of "a craving that made every atom
of his body cry out" and said the moment after, "I do not want to be
cured," and a moment after that, "In ten years I shall be penniless and
shabby, and borrow half-crowns from friends." He seemed to contemplate a
vision that gave him pleasure, and now that I look back, I remember that
he once said to me that Wilde got, perhaps, an increase of pleasure and
excitement from the degradation of that group of beggars and blackmailers
where he sought his pathics, and I remember, too, his smile at my
surprise, as though he spoke of psychological depths I could never enter.
Did the austerity, the melancholy of his thoughts, that spiritual ecstasy
which he touched at times, heighten, as complementary colours heighten one
another, not only the Vision of Evil, but its fascination? Was it only
Villon, or did Dante also feel the fascination of evil, when shown in its
horror, and, as it were, judged and lost; and what proud man does not
feel temptation strengthened from the certainty that his intellect is not
deceived?

VIII

I began now to hear stories of Dowson, whom I knew only at the Rhymers, or
through some chance meeting at Johnson's. I was indolent and
procrastinating, and when I thought of asking him to dine, or taking some
other step towards better knowledge, he seemed to be in Paris, or at
Dieppe. He was drinking, but, unlike Johnson, who, at the autopsy after
his death, was discovered never to have grown, except in the brain, after
his fifteenth year, he was full of sexual desire. Johnson and he were
close friends, and Johnson lectured him out of the Fathers upon chastity,
and boasted of the great good done him thereby. But the rest of us counted
the glasses emptied in their talk. I began to hear now in some detail of
the restaurant-keeper's daughter, and of her marriage to the waiter, and
of that weekly game of cards with her that filled so great a share of
Dowson's emotional life. Sober, he would look at no other woman, it was
said, but, drunk, would desire whatever woman chance brought, clean or
dirty.

Johnson was stern by nature, strong by intellect, and always, I think,
deliberately picked his company, but Dowson seemed gentle, affectionate,
drifting. His poetry shows how sincerely he felt the fascination of
religion, but his religion had certainly no dogmatic outline, being but a
desire for a condition of virginal ecstasy. If it is true, as Arthur
Symons, his very close frien