ‘the temporality of erotic innocence, which sees in the child’s very purity the future corruption that will have been its ruin’ (10). The speaker’s anticipation of inexorable estrangement demands his more effulgent enjoyment of the moment. He scrupulously registers the social strictures which require his removal, and stresses the personal sacrifice this will entail. Dowson’s revisions clearly demonstrate his anxiety: he allows that his love is becoming excessive, but prefers to consider it mutual. A ‘logic of innocence’ also underwrites the funerary coronal to ‘His Lady and to Love’ (Ohi, 10). These ²² See L, 131, 137, 144, 174, 322. ²³ F, 66, via L, 173 and RC, 53.

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‘perfectly meaningless verses’, Dowson says, constitute ‘the only poem that I ever wrote straight off in less than an hour’, probably with an eye on the opening lyric in Michael Field’s Long Ago, which Gray had reviewed in these terms.²⁴ On this occasion, his lyric offering is ‘A wreath for Love to wear, | | All day till Love is dead, | | [A] wreath that lives a day’. Opening his first book of poems with this votive offering, ‘For Love that lives a day’, Dowson acknowledges that the suit it entails is foredoomed from the start. ‘A Coronal’ becomes, therefore, a second ironizing epigraph to Verses, after the bizarre un-dedication.²⁵

The Great Climacteric As Dowson began to overhaul his poetic style, he prepared to make his Catholic confession and worked on fictional projects. A Comedy of Masks was in full swing; he readied ‘A Case of Conscience’ for publication; and probably completed ‘Apple Blossom in Brittany’. Here, more than anywhere else, Dowson attempts to resolve the cognitive dissonance arising from his conjugal interest in Foltinowicz. The heroine of each tale is modelled upon her, and takes her middle name as a badge of authenticity. Marie-Yvonne Mitouard is ‘pretty and very young’, with ‘grey serious eyes’ and ‘rebellious brown hair braided plainly’; Marie-Ursule is scarcely distinguishable: ‘very young and slight—she might have been sixteen—and she had a singularly pretty face’, whose expression ‘in repose was serious and thoughtful, full of conscious wistfulness’ (Dil., 29–30; YB 3, 94, 96). These are Dowson’s first writings to feature conspicuously intergenerational romantic relations. Both tales describe a thinly veiled surrogate for Dowson on the verge of accomplishing his matrimonial designs. The shared plot device of a looming betrothal indicates how nakedly biographical the studies are, and suggests why he remained wary of presenting them as straightforward fiction. By designating them études, he implicitly grants that they owe their existence, and much of their interest, to the individuals on whom they are based. By publishing them, moreover, Dowson revealed his intention long before he would declare it even to his close friends, much less to Foltinowicz herself (L, 221, 222). Like press leaks circulated to gauge reaction to contentious issues, they serve notice of his intent, while maintaining plausible deniability. ‘A Case of Conscience’ opens above the fictional town of Ploumariel, upon a fraught discussion between ‘a man and a girl’ who contemplate life together (Dil., 29). She pleads with him: ‘I will come to the world’s end with you; but oh, Sebastian, do not ask me, let me go. You will forget me, I am a little girl to you, Sebastian. ²⁴ L, 187; see Michael Field, The Poet, edited by Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Toronto: Broadview, 2009), 357. ²⁵ See Ch. 8, Muse, Indedicate.

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You cannot care very much for me’, initiating the conflict of the story (Dil., 30; cf. L, 341). Tellingly, The man looked down at her, smiling masterfully, but very kindly. He took the mutinous hand, with its little sprig of heather, and held it between his own. He seemed to find her insistence adorable; mentally, he was contrasting her with all other women whom he had known, frowning at the memory of so many years in which she had no part. (30–1)

Sebastian Murch may be an ironic invention: to Snodgrass, his ‘name is, in a sense, an accurate reflection of his ontological condition: he besmirches innocence, making [things] “murky”’.²⁶ His sway over Marie-Yvonne is oppressive, and when Tregellan rebukes him for ‘playing with’ and ‘compromising’ her, he voices a concern shared, presumably, by most readers.²⁷ Murch is nevertheless a transparently autobiographical construction. He has ‘never been anything but artist . . . had once been war correspondent of an illustrated paper. . . . had the air of having tasted widely, curiously, of life’, we are told, mirroring Dowson’s own employments and avocations (Dil., 31). His quirk of ‘mentally . . . contrasting’ all the ‘women whom he had known’ identifies Murch more solidly with the author: the supercilious, taxonomizing strictures of Dowson’s ‘experiment’ persist in his disaggregation of the girl he calls ‘Missie’ from previous girlfriends, even as he consolidates her resemblance to Minnie Terry. He certifies Murch as a surrogate by working his own name into the exposition (32, 39). These stories are paradigmatic instances of Dowsonian vie romancée, wherein actual life is entwined into a simulacrum of patterned language. The common desire for a much younger bride is the operative correspondence. In ‘A Case of Conscience’, Marie-Yvonne ‘is a child . . . there is five-and-twenty years’ disparity between’ her and Murch, ‘a man of more than forty’, so she is perhaps sixteen (40, 31). The matter of future conjugal relations is left undecided in the final tableau. Murch’s plans are undermined by a point of dogma, not by their age difference. Indeed, the incongruous relationship is validated by the revelation that Tregellan loves Marie-Yvonne, too. Murch has previously married, leaving him in a ‘peculiar position’ with regard to her, since ‘the Catholic Church does not recognise divorce’ (43, 44). Marriage would cause Marie-Yvonne to sin unwittingly; she must surely discover the deception. These are vital, personal concerns for Dowson. He had ‘practically succumbed’ to Catholicism himself in Ploërmel the previous summer (NL, 23). For each man, a disreputable liaison lies concealed in the past, but resurfaces to blight his romantic progress. Murch proposes to remedy the situation exactly as Dowson had dealt with his own past, when Foltinowicz became his ²⁶ Chris Snodgrass, ‘Ernest Dowson’s Aesthetics of Contamination’, English Literature in Translation, 1880–1920 26.3 (1983): 172. ²⁷ Dil., 36. Dowson had to face down such criticism himself (see L, 229, 231).

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paramount concern: ‘I shall not tell her’, he explains: ‘I have suffered enough for a youthful folly; an act of mad generosity. I refuse to allow an infamous woman to wreck my future life as she has disgraced my past’ (Dil., 43). The imputation of infamy casts further dispersions on ‘Lena’, whose memory Dowson declined to relinquish.²⁸ Dowson’s running epistolatory commentary upon affairs in ‘Poland’ becomes more solemn towards the end of 1890. Perhaps his published story met with tacit understanding, if not overt approval. One evening in December, Foltinowicz ‘was more adorable and wonderful than ever before’, and he confessed that he ‘worship[ed] her’ (L, 179). For Christmas, he presented her with ‘the works of the immortal [Lewis] “Carrol” [sic]’ (180). He knew these phantasmagorical tales would please but also, surely, of Carroll’s adoration of Alice Liddell. The gift is full of suggestion, not only that a similar alliance might be struck, that Dowson could be so inspired by Foltinowicz, could write about her, and even found a career upon her, as he now attempted. This, too, was a silent gift, covertly signalling his feelings towards her.²⁹ On Boxing Day, he composed another wistful lyric on the theme that had preoccupied him since September. When it was finally published as ‘Transition’ in Decorations (1899), the outcome it anticipates had long since come to pass: A little while to walk with thee, dear child; To lean on thee my weak and weary head; . . . . . A little while to hold thee and to stand, By harvest-fields of bending golden corn: Then the predestined silence, . . . . . A little while to love thee, scarcely time To love thee well enough; then time to part.

The lyric concentrates, following the etymology of ‘transition’, upon the speaker’s ‘pass[age]’ away from the beloved child, his ‘part[ing]’ from her, as in ‘Amor Umbratilis’ and ‘Ad Domnulam Suam’.³⁰ ‘Transition’ strongly implies that the speaker’s intended divergence coincides with physical changes that the beloved ²⁸ In ‘Exile’, Dowson ponders ‘Lena[’s]’ subsequent fate: ‘If you be dead, no proclamation | Sprang to me over the waste, gray sea.’ This possibility occurs to Murch, too, forcing Tregellan to interject: ‘You know she is not dead, Sebastian’ (Dil., 43). ²⁹ Lewis Carroll dedicated these books to Liddell, offering them as a ‘love-gift’ (Through the Looking Glass [London: Penguin, 1872], 10). The gesture may have inspired Dowson’s ‘gift of Silence’ and his dedication of Verses. ‘Villanelle of Sunset’ has several parallels with Carroll’s dedicatory lyric. ³⁰ The looming estrangement is imagined in Carrollian terms, where ‘No thought of me shall find a place | In thy young life’s hereafter’ (Looking Glass, 10). Carroll demonstrates how a literary career might be established in very public allegiance to an infant muse, but cautions that alienation from that source of inspiration is inevitable.

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will soon undergo, or is already undergoing. The inspiration on which these climacteric poems depend is transitory by definition. Even as his art flourishes, Dowson acknowledges that ‘one by one | The roses fall, the pale roses expire | Beneath the slow decadence of the sun’ (F, 68). A terminus also hovers around Dowson’s Breton études. He was conscious of writing ‘in the autobiographical manner of both [his] printed stories’ in 1890–1 (L, 152). By exteriorizing those matters which affected him most closely, by transposing them into patterned language and significant form, he hoped to gain insight into them, and traction upon them. Dowson could not resolve his ‘Case of Conscience’ in October, so he reprised its central theme for ‘Apple Blossom in Brittany’, and there presented a solution to his intergenerational quandary. Leaving the manuscript with Moore he remarks that ‘no one has seen it so far & I feel nervous: although I have a sort of notion that it’s the best I have done yet in point of style—as it is certainly the one (finished) which has caused me the most travail’ (186). Taking vie romancée farther than before demanded more craftsmanship and guile, and it required Dowson to hold his nerve. He had not yet made his desires and intentions concerning Foltinowicz explicit to Moore, and would not acknowledge them in his extant correspondence for almost another year. Like its predecessor, ‘Apple Blossom’ is a transparent homage to Foltinowicz nevertheless, a tentative ‘love-gift’ inviting consideration of her self, her future, and her relationship with the author in exotic, picturesque, and subtly decádent terms (Carroll, Looking Glass, 10). Benedict Campion is ‘an Englishman of letters, famous already in his own department’; ‘a man of ripe knowledge, of impeccable taste . . . above all . . . an authority—the greatest, upon the literature and the life (its flavour at once courtly, and mystical . . .) of the seventeenth century. His heart was in that age’ (YB 3, 98, 102). Lockerd explains the dual Catholic origin of the name: ‘Benedict was the fifth-century founder of monasticism, and Edmund Campion was an English Jesuit martyred during the reign of Queen Elizabeth’.³¹ It would also have put Dowson’s readership in mind of Thomas Campion, the most pre-eminently musical of minor Elizabethan poets. Swann notes that Campion ‘was rediscovered in 1889 when A. H. Bullen published a collection of his poems’ at Chiswick Press, which subsequently handled Verses (34). Marie-Ursule is Campion’s ward; he is her guardian or ‘tuteur’, a role that Dowson eagerly assumed vis-à-vis Foltinowicz; and theirs is evidently a ‘relation, which many persons found incongruous’.³² Upon being urged to consider a marriage of convenience, Campion exclaims ‘Non sum dignus, non sum dignus’, echoing ‘Discedam, explebo numeram’ (YB 3, 99). Like ³¹ Martin Lockerd, Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 53. By a like procedure, Francis Donne is an admixture of St Francis and John Donne. ³² YB 3, 107, 97. For Joseph M. Hassett, ‘“the pupil as Muse” phenomenon’ is ‘a tradition at least as old as Plato’s Phaedrus—in which the mentor finds inspiration in an erotic attachment to the pupil’ (W. B. Yeats and the Muses [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010], 124).

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Foltinowicz, Marie-Ursule speaks ‘English, very correctly, but with a slight accent, which gave to her pretty young voice the last charm’ (96). Campion observes that the girl is ‘so foreign in her education and traditions, so foreign in the grace of her movements, in everything except the shade of her dark blue eyes’ (97). His first words to her are ‘Dear child’, a frequent entreaty upon Dowson’s lips at this time (96). The processional which opens the story is plainly based on festivities at Notre Dame de France, in which Foltinowicz regularly participated.³³ Dowson describes them in detail to Moore on 19 October 1890, appending ‘Ad Domnulam Meam’ as though it spontaneously resulted from the experience. In each Breton study, the discovery of intimate affection comes stealthily upon the protagonist, but with revelatory force. Campion declares that he ‘hardly realised it before. Even now—no, how can I believe it possible—that she should care for me’ (99). When Tregellan is suddenly charged with jealousy, his realization is more stupendous: ‘It’s not true, it’s not true,’ he cried aloud, but a moment later knew himself for a self-deceiver all along. Never had self-consciousness been more sudden, unexpected, or complete. . . . Yes! he loved her, had loved her all along. MarieYvonne! how the name expressed her! at once sweet and serious, arch and sad as her nature. The little Breton wild flower! how cruel it seemed to gather her! (Dil., 46)

This may involve an element of special pleading: a sudden apprehension of love is the simplest way of eliding awkward inconsistencies in the protagonist’s feelings for the ingénue, while ensuring that propriety is observed and avoiding the suspicion of the law. Such realizations echo Dowson’s lyrics purporting to have ‘Too late divined’ that his affection has reached incorrigible proportions, but the cringe-worthy last sentence is hardly convincing in disowning Tregellan’s suddenly jealous and lewd predation (F, 69). The second section of ‘Apple Blossom’ describes the process of falling in love in detail, and is essentially autobiographical: Insensibly Campion had come to find his chief pleasure in consideration of this child . . . whose gradual growth . . . he had watched so long; whose future, now that her childhood, her schooldays at the convent had come to an end, threatened to occupy him with an anxiety more intimate than any which hitherto he had known. Marie-Ursule’s future! . . . Campion became aware then of an increasing difficulty in discussing the matter impersonally, in the impartial manner becoming a guardian. Odd thrills of jealousy stirred within him when he was asked to contemplate Marie-Ursule’s possible suitors. (YB 3, 98–9) ³³ See Ch. 3, Our Lady of France (and Soho).

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This naked exposition parallels the precipitous awakening of Dowson’s climacteric lyrics. It begins with disinterested ‘pleasure’ in contemplation of abstract childhood; becomes anxious about the intimacy this affects, about the ‘growth’ which must shatter it; finally, it confesses the visceral wince of envy when confronted with the adult relations that the beloved must naturally pursue. When Campion is offered a respectable match with Marie-Ursule, the matter comes to a head: as he studied her from a fresh point of view, he was none the less disquieted at the part which he might be called upon to play. Diffident and scrupulous, a shy man, knowing little of women; and at least by temperament, a sad man, he trembled before felicity, as many at the palpable breath of misfortune. And his difficulty was increased by the conviction, forced upon him irresistibly, little as he could accuse himself of vanity, that the decision rested with himself. Her liking for him was genuine and deep, her confidence implicit. He had but to ask her and she would place her hand in his and go forth with him, as trustfully as a child. And when they came to celebrate her fête, Marie-Ursule’s seventeenth birthday—it occurred a little before the Assumption—it was almost disinterestedly that he had determined upon his course. At least it was security which he could promise her, as a younger man might not; a constant and single-minded kindness; a devotion not the less valuable, because it was mature and reticent, lacking, perhaps, the jealous ardours of youth. Nevertheless, he was going back to England without having revealed himself; there should be no unseasonable haste in the matter; he would give her another year. (100)

Like Campion, Dowson left Brittany in 1890 having prudently determined to keep his conjugal ambitions to himself. He did precisely as advertised. Making such blatant, confessional incursions upon his own romantic prospects, however, no wonder he was eager to confide in Moore and nervous about the response it would provoke. The real disclosure of this passage concerns the precise nature of the affection thus awakened in the older writer for the ingénue. Campion contemplates a marriage of convenience, not a passionate union, and carefully weighs its advantages relative to ‘the jealous ardours of youth’ (100). His ‘disinterested’ ‘devotion’ promises a comfortable, bourgeois life, disavowing coarser pleasures and deeper fulfilment: a tantalizing prospect for any young lass. Campion approaches this ‘felicity’ in the analytical manner with which Dowson had broached his ‘experiment’ almost two years previously. Examining the matter more closely, he finds that he has fallen in love almost by default: She was his first love precisely because the conditions, so choice and admirable, which rendered it inevitable for him to love her, had never occurred before. And he could watch the time of his probation gliding away with a pleased expectancy

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ERNEST DOWSON which contained no alloy of impatience. An illumination—a quite tranquil illumination: yes, it was under some such figure, without heart-burning, or adolescent fever, that love as it came to Campion was best expressed. Yet if this love was lucent rather than turbulent, that it was also deep he could remind himself. (103)

Campion is (too) eager to distinguish this affection from his formerly passionate exuberances. His convoluted syntax, the fact that he must ‘remind himself ’ of the intensity of his feelings, and justify them, if only to himself, imply that his love for Marie-Ursule is very far from the grande passion of the Frenchified novels which Dowson admired.³⁴ The reader will wonder if this is special pleading, too. But the elaborate distinction is crucial, because it demonstrates Dowson’s capacity to compartmentalize his conjugal feelings for Foltinowicz from his ordinary sexual relations, which he continued to pursue. It shows that he was a bourgeois Victorian gentleman when it came to sex and marriage. As his furtive daydream about settling down with Foltinowicz evolved, he remained sullen about ‘Lena[’s]’ rejection, and he continued to pay for sex regularly. He thought of Foltinowicz, who was thirteen at the time, as a suitable prospect for a conventional alliance, which admitted detachment, and significant licence in extramarital affairs. This is not to say that Campion’s extravagant soliloquizing does not provide rhetorical cover for an underlying (or half-conscious) erotic attraction—or that these stories could not also serve, very plausibly, to mask Dowson’s own prurient designs—only that these practical considerations are worth taking seriously.³⁵ Indeed, Dowson seems always to have viewed marriage as adjunctive to his literary aspirations. Steeling himself to propose, he lamented the deleterious effect which the impasse was having upon his writing: ‘Another year of the stress and tension and uncertainty of these last 6 months will leave me without a nerve in my composition and I am not sure whether I have any now’ (L, 231). Audacity was certainly required if Dowson was to continue writing vie romancée in the manner of his Breton studies. The plot of his most ambitious work in this vein, Adrian Rome, pivots on the cynical device of marrying to expedite artistic production, as detailed in the Introduction. The evolution of the title—‘A Misalliance’, ‘The Opportunist’, ‘The Interlopers’, and ‘The Arrangement of Life’ were all considered—reveals Dowson’s gnawing doubts about all such undertakings.³⁶ ³⁴ The distinction may derive from Henry James (in, for example, ‘Madame de Mauves’, Collected Stories [New York: Everyman, 1999], 1: 217). ³⁵ My argument runs contrary to Roth’s in this respect (‘Ernest Dowson and the Duality of LateVictorian Girlhood’, 164). ³⁶ L, 292–3, 404; see Introduction at n. 36. Dowson’s misgivings are aired at length in Ch. 14, where Rome reluctantly decides to propose: ‘To dispose of the harassing question once and for all; this seemed to him to be the solution, the desired consummation; he was anxious, mainly, to relieve himself of this perpetual necessity of balancing issues, of making a choice. That it was inevitable that he should commit himself, sooner or later, it did not occur to him to deny; and the sooner the plunge was made, he argued, the sooner would he be able to bring trivial affairs to a settlement, to possess his soul in peace. His art,—he pleaded fiercely that this was the first thing to be considered; that he was bound,

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Ploumariel ‘Apple Blossom in Brittany’ makes another remarkable disclosure. It was ‘at Ploumariel when the prospect of such a marriage [of convenience] had dawned on’ Campion; if ‘his first impression had been one of strangeness, he could reflect now that it was some such possibility as this which he had always kept vaguely in view’ (YB 3, 103). The imaginary location of Dowson’s Breton studies is connected with a marriage proposal of a certain kind: not the fulfilment of a grande passion, but the sort of administration of one’s prospects which might occur to a wayward disciple of Zola. When a marriage of convenience finally occurs to Campion, the fitness of the arrangement seems commensurate with his vague longings. The association is reiterated in ‘The Eyes of Pride’: ‘I’m yours, and you know it— body and soul—and they are a poor bargain, my child!’ affirms Richard Seefang, ‘ever since—since Ploumariel’ (Savoy 1, 55). Rosalind Lingard ‘flushed and her head drooped towards him; at Ploumariel they had crossed the great climacteric’ (55). We need not assume erotic consummation to understand the epochal demarcation Dowson proposes, and which he encountered in the last chapter of Marius the Epicurean (2: 213). Ploumariel is the liminal zone of his heart’s desire; the imaginative site of his realization that he was in love, after his fashion, and of his private resolve to marry. For Dowson, as for Campion, ‘it had become an habit with him to spend his holiday—it was often a very extended one’ in Brittany (YB 3, 98). He first visited the region in 1890 with A. C. Hillier, and summered there subsequently with Moore in 1891 and 1892. The name of the fictive setting of his stories derives from Plomeur (ploe or ‘parish’; meur or ‘grand’) in Finistère, and Ploërmel in Morbihan. The coinage may be original to ‘A Case of Conscience’, or it may first appear in an undated letter which Flower and Maas suppose to have been written around 31 March 1890 (L, 126, 145–6). Alternatively, the letter may have been composed around 23 March 1891, as ‘Apple Blossom’ neared completion. In it, Dowson pleads: ‘When will this long, long winter end? I want the summer & “Ploumariel”’ (146). His inverted commas signify that Moore already recognized the term as Dowson’s own. The provenance of his signature neologism is important because it may finally sanction a narrower estimate of when he decided to propose marriage, fixing it to August 1890, when he visited Brittany for the first time. Dowson obsessed about Foltinowicz on each occasion. Returning to England in 1890, he complained that life ‘is very monotonous—but I hope when la chère petite comes as a matter of conscience, to so order his life as to prevent the intrusion of any element incompatible with a perfect devotion to this absorbing spiritual passion. If he must marry (and it seemed that it was expected of him), why, let him marry, in Heaven’s name; marry and have done with it. There was at least a certain security in this step; it promised to confer an immunity from the recurrence of dilemmas so embarrassing. He would marry, as he had taken his degree, in order to dispose of a troublesome formality’ (AR, 171–2).

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back things will improve’ (160). Days later he composed the ‘sunbeam’ letter cited above (162). A change is palpable, but if Dowson has already decided to propose he kept it to himself until January 1892. The following year, he returned to the shocking public scandal which at last hastened his proposal.³⁷ While Dowson may allude to a draft of ‘Apple Blossom’ in March 1891, and in July 1892, it is not extant, and cannot aid the determination. For an idea to ‘dawn’ is not for it to be absolutely established, of course, and Dowson’s conception was vague indeed, whenever it was formed. Upon completion, his study firmly and retroactively associated his decision to pursue a marriage of convenience with an earlier sojourn in Brittany. Dating Dowson’s own climacteric crossing over to August 1890 means that Foltinowicz was just twelve when he arrived at a settled position with regard to her, and that he did so approximately ten months after their first acquaintance. In Thorne’s view, Ploumariel represents ‘an Edenic French idyll which is safely removed from the concerns of London’; Dowson himself calls it a ‘quiet corner of Brittany’.³⁸ The relentless associations with Foltinowicz make it a sort of Breton Wonderland, however; not so much ‘a space of comfortable stasis’, as Thorne contends, but the site of the hero’s ‘climacteric’ turn away from a disgraceful past, towards a life henceforth chastely devoted to the accomplishment of a productive, but irregular, domesticity with her (YB 3, 209). The underlying turmoil of Ploumariel is captured best in the story’s principal symbol: the fleeting appleblossom. For Dowson, ‘the apple orchards of Faouet [sic]’ became metonymic of Brittany and France, ‘the land of apple blossoms’ (L, 201, 238, cf. 193). As the last section begins, we reencounter the pensive couple overlooking the town: They had wandered there insensibly, through apple-orchards white with the promise of a bountiful harvest, and up the pine-clad hill, talking of little things— trifles to beguile their way—perhaps, in a sort of vain procrastination. Once, Marie-Ursule had plucked a branch of the snowy blossom, and he had playfully chided her that the cider would be less by a litre that year in Brittany. ‘But the blossom is so much prettier,’ she protested; ‘and there will be apples and apples— always enough apples. But I like the blossom best—and it is so soon over.’ (YB 3, 106)

Identifying Marie-Ursule with the apple-blossom allows Campion to take refuge in the moment, although his ‘Child [is] growing out of Childhood: and Away!’ (L, 182). The symbol also articulates Dowson’s brief moment of adjournment, his aesthetic delight in Foltinowicz’s juvenility, despite pressing concerns about the future. ‘A Case of Conscience’ had anticipated the association, and it occurs again in ‘Yvonne of Brittany’ (Dil., 40). Dowson even thought of titling his first book of ³⁷ See L, 212–13, discussed below. ³⁸ Joseph Thorne, ‘Ernest and Aubrey: Friendship and Rivalry at the Fin de Siècle’, E, 209; YB 3, 97.

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verse, a prospective volume to be issued in collaboration with Plarr, ‘Apple Blossom from Oxford’, so bound up with Foltinowicz was this leitmotif (L, 185). He had sought a florescent image of her youth since shelving his ‘Blossoms unmeet’ in September 1890, after all. Shortly after completing ‘Apple Blossom’, Dowson privately conceded he was unequal to its stoic and aesthetical resolve. As he explains to Plarr, hoped Օ might happen, feared in the nature of things, seems to grow in grace & favour daily. What a terrible, lamentable thing growth is! It ‘makes me mad’ to think that in a year or two at most the most perfect exquisite relation I have ever succeeded in making must naturally end. Yes, it makes me mad! One ought to be able to cease caring for anyone exactly when one wished; it is too difficult: or one ought to be able to live entirely in the present. (187)

Die Kleine instead of changing, altering, repelling, as I

If he honestly expected to be capable of extricating himself from this increasingly rapturous liaison, which friends were beginning to remark, he now admits that he was wrong. His cool matrimonial designs are troubled by the ‘turbulen[ce]’ of ‘heart-burning’ and ‘adolescent fever’ after all (YB 3, 103). His attraction merely intensifies, he notes with alarm; nor is it accompanied by the misogynistic repulsion usual with him when faced with attractive but unavailable young women. Dowson had indeed ‘crossed the great climacteric’ and cannot now bring himself to ‘pass and part’, though nature itself should require it (Savoy 1, 55; V, 66). Unlike Marie-Ursule or Campion, he is quite unable to ‘live entirely in the present’; the lushest blossom ‘is over so soon’, Dowson feared, leaving him only ‘apples and apples—always enough apples’ (L, 187; YB 3, 106). Returning from Brittany that summer, Dowson learned of a scandal that had lately filled the press concerning the seduction of a sixteen-year-old girl named Lucy Pearman (erroneously, ‘Pearson’) by a thirty-nine-year-old journalist named Edward Newton.³⁹ He likens his panic to ‘a tradition of scorpions . . . who sit in a fiery ring and sting themselves to death’ (L, 212). In the heat of outrage, he is nearly explicit about the extent of his feelings: I have had a moral shock since yesterday, which has racked me ever since with an infinite horror that I may be misunderstood in the only thing that I really care about, by the only people to whom it matters. . . . The worst of it was, that it read like a sort of foul and abominable travesty of—pah, what is the good of hunting for phrases. You must know what I mean, and how I am writhing. ³⁹ Flower and Maas, Thornton and Caroline Dowson, Condé and Gossling, all write of ‘Lucy Pearson’; Adams corrects this, citing three original articles in The Times between Aug. and Sept. 1891 (5, 6–7).

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Dowson’s relationship with Foltinowicz is now ‘the only thing [he] care[s] about’, a fact that had been obvious to his friends and family for some time. That they should suppose his intentions to be prurient constitutes a gross violation of his ‘holy places’. In order to seriously credit Dowson’s indignation, we are obliged to recall that his designs upon Foltinowicz were avowedly chaste, and that he desired an arranged marriage rather than a passionate involvement from the start. He takes considerable pains in this letter to his most intimate friend to insist that his interest is asexual, and does not appear to think that Moore requires much convincing. Whereas the Pearman scandal is a debased ‘travesty’, his own relations with Foltinowicz ask to be considered as serious and pure. He even draws a Wildean lesson that ‘certainly the gods are ironical: they always punish one for one’s virtues rather than for one’s sins’ (213). Dowson was convinced that the scandal produced an imperceptible change of attitude among the Foltinowiczes, and this paralyzed him, personally and artistically. He pleads to Moore: ‘You must not m’en voulez: I simply CAN’T do anything: for the present, I’m done, usé, as dry of any sense of words, or form, as dry of ideas as a sucked orange. This thing is killing me’ (217–18). The palpable alteration prompts Dowson to ensure that he is at least properly understood, and he quickly determines that ‘the most reasonable course’ is ‘to make the disagreeable necessary overtures’ (231). First, he disburdens himself to Moore: I have decided that when ‘Masquerade’ [i.e., A Comedy of Masks] is finished which should happen on or before the 13th. April next which is also a Birthday—I will put an end to this absurd pretence of further consideration which deceives nobody and plainly declare myself. . . . I do not believe in marriage in the abstract in the least. Only it is the price, perhaps a heavy one, which one is ordered to pay if one has an immense desire for a particular feminine society. In the present case, I would pay it ten times over, sooner than risk the possibility of some time or other regretting that I had let go irrevocably something which promised a good deal, which I have never had, & which is perhaps after all the best thing obtainable in this stupid world—simply out of lˆacheté! (221)

This stoic calculation may disguise a sentimental and increasingly erogenous attraction, but it is leveraged in pragmatic, subtly careerist terms. Meanwhile,

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Dowson filled the pages of his manuscript notebook, inscribing the ponderous ‘Villanelle of Marguerites’ on the rear endpaper on 31 December 1891. He had literally turned the page on his experimental entanglement with ‘Lena’, the relationship that (as he put it in ‘The Diary of a Successful Man’) ‘wrote “Finis” to my youth and made a man of me’ (Dil., 13). Confronted by the Pearman scandal, embarking on fresh projects in verse and prose, and so upon a literary career at last, Dowson finally permitted his love to edge out of the shadows.

3 The All-Absorbing Subject Received by a Passionist Priest on the morning he died, Oscar Wilde endured perhaps three pitiful hours as a full member of the Catholic Church: they have sufficed for his enrolment, with Beardsley, Johnson, Gray, Douglas, and Dowson himself, among the ranks of Decadent Catholic writers.¹ With the exception of Gray, who entered the priesthood in 1901, theirs became a generation of notorious converts, rather than eminent Catholics. Wilde’s hasty welcome into the fold demonstrates that confession itself—better still, the possibility of confession— and not lived devotion, is the locus of Decadent Catholic experience. John Henry Newman—whom Dowson considered, with Pater, one of ‘the two greatest men of the century’—is responsible for this special emphasis (L, 146). By establishing a precedent, an idiom, and an audience, Newman’s writing ensured that Decadent writing came to be seen, in Hanson’s terms, as ‘a literature of Christian conversion, but a conversion that never ends, a continual flux of religious sensations and insights alternating with pangs of profanity and doubt’.² Newman’s example led to a vogue for turbulent, devotional lyrics, tending importantly to faith, but centred in doubt like all great confessional literature. This reorientation licenses a more nuanced examination of what Longaker terms ‘the small province’ of Dowson’s religious poetry.³ While it is plainly nonsensical to speak of him as a Catholic poet, Dowson’s confession is exemplary. As Mahoney insists, ‘his decision to go over to Rome is just the right reference point from which to explore the logic behind Dowson’s mind and art’ (199). His confessional lyrics savour the ‘pangs of profanity and doubt’ which interest Hanson, even within the sanctuary of the Church itself. Only in places of intimate spiritual asylum, Dowson seems to say, is modernity capable of fully disclosing its terrible, centrifugal compulsions. His Catholic lyrics are perturbed and occasionally

¹ Wilde received the sacraments, but was ‘incoherent’ and ‘may or may not have signalled his desire for them’ (Jarlath Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005], 16). ² Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 10. This is not an exceptional position: gradual, continuous spiritual transformation is critical in theological accounts of conversion from Augustine to Lonergan (R. T. Lawrence, ‘Conversion, II’, NCE, 4: 237). In Joseph W. Mahoney’s assessment, ‘Dowson lived as a convert still in the process of being converted’ (Fin de Siècle Catholics [unpublished PhD thesis, Pennsylvania State University, 1976], 253–4). ³ Mark Longaker, Ernest Dowson (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), 72.

Ernest Dowson. Robert Stark, Oxford University Press. © Robert Stark (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192884763.003.0004

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baroque, therefore, qualities arising from, and expressing, his modern scepticism, that dubious inheritor of religious doubt in the confessional tradition of Augustine and Rousseau. Following his confirmation, overtly Catholic subjects vanish from Dowson’s verse, yet he continues to explore the dynamics of confession: his Breton lyrics grow out of the accomplished fact of his religious submission, and are equally alert to the consolations of faith and the anguish of doubt; his final story pleads for immanent belief, even unto death. So long as Dowson continued to write, indeed, an incessant confessionalism invigorated his work. Bernard Lonergan calls religious conversion that ‘otherworldly falling in love . . . total and permanent self-surrender without conditions, qualifications, reservations’.⁴ Dowson’s Catholic submission is a second, parallel ‘Amor Umbratilis’, therefore, twining with the progression of his affection for Foltinowicz. This does not make it inauthentic. He undoubtedly experienced true intellectual and religious conversion, exceeding Lonergan’s requirements for ‘fundamental’, or initial, conversion (i.e., ‘the foundational act of self-transcendence that opens one up to the reality beyond the self as an object of knowledge, value, or love [and] creates a horizon’) and including ‘revolutionary’ and ‘evolutionary’ aspects (NCE, 4: 235). The texts explored in this chapter exemplify Lonergan’s insight that ‘a new image of God is frequently accompanied by a new self-image, a new religious community of reference, a new belief system, a new symbol system, a new form of spirituality’ (4: 237). Each of these renovations are amply evidenced in Dowson’s confessional lyrics. The temporary reformation of his sexual habits further suggests that Dowson may have experienced genuine moral conversion, albeit of more limited scope.

An Extraordinary Fascination Good conversion narratives require inauspicious beginnings. Although one early letter gives the impression that Dowson was a Decadent Catholic in waiting, he was not particularly amenable to Roman Catholicism as a young man.⁵ Later, he became open-minded as a matter of principle, where others were concerned, and where the subject was broached in serious literature, but remained personally ambivalent about Catholicism. Dowson’s first Catholic story makes this clear, as ⁴ Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, edited by Robert M. Doran and John D. Dadosky, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 14: 226. ⁵ L, 21–2. Dowson did not initially share Huysmans’ view that conversion ‘was somehow predestined by a commitment to art and beauty’, although it became a useful trope later in life, as his remark to Frank Harris—‘I’ve become a Catholic, as every artist must’—suggests (Robert Pruett, ‘Dowson, French Literature, and the Catholic Image’, E, 164; see L, 327 and Frank Harris, Contemporary Portraits, Second Series [New York, 1919], 69).

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does his correspondence with Charles Sayle, a fellow poet who shared his fondness for public houses, as well as for young girls.⁶ Sayle became an early spiritual confidante and offered Dowson a timely example of religious conversion, albeit to Anglo-Catholicism (NL, 25 n). ‘So you are a Catholic! I envy you hugely’, Dowson enthused upon hearing of this development: ‘Catholicism is about the only beautiful “ism” left nowadays and I feel many degrees nearer you than when you dubbed yourself Anglican: none the less, mine own habit of mind becomes more stable daily’ (L, 58). This mild proviso suggests that Dowson appreciates the impulse to convert but that, for himself, it could not be an urgent consideration. Sayle’s recourse is whimsical, Dowson’s phrasing suggests; he is, by contrast, more reliably Protestant. For Mahoney, this letter is ‘indicative of Dowson’s changing attitude toward Rome, of his open-minded and touching effort to balance his need for surety with an honest desire not to delude himself ’ (209). His ambivalence is captured later the same night in a private retort: ‘If I could see things—or hoodwink myself—? as [Sayle] does I would take a first class single for La Trappe to-morrow’ (L, 59). ‘The Diary of a Successful Man’ features a tolerant standoff much like this. Set in Bruges with the aim of activating that city’s Catholic and Decadent associations, the story examines the aftermath of a ménage à trois involving Dion, his friend Sebastian Lorimer, and Delphine de Savaresse.⁷ Delivering her final choice between these rival suitors in epistolary fashion, twenty years before the commencement of the story, Madame de Savaresse had ‘confused her envelopes’.⁸ The ancient passion of each character remains, but they have adapted to the fiasco in diverse ways: Dion has thrown himself into work; Delphine has taken orders and joined the Dames Rouges; and Lorimer has fallen into nightly attendance upon her as she performs her offices. The truth only dawns on Dion as the Litany of Loreto resounds ‘strophe by strophe’ in the Gothic Church of the Dames Rouges at the climax of the story.⁹ As Lorimer morbidly awaits one final glimpse of Delphine, to be granted only when her dead body will finally pass beyond the convent door to be lain in the church, Dion reads the obdurate tableau of his ‘fantastic attitude’ as an irreducible enigma, the symptom of an ‘unhinged mind’ (26). Lorimer’s

⁶ Longaker, Ernest Dowson, 54. ⁷ Pruett summarizes the ‘long-standing artistic conception of Bruges’ and Belgium’s role as a ‘hotbed of Symbolist production and an iconic landscape of the Decadent imagination’ (E, 175–6, 178–9). Dowson was unacquainted with the city at the time of writing. He implored Moore to visit in Jan. 1889, completed his study by May, before extending the same invitation to Plarr that autumn, whereupon he did, finally, visit (L, 24; NL, 10; S, 118 n). ⁸ Dil., 19. Dowson subsequently referred to the tale’s ‘artistically indefensible misdirected letters’ (L, 152). ⁹ Dil., 22. This revelatory device is adapted from ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. Too rich to detail here, the debt includes significant verbal parallels concerning the avoidance of ‘vault-like places . . . full of ghosts’, and predicting Delphine’s ‘living entombment, this hopeless death in life’ (4, 21). Lorimer is obviously based on that other twisted painter, Roderick Usher.

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eccentric conduct is warranted by the vagaries of his Decadent imagination, and his suddenly acquired Roman Catholic faith: I tried from time to time to bring him down to personal topics [says Dion], but he eluded them dexterously, and it was only for a moment or so that I could keep him away from the all absorbing subject of the Catholic Church, which seems in some of its more sombre aspects to exercise an extraordinary fascination over him. (16)

Lorimer has not become a devoted Catholic, but a fanatical, fixated Catholic. For Dion, this is a drastic indulgence. Lorimer’s enthrallment is the last refuge of an artist crossed in love, and does not arise on the intrinsic, spiritual merits of the faith. His erotic captivation is displaced into ecstatic ritual.¹⁰ For Hanson, such ‘volatile eroticism’ is typical of Decadent Catholicism, and is ‘not necessarily an affront to Catholic belief ’ (26). Dion can only pity Lorimer. When he discovers the truth, he is liberated by the knowledge that Delphine has ‘passed altogether and finally out of [his] life’; notwithstanding a lifetime of revenant desire, he leaves peremptorily for Brussels (Dil., 26). By contrast, Lorimer’s perverse, perpetual adoration is morbidly unattuned to the normal succession of life.¹¹ His total ‘absorption’ in the liturgy, in Delphine’s disembodied voice, wrecks his sanity and dissolves his sovereign identity. The subject of his rapture, the story makes clear, is basically interchangeable. Contemporary Roman Catholicism accommodates both spiritual and erotic exhilarations, offering a language and a venerable tradition to aid their contemplation, as everyone from Baudelaire to James has understood. But for Dowson, this is an artistically barren and deathly trap. His study cautions severely against the facile, pathological, and ineffective displacement of erotic attraction into religious mania, of the ruination of aesthetic capacity in sterile devotion, and is implicitly critical of the vogue for Catholic conversion among his acquaintances. Dion is ‘successful’ only because he is sober enough to get on with the business of life. He bolts from the Church of the Dames Rouges as Poe’s narrator flees the debris of the House of Usher. This juxtaposition of static consecration and dynamic living will become vital to all of Dowson’s Catholic writings. Lorimer’s indomitable devotion will obtain a special resonance when Dowson takes up the same theme in an unironic devotional lyric, almost two years later. In the intervening period, ¹⁰ For Pruett, ‘Catholic ritual . . . becomes a sublimation of emotional injury, a tragic yet aesthetically compelling rehearsal of traumatic loss’ (E, 177). ¹¹ ‘Success’ is not prosperity here, but ‘that which happens to be the sequel of something’, in the process of temporal succession (‘success, n., sense 1a’). Dion is a ‘successful man’ because he liberates himself from the past, embarking poste-haste to Brussels. ‘One takes up one’s life and expiates its errors’, he opines in conclusion, ‘each after one’s several fashion’ (Dil., 26).

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his whole attitude towards Catholicism is transformed in consequence of his relationship with Foltinowicz.

An Operation Not to Be Hurried Dowson’s immediate circle now included several professed Catholics, notably the Foltinowiczes; various potential Catholics, including members of his extended family; and the poets John Gray and Lionel Johnson.¹² At first, Sayle was the most influential of these associates: their correspondence documents Dowson’s gradual awakening to the possibilities of a faith which he could authentically practice. By March 1890, Dowson expressed ‘envy’ that Sayle would soon travel ‘to Rome’, and was already interested in going ‘in another sense as well’.¹³ By late summer, his former tolerance of Catholicism had become personally imperative: Our Lady of the 7 Hills s’impose [sic] on me more and more—& in short I am afraid there is no help for it. I practically succumbed in Brittany—it’s so utterly impossible to continue as an outsider. I shall try & put it off a little longer—if possible until next summer when I can take a month out of England & get the disagreeable part of the business over by myself. Besides I should very much prefer on all grounds to be received abroad. (NL, 23)

Dowson envisioned making his first confession free of habitual Soho temptations, despite repeated avowals that ‘it must be abroad’ (NL, 25). He later commended Johnson’s ‘great . . . courage’ upon conversion, knowing that ‘his “first general confession” must have been extremely disagreeable’ (L, 205). Being received abroad was certainly one solution, but other avenues were open to Dowson. He declined Sayle’s offer of practical assistance to be received on his own terms by Father Sebastian Bowden at the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Knightsbridge, popularly known as the Brompton Oratory, upon his return from Brittany the following year, on schedule (219). Both choices are significant. As Bowden himself explains, ‘In 1847, the Oratory was introduced into England by Cardinal, then Fr., Newman.’¹⁴ Dowson prepared accordingly, putting himself through a course of ¹² Dowson befriended Johnson over the spring and summer of 1890. His influence may be gauged by Dowson’s remark that ‘I have watched many nights with him . . . each time I have come away more astonished at his extraordinary width of knowledge: at his Catholicity in every sense, including Zola & Newman’ (L, 177). Mahoney’s detailed account of the relationship, and its Catholic basis, concludes that ‘Johnson did teach Dowson much of the tremendous amount that he knew about the Catholic Church: his readings from the Fathers, the intricate detail in the Rituale Romanum, the arguments of Pascal, the idea of “correspondence” as in Blake, even the Christian impetus of Pater’s Platonism’ (229). ¹³ NL, 18–19. Sayle was granted an audience with the Pope in Apr. 1891. ¹⁴ Henry Sebastian Bowden, Guide to the Oratory, South Kensington (London: Burns and Oates, 1897), 2.

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Newman’s writings, and threatening Moore with the same (see L, 195, 198, 205). He took Newman’s books with him to Brittany that year, presumably because he had already arranged to be received upon his return (205). His conversion was to be an act of literary as well as religious affiliation. In the event, Newman died while Dowson was abroad, so his first duty upon returning to London was to obtain Johnson’s account of the requiem mass in Newman’s honour at the Oratory, which Johnson attended with Pater (159). Sayle could have been instrumental in this arrangement or, as Adams suggests, Dowson may have had the assistance of Gray or Johnson.¹⁵ More likely, one of Dowson’s cousins—Gerald Hoole or D. L. Secretan—facilitated matters, and served as Dowson’s sponsor during the rite of reception. Both were received at the Oratory themselves, and Dowson first mentions it in relation to one of these occasions.¹⁶ Current guidelines suggest that ‘if someone has had the principal part in guiding or preparing the candidate, he or she should be the sponsor’, and Hoole later disclosed that he had ‘something to do’ with Dowson’s conversion.¹⁷ As an established spiritual guide and able scholar, Bowden was the preeminent choice of confessor to candidates of aesthetical disposition.¹⁸ A decade earlier, Wilde had ‘discuss[ed with him] the possibilities of “coming out” as a Catholic’, according to Killeen, although he ‘does not seem to have “gone over”’.¹⁹ Dowson’s letters to Sayle offer further clues about his preparations for the sacrament. His reference to ‘Our Lady of the 7 Hills’ means something like Our Lady of Rome which, he says, repeating the figure, ‘encroaches on me, in these latter days’ (L, 198). Dowson has just been discussing Sayle’s impending trip. The allusion is curiously confounded with Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, Mater Dolorosa, whose contemplative mysteries are sometimes invoked while praying the rosary. St Philip Neri, founder of the sixteenth-century Oratory in Rome, was a great proponent of the rosary, and Dowson may allude to the Chapel of Seven Dolours at the Brompton Oratory (Oratory, 1, 17–19). Alternatively, he might mean the nearby Church of the Servite Friars, Our Lady of Seven Dolores, on Fulham Road, which he attended in August 1890 with Johnson, as he notes in this very letter (NL, 22–3). Notwithstanding the ambiguity, Dowson appears to have a firm place of reception in mind. He clearly wished to join the Church under Marian auspices as early as August 1890, more than a year before he was eventually received.

¹⁵ Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London: Tauris, 2000), 58; cf. NL, vi–vii. Familiar with the nearby Servite Church, Sayle presumably knew Brompton Oratory, too (NL, 22–3). Dowson also took Clough’s verse to Brittany: he was one of Sayle’s ‘heroes’ (L, 205; J. C. T. Oates, ‘Charles Edward Sayle’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 8.2 [1982]: 238). ¹⁶ ‘An alcoholic debauch’ with Swanton, and perhaps Sayle, may explain Dowson’s repeated vow of ‘no more Brompton Oratori-os!!!’ (L, 101; cf. 70, 172). ¹⁷ Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, 396 (abbreviated henceforth); Longaker, 67. ¹⁸ Bowden had published on Dante, and would later write on The Religion of Shakespeare (1899). ¹⁹ Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde, 16; cf. Mahoney, Fin de Siècle Catholics, 61, 63.

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Dowson’s Catholic conversion has sometimes been viewed as a desperate response to the Lucy Pearman scandal, which cast his relations with Foltinowicz in a lurid light and provoked his indignant fury, but it was not an impulsive decision.²⁰ On the contrary, as he explained to Sayle in September 1890, ‘’Tis an operation not to be hurried, & I shall be only too delighted if it can be accomplished even as soon as next year’ (24–5). This is an informed estimate of the time normally required to prepare for the sacrament. Despite a purportedly ‘pagan childhood’ unacquainted with ‘natural religion’, Dowson was a baptized Christian, and therefore a candidate for reception rather than a catechumen: he required only the liturgical rite of reception to be admitted into the Church, not the lengthier rites of initiation.²¹ While ‘the rite [of reception] is so arranged that no greater burden than necessary is required for the establishment of communion and unity’, a period of probation was nevertheless typical, then as now (RCIA, 387). Not being a convert, Dowson was not mandated to be received during the Easter Vigil, nor on a Sunday; he could be confirmed by any priest having the confidence of the bishop, hence, perhaps, his appeal to the ministry of Brompton Oratory, with its singular mission of fostering access to the sacraments (Oratory, 2). Dowson would have been accompanied by a sponsor, Secretan or Hoole most likely; he would have been required ‘to make a confession of sins beforehand, first informing the confessor that he [was] about to be received into full communion’; he would have received the Eucharist; his name would be entered into ‘a special book’; finally, he was required to return to the Oratory for postbaptismal instruction.²² Bowden concludes his Guide to the Oratory by noting that ‘scarce an educated person embraces Catholicism in England, save through the influence, direct or indirect, of Cardinal Newman’ (109). In Dowson’s case, the influence was explicitly affirmed. He summarizes to Moore: Read the Catholic sermons, the volume on various occasions and that to mixed congregations: personally, I think them in the finest English I have yet met with outside Pater. . . . He strikes me not in the least as one of those, with a genius of conviction like St Paul or Pascal, but rather as of a temper essentially subtile & sceptical, resembling Butler’s: & his Catholicism was the deliberate conclusion of a logical process, and not at all emotional or the issue of early prejudice: that is contradicted by his letters. His faith was not spontaneous & direct like Pascal’s, but a reasoned state of mind conditioned on assent to certain intellectual propositions. (L, 198)

²⁰ See L, 128; Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine, 58. ²¹ Victor Plarr, Ernest Dowson 1888–1897: Reminiscences, Unpublished Letters and Marginalia (London: Elkin Mathews, 1914), 20. ²² RCIA, 395, 399; L, 159, 219; NCE, 4: 64.

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Dowson’s firm determination to be received at Brompton Oratory can probably be dated to this time of heightened enthusiasm for Newman’s writing. As an undergraduate, he had been bitterly opposed to organized religion, and he needed to account for this drastic alteration. Contrasting Newman with Pascal and St Paul reminds Moore that right-reasoning in spiritual matters takes time. Dowson sees Newman as a contemporary; a modern, as ‘subtile & sceptical’ as Pater or Johnson or himself. He strove to convert as Newman had, as ‘the deliberate conclusion of a logical process’, which was Johnson’s manner of conversion, too.²³ This rational approach to spirituality is fundamental to each of Dowson’s Catholic lyrics and short stories. They invariably present faith as an individual choice, to be undertaken in full cognizance of the available alternatives. His poems and studies are trials of nascent commitment: their author takes an imaginative leap of faith in each case. Impelled by Newman’s bold example, many of Dowson’s friends reached the same conclusion. His Oxford friend R. B. S. Blakelock was ‘careering Romewards’; his cousin D. L. Secretan ‘also joined the true church’; Charles Sayle would ‘be received in Rome’, while Sam Smith might ‘go any day’; yet, Dowson considered at the time of his first devotional lyric, ‘I am quite sure that none of these people adore Catholicism more than Johnson & myself—who will nevertheless I believe, continue outside the portals for some time’ (172). Each individual decision was really a partisan act, part of a political movement which, Potolsky contends, advanced a positive, fin de siècle anti-modernism.²⁴ As his letters show, Dowson was fully aware of the radical implications of Catholic conversion. He viewed his impending submission as the inevitable revolt of personal integrity against encroaching materialism, bigotry, and crassness. Conversion was a subversive ‘protest’, a militant act of ‘self defence’ which became necessary as a last resort (198). This is best understood in relation to prevailing ideas about Catholicism, which Hanson encapsulates well: Catholicism was the odd disruption, the hysterical symptom, the mystical effusion, the medieval spectacle, the last hope of paganism, in an age of Victorian puritanism, Enlightenment rationalism, and bourgeois materialism. The decadents regarded faith, their own faith, as a beautiful possibility curiously out of place in a modern context, but no less beautiful for that. (26)

Dowson’s Catholicism exemplifies each facet of this characterization. His conversion entailed genuine revolt against the unofficial ideologies of fin de siècle England. He rejected Protestant majoritarianism and fulminated increasingly ²³ See Lionel Johnson, The Complete Poems of Lionel Johnson, edited by Iain Fletcher (London: Unicorn, 1953), xvi. ²⁴ Matthew Potolsky, ‘Decadence and Realism’, Victorian Literature and Culture 49.4 (winter 2021): 363–4.

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against ‘the flimsy and local claims of Anglicanismus & the Protestant sects. . . . Anglican condescension and Latitudinarian superiority . . . the vulgarity of the dogmatic atheists, and the fatuous sentimentality of the Elesmere [sic] people’.²⁵ As an incipient Catholic, he felt beset by bombastic rhetoric and severe interpolation at every turn. ‘I am being driven to Rome in self defence’ he remonstrated, ‘Vulgarity, sentimentality, crudity: isn’t there an effectual, the most effectual protest against it all?’ (L, 198). A very half-hearted flaneur, Dowson reacted to the push and pull of mercantilism, and its encroachments on intellectual and spiritual life, with fixed scorn. He sought in the Church a means of spiritual, artistic, and personal survival. It was a guerrilla tactic many young artists sought to employ, often with the same, dismaying result. His most fulsome excoriation of the protestant ethic, too long to reproduce here, is a seriocomic rant addressed to an apostrophized representative of the modern bourgeoisie, one Mr Jones (97–9). The tirade illustrates what Dowson felt he was up against, how intensely abrasive he felt modern life to be and, by contrast, what he could mitigate by joining the Church. ‘Established, orthodox convictions properly registered & classified in the book of convention’ are so universally ensconced that all dissent is considered ‘eccentric’, ‘maniac’, ‘lunatic’ (99, 98). Thus is Dowson brought back, by the execrations of its staggered citizenry, to an awareness of his marginal status within a straight-jacketed civilization, and reminded that the price of his individualism is suspicion of his sanity.

Our Lady of France (and Soho) Sometimes, Dowson went directly from such paroxysms to mass at Notre Dame de France, or vice versa. He was drawn to this Marist parish off Leicester Square, which served London’s francophone community, because Foltinowicz attended regularly and took an active role in its ceremonial life. By triangulating his descriptions of her involvement with the church, we can date Dowson’s first Catholic poem to around 19 October 1890: There was a procession after Vespers of the Enfants de Marie & I just managed to discern my special Enfant in spite of her veil, carrying a very big banner and looking as usual extremely self possessed & mistress of the situation. It was a wonderful & beautiful situation: the church—rather dark the smell of incense—the long line of graceful little girls all with their white veils over their heads— banners—: a few sad faced nuns—and last of all the priest carrying the Host, vested in white—censed by an acolyte who walked backwards—tossing his censer up ‘like a great gilt flower’: and to come outside afterwards—London again—the ²⁵ L, 198. Dowson means the Broad Church and Mary Augusta Ward’s Robert Elsmere, respectively (Claire Masurel-Murray, ‘Conversions to Catholicism Among Fin de Siècle Writers: A Spiritual and Literary Genealogy’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 2.76 [autumn 2012], https://doi.org/10.4000/ cve.528).

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sullen streets and the sordid people & Leicester Square! Really a most pictorial evening. Childrens [sic] voices in concert are wonderful! Children’s voices exercised in the ‘Ave Maris Stella,’ are the most beautiful things in the world. What a monstrous thing a Protestant country is! (L, 172)

These regular processions were organized by L’association des Enfants de Marie immaculée, ‘a pious association of lay young girls consecrated to Mary’.²⁶ Founded in 1830 to advance the religious education of working-class, adolescent girls, the Enfants de Marie fostered ‘a continual Marian mysticism’ in order to establish what they termed an ‘elite of piety’ among their members (3, 11). They sported white veils, blue ribbons, and a medal worn around the neck; they met regularly for meetings and retreats, and participated in every manner of religious event, ‘from mass to processions [to] local and national pilgrimages’ (23, 25). The Enfants de Marie were proud to be considered ‘the most beautiful ornament of the parish’ (26; see Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1 Henri Jules Guinier, Un dimanche, enfants de Marie. Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille. Reproduced by permission of the Agence Photographique de la Réunion des musées nationaux. Photo © PBA, Lille, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Jacques Quecq d’Henripret.

²⁶ Hélène Roman-Galéazzi, ‘Les Enfants de Marie Immaculée: Formation d’une élite populaire de la piété’, Rives nord-méditerranéennes 21 (2005): 3. [Online]. Accessed 2 Jan. 2022. https://journals. openedition.org/rives/2553.

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A Decadent allusion registers the quality and intensity of Dowson’s reaction to this display. His sensations are filtered through Dorian Gray’s evocation of the mass, so that Moore may appreciate how ‘the fuming censers, that the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers, had their subtle fascination for him’, too.²⁷ Considering the spectacle from a Decadent perspective lends legitimacy to Dowson’s personal interest. Grasping its æsthetic potential, Dowson hews his first devotional lyric out of the juxtaposition implied in this reportage: Without, the sullen noises of the street! The voice of London, inarticulate, Hoarse and blaspheming, surges in to meet The silent blessing of the Immaculate.

‘Benedictio Domini’ is a ‘sounding’ out of the Church, a poem weighing the sanctuary it offers with the noisesome ways of the fin de siècle metropolis. Finding himself already within a quiet church, the speaker is struck by the coursing throng ‘without’. The first word is a pun: it places them beyond the portal, and establishes their perdition (their ‘swift passage to the fire’) absent the blessings of the Lord (‘the one true solace of man’s fallen plight’). Surprisingly, perhaps, such dogmatic dichotomies are integral to Dowson’s confessional writings. They posit a spiritual and ethical distinction between Roman Catholics and the general populace, who stand condemned in ignorance of the real solace of the true Church. For Bowden, Dowson’s confessor, this apposition was at the very core of the Oratory’s appeal: From the dull and dismal streets of our great city and its begrimed, driven, and melancholy population, with nothing to raise their spirits but a Bank Holiday, should the passer-by turn into the Oratory on any Feast, and see the crowds of all classes, numbers of the most poor, praising God with glad voices, or kneeling in silent prayer before their favourite Altar, or seeking the peace of forgiven sin in the tribunal of penance, he will understand that the true remedy for human evils comes only from above. (105–6)

Guided by Bowden, or upon his own cognizance, Dowson’s Catholic texts are trained upon this vision of sanctuary. He strives in his poems and stories for a vital faith, for sublime distraction from, and remedy for, the sordid woes of metropolitan existence. ²⁷ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, edited by Robert Mighall (London: Penguin, 2000), 128.

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Lionel Johnson, present on 19 October or on a similar occasion, draws much the same distinction in ‘Our Lady of France’, which he dedicated to Dowson.²⁸ In the midst of, and yet opposite to, the griefs of Soho, Notre Dame is, for Johnson, a place to ‘dream’ and to ‘stay’ the woe-begotten nervosity of urban life (Complete Poems, 15). He discerns that ‘Music of France, voices of France, fall piercing fair: | Poor France, where Mary’s star shines, lest her children drown’ (15). His lyric contends that this parish allures because of its alien service, and that Catholicism appeals, by extension, because of its capacity to accost and subvert the complacent provincialism of the English establishment. Dowson’s Breton stories, grounded in suspicion of English parochialism and a specifically Catholic critique of modernity, are quite as polemic. The divergent appeals of devotional and secular life lead to the central dilemma of ‘A Case of Conscience’, which Murch poses summarily to Marie-Yvonne: You have lived overmuch in that little church, with its worm-eaten benches, and its mildewed odour of dead people, and dead ideas. Take care, Marie-Yvonne: it has made you serious-eyed, before you have learnt to laugh; by and by, it will steal away your youth, before you have ever been young. I come to claim you, Marie-Yvonne, in the name of life. (Dil., 32)

These differing outlooks correspond to the opposed domains of the story: ‘this world of Ploumariel where everything is fixed . . . where life is so easy, so ordered’, and another ‘world without definitions, where everything is an open question’ (41–2). The epistemological uncertainty of profane metropolitan existence gradually yields an indictment of ‘modern life; of the complex aching life of cities, with its troubles and its difficulties’ (44). The candour of faith, plain religious life, and the tranquillity of the Church offer Dowson a palpable alternative to the rowdy commotion of mercantile, Protestant, English, modernity. In ‘Benedictio Domini’, a formal air inhabits the church and surrounds the altar even before the second stanza, which muffles and deepens this atmosphere. The entrant must adjust, first, to the essential darkness; then, to the delicate incensation, imbuing the scene with a sedate, dreamlike aura and infusing sound with a reverberate lingering. Thus prepared, amid the tranquil stirrings of the congregation and the vaguer racket of the world beyond, he arrives at the ‘admonition’ of the altar bell, signifying the consecration of the Eucharist which, for the time being, the candidate is denied. The pulsing exclamation of Dowson’s prose draft has been tempered, but its atmosphere is retained in this first devotional lyric: the church remains ‘dark’; the congregation ‘dim’; the Host ‘vested in white’ (L, ²⁸ L, 172 n, 183. Chardin suggests a debt to Rossetti’s ‘The Church Portal’ (Jean-Jacques Chardin, Ernest Dowson [1867–1900] et la crise fin de siècle anglaise [Paris: Éditions Messene, 1995], 322–3).

