ATTRACTIVE VOLUMES OF AUSTIN DOBSON
By David Hackbridge Johnson
They are attractive. Latest pickings
from the trestle tables of a well-known bookshop: two exquisites that just
about fit in the palms of the hands – well rather more modest than exquisite – we
are not talking the fairy books of Andrew Lang, or the blinding gold covers
Althea Gyles made for W.B. Yeats. Gold leaf on green – not by any means
unusual for Victorian books but always a winning combination – like blood and
custard livery for British Railway's coaches (official colour names: crimson
lake and cream) – and – are not the most beautiful stamps made more so by the
use of single or double-colour?
Both copies once belonged to somebody Chandler – the
first name is hard to read and the point after it suggests a diminutive
form. The inscription continues with the year, 1898. The publisher
is Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & co. Ltd. and both books have their ‘tree
of knowledge, tree of life' logo in gold.
Beyond
biblio-fetishism – what's inside? Actually this is poetry to be shared
aloud – they'll be room on the window seat for two or three, plus cat.
It's hard to resist such zest, such innocent humour, such cleverness. I
don't think Dobson is very Victorian – if he is it is by way of a peculiar
antiquarianism – Old-World Idylls is
a giveaway. Opening lines shunt the reader back many decades if not
centuries: This is how ‘A Gentleman of the Old School’ begins: ‘He lived
in that past Georgian day, / When men were less inclined to say / That time is
gold, and overlay / With toil their pleasure;'.[1]
This is undoubtedly a fabricated world,
the halcyon manner albeit deliciously poised. Urban landscapes are of the
Gothic kind: ‘It runs (so saith my Chronicler) / Across a smoky city;- / A
Babel filled with buzz and whir, / Huge, gloomy, black, and gritty; / Dark-louring
looks the hillside near, / Dark-yawning looks the valley,- / But here ʼtis always fresh and clear, / For here – is “Cupid's Alley.” '[2]
The antidote to urban grime is either a ludicrous surprise or a euphemism. ‘Huge’ on the beat shifts the rhythm to add
weight to the picture of massive edifices; ‘dark-louring’ and ‘dark-yawning’
are suitably doleful intonations.
The sing-song
of the Music Hall is never far away in Dobson, and sometimes we are actually in
the theatre: ‘ “Miss Peacock's call”, and who demurs? / Not I who write for
certain; / If praise be due one sure prefers / That some such face as fresh as
hers / Should come before the curtain.'[3] The rhyming is relentless and generative of
smiles, the poet's and ours.
Dobson is a
Francophile with many poems taking their cue from French authors including
Molière, Balzac, Jean de La Bruyère, and Arsène Houssaye. He favours the forms of the Rondeau and the
Villanelle as if echoing the works of Marot and Villon. And some of the poems, for instance, in the
section called ‘Proverbs in Porcelain’, are delightful little playlets, where,
as can be seen here from the first page of ‘A Song Out of Season’, truncation
is all:
Two and a bit pages later and it's all over, with Mr Starry-Skies as we might call him being duped into serenading a mischievous Abbé warbling in falsetto! If I had a dog I'd call it Bijou. Another playlet: who could resist the absurdity of the suitors of a princess turning out to be fish in the Monty Pythonesque ‘The Idyll of the Carp'.?[4] Dobson's needle eye is trained permanently on such little follies, vanities, and lunacies, piscatorial or otherwise.
For the French fancies of ‘Proverbs in Porcelain’
it's time to kick off the cat and any gooseberries in your life and take heed
of the poet's advice: ‘Assume that we are friends. Assume / A common taste for old costume, / Old
pictures,- books. Then dream us sitting,
/ Us two, in some soft lighted room.’[5]
Old-World Idylls has this image at the front of the book,
reproducing a Dobson bookplate:
All sorts of odd things deserve to be addressed in his poems: a sedan chair, an unknown bust, a mammoth tortoise, a stupid picture – mute victims that shrink before the onslaught. Wittier still is ‘The Squire at Vauxhall’,[7] which begins with a disquisition on the vagaries of taste, including some examples from Shakespeare, before introducing ‘Squire Homespun from Clod Hall’, whose journey illustrates the typical scenario of a countryman visiting the city. Eventually, after some adventures on the teeming London streets, he arrives at Vauxhall where ‘The Faustinetta, fair and showy, / Warbled an air from Arsinoë, / Playing her bosom and her eyes / As swans do when they agonize.' It's enough to wake Alexander Pope from slumber, if only that he bash an extra foot into Dobson's lines. The poet’s setting for the poem can be dated to the years 1705-1707 when Thomas Clayton’s opera, Arsino’e, Queen of Cyprus was performed for three consecutive seasons.
Just once in a
while pathos lays a hand on mirth. Hearts of stone might avoid poems like
Masefield's ‘The Daffodil Fields’ less a single reluctant tear squeezes out – they should avoid ‘A Revolutionary Relic'[8]
by Austin Dobson. One of his best poems about an object, and whereas in a
poem like ‘The Old Sedan Chair’, where he recounts the situations the addressed object
finds itself in, as if it was somehow a conscious participant, here, the book
containing the names of the supposed lovers, Savignac and Lucile, is the
springboard for an entire evocation of that fraught period in French history
when the old world of the romantic chateau is threatened by revolutionary
forces with their ‘shame and slaughter’. With a tremendous story of love
denied racing onwards, the mirage is brought to an end in a final verse: ‘Fancies
only! Naught the covers, / Nothing more
the leaves reveal, / Yet I love it for its lovers, / For the dream that round
it hovers / Of “Savignac” and “Lucile.” ʹ The reader has been swept along by the poet in
a remarkable and movingly evoked romance only to be brought back to the
battered book that can speak of nothing.
Here is the
image (I can decipher the surname of the artist only: Szymons) which prefaces
At the Sign of The Lyre:
Old-World Idylls
and At the Sign of The Lyre join my select
Dobson collection. This includes some Hugh Thomson illustrated volumes
which I refrain from showing less they overstimulate salivation. If anyone can
decipher in full Chandler and Szymons, I'd be grateful if they might get in
touch. Both books end with a reproduction of another Dobson
bookplate, whose text translates as ‘as much here as elsewhere'.
A poet here and there and caught on the wing if
you're lucky, before he's off, disappearing into far-away places, where
exquisite 18th century manners echo.
DHJ xii.2024