John Davidson (poet)

John Davidson (11 April 1857 - 23 March 1909) was a Scottish poet, playwright and novelist, best known for his ballads. He also wrote translations from French and German.

John Davidson (1858-1909). Woodcut by Robert Bryden (1865-1939), from Poets of the Younger Generation, 1902. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

John Davidson
Born	April 11, 1858(1858-Template:MONTHNUMBER-11) --> 11 April 1857 – 23 March 1909 Barrhead, East Renfrewshire
Died	March 23, 1909(1909-Template:MONTHNUMBER-23) (aged 50) Penzance
Resting place	Buried at sea off Penzance
Occupation	Poet, playwright, novelist
Language	English
Nationality	Scots
Citizenship	British
Education	Edinburgh University (1876-7)
Spouse(s)	Margaret McArthur of Perth
Children	Alexander and Menzies
Influenced T.S. Eliot

Life

Overview

Davidson was born at Barrhead, Renfrewshire, son of a Dissenting minister. He entered the chemical department of a sugar refinery in Greenock in his 13th year, returning after a year to school as a pupil teacher. He was afterwards engaged in teaching at various places, and having taken to literature went in 1890 to London. He achieved a reputation as a writer of poems and plays of marked individuality and vivid realism. Davidson disappeared on March 27, 1909, under circumstances which left little doubt that under the influence of mental depression he had committed suicide. Among his papers was found the MS. of a new work, Fleet Street Poems, with a letter containing the words, "This will be my last book." His body was discovered a few months later.

Scotland

Davidson was the son of Alexander Davidson, minister of the Evangelical Union, by his wife Helen, daughter of Alexander Crockett of Elgin. He was born at Barrhead, Renfrewshire, on 11 April 1857.

Put to school at the Highlanders' Academy, Greenock, his education was soon interrupted. At the age of 13 he entered the chemical laboratory of Walker's sugar house at Greenock (1870), and in 1871 became assistant to the town analyst there. In these employments he developed an interest in science which became an important characteristic of his poetry.

In 1872 he returned for 4 years to the Highlanders' Academy as a pupil-teacher, and, after a year at Edinburgh University, received in 1877 his 1st scholastic employment at Alexander's Charity, Glasgow.

During the next 6 years he held positions in: Perth Academy (1878-1881), Kelvinside Academy, Glasgow (1881-18822), and Hutchinson's Charity, Paisley (1883-1864). He varied his career by spending a year as clerk in a Glasgow thread firm (1884-1885), and subsequently taught in Morrison's Academy, Crieff (1885-1888), and in a private school at Greenock (1888-18899).

In 1885 Davidson married Margaret, daughter of John M' Arthur of Perth. She survived him with 2 sons, Alexander and Menzies.

Davidson's first published work was Bruce, a chronicle play in the Elizabethan manner, which appeared with a Glasgow imprint in 1886. 4 other plays, Smith: A tragic farce (1888), An Unhistorical Pastoral (1889), A Romantic Farce (1889), and the brilliant Scaramouch in Naxos (1889) were also published while he was in Scotland.

London

Davidson in The Magazine of Poetry and Verse, 1896. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

In 1889 Davidson abandoned school work, and next year went to London to seek his literary fortune. He frequented Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese and joined the Rhymers' Club. Frank Harris, a member of the Rhymers' Club, described him in 1889:

a little below middle height, but strongly built with square shoulders and remarkably fine face and head; the features were almost clasically regular, the eyes dark brown and large, the forehead high, the hair and moustache black. His manners were perfectly frank and natural; he met everyone in the same unaffected kindly human way; I never saw a trace in him of snobbishness or incivility. Possibly a great man, I said to myself, certainly a man of genius, for simplicity of manner alone is in England almost a proof of extraordinary endowment."

Besides writing for the Speaker, the Glasgow Herald, and other papers, Davidson produced several novels and tales, of which the best was Perfervid (1890). But these prose works were written for a livelihood.

Davidson's true medium was verse. In a Music Hall, and other poems (1891) suggested what Fleet Street Eclogues (1893) proved, that Davidson possessed a genuine and distinctive poetic gift. The 2nd collection established his reputation among the discerning few. His early plays were republished in 1 volume in 1894, and henceforward he turned his attention more and more completely to verse. A volume of vigorous Ballads and Songs (1894), his most popular work, was followed in turn by a 2nd series of Fleet Street Eclogues (1896) and by New Ballads (1897) and The Last Ballad (1899).

For a time he abandoned lyric for the drama, writing several original plays which have not been staged, and translating with success Coppee's Pour la Couronne in 1896 and Victor Hugo's Ruy Bias in 1904, the former being produced as For the Crown at the Lyceum Theatre in 1896, the latter as A Queen's Romance at the Imperial Theatre.

