The evidence suggests that Ernest Dowson thought more highly of his prose than his poetry,¹ but that has not been the verdict of the world. If Dowson has an audience at all these days, it is for his frail, languorous poetry, not for his stories, sketches, or translations, or for the two novels he collaborated on. For the most part the stories and sketches are interesting period pieces, pale, delicate variations on Dowson's characteristic themes of lost love and the tragic gap between the flux of life and the perfection of art. The end of "The Diary of a Successful Man" epitomizes the typical Dowson situation. The protagonist sits "in a cloud of incense" in the Church of the Dames Rouges, listening first to the "perfect litany" and then to the beautiful singing of a nun who had been his love years before. The "sweetness and power" of the singing mock the unhappiness of living, and the story closes with the "successful man" feeling "alone in utter darkness."² Estrangement is usually the keynote. Most of Dowson's stories bring to mind the composition played by the young Russian pianist in "An Orchestral Violin": a "mad valse" which "thrilled the nerves painfully, ringing the changes between voluptuous sorrow and the merriment of devils, and burdened always with the weariness of 'all the Russias,' the proper Welt-schmerz of a young, disconsolate people" (p. 50). Too often Dowson's own Weltschmerz feels like little more than adolescent yearning; his suffering did not enjoy the authority of a wide range of experience. Almost all the stories seem the work of a writer who has not reached maturity.

Only in "The Dying of Francis Donne" did Dowson break through to significant work in short fiction. Published in The Savoy in August 1896, the piece has been unduly neglected partly because of questions of definition: is it a story or a sketch? It seems obviously a short story to me,³ but whatever it is—short story, sketch, or study—-"The Dying of Francis Donne" is both artistically austere and rich in felt experience. More than any other Dowson story, it is capable of leaving a more than historical impact on a reader. Certainly it is, in Derek Stanford's phrase, a "grim authentic tour-de-force"⁴—and authentic is a crucial word in a canon marred by artificiality and self-indulgence. "The Dying of Francis Donne" is a masterly delineation of the psychology of dying; the pattern of Donne's death agony is scientifically verifiable. The story is also excellent in its own right, and deserves to endure as a fascinating expression of—and comment on—fin-de-siecle aestheticism.

Francis Donne is a successful physician who has risen to public eminence because of his writing and lectures. This dual profession is important, for Donne is an artist as well as a doctor; he is "great not only in the scientific world, but also in the world of letters" (p. 104). His popularity arises from his ability to clothe the "dry bones" of science in "so elegantly literary a pattern." He is also a characteristic fin-de-siecle writer in being misunderstood: the lectures have become a "social function" and have "almost succeeded in making science fashionable" (p. 105).

But Donne is primarily a physician, not an artist, and in this profession he is even more a child of the end of the century. "The Dying of Francis Donne" is a very brief story, but it confronts no less a theme than the tragedy of being trapped in our mortality. Francis Donne's entire life has been devoted to coming to terms with his dilemma. His strategy is unmistakably that of the aesthete, and his "tired spirit" (ibid.) and "morbid self-consciousness" (p. 106) also place him in the 90's. Donne is above all detached: one of the technical accomplishments of the story is the brilliant manner in which the near-solipsism is rendered. The point, however, is that Donne's detachment is a defense. The only way he can confront the problem of decay and death is to remove himself from life itself. He copes with the "absurdity" (p. 103) of the human situation by trying to keep that situation at a distance.

Donne is essentially a sort of decadent version of Roger Chillingsworth. He has lived exclusively with his mind, because the mind can order and control: "He had lived so long in the meditation of death, visited it so often in others, studied it with such persistency, with a sentiment in which horror and fascination mingled; but it had always been, as it were, an objective, alien fact, remote from himself and his own life." In the objectification of death, there seems a way to control and order life, and so Donne lives secure with his "analytical habit," with a mind that is "so exquisite a mechanism of syllogism and deduction" (ibid.) Death is kept at arm's length and studied for its own sake, as if it has no bearing on Donne's life.

