Of Lionel Johnson

1867-1902.

AN early death has lately robbed the world of letters in England of its one critic of the first rank in this generation. Poet-minds of the Arnold breed, with what may be called the hush of scholarship laid upon their full energies and animations, must necessarily grow rarer and rarer, in a world ever more noisy and more superficial. They cannot expect now the fostering cloistral conditions which were finally disturbed by the great Revolution. Yet they still find themselves here, in a state of royal dispossession, and live on as they can.

Of these was Lionel Johnson. In criticism, though he seemed to care so little about acknowledging, preserving, and collecting what he wrote, he was nobly able to “beat his music out; ” his potential success lay there, perhaps, rather than in the exercise of his singularly lovely and austere poetic gift. But this is not saying that he was more critic than poet. On the contrary, he was all poet; and the application of the poet’s touchstone to human affairs, whether in art or in ethics, was the very thing which gave its extraordinary elasticity and balance to his prose work. Being what he was, a selfless intelligence, right judgments came easy to him, and to set them down, at the eligible moment, was mere play. He had lived more or less alone from his boyhood, but alone with eternal thoughts and classic books. Whenever he spoke, there was authority in the speech colored by companionship with the great of his own election: with Plato ; Lucretius and Virgil; Augustine; Shakespeare. His capacity for admiration was immense, though in the choice of what was admirable he was quite uncompromising. Beyond that beautiful inward exaction, “ the chastity of honor, ” he was naturally inclined to the charities of interpretation. He gave them, but he asked them not, and would not thank you for your casual approval, except by his all-understanding smile. Neither vanity, ambition, nor envy ever so much as breathed upon him, and, scholar that he was, he had none of the limitations common to scholars, for he was without fear, and without prejudice.

A striking feature in the make-up of his mind was its interplay and counterpoise of contrasts. Full of worship and wonder (and a certain devout sense of indebtedness kept him, as by a strict rubric of his own, an allusive and a quoting writer), he was also full of an almost fierce uninfluenced independence. With a great vocabulary, his game was always to pack close, and thin out, his words. Impersonal as Pan’s pipe to the audience of The Chronicle or The Academy, he became intensely subjective the moment he reached his intimate, sparsely inhabited fatherland of poesy. His utterance, as daring in its opposite way as Mr. John Davidson’s, has laid bare some of the deepest secrets of the spirit. And side by side with them lie etched on the page the most delicate little landscapes, each as happily conceived as if “ the inner eye ” and “the eye on the object,” of both of which Wordsworth speaks, were one and the same.

One might have thought, misled by Lionel Johnson’s strongly philosophic fibre, his habits of a recluse simplicity, his faith in minorities, his patrician old-fashioned tastes, that he would have ranged himself with the abstract critics, with Joubert and Vauvenargues, rather than with Sainte-Beuve. But it was another of his surprising excellencies that he was never out of tune with cosmic externals, and the aspirations of to-day. Into these his brain had a sort of detached angelic insight. His earliest book, published while he was very young, was not about some subtlety of Attic thought: it was a masterly exposition of The Art of Thomas Hardy. To have dwelt first with all divine exclusions for housemates is to be safeguarded when time drives one forth among its necessary acceptances and accretions. This same relevance and relativity of our friend, this open dealing with the nearest interest, was his strength; he not only did not shrink from contemporary life, but bathed in the apprehension of it as joyously as in a mountain stream. How significant, how full of fresh force, have been his many unsigned reviews! Nothing so broad, so sure, so penetrating, has been said, in little, elsewhere, of such very modern men as Renan and William Morris.

