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I do not know whether John Davidson, whose life also was tragic, made that “morbid effort,” that search for “perfection of thought and feeling,” for he is hidden behind failure, to unite it “to perfection of form.” At eleven one morning I met him in the British Museum reading room, probably in 1894, when I was in London for the production of The Land of Heart’s Desire, but certainly after some long absence from London. “Are you working here?” I said; “No,” he said, “I am loafing, for I have finished my day’s work.” “What, already?” “I work an hour a day—I cannot work longer without exhaustion, and even as it is, if I meet anybody and get into talk, I cannot write the next day; that is why I loaf when my work is finished.” No one had ever doubted his industry; he had supported his wife and family for years by “devilling” many hours a day for some popular novelist. “What work is it?” I said. “I am writing verse,” he answered. “I had been writing prose for a long time, and then one day I thought I might just as well write what I liked, as I must starve in any case. It was the luckiest thought I ever had, for my agent now gets me forty pounds for a ballad, and I made three hundred out of my last book of verse.”

He was older by ten years than his fellow Rhymers; a national schoolmaster from Scotland, he had been dismissed, he told us, for asking for a rise in his salary, and had come to London with his wife and children. He looked older than his years. “Ellis,” he had said, “how old are you?” “Fifty,” Edwin Ellis replied, or whatever his age was. “Then I will take off my wig. I never take off my wig when there is a man under thirty in the room.” He had endured and was to endure again, a life of tragic penury, which was made much harder by the conviction that the world was against him, that he was refused for some reason his rightful position. Ellis thought that he pined even for social success, and I that his Scots jealousy kept him provincial and but half articulate.

During the quarrel over Parnell’s grave a quotation from Goethe ran through the papers, describing our Irish jealousy: “The Irish seem to me like a pack of hounds, always dragging down some noble stag.” But I do not think we object to distinction for its own sake; if we kill the stag, it is that we may carry off his head and antlers. “The Irish people,” O’Leary used to say, “do not know good from bad in any art, but they do not hate the good once it is pointed out to them because it is good.” An infallible Church, with its Mass in Latin, and its mediaeval philosophy, and our Protestant social prejudice, have kept our ablest men from levelling passions; but Davidson with a jealousy, which may be Scottish, seeing that Carlyle had it, was quick to discover sour grapes. He saw in delicate, laborious, discriminating taste, an effeminate pedantry, and would, when that mood was on him, delight in all that seemed healthy, popular, and bustling. Once when I had praised Herbert Horne for his knowledge and his taste, he burst out, “If a man must be a connoisseur, let him be a connoisseur in women.” He, indeed, was accustomed, in the most characteristic phrase of his type, to describe the Rhymers as lacking in “blood and guts,” and very nearly brought us to an end by attempting to supply the deficiency by the addition of four Scotsmen. He brought all four upon the same evening, and one read out a poem upon the Life Boat, evidently intended for a recitation; another described how, when gold-digging in Australia, he had fought and knocked down another miner for doubting the rotundity of the earth; while of the remainder I can remember nothing except that they excelled in argument. He insisted upon their immediate election, and the Rhymers, through that complacency of good manners whereby educated Englishmen so often surprise me, obeyed, though secretly resolved never to meet again; and it cost me seven hours’ work to get another meeting, and vote the Scotsmen out. A few days later I chanced upon Davidson at some restaurant; he was full of amiability, and when we parted shook my hand, and proclaimed enthusiastically that I had “blood and guts.” I think he might have grown to be a successful man had he been enthusiastic instead about Dowson or Johnson, or Horne or Symons, for they had what I still lacked, conscious deliberate craft, and what I must lack always, scholarship. They had taught me that violent energy, which is like a fire of straw, consumes in a few minutes the nervous vitality, and is useless in the arts. Our fire must burn slowly, and we must constantly turn away to think, constantly analyse what we have done, be content even to have little life outside our work, to show, perhaps, to other men, as little as the watch-mender shows, his magnifying glass caught in his screwed-up eye. Only then do we learn to conserve our vitality, to keep our mind enough under control and to make our technique sufficiently flexible for expression of the emotions of life as they arise. A few months after our meeting in the Museum, Davidson had spent his inspiration. “The fires are out,” he said, “and I must hammer the cold iron.” When I heard a few years ago that he had drowned himself, I knew that I had always expected some such end. With enough passion to make a great poet, through meeting no man of culture in early life, he lacked intellectual receptivity, and, anarchic and indefinite, lacked pose and gesture, and now no verse of his clings to my memory.