21 August: Boreham on Sydney Dobell

A Forgotten Bard
Nearly a century ago, a young poet of extraordinary purity, sweetness and brilliance laid aside his pen for ever. He was scarcely more than a boy when he finished that last manuscript. He afterwards spent twenty years in search of the health that had pathetically eluded him; but he never again attempted to enrich the republic of letters. Sydney Dobell, the anniversary of whose death we mark tomorrow, stands as one of the most exquisite of the early Victorian poets. For splendour of conception and for grace of execution he has seldom been surpassed; and while his brief day lasted, he enjoyed an extraordinary vogue. In the days of the Crimean War, the publication of a new poem by Sydney Dobell represented one of the most refreshing thrills of London life.

Dobell's personal history is as romantic as any of his imaginings. His life story represents an idyll of innocence. As soon as he was born he was called Little Angel-face; and his delighted parents, worshipping every object that those baby fingers touched, set themselves at all costs to guard their treasure from every contaminating influence. Sent to no school or college or university, he was most carefully and most thoroughly educated by chosen tutors in the home. His father and mother trembled lest, in the rough and tumble of life among other boys, any taint should sully the perfect purity of Sydney's mind. No sinister shadow was ever to float across that virgin screen. Never was a child so sheltered, so protected, so completely isolated from the world and all its ways.

A Reflection Of Mediaeval Chivalry
In many respects the novel experiment was an unqualified success. The solitary boy gloried in the life of the fields and of the woods; he was never so happy as when climbing the hills and exploring the valleys of that English countryside. He learned the lore of flowers and grasses and birds; his soul became steeped in the secrets of Nature's most delicious solitudes. It was inevitable that a child so reared should be precocious, old-fashioned, abnormal. Moving so much in the society of his seniors, he matured prematurely. He talked as grown-up people talked, and behaved pretty much as they did. When he was ten, a little girl of his own age visited the home; and, as might have been expected, he fell violently in love with her. But it was no passing fancy. Five years afterwards, their minds remaining steadfast, the two became engaged; and five years later still, at the age of 20, they were married.

Dobell was in every way a striking and attractive personality. He would have been a model for a Grecian sculptor. People who passed him on the street turned to take a second glance at him. He looked for all the world like some Castilian knight, who had magically escaped from a volume of mediaeval romance. Tall, muscular, and athletic, he was a man of graceful carriage and elastic stride. Revelling in the open air, his complexion was sunburnt and weatherbeaten, whilst about his handsome face, with its deep blue eyes, there clustered a picturesque luxuriance of rich nut-brown hair. His fine features gave an irresistible impression of massiveness and princeliness; his whole appearance was arresting, magnetic, and imposing. Travel and intercourse with men swiftly broadened his mind and supplied in large measure the discipline that his severe isolation had denied him. He made distinguished friendships; proved himself worthy of them; and held them to the end. Browning and Tennyson, Mazzini and Ruskin, George Macdonald and Holman Hunt, Hugh Miller and Sir James Simpson, Thomas Carlyle and Charlotte Bronte were all of his circle, and in each of these cases his friendship was highly prized.

The Secret Of His Temporary Sway
Why, it may be asked, was Dobell's remarkable popularity so extremely ephemeral? The fact is that the poems that so delighted his own age were too essentially the offspring of that age. Dobell was naturally sensitive and impressionable. It chanced that the events of his young manhood were particularly absorbing and exciting. His most notable work was given to the world during the years that were marked by events like the charge of the Light Brigade, the heroism of Florence Nightingale, and the relief of Lucknow. Stupendous and epoch-making as these thrilling episodes appeared in the eyes of the generation that witnessed them, the historian, viewing them in more calm and just perspective, has declined to recognise them as incidents of epic significance. But by these events of second-rate magnitude Dobell was profoundly affected. He found it difficult, if not impossible, to keep cool amidst such soul-stirring sensations.

Then, too, it was Dobell's misfortune to fall in with a little coterie of brilliant men who were studiously cultivating what was called the Spasmodic School of Poetry. It was disfigured by languid pessimism, by a somewhat ridiculous affectation of mystery, and by a deadly absence of humour. It was anaemic, thin-blooded, listless and out of touch with reality. It had a hollow ring and it found its articulation in a phraseology that was as artificial as itself. Dobell's association with this school ruined him. It cramped his personality. It made an islander of a continental. It imprisoned in the stuffy dungeon of a narrow period a man made for high altitudes and open spaces. His fancy became fettered and his style stilted. If, today, we admire the nobility of his genius and the beauty of his imagery, we are forced to the conclusion that, had he torn himself free from the hampering meshes of this unfortunate entanglement, he could have soared to a throne among the immortals. His audacious imagination, his efflorescent diction, and his life long passion for simplicity would, in that case, have enriched our literature with classics that would have outshone and outlived anything produced by his more famous but less talented contemporaries.

F W Boreham

Image: Sydney Dobell