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 glace,
Deux spectres ont evoque le passe."

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