CHAPTER XIII DARK ROSALEEN “APOLLO has a class of might-have-beens whom he loves; poets bred in melancholy places, under disabilities; with thwarted growth and thinned voices. . . . The making of a name is too often like the making of a fortune: the more scrupulous contestants are 'Delicate spirits, pushed away In the hot press of the noonday.' Mangan's is just such a memory, captive and overborne. . One can think of no other, in the long disastrous annals of English literature, cursed with so monotonous a misery, so much hopelessness and stagnant grief." Thus, writing, be it remembered, primarily for an American audience, Louise Imogen Guiney in 1897 introduced the shadowy and elusive poet whose sorrowful life-story, so well-remembered in Ireland, was practically unknown in America except to those who had some ancestral link with ' hapless Innisfail.' As regards her "James Clarence Mangan: A Study," prefacing her selection of his poems,1 Mangan's biographer, Mr. D. J. O'Donaghue, is the best witness we can call: "Let me say at once," he wrote to her, " that all my expectations of the work were fully realised; I think it a fine book and a worthy tribute to Mangan. It is produced in a beautiful manner, and so far as your part 1 Lamson, Wolffe & Company, Norwood Press, U.S.A., 1897. John Lane, London. of the work is concerned I like it immensely. I think, too, that you have given the crème de la crème of Mangan's verse, and though I regret the absence of some favourites of mine, I would not dream of questioning your critical capacity in the matter. Your Introduction is quite admirable, luminous and appreciative without being gushing, and on the whole I think nothing better if as good has ever been written of Mangan. "There are errors, . . . and I send you on a separate sheet or two a few corrections which you may think well of using if (as is certain) a second edition is called for. In spite of these errors, I think you are astonishingly accurate, everything considered. Nearly everybody who has written about him has fallen into numerous mistakes.. "It would be almost impertinent in me to praise your critical power. I will only say I admire it very much, as much as your evident wide reading. Do not think me carping because I call attention to some errors. Some of them I fell into myself at an earlier stage, and I really write them down for your own private judgment. ... I would never dream of calling attention to them in a journal or otherwise publicly." The principle that it is unwise to point out the trifling faults of a work to an audience which would be apt not to realise its serious merits, is eminently sound when applied to literature in contradistinction from history or science. Literary criticism should be a summary and interpretation of the outstanding qualities of special writers: not, as it too often is, mere fault-finding, or a critic's mental gymnastic in putting himself between the subject and the reader. We hear on every side to-day that " art is self-expression"; but the noblest art, in literature as in life, may also be selfforgetfulness. The writer who loses consciousness of himself in his determination to do justice to the cause or individual he is expounding, will nearly always carry his readers with 1 Letter dated from Drogheda Lodge, Finglas, Co. Dublin, 10.7.97." Preserved, with the list of corrigenda, in Miss Guiney's own copy of her Mangan. him; and though he may reveal his own soul by the incidents and topics he selects, the human and literary value of his work comes from sympathy with the eternal elements which glimmer and gleam among perishable things. So, Louise Guiney concerned herself more to show Mangan's merits than to catalogue his failures, though a warning as to his limitations could not be omitted: much of his output, both verse and prose, was "stumbling, . . . diffuse, distraught," and he had also that fatal facility so apt to "carry a writer off his feet and wash him into the deep sea of slovenliness." ... "From his very first appearance in print, as a young boy, he displays as his essential characteristics, imagination, and the greatest verbal dexterity.... As an essayist, despite some fine flashes, he is not worth preserving. Nor can it be denied that the same element of restlessness and strain, a sort of alloy from the frightful poverty and degradation nigh it, gets at times into much of Mangan's poetic work. "He was poor, infirm, homeless, loveless; travel and adventures were cut off from him, . . . the cruel necessities of labor sapped his dreams from a boy; morbid fancies mastered him. . . . He is no subject for biography. Paul Verlaine is his only parallel, were it not that Mangan had no such intense moods of religious mysticism, and none of bestiality. 'No purer and more benignant spirit '—it is John Mitchel who speaks, -'ever alighted upon earth; no more abandoned 'wretch ever found earth a purgatory and a hell. There 'were, as I have said, two Mangans: one well-known to the Muses, the other to the police; one soared ' through the empyrean and sought the stars, the other 'lay too often in the gutters of Peter Street and Bride · Street. . . . "In his deadly struggle with the cold world he wore no defiant air and attitude; was always humble, affectionate, almost prayerful. He was never of the Satanic school, never devoted mankind to the infernal gods, nor cursed the sun.'. . . Worldly wisdom is not a gift left in Irish cradles. . . . It is his chief negative merit that he was duped and driven to the wall. Such weakness-rather than the 'push' which receives superstitious reverence,-is advanced civilisation, yet it must not be recommended in hornbooks." Those who knew Mangan knew him chiefly through his own poem " The Nameless One," which we must call to mind if we are to see the full bearing of these remarks. He tells how trampled, derided, hated, And worn by weakness, disease and wrong. With song which alway, sublime or vapid, Tell how this Nameless, condemned for years long Saw things that made him, with groans and tears, long And tell how now, amid wreck and sorrow, That no ray lights. And lives he still then? Yes! old and hoary At thirty-nine, from despair and woe, Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble, Even had he possessed riches, health, ease, renown, Mangan we may suspect was of those who are fated to be exiles on earth. His "translations" from Persian and other Eastern tongues (which tongues he did not know unless in dreams), are full of this melancholy. "The Karamanian Exile which Miss Guiney selects to open the section of "Original Poems ... purporting to be Translations from Oriental languages," though based on the visible woes of exile, palpitates also with that sorrow which is neither exclusively of the East nor of the West but throbs wherever the heart of man yearns for the serenity and happiness his mortal conditions deny him. "I see thee ever in my dreams, Karaman ! Thy hundred hills, thy thousand streams, As when thy gold-bright morning gleams, So thou loomest on my dreams, Karaman ! On all my dreams, my homesick dreams, And from dreams he drew inward sustenance. Shapes of pain and peril may appal me, Darkness and dismay may hover ever; But, cold world, I will not die thy slave." 1 Mangan and Poe "died, under almost identical circumstances of pain and mystery, in the same year," and in their careers both analogies and contrasts are to be found. After epitomising these, Louise Guiney comments, 'Poe was ever the artist; his imagination was not only sumptuous but steadfast; his utterances were 1" Enthusiasm," one of his lyrics. |