So Who Really was Queen Anne? The Truth about The Favourite's Forgotten Monarch

Period comedy-drama The Favourite has already dominated the BAFTAs and it’s got 10 nominations for the Oscars on Sunday (February 24). But, as the UK marks LGBT History Month, how realistic are the lesbian affairs depicted in the film?

What is the true, real-life story of Queen Anne and has The Favourite prioritised fact over fiction? We explore what historians have said about the period.

  Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, The Favourite follows the reign of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) when England is at war with France in the early 18th century. It portrays two cousins, the Duchess of Marlborough, Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), and Abigail Masham (Emma Stone), who fight it out to be court favourites of Queen Anne, including their salacious lesbian affairs with the monarch.

The historical accuracy of the film, which has already bagged seven BAFTA awards, including best actress for Colman, has been hotly debated—from middle-aged parents discussing the lesbian romps in Aga-heated kitchens in southern England, to millenials frantically Googling the “historical accuracy of The Favourite” after watching it that afternoon in their local cinema.

So, how much of the 2019 Oscar-nominated movie The Favourite is real? According to historian Ophelia Field, author of the Sarah Churchill biography The Favourite, which recounts the historical story behind the recent film, Queen Anne’s letters to Lady Churchill were, indeed, of a romantic nature.

  Field, whose biography of Churchill was first published in 2002, before being updated to coincide with the release of the film, says she started researching Queen Anne’s letters written from the 1680s onwards, and “was struck by the fact that they were love letters.”

Field explains that she then did some reading around the topic to “try to contextualise how freakish or how typical these were for the period,” only to discover that the Restoration court—covering the period approximately from the return of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660 until the death of Queen Anne in 1714—was characterised by strong female friendships, which may have been sexual.

“What became clear was that in the Restoration court in which Anne and Sarah grew up—which was a sexually decadent place, though that’s usually been thought about more in a heterosexual way—there was a sort of mini-culture of very passionate relationships between the young maids of honour,” explains Field.

Field adds that Queen Anne’s letters to the Duchess of Marlborough have to be read “in the context of how she obviously absorbed this romantic same-sex culture of the Restoration court.” The historian goes on to highlight several women who she believes were involved in romanticising one another, including Francis Aspley, with whom, she says, Queen Anne’s older sister Princess Mary—later Queen Mary II of England—was “really in love.”

The academic reads aloud one letter from Princess Mary to Apsley, who she calls her “husband,” in which the royal says she longs to “kiss the ground on when once you go, to be your dog on a string.”

Still, Field is quick to admit, we can never know for certain whether the same-sex desire outlined in these letters was acted upon physically, as is suggested in the film.

“Whether any of these relationships were physically consummated is a whole other question—and one that we will never have a concrete answer to,” explains Field.

She highlights one moment in the film where Churchill sends a furious letter to Anne, effectively threatening to “out” her in response to her relationship with Baroness Masham, which is based on a real letter. For Field, the contents of this letter show that Churchill “fully knows that the reputational threat to Anne is the accusation of lesbianism, even if they didn’t have the word lesbian.”

But Field explains that she is frequently frustrated by certain academics who claim that such physical lesbian affairs could never have happened. “The position I take is impatience with certain male historians who infantilize the women and talk as if these letters are only between very young girls,” she adds. “Earlier biographers couldn’t even imagine the possibility that anything was felt erotically, if not acted upon.

“I think it’s not implausible to imagine that there’s some physical expression within all of this, and the intensity is certainly much closer to our modern ideas of sexual love than to our modern ideas of friendship.”

Other academics, however, maintain a more sceptical view over whether Queen Anne’s relationships with Churchill and Masham amounted to anything more than passionate friendship.

Historian Anne Somerset, author of biography Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion, says that, while the film “takes it as a complete given that Queen Anne had active lesbian relationships with the Duchess of Marlborough and Abigail,” she believes that it is “certainly not as straightforward as that.”

For Somerset, the question of whether Queen Anne actually had sexual relationships with the two women is “very complicated.”

Like Field, Somerset acknowledges that there was a “cult of female friendship” during this period in the Restoration court, noting that this has led some to wonder whether Queen Anne’s relationship with Churchill particularly was “more than friendship,” given the letters exchanged between them.

However, Somerset argues that both Anne and Churchill’s relationships with their husbands—and Anne’s 17 pregnancies—are somewhat sidelined in the film. Regarding Anne, Somerset says that her relationship with her husband George of Denmark, who died in 1708, was “just conveniently written out of existence” in The Favourite.

Somerset stresses that there is “every sign that she was absolutely devoted to him,” adding that Anne was “totally devastated” when her husband died.” Churchill, she believes, had a “very passionate marriage with her husband, too.”

“Maybe I’m very naive, but I actually don’t really believe that Anne and Sarah had a lesbian relationship,” she says, adding: “I personally think that [Anne] wasn’t a lesbian.”

Somerset does acknowledge that there was an element of tension between Churchill and Anne when Masham arrived on the scene, which is depicted as an intense love triangle in The Favourite. But, she says, Queen Anne had a “completely different” relationship with Masham, which she suggests was more formal because she addressed Masham using her surname.

Overall, Somerset believes that the film has helped trigger a heightened interest in Queen Anne’s reign, which may not have happened otherwise. And, although the historian takes issue with the film’s portrayal of Anne as “very monstrous”—claiming she “was a totally mannered woman”—she adds: “Apart from that, I keep telling myself that it’s all a good thing.”

The Favourite: The true story behind Queen Anne’s lesbian affairs in Oscar-tipped movie. By

Ella Braidwood.   Pink News,  February 23, 2019.

With Yorgos Lanthimos' film The Favourite dominating the 2019 awards season, a previously forgotten, often overshadowed and arguably unknown English queen has been thrust back into the spotlight.

Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs, reigned from 1702 until her death aged 49 in 1714. Unlike Queen Elizabeth I, Henry VIII and Charles I, little is known about her in the modern day and her life story has rarely been brought into the present - until now.

In the dramedy, Anne is portrayed wonderfully by Olivia Colman, who has already been recognised with a Golden Globe and is up for Best Actress at the BAFTAs and Oscars. The film focuses on the relationships that Anne had with two of her ladies-in-waiting, Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough, played by Rachel Weisz, and Abigail Masham, who is portrayed by Emma Stone.

The Favourite's credentials and critical reception speaks for itself. Clearly, Queen Anne's story is an interesting one, suggesting that this royal doesn't really deserve her obscure place in history. She was, after all, the first Queen of Great Britain, following England and Scotland signing the Acts of Union in 1707. However, as is so often the case with historical re-tellings, artistic license often prevails when it comes to historical accuracy and, in this case, The Favourite is no different. So, let's take a closer look at what we do know about Queen Anne.

The reason for her legacy effacing from mainstream history could be down to two things: Anne reigned during a very heated political era, plus her regime was bookmarked by much more 'exciting' monarchs and time periods, says Elaine Chalus, professor of British history and head of department at the University of Liverpool.

"It was a particularly complicated period of time, politically," she explains. "In some ways, she has been underplayed as someone who was relatively weak and at the mercy of her ministers due to the political divisions, along with the fact she’s female and was ill throughout most of her reign."