Of course this distancing is illusory, and the story begins with the protagonist's moment of truth: Donne knows he is to die. He tries to deny this knowledge, but faced with reality, reason must yield to "casuistry." The detached observer is forcibly jerked back into life and started on the relentless process toward decay and dissolution. The image of mind as exquisite mechanism gives way to the image of "a hunted animal at bay" (ibid.). Donne had known he was living in an illusion—one of his lectures is entitled "Limitations of Medicine"—but the fact remains that once the illusion is shattered, his entire world caves in. The "dull, immutable pain commences" (p. 104) and doesn't let up, and the august, austere, eminent public figure is reduced to "puerile tears" (p. 106). The rest of the story follows Donne's path from London to Brittany to the moment of extinction.

In its modest way the story is as much a depiction of the aesthete's yearning to get beyond flux and sensation as Pater's Marius the Epicurean. Marius refuses to give up the search for the "Ideal, among so-called actual things."⁵ He wants to enjoy the fruits of his sensations, but he also longs for a principle of permanence beyond the constant flux, a principle he discovers in the primitive Christianity practiced in the church in Cecilia's house. Like Marius, Donne delights in the "pleasant sensuousness of life, the joy of the visible world" (p. 105); "his absorbing interest in physical phenomena had made him somewhat a materialist" (p. 108). But once the pain begins and he himself is reduced to nothing more than a physical phenomenon, his philosophical control breaks down. He decides to discontinue the escape offered by morphia, for he realizes that he should reserve use of the drug for the time when the pain will be unbearable. Work offers no escape, for the pain has already gotten the upper hand. Donne withdraws to the bleak coast of Brittany, preferring the "kind indifference of strangers" to the "intolerable pity of friends" (p. 107). It is there that he will end his days—and attempt to discover some final ordering.

All of Dowson's writings are colored by his world-weariness and ennui and by his nostalgia for a harmony that never existed. His life offered more than ample occasion for melancholy: one thinks immediately of the suicides of his parents, the tuberculosis, the hopeless longing for the nymphet with the unlikely name Adelaide Foltinowicz. The other side of dissipation and being faithful to Cynara in his fashion was a kind of stoicism. In Thomas Hardy's works there is a real element of affirmation in the self-conscious stance of facing a cruel universe without flinching. In contrast, Dowson's stoicism is much closer to pathos. He endures because he has no choice, but there is a wistful, almost adolescent quality about his yearning for a better world. "The Dying of Francis Donne" is a success partly because for once Dowson has found a form that allows him to distance his own self-pity and worldweariness. The story is intensely personal of course, but it is also a self-contained artistic construct that needs no autobiographical interpretation. At he same time Dowson's characteristic nostalgia and ennui are unmistakably present, especially in the third section, which describes Donne's life in the fishing village "on the bleak and wave-tormented coast of Finisterre" (ibid.).

The description of sea and village, a carefully wrought impressionist tableau, is one of the most skillful passages in the story:

Bleak and grey it had been, when he had visited it of old, in the late autumn; but now the character, the whole colour of the country was changed. It was brilliant with the promise of summer, and the blue Atlantic, which in winter churned with its long crested waves so boisterously below the little white light-house, which warned mariners (alas! so vainly), against the shark-like cruelty of the rocks, now danced and glittered in the sunshine, rippled with feline caresses round the hulls of the fishing-boats whose brown sails floated so idly in the faint air.

Above the village, on a grassy slope, whose green was almost lurid, Francis Donne lay, for many silent hours, looking out at the placid sea, which could yet be so ferocious, at the low violet line of the Island of Groix, which alone interrupted the monotony of sky and ocean (ibid.).

This descriptive set-piece is included to define the cruel indifference of the universe to man and his labors. Man's "little white lighthouse" cannot help much in the face of the "shark-like cruetly of the rocks" and the "feline caresses" of the waves. Donne's state of mind is "almost peace" as his thought subsides into "lethargy and blank," but he envies the fishermen and their wives the "grim and resigned fatalism" that comes so easy because death is such an everyday affair to them. A "poor little grey church" (ibid.) is at the center of the scattered houses that make up the village, suggesting another sort of order unattainable by Donne. The story contains a nostalgia for the simple lives of the fishermen. Their fatalism and their Christianity allow them a consistent stance toward the universe and toward their mortality. Donne can only go to the cemetery and tell himself, "'And in a little time I shall lie here'" (p. 108).

