It would be better to be purely forgotten, and then rediscovered (or
not, as may befall) than to be half remembered, or remembered by rumour,
as Sydney Dobell seems to have been for many years, and compromised by
the praises that send a straightforward reader shying and swerving to
left or right—anywhere out of the way of their finger-posts. Oblivion is
clean, but not so the encumbered remembrance, and not so the reputation
taken into custody and care by the Introductory Memoir.
There is a small accessible volume of selections from Sydney Dobell’s
poems, of which the biographical and critical introduction is more than
usually disheartening. It is apparently by several hands, and one of
them has the most uncertain hold upon grammatical collocation, while
others seem to express in the thick English of a certain period the
portly zeal of the writers for a poet who had associations with their
own youth. It is, of course, easy not to read an introductory memoir;
and this one should not be read by those who might charge the poet with
the insignificant sincerity (equal in literature to insincerity) of the
honest critics who admired him. There must have been better things
written in his praise than these. We know, for instance, Rossetti’s
admiration (carelessly and thinly alluded to in his rather vacant
letters to Allingham) for _Keith of Ravelston_; and the poets who were
Dobell’s contemporaries must surely have had something better to offer
him than the dull enthusiasm of biographical introductions. He was a
lyrical poets’ lyrical poet, in this sense: the thought, the motive, the
thing for which his best lyric lives, is not only a poetic thought, it
is also a brief one. It closes, it is finished in shape, it holds well
within the verse. There are, needless to say, long thoughts and short
thoughts, which are fit for poetry, reconciled from the beginning with
the poetic intellect, and justified by themselves. It is the brief
thought that is so essentially lyrical. Take, as an example, the
conception of which was born the poem called _Isabel_. She who is dead
was, in love, in piety, in grief, too shy for life, more spiritual, more
wild, and more warm than the world, losing her in her own light, and not
so much as knowing her for a secret creature, had ever seen her to be.
Therefore her poet chooses no time but the dark summer dawn and the
summer sunrise for his songs and for his memories. Her path had missed
men’s footsteps, and he travels into the hours that also are aloof, to
think of her with the thoughts of the imagination. I have thus
reluctantly disarrayed the phrases of the poem in order that the reader
may have the short thought at a glance.
All fine sonnets and other poems in brief final forms have in like
manner brief thoughts—large, great, but short. A short thought which is
poetic is the highest inspiration of the lyric poet, even though there
may be many and many a splendid lyric that has it not, but is as
unclosed as the passage of a bird in flight. So are the greater number
of the poems of Sydney Dobell; he has not the perfect inspiration of the
short thought always, or even often. That inspiration distinguishes
_Isabel_ greatly. Of that poetic poem let me give a stanza or two—
That early hour I meet
The daily vigil of my life to keep,
Because there are no other lights so sweet,
Or shades so long and deep,
Isabel.
And best I think of thee
Beside the duskest shade and brightest sun,
Whose mystic lot in life it was to be
Outshone, outwept by none,
Isabel.
This poem has assuredly rare sweetness and much rarer passion in its
solitary tones; it has in a small measure the emotion of the hours of
sleep, as the waking heart still owns it in face of the breaking of a
summer dawn. The short thought is the matter and form again of those two
sonnets whereby chiefly Dobell’s name is now remembered—_The Army
Surgeon_ and _Home in War Time_. When a poetic short thought is
transfigured in a single beautiful image, then the sonnet is satisfied,
the sonnet is fulfilled. It remained for the English poets so to
conceive the sonnet, not re-arraying but creating it. Of these two
sonnets it is _The Army Surgeon_ that has this fundamental completeness;
the other has not imagery, though it has, with extraordinary finality,
the short thought. In both imagination is intellectual and visual, and
the tide of impassioned feeling is a high tide, that has lifted all the
poet’s blood. These are not, perhaps, in the full sense, great poems;
they have not the peace which seems, beyond all our understanding, to
make an eternal quality of poetry of the tumult of Lear. They are poems
of emotional unrest, but among poems of emotional unrest they are
singularly fine and true, and something at least of the fusing work of
passion is done upon their beautiful diction.
All in all, the whole series of war-poems have a strange success. They
were written during the Crimean war, and they have all the best quality
of their time, which may be called good faith. Sydney Dobell takes his
types as all the Romance poets and their posterity knew them, and he
does not lie in wait for the accidents and incidents of fragmentary
life. He has a milkmaid in all her symmetry, a Lady Constance in hers, a
French chasseur, a wounded officer, a market wife; they are all
conventional. But if the poet found his persons ready for him in a not
all unwise legend, he did no small thing in filling them full of warm
traditionary life. It may well be that the more modern author achieves
somewhat less—or perhaps it would be better to say that he achieves his
work at a less expense of life—when he makes his human creature (his
unit with all the natural lack of unity) to live and to be seen by its
natural singleness; when he so marks the gnarls and knots of the life,
surprised in a separate man, as to give proof of a man by his very
accidents. It may well be easier work to do thus than to do as Sydney
Dobell does with his expected Romance, breathing so fully. The one poet
shall not justly charge the other with any unhandsome or slovenly
dealing.
There is, however, one poem in the war series which has another kind of
life than that of the milkmaid’s song. This is one of the
finest—_Tommy’s Dead_. Who shall say that this poem of actual knowledge,
and of a life lived, is not better than the rest? More full of the
poet’s authentic life it may not be, but the thing is better worth
doing. Tommy’s father is a single and separate creature, and every line
of his song is a strong surprise, though it is but of the thinness, the
dullness, and the last old age in a day of bad news at the farm.
On the other hand, _The Little Girl’s Song_ is only in part the cry of a
child; and yet even in the least childish lines, there is the excuse
that the poet, in the urgency of his feeling, has broken through the
limitations of the childish speech because he could not restrain the
haste of his own pity-driven word. The little girl’s father is at the
war, and she wonders whether indeed she sees her mother wasting with
grief, or whether that face was always so pale. The trivial word of the
child—‘Papa’—seems to make the line more forlorn:
Do not mind my crying, Papa, I am not crying for pain;
Do not mind my shaking, Papa, I am not shaking with fear;
Though the wild wind is hideous to hear,
And I see the snow and the rain.
When will you come back again,
Papa, Papa?
The beautiful _Keith of Ravelston_ is in the series of Crimean poems;
and some who know its undefined sweetness and its mystery may not be
aware with how admirable an art Sydney Dobell introduces its vague
outlines. It is a song sung by one who is happy in the year of sorrow—
She sings the sorrow of the air,
Whereof her voice is made.
Then follows the strain of Romance in an immemorial cadence:
The murmur of the mourning ghost
That keeps the shadowy kine;
‘Oh, Keith of Ravelston,
The sorrows of thy line!’
I must own that _Balder_ and _The Roman_ have not yet persuaded me to
read them through; but the lyrics, if so chosen that a certain vein of
weakness may not appear anywhere, are surely a perdurable part of our
incomparable literature.