What instead dominates the early 18th century in British history is the 'Age of Party'. This refers to the emergence of the two party political system in the UK - the Whigs and the Tories - and their battle for governance.

According to Chalus, both the time period and the monarch herself have not been regarded as interesting to study, with historians instead focusing their resources on other supposedly more interesting historical events which took place either side of Anne's reign.

"It's not seen as exciting as the Glorious Revolution (of 1688), the French Revolution (1789) or the life of Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire and the 1784 election. As the last of the Stuarts, Anne also comes right before the Hanoverians and the Georgians," Chalus explains. "There have been parts of her life which have been studied, but she has not attracted that same level of attention, even from historians."

Biographer Ophelia Field suggests that Sarah, the Duchess of Marlborough, bears some responsibility for the way that Queen Anne is remembered. The two, as documented in the film, fell out - the details of which were consequently publishing her memoirs.

"It was Sarah, after the relationship had soured, who turned Anne into the caricature of ‘insipid heaviness’ that makes her appear a minor figure beside, say, Elizabeth I or Queen Victoria," she writes in her book about Sarah, The Favourite.

Sadly, part of this disinterest could be due to the personal legacy Anne left behind. She's not the intriguing 'Virgin Queen' nor does she possess Mary Queen of Scots' brave and disruptive reputation. Anne is very often quite harshly depicted as "frumpy" and overweight, with a focus on her gout and illness. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Colman told historian Janina Ramirez she put on two and a half stone for the role, with portraits of Anne (often painted with a double chin) serving as inspiration for her characterisation.

Anne's story is not regarded as "triumphant" either. Her personal life was famously blighted by the tragic loss of 17 children through miscarriages, stillbirths and infant deaths (her longest living child, William, died aged 11) .

The effects of these deaths on Anne is represented in The Favourite by her obsession with 17 rabbits which replace the lost children - a symbolism, Chalus tells us, that did not actually happen. In the film, Anne's trauma is epitomised in several scenes, notably through Colman's initial joy transforming into an emotional breakdown after seeing children playing musical instruments. At other times, Anne is interpreted as so thoroughly depressed, she is suicidal. Given what she endured - as well as the pressures of running a country - Chalus says possibly Anne did have depression but, given the illness' fairly recent understanding and acceptance by the medical community, "trying to psychologically diagnose from a modern perspective" is difficult. 

"Certainly, she's desperately unhappy at times and often very sad," Chalus explains. "There's physical exhaustion from the continuous repeat of miscarriage, stillbirth, miscarriage, stillbirth... that process must not have only been physically draining, but mentally too."

Historians studying the Queen more recently have considered whether the ill health which plagued her life could have been the autoimmune condition lupus, which lists depression as a symptom. In the film, we see the Queen's health decline from regular gout flare ups - requiring the constant massages of her ladies-in-waiting - to extreme exhaustion and partial facial paralysis by the end.

In the film, as Sarah and Abigail both compete for power and influence they manipulate the monarch through their sexuality, with both characters engaging in sex scenes with Anne (Colman recently said snogging Weisz is like "winning the lottery"). What evidence is there for the Queen being bisexual? We know she was married to Prince George of Denmark for 25 years up until his death in 1708 and historians roundly perceive them to have had a happy and content relationship.

However, there were passionate letters written from the monarch to Sarah - referenced in the film - ridden with affectionate nicknames and amorous outpourings. As Field writes in her book, Anne often spoke of Sarah "seeing into her heart" and regularly complained of loneliness when Sarah was not around. "I had rather live in a cottage with you than reign empress of the world without you", she wrote in 1692. "I long to be with you again and tis impossible for you ever to believe how much I love you except you saw my heart," and "I have the same sincere tender passion for you as ever," were other phrases uttered in the correspondence.

These letters came to be used by Sarah as a threat when the two women fell out and Abigail replaced Sarah as the favourite. According to Historic Royal Palaces, it was Sarah's political allies (the Marlborough's were big supporters of the Whig party) who spread rumours that Anne and Abigail's friendship actually involved "dark deeds at night". There were also rumours from those close to Anne describing her friendships with her female confidants as "unnatural".

But, how do these rumours reconcile with what else we know about the Queen? Chalus tells us there's "no historical evidence that Queen Anne was involved in any active lesbian affairs".

"She was a woman of her time, very religious, she prayed a number of times a day. Her marriage was monogamous, as far as anyone can tell, with continuous pregnancies as we've said. She was prudish, too," Chalus says, referring to a tale that Anne was once most offended when her shoulder was exposed in a portrait on a coin. "While it is impossible to rule [the affairs] out categorically, it seems highly unlikely. Both Anne’s personal character and the nature of her living arrangements - royal residences were forever bustling with servants and courtiers, and teeming with gossip - mitigate against it."

However, Anne being a "woman of her time" could also serve to explain why the letters between Sarah and Anne were so emotive and in some ways eroticised even if there were no sexual relationships taking place. "What is going on at this point in the 18th century, and is often debated by historians who look at this era, is this business of romantic language being used among women who are close friends. It's highly emotive and passionate."

While the first thought that might spring to mind when its said the Queen had "unnatural" relationships with close female friends such as Abigail might be sexual implications, Chalus suggests this could instead refer to something else. In those days, the monarch was elevated to such a hierarchy - practically believed to be just one step away from the divine - that forming close allegiances with people outside of the inner circle may have been what was deemed "unnatural". Abigail, after all, started off as a palace maid before being promoted to Lady of the Bedchamber and then favourite - an unelected and unaccountable powerful position which was feared by much of the British public, Chalus tells us.

"[The 'unnatural’ reference] could mean there's something sexual going on but it's much more likely, given the time period, that it was about class barriers and letting someone become too close to the body - by that, I mean in a political sense - of the Queen."

Considering Anne's supposedly eventful personal life and the exciting period in history during which she reigned, why is she largely considered a forgotten Queen? Is it because she didn't really reign? In the film, Anne's lack of interest in politics is highlighted when she appears to be far more focused on racing her lobsters.

 Chalus believes it is "wrong" to say Anne wasn't involved with the political happenings of the time. "She is a Queen, at a difficult time, a Stuart and in control. The key thing to realise with Anne is that even if she's ill, to a large degree, she's the one in control, she's not being played. She's Queen of a country which is at war so she is involved. She has a strong sense of what's going on, she sits in the House of Lords and is actively involved. She's not a political non-entity."

Perhaps this is most evident in the way that both of Anne's famous favourites were largely irrelevant once the Queen was done with them. Sarah was banished and, far from being a part of high-class society like she wanted, Abigail faded into obscurity after Anne's death.

Thanks to Colman and Lanthimos, we can now re-visit Anne's legacy and decipher for ourselves just how alluring the Queen was. All the while bearing in mind the tendency for Hollywood to, quite literally, sex up history.

So who really was Queen Anne? The truth about The Favourite's forgotten monarch. By

Olivia Blair. Harpers Bazar,   February  8, 2019

Like many period pieces, particularly those that take liberties with historical accuracy, The Favourite is a visual treat. But it’s no confection in the way that, say, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is. Instead, The Favourite is altogether more sour, something weird and compelling.

