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Aesthetic Memory's Cul-de-sac: The Art of Ernest Dowson CHRIS SNODGRASS University of Florida FOR YEARS the notorious "Dowson Legend" decreed that Ernest Dowson's melancholic poetry and fiction reflected the wrenching reversals in his life, but in fact the tragic themes of Dowson's art were established very early (in the late eighties) and remained virtually unaltered throughout his career.1 The remarkable constancy of Dowson's aesthetic vision actually serves as a kind of metaphor for all those fin-de-siècle attempts to resist corrupting change through timesuspending "aesthetic moments," that effort of the late Victorian "Religion of Art" to redeem life through aesthetic transformation. Dowson's poetic world is rooted in this same nineties' obsession with annulling the ravages of time and obviating the corrupting human desire that seems to be in his works virtually a function of time's decaying effects. But, as in so much of the Decadence, the idealizing dreams and aestheticizing memory of Dowson's protagonists ultimately fail to redeem the timebound world or escape the consequences of egoistic vanity. And what we discover is that this failure is due less to the strength of any vulgar external reality than to the tragic self-contradictions found to be inherent in the human condition and, even more disturbing for the Decadents, in the aesthetic sensibility itself. That time and corrupting desire should figure as such villainous forces in Dowson's art is hardly surprising, since his world—view and resulting poetic mythology were so heavily and decisively influenced by his readings in philosophical pessimism, particularly the works of Arthur Schopenhauer.2 We often find Dowson citing the German philosopher , asserting that sexual longing is only "the Evil Will which baits its trap with the illusion Love ...Cf. Schopenhauer's chapter on Sex and Desire"3 or confessing to collaborator Arthur Moore that 'Plato on 'Love' still seems to me less convincing than Schopenhauer."4 Certainly, the basic paradigms in Dowson's art—sheltered innocence constantly 26 ELT : VOLUME 35:1 1992 besieged, lovers subverting the sympathy and communion they seek, dreamers corrupting the very ideals they desire—are consistent with Schopenhauer's conception of life as a self-spun illusion to mask a metaphysical void, an insatiable, perverse, deceptive, self-perpetuating exercise of egoistic craving, specifically the Will-to-live: "the inner nature of everything is our will."5 For Schopenhauer, as it came to be for Dowson, evil is fundamentally the "crime of existence itself," a "debt" which destines a person to be "rightly exposed to physical and mental suffering, even if he has practised all [the customary] virtues."6 The "calling in" of that debt "appears in the form of the pressing wants, tormenting desires, and endless misery established through this existence ."7 Reversing customary Christian logic, "good" emerges as "the mere abolition of a desire and extinction of a pain."8 The cunning and rapacious Will, incarnated in all living matter, continually deceives us into believing that impassioned desire (culminating in reproductive sexuality) is a sacred release from imprisoning evil and vulgarity; but ultimately, asserts Schopenhauer, "our existence resembles nothing so much as the consequence of a misdeed, punishment for a forbidden desire."9 Consequently, as suggested so often in Dowson's work, time itself, the vehicle through which human desire acts out its Will, becomes not the means of unveiling the 'Platonic Idea," but only the "form under which the Will-to-live, which as a thing in itself is imperishable, reveals to itself the vanity of its striving ... by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value."10 I It follows, of course, that if life is itself a sin expiated only in a renunciation of the Will-to-live—we humans being merely objectifications of that Will, "at bottom of something that ought not to be"11—then redemptive morality can only be a function of self-denial, asceticism, mortification of desire. The only way to vitiate desire and vanity is through self-abnegation: "Suffering is, in fact, the purifying process through which alone, in most cases, the man is sanctified, i. e., is led back from the path...

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