Collected Essays (30 page)

1938

INSIDE OXFORD

T
HE
place lies there below you roughly in the shape of a cross – or a man pegged out on a table for examination. His legs lie up the Banbury and the Woodstock roads among the don’s wives and Ruskin villas; one arm goes out by the High and the other extends past the stations towards Botley which the Devil visited a few years ago; a thin neck stretches by Christ Church and Pembroke, and the poor head – that. I’m afraid, must lie – not unsuitably – in St Aldates among a jumble of old houses, mean streets and shops selling confectionery, second-hand boots and fishing tackle. Now for the operation. Make an incision: lay back a flap of the flesh and see what’s there – in the region of the breast – in a timeless Dunne-like eternity. There goes Professor Freeman, the man who made the Victorians Anglo-Saxon-conscious so that they called their dogs Wulfric and their sons Ethelbert (I have an old faded letter of his in which the ruling passion rather quaintly expresses itself: ‘The wives of priests and bishops are spoken of civilly in Domesday: that is to say they are entered without remark’); there he goes ‘repeating poetry to himself as he walked in the streets, and occasionally leaping into the air when the poem moved him to any enthusiasm’. Another flap is raised, and there is the austere face of the late Dr Farnell, as he tries ‘to stiffen our standard of living’, objecting to the café habit, ‘undergraduates of both sexes sitting there together indulging themselves with pleasant conversation and unnecessary and unmanly food’.

The compilers of this fascinating and very funny anthology
*8
have divided it into four parts – the Place, the Seniors, the Juniors, and Etcetera, with interludes of witty and often wise discussion, and the subdivisions which include such subjects as Visiting Oxford (Verlaine reading his poems in a room behind Blackwell’s shop watched by an anxious Fellow: Thackeray insulted by several bland illiterate dons), Crimes and Punishments (‘It is startling to realize that if, while passing through Oxford, or even Reading
[Ginnett
v.
Wittingham
, 16 Q.B.D. 761] for the first time, a citizen of York is knocked down by the negligent conduct of a member of the University, the former is deprived of all remedy and relief in the High Court of Justice’), Scandals, Famous Men, and Strange and Original Characters. In that rich section my own favourite is Dr Kettel, the seventeenth-century President of Trinity – ‘He did not care for the country revells because they tended to debauchery. Sayd he, at Garsington revell. Here is, Hey for Garsington! and Hey for Cuddesdon! and Hey Hockley! but here’s nobody cries, Hey for God Almighty!’ Trinity has a wealth of such characters, for Dr Kettel is followed by Dr Bathurst who was detected throwing stones at Balliol windows, and it is an encouraging thought that the Trinity tradition is admirably maintained to this day.

A review of so delightful a collection cannot fail to degenerate into an anthology of an anthology. As we would expect, Anthony Wood and Hearne are strongly represented, and I am grateful to the compilers for introducing me to the
Reminiscences
of the Rev. W. Tuckwell and to the anonymous contributor to the
Oxford Mail
(can it be one of the compilers?) who acts as our contemporary Aubrey. I am less grateful for the frequent quotations from George Cox’s dull poem
Red Coats and Black Gowns
, especially when no room is found for
Merton Walks.
May one hope that this collection may prove popular enough to justify many editions and additions, a section say for Ghosts – the Pembroke ghost (whom men cannot recognize as a ghost, but after seeing him – in the shape of a scout, a tutor, who knows? – they commit suicide), the Merton and the Balliol ghosts and the unknown inhabitants of 10 Holywell. Among Curiosities I miss the Devil’s signature at Queen’s, and there are more or less contemporary scandals and hoaxes which deserve to be collected as soon as they are safe from the law of libel: one may now record the bogus Prime Minister’s telephone call to the late Sir Herbert Warren at Magdalen offering him the Poet Laureateship, an appointment he immediately announced to his guests at dinner. And to the Strange and Original Characters I hope it may be possible to add that distinguished necromancer always to be seen in the company of his familiar who sometimes takes the shape of an undergraduate and sometimes that of a small black dog.
*9

From the distant past a few characters neglected by the compilers still clamour for recognition: the servant of Trinity (Trinity again) who kept a brothel, the Swiss barber called Le Maitre who burgled the Ashmolean and got away – temporarily – with a gold coin of the Emperor Otto, and Captain Nathaniel Ogle, R.N., who drove the first steam carriage through Oxford in 1832 accompanied by his Negro servant Xurary.

