If the scene of "The Millionaire" and "Nina" were laid in the United States, these stories would never have been printed. They are without literary merit; they are the crudest melodrama, but their grossness makes them appeal to the prurient, and their foreign origin charms the literary snob. To say that they reflect Russian life is to insult Russia grievously. They do reflect, it is true, the basest part of Russian life, the part which no friend of Russia or of literature can wish reflected. They reflect the gross and hideous bestiality of the Russian criminal class, they reflect the life of people who have added to their native savagery the vices of civilization. They call to mind a picture of the Russian people as something at once bestial and human, a monstrosity, a nightmare: perhaps the thing that Kipling had in mind when he wrote of the bear that walks like a man.

ABSINTHE AT THE CHESHIRE CHEESE

BELONGING rather to gossip than to literary history, the following anecdote is nevertheless significant when considered merely as an illustrative legend. A certain London publisher, it is said, recently had in his possession a notebook that had been found, after his death, among the effects of Lionel Johnson. The poet had scribbled in it memoranda of all sorts: notes for essays, stray epigrams, rough drafts of poems. He had also copied into it, from books and magazines, bits of prose and verse that gave him pleasure. Well, one day this friend said to Johnson's loyal friend, Miss Louise Imogen Guiney—and, by the way, Miss Guiney is not my authority for this story—"Do you know, I have found in this notebook an unpublished poem by Lionel Johnson! It is very beautiful, far better than any of Johnson's published poems. I'll read it to you." Thereupon he opened the notebook and began to declaim:

Last night, ah, yesternight, between her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara!

Of course Lionel Johnson, like every other lover of good poetry, had felt the charm of Ernest Dowson's now famous poem which is headed by the phrase, "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonæ Sub Regno Cynaræ," and had hastily copied it in his notebook, perhaps from Dowson's manuscript at some meeting of the Rhymers' Club. The point of this story is that the publisher, knowing Johnson chiefly as a celebrant of the Catholic faith, attributed to him not one of Dowson's poems about nuns, or Extreme Unction, or the Blessed Sacrament, but a lyric which at least in tradition and phrasing is obviously pagan.

Out of the mouths of babes and publishers! That wise and sympathetic critic, Miss Katherine Brégy, has justly praised the lovely poetry which resulted from Ernest Dowson's return to the faith of his ancestors. She has demonstrated, for all time, the genuineness of his Catholicism, and made Mr. Victor Plarr's recent sneer at his dead friend's conversion seem the most futile thing in his entertaining but ineffective book. It would be absurd for me to attempt to add to Miss Brégy's interpretative appreciations of the "sculptural beauty" of Dowson's religious poems. But, like the simple-minded publisher previously mentioned, I find indications, if not of piety, at least of normality, sanity, wholesomeness, virtue, in nearly every poem which this so-called "decadent" wrote.

There are, and there have always been since sin first came into the world, genuine "decadents." That is, there have been writers who have devoted all their energies and talents to the cause of evil, who have consistently and sincerely opposed Christian morality, and zealously endeavored to make the worse appear the better cause. But every poet who lays a lyric wreath at a heathen shrine, who sings the delights of immorality, or hashish, or suicide, or mayhem, is not a decadent: often he is merely weak-minded. The true decadent, to paraphrase a famous saying, wears his vices lightly, like a flower. He really succeeds in making vice seem picturesque and amusing and even attractive.

Now, this is exactly what Ernest Dowson never could do. He was a member, it will be remembered, of that little band of "esthetic" poets which was called the Rhymers' Club. With them he spent certain evenings at the Cheshire Cheese and there he drank absinthe. This is a significant and symbolic fact. Not in some ominous Parisian cellar, but beneath the beamed ceiling of a most British inn, still stained with smoke from the pipe of Dr. Samuel Johnson, among thick mutton chops and tankards of musty ale, in a cloud of sweet-scented steam that rose from the parted crust of the magnificent pigeon-pie, Ernest Dowson drank absinthe.