BOOK IV

JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN

JAMES CLARENCE MANGAN fills the most tragic place in the Irish literature of this century; and even if he be not its greatest poet, at least he has only equals, no superiors. His fame has been obscured and injured-in part by his own fault, in part by the indiscretion of friends and admirers, in part by the pressure of inevitable circumstance. Born to unhappiness, dowered with a melancholy temperament and a drifting will, he never found natural joy save, like Thomas à Kempis, 'in a nook with a book' and in the exercise of his art. Like sundry other unhappy poets, he found joys less natural and sane in opium and alcohol. It is not essential for our present purpose to examine the kind, the extent, the gravity of his indulgence in these methods of obliviousness or exaltation: the evidence of his contemporaries is conflicting enough, to say that in whatever degree Mangan must share the reproach of Coleridge, De Quincey, Poe, of the Scottish Ferguson and Burns, he yet claims our compassion rather than our contempt. His weakness never marred the purity, in all senses, of his poetry: he made no Byronic parade or boast of his own worst side. From cradle to coffin Melancholy marked him for her own,' and his heart always knew its own bitterness. Infinitely sensitive, of a fragile and tremulous spirit, the harshness of the world was his master, and from the first he succumbed to whatever miseries, real or imagined, came his way. The story of his life is a story of persistent gloom and grayness, peopled by

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phantoms and phantasies of sorrow: he was a born dreamer of dreams, and passed his days in a kind of penumbra. He was gentle and grotesque, eccentric and lovable but much of a mystery to all and to himself. Fit for nothing but literature, and passionately enamoured of it, he was a desultory, uncertain, capricious writer: always a student with a true love of learning, his knowledge was casual, imperfect, hardly a scholar's. Further, it was a part of his strange nature to be innocently insincere, or inventive, or imaginative, about himself and his: there was a deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck' in his composition, and he throws dust in the eyes of his readers, who vainly try to ascertain the precise measure of truth and actuality in his personal or literary statements. With all his devotion to letters and learning, he was incapable of exercising a prolonged and constant energy it was not in him to concentrate and control his powers. When he wrote without inspiration, but in obedience to some external call or need, he wrote either with a strong and arid rhetoric or with a somewhat ghastly air of mocking merriment and jesting cynicism and so little could he command his imagination. that almost the whole of his greatest and most perfect work owes its inception to the work-often the inferior work-of others. The poet of the Dark Rosaleen' is a great original poet such splendour of verse is not translation, but a new creation. And yet, but for the Gaelic poet, Costello of Ballyhaunis, Mangan would not have written his masterpiece.

The poetry of this unique man falls under four chief heads: paraphrases or translations from the Gaelic; those from the German, and sometimes from other modern languages; poems which profess to spring from Turkish and Oriental originals; poems avowedly and indisputably original. His collected poems, of every description, would compose a considerable volume in point of size and it would contain little that is of no valuelittle without some touch, if not of genius, yet assuredly of a singular talent. But were we to exclude from such a collection some twenty or thirty famous pieces, the residue would not be of such a rare and distinguished quality as entitles a cunning

versifier to claim the higher rank of poet. Mangan's great work has never been overpraised: not so his less great. He was an Irishman writing English verse during the first half of the century his wide and genuine if straggling culture, his range of literary interest, his technical mastery of verse, filled his audience with a feeling of novelty. It was a portent, a presage, of an outburst of Irish poetry in English verse such as had not before been heard: and it is not unnatural that Mangan's poetry was received, is often still received, with too lavish an applause, too indiscriminate a welcome. Again : Mangan, though nothing of a politician, was much of a patriot; and national pride tended to exalt the merits of whatever came from Mangan the accomplished, the specially inspired. It is largely a question of date and period: Mangan was a pioneer, and became a source of inspiration. Others have entered into his labours, and Ireland has borne poets of far deeper and more patient culture, and of a technical skill sometimes not far beneath his own at its finest. The mass of Mangan's poetry seems less miraculous and immaculate now than it seemed half a century ago: then, he had scarce a rival; since then, he has had many and worthy rivals, though none has surpassed him. Only his master-work need be considered here, and our brief selections illustrate every aspect of it.

There are few who question the supremacy, among his poems, of those derived from Gaelic sources. Doubtless to the struggling, starving Irish poet, who never dreamed of winning English praise and writing for an English public, Ireland and her history and her hope were natural themes: but patriotism and love of country are insufficient to explain the poetical excellence of these poems. Passionate patriotism can make execrable poetry. Something else there must be to account for this superiority and it can surely be found in the truth that to Mangan, essentially the poet of dreams and sorrows and longings, of an ideal rapture and a perfect beauty, the history of Ireland appealed with a personal force. In that beautiful and tragic history he found what

profoundly moved him, not only as an Irishman who loved Ireland, but as the sad and stricken man who fed on dreams, was haunted by memories, lived in an infinite desire. The laments, the prophecies, the dauntless defiances, the radiant hopes, in a word the various passions which he found in the history and literature of the Gael came home to him: he felt them as he could not feel the emotions of German poets. He therefore brought to his Irish versions such a wealth of unfeigned emotion, such a profusion of artistic cunning, as to make them verily the fresh expression of his own soul and the fine flower of his genius. With but four or five exceptions, he leaves aside the Gaelic poetry of love or laughter, and fills his page with the cry of battle, the wail for the dead, the dirge of departed glory. The note of sorrow-noble and proud sorrow— appears in almost all his Irish poems: nothing so appealed to his sad heart as tears As he broods over the lamentations of ancient bards, raising the keen over Ireland desolate and derelict, over Irish princes exiled or dead, over Irish hopes frustrated and Irish chivalry in defeat, his own immense melancholy kindles into a melancholy of majestic music. He transmutes the mourning Irish music of Owen Ward into English verse of monumental magnificence and monotony in woe as he chants the lament for the lords of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, The O'Neill and The O'Donnell, dead exiles sleeping together in holy Rome: each of the eighteen stanzas, with its elaborate structure, is like a funeral march, full of deep repeated chords, and a wailing cry that pierces up through the heavier tones of sorrow. These poems are starred with the lovely and great names of the princes, the provinces, the pleasant places of Ireland, vanquished, dead, fugitive, ruined, vanished. Where is Brian's fair palace of Kinkora? Whither are flown the Wild Geese? Where is the Young Deliverer of Kathaleen Ny-Houlahan'? And, alas, for the once proud people of Banba!' Weep, Ireland, for Owen Roe! and hear the Banshee crying for the Knight of Kerry! Take your farewell of Patrick Sarsfield! Mourn for glory gone from the Castle of Donegal! Be sad for the soul of O'Sullivan Beara, the betrayed