He translated Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1892) and contributed to Shakespeare's Sonnets (Renaissance edition, 1908) an introduction which, like his various prefaces and essays, shows him a subtle literary critic.

Finally Davidson engaged on a series of Testaments, in which he gave definite expression to his philosophy. These volumes were entitled The Testament of a Vivisector (1901), The Testament of a Man Forbid (1901), The Testament of an Empire Builder (1902), and The Testament of John Davidson (1908).

Death

File:Davidson reward.jpg

'Missing' poster 1909

 Davidson was awarded a civil list pension, and George Bernard Shaw did what he could to help him financially, but poverty, ill-health, and his declining powers, exacerbated by the onset of cancer, caused profound hopelessness and clinical depression.

Late in 1908 Davidson left London to reside at Penzance. On 23 March 1909 he disappeared from his house at Penzance. He had committed suicide by drowning in a fit of depression. His body, which was discovered by some fishermen in Mount's Bay on 18 September, was, in accordance with his known wishes, buried at sea. In his will he desired that no biography should be written, none of his unpublished works published, and "no word except of my writing is ever to appear in any book of mine as long as the copyright endures."

Writing

Though Davidson disclaimed the title of philosopher, he expounded an original philosophy which was at once materialistic and aristocratic. The cosmic process, as interpreted by evolution, was for him a fruitful source of inspiration. His later verse, which is often fine rhetoric rather than poetry, expressed the belief which is summed up in the last words that he wrote, "Men are the universe become conscious; the simplest man should consider himself too great to be called after any name." The corollary was that every man was to be himself to the utmost of his power, and the strongest was to rule. Davidson professed to reject all existing philosophies, including that of Nietzsche, the German philosopher, as inadequate, but Nietzsche's influence is traceable in his argument.

The poet planned ultimately to embody his revolutionary creed in a trilogy entitled God and Mammon. Only 2 plays, however, were written, The Triumph of Mammon (1907) and Mammon and his Message (1908).

Davidson was a prolific writer. Besides the works cited, he wrote: 1. 'The Great Men, and a Practical Novelist,' 1891. 2. 'Laura Ruthven's Widowhood,' a novel (with C. J. Wills), 1892. 3. 'Sentences and Paragraphs,' 1893. 4. 'Baptist Lake,' a novel, 1894. 5. 'A Random Itinerary,' 1894. 6. ' The Wonderful Mission of Ear) Lavender,' a novel, 1895. 7. 'Miss Armstrong's Circumstancas,' a novel, 1896. 8. 'Godfrida,' a play, 1898. 9. 'Self's the Man,' a tragi-comedy, 1901. 10. 'The Knight of the Maypole,' 1903. 11. 'A Rosary,' 1903. 12. 'The Theatrocrat: a Tragic Play of Church and State,' 1905. 13. 'Holiday and other Poems,' 1906. 14. 'Fleet Street and other Poems,' 1909.

Critical introduction

by Aldous Huxley

To one at least of the definitions of poetry does the work of John Davidson correspond. It is a criticism of life, a series of essays in human values. What, he asks, is the real worth of this mode of thought, of this course of action? How far are the world’s accepted standards absolutely valid? These are the questions he puts and answers, sometimes in philosophical narratives, sometimes in more directly discursive dialogues and soliloquies. The greater part of Davidson’s work is frankly didactic. He is without that disinterested passion for pure psychology which led Browning to expound so many contradictory philosophies of life, simply because the mind of men had conceived them and that all mental activity, as such, deserves consideration. Davidson is a moralist, not a psychologist. He always sets out to prove something, and each poem is an argument in support of his general philosophy.

“It has been said: Ye must be born again.

I say to you: Men must be that they are.”

In these lines Davidson has given expression to the fundamental article of his creed. His poems are the elaboration of this theme. There is no one infallible prescription which a man must follow in order to lead a good life. Salvation is to be found in the untrammelled development of personality; there are as many roads to it as there are individuals seeking it. The traditional prejudices of thought, the conditions of modern life, at once artificial and sordid, are fetters which cramp human growth, which, worn long enough, will dwarf and distort the spirit of man. We must away with these, says Davidson. Men must be free to work out their own salvation unhindered by an artificial complication of circumstances.

Davidson’s philosophy is one of strenuous romanticism, combining as it does the creeds of individualistic anarchy and moral earnestness. He rejects some of the most flashy tenets of romanticism—the idea of “genius” as the supreme good, and the notion of a spiritual “escape” out of the material world. He denies the possibility of separating the spiritual from the material, the soul from the body. Men must live in action, reaching good through the purifying ordeal of evil and sorrow. The escape from material active life is an escape from responsibility. Davidson’s anarchic individual has a touch of the muscular Christian in him.