It is perhaps less than exact to claim that Lionel Johnson had no prejudices. All his humilities and tolerances did not hinder his humorous depreciation of the Teutonic intellect; and he liked well King Charles II. ’s word for it — “foggy.” Heine, that “Parisianized Jew, ” was his only love made in Germany. Non-scientific, anti-mathematical, he was a genuine Oxonian: a recruit, as it were, for transcendentalism and the White Rose. His studies were willful and concentrated ; he never tried to extend his province into a thorough understanding, for instance, of arts which he relished, like music and sculpture. And, discursive as his national sympathies certainly were, he was never out of the British Isles. In all such lateral matters, he saw the uses of repression, if his calling was to be not a dilettante impulse, but the sustained and unwasted passion of a lifetime. Culture in him, it is truly needless to say, was not miscellaneous information; as in Newman’s perfect definition, it was “the command over his own faculties, and the instinctive just estimate of things as they pass. ” He had an amazing and most accurate memory for everything worth while: it was as if he had moved, to some profit, in several ages, and forgotten none of their “wild and noble sights. ” And the powers which were so delighting to others were, in a reflex way, a most single - hearted and modest way, sheer delight to himself, chiefly because he had tamed them to his hand.

His non-professorial conception of the function of a man of letters (only it was one of the thousand subjects on which he was sparing of speech, perhaps discouraged by insincerities of speech elsewhere) amounted to this: that he was glad to be a bond-slave to his own discipline ; that there should be no limit to the constraints and the labor self-imposed ; that in pursuit of the best, he would never count cost, never lower a pennon, never bow the knee to Baal. It was not his isolated position, nor his exemption from the corroding breath of poverty, which made it easy for such an one to hold his ground; for nothing can make easy that strenuous and entire consecration of a soul to what it is given to do. It extended to the utmost detail of composition. The proud melancholy charm of his finest stanzas rests upon the severest adherence to the laws and by-laws of rhythm; in no page of his was there ever a rhetorical trick or an underbred rhyme. Excess and show were foreign to him. The real shortcoming of his verse lies in its Latin strictness and asceticism, somewhat repellent to any readers but those of his own temper. Its emotional glow is a shade too moral, and it is only after a league of stately pacing that fancy is let go with a looser rein. Greatly impeded in freedom of expression is that unblest poet who has historic knowledge of his own craft. To him nothing is sayable which has already been well said. Lionel Johnson, even as a beginner, was of so jealous an integrity that his youthful numbers are in their detail almost scandalously free from parentalia. Is it not, surely, by some supernatural little joke that his most famous line, —

“ Lonely unto the Lone I go,” had been anticipated by Plotinus ? Here was a poet who liked the campaign better than Capua. He sought out voluntarily never, indeed, the fantastic, but the difficult way. If he could but work out his idea in music, easy as composition was to him, he preferred to do so with divers painstakings which less scrupulous vassals of the Muse would as soon practice as fasting and praying. To one who looks well into the structure of Ids poems, they are like the roof of Milan Cathedral, “gone to seed with pinnacles, ” full of voweled surprises, and exquisitely devotional elaborations, given in the zest of service, and meant to be hidden from mundane eyes. Yet they have the grace to appear much simpler than they are. The groundwork, at least, is always simple: his usual metre is iambic or trochaic, and the English alexandrine he made his own. Precision clung like drapery to everything he did. His handwriting was unique: a slender, close slant, very odd, but most legible; a true script of the old time, without a flaw. It seemed to whisper: “ Behold in me the inveterate foe of haste and discourtesy, of typewriters, telegrams, and secretaries! ” As he wrote, he punctuated: nothing was trivial to this “enamored architect ” of perfection. He cultivated a half-mischievous attachment to certain antique forms of spelling, and to the colon, which our slovenly press will have none of; and because the colon stood, and stands, for fine differentiations, and sly sequences, he delighted to employ it to tyrannize over printers.

Lionel Johnson’s gallant thoroughness was applied not only to the department of literature. He had a loving heart, and laid upon himself the burden of many gratitudes. To Winchester, his old school, and Oxford, his university (in both of which he covered himself, as it happened, with honors), he was a bounden knight. The Catholic Church, to which he felt an attraction from infancy, and which he entered soon after he came of age, could command his whole zeal and furtherance, to the end. His faith was his treasure, and an abiding peace and compensation. The delicacy, nay, the sanctity of his character, was the outcome of it; and when clouds did not impede his action, it so pervaded, guided, and adjusted his whole attitude toward life (as Catholicism alone claims and intends to do), that his religiousness can hardly be spoken of, or examined, as a thing separate from himself. There was a seal upon him as of something priestly and monastic. His place, like his favorite Hawthorne’s, should have been in a Benedictine scriptorium, far away, and long ago.

