LIONEL JOHNSON: POET

by Adrian Earle
Lionel Johnson was a member of a fine North Country family with an old High Anglican tradition, whose sons had been soldiers for many generations.
As a child he was delicate and soon developed a passion for reading. Having gained a scholarship from his preparatory school in Clifton, he went to Winchester in 1880, where, in his school career, he soon won many prizes. In the remarkable letters written to his cousin and to his many friends can be seen an amazing and precocious knowledge of literature and philosophy.
He became interested in Buddhism under the influence of his friend the late Earl Russell, and in 1883 he writes of an essay for the headmaster: " Yesterday, in an essay for the Doctor on Religious Persecution, 1 (bagged in a tolerably clear statement of Buddhism, expressing my personal views on the subject: I expect to be sat on accordingly."' Then he would be an Anglican priest: " I will be a priest. . . I long to live in seclusion . . infusing beauty and the simplicity of love . . . into minds fresh from God and the great sca."2 In one letter of philosophical discussion he writes. freely of Mill, Schopenhauer, Swedenbolg, Fichte and Newman! Meanwhile, he was writing poetry. In 1884 he says: " The poetry 1 have perpetrated since September, 1882, is enough to till two volumes."Z As a boy of eighteen he is starting on the path to his conversion ; he writes to his cousin: " I am reading Cardinal Newman, the man of all men most beautiful to nte: ah, the infinite attraction of his poetry, his logic, his enthusiasm! How he draws Me step by step, gently and firmly, on to the great dear mother— the Holy and Apostolic Church. . ."
In 1884 Johnson became editor of The Wykehandst, the staid teleran of football and cricket matches; and did his best to turn it into a literary journal: printing his own and his friend's poems, and drawing down the wrath of old Wykehamists for endangering the faith of the young for printing a " papistly inclined article on the Wykehamist martyr, Nicholas Saunders."
Winchester meant more to Johnson than anything except his faith: his whole ilife was shadowed by his devotion to his school: his love of tradition and past ages, his quiet courtesy and charm. even his Catholicism bad their roots where he was taught " amid the haunts, thc traditions and with something of the discipline of Monasticism."
Ali. that loveliness of thine! To have lived enchaunted years Free from sorrows, free from fears. Where thy Tower's great shadow falls Over those proud buttressed walls:
Lionel Johnson had a genius tor friendship, thoutill he never really lost the slight intolerance of his intellectual inferiors and those " who had not Latin or Greek." Many found him cold, proud and reserved hut this was only a shield against the living world he grew to hate, and underneath he was a kind and very loyal friend.
Received into the Church In 1886, with two scholarships, he went up to New College, Oxford, where his literary reputation had already preceded him : slight, short of • stature, with his child's face betrayed by the noble brow. he was reputed to read Lucrctius, Plato and Aeschylus for pleasure. His academic career was a disappointment to numy : though he managed to gain a first in Litterae Humaniores; but his reading outsidoehis studies was enormous and his amazing memory retained nearly aff, he read.
At Oxford, he became the friend of two men, both of whom had an important influence on his development as a critical writer: Arthur Galton gave him his interest in the eighteenth century, and his love for perfection of style; his friendship with Walter Pater gave him more liberal views and brought grace to his writing which under GaltonS influence might have become archaic and rigid. Pater's influepce served also to intensify his desire to live apart from the world: and it was in Oxford that his insomnia became serious and he started to live and work at night, sleeping during the day ; it was here that, trying to sleep. he started to take alcohol.
Sonic of Johnson's finest 'poetry was written while he was at Oxford, and already he had freed himself from a tendency to Swinburnian excess in his Winchester poems, and from contemporary " decadent " patterns. into superb verse, classical in effect, having the quality of graven stone in its unerring rightness of phrase. It might bethought that the poetry of one so deeply and widely read might reflect the style and inspirations of others; but it is as if all this great knowledge had crystallised into the dignity and pure simplicity or his poetical writing.
By 1891 Johnson had realised the fallibility of Anglicao claims and was received into the Church by Fr. William Lockhart, 0.C., in St. Ethelreda's, Ely Place. Johnson. unlike Francis Thompson. never believed that he had a " mission " in writing for, and of, his faith; but within the. bounds of English literary journalism he wrote many splendid essays in the furtherance of Catholic ideals (Johnson said that he considered the profession of a man of letters a third order of the Priesthood), and many of his noblest poems were inspired by Isis faith.
Arthur Gallon had introduced Johnson to The Hobby Horse. a journal that bridged from the pre-Raphaelites to " The 'Nineties," and in 1890 he went to live in 20, Fitzroy Street
with the editors and their circle. Contemporaries describe his room: " Monkish in its scholarly austerity with h portrait of Newman looking rather like Johnson himself, some paintings by Simeon Solomon, a silver crucifix on the walls lined elsewhere with books, and on the mantelpiece a beautiful monstrance . . . talking there by candlelight it never seemed difficult to murniur Villiers de L'isle Adam's proud words: As for living: our servants shall do that for us,' " W. B. Yeats describes him at this time: .. He was very little, and at first glance he seemed but a schoolboy of fifteen . . . he had the delicate strong features of a certain filleted head of a Greek athlete in the British Museum and that resemblance seemed symbolic of the atistere nobility of his verse."4 And writes of a meeting of the Rhymers' Club to which they both belonged: " I shall, however. remember all my life that evening when Lionel Johnson read or spoke aloud in his musical monotone, where meaning and cadence found the most precise elocution. his poem suggested by the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross.' It was as though I Listened to a great speech."5 Dark Angel
Johnson had come to London armed 'with introductions from Pater to all the leading London editors and with his scholarly essays, penetratingly sympathetic, with their just phraseology and amazing sense of the atmosphere of a past age, he soon c'arved for himself a reputation that lifted his work far above everyday literary journalism.
.1,11rele? 894 Johnson wrote The Dark
Because of thee, the land of dreams Becomes a gathering place of fears: Until tormented slumber seems One vehemence of useless tears.
With his vast library and splendid imagination Johnson was able to build up the past he so greatly loved: friends testify to his amazing ability in bringing to life the whole atmosphere of an age in his conversation as in his writing. It was now that he found that drinking had become a terrible disease, en• livening his imagination to escape from the sordid world of late Victorian industrialism he so detested.
Passionately desiring a surrounding of Catholic vulture and tradition, Johnson found Ireland, which became a facet in his love of the Church, and raised all his sympathy in her struggle
for freedom His periodical visits to Ireland must have proved a welcome change from his cloistral existence in London.
In 1895, Johnson left Fitzroy Street and went to live alone in Grays Inn in 1899 he moved again, to Lincoln's Inn. The rest of his life was overshadowed by continual illness and his terrifying battle against " The Dark Angel." The only time many of his friends saw 'him was returning from Mass at Farm Street or very late in thc evening. His life descended in loneliness and melancholy until his tragically early death from a sudden haemorrhage in 1902, He died in St. Bartholomew's Hospital, fortified by the last rites of the Clench, at the age of 35, and is buried at St. Mary's, Kensal Green.
1 From Some Winchester Letters of Lionel Johnson. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.
4 The Trembling of the Veil—W. B. Yeats. b Ibid.