[In the following essay, Noyes contends that Dobson's technical merit as a poet is overrated, but his ability to evoke strong emotions is admirable and often overlooked.]

It was customary, at one time, to speak of the poems of Austin Dobson as if, within a strictly limited range, they were chiefly notable for their technical perfection. They were sometimes thought to be a little "precious," or even exotic—dainties for the literary epicure, exquisitely painted butterflies, emerging from cocoons of golden silk spun by Théodore de Banville, rather than creatures of a warm and breathing humanity. It was one of those generalisations which, because they are in superficial accord with certain obvious facts, obscure many of the more important characteristics of the work. Like so many of the easy judgments of the present day, it became a kind of label for use on all occasions, and it prevented any real analysis of the successive volumes as they appeared.

The danger of attaching labels prematurely is clear enough when one finds, in some of the older books on Victorian literature, that the phrase "Neo-Pre-Raphaelitism" was supposed to be a fairly comprehensive summary of the work of Austin Dobson. There is certainly much that needs revision in the labels that are still attached to him. The quality of his technique has been over-estimated; but, on the other hand, he is greatly under-estimated as a poet of the affections, of simple pleasures and kindly human emotions. Among the English poets he will occupy a permanent place, not unlike that of Charles Lamb among our writers of prose. But he will survive, like many other poets, because of his rare felicities, not because of the general excellence of his craftsmanship in verse. In many ways of course his style is faultless. He possesses nearly all those negative virtues which greater poets have often lacked. His sense of the right use of words, their associations and inner meanings, is unerring, but something more than this is required to make the words flow and sing with that "inevitability," as of a natural law, which marks the imperishable things. It was one of the greatest of lyrical poets who said that "there must be something in the mere progress and resonance of the words, some secret in the very motion and cadence of the lines, perceptible but indefinable," before we can say that the form is wedded to the spirit of poetry. When this happens there is no sign of effort, and yet not the slightest concession to the difficulties of the medium. The rebellious words are conquered and move into their places without any sign of shuffling or adjustment; and the poem unfolds as naturally as a flower, whether it be an elaborate orchid or a simple briar-rose. The result is often confused by the unintelligent with the product of a shallow "facility." They have nothing in common; for the harmony of the first is organic, and the pains and "dear delays" and difficulties of its creation are hidden only because they belonged to its maker and not to itself, and because they were conquered, not merely evaded. The irony is that when they are not conquered—when there is only a rough approximation to the thing aimed at—it is commonly supposed that the evidences of the artist's failure are proof of greater power. They show of course that he is not of the facile order; but they also show that he is not of those who wrestle with the resisting mass, and conquer it, so that the flawless beauty emerges; whether it be on the great scale with Ælig;schylus among the mountain peaks, or with the light-footed grace of Théodore de Banville, among his fairy-like rose-gardens and irised fountains:

Comme une floraison par le printemps hâtée,
Par l'effort de mon bras
Tu sortiras du bloc, O jeune Galatée!
Et tu me souriras !

The rhythmical law is one and the same through all the kinds of true poetry, as it is one and the same throughout nature; and, in service to it, the poet finds his freedom of the universe; so that even the most joyous and lighthearted of French poets could cry:

J'irai jusques au ciel, dans ses voûtes profondes,
Lui voler pour mes vers
Le rhythme qu'en dansant chantent en chœur les mondes,
Qui forment l'univers.

Whenever the lightest verse fulfils the musical law of its being and attains perfection of form, it enters into this universal "dance." Our English Parnassians thus achieved, more often than is recognised, a poetry that has a permanent value. This is true of Austin Dobson; but certain reservations must be made with regard to the nature both of his technique and of its content. Much, even of his best work, has been placed by criticism in the wrong category. The elimination of juvenilia, and the careful exercise of the negative virtues of his art have created the impression that he was much more of the Parnassien in verse than he actually was. There is an occasional stiffness, a slightly forced adjustment of the words to meet the exigencies of metre, which is never apparent in Théodore de Banville; and, in short, Austin Dobson is much more closely akin to the simpler poets whose songs "gushed out from the heart" than to the delicate artists with whom his critics have usually ranged him.

