Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration
By Ernest Dowson
Calm, sad, secure; behind high convent walls,
These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray:
And it is one with them when evening falls,
And one with them the cold return of day.
These heed not time; their nights and days they make
Into a long, returning rosary,
Whereon their lives are threaded for Christ’s sake:
Meekness and vigilance and chastity.
A vowed patrol, in silent companies,
Life-long they keep before the living Christ.
In the dim church, their prayers and penances
Are fragrant incense to the Sacrificed.
Outside, the world is wild and passionate;
Man’s weary laughter and his sick despair
Entreat at their impenetrable gate:
They heed no voices in their dream of prayer.
They saw the glory of the world displayed;
They saw the bitter of it, and the sweet;
They knew the roses of the world would fade,
And be trod under by the hurrying feet.
Therefore they rather put away desire,
And crossed their hands and came to sanctuary;
And veiled their heads and put on coarse attire:
Because their comeliness was vanity.
And there they rest; they have serene insight
Of the illuminating dawn to be:
Mary’s sweet Star dispels for them the night,
The proper darkness of humanity.
Calm, sad, secure; with faces worn and mild:
Surely their choice of vigil is the best?
Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild;
But there, beside the altar, there, is rest.
Now, this is a very beautiful poem. But there is nothing in it which might not have been written by a Protestant. And there is one note in it which seems to me to be absolutely contrary to the Catholic idea of the religious life—and that is the note of melancholy. Ernest Dowson insists that the nuns are sad as well as calm and secure, he insists upon the fact that their faces are “worn and mild.” Also he apparently thinks of the convent as a place of inaction, instead of as a place of ordered and energetic activity. Therefore, this poem, beautiful as it is, seems to me to be in no way Catholic in spirit or in expression.
But while I do not feel that the authenticity of Ernest Dowson’s Catholicity can be proved by his deliberately religious poems, I do think that in nearly every poem which this so-called decadent wrote it is possible to find indications if not of piety, at least of normality, sanity, wholesomeness and virtue.
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 worst 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 æsthetic 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.
There is splendid symbolism in Ernest Dowson’s act of drinking absinthe in the Cheshire Cheese. The wickedness in his poems and his prose sketches is 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 exclaims: “Goddess the laughter-loving, Aphrodite, 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.
Ernest Dowson 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 poems, he uses all the pagan properties, all the splendors of sin’s pageantry, but his theme, his overmastering thoughts, is a soul-shaking lament for his stained faithfulness, for his treason to the Catholic ideal of chastity.
Ernest Dowson 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. Blackie Murdoch has written, but the man who with all his heart praised “meekness and vigilance and chastity,” who “was faithful” in his pathetic ineffective fashion, who knew at last the fidelity of his eternal Mother, who, in Katherine Brégy’s beautiful words, “laid his broken body in consecrated ground and followed his bruised soul, with her pitiful asperging prayers.”
In considering the eccentricities of “The Savoy” and “The Yellow Book,” in considering all the literary and artistic artificialities of the eighteen-nineties, it seems to me that one real value of the cult of peacocks and green carnations, of artificial paganism and sophisticated loveliness, is that it furnishes a splendidly contrasting background for the white genius of Lionel Johnson.
This aristocratic and wealthy young Oxford graduate might so easily have become an æsthete and nothing more! His environment, many of his friendships, even his discipleship, as it may be called, to Walter Pater might naturally be expected to cause him to develop into a mere dilettante, interested only in delicate and superficial beauty, having, by way of moral code, an earnest desire to live up to his blue chine.
Instead, what was Lionel Johnson? He was a sound and accomplished scholar, writing Latin hymns that for their grace and authentic ecclesiastical style might stand beside those of Adam of St. Victor or of St. Bernard himself. Nor was he less deft in his manipulation of the style of the classical authors, as many graceful lines show. And this, remember, was at a time when Latin was most absolutely a dead language to most young English poets, whose attention was given entirely to the picturesque attractions of the Parisian argot beloved of the decadents.
The æsthetic movement of the eighteen-nineties was merely a search for beauty—merely a revolt against Victorian agnosticism and materialism. Johnson found the adventure which all the young poets and artists were seeking; he knew that the only answer to their question was the Catholic Faith.