As he descends toward death, Donne's efforts to transcend sensation and find a principle of permanence become even more intense: ". . . . His purely physical knowledge seemed but a vain possession, and he turned with a passionate interest to what had been said and believed from time immemorial by those who had concentrated their intelligence on that strange essence, . . . the Soul. . . . " (pp. 108-109). In search of his soul and "an harmony of life," he reads, like des Esseintes and Dorian Gray, Greek philosophy and early Christian theology. However, Plato's Phaedo, the Emperor Hadrian's address to his soul, and the "triumphant declarations of the Church"—"Ubi est, mors, victoria tu? Ubi est, mors, stimulus turn?"—can be of no help. The dying Donne is a man in the middle, denied the simple faith of the fishermen, denied the complex systems of faith of earlier eras. Denied "certitude" (p. 109), he sinks into "a drugged, unrestful sleep" (p. 110). The only certitude he is granted is that of death.

And yet Dowson does allow his protagonist a happy ending of sorts. Perhaps there is a bit of wish-fulfillment in the conclusion. Mark Longaker commends the story to "anyone who wishes to know the essential voice of Dowson when his dread malady was tightening its grip."⁶ No doubt this is true, and it is interesting that Dowson lets Francis Donne go out happily: "The corporal capacity of smiling had passed from him, but he fain would have smiled" (ibid.).

Even more interesting, however, is the way Dowson describes the death. The "immense and ineffable tiredness" becomes "this utter luxury of physical exhaustion, this calm, this release" (ibid.). Donne's life had been devoted to escaping from life, but his long dying had wrenched him back to the everyday world of change and decay. Much to his delight, he discovers that the transition into death is a release back into a sort of formal perfection, into a kind of changeless nirvana. The lifetime dedicated to living outside time had ended rudely and abruptly when the dying set in, but at the moment of death Donne is transported back to a world of timelessness, into the bliss of blankness and nirvana.

Donne is even granted a moment of ecstasy as he expires, an epiphanic point in time of complete clarity and perception. During these "few minutes of singular mental lucidity, all his life flashed before him in a new relief. . . . All that was distorted in life was adjusted and justified in the light of his sudden knowledge" (ibid.). This extended moment of clarity and insight is of course a surrogate for religious experience. Dowson can find no way to construct an order out of the chaos, and so he must settle for the heightened moment of order. Because the yearning for order is so intense, Dowson has a particularly high emotional stake in the moment when it comes. Thus there is an unmistakable ecstasy in the "singular mental lucidity" with which Donne passes from life. This moment of insight allows him to understand, order, and aesthetically arrange his entire life just as he leaves time for the timelessness he has always yearned for. The generation of the 90's were descendants of Arnold the poet, wandering between two worlds, one lost, and the other powerless to be born. This type of ecstasy is a commonplace in the poetry and fiction they wrote.⁷

And so at long last Francis Donne completes his dying. He is an aesthete to the very end: as he passes from consciousness "he could yet just dimly hear, as in a dream, the sound of Latin prayers, and feel the application of the oils upon all the issues and approaches of his wearied sense." Then unconsciousness, "and that was all" (ibid.). O death, where is thy sting?

"The Dying of Francis Donne" is richly cadenced and harmonious, and its sharp sense of experience is all the more effective because of its understatedness. The story is something of a miniature, but its economy and compression are such that it is able to confront the largest questions of all. At the same time "The Dying of Francis Donne" contains an important commentary on Dowson's own life and on fin-de-siecle aestheticism in general. It is a mistake to interpret aestheticism exclusively in terms of developments in the arts. The phenomenon is more directly a response to breakdown in the culture at large. Writers retreated to the formal perfection of art and to the doctrine of art for art's sake as a defense against chaos: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." This link between the aesthetic stance of these writers and man's metaphysical dilemma is made clear by the life and dying of Francis Donne.

