Complete Works of James Joyce
Page 254
The literary movement of ‘42 dates from the establishment of the separatist newspaper The Nation, founded by the three leaders Thomas Davis, John Blake Dillon (father of the former leader of the Irish parliamentary party)
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of the middle class, and after a childhood passed in the midst of domestic cruelties, misfortunes, and misery, he became a clerk in a third-rate notary’s office. He had always been a child of quiet and unresponsive nature, secretly given to the study of various languages, retiring, silent, preoccupied with religious matters, without friends or acquaintances. When he began to write, he immediately attracted the attention of the cultured, who recognized in him an exalted lyrical music and a burning idealism that revealed themselves in rhythms of extraordinary and unpremeditated beauty, to be found, perhaps, nowhere else in the range of English literature except in the inspired songs of Shelley. Thanks to the influence of some literary men, he obtained a position as assistant in the great library of Trinity College, Dublin, a rich treasure of books three times as large as the Victor Emmanuel Library in Rome, and the place where such ancient Irish books as The Book of the Dun Cow, The Yellow Book of Lecan (a famous legal treatise, the work of the learned king Cormac the Magnificent, who was called the Irish Solomon) and The Book of Kells are kept, books that date back to the first century of the Christian era, and in the art of miniature are as old as the Chinese. There it was that his biographer and friend Mitchel saw him for the first time, and in the preface to the poet’s works, he describes the impression made on him by this thin little man with the waxen countenance and the pale hair, who was sitting on the top of a ladder with his legs crossed, deciphering a huge, dusty volume in the dim light.
In this library Mangan passed his days in study and became a competent linguist. He knew well the Italian, Spanish, French and German languages and literatures, as well as those of England and Ireland, and it appears that he had some knowledge of oriental languages, probably some Sanskrit and Arabic. From time to time he emerged from that studious quiet to contribute some poems to the revolutionary newspaper, but he took little interest in the nightly meetings of the party. He passed his nights far away. His dwelling was a dark and dingy room in the old city, a quarter of Dublin that even today has the significant name ‘The Liberties’. His nights were so many Stations of the Cross among the disreputable dives of ‘The Liberties’, where he must have made a very strange figure in the midst of the choice flower of the city’s low-life — petty thieves, bandits, fugitives, pimps and inexpensive harlots. It is strange to say (but it is the consensus of opinion among his countrymen, who are always ready to testify in such matters) that Mangan had nothing but purely formal intercourse with this underworld. He drank little, but his health was so weakened that drinking produced an extraordinary effect on him. The death mask that is left to us shows a refined, almost aristocratic face, in whose delicate lines it is impossible to discover anything but melancholy and great weariness.
I understand that pathologists deny the possibility of combining the pleasures of alcohol with those of opium, and it seems that Mangan soon became convinced of this fact, because he began to take narcotic drugs immoderately. Mitchel tells us that toward the end of his life Mangan looked like a living skeleton. His face was fleshless, barely covered with a skin as transparent as fine China. His body was gaunt, his eyes, behind whose infrequent glimmerings seemed to be hidden the horrible and voluptuous memories of his visions, were large, fixed, and vacant, his voice slow, weak, and sepulchral. He descended the last steps toward the grave with frightening rapidity. He became mute and ragged. He ate hardly enough to keep body and soul together, until one day he collapsed suddenly while he was walking in the street. When he was carried to the hospital, a few coins and a worn book of German poetry were found in his pockets. When he died, his miserable body made the attendants shudder, and some charitable friends paid the cost of his sordid burial.
So lived and died the man that I consider the most significant poet of the modern Celtic world, and one of the most inspired singers that ever used the lyric form in any country. It is too early, I think, to assert that he must live forever in the drab fields of oblivion, but I am firmly convinced that if he finally emerges into the posthumous glory to which he has a right, it will not be by the help of any of his countrymen. Mangan will be accepted by the Irish as their national poet on the day when the conflict will be decided between my native land and the foreign powers — Anglo- Saxon and Roman Catholic, and a new civilization will arise, either indigenous or completely foreign. Until that time, he will be forgotten or remembered rarely on holidays as
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The question that Wagner put into the mouth of the innocent Parsifal must come to mind when we read from time to time certain English criticism, due for the most part to the influence of the blind and bitter spirit of Calvinism. It is easy to explain these critics when they deal with a powerful and original genius, because the appearance of such a genius is always a signal for all the corrupt and vested interests to join together in defence of the oldorder. For instance, anyone who has understood the destructive and fiercely self-centred tendency of all of Henrik Ibsen’s works will not be astonished to hear the most influential critics in London inveighing against the playwright on the morning after one of Ibsen’s first nights, calling him (I quote the exact words of the deceased critic of the Daily Telegraph) a filthy, muck-ferreting dog. But the case in which the poor condemned man is some more or less innocuous poet whose fault is that of not having been able to adhere scrupulously to the cult of respectability is less explainable. And so it happens that when Mangan’s name is mentioned in his native land (and I must admit that he is sometimes spoken of in literary circles) the Irish lament that such poetic talent was found joined in him to such licence, and they are naively surprised to find evidence of the poetic faculty in a man whose vices were exotic and whose patriotism was not very ardent.
