GKC and Lionel Johnson

Joseph’s quotation of “The Rolling English Road” in a letter which also touched on Lionel Johnson brought to my attention a remarkable constellation of Chestertonian references (whether discreet, unconscious, or coincidental who can say?) to Lionel Johnson’s death. You will remember the passage:

 

My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,

Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,

But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,

And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;

For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,

Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

A number of things here suggest Johnson: “My friends” (hardly a remarkable reference, but it reappears more decisively below) – friends were very important to the desperately lonely Johnson and feature frequently in his poems; “Friends that Fail Not”, an essay of great charm, was surely known to Chesterton. “Youth” – he died at 35.  “[T]he folly of…youth” not stretched into “the shame of age” – Johnson (who had introduced Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas) led a celibate life after his conversion, but his poetry and drinking indicate that he remained tortured by shame over his homosexual impulses. “[U]ndrugged” – he was an alcoholic. The “inn of death” – he died after suffering a seizure in a pub. “Kensal Green”, where he is buried.

 

These echoes are multiplied and made the more suggestive by lines in Chesterton’s “When I Came Back to Fleet Street”:

 

When I came back to Fleet Street,
Through a sunset nook at night,
And saw the old Green Dragon
With the windows all alight,
And hailed the old Green Dragon
And the Cock I used to know,
Where all good fellows were my friends
A little while ago

 

Johnson was living at Clifford’s Inn just off Fleet Street when he collapsed in the Green Dragon tavern, dying at St Barts Hospital (having received Extreme Unction) several days later: