III. THE POEMS OF LIONEL JOHNSON.

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Lionel Johnson

ONE felt for him something of the tenderness with which Charles Lamb was regarded by his friends. Perhaps in part because he was so little and so frail, but more because he was to the last Saint Lionel, with the qualities that made us think of him by that name. He was overweighted with the things of the spirit and the intellect, childishly little, with the face of a child-saint who has also been a martyr and learned immortal things, a gliding step that hardly touched earth, a shadowy gentle presence that was of us, yet not of us. Once, in his beloved Ireland, a motherly nun, taking him for fifteen, rebuked him for keeping the hours of grown men. “But I am twenty-seven, ” he remonstrated. “I don’t care what age you are, ” she answered, this true daughter of Erin; “but whatever age you are, you do not look it. ” She was wrong, however, His austere, delicate little face with the magnificent brows was too immortally wise to belong to the very young on this earth. I have known one other person who appealed to one’s feminine tenderness as did Lionel Johnson. That was Father 62 Gerard Hopkins, also a poet, a mystic, a scholar. I always think of them in company, and not only because each had the stature of a child and the brows of wisdom.

Lionel Johnson promised to do great things as a critic. We used to say of him that he would raise criticism in England to the level which Sainte-Beuve raised it to in France. He was finely equipped as critic. He had done exquisite things himself, and he brought to the task of judging the work of others a sympathy, a generosity, a capacity for admiration which it took all his critical faculty to counterbalance. His criticisms were literature. Very often he wrote superbly well, and his criticisms were packed so full with knowledge, appreciation, refinement, and taste that it was an education to read them. In all his years of writing, one is certain that he never constructed a slovenly sentence, nor thought a slovenly thought. His critical style was the grand one. One could read his sentences for their majesty conceivably without being interested in the things of which he wrote.

His poetry was like himself: delicate, austere, spiritual — yes, snow-white: that is 63 the word that comes to me, and will not be rejected. It is magnificent, too, in passages, like the great pealing of an organ, in some fane of the old faith to which he turned with such passionate attachment.

But, after all, it is not his work one thinks of this grey day of October when the newspapers tell us he is dead. It is himself, with that something snow-white like his poetry, which the world and the years had no power to smirch. He was always the finest of gentlemen, always delicate and courteous in his manner to women as he was lofty in this thoughts of them, always faithful and generous to his friends. During a friendship of many years he was never known to speak unkindly of any one. Indeed, it was the complaint of duller and colder people that his reports were so much too generous. He had no scorn of others less gifted, as intellectual people are apt to have; but rather in his thoughts raised them to his own level, if he did not set them beyond it.

He had the monastic temperament, and he ought to have been a recluse in a mediæval monastery, dedicating his gifts to the honour and glory of God. He was born out of his 64 due time and place. In the Oxford of the pre-Reformation days he would have been ideally at home. In the London of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries he had no place at all by right. He was passionately Catholic and passionately Irish, with a patriotism not of time or place, but rather of all time. Mary and Ireland; one felt that his thoughts of women, his manner to women, embraced his devotion to those Mothers of Sorrows. And at the last one thinks of him dead in two lines from a poem of his own: —

He hath a glory from that Sun
Who falls not from Olympus hill.

K. H.