We may consider for instance one of his best poems—"A Revolutionary Relic":

'Tis the tale of grief and gladness
Told by sad St. Pierre of yore,
That in front of France's madness
Hangs a strange seductive sadness
Grown pathetic evermore.

The form is derivative of course, as that of all poems must be to a certain extent; but the point is that it is derived in its method of attack, in every cadence of its stanza, and in its very atmosphere, from nothing more exotic than what may be called the foreign ballads of Longfellow, in such verse as this from "Birds of Passage":

Like a print in books of fables
Or a model made for show,
With its pointed roofs and gables,
Dormer windows, scrolls and labels
Lay the city far below.

There is nothing derogatory in this. Nor would Austin Dobson himself have thought so. His own beautiful tributes to the absurdly depreciated poetry of Longfellow (tributes that are conveniently ignored by the literary snobbery of the hour, as are the similar tributes of Henley and Andrew Lang to the best work of the same poet of simple human affections) prove this abundantly. It is merely a question of establishing a fact.

As I read I marvel whether
In some pleasant old château,
Once they read this book together,
In the scented summer weather
With the shining Loire below.

Would any reader be quite certain, apart from the clue of the French words in this stanza, which of the two poets had written it? It happens of course to be Dobson. But even then:

Far above it, on the steep,
Ruined stands the old Château;
Nothing but the donjon-keep
Left for shelter and for show,

and we are back again with Longfellow and Oliver Basselin. There are many other passages that could be quoted, scores of them, to establish not only a superficial similarity in the handling of words and metres, but also a similarity of sentiment, even when the poem wears the fancy dress of the eighteenth century. Dobson explains the fancy dress clearly enough in the "Epilogue to Eighteenth Century Vignettes." It is as clear in "The Child Musician" as it is in the "Mosque of the Caliph" or the "Old Sedan Chair":

It was cushioned with silk, it was wadded with hair,
As the birds have discovered—that old Sedan chair.

And whether he turns to France, or the Orient, the explanation of the underlying similarity may be given in his own words:

We lay our story in the East.
Because 'tis Eastern? Not the least.
We place it there because we fear
To bring its parable too near.

And perhaps, occasionally, to avoid a too obvious wearing of the very human heart upon the sleeve. And Longfellow sometimes did precisely the same thing:

Haroun Alraschid, in the days
He went about his vagrant ways
And prowled at eve for good or bad
In lanes and alleys of Bagdad,
Once found, at edge of the bazaar
E'en where the poorest workers are . . .

But I have inverted the order. The poem should surely run thus:

One day, Haroun Al Raschid read
A book wherein the poet said
Where are the kings and where the rest
Of those who once the world possessed?
They're gone with all their pomp and show,
They're gone the way that thou shalt go ...
O thou who choosest for thy share
The world, and what the world calls fair,
Take all that it can give or lend
But know that death is at the end.

Haroun Al Raschid bowed his head;
Tears fell upon the page he read.

One of these passages is from Dobson; the other is from Longfellow. The reader may decide for himself.

Moreover,—
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers. ..

But again I fear I have inverted the order; for surely it was:

Seventeen hundred and thirty-nine
That was the date of this tale of mine;

For one on the ride of Revere was made;
But this is the Ballad of Beau Brocade.