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172). The apposition of the interior with ‘the sullen streets and the sordid people & Leicester Square’ is preserved and deepened. The lyric as a whole retains an implied movement from the portal to the altar, as the speaker is beckoned further within the church. This, after all, is the crucial vector in Dowson’s life in October 1890. After the vivid signal of the sacring bell has drawn attention to the elevation of the newly consecrated host, provoking a dazzling simile as the miracle is accomplished, the speaker recoils, once more aware of his environs: Strange silence here: without the sounding street Heralds the world’s swift passage to the fire: O Benediction, perfect and complete! When shall men cease to suffer and desire?

The sudden leap into remonstrance is jarring, but part of the point. The altar bell has rung in ‘admonition’ for the speaker, implying exhortation and censure. He is suddenly afflicted by consciousness of sin, with a sense of personal transgression. ‘Man’s fallen plight’ suggests original sin could be of issue; perhaps he means ‘desire’, lust. The speaker is chastened, but reluctant to dilate upon a private confession. The nuptial splendour of the altar, ‘Dressed like a bride, illustrious with light’, may explain the train of thought which suddenly erupts, and is immediately checked, in the last line. ‘Suffer[ing]’ and ‘desir[ing]’ are admitted into the poem as abstruse considerations, but they must signify real anguish and yearning for the author. While Dowson gravitated towards the Church, he grappled simultaneously with his verboten affection for Foltinowicz, and the corresponding fancy that she would make a suitable wife. A month later, he still faltered: ‘I quite feel that one can do nothing but join the Church’, he confesses, ‘but it is a great wrench & full of difficulties: for many reasons, I think it must wait till I am abroad’ (L, 177). Perhaps the cognizance of sin could be lessened by removing himself from the object of his ‘desire’. In any event, Dowson’s two going concerns became so interfused as to be really indistinguishable. Upon his return from Brittany, he could write that Foltinowicz ‘entirely resembles a sunbeam’ and, in close succession, that the altar in her parish church is ‘Dressed like a bride, illustrious with light’ (L, 162; V, 13). The ‘Silent blessing of the immaculate’ complements the ‘gift of Silence’ broached in ‘Amor Umbratilis’, composed the previous month. His writing at this juncture is climacteric in a double and interfused sense, since it involves a dual awakening: to the inevitability of Catholic confession and to the expectation of future conjugal relations with Foltinowicz. Significantly, the former would smooth the way to the latter. Dowson appended ‘the last vapourings of [his] Muse’ to his 19 October letter, the draft ‘Ad Domnulam Meam’ (L, 173). This figure arises from the incensed atmosphere of Notre Dame de France, and the apparition therein of the ‘Little lady

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of [his] heart’. He then signs off, ‘commend[ing Moore] to the Immaculate Heart of Our Lady’, echoing line four, and stressing the co-original provenance of his lyric (173). ‘Vapourings’ has a dismissive, literary sense, but Dowson is not merely being flippant. Rather, he implies that his emergent verse style has been subtly adjusted to the fragrant air of the church. He consciously strove for a lyric form as soft and indistinct as the colours, movements, and sounds in Notre Dame de France. His new poems are, in Pater’s terms, ‘something liturgical, with repetitions of a consecrated form of words’.²⁹ Their prayer-like reticulations offer the solace of constancy against the bedlam of the world beyond the portal.³⁰ The formal outlines of these ‘drifted rhyme[s]’ are scrupulously true; their rarefied verbiage bleeds into other stanzas, other poems (V, 28). Dowson’s stories also pulse with quasiliturgical colouration. The ‘great eyes, that one guessed, one knew not why, to be the colour of violets’ is but the choicest example (Dil., 132). Violet signifies sorrow, penitence, and preparation in the seasonal liturgy; it adorns the altar and is worn by the celebrant during Lent, Advent, All Souls Day and, aptly for ‘The Statute of Limitations’, during offices for the dead. Violet gives way, after Dilemmas, to the apple blossom which Dowson associated with Le Faouët, Brittany, and with Foltinowicz. The total effect is an assortment of purposely oversaturated images, resolved in primary, affective tones.

Choice of Vigil Dowson wrote his most admired religious poem just three days after composing the greatest erotic lyric of the era. The apposition suggests he had arrived at a symbolical crossroads, between the parlour and the cloister. He deemed ‘Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration’ so authentically his own that he placed it on page one of Verses, following the epigraphical troika and repeated title, where it promotes his Catholic credentials to his intended, and mitigates the more disgraceful passages which follow. ‘Nuns’ was composed on the eve of Lent, which began on 11 February in 1891, a season when the faithful are expected to ‘put away’ temptation in preparation for Easter. For candidates for reception, Lent is customarily a time of intense self-scrutiny. A Vergilian mot included opposite the text in Dowson’s holograph notebook epitomizes this concern: ‘Procul o procul este profani’, i.e., Hence, O hence, you who are uninitiated (F, 72v). Between ‘Non sum qualis’ and ‘Nuns’, Dowson indulges in a carnival of excess marking Shrovetide, and turns away in contrition three days later, in Lenten commemoration of prayer, ascesis, and self-mortification. In Verses, ‘Nuns’ includes a dedication ‘For THE COUNTESS SOBIESKA VON PLATT’, identified as ‘Louisa Sobieska (c.1827–97), who married Edouard von Platt ²⁹ Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 1: 4. ³⁰ For Mahoney, too, Dowson’s ‘poems are often prayers’ (Fin de Siècle Catholics, 233).

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. . . sister of Charles Edward Stuart (that is, Charles Manning Allen), a somewhat shady inventor of Scottish cultural history’.³¹ This choice must seem arbitrary until we observe that Louisa’s sister, Clementina Stuart Allen, Countess d’A lbanie, was a nun. The sisters were composers, credited with the arrangement of polkas which Dowson probably heard at the Foltinowiczes’ Polish restaurant.³² Plarr inadvertently divulges how the dedication came to be proffered. Dowson had been solemnly presented to the authentic descendant and last representative of the Stuarts . . . a solemn lady with her grey hair down her back, who stood, pathetically enough, in the upper chamber of a small restaurant in Soho, where the restauranteur and his wife acted as her chamberlains. (22)

Plarr never discussed Adelaide, hence the periphrasis; but his anecdote suggests that Louisa Sobieska von Platt boarded with the Foltinowiczes for a time. The dedication, added in 1896, may commemorate Clementina Allen’s death in 1894. If so, Dowson’s gesture recognizes an impressive introduction; honours an actual nun, albeit indirectly; and ingratiates himself with the broader community served by the restaurant. It implies that he was reliably attuned to the ongoing needs of the establishment, which became increasingly precarious after Joseph Foltinowicz’s demise (see L, 346, 349, 369). Leading with ‘Nuns’ is a sober bid by the author of Verses to be credited a serious benefactor and suitable spouse. The opening words of the lyric, which pithily define the tranquil preserve of Catholic devotion, are particularly amenable to this end: ‘Calm, sad, secure’, Dowson’s nuns fret not concerning the profane world at the convent gate. The terse precision of this opening disguises its richness. The adjectival triumvirate dovetails with the trifoliate epigraph of Verses: the stoic ‘Vitae summa brevis’, the refractory ‘In Preface: For Adelaide’, and the intricate ‘A Coronal’ are, in turn, ‘calm, sad, secure’. As Salemi ascertains, Dowson relies upon the archaic, poetic meaning of sadness here, denoting ‘satisfied, full; steady, serious’.³³ The nuns are ‘sad’ because they have grown weary of profane life, and are sated with modernity. Settled in their round of ritual contemplation, their orderliness has imparted to them an air of grave sagacity: ‘they have serene insight | Of the illuminating dawn to be’, the speaker says, advancing the Lenten theme.³⁴ That these denotations are ³¹ Victorian Literature: An Anthology, edited by Victor Shea and William Whitla (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley, 2015), 931 n. ³² The Albanie sisters appear in The Complete Peerage and Hofmeister XIX, https://hofmeister.rhul. ac.uk/2008/content/monatshefte/1847_06.html. ³³ Joseph S. Salemi, ‘The Religious Poetry of Ernest Dowson’, The Victorian Newsletter 72 (autumn 1987): 45; cf. Jessica Gossling, ‘From the Drawer to the Cloister: Ernest Dowson’s “Poésie Schublade,” ’ E, 96.; Mahoney, Fin de Siècle Catholics, 219; Martin Lockerd, Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 52. ³⁴ Cf. ‘From the day of their election and admission, the catechumens are called . . . illuminandi (“those who will be enlightened”), because baptism itself has been called illuminatio (“enlightenment”) and it fills the newly baptised with the light of faith’ (RCIA, 111).

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now archaic simply adds to the nuns’, and to Dowson’s, quarrel with modernity: to write searchingly and authentically about spiritual life at the Victorian fin de siècle requires an alternative lexicon. Except in his conspicuous Latin titles, Dowson is not a recondite poet; this is an essential part of his grace. These recherché etymological leanings keep his writing vitally poetic. The oldest sense of the word ‘watch’ prevails in the first stanza, too: the nuns maintain a vigil through the night, intent upon the chancel lamp and upon their prayers. Dowson’s etymological instinct is as alert as they. Despite the penumbral haze of his liturgical manner, the setting is still transparently Notre Dame de France. The scene described on 19 October included ‘the church—rather dark the smell of incense’ and, hovering in the background, ‘a few sad faced nuns’ (L, 172). These same nuns—rendered Ursuline in draft, subsequently Carmelite, and finally generic—probably inspired the lyric, in combination with Dowson’s Lenten contemplation of the chancel lamp, introduced in line two.³⁵ As he would have learned from Bowden, ‘the lamp bespeaks the Eucharistic Presence of the God-Man, who is both our light in the darkness of this world, and the pledge of our future glory’ (Oratory, 34). The sanctuary lamp serves as a reminder of the different configuration of temporal and spiritual existence, of the profane succession and mystical plenitude of time (never more so than on Good Friday, when it is temporarily extinguished to mark the Crucifixion; and on Easter Sunday, when it is relumed). As Pruett notes, ‘monastic life occurs on a different temporal axis’ in this poem (E, 161). The nuns are so absorbed in their devotions that ‘it is one with them when evening falls, | And one with them the cold return of day’. To time, they are oblivious. It was only standardized in Britain by Alfred Dowson’s generation, after all, for mercantile reasons aligned with his own commercial interests. Sloughing off British Standard Time is an idealistic and potentially subversive act. ‘These smile at time’, the stanza began in draft and on first publication, implying tolerant scepticism about so arbitrary a convention.³⁶ Dowson is less forbearing when, one desultory anniversary, he bemoans: ‘Why do we have watches or clocks or hours at all—at all?’ (L, 121). In revision, this temporal chagrin is distilled into a deft, homely symbol of temporal existence, centred in redemptive faith, freighted in the language of prayer: These heed not time; their nights and days they make Into a long returning rosary, Whereon their lives are threaded for Christ’s sake. ³⁵ Carmelite Nuns helped establish the Enfants de Marie by founding a chapter at Monte Carmel in 1844, and maintained this association at the Marist parish in Soho (Roman-Galéazzi, ‘Enfants de Marie’, 8). Dowson subsequently learned that these ‘ladies do not perpetually adore’ (L, 214). ³⁶ F, 72; ‘The Carmelite Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration’, The Century Guild Hobby Horse 6 (1891): 136.

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Preferring ‘threaded’ over ‘woven’, altering ‘hours’ to ‘lives’, transforms mere adornment into a trenchant encapsulation of stringent, devotional life (F, 72). The capacity of language to be present to mind at once in the succession of its constituent parts and in its total, articulable form, like a mantra, is heightened in prayer, where the nascent enunciation is always in-touch with the accomplished utterance, and the full utterance is always immanently involved in its partial, moving image.³⁷ The cyclical essence of the rosary heightens this temporal flux, and permits the transcendence of language in contemplation of the mysteries assigned to each decade. The practice of Perpetual Adoration—where the Eucharist is exposed and worshipped in constant prayer—implies an even deeper correlation between the unbroken reticulations of the fixed prayer cycle of the rosary and divine plenitude. Dowson’s Omarian charge is to convey this hefty metaphysical cargo in the humblest figure: for a supposedly unphilosophical writer, he succeeds spectacularly. Dowson was intrigued by time because it was Lent, and he was awaiting reception ‘into the promised fulness of time begun in Christ’ (RCIA, 198). Simultaneously, he had concluded that Foltinowicz—she was then approaching her thirteenth birthday—was an excellent matrimonial prospect. He had only to wait until it should be respectable to propose. Meanwhile, he commenced his own watch and perpetual adoration. Having cautioned against their conflation in ‘Diary’, Dowson was mindful of slippage between sacred and profane devotions. Nevertheless, this became a ‘time of probation’ in a double sense, a period of vigilant consecration to Foltinowicz and to God (YB 3, 103). The arguments in favour of Dowson’s manifold submission are echoed in the sustained inferential passage attributed to the nuns: Outside, the world is wild, and passionate; The sound of laughter, and of wild despair Entreateth 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 should 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 coarse attire, Because their comeliness was vanity. (F, 72r, 72v, 73) ³⁷ Chris Snodgrass concurs: Dowson’s poems are ‘near incantations’ (‘The Poetry of the 1890s’, A Companion to Victorian Poetry, edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison [Oxford: Blackwell, 2002], 330).

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This is the most closely reasoned passage in Dowson’s lyric canon. The sturdiness of the nuns’ deductive flight shows that their choice to ‘c[o]me to sanctuary’ is reasonable, like Newman’s: ‘They saw’, ‘They knew’, and ‘Therefore’ they acted, ‘Because’ they arrived at conviction in the matter. The punctuation strives for prosodic weight, delivering a sense of logical development and ponderable hesitation.³⁸ Monastic profession is often regarded as a second conversion.³⁹ The nuns’ disputation can be urgently posed because Dowson underwent a comparable inferential process. First, the candidate determines to ‘put away desire’: here is no outright renunciation, but merely a cautious sequestration. ‘Desire’—always a carefully assigned, totemic term in what Freeman calls Dowson’s ‘harem of words’—is set aside as he might stow a lyric fragment in his ‘Poesie Schublade’.⁴⁰ Catholics often abstain from sexual activity during Lent, and Dowson would shortly have to totally curtail his usual sexual license in service of his matrimonial suit. Stanza six is accordingly prim—‘comeliness’ is not, in itself, ‘vanity’—and reflects a new anxiety about feminine allure.⁴¹ When the speaker rejoices that ‘Mary’s sweet Star dispels . . . the night’, we should remember the allegorical pattern which only knows ‘the night’ in venereal terms, as in the ecstatic climax of ‘Non sum qualis’. Here, plainly, ‘Dowson uses Catholicism as a substitute for desire’ as Boyiopoulos contends.⁴² As the lyric progresses, the metaphorical and metapoetic implications of perpetual adoration become increasingly apparent. To the sublime figure telling the nuns’ ‘lives and days’ upon their rosary beads, equating their placid faith with the rosary thread, is added the sumptuous figure of their oblivious ‘dream of prayer’, connoting rosary recitation or perpetual adoration. With ‘Vitae summa brevis’, this ensures that Verses begins in an exceedingly dreamful atmosphere. As Freud would soon detail, dreams are characterized by their odd failures of temporal assembly. Dowson’s extralinear lyrics always endeavour to supplement the temporal succession of moments with verbal repetition and prosodic echo. They are layered compositions; overdetermined as the Freudian dreamwork. These reticulations make Verses, and Dowson’s lyric corpus as a whole, echoic and circuitous like ³⁸ On Dowson’s punctual prosody, see Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, ‘Sight and Sound in the Poetic World of Ernest Dowson’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 60.4 (Mar. 2006): 498–507. ³⁹ See NCE, 4: 235. ⁴⁰ L, 187; Nick Freeman, ‘“The Harem of Words”: Attenuation and Excess in Decadent Poetry’, Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle, edited by Jason David Hall and Alex Murray (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 88. ⁴¹ Dowson picked up ‘comeliness’ from Pater, i.e., ‘that subtle and delicate sweetness which belongs to a fine and comely decadence’ (Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry; the 1893 Text, edited by Donald L. Hill [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980], xxiii; cf. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas [New York: Macmillan, 1918], 1: 8, 47). His usage is richly ambiguous, and inclines to the delectable notion that, for these nuns, even modesty is a form of vanity. ⁴² Kostas Boyiopoulos, The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons, and Dowson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 148.

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the prayer cycle; they impose on linearly succeeding English prosody a greater metonymic capacity for surrendering something of their total apprehension with each vanishing syllable. In other words, Dowson’s verse is fundamentally mantric: his best lines and poems immediately summon the larger utterances which they comprise and in which they are embedded. The ‘long, returning rosary’ of ‘Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration’ is offered in strict analogy to the poet’s verse-craft. The etymology of his title implies the recursive design that he rediscovered in the prayer cycle: verse is the turning back, the returning that makes poetry possible in the first place.⁴³ Liturgical composition is also a vital conduit of his con-version, comprising Dowson’s ‘response to the divine call to enter into communion [which] demands a “turning away”, or a “turning back” from the situation of sin’ (NCE, 4: 231). Hence, again, his categorical renunciation of his juvenilia. Verses, on the other hand, is offered as a duty of sentry attendance upon his adored object, equivalent to the nuns’ ‘vowed patrol’. Many readers respond intuitively to the circuitry of Dowson’s verse. Poetry often works in this way, but Dowson’s signature prosodic effects intensify the inculcation of something approaching a ‘dream of prayer’. Following Paul Bourget, critics have sought to define Decadent literature as a fatal breach of organic unity, favouring either the part or the whole.⁴⁴ Dowson’s poems establish a fleeting, mantric rapprochement in such debates about post-Romantic form, throwing the spanner of synecdoche into the works. The parts are not greater than the whole: the parts are the whole. James has something similar in mind when he says, of the contemporary novel, that it is ‘a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts’.⁴⁵ A minor poet among others, Dowson is also a poet of the minor: he systematically elevates prosodic minutiae— the line, the cadence, the word—to positions of maximal importance within total lyric form. In this spirit, ‘Nuns’ ought to be read in concert with the epoch-making lyric Dowson composed three days previously. Their contiguities demonstrate the recursive workings and regenerative capacities of Dowson’s syncretic imagination, and illustrate the verve of self-similarity in his writing. His imagery surfeits individual compositions, and invites shadowy associations of greater salience and scope.⁴⁶ Having realized the totemic significance of the word ‘night’ across his oeuvre, for instance, we quickly discover that ‘dawn’ has a near mystical importance, too. The speaker of ‘Non sum qualis’ has ‘awoke and found the dawn was gray’, ⁴³ Dowson ‘will not pay [Sayle] the sorry compliment of returning verses for [his] poem’, he says, sporting with this derivation (NL, 13). ⁴⁴ Murray and Hall summarize this idea and its legacy (Decadent Poetics, 3). ⁴⁵ Henry James, The Future of the Novel, edited by Leon Edel (New York: Vintage, 1956), 15. ⁴⁶ See Robert Stark, ‘“Faithful . . . In My Fashion[ing]”: Shades of Association in Ernest Dowson’s Poetry’, Victorian Poetry 59.1 (spring 2021): 75–96.

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whereas the nuns ‘have serene insight | Of the illuminating dawn to be’. The greyest ‘dawn’ is necessarily ‘illuminating’; the word only becomes illustrious when written thus on the anagogical plane. Dowson’s palate may be restrictive, but this very limitation potentiates his symbolical annexation of staple images, as here.⁴⁷ As this figure is extended into the quatrain, it takes on a baptismal sense implying the removal of blindness, since ‘night’ is said to be ‘the proper darkness of humanity’ (‘illuminate, v., sense 1b’). Guided by ‘Mary’s sweet Star’, the speaker hopes for his own inaugural elucidation. The trope thus anticipates Dowson’s principal museological figure, advanced in Adrian Rome and elsewhere.⁴⁸ ‘Nuns’ offers an instantaneous riposte to the extravaganza of ‘Last night, ah, yesternight’, by tentatively urging (‘Surely’), and at once doubtfully inquiring, whether the nuns’ ‘choice of vigil is’, indeed, ‘the best?’ The lyrics clarify each other. The choice broached between them—the real struggle between flesh and spirit which is at stake in baptism—becomes stark, inescapable. The competing claims of the cloister and the brothel antechamber are urged in symbolic terms, presaging what Thornton styles the ‘Decadent Dilemma’. While the speaker in the first poem ‘Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng’, the nuns realize ‘the roses of the world should fade, | And be trod under by hurrying feet’. The alternatives become increasingly antithetical as the cloistral disquisition concludes: ‘Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild; | But there, beside the altar, there, is rest’. Despite earnest admiration, the speaker is not wholly convinced by the magnificent example of the perpetually adoring nuns. He is anguished by a veritable ‘choice of vigils’, explored in the confessional diptych of February 1891. Citing the work of those ‘dissipated men’ Johnson and Dowson, with their ‘continual preoccupation with religion’, W. B. Yeats concluded that ‘we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’.⁴⁹ He dramatized this internal conflict in dialogic verse. Dowson extrapolated the same propensities in adjacent texts, in latencies and tensions distributed throughout and across his volumes. These two poems illustrate his fellow Rhymer’s point. The beseeching last stanza of ‘Nuns’ is, of course, self-directed. The speaker urges himself to choose ‘Mary’s sweet star’ rather than Cynara’s ‘pale, lost lilies’. The ‘bought red mouth’ of the sex worker is also ‘sweet’, so the choice is uncertain, a veritable dilemma. In draft, the fifth stanza more closely recalls the roseal carouse of ‘Non sum qualis’: the nuns ‘saw the pageant of the world displayed; | They saw the bitter did outweigh the sweet’ (F, 73). The boon of ‘Mary’s sweet Star’ has a more prophylactic effect: it ‘shines on them through the night, | And lightens them in lone security’ (F, 73). In the end, the decisive factor is neither the perishable allure of worldly desire nor the austere dignity of holy office, but simply the prospect of ⁴⁷ On Dowson’s verbal parsimony, see Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siecle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 204–6. ⁴⁸ AR, 74–5; cf. ‘Carthusians’, ll. 27–8 and Introduction, Decadent Museology. ⁴⁹ W. B. Yeats, ‘Anima Hominis’, Mythologies (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 331.

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‘rest’ in the sanctuary of the Church, where the speaker’s jealous objectification of the nuns, established above all by the clamorous pronominalization, becomes quiet soothing: ‘there . . . there . . .’ ‘Unlike the rhetorician’, says Yeats, the true poet ‘sing[s] amid . . . uncertainty’ (Mythologies, 331).

The Last Refinement ‘Apple Blossom in Brittany’ poses the same dilemma as these duelling lyric meditations on perpetual adoration, secular and sacred. Set on the Feast of the Assumption, which commemorates the Virgin Mary’s corporal reception into heaven, the story further explores the staple appositions of body and soul, world and spirit, and the temporal and eternal planes of existence which animate Dowson’s confessional lyrics. It commences with a redeployed description of the processional at Notre Dame de France which first prompted Dowson to write devotional verse, and ends with a young girl’s commitment to monastic vocation, and the protagonist’s magnanimous refusal to become her despoiler. This opening scene draws heavily upon actual events: the Enfants de Marie appear as ‘a troop of young girls, with white veils over their heads, carrying banners’, a word-for-word interpolation from Dowson’s letter (YB 3, 93; L, 172). The procession transpired ‘after Vespers’; Dowson watched the congregation ‘defile’ (L, 172; YB 3, 94). His observations concerning ‘Children’s voices exercised in the “Ave Maris Stella”’ become the narrator’s impression, too (L, 173; YB 3, 94). Dowson ‘just managed to discern [his] special Enfant in spite of her veil’ (L, 172). In the story, this becomes ‘a smile of recognition . . . answered by a girl in the procession’ (YB 3, 94). The roman-à-clef continues to operate at an intimate level. Marie-Ursule emerges as an unmistakable embodiment of Foltinowicz. A closely observed character study follows, not particularly revealing, but sufficient to demonstrate her literary conversion. The plot itself is substantively implied by her personal circumstances. Foltinowicz’s involvement with the Enfants de Marie was expected to continue until her ‘entry into adult life, marked by a change in [her] social status (either by marriage or by taking [a] religious habit)’, precisely the alternatives entertained in Dowson’s study (‘Enfants de Marie’, 20). Dowson had planned to ‘say nothing to her, until she was at least on her way to being seventeen’; in the story Marie-Ursule ‘will be seventeen shortly, [when] she can speak for herself ’ (L, 277; YB 3, 100). The severe choice facing both girls is crassly recapitulated by the provincial Curée: ‘Craque! it is a betrothal, and a trousseau, and not the habit of religion, that Mademoiselle is full of ’ (104). While Dowson’s declaration will have brought the matter to a head, this predicament is not some libidinal projection, but the express result of Foltinowicz’s involvement with the Enfants de Marie. Even Marie-Ursule’s comportment—her virginal filiation, ‘total adherence’ to the Marian ideal, absolute submission to ‘parental and marital authority’, and

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rejection of the ‘vices inherent in feminine nature’—simply correspond to this role (‘Enfants de Marie’, 16, 48, 20). The intense indoctrination of the Enfants de Marie was calibrated to produce impeccably submissive women, just like the inert jeunes filles of Dowson’s Breton fiction. Sadly, there is no way to directly gauge Foltinowicz’s reaction to her imaginative seizure, just as she faced this excruciating dilemma. When Dowson and Moore consider their systematic pilfery of personae in toto, they grant it might be construed as objectionable. ‘I hope you have not put me into your novel’, one character remarks (AR, 294). ‘Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures’ is franker: I took her voice, a silver bell, As clear as song, as soft as prayer; . . . . I took her whiteness virginal And from her cheek two roses rare: . . . . I stole her laugh, most musical: I wrought it in with artful care; I took her dainty eyes as well; And so I made a Villanelle.

The verbs suggest complete awareness of the ethical issues involved in fashioning confessional poems, howsoever exquisitely wrought, out of such interpersonal plunder. In respect of Foltinowicz, this literary despoliation is particularly sinister, since it entails the notional possession of her ‘whiteness virginal’. Dowson apparently recognizes his own history of underestimating the autonomy of his paramours, of failing to appreciate that they have a legitimate stake in their representation. He probably understood that the dilemmatic axis of ‘Apple Blossom’ would seem presumptuous, therefore. Foltinowicz’s involvement with the Enfants de Marie, a charitable organization intent upon the uplift of the poor, may have been less than vocational, after all, and his proposal was politely declined. Dowson’s Breton writings attempt to legislate these affairs by other means, bulldozing his way to that ‘gift of Silence’. ‘Apple Blossom’ addresses another fundamental question in Dowson’s confessional writing: whether it may be desirable, or even necessary, to relinquish the gratifications and tribulations of modernity. Announcing that Marie-Ursule is considering ‘a vocation’, the Curée dismisses her as a ‘mystical little girl’, and by equivocation: They are good women, nos Ursulines, ah, yes; but our Marie-Ursule is a good child, and blessed matrimony also is a sacrament. . . . It is a little fancy, you see, such as will come to young girls; a convent ague. (YB 3, 104)

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Yet Marie-Ursule’s destiny is plainly figured in her name. The monastic order founded in the name of the virgin martyr offered a sensible choice of refuge for such Enfants de Marie as did not marry.⁵⁰ Campion takes a sympathetic view: ‘Perhaps it was a vocation’, he muses, the phrase, sounding strangely on modern ears, to him, at least, was no anachronism. Women of his race, from generation to generation, heard some such voice and had obeyed it. That it went unheeded now was, perhaps, less a proof that it was silent, than that people had grown hard and deaf, in a world that had deteriorated. Certainly the convent had to him no vulgar, Protestant significance, to be combated for its intrinsic barbarism; it suggested nothing cold nor narrow nor mean, was veritably a gracious choice, a generous effort after perfection. (YB 3, 108)

As in Dowson’s private correspondence, modern life in a Protestant country is vicious, uncouth, and meaninglessly Decadent; the quiet urgings of vocation have ceased to be heard above the din.⁵¹ The various women and girls who take orders in James’s fiction pre-empt Dowson’s discovery of this emblem of revolt against Protestant modernity, while the echo of Keats hints at the lyrical prospects of monastic, and Catholic, submission. As Pruett contends, ‘the inclination to immerse oneself in Catholic ritual was tantamount to a gesture of counterculture, a sensibility against the era’s prevailing attitudes of scientific progress and secularism’ (E, 162). So it seems to Campion. Marie-Ursule’s monastic impulse is so reactionary, he considers, that the world must think it mad: A fancy? a whim? Yes, he reflected; to the normal, entirely healthy mind, any choice of exceptional conditions, any special self-consecration or withdrawal from the common lot of men and women must draw upon it some such reproach, seeming the mere pedantry of inexperience. (YB 3, 106)

Plarr and others responded to Dowson’s own conversion thus. As a Renaissance man, Campion cannot take this view. Because His heart was in that age, and from much lingering over it, he had come to view modern life with a curious detachment, a sense of remote hostility: Democracy, the Salvation Army, the novels of M. Zola—he disliked them all impartially. A Catholic by long inheritance, he held his religion for something more than an heirloom; he exhaled it, like an intimate quality; his mind being essentially of that kind to which a mystical view of things comes easiest. (102–3) ⁵⁰ Dion may have viewed Memling’s Shrine of St Ursula at the Sint-Janshospitaal in Bruges (Dil., 4). ⁵¹ Cf. ‘What is the reason of the intolerable vulgarity of the present day[?] . . . Protestantism’ (L, 150).

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By temperament and training, Campion disdains modernity; his impulse finds fullest expression in his Catholic faith which, Mahoney suggests, came to represent ‘the historical conduit of Western mysticism’ for Dowson (213). Scorning rival institutions of economic uplift, spurning social emancipation as a wilderness of unrestraint, his mystical filiation is perfectly compatible with that of the Ursulines or the Enfants de Marie.⁵² Indeed, Campion’s anti-modernism is a textbook example of the ‘strategic’ conservatism identified by Potolsky (‘Decadence and Realism’, 563). His aesthetically apportioned alienation permits him to grasp the reactionary beauty of Marie-Ursule’s instinct which, he maintains, is less naïve than the world presumes. Like ‘Nuns’, ‘Apple Blossom’ culminates in a disputation upon the virtues and frustrations of monastic life versus the ‘disappointments’ and ‘compensations’ of secular modernity (YB 3, 107). Neither Campion nor Marie-Ursule are convinced partisans in the matter: ‘It was no fixed resolution, no deliberate justification which she pleaded. She was soft, and pliable . . . Argument he could have met with argument; an ardent conviction he might have assailed with pleading’ (106–7). When the dilemma appears confounding, they look to the natural symbols which surround them in Ploumariel for inspiration: ‘the great, stone Calvary’—a life-sized replica of the crucifixion scene—overlooking the village, at which they confront their destiny; the titular apple blossom, ‘white with the promise of a bountiful harvest’; the edifice of the Ursuline convent, which looms impressively on the horizon.⁵³ The first symbol re-establishes the liminal ground of the study, which began on the Feast of the Assumption. The second symbol consolidates Marie-Ursule’s instruction as an Enfant de Marie, which develops a whole plant metaphorical system which assimilates the young girl to the flower. For the flower is pure, without desire; it is the antidote to animality and impulses. The aim of the association is to use the energy of adolescence and channel its passionate character in order to transform this ‘sexual birth’ into a ‘mystical birth.’ (‘Enfants de Marie’, 20)

The third symbol is decisive: ‘I am afraid, afraid,’ she murmured. Their eyes alike sought instinctively the Convent of the Ursulines, white and sequestered in the valley—a visible symbol of security, of peace, perhaps of happiness. ‘Even there they have their bad days: do not doubt it.’ ⁵² Agreeing with Balzac, Adrian Rome laments that ‘universal suffrage means government by the masses, which is the most irresponsible tyranny in the world’ (AR, 98). ⁵³ YB 3, 106; cf. Gertrude Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist (London: Cape, 1932), 250.

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‘But nothing happens,’ she said simply; ‘one day is like another. They can never be very sad, you know.’ (YB 3, 107)

These nuns, too, appear ‘Calm, sad, secure . . . behind high convent walls’, in part because of their presumed adjustment to temporal experience, such that time no longer profanely succeeds (V, 1). Dowson calls attention to the special sense of ‘sad’ which his lyric requires, and that he deems apposite of monastic life, by naïvely opposing it to ‘happiness’ in this exchange; yet the word reverberates throughout the story, occurring seven times in total, until the precise shade of meaning is achieved at the end of the last full paragraph. Campion takes the whole course of the tale to acquire a taste for this sadness. This capacity to inhabit, to relish sadness—shared by the devout believer and the ‘diffident and scrupulous’ man of letters—is the very conduit of empathy and identification which makes ‘Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration’ possible in the first place (100). The same imaginative sympathy operates in ‘Apple Blossom’, preventing Campion from desecrating the innocence of his young ward out of selfish desire. This is not to say that the aesthetic impulse which prevails is altruistic, or that it diverges very much from naked self-interest: on the contrary, Campion is finally moved because of the special felicity that Marie-Ursule’s choice affords him. He re-legislates the aggravating juxtapositions that Dowson gleaned from the pews of Notre Dame de France, and then a sudden aesthetic feeling arises in reaction to his presumably carnal tumult, so that he recoils in picturesque admiration of Marie-Ursule’s awesome decision: And suddenly, with a strange reaction, he was seized with a sense of the wisdom of her choice, its pictorial fitness, its benefit for both of them. He felt at once and finally, that he acquiesced in it; that any other ending to his love had been an impossible grossness, and that to lose her in just that fashion was the only way in which he could keep her always. And his acquiescence was without bitterness, and attended only by that indefinable sadness which to a man of his temper was but the last refinement of pleasure. He had renounced, but he had triumphed; for it seemed to him that his renunciation would be an ægis to him always against the sordid facts of life, a protest against the vulgarity of instinct, the tyranny of institutions. And he thought of the girl’s life, as it should be, with a tender appreciation—as of something precious laid away in lavender. (109)

Campion’s most significant undertaking in the story is not speech or action, but passive ‘acquiescence’—the word is repeated—in Marie-Ursule’s choice. Dowson’s language implies that Campion regards this as an equivalent and complementary surrender. Certainly, he is overcome by nun-like equanimity when he realizes that he cannot oppose her desire or her fate. This fleeting moment is succeeded by a triumphant sense of conquest: Campion is convinced that he can fully and

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permanently possess Marie-Ursule only by acceding to her vocation. Not only will he transcend the whole quandary that has beset the incongruous couple, his ‘renunciation’ will also equip him for future encounters with the ‘sordid facts of life . . . the vulgarity of instinct [and] the tyranny of institutions’—chief among them, one suspects, matrimony—which he has secretly set his heart upon (109). In less mystical terms, all that is really required of Campion is the recognition that Marie-Ursule, although now seventeen, is still a child. While he can maintain his quaint ‘thought of the girl’s life, as it should be, with tender appreciation— as of something precious laid away in lavender’, he is free to go on with his own life ‘without bitterness’.⁵⁴ He is compensated for his pains in sensual and aesthetic terms by the subtlest emotion, ‘that indefinable sadness which to a man of his temper was but the last refinement of pleasure’.⁵⁵ His lingering sadness is sublimated and can now be savoured in a Catholic, and palpably Decadent, sense, as an ‘oversubtilizing refinement upon refinement’, as Symons says.⁵⁶ This aesthetic dividend authorizes Campion’s return to familiar metropolitan ways (cf. Mahoney, 220). ‘His renunciation’ becomes an ‘ægis’ against carnal living; Marie-Ursule’s prophylactic vow rubs off on him (109). As the story concludes, he intends to press the advantage.

⁵⁴ YB 3, 109. Dowson became contemptuous of this naive construction of girlhood (cf. ‘The Visit’). ⁵⁵ YB 3, 109. Campion’s ‘subtle melancholy . . . made life to him almost morbidly an affair of fine shades and nice distinctions’ (105). ⁵⁶ Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, Harper’s Monthly Magazine (Nov. 1893): 858.

4 Still Point of the Turning World Pilgrim Poet Six months before formally joining the Catholic Church, Dowson visited St Hugh’s Charterhouse in Sussex. The experience elicited his penultimate confessional lyric, called simply ‘Carthusians’. While its basis in Dowson’s personal experience is well known, the poem has evaded serious consideration, demonstrating the pernicious observer effect governing reception of his work.¹ ‘Carthusians’ ought to epitomize Dowson’s power of transforming raw experience into exquisite, lyric art; instead, it is dismissed as an anomaly, if it is considered at all. There is good reason for this blind spot: read in context, ‘Carthusians’ confronts readers with the reality of Dowson’s vivid, widely responsive, and highly syncretic imagination; his capacity for significant intratextual absorption; and flair for lyrically condensing abstruse aesthetic matters. It reminds us of the author’s material existence, and the visceral implications this has for his words. The ‘Dowson Legend’ will tolerate none of this: its object is a wraithlike abstractionist, impervious to the world of direct senseimpressions; a moribund dream-lover paralysed by his own actuality, and blind to the reality of others. Dowson is none of these things, most of the time. He composed in the sway of the same miscellaneous and imperative enthusiasms as other poets, before and since; he was moved by the same pressing matters that inspired the achievement of his eminent contemporaries. Dowson probably visited the only Carthusian monastery in England with his uncle, J. R. Dowson, or his paternal cousin, about whom very little has come to light.² They resided in St Aubyns, West Brighton, less than twenty miles from the monastery site at Cowfold, and were more observant Christians than Dowson’s own, nominally Anglican, family, since he fell into the habit of spending Easter weekends with them, first in 1890 (L, 145–6). The Carthusian Order generally discourages visitors, but makes exceptions for locals and special cases. In 1891, however, it was beginning to explore a burgeoning religious tourism sector. ¹ See Introduction, Poor Legendary Poet. ² Dowson’s broader family relations are obscured by inconsistencies. We may gather from his letter of 1–2 Apr. 1889, that J. R. Dowson had a son, cousin to the poet. This unidentified cousin may be ‘my absurd & rubicund cousin of Pembroke [College]’ who ‘has also joined the true Church and will shortly go to the Oratory: the second of my cousins who will be there’; however, Flower and Maas plausibly identify this cousin as D. L. Secretan, and the other as Gerald Hoole (L, 172; see Ch. 3, An Operation Not To Be Hurried).

Ernest Dowson. Robert Stark, Oxford University Press. © Robert Stark (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192884763.003.0005

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For this reason, or because it was a religious holiday, no record of Dowson’s visit exists.³ On these seaside retreats he invariably dined well, enjoyed ‘the Brighton ozone’, and ‘the coziness [sic] of [his] cousin’s club’ (63, 60). If he was accompanied by his parents on earlier trips, for business reasons or relaxation, he later travelled alone, employing the slight sequestration from London to prepare for his reception into the Church (NL, 8 n). His trips almost invariably occur during Lent. In 1891, Easter fell on 29 March. Dowson visited St Aubyns from Good Friday to the following Tuesday (L, 191). He made the excursion to Parkminster on Easter Monday. Dowson was deeply impressed by what he encountered, and relayed his impressions directly to Moore: I spent Monday at a Carthusian monastery in Sussex: Cowfold. An adorable place, high up and away from everywhere. Beata Solitudo! Perpetual Silence! It is an enchanting order: they scarcely live in community, having separate cells in which they live, eat, read & meditate: once a week, for an hour, they may mix with each other & converse. For the rest they see each other only at the various offices: and pass each other in the cloisters with a formal bow and a ‘memento mortis, frater!’ Enchanting people! I hear that it is possible to go down and stay with them for two or three days: I shall try and work it. (191)

That he wished to return suggests that Dowson’s interest went beyond touristic inquisitiveness or monastic voyeurism. He had discovered that the Charterhouse permits residential stays on an exceptional basis, for the discernment of a vocation and, sometimes, for the purposes of retreat. Dowson was not yet a professed Catholic: he presumably entertained the notion of returning to St Hugh’s ‘to read and meditate’, in preparation for his reception. Had Dowson managed to ‘work it’, however, this would be reflected in the meticulous monastery records. Dowson is clearly fascinated by the monks’ sacred vow of silence, which ensures that their solitude is fruitful rather than mere isolating, and he conceived an intense admiration for their decision to abjure the world (see L, 58–9, 97). He was organically sympathetic to the official Church view of the Carthusians as preservators of this severe form of monasticism.⁴ No doubt he learned during his visit that the Charterhouse had been founded in 1873 when two Carthusian sects came to live in exile, having been expelled from France. There had formerly been a Carthusian presence in England until the time of Henry VIII, and Dowson must have ³ Details courtesy of Dom John Babeau, Prior of St Hugh’s Charterhouse. ⁴ As Thomas Merton explains, ‘the Church has always considered, and has sometimes openly declared, that the Carthusians have been the only monastic order to preserve faithfully the true monastic ideal in all its perfection during centuries in which the other orders fell into decay’ (The Silent Life [New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1957], 129).

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been impressed with the restitution, during his own lifetime, of this connection with Catholic Europe. His cicerone would have been sure to emphasize the rule of silence and solitude as they toured the premises, discretely calling guests’ attention to the relics of St Hugh of Lincoln (whence the name of the monastery), Saint Boniface, and the Virgin Mary; to the considerable library, holding one of the largest theological collections in England, with manuscripts dating to the twelfth century as well as, at the time of Dowson’s visit, ‘the archives of the Grande Chartreuse and [its] most precious relics’; to the Gothic Revival edifice itself, an awesome symbol of monastic life.⁵ The Great Cloister, however—at around 1012 meters, among the longest in the world—makes a genuine reckoning with the Carthusian way of life almost inevitable for any visitor to St Hugh’s (Hogg, 9 n). Its vital role in preserving the monks’ solitary life has doubtless been pointed out to tourists since the monastery’s founding. It has principal place in Dowson’s account of his excursion. He relays the essential data as any observant tourist might, in résumé, upon the picture postcards which became subsequently available for purchase at St Hugh’s, when tourists were more actively solicited (see Fig. 4.1).

Fig. 4.1 ‘Carthusian Monks, Cowfold Monastery’. Depicting the monks’ spatiamentum, or weekly community walk. Postcard. Postmarked July 1906. Unknown artist.

⁵ James Hogg, The Carthusians: St Hugh’s Charterhouse, Parkminster, Analecta Cartusiana 68.1 (2018): 11. Bishop Coffin proclaimed the perpetual enclosure of the monastery in 1883; its inviolability is maintained by Papal Bull (8).

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Silent Entreatment Perhaps Dowson composed most of ‘Carthusian’ in the hours or days following his Easter pilgrimage to Cowfold, but the finished poem is dated 27 May 1891 in his holograph notebook, nearly two months later, where it may have been preceded by two poems affirmatively answering the Carthusian injunction to silence: ‘Beata Solitudo’ (on the missing F, 75) and ‘O mors!’ (F, 76). The former, maybe the ‘few inferior verses’ mentioned in the same letter as Dowson’s Parkminster excursion, expresses an eremitic longing to live in a ‘silent valley . . . | | Where all the voices | Of humankind | Are left behind’ (L, 191). The intended sequestration thus matches the Carthusian renunciation of the material world, and repose in unearthly quietude. Real prospect of religious insight attends the speaker and the addressee in this flight of fancy. ‘Vistas | Of gods asleep, | With dreams as deep’ unite them in their faith, and distinguish them from the lumbering masses of humankind. Yet the speaker has chiefly pragmatic advantages in mind: There all forgetting, Forgotten quite, We will repose us, With our delight Hid out of sight. The world forsaken, And out of mind Honour and labour, We shall not find The stars unkind.

Searching for an atmosphere to conceal their intimacy, he is drawn to the secreting function of monastic withdrawal.⁶ ‘Honour and labour’ are (somewhat incongruously) identified as the most irksome obligations that currently oppress the lovers, and the speaker’s yearning to banish them suggests that Dowson was apprehensive about his prospects. Foltinowicz was now thirteen years old: whether he kept his counsel or propositioned her, he risked some affront to her ‘honour’; in either case, he did not have sufficient remunerated work to make a sensible match. Instead, the speaker imagines flying to Ploumariel, with its ‘apple-blossoms | And dewdrenched vine’, or Brittany whence Dowson was about to repair with Moore, and where he already fantasized about making a home with Foltinowicz (see L, 191–3, 237–9). ⁶ Cf. ‘Carthusians’, ll. 17–20.

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We can speak more definitively about ‘O mors! quam amara est memoria tua homini pacem habenti in substantiis suis’. It was certainly composed in the interval between his visit to St Hugh’s and the completion of ‘Carthusians’. The titular motto, from Ecclesiastes, admonishes the reader to accept the reality of death as a means of religious and moral instruction: ‘O death, how bitter is the remembrance of thee to a man that liveth at rest in his possessions.’⁷ Dowson dated his draft 28 April 1891, permitting its correlation with a letter of the same date which reveals he had been expecting to accompany his father on a trip to Bordighera, planned for a year and put off at the last minute (NL, 22). Dowson had been bidding Foltinowicz adieu. As he explains later to Moore, ‘alas! I am not on the golden strand of Bordighera: nor is it at all certain that I may be, reasonably soon, or at all. It depends on the condition of my governor: and he is still vacillating and inclined to stay at home a good deal’ (L, 194). Alfred Dowson was consumptive; since about 1882 he had gone periodically to recruit at Bordighera.⁸ He became so thoroughly acquainted with the tonic effect of Liguria that he published a translation of a specialist travel guide for convalescents in 1883, discussing ‘Local Sanitary Conditions’, ‘The Climate Medically Considered’, and other germane topics.⁹ Dowson knew just what he was getting himself in for. Indeed, the prospect of travel provoked a ‘wild, weird dream’ connecting Dowson’s imminent leave-taking, impending conversion, and a deathly premonition: We were at Venice, you [Moore] & I and Lionel, and we roamed round, not in a gondola but in a quaint phaselus like a Canadian canoe: the three of us sat in the stern with our portmanteaus and the boatman, who said that he had nursed Newman through a fever in Sicily: and we went on searching for an hotel, the bows very high in the air and the water coming in copiously— (L, 194)

Voyaging to Italy seems ominous. The peril of sinking or drowning may reveal concern for his father, since mycobacterium tuberculosis inundates the lungs, which eventually cease to function. Or perhaps the anxiety relates to his impending baptism: Dowson worried that if he ‘roamed round’ with Johnson—I detect a pun—there would be material consequences, not least for his relations with Foltinowicz. While Catholic conversion would facilitate the match, it also made his infatuation more problematical, sinful even. The confusion of Newman, Dowson’s ‘Romeward’ pilot, with the doomed, Venice-bound Keats, further potentiates this ⁷ CP, 234 n; cf. ‘Carthusians’, ll. 31–2. ⁸ Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London: Tauris, 2000), 6. ⁹ Frederick Fitzroy Hamilton, Bordighera and the Western Riviera, translated by Alfred C. Dowson (London: Stanford, 1883). The title also includes ruminations on ‘The Origins of Monasticism’, and ‘The Hermitage and the Cloister’: if Dowson made the excursion to St Hugh’s in his father’s company, these topics doubtless came up.

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premonition.¹⁰ Dowson may worry about the impact of these momentous decisions upon his poetic vocation. In his next letter, he calls Foltinowicz ‘my “Beata Beatrix”’, identifying her unambiguously as a muse for the first time.¹¹ This was Dowson’s mindset when he composed ‘O mors!’ It details an overwhelming emotional response to a romantic severance: Exceeding sorrow Consumeth my sad heart! Because to-morrow We must depart, Now is exceeding sorrow All my part!

The short lines and declarative syntax substantiate Ezra Pound’s hard-won maxim that ‘when one really feels and thinks, one stammers with simple speech’.¹² The disquieting image of ‘sorrow’ devouring the speaker’s ‘sad heart’—the adjective should be appreciated in context—contributes to the portentous tone that depends from the title, and is inculcated within the ponderable prosody. The title itself signifies a material abjuration, monastic in tenor, which can only refer to the speaker’s attachment to his beloved, who must soon be forsaken. He beseeches her to ‘Give over playing’, to ‘cast’ her ‘viol away’—Foltinowicz was a capable violinist—and pleads for quiet, placing a quasi-Carthusian embargo upon speech: Be no word spoken; Weep nothing; let a pale Silence, unbroken Silence prevail! Prithee, be no word spoken, Lest I fail!

Bold enjambments draw out the silent pauses at the end of the line, while imposing an urgent consecutiveness upon the syntax. The last line may be idiomatic— expressing the speaker’s concern that his resolve will falter should his beloved entreat him—or catastrophic. Perhaps Dowson felt a conflict between his romantic ¹⁰ Mark Longaker reports that the Dowsons owned ‘an Italian scene in oils done by Joseph Severn, the man in whose arms John Keats had died. Of Severns [sic], Alfred Dowson spoke as if they had been more than casual acquaintances’ (Ernest Dowson [University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944], 2). Dowson may have heard this story first hand; see Ch. 8, Because I Am Idolatrous. ¹¹ L, 195. Dowson’s remark was occasioned by another visit to Notre Dame de France, where Foltinowicz again participated in the procession; he has the devotional posture of Rossetti’s portrait in mind, not Dante’s Vita Nuova. ¹² Ezra Pound, Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, edited by D. D. Paige (New York: New Directions, 1973), 49.

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and religious intentions. Whatever momentous verge the lyricist is upon, it portends a total transfiguration; an alternate version specifies ‘This last day!’ (RC, 31). Dowson’s departure for Brittany later that summer was still more fraught: ‘I am full of shudders’, he concedes, ‘the solemnity of my adieux in Poland almost reduced Adelaide to tears’ (L, 204). He has manifestly induced this separation anxiety, but its impact can be gauged by his employment of her actual name for once.¹³ That a more joyous lyric does not ensue, apposite of impending spiritual rebirth, exposes lingering doubts about Dowson’s readiness to submit, and about the implications of conversion upon his love life and art. These misgivings are deepened by the titular memento mori, which tacitly acknowledges the dismal purpose of Dowson’s impending trip. The suggestion that the speaker’s own life may be at stake, too, adds to the poignant overdetermination of these simple lines. Death is also the subject of a scrap of verse which accompanies ‘O mors!’ in holograph. In its most fluent form, it reads: To think of thee, O death How very bitter ’tis For him who peaceful plies And battens on his biz.¹⁴

As Thornton and Caroline Dowson indicate, this is a ‘comic translation’ of the titular caption (CP, 234 n). The abandoned ditty sports with what must be genuine reservations about the lifestyle alterations demanded of the Catholic convert. On some level, Dowson would rather continue in his habitual avocations than submit to the canon of the Church. He was concerned, as later comments reveal, that faith was fundamentally incompatible with his artistic enterprises.¹⁵ This fragment shows that Dowson responded to the idea of Carthusian mortification as a means of achieving an ampler spiritual life, nevertheless. These ostensibly secular lyrics admonish with a monastic flavour; they are propaedeutic to, and companionate with, ‘Carthusians’.

Artist in Residence Between his pilgrimage to Cowfold on 1 April, and the completion of ‘Carthusians’ on 27 May, Dowson’s preparation for conversion intensified: he read Newman; ¹³ Dowson writes ‘Adelaide’ just five times in his extant correspondence, typically at fraught moments in their relations (L, 150, 160, 204, 206, 366). ¹⁴ Verso of ‘O mors!’, Morgan Library and Museum (MA 1489.1). ¹⁵ The possibility that Dowson took a personal vocation as seriously as his surrogate characters cannot be wholly dismissed (see L, 178, 327).

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made light-hearted provisions for Moore’s religious instruction; adapted his lyrical style to Carthusian ideals, experimenting with shorter lines and more pregnant caesural effects; and came to see Foltinowicz in Beatrician terms. It took him the best part of two months to complete this ‘set of verses on the “Carthusians” . . . too lengthy to enclose’ (L, 201). At thirty-six alexandrine lines, in nine quatrain stanzas, ‘Carthusians’ is, indeed, among Dowson’s lengthiest lyrics. Its long gestation is telling: when a topic demanded sustained concentration, Dowson worked slowly and methodically. He may have collected sundry impressions, working them intermittently into language and music in a series of drafts, until they came more urgently into focus. This is the method of ‘Extreme Unction’, which he mooted as a suitable topic for ‘æsthetic poetry’ four years prior to committing his thoughts to verse, and his procedure at the end of his active writing career, if we may judge from surviving ‘Fragments Fragments | by Ernest Ernest Dowson Dowson | Copied out. Paris—to be worked up | Nov. 1897’.¹⁶ Dowson’s holograph notebook, a fair-copy repository of work he wished to preserve, does not serve this purpose: he kept loose jottings separately, in his poetry drawer.¹⁷ His correspondence likewise preserves fair copies of individual lyrics, sometimes trialling alternate titles or lines. Since Dowson acknowledges just one poem (‘A Coronal’) that was composed ‘straight off in less than an hour’, the existence of such a cache of fragments and drafts is a needful surmise (L, 187). Its hypothetical existence caveats all efforts to date Dowson’s work by textual correlation (especially when gestation is protracted). ‘Carthusians’ is Dowson’s simplest, most direct title. It refers precisely to the monks of that creed and, deployed so spartanly, calls attention to their domicile and manner of life at the Charterhouse. As the speaker twice notes, these monks are to be known periphrastically as ‘dwellers with the Christ!’ He lingers upon the monastery complex—its environs, ‘austere walls’, severe adornments, and cloister—endowing the poem with materiality. He responds adroitly to the features that any cicerone would notice, reckoning with their history and lore. These distinctive points, in turn, govern Dowson’s sightseeing composition: it becomes an artefactual, lyric souvenir of his excursion, analogous to the picture postcards then (or soon to be) in circulation. The tenor of this minor pilgrimage only becomes

¹⁶ F, loose-leaf; see Afterlives: In Epilogue. ¹⁷ Dowson employs the term just once: ‘I have been looking over my “Poesie [sic] Schublade” as represented by a small MSS book’ (L, 187; emphasis added). The two repositories are not necessarily identical. The term was first utilized by Longaker as a catch-all descriptor of the holograph notebook plus sundry draft material (P, 231). Gossling takes it up as a synonym for the holograph notebook, restoring the usual French accent, and arguing productively that it ‘has connotations of intimate boudoir poetry . . . “Poésie Schublade” is poetry written into a notebook regarded as an imaginary drawer in which precious objects are hidden’ (E, 86). This imaginative leap is not required, however: Dowson kept his ‘letters and Mss.’ in a standard desk drawer at Bridge Dock and copied the best of it neatly into a representative copy book; his ‘Poesie Schublade’ is so much like a regular drawer that he misplaced the key to it on at least one occasion, ‘grew desperate & sent for a lock smith’ (NL, 15). When ‘Non sum qualis’ appeared in the Hobby Horse for Apr. 1891, Dowson kept his copy ‘at Limehouse, in the seclusion of my desk’ (L, 197).

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clear when the speaker returns to the Decadent metropolis: as arresting as the visit proves in intrinsic terms, part of its significance lies in the lessons that the tourist can derive from it after the fact. For the artistically minded tourist, St Hugh’s collection of portraits and murals by Lyonnaise painter (Benoît) Antoine Sublet would be the undoubted highlight of any visit. He was commissioned by the Carthusian Order around 1880, and completed his first portraits in 1883.¹⁸ These were proudly exhibited to any guest. Sublet returned to Parkminster shortly after Dowson’s visit to oversee the hanging of his dreadful mural, Le Martyr de religieux sous Henri VIII (1888–1891; see Fig. 4.2). He returned to France in 1895, and died in Paris in 1897. The Chronicle of St Hugh’s is precise about the laborious process of fixing Le Martyr de religieux sous Henri VIII in place, known as marouflage. The technique, traditionally employing an adhesive compound of white lead and linseed oil, is

Fig. 4.2 Antoine Sublet, Le Martyr de religieux sous Henri VIII (1888–1891), oil painting on mounted canvas; with Christ on the Cross (1883), oil on canvas. St Hugh’s Chapterhouse, Cowfold, Sussex. Reproduced by courtesy of Prior John Babeau. ¹⁸ Cf. ‘Pˆaques tombait le 25 mars . . . Après Pˆaques, on se mit à préparer l’église, les chapelles et tous les lieux réguliers . . . On mit en place le fameux tableau de Mr . Sublet, l’Apothéose de Saint Hugues . . . Parmi les autres tableaux de Sublet, ceux représentant Saint Zacharie et Sainte Elisabeth . . . Sainte Marie Madeleine, Saint Joseph, se font particulièrement remarquer’ (The Chronicle of St Hugh’s, 142–3; courtesy of Dom Babeau). Other works undertaken for the monastery at this time include portraits of St Edouard the Confessor, St Artaud, and Christ on the Cross. Sublet’s Saints et bienheureux de l’Ordre des Chartreux (depicting St Bruno, St Hugh, and St Roseline), and the Décor de la Salle du Chapitre Père (1883, 1888–1891) were added in 1893 (Chronicle, 267).

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ancient, but the word entered English at this time (the first recorded instance in the OED is also dated 1883). A canvas to be mounted by marouflage may be substantially or totally completed in advance, or a blank canvas might be installed as the base for a subsequently imposed mural. For the panels destined for the Fathers’ Chapterhouse, Sublet employed the former procedure, as is evident from the Chronicle, which records that In October, Mr Sublet came and put into place his paintings that should ornament the Chapter House. He had worked on them for three years. The work is carefully done and very faithful with regard to dress and local colour; however many reproach the artist for having been too realistic. (243)

Dowson probably did not see the installed painting on Easter Monday of that year. As the painting had been in progress for three years prior to its placement, however, its subject and manner of treatment would have been a topic of much speculation, especially when an artist came calling. Possibly, it awaited marouflage on-site.¹⁹ As the Prior of the monastery, Dom Victor Marie Doreau, had just published a study of Henri VIII et les martyrs de la Chartreuse de Londres (Paris, 1890), the subject would have taken skill to avoid (Hogg, 10 n). I dwell on this matter because Le Martyr de religieux sous Henri VIII may have inspired ‘Carthusians’, or indirectly informed it. Even if he did not see the mural, and simply heard about its theme and manner, the correspondence still demonstrates the productive nature of this touristic encounter upon Dowson’s art. The first stanza appears to issue directly from the iconography of the impressive fresco: Through what long heaviness, assayed in what strange fire Have these white monks been brought, into the way of peace, Despising the world’s wisdom, and the world’s desire, From which the body of this death bring no release? (F, 77)

Dowson may be writing from proximal or mediated experience. ‘Long heaviness’, ‘strange fire’, ‘the world’s wisdom’, and ‘the body of this death’ are not ordinary, observable features of monastic life, whatever degree of interaction may be inferred from Dowson’s epistolary remarks. If we assume that Sublet’s mural is available as a point of lyrical departure, these historical and mythopoeic details ¹⁹ The syntax is ambiguous on this point: ‘En Octobre, Mr Sublet vint placer ses peintures sur toiles, qui devaient orner la Salle du Chapitre. Il y avait travaillé pendant trois ans’ (Chronicle, 243).

