Lionel Johnson

Lionel Pigot Johnson (1867-1902). Courtesy The Dabbler.

Lionel Pigot Johnson (15 March 1867 - 4 October 1902) was an English poet, essayist and literary critic.

Life

Overview

Johnson wrote Ireland, and other poems (2 volumes, 1897), The Art of Thomas Hardy, and miscellaneous critical works.

Youth and education

Johnson in 1885, at Winchester. From The Poetical Works of Lionel Johnson, 1915. Courtesy Inernet Archive.

Johnson was born at Broadstairs, Kent, on 15 March 1867, 3rd son of Captain William Victor Johnson of the 90th regiment light infantry (1822–91) by his wife Catherine Delicia (Walters). The father was 2nd son of Sir Henry Allen Johnson, 2nd baronet (1785–1860), and grandson of General Sir Henry Johnson, 1st baronet.

During Lionel's boyhood his family resided at Mold, Flintshire, and afterwards settled at Kingsmead, Windsor Forest. He was educated at Durdham Down, Clifton, and at Winchester College, where he gained a scholarship in 1880 and remained 6 years. He rose rapidly in the school, and won the prize for English literature in 1883, the prize for an English essay in 1885. He edited the school paper, The Wykehamist, from 1884 to 1886, and converted it, so far as he dared, into a literary review, with articles on Wykehamical poets and discussions of the technique of verse.

From early boyhood he was a writer of verse, mainly imitative, and an omnivorous reader, with a retentive memory and an inveterate habit of quotation. At Winchester he wrote his 1st critical essay of any importance, on the "Fools of Shakespeare," which was published in Noctes Shakesperianæ (1887). Small in stature and of frail physique, he took no exercise save walking, making vacation tours in Wales, the Lake country, and Cornwall.

In December 1885 Johnson won a Winchester scholarship to New College, Oxford, and in July 1886 he gained the Goddard scholarship for proficiency in classics. He went up to New College in October 1886, taking a 2nd class in classical moderations in 1888 and a 1st in literæ humaniores in 1890. At Oxford, as at Winchester, he was something of a literary dictator. There he formed his prose style by the study chiefly of his namesake, Samuel Johnson, and was profoundly influenced by Walter Pater.

Career

On leaving Oxford in 1890 he entered on a literary career in London, living at 20 Fitzroy Street with a little group of artists and men of letters. The publisher Charles Kegan Paul helped to start him in journalism, and he was soon hard at work reviewing for the Academy, Anti-Jacobin, National Observer, Daily Chronicle, and Pall Mall Gazette.

His ambition to become known as a poet was delayed by the necessity of earning money to free himself of debts contracted at Oxford by lavish expenditure on books and prints. This he had accomplished by the end of 1891; but his original eagerness for publication had passed off, and he continued to write and revise. While preparing his 1st prose book, on Thomas Hardy, he walked for a month (June 1892) in Dorset. Some of the best of his early poems made their appearance in the Century Guild Hobby-Horse and the 1st and 2nd Book of the Rhymers' Club, 1892-1894.

Even before he went to Oxford Johnson had grown skeptical about the validity of Anglican claims, and, though he still conformed outwardly to the Church of England, he read deeply in Roman catholic theology and cultivated the acquaintance of priests as well as poets. On 22 June 1891 he was received into the Church of Rome, and talked for a time of taking orders.

In October 1895 Johnson moved to 7 Gray's Inn Square, Gray's Inn, a few years later to New Square, Lincoln's Inn, and again to Clifford's Inn, where the close of his life was spent in illness and absolute seclusion. His health had been undermined by intemperance and the habit, formed in boyhood, of working late at night.

On 22 September 1902 he sent his last poem, on Pater, to the editor of the Academy. A week later he fell in Fleet Street, fractured his skull, and died in St. Bartholomew's Hospital, without recovering consciousness, on 4 October. He was unmarried.

Writing

Poetry

The Columbia Encyclopedia says that, "As a whole Johnson's poetry is spare and austere, often spiritual in content and deeply emotional. As a poet he had a genuine though limited inspiration. Often ornate, almost always felicitous in language, he knew how to be simple, but was rarely passionate. There are lyrics, however, like "The Dark Angel," that spring from profound inward experience and are faultless in expression.

After his conversion to Catholicism in 1891, asceticism, reverence for catholic tradition, sympathy with catholic mysticism, and a love of the niceties, rather than the splendours, of ritual — catholic puritanism, as he called it — became henceforth prominent in the subject-matter of his poems, of which a collection came out in 1895.

