George Darley by Alice Meynell

It was Beddoes who gave this half-forgotten poet, his contemporary, the name of violence. Being conscious of the brief and unimportant pause of poetic inspiration during which they lived, Beddoes wrote a letter of dismay wondering whether it were to the sentimental L. E. L. or to the violent George Darley that the trust of English poetry should be committed. It was, as we now confess with peace of mind, to neither; and there is a lesson to be learned from the desperate question-to the effect that all is not lost because an interregnum befalls and the crown of poetry is visibly put by. Beddoes was in distress for his twenty years or so. The twenty years close up in the natural perspective, and the utterance of that anxiety sounds futile and uneasy, breaking in upon sounds of more moment.

George Darley's violence, such as it was, had its way principally in a choice of words intended to retrieve the language from the Teutonism that began its fashion before he died in the middle of the century. He apparently did not hold the English language to be finally closed in, and in this he agreed with other and greater men who have used all their strength, at times with a single hand, to hold that door open. But perhaps Darley was not always careful enough of the difference between scholarly Latinisms and those whereof a poet in his haste might not stop to test the doubtful scholarship.