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 hand, 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 view 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 tedious, 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.
Among 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.