1938

[2]

GEORGE DARLEY

A
BOOK
yet remains to be written on the tragedy of those rare poets who have been ruined by their own lack of conceit. It is a curious psychological fact that men with interests almost entirely intellectual will suffer a sense of inferiority and shame from a purely physical defect, which will sometimes cancel their whole work. There are cases, naturally, where that shame has not been disastrous, but none the less it has been present. Byron was driven by his lame leg to a bitter isolation and to satire: from the calm, but somewhat too facile loveliness of ‘She walks in beauty like the night’ to the tortured medley of buffoonery and grandeur which he called
Don Juan.
Byron’s shame was our gain. Stevenson, however much he might sound the brazen trumpet of his heroics, was ashamed of his consumptive body. ‘Shall we never shed blood?’ he asked, only half-humorously, and he hoped that in the swords’ clash of
Kidnapped
, his readers would forget that one man, by no stretch of imagination, could ever put himself in the round house with Alan Breck. And yet, because he too was forced like Byron, though by more material circumstances, into isolation, we have gained a level controlled prose as likely to endure as that of Addison, and at least one great novel
Weir of Hermiston.

George Darley’s defect compared with that of Byron and that of Stevenson seems small and very ludicrous. He had a stutter, and perhaps its lack of any possibility of a romantic pose made it the harder to bear. He was a poet of infinite potentiality, and he spent his poetic life almost entirely on the writing of pretty songs and unactable plays. Now, more than a hundred years since his death, his work, and among most even his name, is forgotten. He is to be found occasionally in anthologies – Robert Bridges included a large number of extracts from his
Nepenthe in The Spirit of Man
– and to the general public he is known, if he is known at all, as the author of a charming song, a favourite of the Victorian drawing-rooms.

Darley was born in 1795 in Dublin of Irish parents, the eldest of a family of four sons and three daughters. His parents went from Ireland to the United States, when he was still a child, and left him at Springfield, Co. Dublin, in the care of his grandfather, with whom he remained until he was about ten years of age. The impediment in his speech was already with him and probably already exaggerated in a morbid and nervous mind. But past misery is easily transmuted into happiness, and later, looking back, he was very ready to find in those years, in what is known as the Garden of Ireland, joys which at the time he had not recognized.

When a child [he wrote] I thought myself miserable, but now see that by comparison I was happy, at least all the ‘sunshine of the breast’ I now enjoy seems a reflection of that in the dawn of life. I have been to
La belle France
and to
bella ltalia
, yet the brightest sun which ever shone upon me broke over Balleybetagh mountains.

Little of Darley’s early youth is known to us. On his parents’ return from America he joined them in Dublin, entered Trinity College there in 1815 and graduated in 1820. Science and mathematics had been his studies, and in his studies he had lived. Human intercourse then, as later, was less shut out from him by his stutter than by the morbid introspection into which it plunged him. It made him first shy and then bold with the exaggerated self-importance which is so often to be found in dwarfs. He recoiled and sprang. He was determined in those first days, when nothing had been tried and therefore nothing had yet failed, to make the world take notice of him and forget the stutter. And the world, in the person of passing acquaintances, would never have noticed the stutter without his own self-conscious underlining. He was beautiful in a delicate, somewhat Shellyan fashion, ‘tall and slight with the stoop of the student; delicate features slightly aquiline; eyes not large but very earnest, with often a far away expression; hair dark brown and waving’. There were times in those days when he completely forgot his impediment in excited conversation.