Those who have written about him have been scrupulous in holding the balance between the drunkard and the opium-eater, and have taken great pains to determine whether learning or imposture was hidden behind such phrases as ‘translated from the Ottoman’, ‘translated from the Coptic’; and save for this poor remembrance, Mangan has been a stranger in his native land, a rare and bizarre figure in the streets, where he is seen going sadly and alone, like one who does penance for some ancient sin. Surely life, which Novalis has called a malady of the spirit, is a heavy penance for Mangan, for him who has, perhaps, forgotten the sin that laid it on him, an inheritance so much the more sorrowful, too, because of the delicate artist in him who reads so well the lines of brutality and of weakness in the faces of men that look at him with hate and scorn. In the short biographical sketch that he has left us, he speaks only of his early life, his infancy and childhood, and tells us that as a child he knew nothing but sordid misery and coarseness, that his acquaintances defiled his person with theirhateful venom, that his father was a human rattlesnake. In these violent assertions we recognize the effects of the oriental drug, but nevertheless, those who think that his story is only the figment of a disordered brain have never known, or have forgotten what keen pain contact with gross natures inflicts on a sensitive boy. His sufferings drove him to become a hermit, and in fact he lived the greater part of his life almost in a dream, in that sanctuary of the mind where for many centuries the sad and the wise have elected to be. When a friend remarked to him that the tale mentioned above was wildly exaggerated and partly false, Mangan answered, ‘Maybe I dreamed it.’ The world has evidently become somewhat unreal for him, and not very significant.
What, then, will become of those dreams, which, for every young and simple heart are garbed in such dear reality? One whose nature is so sensitive cannot forget his dreams in a secure and strenuous life. He doubts them for the first time and rejects them, but when he hears someone deride and curse them, he would acknowledge them proudly; and where sensitivity has induced weakness, or,
as with Mangan, refined an innate weakness, would even compromise with the world to win at least the favour of silence, as for something too frail to bear a violent disdain, for that desire of the heart so cynically derided, that cruelly abused idea. His manner is such that none can say whether it is pride or humility that looks out of his vague face, which seems to live only in the clear and shining eyes, and in the fair and silken hair, of which he is a little vain. This reserve is not without dangers, and in the end it is only his excesses that save him from indifference. There is some talk of an intimate relation between Mangan and a pupil of his to whom he gave instruction in German, and later, it seems, he took part in a love-comedy of three, but if he is reserved with men, he is timid with women, and he is too self- conscious, too critical, knows too little of the flattering lie ever to be a gallant. In his strange dress — - the high conical hat, the baggy trousers three times too big for his little legs, and the old umbrella shaped like a torch — we can see an almost comical expression of his diffidence. The learning of many lands goes with him always, eastern tales and the remembrance of curiously printed medieval books which have rapt him out of his time, gathered day by day and woven into a fabric. He knows twenty languages, more or less, and sometimes makes a liberal show of them, and has read in many literatures, crossing how many seas, even penetrating into the land of Peristan, which is found in no atlas. He is very much interested in the life of the seeress of Prevorst, and in all the phenomena of the middle nature, and here, where most of all the sweetness and resoluteness of soul have power, he seems to seek in a fictitious world, but how different from that in which Watteau (in Pater’s happy phrase) may have sought, both with a certain characteristic inconstancy, what is found there in no satisfying measure or not at all.
His writings, which have never been collected in a definitive edition, are completely without order and often without thought. His essays in prose are perhaps interesting on the first reading, but, in truth, they are insipid attempts. The style is conceited, in the worst sense of the word, strained, and banal, the subject trivial and inflated, the kind of prose, in fact, in which the bits of local news are written in a bad rural newspaper. It must be remembered that Mangan wrote without a native literary tradition, and wrote for a public that was interested only in the events of the day, and insisted that the only task of the poet was to illustrate these events. He was unable to revise his work, except in unusual cases, but, aside from the so-called humorous burlesques, and the occasional poems, which are obvious and unpolished, the best part of his work makes a genuine appeal; because it was conceived in the imagination, which he himself calls, I think, the mother of things, whose dream we are, who images us to herself, and to us, and images herself in us, that power before whose breath the mind in creation becomes (to use Shelley’s phrase) a fading coal. Though in that which he has written best the presence of alien emotions is often felt, the presence of an imaginative personality reflecting the light of imaginative beauty is felt even more vividly. East and West meet in that personality (we now know how), images interweave there like soft luminous scarves, the words shine and ring like the links in a coat of mail, and whether he sings of Ireland or of Istamboul, his prayer is always the same, that peace may come again to her who has lost it, the pearl of his soul, as he calls her, Ameen.