Another leading factor of his poetry, his love for Ireland, was of later growth, and tells especially in his second volume, 'Ireland and other Poems' (1897). His interest in nationalist politics and in the Irish literary revival was fostered by a visit to Ireland in September 1893, which he often repeated, but his own alleged Irish origin was a literary pose, and Celtic influences had reached him through Wales.

Miscellaneous

Johnson's best work, in both prose and verse, was done in the decade of 1886-95. The brilliant promise of his youth was hardly fulfilled. But his criticism was acute and based on profound learning, even if the omniscience that he was apt to affect sometimes provoked distrust.

Johnson published: 1. 'The Gordon Riots' (No. 12 of Historical Papers, edited by John Morris, S.J.), 1893. 2. 'Bits of Old Chelsea' (letterpress written by Johnson jointly with Richard Le Gallienne), 1894 fol. 3. 'The Art of Thomas Hardy,' 1894. 4. 'Poems,' 1895. 6. 'Ireland, with other Poems,' 1897. His scattered critical essays, among which an essay on Walter Pater in the 'Fortnightly Review,' September 1894, is especially worthy of mention, were collected as 'Post Liminium; Essays and Critical Papers,' with an introduction by Thomas Whittemore, in 1911. Selections of Johnson's poems appeared at the Dun Emer Pres, Dundrum, 1904, and in the 'Vigo Cabinet' series, 1908.

Critical introduction

by Laurence Binyon

One might say that scholarship was the abiding passion of Lionel Johnson’s life; but scholarship interpreted in a gracious and a genial sense, imaginative scholarship, the devotion to “humane letters,” not learning pursued merely for learning’s sake. “Dear human books,” he writes in one of his poems. His books and friends were his most prized possessions; and the books because they were friends. Though he was anything but a typical English schoolboy, no one has celebrated so ardently and abundantly as Johnson his love for his school and his college. Winchester and Oxford, homes of learning, homes of immemorial tradition, with their ancient beauty of buildings and gardens, yet in their atmosphere renewed continually by the companionship of youth; these venerable places inspired some of his happiest verse. He loved the landscape in which they are set, both for its own sake and still more for its associations.

When he came to live in London it was the yet richer and more august traditions of its streets which made them, too, enchanted ground. Yet he was no mere dweller in the past who averts his face from the present. He relished his own day and all its interests. He was a humanist, like Pater, who, with Arnold and with Newman, deeply influenced him; and human history was to him a kind of immense cathedral, the shrine of heroes, saints, and poets, in which one could wander still and listen to the music of the immortals.

With such a temperament, it was natural that Johnson should be drawn to Catholicism. His love of comely order, his intense attachment to tradition, no less than deeper instincts of his nature, were satisfied in the Church of Rome. His finest poems are religious, or have a religious tinge. He uses language as a kind of ritual. He wrote ecclesiastical Latin poems admirably and with ease. No English poet indeed belongs more closely than Johnson to the Latin tradition. He wished to be, and even persuaded himself that he was, Irish; he loved Celtic things; but his verse echoes Virgil’s wistfulness rather than the immaterial melancholy of the Celt. True child of Oxford, he was drawn to lost causes. His best known poem celebrates Charles I. Yet it is characteristic of Johnson’s wide imaginative sympathies that he could write of Cromwell hardly less finely, in the poem which begins —

  “Now on his last of ways
The great September star
That crowned him on the days
Of Worcester and Dunbar,
Shines through the menacing night afar.”

Johnson used a considerable variety of metres, but was happiest in the more formal types. He was fond of writing sonnets in Alexandrines, and made a pensive languid beauty of his own out of this unusual form. But many of his best pieces are in short measures, like the Charles I. The astringent brevity of these strengthened his style: for with all his nicety and exactness, he was sometimes seduced by a love of language for its own sake, a love of beautiful and sonorous words, so that the diction seems like a rich, stiff vestment over the thought rather than moulded closely on its form. He had a weakness for words like magnifical, perdurable, roseal; epithets that a younger school would recoil from, in virtuous horror of “literary” language. Johnson, moved by no such feeling, preferred consecrated words, rich in associations of the past.

He was inclined to write too much, and not always with quite adequate motive. But if he failed of true Latin terseness, he was never rhetorical in the sense of being merely sounding or insincere. Most of his verse, it must be remembered, was written when he was a very young man; in his later poems, such as the memorial lines on Walter Pater written just before his own death, the note of a deeper emotional experience is heard, and the poetry gains thereby. In the best of his poems there is a mingling of austerity and ornateness, of ardour and discipline, which gives them a peculiar distinction. And at the core of them is a spiritual fire burning clearest in that poem ... which ends with the cry:

  “Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so,
Dark Angel! triumph over me:
Lonely, unto the Lone I go;
Divine, to the Divinity.”

