Two years later the Club’s second book appeared, and Dowson has again half a dozen poems in it, including the lovely Extreme Unction, and that rather doubtfully praised lyric ‘non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae.’ Then in the same year as The Savoy (1896) appeared his Verses, printed on Japanese vellum and bound in parchment, with a cover design in gold by Aubrey Beardsley—a typical Smithers book. This volume contains the best of Dowson, the handsel (if it is not too big a phrase to use of such a delicate and delightful artist), the handsel of his immortality. For there is something about Dowson’s best work, though so fragile in its texture, that has the classic permanence of a latter-day Propertius. He has a Latin brevity and clarity, and he is at his best in this volume. Something has vanished from the enchantment of the singer in Decorations (1899). It is like the flowers of the night before. One feels that so many of these later verses had been done perforce, as Victor Plarr says, rather to keep on in the movement lest one was forgotten. But in 1899 the movement was moribund, and the winter of discontent for the Pierrots of the nineties was fast closing down. Remembering these things, one murmurs the sad beauty of those perfect lines of this true poet in his first volume:
When this, our rose, is faded,
And these, our days, are done,
In lands profoundly shaded
From tempest and from sun:
Ah, once more come together,
Shall we forgive the past,
And safe from worldly weather
Possess our souls at last.
Not without reason one feels he has been called the ‘rosa rosarum of All the Nineties,’ in so far as poetry is concerned; but, personally, I would prefer to call him, if one has to call such a true poet anything, the poets’ poet of the nineties. The best of his short stories rank high in the great mass of the literature of those days, and are dealt with (together with his partnership in two novels) in another section. As for his little one-act play, The Pierrot of the Minute, one is apt to feel perhaps that Beardsley was not over unjust to it, when he described it as a tiresome playlet he had to illustrate. At any rate, it was the cause of Beardsley’s doing one or two admirable decorations, even if the actual play, in which the young American poet of the nineties, Theodore Peters (of whom more anon), and Beardsley’s own sister acted, was not effective as a stage production.
There is no doubt but that Davidson, though he was outside the coteries of the nineties, was still of them. First of all he was a Scotchman of evangelical extraction, and secondly he was not an Oxford man. All this made him outside the group. On the other count, he was of the Rhymers’ Club, though he did not contribute to the books. He was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, though the French influence in him was rather negative. His books came from the Bodley Head and were well recognised by its other members. Beardsley even decorated some of them, and Rothenstein did his portrait for The Yellow Book. In fact, Davidson himself wrote for that periodical. All this made him of the group. It would be thus impossible to pass over such a poet in connection with this movement, for Davidson has written some magnificent lyrics, if he has made his testaments too often and too turgidly. The Davidson, indeed, of the nineties will be discovered to be, by any one examining his works, the Davidson that will most probably survive.
He was born in 1857, but as Mr. Holbrook Jackson admirably puts it, ‘John Davidson did not show any distinctive fin de siècle characteristics until he produced his novel Perfervid[16] in 1890.’ His next work, a volume of poetry, which was the first to attract attention, In a Music Hall and other Poems (1891), accentuates these distinctive characteristics, and fairly launches him on the tide of the movement. Before that time he had been school-mastering and clerking in Scotland, while his leisure had begotten three rather ill-conceived works. Davidson discovered himself when he came to London to write. The movement of the nineties stimulated him towards artistic production, and when that movement was killed by the fall of Wilde, and buried by the Boer War, Davidson again lost himself in the philosophic propaganda of his last years before he was driven to suicide. Philosophy, indeed, with John Davidson, was to eat one’s heart with resultant mental indigestion that completely unbalanced the artist in him. Therefore, so far as this appreciation is concerned, we only have to deal with the happy Davidson of the Ballads and Fleet Street Eclogues fame; the gay writer of A Random Itinerary (1894); the rather hopeless novelist of Baptist Lake (1894), and The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender (1895). The last tedious phase before he gave himself to the Cornish sea is no affair of ours. In his Testament he says ‘none should outlive his power,’ and realising probably that he had made this mistake, he wished to end it all.
[16] The Eighteen Nineties, by Holbrook Jackson, p. 215 1913.
But in the nineties he was like his own birds, full of ‘oboe’ song and ‘broken music.’ Seldom has the English river, the Thames, been more sweetly chaunted than by him. While if we are looking for his kinship with his time there is no doubt about it in The Ballad of a Nun, who remarks:
I care not for my broken vow,
Though God should come in thunder soon,
I am sister to the mountains now,
And sister to the sun and moon.
A statement which we feel many of the Beardsley ladies cadaverous with sin or fat with luxury would have been quite capable of repeating. Again, his Thirty Bob a Week in The Yellow Book is as much a ninety effort as his Ballad of Hell, while his novel, Earl Lavender, is a burlesque of certain of the eccentricities of the period. In a poetical note to this volume he sings:
Oh! our age end style perplexes
All our Elders’ time has famed;
On our sleeves we wear our sexes,
Our diseases, unashamed.