So he sang in one of his best known numbers. Meanwhile, the saints, bright from their earthly battle, and especially the angels, and Heaven their commonweal, were always present to the imagination of this anima naturaliter Christiana. Again, his most conscious loyalty, with the glamour of mediæval chivalry upon it, was for Ireland. He was descended from a line of soldiers, and from a stern soldier who, in the ruthless governmental fashion of the time, put down at New Ross the tragic insurrection of 1798. Study and sympathy brought his great-grandson to see things from a point of view not in the least ancestral; and the consequence was that Lionel Johnson came to write, and even to lecture, as the heart-whole champion of hapless Innisfail. In the acknowledged spirit of reparation, he gave his thought, his time, and his purse to her interests. He devoted his lyre to her, as his most moving theme, and he pondered not so much her political hope, nor the incomparable charms of her streams and valleys, as her constancy under sorrows, and the holiness of her mystical ideal. His inheritance was goodly unto him, for he had by race both the Gaelic and the Cymric strain, and his temperament, with its remoteness, and its sage and sweet ironies, was by so much more and less than English. But he possessed also, in very full measure, what we nowadays perceive to be the basic English traits: deliberation, patience, and control. It was owing to these unexpected and saving qualities in him that he turned out no mere visionary, but made his mark in life like a man, and that he held out, for five and thirty years, in that fragile, terribly nervous body always so inadequate and perilous a mate for his giant intelligence.

Next to the impersonal allegiances which had so much claim upon him was his feeling for his friends. The boy Lionel had been the exceptional sort of boy who can discern a possible halo about a master or a tutor; and at Oxford, as at Winchester, he found men worth his homage. The very last poem he sent forth, only the other day, was a threnody for his dear and honored Walter Pater, honored and dear long after death, as during life. Like so much else from the same pen, it is of synthetic and illuminating beauty, and it ends with the tenderest of lyrical cries:—

Friendship, with Lionel Johnson, was the grave, high romantic sentiment of antique tradition. He liked to link familiar names with his own by means of little dedications, and the two volumes of his poems, with their placid blue covers and dignity of margin, furnish a fairly full roll-call of those with whom he felt himself allied: English, Irish, Welsh, and American; men and women; famous and unknown; Christian and pagan ; clerical and lay. It was characteristic of him that he addressed no poems directly to a friend, except once or twice, when well sheltered by a paraphrase, but set apart this or that, in print, as private to one or another whose heart, he knew, would go along with it. As a proof of the shyness and reticence of his affections, it may be added that some who were fond of him did not discover, for years after (and perhaps some have not yet discovered), the page starred with their own names, once given to them in silence, and for remembrance, by the hand which of late answered few letters, and withdrew more and more from social contact.

Alas, this brings us upon sad ground. We all first began to be conscious of losing him nearly four years ago, when he shut himself up, and kept obstinate silence, for weeks and months, in the cloistral London nooks where he and his library successively abode. Then, not quite two years ago, he had a painful and prolonged illness, in the course of which his hands and feet became wholly crippled; and for the ardent lover, in any weather, of the open countryside arrived a dark twelvemonth of indoor inaction. It is to be feared he was not properly nursed; he had never known how to care for himself, and had lived as heedless of the flesh as if he were all wings. It seemed ungenerous, that instinct to go into the dark at times, wholly away from wonted intercourse. Yet it was neither ungenerous nor perverse. Surging up the more as his bodily resources failed him, a “mortal moral strife ” had to be undergone: the fight in which there can be no comrades. The brave will in him fought long and fought hard : no victor could do more. He had apparently recovered his health after all the solitude and mental weariness, and had just expressed himself as “greedy for work,” when he went out from his chambers in Clifford’s Inn, late on the night of the 29th of September, for the last of his many enchanted walks alone: for with Hazlitt, against Stevenson, this walker held that any walk is the richer for being companionless. No one saw him faint, or stumble and fall; but a policeman on his beat found the unconscious body against the curb in Fleet Street, and had it carried to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. And there in the ward he lay, with his skull fractured (a child’s skull it was, abnormally thin, as the inquest showed), recognized and tended, but always asleep, for four days and five nights; and then the little flickering candle went quietly out. In the bitter pathos of his end he was not with Keats, but with Poe. It was the 4th of October, 1902, a Saturday of misted autumn sunshine, sacred in the ecclesiastical calendar to the Poverello of Assisi. Of that blessed forerunner his dead poet had once written : —

