GEORGE DARLEY

It was Beddoes who gave this half-forgotten poet, his contemporary, the name of violence. Being conscious of the brief and unimportant pause of poetic inspiration during which they lived, Beddoes wrote a letter of dismay wondering whether it were to the sentimental L.E.L. or to the violent George Darley that the trust of English poetry should be committed. It was, as we now confess with peace of mind, to neither; and there is a lesson to be learned from the desperate question—to the effect that all is not lost because an interregnum befalls and the crown of poetry is visibly put by. Beddoes was in distress for his twenty years or so. The twenty years close up in the natural perspective, and the utterance of that anxiety sounds futile and uneasy, breaking in upon sounds of more moment.

George Darley’s violence, such as it was, had its way principally in a choice of words intended to retrieve the language from the Teutonism that began its fashion before he died in the middle of the century. He apparently did not hold the English language to be finally closed in, and in this he agreed with other and greater men who have used all their strength, at times with a single 83hand, to hold that door open. But perhaps Darley was not always careful enough of the difference between scholarly Latinisms and those whereof a poet in his haste might not stop to test the doubtful scholarship.

Apart, however, from the Latinisms, which are not many, there is with Darley a certain delight in quaintness which makes of Teutonic words a disagreeable kind of slang. ‘Streamy vales’, for example, is not a welcome phrase. Like to this is the prank of writing ‘bittern ooze’. The ambiguity makes the words even grotesque; for the poet is writing of a marsh; is he then making the word ‘bitter’ more ‘quaint’, or is he taking the name of a bird for an adjective? Either way he is trifling. But as George Darley died a disappointed man, and as his poetry had light and space in it, and there was lacking the perception of these in his readers at the time, it is rather his beauties than his faults that shall be dealt with here. Life, light, and distance—in poetry—seem to leave on the mind’s eye the impression of red, yellow, and blue, radiant less or more according as the life is less or more impassioned, the light celestial, and the space remote; though no red, not even red veiled by the blond and tender colours of humanity, shines in Darley’s verse, there is assuredly no dimness in his gold nor dullness in his azure. At the first page of Nepenthe the reader takes a larger and more liberal 84view of the world of the poet before him, reading this line on the daytime sun

High on his unpavilioned throne.

It is followed, unfortunately, by some commonplaces, but in itself it is fine. Less beautiful, but also a felicity for the visionary eye, is the phrase, ‘that huge-meadowed plain’. It is, at any rate, a word to sigh for in the narrow town and the narrow winter.

George Darley wrote of fairies—a dull subject, let us confess at last; and more than half of his drama of Sylvia, the May-Queen, is acted by fairies and fiends at war. But there are some happy fancies even in the prattle of fairy-queens to their courtiers, as where Morgana rallies her tender follower:

I’ve seen thee stand

Drowning amid the fields to save a daisy.

And again:

Thou once didst cherish

In thy fond breast a snowdrop dead with cold.

Darley was as resolute an Elizabethan as Beddoes, but while Beddoes darkened his skies for the drama of passions graced with trivial flowers blooming in an angry light, Darley addressed himself rather to the imitation of the humour and the prettiness. He copied the Shakespeare of the Midsummer Night’s Dream, and though the critics say that his rustics are 85tedious, it seems to me an unjust judgement. Granted the delight that Shakespeare finds in the derision of clowns as they blunder with words too long for their fortunes, and it is not fair to say that Darley is really a bore. His Andrea in the May-Queen makes no bad sport of that kind. Darley has the situation and the quality of the laughter from Shakespeare, but the phrase is of his own exceeding ingenuity; and when the transformed serving-man meets that dapper elf Nephon, there is some very fair success in the frolicking. ‘Where is this mighty small-spoken gentleman?’ asks Andrea (unluckily Darley did not know that the penultimate of this Italian name is long). ‘Hillo, Signor Nobody; at what point of the compass must I look, to be mannerly?’ The most charming thing in the play is this exquisite beginning of the song of a fairy who has lost the mortal lady in her care:

Where can my young beauty be

That I have not found her?

Out alas! this is not she,

With a shroud around her?

This is beautiful and ancient versification and rhythm. But Darley had never got free from the habit of anapaestic vulgarities, out of date with all he wrote; and immediately after that delicate verse he begins again to caper:

For the pride of the valley, the flower of the glen, and so forth.

86Among the phrases that give a flash to the verse is one, of graver value, that seems to recall something of Coventry Patmore’s ‘bright anger’. And Darley takes a flight about the world, in his happy mood and his foreboding, and there are rich lines in his landscape, such as these:

And mine ear rung with ocean’s roar,

And mine eye glistened with its blue.

With how much perception, how pliant a turn of thought, how instant a reflection, how delicate a sense of mood and habit Darley could play the seventeenth-century poet is proved by his famous lyric, It is not beauty I demand, with this among its stanzas:

Tell me not of your starry eyes,

Your lips that seem on roses fed,

Your breasts where Cupid tumbling lies,

Nor sleeps for kissing of his bed.

In the first edition of the Golden Treasury this poem, of then unknown authorship, was placed, carefully timed, between Wotton and Carew. It seems to have been withdrawn altogether when its writer was found to be of the nineteenth century.

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