Tied with Roma for the most 2019 Oscars nominations, The Favourite is set in early-1700s England during the reign of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman, up for Best Actress), a monarch plagued by physical ailments and the trauma of losing 17 children. Wickedly funny and at times devastating, it focuses on Anne’s childhood friend and lover Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz, nominated for Best Supporting Actress) and Sarah’s cousin Abigail Hill (Emma Stone, ditto), newly arrived to the palace, as they vie for the queen’s affections in the pursuit of power and security.

With his creative team, director Yorgos Lanthimos created a visual style that’s highly specific, a sophisticated mix of restraint and absurdity. Scenes at Hatfield House, the film’s primary location, are lit almost entirely by pale daylight or candles; on film, those vast spaces and hallways bulge wildly thanks to the use of a fisheye lens. Stone, Weisz, and Colman largely wear no makeup; the foppish Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult) is never without a full face of lead-based paint and a gigantic wig. Members of Parliament entertain themselves by racing ducks and chucking oranges at a naked man for fun. Why? Why not?

To explain the movie’s most striking — and most telling — visual details, I talked to costume designer Sandy Powell, production designer Fiona Crombie, hair and makeup lead Nadia Stacey, and director of photography Robbie Ryan.

Creating the visual world of The Favourite required selective breaks with historical accuracy. Powell, Stacey, and Crombie studied up on early-18th-century English styles to use as the basis of their work, then tweaked them, creating a slightly off-kilter version of reality.

“The danger is that if you don’t stick within the world at all, it looks like you got the period wrong,” says Stacey. “The guideline was to stick within the silhouette of the period but then create our own twist on that.”

For Stacey, that meant following the general shape of men’s wigs from the early 1700s, but for certain scenes, she made them pink, orange, or blue. Similarly, Powell used period-appropriate styles for the costumes, but she largely restricted the color palette to black and white, with some silver and gold in the mix. This created a striking, cohesive look. She also added in modern details, like denim from old jeans that she used to make the kitchen staff’s dresses.

“Anything to make it a little odd, a little off the wall,” Powell writes in an email.

Among the anachronisms in the film’s set pieces are Queen Anne’s wheelchair, which wouldn’t have been invented yet, and a blue cake that she eats in a temper, knowing that it will upset her stomach, and promptly vomits back up.

“Birthday cakes did not exist, and they were definitely not blue,” says Crombie.

That’s what the script called for. The cake is a pastel blue, and while it doesn’t stand out against the set and costumes as a glaring error, it’s meant to be, in Crombie’s words, “just a little bit surreal.” This is the key to the historical inaccuracies in The Favourite’s visuals: Everything makes sense within the logic of the film.

To ratchet up the film’s bizarro quality, Ryan made frequent use of a fisheye lens that warped the scenes to wild effect, underscoring the strangeness of the fictionalized Queen Anne’s court. This was Lanthimos’s idea, Ryan says, and though it was a risky, tricky move — a lens that wide captures so much that a camera operator’s head might poke into the top of the shot if they’re not careful — it paid off.

Anne’s public appearances are almost always cut short. She panics and collapses while addressing Parliament, when attending a ball she can only stand to be there for a few minutes before demanding to be taken back to her room, and she doesn’t even make it to meet with the Russian ambassador; Sarah informs her that her dramatic eye makeup makes her “look like a badger,” and Anne retreats to her room. In all of these scenes, the queen’s makeup and clothing is extra special: She wears a big white-and-black fur robe for her speaking engagement, and to the party she wears a dress covered in bows and gleaming studs. These costumes are important “in just how massive and uncomfortable they are,” Powell writes.

“Poor Anne spends most of the film in utter misery, so those few scenes where she has no choice but to change out of her nightgown really had to show that contrast. And of course it never lasts long,” she writes.

Underneath those heavy outfits, Colman was wearing prosthetics to give her the appearance of severely swollen legs and feet due to Anne’s gout. She wore a full prosthetic for scenes where her leg is visible, but even when her skirts fully covered her legs, the team used a second version that was easier to apply, to give Colman a constant sense of Anne’s difficulty walking.

When it came to Anne’s makeup for the party scene — a dark, pointed lip and cheek rouge — Stacey wanted it to look “slightly weird and wrong.” The “badger” makeup has an intentionally childish quality. It’s blotchy, as though someone used their fingers to do it, and not very well.

“She’s trying to be as fashionable as the women in the court, but she got someone to do it and she didn’t get it right,” Stacey says.

It took Stacey some time to figure out how to interpret the line “You look like a badger,” since the script doesn’t spell it out. After considering the strong black and white lines in the set and costuming, she landed on a band of black eyeshadow that sweeps outward to the temple, inspired in part by Daryl Hannah’s makeup in Blade Runner.

In many scenes, Colman wore no makeup, as did Stone and Weisz. No foundation, no blush, no mascara — “if anything, a little cover-up for pimples,” Stacey says. This mandate came courtesy of Lanthimos, and it’s a very different approach from the many period pieces in which actors’ cheeks are mysteriously rosy, their skin shockingly clear, and their eyes suspiciously bright (“no makeup” makeup at its most deceptive).

Throughout the film, the women in Queen Anne’s court dress in black and white, often embellished with what looks like lace but is actually laser-cut black vinyl or white cotton laid on top of the opposite color. “They come across almost like chess pieces,” Powell says, which is particularly true when the actors are standing on a black-and-white-checked floor during a party scene.

Abigail’s ascent from kitchen maid to the queen’s “favourite” is visible in her clothing, with the balance of black and white signaling her upward trajectory. At the start of the movie, Abigail has fallen on hard times, so Powell dressed Stone in “something that would have been nice once, though now is worn out.” Since white fabric would have been a signal of wealth, Powell added more white to her dresses over the course of the movie.

“As a lady-in-waiting, Abigail starts in plain black, and as she graduates higher in status to Queen’s maid and then to lady again after she marries, we incorporated more white into her outfit,” Powell writes in an email. “She comes into money and her clothes get finer and she adds more makeup and jewelry, almost to the point of vulgarity.”

Some of the most eye-catching costumes in the film belong to Sarah, who wears menswear-inflected outfits to go shooting and riding. For the former activity, she wears a white-and-black coat and a tricorn hat, along with trousers and tall boots; for the latter, she goes for an all-black look in a fabric made to look like leather.

“I wanted her to be strong and in command, if not ‘masculine’ in the sense we usually see,” Powell explains. “So you have the trousers, with other modern touches like fake leather to supplement. The idea had been that as any emancipated woman might, she could incorporate menswear into her 

outfits and look great in it, almost like an 18th-century Katharine Hepburn. Rachel carries herself like that anyway, confident and in control, so it wasn’t a difficult look for her.”

Covered in tapestries, Anne’s room was the largest and most ornate in Hatfield House, the location where much of The Favourite takes place. Crombie simplified the space by taking out the carpets, and she installed a custom four-poster bed and elaborate cages for the queen’s many pet rabbits, each one representing a child she’d lost. The cages she decorated like dollhouses, with tiny silver bowls, miniature cakes, microgreens, and small brushes.