Leaving those who like riddles to disentangle the various authors involved (with the assurance that several of these lines are by Longfellow and several by Austin Dobson), let us return, for a moment, to consider the technique of the "Revolutionary Relic." In the stanza which I quoted above, the line:

That in front of France's madness

is typical of one of Dobson's faults. His use of the word "France's," a form that is not used in good prose, because it is ugly (the armies of France, the history of France, being preferable to France's armies, or France's history)—is a concession exacted from him in verse by the difficulty of his medium. It is only a slight concession; but it is in these very slight matters that the little more and the little less make a world of difference in the technique of verse. Even if it were not ugly, it would be wrong, not because it is an unusual form, but because the metre compelled it, and though a thousand arguments can be adduced in its favour, the finer sense of the ear, and what is more important, the artistic conscience, knows that it was forced and it gives the line a stiffness, an awkwardness, a feeling that the poet is not in complete mastery of his instrument. It is all very well to talk of "facility" in verse; but the "facility" that shows no sign of effort is only achieved in one way, by the conquest of just these little difficulties; and the poets who write with the flowing freedom of:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

or with the more deliberate art of the "Eagle":

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.
He watches from his mountain walls
And, like a thunder-bolt, he falls,

show no signs of labour, either because they have conquered these difficulties, or because their mastery over their instrument is so complete that it has become a perfectly natural means of expression to them and they can forget all about it.

In the same "Revolutionary Relic," there are other minor faults. A "sadness grown pathetic" is very much the same thing as a "pathos grown sad." There is not enough differentiation of ideas to deserve the verb or the sentence. In short, it is padding to fill out the line. There is also in the fourteenth stanza the use of the older form "waileth" and "wheeleth," where it is useful to the metre, and again the modern form "halts" and "seems," in other stanzas, where it is more convenient. Precedents can be alleged, but it is a fault as it is done here. Even in the "Essays in Old French Poems" there are similar faults. There is too much reliance on that easier method of finding a feminine rhyme in present participles; and even then, if the sea-mews are crying in one line you may find that the waves are forced to be plying the reef in another. In the almost perfect "Love comes back to his vacant dwelling," there is just that awkwardness in the arrangement of the words of a subsequent line—"He makes as though in our arms repelling"—that robs it of its final supremacy. On the other hand there is the quite flawless:

Chicken-skin, delicate, white,
Painted by Carlo Vanloo,
Loves in a riot of light,
Roses and vaporous blue;
Hark to the dainty frou-frou!
Picture above, if you can,
Eyes that could melt as the dew,—
This was the Pompadour's fan!

Precise in every beat, absolutely natural in the order of the words, exquisitely true and unforced in its rhymes, and coming down on the first syllable of each line with the unerring pulse of the dancers' feet in a minuet, the poem—for it is a poem, not merely vers de société—mounts with an airy and half-smiling grace to a burden that suggests a gay and brightly-coloured world, vanishing at a waft of its painted daintiness:

Where is the Pompadour, too?
This was the Pompadour's fan.

It joins the universal dance of Théodore de Banville's famous ballades, and is therefore poetry.

But it is not in these experiments that Austin Dobson achieves his greatest successes.

"Yes; when the ways oppose," he begins his "Ars Victrix," in imitation of Gautier; and never did an opening line sound more like a translation by a somewhat stiff hand. Then, suddenly, a page is turned and we get the flowing melody of:

The ladies of St. James's!
They are so fine and fair,
You'd think a box of essences
Was broken in the air:
But Phyllida, my Phyllida!
The breath of heath and furze
When breezes blow at morning
Is not so fresh as hers.

The ladies of St. James's!
They're painted to the eyes.
Their white it stays for ever,
Their red it never dies:
But Phyllida, my Phyllida,
Her colour comes and goes.
It trembles to a lily,—
It wavers to a rose.

The ladies of St. James's!
You scarce can understand
The half of all their speeches,
Their phrases are so grand:
But Phyllida, my Phyllida!
Her shy and simple words
Are clear as after rain-drops
The music of the birds.

The lines are familiar enough as a piece of eighteenth century fancy dress; but it is not the fancy dress that gives them their warmth and life. There is a human heart beating beneath it in wistfulness and longing; and the quiet poignancy of the desire that all poets know for the true and simple things. The poem may be regarded quite justly as an invocation addressed to the poet's own Muse. If there be any masquerading in it it is merely the old device of hiding something that is deeply felt with a smile; and, if the reader cares to meet the poet half-way, he will find that these stanzas—quietly repeated—have the true ecstasy pulsing in them.

