Dobson's Proverbs in Porcelain

MR. AUSTIN DOBSON is more or less known in this country as a writer of vers de société,—that is to say, he is not known at all. A man’s grade should be fixed by his highest, not his lowest. That Mr. Dobson has been so unworthily labeled is somewhat his own fault; for on the title-page of his first volume he modestly designated his poems as vers de société, and the reviewers of his native island accepted him at his own valuation. But Mr. Dobson is something more than a maker of boudoir ballads: he is a young English poet with special gifts, a writer of winged lyrics. I say winged lyrics, to intimate that they fly far above the average verse of the English magazines; there are even very pretty lyrics which only crawl. He has been classed with Praed and Locker, but he has a greater mastery of rhythm than the one, a wider range than the other, and at his best he rises into an atmosphere which neither of these writers has frequently breathed.

Mr. Dobson has published two volumes of miscellaneous verse. The first collection is entitled Vignettes in Rhyme, and the second, now under consideration, takes its fanciful title from a cluster of rhymed proverbs in dramatic form, —a species of airy poem quite novel in English literature. The finest of these six little comedies are The Cap that Fits and Good-Night, Babette, though they all have point, wit, and a certain high-bred precision that is harder to describe than to like. I fancy, however, that the Proverbs in Porcelain, in spite of their idiomatic neatness, will be passed over as trifles, except by those readers who have been bewitched by such things as George Sand’s Un Bienfait n'est jamais perdu and De Musset’s Il faut qu'une porte soit ouverte ou fermée. On second thought, perhaps it is to some of the pieces in the Saynètes and Monologues, published by Tresse of Paris, that Mr. Dobson’s sketches bear the closer affinity. I find his work in this kind delightful, though these are not the poems that give him the rank as a poet to which I think him entitled. In the Elizabethan era he would have laid at Gloriana’s pointed shoe-tips that same Loyall Ballade of the Armada which, with its stiff archaic turns, seems so forlornly out of place in the modern typography of Mr. John C. Wilkins, of Castle Street, Chancery Lane; or, later, Mr. Dobson would have caused Waller and the other court poets to turn green with jealousy, for our singer has the grace of Suckling and the finish of Herrick, and is easily the master of both in metrical art.

I do not intend that wholly as praise. A man may be much too ingenious with his anapests and dactyls. It is difficult to write the pantoum, — an intricate Maylan arrangement of rhyme; it is also difficult to keep three balls in the air; but neither feat is likely to stir the spectator’s envy. (Why not object, then, to the Italian form of the sonnet, which is even more difficult than the pantoum? asks one. Because the sonnet is capable of an infinite variety of music, and has dignity. The pantoum lacks compass and is monotonous; it is like a tiresome old person who all the time repeats himself.) Mr. Dobson’s triolets, rondels, rondeaus, and other imitations of obsolete fashions of French verse are examples of his exceeding skill; but for my part, I confess I hold that even the lowest slope on Parnassus is too good a site for a gymnasium.

Mr. Dobson’s facility sometimes lures him into being merely artificial. The group of poems called A Case of Cameos is an instance in point. The poet audibly says to himself: I will write ten verses on the agate cameo, ten on the carnelian, ten on the sardonyx, and so on, until a certain number of carved gems is exhausted. I will do this, he says, and — what is worse — does it very cleverly. But no poem, not even a couplet really worth the writing, was ever written on so mechanical an impulse.

One would have to be a captious critic to find many serious flaws in Mr. Dobson’s graceful workmanship. Here and there he recalls the manner of other Writers, but never offensively. In trifles like Cupid’s Alley and Dora versus Rose, he displays a commendable appreciation of Mr. Locker’s delicate melody. The stanzaic form used in the prologue and epilogue to the Proverbs pleasantly suggests The Daisy of Tennyson and the quatrain of Omar Khayyám; but the strongest quality in all is the poet’s individuality: —

It is in such poems as The Idyl of the Carp, The Prayer of the Swine to Circe (a poem of subtile beauty), and To a Greek Girl that Mr. Dobson is thoroughly his best self. Though the Vignettes in Rhyme is not here in question, I must cite with the above-named pieces The Death of Procris, The SunDial, The Sick Man and the Birds, and The Story of Rosina. I copy the lines To a Greek Girl, not because they illustrate the rarest mood of the author, but because they come within the limits of quotation: —

TO A GREEK. GIRL.

(AFTER A WEEK OF LANDOR'S HELLENICS.)

This, to be sure, is not the kind of song men shout going to battle; but when young Agamemnon gets home from the wars and lies dreaming under the trees, with his helmet tumbled among the myrtles, he need not affect to scorn such light strains. But Mr. Dobson has soberer measures. There is a fine sonorous music, like martial sounds blown through metal, in some verses beginning, —

It is a lot of gray prodigals lamenting lost opportunity and begging for yesterday : —

a ballad quite in the manner of Villon. “Enter a Song singing” is the quaint stage direction now and then met with in old English masques. Many of Mr. Dobson’s lyrics seem the very personifications of songs singing themselves. The interludes in Good Night, Babette, for example: —

This loses somewhat by separation from the context. The half-mystical chant is indescribably effective in its proper place. A vein of pure pathos runs through several of Mr. Dobson’s briefer pieces, and makes us regret that he is so often content to be merely witty and elegant.

These three stanzas are very simple, natural, and touching: —

THE CRADLE.

With one more extract,—from Ars Victrix, an admirable paraphrase of the concluding poem in Gautier’s Émaux et Camées, — I commend Mr. Dobson and his book to the reader’s good graces: —

Théophile Gautier himself was not more thoroughly an artist than Mr. Dobson. It will be gathered from what has been said and quoted that he is not one of the deep organ-voices of England. He is a very fresh, polished, and graceful poet, whose right to a seat in the choir is as incontestable as that of the leading singer. All the same, I am afraid it will go hard with Mr. Dobson when he is dragged before those austere judges who always demand of the poetical culprit: Did you have a mighty Purpose? I hope Mr. Dobson will be Yankee enough to answer the question by asking another: What purpose had Keats in writing Hyperion, or The Eve of St. Agnes, or the Ode to a Grecian Vase? Of course that will not save Mr. Dobson.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich.