Collected Essays (31 page)

The filibustering medical poet from the sea coast of Bohemia was not likely to find Darley attractive, and in 1826 he wrote to Proctor from Hanover a little impatiently: ‘Is Darley delivered yet? I hope he’s not a mountain.’

The next year
Sylvia
appeared, a pretty fairy comedy – as Miss Mitford said – ‘something between
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and
The Faithful Shepherdess
’. Miss Mitford was charmed by it. So was the future Mrs Browning, who found it ‘a beautiful pastoral’. Lamb thought it ‘a very poetical poem’ and was pleased with the stage directions in verse. Beddoes, if he ever read it, remained discreetly silent, as silent as the public. Yet the play is very readable, and at one point shows a little of the swing and power which Darley was later to display in
Nepenthe.
In the penultimate scene, the stage directions, which have been growing looser and looser in texture, are suddenly abandoned for a vivid comparison between Byron and Milton:

But the ears of the public were as firmly closed to the occasional beauty as to the rather imitative prettiness of the whole. The mountain had brought forth its mouse.

Darley was not a man with the courage to stand against silence. Attack might have made him aggressive, silence only made him question his own powers, the most fatal act an artist can commit. He published no other poetry for public circulation until 1840, when his long and tedious play
Thomas à Becket
, showing the influence of Sir Henry Taylor, appeared, followed the next year by a still duller play,
Ethelstan
. In writing to Proctor about the former play, he gave rein to the doubt which had been haunting him:

I am indeed suspicious, not of you but myself; most sceptical about my right to be called ‘poet’, and therefore it is I desire confirmation of it from others. Why have a score of years not established my title with the world? Why did not
Sylvia
, with all its faults, ten years since? It ranked me among the small poets. I had as soon be ranked among the piping bullfinches.

Sylvia’s
failure drove him back to science. In the next few years he published a series of volumes on elementary mathematics,
A System of Popular Geometry, A System of Popular Trigonometry, Familiar Astronomy
, and
The Geometrical Companion
, several of which became popular. Indeed from this time on he was linked finally with mathematics. Carlyle spoke of him as:

Darley (George) from Dublin, mathematician, considerable actually, and also poet; an amiable, modest, veracious, and intelligent man – much loved here though he stammered dreadfully.

Sir F. H. Doyle wrote of him as ‘a man of true genius, and not of poetical genius alone, for he distinguished himself also as a mathematician and a man of science’, and Allan Cunningham in
The Athenaeum
called him ‘a true poet and excellent mathematician’. Darley himself, in a letter to Cary, wrote:

I did not mean Mathematics inspired poetry but only that the Science was absolutely necessary for such an extravagates as I am. Only for this cooling study I should be out of my reason probably – like poor Lee’s hero ‘knock out all the start’ and die like a mad dog foaming.

But the lyrics that Darley was writing, and occasionally publishing in the
London
and the
Athenaeum
to which he began to contribute a series of letters from abroad on foreign art, and his usual truculent dramatic criticism, show little of the fevered turmoil of mind at which the letter to Cary hints. That turmoil was to burst out once, and once only, unforgettably in
Nepenthe.
Now, as though his grip upon himself grew, as he became more and more conscious of the repressed, thwarted instincts within himself, the best of his lyrics show a calm, though sometimes complaining, restraint:

When his grip relaxed, it was not yet into ungoverned imagination, but into pretty and cloying fancies, which sometimes break into a faint beauty of metaphor, as in the opening to his conventional and uninspired sonnet to Gloriana:

But though it was his loneliness which caused his failure, it was loneliness that inspired some of his best lyrics. No one can contend that these short poems approach very close to greatness, but they are at their best extremely charming minor poetry.
The Dove’s Loneliness
masters a music and rhythm which seem to lie just outside analysis, and its dying close might have been written by Mr de la Mare:

Here are many of Mr de la Mare’s technical artifices, the half rhymes – Peace and Loveliness, well and still – the fondness for the letter ‘I’ in conveying the sense of uncertain and undefined longing, the alliteration of words, as well as letters – Love and Loveliness. Mr de la Mare has been compared with Keats and Blake and Christina Rossetti. It is strange that no one has noted the affinity with Darley. The resemblance does not lie in one solitary poem, but is continually recurring:

But it is with the extraordinary
Nepenthe
that George Darley will live or die. A few copies of the poem were printed for private circulation in 1835, as Miss Mitford wrote,

with the most imperfect and broken types, upon a coarse, discoloured paper, like that in which a country shop-keeper puts up his tea, with two dusky leaves of a still dingier hue, at least a size too small, for cover, and garnished at top and bottom with a running margin in his own writing.