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take on a more palpable existence.²⁰ They are more consistent with abstract enumeration from a pictorial likeness.²¹ The demonstrative pronoun—‘These white monks’—might denote true or mimetic attendance, as if a compositional feature had just been noticed. The speaker himself adopts the attitude of the cicerone, maybe, directing the reader to intricate details and curious lore. Sublet’s mural depicts the Carthusians during their systematic persecution under the reign of Henry VIII. The barbarism visited upon them may explain the echo of Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ in line one, and Dowson’s slightly obscure fourth line.²² The decapitator performs his work industriously, poised like a smith over an anvil. The panel depicts a production-line leading to this grisly end: first, the monks are hung; their white habits—which ‘symbolize the new life which animates [them], the conversion of [their] entire being to God’—are then removed.²³ Next, they are emasculated and disembowelled; systematically, as appears from the thrusting hand of the despoiler on the left, and the Dantescan exhibit opposite. Castration and disembowelment, not necessarily posthumous, was the usual punishment for the monks’ crime of High Treason, a legal confection stemming from Carthusian opposition to the Act of Succession, recognizing the progeny of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn as legitimate heirs to the English throne, and to the Act of Supremacy, which appointed Henry potentate of the Church of England. The purpose of the ‘strange fire’ is not therefore hard to discern: it consumes the clothes, entrails, and genitalia of the novitiates, glimpsed, almost, in the receptacle near the centre of the right panel. It might heat a torture instrument (the bident held in readiness by the diabolic expert in red) or fuel the boiling vat above, while pallid visages gape on. Victims of disembowelment and emasculation often had

²⁰ Dowson’s attitude toward mimesis has provoked a range of critical responses. Weiner considers that his ‘anti-mimetic, anti-representational formalism’, derives from Pater and seeks, in his terms, to ‘“obliterate” mimetic subject matter and reveal a pure song at the heart of poetic expression’ (Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, ‘Sight and Sound in the Poetic World of Ernest Dowson’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 60.4 [Mar. 2006]: 487, 485). This generally realizes ‘an artificial poetry, free from the burdens of observing and describing the world’, and reveals Dowson’s systematic ‘attempt . . . to divorce poetry from any act of observation’ (482, 483). For Chardin, on the other hand, ‘what strikes in the first place when reading these poems is their pictorial dimension. Structured around deathly symbols and cadaverous images, they betray the desire to show death rather than annunciate it, by a writing that constantly solicits the look and the inner eye’ (Jean-Jacques Chardin, Ernest Dowson [1867–1900] et la crise fin de siècle anglaise [Paris: Éditions Messene, 1995], 125). ²¹ In ‘Nuns’, Dowson’s flight of fancy was inspired by a glimpse of ‘a few sad faced nuns’ in Notre Dame de France: no ‘high convent walls’, no perpetual adoration was present to his imagination (L, 173). ²² However, see St Paul: ‘O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death’ (Rom. 7:24). ‘This death’ distinguishes corporal death, and metaphorical death to sin, through conversion or sacred vows. As the citation of Job 16:16 on F, 73v demonstrates, Dowson sought scriptural support for ‘Carthusians’, as he had once sought classical mottoes on which to ‘hang’ sonnets (L, 146). ²³ A Carthusian, First Initiation into Carthusian Life (Leominster, Herefordshire: Gracewing, 2010), 15.

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their organs burnt or boiled in front of them before they died.²⁴ Dowson rightly weighs the terrific purpose of this ‘strange fire’: it is no spiritual cliché, but visceral, astounding, unaccountable.²⁵ ‘A ssay’ is employed in the recondite, metallurgical sense—meaning trial ‘by “touch”, fire, etc’.—developing this conflagratory image (‘assay, n., sense II. 6a’). Dowson appears to reply to the detached excruciation of Sublet’s mural. The cadaver on the table claims his attention in the obscure fourth line: from the vacant eyes and open mouth the viewer may gather that ‘the body of this death brings no release’. Death results, instead, in the production of a corpse, hideously disfigured, wraithlike, its pallid colouration strangely like the habit worn formerly by the martyred. As the dire execution sequence progresses, it becomes clear that it is contrived to afford precisely no earthly release; only the angels can confer peace, signified by the palm branch, and sainthood, indicated by the halo, in the top right of the mural.²⁶ Dowson had discussed the English Martyrs with Charles Sayle, whose essay on the Blessed Cuthbert Mayne caught his attention two years previously (NL, 14). He also noticed the death of Pierre Chanel, a recently beatified French martyr, while drafting ‘Carthusians’ (L, 195 n). As he prepared to be received into Catholic communion, the passion of the Carthusian Martyrs, the first of the Protestant Reformation, held awesome personal and political significance for him. To commemorate their death—in a mural, a poem, or on a Feast Day (the English Martyrs are remembered on May 4, just as ‘Carthusians’ was coming together)— was, Dowson considered, tantamount to protesting a sinister turn in national cultural history. The consecration of St Hugh’s in 1883, for which Sublet’s work was intended—and the re-establishment of the Order of Carthusian in England, which it celebrated—were hugely political undertakings themselves, and only gradually overcame local prejudice, after earning rebukes from Cardinal Manning and Queen Victoria.²⁷ Dowson’s visit, and his encounter with Sublet’s mural, confirmed his established view of Catholic monasticism as a response to encroaching philistinism. Bordighera and the Western Riviera had described the founding of monasticism in Europe as the ‘natural outcome and one of the first results’ of the Gothic invasion: The sight of the desolation which reigned over the finest countries of the empire, the depravity and the ignorance which had invaded and eaten into society, and ²⁴ The first English martyr, St John Houghton, remained fully conscious throughout his ordeal, which culminated in his heart being riven from his chest and held in view, inspiring Francisco de Zurbarán’s famous painting. ²⁵ ‘Strange, adj., sense 10a’. As Catherine Maxwell notes, ‘strange’ is a fixture in Swinburne’s verse (‘Decadent Poetics after Swinburne’, Decadence: A Literary History, edited by Alex Murray [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020], 184). ²⁶ In line eleven, Dowson distinguishes the martyrs from the early, uncanonized saints who were not killed for their faith, and whose spiritual victory is symbolized by the crown of bay, or laurel. ²⁷ Hogg, The Carthusians, 9; quoting Christopher Martin, A Glimpse of Heaven: Catholic Churches in England and Wales (Historical England and Liverpool University Press, 2009), 159.

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the ravages and massacres which increased on every side, could not fail to disgust thinkers and men of lofty character with life and the world around them. . . . hermits began to gather into communities and to build dwellings, frequently of a fortified character, which in time became the only refuges remaining in Europe for those who had either attained knowledge or were desirous of acquiring it. Letters, the fine arts, and science were forced into the background; they were unknown even to the higher classes, and despised by those who made warfare their profession. The Church alone could offer them an asylum and safety; and so it came to pass that thought and learning found in the cloister both a sanctuary and a home. (71, 70)

For Dowson, this perceived compatibility with intellectual and artistic life made Catholicism more appealing. At Parkminster, he was reminded of the fortified monastery at Saint-Honorat described in the same chapter, which he surely visited in his formative years.²⁸ It had been variously inhabited by Benedictine and Cistercian (or Bernardine) ‘white monks’: textual variants of the lyric may refer to both sects.²⁹ ‘What a monstrous thing a Protestant country is!’ Dowson had railed six months earlier (L, 173). His correspondence maintains this pugnacious, anti-Protestant tone throughout the final stages of his preparations for reception (150, 198). On the eve of completing ‘Carthusians’, he complained to Moore: Let us give up writing & thinking and doing & hie us to Brittany with what speed, we may, and there with cider and incense and a portmanteau full of books, let us forget the infinite stupidity that prevails in this Protestant, respectable, democratic, hopelessly inartistic country. (L, 200)

What more vivid and forceful warrant of Dowson’s prejudice might be adduced than Sublet’s fresco? The Catholic persecution it commemorates would seem to justify Dowson in the belief that ‘the world’s wisdom’ ought to be despised, since it culminates in such dreadful despoliation. Against the arrayed forces of evil, ‘Stands the cross, still point of the turning world’. Sublet’s mural and its frontispiece now insist, above all, on the soundness of this Carthusian motto—stat crux dum volvitur orbis, derived from the writings of St Bruno—in the superpositioning of the crucifix so that the atrocities appear to unfold in the background and around it. The Passion of Christ becomes the true focus of contemplation, literally offsetting, and redeeming, the temporal suffering of the Carthusian martyrs. At the climax of ²⁸ ‘Continental in feeling, and observant of the beauty and tranquillity which are part of the Catholic faith’, Longaker writes, ‘the beauty of the architecture and pageantry of the Catholic Church he could not well escape during his boyhood sojourns on the Continent’ (66–7). ²⁹ SS, 30. A wooden statue of St Benedict greeted Dowson in the left choir of the church at St Hugh’s, opposite St Bruno (Hogg, The Carthusians, 70–3).

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both extant drafts, Dowson implores the monks to ‘Posses your visions still, possess your aching Christ’; this visionary torment is removed from the published text, leaving only ‘The sweeter service of the most dolorous cross’ to hint at the excruciating intimacy of their fearsome cohabitation (F, 78; SS, 30v).

Sacred Silence The shocking episode of English history depicted in Le Martyr de religieux sous Henri VIII, which scandalized Catholic Europe, is submerged in Dowson’s lyric. It never divulges the potentially ekphrastic mode of its opening. Dowson’s proper subject is the total excursive experience, his immersion into and withdrawal from this cloistered realm: the mural serves as a poignant backdrop. Like a docile pilgrim, inquiring and obedient to the hour, his attention does not linger on the painting, on anything, overlong. But glancing around the Charterhouse, recounting the provenance and perseverance of its inhabitants, he cannot quite escape its macabre influence: Within their austere walls, no voices penetrate; A sacred silence only, as of Death, obtains: Nothing finds entry here, of loud or passionate; This quiet is the exceeding profit of their pains. From many lands brought here, by divers fiery ways, To each has come the vanity of earthly joys: And one was crowned with thorns, and one was crowned with bays And each was tired, at last, of the world’s foolish noise. (F, 77)

St Hugh’s Charterhouse is, in principle, open to visitors, but it imposes an austere deportment upon all who are admitted.³⁰ The obnoxiousness of worldly din and the consecration of silence are by now recognizably Dowsonian themes, but they are also Carthusian leitmotifs. As Merton notes, any encounter with the sect is apt to leave a deep impression: The spirit of the Carthusians can easily be deduced from the life which they lead. It is a spirit of solitude, silence, simplicity, austerity, aloneness with God. The intransigence of the Carthusian’s flight from the world and from the rest of mankind is meant to purify his heart from all the passions and distractions which necessarily afflict those who are involved in the affairs of the world. (135) ³⁰ For Chardin, this line echoes Sayle’s ‘Nothing doth enter here of new or strange’ (323; citing ‘Evening—King’s College Chapel, Cambridge’, from Eroditia [1889]).

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Dowson may have arrived independently at a moral and aesthetic ideal of ‘sacred silence’, but his pilgrimage to Parkminster refined this notion, and emboldened his pursuit of it. The impact of the Carthusian spirit on Dowson’s increasingly quiescent musings can also be gauged by his gathering three lyrics together under the title of ‘In Praise of Solitude’ in September 1891. This grouping marries a triumvirate of mature Dowsonian concerns—‘Flos Lunae’, about the breakdown of his relationship with ‘Lena’; ‘Amor Umbratilis’, concerning his hesitancy to indite verses for Foltinowicz; and ‘Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration’, his first major devotional lyric—under a Carthusian slogan. It is a tremendous showing. Mahoney explains that the sequence was ‘submitted to the Hobby Horse almost on the eve of his conversion’: the title was determined just a week before Dowson’s submission and in Catholic conversation with Johnson, who first proposed ‘Umbratilia’ and subsequently (Mahoney surmises) ‘Laudes Solitudinis’, which Herbert Horne put into English.³¹ In Mahoney’s view, the growing association in his mind of solitude and silence with faith marked the moment of his going into the Catholic Church. The reticence of Dowson to go on talking about his beliefs highlights the central place they had assumed in his poetic cosmos. (233)

When Dowson became capable of expressing his spiritual concerns artistically, that is, he no longer wished to discourse prosaically upon them. In Carthusian postulancy he discovered an analogue for his own uncertain commitment; he marked his confession in Carthusian terms, taking an equivalent vow of silence, permitting himself to speak of spiritual and religious matters mainly in the rare music of verse. Dowson transcends the fin de siècle vogue for crepuscular, symbolist poetry by taking parsimony further than his contemporaries, and by executing his sparse lyrics with more prosodic daring. Thornton correctly identifies his innovation in this regard, noting (with an unattributed citation) that ‘Dowson has “nervous rhythms that depend greatly on pauses and heard silences, a rhetoric of silence almost”’.³² His technical effort of concentration corresponds to the ‘single-minded insistence on silence and solitude’ evinced by the Carthusian order, who ‘insist . . . perhaps more than anyone else in the Western Church’ upon these restraints (Merton, 134, 127). Dowson, too, becomes a fundamentalist of silent devotion; he reckons sincerely with the aesthetic implications of Carthusian monastic commitment. Early Carthusian writings often read like a résumé of Dowson’s lyrical project in 1891. Dom Innocent Lemasson, for instance, holds that ³¹ Joseph W. Mahoney, Fin de Siècle Catholics (unpublished PhD thesis, Pennsylvania State University, 1976), 233; see L, 214, 217 n. ³² R. K. R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma (London: Arnold, 1983), 105.

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The principles of the Carthusian life are quiet (quies) or rest from worldly things and desires, solitude which removes us from the company of men and from the sight of vanities, silence from useless speaking, and the quest for supernal realities (superiorum appetitio) that is to say seeking and delighting in things that are above. All other things are passed over. (Quoted in Merton, 139)

Dowson’s secular and devotional lyrics urge quiet withdrawal, the relinquishment of ‘vanity’, and insinuate that truth can only be realized in passionate surrender. They plead with an unnamed addressee—plainly Foltinowicz—to forego ‘useless speaking’ entirely. Dowson takes this injunction quite literally. St Bruno himself, detailing the foundational concerns of the order, cites the false attractions and ephemeral riches of this present life . . . comparing with them the joys of eternal glory. As a result we were inflamed with divine love and we promised, determined and vowed to abandon the fleeting shadows of this world at the earliest opportunity.³³

This nearly suffices in précis of the dilemma broached in Dowson’s Catholic writings, which leverages monastic perspective in order to fulminate against discordant modernity. The strife of contemporary existence is articulated in Carthusian terms, as a tumult of ‘fleeting shadows’, ‘false attractions’, ‘ephemeral riches’, and noisome disturbance, contrasting the devotional life of serene quietude and repose, confident in—or hopeful of—God’s grace. In ‘Carthusians’, the contrarian virtues of ‘silence and austerity’ are introduced in the second stanza, in lines that follow the pecuniary drift of Bruno’s remarks, and reprised in what could be a provisional conclusion, before the envoy of the last two stanzas (F, 78; see CP, 254–5 n). For Dowson, the monks’ ‘quiet is the exceeding profit of their pains’: the elongating elision expresses the pre-eminence of their spiritual accounting. Just as his nuns ‘put away desire’, because ‘the world is passionate and wild’, so his monks exclude everything noisome from their lives: ‘Nothing finds entry here of loud or passionate.’ The syntax is curiously indirect: ‘loud’ and ‘passionate’ are not even admitted as ordinary adjectives, but as rumoured categories, hovering just beyond the ken of the inductee. Beginning with this second stanza, Dowson makes the monastery a sound-proof echo chamber in which each syllable is permitted to linger and slowly diffuse throughout the cloister: the trochees of ‘sacred silence’, the scant consonants muffled in assonance. This acoustical impressionism relies upon spacious alexandrines for its cumulative effect. ³³ St Bruno, Letter to Raoul le Verd, in Early Carthusian Writings, edited by A Carthusian (Gracewing, 2009), 22.

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Carthusian silence is an end in itself, but also functions to deepen the solitude of these ‘dwellers with the Christ’, in order that they may, as Merton says, ‘place the soul in a state of silence and receptivity that will open its spiritual depths to the action of the Holy Spirit who makes known the mysteries of the Kingdom of God and teaches us the unsearchable riches of the love and wisdom of Christ’ (139). At St Hugh’s, this purpose is best revealed in the Great Cloister. Any monastery tour would provide ample opportunity to learn how, precisely, it safeguards the monks’ isolation. In Dowson’s postcard-perfect account of his visit it has, accordingly, principal place. As his impressions are bulletined to Moore directly, they offer the clearest available illustration of his working method as a poet. Much that Dowson journals is given self-contained form in stanzas four and five of ‘Carthusians’. St Hugh’s is set on a hilltop, ‘high up and away from everywhere’.³⁴ Dowson heard that ‘higher calling’; he followed ‘the steeper path’ unto the monastery gate; doubtless he both ‘meditate[d] and prayed’ within the compound. The circumstantial facts of his coming to sanctuary coincides, therefore, with the figurative journey of the Carthusian novitiate, allowing personal identification with their ‘great refusal’. Approaching Parkminster sympathetically, the speaker easily detects the ‘bond’ of ‘solitude and silence’ that unites the fraternity. This might seem antithetical to the core purpose of Carthusian monasticism, an order that were forbidden the saying of Mass for much of their history, so strenuous was their obligation (see Merton, 135). This visitor immediately grasps the defining paradox of the ‘cloistered company’, however, a key part of the institutional lore of the Charterhouse. On first visiting the Grande Chartreuse, St Hugh himself recorded that Their rule encouraged solitude, not isolation. They had separate cells but their hearts were united. Each of them lived apart, but had nothing of his own, and did not live for himself. They combined solitude with community life. They lived alone lest any should find his fellows an obstacle to him; they lived as a community so that none of them should be deprived of brotherly help.³⁵

The delectable paradox of the community of solitaries is inherent to the cloister (L. ‘claustrum, clōstrum, “a bar, bolt, lock”’ [‘cloister, n’.]). The Carthusians of St Hugh’s are doubly portcullis’d: their admired cloister keeps the world at bay and alienates each member of their silent order from his colleague. Dowson perceives that muteness inclines to solipsism, and vice versa: ‘None knoweth here the secret of his brother’s heart.’ The individuality and sociability of each frater is carefully ³⁴ L, 191. This is invariably so: ‘the Charterhouse is built by preference in the mountains’ (Merton, 131). ³⁵ Anon, Carthusian Saints (Charterhouse of the Transfiguration, 2006), 23–4; citing Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis: The Life of Saint Hugh of Lincoln, edited by Decima L. Douie and David Hugh Farmer (London: Nelson, 1961–2).

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withdrawn, replaced ‘with a formal bow and a “memento mortis”’, until the hour apportioned them to ‘mix with each other & converse’ (L, 191). This ‘cloistered company’ are ‘companionless’ because they ‘dwell’ not with each other, the poem twice reminds us, but ‘alone with Christ’. Dowson’s confessional poems generally become richer when their doctrinal borrowings, contexts, and traditional insights are borne in mind, but line 19 requires no theological preparation to understand: ‘They are but come together for more loneliness’, is as frankly cloister-phobic as any line in English devotional verse. Dowson hoped to place this ‘set of verses on the “Carthusians”’ in the Century Guild Hobby Horse, as ‘a pendant to the “Ursulines”’ (L, 201). He explicitly regarded it as a parallel or companion piece, a sequel or supplement, to the earlier poem (192; ‘pendant, n., sense 10’). Here we see Dowson’s derivative imagination at work: he relies on the transmission of language and ideas from one composition to another; a scrambling of textual integrity, resulting in scrutable patterns of interference. His second reclusive poem may have been tentatively wound up—absent the last two stanzas—about seven weeks after his first; it was finally completed about three months after the same date at the beginning of Lent. Each poem anticipates worldly refutation before culminating in celebration of their self-sufficient, solitary devotees: the uncertain inquiry of ‘surely their choice of vigil is the best?’ is amplified in the echo chamber of the Carthusian cloister, becoming triumphant and ecstatic: O beatific life! who is there shall gainsay Your great refusal’s victory, your little loss, Deserting vanity for a more perfect way, The sweeter service of the most dolorous cross. Ye shall prevail at last, surely, ye shall prevail! Your silence and austerity shall win at last. (F, 78)

These jarring contrastive figures commemorating the ‘victory’ of ‘refusal’, and the ‘deserti[on]’ of ‘vanity’, turn worldly values on their head. The Carthusians’ ‘little loss’ is converted into a ‘win at last’, demonstrating the shrewdness of their spiritual economy and the negligibility of their short-term sacrifice. The last line of stanza six again takes solace in decadently sweet sadness, which the speaker tangibly locates in the offices of Catholic devotion, specifically in ‘The sweeter service of the most dolorous Cross.’ This is the great paradox of monastic life: that temporal sufferance may be clarified into a nourishing, mystical elation.³⁶ Dowson’s lyric yields a final emblem of Carthusian victory. In the penultimate stanza of ‘Nuns’, we read that ‘Mary’s sweet Star dispels for them the night, | The ³⁶ Dowson’s ‘more perfect way’ alludes to the pastoral work of St Philip Neri, founder of the Oratory; cf. Henry Sebastian Bowden, Guide to the Oratory, South Kensington (London: Burns and Oates, 1897), 21.

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proper darkness of humanity’, while in its ‘pendant’, we are assured that ‘Desire and mirth, the world’s ephemeral lights shall fail, | The sweet star of your queen is never overcast.’ The coincidence of lineation underscores the thematic resemblance: Dowson might almost have been writing from earlier copy.³⁷ The identification of Stella Maris with Polaris, the Lode Star, dates to the ninth century. Dowson knew that the Carmelite Order were founded, and continued to be based, at Stella Maris Monastery on Mount Carmel, hence the ending of ‘The Carmelite Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration’. But Carthusians also reserve a special place in their devotional life for the mother of Christ. As Merton explains, a typical hermitage contains, on the second floor . . . the Ave Maria [which] is hardly used at all: it is a kind of antechamber to the real cell where the monk spends most of his time. But by a charming and ancient custom, this antechamber, dedicated to the Virgin Mother of God and containing her image, is a place where the monk pauses in prayer on his way in and out of his cell. Carthusian mysticism thinks of the monks’ life of solitude as hidden within the Heart of the Virgin Mother. (131)

The thirty-four monks’ cells adjoining the Great Cloister at Parkminster each have ‘two rooms, the Ave Maria and the cubiculum’ (Hogg, 9). For Dowson, too, such mystical lore was increasingly precious: he turned to the ‘last verse’ of the plainsong hymn ‘Ave Maris Stella’ at the end of the opening processional in ‘Apple Blossom in Brittany’, linking the story to his experience on 19 October 1890, and to Foltinowicz, as we have seen.³⁸ He was always stimulated by Swinburne’s anti-Madonna in ‘Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)’, and appreciated its Baudelairean pedigree; if he also knew Gray’s version of ‘À Une Madone’, Dowson may have taken the ‘Star of the Sea’ as an emblem of Decadent inspiration, though unmentioned in the original.³⁹ He encountered visceral Marian patronage in Brittany, whence the Catholic atmosphere of Ploumariel. The Marianism Dowson discovered at the heart of the monastic traditions of the Church suggested a secular equivalent: an uninterrupted and unending devotion to Foltinowicz modelled on the anchorage he witnessed (and uncannily like that he cautioned against in ‘The Diary of a Successful Man’). The traditional image of the Queen of Heaven and Star of the Sea became the archetype for his principal symbol of inspiration, in Adrian Rome and elsewhere.⁴⁰ Dowson at last sublimated his idiosyncratic museology within the trans-personal, inspirational ³⁷ This becomes Dowson working method in the last productive phase of his career. See Ch. 8, Because I Am Idolatrous, and Afterlives: In Epilogue. ³⁸ Johnson also wrote a poem with this title. ³⁹ John Gray, Silverpoints (London: Bodley Head, 1893), 34. ⁴⁰ See Introduction, Decadent Museology. Ch. 6 of Adrian Rome was not written until Dowson returned from Brittany the following year (see L, 242).

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tradition of the Church. His Mariology encompasses a proper Catholic veneration of the mother of Christ, sustainer and intercessor, and his eccentric devotion to Foltinowicz, her namesake after all, whom he hoped one day to marry, and to whom he now attached the service of his imaginative life. This was too much for Johnson: he broke with Dowson after learning he intended to propose to Foltinowicz, accusing him ‘not of vulgarity, of banalité . . . so much as of being impracticable and foolish and irresponsible’ (L, 225; cf. Mahoney, 238). Dowson satirized the incident in Ch. 2 and Ch. 4 of Adrian Rome. Lord Henry Minaret finally confronts the protagonist about Sylvia Drew: ‘you must see, she is not your equal. It isn’t even a kindness to marry her; it’s damnation for both of you’ (AR, 53). While Johnson’s opposition was expressed in dogmatic form, Dowson saw plainly that class chauvinism was the real issue. He formulated a Decadent riposte: ‘God or the Flesh or the Devil—an artist may be in bondage to any one or other or all of these Powers and retain his self-respect—but the world mustn’t, positively must not exist for him—or so much the worse for his art’ (L, 224; cf. 223). Gray’s or Dowson’s phrase, the construction echoes Baudelaire’s prose poem applauding the intoxicating powers of wine, poetry, and virtue, while the aesthetic credo draws upon Marius Aurelius’ ascêsis and Dowson’s invigorating encounter with Carthusian mortification. It is hard to discern which ‘Power’ Dowson was most in thrall of when it came to Foltinowicz, which may have been Johnson’s point. He appreciated that the relationship was opprobrious, and made it a core feature of his self-presentation, nevertheless.

Memento Mortis, Frater Some of these insurrectionary impulses re-emerge in the explosive final stanzas of ‘Carthusians’, which may have been added well after Dowson’s Parkminster pilgrimage. The speaker is thrust from his temporary sanctuary, hurled upon the fin de siècle metropolis, whence he remembers what he has witnessed: We laugh and fling up flowers and laugh, we laugh across the wine: With wine we dull our souls, and careful strains of art: Our cups are polished skulls round which the roses twine: None whispers that the shadow of death is on his heart. Who dares to say that Death’s hard hand Move on white company, whom that has not sufficed, Our viols cease, our wine is Death, our roses fail: Possess your visions still, possess the aching Christ, Though the world fall apart, surely ye shall prevail. (F, 78)

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Whereas the dénouement of ‘Nuns’ is centripetal, closing around the altar scene, the culmination of ‘Carthusians’ is centrifugal.⁴¹ The monastic tourist returns directly to his awesome dissipation; the scene recalls the orgy of ‘Non sum qualis’. At the poem’s true climax, the Cross features prominently, like Sublet’s Christ on the Cross (1883) in St Hugh’s Chapterhouse: it becomes an object of intense veneration for the devotee, the ‘still point of the turning world’. The troublesome line in the penultimate stanza does not appear to correspond to details from the Chapterhouse frieze, although composed in the same spirit. Its subject is not the Carthusians, after all, but another, less sufficient, company: the poet and his heedless generation. Instead, the line probably derives from scripture: Dowson noted a crux from the Book of Job opposite ‘Vanitas’ in his holograph notebook: ‘On my eyelids is the shadow of Death’.⁴² The phrase appears verbatim in Dowson’s first draft of the line, which transposes Death’s obscure passage onto the heart. The next iteration reifies Death, and recalls the atrocities visited upon the Carthusian Martyrs (and perhaps de Zurbarán’s iconic painting). Finally, the speaker directs his criticism with less mystical intensity upon the blindness of his companions and contemporaries: ‘none’ among them ‘dares to look at Death’—in the Pauline language of the first stanza, at Sin—even as they chase oblivion and toast their ‘polished skulls’.⁴³ While ‘polished’ Decadent perfection comes easily to them—and these are among the most Decadent lines in English verse—intimate confession, true understanding of the self, of the predicament of faith in a modern world, are often evaded or unconvincingly addressed. By contrast, the Carthusian band live on terms of extreme intimacy with the ‘shadow of death’; they ‘pass each other in the cloister with a formal bow and a “memento mortis, frater!”’ (L, 191). The published line transforms this sombre reminder into a gargoyle. The Carthusians do not simply personify Dowson’s distrust of modernity, and his longing to ameliorate, somehow, its discontents: these are anti-Decadent monks, and their reactionary tradition of austerity allows him to formulate a ⁴¹ Pater distinguishes between ‘the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies’ of Greek thought, the former ‘throwing itself forth in endless play of undirected imagination; delighting in colour and brightness, moral or physical; in beautiful material, in changeful form everywhere, in poetry, in music, in architecture and its subordinate crafts, in philosophy itself ’; and the latter, ‘a severe simplification everywhere . . . a sort of Parmenidean abstractness, and monotony or calm [which] enforces everywhere the impress of its reasonable sanity, its candid reflections of things as they really are; its sense of logical proportion. . . . which links the individual units together, states to states, one period of organic growth to another, under the reign of a strictly composed, self-conscious order, in the universal light of the understanding’ (Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism, Selected Essays, edited by Alex Wong [Manchester: Carcanet, 2018], 226–7). ⁴² F, 73v. A contemporary translation of Job 16:16 gives: ‘deep darkness is on my eyelids’ (New Oxford Annotated Bible, 5th edn, edited by Michael D. Coogan et al. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 751). ⁴³ Kostas Boyiopoulos judges that ‘The imagery of flowers and wine in conjunction with skull-cups is that of a twisted Holy Communion, evoking the Catholic satanic rituals in Huysmans’ Là -bas’ (The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons, and Dowson [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015], 146).

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critique of the contemporary aesthetic scene. As Boyiopoulos notes, ‘“Our viols cease, our wine is death, our roses fail” [is] a triad that corresponds to the [Decadent] poet’s doctrine of “wine and woman and song”’ (146). The fin de siècle pilgrim-poet’s intimation of mortality does not become a salve to aid his spiritual growth, but a spur to gather his rosebuds while he may. Yet the tourist is under no illusions: he understands now that poetry, revelry, and love are themselves Decadent concerns, and leaves Parkminster with insight into his own manner of living. His capacity for song can be stilled in an instant; the beauty he so admires vanishes. About alcohol he is surprisingly unguarded: ‘Our wine’—opposite the Eucharist, or monkish elixirs like Chartreuse and Benedictine—‘is death’. Dowson could hardly be clearer about the deleterious effect of alcohol consumption upon his health.⁴⁴ The speaker acknowledges a high price for the temporary relief that spiritous liquor affords: it ‘dull[s] our souls’ and may either inspire, or throttle, ‘careful strains of art’ (the syntax is ambiguous). Decadent poetry comes in for indictment here, too, therefore. ‘Carthusians’ connects the recursive and reticular aspects of Dowson’s art and the obsessive cast of mind occasioned by routine imbibement and overabundant sensual pursuits. This is reflected in the decisive rhymes of the penultimate stanza: where ‘wine’ ‘[en]twine[s]’ the heart; and ‘art’ keeps ‘apart’. As George Eliot notes, the peril of excessive and exclusive technical mastery is that ‘Poetry, from being the fullest expression of the human soul, is starved into ingenious pattern-work.’⁴⁵ As ‘Carthusians’ finally insists, monastic tourism may offer, at best, a fleeting affirmation of human mortality, a portable souvenir of mortification suitable mainly for toasting and roistering back at the club. But it is better than nothing. The lesson may help explain the quaint legend that Dowson ‘would sometimes furtively take a little gold cross from his waistcoat pocket and dip it in the glass before he drank’ (L, 380). The gesture is not some sentimental consecration, surely, but a Carthusian memento mortis, a habitual aide-mémoire that, indeed, ‘our viols cease, our wine is death, our roses fail’. The final line of ‘Carthusians’ allows another eventuality to dawn upon Dowson’s imaginative universe: the prospect that his ‘world’ might ‘fall apart’. Later, when the self he was now fashioning was

⁴⁴ As a younger man, Dowson showed little compunction about binging with his friends, but by May 1891, when these lines were composed, he was willing to privately acknowledge a problem. The risks were borne home to him by the death of Joseph Foltinowicz, whom Dowson declined to ‘reproach . . . with an undue love of alcohol’; he uses nearly the same formulation for his own and Smithers’ drinking: both are ‘fond (unduly) of “fire water”’ (L, 275, 334). Smithers became concerned as Dowson corrected proof of Verses, eliciting this response: ‘You are wrong about the liver, though no doubt right about the causality of the drink. It’s a complete breakdown of the nervous system. I think when my next month is up, if I can screw up the courage, I will move to Faouet where the doctor is an old friend of mine, & see if he can patch me up for a little while longer’ (unpublished letter to Smithers, Clark Memorial Library, UCLA). Defensive remarks proliferate later (L, 353, 371, 384, 397, 398, 415). ⁴⁵ George Eliot, ‘Notes on Form in Art’, Selected Critical Writings, edited by Rosemary Ashton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 359.

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threatened with obliteration, he remembered this phrase: ‘Nay! She is gone, and all things fall apart’, opines the speaker of ‘Quid non speremus, Amantes?’ Dowson’s second romantic rejection, when it arrived, appeared tantamount to a personal holocaust, and to demand such a martyrdom.

5 Dowson’s Lunatic Asylum Sorcerer’s Moon Dowson’s Catholic conversion polarized his writing. Its centripetal tendencies are apparent from the stark juxtapositions of his first confessional lyric to the explosive dénouement of ‘Carthusians’ where, anchoring himself to Stella Maris, cleaving to ‘the aching Christ’, the speaker recoils upon the madcap, twilit world of Decadent art (F, 78). From the middle of 1891, his verse exhibits these polar influences in sidereal terms. Dowson’s lyrical cosmos is dominated by what Pater calls ‘the tyranny of the moon, not tender and far-off, but close down—the sorcerer’s moon, large and feverish’.¹ Pater’s writings, indeed, constitute the most elemental atmosphere of Dowson’s thought. From 1890 to 1892, he derived from them a peculiar erotology, underwriting his new love poems. Several of these lyrics, including ‘Flos Lunae’ and ‘Sapientia Lunae’, probe the enigmas of sublunary affairs, positing an affinity between the moon and the mysterious muse-function of the beloved. Dowson’s moonish muse is tyrannical, in Pater’s terms, because she usurps the poet’s sovereign power of articulation, stilling ‘the calm fount of speech’ (V, 16). Her operations are strictly monodirectional: the poet’s ‘human heart’ is ‘trouble[d]’ by her every sway, his ‘prayers’ waft towards her like ‘incense’, but still he ‘would not alter’ her, nor ‘change’ her if he ‘might’. Betimes ‘the pale, soft moon discloses’ occult wisdom, and the poet is reduced to her supine amanuensis, simply ‘reading’, ‘ponder[ing]’, ‘musing’ on her ‘secrets’ (50). This leery, lyric stenographer and his designated ‘Pale daughter of the lunar night’ evolve into the dramatis personae of Dowson’s most programmatic work, The Pierrot of the Minute, A Phantasy in One Act (F, 79). Along with its antecedent lyrics, Dowson’s short play shows him to be a staunch fantasist indeed. Marrying the escapist traditions of the Commedia dell’arte with the inscrutable verve of Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes (1869), whose allegorical potentiality seemed endlessly renewable in the Nineties thanks to innovative recent works like Albert Giraud’s Pierrot Lunaire: Rondels Bergamasques (1884) and L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune selon Jules Laforgue (1885), Dowson’s imagination is permitted to wander in miniature symbolist dreamscape, thrillingly fin de siècle, and indubitably his own.

¹ Walter Pater, ‘Æsthetic Poetry’, Appreciations, With an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1889), 218.

Ernest Dowson. Robert Stark, Oxford University Press. © Robert Stark (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192884763.003.0006

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Dowson’s lunatic asylum—his flight into selenian fantasy—was motivated by the same ‘great refusal’ of a drab, money-grubbing modernity that inspired his Catholic conversion, and grounded in the renegotiation of Cynthian eros prompted by his chastening passion for Foltinowicz (D, 7). His interest in lunatic symbolism goes back at least to 23 December 1889, however, when he went to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe. The performance, which he appreciated in a qualified way, provoked this response: Shall we [he asks Moore] write a novel—the study of a man two-sided, i.e. by temperament etc, humanus, pleasure loving, keenly sensible to artistic impressions, & to the outward & visible beauty of life—& at the same time morbidly conscious of the inherent grossness & futility of it all—& so trace the struggle between his sensibility & his fanaticism—until the latter has spoilt the whole of art & nine tenths of life for him, & made him either a suicide, a madman or simply a will-less, disgustful, drunken debauchee. I don’t see any other possible dénouement. (L, 122)

The collaborators never implement the scenario, but this tension between aesthetic ‘sensibility’ and ‘morbid . . . fanaticism’ is crucial to each of their published novels, and much of Dowson’s short fiction. The schema responds to the imaginative ‘compact’ between ‘the lunatick, the louer, and the Poet’ in Shakespeare’s comedy.² Dowson still smarted from the loss of Hélène’s ‘beauty’, though he held it to be of a common sort, and Theseus’ line about discovering paragons in a ‘brow of Ægypt’ would have rung true (5. 1. 11). To Moore he proposes that they put a Decadent stamp upon the tired trope. The contemporary hazard of ‘suicide’—‘Felix’ must be ‘Martyr[ed]’ in their abortive novel—or the pedestrian ignominies of dissolution and ennui, would be added to the compounded infirmities of the fantasist, since they were likelier to emerge from the welter of aesthetic sensibility and passionate fervour at the Victorian fin de siècle. Dowson’s protagonists are invariably of this sort: veteran sensualists, but vacillating and vague by temperament; disdaining every bourgeois institution and attitude, and not merely the quaint morality that fixes them as society’s perennial marginalians. Thus Oswyn, Rainham, and Adrian Rome; the unnamed writer in ‘An Orchestral Violin’, Michael Garth, and Sebastian Murch: all recognizably Decadent anti-heroes, descendant of Des Esseintes and Lord Henry Wotton. Dowson had explored the connection between art and madness in his previous study, ‘The Diary of a Successful Man’. When Lorimer’s passion for Delphine de Savaresse is thwarted—she declares her love for his rival, and takes inviolable religious vows—his reason is overthrown. He sublimates his desire in profane ² William Shakespeare, A Midsommer Nights Dreame 5. 1. 7, The Complete Works: Critical Reference Edition, edited by Gary Taylor, John Jowett, Terri Bourus, and Gabriel Egan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 1: 912.

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devotion of her sacralized person. For Dion, who loved Delphine as well but was neither artistically nor catholically inclined, Lorimer’s story becomes a cautionary tale. Returning to the theme after experiencing the transports of love and the blight of disappointment first hand, Dowson became less critical and aloof. He had by then carefully inspected Verlaine’s poetry, and propounded ‘Sapientia Lunae’ in his own name. He now fathomed the latent associations between these states of excellent disorder and the sway of the moon, once thought to cause periodic insanity. What should he call those paroxysms of romantic nostalgia which seized him from time to time, if not ‘lunacy’? His next lyric but one attends to Theseus’ ‘compact’ more carefully, therefore, without pathologizing it, as if from Lorimer’s perspective.

Bedlam Nothing has come to light about the compositional circumstances of ‘To One in Bedlam’. The sonnet first appeared in Albemarle in August 1892; Flower and Maas conjecture that it was underway by 17 May (L, 234). Dowson may have known or heard about someone who was admitted to the Hospital of St Mary’s of Bethlehem, in Bishopsgate, London, prompting the lyric; he may have worried that his mother could end up there; but the situation evoked in the first quatrain establishes that he did not visit the facility himself. The vile conditions he describes—the ‘sordid bars’ and ‘strait, caged universe, whereat the dull world stares, | Pedant and pitiful’—are amply attested in historical descriptions of Bedlam, but not after 1864, when the criminal lunatics wing was disbanded, and the internees transferred to alternate facilities at Broadmoor.³ Writing in 1915, the hospital chaplain observes that the ‘heavy iron guards, which disfigured and darkened all the windows in the upper galleries’, were removed in 1854, leaving but a ‘solitary specimen’ for

³ For centuries, internees were kept in separate bedrooms, in two ‘wings’ of four ‘galleries’ each, depending on their classification, and ‘locked up’ after eight o’clock (Anon, Sketches in Bedlam, [London: Sherwood, Jones & co., 1823], xviii, xx). Throughout the eighteenth century, patients admitted on their own cognizance, ‘curables’, were housed on ‘the ground story, No. 2’, whereas ‘the upper gallery, No. 4, is for the incurables, and contains patients of that description only’ (xix). Criminals were housed in a separate building (xix). ‘Noisy and dangerous patients, some of whom are very uncleanly’, were kept ‘in the basement’, or gallery ‘No. 1’ (xix). As late as 1857, conditions for this minority of internees remained dire. The Quarterly Review excoriated: ‘These dens, for we can call them by no softer name, are the only remaining representatives of old Bedlam. They consist of dismal arched corridors, feebly lit at either end by a single window in double irons, and divided in the middle by gratings more like those which enclose the fiercer carnivora at the Zoological Gardens than anything we have elsewhere seen employed for the detention of afflicted humanity’ (quoted in Jonathan Andrews, Asa Briggs, Roy Porter, Penny Tucker, and Keir Waddington, The History of Bethlem [New York: Routledge, 1997], 502–3). After criminal lunatics were transferred to Broadmoor in 1863–4, the Governors of Bethlem ‘immediately set about demolishing the criminal buildings’, breaking ‘its last link with the past’ (503, 506).

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visitors ‘to shudder at’.⁴ He reproduces their lattice form, lamenting that ‘Iron bars do make a cage just as certainly as stone walls a prison, and this cage-work . . . obstructed the light, and drove the iron into many a patient’s soul’ (355). Whether iron guards remained in the lower galleries is unclear, since O’Donoghue notes that ‘the process of transformation is still incomplete’ in his own day; most had probably been replaced with ‘long, upright panes of glass, set in a light framework of iron’ (355). Dowson’s ‘sordid bars’ are anomalous, then. One could find them in a gaol, but not in a psychiatric facility. Had he visited Bethlem, he would not have met patients in their quarters, anyway, but in communal areas (see History of Bethlem, 456). The use of straw bedding at Bethlem was notorious. For much of its history, straw was viewed as a perfectly normal kind of bedding . . . not just for the mad, but for the sick and vagrants. Straw was not only cheap, it was considered hygienic, permitting urine to drain through to the bottom of the patients’ cribs rather than soak into sheets and mattresses. Yet, by the later eighteenth century at least, most patients lay on sheeted beds. (203)

Its provision was gradually discontinued in the upper galleries in response to a scathing report by the 1815 House of Commons Select Committee on Madhouses, and totally abolished in the basement galleries with the transfer of criminal lunatics in 1864.⁵ Dowson simply could not have witnessed the use of straw bedding in 1892, except in a theatre—where it remained a staple in depictions of Bedlam until the end of the century—or, possibly, a gaol. The image had nevertheless become synonymous with Bethlem as a potent signifier of madness and its mistreatment, and Dowson employs it as such. His sonnet acknowledges that the stable bedding of Bedlam is ‘miserabl[e]’, but also calls it ‘scentless’, imagining the inoffensive cleanliness of the facility, perhaps, or urging the basic, unfouled humanity of the inmate so described. Crucially, Dowson’s bedlamite interweaves this innocuous stuff into contentious ‘posies’—so the speaker supposes—to the dismay of nitpicking keepers (as hospital ⁴ Edward Geoffrey O’Donoghue, The Story of Bethlehem Hospital (New York: Dutton, 1915), 354; cf. History of Bethlem, 490. ⁵ The anonymous ‘Constant Observer’ of Sketches in Bedlam sets the fact down without compunction: ‘In the basement gallery, where the disorderly patients are, there are no sheets, and they sleep on straw’ (xx). Just the following year, straw bedding was employed in an increasing minority of exceptional cases (History of Bethlem, 115–16, 221, 415–16, 431). That of Ann Morley generated a furore, and was the subject of an investigation by the Lunacy Commission in 1852. She complained of ‘being placed in the basement, where she was expected to sleep on straw in the cold’ (468; cf. 470–1). Defending themselves against accusations of mistreatment, the Governors of Bethlem ‘argued that the use of straw, properly covered with blankets, was not unsuitable. If anything it was shown as a hygienic measure’ (476). Subsequent Lunacy Commission Reports, in 1853 and 1861, claim satisfaction ‘with the general cleanliness of the wards and with the condition and character of the furniture and bedding’ (489). An 1855 General Report, comparing the treatment of female patients in 1853 and 1808, implies that straw bedding had already been abolished (494).

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staff were termed), and the chagrin of prurient onlookers. Dowson subsequently explained this ‘rather fantastical image’ to Henry Davray: ‘I imagine the madman (fou) making imaginary bouquets of roses out of the straw which lines his cage’ (L, 370). The garland is emblematic of poesy, of course, and has a special, metapoetic significance in Dowson’s oeuvre. There is art in this abjection, too, he insists. Symons noted this capacity to ‘transfigur[e] . . . a dreadful thing with beauty’.⁶ ‘In the moment’s intensity of this comradeship with madness’, he observes, ‘how instinctively the imagination of the poet turns what is sordid into a radiance.’ The Dowsonian lyricist is a deranged florist, arranging foolish bouquets with ‘delicate, mad hands’, to while away the time of his captivity. An unusual adjective in the context, ‘pedant’ extends the conceit into the critical domain, censuring the ‘dull’ superintendents of the literary scene for their ‘stupidity’. Even Punch came to appreciate the correspondence, and by 1897 supposed that ‘Decadence is now a recognised form of lunacy.’⁷ Fifteen months later, Dowson still judged ‘To One in Bedlam’ a strong poem, marking it second, after ‘Non sum qualis’, ‘in the order in which [he] should wish personally’ to have his poems appear in the Rhymers’ second anthology (L, 287). Reading proof, he was struck by the aptness of the conceit, and adjusted it into a bon mot for Smith: ‘One lives and talks as if the making of many books were the end and aim of all things’, Dowson writes, ‘I am afraid they are the straws one chews to cheat one’s appetite’ (303; cf. 304, 306). In this notional bedlamite, Dowson had discovered an arresting symbol of the Decadent artist. ‘Coleridge and Yeats had seen the poet as madman’, says Thornton, ‘but Dowson adds the imprisonment, the “strait, caged universe” out of which he is “rapt” by the non-worldly, the “divine” and the “enchaunted”’.⁸ The second quatrain leaves no doubt that the lunatic’s disconcerting absorption, grandiose vision, abandoned hauteur, and astronomical gloom are serviceable fin de siècle qualities. In the sestet, the speaker professes to be ‘fain of all thy lone eyes promise me’; to perceive in so-called madness a palpable freedom: from the humiliating cycles of toil and its dubious rewards, from bogus moral accountancy, from egoism. The sonnet becomes an indictment of a savagely unhinged civilization that treats its poets, artists, and dissenters so monstrously. The balance swings in favour of the bedlamite: Better than mortal flowers, Thy moon-kissed roses seem: better than love or sleep, The star-crowned solitude of thine oblivious hours! ⁶ Arthur Symons, ‘Ernest Dowson’, The Poems of Ernest Dowson (London: Lane, 1906), xxvii. ⁷ ‘From the Log of a Log-Roller’, Punch, 16 Jan. 1897, 34; cited by Nick Freeman, ‘Fighting Like Cats and Dogs: Decadence and Print Media’, Decadence: A Literary History, edited by Alex Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 96. ⁸ R. K. R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma (London: Arnold, 1983), 98. John R. Reed maintains, however, that ‘the self-conscious poet cannot so easily disregard real sordidness and therefore can never fully escape to an enchanted solitude’ (‘Bedlamite and Pierrot: Ernest Dowson’s Esthetic of Futility’, ELH 35.1 [Mar. 1968]: 113).

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Bedlam’s litter is imaginatively converted into ‘lunar roses’ of the species sought by Neobule in ‘A Requiem’; they are ‘not so sweet’ as ‘mortal flowers’, but ‘pale and blue’. The narcotic quality of this conclusion may reflect the increased ‘use of opium and other drugs as a form of chemical restraint’ in mental asylums throughout the country, not just Bethlem Hospital, where ‘morphine was used at night to help the patients sleep’ (History of Bethlem, 493). But the bedlamitepoet truly escapes his forcibly constrained world in captive artifice. Therein he obtains an oblivion exceeding ecstasy or the transports of dream. His dungeon is imaginatively dilated, and becomes a cosmos unto itself. The outstanding candidate for Dowson’s bedlamite, if he really existed, is John Evelyn Barlas, that ‘charming poet and anarchist, who was lately run in for shooting the House of Commons’ when Dowson (or possibly John Davidson) introduced him to the Rhymers’ Club in spring 1892.⁹ Barlas published eight volumes of verse during his lifetime. His skill as a sonneteer attracted Meredith’s attention, and Johnson dedicated an alexandrine sonnet, ‘Sortes Virgilianae’, to him in 1891.¹⁰ Dowson, for his part, particularly esteemed his 1887 symbolist influenced volume, Phantasmagoria: Dream-Fugues.¹¹ When Barlas fired a revolver upon Parliament on New Year’s Eve 1891, he was remanded in custody in Holloway Gaol: the Medical Officer found that he was ‘insane and should be sent to an asylum’.¹² Barlas received visitors ‘throughout his imprisonment’: Wilde, who subsequently stood bail; staunch friend Davidson; and John Gray, who ‘attend[ed] to some of the more prosaic aspects of Barlas’ defense, including the provision of legal counsel’ (Cohen, 117, cf. 114). If Dowson did not visit Holloway himself, he heard about it first hand from Gray, and read about it in the press, where Robert Sherard and others sought to ensure a favourable hearing (113). Even Barlas’ defenders were privately convinced that he ‘had gone mad’, at least temporarily; they rallied because ‘it would be very awkward if he were declared insane’, and their ministrations prevailed, for a time (Cohen, 114, cf. 113, 115). Barlas was released on 15 January 1892, but soon found himself in trouble again. He was committed to James Murray’s Royal Asylum in Perth, and subsequently to Gartnavel Asylum, near Glasgow, where he spent the rest of his life (123, 127). Dowson tried to stay in touch while Barlas was at liberty, but soon reported that ‘the search for Barlas is like the search for the Sangreal’ (L, 236). Wilde speaks for everyone when he writes, in response to Barlas’ letter of thanks for standing bail, that ‘We poets and dreamers are all brothers’, a sentiment derived

⁹ L, 225; Philip K. Cohen, John Evelyn Barlas, A Critical Biography: Poetry, Anarchism, and Mental Illness in Late-Victorian Britain (High Wycombe: Rivendale, 2012), 155–6. ¹⁰ For Meredith, ‘It is in the Sonnets, not in the Lyrics, that [Barlas] takes high rank among the poets of his time’ (The Letters of George Meredith, edited by C. L. Cline [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970], 3: 1213). ¹¹ Mark Longaker, Ernest Dowson (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), 92. ¹² The Times, Jan. 8, 1892; quoted in Cohen, John Evelyn Barlas, 113.

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from Shakespeare, popularized by the Romantics, utilized by Barlas’ confederation of supporters, and echoed in Dowson’s sonnet.¹³ Barlas’ ‘high courageous spirit, his contempt for conventionalism’ inspired admiration and loyalty (Cohen, 116). Early in the proceedings against him, he pugnaciously asserted his credentials as ‘a Bachelor of Arts of Oxford’ in exculpation of his behaviour (116). Dowson would have enjoyed this supercilious gesture. His sonnet concludes by asserting his subject’s imaginative superiority, his genius for oblivion. It lauds the bedlamite’s defiance in surprisingly militant terms: as ‘the dull world stares’ at him, ‘his rapt gaze wars | With their stupidity!’ Barlas had been sedated with bromide of potassium at Holloway, following Sherard’s recommendation in the Pall Mall Gazette, hence ‘the star-crowned solitude of [his] oblivious hours’ (115–16). Dowson surely discerned the many ways that Barlas’ confinement embodied the situation of the Decadent artist: ‘To One in Bedlam’, his most urgent, socially engaged short lyric, may well commemorate his plight. If, on the other hand, Dowson alighted upon this theme because it allowed him to explore the outcast, marginal status of the poète maudit, lunatic almost by definition, his title need not be taken literally. ‘Bedlam’ might stand for another mental institution, for a gaol, or it may figuratively denote his subject’s mental state (‘bedlam, n., sense 4 and 3a’). If Dowson has an actual inmate in mind, a published sonnet risks exhibiting him before the ‘dull world’ in the prurient manner of Sketches in Bedlam. He avoids addressing anyone by name in the title, mitigating a potential ignominy. This gesture might also imply that any single patient is apt to become discounted in the immense apparatus encompassing them. The earliest sense of the word ‘mortal’, employed at the climax of the poem to distinguish the addressee from the population at large by dint of his loftier imagination, suggests that the addressee may be ‘“(any) one”, “(no) one”’ (‘mortal, n., sense 1a’). Since Dowson acknowledges that the act of ‘making imaginary bouquets’ is invented, his ‘madman (fou)’ may be ‘imagine[d]’, too (L, 370). Symons argued that the poem was essentially biographical, ‘a symbol of the two sides of [Dowson’s] own life: the side open to the street, and the side turned away from it, where he could “hush and bless himself with silence”’ (‘Ernest Dowson’, xxvii). Whether or not he had Barlas in mind, ‘To One in Bedlam’ allows Dowson to express genuine empathy for a ‘lamentable brother’, without necessitating a personal confession of disequilibrium. His addressee shares the author’s own bewilderment and sublime disarray, inviting dispassionate self-consideration.¹⁴ Dowson’s bedlamite, whatever else he may be, is a persona, a lyric mask held up, if not quite worn in public.

¹³ Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert HartDavis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 511; cf. Cohen, John Evelyn Barlas, 115–16, 127. ¹⁴ Davidson responded similarly to Barlas’ plight (Cohen, John Evelyn Barlas, 128).

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Masquerade The belaboured premise of Dowson and Moore’s first published novel is that life and love amount to a ‘harlequinade’ or ‘masquerade’ (the latter being the working title) in which all participants play out a series of roles.¹⁵ It was a trendy theme— Verlaine, Wilde, and Yeats wrote about masks—and Dowson warmed to it as the work progressed (see L, 155). An even more concerted examination of masquerade followed: the atypical rhapsody ‘De Amore’, composed in 1894 as Dowson’s long-cherished hope of marrying Foltinowicz began to fade. This lyric manifesto speaks more narrowly of ‘Love’s masquerade’, the relentless donning of customary disguises, elaborate and fantastic, which makes sexual and social relations possible in a Decadent civilization. Amatory relations, Dowson asserts, are pretentious (self-)deceptions. Although individual relationships may fail, the argument of his longest published lyric runs, Love itself endures. It is distinct from the provisional coupling of lovers as a dance is distinct from the shifting alignment of dancers, to borrow Yeats’s figure: a furtive, vital force underlying our intercourse. Accordingly, Love is unperceived by many who are moved by it, and misconstrued even by those who grasp its significance and power. A drastic alterity, ever at variance with appearances, makes Love a subversive force, ‘Wh[ich] art, when all things seem.’ The poet intuits the real state of things, but can only divulge it hieratically, as in this oblique incantation. ‘De Amore’ is especially interested in that furtive, unsung love ‘which lives and dies unknown’. At least one of Dowson’s paramours has been ‘utterly disowned’ in this way, as we have seen. Placing this poem first in Decorations, immediately after ‘To Hélène’, now epigraphically repurposed as ‘Beyond’, Dowson builds in a commitment to lyrical disguise. This new title conceals the rondeau’s origin, and purports to signal a new phase in the poet’s career, but masquerade in fact conceals the author as effectively as it disguises ‘Hélène’, ‘Lena’, or ‘Claire’. In a telling remark, Adrian Rome identifies ‘the most arduous part of composition—revision, erasure, reconstruction’ (AR, 164). These three secondary processes are hallmarks of Dowson’s compositional method. His writing always entails some effacement of circumstance, some masking of personality; this fundamental commitment to subterfuge may be its most Decadent feature. At first, masquerade simplified Dowson’s work. He composed roman-à-clef studies which parade friends and associates before a readership comprising those same friends and associates. His practical method suggests the underlying metaphor. He and Moore would ‘divide the work easily & both weigh in somewhat heavily with [their] personal impressions & [their] actual acquaintance’ (L, 152). ¹⁵ CM, 2: 145. The chief exponent of this view is Lady Garnet: ‘we dance on and make believe we enjoy it, and by-and-by, if we play hard enough, we do believe it for a minute or two. . . . sometimes one guest steals away with his bosom friend into a corner, and they look under each other’s masks. But it isn’t a nice sight, and it mustn’t happen very often’ (2: 78–9).

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Drawing upon his artistic background, Moore furnishes the first, passing allusion to the Commedia dell’arte in their writing. When Richard Lightmark privately exhibits his work, one portrait catches the attention of Eve Sylvester, whom he will shortly marry: ‘the picture of a pretty fair-haired girl, dressed as Pierrette, the general lack of detail and absence of background only making the vigorously outlined face more distinct’ (CM, 1: 117). Perhaps Moore had John Da Costa’s oil-on-canvas Pierrette in mind. Noticing that the sitter is ‘curiously . . . dressed’, Eve wonders ‘What is she intended to represent? Is it a fancy dress?’ (1: 118). She fails to identify the modish regalia and tradition, which might otherwise have alerted her to the prurient subtext of the portrait, and exposed her suitor’s lascivious, deceitful past. We learn the whole story in the following chapter: after cynically employing Kitty Crichton as a model two years previously, Lightmark seduced and then abandoned her when she became pregnant with his child, Margot.¹⁶ Kitty became ill and fell into poverty; in desperation she sought out the father of her child, at Rainham’s Dock and then at home. Following a climactic discovery scene in the middle of the novel, which causes Rainham to undergo a ‘moral revolution’ and reveals Lightmark’s true nature, Kitty is no longer useful to the authors, and she is not mentioned at all in the last volume (2: 144–5). They utilize her with a degree of compassion for a while and, like Lightmark, permit her to ‘vanish’ (1: 130). Lightmark can exploit the situation, capitalizing upon his shabby behaviour in aesthetic and commercial terms, because of the masquerade of the Commedia dell’arte. It exhibits, disguises, and legitimizes the salacious entanglement all at once. He appeals to art to discount any sense of obligation, to neutralize Kitty’s legitimate claims upon him. Moore drafted this studio scene, but Dowson plotted the novel: Lightmark’s gauche display of erotic conquest in the name of art parallels his seduction of ‘Lena’, for novelistic ends, the previous summer. The particulars of the portrait, short in detail and devoid of background information, recall Dowson’s scant treatment of her in the Hélène poems. This time around, ‘the tragical story of Kitty Crichton . . . with all its shameful possibilities’, begins while she was, in Lightmark’s words, a ‘dressmaker’s apprentice, or something of that sort, who found the work and hours too hard’ (CM, 2: 16; 1: 130). A ‘really pretty girl’ from the working-classes, she was employed as a typist when this dissembling man presented a chance of escaping her drudgery (1: 130, 146). Lightmark admits that he ‘wasn’t [really] a painter’; that he only painted ‘for amusement [and] didn’t exhibit. [That h]e was a newspaper writer’ (1: 186). These incidentals derive from the true story of the pretty waitress who absconded from her home and her job, because the hours were long, during a summer dalliance with The Critic’s ‘special ¹⁶ Later adopted by Rainham and then by Oswyn, Margot is nicknamed ‘missie’ (CM, 2: 188). The novel awkwardly elides Rainham’s affection for her (2: 186–9).

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correspondent for all Music Halls’, who had pursued her for his own surreptitious purposes (L, 76). Lightmark’s protestation of amateurism evokes the young, practically unpublished, poet, who didn’t ‘pretend to write verse seriously’, who insisted he had ‘never done any more than play with verse’ (26, 58). Dowson is ‘weigh[ing] in somewhat heavily with [his] personal impressions & [his] actual acquaintance’ here, as planned (152). This is clearest when the authors divulge Kitty’s place of abode: ‘I live in Charlotte Street, No. — But pray let me go alone, sir! It will not be your way’ (CM, 2: 160). This is the location of the Horseshoe Bar, the ‘Pot au feu’ where ‘Lena’ worked. In Dowson’s first synopsis, ‘Lena’ features as ‘the old flame’ of the villain, ‘a girl of the people whom he has seduced . . . the Frail one’, ‘the seduced maiden Nancy’, ‘Olga Nethersole’, ‘Bessie—a deceived maiden’, and ultimately as ‘the unfortunate Kitty’ (L, 151, 152, 153, 154, 161). He worried that he might ‘funk’ the character, and left her development to Moore (161, 162–3). Kitty is merely ‘the predestined prey of circumstance’, doomed, even before the novel commences, to die of ‘her malady’, tuberculosis (CM, 2: 174, 144). Longaker rightly objects that she is ‘little more than a symbol of a multitude of poor girls who have been deluded by handsome and deceitful men’ (126–7). The serial revision of her name suggests how derivative the initial conception was, and how peripheral women really are to the ‘unregenerate society of bachelordom’ featured in the novel (CM, 2: 202). Already a stock character, Kitty loses nothing by reduction to generic type in Lightmark’s portrait. Still, the Pierrette mask has a complex range of aesthetic and biographical associations as it first appears in Dowson’s oeuvre: it signifies the derivative, commercial nature of Lightmark’s painterly style, marking him as an inept artist; it draws out the theme of masquerade, upon which the collaborators stake their claim to social and aesthetic interest; it illustrates how conventional motifs, and a superficial patina of form, can disguise odious desires. Finally, it hints that the traditional regalia of the Commedia dell’arte might suit Dowson’s own erotic musings, tempering their secret ardour by imposing a coolly alienating and subtly ironizing façade.