Anne’s room is a kind of retreat from the world, but it’s also a semi-public forum. Members of Parliament come to her bedside for meetings, and it’s where Abigail and Sarah vie for her affections. As such, Anne’s room is messy and lived-in, filled with flowers and food in various states of consumption, constantly shifting to fit the needs of its inhabitants.

It’s also where Anne suffers from attacks of gout in the middle of the night. Crombie’s team did detailed research into the era’s remedies for gout, and for those scenes, they dressed Anne’s room with medical equipment, pastes, and jars of real leeches. (“They’re not that easy to come by,” says Crombie.) You’d probably miss the leeches because those scenes are candlelit and relatively dark, Crombie says, but they’re sitting with the doctor’s equipment. It’s unappetizing details like these that prevent the film from becoming too precious.

The men of The Favourite frequently come off as ludicrous; their political concerns are incidental to the real drama unfolding between the three women. Nobody embodies this more than opposition leader Harley, whose forceful personality is matched only by his over-the-top ensembles, towering wigs, and heeled shoes. Actor Nicholas Hoult already clears 6 feet, and in costume, he’s a giant.

“I wanted him to be this larger-than-life character,” says Stacey. “The wigs just got bigger and bigger, and the bigger they got, the more Yorgos loved it.”

Stacey devised a variety of wigs for Harley, including a horned affair that signals his devilish inclinations and a long orange wig that he wears on more celebratory occasions. He wears white face paint and rouge throughout, with a shifting roster of black patches (for instance, in the shape of a rampant lion) adhered to his cheeks and chin depending on the situation.

As Harley says to his friend Samuel Masham (Joe Alwyn), “A man must look pretty.”

But he doesn’t totally. Stacey wanted the men’s hair and makeup to look somewhat crude. Their wigs were meant to look like they’d been worn for days, not freshened up every single morning in a trailer. The white makeup caked on their faces, which would have damaged the skin due to its lead content, was sweaty and imperfect.

“The fact is, in that era they would have been really dirty, smelly people,” Stacey says. “The wigs would have had lice in them.”

Some of the absurdist fun in The Favourite comes from the men of Parliament and court, who entertain themselves by racing ducks and throwing oranges at a naked man wearing a wig, a scene that comes without context. These events take place in the same room, and Crombie wanted them to have a spontaneous quality, as though someone suddenly suggested that they hold a duck race or have a party. The duck circuit was staged to look improvised, made from wooden stools and benches placed on their side. An animal handler dressed in costume threw fish to get them to run, because ducks are not much inclined to do so.

“Those spaces just constantly change. There’s something so lovely about the idea of whim,” Crombie says.

The strange, beautiful, gross aesthetic of The Favourite. By  Eliza Brooke. Vox ,  February  21, 2019

Also of interest :

The real women of ‘The Favourite’ included an 18th-century Warren Buffet. By  Amy Froide. The Conversation , February 22, 2019. 

Rewriting the past: do historical movies have to be accurate?

From Green Book to The Favourite, several of this year’s Oscar contenders have been accused of historical misrepresentation. But movies have always played fast and loose with the facts.

By Alex von Tunzelmann. The Guardian , February 1, 2019. 

The Favourite: at last we’re seeing lesbianism take centre stage in popular culture.

Three of the most visible popular cultural texts of the past few months, the multiple-Oscar-tipped period film The Favourite, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s BBC crime drama Killing Eve and Sally Rooney’s bestselling debut novel Conversations with Friends, are evidence of a shift whereby queer female identities are at last gaining a modicum of mainstream exposure and legitimacy.

By Mary Harrod. The Conversation ,  January 25, 2019 

Ernest Dowson : 17 poems

                        Ernest Dowson by Charles Edward Conder  pencil, circa 1890s. National Portrait Gallery

They are not long

    Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

          Love and desire and hate:

I think they have no portion in us after

              We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

       Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

            Within a dream.

Film by Jim Clark of Ernest Dowson reading his poem "Cynara". YouTube

Cynara

    Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine

There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed

Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;

And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

    Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,

Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;

Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

    When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,

Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind,

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

    Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,

But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,

Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;

And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,

    Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

Beyond

Love’s  aftermath! I think the time is now

That we must gather in, alone, apart

The saddest crop of all the crops that grow,

     Love's aftermath.

Ah, sweet,--sweet yesterday, the tears that start

Can not put back the dial; this is, I trow,

Our harvesting! Thy kisses chill my heart,

Our lips are cold; averted eyes avow

The twilight of poor love: we can but part,

Dumbly and sadly, reaping as we sow,

     Love's aftermath.

Jadis

Erewhile, before the world was old,

When violets grew and celandine,

In Cupid's train we were enrolled:

     Erewhile!

Your little hands were clasped in mine,

Your head all ruddy and sun-gold

Lay on my breast which was your shrine,

And all the tale of love was told:

Ah, God, that sweet things should decline,

And fires fade out which were not cold,

    Erewhile.

It is Finished

The pure grey eyes are closèd now,

     They shall not look on yours again;

Upon that pale and perfect brow,

     There stays no sign of grief or pain.

The little face is white and cold,

      The parted lips give forth no breath,

The grape-like curls of sun-bleached gold,

      Are clammy with the dews of death.

Speak to her and she will not hear,

      Caress her, but she will not move,

No longer feels she hope or fear,

      No longer knows she hate or love.

Ah dream no false or futile dreams,

      Nor lull thyself on fantasy,

That death is other than it seems,

    Or leads to immortality.

She will not speak to thee again,

     Tho’ thy whole soul in tears be shed,

For tears and prayers are all in vain,

     She is but dead, she is but dead!

                                   Elliott & Fry – Minnie Terry as Daisy Desmond ,  1889 

Vesperal

Strange grows the river on the sunless evenings!

The river comforts me, grown spectral, vague and dumb:

Long was the day; at last the consoling shadows come:

Sufficient for the day are the day’s evil things!

Labour and longing and despair the long day brings;

Patient till evening men watch the sun go west;

Deferred, expected night at last brings sleep and rest:

Sufficient for the day are the day’s evil things!

At last the tranquil Angelus of evening rings

Night’s curtain down for comfort and oblivion

Of all the vanities observed by the sun:

Sufficient for the day are the day’s evil things!

So, some time, when the last of all our evenings

Crowneth memorially the last of all our days,

Not loth to take his poppies man goes down and says,

“Sufficient for the day were the day’s evil things!”

“Cease smiling, Dear! a little while be sad”

Dum nos fata sinunt, oculos satiemus Amore

Propertius

Cease smiling, Dear! a little while be sad,

   Here in the silence, under the wan moon;

Sweet are thine eyes, but how can I be glad,

      Knowing they change so soon?

For Love’s sake, Dear, be silent! Cover me

   In the deep darkness of thy falling hair:

Fear is upon me and the memory

     Of what is all men’s share.

O could this moment be perpetuate!

   Must we grow old, and leaden-eyed and gray,

And taste no more the wild and passionate

      Love sorrows of to-day?

Grown old, and faded, Sweet! and past desire,

   Let memory die, lest there be too much ruth,

Remembering the old, extinguished fire

      Of our divine, lost youth.

