The Nature of Aesthetic Experience in the Poetry of the Nineties: Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, and John Gray

223 THE NATURE OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE IN THE POETRY OF THE NINETIESi ERNEST DOWSON, LIONEL JOHNSON, AND JOHN GRAY By James G. Nelson (University of Wisconsin) The poetry of the nineties in England never has been sufficiently valued by students and critics of literature. Of the several reasons one legitimately might advance to explain the lack of interest in such poets of the period as Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Gray, Arthur Symons, even the early W. B. Yeats, is the failure on the part of readers to understand the nature of the experience conveyed in the poems. In this essay I should like to explore briefly a sampling of poems from the canon of Gray, Dowson, and Johnson - poets I consider typical of the aesthetic milieu of the nineties - in an effort to arrive at a better understanding of the aesthetic experience so central to the nineties poetic tradition. The most interesting poets of the nineties are a part of an aesthetic tradition which extends from the Romantics, especially John Keats, through Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelite poets into the so-called decadent nineties. Although the aesthetic pronouncements, of John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold in such influential works as Modern Painters, vol. II, The Stones of Venice. the essays in Culture and Anarchy, and those such as "The Study of Poetry," were influential so far as the aestheticism of the nineties is concerned, it was the works of Walter Pater, especially the Pater of the early essays - the "Wordsworth" and those collected in The Renaissance - which were crucial in the development of the aesthetic stance of the nineties poets. However, important to both the aestheticism of Ruskin, Arnold, and Pater was the concept of "coming to life," of, as Pater stated it in its extremest form, burning "always with this hard, gemlike flame."1 Culture and art were, in particular, a means of rising above the low-pulsed, death-in-life condition of narrow-minded Puritanism and Philistinism which characterized Victorian society. Through what Arnold called "curiosity," that "desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are,"2 one could live a truly vital, more intensely satisfying life. And although in "Sweetness and Light," Arnold subordinated this desire "'to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent'" to what he called "the moral and social passion for doing good,"3 the poets of the nineties, sickened and repelled by the materialism and vulgarity of late Victorian society, largely ignored Arnold's "moral and social passion." Instead, they sought through a highly personal, eccentric pursuit of of art and culture to attain what Pater called "this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness" (Ren.. 238), a heightened sense of aesthetic awareness by being present "at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy" (Ren.. 236). Rather than seeking a multiplied consciousness, an 224 Hellenic breadth of view through an involvement with life, an altruistic effort to share one's "passion" with others, the nineties poets, attentive to the life styles of such figures as Rossetti and Pater as well as to the aesthetic views conveyed in their writings, retreated into a realm of art and personal emotions which served as the sole source of intensity and life. Their moments of intense perception, of vital awareness resulting from an often fleeting encounter with beauty, became the center of many of their poems. In his early poem, "My Sister's Sleep," Rosetti describes a moment in which the poem's persona "comes to life" under the impact of what Edgar Allen Poe called the "most poetical topic in the world," the death of a beautiful woman. As I have shown elsewhere,4 the persona who has what Pater described as that "certain kind of temperament , the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects" (Ren., x), calmly awaits the approaching death of his young sister. Exhausted from lack of sleep, his mind has, just as the critical moment occurs, reached a state of euphoria or clairvoyance in which his sensibility is heightened and his powers of perception stimulated to the...