Cher Pierrot Critics assume that Dowson met William Theodore Peters, an American actor, poet, and journalist, at the meetings of the Rhymers’ Club, where he is reputed to have been a ‘permanent guest’ (L, 124, 235). Dowson’s correspondence suggests otherwise. Peters arrived in London in 1892, and was eager for introductions; as a favour to a theatrical acquaintance, perhaps, Dowson obliged, and took him to meet the group.¹⁷ First, he tried to introduce Peters to John Gray (235; cf. 244). Then, with a Rhymers’ summit looming in August, he extended an invitation: ¹⁷ See Cyril Clemens, ‘William Theodore Peters’, Notes and Queries 186.8 (8 Apr. 1944): 183.

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‘I am greatly hoping to meet you soon’, he reassured Peters, two months having elapsed since their first contact, ‘I hope in another few weeks sufficient Rhymers will be returned from wandering to make a séance possible—when I shall hope to have you of the company’.¹⁸ Dowson followed up when the meeting eventually transpired in September, prompting Peters to ‘mind & bring a rhyme’.¹⁹ Dowson was resolved and courteous as literary usher, attesting to his growing confidence as an author, and his stature within the coterie.²⁰ That said, his initial letters are the most perfunctory of his extant correspondence. Letters in which he apologizes for missing fixed engagements, or alters plans at the last minute, run to a veritable index of the relationship. Yet Dowson also shared his writerly successes with Peters—the April 1891 Hobby Horse, for instance, including ‘Non sum qualis’— and invited Peters to consult on his own work (237). Summoning him to dinner upon his return from Brittany that year, Dowson adds: ‘bring your MSS with you. After dinner we shall have an uninterrupted tête à tête in which we may go through them.’²¹ If Peters was content to play literary petitioner upon his arrival in London, Dowson was equally gratified to have a congenial acolyte, with evident means at his disposal. Peters cut an androgynous figure, more pronounced in performance, which even Dowson noticed (L, 254; see Fig. 5.1). This doubtless made life difficult in the wake of Wilde’s trial in 1895, and may be one reason Peters settled in Paris, where he died in 1904.²² Sherard records that his ‘portrait used to hang in the drawing room in [Wilde’s residence at] Tite Street’ (392). One vivid, contemporary account presents Peters as a dandiacal bon-vivant with good taste, excellent contacts, and capital: William Theodore Peters . . . was always taken more or less as a joke. ‘Willie Peters’ is a joy; a poseur with a serious ambition to be recognised as a poet. Unlike the man who was a Christian, but ‘didn’t work much at it’, he devoted to his fad all the activities of a not-too-strenuous life. He toiled early and late at the task. He was, as an irreverent American once said of him, that ‘rara avis in human kind,—a poet with money’, and so stole time from his verse-making to give charming little dinners, the lists of which were redolent with Lady This and Countess That, since he knew nearly every woman of title, native or sojourner, in Paris.²³ ¹⁸ L, 240. Dowson also mentions a ‘witty old lady of my acquaintance who is anxious to meet’ Peters, a Miss Roberts (240 n, cf. 42 n). ¹⁹ L, 242; Peters was otherwise engaged (244). ²⁰ As well as Barlas and Peters, Dowson brought other guests to the Cheshire Cheese, including a ‘quaint old German . . . Dr Eugene Oswald, the President of the Carlyle Society’ (L, 246–7). ²¹ L, 241. Dowson may have contributed in this way to Peters’ subsequent publications: The Tournament of Love: A Pastoral Masque in One Act (Paris: Brentano, 1894), which imitates The Pierrot of the Minute, and Posies Out of Rings and Other Conceits (Bodley Head, 1896). ²² See Robert Sherard, Twenty Years in Paris (London: Hutchinson, 1906), 392; Bernard Muddiman, The Men of the Nineties (London: Danielson, 1920), 97. ²³ Mrs Edmund Nash Morgan, ‘Verses Written in Paris by Various Members of a Group of “Intellectuals”’, The Critic: An Illustrated Monthly Review of Literature, Art and Life 39 (1901): 38.

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Fig. 5.1 Eustace Frederick Calland, Portrait de M. Peters. Armand Dayot and Photo-Club de Paris, Première Exposition d’A rt Photographique (Paris, 1894), 60r. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Peters is pictured wearing his admired ‘Renaissance Cloak’.

When the Rhymers went en masse to a Friday night performance of The Duchess of Malfi in October, Peters was of the party (L, 244, 245). With Dowson and Johnson, he made the very most of the occasion: by the time they separated at 3 a.m. on Monday morning, Dowson had ‘rashly undertaken to make a little Pierrot play, in verse for Peters . . . to be delivered in a fortnight’.²⁴ The Pierrot of the Minute may have been undertaken as a challenge as much as a commission, in the ordinary sense. Its austere conception reveals an author at the height of confidence. No money need have changed hands initially. Dowson habitually mentions small sums realized by publication, and sometimes proposed work on speculation, as with his mooted translation of Pierre Louÿs’ Aphrodite, but no

²⁴ L, 246. Dowson’s timeframe runs from acceptance, sometime over the Malfi weekend, until he surrendered the ‘remainder of the play’ around Nov. 5 (251). By Oct. 30 or 31, one week later, the play was substantially finished, ‘want[ing] about 100 lines . . . to completion’ (249). By Nov. 1 or Nov. 2, ‘the play [was] done . . . save only the song to [Peters’] formula’ (249).

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revenue is mentioned in this case.²⁵ He exercised himself considerably to ensure that the play was successful, personally soliciting interest from actors, agents, and theatre companies, even enlisting his father in the publicizing drive.²⁶ Peters and Dowson probably calculated that the venture could make a modest success in provincial touring theatres and as a fashionable curtain-raiser. Dowson was well placed to effect this outcome, through his cousin Gerald Hoole, theatrical acquaintances like Courtenay Thorpe and Harrington Bailey, and Oscar Wilde, to whom he offered the play as an opener for A Woman of No Importance at the Haymarket (see L, 255, 273, 280; CP, 246–7 n). In Adrian Rome, a play which bears some resemblance to Dowson’s ‘Phantasy’ has just this effect, as we shall see, catapulting its author to celebrity. Dowson settled upon a stable mode of addressing Peters around this time: he trialled ‘Confrère’ and ‘Poète’ before landing on ‘Cher Pierrot’ (242, 238, 245 passim). Other acquaintances, such as Sherard, also employed the sobriquet (Twenty Years in Paris, 392). This helps explains the nature of the commission.²⁷ Peters identified so strongly with the figure just then in vogue, whose name he shared, that he composed a slew of lyrics employing the persona, some of which later appeared in Posies Out of Rings, answering more subversive Pierrotic murmurations by Giraud, Laforgue and others. His book is one-dimensional, its repeated application of Pierrot’s chalk face redolent merely of a broken heart, but the studious reduction of social and sexual relations to facility is expressly the point. Peters is drawn to Dowsonesque themes (‘Requiescat’), and one or two lyrics (‘Pierrot and the Statue’ e.g.) may have influenced Dowson in turn (his ‘Epigram’). His language either imitates or anticipates that of Dowson’s lunatic asylum: ‘I . . . have always fretted for the moon’, he swears in one lyric (Posies, 9). Another intones: Am I forgiven? O, heart’s delight, Moon of my heaven, Star of my night! (46)

If Dowson endeavoured to tutor the apprentice Rhymer, such was his task. ²⁵ The following July, on the eve a performance of the play, Dowson remonstrates with Peters: ‘Prithee, let us not send each other, disagreeable, blue, flimsy, official money orders, wherewith neither Pierrots nor Poets are concerned’ (L, 281). He accepts the sum, but objects to its business-like remittance. This could represent Dowson’s share of payment for recent performances; a final settlement of the commission; a fee for ‘On His Renaissance Cloak’; or a loan which, on the evidence of Smithers’ account, Peters was in the habit of making (281, 282, 283). He wished to contribute to Dowson’s solvency, and generally had sufficient tact to contrive means of doing so which did not offend him. ²⁶ Alfred Dowson suggested sending the play to Dramatic and Sporting News for a review and possible sketch (unpublished letter to Peters, 2 Dec. 1892, Berg Collection, New York Public Library). ²⁷ It may also imply that Dowson had agreed to write the play by 20 Oct.

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These coincidences are vital to the play Dowson came rapidly to write. The principal role is a vehicle for Peters: he was slated to perform it in barely a fortnight, and Dowson composed in a bespoke manner, employing the language, images, and themes that Peters used in self-presentation (L, 246). Historically, the Pierrot role has often guaranteed special attention for the performing artist.²⁸ Peters’ well-healed audience, secured in advance for an intimate premiere at the Officers’ Club in Aldershot and for a ‘very much confined’ gathering of the conservative Primrose League at the Chelsea Town Hall, could be relied upon to discern the private resonances of the production.²⁹ It comprised close friends; one member even furnished part of the wardrobe, a ‘superb buckle . . . part of the Palmerston diamonds’.³⁰ Dowson worried that he would be put upon by ‘terrible South Kensington young ladies and fashionable Chelsea Mesdames’, but the intimate circumstances of these productions simplified his task by suggesting a mannered, curial presentation, and detaching him from Pierrot and his predicament (247). The distantiation was liberating: it permitted Dowson to look askance upon his own affections, from an offset corner of the literary tradition, instead of scrutinizing them mincingly. His commitment to the composition, performance, and publicization of the play offered further respite from his private concerns at the end of 1892. To Peters, Pierrot was a spurned lover. The scenari of the Commedia dell’arte afforded him nearly infinite scope, but ‘by the end of the 19th century, [he] was widely recognized in the Francophone world as the personification of the hopeless romantic. As such’, notes Rodrı´guez, ‘many artists and bohemians—among them, the symbolist poets of the fin de siècle—adopted him as their banner.’³¹ Dowson’s great disenchantment lay ahead of him in 1892, so he drew upon the hard-won insights of his ‘experiment’ for the play instead. This arrangement licenced, and even required, acknowledgement of his naiveté in dealing with ‘Lena’. Dowson’s struggle to come to terms with the failure of this relationship is the underlying concern of the play, and the explicit subject of its more lyrical passages. As the Moon Maiden knows, the Pierrotic lover is ‘fate[d]’ to cleave always to the ‘image’ of his beloved after the fatal encounter; though he ‘loves long and late’, his ‘heart’ is destined to become ‘truant’, a vagabond drifting from place to place, because it has been eternally deprived of the possibility of satisfaction; his very life will be frozen, ‘silvered over with the moon’s pale beams’ (ll. 460, 455, 458, 457, ²⁸ For Robert F. Storey, ‘Pierrot’s pathetic white face cannot be unmasked: creator and role are fused into a single character’ (Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978], 31). ²⁹ L, 253. Peters’ ‘Epilogue’ beseeches: ‘On no account let any say | That Pierrot finished Mr Dowson’s play’ (Posies, 73). ³⁰ L, 254. Lady Mount-Temple also gave Peters his titular ‘ring of pearl and strange moonstone’ (Posies, 9). ³¹ Albert Giraud, Pierrot Lunaire: Rondels Bergamasques, translated by Alejandro Rodríguez (Eindhoven: Bakstenen Huis, 2020), 7–8.

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453). This is literally the last word on the matter, in the play. That love is essentially imaginary, and is therefore prone to memorial enthralment, is Dowson’s quintessential theme. His lyrics and short fiction habitually explore the nature, status, and function of such captive ‘image[s]’ and ‘dreams’.³² The Pierrot of the Minute, with its ethereal mise-en-scène, alien masquerade, frigid heroic couplets, and unactionable dialogue, enacts the stultification of primal passion, as it wanes into fixed idea.³³ The light of the sorcerer’s moon is registered in an array of lunatic compound adjectives strewn throughout the play in ominous warning to Pierrot. These constellations derive from Dowson’s mad sonnet, where the lunatic’s ‘moon-kissed roses’ are pronounced ‘Better than mortal flowers’. The Moon Maiden promulgates the same notion: ‘How wan and pale do moon-kissed roses grow’, she interjects: ‘Dost thou not fear my kisses, Pierrot?’ (ll. 197–8). She counsels that ‘Moon-kissed mortals seek in vain | To possess their hearts again!’; admonishes Pierrot as a ‘Moon-struck child’; before confirming him a ‘Moon-lover . . . always’ (ll. 289– 90, 299, 378). Pierrot has ample notice that his sanity is at stake. He is brought within compass of the Moon Maiden and her sister ‘moon maids’ by such ‘moon fanc[ies]’, and gradually within the orbit of the Queen Moon herself, ‘Moon-calm, moon-pale, with moon stones on her gown’.³⁴ These spontaneous kennings are largely responsible for the strange, nocturnal atmosphere that fixes Pierrot and The Lady in their luminous place.³⁵ If the Moon Maiden can be considered a ‘personified moonbeam’ as Adams suggests, we might trace Dowson’s conception to the clair-de-lune cited in preface to Verses, ‘the moonlit night in summer, when all is perfume, soft shadows, pale light, and infinite horizons’.³⁶ Dowson probably arrived directly at the notion via ‘Claire: la Lune!’, however, which addresses a ‘Pale daughter’ and ‘Maid of the lunar night’.³⁷ The most straightforward derivation

³² In ‘The Statute of Limitations’ and ‘Epigram’, for example. Dowson’s ‘truant heart’ mirrors W. B. Yeats’s ‘pilgrim soul’ (‘When You Are Old’, The Poems, edited by Daniel Albright [London: Everyman, 1992], 62). ³³ Pierrot thus satisfies Gautier’s requirement for Decadent art by tracing ‘the odd hallucinations of fixed ideas passing into mania’ (Théophile Gautier, ‘Charles Baudelaire’, The Works of Théophile Gautier, translated by F. C. de Sumichrast [New York: Sproul, 1908], 23: 40). ³⁴ Ll. 311, 344, 355. Peters suggested ‘moonstones’; Dowson agreed to ‘bear [it] in mind’ (L, 248; see Thornton, 100). ³⁵ As in Hubert Robert’s painting, Fête de nuit, donnée par la Reine au Comte du Nord, au Petit Trianon (oil-on-wood, c.1782–1783). ³⁶ Adams, Madder Music, 68; Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, translated by Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1964), 454. The ontological status of The Lady is the subject of some speculation: ‘How art thou designate?’ Pierrot asks, before suggesting alternatives, including a ‘Goddess or Naiad! Lady of this Grove, | Made mortal for a night to teach me love’, and a personification of Love (ll. 167, 123–4, 117–19, 158). Once only, she calls herself ‘The Maiden of the Moon’, and Pierrot therefore acknowledges her ‘Sweet Moon Maiden’ (ll. 176–7). In the script she is invariably ‘The Lady’ when speaking and, twice only, ‘a’ or ‘The Moon Maiden’ in the stage directions. The more common appellation identifies her with the ‘Lady’ of Dowson’s lyric corpus. ³⁷ F, 79. Pierrot fantasizes about flying ‘From the low regions of the solar day; | Over the rainbow, up into the Moon’, with this epithet in mind (ll. 186–7).

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suggests that Dowson came to appreciate that ‘Hélène’, the first of several guises devised for his muse, was ‘was a variant of Selene, the Moon Goddess’, and that his Pierrotic commission invited him to explore the association.³⁸

Phantasy in One Act Whether or not some financial accommodation was reached, Peters dictated the parameters of their collaborative venture to Dowson. These can be inferred from the surviving correspondence. ‘My dear Pierrot’, Dowson writes: I am starting on the play, & will push on with it quam cellerime. But I find it excessively difficult and fear that with a limitation of two characters I can not attempt any dramatic effect. Is this required? Or will you be satisfied with a folium rosae which must depend entirely on its verses and the speaking of these to carry it through, with the help of the Pierrot’s tradition? Would you by the way send me a line to say what you meant exactly with the extract of the fairy song you gave me? Has music been made for that, and do you want to bring it in? Or is a lyric in that metre to fit the music suggested? (L, 245)

Peters has obviously included detailed instructions concerning the dramatic and poetic form of the playlet. To mitigate his severely limited dramatis personae, Dowson proposes to write for the spoken voice, rather than the dramatic agent. He will rely on the actors’ capacity to deliver his lines, on their inherent poesis, and upon the traditional and symbolical associations of the Pierrot motif to ‘carry’ his meaning. It was risky to attempt such a nakedly lyrical drama, but a workable solution given the limitations of the production. Dowson considered that he was writing a ‘folium rosae’, a leaf of roses. The term emphasizes the desiccated beauty he sought, which Smithers helped realize more perfectly still. The figure integrates the play with Dowson’s other gatherings of lyric posies. When Pierrot débuted, he was anxious about these aspects: he noted that Peters ‘acts well’ but worried that ‘he may be rather overheard than heard’ (254). Dowson later co-opted these circumstances for the plot of Adrian Rome. The titular character ‘is a poet, remember, essentially—though he happens to have written a good play. He knows nothing about the theatre’ (AR, 199–200). Rome’s theatrical début is a satirical melodrama called ‘The Opportunists: a Comedy’— Dowson had mooted the title for the novel itself—while another play, ‘a disreputable type-written copy of The Lady of the Moon, still encircled by the wisp ³⁸ Joseph M. Hassett, W. B. Yeats and the Muses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 93. Dowson covered this track later, with a blatant red herring: ‘Lady Adela[ide] Moon, a lady with a passion for barbarous experience’ (AR, 116).

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of pale green ribbon which had confined its vagrant pages’, has a crucial role in the dénouement (L, 292–3; AR, 258). Neither corresponds in every particular to Dowson’s own composition, but these allusions do invoke Pierrot. Conceiving ‘the Drama as a vehicle of Art’, Rome has penned a ‘masque of the high-minded, chivalrous lover’, a ‘play of manners’ without ‘the elements of a popular success’ (AR, 163, 119, 106, 121). ‘To get an intensely tragical effect out of modern situations’, he discovers, ‘one must take them in the tone of comedy’ (199). He intends ‘a play which shall be readable as well as actable, a play which shall present an interesting life-scene, with style, form, literary finish, dignity,—in a word, a work of art, not a skeleton for a star actor to clothe with mannerisms’ (106). Rome deems he has ‘succeeded in his constant endeavour to be classically fine, without “preciousness”, or merely ornate writing; to be simple, inevitable, precise’ (114). Dowson, alas, did not pull off an equivalent feat. Nevertheless, Pierrot ambitiously expands his lyrical horizon, and these rare critical remarks show just how emersed in the aesthetic debates of the era he was capable of becoming. Dowson’s acceptance of this very specific brief would be remarkable if he was not essentially a collaborative writer. Peters furnished explicit prompts, including an ‘extract’ of a ‘fairy song’ of his own composition (L, 245). Dowson refers to this scrap of verse again on the verge of completion, remarking that ‘the play is done, I think: save only the song to your formula’ (249). ‘The Moon Maiden’s Song’ which now closes the play is not obviously indebted to Peters’ ‘The Fairies’ Song, from LE BAISER. After the French of Théodore de Banville’, but the original was lost in July 1893, and Dowson may have rewritten it (282). He tolerated close scrutiny of his evolving playtext, and ‘went over parts of it’ with Johnson, ‘discuss[ing] certain lines [he] was not sure of, & accept[ing] sundry of his emendations’ (249). He even incorporated Peters’ suggestions, against his better judgement (248–9). As Peters’ directions were technical, and Dowson accepted his textual interference, he may have stipulated the use of couplets, too. Dowson rarely used them, appreciating that their relentless, encapsulating drive was out of key with the tentative claims he was wont to advance. In ‘Spleen’ and the ‘After Paul Verlaine’ sequence, probably composed immediately before Pierrot, he learned to stultify the couplet form, yielding a shadow-world ‘all frozen fast’, as in the play (D, 14). Given the paucity of action, and strict, formal requirements, Dowson’s resolve to lean into ‘the Pierrot’s tradition’ to ‘carry’ his play ‘through’ is a viable strategy, which he did not really implement (L, 245). In reading or performance, the play makes no esoteric demands upon its audience, who need be no more conversant with Pierrotic matters than Eve Sylvester. As that episode shows, Dowson was generally ambivalent about the Commedia dell’arte. His enthusiasm was limited by a passing acquaintance, derived mainly from Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes, which employs the Commedia as a willowy subterfuge, camouflaging personal and amorous concerns in graceful, ironic badinage. The vogue which this work inaugurated endured well into the fin de siècle, and Peters’ notion (judging by Dowson’s

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salutation, and Posies Out of Rings) must have been to exploit fashionable interest in recent Pierrotic works. In the end, Aubrey Beardsley installed Pierrot as a symbolic fixture in England, perhaps because he had already cultivated a reputation for delicate works and personal notoriety capable of bolstering biographical allusion. Yet Peters was in the avant-garde of this, and helped prepare a bourgeois audience for Beardsley’s work. Dowson’s engagement with Fêtes galantes began with ‘Claire: la Lune!’, a reworking of its second lyric, and continued through several translations which probably once occupied pp. 80–2 of the holograph notebook. His original composition diverges wildly from Verlaine’s, taking just a hint concerning the setting—a diffused atmosphere more than anything—and the convenience of its tweaked pathetic fallacy. In Verlaine’s lyric, the beloved’s ‘soul’ is exteriorized onto a Watteauesque ‘landscape’ peopled by masquerading figures who sport among ‘marble statues’, in ‘sad and beautiful moonlight’.³⁹ The clair-de-lune is their element; so rare and elusive it seems made of half-ironic music, which ‘sets the birds softly dreaming in the trees, | And makes the marbled fountains . . . | . . . sob their ecstasies’ (29). This quivering synaesthesia becomes the medium of ‘Flos Lunae’, and the moonscape of the ‘glade in the Parc du Petit Trianon’, upon which Dowson looses his Pierrot Lunaire (PM, 9). More than ‘the Pierrot’s tradition’ itself, Dowson requires his audience to recognize this atmosphere, the passé ‘manière de Paul Verlaine’, to establish the crepuscular mood of the play.⁴⁰ Dowson does not mention it, but Peters also mandated the play’s setting. The four stipulations of the initial stage directions balance symbolism and verisimilitude, allowing the producers latitude in set design (PM, 9). The ostensible location is fixed more precisely to the Temple de l’Amour, in the Jardin Anglais du Petit Trianon, at Versailles (PM, 15). Designed by architect Richard Mique in 1777– 8, the Temple of Love is a neoclassical rotunda with twelve Corinthian columns, surmounted by an elaborate cupola featuring a coat of arms and five rows of rosettes. In the centre stands a replica, made by Louis-Philippe Mouchy, of an ancient sculpture of Cupid. As Peters knew, Petit Trianon was the private domain of Marie-Antoinette, gifted to her exclusive use by Louis XVI. By association with its most famous, and notorious, inhabitant, Petit Trianon might represent a placid retreat from the intrigues of Versailles, or a harem of Decadent depravity.⁴¹ In ³⁹ Paul Verlaine, ‘Clair de lune’, translated by Norman R. Shapiro, One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine: A Bilingual Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 29. ⁴⁰ Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems, translated by Martin Sorrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 188–91. ⁴¹ ‘The most conspicuous woman in eighteenth-century France, Marie Antoinette became a convenient screen on which to project the political and social preoccupations of her age, and she has remained a disputed symbol ever since. . . . one of the most vilified women in history. Mixing accusations of disloyalty and perversity, pamphleteers pornographically “exposed” the promiscuous acts of every imaginable variety she had allegedly committed with every conceivable partner. Such extraordinary vilification invited a sharp reaction once the revolution was over. During the second Restoration of 1815–1830 Marie Antoinette was recast as a martyr’ (Thomas E. Kaiser, ‘Marie Antoinette’,

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‘Marie Antoinette Playing Upon the Spinet in the White and Gold Salon at Little Trianon’, Peters inclines to the former view (Posies, 44). Its ostensible occurrence within Marie-Antoinette’s private domain heightens the air of aesthetic asylum that pervades the play, and ironizes the mannered courtship that transpires on-stage. Dowson’s subtitle marshals the aforementioned elements into a coherent genre. ‘A Phantasy in One Act’ announces that The Pierrot of the Minute is a lyrical projection, manifesting some elusive facet of Love itself. The play is, in Adrian Rome’s words, ‘the presentment of a temperament, of a condition of soul, of nerves’ (AR, 106). The Greek etymon, ϕαντασία, grounds it in the spectacular. In scholastic usage, ‘phantasy’ indicates purely mental apprehensions which enable the perceptual apparatus to function; subsequent usage evokes the phantasmagorical and illusory, or delusive and hallucinatory, nature of this apprehended form; by the fin de siècle, the word implies daydream (‘fantasy | phantasy, n’.). Phantasy was already the preferred medium for Pierrotic ruminations by this time. Giroud, for example, explicitly proclaims ‘the right of the poet to lyrical Fantasy’ in defence of Pierrot Lunaire (15). Dowson’s play asserts this prerogative with equal ‘insolence’ (15). Nominating it ‘Phantasy’, Dowson establishes that it is above all a lyrical or musical composition, a Fantasia, written ‘in the manner of the French “symbolists”: verses making for mere sound, & music, with just a suggestion of sense, or hardly that; a vague Verlainesque emotion’ (L, 189–90; cf. Dil., 90). Music startles Pierrot into renewed expectation at the beginning of the play, disturbs him with recollections of his ‘heart’s complaint’ throughout, and lulls him asleep at the end (ll. 54–5, 72–3, 125). So ubiquitous and affective are its synaesthetic moonbeams that Pierrot wonders: ‘Why should I be so musical and sad?’ (l. 125). With the accidental adroitness that characterizes the role, he articulates the dilemma of the disconsolate love poet.

I Am Thy Lyre Dowson’s stock character is unique in one respect, since he is styled Pierrot ‘of the Minute’. In its notional curtailment of action to an extended instant, the play (the word takes on a non-theatrical, childish sense) becomes a sequence of purely verbal incidents, a highfalutin badinage. Nothing exists for Pierrot beyond the event horizon of the lyric. His entire being is constrained within a lyric moment. With its whole analysis formulated in durational terms, Pater’s suppressed Conclusion to The Renaissance offers one mandate for this attenuated existence.⁴² The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, edited by Bonnie G. Smith. Oxford Reference Online, https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195148909.001.0001/acref9780195148909-e-651. Accessed 13 Jan. 2023). ⁴² Peters met Pater shortly after the premiere, eliciting Dowson’s ‘envy’ and admiration for ‘the finest artist now with us’ (L, 257). Dowson subsequently left a volume of Pater’s writing in Peters’ rooms (274).

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Any number of quotations might elucidate Dowson’s Pierrotic diminishment. Pater holds, for instance, that Every one of [our] impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner in its own dream of a world. . . . [T]hose impressions of the individual mind to which . . . experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight . . . each of them is limited by time . . . as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is.⁴³

Dowson’s Pierrot is definitionally enstraitened within this zone of aestheticized minutiae; the fugitive present, in which he might actually attain his desire, evades him, nevertheless. The essential solipsism of the lyric self, deepened in the plenilunar atmosphere of the play, collapses inwardly, and Pierrot of the Minute discovers nothing on which he may depend; moment to moment, he is robbed of all he longs to experience; the more he attends to his phantasy, the more surely must it vanish. Pater’s most memorable inferences stem from such fine temporal mincing: Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us,—for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. . . . how shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. (188–9)

A Paterian thrill-seeker, Dowson’s Pierrot epitomizes this philosophy. As the play commences, he professes total in-expérience: ‘I never loved! I know not what love is. | I am so ignorant’ (ll. 30–1). This sad deficiency explains ‘Why came I here, and why am I Pierrot’ (l. 20). The play is arranged so ‘That for a moment he may touch and know | Immortal things, and be full Pierrot’ (ll. 147–8). Pierrot’s credulous adherence to Paterian stricture in 1893 exposes him to ridicule. His ‘success’—in ‘Diary’, Dowson had stripped the term of its ordinary sense, resolving it into Paterian ‘pulses’ succeeding ‘swiftly from point to point’—will depend upon the quality of his passion alone. ‘Our one chance lies in expanding that interval’, Pater says, ⁴³ Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry; the 1893 Text, edited by Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 187–8.

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in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. (190)

While the play is contrived to test Pierrot’s mettle, that he should be found wanting is a foregone conclusion. The ‘Pierrot’s tradition’ requires this. Far from enabling a ‘quickened, multiplied consciousness’, the lunatic aperture of the playlet backs Pierrot into an aesthetic cul-de-sac, fating him to Forthwith forget all joyance of the day, Forget [his] laughter and forget [his] tears, And dream away with singing all [his] years— [A] Moon-lover . . . always! (ll. 375–9)

The Moon-Maiden considers this fate to be a prison into which lunatics, lovers, and poets doom themselves; she sends her meddling ministers ‘To gaze on [such] mortals through their lattice bars’ (l. 371). The allusion confirms that Pierrot is effectively a lunatic bedlamite, fixated upon an impossible ‘image’ of love (l. 455). In his epilogue, Peters describes this trajectory in Paterian terms, teasing That Pierrot had ‘arrived,’ achieved success, When, as it happened, presently, alas! A terrible disaster came to pass . . . . For he was nothing but a firework. . . . . With every artist it is even so; The artist, after all, is a Pierrot— A Pierrot of the minute, naïf, clever, But Art is back of him, She lives for ever! (Posies, 74)

The passionate artist expends himself in a series of lame ejaculations in this derisive commentary. The play is implicitly compared to a ‘feu d’artifice, | With candles, rockets, and a centre-piece’, surmounted ‘on high, | Outlined in living fire against the sky’, with ‘A glittering Pierrot, radiant, white, | . . . | Whose pompons too were fire’ (73). Following Peters, Dowling contends that Pierrot is emblematical of ‘the subjective poet who must be both flame and fuel . . . that must inevitably consume

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itself ’.⁴⁴ When finally his ‘golden shower of rockets was all spent’, Pierrot simply expires. Maintained in ecstasy so long, Pater’s ‘hard gem-like flame’ has become a squib. Facile as it appears, The Pierrot of the Minute, satirizes these foundational tenets of the Aesthetic Movement. Whether or not Dowson responds to Peters’ romantic tribulations in this made-to-order work, he plainly has a general indictment in mind, too. The Conclusion to The Renaissance offers a phenomenological paradigm for Dowson’s Pierrot, but that other recanted essay, ‘Æsthetic Poetry’, establishes its artistic milieu. As noted, the presiding symbol of this school is the ‘tyranny of the moon, not tender and far-off, but close down—the sorcerer’s moon’ (Appreciations, 218). Dowson launched this phase of his career with a symbolist nocturne (a genre that, for Pater, epitomizes the aesthetic impulse of Provencal poetry), introducing a lunatic pallor into his verse (219). The really essential thing about ‘æsthetic’ poetry, Pater says, the peculiar ‘atmosphere on which its effect depends’, is the mood of ‘reverie, illusion, delirium’ that welters around this ‘sorcerer’s moon’ (213, 217). The whole dramaturgy of Pierrot is devoted to raising such an atmosphere. ‘Into this kingdom of reverie, and with it into a paradise of ambitious refinements’, says Pater, ‘the earthly love enters, and becomes a prolonged somnambulism’ (216). Dowson’s Pierrot can scarcely keep long enough awake for the minuscule action of the play into which he has haplessly ambled. ‘Sleep cometh over me’, he yawns before the Moon Maiden’s visitation; he is called ‘sleeper’ throughout; and ‘the curtain falls upon [him] sleeping’ (ll. 75, 446 passim, 148). A more thoroughgoing sleepwalker would be hard to coax into a theatrical turn. The most immediate spur towards Pierrot’s distinctive aesthetic may be Pater’s remark that Here, under this strange complex of conditions, as in some medicated air, exotic flowers of sentiment expand, among people of a remote and unaccustomed beauty, somnambulistic, frail, androgynous, the light almost shining through them. Surely, such loves were too fragile and adventurous to last more than for a moment. (217)

This gives the measure of Dowson’s dramatis personae and warrants the narrow scope of his presentation. Potentially subversive in themselves, the characters are suited (only) to the moonlit pageant in which they appear. Their mere presence develops the essential theme of the play: that even the most refined forms of amorous attachment are flimsy and evanescent; that love itself is insubstantial, chimerical, imaginary.⁴⁵ ⁴⁴ Linda C. Dowling, ‘The Aesthetes and the Eighteenth Century’, Victorian Studies 20.4 (summer 1977), 373. ⁴⁵ Allyson Kreuiter considers Pierrot’s ‘lunatic emotions . . . ambivalent and indeterminate sexuality and perversely self-generated desires’ (‘Androgyny in Dowson’s The Pierrot of the Minute’, English Academy Review: Southern African Journal of English Studies 29.1 [2012]: 66).

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The moral of the play is duly imparted in ‘The Moon Maiden’s Song’ (and underlined in Peters’ ‘Epilogue’): Love stays a summer night, Till lights of morning come; Then takes her wingèd flight Back to her starry home. (ll. 465–8, ll. 473–6)

Pierrot’s role, qua lover, is correspondingly brief, hence the title.⁴⁶ But the lunatic ‘minute’ of the play offers paradoxical prospects, as in the following exchange. The Lady reads: ‘Au Petit Trianon, at night’s full noon, Mortal, beware the kisses of the moon! Whoso seeks her she gathers like a flower— He gives a life, and only gains an hour.’ PIERROT (Laughing recklessly). Bear me away to thine enchanted bower, All of my life I venture for an hour. THE LADY. Take up thy destiny of short delight; I am thy lady for a summer’s night. (ll. 137–44)

Pierrot is eagerly duped, but his mirth is justifiable since the ‘hour’ he stands to gain is an advancement upon the ‘minute’ allotted to him by the title. If he guesses already that ‘Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam’, he should accept the proffered deal. The dialogue does not otherwise insist upon this chronometric paradox, but the title focuses attention upon this Faustian bargain whereby Pierrot is transformed into a lunatic poet. Only with this temerarious gamble can he realize his true nature, though he must live to rue it always. His moment of bliss balloons into an eternity . . . of brooding upon lost things and chances missed. Commencing with the first ‘gentle music’ of the play, where Pierrot balks at ‘Days yet unlived [which] I almost lived again’, and culminating in this crucial Faustian pact, the lyrical ‘minute’ of the play is, in effect, a weird Mobius surface, miniature and yet unbounded. Kreuiter terms this ‘dream time’, a ‘semiotic transgression’ which ‘violates the laws of the symbolic’ (‘Androgyny’, 64). Its paradoxical temporal folds are divulged in metapoetic terms: the Queen Moon is said to ‘gather’ those who ‘seek her . . . like a flower’, before the Moon Maiden’s dance ⁴⁶ The title may signify, additionally, that Pierrot of the Minute is not ‘the moonstruck dreamer of old songs’, as Verlaine says, but a true contemporary (Selected Poems, 119). It may acknowledge that the piece was composed in just over a week, or echo Peters’ The Children of the Week (1886).

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beguiles her victim, ‘And weaves his heart into [her] coronal’ (ll. 17–18, 139, 156). The figure recalls the ‘frail, fair wreath’ of Dowson’s own coronal, also funereal of Love, and the straw ‘posies’ of his bedlamite ‘brother’: but the knotted stuff of art is now Pierrot’s ‘heart’ (V, xi, 5). Like the bedlamite, he has been transported beyond ‘love or sleep’ into oblivious solitude during these rapturous musical interludes, ‘forget[ing] all things—my name and race, | All that I ever knew except thy face’ (ll. 13, 163–4). Content with this excruciating arrangement, he simply pleads: ‘Play out thy will on me: I am thy lyre’ (l. 173). Pierrot cannot escape configuration as a symbol of the artist, despite Dowson’s authorial detachment and a tendency to become ironical. But he is no stock character, no generic duplicate of the artist per se; rather, Pierrot of the Minute is an authentic mask of the Dowsonian lyricist, impelled by the author’s unique expérience, transfixed by corresponding erotic after-images, fascinated by the same ritual and symbolic actions. As the play commences: ‘Pierrot enters with his hands full of lilies’, then ‘gathers together his flowers and lays them at the foot of Cupid’s statue.’ In a very short piece without notable action, these gestures must claim inordinate attention. For Dowson’s readers, they are intertextually legible, since they echo, and amend, the dramatic situation of ‘Amor Umbratilis’. Setting his manuscript book aside, that he might woo his young muse more modestly, the mumming speaker of that poem had concluded: I have no songs to sing, That you should heed or know: I have no lilies, in full hands, to fling Across the path you go. I cast my flowers away, Blossoms unmeet for you! The garland I have gathered in my day: My rosemary and rue.

In the play, the scroll directs Pierrot to ‘Cast down thy lilies, which have led thee on’ (l. 34). The echo is resounding, but the language has meanwhile become ambiguous. Having arrived at ‘the very shrine of Love’ by following, and ‘gather[ing]’ most diligently, this same ‘clue of lilies’, Pierrot’s path ends in a cul de sac, and he must depart whence he came (ll. 12, 10, 3). Beguiled into straying far from the ‘gleaming courts and gardens of Versailles’ in the unmistakable promise of gratification, he has been left unsatisfied (l. 8). He has been cheated by what appeared to be a ‘Dryad of the trees’, a ‘Goddess or Naiad . . . | Made mortal for a night to teach [him] love’, but may be just the clair-de-lune, a mere moonbeam (ll. 8, 167, 128, 123–4). He grasps this at last:

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Be what thou wist, Goddess, moon-maid, Marquise, So that I gather from thy lips heart’s ease. (ll. 430–1)

But the minute allotted for his fulfilment is already elapsing; the ‘dramatic phantasy’ in which he is caught up with the audience or reader is already dissolving. The whole play, indeed, is one attenuated anticlimax. If there is a lesson here, it is revealed by The Lady during the courtly entertainments: ‘Who hopes to catch | A moon-beam, must use twice as much dispatch’ (ll. 327–8). Pierrot’s captivation, his erotic dispossession, has been affected by poetic means: the same ‘gathering’, garlanding, and bequeathing of lyric posies that underwrites the poet-speaker’s compact with the muse has ultimately ‘led him on’. His ‘quest’ may amount to a fruitless fool’s errand, but it is inescapably his destiny, whether he ‘casts [his] flowers away’ or follows his ‘clue of lilies’ unerringly, laying them in burthen ‘Before the tender feet of Cupidon’ himself (ll. 44, 9, 3, 35). Peters asked Dowson to read the finished playtext to Ida North, who was to play The Lady, around 28 October. He tried to put off this ordeal, insisting it was ‘very much better that Miss North should have the opportunity of sampling it so to speak without being restrained in her criticism by the presence of the authour [sic]’ (L, 248). Peters may have gone alone to see North, with Dowson instead attending subsequent rehearsals (249, 251, 253). On the evidence of Adrian Rome, however, Dowson may not have successfully shirked this obligation. An authorial recital of The Opportunists features in Ch. 10, constituting the climax of a prospective first volume. The scene transpires at a ‘little dinner part[y]’ in a ‘little house in Mayfair’: It was but a vague circle of arm-chairs that confronted him, for the large, handsome room was dimly lighted. The well-bred hush which ensued amongst the indistinguishable guests, after a few preliminary murmurs, struck Adrian cold, and he plunged at his title, at the list of his characters, desperately, with a voice that trembled. But a moment later, with the opening of his first act, his disorder had passed away. A sudden determination to do his work justice, mingled with a renewed confidence in it, had restored him. When he turned the first page, he read, until he came to the end, in a low, distinct voice, full of subtile modulations, with composure and conviction; he had forgotten his audience. People listened, watched him with an increasing curiosity; they were disposed to be interested, finding his long, oval face, rather pale, with its vivid eyes against the background of shadow, a picture impressive and striking. (AR, 112, 117–18)

If the scene is not simply invented, Dowson may combine his trepidation about reciting his play with his recollection of a private performance on 29

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March 1893 at ‘the studio of Miss Curtois, 5A Clareville Grove, Gloucester Rd. SW’.⁴⁷ It offers a vivid portrait of the artist, and accords with contemporary impressions of Dowson’s own soft reading of verse at meetings of the Rhymers’ Club.⁴⁸ Dowson’s exhilaration at completing such a public-facing work, his pride, and sense of vindication at having his work performed, is also clear. This was vital to his prospects in 1892, when romantic success appeared to wait upon literary accomplishment. Indeed, his public début was effectively staged from the Foltinowiczes’ restaurant: Dowson left his manuscript here for Peters’ collection and went from here to the premiere at Chelsea Town Hall. He pressed Moore excitedly to ‘come & fetch’ him thence: ‘Do try & come tonight if you can. Gray, Texeira, Horne, Symons & my people y’ seront. I want your support. I went through scenes yesterday which would take ten years from a strong man’s life’ (L, 253–4). What Foltinowicz made of this palaver is not recorded. All that can be established about this first, modest performance was Dowson’s inevitable hangover, which he shook off in the Cock Tavern (254). He had not the ‘courage’ to repeat the experiment when Pierrot played in Aldershot on 5 December; he likely failed to attend the performance at the West Theatre of the Royal Albert Hall on 4 May 1893; he certainly missed a show in early July, due to his permanent removal from Bridge Dock (256, 280–1). These omissions of courtesy irked Peters; nor was he thrilled when Dowson mislaid ‘the original draft of the play’ in May 1893, and ‘The Moon Maiden’s Song’ then or in July (280, 282). Although Peters commissioned verses ‘On His Renaissance Cloak’ and arranged a portrait of Dowson in September, the relationship become strained.⁴⁹ Yet Peters continued to support Dowson, who relied upon and confided in Peters throughout his bleakest moments; when, for example, he spent a restless night in November 1897 ‘reading through & destroying old letters . . . in the bottomless pit of depression’ (396). Peters was ‘a paragon of efficiency, economy & kindness’, Dowson said later, in just estimation of their total relations (402; cf. 396). The same letter announces that Dowson has neglected to obtain a ‘large paper cop[y] of Pierrot’ for him, which Smithers had published the previous year, despite his stated intention.⁵⁰ It was to be his final apology. ⁴⁷ L, 275. The scene may also transpire at the home of Miss Roberts (see n. 18). ⁴⁸ Jepson records that the Rhymers, ‘all seething with the stern sense of their poetic mission . . . all of them, except Yeats, read their verse in hushed voices’ (Memories of a Victorian [London: Gollancz, 1933], 1: 236). For Ernest Rhys, Dowson was ‘[un]able to make the rhythm tell, when he read his poems; but they had an individual savour unlike that of any other poet’ (Everyman Remembers [London, 1931], 106; see, however, Longaker, Ernest Dowson, 107). ⁴⁹ L, 280–1, 293. One surviving copy of the well-known photograph of Dowson as a young man is inscribed to Peters, and may have been supplied in lieu of the ‘defer[red]’ portrait (293). He also sat for a lost portrait by Gustave Loiseau in 1896 (364). ⁵⁰ L, 403. Peters had received a presentation copy of Verses, number 85 of 300 small paper copies, now in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Between Nov. 1893 and Oct. 1897, no correspondence between Peters and Dowson survives.

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Dowson alludes to one further letter, unfortunately not extant, written in fulfilment of Peters’ request for a short preface for his planned collection of poems for the House of Smithers. Although White Scarabs was listed in Smithers’ catalogue, it was never issued, nor has the apparently derisive preface been traced (see L, 415).

6 The Reign of Reverie When Dowson’s ‘experiment’ with ‘Lena’ failed in autumn 1889, he never mentioned her again. He scrambled or suppressed those poems in which she obscurely featured, expunging her in toto from his vie romancée. He dealt thus with every personal calamity, including the suicide of his parents. Repealing experience was vital to Dowson’s working method, not just a way of managing unfavourable outcomes. For Adrian Rome, as we have seen, ‘the most arduous part of composition [was] revision, erasure, reconstruction’ (AR, 164). These three processes govern the res and verba of Dowson’s writing, especially where his juvenile self and former relations are concerned. In Coleridgean terms, he ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate’.¹ That we know about his proposal to Adelaide Foltinowicz at all is therefore extraordinary, given these expurgatory tendencies. The most private episode in his guarded life might easily have become tacenda, like other intimate biographical occurrences. Early critics were divided about what to do with this highly personal material: Symons refers knowingly, and erroneously, to ‘the young girl to whom most of his verses were to be written’ in what became the standard introduction to Dowson’s verse, pondering Socratically whether ‘it ever meant very much to her to have made and to have killed a poet?’² More intimate friends considered that his abortive matrimonial designs were best dropped. Plarr felt ‘compel[led] . . . to omit passages, nay to suppress whole letters of great beauty’ from his 1914 memoir, which would otherwise prove ‘fully explanatory of themselves’ of Dowson life and work.³ With their 1967 edition of Dowson’s correspondence, Flower and Maas address these lacunae: letters concerning his declaration and proposal finally assume canonical importance, shoring up the ‘Dowson Legend’. As we have seen, however, Foltinowicz was purposely entangled with Dowson’s vie romancée from the outset of their acquaintance. He first contemplated marriage as a means of providing the security and comfortation he supposed necessary to ballast a literary career; he ‘wrought [Foltinowicz] in’ to his oeuvre until she seemed to dominate it, eclipsing other concerns (V, 37). In the process, Dowson ¹ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, edited by J. Shawcross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907), 1: 202. Coleridge’s subsequent stipulation is equally decisive for Dowson’s art: ‘where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead’ (202). ² Arthur Symons, ‘Ernest Dowson’, The Poems of Ernest Dowson (London: Lane, 1906), xii, xiii. ³ Victor Plarr, Ernest Dowson 1888–1897: Reminiscences, Unpublished Letters and Marginalia (London: Elkin Mathews, 1914), 50, 51.

Ernest Dowson. Robert Stark, Oxford University Press. © Robert Stark (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192884763.003.0007

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renovated his writing style, and fashioned an authorial persona suitable for her surreptitious address. He linked formal notice of his determination to propose, and the proposal itself, to his publishing plans. ‘We make love with infinite reservations & are always conscious that there is something factitious about it’, Dowson once proclaimed of his ‘experiment’; he remembered the prognosis in subsequent ‘Arrangement[s] of Life’ (L, 48, 404). Symons and Plarr both detected something ‘factitious’ about the affair (Symons, v; Plarr, 50). Prior to his ‘experiment’, after all, Dowson had sought to acquire a theoretical understanding of love much as any young novelist might prepare to write a novel: he compiled an erotological bibliography, including philosophical writings by Plato, Schopenhauer, and Stendhal, as well as the fiction of James, Eliot, Meredith, Turgenev, Balzac, Zola, Malet, and others (L, 45, 112, 132–3, 142). By the time he met Foltinowicz, Dowson was convinced that much of what he wished to know about love could be found in Pater’s writings. In ‘Æsthetic Poetry’, he discerned the manner in which he would fall in love. Pater views ‘æsthetic poetry’ as ‘an afterthought’ of Romanticism, suffused with a ‘medieval spirit’, marrying ‘mystic religion’ and ‘mystic passion’.⁴ It resurrects and reconfigures the ‘imaginative loves’ of Provençal poetry, which attained the status of ‘a rival religion with a new rival cultus’.⁵ ‘Æsthetic Poetry’ entails a ‘reign of reverie’ like that of the Gothic cloister, ‘for the object of this devotion was absent or veiled . . . distracted, as in a fever dream, into a thousand symbols and reflections’ (216). The medieval Church, says Pater, had a thousand secrets to make the absent near. Into this kingdom of reverie, and with it into a paradise of ambitious refinements, the earthly love enters, and becomes a prolonged somnambulism. Of religion it learns the art of directing towards an unseen object sentiments whose natural direction is towards objects of sense. Hence a love defined by the absence of the beloved, choosing to be without hope, protesting against all lower forms of love, barren, extravagant, antinomian. It is the love which is incompatible with marriage, for the chevalier who never comes, of the serf for the chˆatelaine . . . Provençal love is full of the very forms of vassalage[:] To be the servant of love, to have offended, to taste the subtle luxury of chastisement, of reconciliation. (216–17)

For as long as the idea of an eventual match with Foltinowicz remained alive to Dowson’s imagination, he lived under such a ‘reign of reverie’. The entire course

⁴ Walter Pater, ‘Æsthetic Poetry’, Appreciations, With an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1889), 214. ⁵ Pater, Appreciations, 215–6. Dowson’s ‘most excellent cult of la Fillette’ may derive from Pater’s usage (L, 164).

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of his affection—its slow emergence from the shadows; its discovery to intimate friends; the long-adjourned and suddenly divulged proposal; the ultimate and unmentionable refusal—is suffused with this ‘imaginary’ and ‘æsthetic’ light. As Ch. 2 shows, Pater’s language had empowered Dowson to categorize and name his feelings for Foltinowicz early in the relationship. His construction of a domain of aestheticized love, and the implicit delineation of how ‘æsthetic’ poetry about it might proceed, stimulates the ‘borrowed, perhaps factitious colour and heat’ of Dowson’s new love poems (216). A mood of ‘prolonged somnambulism’ pertains in these lyrics; their sensual energy is impalpably directed, and hovers miasmically around a paradoxical silence; if not quite absent, the beloved is oblivious and the speaker becomes a chastened vassal, taking perverse pleasure in his own debasement. As a description of the diffident adherent of ‘Amor Umbratilis’, or the wan paramours of Pierrot, Pater’s evocation of love under a ‘reign of reverie’ can hardly be improved.

One Foot Upon the Absolute On the last day of 1891, just before announcing he would propose, Dowson weighed his prospects in ‘Villanelle of Marguerites’, which he copied onto the rear endpaper of his manuscript notebook. The title refers to the cultivar of daisy in the premonitory nursery rhyme, and is not a woman’s name. He had patiently awaited the maturity of his matrimonial designs, and was in no mood to be deterred by lingering doubts concerning the age difference betwixt Foltinowicz and he. Although the form of the lyric is whimsical, the speaker is sullen, determined not to read any significance into the beloved’s frolicsome game. Nor will he fall into the epistemological trap laid by Wordsworth’s ‘simple child’ in ‘We Are Seven’: he recognizes her amusement ‘is but playing’ to the child, that it would be sententious of him to engage, even sportively, in its meek prophesizing.⁶ He is convinced ‘she will not care’, no matter ‘how many petals fall’, and declines to anticipate the future, which may yet prove seasonable to his designs. As it is, She would not answer us if we should call Across the years: her visions are too fair; . . . . . She knows us not, nor recks if she enthrall With voice and eyes and fashion of her hair.

An intergenerational chasm separates their respective worlds: the beloved is sequestered in a visionary childhood that the speaker cannot enter into, even ⁶ William Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: Twenty-First Century Oxford Authors, edited by Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 21.

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in jest. The implication that Foltinowicz is oblivious to Dowson’s yearning is at odds with his repeated assertions to the contrary in his correspondence where, in Roth’s phrase, she may be ‘innocent’, but is ever ‘on the verge of knowing’.⁷ The villanelle declines to project the observer’s fantasy of worldliness onto the beloved because, being essentially private, it does not have to. Foltinowicz appears simply as a child. Her rapt involvement in her play, and perfect indifference to his equally engrossing attachment, insulate her from the speaker’s vulgar encroachments, hindering his designs upon her. This carefree attitude is no longer something to celebrate, as it had been in Dowson’s journalism. As the reticulations of the villanelle cascade to their denouement, the speaker grows bitter. He ‘pass[es] and go[es]’, retreating as before, bethinking how ‘she shall not recall | What men we were, nor all she made us bear’. With the trite violence of the daisies she tears, Foltinowicz is transformed into the callous agent of the poet’s devastation, a foundational trope of the ‘Dowson Legend’. Her mythopoeic fate was being prepared for her even as Dowson proclaimed his determination to marry her. The legendizing propensities of this riddling reverie are also utilized in Adrian Rome. The collaborators introduce the primary love interest, Sylvia Drew, in Ch. 2, composed in June or July 1893.⁸ ‘Bending down among some flowers’ in a gardenclose behind ‘a little shop’, she came towards [Rome], with her hands full of white marguerites, [and] he was struck pictorially by the fitness of her companionship with such things. And, indeed, observers less interested than a lad of seventeen, who was a half-fledged poet already, and, after the manner of his kind, deeply in bondage to the delight of the eye, might have found something in this girl’s carriage and movements akin to the natural waywardness of flowers. (AR, 16, 15, 17)

This passage establishes that the novel is a Ku¨nstlerroman with an implied basis in Dowson’s life. When Sylvia ‘impatiently scatter[s] . . . petals on the ground’, and Rome exclaims, ‘A s if you cared . . . it matters very little to you’, familiarity with Dowson’s poetry will impress readers with the fatefulness of the occasion, marking this as an inaugural moment in Rome’s literary career (19, 20). He has a book of ‘verses’ in prospect, we discover—Sylvia and Adrian both emphasize the word— confirming the allusion, even hinting (only to disappoint) at a structural level of

⁷ Christine Roth, ‘Ernest Dowson and the Duality of Late-Victorian Girlhood: “Her Double Perversity,” ’ English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 45.2 (2002): 159. Around 23 Feb. 1892, a few weeks after composing this villanelle, Dowson was ‘no longer in the least doubtful that to Her I am perfectly obvious’ (L, 275). ⁸ Dowson first mentions the new novel in early Aug. 1893; by Sept. he was on to Ch. 17 (L, 284–5, 291).

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significance, networking the novel with Dowson’s lyrical production.⁹ Parallels like this implicate the author of Verses in Rome’s fate. Meanwhile, letters to Moore and Plarr announcing Dowson’s intention to propose, dating from early January 1892, are fervent and strident by turns. Each man has a different quotient of sympathy with the project.¹⁰ To his collaborator, Dowson endites an apologia which must be quoted at length: I have not any longer a shadow of doubt that my condition is transparently obvious to everybody concerned, and that the Damozel perfectly understands the situation, and since it is merely an English tradition which assumes Heaven knows why? that a girl is not Amabilis when she is at her most amiable age— why should I delay in putting a rather untenable situation easily right? This is not folly as you will probably declare, but excellent reason. I mean that I should be quite content myself to possess myself my soul [sic] in patience, in recognition of a convention that I don’t personally believe in, if it was required. Only when it is clear to me that by so doing I simply lose ground and my scrupulousness is only accounted to my indecision and lack of courage—I can’t see the use of it. In fact the difficulties melt away: they are entirely social ones—they don’t realize them and I have never understood them—and never shall. En voilà pour toujours. Therefore mon bien cher ami and esteemed collaborator, I have decided that when ‘Masquerade’ is finished which should happen on or before the 13th. April next which is also a Birthday—I will put an end to this absurd pretence of further consideration which deceives nobody and plainly declare myself. [. . .] I do not believe in marriage in the abstract in the least. Only it is the price, perhaps a heavy one, which one is ordered to pay if one has an immense desire for a particular feminine society. In the present case, I would pay it ten times over, sooner than risk the possibility of some time or other regretting that I had let go irrevocably something which promised a good deal, which I have never had, & which is perhaps after all the best thing obtainable in this stupid world—simply out of lˆacheté! (221)

He anticipates Moore’s objections: it might be ‘folly’ to ‘plainly declare’ himself, but it has become ‘inevitable’, and he is unwilling to risk losing Foltinowicz because of perceived pusillanimity. Linking his matrimonial prospects to his literary career opens Dowson to accusations of opportunism and ‘The Arrangement of Life’ (404). An alliance with Foltinowicz ‘promised a good deal’, and Dowson anticipates some future dividend ‘which [he has] never had’. That he hoped to experience ⁹ ‘My verses—oh, I daresay they are bad enough. No, they are good, some of them,’ says Rome (AR, 20). ¹⁰ Stories about ‘good-natured, middle-class m[e]n falling for the wiles of a working-class girl and marrying her’ were common, Adams suggests, and a source of alarm for Dowson’s friends (Jad Adams, ‘“Slimy Trails” and “Holy Places”: Dowson’s Strange Life in Context’, E, 149–50).

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unrivalled intimacy with a girl who was then approaching her fourteenth birthday indicates the deficiency of his prior relations with women. To Plarr, Dowson writes more ardently: I must confess to you. Hélas, mon vieux, I am ready to make all the sentimental surrenders—even the last and most of all, when She is come to years of discretion. I haven’t a shred of reason left in me. Don’t despise me too much: but so it is. To think that I should have come to this. . . . Forgive my incoherency, give me your condolences & let all then be tacendum. (222)

Dowson’s ‘confess[ion]’ and ‘surrender’, divulged in Catholic terms, confirms an open secret. Plarr is ‘properly a worshipper & devout follower of the most excellent cult of la Fillette’, and would of course grant absolution (164). Hitherto, Dowson had exhibited only disdain for marriage; he is suddenly most willing to acquiesce in the contemptible institution. His fiat that the matter should be passed over in silence, his love permitted to abide in the shade, stands in patent contrast to Plarr’s circumstances, who had just become engaged: Dowson’s next letter is to offer his congratulations.¹¹ He soon finds himself rhapsodizing about that curious indefinable charm which I recognized yesterday; and which makes the blood dance in my veins whenever She speaks or smiles or moves. It seems to me that at last, by an affection of this kind one does really, in a life of shadows and dreams and nothings, set one’s foot upon the absolute—the τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι. (223)

To be able, finally, to talk in this candid, high-toned way about Foltinowicz is a palpable relief. Dowson speaks not of love, but ‘an affection of this kind’, which dispels the miasmas of contemporary existence, instilling a deep sense of meaningfulness in the rapt lover. His ‘affection’ has become an epistemological anchor that, for the moment, ballasts his affairs; later, the same idée fixe will draw him under, imperilling his sense of self. For some time, Dowson had worried that his literary and conjugal aspirations were incompatible. This was an implicit concern in the climacteric poems of 1890. He had since filled his manuscript notebook, pledging: There is an end of my desire: Now have I sown, and I have harvested, And these are ashes of an ancient fire, ¹¹ Plarr’s match was uneccentric: Helen Marion Shaw was three or four years junior when they married in Aug. 1892 (R. K. R. Thornton, ‘Plarr, Victor Gustave’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004], 44: 524).

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‘Vain Resolves’ begins with the intention of finally turning the page on Dowson’s affair with ‘Lena’, but soon admits the futility of the endeavour. The direct speech, the definite articles, and the subsequent dedication to Jepson, obviously intended for the whole assemblage of the holograph notebook, ground the poem in palpable reality, as if the drama involved the act of manuscript transferal itself (F, 87v). Dowson announced he would propose to Foltinowicz days later. ‘Sapientia Lunae’ refers to the same choice of literary or connubial success. Composed in late February or early March 1892, it retains the neat, dialogical form of ‘Vain Resolves’, and the stanza very nearly, while evoking Dowson’s experimental lyrics, ‘Wisdom’ and ‘Flos Lunae’ in particular. It presents Dowson’s rejoinder to ‘the wisdom of the world’ urging the poet: Go forth and run, the race is to the brave; Perchance some honour tarrieth for thee! . . . . . There are bays: Go forth and run, for victory is good, After the stress of the laborious days.

The speaker is unmoved by the prospect of worldly acclaim, since he possesses more ample compensations: her eyes are pure and sweet As lilies, and the fragrance of her hair Is many laurels; and it is not meet To run for shadows when the prize is here.

Much better that a poet of such queer affection should ‘cast [his] flowers away’ than broadcast his attachments or court public acclaim. Glossing the refrain for a prospective French translation in 1896, Dowson connects the principal symbol— a ‘rune of roses’—to the oracular nursery game of ‘Marguerites’: ‘“runes” were an ancient form of picture or symbol-writing used in Druidical times before writing was invented’, he says; ‘A s I use it, it is little more than an archaic form of oracle. Mon idée peut être assez bien traduite par “oracles des roses”’ (L, 370). Now, the speaker inspects the beloved’s posies for their occult significance directly, and does not wait upon her clement interpretation. He calls this ‘musing’ in the second stanza, linking his inspirational convictions and symbolist commitment.