The atmosphere of the literary world in which he lived seems to have had no effect upon Lionel Johnson’s mind and soul. He was “of the centre” not “of the movement.” He gladly accepted the gracious traditions of English poetry. He followed the time-hallowed conventions of his craft as faithfully as did Tennyson. He had no desire to toss Milton’s wreath either to Whitman or to Baudelaire.
But these virtues are perhaps chiefly negative. Almost the same thing might be said of many poets, of the late Stephen Phillips, for example, who certainly was an honest traditionalist, uninfluenced by decadence or æstheticism. But Lionel Johnson had also (what Stephen Phillips lacked) a great and beautiful philosophy. And his philosophy was true. He was so fortunate as to hold the Catholic Faith. This Faith inspired his best poems, shines through them and makes them, as the word is used, immortal.
While Lionel Johnson was not exclusively a devotional and religious poet, the theme which he sang with the most splendid passion and the most consummate art was the Catholic Church. This was the great influence in his life; it is to this that his poetry owes most of its enduring beauty. But there were other influences, there were other things which claimed, to a less degree, his devotion. One of these is Ireland.
Lionel Johnson’s chivalrous loyalty to Ireland was not without its quaint humor. He was descended from the severe and brutal general who savagely put down the insurrection of 1798. But he by no means shared his ancestor’s views in Irish matters; he was an enthusiastic advocate of Irish freedom and a devoted lover of everything Irish.
Although he hailed with delight the revival of ancient Celtic customs and the ancient Celtic language, Lionel Johnson was far from being what we have come to call a neo-Celt. He did not spend his time in writing elaborately annotated chants in praise of Cuchulain and Deidre and Oengus, and other creatures of legend; the attempt to reëstablish Ireland’s ancient paganism seemed to him singularly unintelligent. He saw that the greatest glory of Ireland is her fidelity to the Catholic Faith, a fidelity which countless cruel persecutions have only strengthened. And so when he wrote of Ireland’s dead, he did not see them entering into some Ossianic land of dead warriors. Instead he wrote:
For their loyal love, nought less,
Than the stress of death sufficed:
Now with Christ, in blessedness,
Triumph they, imparadised.
Similarly, in what is generally considered to be his greatest poem, the majestic and passionate “Ireland,” his most joyous vision is that of the “Bright souls of Saints, glad choirs of intercession from the Gael,” and he concludes with this splendid prayer:
O Rose! O Lily! O Lady full of grace!
O Mary Mother! O Mary Maid! hear thou.
Glory of Angels! Pity, and turn they face,
Praying thy Son, even as we pray thee now,
For thy dear sake to set thine Ireland free:
Pray thou thy Little Child!
Ah! who can help her, but in mercy He?
Pray then, pray thou for Ireland, Mother mild!
O heart of Mary! Pray the Sacred Heart:
His, at Whose word depart
Sorrows and hates, home to Hell’s waste and wild.
Lionel Johnson was, as Miss Louise Imogen Guiney has written, “a tower of wholesomeness in the decadence which his short life spanned.” His purely secular poems are best when his Catholic Faith, seemingly without his willing it, unexpectedly shines out in a splendor of radiant phrases. And of all his poems, those which constitute his most important contributions to literature, are those which are directly the fruit of his religious experiences or of his love for Ireland. He was not so great a poet as Francis Thompson. He never wrote a poem that will stand comparison with “The Hound of Heaven” or the “Orient Ode.” But the sum of the beauty in all his work is great, and his poetry is, on the whole, more companionable than that of Francis Thompson; it is more human, more personal, more intimate.
And to at least two of Lionel Johnson’s poems, the adjective “great” may, by every sound critical standard, safely be applied. One of these is the “Dark Angel,” a masterly study of the psychology of temptation, written in stanzas that glow with feeling, that are the direct and passionate utterance of the poet’s soul, and yet are as polished and accurate as if their author’s only purpose had been to make a thing of beauty. The other is “Te Martyrum Candidatus,” a poem which may without question be given its place in any anthology which contains “Burning Babe,” “The Kings,” and Crashaw’s “Hymn to St. Teresa.” It has seemed to me that these brave and beautiful lines, which have for their inspiration the love of God, and echo with their chiming syllables the hoof-beats of horses bearing knights to God’s battles, might serve as a fitting epitaph for the accomplished scholar, the true poet, the noble and kindly Catholic gentleman who wrote them.