Born, at Cranbrook, Kent, 5 April 1824. Family removed to Cheltenham, 1836. Educated privately. Married Emily Fordham, 18 July 1844. Literary activity, and enthusiasm in patriotic causes of various countries. Visit to Switzerland, Aug. 1850. Lived in Edinburgh, 1854–57. Wintered in Isle of Wight, 1858–61. Increasing ill-health. Wintered near Cannes, 1862; in Spain, 1863; in Italy, 1864. Lived in Gloucestershire from 1866 till death. Died, at Barton-End House, Gloucestershire, 22 Aug. 1874. Buried in Painswick Cemetery. Works: “The Roman” (under pseud. “Sydney Yendys”), 1850; “Balder” (anon.), 1854 [1853]; “Sonnets on the War” (with A. Smith; anon.), 1855; “England in Time of War,” 1856; “The Nature of Poetry,” 1857; “Of Parliamentary Reform,” 1865. Collected Works: Poems (2 vols.), 1875; Prose, 1876; “Thoughts on Art, Philosophy and Religion,” ed. by G. Nichol, 1876; “Life and Letters” (2 vols.), 1878.
| And thou, too, gone! One more bright soul away | |
| To swell the mighty sleepers ’neath the sod; | |
| One less to honour and to love, and say, | |
| Who lives with thee doth live half-way to God! | |
| My chaste-souled Sydney! Thou wert carved too fine | |
| For coarse observance of the general eye; | |
| But who might look into thy soul’s fair shrine | |
| Saw bright gods there, and felt their presence nigh. | |
| Oh! if we owe warm thanks to Heaven, ’tis when | |
| In the slow progress of the struggling years | |
| Our touch is blest to feel the pulse of men | |
| Who walk in light and love above their peers | |
| White-robed, and forward point with guiding hand, | |
| Breathing a heaven around them where they stand! |
Pure without pedantry, he had the “scorn of scorn” for every form of falsehood; but the range of his charity was limited only by his love of truth. The sense of humour, comparatively absent from his writings, showed itself in the delicate irony of his rare rebukes. His loyalty to friendship—that half-forgotten virtue of an earlier age—has never been surpassed. He was chivalrous to an extreme, and this sometimes led his judgment astray on behalf of fallen causes, with a touch of lofty yet gracious mannerism which recalled the ideal of a Castilian knight. A radical reformer in some directions, he had little sympathy with the extreme phases of democracy, and held the tyranny of mobs and autocrats in equal aversion. Like those of most poets, his theoretical politics had a visionary side: but he was far from being a mere dreamer. Of practical well-doing towards the poor, of encouragement to the young and all who were struggling for a recognition of their merits, he was never weary: for of the jealousy which is one of the main blots of our literature, he had not a tinge. He could afford to be generous: and to almost all with whom he came in contact, grateful or ungrateful, he had done some kindnesses.
A life lived, as it were, in the Divine Presence chamber, in unremitting endeavour to keep the Divine attributes constantly before the mental vision, and to bring its own being more and more into harmony with the glorified humanity of Christ, is not likely to hide ugly things in dark places; nor was Sydney Dobell’s character, spite of his intellectual subtlety, difficult for any ordinarily intelligent love to read. The child’s open heart was as signally his as the poet’s open eye. He was most a hero for those most familiarly associating with him. His whole later life was heroic with that surely most difficult heroism—of submission. No disappointment and no suffering ever soured or embittered one moment of his manhood; no murmur ever passed his lips. Yet his was never a stunned submission. The very breath of his life was sweet; his gracious pleasantness made all who served him, in things great or things small, find such service self-rewarding. His simplest words and deeds were dignified by the nobleness of his nature.
His own letters and the testimony of all his friends concerning him go to prove that, full of trial as his life was, there was in him little or none of that morbidness or even melancholy to which men of genius are supposed to be prone. “Spasmodic” as his poetry was considered, he himself was of a cheerful and healthy mind, and there remained in him and with him to the very last a most touching enjoyment of all that was left him to enjoy, which must have been one of its greatest charms in the eyes of those who loved him. And these were not few. For if he exacted much, he gave much, especially to women, with whom his friendships were many and sincere, and whom he treated, high and low, near or distant, with the chivalrous tenderness of a stainless heart, as seeing in all womanhood the reflection of his own ideal of it—his wife.