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‘Gray Nights’ is an equally runic composition. Dowson was drunk when he drafted it, and ‘found it . . . absolutely unintelligible’ the next morning (226). While the sonnet cannot be securely dated, it reveals serious doubts about relinquishing poesy to accommodate his nuptial designs. The speaker relates a dream in which he travels through a ‘long, sandy tract of No Man’s Land’, plucking poppies and ‘cast[ing]’ them away ‘with scant esteem’. Dowson had just written off swathes of lyrics, most of which remained expunged from his canon until Flower’s collected edition of 1934. This narcotic dream song expresses his misgivings in symbolic terms. As the octave suggests, Dowson also worried that the museological alliance he sought with Foltinowicz would ultimately prove barren. The speaker embarks upon ‘a road unplanned’ until the ‘stars expire’ and the poppies grow ‘rarer’. At last, the beloved’s luminosity fails entirely: thine eyes Grown all my light, to light me were too tired, And at their darkening, that no surmise Might haunt me of the lost days we desired, After them all I flung those memories!

The vision concludes by reaffirming the speaker’s resolution to have done with the past, to banish his lyrics about his former life. The terminal image recalls how Dowson once ‘Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, | Dancing, to put thy pale lost lilies out of mind’, reminding himself just what is at stake should inspiration fail (V, 17). Dowson’s nightly watches at the Foltinowiczes’ restaurant ensured that he was regularly ‘in a condition too lyrical even for the society of poets’ in the early months of 1892 (L, 228). Adelaide reassured him that he was well thought of, and may have encouraged him; his surmises on this point are invariably tepid. To Plarr, for instance—his most sympathetic confidante—he can only affirm that ‘She has been, I am glad to say, extraordinarily sweet for the last four weeks; so that in spite of my invincible pessimism I begin at last to think that there is, really, beneath her double perversity of enfant gˆatée and jeune fille coquette a solid foundation of affection’ (275). Hedging all the while, Dowson nevertheless became ‘entirely absorb[ed]’ in his connubial prospects: ‘I neither write to nor see anybody else unless by accident’, he says (275). ‘Far too absorbed to do anything but sit, in Poland, & gather the exquisite moments’, this ‘reign of reverie’ endured for weeks.¹² Dowson’s language reminds his interlocutor that, as Ohi contends, ‘absorption’ amounts to ‘an ethical capacity’ in Pater’s writing, that ‘fascination [is] a form of self-fashioning’.¹³ His Paterian virtue-signalling soon attracted the attention of his extended family and ¹² L, 228; cf. 196, 223, 224, 275, 278, 279. ¹³ Kevin Ohi, Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 22.

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broader acquaintance. Discovering that ‘this infatuation of mine’ had been ‘openly discussed the whole of dinner-time’ by Johnson and his uncle, he did not take offence but consoled himself: ‘if it is so obvious to all my friends and relatives it ought to be equally so to the Poles as well’ (L, 231). Conspicuousness was precisely the point of this public obeisance: Dowson’s capacity for absorption legitimized his claim. He framed his comportment in mystical and philosophical terms. Paying court became attendance at the ‘Cult of Adelka’, whose rites he elaborated in soaring letters to Plarr (227). He genuinely felt that he was discovering his essential self, what he termed ‘my τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι’ (230). A kind of transcendental grace attends him at times like these: I do nothing, live in a sort of dream, of nothing: and I have never before lived to such an exhausting extent. To find an irrational residuum in oneself, eluding one’s last analysis, is by some strange freak, reasonably a consolation. Does not a great, personal passion become a whole metaphysic? At least an abstract, metaphysical notion, or a sacrament, or a mystery, or a miracle, in certain lights, becomes more credible than any material thing or appearance, one’s mere going or doing, or talk or juxtaposition or the death one will die. [. . .] Though I have done, nor said, nor suffered anything tangible since I last saw or wrote to you, I write as an illuminato: I seem to have seen mysteries, & if I fail to be explicit, it is because my eyes are dazzled. (230–1)

Dowson is remembered as a poet of love and loss, but such rapture is rare in his published writing. He draws upon these insights to delineate Benedict Campion’s ‘lucid’ and ‘tranquil illumination’, and a single phrase in ‘The Eyes of Pride’ exceeds these transports in sensual terms (YB 3, 103; Savoy 1, 52). These moments are the closest Dowson came to realizing a grande passion; they represent the summit of his spiritualized affection, and give the measure of his subsequent decline.

In Dreamful Autumn The Pierrot of the Minute, discussed in Ch. 5, best illustrates how Dowson’s ‘reign of reverie’ resulted in a distinctly ‘æsthetic poetry’ during the second half of 1892. Contemporaneous lyrics show that he was at first content to bide his time; he felt ‘better and at home | In dreamful Autumn’, as he put it in ‘Autumnal’. The softness of the decádent season fit his mood but, as a significantly older lover, it also entailed a vague menace. Dowson was concerned about the implications of growing old while Foltinowicz remained young, and explored his anxieties in ‘In Tempore Senectutis’ and ‘The Statute of Limitations’. For the lovers in these texts, time closes in and will soon run out. Dowson probably had Yeats’s ‘When You

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Are Old’ in mind, which he could have heard at the Rhymers’ Club and read in print by 1892, rather than Ronsard’s sonnet (W, 256 n). In draft, he appended an epigraph from Psalms which shows that he viewed the theme as commonplace (L, 247). Like Yeats’s poem, ‘In Tempore Senectutis’ traces the course of a grande passion: the beloved is, first, the staunch ‘friend of my heart!’; then ‘My soul’s desire!’; and finally ‘My life’s one love!’ Dowson was still a young man with his future ahead of him in October 1892: awareness of mortality does not prompt his lyric so much as Foltinowicz’s vivid juvenility, and the knowledge that she will soon be old enough to accede to his proposal. Characteristically, the poem looks forward and backward at once, the underlying intergenerational relationship realizing a sort of temporal vertigo. The speaker requires the advancement which will hasten the beloved’s majority and, at the same time, the memorial rejuvenation he desires for himself. Dowson does not consider that the nearly eleven-year age difference between them will seem lesser with each passing year; on the contrary, it must loom ever larger, an insurmountable hindrance, causing her to shrink from him, retreating into memory and regret, until ‘love and pity’ become ‘at last’ irreconcilable. He is thrown back upon the old conundrum: the addressee is both ‘His Lady and His Friend’, as the draft title stresses, and the primal relationship finally reasserts itself, to his dismay (L, 247). ‘In Tempore Senectutis’ deflects onto the beloved the ‘proleptic certainty of loss’ which, Ohi says, governs ‘the temporality of erotic innocence’, but cannot thereby escape becoming a ‘dyspeptic little poem’ (Innocence and Rapture, 10; L, 248). Dyspeptic, too, is ‘The Statute of Limitations’, the only one of Dowson’s stories to prove influential.¹⁴ Completed at this time of anticipations grave and gay, this wry study imagines the inevitable outcome of an intergenerational obsession (see L, 240, 252). The encroachments of age upon desire were familiar to Dowson from L’Éducation sentimentale; he updates the theme for the era of mechanical reproduction. Separated from his child sweetheart by the Atlantic Ocean for seven years, Michael Garth has become fixated on a photograph of his intended, depicting ‘the charming, oval face of a young girl, little more than a child, with great eyes, that one guessed, one knew not why, to be the colour of violets, looking out with singular wistfulness from a waving cloud of dark hair’ (Dil., 126–7). This mantric description, the pre-eminent instance of ‘drifted rhyme’ in Dowson’s prose, is repeated four times, giving Garth an air of ‘intimate madness, which left him no peace’ (131). The photograph is literally a fetish object, a quintessence of girlhood: it makes him feel old, and inspires increasing dread as he reapproaches England to be reunited with his adult fiancée, ultimately precipitating his suicide. A ‘nightmare’ and a ‘horror’, the image becomes a ‘morbid demon which possessed him’, leaving Garth ‘with an incurable sadness; miserable and afraid’ (131, 133). ¹⁴ See R. Y. Jenkins, ‘A Note on Conrad’s Sources: Ernest Dowson’s “The Statute of Limitations” as Source for Heart of Darkness’, English Language Notes 24.3 (Mar. 1987): 39–41.

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The autobiographical basis of the central relationship is unmistakable. For Garth, as for Dowson, ‘the crisis had come, just when his life was complicated by the sudden blossoming of an old friendship into love . . . complete and final’ (129). ‘The girl . . . was poor’ and ‘very young: there was no question of an early marriage; there was not even a definite engagement. Garth would take no promise from her: only for himself, he was her bound lover while he breathed’ (129–30). These circumstances are Dowson’s, vis-à-vis Foltinowicz, in autumn 1892: the ‘crisis’ of her ‘blossoming’ into womanhood, his ineluctable, yet ineffectual, response. Garth requires money to ‘restore him to his beautiful mistress’ (128). He arrives by ratiocination at the decision to marry, as Dowson had. Cavalierly, he insists that his young fiancée’s word should not be construed as binding, grasping, almost, that her consent is not quite meaningful, considering her age. Garth claims to be ‘passionately in love, in love comme on ne l’est plus’, and his formula is apt (129). Loving something that no longer is, can he be said to love at all? Dowson exorcises his own misgivings about the durability of idealized, intergenerational love in this study. He is plainly conscious that he might outgrow his grande passion, which is one sense of the title. When ‘Statute’ appears last in Dilemmas, moreover, it cautions Foltinowicz not to demure overlong. The underlying conception of ‘Statute’ conflates Dowson’s earlier worship of Minnie Terry and his new enthralment. He went to extraordinary lengths to collect likenesses and paraphernalia celebrating Terry’s career throughout 1889–90, as we have seen.¹⁵ Dowson routinely discussed these fetish objects in sexualized terms: he ‘pine[d]’ for ‘picture[s]’, which he delighted in ‘possessing’ (L, 109, 93). This mania, an example of the ‘erotic collecting culture’ of the fin de siècle which, Orrells contends, ‘summed up the Decadent style’, peaked following his affair with ‘Lena’.¹⁶ Now that the Foltinowiczes ‘have promised to have [Adelaide] photographed soon’, he hoped to convince Moore ‘how curiously like she is to at least two photographs of Minnie’ (196). Dowson does not compare the girls directly; he establishes Foltinowicz’s mettle in semblable terms, emphasizing her iterative allure. His nickname for Foltinowicz—‘Missie’—echoes the name of her fetishized predecessor; he enjoins them to the same epithet—‘la petite’ or ‘la chère petite’. In each case, Dowson represents himself as a zealot attending a ‘cult’, a word he reserves for the worship of little girls, whether in ‘the cult of Minnie Terry’ (121), ‘The Cult of the Child’ (433), ‘the most excellent cult of la Fillette’ (164), or ‘the Cult of Adelka’ (227). ‘The Statute of Limitations’ proclaims the folly of trying to possess a young girl via her image and insignia. By concentrating Garth’s idolatry upon an earlier photograph, Dowson acknowledges that ‘this infatuation of [his]’ was dangerous and ¹⁵ See Ch. 2 at n. 2. ¹⁶ Daniel Orrells, ‘Nineteenth-Century Decadence and Neoclassical Aesthetics: Androgyny, Ambiguity and Collecting Culture’, Decadence: A Literary History, edited by Alex Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 22, 18.

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factitious (231). The photographic keepsake fosters morbid objectification, resulting in a decádent romantic attachment. Garth’s photo-fixation shows that Dowson was cognizant of capitalism’s tawdry incursions upon the realms of desire; he grasped how his own affections emerge from, and resonate within, a mass culture in which, to quote Gautier, ‘fictitious life has taken the place of natural life and developed in man wants till then unknown’.¹⁷ He offers Garth just one way out of this morass: his suicide replaces an imperishable memento with an equally durable, but authentic memory, which ‘experience could never tarnish, nor custom stale’ (Dil., 139). Smothering his Decadent fixation upon ‘the one rival with whom she could never compete; the memory of her old self, of her gracious girlhood, which was dead’, Garth allows his fiancée to preserve her own, saner, image of himself, and thus escape a ‘marriage of corpses’ (137, 136). The complex ironies of this climax are announced in the expository framing, where the narrator explains that the ‘edifying’ nature of ‘the issue of [his] impressions’ resides in their ‘singular irony’ (126). Dowson’s construction notes for his exactly contemporaneous novel demonstrate that this was what he valued most in fiction. For A Comedy of Masks, the ‘best dénouement & the most artistic’ would ensure that ‘the pathos of . . . sacrifice would be only heightened by the suggestion left of its futility’ (L, 153–4). The authors’ masters were James and Flaubert. ‘Statute’ owes a particular debt to the ending of L’Éducation sentimentale, in fact. In the last pages of the novel, just as it appears that Frédéric Moreau’s life-long infatuation with Madame Arnoux will be consummated, he is confronted with a harsh reality. He finally sees that the idealized ‘picture’ which had long sustained him ‘blotted out all the others’; he tells Arnoux as much, and ‘she rapturously accepted this adoration of the woman she had ceased to be’.¹⁸ Frédéric’s sudden awareness of the disparity betwixt his private icon and reality thwarts his desire, and the saccharine tide of sentimentality that surges through the novel. He suspected that Madame Arnoux had come to offer herself to him; and once again he was filled with desire, a frenzied, rabid lust such as he had never known before. Yet he also had another, indefinable feeling, a repugnance akin to a dread of committing incest. Another fear restrained him—the fear of being disgusted later. Besides, what a nuisance it would be! And partly out of prudence, and partly to avoid degrading his ideal, he turned on his heel and started rolling a cigarette. (455)

Garth’s sense of irony is not equal to this series of anticlimactic insights. He speaks only of the captive ‘phantom’ of the photograph; of the gothic ‘shadow’ which ¹⁷ Théophile Gautier, ‘Charles Baudelaire’, The Works of Théophile Gautier, translated by F. C. de Sumichrast (New York: Sproul, 1908), 23: 40. ¹⁸ Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, translated by Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1964), 454.

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pursues him; of the ‘morbid demon which possessed him’ and which propels him towards that ‘marriage of corpses’ (Dil., 134, 133). Nevertheless, the taboo which Frédéric vaguely intuits is transposed into Dowson’s intergenerational story. Frédéric’s ridiculous position spoke to him directly as he weighed his amatory lot in autumn 1892, and became fundamental to the way he would present his poems to the public nearly four years later. This structural allusion, which may be among the ‘very obscure reasons’ Dowson has for liking the story, complicates his infatuation with, and proposal to, Foltinowicz, suggesting acute self-awareness and an inurement to disappointment (L, 252).

Puzzles and Culs-de-Sac Dowson’s ‘reign of reverie’ began to dissolve the following spring. He complains that my affairs will not bear talking over, or writing about. They are like a Chinese puzzle; and grow more confused and inextricable the closer one considers them. I endeavour to possess my soul in patience, but the result is not so much resignation, as a sort of sloth & tristitia, ‘which even monkish moralists have held to be of the nature of a sin.’ (266)

This melancholy inertia is attested in the paucity of lyrics dating from the period. Dowson worked sporadically upon Adrian Rome, but the most angst-ridden period of his courtship produced little verse. The lyrics which did ensue bear more directly upon his matrimonial intentions and, as his simile implies, are compacted into taught, epigrammatical forms. Dowson thought well of these new poems, and considered them of a piece (see L, 305). As the untraced citation shows, he also continued to rely principally on Paterian language and ideas to elucidate the experience of being in love, which lent itself to ‘resignation, a sombre resignation, a sad heart, patient bearing of the burden of a sad heart’.¹⁹ In ‘Terre Promise’, Dowson directly addresses his stalled relations with Foltinowicz. The lyric finds him straining his ear to things left unsaid in ‘Poland’. The first stanza charges the least significant moments of innocuous proximity with superabundant implication: Even now the fragrant darkness of her hair Had brushed my cheek; and once, in passing by, Her hand upon my hand lay tranquilly: What things unspoken trembled in the air! ¹⁹ Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 2: 51.

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The surreptitious joy of the undeclared lover is palpable. For an aspiring husband, the hand is a most consequent part of the female form, a symbol of the longed-for marriage-pledge, and a site of preliminary conquest. Dowson became fanatical about such fleeting manual contact, and employed the figure again in Adrian Rome, disclosing the hero’s love for Sylvia Drew: she ‘uttered a little despairing moan, and then turned to [Rome], laying one hand (how well he remembered that dimple, between garden-glove and sleeve, on the sunburnt wrist!) upon his arm’ (AR, 132). The details derive from the climax of L’Éducation sentimentale. Marie Arnoux discloses that she discovered Frédéric’s secret adoration ‘one evening when you kissed my wrist between my glove and my sleeve. I said to myself: ‘Why, he loves me . . . he loves me’. But I was afraid of making sure. Your discretion was so charming that I took pleasure in it as in an unconscious, never-failing homage’ (453). Undertaking the same duteous service, Dowson makes this sign of perpetual adoration, and is desperate for its detection. He sensed he was close to accomplishing his desire, as the second stanza makes clear: ‘A lways I know, how little severs me | From mine heart’s country, that is yet so far.’ Dowson’s correspondence steadily reiterates the point. As his ‘never-ending homage’ continued, he wondered what infinitesimal modulation of silence could communicate his arrival thence: Ah might it be, that just by touch of hand, Or speaking silence, shall the barrier fall; And shall she pass, with no vain words at all, But droop into mine arms, and understand!

Foltinowicz has become the conquestable promised land of the title, understood quite literally as a physical place to which the speaker has journeyed. He is ‘sever[ed]’ therefrom by a ‘bar’ or ‘barrier’, which may be ‘shatter[ed] utterly’, or simply ‘fall’, should the beloved utter the requisite passwords, or signal her assent less overtly. Dowson extrapolates from the ‘barrier closing the entrance into a city, formed originally of ‘posts, rails, and a chain’. Afterwards applied to the gate by which these were replaced, as in Temple-bar, and the Bars or gates of York, etc’. (‘bar, n.1 , sense II.i.13.a’). If a figurative ‘bar’ or ‘barrier’ is intended, Dowson may invoke the beloved’s chastity or virginity. His object is said to be a ‘country’ unto itself, potentially utilizing the obscene pun once frequent in renaissance verse (and frankly acknowledged in ‘Soli cantare periti Arcades’). This veiled sense is brought out when read in conjunction with ‘Ad Manus Puellae’, which plots further encroachments from the ‘finger-tips’ to the ‘higher lands, | The citadel of [her] sacred lips’, confessing that the speaker ‘know[s] not the way’. Announcing his declaration a few weeks later, Dowson considers that ‘the mind of a girl, a girl of that age, is such an inexplicable country to oneself: but a woman might give one clues’ (L, 277). These erotic stirrings are tempered in revision. Dowson trialled

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‘droop’ in the first line, but reserves it for the last line of the published text instead. When it finally arrives, the beloved’s surrender is oddly flaccid, as though she too is exhausted by the expectant, sensual atmosphere, and they expire together in tacit acceptance. His designs have not advanced very far from the paternal scene of ‘Villanelle of Sunset’, and its soporific injunction to his ‘white bird’ to ‘seek [her] nest’. ‘Ad Manus Puellae’ is a more intricate composition. Among Dowson’s many refined lyrics, it may be the most curial. There is a ‘learned erotomania’ about its ‘hoard[ing] and tell[ing]’, to borrow Wilde’s description of its dedicatee, Leonard Smithers, cited in the introduction, who ‘love[d] first editions, especially of women’, and for whom ‘little girls are his passion’.²⁰ The archaic diction and ornate syntax disguise intimate (if not scandalous) confidences. In Roman Law, the ‘manus’ was ‘a form of power or authority, principally involving control over property, held in some instances by a husband over his wife’, and therefore ‘a form of marriage contract giving a husband such authority’ (‘manus, n.1 , sense 2’). Dowson’s opening lines take a cavalier attitude toward such matters: I was always a lover of ladies’ hands! Or ever mine heart came here to tryst, For the sake of your carved white hands’ commands; The tapering fingers, the dainty wrist; The hands of a girl were what I kissed.

‘Here’ on the threshold of ‘Terre Promise’, where he has come again ‘to tryst’, the speaker is frank about his manual predilection. Absent this penchant (the second line may imply), his ‘heart’ would never have alighted upon its present object. He lingers with a connoisseur’s indulgence; ‘for the sake’ of their exquisite shape, for their implied directive. This leads to a surprising detection: he has been caressing ‘the hands of a girl’, not some ‘ladies’ hands’, as has been his wont. The published poem does not make much of this distinction, but it looms largely in Dowson’s revision process, where the title wavers characteristically between ‘Ad Manus Dominae’ (‘To His Mistress’s Hands’) and ‘Ad Manus Puellae’. Rather than worrying this categorical distinction, the published text emphasizes the serial nature of the speaker’s manual interest. As soon as his present objet d’amour appears, he recalls a prior encounter. In draft, the contrastive features are italicized: I remember a hand like a fleur-de-lys When it slid from its silken sheath, her glove; With its odours passing ambergris; ²⁰ Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert HartDavis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 924.

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And that was the empty husk of a love. Oh, how shall I kiss your hands enough? (L, 271)

These hands are not ‘your[s]’: they rather belong to some remembered hand, ‘glove[d]’ with more sophistication, scented and ‘sheath[ed]’ in ‘silk’, but ‘empty’ for all. An inveterate comparer of women, Dowson distinguishes between the beloved, addressed in the second person, and another woman, a former lover or courtesan, addressed in the third person. Her hands and outward appearance are artfully Frenchified, and so likened to the heraldic lily. While ambiguous, the implication of the metaphorical ‘husk of love’ is clear: some indiscretion involving a false love—formerly or more recently—makes the speaker remorseful. He has come to crave absolution, but cannot imagine how to atone for his lapse: ‘Oh, how shall I kiss your hands enough?’ In one variant, a catastrophizing Verlainian epigraph heightens these apologetics (W, 246 n; CP, 231 n). Sagesse XVII expresses remorse for the ‘human mistakes | And pagan things’ committed by the author, who begs for a ‘sign that forgives’ from the beloved’s ‘venerated hands’.²¹ Drawing on the fabled circumstances of this volume, perhaps, Dowson considers that he, too, is ‘always in prison to their commands’ (L, 272). Acknowledging that his usual obsequious manner is stymied, the speaker appeals to the conventional significance of the beloved’s hand: ‘I know not the way from your finger-tips, | Nor how I shall gain the higher lands, | The citadel of your sacred lips’, he sighs. Progress, triumph, depends upon first securing her symbolic pledge; he remains in ‘captive’ bondage to it (which, he maintains, is ‘pleasant’ enough). Because of an abrupt syntactical elision, the final line is difficult to expound. I read: ‘I am . . . most [of all captive to] your hands’. Previously, the speaker’s manual attention was general and apt to wander; he claims to restrict it now (as if ‘your’ remained italicized). He hastily reaffirms his content to stay the will of her hand, for now, and not seek to advance upon some other part of her anatomy. But the transporting contemplation of the lyric is forestalled, and the text stops short. That the symbol being so assiduously considered belongs to ‘a girl’ still shocks the speaker, interrupts his traditional conceit, and grounds his flight of fancy. Dowson was often thus transported; and niggled back to reality. ‘Ad Manus Puellae’ was the last lyric Dowson wrote before he proposed to Foltinowicz. He had prepared his closest friends for this eventuality from the beginning of the previous year and, with his Breton studies of conscience-ridden affiance and ‘Villanelle of Marguerites’, had extensively trialled his conjugal prospects in his writing. When he ‘declared’ himself at last, Dowson claimed that neither Foltinowicz nor her mother were surprised (L, 277). They had other things on their mind. ²¹ Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems, translated by Martin Sorrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 103.

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Dowson’s ambitions began to take palpable form when it became clear that Joseph Foltinowicz was dying. ‘I should like very much to reveal myself there entirely’, he explains, ‘especially insomuch as Monsieur’s days are very obviously numbered, and before the changes and revolutions which this fact makes one anticipate, I should like to be firmly established’ (275). He proposed three weeks later, ‘on or about the 15th [April 1893]’, and Joseph Foltinowicz died about nine days subsequent to his proposal, on 24 April.²² Two months elapsed between Dowson’s mention of his likely demise as a spur to action and Joseph Foltinowicz’s actual death: he did not propose on the eve of this grim event, as has been suggested. Dowson always characterized his proposal as spontaneous, but the truth is that he calculated rather cynically on this being the most pragmatic course of action available to him (278). It was premeditated, and explicitly connected with the familial reorganization necessitated by Foltinowicz’s passing. Dowson’s ‘reign of reverie’, then, culminates in a Hamletish affectation disguising selfish interests, and occasionally ruthless (even morbid) cunning. He pre-empted accusations of opportunism by declaring that he had no ‘ghoulish desires against [Joseph Foltinowicz’s] length of days’ and had ‘certainly been treated by him always with a great deal of consideration’ (275). But the two events are inseparable in his mind. Here is how he breaks the news to Plarr: Foltinowicz is given up by the doctors, and sinks from day to day. You can imagine that in the rather strenuous atmosphere that prevails there I have been carried off my feet. I am afraid you will accuse me of great folly, but yesterday, last night, I declared myself. Do you blame me very much? I should like to know. I thought I had resolution enough to say nothing to her, until she was at least on her way to being seventeen. But we happened to be alone together, and we spoke of grave things and my resolution collapsed. She behaved with very much more discretion than I showed; she seemed to think that I ought to have waited till she was older, but she admitted that she was not surprised, and she was not angry. And then as they say in Parliament, ‘the matter dropped.’ (277)

Compassionate as his intention must have been, Dowson’s proposition is selfish and opprobrious, as Adelaide herself grasps readily enough. Just weeks ago, he had written intrepidly upon the threshold of ‘mine heart’s country, that is yet so far’ (V, 34). ‘Half a word’, spoken decidedly out of turn, has indeed ‘shatter[ed] utterly’ the tacit (and perhaps imaginary) understanding which prevailed in ‘Poland’, only to be replaced by an even more odious arrangement that they ‘should not allude to the thing any more for the present’ (L, 277). ‘What in the world shall I do?’ he implores; ‘How long is this extraordinary cul de sac to last?’ (277). ²² L, 278; Dowson may refer to the proposal, or to a conference with Madame Foltinowicz the following day.

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As the dust began to settle, Dowson confided in Sam Smith, whom he had kept appraised of his matrimonial intentions for the last year or so. The letter is marked ‘strictly private and confidential’ and ‘proceed[s] to inform [Smith] of certain recent developments in [his] affairs’ (277–8). The tone is haughty, as if Dowson is preoccupied with his reputation as a love poet.²³ He may have been talking to Yeats.²⁴ While his previous bulletin comes nearer the truth, this long epistle demonstrates the meticulous control Dowson wished to exert over the narrative: I suppose it will not surprise you very much to hear that I have at last unburdened myself. We were all in rather a stressful state of nerves—and Missie herself rather brought it about by her curious changes of mood—sometimes she was perfectly charming at others she would hardly speak to me. Quid plura dicam? Finally I was goaded into a declaration—of course it was rather an inopportune time, the father having been given up by the doctors—but on the other hand, I don’t suppose except for the rather tense state we were in on this account, I should have been so precipitate. She took it with a great deal of dignity and self-possession; I don’t think I have ever admired her more. She reminded me very properly that she was rather too young: but she proceeded to admit that she was not surprised at what I had told her, and that she was not angry. Of course I had asked her for no answer—I merely left her with no possible reason to doubt my seriousness in the matter. Finally I suggested that she should forget what I had said for the present— and that we should resume our ancient relation and be excellent friends—and nothing more. Upon this understanding we separated. The next day—after twelve of about as miserable hours as I hope to spend—it seemed to me that I had upset the whole arrangement—a conversation with Madame reassured me. Nothing could possibly exceed her extreme kindness and delicacy. She didn’t in the least appear to resent, as she might very reasonably have resented, my proposing to her daughter, without her permission a couple of days before her 15th birthday; on the contrary she seemed rather pleased—in short, she was perfect. Moreover she gave me every hope—she said that Missie had told her she would like the idea in a year or two:—only just then she was naturally strung up and disordered by her father’s state. According to Madame it will arrange itself. (278)

²³ Dowson’s tone reflects his view of Smith: ‘at a distance I admire & esteem him: but there is a certain lack in him, of subtility, or of tact; which is the outward & visible sign of an inward & spiritual subtility’ (L, 180). Since Plarr withheld Dowson’s most intimate letters, the impression has arisen that (as Longaker points out) ‘it was to Smith that he wrote most fully about his love affair with Adelaide’ (P, 216; cf. L, 31 n). ²⁴ ‘This letter is like Tristan and Isolde, it has nothing but love and death in it’, Dowson explains (L, 280). He later amplified the remark, siding with Yeats rather than Ernest Radford on the scope of contemporary lyric poetry: ‘Love & Death are almost more permanently with us than the Labour Movement & will probably survive it—& I don’t quite see how the Radicals are going to abolish them. In the meantime as they interest me more than sociological questions I am afraid I shall continue to “use” them’ (298).

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Smith, Dowson considers, surely expected this ‘unburden[ing]’. His proposal was not just inevitable, but forced; he was ‘goaded’ into it by Foltinowicz herself, who ‘brought it about by her curious changes of mood’, a wilful, petulant act designed to undermine his resolution. The humane drama unfolding in the background does not impinge upon matters at all: the unsentimental narrator does not consider that Madame Foltinowicz might be grieving, and only reluctantly allows that Adelaide might be affected when he is tactfully reminded. Madame Foltinowicz’s purported reaction is likely coloured by Dowson’s bias and agenda, especially his conviction that Continental ideas about marriage would stagger parochial Englanders (see L, 230). By the time he reports to Smith, his expressions have calcified into formulae; at least one—that he asked Foltinowicz ‘for no answer’ and ‘merely left her with no possible reason to doubt [his] seriousness’—had been trialled in advance in his short fiction. In ‘Statute’, recall, Michael Garth ‘would take no promise from’ his intended; ‘only for himself, he was her bound lover while he breathed’ (Dil., 130). The ideal response is also given in advance: ‘how tenderly she repudiated her freedom’ (130). Foltinowicz did no such thing. The study was composed the previous summer, complete by November, and would appear shortly after Dowson’s proposal: to publish this intimate transcript so suddenly upon the events themselves, before the matter was in any way resolved, was a breach of confidence, particularly in light of Dowson’s retreat into tacenda. Dowson had his story straight by the time he briefed Smith. Adelaide’s actual response is hard to gauge, since he relays Madame Foltinowicz’s paraphrase of her daughter’s purported answer: only that ‘she would like the idea in a year or two’ (L, 278). Still preoccupied by what he took to be her shifting moods, a vestige of the éspèce de type which he associated with musedom, Dowson reprised the pubertal theme of his climacteric poems for the only lyric to date from this period, ‘Growth’. Remarkably—but as Dowson’s letter makes perfectly clear— behind this subtle meditation on the changes wrought by experience stalks Death; the veritable corpse of Joseph Foltinowicz lies just out of sight. His letter, which alludes to ‘some verses’ he was ‘try[ing to] finish . . . upon this matter’, scrutinizes Foltinowicz’s bearing and conduct ‘during the last difficult week—that immensely trying time which has to elapse between a death and a burial—quite the cruellest part of death’, and is ‘amazed’ to discover ‘she was intensely distressed and worn out’ but ‘perfectly composed’ (279). ‘Growth’ tests this mettle, endeavouring to discover whether her trauma has wrought any change (that might impinge upon his chances). ‘Half-sorrowful’ at first—an extraordinary expression in the circumstances—the speaker first presumes the beloved’s loss of innocence: she has ‘Become a maid, mysterious and strange’. But the lyric gradually accepts that this obfuscation results from the speaker’s own distemper; his ‘doubting soul’ is responsible for a faltering judgement. This parallels Dowson’s caveat to Smith: ‘She herself is sometimes very charming, sometimes not! But in the latter case it

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is merely my own abominably irritable temper which is to blame’ (231). The contrastive scrutiny continues: ‘the ancient good | Of her dear childhood’, as it was ‘in the olden time’, is weighed in light of recent developments, and ‘the glory of her waking maidenhood’ is found to match—for the repetition of diction and figure is highly patterned—that of the child he fell in love with, and so to meet, and even exceed, the speaker’s newfound expectations. The ‘dawn[ing]’ effulgence of ‘waking maidenhood’ turns out only to be a ‘new disguise’; the growing woman is not so different from the ‘chang[ing]’ child. Before, this had frightened Dowson; now, he almost hopes to enjoy it. While others mourned, then, Dowson scrutinized Foltinowicz’s character and disposition. But doing so, he came to retract his cynical conviction that ‘growth’ is always a ‘lamentable thing’ when it comes to young girls (187). Indeed, by eclipsing the personal catastrophe which precipitates it, ‘Growth’ enacts ‘a sort of instinctive protest against the thought of death by healthy life’ (279). The word ‘glory’ captures this. Childhood and maidenhood—which are held to be distinct states notwithstanding the speaker’s discovery of certain similarities—each requires a separate epitome: both are found in the beloved in their ‘highest state of magnificence or prosperity’ (‘glory, n., sense 8’). This aurelian tinge associates Foltinowicz with Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix and the virginal maids of Dowson’s Breton stories.²⁵ In detailing these insights to Smith, Dowson lays special emphasis upon the beatific communion that has already resulted from his relations with this semi-divine entity: It is a very odd history—Heaven knows how it will end. In my more rational moments however, I am inclined to consider that that is of quite secondary importance; the important thing is that one should have, just once, experienced this mystery, an absolute absorption in one particular person. It reconciles all inconsistencies in the order of things, and above all it seems once and for all to reduce to utter absurdity any material explanation of itself or of the world. (279)

Extravagant as he knew this claim to be, Dowson felt it to be true. He had found his raison d’être, precisely where he had sought for it. Foltinowicz embodied the ideals already celebrated in his verse, and held out the prospect of a personal and artistic alliance which he craved. She promised to focus and unify his idiosyncratic passions, predilections, and projects. She must have seemed, to borrow Emerson’s phrase, ‘the new religion, the reconciler, whom all things await’.²⁶

²⁵ See Ch. 4 at n. 11. ²⁶ Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Poet’, The Complete Essays and Other Writings, edited by Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1940), 338.

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Things Fall Apart Yet the time of Dowson’s museological inspiration was effectively over. His relationship with Foltinowicz became increasingly querulous and recriminatory by 1894, as ‘Amantium Irae’ and ‘The Eyes of Pride’ attest, so that as her sixteenth birthday approached, Dowson was no longer sanguine about his chances (L, 305). No longer inclined to apotheosize deferred and imaginary things, his lyrical production dwindled. Occasional exceptions, like the ironically titled ‘Quid non speremus, Amantes?’, dated 9 April 1894, are among his most pessimistic compositions. The titular allusion here, to Vergil’s eighth Eclogue, suggests that Dowson began to accept he would not marry Foltinowicz after all. In the target passage, Damon laments that his lover Nysa has been claimed by his rival, Mopsus; in the ensuing pandemonium he fancies ‘Griffins and horses will mate . . . | deer will come to the drinking bowl with the hounds’.²⁷ For Thornton and Caroline Dowson, ‘it is tempting to read Dowson’s own situation into this; perhaps Adelaide had indeed been given to another as she approached her sixteenth birthday’ (CP, 243 n). While not corroborated, this is a fair surmise. ‘Quid non speremus, Amantes?’ begins in the manner of Dowson’s recent lyrics: Why is there in the least touch of her hands More grace than other women’s lips bestow, If love is but a slave in fleshly bands Of flesh to flesh, wherever love may go?

Juxtaposing this manual image, a staple in Dowson’s engagement lyrics, and the kisses of ‘other women’s lips’, suggests that Dowson struggled to remain celibate, as required by his suit. The issue may have been openly broached. ‘The Eyes of Pride’ includes the recrimination that ‘she . . . was exacting, jealous of his past life; he was faithfully her lover, and he felt aggrieved, perhaps unjustly, that womanlike she took constancy too much for granted, was not more grateful that he did not lapse’ (Savoy 1, 56). The stanza accordingly refutes the pleasures of the ‘flesh’ (repeated three times in seven syllables), while granting the absurdity of the speaker’s enduring fetish. The next stanza develops the contrast: Why choose vain grief and heavy-hearted hours, For her lost voice and dear, remembered hair, If love may cull his honey from all flowers, And girls grow thick as violets, everywhere? ²⁷ Virgil, Eclogues 8, ll. 26–7, translated by A. S. Kline, Poetry in Translation, https://www. poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/VirgilEclogues.php. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.

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Faced with ‘dear’ loss, the speaker ‘vain[ly]’ sulks, despite ample enticements. His agency in these matters is notionally transferred to ‘love’ (uncapitalized, as the poem begins), whose natural action is ‘cull[ing] . . . flowers’, gathering, picking, and plucking, indiscriminately. This is Dowson’s principal meta-poetic symbol, and suggests that his concerns may exceed personal gratification. In draft, he invokes not ‘love’, nor even ‘most High Love’, but that ‘most high Lord! . . . crowned with myrtle sprays’: the apostrophe is to Amor, as Dowson conceived and developed the trope in his initial lyrics of museological devotion (L, 305). The strained comparison between the ‘lost voice and dear remembered hair’ and the women among whom he may freely select, simply reminds the poetspeaker of what he stands to relinquish: girls may ‘grow thick as violets, everywhere’, but they only remind him of ‘the charming, oval face of a young girl, little more than a child, with great eyes, that one guessed, one knew not why, to be the colour of violets’ (Dil., 126–7). The simile itself awakens his despair: Nay! She is gone, and all things fall apart; Or she is cold, and vainly have we prayed; And broken is the summer’s splendid heart, And hope within a deep, dark grave is laid.

This stanza witnesses the internment of ‘hope’, in the same unmarked ‘grave’ to which Dowson had once committed Love. The possibility that ‘She is gone’ is just one of several disappointments that the speaker can envisage, however. Personal apocalypse is admitted as a possibility, but with such devastating force that he immediately steps back from the verge. The celebrated phrase came ready-made to W. B. Yeats, on the evidence of his draft manuscripts for ‘The Second Coming’.²⁸ His visionary scribblings are in no way indebted to Dowson. Yet the unacknowledged currents of inspiration blowing ‘out of Spiritus Mundi’ might well include Dowson’s love lyrics, for the great poet always held that ‘Dowson’s best verse [is] immortal.’²⁹ Yeats had proposed to Iseult Gonne in 1916; she refused but, like Dowson, he would not ‘regard the refusal as definitive’, and continued to write about his ‘hunger for the apple on the bough | Most out of reach’.³⁰ Iseult represented for Yeats what Adelaide meant for Dowson: ‘a marmorean Muse who stimulates a desire that exists to be deferred’ (Hassett, 122). Yeats’s recognition ‘that desire and its deferral are essential components of inspiration’ is a fundamentally Dowsonian insight, among the ²⁸ See Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines: W. B. Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 16–25. ²⁹ W. B. Yeats, The Poems, edited by Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1992), 235; Autobiographies, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, edited by William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald (New York: Scribner, 1999), 3: 241. ³⁰ Joseph M. Hassett, W. B. Yeats and the Muses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 115; Yeats, Poems, 210.

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most vital aspects of his legacy, laundered, as it has been, through Autobiographies (122). When Yeats worries that he ‘might become unhappy through a long vain courtship’ he doubtless has Dowson’s archetypal example in mind, as well as his own fruitless pursuit of Iseult’s renowned mother.³¹ Here, in ‘Quid non speremus, Amantes?’ is Dowson’s warning about the peril Yeats strained to avoid. He arrived at this memorable phrase via ‘Carthusians’, whose last line insists that, ‘though the world fall apart, surely ye shall prevail’. Yeats’s apocalyptic vision may thus unknowingly originate in the macabre iconography of Antoine Sublet’s mural at St Hugh’s Charterhouse. The remaining two quatrains of ‘Quid non speremus, Amantes?’ are more circumspect. Fluctuating between degradation and grace appears to result in philosophy. The carnal exigencies which prompted the lyric assert themselves again, not as ends in themselves, but as vehicles of spiritual transcendence. Love is no ‘slave in fleshly bands | Of flesh to flesh’; it may begin in sensual ‘enthral[ment]’, but ultimately (and with echoes of Herbert and Hopkins) ‘springs | Out of [t]his agony of flesh at last’, rising ‘on wings | Soul-centred’. ‘The rule of flesh’ is vulgar, but temporary and preparatory. True ecstasy amounts to an Eleusian emancipation from desire. In the last stanza, the speaker renews his commitment to Amor, irrespective of the personal anguish that must accrue to his acolytes: Then, most High Love, or wreathed with myrtle sprays, Or crownless and forlorn, nor less a star, Thee may I serve and follow, all my days, Whose thorns are sweet as never roses are!

‘Love’ fulfils the promise of the previous stanza and arises (at least to the level of capitalization) deified. In draft, the ecstatic speaker dedicates himself to his ‘most high Lord!’, as Dowson had conceived of Amor in previous lyrics written in homage to Foltinowicz (L, 305). The last line recognizes that this service is masochistic, verging on Christ-like martyrdom, since the lover’s crown is a thorned wreath, his agony a savourable passion. Readers often suppose that ‘Non sum qualis’ juxtaposes Dowson’s chaste adoration of Foltinowicz and his pursuits with a Soho sex worker. It does not. But he did take up something like this comparison in at least two lyric reveries, ‘Ad Manus Puellae’ and ‘Quid non speremus, Amantes?’ The latter is fittingly dedicated to Moore who was, after all, Dowson’s youthful co-experimenter and confidante in his more salacious fleshly adventures (354; cf. 114). The lyric announces the poet’s commitment, not to Foltinowicz per se, but to Amor. He claims henceforth to scorn personal advantage, to enjoy the perverse savour of every affliction meted ³¹ Hassett, Yeats and the Muses, 127; citing Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, 3340. Iseult Gonne frequently appears in Dowsonian terms in Yeats’s verse, as ‘a white | frail bird’ or ‘a most ridiculous little bird | Tore from the clouds’ (Hassett, Yeats and the Muses, 125, 104).

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out in Love’s service, for its own sake. His suit may succeed or fail: Love is its own reward. This is a crucial development in Dowson’s project of delineating the course and mechanism of museological inspiration. Love is appointed the poetic lodestar of his life: an orientational guide and perennial source of illumination. Paradoxically, the muse-poet only comes into his own estate when faced with what Yeats terms ‘purifying discouragement’.³² This dialectic is given free rein in ‘De Amore’. Dowson’s longest published lyric very substantially accords with the climax of ‘Quid non speremus, Amantes?’, so we can date the poems together. It lays out a metaphysic of love and explains why the poet-speaker upholds the cause, now it appears to be lost.³³ It begins: Shall one be sorrowful because of love, Which hath no earthly crown, Which lives and dies unknown? Because no words of his shall ever move Her maiden heart to own Him lord and destined master of her own: Is love so weak a thing as this[?]

The god of love and the love poet are unanimous here, like Pierrot and the actor who interprets and embodies him.³⁴ Love is apostrophized; the speaker is his surrogate. Fealty to Amor seemingly licenses him to speak for the beloved, too: he extends his stern logic of dominion over her, claiming rightful ownership of her ‘maiden heart’ which, in Dowson’s quaint idiom, may mean something like her adolescent longing, rather than her childish affection, and her words, which should dutifully accord with his own. In the context of Dowson’s receding conjugal aspirations, this appeal to proprietary and providential justifications is brazen. Balancing these grandiose claims, the strophe concludes by scoffing at the puerile, petty state the lover has been reduced to. Occasional visitors around this time were apt to comment upon Dowson’s ‘transparently imbecile condition’ (L, 304). Dispelling any doubt that the poem ruminates on Dowson’s own affairs, the second strophe plainly transposes his abortive courtship: Is there no comfort then in love’s defeat? Because he shall defer, For some short span of years all part in her, Submitting to forego The certain peace which happier lovers know; Because he shall be utterly disowned, ³² W. B. Yeats, Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1959), 341; cf. Hassett, 122. ³³ See Ch. 5, Masquerade. ³⁴ See Ch. 5 at n. 28.

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As this spasmodic apostrophe proceeds to its terminal reification, it is easy to forget it coincides with Dowson’s realization that Foltinowicz would not marry him. Despite his patience and amenity, she has not come around to the idea in the least, and Dowson seeks some measure of ‘comfort’ in the cosmic overthrow of his long-cherished aspirations. The third strophe indulges in special pleading to offset impending rejection. The world may yet ‘grow . . . to him a fairer place’ as he passes from the zone of his affection. He steels himself for despondency, and affirms the beloved’s continuance in her accustomed tutelary role as the remotely guiding star of his poetic enterprise.³⁵ The language and thought also overlaps with ‘Quid non speremus, Amantes?’ ensuring that the acolyte of ‘De Amore’ is consoled, as in the companion lyric. He reasons that ‘Love that is love at all | Needs not an earthly coronal’, scornfully remembering his first faltering dedicatory verses. This is a paradoxical position for a poet to be placed in, but one that Dowson had broached earlier in his climacteric adjurations of silence. Dowson drew attention to this structural parallel by placing ‘De Amore’ on the first page of Decorations, after the epigraphical poem, as ‘A Coronal’ had been situated in Verses. It therefore establishes a precarious continuity with the poems on the loss of love in that volume, grounding them retrospectively in the same conception of museological guidance. Dowson struggled to bring his fervent (but strictly redundant) prayer to a satisfactory conclusion. The final strophe asserts that the ultimate endowment of true love is immortality; love alone will ‘save | From the devouring grave’, as its ‘dominion doth out-tyrant death’, when the traditional purveyor of this provision—‘art’—inevitably fails. Dowson offers a Christological warrant for this confidence in the deleted draft lines concluding the poem: Foiled, frustrate and alone, and crucified, Go with me all my way, And let me not blaspheme. (F, loose-leaf )

Echoing the moping self-characterization of line 23, this ending, which would otherwise be anomalous in Dowson’s canon, parallels the close of ‘Quid non speremus, Amantes?’, accentuating the conventional religiosity of his conception of Amor. His ‘mystic passion’ rests, finally, on ‘mystic religion’ (Pater, Appreciations, 214). ³⁵ See Introduction, Decadent Museology. Ch. 19 of Adrian Rome was drafted in late September or October 1893. The Dowson–Moore correspondence is interrupted for two years following the commencement of Ch. 17, around 6 Sept. (L, 291).

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Ironically, Dowson’s long hiatus from verse composition during this ‘reign of reverie’ obscure his growing scepticism about the prospects of effective or meaningful communication, whether in verse or prose. The lacunae opened up by this unspoken crisis allows readers to appreciate, indirectly, that interpersonal conveyance of meaning—as opposed to mere expression—has been central to Dowson’s conception of lyric poetry all along. A complementary understanding of the mechanisms of poetic inspiration, as a kind of mediumship, brings this fundamental alterity into relief, just as his relationship with Foltinowicz became serviceable. As his ‘reign of reverie’ was prolonged into 1894, the hazard of such a conception, that the muse-designate would subsequently withdraw from his ken, seemed increasingly inevitable to Dowson. Foltinowicz indeed withdrew, and ceased to be an approachable subject for sentimental studies or wistful lyrics. Her indifference must have been acutely obvious when Dilemmas was issued in June 1895 carrying a dedication ‘To MISSIE (A. F.)’ but producing no appreciable (or at least no chronicled) effect. The following year, as in 1889, Dowson’s muse-manqué walked right off his page. His few, remaining lyrics pertaining to her are defeated, nostalgic pieces written in sum, codae to an affair that never was.

7 Betwixt the Bounds of Life and Death As his fantastical bond with Foltinowicz unravelled, Dowson endured a series of misfortunes. Even as he proposed marriage in spring 1893, his father’s health was in serious, perhaps terminal, decline, and his mother endured long bouts of illness.¹ His own health faltered that summer, when he suffered his first, full-blown tubercular attack—‘a nasty jar on account of my lung’—in August.² The implications were obvious. Tentatively, Dowson began to confront his own mortality. He consulted doctors; religious and philosophical writings; Byron and Keats. Then he was rocked by his father’s death, not by phthisis but by probable suicide, in August 1894. His mother’s death, also by suicide, followed in January. Annie Dowson hung herself in her bedroom: Dowson discovered her body. He never discussed these calamities. If they figure at all in his published writing, they do so only obliquely. The Freudian adage, that forgetting is often the liveliest form of remembering, is apposite. Dowson’s letters, silent on the events themselves, indicate that an immeasurable havoc was wrought at the core of his being. Like the venerable Doctor Lanyon in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, he tottered under a barrage of paradigm-altering developments.³ Dowson always endured periods of depression.⁴ Alone in London throughout summer 1893, attempting to ‘recruit’ from this first onslaught and advance his matrimonial cause, he fell into ‘one of [his] periodic melancholies or spleens . . . when I am bad company for myself & intolerable to my friends’ (L, 288, 292). The poem ‘Spleen’, dedicated to Symons, best evokes these languorous paralyses, although it was probably written earlier, concerning ‘Lena’.⁵ His first, unequivocal intimation of his own mortality scared Dowson, and immediately checked his literary aspirations. He fell into a ‘prolonged epistolary paralysis . . . not even attempt[ing] to write any longer, not even verses’ (286). Ch. 18 of Adrian Rome, composed that autumn, describes this impasse. Afflicted by an ‘enforced loneliness’, the protagonist suddenly remembers ‘his work—his neglected, forgotten work . . . the ¹ L, 261; Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent (London: Tauris, 2000), 62. ² L, 289; cf. 281, 282, 283, 284, 288–9, and Mark Longaker, Ernest Dowson (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), 225. ³ In Victor Plarr’s estimation, these events ‘shook him to the roots of his being’ (Ernest Dowson 1888–1897: Reminiscences, Unpublished Letters and Marginalia (London: Elkin Mathews, 1914), 102. ⁴ See L, 60, 61, 149, 192, 200. ⁵ See Ch. 1, An Old Passion.

Ernest Dowson. Robert Stark, Oxford University Press. © Robert Stark (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192884763.003.0008

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perpetual need of artistic creation, which, however intermittent, was, after all, the sharpest stimulus of his life, for ever restlessly urging him’ (270). He then suffers a crisis of confidence: He dropped his useless pen with a gesture of impotence . . . It seemed to him, just then, that he had reached the end of his tether, of his facility, his genius, his talent—call it what you will; of that, nothing seemed left but a memory, and he mourned for it, and all its unfulfilled promise, as for a dead child. He had been patient, had chosen his season, and built his altar, but for all his waiting the fire from heaven had not descended; his hieratic studiousness had brought forth no inspiration; and nothing seemed left but to beat a spleenful retreat, demolishing the unachieved, unsanctified pile. And he abandoned himself to the depression of the hour, to the tide of self-pity which surged over him. (271–2)

This apparent failure of his literary talent also frightened Dowson.⁶ His retrospective description—it continues with a survey of the ‘tangible result of his labour, in work, not quite imperfect, by no means unappreciated’—suggests that, at twentysix years old, Dowson was taking stock, assessing his total accomplishment (272). He began to see his career in the past tense. His remaining work increasingly accedes to the task of ‘that pitiable summing-up of experience’ which ensues (272). Signing-off one contemporaneous letter to Plarr, Dowson cites Byron: ‘If I do not speak to you of my own affairs, it is not from want of confidence, but to spare you and myself. My day is over—what then?—I have had it. To be sure I have shortened it’ (L, 286). His fate appointed, Dowson felt culpable. Plarr agreed: ‘my poor friend was doomed to die of phthisis . . . already in 1894 it seemed to have got him in its clutches’; he cited Dowson’s lack of self-care, itinerancy, poor diet, and irregular hours as ‘contributory causes of his final malady’ (101). Dowson was convinced, however, that his thwarted passion for Foltinowicz was the true source of his problems. ‘The Garden of Shadow’, included in Dowson’s submission for The Second Book of the Rhymers Club on 20 August 1893, is the first lyric to respond to this manifold crisis (L, 287). Transpiring within the Foltinowiczes’ ‘garden’s close’, a bounded yard on their Sherwood Street premises, it recalls ‘Villanelle of Marguerites’ and Dowson’s marriage proposal. Now, the garden ‘Is grown a wilderness, where none shall find | One strayed, last petal of one last year’s rose.’ Time and circumstance have blasted those idle games of passionate divination. The title imposes a bleak suggestion, borrowed from Psalm 23, that the shadow of death has blighted the Edenic scene of yore. Despair overcomes the speaker: ‘O bright, bright hair! O ⁶ Rome’s gauche simile may explain Dowson’s anomalous lyrics about the purported death of a child. For instance, ‘The Dead Child’, apparently composed following his affair with ‘Lena’, may commemorate the failure of his inspiration, and the demise of the muse function.

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mouth like a ripe fruit! | Can famine be so nigh to harvesting?’ Nowhere else in his canon does Dowson allow such a sensual image of Foltinowicz to stand. The exception is mitigated by the irony of having waited so long for satisfaction. Dumbfounded, he reverts (via Swinburne’s ‘The Garden of Proserpine’, ll. 6–7) to the parabolic imagery of his failed ‘experiment’, before introducing a new symbol of the impasse to which he has been brought: ‘Love, that was songful, with a broken lute | In grass of graveyards goeth murmuring’. Unable to contemplate lyric composition, Dowson is reduced to a morbid stupor, his Pierrot thrust into bedlam. In the last stanza, he wryly appreciates that the beloved’s garden will ‘change and grow with spring’, while he himself will have passed out of the cycle of life and will take no further ‘part in seed-time nor in harvesting’. The whole course of his wooing, and the lyric career fashioned upon it, is consigned to oblivion.

The True Face of Death Not even Verlaine’s visit to London could restore Dowson to ebullience. Rather, it had the opposite effect, since ‘Verlaine was in poor health, suffering from rheumatism exacerbated by alcoholism and a general disregard for his own well-being’ when he arrived on the 20th of November 1893.⁷ Dowson makes scant mention of his first encounter with his favourite living poet (see L, 299, 302). He was, however, struck by an alarming resemblance, and later observed that, ‘as no one is better aware than myself, I have always had, alas! too much of that “swift, disastrous & suicidal energy” which destroyed our dear & incomparable Verlaine’.⁸ As he staggered under the weight of his own mortality, Decadent platitudes about the supposed fate of the poète maudit offered a comprehensible narrative about his own life and destiny, under scarcely fathomable circumstances. Myth and reality began to converge. Meeting Verlaine also coincided with a period of deeper engagement with French literature. Dowson took on his first major translation project for Smithers’ Lutetian Society, Zola’s La Terre, but found the work hard going and uncongenial.⁹ It nevertheless refocused a dormant ambition to write about the extreme unction portion of Le Rêve, which he had singled out in 1889. The result is not the ‘æsthetic’ poem Dowson then envisioned, but a confessional lyric in his established Catholic ⁷ Matthew Creasy, ‘“Rather a Delicate Subject”: Verlaine, France and British Decadence’, Decadence: A Literary History, edited by Alex Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 66. ⁸ L, 371–2; quoting Arthur Symons, ‘A Literary Causerie: On a Book of Verses’, Savoy 4 (Aug. 1896): 93. ⁹ See L, 260, 304. Vincent O’Sullivan contends that ‘A s Dowson became unwilling or unable to produce original work, Smithers put him on translations. . . . some of Dowson’s friends took objection to that’ (Aspects of Wilde [New York: Holt, 1936], 119).

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mode. A draft appears in the same letter mentioning his dinner engagement with Verlaine. It begins: Upon the lips, the hands, the feet, On all the passages of sense, The annealing oil is spread with sweet Renewal of lost innocence. The roving feet that ran so fast To meet desire are soothly sealed: The eyes that were so often cast On vanity, are touched and healed. (299)

Another impetus for this passage is Flaubert’s description of the administration of the last rites to Emma Bovary, of which, Wheatley establishes, Dowson’s ‘second stanza is practically a translation’.¹⁰ The mortality pending in the lyric is not some impalpable literary abstraction, however, and it is not Joseph Foltinowicz’s, as Adams suggests, but Dowson’s own (Madder Music, 76). If he now re-read Madame Bovary, he must have done so in horror. With heaving lungs; protruding tongue; eyes that, ‘as they rolled, grew paler, like the two globes of a lamp that is going out’; and ‘death-rattle’, Emma’s finale will alarm the halest of readers, and Dowson was reeling from the first assault of an incurable pulmonary disease.¹¹ Such details are wholly absent from ‘Extreme Unction’, which posits a serene quietus in death, concentrating, almost in antithesis, upon a conjectured release ‘from troublous sights and sounds’, and a ‘sweet | Renewal’ of the spirit, consistent with the baptismal symbolism of viaticum.¹² Emma Bovary had presumed that death would come to her thus. Glimpsing the priest’s violet stole, ‘she was doubtless reminded, in this moment of sudden serenity, of the lost bliss of her first mystical flights, mingling with the visions of eternal beatitude that were beginning’ (256). Instead, she is made to suffer acutely. Dowson’s unusual gerund, ´ ‘annealing’—from the Old English ælan, to set on fire or enflame, with an artisanal sense, derived from the baking of tiles, implying the encaustic fusion of minerals— retains the tenor of Flaubert’s original (‘anneal, v’.). Bovary is even described as ‘a galvanized corpse’ who must ‘blend her sufferings with those of Jesus Christ’ (257, 256; emphasis added). Dowson anticipated an ecstatic demise, but trusted that sincere belief and ritual would temper it. His figure recalls the ‘strange fire’ which ¹⁰ Katherine Wheatley, ‘Ernest Dowson’s Extreme Unction’, Modern Language Notes 38.5 (May 1923): 315. ¹¹ Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, translated by Eleanor Marx Aveling and Paul de Man, edited by Margaret Cohen (New York: Norton, 2005), 257. ¹² Viaticum ‘is the renewal of the baptismal profession of faith . . . a renewal and fulfilment of initiation into the Christian mysteries’ (J. M. Donohue, ‘Viaticum’, NCE 14: 471).

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‘assay[s]’ his Carthusian monks, bringing them ‘into the way of peace’ (D, 6). ‘Atoning’, preferred for the canonical text, dissolves this searing, visionary alchemy, but is doctrinally correct, as Johnson, who praised the lyric and to whom it is therefore dedicated, could best advise.¹³ Dowson’s draft also retains Flaubert’s contrapasso, whereby the bodily means of Emma’s destruction—her ‘roving feet’, emblematic of her shuttling involvements—are consecrated at last (L, 299). As well as signalling its awareness of Bovary’s ignominious demise, ‘Extreme Unction’ invokes Marius Aurelius’ more dignified passing. In his earlier comments to Moore, Dowson had lauded the scene from La Rêve as ‘Zola at his best’, and noted that ‘he reminds me—or rather this episode reminds me . . . of Pater—a strange conjunction but it is so. . . . The purifying of the separate orifices of sensation with the consecrated oils strikes me as an excessively fine notion . . . the most fitting exit for the epicurean’ (L, 21). The last rites have sensual applications and epistemological implications in Pater’s novel. We read that ‘Gentle fingers had applied to hands and feet, to all those old passage-ways of the senses, through which the world had come and gone for him, now so dim and unobstructed, a medicinable oil.’¹⁴ Dowson’s lyric likewise probes the limits of the sensorium. The speaker feels that the ‘world had come and gone for him’, too, and wonders if he is destined to ‘retrace his life’ in extremis (Marius, 2: 224; L, 300). The allusion is more pronounced in draft. Marius tries to fix his mind . . . on all the persons he had loved in life—on his love for them, dead or living, grateful for his love or not, rather than on theirs for him—letting their images pass away again, or rest with him, as they would. In the bare sense of having loved he seemed to find, even amid this foundering of the ship, that on which his soul might ‘assuredly rest and depend.’ One after another, he suffered those faces and voices to come and go, as in some mechanical exercise, as he might have repeated all the verses he knew by heart, or like the telling of beads one by one. (2: 223)

This last phrase had haunted Dowson since ‘Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration’, and he alludes to it again in ‘In a Breton Cemetery’. Going over his literary remains, line-by-line, Dowson’s late lyrics will attempt this inventory. The intertextual triangulations of ‘Extreme Unction’ weigh two very different end-of-life scenarios, then, searching ‘through shadows’ for ‘the true face of death’. Dowson draughts from tradition to make sense of the future, in modernist fashion. The poem also signals a ¹³ L, 299. Originally ‘a sacrament of passage’, viaticum became ‘a penitential rite that emphasised the forgiveness of sins, deliverance from pain and punishment after death, and the need for protection against the enemy’ (NCE, 14: 470). ¹⁴ Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 2: 224.

