Sydney Dobell by Alice Meynell

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.