No one who knew Sydney Dobell, no one who had ever so brief a glimpse of him, can read without tears the simple and beautiful Memorials, now just published, of his gracious, quiet, and uneventful life. Predestined to physical martyrdom, he walked the earth for fifty years, at the bidding of what to our imperfect vision seems a pitiless and inscrutable Destiny. Why this divinely gifted being, whose soul seemed all goodness, and whose highest song would have been an inestimable gain to humanity, should have been struck down again and again by blows so cruel, is a question which pricks the very core of that tormenting conscience which is in us all. Ill-luck dogged his footsteps; sickness encamped wherever he found a home. His very goodness and gentleness seemed at times his bane. At an age when other men are revelling in mere existence he was being taught that mere existence is torture. We have read of Christian martyrs, of all the fires through which they passed; but surely not one of them ever fought with such tormenting flames as did this patient poet, whose hourly cry was of the kindness and goodness of God. From first to last, no word of anger, no utterance of fierce arraignment, passed his lips.
The poet’s mother was a very religious woman, and with fond enthusiasm she devoted her first-born, when she was only nineteen years old, to the Church. This was the primitive Christian Church founded by her father, Mr. Samuel Thompson. His mother pondered all the boy’s sayings, like the mother of Jesus, and his father kept memoranda of the son’s doings, and his plans for the boy. His mind and his emotions were thus unduly stimulated. At ten, his biographers say, he had read all Miss Martineau’s books on political economy, besides having ventured on the Trinitarian controversy. He was educated by his father at home, and at twelve he entered his father’s counting-house. While there, he studied the languages, and wrote poetry, and also interested himself in religious and scientific subjects. He joined the Church and was married at twenty. His mind was eminently religious. His courtship … was carried on over the Bible. He refused in his early married life to associate with any families of the neighborhood who did not belong to his own sect. He smiles in his after life at his own narrowness; but in spite of it all, he says he looks back at this period with “a kind of self-reverence,” because “he never thought a thought or said a word but under the very eyes of God.”
Of the resources of the intellect so mysteriously held back from what seemed its fitting work, perhaps only a few, even of those who knew him best, can judge; but his life evidenced, as no words or work could have done, the vitality of his faith, at once enlightened and deeply reverent—faith that was never shaken by the temptations of the intellect, nor weakened by years of disappointment and deprivation. No pressure of suffering was able to exhaust his cheerfulness, nor to wear out the sweetness of his patience. In him innate brightness and elasticity had been strengthened and elevated by spiritual culture into something beyond and above the result of mere temperament. To the last moment of his conscious life he remained bravely submissive, “trusting not God the less for an unanswered prayer.”
In our rambles [1860] under the clematis-festooned cliff, on the rocky, broken meadow-ground, and by the sea-driven woods, we were occasionally accompanied by Sydney Dobell, who, suffering from rheumatism of the heart, had passed the winter in the island. He idolised Nature after a microscopic fashion; hunted amid a million primroses for one flower that combined in the hue and shape of petals and stem the perfection of seven; rapturously studied the tints of the sparrows’ backs, assuring us no two sparrows were alike; and descanted on the varied shades of grey in the stone walls. Yet even this fatiguing minuteness of observation trained the eye to perceive the marvellous perfection, beauty, grace, and diversity of colour and form in the tiny handiworks of the Almighty Creator.
His character as a man, far from reproducing the inequalities of his poetry, was one of uniform elevation: he was chivalrous, transparently candid, lofty in all his aims, and capable of the most disinterested and self-sacrificing kindness.
The Roman, 1850
There is a hearty purpose and a solemn earnestness in “The Roman” which we think is calculated to teach an admirable lesson to, and produce a powerful effect upon, the minds of the present age…. Our poet shows us the dignity of man—the power he can exercise, the active power of kindling great thoughts in his fellow-men—rousing them up from their lethargic sleep—snapping the fetters which cramp their spiritual freedom, and bidding them pursue the path which God has placed before them, and along which duty guides them—peradventure to a grave. He shows us also Man’s passive power—the nobler of the two, and by far the more difficult to practise—the power which can impel the soul right onward, like an arrow to its mark; which yields not to the sun-smile of fortune nor to the pitiless peltings of the tempest-cloud: the power from which the shafts of scorn fall off with deadened point; which walks unscathed through the fiery furnace of a nation’s mockery; and gazes with an unblenched eye upon the ghastliest insignia of death. He shows us Pity bending with unutterable tenderness; Love sacrificing self at the altar of its divinity; Resolution stern as fate, sheathing the spirit as in a panoply of steel; Hope, baffled, bleeding, but like the dolphin, beautiful in death; Faith lifting its flashing eyes to Heaven, and speaking forth the words of inspiration. He takes us by the hand and conducts us reverently among the ruins of the past—he leads us within the circle of its magic presence, and bids us look and wonder.
