| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Notes Editor's Note: Opposite page 26. Ernest Dowson, by Charles Conder. Signed and inscribed. Given by Lady Gosse family in 1928. Pencil, 5 ⅞ x 5 inches. We thank the National Portrait Gallery, London, for permission to reproduce this print. 1. For example, contrary to the Legend's assumptions about the shaping influence of Adelaide Foltinowicz, Dowson crafted many of his most elegant celebrations of childhood innocence prior to November 1889, when he first met the eleven-year-old "Missie"; furthermore, he drafted such bleak poems as "A Last Word" not at the end of a desolate and frustrated life, as was once assumed, but in 1886, while still a teenager, well prior to his notorious confrontations with "reality." 2. I have argued elsewhere, initially in "Ernest Dowson's Aesthetics of Contamination," ELT, 26 (1983), 162-174, that while Dowson's melancholic temperament was undoubtedly reinforced by many elements—a predisposition to despondency, a "rootless" upbringing, the disease of alcoholism, among them—Schopenhauer's works furnished the synthesizing locus (and impetus) for his pessimism and the keystone for his poetic vision. Among Dowson's contemporaries who testified to Schopenhauer's profound influence on the late Victorian period in general and Dowson in particular are Victor Plarr in Ernest Dowson, 1888-1897: Reminiscences, Unpublished Letters and Marginalia (New York: Gomme, 1914), Grant Richards in Memories of a Misspent Youth (London: Heinemann, 1932), Robert Harborough Sherard in Twenty Years in Paris (London: Hutchinson, 1905), Edgar Jepson in Memories of a Victorian (London: Gollancz, 1933), and W. R. Thomas, "Ernest Dowson at Oxford," Nineteenth Century & After, 103 (April 1928), 560-66. In addition, Dowson's biographer Mark Longaker, in Ernest Dowson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945), 21-22, suggested the possible influence on Dowson of Pater and Schopenhauer, noting that the works of both thinkers were exercising considerable impact among Oxford undergraduates in the 1880s. John R. Reed, in "Bedlamite and Pierrot: Ernest Dowson's Esthetic of Futility," ELH, 35 (1968), 94-113, also remarks on Dowson's reading of Schopenhauer. 3. Victor Plarr, Ernest Dowson, 1888-1897: Reminiscences, Unpublished Letters and Marginalia (New York: Gomme, 1914), 47. 4. Ernest Dowson, The Letters of Ernest Dowson, Desmond Flower and Henry Maas, eds. (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1967), 45. 5 March 1889. 5. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Idea, 3 vols. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, trans. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1883-1886), II: 407; cf. III: 306-307, 377-79, 388. Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hillingdale, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 63. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Will to Live: Selected Writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Taylor, ed. (1962; New York: Ungar, 1975), 281. 6. The World As Will and Idea, I: 328, III: 420-21. 7. Ibid., III: 376, 391. 8. Essays, 41-42. 9. Ibid., 49-50. 10. Ibid., 51. 11. The World As Will and Idea, II: 428-429; III: 306-308. 12. Ibid., III: 462; cf. III: 424, 462-63. 13. The dates I ascribe to Dowson's works refer to the date of composition, as well as it can be determined based on the evidence, especially Dowson's letters, Desmond Flower's analysis of Dowson's manuscript book in The Poetical Works of Ernest Christopher Dowson, ed. Desmond Flower (1934; London: Cassell, 1967), 237-40, and Mark Longaker's notes to the stories in The Stories of Ernest Dowson, ed. Mark Longaker (1947; New York: Barnes, 1960) 1-13, 153-60. 14. The Stories of Ernest Dowson, 42, 46, 49. 15. Ibid., 132-33. 16. Ibid., 136. 17. Letters, 224 (c. 13 February 1892). 18. The Poems of Ernest Dowson, Mark Longaker, ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), 105. "The Dead Child" (1892), line 14. 19. Letters, 144 (28 March 1890). 20. The World As Will and Idea, I: 208-10, 238-53; Essays, 156-60. 21. Letters, 223 (February 1892). 22. Ibid., 137-38 (16 February 1890). 23. Ibid., 187 (5 March 1891). 24. Ibid., 22 (3 January 1889). 25. Poems, 76 (lines 4-9). 26. The World As Will and Idea, I: 208-10, 346, 489 ff., II: 428-29; Essays 155-56; The Will to Live 235-37...
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