In fact, whenever Austin Dobson relies on his craftsmanship and his eighteenth century furniture, or his merely decorative effects, as in "The Masque of the Months," his work is comparatively a failure; and, whenever he deals with kindly and simple human beings, his work kindles with affection and he sometimes achieves a little masterpiece. There is nothing very much better of its kind in the language than "The Curé's Progress":

There's a little dispute with a merchant of fruit
Who is said to be heterodox,
That will ended be with a "Ma foi, oui!"
And a pinch from the Curé's box.

There is also a word that no one heard
To the furrier's daughter Lou;
And a pale cheek fed with a flickering red
And a "Bon Dieu garde M'sieii!"

But a grander way for the Sous Préfet
And a bow for Ma'am'selle Anne;
And a mock "off-hat" to the Notary's cat,
And a nod to the Sacristan:—

For ever through life the Curé goes
With a smile on his kind old face—
With his coat worn bare, and his straggling hair
And his green umbrella case.

Technically, it is not perfect; the inversion of "That will ended be" for the sake of the internal rhyme is a concession to a difficulty, not a conquest of it. But it is a marvellous little picture of a living human being; and the "mock off-hat" is as vividly and lightly touched in as anything of the kind in English poetry. It is poetry because almost every pulse of its metre is creative, and helps to reveal an unforgettable character on his own kindly pilgrimage through time. "The Child Musician" and "A Gentleman of the Old School" are two other examples of the same mastery; and, in the latter of these, there is once again that note of longing for a simplicity lost by the modern world:

We read—alas, how much we read!
The jumbled strifes of creed and creed
With endless controversies feed
Our groaning tables;
His books—and they sufficed him—were
Cotton's "Montaigne", "The Grave" of Blair,
A "Walton"—much the worse for wear—
And "Æsop's Fables."

One more—"The Bible." Not that he

Had searched its page as deep as we;
No sophistries could make him see
Its slender credit;
It may be that he could not count
The sires and sons to Jesse's fount—
He liked "The Sermon on the Mount"—
And more, he read it.

.....

Lie softly, Leisure! Doubtless you
With too serene a conscience drew
Your easy breath, and slumbered through
The gravest issue;
But we, to whom our age allows
Scarce space to wipe our weary brows,
Look down upon your narrow house,
Old friend, and miss you.

Of the poems written in the manner of Gay, it is enough to say here that they are faultless of their kind, and better than the original models. Taken all together, with what may be called the critical poems—including "The Fables," "The Prologues and Epilogues," "The Varia," the Memorial Verses, the beautiful tribute to Tennyson and the delightful little epistles to Mr. Edmund Gosse and others—they constitute perhaps the best Ars Poetica in English verse. They have an insight into the essentials of good writing and a mellow wisdom that might be of incalculable value to the present chaotic generation.