It was not reprinted until 1897.

Nepenthe
is one of the most remarkable poems that the nineteenth century produced. It was no wonder that Miss Mitford, before this wild medley of Shelley, Milton, and Keats, made a single whole by the feverish personality of Darley himself, wrote that ‘there is an intoxication about it that turns one’s brain’. Darley himself in a letter to Chorley gives a much needed explanation of its theme:

to show the folly of discontent with the natural tone of human life. Canto I attempts to paint the ill-effects of over-joy; Canto II those of excessive melancholy. Part of the latter object remains to be worked out in Canto III, which would otherwise show – if I could ever find confidence, and health and leisure to finish it – that contentment with the mingled cup of humanity is the true ‘Nepenthe’.

But Darley, perhaps because he never found that Nepenthe, left the poem a fragment.

The poem opens with the same speed, the same magical rush of wings, on which it takes its whole course of 1600 odd lines:

The poem cannot be followed as a detailed plot. It remains in the mind as a succession of vivid images:

of beautiful episodes – the death of the phoenix, with its lovely lyric
O Blest Unfabled Incense Tree
, which has found a place in many anthologies, and the less known but no less lovely:

Then follow episodes drawn too closely from Keats, bands of bacchantes and nymphs, who dance with too self-conscious a flow of drapery. But soon the reader is whirled again over a changing panorama of sea and land, India, Petra, Palmyra, Lebanon, Ionia, the Dardanelles, sees from above the broken body of Icarus tossed backwards and forwards upon the reefs, sees Orpheus torn by the Furies and in a last moment of frenzy the two deaths are mingled and made his own, in the sound of the waves that beat upon Icarus, the sound of the Furies’ voices calling to the hunt.

The second canto is less varied in note and less varied in sense. Darley falters a little on his long flight, but there is still much to admire:

When it is remembered that this poem was written after Shelley’s death, when the most noted poets, with the exception of Wordsworth and Coleridge, were Hood, ‘Barry Cornwall’, Joanna Baillie, and Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, it is easy to realize something of the consternation with which it was greeted by Miss Mitford. None of Darley’s friends, to whom the poem was sent, seems to have suggested a public printing. They were bewildered, a little stunned, perhaps inclined to laugh. Even Miss Mitford, who gave the hungry poet some measured praise, failed to read his poem to the end. Perhaps Darley himself was bewildered by this one flash of genius, this loud and boisterous changeling of his loneliness. The last lines of the poem express a wish to leave ‘this busy broil’ for his own accustomed clime:

Certainly his genius seems to have died at the moment of its first complete expression. The body of the poet lived on for another ten years, produced the two monumental plays, wandered about the Continent, wrote charming and growingly despondent letters, as the ‘pains, aches, and petty tortures’ of his ill health increased, to some pretty cousins in Ireland, and died at last from an unromantic decline in London on 23 November 1846, still uncertain and doubting of his own powers.

Am I really a poet? was the question which always haunted him.

You may ask could I not sustain myself on the strength of my own approbation? But it might be only my vanity, not my genius, that was strong. . . . Have not I too, had some, however few, approvers? Why yes, but their chorus in my praise was as small as the voice of my conscience, and, like it, served for little else than to keep me uneasy.

‘Seven long years,’ he had written to Miss Mitford, in a letter, ‘startling to receive . . . and terrible to answer’, ‘have I lived on a saying of Coleridge’s that he sometimes liked to take up
Sylvia.
’

1929

THE APOSTLES INTERVENE

T
HE
Victorians were sometimes less high-minded than ourselves. The publication of a little booklet on the Spanish Civil War called
Authors Take Sides
has reminded me of an earlier group of English writers who intervened in Spain a hundred years ago. They were – questionably – more romantic; they were certainly less melodramatic: they were a good deal wiser. ‘With all my anger and love, I am for the People of Republican Spain’ – that is not the kind of remark that anyone with a sense of the ludicrous should make on this side of the Channel. Alfred Tennyson did at least cross the Pyrenees, though his motives, to hysterical partisans like these, may appear suspect: there is every reason to suppose that he went for the fun of the thing – fun which nearly brought Hallam and himself before a firing squad as it did the unfortunate and quite unserious-minded Boyd. He doesn’t in later years seem to have wished to recall the adventure, and only a few lines in the official life of Tennyson connect him and his Cambridge club, the Apostles, with the conspiracy of General Torrijos and the Spanish exiles.