One gloomy Thing indeed, who now
Lays in the dust his lordly brow,
Had might, a deep indignant sense,
Proud thoughts, and moving eloquence;
But oh! that high poetic strain
Which makes the heart shriek out again
With pleasure half mistook for pain;
That clayless spirit that doth soar
To some far empyrean shore
Beyond the chartered flight of mind,
Reckless, repressless, unconfined,
Springing from off the roofed sky
Into unceiled Infinity . . .
That strain, this spirit was not thine.
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:
Oh nymph! release me from this rich attire,
Take off this crown thy artful fingers wove;
And let the wild-rose linger on the brier
Its last sweet days, my love!
For me shalt thou, with thy nice-handed care,
Nought but the simplest wreath of myrtle twine,
Such too, high-pouring Hebe’s self must wear,
Serving my bower with wine.
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:
To thee, bright lady! whom all hearts confess
Their queen, as thou dost highly pace along,
Like the Night’s pale and lovely sultaness
Walking the wonder-silent stars among.
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:
Smile thou and say farewell! The bird of Peace,
Hope, Innocence and Love and Loveliness,
Thy sweet Egeria’s bird of birds doth pray
By the name best-belov’d thou’lt wend thy way
In pity of her pain. Though I know well
Thou woulds’t not harm me, I must tremble still;
My heart’s the home of fear; ah! turn thee then,
And leave me to my loneliness again.
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:
O was it fair:
Fair, kind or pitiful to one
Quite heart-subdued – all bravery done,
Coyness to deep devotion turned,
Yet pure the flame with which she burned, –
O was it fair that thou shoulds’t come,
Strong in this weakness, to my home,
And at my most defenceless hour,
Midnight, shoulds’t steal into my bower,
In thy triumphant beauty more
Fatal that night than e’er before?
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:
Over a bloomier land, untrod
By heavier foot than bird or bee
Lays on the grassy-bosomed sod,
I passed one day in reverie:
High on his unpavilioned throne
The heaven’s hot tyrant sat alone,
And like the fabled king of old
Was turning all he touched to gold.
The poem cannot be followed as a detailed plot. It remains in the mind as a succession of vivid images:
Sudden above my head I heard
The cl
iff-scream of the thunder-bird,
The rushing of his forest wings,
A hurricane when he swoops or springs,
And saw upon the darkening glade
Cloud-broad his sun-eclipsing shade.
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:
O fast her amber blood doth flow
From the heart wounded Incense Tree
Fast as earth’s deep embosomed woe
In silent rivulets to the sea!
Beauty may weep her fair first-born,
Perchance in as resplendent tears,
Such golden dewdrops bow the corn
When the stern sickleman appears.
But oh! such perfume to a bower
Never allured sweet-seeking bee,
As to sip fast that nectarous shower
A thirstier minstrel drew in me.
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.
In the caves of the deep – Hollo! Hollo! –
Lost Youth! – o’er and o’er fleeting billows!
Hollo! Hollo! – without all ruth! –
In the foam’s cold shroud! – Hollo! Hollo!
To his everlasting sleep! – Lost Youth!
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:
From Ind to Egypt thou art one,
Pyramidal Memphis to Tanjore,
From Ipsambul to Babylon
Reddening the waste suburban o’er;
From sandlocked Thebes to old Ellore,
Her caverned roof on columns high
Pitched, like a Giant Breed that bore
Headlong the mountain to the sky.
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:
There to lay me down at peace
In my own first nothingness.
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
THE 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.
It was the fashion among the Apostles to be Radical, a fashion less political than literary and metaphysical, connected in some recondite way with the reading of Charles and Arthur Tennyson’s poetry, with long talks in Highgate between Coleridge and John Sterling, when the old poet did most of the talking, starting, according to Hazlitt, from no premises and coming to no conclusions, crossing and recrossing the garden path, snuffling softly of Kant and infinitudes, embroiling poor Sterling for ever in the fog of theology. When politics were touched on by the Apostles it was in an amused and rather patronizing way. ‘’Twas a very pretty little revolution in Saxony,’ wrote Hallam in 1830, ‘and a respectable one at Brunswick’ (the dilettante tone has charm after the sweeping statements, the safe marble gestures, the self-importance of our own ‘thirties – ‘I stand with the People and Government of Spain’). Only in the rash Torrijos adventure did the Apostles come within measurable distance of civil war.