“The Roman,” with its noble fervour of tone and wealth of illustration, proved that we had amongst us a new poet, whose genius was dedicated, not chiefly to the expression of personal feeling, or to the treatment of domestic themes, but to the worship of liberty and the defence of a glorious but enslaved country. The sympathy which, in the first poem, he showed with the larger interests of human life, is indeed discernible in all the more important works that subsequently proceeded from his pen.
The success of his first considerable work, “The Roman,” was rapid and unmistakable. The theme and its treatment, in accord with popular sentiment, in no less degree the flow of the lyrics, the strong sweep of the graver verse, the frequent richness of the imagery, enlisted the favour alike of the general public and of discerning critics. With defects readily condoned to the writer’s youth, and many minor merits, its main charm lay in the novelty of its aim. It was hailed as the product of a man of refined culture, whose sympathies went beyond the mere love of “harmony in tones and numbers’ lisp,” and crossed the “silver streak” to welcome the wider movements of his age. “The Roman” was continental in a sense that the work of none of our poets, since Byron, had been.
This is not merely a vigorous, but a thoroughly sane performance, but the orator is more evident than the poet.
Balder, 1854
I find that many reviewers have mistaken the moral purpose and import of “Balder,” and I therefore prefix to my Second Edition these few explanatory lines. The present book is the first part of a work, which I hope to complete in three Parts. I intend as the principal subject of that work the Progress of a Human Being from Doubt to Faith, from Chaos to Order. Not of Doubt incarnate to Faith incarnate, but of a doubtful mind to a faithful mind. In selecting the type and conditions of humanity to be represented, I chose, for several important reasons, the poetic type and the conditions of modern civilization. And in treating the first and sadder portion of my subject I felt that justice to Nature required me to avoid all conventional portraits of the doubter, and—since in these days his malady is more often negative than positive—to indicate the absence of faith rather by the states and proportions of the other qualities than by a more distinct and formal statement of the differential defect…. I have reason, however, to blame some of these powerful witnesses for the indecorous haste and uncharitable dogmatism with which, as I have seen and am informed, they have taken for granted that I must personally admire the character I think fit to delineate, and that I present as a model what, in truth, I expose as a warning. That I, in common with many of my critics, am not altogether free from some of the sins of my hero is probable on the general principal that “Balderism” in one form or another is a predominant intellectual misfortune of our day. But that I have no theoretical approbation of such errors, may, I think, be naturally inferred from the history of failure and sorrow which I have herein attached to them.
“Balder” arrived safely. I looked at him, before cutting his leaves, with singular pleasure. Remembering well his elder brother—the potent “Roman,” it was natural to give a cordial welcome to a fresh scion of the same house and race. I have read him. He impressed me thus. He teems with power. I found in him even a wild wealth of life; but I thought this favourite and favoured child would bring his sire trouble; would make his heart ache. It seemed to me that his strength and beauty were not so much those of Joseph—the pillar of Jacob’s age, as of the Prodigal Son who troubled his father, though he always kept his love. How is it that—while the first-born of genius often brings honour—the second, almost as often, proves a source rather of depression and care? I could almost prophesy that your third will atone for any anxiety inflicted by this his immediate predecessor. There is power in that character of “Balder” and, to me, a certain horror. Did you mean it to embody, along with force, many of the special defects of the artistic character? It seems to me that those defects were never thrown out in stronger lines. I did not and could not think you meant to offer him as your cherished ideal of the true great poet. I regarded him as a vividly coloured picture of inflated self-esteem, almost fanatic aspiration—of a nature that has made a Moloch of the intellect—offered up in pagan fires the natural affections, sacrificed the heart to the brain.
We think that the two main objections to “Balder” will be monotony and obscurity. We will not say of the hero, what an admirer of Yendys said of the Monk in “The Roman,” that he is a great bore and humbug; but we will say that he talks too much, and does too little. The poem is little else than one long soliloquy.
