<em>Celebrating a lost Victorian voice.</em>
Lionel Johnson: Poetry and Prose
Robert Asch
Saint Austin Press, £29.99, 544 pages
When Lionel Johnson was 31 and stricken with alcoholism, his friend Stopford Brooke described him as “mournful and decaying… young, but also very old”. Since his days at Winchester College, Johnson’s scores of friends had noted his arresting precocity and love of being intoxicated (with poetry as well as alcohol, and frequently together). Having earned the admiration of such poets as Ezra Pound and TS Eliot, Johnson would die of a stroke at 35, leaving behind an extensive literary corpus, most of which quickly fell into obscurity.
Robert Asch’s collected edition of Johnson’s poetry and prose is a remarkable work of restoration. Asch arranges critical essays, letters, fragments and dozens of poems – some of which were previously untranscribed – with scrupulous footnotes and a comprehensive chronology of Johnson’s life. Johnson is often remembered as the Decadent poet who introduced Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, though with his conversion to Catholicism in the early 1890s came a profound regret for having precipitated the relationship which would scandalise English society. Catholic conversion was not rare among late Victorian aesthetes, but Johnson’s poetic oeuvre is particularly steeped in catholicity. He rarely entertained the (albeit slippery) Aestheticist slogan “art for art’s sake”: moral struggle and praise of virtue pervade the 88 poems in this selection.
In “The Dark Angel”’, Johnson’s best-remembered poem, he vividly addressed his struggle with homosexuality as a convert. The sin of lust is “the Dark Paraclete”, a diabolical inversion of the Holy Ghost which the speaker decries before finally surrendering with operatic despair: “triumph over me:/ Lonely, unto the Lone I go;/ Divine, to the Divinity.” Though his most famous, it is not Johnson’s best poem: readers will be pleased to discover gems like “Quoque Suos Manes” which resembles the “terrible sonnets” of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The speaker confronts his own spirit with frenzied questions: “What have you seen, eyes of strange fire!… Haunted and hard, still eyes, malignant and serene?” The incandescent language draws on Lucretius, Pater and Blake (as the footnotes diligently reveal) before closing with a dreadful utterance of damnation, echoed in several other poems: “The Will of God so saith.”
Another obscure poem, “A Sad Morality”, shows Johnson at his most Chestertonian: the devil plays “with a Thinker’s soul”, convincing him by flattery “to make man’s morals new”. This gives rise to heresies like Darwinism and Arianism. Eventually, atheism and moral relativism render mankind “heretics both to Heaven and Hell”, causing the earth to float out of the devil’s grip “into the Void of the Cosmic Unemployed”. Johnson used his humour in service of conservative morality elsewhere: in 1891 he parodied “Ave Imperatrix”, Wilde’s heavy-handed critique of monarchy and warring empires, in “Amores Semi Mortui”: “Ah pallid loves! Ah mournful hours!/ Ah everything that has a rhyme!”
WB Yeats remembered his friend to have “loved his learning better than mankind”. The subjects of Johnson’s essays are indeed high-minded, from Lucian to the Gordon Riots to the fools of Shakespeare (“love, in their folly, prevails over the defilements that clog the overblown spirit of Rabelais, and bring dissonance into delightsomeness”). But Johnson loved mankind dearly: in one of several poems dedicated to a friend, “The Classics”, Johnson mentions a different Graeco-Roman figure in each stanza but inscribes their various triumphs to his friend John Thynne, “who dreams with Plato and, transcending dreams, / Mounts to the perfect City of true God”.
In his letters, Johnson spoke of a sacramental calling which was never realised. He wrote to George Santayana in 1888: “When you next hear from me you will probably hear that I am a Jesuit novice or a budding Carthusian… but just now I am lazy and fond of life this side of death.” Johnson was not lazy when it came to his writing, the breadth and brilliance of which Asch brings to light more than before. As much of Johnson’s work remains lost, with this edition Asch hopes to catalyse the identification and collection of the surviving corpus.
<em>Jane Cooper is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford</em>.
