Indeed, why repeat it, both Dowson and he will live by their poetry. But in the case of Davidson, in addition, there is his rather elephantine humour. While again it must always be remembered that he had the courage to state that the fear of speaking freely had ‘cramped the literature of England for a century.’ It was the liberty of the French literature indeed that in no small degree captivated the minds of all these young men. Very few of them, however, had the courage to speak freely. But it must always remain to Davidson’s credit that he tried to write a freer, emancipated novel, which, however, he failed to do, because he had a very remote idea of novel construction.
It was in 1896 that the quaint little salmon-pink volume of William Theodore Peters, the young American poet, appeared, entitled Posies out of Rings. This young American was an intimate of some of the men of the nineties, and though it is doubtful whether he himself would have ever achieved high fame as a poet, he had a sincere love for the beautiful things of Art. Among all these tragedies of ill-health, insanity and suicide that seemed to track down each of these young men, his fate was perhaps the saddest of all, for he died of starvation in Paris,[17] where many of his verses had appeared in a distinctly American venture, The Quartier Latin. His volume of conceits are a harking back, not always satisfactorily, to the ancient form of the versified epigram. What was wrong with his Muse is that it was only half alive. He puts indeed his own case in a nutshell in that charming little poem Pierrot and the Statue, which I venture to quote in full:
[17] R. H. Sherard, Twenty Years in Paris.
One summer evening in a charméd wood,
Before a marble Venus, Pierrot stood;
A Venus beautiful beyond compare,
Gracious her lip, her snowy bosom bare,
Pierrot amorous, his cheeks aflame,
Called the white statue many a lover’s name.
An oriole flew down from off a tree,
‘Woo not a goddess made of stone!’ sang he.
‘All of my warmth to warm it,’ Pierrot said,
When by the pedestal he sank down dead;
The statue faintly flushed, it seemed to strive
To move—but it was only half alive.
Such was the Muse’s response to Peters’ wooing; while he, in that strange bohemian world of so many of the young writers of that day, wrote in another short poem the epitaph of the majority of those who gave so recklessly of their youth, only to fail. It is called To the Café aux Phares de l’Ouest, Quartier Montparnasse:
The painted ship in the paste-board sea
Sails night and day.
To-morrow it will be as far as it was yesterday.
But underneath, in the Café,
The lusty crafts go down,
And one by one, poor mad souls drown—
While the painted ship in the paste-board sea
Sails night and day.
Such, indeed, was too often the fate of the epigoni of the movement. Their nightingales were never heard; they were buried with all their songs still unsung.
The only other volume which Theodore Peters essayed, to my knowledge, was a little poetic one-acter like his friend Ernest Dowson’s Pierrot of the Minute (for which work he wrote an epilogue). Peters’ play, entitled The Tournament of Love, is a very scarce item of the nineties’ bibliography. He calls it a pastoral masque in one act, and it was published by Brentano’s at Paris in 1894 and illustrated with drawings by Alfred Jones. As Bantock wrote the music for The Pierrot of the Minute, Noel Johnson composed the melodies for The Tournament of Love. The masque was put on at the Théâtre d’Application (La Bodinière), 18 rue St. Lazare, May 8, 1894. Peters himself took the part of Bertrand de Roaix, a troubadour, while among the cast were Wynford Dewhurst, the painter, and Loïe Fuller, the dancer. The scene is an almond orchard on the outskirts of Toulouse, on the afternoon of the 3rd May, 1498. ‘A group of troubadours discovered at the right of the stage, seated upon a white semicircular Renaissance bench, some tuning their instruments. Other poets towards the back. A laurel tree at the right centre. On the left centre two heralds guard the entrance to the lists.’ Pons d’Orange, the arrived poet, will win at this tournament of love, the Eglantine nouvelle, ‘that golden prize of wit.’ But it is won by Bertrand de Roaix, who wants it not, but the love of the institutress of this court of love, ‘Clémence Isaure, the Primrose Queen of Beauty.’ At his love protestations she laughs; the troubadour goes outside the lists and stabs himself. As he lies dying Clémence, clothed in her white samite, powdered with silver fleur-de-lys and edged with ermine, her dust-blonde hair bound with a fillet of oak-leaves, comes forth from the lists and finds her boy lover’s body:
Love came and went; we
Knew him not. I have found my soul too late.