Complete Works of James Joyce (345 page)
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Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. It speaks of what seems fantastic and unreal to those who have lost the simple intuitions which are the tests of reality; and, as it is often found at war with its age, so it makes no account of history, which is fabled by the daughters of memory, but sets store by every time less than the pulsation of an artery, the time in which its intuitions start forth, holding it equal in its period and value to six thousand years. No doubt they are only men of letters who insist on the succession of the ages, and history or the denial of reality, for they are two names for one thing, may be said to be that which deceives the whole world. In this, as in much else, Mangan is the type of his race. History encloses him so straitly that even his fiery moments do not set him free from it. He, too, cries out, in his life and in his mournful verses, against the injustice of despoilers, but never laments a deeper loss than the loss of plaids and ornaments. He inherits the latest and worst part of a legend upon which the line has never been drawn out and which divides against itself as it moves down the cycles. And because this tradition is so much with him he has accepted it with all its griefs and failures, and has not known how to change it, as the strong spirit knows, and so would bequeath it: the poet who hurls his anger against tyrants would establish upon the future an intimate and far more cruel tyranny. In the final view the figure which he worships is seen to be an abject queen upon whom, because of the bloody crimes that she has done and of those as bloody that were done to her, madness is come and death is coming, but who will not believe that she is near to die and remembers only the rumour of voices challenging her sacred gardens and her fair, tall flowers that have become the food of boars. Novalis said of love that it is the Amen of the universe, and Mangan can tell of the beauty of hate; and pure hate is as excellent as pure love. An eager spirit would cast down with violence the high traditions of Mangan’s race — love of sorrow for the sake of sorrow and despair and fearful menaces — but where their voice is a supreme entreaty to be borne with forbearance seems only a little grace; and what is so courteous and so patient as a great faith?
Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state. The philosophic mind inclines always to an elaborate life — the life of Goethe “or of Leonardo da Vinci; but the life of the poet is intense — the life of Blake or of Dante — taking into its centre the life that surrounds it and flinging it abroad again amid planetary music. With Mangan a narrow and hysterical nationality receives a last justification, for when this feeble-bodied figure departs dusk begins to veil the train of the gods, and he who listens may hear their footsteps leaving the world. But the ancient gods, who are visions of the divine names, die and come to life many times, and, though there is dusk about their feet and darkness in their indifferent eyes, the miracle of light is renewed eternally in the imaginative soul. When the sterile and treacherous order is broken up, a voice or a host of voices is heard singing, a little faintly at first, of a serene spirit which enters woods and cities and the hearts of men, and of the life of earth — det dejlige vidunderlige jordliv det gaadefulde jordliv — beautiful, alluring, mysterious.
Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are realities and these alone give and sustain life. As often as human fear and cruelty, that wicked monster begotten by luxury, are in league to make life ignoble and sullen and to speak evil of death the time is come wherein a man of timid courage seizes the keys of hell and of death, and flings them far out into the abyss, proclaiming the praise of life, which the abiding splendour of truth may sanctify, and of death, the most beautiful form of life. In those vast courses which enfold us and in that great memory which is greater and more generous than our memory, no life, no moment of exaltation is ever lost; and all those who have written nobly have not written in vain, though the desperate and weary have never heard the silver laughter of wisdom. Nay, shall not such as these have part, because of that high, original purpose which remembering painfully or by way of prophecy they would make clear, in the continual affirmation of the spirit?
James A. Joyce
1902
These are the verses of a writer lately dead, whom many consider the Davis of the latest national movement. They are issued from headquarters, and are preceded by two introductions wherein there is much said concerning the working man, mutual improvement, the superior person, shady musical plays, etc. They are illustrative of the national temper, and because they are so the writers of the introductions do not hesitate to claim for them the highest honours. But this claim cannot be allowed, unless it is supported by certain evidences of literary sincerity. For a man who writes a book cannot be excused by his good intentions, or by his moral character; he enters into a region where there is question of the written word, and it is well that this should be borne in mind, now that the region of literature is assailed so fiercely by the enthusiast and the doctrinaire.
An examination of the poems and ballads of William Rooney does not warrant one in claiming for them any high honours. The theme is consistently national, so uncompromising, indeed, that the reader must lift an eyebrow and assure himself when he meets on page 114 the name of D’Arcy MacGee. But the treatment of the theme does not show the same admirable consistency. In ‘S. Patrick’s Day’ and in ‘Dromceat’’ one cannot but see an uninteresting imitation of Denis Florence M’Carthy and of Ferguson; even Mr. T. D. Sullivan and Mr. Rolleston have done something in the making of this book. But ‘Roilig na Riogh is utterly lacking in the high distinctive virtue of The Dead at Clonmacnoise, and Mr. Rolleston, who certainly is not driven along by any poetic impulse, has written a poem because the very failure of the poetic impulse pleases in an epitaph. So much can careful writing achieve, and there can be no doubt that little is achieved in these verses, because the writing is so careless, and is yet so studiously mean. For, if carelessness is carried very far, it is like to become a positive virtue, but an ordinary carelessness is nothing but a false and mean expression of a false and mean idea.
Mr. Rooney, indeed, is almost a master in that ‘style’, which is neither good nor bad. In the verses of Maedhbh he writes:
‘Mid the sheltering hills, by the spreading waters,
They laid her down and her cairn raised
The fiercest-hearted of Erin’s daughters —
The bravest nature that ever blazed.