We are constantly being told by writers whose ignorance of their subject is only equalled by their conceit, that the young poets of to-day are "sick to death" of the set mechanical forms of the great Victorian poets. If the Victorian poets wrote in set mechanical forms then they were not "great." But the plain truth of the matter is that the forms of English poetry were expanded and extended in a thousand new directions during the Victorian period. More new metrical forms were invented by Browning and Swinburne alone than are to be counted in the whole range of preceding English poetry; whilst almost every lyric that Tennyson wrote, from his earliest juvenilia to "Crossing the Bar," had something in its cadence or movement that was not to be found in English poetry before him. This is also true of Christina Rossetti and a dozen other poets. The forms of verse were not nearly so "set" as they were when Greece and Rome expressed themselves in their hexameters and pentameters. No Victorian of importance was as limited in his metrical range as some of the most important poets of the Elizabethan, or indeed of any other period. It could almost be demonstrated that taken all together the Victorians invented and used more new rhythmical movements that all the poets of all former periods combined. Tennyson's Maud alone has a range of metrical invention and metrical freedom wider than that of all the poets combined in many preceding centuries. The reader who doubts it has only to open the volume and note the forms which are not to be found in earlier poets. Even in the academic Matthew Arnold there are many quite new rhythmical movements, exquisitely free in their musical law, like the "Songs of Callicles," or "Dover Beach," or "In Utrumque Paratus." The plain fact is that the modern "revolt" is not against "set forms," but against form itself—a very different matter—and all too often it obviously proceeds from the consciousness that the "rebel" cannot hope to compete with his predecessors unless the standards are lowered. It is a tendency that is manifest not only in literature, but in all the arts and throughout the whole of our civilisation, and it is time that it was met and answered. Curiously enough, one of the most obvious facts about the outstanding work of the "revolting" groups (there are others of course) is that, with one or two exceptions, it has been in forms that may justly be called "set"—the sonnet, the stanzas—used by Chaucer and William Morris, and sometimes quatrains that have been made a little easier to handle by the simple process of rhyming only the second and fourth lines, or by accepting various rough approximations to the end in view. The rest of the "revolt" is mere chaos. The revolt against form, in fact, forbids results in art. It is not a revolt against Victorianism, but a revolt against order and proportion and the laws of good writing in all ages. Worst of all, it is a revolt against the only principle that can lead to the really valuable new results—the principle of development, the natural evolution of a great tradition. The present generation is being confused by its present pastors—some of them merely ignorant guides who are striving to turn literature into a kind of walking race, in which the first duty is to be "abreast" of an age that has almost ceased to believe in anything but the material rewards for work badly done. The gospel naturally appeals to many of the young who desire a quick and easy road to such rewards; but those who utter the warning must not be regarded as the enemies of the young or apostles of reaction; and there could be hardly any friend more useful, more likely to help the young to a real appreciation and knowledge of literature than one who should say, "Give a certain portion of your days and nights to the study of the Ars Poetica in these poems of Austin Dobson. Do this one thing thoroughly, and with only a little readiness to learn, and you will then be at least better qualified to express your own opinions."

But this part of the work is primarily critical: and the essential poetry of Austin Dobson is usually to be found in the kind which I have indicated earlier.

On more than one occasion, however, the kinds were united, as when he filled an old French form with his own human pity and made one of his most perfect poems, a lyric touched with the light and consecration to which he laid no claim. It is time that criticism should claim it for him in such work as this:

In Angel-court the sunless air
Grows faint and sick; to left and right
The cowering houses shrink from sight
Huddled and hopeless, eyeless, bare.
Misnamed, you say? For surely rare
Must be the angel-shapes that light
In Angel-court.

Nay! the Eternities are there.

Death at the doorway stands to smite;
Life in its garrets leaps to flight;
And Love has climbed the crumbling stair
In Angel-court.

In the last five lines there are beauty, power of imagination and high poetry; and, in themselves, they would justify an affirmative answer to the question in the poem that ends his works—"In After Days."

This last poem has the diamond-like form mat makes for permanence. It is rounded and delicate and whole as a single drop of dew that can yet reflect the depth and glory of the sky in its own small lucid mirror. No competent reader can help feeling the poignancy of its regret for something that our literature is in danger of losing. There were realms of literature, once, and there are still (though they are surrounded by a thousand enemies) in which it would seem small praise to say of a man that he kept his pen from defilement. But I cannot help remembering the question asked by a critic in a leading journal with regard to the dullest, dirtiest and worst-written book that was ever printed and suppressed—"If this is not high art, what is?"

What is? It would be easy to give a more imposing answer; but it would be quite enough to point to the brief leave-taking of Austin Dobson and say, to begin with, and for the reasons I have given above, this:

In after days, when grasses high
O'er-top the stone where I shall lie,
Though ill or well the world adjust
My slender claim to honoured dust,
I shall not question or reply.

I shall not see the morning sky;
I shall not hear the night-wind sigh;
I shall be mute, as all men must
In after days.

But yet, now living, fain would I
That someone then should testify,
Saying, "He held his pen in trust
To Art, not serving shame or lust."
Will none? Then let my memory die
In after days!