Dowson seems to be saying that the harmonies of art offer no real escape from the despair of living. Donne is able to escape the tyranny of time only by intellectual detachment and by death. These two forms of escape are directly related, and surely the effect is to question the detachment implicit in aestheticism, in attempting to convert one's life into a work of art.

Donne's "burning sense of helplessness" (p. 106) is emphasized in his dying, but his loneliness throughout is even more terrible. The "eminent surgeon" who dies early in the story is an "acquaintance" (p. 105), not a friend. He goes to Brittany to escape the "intolerable pity of friends," but no friends are in evidence and it is hard to believe Donne has close friends. The simple inhabitants of the fishing village are "kindly" (p. 107), but they necessarily allow him to maintain his shell of isolation. The companions by his deathbed are a nurse, a faithful servant, and a priest. One thinks back to the work Donne tries to do early in the story to take his mind off the recent discovery that he is dying: "He had selected the work of a distinguished German savant upon the cardiac functions, and a short treatise of his own, which was covered with recent annotations, in his crabbed handwriting, upon 'Aneurism of the Heart'" (p. 106). This detail is in the story to tell us that Donne is suffering above all from heartlessness. Instead of coming to terms with man's fate, he has tried to escape it, and as a result his life has been a living death, cold and sterile, without community, without love, without even emotion.

Donne learns that he cannot escape his mortality: no one can. But his decision to seek detachment is also a decision to deny life itself. The deepest and most profound meaning of this story is that the life of aethetic detachment is nothing more than a long dying. "Dust thou art and to dust thou will return," Dowson's epigraph tells us; this is the main fact the story presents. Nevertheless, another message resonates through the carefully measured prose: the aesthete's headling flight from life is a horrible mistake. "The Dying of Francis Donne" is something of a personal testament. Apparently Ernest Dowson had learned to measure the cost of the life he had chosen.

¹ Ernest Dowson, The Stories of Ernest Dowson, ed. Mark Longaker, (Philadelphia, 1947), p. 1.

²The Stories of Ernest Dowson, pp. 35-37. Subsequent references to this volume will be incorporated in the text.

³ Dowson himself is responsible for some of the confusion. He called it a "story" when it was just "under weigh" in early April 1896, but three weeks later he referred to it as "my story or study rather" (The Letters of Ernest Dowson, ed. Desmond Flower and Henry Maas, Rutherford, N. J., 1967, pp. 352, 358). In its printed form it is subtitled "A Study." Thomas Burnett Swann classifies it as a sketch because "it lacks both conflict and detailed characterization" (Ernest Dowson, New York, 1964, p. 82). This comment seems to me, however, to misrepresent the piece, for there is ample inner conflict and the author's control of point of view (that of a nearsolipsist) explains the absence of detailed characterization.

Mark Longaker, who should know best, also seems to consider it a sketch in associating it with the five brief prose-poems of Decorations. He vaguely declares that "The Dying of Francis Donne," "Absinthia Taetra," and "The Visit" are "unmistakably poetic" (The Stories of Ernest Dowson, p. 9).

It seems true enough that Dowson wrote his best prose "in the pieces in which he was not burdened by the necessity of telling a sustained story" (Stories, p. 9), but this does not necessarily make "The Dying of Francis Donne" a sketch. Certainly it is confusing to categorize it with the wraith-like pieces in Decorations, all of which are about half-a-page in length, especially since it manages to compress quite an extensive action into eight pages. It may also be germane to observe that "The Dying of Francis Donne" is unlike the other short prose pieces in being devoid of self-conscious literary posturing.

⁴ Derek Stanford, Short Stories of the 'Nineties: A Biographical Anthology, New York, 1968, p. 204.

⁵Marius the Epicurean: His Situation and Ideas, London: Dent, 1885, p. 83.

⁶The Stories of Ernest Dowson, p. 121.

⁷ Cf. Chapter 7, "Ecstasy," pp. 154-176 of John A. Lester, Jr., Journey Through Despair, 1880-1914: Transformations in British Literary Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). Dowson is mentioned regularly in this work.