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