We have called Davidson a didactic poet; and if we want to pigeon-hole and classify any farther, we may add that he has the makings of a “nature-poet.” His natural descriptions display a very genuine appreciation and are often beautiful, though he is apt to bring nature into his poems in order to enforce the somewhat hackneyed moral, “God made the country and man made the town.” His descriptive methods are those of the seventeenth century. He paints nature in those elaborately anthropomorphic conceits so dear to Crashaw and his contemporaries of the “metaphysical” school. Such an image as

" “In chestnut sconces opening wide

Tapers shall burn some fresh May morn,”

is an example of the suggestive charm of this sort of description when carried out successfully. And Davidson is generally successful, though his conceits lapse sometimes into mere quaintness, as when he speaks of sun and cloud playing a game of blind-man’s buff, in the course of which the sun claims

“Forfeit on forfeit, as he pressed

The mountains to his burning breast.”

This unevenness, this tendency to slip suddenly from beauty to absurdity, is characteristic of Davidson’s whole work. Passages of striking originality alternate with flat conventionalities that are poetical only as “poetic diction” is poetical. In his Ballads, for instance — those didactic romances enriched with all the ornaments of cultured poetry and as unlike real ballads as well might be — stanzas, of a force and brilliance truly poetical, shine out from dull sing-song passages of rhymed prose. In Davidson’s work, together with flatness, the other and opposite fault of overemphasis is frequently to be found. In reading him we are likely to be troubled with “the sulphurous huff-snuff” of a good deal of high-astounding fustian. But in studying uneven work, it is the business of the appreciative reader to look not at the depressions, but at the poetical elevations. Davidson possesses the Art of Rising as well as the Art of Sinking. The merits which, at the crest of his achievement, he displays are among the cardinal poetic virtues. The terse expression of concentrated thought, imaginative boldness, beauty as well of imagery as of diction—these are qualities of Davidson’s poetry at its best. Add to this his earnest moral purpose, and even the critic who still retains the conception of poetry as a “sugared pill” of doctrine made palatable by fancy, will subscribe to the judgment which allows Davidson a place among the poets.

Quotations

• "This is an age of Bovril."
• "Men are the universe become conscious."

Recognition

Davidson's poetry was a key early influence on important Modernist poets, in particular, his compatriot Hugh MacDiarmid, T.S. Eliot (who was especially fond of the poem 'Thirty Bob a Week' (In Ballads and Songs, 1894)), and Wallace Stevens. Davidson's poem "In the Isle of Dogs", for example, is a clear intertext of later poems such as "The Waste Land" by Eliot and "The Idea of Order at Key West" by Stevens.

2 of his poems, "Song (The boat is chafing at our long delay)" and "The Last Rose", were included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

In 1906 he was awarded a civil list pension of £100 a year.

Davidson's portrait was drawn by Walter Sickert and by Robert Bryden. A caricature by Max Becrbohm appeared in 'The Chapbook,' 1907, and William Rothenstein did a portrait of him for The Yellow Book. In Men and Memories (1931), Rothenstein said that when Max Beerbohm looked at his pictures of Davidson, he had complimented him on the 'subtle way he had handled his toupée'. Rothenstein wrote that he had not noticed that Davidson was wearing one.

Publications

Poetry

• In a Music Hall, and other poems London: Ward & Downey, 1891.
• Fleet Street Eclogues. London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1893.
• Ballads and Songs. London: John Lane, 1894; Boston: Copeland & Day, 1894.
• St. George's Day: A Fleet Street eclogue. London & New York: John Lane, 1895.
• A Second Series of Fleet Street Eclogues. London: John Lane, 1896; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1896.
• New Ballads. London & New York: John Lane, 1897.
• The Last Ballad and other poems. London & New York: John Lane, 1899.
• Testaments No. I: The testament of a vivisector. London: Grant Richards, 1901.
• Testaments No. II: The testament of a man forbid. London: Grant Richards, 1901.
• Testaments No. III: The testament of an empire builder. London: Grant Richards, 1902.
• The Testament of a Prime Minister. London: Grant Richards, 1904.
• Selected Poems. London & New York: John Lane, 1905.
• The Ballad of a Nun (illustrated by Paul Henry). London: John Lane, 1905.
  • The Ballad of a Nun, and other poems. Girard, KS: Haldeman-Julius, 1925.
• Holiday, and other poems; with a note on poetry. London: E.G. Richards, 1906.
• The Testament of John Davidson. London: G. Richards, 1908.
• Fleet Street, and other poems. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1909.
• Poems (edited by R.M. Wenley). New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924.
• John Davidson: A selection of his poems (edited by Maurice Lindsay; with preface by T.S. Eliot & essay by Hugh MacDiarmid). London: Hutchinson, 1961.
• The Poems of John Davidson (edited by Andrew Turnbull). (2 volumes), Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973; Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1973.
• Three Poets of the Rhymers' Club: Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Davidson (edited by Derek Stanford). Cheadle, UK: Carcanet Press, 1974.