Recognition

His poem "Sir Walter Raleigh in the Tower" won the Queen's Gold Medal for English Verse at Winchester College in 1885. He won the medal again in 1886, for a poem on "Julian at Eleusis."

A tablet to his memory was placed in the cloisters of Winchester College in 1904.

Louis Untermeyer included 2 of his poems, "Mystic and Cavalier" and "To a Traveller," in Modern British Poetry, 1920.

In popular culture

Johnson died of a stroke after a fall in the street, though some claimed it was a fall from a barstool. Ezra Pound alludes to the rumor in his poem, "Siena Mi Fe, Discfecemi Maremma", printed in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley:

For two hours he talked of Gallifet;
Of Dowson; of the Rhymers' Club;
Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died
By falling from a high stool in a pub . . .

But showed no trace of alcohol
At the autopsy, privately performed —
Tissue preserved — the pure mind
Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed.

"The Dark Angel" served as one of the influences for the Dark Angels chapter of Space Marines in the Warhammer 40,000 fictional universe. Their Primarch, Lion El'Jonson, is also named after the poet.

Publications

Poetry

• Sir Walter Raleigh in the Tower. Chester, UK: Phillipson & Golder, 1885.
• Poems. London: Elkin Mathews, 1895; Boston: Copeland & Day, 1895.
• Ireland, with other poems. London: Elkin Matthews, 1897; Poole, UK, & New York: Woodstock Books, 1996.
• Twenty-one Poems Written by Lionel Johnson (selected by William Butler Yeats). Dundrum, Ireland: Dun Emer Press, 1904; Portland, ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1908; Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1971.
• Selections from the Poems (with introduction by Clement King Shorter). London: Elkin Mathews, 1908.
• Some Poems of Lionel Johnson; newly selected (selected with introduction by Louise Imogen Guiney). London: Elkin Mathews, 1912.
• The Poetical Works. London: Elkin Matthews, 1915; New York: Macmillan, 1915.
• The Religious Poems (preface by Wilfrid Meynell). London: Elkin Mathews / Burns & Oates, 1916; New York: Macmillan, 1916.
• A New Selection from the Poems. London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot, 1927.
• The Collected Poems (edited by Ian Fletcher). London: Unicorn Press,1953; New York: Garland, 1982.
• Three Poets of the Rhymers' Club: Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, John Davidson (edited by Derek Stanford). Cheadle, UK: Carcanet Press, 1974.

Non-fiction

• The Gordon Riots. London: Catholic Truth Society, 1893.
• The Art of Thomas Hardy. London: Matthews and Lane, 1894. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1894.
  • new edition (with a chapter on Hardy's poetry by J.E. Barton). London: John Lane, 1923.
• Post Liminium: Essays and critical papers (edited by Thomas Whittemore). London: Elkin Mathews, 1911; New York: M. Kennerley, 1912; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1968.
• Reviews and Critical Papers (edited by Robert Schafer). London: Elkin Mathews, 1921; New York: E.P. Dutton, 1921; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1966.

Letters

• Some Winchester Letters of Lionel Johnson London: George Allen & Unwin / New York: Macmillan, 1918.
• Some Letters to Richard Le Gallienne. Edinburgh: Tragara Press, 1979.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

"Destroyer of a Soul" by Lionel Johnson

Poems by Lionel Johnson

To a Traveller Lionel Johnson Audiobook Short Poetry

1. The Dark Angel

See also

• List of British poets
• Timeline of British poetry

References

•  Dodgson, Campbell (1912). "Johnson, Lionel Pigot". In Lee, Sidney. Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement​. 2. London: Smith, Elder. pp. 374-376.  . Wikisource, Web, Jan. 31, 2018.
• Gary Paterson, At the Heart of the 1890s: Essays on Lionel Johnson, AMS Press, 2008.
• Richard Whittington-Egan, Lionel Pigot Johnson: a biography. Rivendale Press

External links

Poems

• "July"
• Johnson in Modern British Poetry: "Mystic and Cavalier," "To a Traveller"
• Johnson in The English Poets: An anthology: "By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross," "The Church of a Dream," "The End," "Walter Pater"
• Lionel Johnson at Poets' Corner (7 poems)
• Lionel Pigot Johnson at PoemHunter (16 poems)

Audio / video

• Lionel Johnson poems at YouTube

Books

• Lionel Johnson at Amazon.com

About

• Johnson, Lionel Pigot in the Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature
• Lionel Johnson (1867-1902) at Ricorso
• "Lionel Johnson: The strange afterlife of a minor poet"

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: Johnson, Lionel Pigot