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.

XI

Gradually Arthur Symons came to replace in my intimate friendship, Lionel
Johnson from whom I was slowly separated by a scruple of conscience. If
he came to see me he sat tongue-tied unless I gave him the drink that
seemed necessary to bring his vitality to but its normal pitch, and if I
called upon him he drank so much that I became his confederate. Once, when
a friend and I had sat long after our proper bed-time at his constantly
repeated and most earnest entreaty, knowing what black melancholy would
descend upon him at our departure, and with the unexpressed hope of
getting him to his bed, he fixed upon us a laughing and whimsical look,
and said:--"I want you two men to understand that you are merely two men
that I am drinking with." That was the only time that I was to hear from
him an imaginary conversation that had not an air of the most scrupulous
accuracy. He gave two accounts of a conversation with Wilde in prison; in
one Wilde wore his hair long, and in the other it had been cropped by the
prison barber. He