Plays

• Diabolus Amans: A dramatic poem. Glasgow: Wilson & McCormick, 1885.
• Bruce: A drama in five acts. Glasgow : Wilson & McCormick, 1886.
• Smith: A tragedy. Glasgow: F.W. Wilson, 1888.
• An Unhistorical Pastoral. London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894.
• Plays by John Davidson. London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane / Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1894.
  • Scaramouche in Naxos. London: T.F. Unwin, 1990.
• Godfrida: A play in four acts. London & New York: John Lane, 1898.
• Self's the Man: A tragi-comedy London: G. Richards, 1901.
• The Knight of the Maypole: A comedy in four acts. London: Grant Richards, 1903.
• The Theatrocrat: A tragic play of church and stage. London: E. Grant Richards, 1905.
• God and Mammon: A trilogy. London: E. Grant Richards
  • The Triumph of Mammon, 1907.
  • Mammon and His Message, 1908.

Novels

• The North Wall. Glasgow: Wilson & McCormick, 1885.
• Perfervid: The Career of Ninian Jamieson. London: Ward & Downey, 1890.
• The Great Men and A Practical Novelist (illustrated by E.J. Ellis). London: Ward & Downey, 1891.
• Laura Ruthven's Widowhood (with C.J. Wills). London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1892.
• Baptist Lake: A novel. London: Ward & Downey, 1894.
• A Full and True Account of the Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender. 1895; New York: Garland, 1977.

Short fiction

• The Pilgrimage of Strongsoul and other stories. London: Ward & Downey, 1896.
• Miss Armstrong's and other circumstances. London: Methuen, 1896.
• A Rosary. London: Grant Richards, 1903.
  • republished as A Random Itinerary. London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894; Boston: Copeland & Day, 1894.

Non-fiction

• Sentences and Paragraphs. London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1893.
• Commercial Federation and Colonial Trade Policy. London: S. Sonnenschein / New York: Scribner's, 1900.
• The Man Forbid, and other essays (introduction by Edward J. O'Brien). Boston: Ball Publishing, 1910.

Translated:

• Charles Montesquieu, Persian Lettes (Lettres Persanes). London: privately printed, 1892; London: Routledge / New York: E.P. Dutton, 1897.
• François Coppée, For the Crown: A romantic play in four acts (Pour la couronne). London: Nassau Press, 1896.
• Victor Hugo, A Queen's Romance (Ruy Blas). London: Grant Richards, 1904.

Collected editions

• Selected Poems and Prose (edited by Arthur Sloan). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press / London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

John Davidson's "A Runnable Stag"

John Davidson Poem- A Ballad of Hell

Poems by John Davidson

1. In the Isle of Dogs

See also

• List of British poets

References

•  Bickley, Francis (1885) "Davidson, John" in Stephen, Leslie Dictionary of National Biography 1 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 472-474 
• John Sloan, John Davidson, First of the Moderns: A literary biography (1995)

External links

Poems

• John Davidson in the Oxford Book of English Versen 1250-1900: "The Last Rose", "Song (The boat is chafing at our long delay)"
• Davidson in A Victorian Anthology: "Harvest Home Song," "A Ballad of Heaven," "London"
• Davidson in The English Poets: An anthology: "Piper, Play!," "A Ballad of Heaven"
• John Davidson in Modern British Poetry: "A Ballad of Hell," "Imagination"
• "A Northern Suburb", Poem of the Week at The Guardian.
• John Davidson at the Scottish Poetry Library (profile & 4 poems)
• Selected Poetry of John Davidson (1857-1909) (4 poems) at Representative Poetry Online
• 5 poems by Davidson: "Snow,"Summer Rain," "Autumn," "A May Morning," "December"
• John Davidson at PoemHunter (15 poems)
• John Davidson at Poetry Nook (101 poems)

Books

• Works by John Davidson at Internet Archive
• Works by John Davidson at Project Gutenberg
• Text of Scaramouch in Naxos at La Commedia dell'Arte

About

• John Davidson in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• John Davidson profile at Internet Accuracy Project
• John Davidson at the yellow nineties online
• John Davidson in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Dictionary of National Biography, 2nd supplement​ (edited by Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1912. Original article is at: Davidson, John