“Balder” is the longest poem of our time, with the exception perhaps of “Festus;” and apart from the exquisite songs of Amy, which if extracted would of themselves make a mournful anthology, there are not in its entire length a dozen pages of purely human interest. It contains wonderful things, it has passages of marvellous subtlety and music, but these fail to make pleasing the stupendous egotism. Now it is evident that if you wish to cure a sick man you must give him a medicine which it is possible for him to take, and if you wish by means of a poem to make the world better, you must needs write a poem which it will be possible for the world to read. “Balder” is to the large majority of persons simply unreadable, and this not from any defect of genius, but because it is based upon an erroneous theory. In “Balder” too, one is perpetually conscious of a certain compulsion, of effort; there is a lack of spontaneity, of easy, unconscious, unsolicitous result, as of an Æolian harp sighing to the caprices of intermittent wind. At times the writer almost ceases to be a poet, and becomes a pamphleteer…. Altogether, “Balder” is one of the most painful of books. There is in it an atmosphere of stagnant formless woe, a crude misty misery, a selfishness that might be felt; in reading it you grope, as it were, through some solid breathless gloom. And yet if any one would form a just estimate of the power and originality of Mr. Dobell’s genius, of the swift-cleaving character of his intellect, to this book he must come and endure its pain. With all its gloom and horror I do not know where else you will meet such sudden, unexpected, exquisite sweetness; such radiant sunniness of nature; such lovely lyrical trills, like the carol of a bird from the blossomed apple-tree in the orchard heard through the silence of a house in which a dead man is lying; such strokes of sharp pathos at which the printed page disappears to slowly glimmer back.
The incomplete and painful plot was felt to be unnatural, and many of the details were disagreeable. The luxuriance of its imagery was like cloth of gold thrown over the limbs of a Frankenstein. But few contemporary English poets had scaled the heights of its finest passages. Every chapter bore witness to the author’s analytic subtlety and passionate power. Few descriptions of external nature surpass the master sketches of “Balder:” they are drawn by the eye and pencil of one who, from a watch-tower on the hills, outgazed the stars and paid homage, like the Persian, to a hundred dawns.
It would be no exaggeration to affirm that it contains beauties beyond the reach of any contemporary poet: but the plan is so preposterous, and the general effect so chaotic, that the character “arena sine calce” would be fatally applicable were not the sand so often dust of diamond. What the second and third parts would have been like is difficult to conjecture, though we know that the second part was to have been eked out by the inclusion of a drama to have been entitled “The Cardinal.” Dobell probably discovered that he was on a wrong track, for he never attempted to continue the poem, and the self-confessed failure may have co-operated with aggravated ill-health in producing the paralysis of intellectual activity which befell his later years.
If we regard the poem in the light most favourable to it, as a collection of passages in verse, we have to admit the most amazing inequalities. Few passages in literature are more hideous than the description of the monster on which Tyranny rides; but, on the other hand, the best passages may challenge comparison with all but the greatest poetry. Even this comparison has been sometimes made. The description of Chamouni has been said to rival the great hymn of Coleridge, and that of the Coliseum the celebrated stanzas of Byron on the same subject. The comparison, especially with Coleridge, is unkind to Dobell. At his best he cannot rival one of the most poetic minds in all literature in one of its highest flights. Nevertheless, both passages are exceedingly good. The subjects moreover are characteristic. Magnitude and massiveness are congenial to Dobell, and almost necessary to draw out his best. “Alone among our modern poets,” says Dr. Garnett, “he finds the sublime a congenial element.” It is in such passages as those named, and in Balder’s magnificent vision of war, that Dobell shows the grand material of poetry that was in him.
General
Smith’s females are houris in a Mahometan heaven; those of Yendys are angels in the Paradise of our God. Smith’s emblem of woman is a rich and luscious rose, bending to every breath of wind, and wooing every eye; that of Yendys is a star looking across gulfs of space and galaxies of splendor, to one chosen earthly lover, whose eyes alone respond to the mystic messages of the celestial bride. Smith’s idea of love, though not impure, is passionate; that of Yendys is more Platonic than Plato’s own.
