Through kinship a man who is born potentially a poet comes first into relation with poets, and with E. Dowden’s sensuousness of capacities it was natural that he should be in his early years attracted to Keats, to the long, deep, rich dwelling of his verse on the vision and the sounds of Nature. It was not until he had advanced some way towards middle life that he came into vital contact with Shelley. He had felt aloof from him; but the attraction, when once owned, became very powerful, and he yielded to the delight of the swift motion of the Shelleyan utterances.
He always recognized Robert Browning’s greatness profoundly, and responded to all his best truths, especially as regards the relation, in love, of Man and Woman, but he never became pledged to an all-round Browning worship; his admiration had no discipleship in it.
For Walt Whitman, with whom a personal friendship, strong on both sides, was formed, he felt the cordial reverence due to the giver of what he reckoned as a gift of immense value. While condemning whatever was unreticent in Leaves of Grass, he at the same time saw there the great flood of spirituality available as a force for emancipation of our hearts from pressure of sordidnesses in the world.
It is somewhat remarkable that with all his trend towards the great spiritual and mystical forces in literature he was all along never without a keen appreciation of the writers who brought mundane shrewdness and wisdom. The first book he bought for himself in childhood with the hoarded savings of his pocket-money was Bacon’s Essays, with which as a small boy he became very familiar. And all through his life he sought with unfailing pleasure the companionship of Jane Austen again and again. And amongst the books which he himself made, it was perhaps his Montaigne that gave him, in the process of making, the delicatest satisfaction—the satisfaction of witnessing and analysing the dexterous play of human intellect and character on low levels.
His attraction to Goethe—very dominant with him in middle life—came, I imagine, from the fact that he saw in that mightiest of the Teutons two diverse qualities in operation—the measureless intellectual spirituality and the vast common-sense of mundane wisdom.
In this attraction there was also the element of the magnetism which draws together opposites—not less forcible than the attraction between affinities.
As regards the moral nature, his own was as far as the North Pole is from the South from that of the great sage of Weimar, whose serenely-wise beneficence contained no potentialities of sainthood, martyrdom or absolute human love. He sought gain from Goethe just because of that unlikeness to what was in himself.
At one period of his literary work he was intending to make as his “opus magnus” a full study of Goethe’s life and works, and with that intent he carried on a course of reading, and laid in a great equipment of workman’s tools—Goethe books in German, French and English. From this project he was turned aside by a call to write the life of Shelley—a long and difficult task. But he never lost sight of Goethe. In one of the later years of his life, as recreation in a summer’s holiday in Cornwall, he translated the whole of the “West-Eastern Divan” into English verse, and previously, from time to time, isolated essays on Goethe themes appeared amongst his prose writings. And yet it is not unlikely that even if the task of Shelley’s biography had not intervened, no complete study, such as he had at first planned, might have been ever accomplished by him on Goethe, for with experience there came to him a growing conviction that his best work in criticism could only be done in dealing with what was written in his mother-tongue.
Some of Edward Dowden’s friends, Nationalist and Unionist both, have felt regret that he, the gentle scholar, gave such large share of his energies to the strife of politics, as if force were subtracted thereby from his work in Literature. They are mistaken. The output of energy thus given came back to the giver, reinforcing his prose writing with a mundane vigour and virility, exceeding what it might have had if he had kept himself aloof from the affairs of the nation.
Yet, strangely enough, between his politics and his poetry there was a water-tight wall of separation. Other men, to take scattered instances, Kipling, Wordsworth, Milton, fused in various ways their political feeling and their poetical. This Edward Dowden never attempted. I cannot analyse the “why.”