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postural change in lyrical method, which becomes more overtly retrospective and self-similar henceforth, tending already towards a terminal style. Under the burden of its decádent gatherings, ‘Extreme Unction’ becomes overawed and ecstatic: Vials of mercy! Sacring oils! I know not where nor when I come, Nor through what wanderings and toils, To crave of you Viaticum.

The speaker anticipates need of some palliative at last. Morphia and soothing unguent are most welcome, but viaticum—holy communion taken during a final mass—is what he truly ‘crave[s]’.¹⁵ He understands the sacrament in etymological terms, as ‘provision for a journey’ (‘viaticum, n’.). The Eucharist is ‘food for the passage through death to eternal life . . . as a meal, one which prepares all who take part in it for the heavenly banquet’ (‘Viaticum’, NCE, 14: 470, 471). Exiled to ‘wanderings and toil’, Dowson looked forward to the only possible end to his wayfaring, in heavenly communion. He does not expect Marius’ serenity, but hopes at least to ‘see | Through shadows, the true face of death’. The lyric concludes with this tentative, transcendental expectation: Yet, when the walls of flesh grow weak, In such an hour, it may well be, Through mist and darkness, light will break, And each anointed sense will see.

Its certainty gathering in the internal rhymes of ‘wall’, ‘well’, and ‘will’, and in the choice terminal rhymes, the final stanza moves insensibly from hypothesis to affirmation. Clearly, Dowson is cultivating that ‘meditatio mortis, ever facing towards the act of final detachment’, which Pater recommends (Marius, 2: 209). The aptest epigraph of the epicurean, both agree, is an affirmation of tentative faith, of the possibility of redemption, for moribund sinners like themselves. Dowson writes assuredly, while honestly confessing the fears and doubts which beset him.¹⁶

Amor Longa, Vitae Brevis Dowson had already composed several valedictions when he wrote his only lyric of that name on 13 December 1893. Unlike earlier compositions, it concerns a ¹⁵ Francis Donne holds that ‘what peace might be his’ at the end of his life ‘would be the peace of morphia’ (Savoy 4, 69). ¹⁶ Cf. Joseph W. Mahoney, Fin de Siècle Catholics (unpublished PhD thesis, Pennsylvania State University, 1976), 231.

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final parting, to which the speaker is wholly resigned.¹⁷ No occasion for divorce is specified, and neither lover has instigated it. Rather, the emphasis falls upon the tolerance with which severance must be accepted: If we must part, Then let it be like this; Not heart on heart, Nor with the useless anguish of a kiss: But touch mine hand and say: ‘Until to-morrow or some other day, If we must part.’

Opening and closing the stanza, the repeated line gives the whole deliberation an extemporizing, contingent quality; vagueness underscores the provisional nature of any accommodation. The speaker’s only stipulation is that the separation should be muted. He bids his addressee to recite the lines in italics, schooling her to accept, and belittle, his departure. A poignant dramatic situation is concentrated in the small estate of the lyric, charging it with intensity. In the second stanza, the speaker reverts to the silent trystings of ‘O mors!’ Now, however, auditor and reader are permitted to listen in to the voice of silence itself: Words are so weak When love hath been so strong: Let silence speak: ‘Life is a little while, and love is long; A time to sow and reap, And after harvest a long time to sleep, But words are weak.’

‘Silence’ aptly insists that every compact of the heart is undone, at last, in ‘sleep’, but that ‘love’ itself outlasts human ‘life’. Dowson does not subscribe to the traditional conceit, that the words of the muse-poet confer immortality, contending instead that silence is the fitter, more poetic, tribute. True love subdues the futile urge to write, and thrives in a rarer atmosphere than words. The occasion of this sombre valediction is stated more nakedly in draft. An abandoned revision of the first stanza trials ‘Because I have no morrow | I must depart’ (F, 76). In the second stanza, several variants of the penultimate line hew closer to the underlying biographical circumstances: ‘after harvest God’s good time to sleep’ inflects the poem with complaisant orthodoxy; ‘failing harvest’ establishes a concern that Dowson’s personal and literary designs may never come to fruition; ¹⁷ See Ch. 4, Silent Entreatment.

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‘if we reap not, a long time to sleep’ amplifies this contingency.¹⁸ Once, this biblical simile was Dowson’s standard index of poetic justice, but death has short-circuited the conceit. The grave looms whether or not the lover attains their desire, or the poet spins their verse. The fluctuation of long and short lines expresses this irony. The serial colons fill this lyric with attendant pauses, landing each succeeding thought like runway lights guiding aircraft in a storm. Such prosodic effects incline to the theme, that ‘words’—as distinct from silent colloquy—‘are weak’.¹⁹ Dowson has become a ‘word be-mocker’; he increasingly rejects Yeats’s inaugural lyric thesis that ‘words alone are certain good’.²⁰ Silence, which punctuates and formally demarcates every utterance, is the true medium of the lyric; annihilation and the void are the genuine custodians of posterity. ‘A Valediction’ therefore presents the doomed lover’s riposte to the ars longa, vita brevis motif, memorably formulated by Chaucer: ‘The Lyf so short, the craft so long to Lerne’.²¹ Dowson died at just thirty-two, but intercepted his own precarious posterity four years earlier by choosing obdurate silence and abandoning his craft. He was inclining to this lyrical desertion as early as 1894. Dowson wrote little verse during the first part of the year, and few letters survive from this time. His few extant lyrics suggest that Love and Death became indissociable considerations. With ‘Amantium Irae’ and ‘Impenitentia Ultima’, which appear between ‘Extreme Unction’ and ‘A Valediction’ in Verses, Dowson assembled the most unremittingly morbid portion of his canon, underwriting the myth of the moribund poète maudit. The former, dated 15 March 1894 in draft and titled ‘Here and Now’, contends that the speaker and beloved may ‘once more come together’ to ‘possess [their] souls at last’, but only in some dubious afterlife, when ‘these, our days, are done’ (SS, 22v). ‘Nevermore’, in other words: Poe’s macabre watchword extends the barren domain of ‘The Garden of Shadow’ unto their appointed ‘place of shadows’. Tempting as thoughts of shared futurity are, the lovers must confine their hopes and expectations to the present; nostalgia leads only to ‘vain . . . regret’. Mortality curtails these dilatory tendencies. ‘Here and Now’, just two things matter: ‘The rose of love, ungathered[,] | The bay, we have not won’ (SS, 22v). The poem thus reckons squarely with romantic disappointment and poetic failure. The first line recalls an image long associated with Dowson’s proposal—‘The little Breton wild flower! how cruel it seemed to gather her!’—as well as his signature figuration of the poet’s task (Dil., 46). In draft, ‘the myrtle, never won’, restricts the poem to the loss of love, saying nothing about ¹⁸ ‘If we must part’, J. Harlin O’Connell Collection, New York Public Library; SS, 22; W, 262 n. ¹⁹ On Dowson’s temporal punctuation and quantitative caesural effects, see Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, ‘Sight and Sound in the Poetic World of Ernest Dowson’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 60.4 (Mar. 2006): 498–507. ²⁰ W. B. Yeats, ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’, The Poems, edited by Daniel Albright (London: Everyman, 1992), 33. ²¹ Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Parliament of Fowls’, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, edited by Larry D. Benson and F. N. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 385.

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poetic recognition (SS, 22v). The phrase recalls Dowson’s rationale for proposing marriage, to obtain ‘something which promised a good deal, which I have never had’ (L, 221). The Terentian title, signifying ‘lovers’ quarrels’, does not feature in holograph and may have been added to offset the autobiographical aspects of the lyric. The change in emphasis reflects Dowson’s growing exasperation with Foltinowicz. The speaker is willing to ‘forgive the past’, but only reveals what grieves him towards the end of the poem. Since death will cancel their relations, it becomes imperative that the lovers shun ‘pride’ in their present dealings, lest they are thwarted in the present as they have been disappointed in the past. The last stanza is most admonishing, and concludes with a silly ultimatum: ‘Doff sorry pride for pardon, | Or ever love go by’. The lovers are enjoined to cast off ‘pride’ in salutation to ‘love’, as though waiving a cap or top hat. This pantomimicry offsets the morose circumstances, but risks triviality, falseness, and condescension, especially when the rest of Terence’s line—that ‘lovers’ quarrels make their love stronger’—is borne in mind (CP, 241 n). The speaker is plainly riled by some perceived haughtiness, stubbornness, or fastidiousness in his interlocutor, a failing that he also recognizes in himself. ‘Our pride’, as he owns it, might ‘serve at last’ to unite the couple; it may even be proper to their gallant fashion of Amor. But pride is also the first and gravest of the seven deadly sins. To someone who suspects they are terminally ill, it must seem particularly corrosive, futile, and ironic. Dowson was always alert to what he termed vanity; when he became despondent about his future, pride irked him more especially, so he studied it. Upon completion, Dowson thought ‘The Eyes of Pride’ his most satisfactory short story to date (L, 319). Set in Piccadilly, it glances back to where a serially riven couple first fell in love: Ploumariel, no longer a bucolic backdrop, has become oversaturated with climacteric heft. Richard Seefang and Rosalind Lingard air their mutual grievances from the outset: ‘You are as you are,’ he said deliberately; ‘proud, capricious, not very sweet of temper, and—I suspect——’ Her eyes challenged him, he completed his phrase: ‘A bit of a flirt!’ ‘And yet you——’ ‘And yet I love you; good God! What am I myself ?’ She glanced at him with a sort of mocking tenderness. ‘You are very proud,’ she said; ‘capricious, I don’t know; but stubborn and headstrong; I think you can be very cruel, and I am sure you have been very wicked.’ ‘And yet?——’ (Savoy 1, 54–55)

Reading biographically, Dowson considered Foltinowicz to be disdainful, tetchy, and sour. When faced with the same perceived vice, Adrian Rome acknowledges ‘half admiration, half repulsion, an odd desire to subjugate

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[Marion Brabant] . . . to abase her pride, which at times clashed stridently with his own’.²² Dowson’s fiction bluntly depicts the disputatious disentangling of his relations with Foltinowicz, not only their numinous beginnings. That Foltinowicz was also flirtatious, a point made repeatedly in the story, has received some corroboration, notably from John Gray.²³ For his part, Dowson now recognized his suit was obstinate and reckless; that he was capable of great callousness; he had, as the story euphemistically admits, ‘lived as other men’, which became glaringly obvious, whether or not Foltinowicz was ‘exacting, jealous of his past life’ (Savoy 1, 55, 56). The relationship was vexed on each side by questions of character and sexual conduct.²⁴ Upon sober inspection, Both had known speedily how it must end. He was impatient, tyrannical; she, capricious and utterly a woman; their pride was a great Juggernaut, beneath whose car they threw, one by one, their dearest hopes, their happiness and all that they cared most for in life. (55)

The étude is, in sum, a cautionary tale, written to forestall the Karenina-like wreckage of their relationship. By the time it appeared in January 1896, dedicated ‘To A. F.’, Dowson was in France; Foltinowicz was already involved with Augustus Noelte (51). Dowson was out of sympathy and short of options. ‘The Eyes of Pride’ includes an astonishing exchange between Rosalind and Seefang that hints at the ultimate source of his frustrations: When she looked up, the sun, moving westwards, lit up the valley opposite them, illuminating the white stones of a village cemetery. Her eyes rested upon it. Presently she said: ‘Oh, my dear, let us be kind to each other, bear and forebear . . . . That’s the end of it all.’ For a moment he was silent; then he leant over and kissed her hair. ‘Rosalind, my darling, I wish we were dead together, you and I, lying there quietly, out of the worry of things.’ It was a fantastic utterance, an odd and ominous mood to interrupt their foolish talk of plighted lovers; it never recurred. But just now it came back to him like an intuition. It is so much easier to die for the woman you love than to live with her. (55) ²² AR, 162. The novel implies that Dowson’s proposal to Foltinowicz may have been the source of these tensions: ‘If pride had held him silent afterwards, it was pride no less which had dictated Sylvia’s answer: and when friends or lovers withdraw themselves to separate pinnacles, estrangement follows as a matter of course’ (109). ²³ See Savoy 1, 55–6; Adams, 60. ²⁴ Longaker records that ‘some of Dowson’s acquaintances . . . reported that [Foltinowicz’s] innocence was sullied long before he lost her’ (S, 122 n). Adams takes the anonymous source to be Moore (151).

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If this ‘fantastic utterance’ has a biographical basis, Dowson clearly found it blameworthy and embarrassing. From one point of view, Seefang is only repeating the familiar Dowsonian refrain that death alone offers respite from human troubles. This basic pessimism is part of what Snodgrass calls ‘Dowson’s gloomy Schopenhauerian vision’, in which ‘the corroding decay of egoistic desire is total and inescapable’: only death permits escape from the original corruption of desire.²⁵ On the other hand, Dowson knew that his increasingly morbid preoccupations were unseemly and off-putting. It is one thing for Seefang to tempt suicide, but quite another for him to hanker for the decease of the lover who spurns him. The ‘ominous mood’ that succeeds his macabre proclamation demonstrates its actual menace, and the madness of the suicide pact he, in effect, proposes. Seefang is most ruthlessly determined to possess Rosalind at just the moment she scorns to be acquired. He reacts to her withdrawal of consent desperately, vehemently, appearing to set aside his own mortal distress but actually appealing to it in a last-ditch effort to prevail upon her sympathy, so that we see his fangs nakedly exhibited and cynically exposed. Later, Dowson’s identification of Foltinowicz with the poems of Verses—‘To you, who are my verses’, he writes—shows an analogous determination to possess her in final, symbolic terms, to exhibit his possession of her, just as she refuses him (V, ix). Seefang’s desperate, femicidal wish is not unique in Dowson’s canon. Notable instances occur in ‘The Dead Child’, ‘Yvonne of Brittany’, ‘A Requiem’, ‘The Statute of Limitations’, and ‘A Case of Conscience’. When Sebastian Murch is reminded that he is married, he consoles himself that the ‘infamous woman’ who has ‘disgraced [his] past . . . may be actually dead’ (Dil., 43). Michael Garth speculates about ‘the girl that I loved: it’s as if she had died. Yes, she is dead, as dead as Helen: and I have not the consolation of knowing where they have laid her’, he says (136). Not content treating his erstwhile lover ‘as if she had died’, Garth insist she is actually dead. The conceit recurs throughout Dowson’s canon; the beloved, or Love itself, is imaginatively interred, ritually sacrificed, killed off, transformed into a corpse-bride. Garth’s convenient simplification recalls Hélène of the rondeaux— ‘Lena’ that is, ‘the girl [Dowson had] loved’ in 1889—as much as his ostensible object of comparison, Helen of Troy (136). The femicidal impulse that courses throughout Dowson writing is a habitual aspect of his misogyny, and a collateral result of his museology. He once routinely expressed the same annihilatory fantasy in his correspondence: it is preliminary to his attitude towards women, and arises from his inability to do with them as he pleases. In one of his earliest letters, he protests that ‘I wish women had never been invented’ and two months later grumbles: ‘What a charming world it would be if they did not exist’ (L, 18, 22). These remarks suggest that more is at stake than the motif ’s gothic aptness, ²⁵ Chris Snodgrass, ‘Aesthetic Memory’s Cul-de-sac: The Art of Ernest Dowson’, English Literature in Translation, 1880–1920 35.1 (1992): 29, 45–6.

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or ‘Dowson’s gloomy Schopenhauerian vision’ (Snodgrass, 29). Orrells complains of ‘the necrophilia at the heart of male-authored nineteenth-century aesthetics’, and Dowson’s canon helps normalize and extend the trope.²⁶ The notion of dying ‘for the woman you love’, when it became impossible to live with her, has become indispensable to the posthumous ‘Dowson Legend’, but it was undoubtedly Dowson’s own view about his personal and artistic destiny. He had been searching for such an adjunct to his literary talent, on the lookout for such a martyrdom, his whole career.

Exile His father’s suspected suicide on 15 August 1894 plunged Dowson into grief. Various duties now fell to him: he temporized, excusing himself from all engagements. It even disrupted plans to issue his stories with the Bodley Head (L, 308). His reverie of a future life with Foltinowicz stalled and receded, revealing itself to have been an idle fantasy all along, and Dowson’s creative interests waned.²⁷ He wrote no new verse until the end of the following year; completed just one story in that time; and only five letters have survived from the course of the year. Dowson was in regular contact with a doctor throughout this period, and his hiatus from writing may have been deliberate and advised, as was Keats’s.²⁸ Then, six months after his father’s decease, Dowson’s mother killed herself. He abandoned his makeshift home at Bridge Dock in the summer of 1895, finally cutting loose from the family’s moribund commercial enterprise. In a letter from November 1894, Dowson wonders if he met Symons the previous night ‘in a state of most extreme intoxication’ or dreamt that he did.²⁹ ‘I am hovering between “Blind Alleys” and “Sentimental Dilemmas” as a title for my stories’ he informs his phantom addressee: both prospective titles express his situation (L, 309). Acknowledging proof the following April, he signs another letter with Elkin Mathews’ name, which he misspells, noting only that The order of the stories will do very well as they are. It would certainly be not worth while changing them now. Would you please let me have a proof of the dedication, as I should like to see the size of the type used etc. (309) ²⁶ Daniel Orrells, ‘Nineteenth-Century Decadence and Neoclassical Aesthetics: Androgyny, Ambiguity and Collecting Culture’, Decadence: A Literary History, edited by Alex Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 40. ²⁷ See Ch. 6, Things Fall Apart. ²⁸ See L, 308 n, and Ch. 4 at n. 44. ²⁹ Unpublished letter to Symons, 15 Nov. 1894, Ernest Dowson Collection, Princeton University Library; redacted at L, 309.

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Dowson was painstaking about arranging his work: the echoes and adjacencies inculcated in formal sequence are among the most reliable, salient, and distinctive features of his writing. This letter signals not that he discountenanced these aspects, but that he was increasingly anxious about the discursive arena in which their meaning must be asserted and read (notwithstanding his glaring epistolary mistake). By convention, design features concerning a dedication page are subject to an author’s approval, whereas those pertaining to the rest of the book are the publisher’s sole prerogative. Writing was a way of being in the world for Dowson. His dedications demand recognition of the interpersonal relationships they memorialize. Counteracting this socialized view of authorship, Dowson’s exalted notion of an embodied, adolescent muse did not lastingly channel inspirational alterity, or genuinely open his writing up to new perspectives: it backed him, Pierrot-like, into an imaginative cul-de-sac, as he began to realize. Critics assume ‘something went badly wrong in “Poland”’ in autumn 1895; ‘that Adelaide declared firmly that she would not marry’ Dowson (L, 265; cf. Adams, 110). His correspondence with her over the next months, though not extant, was apparently regular, and Dowson gives no indication of a rupture. Instead, his medical prognosis may have intercepted his literary and romantic projects. Dowson went abruptly to Belgium, then Paris, and on to Pont-Aven, causing consternation among his friends. He referred to this as an ‘exile’, understood in etymological and poetic terms, implying a period of ruin and devastation, destitution and destruction, waste and overthrow (‘exile, n., sense 1’). To be exiled is to be ravaged and driven out. Dowson is ‘tempest-tossed, and driven from pillar to post’, as one lyric contends (D, 19). Symons amplified Dowson’s notion, alluding to ‘the shipwrecked quietude of a sort of self-exile . . . somewhere on a remote foreign sea-coast’ in his legendizing review of Verses (Savoy 4, 93). Dowson ‘contemplate[d] an exile of years’ and spoke of his intentions to remain in France in the medium to long term (L, 316, 318; cf. 342–3). All the while, he was extremely and persistently lonely, hungry for newspapers, weekly reviews, magazines of any sort, even for London gossip (322, 335, 349). Dowson’s justifications for removing to and continuing in France often read like public relations bulletins. He is keen to disabuse friends of the impression he has suffered some grievous calamity. Thus: You mustn’t imagine . . . that my ‘crisis’ was sentimental. God forbid. I have just answered my damigella’s last letter and we are on the most affectionate terms—at least I think so—that we have been on for years. You must go and see her when you are in London—please do that, and speak of me as freely as you like, only do not speak of my exile as being so prolonged as I presume it will be. I always write to her with the intention of returning in a month or two—and so I may—for a fortnight! but I doubt if ever I shall make my home in England again. . . . I have taken a great dislike to London. I really came away on a sort of mad impulse—which I have

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not since regretted—because I was financially broke . . . somewhat sensationally I admit, but not in the state of desperation which I believe is rumoured about me. (320)

Purporting to set the record straight, this dispatch does not deny that something was seriously amiss, only that the cause was ‘sentimental’. Dowson objects to Marmaduke Langdale’s characterization of having ‘created a sort of mist of trouble, vague as ghosts in a dream, [that] forms a sort of halo of sorrow . . . and excites the tears and sympathy of those who live and admire [him] from afar’, but this is a fair impression (320). His lyrics had begun to feature images of Christ-like martyrdom, and he would shortly authorize Symons’ dilapidated legend. Dowson’s special pleading, his reticence about taking off upon a ‘mad impulse’, notwithstanding his real financial worry, demonstrate his sensitivity about being characterized as a moribund cliché. The caricature alarmed him because it came very near the truth. This trepidancy might also explain Dowson’s reluctance to divulge his true intentions to Foltinowicz. She expected his return, evidently; he has some private reason for not going back. Dowson also alludes to ‘the extreme truth which perhaps it is not yet seasonable to say’ in this letter (320). He may simply mean his disinclination to return to London, but he employs the terminal language of ‘Extreme Unction’ to imply the underlying reason for remaining abroad. He had already confided his sense of ‘doing certain things for the last time’ to Smith (303). A further tubercular episode, in January 1896, caused him to fret over his imminent ‘journey to Pontaven, which [he] begin[s] to think will be [his] last journey’ (340). He notified Conal O’Riordan that he wished to appoint him, with Smithers, as literary executor (341). But Dowson was simply unwilling to tell Foltinowicz that he thought he was dying. His year of ‘exile’ is most readily explained by an innocuous remark in the same letter: ‘I have been told particularly that my one chance depends on my ability to avoid any strong emotion or excitement’ (340). Dowson had presumably obtained medical advice, and been given but a single chance of recovery. He worried that disputes over his patrimony were depriving him of ‘any chance that remains to [him] of getting cured’ (340). But to truly avoid grievous emotional strain Dowson would have had to remove himself from ‘Poland’ and from London. He knew this well from his father’s writing and example, and from that of Keats moreover, whose doctors had discouraged him from seeing Fanny Brawne or writing verse, as Dowson knew from Joseph Severn directly.³⁰ Dowson, who had been consulting a physician since his father’s death and his own first tubercular attack, probably received a reliable diagnosis in the summer of 1895, kept it quiet, and determined to go to France at the first opportunity (see L, 308). A convenient pretext presented itself when Charles Conder prevailed upon Smithers to finance a trip to Europe ³⁰ See Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 637, 640.

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to illustrate La Fille aux Yeux d’Or, and Dowson followed suit.³¹ As he wrote to Jepson from Paris, ‘although one never quite escapes from the “horror of life” one avoids it better here’ (319). Dowson’s letters from France hardly mention Foltinowicz at all. ‘Impenitentia Ultima’ proves to be the exception to a general moratorium, and the title suggests that love was a proscribed theme. Symons took the poem for the first number of The Savoy in early December, so it was likely composed in November 1895. A sardonic last will and testament, the lyric flaunts Dowson’s reckless desire to ‘cast aside the veil of dolorous years’ just once, and expire in Foltinowicz’s arms: Her pitiful hands should calm, and her hair stream down and blind me, Out of the sight of night, and out of the reach of fear, And her eyes should be my light, whilst the sun went out behind me, And the viols in her voice be the last sound in mine ear.

Electing thus to die, the reprobate poet unrepentantly embraces the fatal passion which has brought him to his end. Dowson had written in this vein before, but recognition of his malady renders this evocation of his own death more trenchant, especially in draft: For, Lord, I was free of all Thy flowers, and I chose the world’s sad roses, And that is why I must eat my bread in bitterness and sweat; But at Thy terrible Judgement Seat, when this my sad life closes, I am ready to reap whereof I sowed, and pay my righteous debt.³²

On this account, his devotion to Foltinowicz directly results in exile, privation, and death; we gather all too clearly what an abject existence he somehow eked out at 214 Rue Saint-Jacques. This fever is not divinely inspired, nor even the result of unruly romantic commitments, but is symptomatic, rather, of Dowson’s frequent alcoholic hangovers. He often reported being too ‘seedy’ to do anything but ‘lie in bed’ and drink milk.³³ It follows that his stay in France was not curative, but preventative. By avoiding all mention of Foltinowicz, he still hoped to recover sufficiently to marry her eventually (L, 349). From Dowson’s many invocations of isolation, loneliness, and depression, from his hankering after news and gossip, we may further infer that Dowson’s ‘exile’ was an enforced obligation and hardship, and that he was sorely conscious of all ³¹ James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 248–9. ³² Savoy 1, 131; cf. F, 30–1, 34; V, 47–8, 53. ³³ L, 325, cf. 308, 328, 330, 339, 340, 353, 360 passim.

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he was missing out on. His sense of sacrifice would have been most acute when Verses finally appeared—dedicated to Foltinowicz in pledge of his continuing troth during this enforced absence, like ‘all [his] work’—and he was not in London to witness the occasion, or gauge her reaction.³⁴ Such injustices lead to peevishness in ‘Impenitentia Ultima’, in response to the caprice of a deity whose ‘anger’ will shortly ‘cleave [the speaker] through as a child cuts down a flower’. The figure transforms the carefree child of ‘Villanelle of Marguerites’ into a deathly reaper; Foltinowicz has become, by extension, an incipient femme fatale, the bright and dark angel of the poet’s destruction. While he remained in Paris, Dowson endured ‘frightful’ and ‘extreme moments of depression’, in which he ‘wallow[ed] constantly in blackest sloughs of despond’ (L, 336, 328, 329). Serious tubercular episodes—‘my specific disease which increases by leaps & starts’—gripped him in November and January (L, 321; cf. 313, 339, 340). Dowson was challenged by penury for the first time in his life, and obliged to requisition small loans from his friends, trying them also. Debt dulls and sadly overwhelms his spirited correspondence after 1896. In one letter he sketches (and costs) a poet’s repast which features: 1. Bread [5c]. 2. Cheese [Brie, 20c] 3. Tooth-Glass 4. ½ Bot. [red wine, 50c] 5. Various literary effects. (326; interpolated from 325)

Although dining ‘on the most frugal scale . . . yet contrived’, Dowson claims ‘not [to] feel depressed’ (325). He can generally discover a modicum of contrapasso in his miserable state, if only for the sake of congeniality, or to cadge a remittance. The following day, buoyed by receipt of £1 from Conal O’Riordan, he ventured to Fontenay-aux-Roses, where he ‘concocted’ the mock-pastoral ‘Soli cantare periti Arcades’ as he ‘drank [his] bock’ ‘outside a rural café’.³⁵ ‘One has one’s fortunate days sometimes’, he reported (326). Swann perceives an echo of Campion’s ‘I care not for these ladies | That must be wooed and prayed’ in this wistful lyric, which also channels Norman Gale’s Orchard Songs.³⁶ It gives fair measure of Dowson’s lingering romantic preoccupations, while signalling that he was notionally prepared to search out other consolations if Foltinowicz proved ‘over fine and nice’ (V, 41). Just before Christmas, Dowson ‘spent an entire night in writing the preface (from midnight—8.30 AM)’ to his translation of La Fille aux Yeux d’Or.³⁷ ‘Walking, ³⁴ See Ch. 8. Verses was issued at the nadir of Dowson’s relations with Foltinowicz, as a candid letter implicitly acknowledging her engagement shows: ‘My poems will be out in a day or two—perhaps are out now . . . But as I have no lungs left to speak of, an apology for a liver, and a broken heart I may be permitted to rail’ (L, 361–2). ³⁵ L, 326; contra Longaker, Ernest Dowson, 193. ³⁶ Thomas B. Swann, Ernest Dowson (New York: Twaine, 1964), 34; cf. L, 270. ³⁷ L, 334; see Introduction, at n. 76, and Ch. 8, The Devil’s Dance.

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lounging & writing verses in rustic cabarets’ had restored his spirits temporarily, but did little to dispel the desperation which beset him during his year of ‘exile’, and afterward, often eclipsing his authentic personality (L, 329). Throughout December, he confronted his anxieties in a sombre lyric which he finally enclosed to Gray at the end of the month. Dowson had recently returned to the Hôtel Colbert in Saint Germain-en-Laye after an absence of eight years.³⁸ In the intervening time—which happens to approximately circumscribe Dowson’s active writing career—the wan tourist who now retraces his steps has been totally transformed. This spectral lyric is best approached via Dowson’s initial reportage: Six years ago—(but certainly it was in the summer) I thought it the prettiest place in the world. Now the Palace looks to me like a barrack, the church is the very image of a half-bred dachshund & the terrace—well, I did not go on the terrace; I shivered when I looked through the grille. And yet I have lunched exceedingly well, & the petite femme, who lunched with me, is exceedingly pretty, . . . and the weather is remarkably fine for December . . and what a thing it is to have been young! (324 sic)

The ensuing lyric is correspondingly nostalgic and bereft. A flashing first stanza marks the epochal changes that have overcome the speaker in seasonal terms. Once-verdant tree branches on the hotel grounds are desiccated into ‘sombre lace’, contriving a harsh silhouette against the winter sky. The speaker projects a menacing emotionality into this environment. He recalls that lush verdure once concealed an arresting visage, now hidden in the past. The compound effect is disorientating, uncanny. He wonders what has become of that face, glimpsed for a moment, but his elusive sifting of sense-impressions and feelings results in a dizzying kaleidoscope. Again, a vaguely apprehended figure, the ‘glory of thy head’, interposes itself amidst recollections of the vanished ‘gold and green’ of ‘sun and summer’. Absent things flood in, excavating and effacing the present. The speaker does not identify the subject of his vision, for it hardly matters who she is, or was: like him, she has been engulfed in the obliviating drift of time. The remainder of the lyric is given in one breathless sentence: Oh, the white Gaunt ghosts that flutter where thy feet have sped Across the terrace, that is desolate, And rang then with thy laughter: ghost of thee ³⁸ L, 337, 327. Dowson first wrote that ‘six years’ had elapsed since his visit (324).

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That holds its shroud up with most delicate, Dead fingers; and behind, the ghost of me, Tripping fantastic with a mouth that jeers At ruddy roseal flowers of youth the turbid streams Have tossed and torn, through all the barren years To death, the host of all our golden dreams. (L, 338)

The grammatical subject of this vision remains hard to discern. The terrace scene, upon which Dowson ‘shivered when [he] looked through the grille’, has dissolved into ‘a place of shadows & unreality’ (324, 349). The projected pall of stanza three may be the trellis grating or, more probably, the ‘sombre lace’ of the ‘bare’ trees. The images continue to fold onto and into each other, their prismatic refraction emblematic of the speaker’s pulverized self. The ostensible addressee, a revenant ‘ghost of thee’, may or may not resemble the ‘petite femme’ with whom Dowson dined upon his return to the Hôtel Colbert. At last, he too is implicated in the phantasmagoria: a ‘ghost of me’ is folded into the nightmare. The antic who appears is not recognizably the author of the poem. He appears to ‘dance the devil’s dance’ (as Dowson put it in a subsequent lyric), deriding life itself.³⁹ The ironic lyricism of the last line only demonstrates how forlorn Dowson’s literary and romantic aspirations have been all along, for the gathered ‘host’ are corpses, all.

World’s End at Last Brittany always supplied the function of terminus in Dowson’s imagination. He first toured the region with A. C. Hillier in 1890 and looked forward to returning each summer, often with Moore. In 1891 and 1892 he fantasized about settling in Le Faouët, taking a house, rusticating with Foltinowicz, and growing old.⁴⁰ The westernmost department of Brittany, Finistère, exercised a special hold upon him, which he encapsulated by transposing the name into English and Latin when he arrived there during his ‘exile’: ‘Me voici at the World’s end (finis-terrae) at last’ (341). For Adrian Rome, the Breton coast epitomized ‘a place to work in . . . with no noise except the wind and the waves—a grey, silent limbo of a place’ (AR, 211). Dowson was on what he took to be his ‘last journey’ (L, 340). ³⁹ D, 29. The last stanza may involve an unlikely allusion: the phrase ‘tripping the light fantastic’, hailing from Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’, was popularized in 1894 by Blake and Lawlor’s hit song ‘The Sidewalks of New York’. The last verse bears upon Dowson’s theme. ‘Poets as radically different as Davidson, Kipling and Arthur Symons all drew metrical inspiration from the music halls (and music-hall ballads)’, and Dowson may have, too (Chris Snodgrass, ‘The Poetry of the 1890s’, A Companion to Victorian Poetry, edited by Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison [Oxford: Blackwell, 2002], 323). ⁴⁰ L, 237–8, 239, 361–2, 369; cf. AR, 208, 211.

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He spoke of ‘my departure—my really very last departure’ (406). Pont-Aven he found to be ‘an adorable little town all shut in by hills except where an estuary of the sea runs up’ (341). He overlaid its topography to create Ploumariel from an aggregate of local stimuli, such as the ‘calvary on its pile of stones, as ancient as the church’, noticed in contemporary reports.⁴¹ Although he had written extensively about the town, he did not absolutely intend to settle in Pont-Aven. His memories and imaginative associations made it a daunting prospect, but he knew it was cheap, had a relatively healthful climate, and a tolerable artistic life (see L, 335, 345). He hoped to work well there, and expected friends to visit (344, 340). Dowson was undecided about where to publish his poems at the end of 1895 (337). He had an informal commitment to Elkin Mathews and Lane to follow up Dilemmas with the Bodley Head. The former evidently ‘regarded the matter as settled and spoke of the book as on his list’, but for Dowson the arrangement, which certainly existed, was indefinite, and complicated by the meddling of Edgar Jepson, who had ‘constitute[d] himself a sort of emissary’ in the matter, ultimately contracting publication against Dowson’s direct instructions (W, 26; L, 331, 337). Dowson resented Jepson’s presumption and ‘double-dealing’, and came to consider it ‘a most impertinent interference with my business [and] a gross breach of confidence’ (346). He asked Moore, a lawyer by trade, to intervene, ‘as delicately or as forcibly as you like’, and anticipated ‘ructions’.⁴² As this spat escalated, Dowson had become fast friends with Leonard Smithers who ‘took [him] under his wing’, Nelson says, commissioning a series of translations and ‘drawing him into the circle of writers and artists—Symons, Conder, and Beardsley among them—who joined the publisher in the planning of the Savoy’ (Publisher, 225, 226). Smithers offered Dowson ‘most magnificent terms’ to issue his poems and, after a visit to Paris in December 1895, Dowson was ready to accept, though he may not have done so formally until February (L, 337; cf. 313). Dowson made an initial selection for Verses before arriving at Pont-Aven. He planned to supplement, sequence, and revise his manuscript, and may have needed to gather material from disparate sources. Some good poems eluded

⁴¹ Cf. Gertrude Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist (London: Cape, 1932), 250. ⁴² L, 331, 342. Assuming good faith, Jepson’s behaviour is hard to understand. Dowson transferred his manuscript notebook to him sometime after his return from Barbados in 1893; perhaps in exchange for helping Dowson move out of Bridge Dock in 1895 (F, 87v; Longaker, Ernest Dowson, 169). If so, Jepson may have felt, as its putative owner, that his exertions on its behalf were justified and desirable. If Dowson did not retain the notebook, he would naturally have wanted access to prepare his first book, yet V does not appear to be based on F, but Dowson’s published lyrics (of only thirteen poems which appear in F and V, just one—‘Vain Resolves’—was unpublished). Inexplicable omissions from V —‘Carthusians’, for instance—might also result from Jepson’s ownership. For Decorations, however, the reverse is true: just one of the fifteen poems appearing in F and D was previously published— ‘Beyond’—and no variants appear in Dowson’s letters: F may well have been available, to Dowson or Smithers, in 1899. Ernest Dowson Re-Collected: A New, Chronological Variorum Edition will aim to resolve the matter of recension.

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collection. ‘Impenitentia Ultima’ made the cut, whereas ‘Saint Germain-en-Laye’ did not, for instance, because Dowson had not retained a copy (344). Nelson details the next stages of manuscript preparation. At Pont-Aven, he finally set seriously to work on revising his poems and making the decision to add several more. Probably sometime in late March, he completed his work after a careful and painstaking revision. [. . .] Once in receipt of Dowson’s manuscript, Smithers apparently acted with dispatch, having gotten the text to the printer and proofs to Dowson within the compass of about two weeks. Dowson, in his anxiety to see his book in print, must have been equally prompt with his work of reading and correcting the proofs, for by early April he had returned them, alerting Smithers that he had sent off ‘proofs of the poems & the additional poems.’⁴³

Dowson left the accidentals to Smithers, who played a substantial role in establishing the text of Verses, Pierrot, and Decorations (Nelson, 234; cf. 242–6). Smithers rapidly engaged Chiswick Press, ‘the finest printer in London’, Nelson says, ‘direct[ing] its manager Charles Jacobi, to use fine-quality papers for each issue’ (235). When he arrived at ‘World’s End’, Dowson was primed to launch his poetic career with the cutting-edge publisher of the moment. From ‘A Coronal’ to ‘Chanson Sans Paroles’, the sequence of Verses would tell the course of his prostration, frustration, and anticipation in suit of Adelaide Foltinowicz. But for now—because matrimonial success depended on his doing so, and because his very life might be at stake—he determined to think other thoughts. Once installed, more or less happily, in the country of Gauguin and Bernard, he overhauled his verse style, warily opening it to the bright world around him. He adopted more impressionistic (or syntheticist) techniques, marrying intense feeling with sharp, peripheral colour and form, spurred on, perhaps, by the avant-garde company he was now keeping. Two new poems were probably written in time to be included in Verses, in March and early April 1896 respectively, had Dowson so desired. He held them back. Although they are not more doleful than his prior lyrics about death, they are untempered by any thought of reunification with Foltinowicz. Indeed, Dowson’s first lyrical port of call was the local cemetery. He found common ground with the ‘fisher-folk’ and ‘peasant-folk’ interred at the Cemetière de la ville de Pont-Aven (D, 19). He admired their lives of ‘anxious’ and ‘patient industry’; the way they ‘told’ their lives ‘away, | From day to market-day, | As one should tell, | . . . | Some sad old rosary’.⁴⁴ This comported with his epicurean ideal, and recalled Marius ⁴³ Nelson, Publisher, 234; quoting unpublished letter to Smithers, 2 Apr. 1896 (Clark Memorial Library, UCLA). ⁴⁴ D, 19. On the site itself, see Longaker, Ernest Dowson, 223–4; Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist, 249.

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‘suffer[ing] those faces and voices to come and go . . . like the telling of beads one by one’ (Marius, 2: 223). Dowson also remembered his nuns: like those cloistered sisters, the Breton peasantry are temporally oblivious, offering their very lives to God in ritual prayer. He was now settling the arrangement of Verses; his hope and comfort remained the prospect of dignified withdrawal, and ‘sanctuary’ in the Breton dust. Reverting to the same conceit, he reminds readers that the prayerful image fundamentally configures the poet’s enumerative task of telling verses, of reckoning and reciting life, as in ‘a dream of prayer’ (V, 2). Such work, like the defiance of ‘fierce Atlantic ways’ or the sufferation of tedious commerce, makes the poet no less deserving of familiar rest. ‘In a Breton Cemetery’ survives in several manuscripts, each subscribed ‘PontAven’. This sense of place is so vital that Dowson calls it a ‘versicle du pays’ (L, 350). The significance of the exceptional locale is immediately apparent: They sleep well here, These fisher-folk, who passed their anxious days, In fierce Atlantic ways; And found not there, Beneath the long, curled wave So quiet a grave. (L, 350)

This cemetery is an estimable place to ‘sleep’ because Pont-Aven is an honest place to die. By way of contrast, Dowson invokes le grande pêche, a triennial fishing expedition to Icelandic waters undertaken collectively by the community, which claimed many local men, and finds no comparable consolation in their decease. He was determined to die alone—to ‘meet [Death], a stranger in a strange land, with only strange faces round [him] and the kind indifference of strangers, instead of the intolerable pity of friends’, as he writes in his last étude (Savoy 4, 70). The notion derives, of course, from the final chapter of Marius the Epicurean. Francis Donne, Dowson’s doppelga¨nger on this last occasion, claims affinity with the dying animal, ‘who steals away to an uttermost place in the forest, who gives up his breath in a solitude and hides his dying like a shameful thing’ (70). The graveyard at ‘World’s End’, finis terrae, served this purpose for Dowson; a more serene, further-flung final berth than the Icelandic seabed. Dowson’s last story imaginatively fulfils his ancient yearning to reside permanently in Brittany, and allows some measure of narrative control over the fate that was engulfing him. Donne has removed to ‘the bleak and wave-tormented coast of Finistère, somewhere between Quiberon and Fouesnant . . . without leave-takings or explanation, almost secretly, giving but the vaguest indications of the length or direction of his absence’ (70). This is virtual autobiography, vie romancée. He establishes himself in ‘a little fishing-village [with] a few scattered houses . . . collected round a poor little gray church . . . And there for many days

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he dwelt . . . in a state of mind which, after all the years of energy, of ambitious labour, was almost peace’ (70). He could be in Pont-Aven, or Le Faouët. Donne has selected his final resting place because it is remote, and on philosophical grounds: the inhabitants . . . were a poor and hardy, but a kindly race: fishers and the wives of fishers, whose children would grow up and become fishermen and the wives of fishermen in their turn. Most of them had wrestled with death; it was always so near to them that hardly one of them feared it; they were fatalists, with the grim and resigned fatalism of the poor, of the poor who live with the treachery of the sea. Francis Donne visited the little cemetery, and counted the unnumerable crosses which testified to the havoc which the sea had wrought. Some of the graves were nameless; holding the bodies of strange seamen which the waves had tossed ashore. ‘And in a little time I shall lie here,’ he said to himself. (71)

This passage explains why the village graveyard appealed so urgently to Dowson. He had always admired ‘the primitive insouciance’ of the Bretons and had affected the same ‘grim and resigned fatalism’ since his youth.⁴⁵ Living so familiarly with the ‘treachery’ of the sea deprives death of those powers of stupefaction which it assumes in metropolitan existence. Dowson’s prose writings about death all have this in common: at the moment of decease, the modern, urbane fear of death is withdrawn. Death is a pacific, uncanny figure in his work, a consoler rather than a harrier, as conjectured in his rejoinder to Flaubert.⁴⁶ Initially, Dowson was less sanguine about the options facing the ‘fisher-folk’, ‘peasant-folk’, and poet. He depicts Breton life in futile terms, with vague awareness of the class strata discerned in his final story. Local lives are tolled ‘Dimly, mechanically’, like ‘Some poor, sad rosary’.⁴⁷ Prayerful endeavour is as barren as passionate attachment. The speaker advances no dogma and seeks no consolation. As in ‘Saint Germain-en-Laye’, he is ‘passion-tossed and driven from pillar to post, | A poor worn ghost’, as ‘dear dead people with wan hands | Beckon [him] to their lands’ (The Pageant, 232). The underlying reasons for Dowson’s ‘exile’ and its ⁴⁵ L, 359. Dowson associated Le Faouët, quite conventionally, with the ‘unexplored barbarisms on the extreme west of Finisterre’ (237). According to one contemporary guide, ‘the typical Breton [is] braced physically to withstand the shocks of the tempest, resists with an almost irresistible vis inertia the advance of French civilization; whom neither the progress of steam nor compulsory education has much disturbed’ (Henry Blackburn and Randolph Caldecott, Breton Folk: An Artistic Tour in Brittany [Boston: Osgood, 1881], 156). ⁴⁶ For Francis Donne, ‘the pain—oh, miracle! had ceased. . . . And it suddenly flashed over him that this—this was Death; this was the thing against which he had cried and revolted; the horror from which he would have escaped; this utter luxury of physical exhaustion, this calm, this release’ (Savoy 4, 73; cf. D, 47–8). ⁴⁷ The Pageant (1897), 232.

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vagrant manner; the magnetism of Pont-Aven, its people, and its desolate Atlantic graveyard, are felt more concretely here: the speaker is no accidental victim of force majeure but, like his grave fellows, the agent of his undoing. The last line warrants the titular revision of ‘On’ to ‘In a Breton Cemetery’: this is no occasional lyric on a sundry theme; the speaker is not just passing through. Dowson is Donne. He later confessed to Smithers that ‘I have utterly fallen in love with the cemetery here—I have already sent you versicles upon it—and have selected the particular spot—(a concession de 5 ans)—in common decency my relations cannot bury me cheaper than that—where the worms shall eat me’.⁴⁸

Misericord Recognizing a new plaintiveness in this ‘versicle du pays’, Dowson introduces a subsequent lyric as ‘a poem in my Breton manner’, and mentions ‘a poem, genre Pont-aven’ in a contemporaneous letter.⁴⁹ These epithets may be intended for ‘Breton Afternoon’, as Flower and Maas suppose, or ‘The Sea-Change’. Dowson speaks of ‘sundry ambiguous verses some of which’ he intended for Savoy 3, so he may have worked on both drafts simultaneously.⁵⁰ A ‘manner’ implies several specimens in the same style. Dowson’s Breton lyrics have in common a looser and longer line, even, than the ‘experiment[al]’ alexandrines he brandished so insinuatingly in ‘Non sum qualis’ (184). They are set in heptameter or septenary lines, often of fifteen syllables, pivoting upon a strong medial caesura after the tenth, which briefly holds the utterance to a resurgent pentameter, then surges past it, like a breaking wave. A tidal prosody thus unifies these Breton poems.⁵¹ ‘The Sea-Change’ is accompanied by a description of a matching episode in Dowson’s correspondence. In early April 1895, ‘Parisian acquaintance’ Maurice Cremnitz and he ‘got a boat which [they] took down the river [Aven] . . . nearly to the sea. Missed the tide, or forgot about it, & had to scull up four miles, unaided . . . against a tide of seventeen horse-power’ (352, 353). This led Dowson to fantasize about continuing outward, yielding to those elemental forces. A draft accordingly begins: ⁴⁸ Unpublished letter to Smithers, Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. ⁴⁹ L, 350, 353; unpublished letter to Smithers, J. Harlin O’Connell Collection, Princeton University Library. ⁵⁰ Unpublished letter to Smithers, Clark Memorial Library, UCLA. ‘Breton Afternoon’ duly appeared in Savoy 3 (July 1896), 36. ⁵¹ Compare ‘They sleep well here, | These fisher-folk who passed their anxious days’ with ‘Here, where the breath of the scented-gorse floats || through the sun-stained air’ (D, 19, 25). ‘The Sea-Change’ flushes each way: Where river and ocean meet in a great || tempestuous frown Beyond the bar, || where on the dunes the white-capped rollers break. (21) For a brilliant demonstration of Dowson’s innovations in long-lined verse, see A. T. Wong, ‘Dowson’s “Cynara” and the English Alexandrine’, English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 60.2 (2017): 210–34.

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Where river and ocean meet in a broad tempestuous frown, Beyond the bar, where on the dunes the great, green rollers break; Above, one wind-mill stands forlorn, on the arid, grassy down: I will set my sail on a stormy day & cross the bar and seek, That I have sought and never find, the exquisite, one crown, Which crowns one day, with all its calm, the passionate and the weak.⁵²

The poem is subscribed ‘Pointe du Pouldu’ in holograph and in Decorations (but not in proof marked for the author) suggesting that Dowson associated it with the famous scenes painted by Gauguin several kilometres along the Finistère coast, at the mouth of La Laïta.⁵³ His lyric may have been composed there, in whole or in part, or this may again betoken Dowson’s patient, syncretic approach to verse composition.⁵⁴ The Atlantic coast—he calls it ‘the ancient sea, so cosmic and original’—was always full of suggestion for him, and the completed lyric may be an affective collage of various impressions (AR, 73). Dowson was translating Muther’s History of Modern Painting with Greene and Hillier, and often spoke of Gauguin at this time.⁵⁵ His collaborator hailed from a well-known artistic family, and knew several local painters (L, 342). He knew that the combination of discrete perceptions to evoke an underlying and uniting emotional truth was a syntheticist move. Considered in this light, his ‘versicle[s] du pays’ may be considered affective, memorial patchworks, informed by, and analogous to, the renowned paintings that put Pont-Aven on the map. Dowson’s correspondence merely notes the natural limitations placed upon his adventure by the tide and the Atlantic; ‘The Sea-Change’ imagines their wilful breach as an act of final capitulation. It is a suicidal poem, ballasted by a Tennysonian undercurrent. Dowson’s poems often feature death, including his own, and sometimes solicit it.⁵⁶ The early lyric, ‘Thalassios’, evokes the speaker’s drowning (and could have been inspired by the grande pêche). His fiction also features death by water, in the climaxes of ‘Statute’ and (under Moore’s stewardship) Adrian Rome (cf. L, 178). Suicide was a persistent thought, which became more urgent at Finistère in 1896. Dowson actually considered ending his life here, as he subsequently confided from a rented room above the Foltinowiczes’ restaurant: ‘I ought ⁵² ‘Sea-Dreams: for Mademoiselle Elizabeth de Krouglicoff ’, Morgan Library and Museum (MA 2623). ⁵³ ‘Sea-Dreams’, Morgan Library; LA, 22. ⁵⁴ Dowson listed Le Pouldu among the Breton villages he visited on the dedication page of his copy of Dilemmas (L, opposite 392). Longaker maintains that the poem was written ‘at Pont-Aven, from which he made short excursions to the promontory Point du Pouldu’ (P, 244). ⁵⁵ Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist, 255. On Dowson’s grasp of ‘nineteenth-century painting in its conceptual and technical aspects’, see Weiner, ‘Sight and Sound’, 485–6; Michael J. O’Neal, ‘Style as Mimesis in the Poetry of Ernest Dowson’, Style 13.4 (autumn 1979): 365. ⁵⁶ See F, 17; V, 51–2; D, 4–5, 19, 27, 47–8.

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to have drowned myself at Pont Aven’, he laments to Smith.⁵⁷ The dispatch does not suggest he was being rhetorical.⁵⁸ Dowson’s romantic predicament was on his mind, not just his failing health. The ‘exquisite one crown, | Which crowns one day, with all its calm, the passionate and the weak’ is, of course, Death. It recalls the coronal figure that once signalled the rededication of his life and work to Foltinowicz.⁵⁹ Unlike Tennyson, Dowson desires nothing beyond his ‘bourne of Time and Place’; only ‘that’ which he has ‘sought and never find[s]’.⁶⁰ He employed a similar expression once before, revealing his intention to propose to Foltinowicz, rather than ‘let[ting] go irrevocably something which promised a good deal, which I have never had’ (221). Reviewing his life’s work now, he could not fail to be reminded of those buoyant intentions. Dowson’s new poem specifically invokes ‘Thalassios’ in its parenthetical clauses, which pick up the mode of address and the rhapsodic apostrophe of the earlier composition. In the second stanza, the sea arises in response to the speaker’s summons to become his truest lover, and destroyer: I shall be thine, my sea! at last, thy kisses on my face Shall seal all things that are old, outworn; all anger & regret Shall pass as the dreams & days have past, & in thy salt embrace, When thy fierce caresses blind mine eyes, & my limbs grow stark and set, All that I knew, in all my mind shall no more have a place: The weary ways of men and a woman I shall forget.⁶¹

An oceanic muse grants the speaker an end which cancels his conscious awareness, achieving inspired oblivion. J. Alfred Prufrock will be deprived of this consolation: post-romantic ‘Sea-Dreams’ (as the poem is called in draft) last only ‘Till human voices wake us, and we drown’.⁶² Here, in what may be a transcription of another upsetting dream, death results in the diminution of knowledge and sense-certainty, the extinguishing of awareness and, ultimately, in annulment of the apparatus and ‘place’ of thought (as in ⁵⁷ L, 382; see Afterlives: In Epilogue, and Longaker, Ernest Dowson, 224. R. Thurston Hopkins met Dowson ‘towards the end of the eighteen-nineties’ and recalls that ‘he carried a small silver-plated revolver in his hip pocket. . . . He would produce it, and hand it round for inspection in bars and cafés, without comment, and for no apparent reason at all’, or because ‘he was toying with the idea of suicide’ (L, 440). ⁵⁸ See Afterlives: In Epilogue. ⁵⁹ Cf. F, 11; V, 8; D, 11; AR, 351. ⁶⁰ Alfred Tennyson, Tennyson: A Selected Edition, edited by Christopher Ricks (New York: Routledge, 2014), 666. ⁶¹ ‘Sea-Dreams: for Mademoiselle Elizabeth de Krouglicoff ’, Morgan Library and Museum (MA 2623). ⁶² T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), 7; also compare ll. 10–12 with ‘Prufrock’, ll. 126–31).

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Emily Dickinson’s celebrated lyric, ‘I heard a fly buzz’). Before extreme failure of the sensorium, the last bastion of individual personhood, the true self is revealed in its essential form. This culminates in a final thought, in the revised poem, of ‘one woman I shall forget’. Similarly, ‘The Dying of Francis Donne’, traces the degeneration of the protagonist’s sentience from ‘great tiredness’, to ‘a fainter consciousness, in which he could yet just dimly hear, as in a dream, the sound of Latin prayers’, to ‘utter unconsciousness’, until ‘that was all’ (Savoy 4, 74). Life comes to an end like everything else; it has no issue, no sequel. All that finally matters is the core private concerns of the individual in extremis. Again, the protagonist’s final thought concerns ‘the girl whom he had loved, but who had not loved him’.⁶³ Dowson gives this coincidental realization slender scope, but it plainly shows that he knew this was, indeed, ‘the very end’ of his relationship with Foltinowicz (Savoy 1, 63). This knowledge propels him towards a final gambit: the guarded, modernist preface to Verses. Another ‘versicle du pays’, ‘Breton Afternoon’ is a pastoral phantasmagoria whose dappled coloration and brooding, emotional intensity evokes the syntheticism of the Pont-Aven School and anticipates Dylan Thomas’ impressionist lyrics in the twentieth century. It commences with a self-portrait of the exiled artist at ‘World’s End’: Here, where the breath of the scented-gorse floats through the sunstained air, On the steep hill-side, on a grassy ledge, I have lain hours long and heard Only the faint breeze pass in a whisper like a prayer, And the river ripple by and the distant call of a bird. On the lone hill-side, in the gold sunshine, I will hush me and repose, And the world fades into a dream and a spell is cast on me; And what was all the strife about, for the myrtle or the rose, And why have I wept for a white girl’s paleness passing ivory!

There was ample time for such reveries in the spring and summer of 1896, when Dowson was so often alone. The speaker inspects his environment, and ruminates over the past, in a futile effort to isolate and retain meaning. Dowson evokes this scene again in his last story, amplifying its solemnity (Savoy 4, 70). With a voice arising from ulterior depths, the speaker concedes that his literary and romantic plights are trivial concerns, in light of his mortality. The vivacity of the ⁶³ Savoy 4, 74. When Marius learned ‘that his last morning was come, [he too] turned to think once more of the beloved’ (Marius, 2: 224).

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‘Breton Afternoon’ mollifies his melancholy, permitting sensuous enjoyment of the moment, and teaching him his veritable place in the order of things. No less aware of his mortal predicament, the speaker has contrived an interlude of solace: Out of the tumult of angry tongues, in a land alone, apart, In a perfumed dream-land set betwixt the bounds of life and death, Here will I lie while the clouds fly by and delve an hole where my heart May sleep deep down with the gorse above and red, red earth beneath.

‘Exile’ at ‘World’s End’ provides isolated moments of such total escape that the formal and ontological boundaries of things appear to dissolve: in this ‘perfumed dream-land’, ‘life and death’ are scarcely differentiable, the speaker’s heart sinks into the ‘red, red earth’. The lull experienced on this hillside is only a brief hiatus, but it prefigures the mysterious threshold that Dowson ineluctably approaches; his Breton vision is preparation for the extreme passage he must soon attempt. Dismayed by life’s vain endeavour, the speaker determines to enjoy his sojourn until the Angelus bell rings out, ‘steal[ing his] way from the village under the hill’. His intention to withdraw unobserved suggests he has a figurative homecoming in view, and means to die without drawing attention to himself, like Marius Aurelius and Francis Donne. The lyric concludes in actual prayer: Mother of God, O Misericord, look down in pity on us, The weak and blind who stand in our light and wreak ourselves such ill.

Italicized to coincide with the retrospective lines from the depths in stanza two, this strange supplication recalls the refrain of Swinburne’s ‘Dolores’. ‘O Misericord’ is equivocal: a plea for compassion, pity, or mercy, which also subtly evokes the dagger by which the speaker may yet hope to achieve a final coup de grˆace.⁶⁴ The speaker is not just praying for himself in these lines, but for those like him; for his generation. ‘Weak and blind’, Dowson’s contemporaries do not grasp the selfinflicted nature of their ‘ill’-ness. They rather ‘stand in [their] own light’, occluding their literary lustre by the foolish lives they lead (‘light, n.1 , sense P.5.a.ii’). Dowson’s final judgement is obstinate, splenetic, emphatic; as he puts it in ‘A Last Word’: ‘we have only known | Surpassing vanity: vain things alone | Have driven our perverse and aimless band’. ⁶⁴ See Weiner, ‘Sight and Sound’, 492.

8 The End of All the Songs Muse, Indedicate The imminent publication of his outrageous erotic poem, ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae’ in the Hobby Horse did not provoke in Dowson the same trepidation as ‘In Preface: For Adelaide’ (L, 190). More than any text in his canon, he agonized, second-guessed, and anguished over its construction and reception (359, 360, 367). The stakes—at once personal, since Dowson attached the outcome of his marriage suit to the publication of his first book of poetry; and artistic, since he faithfully subscribed the ensuing poems to Foltinowicz’s museological tutelage—simply could not have been higher. The preface has since become the most fateful crux in the book, the Ur-text of the ‘Dowson Legend’. Considered as text, rather than as a preliminary authorial declaration, it possesses a complex personal, lyrical, and mythopoeic significance. Taking this worldliness—this socio-aesthetic embeddedness and interpersonal functionality—fully into consideration, we must acknowledge that here is no discrete dedication to the volume, but rather a composition ‘in’ preface, ‘for’ someone called ‘Adelaide’. The first conjunction carries the suggestion that its polyglot paragraphs are integrally part of the book, not ancillary to it, an impression enhanced by its placement following ‘Vitae summa brevis’ and the table of contents. ‘Preface’—which Dowson always prefers over near synonyms in his correspondence—obtains an almost liturgical sense here: the Preface of the Mass is ‘the introduction to the central part of the Eucharist, consisting principally of an offering of thanksgiving and praise to God’; not a separate, auxiliary part of the liturgy, but its commencing movement.¹ ‘In Preface: For Adelaide’ is, analogously, part of the initiation of Verses. The second conjunction indicates that Verses is an offering or gift, disclosing the goal and object of the book, in a double sense, of Dowson’s verses in their totality. Verses is purposed expressly to secure the hand in marriage, of someone actually named ‘Adelaide’. Dowson uses her Christian name just five times in his entire correspondence: employing it here is formal but intimate; it implicates the actual person, Ellen Adelaide Mary Foltinowicz, in Dowson’s publishing ventures as never before. Verses is ‘for’ her; she is their object(ive).

¹ L, 367; ‘preface, n., sense 1.’

