rhapsody of 'Nepenthe,' only later printed in full, is enough to show us. But Miss Mitford, when she roused the author to his grateful confessions, had not read it to the end, as she confessed to the world afterwards. Nor is any one else likely to fix his mind sufficiently on these bright motes in the air. Even 'Sylvia,' which has a kind of pretence at story-telling, baffles the attention. Only the few loveliest of the songs can be lingered over. For Darley was, as he said of himself, 'a day-dreamer of no ordinary extravagance, and was perpetually creating such labyrinths of thought around him that no wonder if he was sometimes lost in them.' 'Some of his compositions,' he says also, 'were less irregular, and, indeed, as works of fancy their novelty of conception and imagery may perhaps recommend them with those who have just as severe a contempt for meteors, and just as profound an admiration for paving-stones, as I wish them.' Yet it will surprise no one who reads 'Sylvia' that George Darley has been forgotten so soon, and that he made so little fame in his time. It is full of fancy, gaiety, and blithe singing; there are lyrics that echo Elizabethan airs with an almost deceptive music; the blank verse is continually dropping jewelled words by the way, and there is a strained antic quality in the motley prose, like a jangling of fools' bells. But there is no clear path through this fairy maze, this no man's land in which there are no laws, even of an inverted logic; nothing that happens matters, and we are hardly aware of what is happening. 'The benefit of a perfectly unrestricted design,' though it seemed to Darley to 'afford him the best chance of succeeding,' may be said rather to have left him with no chance whatever of success. Before abandoning the reins to one's caprice, it is well to know what instinct or sense of direction there is in the fantastic animal. Caprice is apt to turn in a ring, and come back to the startingplace in the end, which is much the case with 'Sylvia.' Before it is over, before it has even got to its best moment, in the delirious procession of the fairies, we are a little tired of the journey. The whole extravagance once over, we look back as on a confused dream, out of which we still remember some delicate, thin, festal music of flutes. I am not sure that Darley was not right, and most others wrong, in thinking that he had put his best, most living work into the two unactable plays of 'Thomas à Becket' and 'Ethelstan.' Incoherent, desultory, there are in them fine madnesses, dramatic moments, a flitting and aspiring energy, a coming and going of a strange, personal poetry. The queen's dwarf Dwerga, in 'Becket,' is, as he realised, 'the highest creation in the work.' 'I wrote it,' he says, 'with delight, ardour, and ease,' and there is a fine Middletonian grotesque in the infamous creature dieted on 'rich snails that slip My throttle down ere I well savour them; Most luscious mummy; bat's milk cheese; at times The blank verse has rich Elizabethan echoes in it, and can speak with this dignity, in the mouth of Becket: "T is reasonable, I do confess, to think that this fine essence, Grandeur of soul, should breathe itself throughout The mien and movements: every word should speak it, - like the pleased lion's murmur! Each tone, glance, posture, should be great with it. All levity of air, too buoyant cheer, The o'er familiar smile, salute, and chat Which sinks us to the low and common level, Should be dismissed, and giant-minded things Disclaim the pigmy natural to most men.' Yet the plays are the experiments of a lyrical poet, and must be read chiefly for the bravery of the writing. As a lyrical poet, Darley is most himself and at his best in 'Sylvia.' In most of his other songs (which have now and then a plaintive Irish colour cadence, like that used by him in more than one poem, in which he anticipates a masterpiece of a later writer) there is often an attempt to spin his web out of too thin a substance, which breaks in his hand. Everywhere there are little snatches, little flutterings of song, which are felt for a minute and then are gone. 'The Maiden's Grave' and 'Love's Devotion' are dainty elegies; 'Heroa' would have pleased Landor, and 'Robin's Cross' must please all. But the best lines are in lyrics made consciously after Elizabethan models, and they are rarely so good as these two almost supremely good ones: 'He who the Siren's hair would win Darley's good things are for the most part either scattered or broken. They could never be mended or brought together, and he is not likely to be remembered for more than these bright fragments. 1 JEREMIAH JOSEPH CALLANAN (1795-1829) 1 CALLANAN said of himself, in one of his most personal poems: 'I only awoke your wild harp from its slumber, And mingled once more with the voice of those fountains 'It is Callanan's distinction - a great one, though ignored Irish rhythm, has a combination of naïveté with imagination that is rarely to be found beyond the Celtic borders. Listen to this tune: "T is down by the lake where the wild wind fringes its sides, I think as at eve she wanders its mazes along The birds go to sleep by the sweet wild twist of her song.' It is that word 'twist' which drops the pinch of salt into the bowl. SIR THOMAS NOON TALFOURD (1795-1854) 1 1 'ION' is the work of a man who might well have been the friend of Lamb. It is, as he himself calls it, 'the phantom of a tragedy,' but it is a kindly and gentle shade, and it still makes pleasant reading, though it can never have lived on the stage with more than what came to it from Macready's 'extraordinary power of vivifying the frigid and familiarising the remote.' Frigid, though his own word, is not quite the word which describes that almost idyllic quality which, attractive in itself, is rather apart from the purpose of drama. Everywhere there is a sort of faint irrelevant eloquence, and what might well be a simple statement, that the headsman and his sword are ready, is thus rendered: 'Even now the solemn soldiers line the ground, The steel gleams on the altar, and the slave Talfourd came to the drama oddly, from Hannah More's 'Sacred Dramas,' through Addison's 'Cato.' What began so far away from us comes in the end to have a certain kinship with Browning's early drama, in a frank and manly pathos and sense of friendship. The poetry never gets quite beyond the state of poetical feeling. Talfourd seems unable to get 1 (1) Ion, 1836. (2) The Athenian Captive, 1838. (3) Glencoe. (4) The Castilian, 1853. over his surprise, that anything so 'feeble in its development' should have succeeded for its moment even on the stage, and reminds us that it was never really intended to be acted. 1 JOHN HAMILTON REYNOLDS (1796-1852) 1 It is as a friend, companion, and fellow worker of Keats that Reynolds is best remembered, though in his day he made a little place of his own as a satirist, in the unsigned 'antenatal Peter,' as Shelley called the brilliant parody of Wordsworth. It was reviewed by Keats in 'The Examiner,' and the review led to Shelley's 'Peter Bell the Third.' Its author said afterwards: 'Ah, which is the serious poem?' in order to answer: 'The Burlesque, by its having a meaning.' 'Peter Bell' was the radiant, gentlemanly mockery of a poet by a poet, itself a kind of homage and criticism in one. 'I am the mighty mental medlar, I am the lonely lyric pedlar, I am the goul of Alice Fell'; says the 'real Simon Pure.' Reynolds had a good technique in comic verse, and a poetical feeling which expresses without quite achieving itself in some of his sonnets and songs. But, as he said of himself, he 'had not the heart to rush at Fame'; or, as it has been said of him since, 'he was too light a weight for a grave age.' His early work was imitative, but with a boyish freedom. 'Safie,' dedicated to Byron, was full of Byronisms such as 'Despair is poison of the heart, It rankles in a feeling part.' 'The Eden of Imagination' is a pleasant dream of a paradise after Leigh Hunt. 1 (1) Safie, an Eastern Tale, 1814. (2) The Eden of Imagination, 1814. (3) The Naiad, 1816. (4) Peter Bell, 1819. (5) The Fancy, 1820. (6) Odes and Addresses to Celebrated Persons (five by Reynolds and the rest by Hood), 1825. (7) The Garden of Florence, 1831. |