O red pomegranate of thy perfect mouth!

   My lips’ life-fruitage, might I taste and die

Here in thy garden, where the scented south

      Wind chastens agony;

Reap death from thy live lips in one long kiss,

   And look my last into thine eyes and rest:

What sweets had life to me sweeter than this

      Swift dying on thy breast?

Or, if that may not be, for Love’s sake, Dear!

   Keep silence still, and dream that we shall lie,

Red mouth to mouth, entwined, and always hear

   The south wind’s melody,

Here in thy garden, through the sighing boughs,

   Beyond the reach of time and chance and change,

And bitter life and death, and broken vows,

      That sadden and estrange.

Exchanges

All that I had I brought,

     Little enough I know;

A poor rhyme roughly wrought,

     A rose to match thy snow:

All that I had I brought.

Little enough I sought:

       But a word compassionate,

A passing glance, or thought,

       For me outside the gate:

Little enough I sought.

Little enough I found:

      All that you had, perchance!

With the dead leaves on the ground,

      I dance the devil's dance.

All that you had I found.

April Love

We have walked in Love's land a little way,

   We have learnt his lesson a little while,

And shall we not part at the end of day,

   With a sigh, a smile?

A little while in the shine of the sun,

   We were twined together, joined lips, forgot

How the shadows fall when the day is done,

  And when Love is not.

We have made no vows--there will none be broke,

   Our love was free as the wind on the hill,

There was no word said we need wish unspoke,

   We have wrought no ill.

So shall we not part at the end of day,

   Who have loved and lingered a little while,

Join lips for the last time, go our way,

   With a sigh, a smile?

Exile

By the sad waters of separation

   Where we have wandered by divers ways,

I have but the shadow and imitation

   Of the old memorial days.

In music I have no consolation,

   No roses are pale enough for me;

The sound of the waters of separation

   Surpasseth roses and melody.

By the sad waters of separation

   Dimly I hear from an hidden place

The sigh of mine ancient adoration:

   Hardly can I remember your face.

If you be dead, no proclamation

   Sprang to me over the waste, gray sea:

Living, the waters of separation

   Sever for ever your soul from me.

No man knoweth our desolation;

   Memory pales of the old delight;

While the sad waters of separation

   Bear us on to the ultimate night.

Epigram

Because I am idolatrous and have besought,

With grievous supplication and consuming prayer,

The admirable image that my dreams have wrought

Out of her swan’s neck and her dark, abundant hair:

The jealous gods, who brook no worship save their own,

Turned my live idol marble and her heart to stone.

Villanelle of the Poet's Road

Wine and woman and song,

     Three things garnish our way:

Yet is day over long.

Lest we do our youth wrong,

     Gather them while we may:

Wine and woman and song.

Three things render us strong,

     Vine leaves, kisses and bay;

Yet is day over long.

Unto us they belong,

     Us the bitter and gay,

Wine and woman and song.

We, as we pass along,

     Are sad that they will not stay;

Yet is day over long.

Fruits and flowers among,

     What is better than they:

Wine and woman and song?

     Yet is day over long.

A Last Word

Let  us go hence: the night is now at hand;

The day is overworn, the birds all flown;

And we have reaped the crops the gods have sown;

Despair and death; deep darkness o'er the land,

Broods like an owl; we cannot understand

Laughter or tears, for we have only known

Surpassing vanity: vain things alone

Have driven our perverse and aimless band.

Let us go hence, somewhither strange and cold,

To Hollow Lands where just men and unjust

Find end of labour, where's rest for the old,

Freedom to all from love and fear and lust.

Twine our torn hands! O pray the earth enfold

Our life-sick hearts and turn them into dust.

To a Lost Love

I seek no more to bridge the gulf that lies

Betwixt our separate ways;

For vainly my heart prays,

Hope droops her head and dies;

I see the sad, tired answer in your eyes.

I did not heed, and yet the stars were clear;

Dreaming that love could mate

Lives grown so separate;--

But at the best, my dear,

I see we should not have been very near.

I knew the end before the end was nigh:

The stars have grown so plain;

Vainly I sigh, in vain

For things that come to some,

But unto you and me will never come.

Dregs

The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof

(This is the end of every song man sings!)

The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,

Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain;

And health and hope have gone the way of love

Into the drear oblivion of lost things.

Ghosts go along with us until the end;

This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.

With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait

For the dropt curtain and the closing gate:

This is the end of all the songs man sings.

To A Lady Asking Foolish Questions

Why am I sorry, Chloe? Because the moon is far:

And who am I to be straitened in a little earthly star?

Because thy face is fair? And what if it had not been,

The fairest face of all is the face I have not seen.

Because the land is cold, and however I scheme and plot,

I can not find a ferry to the land where I am not.

Because thy lips are red and thy breasts upbraid the snow?

(There is neither white nor red in the pleasance where I go.)

Because thy lips grow pale and thy breasts grow dun and fall?

I go where the wind blows, Chloe, and am not sorry at all.

Spleen

    For Arthur Symons

I was not sorrowful, I could not weep,

And all my memories were put to sleep.

I watched the river grow more white and strange,

All day till evening I watched it change.

All day till evening I watched the rain

Beat wearily upon the window pane

I was not sorrowful, but only tired

Of everything that ever I desired.

Her lips, her eyes, all day became to me

The shadow of a shadow utterly.

All day mine hunger for her heart became

Oblivion, until the evening came,

And left me sorrowful, inclined to weep,

With all my memories that could not sleep.

The death of Ernest Dowson will mean very little to the world at large, but it will mean a great deal to the few people who care passionately for poetry. A little book of verses, the manuscript of another, a one-act play in verse, a few short stories, two novels written in collaboration, some translations from the French, done for money; that is all that was left by a man who was undoubtedly a man of genius, not a great poet, but a poet, one of the very few writers of our generation to whom that name can be applied in its most intimate sense. People will complain, probably, in his verses, of what will seem to them the factitious melancholy, the factitious idealism, and (peeping through at a few rare moments) the factitious suggestions of riot. They will see only a literary affectation, where in truth there is as genuine a note of personal sincerity as in the more explicit and arranged confessions of less admirable poets. Yes, in these few evasive, immaterial snatches of song, I find, implied for the most part, hidden away like a secret, all the fever and turmoil and the unattained dreams of a life which had itself so much of the swift, disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius.