Ernest Dowson. Robert Stark, Oxford University Press. © Robert Stark (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192884763.003.0009

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This thoroughgoing identification requires the poet-speaker to decline a conventional dedication. He insists, properly, that the book remains un-dedicated; that ‘Adelaide’ herself, ‘for once . . . shall go indedicate’ (V, ix). A standard dedication would be ‘trivial’ by contrast, he says; subscribing any single poem to her, as he does for sundry acquaintances, following Verlaine’s example, tawdry. ‘Trivial’, thrice repeated, insists that ‘In Preface’ is part of a three-part introductory sequence, a triforium, to Verses, along with ‘Vitae summa brevis’, and ‘A Coronal’. These epigraphical texts organize the collection in discrete ways and together, a feature that Beardsley’s gilt design, ‘a spray of three tendrils with leaves enclosed in a double border’, responds to.² Like a musical stave, each chord or harmonic being once struck will resonate throughout the piece: ‘Vitae summa brevis’ peers into the void like the Rubáiyát; ‘A Coronal’ is a signature of Dowson’s verse-craft, the otherworldly artifice of the overall design, the outmoded ideal of courtly love the speaker clings to; ‘In Preface: For Adelaide’ signals the allusive, proto-modernist methodology, ‘gather[ing] and entwin[ing]’ all the lyrics that follow in service of vie romancée (V, xi). As preposterous as his proclamation of her consanguine identity with the ensuing poems may be, the conceit has so far stuck, marrying the personage of the author with the actual girl he implicates in a perverse, aesthetic embrace, by an authorial fiat which readers and critics have been content to regard as inviolable holy writ. The word ‘indedicate’ (if word it be) seems awkward, unbefitting of the muse of Verses. Dowson’s coinage is not capable of elucidation by the OED or internet search. The purport is nevertheless clear: the addressee ‘shall go indedicate’, by not quite having the book dedicated to her, while, by dint of this oblique preface, she will yet be ‘not quite anonymous’. At first, Dowson intended the prefatory text to stand without a title: it was a last-minute addition, apparently for the sake of disambiguation.³ If the text courts constructive ambiguity, readers of Verses were unperplexed. ‘Adelaide’ must soon have felt herself transparently flaunted when they came to dine at her family restaurant. The ensuing grandiose claims only make matters worse, adding to her likely suspicion that things did not add up. The poet-speaker asserts that he ‘need not write [her] name for [her] at least to know that this and all [his] work is made for [her] in the first place’. The conceit is traditional: at the start of Vita Nuova, Dante says ‘there is no need to name this gracious

² James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 235. The design recalls— and perhaps alludes to—Beardsley’s ‘Les Revenants de Musique’, which Verses, particularly its closing lyric, may call to mind (The Studio 1 [1893], 18). Dowson’s revenant music (Fr. revenant, from revenir, to return) offers a more edifying explanation than Beardsley’s wisecrack: ‘the letter Y—“Why was this book ever written?”’ (Vincent O’Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde [New York: Holt, 1936], 115). ³ L, 358 n; cf. Mark Longaker, Ernest Dowson (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), 201.

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lady, | Because her qualities tell who she was’.⁴ Foltinowicz would not have made the connection, however, and probably suspected it was an outright falsification (as this study reveals it to be). Doubtless, Dowson shared his early writing with her; some verses were inspired by, and ‘made for’, another woman altogether. To let Verses ‘go indedicate’ is, then, to pronounce the book un-dedicated, even as it is prefaced ‘For Adelaide’. The gesture is ambivalent, involving a saying and unsaying consistent with Dowson’s delible poetics of ‘Amor Umbratilis’, of love in the shade.⁵ His subtly annulling adjectival back-formation casts a miniscule particle of doubt upon the sincerity of the poet-speaker’s overloaded design and superabundant expectation. These difficulties are compounded, not elucidated, by the epigraphical text which follows. The French paragraphs are ostensibly included to, as the speaker says, ‘commend my little book to [“Adelaide”] in sentences far beyond [his] poor compass’. They are serviceable enough, superficially. Morissette first observed that the text derives from the dénouement of L’Éducation sentimentale, noting that ‘the original speech made by Frédéric to Mme Arnoux is treated, in the novel, quite ironically, as a piece of romantic self-deception and exaggeration’, whereas Dowson ‘accepts the passage without mental reservation’.⁶ He is partly correct. The original passage (discussed in Ch. 6, In Dreamful Autumn) is the quintessential rencontre of French Décadent literature. Long after the disappointment of his grande passion, Frédéric Moreau is surprised in his study by Marie Angèle Arnoux, the object of his life-long, clandestine, love. She reveals that she has known about his feelings all along, since he once ‘kissed [her] wrist between [her] glove and [her] sleeve’.⁷ This became a Dowsonian leitmotif in 1893, as he contemplated proposing marriage. The devotees declare that they ‘have loved each other well. . . . But without belonging to one another’, and it seems that Frédéric’s devotion will finally be rewarded, his ‘sufferings’ finally ‘redeemed’ when, by chance, ‘the lamp, standing on a console table, lit up [Arnoux’s] white hair’ (453–4). This, to Frédéric, ‘was like a blow full in the chest. To conceal his disappointment, he went down on his knees, and started murmuring endearments to her’ (454). Dowson’s epigraph is lifted from just this point in the novel. In fact, it combines three discrete impressions. The second part, from the paragraph break, is spoken sincerely by Arnoux, just before Frédéric’s jolt: ‘Sometimes your words come back to me like a distant echo, like the sound of a bell carried by the wind; and when I read about love in a book, I feel that you are there beside me . . .’ (453). Dowson’s

⁴ Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, translated by Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 13. ⁵ See Ch. 2, Umbratilia. ⁶ Bruce A. Morissette, ‘The “Untraced Quotation” of Ernest Dowson’s Dedication’, Modern Language Notes 58.7 (Nov. 1943): 559. ⁷ Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education, translated by Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1964), 453.

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elision is disingenuous, and disguises a change in speaker. In the original, Frédéric replies: ‘You have made me feel all the things in books which people criticize as exaggerated’ (453). The first part of Dowson’s epigraph is also spoken by Frédéric: Your person, your slightest movements seemed to me to possess a superhuman importance in the world. My heart used to rise like the dust in your footsteps. The effect you had on me was that of a moonlit night in summer, when all is perfume, soft shadows, pale light, and infinite horizons. For me your name contained all the delights of flesh and spirit, and I repeated it again and again, trying to kiss it with my lips. (454)

Not uttered in vainglorious triumph, nor in sincere avowal of his long-thwarted desire, these charming words are mouthed only to disguise Frédéric’s annoyance, ‘to conceal his disappointment’ (454). Arnoux takes them in earnest. She fails to grasp the seething irony that consumes him, and ‘rapturously accepted this adoration of the woman she had ceased to be’ (454). Now ‘drunk with his own eloquence’, Frédéric ‘began to believe what he was saying’ (454). Possibly, Dowson was simply taken by Flaubert’s vivid language in the service of overwhelming passion. These are, he says, ‘sentences beyond my poor compass’, implying admiration of the sentiment and its pithy encapsulation. The structural and dramatic ironies of the passage perhaps seemed less urgent than its belletristic appositeness to his own sensation of being in love. Yet Dowson knowingly elides the devastating realization and, doing so, juxtaposes the two lovers’ totally divergent experience of the culminating moment in their relationship. He thematizes their misunderstanding, allowing the ironies of their circumstances to circulate within Verses. We may be certain that Dowson fully appreciated the tone of this sequence because he spins the plot of ‘Statute’ out of it. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean after a long exile from his bride to be, Michael Garth is also horrified that his beloved has grown old. Dowson copied Flaubert’s anticlimax, a four-word paragraph concluding the penultimate chapter—‘And that was all’— at the end of ‘Francis Donne’, and mimicked it at the end of ‘The Eyes of Pride’.⁸ Without wishing to wholly discount the earnestness of Dowson’s dedication to Foltinowicz, then, the devastating irony of this intertext cannot be overlooked. To ‘commend’ Verses with these lines is effectively to begin with a crisp disclaimer that love’s boldest praise is often false and artificial. Hence the wary reluctance of Dowson’s effusive dedication, which suggests that his own ‘lucubrations’ may ultimately involve the same questionable double-dealing (L, 365). Inscribing Verses in this factitious way is tantamount to dissembling like Frédéric, to advertising the author’s insincerity or two-facedness up-front. To do ⁸ Flaubert, Sentimental Education, 455; Savoy 4, 74; Savoy 1, 63.

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so with an allusion, moreover, is to guarantee that some of its intended readership must remain ignorant of the fact. The source passage was only identified in 1943 (see n. 6). Foltinowicz, eighteen at the time of publication, cannot have been expected to fully grasp the significance of the very passage that addresses her directly and with (apparently) polished candour. Unless it entailed some private association, it would have been quite ‘beyond [her] poor compass’. This is primarily a question of the complex purport of the modernist fragment Dowson has shored up against his ruin, and its compatibility with his stated intentions with regard to her, rather than Foltinowicz’s French language ability (which was solid by all accounts). His own doubts about whether or not Foltinowicz would recognize the pseudo-dedication acknowledge this. The Decadent ‘network[ing]’ of ‘In Preface: For Adelaide’, to leverage Potolsky’s key insight, situates Verses at some point on a continuum between romantic irony and postmodern uncertainty.⁹ It signals that the following lyrics will found their claims upon tradition, and that they will weave their (often ironical) sense in complex inter- and intra-textual ways, scrambling and reconstruing meaning, as Dowson illustrates in this contrived composite. The overall effect confirms that the passions and sentiment explored in the poems are ardently felt, but nevertheless bookish and factitious, and as liable to deceive as Frédéric Moreau’s obsequious flattery. Dowson repurposes Flaubert’s French because it showcases his Decadent commitment to allusivity, and lends itself to irony and double-speak.¹⁰ It configures Verses to serve a public discourse of fealty to Foltinowicz, even as individual poems pay discrete homage to an anterior beloved. Alkalay-Gut appreciates that the preface then becomes ‘a kind of intentional dead letter whose value is exclusively expressive and aesthetic’.¹¹ Dowson was truly unconcerned that Foltinowicz should grasp its purport, only that it should ‘help [her] to be kind’ to the book, and favour his suit. He worried about how she would respond, not only to his presentational audacity, but also to this allusive chicanery, which he feared might backfire. He asked Smith to inform him how she ‘takes’ the preface, specifically, knowing it was fundamentally open to interpretation, and ‘only ask[s] that she does not m’en vouloir for it’, conceding that it may be construed as blameworthy (L, 367). This alarm may stem from the controversy surrounding Alfred Douglas’ proposed dedication of his poems to Wilde, which caused a public scandal when notice appeared in the Mercure de France. Dowson first mentions his concern around 25 April 1896, when he also requests Douglas’ address, to forward a presentation copy of Verses (359). Smithers was ‘right not to publish’ Douglas, he ⁹ Matthew Potolsky, The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 5. ¹⁰ See Robert Stark, ‘Faithful . . . In My Fashion[ing]’: Shades of Association in Ernest Dowson’s Poetry,” Victorian Poetry 59.1 (spring 2021), 75–96. ¹¹ Karen Alkalay-Gut, ‘Ernest Dowson and the Strategies of Decadent Desire’, Criticism 36.2 (spring 1994): 248.

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considers, confessing that he was nevertheless ‘sick of the monstrous bêtise of the people who make it unwise for [him] to do so’.¹² When the title was withdrawn on the eve of publication, Dowson welcomed the development (369). With the scandal still alive in the press, he was apprehensive that he, too, had ‘chose the wrong method and the wrong moment’ in his dedication; if there is, as Wilde contends, ‘a tact in love, and a tact in literature’, he worried that his dedication, too, was ‘not sensitive to either’.¹³ Douglas’ poems also went ‘indedicate’ when they appeared in October, by which point it would have been ‘trivial’ and ‘presumptuous’ to include a dedication at all; Douglas had no need to name Wilde for the dedication to be well understood by every reader of his poetic début (V, ix). Alkalay-Gut concludes that ‘a major goal [of the preface] is to invent and marginalize the woman while concentrating upon her. She is his verse because he creates her as such’ (248). To state the matter in these terms is to realize how much Dowson’s dedicatory strategy owes to his ‘experiment’ with the girl he insisted on calling ‘Lena’, the better to incorporate her within his vie romancée. ‘Adelaide’ is valuable to him, as ‘Lena’ was valuable: for her literary propensities. To actuate these vectors of inspiration, Dowson again transforms his object into textual fantasy, muting her real voice and eclipsing her person in the process. Foltinowicz is incorporated wholesale, and effectively effaced, by Dowson’s compound undedication, and by the poems that follow; represented and replaced by the last in a sequence of muse-figures, whose genealogy is traced herein. Dowson’s meaning fully emerges only in these traditional and intertextual ways. He relies, equally, on a compact with his readership, and with posthumous criticism, to realize this totemic muse-figure. As Levy discerns, ‘the muse is, in part, imagined by the reader . . . is actually formulated by both the reader and the poet working together’.¹⁴ Early readers were quick to jump to the authorized conclusion but, as Longaker explains, ‘The quotation from Flaubert’s Education Sentimentale [sic] only heightened the impression expressed in some circles that Dowson was casting pearls before swine’ (201–2). Her working-class station rendered ‘Adelaide of Soho’ ineligible for elevation to the role once occupied by Petrarch’s and Sidney’s muses (202). By failing to observe the class distinction between the author, son of a propertied dry docker, and the Foltinowiczes, Verses was an affront to the social order, moreover, and to those of Dowson’s acquaintance—Johnson, O’Riordan, Symons—who would maintain it. Symons drew inordinate attention to ‘the young girl to whom most of his verses were to be written’ in his notice of Verses, investing heavily in the ‘virginal devotion, as to a Madonna’ that Dowson bestowed upon

¹² L, 357. This was ‘one of Flaubert’s favorite words’, and duly became one of Dowson’s, too (David Weir, Decadence: A Very Short Introduction [Oxford: Oxford University Press], 32). ¹³ Oscar Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert HartDavis (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 724. ¹⁴ Gayle A. Levy, Refiguring the Muse (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 21.

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her.¹⁵ His later obituary evolved out of this piece, and became the standard introduction to Dowson’s poetry. There, ‘Adelaide’ reigns supreme as the incontestable muse of Verses: ‘Did she ever realise more than the obvious part of what was being offered to her, in this shy and eager devotion?’ Symons asks, ‘Did it ever mean very much to her to have made and to have killed a poet?’¹⁶ ‘Adelaide’ is finally classified as femme fatale, the cornerstone of the ‘Dowson Legend’. Symons does credit her with the capacity to concentrate and direct Dowson’s lyrical imagination, what he terms ‘the gift of evoking, and . . . retaining, all that was most delicate, sensitive, shy, typically poetic, in [his] nature’ (‘On a Book of Verses’, 92). Dowson means something like this in his preface, presumably, and Symons may have benefited from his elucidation. This is the essential part of her musedom. She is the fork struck in the key of his original stringing. The conceit gained currency until Dowson criticism was often reduced to repeating the mantra that ‘Adelaide’ is in some mysterious but vital way tantamount to the poems themselves, taking on a readerly and discursive verity beyond the author’s control (and apparently beyond the professional critic’s power to discern).

Because I Am Idolatrous In April, Dowson made final selections for Verses and reviewed his life’s work. Concern about his health was amplified by distress at the similar condition of several friends: Beardsley was taken ‘very seriously ill . . . attacked with congestion of the lungs’; Vincent O’Sullivan, with Beardsley in Belgium, had become ‘alarmed about his health and returned to London’ (L, 355, 356). Around the 24th, Dowson reached a general conclusion: ‘A las! We are a degenerate and maladive race’ (356). Excusing a tardy reply to Smithers the following day—he has ‘been ill (for two days, rather seriously) & am still shaky . . . seedy & depressed’—Dowson reiterates with Baudelairean and Paterian timbre: ‘What a maladive and wretched generation we are’ (357–8; cf. Weir, 50, 64). A sense of epochal degeneration, to use Max Nordau’s language, was in the air. As part of a systematic re-engagement with, and morbid reassessment of, his earlier writing, Dowson partially revised his final sonnet ‘Of a Little Girl’. ‘Epilogue’ became his penultimate, individually published lyric, with its appearance in Savoy 7 in November 1896 and later, as ‘A Last Word’, the final verse composition of Decorations.¹⁷ As a coda to Dowson’s life and work, and the labours of his contemporaries (not least in the Savoy), its conclusions are bitter and drastic:

¹⁵ Arthur Symons, ‘A Literary Causerie: On a Book of Verses’, Savoy 4, 92–3. ¹⁶ Arthur Symons, ‘Ernest Dowson’, The Poems of Ernest Dowson (London: Lane, 1906), xiii. ¹⁷ After Symons rejected ‘In a Breton Cemetery’, Dowson placed it in The Pageant (1897).

214

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Dowson once again blasts the narcissism of the Decadent experiment (cf. Longaker, 214). His revisions also explain what, indeed, had ‘driven’ him from England: he had sought ‘Freedom . . . from love and fear and lust’. Despite his removal from her vicinity, Dowson was unable to relinquish his futile obsession with Foltinowicz. Around this time, days before the publication of Verses, she announced definitively that she would not marry him. She must have written to say so, perhaps omitting that she had become engaged to Augustus Noelte, a tailor who lodged with the family on-premises at Sherwood Street, and helped when the restaurant was busy.¹⁸ Dowson abruptly breaks silence on sentimental matters, which he deemed vital to his wellbeing, to declare his broken heart: ‘Missie writes to me fairly often, friendly letters, which give me sleepless nights and cause me to shed morbid and puerile tears. But she is very kind’, he sorrowfully observes, divulging the proximal cause of his anguish (L, 362). This was the last letter Dowson wrote to Plarr, who casts its revelations in a terminal light: ‘the sun had ceased to shine for poor Ernest Dowson . . . It was a shock, almost a blow, however kindly and calm its phrases’.¹⁹ This is also the final allusion to Foltinowicz in Dowson’s extant correspondence. He cannot bring himself to state her name to his dear friend, and supplies only a dash, un-writing her personal involvement in his vie romancée. This epistolary erasure follows the un-dedication of Verses by a matter of days. Dowson instinctively cancels Foltinowicz when it becomes clear she is not interested in him or his books. He had been preparing for this eventuality in his guarded recent poems, and had factored it in to his carefully worded preface. Now, he panicked that his dedicatory gesture would seem ¹⁸ See John Gawsworth, ‘The Dowson Legend’, Essays by Divers Hands 17 (1938): ix. I follow Jad Adams in supposing that Dowson did not learn about the relationship until his return to England, his remarks about heartbreak notwithstanding (Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent [London: Tauris, 2000], 141). An analogous situation arises in ‘Countess Marie of the Angels’, apparently completed by 22 Mar. 1896, when Mallory learns that his ‘ambiguous cousinship’ with Marie-Joseph-Angèle de la Tour de Boiserie, which had slowly ‘ripened’ into love, is scuppered by a rival (L, 348; Savoy 2, 175). Mallory’s last letter addressed her while she was ‘actually, at that time, though of this fact he was ignorant, betrothed to a certain Comte Raoul des Anges. The news of the marriage reached him months later’ (176). Dowson knew, or guessed, how things would turn out even as he composed his preface. ¹⁹ Victor Plarr, Ernest Dowson 1888–1897: Reminiscences, Unpublished Letters and Marginalia (London: Elkin Mathews, 1914), 115.

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grasping and preposterous. He wrote to Smith, conceding that it may have been misguided: Perhaps you are right in your remarks about my preface. . . . But it is too late to convert me now; I am idolatrous for the rest of my days. Idolatrous to the extent that Keats was when he wrote from Rome to his friend Browne: ‘the lining which she put in my travelling cap scalds my head,’—and like Keats I can not open her letters for a day or so after they reach me. . . . Go and see my Missie I beseech you: and tell me how she takes my ‘Preface’—if she reads it. I only ask that she does not m’en vouloir for it, and that is a little thing to ask for as absolute an adoration as any girl or woman has ever had from anyone. (L, 367)

Styling himself a lovelorn poète maudit in the Keatsian tradition, Dowson’s parallel was seized upon by Symons, who wrote of his ‘Keats-like face, the face of a demoralised Keats’s, exerting a discernible influence upon Dowson’s posthumous reception, as Gawsworth details.²⁰ The conceit is Dowson’s own, however, and had been waiting in store for him for some time. Dowson’s allusions always reward attention. He had been reading Keats’s final correspondence, convinced that his fate chimed ominously with that of his predecessor. He turned to these letters when his prognosis became clear, when he located the apparent source of his trouble in his romantic tribulations. Legendary accounts of Keats’s last days were known to Dowson from childhood: he heard them first hand from Joseph Severn, who accompanied the poet to Italy and tended to him throughout the final weeks of his illness (see Adams, 132). Severn himself co-authorized one crucial aspect of the legend, that ‘If [Keats] dies I am witness that he dies of a broken heart’.²¹ Dowson may allude to this in his catastrophizing letters breaking the news to Plarr and Moore (L, 362, 369). He was left rueing his sacrifice, and strangely exalted by it, simultaneously. This mythopoeic simplification helped him make sense of his own desperate situation. To Smith, Dowson cites Keats’s first letter from Italy, whence he had removed on urgent medical advice. His first thought is of Fanny Brawne, whom his doctors had

²⁰ Symons, ‘On a Book of Verses’, 91; Gawsworth, ‘The Dowson Legend’, 95. ²¹ Joseph Severn to John Taylor, 24 Dec. 1820, John Keats, Selected Letters, edited by Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 490. Leigh Hunt’s remembrance, that Keats ‘suddenly turned upon me, his eyes swimming with tears, and told me he was “dying of a broken heart.” He must have been wonderfully excited to make such a confession; for his was a spirit lofty to a degree of pride’, is also foundational for the legend (Leigh Hunt, Wishing-Cap Papers [1873], 239; quoted in Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats [New York: Oxford University Press, 1966], 652).

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all but forbidden him from seeing. As an approximation of Dowson’s own mood at this time, Keats’s letter is worth citing: The persuasion that I shall see her no more will kill me. I cannot q[uit]. My dear Brown, I should have had her when I was in health, and I should have remained well. I can bear to die. I cannot bear to leave her. Oh, God! God! God! Everything I have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear. The silk lining she put in my travelling cap scalds my head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her. I see her. I hear her. There is nothing in the world of sufficient interest to divert me from her a moment. . . . O, that I could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to write to her, to receive a letter from her. To see her handwriting would break my heart; even to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written would be more than I can bear. My dear Brown, what am I to do? Where can I look for consolation or ease? If I had any chance of recovery, this passion would kill me. (Selected Letters, 480)

Seizing upon Keats’s example, Dowson implies that he could have written this himself. Like Keats, he thought he was dying. He had taken himself abroad to preserve his life until Foltinowicz was old enough to marry. But she had decided against his suit. Fate, it seemed, had ordained for him a Keatsian end. Dowson evidently shared Keats’s conviction that ‘If [he] had any chance of recovery, this passion would kill [him]’. He experienced refusal in Keatsian terms. Reading Keats’s last letters established a framework which accommodated his terminal disease and his romantic fate: without becoming less doleful, they obtained for him a modicum of internal coherence which rendered them comprehensible.²² Dowson’s belated confession of idolatry may suggest that ‘Epigram’ was among the very last poems to make the April deadline for Verses, or that its inkling of failure, both romantic and inspirational, struck him anew at this time. These interrelations are clearest in draft: Pygmalion au Rebours Because I am idolatrous & have besought With grievous supplication & consuming prayer, The admirable image that my dreams have wrought Out of her swan’s neck & her dark abundant hair: The jealous gods that brook no worship save their own Have made mine idol marble and her heart—a stone.²³ ²² See Afterlives: In Epilogue. ²³ Unpublished letter to Symons, uncertainly dated, by Symons to 18 Nov. 1894 and by Flower and Maas to 15 Nov. (Ernest Dowson Collection, Princeton University Library; L, 309).

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Dowson tidied this up, first as ‘The Requital’, and then as ‘Epigram’ in Verses (see W, 186, 288 n). In fact, he thought of the composition as an ‘epigram, (in the antique sense of the word)’ from the start, as a pithy encapsulation of his just desserts.²⁴ The double-barrel Decadent allusion of the draft title draws attention to a word that twenty-first-century readers will take for granted: ‘image’ is not employed in Pound’s phanopoeic sense, but in a quasi-religious manner, as a figment or semblance.²⁵ This ‘admirable image’ is more of an hallucination arising under Dowson’s ‘reign of reverie’, the dubious reward of his idolatry. Conceiving of the beloved in this way is, in fact, the first stage of an alienating process which culminates in the marmoration of the speaker’s absurdly ‘live idol’, and the ossification of the beloved’s ‘heart’. The titular ‘requital’ occurs not ‘because’ of the speaker’s supine worship per se—‘as absolute an adoration as any girl or woman has ever had from anyone’—but because of the lyricizing dream-work wrought ‘out of ’ her personhood (L, 367). Dowson’s poetic orientation towards the objet d’amour implies as much. The poem therefore stands in distinction to ‘In Preface: For Adelaide’ and ‘A Coronal’, demonstrating the sterility of Dowson’s transactional conception of museological inspiration. Life appeared to Dowson at sundry moments as a sort of dream, which became a leitmotif of his writing around this time. He fantasized that his ‘dreams and days shall fade’ in the ‘salt embrace’ of suicide; or with a serene ‘fainter consciousness’ in which he might ‘dimly hear, as in a dream, the sound of Latin prayers’ (D, 22; Savoy 4, 74). There is a consoling, Paterian aspect to his hope that life should thus end. Dowson develops a particularly unreal, mesmeric atmosphere in the haunted prose poems which he composed from the summer of 1896. Perhaps he had, like Francis Donne, a reserve of morphia to draw upon as his disease worsened (Savoy 4, 69–70). In ‘The Visit’, the speaker wonders ‘Darkly, as in a dream’, why his death agony and memories no longer cause pain. In the adjacent prose poem, a ‘liberator’ reports having seen ‘the blue lakes’ of his beloved’s eyes ‘in a dream’: this makes her, of course, ‘The Princess of Dreams’.²⁶ The superabundance of dream images, and the increasingly labyrinthian correspondences it inweaves across Dowson’s late writing, helps mark this as a distinctive phase in his oeuvre. His writing assumes tantalizing allegorical dimensions which have much in common with that of his American contemporary, Stephen Crane; with his master, Charles Baudelaire; and with Olive Schreiner, whom he admired.²⁷ While ‘Baudelaire was not the inventor of prose poetry’, Desmarais and Weir submit, ‘he was ²⁴ Unpublished letter to Symons, Ernest Dowson Collection, Princeton University Library. ²⁵ Cf. L, 388; Gen. 1:26, 27. ²⁶ See Robert Stark, ‘“Faithful . . . In My Fashion[ing]”: Shades of Association in Ernest Dowson’s Poetry’, Victorian Poetry 59.1 (spring 2021): 83–4. ²⁷ CP, xiv. On Crane as a Decadent poet, see Kirsten MacLeod, ‘Decadent America 1890–1930’, Decadence: A Literary History, edited by Alex Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 294.

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easily its most accomplished practitioner by the time decadent culture had become established in 1880s France’.²⁸ They cite a letter in which he isolates the ‘miracle’ of ‘poetic prose’ in its music ‘without rhythm or rhyme, supple and choppy enough to accommodate the lyrical movement of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the bump and lurch of conscience’.²⁹ Dowson’s specimens are squarely in this tradition. He exploits the formal enticements and allegorical propensities of the genre to great effect, excavating its capacity for closure and implication, often pulling the rug from under the reader’s feet at the last moment. Formally, his prose poems stand in a compelling, almost luridly ironical, relationship to Dowson’s own life, which offered the tantalizing possibility of a rich, expressive career, before he was crossed in love and health and those prospects were cruelly withdrawn. This makes them odd bedfellows for the verse portion of Decorations, as Dowson intuited.³⁰ His phantasmagorical turn may have been prompted by revisiting the quintessential dream song, ‘Vitae summa brevis’, in preparation for Verses or, indeed, Dowson may have written the famous lyric now, and included it at the last minute.³¹

Now Be the Music Mute Dowson had arrived at an insoluble dilemma. Having ‘cast the die for Love or death’ with his preface to Verses, and having failed thereby to win Foltinowicz’s esteem, his position as a suitor and as a muse-poet was now untenable (Keats, Selected Letters, 391). He had to face the fact that his predicament with her could not be worked out in literature. Dowson had suppressed the urge to write verses for or about Foltinowicz during the period of his Breton exile for medical reasons, resulting in a new manner; after the publication of Verses and his categorical rejection, he determined that the only course of action open to him was to repudiate poesy outright. The muses had betrayed him. Although he continued to work assiduously on the translations which afforded his meagre subsistence, and was studious of additional fictional projects, Dowson ‘always [had] a sort of feeling upon [him] that [he was] doing certain things for the last time’ (L, 303). He was conscious of living what Keats termed a kind of ‘posthumous existence’—the allusion is explicit—in which his private and professional lives had already run their course (Keats, Selected Letters, 485).

²⁸ Jane Desmarais and David Weir, ‘Prose Poetry: All the Rest is Literature’, The Oxford Handbook of Decadence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 353. ²⁹ Desmarais and Weir, ‘Prose Poetry’, 355–6; citing Jeremy Noel-Tod, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (London: Penguin, 2018), 3. ³⁰ Smithers suggested the inclusion of the prose poems in Decorations (L, 414). ³¹ See Ch. 2, Une Petite Demoiselle of My Acquaintance. ‘Vitae summa brevis’ resembles the last retrospective passage of ‘The Dying of Francis Donne’. Dowson returns to the stanza, very nearly, in ‘Venite, Descendamus’.

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Certain he was dying, coming at last to hold wide-ranging grievances about the futility of his literary aspirations, and the narcissistic personal conduct that followed from his absolute museological commitment, Dowson determined that it was time to serve the coup de grˆace he had invoked in ‘Breton Afternoon’, and bring his career as a lyrical poet to a peremptory conclusion. The poem he eventually placed directly following his excruciating prayer for ‘misericord’ in Decorations is emphatic: LET be at last: give over words and sighing, Vainly were all things said: Better, at last, to find a place for lying, Only dead. Silence were best, with songs and sighing over; Now be the music mute: Now let the dead, red leaves of autumn cover A vain lute! Silence is best: for ever and for ever, We will go down to sleep, Somewhere, beyond her ken, where she need never Come to weep. Let be at last: colder she grows, and colder; Sleep and the night were best; Lying, at last, where we cannot behold her, We may rest. (Savoy 4, 41)

‘Venite, Descendamus’ was probably written shortly before its appearance in August 1896, since it does not feature in Verses. Dowson returns to the theme of beneficent silence which he had associated with Foltinowicz from the beginning of his infatuation, and which became an almost programmatic aesthetic preoccupation at the time of his religious confession. This time, however, the ‘gift of Silence’ he presages is assuredly for his own sake. ‘Silence is best’, he concedes, ‘for ever and for ever’. He cannot evade the cause of his misery, nor face the perpetual interdiction of ‘forever’. Dowson’s lyrics, as he urges ‘In Preface’, were designed exclusively to win Foltinowicz; his silence will be as dogged. The speaker’s concern is not with ‘words’ but with ‘songs and sighing’; he purposes to cease all lyrical endeavour, to put his ‘vain lute’ aside, allowing it to be reincorporated within the general decádence of the season. Buried in the ‘dead, red leaves of autumn’, his lyrical capacity meets the same symbolic fate as Amor, whose imaginative internment Dowson had anticipated at the onset of his rapture, and as he had imagined for himself in the adjacent ‘Breton Afternoon’. The anaphora and

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insurgent repetition of ‘Venite, Descendamus’ clashes with its longing to quietus, and there is always something factitious about renouncing poesy in verse. The sincerity of Dowson’s repudiation can be judged, however, by the fact that he exactly implemented the policy recommended here. We cannot speak precisely about this final spurt of lyrical activity: at most, Dowson composed just a few other poems— two, three, four perhaps—each of them codae upon his museological career, before abandoning verse composition altogether. ‘Venite, Descendamus’ is Dowson’s tentative but resolute farewell to poesy. This overlooked poem is therefore among the most ‘extreme’, the most terminal, of his lyrics. That ‘The Dying of Francis Donne’ accompanies it in Savoy 4 only intensifies this impression. Its inclusion in the August 1896 number suggests it was written in the late summer, notwithstanding its notice of the ‘dead, red leaves of autumn’ (seasons were primarily symbolical for Dowson, and the image may owe something to Shakespeare’s Sonnet LXIII anyway). The valediction is obviously a companion piece to ‘A Last Word’: its disavowal is rooted in the belated recognition that writing, and especially verse composition, is basically a ‘vain’ endeavour, and it employs the same generalizing, first-person plural that characterizes several of Dowson’s last lyrics, wielded no longer in collective admonishment but in resignation and consolation. The summons to departure of ‘A Last Word’, with which the octave and the sestet both commence, is reinscribed in the title of ‘Venite, Descendamus’, echoed in the first lines of the first and fourth stanza, so that it may be, again, that the new composition began with rereading the old.³² Just as the scrambled sonnet readjusts the epigraph of the sonnets ‘Of a Little Girl’, so ‘Venite, Descendamus’ recycles the stanza Dowson devised for ‘To Cynara’ and ‘Vitae summa brevis’. He is plainly surveying his life’s work, settling his canon. The title is significant in this regard: Thornton and Caroline Dowson trace the phrase to Gen. 11:7: ‘Therefore let us go down and mix up their language, so that they may not be able to understand one another’ (CP, 259 n). While there may be ‘little to relate this passage about the Tower of Babel to Dowson’s poem’ intrinsically, the allusion becomes salient when encountered in chronological sequence, as the culmination of Dowson’s vie romancée (259 n). His failure to persuade Foltinowicz to marry him, by writing for and about her, and by dedicating his works and his life to her in the most conspicuous way that contemporary manners would tolerate, shook his faith in the thaumaturgical power of verse, and the capacity of language to signify at all. Like Adrian Rome, he wonders if he has ‘done wrong, perhaps, to commit his ultimate appeal to the untrusty mediation of written words’, at last (AR, 352). Dissolving his lyrical personae in a babelish confusion of tongues is one way of confounding his art. It follows from the conviction that ‘Words are so weak | When love hath been so strong’, and makes an obvious sequel to the jargon of ‘Chanson Sans Paroles’, the concluding poem of Verses (V, 49). ³² Swinburne’s ‘A Leave-Taking’ is also an important precursor (cf. CP, xxii).

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Perhaps Dowson had Arthur Rimbaud’s example in mind when he determined to abandon poetry. He once recommended an article by Édouard Dujardin on purely abdicative grounds: Rimbaud, he says, was Verlaine’s friend & master[,] ‘le grand déclassé’—who was so consistent in his social hatred that he threw away his identity & dropped finally into the crowd just when he was at the zenith of his success. Verlaine parted from him in Metz in 1876—& since then no one has heard of or seen him. (L, 144)

Dowson appreciated the irony of such an end: ‘if I can work that incident up a little it will form a very fitting dénouement to my unhappy Mme de V[iole]’, he said (144). Instead, he held back the plot twist for personal use, as the inevitable outcome of his museological investment in Foltinowicz. It was, as Verlaine wrote of Rimbaud’s renunciation of poetry, logical, genuine, and necessary.³³ What Dowson could not utilize in his stories, he absorbed into life.

The Devil’s Dance Dowson gave up verse, and considered getting out of literature altogether. His interest in Adrian Rome evaporated. Moore says he ‘became increasingly more erratic and dilatory as a correspondent, and it became more and more difficult to extract his “copy” from him; indeed, in the end, I found myself compelled to write the last few chapters of Adrian Rome without his cooperation’.³⁴ In Dowson’s penultimate story, this literary desertion takes analogical form. Following his beloved’s betrothal to another, and a terminal lapse in their correspondence, Sebastian Mallory attempts to concentrate on his miliary career: he set himself, buoyed up by a certain vein of austerity in his nature, to conquer that instinctive distaste which, from time to time, still exercised him towards his profession, to throw himself into its practice and theory, if not with ardour, at least with an earnestness that was its creditable imitation. (Savoy 2, 176)

This approximates Dowson’s attitude towards literature: his ‘instinctive distaste’ was always evident in a constitutional aversion to the reading public and a generic distrust of publishers. He did ‘throw himself into [the] practice and theory’ of writing from summer 1896, composing a preface to his imminent translation of La Fille aux Yeux d’Or, and planning several other projects (L, 328, 332, 334, 415). He also considered writing preliminary matter for Les Liaisons Dangereuses (394). At their ³³ Paul Verlaine, Les Poètes Maudits (Paris: Vanier, 1884), 18. ³⁴ Quoted in Longaker, Ernest Dowson, 124. Dowson’s last extant letter to Moore is dated June 1896 (L, 368–9).

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final parting—agreeing that neither had ‘real faith’ in Mallory’s ‘project’; that each knew in their hearts ‘it was impossible’ that Angèle should accept his marriage proposal—Mallory states bluntly: ‘I have given up my profession’ (Savoy 2, 182, 183). The story is subscribed ‘Paris—Pont-Aven, 1896’, as if Dowson wished to fix the place of his own professional resignation. Dowson’s translation work for Smithers, too, which wholly supplied his sustenance, now seemed more trouble than it was worth. At the end of the following year, 1897, he wrote to express his frustrations, proposing a new start: No—I have not taken literature as an amusement; I have tried to live by it. . . . all the more reason for my abandoning it now while I have still a small capital which might be turned to account. . . . My idea, however, is to . . . go to Johannisberg [sic]. I have a friend out there who edits a paper & who does pretty well & if nothing else turns up which I could work ‘on my own’, I should be sure of getting a berth on his journal. But there are lots of other openings which I should try in preference. I can get to the Cape (intermediate) for a very few pounds & something might be done there, en route. If, according to a pamphlet I remember hearing of, you can start as a tobacconist with £20—surely with a few hundreds I can get a better crutch than literature in some of our numerous colonies. (L, 401)

Inspired by Rimbaud’s poetic resignation, Dowson entertained thoughts of an alternate, post-literary life as a bourgeois in the European colonies. He outlined other schemes to Smithers, too (see L, 413). At the end of his life, he reportedly complained to Sherard that ‘Literature has failed for me. I shall look somewhere else in the future’, prompting Sherard to conclude that Dowson ‘affords altogether the most discouraging example of the inutility of conscientiousness in modern English literature that one can find’.³⁵ Yeats concurred, opining: ‘I cannot imagine the world where he would have succeeded’.³⁶ In the year following the appearance of Verses, then, Dowson’s philological crisis only deepened, and his ancient hatred of London did nothing to dissipate it. His few remaining poems are concerned with the breakdown of his lifelong ambition to do original literary work. While these may well have been written before ‘Venite, Descendamus’ and ‘A Last Word’—it is tempting to insist that they must have been, for the sake of an orotund dénouement to Dowson’s vie romancée—several were ³⁵ Robert H. Sherard, ‘Ernest Dowson’, The Author 10.12 (May 1900), 266–7, 266. ³⁶ W. B. Yeats, Memoirs, edited by Denis Donoghue (London: Macmillan, 1972), 92. Pound may have heard this ‘smoking-room anecdote’ from Yeats, while working as his secretary at Stone Cottage or in public lectures preceding this, and his light-hearted parody ‘The Lake Isle’ may derive from Dowson’s plan to arise and go, to Johannesburg; it is certainly consonant with Pound’s view of Dowson in ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ (see James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism [London: Oxford University Press, 1988], 165–7, cf. 15). Dowson’s failure as a muse-poet, not his abonnement of the role, became preliminary to the modernist’s notion of a ‘tragic generation’ against whom they sought to define their own vigour and robustness, while borrowing much from him, technically.

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published in subsequent numbers of the Savoy, and this sequence is tentatively retained here. Two such poems (‘A Song’ and ‘Exchanges’) are defeated encomia to Foltinowicz in the same key, and two (‘Dregs’ and ‘The Three Witches’) are more scathing and vituperative, illustrating the drift of Dowson’s response to the end of his romantic and literary career. Slight as this first pairing may be, it illuminates Dowson’s frame of mind following the collapse of his marital designs. Reprising the embittered theme of ‘Epigram’, each ponders the desserts that accrue to the muse-poet for his tender offices. Exhaustion and injustice are pleaded in ‘A Song’: All that a man may pray, Have I not prayed to thee? What were praise left to say, Has not been said by me, O, ma mie? Yet thine eyes and thine heart, Always were dumb to me: Only to be my part, Sorrow has come from thee[.]

Indignant that his misintended prayers have not been answered, that his copious ‘praise’ has not been credited or recompensed, the speaker is ‘dismay[ed]’ and sadly yields his claim. Dowson’s canon includes no obvious panegyrics upon Foltinowicz: ‘Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures’, and ‘Growth’ come nearest to poems of ‘praise’, so the word is employed unusually. Dowson may allude to the manifold acknowledgements of ‘In Preface: For Adelaide’, where the poet-speaker concedes that he has ‘no silver tongue such as were fit to praise’ the beloved, and instead ‘commend[s]’ his ‘little book’ to her. Having offered Verses in tribute, he holds nothing in reserve for ‘praise’ to ‘say’. Foltinowicz’s response to the appearance of Verses—to any of Dowson’s published works—is not known. This suggests her reaction underwhelmed Dowson, for he would have exulted in relaying any trifling enthusiasm to Moore, Plarr, and Smith. ‘A Song’ confirms that her ‘eyes and . . . heart, | Always were dumb to me’. The implication of the last verse-foot is that her muteness is only relative to the speaker, to Dowson, and that the same ‘eyes and . . . heart’ might answer another more ardently. Fearing that Dowson was about to dedicate Verses to her might have prompted Foltinowicz to write to definitively refuse him, since Dowson learned the news just after settling the wording. He expected Verses to be published in May, so he had to wait about a month to gauge her reaction (L, 361). Foltinowicz finally received one of thirty large paper copies, which only became available several weeks after the ordinary edition, sometime in the middle of June (367). The last three stanzas of ‘Chanson Sans Paroles’, the final utterance in the highly

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wrought sequence of Verses, anticipate the moment when she would finally see the volume and be persuaded of Dowson’s love: ‘she will hear and awake! | | She will hearken and glide . . . | . . . to my side’, the speaker supposes. He literally waits for his ‘leaves to be waved’, or else ‘for a sign’ that ‘this world’ will be ‘saved’, but his song gives out before she can pick up his book: ‘In the deep violet air, | Not a leaf is stirred’. If Foltinowicz responded to the publication of Verses as he feared, Dowson would have cause to resent its appearance, as ‘Venite, Descendamus’ might lead us to expect. Its conclusions—that ‘vainly were all things said’; that ‘Silence were best, with songs and sighing over’—would suit a very cool reception indeed. Nevertheless, Dowson took real delight in publication, and even reported to Symons that his ‘reviews are really a joy’ to him (L, 372). The gift economy that underwrites all of Dowson’s muse poems is given blunter treatment in ‘Exchanges’, a more obvious sequel to ‘Epigram’. The speaker has come to market, as in the approximately contemporaneous prose poem of that name, hoping to find companionship and perhaps to elicit a modicum of sympathetic interest. To barter he has enlisted his whole being: All that I had I brought, Little enough I know; A poor rhyme roughly wrought, A rose to match thy snow: All that I had I brought.

Again, the speaker has no surplus store of ‘praise’ to offer his beloved, now he has blown his wad, as Dowson had to no avail in issuing Verses. It was ‘encadré’ in ‘luxury’ by Smithers, with an ‘[admirable] binding block . . . simplex munditiis, & yet most sumptuous’ by Beardsley; Foltinowicz received the folio edition in Japanese vellum.³⁷ Surely, the poet-speaker implies, his purse ought to have been adequate to the modest acquisition he wished to make. He only ‘sought . . . a word compassionate, | A passing glance, or thought’. Yet his ‘poor rhyme[s] roughly wrought’ could not procure such trivial considerations; the beloved disdains to notice and he is left to agonize ‘outside the gate’, in an apparent allusion to the crucifixion of Christ (Heb. 13:12). The third stanza attributes this failure of understanding to an intrinsic lack of empathy in the beloved herself: ‘Little enough I found’, the speaker muses: ‘A ll that you had, perchance!’ There was nothing phenomenal to discover in his attachment to Foltinowicz, or in her person. For Adams, this is ‘the most bitter’ of Dowson’s poems about the failure of the relationship (151). ³⁷ L, 365. The lavish production heightened Dowson’s feeling of trepidation about publication in some respects: ‘I am only afraid the reviewers will think the contents unworthy of such display’, he maintained (365). ‘A Crystal is said to be . . . Encadré or framed, when it has facets which form kinds of frames or squares around the planes of a more simple form already existing in the same species’ (‘encadré, adj.’; quoting Robert Jameson, A Treatise on the External Characters of Minerals). See Ch. 8 at n. 2.

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Thus, the final note of Dowson’s oeuvre is struck: quietly at first, he begins to divest from the museological myth he had so long prepared, and that he had so recently insinuated into Verses. Before long, his disaffection has become grotesque: ‘With the dead leaves on the ground, | I dance the devil’s dance’, we read in ‘The Three Witches’; Dowson’s poetic début is obscurely trammelled, rendered prematurely obsolete. No longer certain of his status as a muse-poet, or of his inspirational charge, the speaker throws a tantrum, in deranged impersonation of the evil spirits of the miracle plays. ‘The Three Witches’ aspires to be the most terrific of Dowson’s lyrics. Its failure to evoke a genuinely ominous atmosphere— pronounced in comparison with Johnson’s ‘The Dark Angel’—does not detract from the acuity of certain lines. Dowson’s underlying conception for the lyric probably derives from his engagement with the works of Pierre Louÿs, who had launched his career with a book of erotic verse entitled Astarté, and achieved popular success with Aphrodite: mœrs antique in 1896.³⁸ Encouraged by Wilde and sensing ‘a great succès’, Dowson lobbied to translate this ‘delightfully scabrous roman’; Louÿs assented but temporized, and Dowson ultimately lost out on the assignment.³⁹ In December 1895, Dowson had pronounced himself, with Louÿs, ‘the greatest authority in Europe on Lesbianism’, wholly on account of his translations of La Fille aux Yeux d’Or, and dedicated the volume to him ‘by permission—or request’ (L, 334, 336). This accounts for the arresting shift—unique in Dowson’s canon—to a female persona for this lyric. Astarte—which Dowson rhymes with ‘party’, following Louÿs—is a lunar goddess of female sexuality, associated at various times with Ba’al, Ishtar, Isis, and Aphrodite. In ancient Judea, she was known as ‘She of the Womb’, and the ‘Queen of Heaven’.⁴⁰ In the Bible, Astarte is named Ashtoreth, and inspires fear and abhorrence. She and her cult are associated with sacred prostitution, and her worship is said to be the cause of God’s abandoning the Israelites (Judg. 2:12–14). In one tradition, the name is pronounced like bōshet, meaning ‘abomination’, which may contribute to Dowson’s conception, as might Astarte’s denomination, in Jewish mythology, as a ‘female demon of lust’ (‘A starte’). Louÿs returned to the figure throughout his writing, where she appears as a teeming, late-Romantic muse-figure, reconciling the full gamut of female archetypes: a ‘boundless, incorruptible, creative mother; first-born and self-begot . . . Pure, and orgasmic, ineffable, nocturnal; sweet [and] fire-breathing’.⁴¹ Astarte ‘grants secret graces’ which ‘unite’ her followers in ‘love’ and ‘furious desire’, causing the ‘wild beasts’ to multiply, and ‘the sexes to join in the forest’ (216, 219). ³⁸ Cf. ‘Potnia Thea’ (F, 5–7). ³⁹ Wilde, Letters, 926; L, 324, 391; see Longaker, Ernest Dowson, 183, 250. ⁴⁰ ‘A starte’, The New World Encyclopaedia, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Astarte. Accessed 8 Nov. 2021. ⁴¹ Pierre Louÿs, ‘Hymne à Astarté’, Les Chansons de Bilitis (Paris: Libraire Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1900), 216, 219. See Introduction, Decadent Museology.

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This licenses a diabolical epitome of Dowson’s generation as ‘the children of Astarte, | Dear abortions of the moon’. To self-identify as a (putatively female) child of Astarte is of course to sexualize and paganize the art and inspiration Dowson had lately presented in chaste, devotional terms. He may be aware that the plural form of the goddess’s name in Hebrew was extended to include goddess-worship in general, and so this indictment may take on the broader implication that he was, and his generation were, incapable of resisting erotic enticements; that their immoderate worship of women in their writing, and their exaltation of women to quasi-divine status as muses, was fatally in error. In consequence of their misdirected passion, their lives have been lived in forced expulsion from a preferable and more natural state. To be wrested from the womb of the primal lunar goddess means to live a monstrously deformed life, and premature death. Usurping the bravado of ‘Villanelle of the Poet’s Road’, his contemporaries are now possessed of a propulsive, maniacal fury: We shall wander through the meaning Of a day and see no light, For our lichened arms are leaning On the ends of endless night. We, the children of Astarte, Dear abortions of the moon, In a gay and silent party, We are riding to you soon.

The world of these Decadent desperados is uninhabitable and incomprehensible. Their lives seem meaningless, but they are haunted by elusive feelings of significance. Read in conjunction with the final supplication of ‘Breton Afternoon’, the problem is not that the ‘day’ is insignificant, but that it is self-occluding: a sort of uncertainty principle obtains, preventing the ego-ridden observer from grasping phenomena in which they are both interested and implicated. The ‘lichened arms’ of the speaker and her cohorts symbolize their Decadent petrification. Approaching death, ‘on the end of endless night’, they verge upon natural reincorporation. ‘Lichen’ is a skin disease; Dowson suffered from a rash in the spring of 1896 which had not abated when Verses appeared in June (L, 364). He conflates these senses, imparting a weird decrepitude to these wizened riders bound furiously upon ‘the flame which never dies’.⁴² They are emissaries, determined on ‘strange and abominable flights into the darkness of the pit, into the black night of the unknowable and the unknown’ (Savoy 4, 71). The speaker presents a stoic aspect amidst the apocalypse: her eyes are ‘strained and tearless’; if they are ‘silent’, they are nevertheless ‘gay’, ‘yearning, yearning, yearning’ with otherworldly passion. ⁴² Though commonplace, Dowson probably procured his eternal flame from Swinburne’s ‘Dolores’, ll. 281–2.

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‘The Three Witches’ also offers a macabre update to The Pierrot of the Minute. Its sinister imagery perverts the lunatic cosmogeny offered by the Moon-Maiden, who ‘sits upon a throne of amethysts | And orders mortal fortunes as she lists’ (ll. 357–8). ‘Hers is the lustrous kingdom of the heart’, we are told, ‘And dreamers all, and all who sing and love, | Her power acknowledge, and her rule approve’ (ll. 364–6). The Moon-Maiden affirms that Pierrot is ‘one of hers’, doomed to Forthwith forget all joyance of the day, Forget their laughter and forget their tears, And dream away with singing all the years— Moon-lovers always! (ll. 375–8)

This destiny has its consolations, but Dowson revises his romantic diagnosis in his last lyrics. Rather than the ‘moon-struck child[ren]’ of the Pierrot play, he and his generation have become ‘Dear abortions of the moon’ (l. 299; D, 8). They remain ‘children’ of the moon-mother in her ‘list[ing]’ caprice but, as Pierrot had discerned in a moment of ironic clarity, she resembles ‘grim Clotho and her sisters twain | With shrivelled fingers’, spinning a ‘web of bane’ more than a fecund source of dream songs (ll. 361–2). Given their derivation from Louÿs, the three witches are probably not the Fates, however, but the Furies. In Hesiod’s Theogony, the three sisters are born of Uranus’ castration, as Aphrodite emerges from the seafoam.⁴³ They appear to Dowson at last, while settling his affairs and his canon, as the vengeful enforcers of destiny. His marauding riders are set on an inalterable course; whence, or for what reason, is no longer worth the reckoning. They are about their final journey, about to ‘astart’ in the primitive, poetic sense: withdrawing, removing, escaping (‘astart, v., sense 3b’).

Ghosts This quixotic attitude is struck again in another very late leave-taking poem, which Dowson entitled ‘Vale’ at first, before amending to ‘Dregs’ when correcting proof of Decorations in 1899. The refrain, borrowed for the occasion from Swinburne’s ‘A Ballad of the Burdens’, reiterates Dowson’s conclusion that his career had reached its terminal phase and logical finale. He was content to suffer his lyrical ambitions to become derelict: Vale The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof, (This is the end of every song man sings!) ⁴³ Cf. Louÿs, Chansons de Bilitis, 216.

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The lyric is hard to date, since Dowson declined to publish it until Decorations, but the atmosphere of absinthe and sea air, and the phrasing, strongly associate it with his Breton lyrics and late prose poems.⁴⁴ The implied chronology of the speaker’s final defeat—‘love’ goes first, then ‘health’, ‘hope’ last—suggests that the poem was written after Dowson’s broken-hearted acknowledgements of May and June 1896, and after his last throw of the dice with his dedication of Verses. In June, he wrote that ‘I am in wretched health, with continual blood-spitting . . . but am doing much work, verse especially’ and these circumstances comport with the details of the poem (L, 367–8). The oblivion which he had always craved becomes Dowson’s portion at last in this poem, but it is no consolation that ‘love’, ‘health’, and ‘hope’ have slipped from him ‘into the drear oblivion of lost things’, since he remains mindful of them, and their loss. These consecutive failures parallel those of sense, consciousness, and being in ‘The Dying of Francis Donne’: everything is rent from the poet; stripped layer by layer, item by item. His last poems ask what endures after the ultimate decádence. The provisional answer, here, is that his are the titular ‘dregs’ of experience and inspiration: a chastening corrective for Pater’s headlong rush into the immanence of things. Dowson’s ultimate answer is that nothing whatsoever remains. For the moment, he can only marvel at his rotten luck. The second couplet jumps out, a suddenly apprehended insight, comprehensible at last: Ghosts go along with us until the end; This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.

These hauntings could be read generically, but for a poet convinced he was dying, they must possess immediate sense. We might wonder, as Verlaine put it, These agitated ghosts, are they the poet’s Drunken thoughts, or his regret, or his remorse, ⁴⁴ Cf. ‘I have looked for the woman I might have loved, and the friend we hear of ’ (D, 43).

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Ghosts spinning to the cadence of chaos, Or are they just dead? (‘Nuit du Walpurgis classique’, Selected Poems, 25)

The answer is not far to seek. Two ghosts hover around Dowson in this extreme state: his remembranced ‘mistress’ is surely ‘Lena’, his first love, his archetypal muse, and the true subject of his most celebrated poem. The ‘friend’ he now recognizes, uncertainly, is doubtless Adelaide Foltinowicz, the young lady to whom he had ‘commend[ed]’ Verses and ‘all [his] work’, but whose affection for him never outgrew childish rapport or coy amity (V, ix). Dowson had begun to query his habitual ways of thinking about Foltinowicz already in ‘In Tempore Senectutis’, where his addressee is designated ‘Friend of my heart’ and ‘My life’s one love’ by turns. Even now, Dowson cannot help but compare these two very different women, and the roles they declined to fulfil for him. Much ink had been spilled arriving at these companionable epithets, ‘mistress’, and ‘friend’. The word ‘love’ is notably absent. Not so in the undated and uncollected poem ‘Fantaisie Triste’ which, if it is also a late lyric, presents a surprising and unlooked for conclusion to Dowson’s quandary in extremis. So nostalgic is this poem, it reads like a terminal survey of the speaker’s love life. The sad fantasy of the title presumably refers to love (or even to life) itself, in riposte to ‘De Amore’ and Pierrot. The first stanza is dedicated to young love: To my first love, Loved all above: I’ the late spring, Pansies, pansies, Such strange fancies, Were all I had to bring.⁴⁵

The details are consistent with Dowson’s first love affair. Wild pansy, heartsease, is an apt emblem of his juvenile affection because of its vibrant coloration and ease of cultivation. Dowson was engrossed by James’s jeunes filles at the time, Pansy Osmond in particular, and modelled several of his own characters upon her (see L, 118, 157, 161). As Moore reminds us, the English name was so invariably linked with its French root, pensée, that it becomes practically impossible to regard the association as a pun.⁴⁶ Dowson’s Zola-inspired ‘experiment’ involved ‘strange fancies’ indeed, and ‘Lena’ justifiably declined to put up with them. ⁴⁵ Berg Collection, New York Public Library. ⁴⁶ Arthur Moore, The Knight Punctilious (London: Methuen, 1903), 57; cf. 18, 268.

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The speaker then turns his attention to a more recent, and final, passionate attachment: To my last love, Loved all above: At evening, One chrysanthemum, Of wan autumn, Is all I have to bring.

The phrasing exactingly equates the two instances of love, implying that the objet d’amour hardly matters at all. The hyperbolic propensity of exclusive, romantic absorption is the really significant fact: every other concern, each prior romantic interest, diminishes in its light. This poem therefore permits detachment from each specific instance of infatuation, without lessening the intensity of the supervening appetite for being in love. The speaker is, with Augustine and Baudelaire, ‘passionately in love with passion’.⁴⁷ A single chrysanthemum would be an odd gift, but this stanza is dedicated to the speaker’s ‘last love’ (cf. AR, 87). The funerary implications imply that his demise will shortly follow the end of this relationship. Why this lyric never made it into either of Dowson’s canonical publications is hard to guess.⁴⁸ Maybe the text once appeared in the holograph notebook, was excised and lost; it could be the poem which ‘slipped’ Dowson’s memory as Smithers prepared Decorations, but which he mailed separately around 9 March, 1899 in the ‘hope [that] it is not too late’; just possibly, it postdates his last volume completely.⁴⁹ Either way, the poem is implicitly a late, dedicatory offering: by this stage, the ‘evening’ and ‘wan autumn’ of his life, Foltinowicz had become Dowson’s ‘last love’, and his capacity for resplendent floral gifts had considerably dwindled. The third stanza opens an unnerving vista upon the past: In a dim past, Overcast, With the dead flow’rs And the strayed hours; (There are no flowers left to bring, There are no songs left to sing) Let first be last! ⁴⁷ Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated by Thom Maine (London: Phaidon, 1995), 9. ⁴⁸ ‘Fantaisie Triste’ was first published posthumously by John Gawsworth, in Known Signatures (London: Rich and Cowan, 1932), 35. ⁴⁹ L, 407. Althea Gyles’ design for Decorations is usually thought to feature a rose; if it is instead a single chrysanthemum, ‘Fantaisie Triste’ may make more sense. See Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents, 245–6.

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Since 1890, Dowson has routinely represented his poesy as posies to be bestowed upon the beloved. Now his ‘flow’rs’ are dead or gone. The syntax insists that, along with the speaker’s ‘strayed hours’, his defunct floriations have themselves obscured ‘the dim past’: lyric composition is implicated in the distortion of reality which oppresses, that leads to self-incrimination, and causes him to turn on his miasmic generation. The contention chimes with many late texts in Dowson’s oeuvre. The really emphatic part of the stanza is relegated to parenthesis, a last cri de cœur, smothered by the verse pattern. The last line of ‘Fantaisie Triste’ ambivalently heralds the speaker’s impending demise, now that his life and work have run their course, and a transvaluation of his earthly affections. Dowson seemingly rediscovers that his initial experience of love was crucial to his subsequent life and work, and anticipates a time when this archetypal experience is restored to its true significance. He is not thereby released from his ultimate obsession, but he comes to view it in context. Reasons to suppress his first grande passion were fewer in 1899 than in 1892, when Dowson threw himself, with an empty notebook and a clean slate, into a new, lifelong love; fewer, also, than in 1896, when he seized the opportunity to make a public demonstration of his fealty, elevating Foltinowicz to the status of co-conspirator and co-author of Verses. But this realization would have struck most forcibly after 1897, in his perceived abandonment, when any deviation from his established trajectory as a muse-poet would now threaten the coherence of the body of work just then concluding. Indeed, ‘Fantaisie Triste’ may coincide with Dowson’s decision to spike the dedicatory lines from Propertius that he had intended to include with Decorations, which would have associated his work with Foltinowicz one last time, and his advancement of ‘To Hélène’ to the prime, epigraphical position of the volume, where he indeed sets his ‘first love’ at the head of a full-length publication, at last. ‘Fantaisie Triste’ may not be Dowson’s final lyric but, like several of his very last texts, it speaks from the very threshold of his posterity.