This figure which he adores recalls the spiritual yearnings and the imaginary loves of the Middle Ages, and Mangan has placed his lady in a world full of melody, of lights and perfumes, a world that grows fatally to frame every face that the eyes of a poet have gazed on with love. There is only one chivalrous idea, only one male devotion, that lights up the faces of Vittoria Colonna, Laura, and Beatrice, just as the bitter disillusion and the self-disdain that end the chapter are one and the same. But the world in which Mangan wishes his lady to dwell is different from the marble temple built by Buonarotti, and from the peaceful oriflammel of the Florentine theologian. It is a wild world, a world of night in the orient. The mental activity that comes from opium has scattered this world of magnificent and terrible images, and all the orient that the poet recreated in his flaming dream, which is the paradise of the opium-eater, pulsates in these pages in Apocalyptic phrases and similes and landscapes. He speaks of the moon that languishes in the midst of a riot of purple colours, of the magic book of heaven red with fiery signs, of the sea foaming over saffron sands, of the lonely cedar on the peaks of the Balkans, of the barbaric hall shining with golden crescents luxuriously permeated with the breath of roses from the gulistan of the king.
The most famous of Mangan’s poems, those in which he sings hymns of praise to his country’s fallen glory under a veil of mysticism, seem like a cloud that covers the horizon on a summer’s day, thin, impalpable, ready to disperse, and suffused with little points of light. Sometimes the music seems to waken from its lethargy and shouts with the ecstasy of combat. In the final stanzas of the Lament for the Princes of Tir-Owen and Tirconnell, in long lines full of tremendous force, he has put all the energy of his race:
And though frost glaze to-night the clear dew of his eyes,
And white gauntlets glove his noble fair fine fingers o’er,
A warm dress is to him that lightning-garb he ever wore,
The lightning of the soul, not skies.
Hugh marchedforth to the fight — I grieved to see him so depart;
And lo! to-night he wanders frozen, rain-drenched, sad, betrayed —
But the memory of the lime-white mansions his right hand
hath laid In ashes warms the hero’s heart.
I do not know any other passage in English literature in which the spirit of revenge has been joined to such heights of melody. It is true that sometimes this heroic note becomes raucous, and a troop of unmannerly passions echoes it derisively, but a poet like Mangan who sums up in himself the soul of a country and an era does not so much try to create for the entertainment of some dilettante as to transmit to posterity the animating idea of his life by the force of crude blows. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that Mangan always kept his poetic soul spotless. Although he wrote such a wonderful English style, he refused to collaborate with the English newspapers or reviews; although he was the spiritual focus of his time, he refused to prostitute himself to the rabble or to make himself the loud-speaker of politicians. He was one of those strange abnormal spirits who believe that their artistic life should be nothing more than a true and continual revelation of their spiritual life, who believe that their inner life is so valuable that they have no need of popular support, and thus abstain from proffering confessions of faith, who believe, in sum, that the poet is sufficient in himself, the heir and preserver of a secular patrimony, who therefore has no urgent need to become a shouter, or a preacher, or a perfumer.
Now what is this central idea that Mangan wants to hand down to posterity? All his poetry records injustice and tribulation, and the aspiration of one who is moved to great deeds and rending cries when he sees again in his mind the hour of his grief. This is the theme of a large part of Irish poetry, but no other Irish poems are full, as are those of Mangan, of misfortune nobly suffered, of vastation of soul so irreparable. Naomi wished to change her name to Mara, because she had known too well how bitter is the existence of mortals, and is it not perhaps a profound sense of sorrow and bitterness that explains in Mangan all the names and titles that he gives himself, and the fury of translation in which he tried to hide himself? For he did not find in himself the faith of the solitary, or the faith that in the Middle Ages sent the spires in the air like triumphant songs, and he waits his hour, the hour that will end his sad days of penance. Weaker than Leopardi, for he has not the courage of his own despair, but forgets every ill and forgoes all scorn when someone shows him a little kindness, he has, perhaps for this reason, the memorial that he wished, a [‘constant presence with those that love me’.]
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[Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice
, a revolt, in] a certain sense, against actuality. It speaks of that which seems unreal and fantastic to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the tests of reality. Poetry considers many of the idols of the market place unimportant — the succession of the ages, the spirit of the age, the mission of the race. The poet’s central effort is to free himself from the unfortunate influence of these idols that corrupt him from without and within, and certainly it would be false to assert that Mangan has always made this effort. The history of his country encloses him so straitly that even in his hours of extreme individual passion he can barely reduce its walls to ruins. He cries out in his life and in his mournful verses against the injustice of despoilers, but almost never laments a loss greater than that of buckles and banners. He inherits the latest and worst part of a tradition upon which no divine hand has ever traced a boundary, a tradition which is loosened and divided against itself as it moves down the cycles. And precisely because this tradition has become an obsession with him, he has accepted it with all its regrets and failures and would pass it on just as it is. The poet who hurls his lightning against tyrants would establish upon the future an intimate and crueller tyranny. The figure that he adores has the appearance of an abject queen to whom, because of the bloody crimes that she has committed and the no less bloody crimes committed against her by the hands of others, madness has come and death is about to come, but who does not wish to believe that she is about to die, and remembers only the rumour of voices that besiege her sacred garden and her lovely flowers that have become pabulum aprorum, food for wild boars. Love of grief, despair, high-sounding threats — these are the great traditions of the race of James Clarence Mangan, and in that impoverished figure, thin and weakened, an hysterical nationalism receives its final justification.