Ernest Christopher Dowson was born at The Grove, Belmont Hill, Lee, Kent, on August 2nd, 1867; he died at 26 Sandhurst Gardens, Catford, S.E., on Friday morning, February 23, 1900, and was buried in the Roman Catholic part of the Lewisham Cemetery on February 27. His great-uncle was Alfred Domett, Browning's "Waring," at one time Prime Minister of New Zealand, and author of "Ranolf and Amohia," and other poems. His father, who had himself a taste for literature, lived a good deal in France and on the Riviera, on account of the delicacy of his health, and Ernest had a somewhat irregular education, chiefly out of England, before he entered Queen's College, Oxford. He left in 1887 without taking a degree, and came to London, where he lived for several years, often revisiting France, which was always his favourite country. Latterly, until the last year of his life, he lived almost entirely in Paris, Brittany, and Normandy. Never robust, and always reckless with himself, his health had been steadily getting worse for some years, and when he came back to London he looked, as indeed he was, a dying man. Morbidly shy, with a sensitive independence which shrank from any sort of obligation, he would not communicate with his relatives, who would gladly have helped him, or with any of the really large number of attached friends whom he had in London; and, as his disease weakened him more and more, he hid himself away in his miserable lodgings, refused to see a doctor, let himself half starve, and was found one day in a Bodega with only a few shillings in his pocket, and so weak as to be hardly able to walk, by a friend, himself in some difficulties, who immediately took him back to the bricklayer's cottage in a muddy outskirt of Catford, where he was himself living, and there generously looked after him for the last six weeks of his life.

He did not realise that he was going to die; and was full of projects for the future, when the £600 which was to come to him from the sale of some property should have given him a fresh chance in the world; began to read Dickens, whom he had never read before, with singular zest; and, on the last day of his life, sat up talking eagerly till five in the morning. At the very moment of his death he did not know that he was dying. He tried to cough, could not cough, and the heart quietly stopped.

I cannot remember my first meeting with Ernest Dowson. It may have been in 1891, at one of the meetings of the Rhymers' Club, in an upper room of the "Cheshire Cheese," where long clay pipes lay in slim heaps on the wooden tables, between tankards of ale; and young poets, then very young, recited their own verses to one another with a desperate and ineffectual attempt to get into key with the Latin Quarter, Though few of us were, as a matter of fact, Anglo-Saxon, we could not help feeling that we were in London, and the atmosphere of London is not the atmosphere of movements or of societies. In Paris it is the most natural thing in the world to meet and discuss literature, ideas, one's own and one another's work; and it can be done without pretentiousness or constraint, because, to the Latin mind, art, ideas, one's work and the work of one's friends, are definite and important things, which it would never occur to any one to take anything but seriously. In England art has to be protected not only against the world, but against one's self and one's fellow artist, by a kind of affected modesty which is the Englishman's natural pose, half pride and half self-distrust. So this brave venture of the Rhymers' Club, though it lasted for two or three years, and produced two little books of verse which will some day be literary curiosities, was not quite a satisfactory kind of cènacle. Dowson, who enjoyed the real thing so much in Paris, did not, I think, go very often; but his contributions to the first book of the club were at once the most delicate and the most distinguished poems which it contained. Was it, after all, at one of these meetings that I first saw him, or was it, perhaps, at another haunt of some of us at that time, a semi-literary tavern near Leicester Square, chosen for its convenient position between two stage-doors? It was at the time when one or two of us sincerely worshipped the ballet; Dowson, alas! never. I could never get him to see that charm in harmonious and coloured movement, like bright shadows seen through the floating gauze of the music, which held me night after night at the two theatres which alone seemed to me to give an amusing colour to one's dreams. Neither the stage nor the stage-door had any attraction for him; but he came to the tavern because it was a tavern, and because he could meet his friends there. Even before that time I have a vague impression of having met him, I forget where, certainly at night; and of having been struck, even then, by a look and manner of pathetic charm, a sort of Keats-like face, the face of a demoralised Keats, and by something curious in the contrast of a manner exquisitely refined, with an appearance generally somewhat dilapidated. That impression was only accentuated later on, when I came to know him, and the manner of his life, much more intimately.

I think I may date my first impression of what one calls "the real man" (as if it were more real than the poet of the disembodied verses!) from an evening in which he first introduced me to those charming supper-houses, open all night through, the cabmen's shelters. I had been talking over another vagabond poet, Lord Rochester, with a charming and sympathetic descendant of that poet, and somewhat late at night we had come upon Dowson and another man wandering aimlessly and excitedly about the streets. He invited us to supper, we did not quite realise where, and the cabman came in with us, as we were welcomed, cordially and without comment, at a little place near the Langham; and, I recollect, very hospitably entertained. The cooking differs, as I found in time, in these supper-houses, but there the rasher was excellent and the cups admirably clean. Dowson was known there, and I used to think he was always at his best in a cabmen's shelter. Without a certain sordidness in his surroundings he was never quite comfortable, never quite himself; and at those places you are obliged to drink nothing stronger than coffee or tea. I liked to see him occasionally, for a change, drinking nothing stronger than coffee or tea. At Oxford, I believe, his favourite form of intoxication had been haschisch; afterwards he gave up this somewhat elaborate experiment in visionary sensations for readier means of oblivion; but he returned to it, I remember, for at least one afternoon, in a company of which I had been the gatherer and of which I was the host. I remember him sitting a little anxiously, with his chin on his breast, awaiting the magic, half-shy in the midst of a bright company of young people whom he had only seen across the footlights. The experience was not a very successful one; it ended in what should have been its first symptom, immoderate laughter.

Always, perhaps, a little consciously, but at least always sincerely, in search of new sensations, my friend found what was for him the supreme sensation in a very passionate and tender adoration of the most escaping of all ideals, the ideal of youth. Cherished, as I imagine, first only in the abstract, this search after the immature, the ripening graces which time can only spoil in the ripening, found itself at the journey's end, as some of his friends thought, a little prematurely. I was never of their opinion. I only saw twice, and for a few moments only, the young girl to whom most of his verses were to be written, and whose presence in his life may be held to account for much of that astonishing contrast between the broad outlines of his life and work. The situation seemed to me of the most exquisite and appropriate impossibility. The daughter of a refugee, I believe of good family, reduced to keeping a humble restaurant in a foreign quarter of London, she listened to his verses, smiled charmingly, under her mother's eyes, on his two years' courtship, and at the end of two years married the waiter instead. Did she ever realise more than the obvious part of what was being offered to her, in this shy and eager devotion? Did it ever mean very much to her to have made and to have killed a poet? She had, at all events, the gift of evoking, and, in its way, of retaining, all that was most delicate, sensitive, shy, typically poetic, in a nature which I can only compare to a weedy garden, its grass trodden down by many feet, but with one small, carefully tended flowerbed, luminous with lilies. I used to think, sometimes, of Verlaine and his "girl-wife," the one really profound passion, certainly, of that passionate career; the charming, child-like creature, to whom he looked back, at the end of his life, with an unchanged tenderness and disappointment: "Vous n'avez rien compris à ma simplicité," as he lamented. In the case of Dowson, however, there was a sort of virginal devotion, as to a Madonna; and I think, had things gone happily, to a conventionally happy ending, he would have felt (dare I say?) that his ideal had been spoilt.

But, for the good fortune of poets, things rarely do go happily with them, or to conventionally happy endings. He used to dine every night at the little restaurant, and I can always see the picture, which I have so often seen through the window in passing: the narrow room with the rough tables, for the most part empty, except in the innermost corner, where Dowson would sit with that singularly sweet and singularly pathetic smile on his lips (a smile which seemed afraid of its right to be there, as if always dreading a rebuff), playing his invariable after-dinner game of cards. Friends would come in during the hour before closing time; and the girl, her game of cards finished, would quietly disappear, leaving him with hardly more than the desire to kill another night as swiftly as possible.