In the sense of having something personal and peculiar, some new thing to supplement and enrich modern culture, Sydney Dobell is fairly entitled to be considered an original poet. I have remarked elsewhere that Chaucer and Spenser are the fountainheads of all succeeding English poetry. Chaucer is the father of the humorous, kindly, dramatic, genially-lyrical men; Spenser of the intense, allegorical, didactic, remote, and, by comparison, unsocial men. Shakespeare, Dryden, Burns, Byron, Browning, draw descent from Chaucer, Milton, Young, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Tennyson from Spenser. Sydney Dobell too is of the line and stock of Spenser. His mental constitution is high, solitary, disdainful. His genius is of an ascetic and fakir kind. He stands apart from his fellows, and wraps himself up in the mantle of his own thoughts. He is terribly self-conscious; he is the slave of ideas; he writes for a purpose, and as if under a certain compulsion. There is nothing he hates so intensely as commonplace; nothing he loves so intensely as beauty—the more ideal the better; and in his fine music a quick ear will not unfrequently detect a stridulous tone, as if the string from which it is drawn were a trifle too tightly strung. In whatever he writes, whether he is purely and simply beautiful, or haughty as Apollo conscious of glowing limbs, or grotesque or extravagant, you will find nothing done at haphazard; he knows precisely the why and the wherefore, and will be able to render you a sufficient reason for everything. If it be at all admissible, now that the word has been so foully fingered and misused, to call a man earnest that man is Sydney Dobell. He is essentially a missionary. He has neither written for the mere enjoyment of writing nor for money, nor for fame, but mainly because he has a doctrine to preach, a cause to plead; and his doctrine he has preached in ears too long accustomed to sounding brasses and tinkling cymbals to give heed to high discourse.
I was equally delighted with what you say about Dobell’s “Keith of Ravelston”—not only because you have so flatteringly lugged in my name in connexion with it, but because I have always regarded that poem as being one of the finest, of its length, in any modern poet—ranking with Keats’s “La Belle Dame, sans Merci,” and the other masterpieces of the condensed and hinted order so dear to imaginative minds. What a pity it is that Dobell generally insists on being so long-winded, when he can write like that! There is a snatch of sea-song (about the Betsy Jane) in “Balder” which is fifty times as good as anything in Dibdin, who is nevertheless not contemptible.
A singularly original and lofty-natured, as well as subtly-intellectual man.
A man of cultivated intellectual tastes and benevolence of character, Mr. Dobell seems to have taken up some false or exaggerated theories of poetry and philosophy, and to have wasted fine thoughts and conceptions on uncongenial themes. The great error of some of our recent poets is the want of simplicity and nature. They heap up images and sentiments, the ornaments of poetry, without aiming at order, consistency, and the natural development of passion or feeling. We have thus many beautiful and fanciful ideas, but few complete or correct poems. Part of this defect is no doubt to be attributed to the youth of the poets, for taste and judgment come slowly even where genius is abundant, but part also is due to neglect of the old masters of song. In Mr. Dobell’s first poem, however, are some passages of finished blank verse.
Probably there never was a better loved or better hated—at any rate better abused man, during his lifetime, than Sydney Dobell. Bursting into sudden notoriety by his remarkable drama “The Roman;” watched hopefully by all the critics as the new poet of the age, then disappointing the expectations of most by his incomprehensible next work, “Balder—the First Part” (the second part, which might have elucidated it, being, alas! never written); afterwards dwindling down through “England in Time of War” and other lyrics of fragmentary kind to a style of writing, poetry or prose, of which the few published specimens were, to the ordinary mind, almost wholly incomprehensible; until, after a long, sad silence, during which he was almost forgotten, came the news of his death in the prime of his days…. Whether or not Sydney Dobel was a man of genius—whether his writings, which have been pronounced by some to contain passages as grand as Milton, and to evince a knowledge of humanity not unworthy of Shakspeare, and been condemned by others as hopelessly obscure, long-winded, and puerile, will live for posterity, this paper does not attempt to decide. The poems are open to all—every one can read and judge for himself. “The Roman” was written and published when he was but twenty-five. “Balder” followed soon after. These are his only complete poems; though they were followed by a good many sonnets and lyrics, especially “England in Time of War,” which contains passages of unparalleled beauty. And at thirty-five the poet—“spasmodic,” eccentric, unintelligible as his writings may be called, few will deny to him that title—the poet published his last work. This single decade, then, is all that posterity has to judge him by…. Dobell’s correspondence must have been very voluminous, and it is much to be regretted that the book contains so little of it. His is an exquisitely polished epistolary style, perhaps even too perfect, as in its striving after originality it sacrifices that frank simplicity which must be given up if people write their commonest letters “with an eye to posterity.”
Such warping and blighting influences made Sydney Dobell’s public service fall so far short of his extraordinary capacities as to amount practically to failure. His senses were abnormally acute, like those of a savage, and this made his appreciation of natural loveliness remarkably keen; his powers of imagination and sympathy and his super-subtle reflective faculty completed his poetic endowment. The bent of his mind, the surcharging of his soul with religious emotion and mystical feeling, led him sometimes into that region of dreamy poetic conjecture with which readers of the transcendentalists are familiar, where the object, too vague for thought, is grasped at through symbols, and the qualities of the symbol extended fancifully to the unknown object…. His poetry is unwrought ore, his published prose stray leaves of thought, but in himself it is not too much to say he came near to his own conception of the poet’s ideal life.