He had not been pre-eminently successful at Trinity College. Although he had a great talent for mathematics, his stutter had impeded him in at least one examination. No high academical post was open to him, and in any case a career of teaching was impossible. It was therefore with some sense, as well as some courage, that he flung himself in 1822 upon literary London, with his first volume of verse
The Errors of Ecstasie
. He was twenty-seven years old, but the majority of the poems must have been written years before, for they are completely devoid of merit. The lyrics are full of the conceits of roses and bees from which the future poet never freed himself. They are tuneful but seldom musical. The title poem is a long and very wearisome blank verse dialogue between a poet contemplating suicide and the moon. It is of interest for a few clearly autobiographical lines:

and for a very occasional line where Darley is caught in a youthful pride and defiance which he lost too soon:

When he wrote that, poor and halting though the blank verse might be, there was hope for Darley. Vitality and pride, two most necessary sources for poetry, were his ‘and at the rainbow’s foot lay surely gold’.

Literary London was not unkind to the new poet. A critic wrote of his book that it was

a work as well of intellect as of temperament, although his fancy has been inadequately controlled. . . . His poetry is to be blamed for the wildness of imagination, not the weakness of sensuality.

and the next year found him a regular contributor to the
London Magazine.
It was the time of the proprietorship of Taylor and Hessey, when the contributors were invited to meet one another at dinner once a month at the offices of the firm in Waterloo Place. Here he met De Quincey, Proctor, Talfourd, Clare, Hazlitt, Hood, whose finest poems, the
Ode to Autumn
and the sonnets on
Silence
and
Death
, appeared this very year in the magazine, Henry Cary, the translator of Dante, and Lamb. The two latter he was soon able to number among his few friends. There are occasional references to him in Lamb’s letters, and he seems to have been a regular visitor at Enfield, sometimes in the company of Cary, sometimes in that of Allan Cunningham.

But the shyness induced by the stutter stood in the way of his friendships. In a volume of tales.
The Labours of Idleness
, which he published in 1826 under the name of Guy Penseval, he gave a clear picture of his own self-consciousness. We can see him at Waterloo Place sitting in the background of the conversation, feeling himself neglected with a growing and unjust resentment, suddenly plunging into the conversation with the same asperity as characterized the dramatic criticism which he was now writing for the
London Magazine
under the pseudonym of John Lacy:

I always found myself so embarrassed in the presence of others, and everyone so embarrassed in mine – I was so perpetually infringing the rule of politeness, saying or doing awkward things, telling unpalatable truths, or giving heterodox opinions on matters long since established as proper, agreeable, becoming, and the contrary, by the common creed of the world; there was so much to offend and so little to conciliate in my manners, arrogant at one time, puling at another; dull when I should have been entertaining; loquacious when I should have been silent . . . that I quickly perceived obscurity was the sphere in which Nature had destined me to shine. . . . At first indeed there were several persons who liked, or seemed to like me, from a certain novelty of freshness in my manner, but as soon as that wore off they liked me no longer. I was ‘an odd being’ or ‘a young man of some genius but very singular’: something to fill up the gaps of tea-time conversation when the fineness of the evening and the beauty of the prospect had already been discussed by the party.

This feeling of inferiority, the idea that people only ‘seemed’ to like him, was no doubt enhanced by the London dinners, where Lamb and Hood set the key to a conversation which chiefly consisted in a quick succession of bad puns. And yet Darley had met with undeserved good fortune. He had established himself in literary London with one book of very mediocre verse and a volume of short stories, interspersed with lyrics. And
Sylvia
was growing in his head,
Sylvia
which was to set him upon the pinnacle of fame. The idea that he was carrying a masterpiece in his mind must have made the alternatively shy and aggressive poet almost insupportable. Beddoes wrote to Kelsall in 1824, after a visit to Mrs Shelley’s:

Darley is a tallish, slender, pale, light-eyebrowed, gentle-looking bald pate, in a brown suit and with a duo-decimo under his arm – stammering to a most provoking degree, so much so as to be almost inconversible – he is supposed to be writing a comedy or tragedy, or perhaps both in one.