The only other Englishman of letters so elfin-small and light was De Quincey. Few persons could readily be got to believe Lionel Johnson’s actual age. With his smooth hair and cheek, he passed for a slim undergrown boy of sixteen; his light-footed marches, in bygone summers, over the Welsh hills and the coasts of Dorset and Cornwall, were interrupted at every inn by the ubiquitous motherly landlady, expostulating with him for his supposed truancy. His extreme sense of humor forbade annoyance over the episode; rather was it not unwelcome to one who had no hold on time, and was as elemental as foam or air. Yes, he lived and died young. It was not only simple country folk who missed in him the adult “note.” And yet a certain quaint and courageous pensiveness of aspect and outlook; a hint of power in the fine brows, the sensitive hands, the gray eye so quick, and yet so chastened and incurious, could neither escape a true palæographer, nor be misconstrued by him. Lionel Johnson must have been at all times both a man and a child. At ten years old, or at the impossible sixty, he must equally have gone on, in a sort of beautiful vital stubbornness, being a unit, being himself. His manners, as well as his mental habits, lasted him throughout; from the first he was a sweet gentleman and a sound thinker. His earliest and his latest poems, in kind altogether, and largely in degree, were of a piece. A paper produced at Winchester School, on Shakespeare’s Fools, is as unmistakably his as his final review of Tennyson. To put it rather roughly, he had no discarded gods, and therefore no periods of growth. He was a crystal, a day-lily, shown without tedious processes. In his own phrase,—

He had a homeless genius: it lacked affinity with the planetary influences under which he found himself here, being, as Sir Thomas Browne grandly says, “older than the elements, and owing no homage unto the sun.” He seemed ever the same because he was so. Only intense natures have this continuity of look and mood.

With all his deference, his dominant compassion, his grasp of the spiritual and the unseen, his feet stood foursquare upon rock. He was a tower of wholesomeness in the decadence which his short life spanned. He was no pedant, and no prig. Hesitations are gracious when they are unaffected, but thanks are due for the one among gentler critics of our passing hour who cared little to “publish his wistfulness abroad, ” and was often as clear as any barbarian as to what he would adore, and what he would burn. He suffered indeed, but he won manifold golden comfort from the mercies of God, from human excellence, the arts, and the stretches of meadow, sky, and sea. Sky and sea! they were sacrament and symbol, meat and drink, to him. To illustrate both his truth of perception when dealing with the magic of the natural world and his rapturous sense of union with it, I am going to throw together, by a wholly irregular procedure, consecutive sections of three early and unrelated poems; one written at Cadgwith in 1892, one at Oxford in 1889, and the last (with its lovely opening anticipation of Tennyson), dating from Falmouth Harbor, as long ago as 1887.

I.

II.

III.

Surely, no pity need be wasted upon one who resolved himself into so glorious a harmony with all creation and with the mysteries of our mortal being. To be happy is a feat nothing less than heroic in our complex air. Snow-souled and fire-hearted, sentient and apprehensive, Lionel Johnson, after all and in spite of all, dared to be happy. As be never worried himself about awards, the question of his to-morrow’s station and his measure of fame need not intrude upon a mere character-study. Memorable and exhilarating has been the ten years’ spectacle of him in unexhausted free play, now with his harp, now with his blunted rapier, under the steady dominion of a genius so wise and so ripe that one knows not where in living companies to look for its parallel. Well: may we soon get used to thinking of our dearest guild-fellow in a safer City, where no terror of defeat can touch him! “And he shall sing There according to the days of his youth, and according to the days of his going up out of the land of Egypt.”

Louise Imogen Guiney.