Of course it is true—more's the pity!—that in the melancholy years just before his death he drank absinthe in places where it is terribly fitting to drink absinthe. But this does not destroy the splendid symbolism of his act of drinking absinthe in the Cheshire Cheese. The wickedness in his poems and in his prose-sketches are always as affected and incongruous as is that pallid medicine in any honest tavern.
He tried hard to be pagan. In the manner of Mr. Swinburne, he exclaimed: "Goddess the laughter-loving, Aphrodite, befriend! Let me have peace of thee, truce of thee, golden one, send!" And not even Mr. Swinburne ever wrote lines so absolutely unconvincing. He said, "I go where the wind blows, Chloe, and am not sorry at all." And from this lyric no one can fail to get the impression that the poet was very sorry indeed. He imitated, even less successfully than Oscar Wilde, the unpleasant prose poems of Baudelaire, and he made the very worst of all English versions of Paul Verlaine's "Colloque Sentimental."
When Dowson took hashish during his student days, Mr. Arthur Symons tells us, it was before a large and festive company of friends. I do not think that he convinced them that he was that supposedly romantic character, an habitual user of the drug. The hashish, so to speak, in his poems is similarly incongruous and unconvincing. He was an accomplished artist in words, a delicate, sensitive and graceful genius, but he was no more fitted to be a pagan than to be a policeman. And so, in his best-known poem, he uses all the pagan properties, all the splendors of sin's pageantry, but his theme, his over-mastering thought—very different from the over-mastering thought of, say, Mr. Arthur Symons in similar circumstances—is a soul-shaking lament for his stained faithfulness, for his treason to the Catholic ideal of chastity.
He could not write poems that really were pagan. He was not a true decadent. And for this undoubtedly he now is thanking God. He had his foolish hours: he sometimes misused his gift of song. But—and this is the important thing about it—he did not know how to misuse it successfully. The real Ernest Dowson was not the picturesque vagabond about whom Mr. Arthur Symons and Mr. Victor Plarr have written, but the man who with all his heart praised "meekness and vigilance and chastity," who "was faithful" in his pathetic, ineffective fashion, but who knew at least the fidelity of his eternal Mother, who, in Miss Brégy's beautiful words, "laid his broken body in consecrated ground and followed this bruised soul with her pitiful, asperging prayers."
JAPANESE LACQUER
WHAT was the matter with Lafcadio Hearn? No American has written prose more delicate and vividly beautiful than his, nor has any one else—not even Yone Noguchi—put into English so clear a revelation of Japan's soul. Yet after an hour with "Kwaidan" or "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan" the normal reader is wearied and, instead of being grateful to the erudite and skillful author, regards him with actual dislike.
Why is this? Is it because Hearn had a morbid fondness for the tragic, and loved to dwell on mental, physical and spiritual disease? This is partly the reason, yet De Quincey and Edgar Allan Poe inspire no such aversion. Is it because Hearn's style is too rich, exquisite and precious? Walter Pater had the same fault, but Walter Pater is read with delight by Hearn's enemies. Is it because of Hearn's ridiculous religious prejudices—his hatred for the Jesuits, for example? No, Hearn's hatred for the Jesuits is simply a bad little boy's impudence toward his schoolmaster. He had none of George Borrow's fiery, romantic passion against the "Man in Black." And Borrow's "Lavengro" and "Romany Rye" were loved even by so un-Protestant a writer as Lionel Johnson.
No, the reason lies deeper, and is simpler, than any of these. Hearn failed, not because he was precious, not because he was morbid, not because he was prejudiced, but because he had no imagination.
Lafcadio Hearn was, in the worst sense of the word, a realist. He had thoroughly the materialistic attitude toward life; he could see only the dull outside of things, not the indwelling splendor. An imaginative man would have delighted in his mixed Greek and Irish blood, would have realized that as a newspaperman he was a member of the most romantic profession the world has known, would have seen that New Orleans was no mean city. But Hearn was so prosaic and matter-of-fact that he saw only the forms and outlines of the things about him, and so sentimentally credulous that he believed that Japan contained greater wonders than Louisiana. Dr. George M. Gould, in his interesting but unpleasant work, "Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," blames many of his dead friend's faults on his defective vision. But Hearn's myopia was spiritual as well as physical: he could not see the soul.