Meanwhile she and the mother knew that the fragile young man who dined there so quietly every day way apt to be quite another sort of person after he had been three hours outside. It was only when his life seemed to have been irretrievably ruined that Dowson quite deliberately abandoned himself to that craving for drink, which was doubtless lying in wait for him in his blood, as consumption was also; it was only latterly, when he had no longer any interest in life, that he really wished to die. But I have never known him when he could resist either the desire or the consequences of drink. Sober, he was the most gentle, in manner the most gentlemanly of men; unselfish to a fault, to the extent of weakness; a delightful companion, charm itself. Under the influence of drink, he became almost literally insane, certainly quite irresponsible. He fell into furious and unreasoning passions; a vocabulary unknown to him at other times sprang up like a whirlwind; he seemed always about to commit some act of absurd violence. Along with that forgetfulness came other memories. As long as he was conscious of himself, there was but one woman for him in the world, and for her he had an infinite tenderness and an infinite respect. When that face faded from him, he saw all the other faces, and he saw no more difference than between sheep and sheep. Indeed, that curious love of the sordid, so common an affectation of the modern decadent, and with him so genuine, grew upon him, and dragged him into more and more sorry corners of a life which was never exactly "gay" to him. His father, when he died, left him in possession of an old dock, where for a time he lived in a mouldering house, in that squalid part of the East End which he came to know so well, and to feel so strangely at home in. He drank the poisonous liquors of those pot-houses which swarm about the docks; he drifted about in whatever company came in his way; he let heedlessness develop into a curious disregard of personal tidiness. In Paris, Les Halles took the place of the docks. At Dieppe, where I saw so much, of him one summer, he discovered strange, squalid haunts about the harbour, where he made friends with amazing innkeepers, and got into rows with the fishermen who came in to drink after midnight. At Brussels, where I was with him at the time of the Kermesse, he flung himself into all that riotous Flemish life, with a zest for what was most sordidly riotous in it. It was his own way of escape from life.

                                              Photographer Unknown – Ernest Dowson and mother, 1868

To Dowson, as to all those who have not been "content to ask unlikely gifts in vain," nature, life, destiny, whatever one chooses to call it, that power which is strength to the strong, presented itself as a barrier against which all one's strength only served to dash one to more hopeless ruin. He was not a dreamer; destiny passes by the dreamer, sparing him because he clamours for nothing. He was a child, clamouring for so many things, all impossible. With a body too weak for ordinary existence, he desired all the enchantments of all the senses. With a soul too shy to tell its own secret, except in exquisite evasions, he desired the boundless confidence of love. He sang one tune, over and over, and no one listened to him. He had only to form the most simple wish, and it was denied him. He gave way to ill-luck, not knowing that he was giving way to his own weakness, and he tried to escape from the consciousness of things as they were at the best, by voluntarily choosing to accept them at their worst. For with him it was always voluntary. He was never quite without money; he had a little money of his own, and he had for many years a weekly allowance from a publisher, in return for translations from the French, or, if he chose to do it, original work. He was unhappy, and he dared not think. To unhappy men, thought, if it can be set at work on abstract questions, is the only substitute for happiness; if it has not strength to overleap the barrier which shuts one in upon oneself, it is the one unwearying torture. Dowson had exquisite sensibility, he vibrated in harmony with every delicate emotion; but he had no outlook, he had not the escape of intellect. His only escape, then, was to plunge into the crowd, to fancy that he lost sight of himself as he disappeared from the sight of others. The more he soiled himself at that gross contact, the further would he seem to be from what beckoned to him in one vain illusion after another vain illusion, in the delicate places of the world. Seeing himself moving to the sound of lutes, in some courtly disguise, down an alley of Watteau's Versailles, while he touched finger-tips with a divine creature in rose-leaf silks, what was there left for him, as the dream obstinately refused to realise itself, but a blind flight into some Teniers kitchen, where boors are making merry, without thought of yesterday or to-morrow? There, perhaps, in that ferment of animal life, he could forget life as he dreamed it, with too faint hold upon his dreams to make dreams come true.

For, there is not a dream which may not come true, if we have the energy which makes, or chooses, our own fate. We can always, in this world, get what we want, if we will it intensely and persistently enough. Whether we shall get it sooner or later is the concern of fate; but we shall get it. It may come when we have no longer any use for it, when we have gone on willing it out of habit, or so as not to confess that we have failed. But it will come. So few people succeed greatly because so few people can conceive a great end, and work towards that end without deviating and without tiring. But we all know that the man who works for money day and night gets rich; and the man who works day and night for no matter what kind of material power, gets the power. It is the same with the deeper, more spiritual, as it seems vaguer issues, which make for happiness and every intangible success. It is only the dreams of those light sleepers who dream faintly that do not come true.

We get out of life, all of us, what we bring to it; that, and that only, is what it can teach us. There are men whom Dowson's experiences would have made great men, or great writers; for him they did very little. Love and regret, with here and there the suggestion of an uncomforting pleasure snatched by the way, are all that he has to sing of; and he could have sung of them at much less "expense of spirit," and, one fancies, without the "waste of shame" at all. Think what Villon got directly out of his own life, what Verlaine, what Musset, what Byron, got directly out of their own lives! It requires a strong man to "sin strongly" and profit by it. To Dowson the tragedy of his own life could only have resulted in an elegy. "I have flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng," he confesses in his most beautiful poem; but it was as one who flings roses in a dream, as he passes with shut eyes through an unsubstantial throng. The depths into which he plunged were always waters of oblivion, and he returned forgetting them. He is always a very ghostly lover, wandering in a land of perpetual twilight, as he holds a whispered colloque sentimental with the ghost of an old love:

"Dans le vieux parc solitaire et glacé, Deux spectres ont acévoquacé le passacé."

It was, indeed, almost a literal unconsciousness, as of one who leads two lives, severed from one another as completely as sleep is from waking. Thus we get in his work very little of the personal appeal of those to whom riotous living, misery, a cross destiny, have been of so real a value. And it is important to draw this distinction, if only for the benefit of those young men who are convinced that the first step towards genius is disorder. Dowson is precisely one of the people who are pointed out as confirming this theory. And yet Dowson was precisely one of those who owed least to circumstances; and, in succumbing to them, he did no more than succumb to the destructive forces which, shut up within him, pulled down the house of life upon his own head.

A soul "unspotted from the world," in a body which one sees visibly soiling under one's eyes; that improbability is what all who knew him saw in Dowson, as his youthful physical grace gave way year by year, and the personal charm underlying it remained unchanged. There never was a simpler or more attaching charm, because there never was a sweeter or more honest nature. It was not because he ever said anything particularly clever or particularly interesting, it was not because he gave you ideas, or impressed you by any strength or originality, that you liked to be with him; but because of a certain engaging quality, which seemed unconscious of itself, which was never anxious to be or to do anything, which simply existed, as perfume exists in a flower. Drink was like a heavy curtain, blotting out everything of a sudden; when the curtain lifted, nothing had changed. Living always that double life, he had his true and his false aspect, and the true life was the expression of that fresh, delicate, and uncontaminated nature which some of us knew in him, and which remains for us, untouched by the other, in every line that he wrote.