London in 1830 contained a small group of refugees who had been driven from Spain by the restored Bourbon, Ferdinand. Ferdinand after his long captivity in Bayonne had sworn to observe the Constitution. He broke his oath, dissolved the Cortes, and restored the Inquisition. After three years of civil war the French bayonets of the Duc d’Angoulême established him as absolute king. Foreign intervention again: it is difficult for the historian to feel moral indignation.
So in London the Spanish liberals gathered. ‘Daily in the cold spring air,’ wrote Carlyle, ‘under skies so unlike their own, you could see a group of fifty or a hundred stately tragic figures, in proud threadbare cloaks; perambulating, mostly with closed lips’ – a grotesque vision obtrudes of those other tragic figures who perambulated with open mouths – ‘the broad pavements of Euston Square and the regions about St Pancras new church.’ Their leader was Torrijos, a soldier and diplomat, the friend of Sterling’s parents, and soon therefore the friend of the literary and metaphysical Apostles. In Sterling’s rooms in Regent Street and radicals met Torrijos and talked. Sterling was twenty-four and Tennyson twenty-one.
The Apostles would probably have played no active part if it had not been for Sterling’s Irish cousin, Robert Boyd, a young man of a hasty and adventurous temper, who had thrown up his commission in the Army because of a fancied insult and now, with five thousand pounds in his pocket, planned to go privateering in the East. Torrijos needed capital and promised Boyd the command of a Spanish cavalry regiment on Ferdinand’s defeat. Even without the promise the idea of conquering a kingdom would have been enough for Boyd, whose ambition it was to live, like Conrad’s Captain Blunt, ‘by his sword’. A boat was bought in the Thames and secretly armed. Boyd and the Apostles were to sail it down the river at night to Deal and there take on b
oard Torrijos and fifty picked Spaniards. The excitement, perhaps the sudden intrusion of reality when the arms came on board, proved too much for Sterling, ‘Things are going on very well, but are very, even frightfully near’, he wrote in February 1830, and soon his health gave way and furnished him with an excuse to stay behind, saved him for a Bayswater curacy, for the essays on Revelation and Sin, for death at Ventnor. But he did not avoid all danger; the Spanish Ambassador got wind of the preparations, the river police were informed, and one night they appeared over the side and seized the ship in the King’s name. Sterling dropped into a wherry, while a policeman brandished a pistol and threatened to shoot, escaped to Deal and warned Torrijos. The Spaniards crossed to France, and still accompanied by Boyd and a few of the Apostles, made their way in small parties to Gibraltar.
Tennyson and Hallam were not with them – a Cambridge term intervened. But for the long vacation they had a part to play, not altogether without danger. While Torrijos waited at Gibraltar, money and dispatches had to be carried to other insurgents in the north of Spain. So Tennyson and Hallam travelled across the Pyrenees by diligence, passing Cauteretz on the way, which Tennyson remembered thirty-two years later in a gentle poem to the memory of his friend, and reached the rebels’ camp.
‘A wild bustling time we had of it,’ Hallam declared later. ‘I played my part as conspirator in a small way and made friends with two or three gallant men who have since been trying their luck with Valdes.’ One of these was the commander, Ojeda, who spoke to Tennyson of his wish ‘couper la gorge à tous les curés but added with his hand on his heart, ‘mais vous connaissez mon coeur.’ The two came back from the ‘ferment of minds and stir of events’ in the steamer Leeds from Bordeaux, and a young girl, who was travelling with her father and sister, paid particular attention to Hallam, ‘a very interesting delicate looking young man’. He read her one of Scott’s novels, and Tennyson listened in the background, wearing a large conspirator’s cape and a tall hat. They did not confide their story to her.
Collected Essays Page 24