Afterlives: In Epilogue

At times in these last poems, Dowson is stoic, accepting of his fate; at other time, he decries the muses who have forsaken him. His vitriol is both general and particular, registering most keenly in personal allusions to his terminal circumstances, and to their imagined cause, in Adelaide Foltinowicz. The impression of an increasingly maniacal and decrepit author poring over his earlier work emerges: dumbfounded that his exquisite phrases have failed to rivet the errant beloved, he is nevertheless caught up in the feelings and memories that they summon. He, not she, is transfixed Pygmalion-like to ‘the admirable image that [his] dreams have wrought’ (V, 54). For a while, this rapt attention engenders fresh new work. Dowson was always inspired by his reading. This time, however, he withdrew into lyrical selfcolloquy, intensifying that aspect of his writing which is most quintessentially Decadent. His last poems still weave their intertextual sense in conspiratorial ways, but mainly in conversation, now, with Verses. His seminal lyrics are ensured a brief, compensatory sequel in these subsequent floriations, even as his poetic development is forestalled. Ultimately, the end of Dowson’s real and fancied relationship with Foltinowicz signalled the end of his imaginative career, as a vatic poet and as a prose observer of sentimental dilemmas. The most vulgarly material circumstances of his life—ruined health and urgent financial need—caught up with him, attaching a peremptory rigor mortis to the sheer imaginative palsy that arose in dismay following the appearance of Verses and his romantic rejection. In the generous spirit of Dowson’s closest friends and the eminent critics who have responded to his writing before me, I pass over the grinding indignity of Dowson’s last years in tacenda: bestowing a small ‘gift of Silence’ at last upon a subject to which I have devoted so much scrutiny, which would have been so unwelcome (V, 7). My concern is not with Dowson’s biography, after all, but with his vie romancée. Writing had always been a social undertaking for Dowson; it meant connection and connectedness. He could most readily be persuaded to embark upon a publication scheme when it required the sustained fellowship of some collaborator—a Plarr, Moore, Peters, or Smithers—or the surrogate mutuality of a co-authorial muse like ‘Hélène’, ‘Cynara’, or ‘Missie’. Dowson’s museology was therefore, and in particular, a (very narrow) window onto female experience, which spoke to the poet in him as something absolutely Other, awakening him to language, and rousing him to pattern and form. The highly conventional encounter with

Ernest Dowson. Robert Stark, Oxford University Press. © Robert Stark (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192884763.003.0010

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alterity which Dowson’s writing enabled—or simulated—was not only a way of reciprocally being in the world, of giving and receiving, but a kind of imaginative intercourse. In its richest vein, Dowson’s poetry is therefore carnal, in a sense, whether it transpires ‘between the kisses and the wine’, in shadowy disavowal of sexual interest, or in a Soho cloister (V, 17). Inspiration is consanguine in nature. It amounts, almost by definition, to self-illimitation. Moreover, being melancholy and brooding by temperament, Dowson had always looked to literature—to reading, but especially to writing, in planned campaigns of mutual composition or in the momentary transports of vatic conductivity and museological mediumship— as a way of escaping himself. Writing was a palliative for loneliness, a bulwark against the ‘spleen’ of self-loathing (see L, 292, 326, 340). His lyrics therefore strive relentlessly against the regime of a ‘simplex’, expressive self, in their allusive cacophonies, shadowy associations, self-similarities, and contra-dictions (L, 60). In this, Dowson is the inheritor of Browning and the forebear of his modernist admirers. But in proportion as his prospects in life and love receded, his irrepressibly mutual, conspiratorial aesthetic came to seem a vain endeavour. He failed Keats-like into his sole self. Dowson had prepared this finale for himself with exquisite precaution, notably in ‘The Dying of Francis Donne’, a startling self-epigraph cast in the long shadow of the final chapter of Marius the Epicurean. Determined as he was to ‘meet [Death], a stranger in a strange land, with only strange faces round [him] and the kind indifference of strangers, instead of the intolerable pity of friends’, Dowson nevertheless returned to London, reluctantly, at the end of October 1896 (Savoy 4, 70). He intended to ‘stay four or five days’ and ‘afterwards . . . return to Brittany, to Pont-Aven, or to some southern & sun-favoured part of Europe’ (L, 373). Wisely, Dowson had planned the briefest possible return visit, and was chagrined when he had to prolong it; but he was ‘starting on a new & monumental translation for Smithers [of Les Liaisons Dangereuses]’ which necessitated his ‘staying in London’ (373, 374). Then, following a short stint at his old premises at Featherstone Buildings, High Holborn, he again became ensconced in Sherwood Street, above the Foltinowiczes’ restaurant. If Dowson left London to escape the emotional turmoil which he knew to be deleterious to his health, this bizarre, inexplicable act would be tantamount, almost, to a frantic, suicidal impulse. Smith destroyed a cache of Dowson’s letters from this time, but those which survive confirm that his frightful tenancy at ‘Poland’ appeared very much in this light. His first extant letter of 1897, datelined April, and 19 Sherwood Street, commences thus: I know that you must think me a fool, but I am suffering the torture of the damned. I ought to have drowned myself at Pont Aven, or having come back to London I ought to have had the strength of mind to have kept away. Now, if I change my rooms or go to the Arctic Pole it is only an increased intolerable Hell, and . . . there

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is not a person I come across who realizes that I am being scorched daily, or does not put down my behaviour to sheer ill humour. Quousque tandem, Domine, quousque tandem? (382)

This infernal imagery harkens back to Dowson’s letter of 4 June 1896, also to Smith, which cited Keats’s tortured letter about Fanny Brawne.¹ Indeed, Dowson’s excruciating new dilemma—the word is hardly adequate—rhymes strangely with, and may have been contrived in living allusion to, Keats’s famous quandary, at the end of his life, of being too near his beloved for his own good.² ‘Were you to lose a favorite bird from the cage, how would your eyes ache after it as long as it was in sight’, the great poet wrote, ‘when out of sight you would recover a little’.³ If Dowson was unconscious of masochistic motivation, he might have reasoned thus. On the other hand, having tried and failed to live apart from Foltinowicz, he may now have supposed, also with Keats, that a final separation could now be fatal to his chances of recovery.⁴ It might have occurred to him to try to free himself from his passionate agony by immersing himself fully in the reality of Foltinowicz’s impending marriage to Noelte. Or else this may be a last-ditch, thaumaturgic fantasy, a final attempt to avoid Keats’s fate by remaining faithful in his fashion, by keeping his strange troth. Probably, Dowson simply could not bear to be removed from Foltinowicz at this time, and was fully aware of the consequences of remaining hopelessly adjunctive to the domestic scene from which he was forever excluded.⁵ Howsoever he convinced himself to take up residence at Sherwood Street, it was a disaster. Dowson then begin to dispose of his affairs. The last of his short stories and lyrics appeared in The Savoy, numbers 4 (August 1896) and 7 (November 1896) ¹ L, 367; see Ch. 8, Because I Am Idolatrous. ² In Bate’s view, ‘Living nearby, alone, [Keats] would be wanting to come over constantly or to have Fanny visit him; and he had no right to make such demands. [His doctors] Bree and Rodd, moreover, had kept telling him that he must avoid any emotional excitement. Perhaps they were right, and if he did as they said he might get well again. Counterpointed with these thoughts was still another . . . if he was going to die within the next year (and there is little doubt that some of the time he was convinced that this would happen), then, in Stoic self-protection, he must cut himself off a little—try to care less passionately about all that he dreaded most to lose’ (Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats [New York: Oxford University Press, 1966], 644). ³ John Keats, Selected Letters, edited by Grant F. Scott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 443. ⁴ When the necessity of going to Italy to recover was first broached, Keats was appalled: ‘’Tis certain I shall never recover if I am to be so long separate from you’ (Selected Letters, 450). He reiterates this position in his final letter to Brawne: ‘The fact is I cannot leave you, and shall never taste one minute’s content until it pleases chance to let me live with you for good. . . . A person in health as you are can have no conception of the horrors that nerves and a temper like mine go through. . . . If I cannot live with you I will live alone. I do not think my health will improve much while I am separated from you’ (457). ⁵ Jad Adams also entertains a sullen, algolagnistic motive: ‘Perhaps he wanted one last look at Missie before she was gone forever. Perhaps he just wanted to torment himself and deliberately chose the position of greatest pain’ (Madder Music, Stronger Wine: The Life of Ernest Dowson, Poet and Decadent [London: Tauris, 2000], 142).

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respectively, and in The Pageant (see Ch. 8 at n. 17). When Smithers determined that The Pierrot of the Minute ‘would have a sufficient appeal to warrant the manufacture of a small edition’, Dowson listlessly acquiesced.⁶ He makes no mention of the project in his surviving correspondence, and ‘the many variations between the two manuscripts and the first edition are probably’, in Longaker’s view, ‘as much the result of Smithers’ knack of preparing manuscripts for the press as of Dowson’s revisions of the proof.’⁷ Pierrot was issued in two forms in early March 1897 and—with Beardsley’s cover, frontispiece, and cul-de-lampe—became ‘one of the masterpieces of bookmaking in the Nineties’.⁸ The thirty numbered ‘large paper copies . . . all sold’ by the turn of the year, so that Dowson could not offer one to Peters, who had commissioned the work (L, 403). A brief sojourn at Arques-la-Bataille, often in the still resplendent company of Wilde, momentarily revived Dowson. He discussed a scheme for a short novel, if he could fund it, and the irony of having ‘never felt so physically well, or so morally fit to work & not to drink as I do at present’, although the remark may be calculated to extract a loan from Conal O’Riordan (L, 384). Writing has ‘somewhat cheered’ him, he says, but ‘all my misères will return in a moment’ (385). Foltinowicz married Augustus Noelte on 26 September, while Dowson was staying with J. de Courcy MacDonnell at Fairy Hill, in Limerick on the River Shannon: Moore bore Dowson’s wedding present to the Bavarian Chapel in Westminster on his behalf.⁹ Moore also had to wind up Adrian Rome unaided and did so, effectively, by October. November finds Dowson ‘reading through & destroying old letters . . . in the bottomless pit of depression’ (L, 396). That he maintained a manuscript notebook of some sort is demonstrated by a tantalizing loose title page inscribed ‘Fragments Fragments Dowson | Copied out. Paris — to be worked up | Nov. 1897’. but there | by Ernest Ernest Dowson is little evidence that ‘he was still actively writing verse’, as Adams contends.¹⁰ Possibly, these were notes, relics, debris of the most incoherent sort. The title page may also have been a means of classifying and gathering the short prose poems that were later included in Decorations. Even in this eventual setting they seem detached and piecemeal, shards of the larger dreamscape into which Dowson was inexorably slipping.¹¹

⁶ Mark Longaker, Ernest Dowson (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944), 227. ⁷ Longaker, Ernest Dowson, 227. The matter will be fully considered in Ernest Dowson Re-Collected: A New, Chronological Variorum Edition, edited by Robert Stark (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming). ⁸ James G. Nelson, Publisher to the Decadents: Leonard Smithers in the Careers of Beardsley, Wilde, Dowson (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 243. ⁹ CP, xxv. Flower and Maas give an alternate date of 30 Sept. (L, 378; cf. Adams, 148). Prior to his departure, Dowson was living at Sherwood Street: I find Symons, suggestion that he fled London to escape the occasion entirely persuasive (see L, 378, however). ¹⁰ F, loose-leaf; Adams, 150; cf. 157, 163. ¹¹ The epigraph which later appears in Love’s Aftermath may have been intended for these prose poems, since it also appears on the draft title page (see Fig. 1.2; F, loose-leaf ). The homely figure of Cynthia, in particular, is an apt patron of ‘The Fortunate Islands’, where the ‘old, withered mariners’

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Adrian Rome appeared in April 1899. Dowson appreciated the reviews which reached him the following month (L, 408, 410). By then, he was already engaged on what would become his final literary undertaking: settling the contents, sequence, and broader discursive parameters of Decorations. This venture, too, was Smithers’ idea. It has been suggested that Dowson undertook the work of revision, selection, and arrangement without zeal, but the impression arises from a paucity of correspondence on very much other than his unpaid bills and moneymaking schemes in these last years. In fact, Dowson approached his final publication with diligence, fervour, and due consideration of the contents and sequence of the volume. He guessed it was fated to become his last will and testament. This is reflected in his placement of ‘Rondeau | To Hélène’ in the epigraphical position, where it obtains a new, grim resolve as ‘Beyond’, and in the reassignment of the revised epigraph to the sonnets ‘Of a Little Girl’ as the final poem, ‘A Last Word’.¹² Dowson’s unflagging attention to such matters, in the final months of his life, is evident in his complaint to Smithers that ‘the poems what with arranging & redigeant have taken up all my time’, and in his concern about whether the prose poems would ‘go well together’ with the verse, as Smithers supposed they would.¹³ Decorations implements many substantive revisions to Dowson’s published and unpublished lyrics, some of which are legible in thick pencil in the holograph notebook, implying that it was made available—either to Dowson or to Smithers—for this purpose.¹⁴ On whose authority these emendations were made remains a matter for conjecture, but it seems likely that Dowson did substantially overhaul his draft material for this last production in the late spring and early summer of 1899, before lightly correcting proof in August.¹⁵ The most significant alteration introduced at this time concerns the title: Love’s Aftermath: In Verse and Prose was dropped, in preference for Decorations: In Verse and Prose (see Fig. 1.2). This was Smithers’ prerogative. ‘With regard to the verses’, Dowson remarked when he became emersed in revision and redigeant, ‘the title I have used is quite discretional. I can think of nothing better’ (L, 414). He had presumably suggested Love’s Aftermath ‘in despair of a good inclusive title’, following spontaneously from the epigraphical poem; Smithers rejoined with ‘Poems in Prose & Verse’, which Dowson found ‘all right’ (415). After he had passed proof,

have returned ‘again [to] the port of [their] nativity’ (D, 43–4). Pater may have inspired Dowson’s recourse to lyrical prose by preparing Marius for ‘some ampler vision, which should take up into itself and explain this world’s delightful shows, as the scattered fragments of a poetry, till then but halfunderstood’ (Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensations and Ideas [New York: Macmillan, 1918], 2: 219–20). ¹² See Ch. 1, The Saddest Crop. ¹³ L, 414. See Introduction, Arrangement of Life. ¹⁴ See Ch. 7, at n. 42. ¹⁵ See n. 7 and n. 11. Nelson holds that ‘the preparation of the manuscript of Decorations’ may have ‘cost Smithers a good deal of work’, as it was not immediately forthcoming upon conclusion of the publishing agreement (243).

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Smithers hit upon the eventual wording. Decorations: In Verse and Prose is a superior title, capturing the ornate, patternist quality of Dowson’s art, so germane to the era in which he lived and wrought.¹⁶ But the lyrics and prose poems collected here are more than ornamental accessories: the title has an honorific function, too, indicating that the volume will serve as a badge of worth or distinction. Smithers famously quipped upon the death of Jean de Tinan: ‘Damned puny Frenchmen! They can’t stand anything. Look at Dowson. Is he dead?’¹⁷ He also once joked that he had ‘come to Paris to kill Dowson’, when it was abundantly clear, as O’Sullivan remarks, that Dowson was ‘three-quarters dead already’ (114). The title may be conferred by the publisher upon the author in this battle-hardened spirit. Another potential spur may be discovered in a running joke between the two men in February and March 1899. Dowson had received a cryptic note via Smithers purporting to be from ‘a serious Belgian consulate’ insinuating that ‘[King] Leopold has discovered my merit and decided on decorating me’ (L, 406). Dowson is savvy enough to suppose he had been pranked by J. de Courcy MacDonnell, the Irish friend with whom he had stayed in 1897, or by Smithers himself, but he determined to ‘risk the 2/3’ and reply all the same (406). Needless to say, there is no record of the Belgian government proposing to recognize Dowson’s services to literature. The title may be proffered in ironic consolation for Dowson’s really extensive tribulations, for his war wounds and hard graft as Smithers’ translator of choice.¹⁸ The surmise is consistent, anyway, with the foregoing attempt to show that he led an engrossing and robust existence, while practising a vigorous, sullen craft; that he wrote about the subjects which poets have always written about, with inimitable style, and incorrigible élan. If Dowson was not in on the joke, I fancy he would have appreciated it. But if these decorations were ordained for the surviving hero, they accrued to the fallen soldier instead. Decorations was published during Dowson’s lifetime, but only just, and he did not live to see the reviews.

¹⁶ The ornate quality of Decorations was recognized immediately by, for example, The Academy, which noted that ‘in style it is exceedingly craftsmanlike [sic] and perfect, with a sense of form that lends appropriateness to the title’ (quoted in Adams, 161). ¹⁷ Vincent O’Sullivan, Aspects of Wilde (New York: Holt, 1936), 122. ¹⁸ O’Sullivan may hint at something like this when he describes ‘the spectacle’ of Dowson ‘slowly killing himself . . . with no decoration in the process’ (116). Sherard insists that when Dowson was on his deathbed and forced by his landlord to appeal to Smithers to meet an arrears of rent, the publisher, who was in Dieppe, had only ‘left a sarcastic note for Ernest Dowson’ (L, 418).

Bibliography Manuscripts Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tolden Foundations. holograph poems (C0213); authorial proof of Decorations; translator’s preface; holograph letters. The Chronicle of St. Hugh’s, St Hugh’s Charterhouse, Cowfold, Surrey. Ernest Dowson Collection, Princeton University Library. holograph letters. Ernest Dowson. ‘The Flower Notebook’, MA 1480, Morgan Library and Museum, New York. Dowson’s fair-copy manuscript notebook; sundry holograph poems and letters. J. Harlin O’Connell Collection on English Artists, 1825–1952, Princeton University Library. holograph poems and stories; authorial proof of Decorations; holograph letters; draft publishing agreement. Ernest Dowson. Samuel Smith Manuscript, Add MS 45135, British Library. holograph poems; photographs. Oscar Wilde and le fin de siècle Collection, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles. holograph letters.

Dowson’s Published Works: A Selection Balzac, Honoré de, La Fille aux Yeux d’Or, tr. Ernest Dowson, with preface (London: Smithers, 1896). Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre Ambroise François, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, or, Letters Collected in a Private Society and Published for the Instruction of Others, tr. Ernest Dowson, 2 vols (London: Privately Printed [Smithers], 1898). Couperus, Louis Marie Ann, Majesty: A Novel, tr. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos and Ernest Dowson (London: Fisher Unwin, 1894). Dowson, Ernest, ‘Apple Blossom in Brittany’, The Yellow Book 3 (Oct. 1894), 93–109. Dowson, Ernest, ‘Benedictio Domini’, The Hobby Horse 7/3 (1894), 82. Dowson, Ernest, ‘Breton Afternoon’, The Savoy 3 (July 1896), 40. Dowson, Ernest, ‘A Case of Conscience’, The Century Guild Hobby Horse 6/21 (Jan. 1891), 2–13. Dowson, Ernest, Collected Poems, ed. R. K. R. Thornton with Caroline Dowson (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press, 2003). Dowson, Ernest, Collected Shorter Fiction, ed. Monica Borg and R. K. R. Thornton (Birmingham: Birmingham University Press, 2003). Dowson, Ernest, ‘Countess Marie of the Angels’, The Savoy 2 (Apr. 1896), 173–83. Dowson, Ernest, ‘The Dead Child’, Atalanta 6/65 (Feb. 1893), 358. Dowson, Ernest, Decorations: In Verse and Prose (London: Smithers, 1899). Dowson, Ernest, ‘The Diary of a Successful Man’, Macmillan’s Magazine 61 (Feb. 1890), 274–81.

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Dowson, Ernest, Dilemmas: Stories and Studies in Sentiment (London: Elkin Mathews, 1895). Dowson, Ernest, ‘The Dying of Francis Donne’, The Savoy 4 (Aug. 1896), 66–74. Dowson, Ernest, ‘Epilogue’, The Savoy 7 (Nov. 1896), 87. Dowson, Ernest, ‘The Eyes of Pride’, The Savoy 1 (Jan. 1896), 51–63. Dowson, Ernest, ‘Impenitentia Ultima’, The Savoy 1 (Jan. 1896), 131. Dowson, Ernest, ‘In Praise of Solitude’ [comprising ‘Fleur de la lune’, ‘The Carmelite Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration’, ‘Amor Umbratilis’], The Century Guild Hobby Horse 6/24 (Oct. 1891), 136–37. Dowson, Ernest, The Letters of Ernest Dowson, ed. Desmond Flower and Henry Maas (Cranbury NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1967). Dowson, Ernest, ‘Moritura’, London Society. An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation 51/303 (Mar. 1887), 297. Dowson, Ernest, ‘My Lady April’, Temple Bar 85/341 (Apr. 1889), 514. Dowson, Ernest, New Letters from Ernest Dowson, ed. Desmond Flower (Andoversford, Gloucestershire: Whittington, 1984). Dowson, Ernest, ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae’, The Century Guild Hobby Horse 6/22 (Apr. 1891), 67. Dowson, Ernest, ‘Of His Lady’s Treasures. (Villanelle.)’ Temple Bar 98/393 (Aug. 1893), 484. Dowson, Ernest, ‘Of Marguerites. (Villanelle.)’ Temple Bar 102/402 (May 1894), 144. Dowson, Ernest, ‘On a Breton Cemetery’, The Pageant 2 (1897), 232. Dowson, Ernest, The Pierrot of the Minute, A Dramatic Phantasy in One Act (London: Smithers, 1897). Dowson, Ernest, The Poems of Ernest Dowson (2nd edn, London: Lane, 1906). Dowson, Ernest, The Poems of Ernest Dowson, ed. Mark Longaker (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1962). Dowson, Ernest, The Poetical Works of Ernest Dowson, ed. Desmond Flower (London: Cassell, 1934). Dowson, Ernest, ‘A Requiem’, The Hobby Horse 7/3 (1894), 81. Dowson, Ernest, ‘A Roundel’, Temple Bar 99/394 (Sept. 1893), 112. Dowson, Ernest, ‘Saint-Germain-en-Laye’, The Savoy 2 (Apr. 1896), 55. Dowson, Ernest, ‘A Song’, The Savoy 5 (Sept. 1896), 36. Dowson, Ernest, ‘Sonnet. To a Little Girl’, London Society. An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation 49/299 (Nov. 1886), 516. Dowson, Ernest, ‘Souvenirs of an Egoist’, Temple Bar 82 (Jan. 1888), 83–98. Dowson, Ernest, ‘The Statute of Limitations’, The Hobby Horse 7/1 (1893), 2–8. Dowson, Ernest, The Stories of Ernest Dowson, ed. Mark Longaker (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1947). Dowson, Ernest, ‘The Story of a Violin’, Macmillan’s Magazine 64 (June 1890), 305–14. Dowson, Ernest, ‘Terre Promise’, The Hobby Horse 7/3 (1894), 81–82. Dowson, Ernest, ‘The Three Witches’, The Savoy 6 (Oct. 1896), 75. Dowson, Ernest, ‘To One in Bedlam’, The Albemarle: A Monthly Review 2/2 (Aug. 1892), 67. Dowson, Ernest, translator’s preface to La Fille aux Yeux d’Or (Berg Collection, New York Public Library), 2. Dowson, Ernest, ‘Venite, Descendamus’, The Savoy 4 (Aug. 1896), 41. Dowson, Ernest, Verses (London: Smithers, 1896). Dowson, Ernest, and Arthur Moore, Adrian Rome (London: Methuen, 1899).

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. absorption 16–17, 28, 79, 93, 104, 131, 161–162, 173, 230 Adams, Jad 7–8, 38–40, 43, 61, 75, 83–84, 108, 141–142, 158, 180, 183, 214–215, 224, 234–235 ‘Ad Domnulam Meam’ see ‘Ad Domnulam Suam’ ‘Ad Domnulam Suam’ 48, 64–66, 68–70, 90–91 ‘Ad Manus Puellae’ 167–170, 176–177 adolescent girls 15, 23, 28–29, 32, 47, 54, 58, 63–64, 68–71, 73–75, 79–80, 98–99, 101, 103, 158, 162–165, 167–169, 172–173, 177, 229 Adrian Rome (with Arthur Moore) 10–13, 23–28, 52–53, 72, 96–97, 99, 101, 122–123, 128, 134, 138–139, 142–143, 145, 151–152, 154, 157–158, 166, 167, 178, 180–181, 188–189, 197–198, 203–204, 220, 221, 235–236 Aeneid see Vergil æsthetic poetry 6–7, 21–22, 30, 40–41, 59–61, 110–111, 124–125, 127, 148, 155–156, 162–163, 182–183 aestheticism 10–13, 16, 21, 26–27, 30, 83, 88, 101–103, 123, 128, 142–143, 145, 155–156 ‘After Paul Verlaine’ 143 Agamben, Giorgio 62–63 Albemarle 129–130 alcohol 124–125, 161, 182, 191, 194, 228, 235 aliases 33–34, 38, 52–53, 56–57, 139 Alkalay-Gut, Karen 50, 211, 212 Allen, Charles Manning 91–92 Allen, Clementina Stuart, Countess d’A lbanie 91–92 allusion 3–5, 11, 29–30, 33–34, 46–47, 50–53, 59, 88, 104, 121, 143–144, 147, 157, 165–166, 184, 192, 208, 210–211, 215, 217, 220, 224, 232–234 alterity 26, 29, 134, 179, 192, 232–233 ‘Amantium Irae’ 174, 187–188 amie enfants 59–60 Amor(e) (see ‘Amor Umbratilis’; ‘De Amore’) 175–179, 188, 219–220

‘Amor Umbratilis’ 59, 68–69, 74–75, 79, 90, 118, 150, 155–156, 208–209, 219 androgyny 137, 148 Anglicanism see Protestantism Antoinette, Marie 144–145 Aphrodite see Louÿs, Pierre ‘Apple Blossom in Brittany’ 63–64, 66, 69–75, 98, 122, 128 Archilochus 50 Arques-la-Bataille 235 arrangement 4, 8, 16, 22, 32, 73, 91–92, 130–131, 191–192, 219, 236 ‘Arrangement of Life, The’ see Adrian Rome As in a Looking Glass see Philips, F. C. Atherton, Gertrude 8–9, 101, 197–198, 203 Augustine, St 78–79, 230 ‘autobiographical manner’ 10–11, 66, 67–71, 98, 134–135, 164, 186–190, 200–201 ‘Autumnal’ 162–163 Babeau, John 104–105, 112 Bailey, Harrington 138–139 Bakhtin, Mikhail 22–23 Balzac, Honoré de 29–30, 101, 154–155, 193–194, 225 Banville, Théodore de 21–22, 143 Barlas, John Evelyn 132–133, 136–137 Bates, Victoria 19 Baudelaire, Charles 28, 81–82, 122, 123, 213–214, 217–218, 230 Beardsley, Aubrey 78, 143–144, 198, 208, 213–214, 224, 234–235 ‘Beata Solitudo’ 107 Beauvoir, Simone de 27, 36–37, 61 Bedlam see Bethlehem Hospital Bellay, Joachim du 40–41 Benedict, St 69–70, 116 ‘Benedictio Domini’ 88–90 Bernard, Émile 199–200 Bernhardt, Sarah 34 Bertha (girlfriend) 19 Bethlehem Hospital (Hospital of St Mary’s of Bethlehem, Bishopsgate) 129

INDE X ‘Beyond’ 40–41, 45–46, 134, 198, 231, 236 Blake, William 82, 114–115 Blakelock, R. B. S. 85 Bloom, Harold 27 Bordighera 108 Bordighera and the Western Riviera 108, 115 Bourget, Paul 96 Bowden, Sebastien 82–84, 88, 93, 121 Boyiopoulos, Kostas 95, 124–125 ‘Breton Afternoon’ 202, 205–206, 219–220, 226 Breton writing 69–70, 72–73, 78–79, 89, 123, 169–170, 173, 202, 228 Bridge Dock, Limehouse 54, 110–111, 152, 191, 198 Bristow, Joseph 47–48 Brittany 58, 70, 73–75, 82–83, 89, 90–91, 98–99, 107, 109–110, 116, 122–123, 136–137, 197, 233 Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum 129–130 ‘broken heart’ 139, 175, 194–195, 214–216, 228 Brompton Oratory (Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Knightsbridge) 82, 88, 104–105, 121 Browning, Robert 232–233 Bruges 80–81, 100 Bruno, St 112, 116–117, 119 Byron, George Gordon (Lord) 1–2, 180, 181 Campion, Edmund 69–70 Campion, Thomas 69–70, 195 career, literary 1–2, 9–10, 12–13, 15–16, 23, 30, 52–53, 68–69, 72, 76–77, 110–111, 121–122, 134, 148, 154–155, 158–161, 180–182, 187–188, 199–200, 219, 222, 227, 235 Carroll, Lewis (Charles Dodgson) 20–21, 68–69 ‘Carthusians’ 104, 128, 175–176, 183–184, 198 Carthusians, Order of 104 ‘Case of Conscience, A’ 66–68, 73–75, 89, 187–188, 190–191 Chanel, Pierre 115 ‘Chanson Sans Parole’ 199–200, 220, 223–224 characterization 10–11, 23, 33–36, 38, 51–52, 58, 60–61, 66, 98–99, 135–136 Chardin, Jean-Jacques 89, 113–114, 117 Chaucer, Geoffrey 186–187 children see little girls Chiswick Press 69–70, 199 Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre 36–37, 233 Chronicle of St. Hugh’s, The 112–113 ‘Claire: la Lune!’ see ‘Flos Lunae’ Clough, Arthur Hugh 83 Cock Tavern, The 47–48, 152 Cohen, Philip K. 132–133 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 131, 154

249

collaborative writing, 2–3, 7, 13, 24, 29–30, 74–75, 128, 134–136, 142, 143, 157, 158, 203, 232–233 ‘Colloque Sentimental’ 143 Comedy of Masks, A (with Arthur Moore) 12–13, 23, 26, 51–53, 58, 66, 76, 128, 134, 158, 165 commedia dell’arte 23, 127, 134–136, 140–141, 143–144 Condé, Alice and Jessica Gossling 15–16, 75 Conder, Charles 193–194, 198 confessional writing 16–17, 43–44, 57–58, 71, 78–79, 88, 90, 98, 99, 104, 118, 120–121, 127, 133 Conrad, Joseph 163 conversion (see Roman Catholicism) 26–27, 66, 78, 95–96, 109–111, 127–128, 219 ‘Coronal, A’ 21–22, 65–66, 92–93, 110–111, 149–150, 178, 199–200, 203, 208, 217 correspondence 9–10, 17, 19, 89–90, 98, 110–111, 120, 136–137, 142, 152–153, 156–157, 167, 172–173, 178, 180–181, 187–188, 190–192, 194, 195, 207, 214–215, 221, 234–236 ‘Countess Marie of the Angels’ 10–11, 13, 214–215, 221 Cowfold see Saint Hugh’s Charterhouse, Parkminster Crane, Stephen 217–218 Creasy, Matthew 182 Cremnitz, Maurice 202 Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, The 18–19, 32, 39, 70 Critic, The 52–53, 135–136 ‘critical spirit’ 37–39, 47–48, 50, 78–80, 84–85, 89 Crowell, Ellen and Alex Murray 2–3, 7, 8–9 ‘Cult of the Child, The’ 156–157 cults 1–3, 6–7, 20–21, 59–60, 155, 159, 162, 164, 225 Cynara: The Story of Ernest and Adelaide see Plarr, Marion Da Costa, John 134–135 Dante, Alighieri 83, 208–209 Davidson, John 132–133, 197 Davray, Henry 130–131 ‘De Amore’ 26–27, 134, 175–177, 229 ‘Dead Child, The’ 57–58, 181–182, 190–191 death 28, 40, 50, 56–57, 75, 78–82, 108, 110, 114–115, 123, 124–126, 169–170, 172–173, 178, 180–182, 213–219, 227, 233, 236–237 Decadence 6–7, 10–11, 15–17, 21, 34, 61, 100, 103, 122, 124–125, 127, 128, 130–136,

250

INDE X

144–145, 164–165, 182, 209, 213–214, 217–218, 226, 228 Decadent criticism 2–4, 6–10, 30, 212–213 Decadent style 8–9, 13–14, 21, 22–23, 34, 38–39, 124–125, 140–141, 164, 210–211, 232 Decorations: In Verse and Prose 12–13, 21–22, 41, 134, 178, 198–199, 203, 213–214, 217–219, 227–228, 230, 231, 235–237 dedications 31, 41, 45–46, 62, 178–179, 191, 194–195, 203, 207, 220, 223–225, 230 depression 152–153, 180–181, 194–195, 213–214, 235 Desmarais, Jane and David Weir 217–218 Despard, Lena (character) 33–34, 43 ‘Diary of a Successful Man, The’ 76–77, 79, 94, 100, 122–123, 128–129, 146 Dickinson, Emily 204–205 Dilemmas: Stories and Studies in Sentiment 6–7, 164, 179, 191–192, 198, 203 ‘Discedam, explebo numeram, reddarque tenebris’ 63–64, 69–70, 74–75 Doreau, Victor Marie 113 doubt (see ‘critical spirit’) 72, 78–79, 96–97, 109–110, 156, 158, 161, 172–173, 185, 210–211 Douglas, Alfred (Lord) 59–60, 78, 211–212 Dowling, Linda 5–6, 96–97, 147–148 Dowson, Alfred (father) 24, 108–109, 138–139, 180, 191, 193–194 Dowson, Annie (mother) 129–130, 180, 191 ‘Dowson Legend,’ the (see Gawsworth, John) 1, 8–9, 23–24, 31, 32, 52, 59, 104, 154, 156–157, 182, 190–191, 193, 207, 212–213 Dowson, J. R. (uncle) 104–105 dream 72, 89–90, 94, 95–96, 104, 107–108, 127, 132–133, 140–141, 144, 145–147, 149–150, 155, 159, 161, 162, 191, 193, 196, 199–200, 203–206, 216, 217–218, 227, 232, 235 ‘Dregs’ 222–223, 227–229 ‘drifted rhyme’ see ‘Vain Hope’ Dujardin, Edouard 221 ‘Dying of Francis Donne, The’ 185, 200–202, 204–206, 210, 217–218, 220, 228, 233 Dylan, Bob 17 Eliot, George 124–125, 154–155 Eliot, T. S. 6–7, 30, 204 Elkin Mathews, Charles 191, 198 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 173–174 emotion 11, 38, 40–41, 45, 47, 51–52, 55–56, 59–60, 68, 109–110, 140, 145–146, 159, 191, 193–194, 196, 199–200, 203, 205, 214, 232–233

Enfants de Marie Immaculée, L’association des 61–62, 69–70, 75, 86–87, 93, 98–99, 101 ‘Epigram’ 140–141, 216–217, 222–224, 232 ‘Epilogue’ see ‘Last Word, A’ études see studies ‘Exchanges’ 197, 222–224 ‘exile’ (in France) 67–68, 191, 200–202, 206, 214–215, 218 ‘exile’ (in France) 67–68 experience 9–16, 13, 36–37, 44, 51, 69–70, 145–146, 150, 154, 181 ‘experiment’ (see ‘Lena’) 14–15, 29, 31, 59–60, 67, 71, 76–77, 140–141, 154–155, 160, 176–177, 181–182, 212, 229 ‘experimental’ writing 13–15, 37 ‘Extreme Unction’ 110–111, 182, 187–188, 193 ‘Eyes of Pride, The’ 28, 51–52, 73, 162, 174, 188–191, 210 ‘Fall of the House of Usher, The’ see Poe, Edgar Allan ‘Fantaisie Triste’ 45–46, 229–231 Faouët, Le 74, 90–91, 124–125, 197–198, 200–201 fatalism 56, 200–202 feelings see emotions Felix Martyr (with Arthur Moore, unpublished novel) 59–60, 128 femme fatale 194–195, 212–213 Field, Michael (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper) 29–30, 65–66 Fille aux Yeux d’Or, La see Balzac, Honoré de Finistère 66–67, 73–74, 197, 203–204, 206 Flaubert, Gustave 36–37, 50, 141–142, 162–163, 165 L’Éducation sentimentale 165–167, 209–213 Madame Bovary 183–184, 201 ‘Flos Lunae’ 48–50, 118, 127, 141–142, 144, 160 Flower, Desmond 17, 32, 161 Flower, Desmond and Henry Maas 10, 15–16, 59, 75, 129–130, 154, 202, 235 ‘Flower Notebook’, the see holograph notebook Foltinowicz, Ellen Adelaide Mary (see muse[s]) 2–3, 5, 7–8, 14–17, 22–23, 32–33, 54, 79, 81–82, 86, 90–92, 108–109, 119, 122–123, 128, 152, 214–215, 229, 231–235 courtship 13, 26–27, 54, 94, 98–99, 107, 122–123, 154, 181–182, 188–189, 191, 199–200, 207 demise of relationship 174, 180, 181, 188–189, 199–200, 204–205, 224, 232 depictions of 98–99, 110–111, 181–182 first meeting 17, 54–55 full name 109–110, 207, 214–215

INDE X influence on Dowson’s writing 31–32, 44, 54, 90–91, 108–109, 118, 165–166, 199–200, 212–213 proposal 34–36, 66, 71–74, 76, 123, 134, 154, 180, 181–182, 187–189, 204, 209 puberty 68–69, 71, 75, 172–173 rejection of Dowson 60–61, 125–126, 134, 174, 192, 194–195, 204–205, 214–216, 218, 223–224, 232 Foltinowicz, Joseph 92, 124–125, 169–173 Fontenay-aux-Roses 195 Ford, Ford Maddox 51 Ford, John 2 foreignness 69–70, 200 ‘Fortunate Islands, The’ 228, 235 Fowler, Rowena 40 ‘Fragments | By Ernest Dowson | Copied out. Paris—to be worked up’ 110–111, 235 Freeman, Nick 4, 6, 33, 95 ‘From the Icelandic’ see ‘Thalassios’ Gale, Norman 195 ‘Garden of Shadow, The’ 181–182, 187–188 garland 63, 65–66, 130–131, 142, 149–151, 160, 175–176, 208 Gauguin, Paul 199–200, 203 Gautier, Théophile 140–141, 164–165 Gawsworth, John (see ‘Dowson Legend’, the) 4, 15–16, 214–215 gifting (see ‘Amor Umbratilis’) 60–64, 68, 69, 207, 224, 230, 231 Giraud, Albert 127, 139, 145 Gonne, Iseult 175–176 Gossling, Jessica (see Condé, Alice and Jessica Gossling) 92–93, 110–111 grande passion 55, 72, 73, 162–164, 194, 215–216, 229–231 grande pêche, le 200, 203–204, 209 Gray, John 65–66, 78, 82–83, 122–123, 132, 136–137, 152, 188–189 ‘Gray Nights’ 161 ‘Growth’ 172–173, 223 Gyles, Althea 230 Hall, David Jason and Alex Murray 21, 96 Hanson, Ellis 38–39, 61, 78–79, 81, 85 Harris, Frank 8–9, 52–53, 79–80 Hassett, Joseph M. 18, 27, 69–70, 141–142, 175–176 Hazel, Agnes 34 Hesiod 227 Hillier, Arthur Cecil 58, 73–74, 197–198, 203

251

History of Modern Painting, The (trans. Dowson, with George Arthur Greene and Arthur Cecil Hillier) 203 Hobby Horse, The (aka The Century Guild Hobby Horse) 12–13, 110–111, 118, 121, 136–137, 207 Holloway Gaol 132 holograph notebook (the ‘Flower Notebook’) 17, 21–22, 32, 43–46, 48, 59, 76–77, 91, 107, 110–111, 124, 144, 156, 159–161, 198, 230, 236 Hoole, Gerald (cousin) 83–84, 104–105, 138–139 Hopkins, R. Thurston 203–204 Horace 46–47, 50 Horne, Herbert 118, 152 Houghton, John, St 114–115 Hugh of Lincoln, St 120 Hunt, Leigh 215 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 79–80, 124–125, 128 ‘Impenitentia Ultima’ 187–188, 194–195, 198–199 ‘In a Breton Cemetery’ 184–185, 192, 199–202, 213–214 ‘In Praise of Solitude’ 118 ‘In Preface: For Adelaide’ 17, 31–32, 50, 62–63, 65–66, 92–93, 141–142, 190, 194–195, 204–205, 207, 214–215, 217, 218–219, 223 inspiration (see muse) 16–17, 20–27, 29, 51–52, 59, 68–69, 104, 113–114, 122–123, 175–176, 179, 180–181, 212, 216–217, 225, 226, 232–233 ‘In Tempore Senectutis’ 162–163, 229 intergenerational relationships 66–71, 156–157, 162–166 intertextuality 3–4, 65, 104, 150, 184–185, 210, 212–213, 232 irony 13, 47–48, 65–67, 76, 143–145, 150, 165–166, 174, 179, 181–182, 186–187, 188, 197, 209–211, 217–218, 221, 227, 235, 237 James, Henry 11, 33–34, 36–38, 43, 54, 72, 81–82, 96, 100, 154–155, 165, 229 Jackson, Laura (Riding) 52–53 Jenkins, R. Y. 163 Jepson, Edgar 7–9, 151–152, 160, 193–194, 198 Johnson, Lionel 59, 64, 78, 82, 89, 97–98, 108–109, 118, 122–123, 132, 138, 143, 161–162, 183–184, 212–213, 224 Joyce, James 30 Keats, John 15–16, 100, 108–109, 180, 191, 193–194, 214–216, 218, 232–234

252

INDE X

Killeen, Jarlath 78, 83 Kincaid, James 59–60 Kreuiter, Allyson 148–150 Kristeva, Julia 22–23 Ku¨nstlerroman 13, 24, 33–34, 157–158 Laforgue, Jules 127, 139 Lane, John 198 Langdale, Marmaduke 193 Langtry, Lillie 33–34 ‘Last Word, A’ 206, 213–214, 220, 222–223, 236 legal studies 19 Le Gallienne, Richard (Richard Thomas Gallienne) 8–9, 130–131 ‘Lena’ 14–15, 19, 31, 54, 55, 57–58, 60–61, 63, 67–68, 72, 118, 128, 134–136, 140–141, 154, 160, 164, 181, 190–191, 212, 229 letters see correspondence Levy, Gayle A. 16, 31, 57, 212–213 Liddle, Alice 20–21, 68 life writing 2–3, 8–9 little girls (see amie enfants) 54, 59, 66–67, 156–157, 168 Lockerd, Martin 69–70, 92–93 Loiseau, Gustave 152–153 Lombard, Pierre de (alias) 52–53 London 23–24, 29, 55–56, 58, 59, 74, 82–83, 86, 105, 129–130, 136–137, 180–182, 192–195, 199, 213–214, 222–223, 233, 235 London Society 17 loneliness 24, 29–30, 120–121, 180–181, 192, 194–195, 205–206, 232–233 Lonergan, Bernard 78–79 Longaker, Mark 5, 10–11, 15–16, 59, 78, 110–111, 115, 132, 136, 171, 180, 188–189, 203, 212–213, 234–235 Louÿs, Pierre 138–139, 225, 227 ‘Love’s Aftermath’ see Decorations: In Verse and Prose ‘Love’s Epilogue’ 41–43 lunacy (see madness) 86, 127, 227 MacDonnell, J. de Courcey 235, 237 MacLeod, Kirsten 6–7, 20–21, 217–218 Madame de Viole (unpublished novel) 221 madness 45, 67–68, 75, 86, 100, 128–129, 141–142, 163, 192 Mahoney, Joseph 78–80, 82, 92–93, 101, 118 Malet, Lucas (Mary St Leger Kingsley) 23–24, 154–155 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 2–3 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (1962) 1–2, 4

Marianism (see Enfants de Marie) 26–27, 83, 87, 89, 95, 98–99, 121–123, 212–213 ‘Markets’ 224 marriage 58–60, 66, 67–68, 72, 76, 90, 100, 102–103, 158, 159 marriage of convenience 13, 23, 69–74, 76, 159–161, 163–169, 172, 187–188, 199–200, 207, 234 Martyr de religieux sous Henri VIII see Sublet, (Benoît) Antoine martyrdom 59–60, 69–70, 100, 112–117, 124, 125–126, 128, 144–145, 176, 190–191, 193 masquerade 9, 134, 140–143 ‘Masquerade’ see Comedy of Masks, A Maxwell, Catherine 114–115 Mayne, Cuthbert, St 115 melancholy see depression memory 24, 62–63, 67–68, 140–142, 162–165, 168–169, 180–181, 204–206, 227, 232 Mercure de France 211–212 Meredith, George 132, 154–155 Merton, Thomas 52–53, 117, 118, 120, 121–122 Milton, John 197 mimesis 5, 8–9, 12, 13–14, 113–114 misogyny 15–16, 32, 39, 52–53, 75, 188–191 modernism 6–9, 85, 101, 184–185, 204–205, 208, 210–211, 222–223, 232–233 modernity 51, 78–79, 89, 92–93, 99, 100–101, 119, 124–125, 128, 131 monasticism 69–70, 93, 95, 98, 100–102, 104–110, 118–126 Monmartre, Anatole de (alias) 52–53 Moore, Arthur (see Comedy of Masks, A; Adrian Rome) 33–34, 59, 69, 73–74, 76, 80–83, 107, 108, 110–111, 128, 134–136, 152, 158–159, 164, 176–178, 197–198, 203, 215, 221, 232–233, 235 Knight Punctilious, The 229 ‘Second Thoughts’ 24 Morbihan 73–74 Morissette, Bruce A. 209 Morris, William 40–41 ‘Mosaic, A’ 17, 21, 22 Muddiman, Bernard 8–9, 137 Murger, Henri 34–37 muse(s), the 15–17, 19–21, 31–32, 41, 47–48, 51–52, 57, 59–61, 63, 68–70, 90–91, 96–97, 108–109, 122–123, 127, 141–142, 151, 156–157, 160–161, 172–176, 179, 181, 192, 194–195, 204, 207, 218, 225, 229, 232–233 museology 16–17, 21, 61, 96–97, 122–123, 175, 178–179, 186, 190–191, 207, 217–223, 225, 226, 231, 232–233 music halls 34, 54, 135–136, 197

INDE X ‘My Lady April’ 31 mysticism 22–26, 29, 59–61, 69–70, 85, 87, 93, 96–97, 99, 100–101, 103, 121–122, 155–156, 162, 173, 178, 180–181, 183–184 Nelson, Claudia and Lynne Vallone 18–19 Nelson, James G. 193–194, 198–199, 208, 234–236 Neri, Philip St 83, 121 networks, textual (see allusion; self-similarity) 3–6, 15–16, 22–23, 30, 34, 157–158, 210–211 New Criticism 6–9 Newman, John Henry 78, 82, 95, 108–111 Noelte, Augustus 10–11, 189, 214–215, 234, 235 ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae’ 3–5, 15–16, 46–48, 51, 52, 64, 91, 95, 96–98, 110–111, 123, 131, 136–137, 161, 176–177, 202, 207, 229, 232–233 Nordau, Max 213–214 North, Ida 151 Notre Dame de France 69–70, 86, 93, 98, 102, 108–109, 113–114 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) 20–21 ‘Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration’ 91, 101, 102, 113–114, 118, 119, 121–122, 184–185, 199–200 oblivion 45, 62–63, 124, 132–133, 181–182, 204, 227–228 O’Donoghue, Edward Geoffrey 129–130 ‘Of a Little Girl’ 16–21, 32–33, 43–44, 55–58, 213–214, 220, 236 Ohi, Kevin 18, 60–61, 65–66, 161–163 omission (from publications) 9–10, 32, 43–44, 81–82, C7P ‘O mors! quam amara est memoria tua homini pacem habenti in substantiis suis’ 107–110, 186 ‘On His Renaissance Cloak’ 138–139, 152–153 ‘Orchestral Violin, An’ 10–11, 38, 51–52, 128 O’Riordan, Conal 193, 195, 212–213, 235 Orrells, Daniel 164, 190–191 O’Sullivan, Vincent 8–9, 182–183, 208, 213–214, 236–237 paedophilia 20–21, 58 Pageant, The 213–214, 234–235 Paris 29, 111–112, 137, 192–195, 198, 202, 221–222, 235, 236–237 Parker, Sarah 20–21, 28 Parkminster see Saint Hugh’s Charterhouse, Parkminster

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parsimony 5–6, 96–97, 118 Pascal, Blaise 82, 84–85 passion see emotion; grande passion Passion of Dr Ludovicus, The (with Arthur Moore, unpublished novel) 37 Pater, Walter 6–7, 16, 21–22, 26, 40–41, 78, 82–85, 90–91, 95, 127, 145, 161–162, 217–218, 228 ‘Æsthetic Poetry’ (see also æsthetic poetry) 6–7, 127, 148, 155–156, 178, Marius the Epicurean 55–56, 59–61, 73, 123, 166, 184–185, 199–200, 204–206, 233, 235 Plato and Platonism 124 Renaissance, The 145–146, 148 Paul, St 84–85, 114–115, 124 Pearman, Lucy 73–77, 84 perpetual adoration (see ‘Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration’) 81–82, 91, 93–98, 167 Peters, William Theodore 13, 136, 142–149, 151, 152–153, 232–235 ‘Epilogue,’ Pierrot of the Minute 140, 147–149 Petit Trianon, Parc du (Versailles) 144–145 phantasy 145–146, 151 Philips, F. C. 32–34 photography 24, 152–153, 163, 164–166 Pierrot (character) 138–142, 144, 145–150, 177, 192, 227 Pierrot of the Minute: A Dramatic Fantasy in One Act, The 13, 26–27, 127, 136, 142, 145, 155–156, 162–163, 199, 227, 229, 234–235 Plarr, Marion 2–9, 52–53 Plarr, Victor 2–3, 7–9, 20–22, 52–54, 60–61, 74–75, 80–81, 84, 91–92, 100, 154–155, 158–159, 161–162, 170, 171, 180, 181, 214–215, 232–233 Plato 62–63, 69–70, 154–155 Ploërmel 67–68, 73–74 Plomeur 73–74 ‘Ploumariel’ 66–67, 73, 89, 101, 107, 122, 188, 197–198 Poe, Edgar Allan 80–82, 187–188 poésie pure 62–63 ‘Poesie Schublade’ (drawer poetry) 59–60, 95, 110–111 poète maudit 1–2, 6–7, 9–10, 133, 182, 187–188, 215 Pointe du Pouldu 203 Pont-Aven 192–193, 197, 202–205, 221–222 ‘Potnia Thea’ 225 Potolsky, Matthew 2, 5, 13–14, 34, 85, 101, 210–211 Pound, Ezra 6–9, 30, 51, 109, 217, 222 poverty (see social class) 195, 232

254

INDE X

prayer 88, 90–96, 178, 199–202, 204–206, 217–218, 222–223 Preface, La Fille aux Yeux d’Or 29–30, 195–196, 221–222 presentation copies 45–46, 211–212, 223–224 pride 188–189 ‘Princess of Dreams, The’ 217–218 promiscuity, sexual 43–44, 47–48, 61, 67–68, 72, 79, 95, 134–135, 144–145, 174, 188–189 Propertius, Sextus 41, 231 Prose, Francine 26, 29 prose poems 17, 217–218, 228, 235–237 prosody 6–7, 9–10, 47–48, 95–97, 109–111, 118, 119, 186–187, 202, 217–218 prostitution (see ‘Non sum qualis’) 43, 47–48, 51, 64, 67–68, 72, 97–98, 169, 176–177, 225 Protestantism 79–80, 85–86, 89, 100, 104–105, 116–117 Protestant Reformation 115 Pruett, Robert 79–81, 93, 100 Punch 130–131 ‘Pygmalion au Rebours’ see ‘Epigram’ ‘Quid non speremus, Amantes?’ 125–126, 174–178 reception, rite of 83–84 Reed, John R. 131 religious poetry see Roman Catholicism ‘Requiem, A’ 3–4, 50–51, 132, 190–191 ‘Requital, The’ see ‘Epigram’ Rêve, Le see Zola, Émile reviews 15–16, 31, 192, 224, 236–237 revision 32, 41, 43–44, 48, 50, 65–66, 93–94, 110–111, 143, 154, 167–168, 186–187, 198–199, 213–214, 234–236 Rhymers’ Club, The 131–132, 136–139, 151–152, 162–163, 181–182 Rhys, Ernest 8–9, 151–152 Ricks, Christopher 29–30 Rimbaud, Arthur 2–3, 221, 222 Robert, Hubert 141–142 Robson, Catherine 32, 44 Rodgers, Beth 20–21 Rodrı´guez, Alejandro 140–141 role see typology, character roman-à-clef (see characterisation) 23, 98–99, 134–135 Roman Catholicism 26–27, 67–70, 78, 104, 207 ‘Rondeau (Could you forget)’ 18 ‘Rondeau | Hélène (You loved me once!)’ 41–43, 45–46 ‘Rondel (Ah, dear child)’ 44–45, 55–56, 63 rosary 83, 94, 95–96, 199–202

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 89, 108–109, 173 Roth, Christine 17–19, 28–29, 34–36, 59–60, 72, 156–157 ‘Roundel | To Hélène (The golden hours!)’ 45–46 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 78–79 Said, Edward 7–8 ‘Saint Germain-en-Laye’ 196–199, 201–202 Saint Hugh’s Charterhouse, Parkminster 104, 175–176 Salemi, Joseph S. 92–93 ‘Sapientia Lunae’ 127, 160 Savoy, The 194, 198, 202, 213–214, 220, 222–223, 234–235 Sayle, Charles 20–21, 58, 79–80, 82, 83–85, 95–96, 117 Scènes de la Vie de Bohème see Murger, Henri scepticism see ‘critical spirit’ Schopenhauer, Arthur 56, 154–155, 190–191 Schreiner, Olive 52–53, 217–218 ‘Sea-Change, The’ 202–204–C759 Secretan D. L. (cousin) 83–85, 104–105 self-fashioning 9–11, 22, 52–53, 161–162 self-similarity 3–5, 21, 29–30, 96–98, 121–122, 184–185, 192, 217–218, 220, 232–233 sentiment (see emotions; Dilemmas: Stories and Studies in Sentiment) 10–11, 14, 16–17, 39, 51, 76–77, 158–159, 165, 172, 179, 192–193, 210–211, 214–215, 232 Severn, Joseph 108–109, 193–194, 215 Shakespeare, William 57–58, 128, 132–133, 220 Sherard, Robert 7–8, 132, 137, 139, 222 ‘Sidewalks of New York, The’ (James W. Blake and Charles B. Lawlor) 197 silence 9–10, 59, 68, 90, 99, 105–107, 117, 133, 155–156, 159, 167, 178, 180, 186–187, 214–215, 219, 223–224, 232 sin 90, 95–96, 108–109, 113–114, 124 slang 17, 44 Smith, Samuel 15–16, 55, 85, 131, 171–173, 193, 203–204, 211, 214–216, 233–234 Smithers, Leonard 20–22, 124–125, 138–139, 142, 152–153, 168, 182–183, 193, 198–202, 211–214, 217–218, 222, 224, 230, 232–237 Snodgrass, Chris 6–7, 67, 94, 190–191, 197 social class 19–20, 32, 34–37, 72, 85–86, 99, 101, 123, 135–136, 158, 164, 199–202, 212–213 ‘Soli cantare periti Arcades’ 167–168, 195 ‘Song, A’ 222–224 ‘Spleen (for Arthur Symons)’ 45, 143, 180–181 Stark, Robert 22–23, 45, 47–48, 96–97, 211, 217–218

INDE X ‘Statute of Limitations, The’ 14, 90–91, 128, 140–141, 162–166, 172, 190–191, 203–204, 210 Stella Maris 26–27, 121–122, 127 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 154–155 Stevenson, Robert Louis 180 Storey, Robert F. 140 Story of an African Farm, The see Schreiner, Olive Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The see Stevenson, Robert Louis. studies (aka études) 10–12, 14–15, 66, 69–70, 72–74, 128, 188–189 Sublet, Benoît Antoine 112–117, 124, 175–176 success 81–82, 146 suicide 163–165, 180, 182, 190, 191, 202, 203–204, 206, 217–218, 233–234 Swann, Thomas B. 6, 8–9, 69–70, 195 Swanton, Calvert Hutchinson 83 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 27–28, 32–33, 47, 50–53, 114–115, 122, 181–182, 206, 220, 226, 227 Sydney, Philip (Sir) 26–27 symbolism (see Verlaine, Paul) 51, 127–128, 132, 140–145, 148, 150, 160–161, 163, 168–169, 175, 181–182, 190 Symons, Arthur 8–11, 152, 191, 193, 194, 197, 198, 212–213, 223–224, 235 ‘A Literary Causerie: On a Book of Verses’ 4–5, 15–16, 182–183, 192, 212–213, 215 ‘Decadent Movement in Literature, The’ 103 ‘Ernest Dowson’ 23–24, 50, 130–131, 133, 154–155, 212–213 syntheticism 199–200, 203, 205 tacenda (see silence) 60–61, 154, 158–159, 172, 180, 232 Teixeira de Mattos, Alexander 152 Temple de l’A mour see Petit Trianon Tennyson, Alfred (Lord) 50, 203–204 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) 188 ‘Terre Promise’ 166–168, 170 Terry, Minnie 54–55, 164 ‘Thalassios’ 203–204 Thomas, Dylan 205 Thomas, W. R. 8–9, 13–14, 60–61 Thorne, Joseph 74 Thornton, R. K. R. 9–10, 33–34, 51, 96–97, 118, 131 Thornton, R. K. R. and Caroline Dowson 75, 110, 174, 220 Thorpe, Courtenay 138–139 ‘Three Witches, The’ 222–223, 225–227

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time 41–44, 46, 65, 68, 85, 93–96, 102, 145–146, 148–151, 162–163, 187–188, 196, 199–200, 219 Tinan, Jean de 236–237 ‘To a Child growing out of Childhood: and Away!’ see ‘Discedam, explebo numeram, reddarque tenebris’ ‘To Cynara’ 45–47, 57–58, 220 ‘To Hélène | A Rondeau’ see ‘Beyond’ ‘To His Mistress’ 41–44 ‘To Nature’ 27 ‘To One in Bedlam’ 128–129, 141–142, 149–150 ‘Transit Gloria’ 24 ‘Transition’ 6–7, 68–69 translation 2–4, 34–36, 108, 110, 138–139, 144, 160, 182–183, 195–196, 198, 203, 218, 221–222, 225, 233, 237 tuberculosis 22–23, 108–109, 136, 180, 213–214, 227–228, 232 Turgenev, Ivan 154–155 typology, character 20–21, 27, 31, 54, 55, 61, 69–70, 98–99, 122–123, 136, 145, 149, 172–173, 178, 212–213, 222, 225, 229 ‘Vain Hope’ 21–22, 90–91, 163 ‘Vain Resolves’ 159–160, 198 ‘Vale’ see ‘Dregs’ ‘Valediction, A’ 185–188, 220 ‘Vanitas’ 45, 124 ‘Venite, Descendamus’ 217–220, 222–224 Vergil 64, 91, 174 verisimilitude 12–15, 144–145 Verlaine, Paul 45, 48, 51, 127, 128–129, 134, 143–145, 149, 169, 182–183, 208, 221, 228 Verses 15–16, 21–23, 31, 41, 52–53, 65–66, 69–70, 91–93, 95–96, 124–125, 141–142, 152–153, 157–158, 165–166, 178, 187–188, 190, 192, 194–195, 198–200, 204–205, 207, 213–220, 222–225, 228, 229, 231, 232 ‘versicle du pays’ 200, 202, 203, 205 viaticum 183–185 Victoria I 115 vie romancée 2–3, 9–10, 14–17, 23–24, 52–53, 67–69, 72, 154–155, 200–201, 208, 212, 214–215, 220, 222–223, 232 villanelle 21–22 ‘Villanelle of His Lady’s Treasures’ 10–11, 22–23, 99, 223 ‘Villanelle of Marguerites’ 76–77, 156–158, 160, 169–170, 181–182, 194–195 ‘Villanelle of Sunset’ 57–58, CSP12, 68, 167–168 ‘Villanelle of the Poet’s Road’ 226 ‘Visit, The’ 103, 217–218

256

INDE X

‘Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam’ 56–58, 92–93, 95–96, 149, 207–208, 217–218, 220 von Platt, Countess Louisa Sobieska 91–92 Weiner, Stephanie Kuduk 6, 62–63, 95, 113–114, 186–187 Weir, David 21–22, 211–212 Wheatley, Katherine 183 Wilde, Oscar 1–2, 10–11, 20–21, 76, 78, 83, 132–134, 137, 138–139, 168, 211–212, 225, 235 Critic as Artist, The 21 Decay of Lying, The 12–13

Picture of Dorian Gray, The 9, 44, 88, 128 ‘Wisdom’ 160 Wong, Alex (A. T.) 46–48, 202 Wordsworth, William 156 wreath see garland Yeats, W. B. 5–9, 13, 30, 52, 97–98, 131, 134, 140–141, 151–152, 162–163, 171, 175–176, 186–187, 222 ‘Yvonne of Brittany’ 74–75, 190–191 Zola, Émile 13–15, 37, 73, 82, 100, 154–155, 182–184, 229