"Faithful...In My Fashion[ing]": Shades of Association in Ernest Dowson's Poetry

Then may the battle be decided by what people are pleased to call our own experience. Our own indeed! What is our own save by mere courtesy of speech? A matter of fashion. Sanction sanctifieth, and fashion fashioneth.

Samuel Butler, Life and Habit (1877)

The following anecdote, which appeared in T.P.'s Weekly in July 1913 attributed to "Guy Thorne," pseudonym of the journalist and novelist Ranger Gull, may be the quaintest of all the sundry tales that have become attached to the life of Ernest Dowson. Gull describes meeting the poet in London in 1898:

He seemed a lost creature, a youthful ghost strayed amongst the haunts of men, an object of pity. Pale, emaciated, in clothes that were almost ragged, poor Ernest flittered from bar to bar in search of someone with whom to talk. When he found a friend, his face would light up with a singular and penetrating sweetness that made one forget his untidiness— to use no other word—which verged on offence. He was never penniless, was always the first to pay for others, and when the drink was served he would sometimes take a little gold cross from his waistcoat pocket and dip it in the glass before he drank. Someone who did not know the circumstances said, "Ernest, were you ever in love?" The poet answered in the words of Voltaire. "Vous me demandez si j'ai aimé: oui! C'est une histoire singulière et terrible."¹

Readers will at once recognize the poète maudit of the so-called "Dowson Legend," a figure who, in the words of Arthur Symons, was "never robust, and always reckless with himself"; was often of degraded appearance and was attracted to "sordidness in his surroundings"; was addicted to alcohol and drugs; was weak, of variable moral character; and was, above all, governed by "the swift, disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius."²

Trite as they may be, these remarks have the merit of shedding some light at least on Dowson's art and practice as a writer, as more eminent accounts usually do not.³ On being invited to discourse upon his amatory history, the subject of this anecdote does not whimsically recollect a fond past, or peer into his heart, but finds his own situation captured in the words of a foreign writer, in an exotic, outré tradition. Gull marks Dowson's experience as unusual or "singulière" in this way: French literature, not English literature, most accurately reflects his own peculiar aphrodisian misfortune. The encapsulation of the speaker's sentiments in words attributed to Voltaire signal, paradoxically, that they are at once uncommon and yet of a distinct and knowable—perhaps even archetypal—nature.

The lovelorn moribund of Gull's narrative appears to be moping and sententious but, if we may attach any veracity to the account at all, the real Ernest Dowson may be having a laugh.⁴ His French punchline hints at the irregularity of his infamous infatuation with Adelaide Foltinowicz, who was eleven years old when he first met her and determined to bestow his life's work upon her; he was twenty-two. The surreptitious reference hints at the illicit nature of this attachment simply by being French, which was almost automatically associated with scandalous novels and scandalous conduct, and would have been regarded with suspicion outside bohemian circles at this time. But our aptly surnamed stenographer does not recognize, and wrongly attributes, the allusion Dowson makes, and does not get his joke. Dowson replies to his inquisitor very nearly with the opening lines of Théophile Gautier's short story, "La Morte Amoureuse" (variously translated as "The Dead Lover," and "The Vampire"):

Vous me demandez, frère, si j'ai aimé; oui.—C'est une histoire singulière et terrible, et, quoique j'ai soixante-six ans, j'ose à peine remuer la cendre de ce souvenir.⁵

You ask me, brother, if I have ever loved. Yes. It is a strange and terrible story, and, though I am sixty-six, I hardly dare even now to...