Dowson was the only poet I ever knew who cared more for his prose than his verse; but he was wrong, and it is not by his prose that he will live, exquisite as that prose was at its best. He wrote two novels in collaboration with Mr. Arthur Moore: "A Comedy of Masks," in 1893, and "Adrian Rome," in 1899, both done under the influence of Mr. Henry James, both interesting because they were personal studies, and studies of known surroundings, rather than for their actual value as novels. A volume of "Stories and Studies in Sentiment," called "Dilemmas," in which the influence of Mr. Wedmore was felt in addition to the influence of Mr. James, appeared in 1895. Several other short stories, among his best work in prose, have not yet been reprinted from the Savoy. Some translations from the French, done as hack-work, need not be mentioned here, though they were never without some traces of his peculiar quality of charm in language. The short stories were indeed rather "studies in sentiment" than stories; studies of singular delicacy, but with only a faint hold on life, so that perhaps the best of them was not unnaturally a study in the approaches of death: "The Dying of Francis Donne." For the most part they dealt with the same motives as the poems, hopeless and reverent love, the ethics of renunciation, the disappointment of those who are too weak or too unlucky to take what they desire. They have a sad and quiet beauty of their own, the beauty of second thoughts and subdued emotions, of choice and scholarly English, moving in the more fluid and reticent harmonies of prose almost as daintily as if it were moving to the measure of verse. Dowson's care over English prose was like that of a Frenchman writing his own language with the respect which Frenchmen pay to French. Even English things had to come to him through France, if he was to prize them very highly; and there is a passage in "Dilemmas" which I have always thought very characteristic of his own tastes, as it refers to an "infinitesimal library, a few French novels, an Horace, and some well-thumbed volumes of the modern English poets in the familiar edition of Tauchnitz." He was Latin by all his affinities, and that very quality of slightness, of parsimony almost in his dealings with life and the substance of art, connects him with the artists of Latin races, who have always been so fastidious in their rejection of mere nature, when it comes too nakedly or too clamorously into sight and hearing, and so gratefully content with a few choice things faultlessly done.

And Dowson, in his verse (the "Verses" of 1896, "The Pierrot of the Minute," a dramatic phantasy in one act, of 1897, the posthumous volume "Decorations"), was the same scrupulous artist as in his prose, and more felicitously at home there. He was quite Latin in his feeling for youth, and death, and "the old age of roses," and the pathos of our little hour in which to live and love; Latin in his elegance, reticence, and simple grace in the treatment of these motives; Latin, finally, in his sense of their sufficiency for the whole of one's mental attitude. He used the commonplaces of poetry frankly, making them his own by his belief in them: the Horatian Cynara or Neobule was still the natural symbol for him when he wished to be most personal. I remember his saying to me that his ideal of a line of verse was the line of Poe:

"The viol, the violet, and the vine";

and the gracious, not remote or unreal beauty, which clings about such words and such images as these, was always to him the true poetical beauty. There never was a poet to whom verse came more naturally, for the song's sake; his theories were all æsthetic, almost technical ones, such as a theory, indicated by his preference for the line of Poe, that the letter "v" was the most beautiful of the letters, and could never be brought into verse too often. For any more abstract theories he had neither tolerance nor need. Poetry as a philosophy did not exist for him; it existed solely as the loveliest of the arts. He loved the elegance of Horace, all that was most complex in the simplicity of Poe, most birdlike in the human melodies of Verlaine. He had the pure lyric gift, unweighted or unballasted by any other quality of mind or emotion; and a song, for him, was music first, and then whatever you please afterwards, so long as it suggested, never told, some delicate sentiment, a sigh or a caress; finding words, at times, as perfect as the words of a poem headed, "O Mors! quam amara est memoria tua homini pacem habenti in substantiis suis."

There, surely, the music of silence speaks, if it has ever spoken. The words seem to tremble back into the silence which their whisper has interrupted, but not before they have created for us a mood, such a mood as the Venetian Pastoral of Giorgione renders in painting. Languid, half inarticulate, coming from the heart of a drowsy sorrow very conscious of itself, and not less sorrowful because it sees its own face looking mournfully back out of the water, the song seems to have been made by some fastidious amateur of grief, and it has all the sighs and tremors of the mood, wrought into a faultless strain of music. Stepping out of a paradise in which pain becomes so lovely, he can see the beauty which is the other side of madness, and, in a sonnet, "To One in Bedlam," can create a more positive, a more poignant mood, with fine subtlety.

Here, in the moment's intensity of this comradeship with madness, observe how beautiful the whole thing becomes; how instinctively the imagination of the poet turns what is sordid into a radiance, all stars and flowers and the divine part of forgetfulness! It is a symbol of the two sides of his own life: the side open to the street, and the side turned away from it, where he could "hush and bless himself with silence." No one ever worshipped beauty more devoutly, and just as we see him here transfiguring a dreadful thing with beauty, so we shall see, everywhere in his work, that he never admitted an emotion which he could not so transfigure. He knew his limits only too well; he knew that the deeper and graver things of life were for the most part outside the circle of his magic; he passed them by, leaving much of himself unexpressed, because he would not permit himself to express nothing imperfectly, or according to anything but his own conception of the dignity of poetry. In the lyric in which he has epitomised himself and his whole life, a lyric which is certainly one of the greatest lyrical poems of our time, "Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae," he has for once said everything, and he has said it to an intoxicating and perhaps immortal music.

Here, perpetuated by some unique energy of a temperament rarely so much the master of itself, is the song of passion and the passions, at their eternal war in the soul which they quicken or deaden, and in the body which they break down between them. In the second book, the book of "Decorations," there are a few pieces which repeat, only more faintly, this very personal note. Dowson could never have developed; he had already said, in his first book of verse, all that he had to say. Had he lived, had he gone on writing, he could only have echoed himself; and probably it would have been the less essential part of himself; his obligation to Swinburne, always evident, increasing as his own inspiration failed him. He was always without ambition, writing to please his own fastidious taste, with a kind of proud humility in his attitude towards the public, not expecting or requiring recognition. He died obscure, having ceased to care even for the delightful labour of writing. He died young, worn out by what was never really life to him, leaving a little verse which has the pathos of things too young and too frail ever to grow old.

Arthur Symons, 1900.

The Victorian Web 

                                

 On the poem : Cynara.  By Carol Rumens.  The Guardian , March 14, 2011

Frederick Delius set the poem to music in 1907, but left it incomplete until 1929, when he had    been blinded by syphilis.  

Fidelity & Its Inebriates: Ernest Dowson, Frederick Delius, & The Days of Wine and Roses. By Hendrik Slegtenhorst. November 10, 2014

On the poem :  It is finished.   Agapeta Wordpress, April 19, 2015

More poems here  : The HyperTexts

On his love for child actress Minnie Terry.  Ernest Dowson and the Cult of Minnie Terry. Pigtails in Paint, January 8, 2015

Photo of his grave at the  Brockley and Ladywell Cemetery within the London Borough of Lewisham. Runner500. September 28, 2017