“Portions of Dobell’s ‘The Roman’ have greatly impressed me, particularly its songs and descriptive and recitative passages; and I have inferred from the melody of their versification and the unwavering unity of their design and treatment that his sonnets must be of a high order. Have you any specimens of his style?” “Yes; but I fear they will disappoint your expectations. Dobell’s sonnets are forcible and coherent enough, but are seldom poetical. Their coherence is that of statement and assertion merely, far different from the poetic unity whose office it is, as a poet yet to be cited tells us, to fuse many modes of light in one bright thought. His forcibleness, too, is more in the manner of the utterance than in its matter. The language of his sonnets is bold, resonant, stilted—the sentiments literal and prosaic, inspired by the will rather than by the fancy or imagination.”
Although only a short period has elapsed since Dobell’s death, though it seems only yesterday that the poet lay forgotten in some dark limbo of poetic failures, the public is already aware of him as one of the strong men of his generation, strong, too, in the sublimest sense of goodness, courage, and all the old-fashioned Christian virtues. He would have been recognised, perhaps, sooner or later, though I have my doubts; but that he has been recognised so soon is due to such love and duty as are the crown and glory of a good man’s life. The public gratitude is due to those who have vindicated him, and made impossible all mistakes as to the strength of his genius and the beauty of his character. His music was not for this generation, his dreams were not of this earth, his final consecration was not to be given here below.
| Vex not his ghost; oh, let him pass! He hates him much | |
| That would upon the rack of this rough world | |
| Stretch him out longer. |
Dobell’s character was above criticism. The nature of his work has been indicated, its quality will be variously estimated. Original and independent of formulæ to the verge of aggressiveness, he shared by nature, by no means through imitation, in some of the defects, occasional obscurity, involved conceits, and remoteness, of the seventeenth-century school which Dr. Johnson called metaphysical; but in loftiness of thought and richness of imagery his best pages have been surpassed by few, if any, of his contemporaries. His form is often faulty, but his life and writings together were in healthy protest against the subordination of form to matter that characterises much of the effeminate æstheticism of our age. Manliness in its highest attributes of courage and courtesy pervaded his career; his poetry is steeped in that keen atmosphere to which it is the aim of all enduring literature to raise our spirits.
His really poetical works (the “Roman” is merely fine rhetoric) are a succession of these contrasts,—splendid diction alternating with dull verbiage, true sublimity with outrageous extravagance or mere inanity. To Dobell it was all one. He was utterly incapable of discriminating between his good work and his bad. He depreciated his own “Keith of Ravelston,” a ballad unsurpassed in our literature for its weird suggestiveness, and in his later productions, fortunately few and far between, he exaggerated the obscurity and pretentiousness of the worst passages of “Balder.” In his “England in time of War,” more provokingly because more inexcusably unequal than “Balder,” he never seems to know when he is writing from the heart and when he is condescending to sentimental and sonorous claptrap. He saw no reason why he should not be the Shakespeare or the Dante of his age, and had no glimmering of the mental angularities and the external disadvantages which made such a pretence preposterous. In a word, scarcely any poet equally inspired has been equally insane. The redeeming feature in the man and the poet is magnanimity. By a native instinct he seeks the highest things. He works on a large scale: indeed, it may be almost said that the greater his theme the better he succeeds with it.
Nor do this charm, this grandeur, fail to reappear (always more or less closely accompanied by the faults just mentioned, and also by a kind of flatulent rant which is worse than any of them) both in Dobell’s war-songs, which may be said in a way to hand the torch on from Campbell to Mr. Kipling, and in his marvellously unequal blank verse, where the most excellent thought and phrase alternate with sheer balderdash—a pun which (it need hardly be said) was not spared by contemporary critics to the author of “Balder.”
Few poets are so uneven, perhaps hardly any poet capable of rising so high has ever sunk so low. Many passages are mere fustian, some are outrages against all taste; but others have a sublimity not often surpassed.
Notwithstanding Dobell’s glaring faults, it may be questioned if he had not a more genuine faculty than Bailey. Granting all that may be said about the thinness of the thought, and the triviality of the passion underlying so much inflated language, there remain passages of true lyrical power in which the writer approves himself an undoubted poet.
