It is late to be telling of Dowson, with the eighteen-nineties nearly out of sight, and yet it is Dowson and Lionel Johnson that I know most of, from the last of this period. Poles apart these two poets are, the one so austere and almost collegiate in adherence to convention, the other too warm to let a coldness obsess his singing. There doesn't seem to be anything wonderful about Dowson, and yet you want to be saying a line of his every now and then, of him "that lived, and sang, and had a beating heart," ere he grew old, and he grew old so soon. "Worn out by what was really never life to him," is a prefatorial phrase I recall. There was a genuine music in Dowson, even if it was smothered in lilies and roses and wine of the now old way of saying things. "Come hither child, and rest—Behold the weary west," might have been the thing he was saying to himself, so much is this the essence of his lost cause.

There is a languor and a lack of power to lift a hand toward the light, too much a trusting of the shadow. "I have flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, to put those pale lost lilies out of mind." Always verging on a poetic feeling not just like ourselves in these days, and yet Dowson was a poet. He caressed words until they sang for him the one plaint that he asked of them. That he was obsessed of the beauties and the intimations of Versailles, is seen in everything he did, or at least he imbibed this from Verlaine. He was himself a pale wanderer down soft green allÉes, he had a twilight mind struggling toward the sun, which was too bright for him, for the moon was his brightest light. Echoes of Verlaine linger through his verse and a strain of Poe is present, poet whom he with his French taste admired so much, two very typical idols for a young man with a sentimental journey to pursue. Lost Adelaides, to keep him steeped in the sorrow that he cherished, for he petted his miseries considerably; or was it that he was most at home when he was unhappy? He would rather have seen the light of day from a not quite clear window, for instead of a clear hill, he might see a vague castle of his fancy somewhere. He hadn't the sweep of a great poet, and yet somehow there was the linnet in him, there was the strain of the lute among the leaves, there was the rustle of a soft dress audible, and the passing of hands he could not ever hold.

He was the poet of the lost treasure. "Studies in Sentiment" is, I think, the title of a small book of prose of his. He might have called his poems "Studies in sentimentality". And yet, for his time, how virile and vigorous he sounds beside "Posies out of Rings", of his friend Theodore Peters, of the renaissance cloak, the cherry coloured velvet cloak embroidered in green leaves and silver veinings, so full of the sky radiance of Dowson himself, this cloak. Cherry sounds red and passionate. But it was a cherry of olden time, with the bloom quite gone, the dust of the years permeating its silken warp. It reposes here in America, the property of an artist of that period.

One likes Dowson because of his sincerity, and a clear beauty which, if not exactly startling, was in its way truly genuine. It was merely too late for Dowson, and it was probably too soon. Swinburne had strummed the skies with every kind of song, and Verlaine had whispered every secret of the senses there was, in the land of illusion and vaguery. Dowson was worshipper of them both, for it was sound first and last that he cared most for, the musical mastery of the one and the sentimentality of the other. He was far nearer Verlaine in type. He had but the one thing to tell of, and that was lost love, and he told it over and over in his book of verse. His Pierrot of the Minute was himself, and his Cynara was the ever vanishing vision of his own insecurity and incapability. He perished for the love of hands. He is so like someone one knows, whom one wants to talk to tenderly, touch in a friendly way, and say as little as possible. He comes to one humanly first, and asks you for your eye to his verse afterward, something of the "Little boy Lost", in his so ineffectual face, weak with sweetness and hidden in shyness, covered with irresponsibility, or lack of power to be responsible.

He was a helpless one, that is certain. He resorted to the old-fashioned methods of the decadents for maintaining the certain requisite melancholy apparently necessary to sing a certain way. In the struggle of that period, he must have seemed like a very clear, though a very sad singer. There were no lilies or orchids in his buttonhole, and no strange jewels on his fingers, for you remember, it was the time of "Monsieur Phocas", and the art of Gustave Moreau. He was plain and sincere, and pathetic, old-fashioned too in that he was bohemian, or at least had acquired bohemianism, for I think no Englishman was ever really bohemian. Dieppe and the docks had gotten him, and took away the sense of mastery over things that a real poet of power must somehow have. He was essentially a giver-in. His neurasthenia was probably the reason for that. It was the age of absinthe and little taverns, for there was Verlaine and the inimitable CafÉ d'Harcourt, which, as you saw it just before the war, had the very something that kept the Master at his drinks all day.

Murger, Rimbaud, Verlaine had done the thing which has lasted so singularly until now, for there are still echoes of this in the air, even to the present day. Barmaids are memories, and roseleaves dried and set in urns, for that matter, too. How far away it all seems, and they were the substance of poetry then. Sounds were the important things for Dowson, which is essentially the Swinburne echo. Significant then, that he worshipped "the viol, the violet, and the vine" of Poe. There was little else but singing in his verse however. His love of Horace did less for him than the masters of sound, excepting that the vision comes in the name "Cynara". But it was all struggle for Dowson, a battle with the pale lily. It was for this he clung to cabmen's lounging places. He was looking for places to be out of the play in. He couldn't have survived for long, and yet there is a strain of genuine loveliness, the note of pure beauty in the verse of Dowson. He was poet, and kept to his creed with lover-like tenacity.

He helped close a period that was distinguished all over the world, the period of the sunflower. Apart from its wildest and most spectacular genius, it has produced Lionel Johnson with his religious purity, and Aubrey Beardsley. It was the time of sad and delicate young men. They all died in boyhood really. These were, I think, with Dowson the best it offered. We never read Arthur Symons for his power in verse, he with so much of the rose-tinted afterglow in him, so much of the old feeling for stage doors and roses thrown from the boxes, and the dying scent of lingerie. His essays will be a far finer source of delight for a much longer time, for therein is the best poetry he had to offer.

Dowson was, let us say not mockingly, the boyish whimperer in song. He was ineffectual, too much so, to take up the game of laughter for long. That would have been too strenuous for him, so he had to sit and weep tears of wordy rain. "Il pleut dans mon coeur" was the famous touch of his master, it was the loudest strain in him. That was the lover-strain, and Dowson was the lover dying of love, imaginary love probably, and saw everywhere something to remind him of what he had pathetically lost. If there had been a little savage in him, he would have walked away with what he wanted. He maybe did have a try or two, but they couldn't have endured, for he wasn't loving a particular Adelaide. That was the name he gave to love, for it was woman's lips, and eyes and hands that he cared most for, or at least seemed most to care.

It was in the vision that crossed his ways in the dark and boisterous taverns where love finds strange ways for expression, that the singleness of feeling possessed him. It was among the rougher elements of dock life that his refinements found their level. Dowson sang and sang and sang, until he grew old at thirty-three, "worn out by what was never really life to him". Aged pierrot, gone home to his mother, the Moon, to bask forever in the twilight of his old and vague fancies. There might he strum his heart out in the old way, and the world would never hear, for it has lost the ear for this kind of song. Perhaps in two hundred years, in other "golden treasuries" there may appear the songs of Dowson as among the best of those early and late singers of the nineteenth century. We cannot say now, for it cloys a little with sweets for us at this time, though it was then the time of honey and jasmine, and the scent of far away flowers. Pierrot of the glass, with the hours dripping away in fine, gold rain. That was the genius of poets like Dowson, and pierrot was the master of them all.