A little above this is the Moot-Hall in the Front of the Middle-Row, on one side of which is one of the best-furnished Flesh-Shambles in the North of England: on the other the Wool-Market for Broad-Cloth which is the All in All.
There speaks the lover, the lover of what you see in the plate called ‘The Prospect of Leeds’ – two churches, a town hall like a German toy, a little river with a few sailing ships and a bridge, and perhaps two hundred houses trailing gently off into the fields where an artist sits on the grass.
What sort of life do topographers lead? We know the bicycle and the back bent by brasses, but if we want to know more we cannot do better than read Thoresby’s diary. For the times, with topographers hardly change. Born just before the Restoration, Thoresby’s period included the Popish Plot, the Revolution, the wars with France. The wars did affect him – they made the price of paper dear and delayed a little the publication of Ducatus Leodiensis, and at the time of the Revolution the rumour that the Irish were ravaging the country, spread by God knows what Orange agents, struck home in Leeds with a night alarm – ‘Horse and arms! Horse and arms! Beeston is burnt, and only some escaped to bring the doleful tidings!’ – a fine topographical lament. Yet Thoresby admits himself that he was ‘more immediately concerned’ that year with a little fire in his house which burnt his children’s coats hanging on a line. No, he had little interest in great events, in his trade or even the government of his local town. He paid a fine of £20 rather than be an alderman and his eventual ‘conversion’ from nonconformity was partly, one feels, due to the presence of good antiquarians on the bench of bishops, partly his desire simply to avoid trouble – for the sake of his studies. There is a charming passage in which he refers to a friend’s ‘little Paradise, his library’, but Thoresby himself was no bookworm. He would ride miles to hear a story, to copy an epitaph, to preserve from time. . . . Topographers are not selective – everyone who ever lived, any building which ever existed, contributes to the ideal city, so that the habit of collecting grows and Thoresby’s museum included such various things as a toothbrush from Mecca, the Crown of an Indian King, a large Prussian Boot, the hand and arm of quartered Montrose, just as his successors collected postage stamps, cigarette cards, even tram tickets. Pedigrees of all the leading families, ‘strange accidents’ like the ‘Stones that came out of the Hands and Feet of the Rev. and pious Mr Blackbeard, once Lecturer at Leedes’ – all were part of this city in the mind. Sometimes he arrived too late: we watch him peer in vain at an inscription: ‘Alexander Foster, who departed this life the 27th June, 167 . . . aetat 61:
Once to our liking growing daily fast,
But by Death’s . . . at the last.
The rest not legible.’
But one is glad he was in time to preserve from weather and lichen:
Under this Stone doe lye six children small
Of John Willington of the North-hall,
and this sad conceit:
Here near God’s Temple lies at rest
A Martyn in his Earthly Nest.
Alas! a topographer needs a topographer in turn to preserve what he has preserved. Thoresby’s book, of course, is there, but his collection left to a clerical son was sold, scattered, destroyed. Montrose’s arm found a temporary home with a Dr Burton, but against other items in the auctioneer’s catalogue there are grim notes. ‘Eggs – All broken’, ‘Serpents – Thrown away’, ‘Plants – all rotten and thrown on the dunghill’. And as for Leeds itself – well, we may question whether the dunghill, too, was not its proper destination, though Thoresby would not have thought so, glad of a chance to record another century of sooty life. He would have said, perhaps, with his plainness and simplicity and the smirk of satisfaction you see on his portrait, that one can fare further and fare worse, and it is true that his own family came to an abrupt end in far away Calcutta, in a worse Black Hole than his ideal city was ever to become.
1938
INSIDE OXFORD
THE 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.
I’ve been roaming! I’ve been roaming!
Where the meadow dew is sweet,
And like a queen I’m coming
With its pearls upon my feet.
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:
Didst thou not barter Science for a song?
Thy gown of learning for a sorry mantle?
and for a very occasional line where Darley is caught in a youthful pride and defiance which he lost too soon:
I would not change the temper of my blood
For that which stagnates in an idiot’s veins,
To gain the sad salvation of a fool.
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 se
veral 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.
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: