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.
II
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.
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