He was unhappy, and he dared not think.
To unhappy men, thought, if it can be set at work on abstract questions,
is the only substitute for happiness; if it has not strength to overleap
the barrier which shuts one in upon oneself, it is the one unwearying
torture. Dowson had exquisite sensibility, he vibrated in harmony with
every delicate emotion; but he had no outlook, he had not the escape of
intellect. His only escape, then, was to plunge into the crowd, to fancy
that he lost sight of himself as he disappeared from the sight of others.
The more he soiled himself at that gross contact, the further would he seem
to be from what beckoned to him in one vain illusion after another vain
illusion, in the delicate places of the world. Seeing himself moving to
the sound of lutes, in some courtly disguise, down an alley of Watteau's
Versailles, while he touched finger-tips with a divine creature in
rose-leaf silks, what was there left for him, as the dream obstinately
refused to realise itself, but a blind flight into some Teniers kitchen,
where boors are making merry, without thought of yesterday or to-morrow?
There, perhaps, in that ferment of animal life, he could forget life as he
dreamed it, with too faint hold upon his dreams to make dreams come true.
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