Here the writer has not devised, he has merely accepted, mean expressions, and even where he has accepted a fine expression, he cannot justify his use of it. Mangan’s Homeric epithet of ‘wine- dark’ becomes in his paper a colourless and meaningless epithet, which may cover any or all of the colours of the spectrum. How differently did Mangan write when he wrote:
Knowest thou the castle that beetles over
The wine-dark sea’.
Here a colour rises in the mind and is set firmly against the golden glow in the lines that follow.
But one must not look for these things when patriotism has laid hold of the writer. He has no care then to create anything according to the art of literature, not the greatest of the arts, indeed, but at least an art with a definite tradition behind it, possessing definite forms. Instead we find in these pages a weary succession of verses, ‘prize’ poems — the worst of all. They were written, it seems, for papers and societies week after week, and they bear witness to some desperate and weary energy. But they have no spiritual and living energy, because they come from one in whom the spirit is in a manner dead, or at least in its own hell, a weary and foolish spirit, speaking of redemption and revenge, blaspheming against tyrants, and going forth, full of tears and curses, upon its infernal labours. Religion and all that is allied thereto can manifestly persuade men to great evil, and by writing these verses, even though they should, as the writers of the prefaces think, enkindle the young men of Ireland to hope and activity, Mr. Rooney has been persuaded to great evil.
And yet he might have written well if he had not suffered from one of those big words which make us so unhappy.There is no piece in the book which has even the first quality of beauty, the quality of integrity, the quality of being separate and whole, but there is one piece in the book which seems to have come out of a conscious personal life. It is a translation of some verses by Dr. Douglas Hyde, and is called ‘A Request’, and yet I cannot believe that it owes more than its subject to its original. It begins:
In that last dark hour when my bed I lie on,
My narrow bed of the deal board bare,
My kin and neighbours around me standing,
And Death’s broad wings on the thickening air.
It proceeds to gather desolation about itself, and does so in lines of living verse, as in the lines that follow. The third line is feeble, perhaps, but the fourth line is so astonishingly good that it cannot be overpraised:
When night shallfall and my day is over
And Death’s pale symbol shall chill my face,
When heart and hand thrill no more responsive,
Oh Lord and Saviour, regard my case!
And when it has gathered about itself all the imagery of desolation, it remembers the Divine temptation, and puts up its prayer to the Divine mercy. It seems to come out of a personal life which has begun to realize itself, but to which death and that realization have come together. And in this manner, with the gravity of one who remembers all the errors of his members and his sins of speech, it goes into silence.
1902
Mr. George Meredith has been included in the English men of letters series, where he may be seen in honourable nearness to Mr. Hall Caine and Mr. Pinero. An age which has too keen a scent for contemporary values will often judge amiss, and, therefore, one must not complain when a writer who is, even for those who do not admire him unreservedly, a true man of letters, comes by his own in such a strange fashion. Mr. Jerrold in the biographical part of his book has to record a more than usual enormity of public taste, and if his book had recorded only this, something good would have been done; for it is certain that the public taste should be reproved, while it is by no means certain that Mr. Meredith is a martyr.
Mr. Jerrold confesses his faith in novels and plays alike, and he will have it that ‘Modern Love’ is on the same plane with the ‘Vita Nuova’. No one can deny to Mr. Meredith an occasional power of direct compelling speech (in a picture of a famine he wrote ‘starving lords were wasp and moth’) but he is plainly lacking in that fluid quality, the lyrical impulse, which, it seems, has been often taken from the wise and given unto the foolish. And it is plain to all who believe in the tradition of literature that this quality cannot be replaced.
Mr. Meredith’s eager brain, which will not let him be a poet, has, however, helped him to write novels which are, perhaps, unique in our time. Mr. Jerrold subjects each novel to a superficial analysis, and by doing so he has, I think, seized a fallacy for his readers. For these novels have, for the most part, no value as epical art, and Mr. Meredith has not the instinct of the epical artist. But they have a distinct value as philosophical essays, and they reveal a philosopher at work with much cheerfulness upon a very stubborn problem. Any book about the philosopher is worth reading, unless we have given ourselves over deliberately to the excellent foppery of the world, and though Mr. Jerrold’s book is not remarkable, it is worth reading.
1903
In this book, the latest addition to the already formidable mass of modern Anglo-Irish literature, Mr. Gwynn has collected ten essays from, various reviews and journals, essays differing widely in interest, but for all of which he would claim a unity of subject. All the essays deal directly or indirectly with Ireland, and they combine in formulating a distinct accusation of English civilization and English modes of thought. For Mr. Gwynn, too, is a convert to the prevailing national movement, and professes himself a Nationalist though his nationalism, as he says, has nothing irreconcilable about it. Give Ireland the status of Canada and Mr. Gwynn becomes an Imperialist at once. It is hard to say into what political party Mr. Gwynn should go, for he is too consistently Gaelic for the Parliamentarians, and too mild for the true patriots, who are beginning to speak a little vaguely about their friends the French.
Mr. Gwynn, however, is at least a member of that party which seeks to establish an Irish literature and Irish industries. The first essays in his book are literary criticisms, and it may be said at once that they are the least interesting. Some are mere records of events and some seem written to give English readers a general notion of what is meant by the Gaelic revival. Mr. Gwynn has evidently a sympathy with modern Irish writers, but his criticism of their work is in no way remarkable. In the opening essay he has somehow the air of discovering Mangan, and he transcribes with some astonishment a few verses from ‘O’Hussey’s Ode to the Maguire. Few as the verses are, they are enough to show the real value of the work of the modern writers, whom Mr. Gwynn regards as the voice of Celticism proper. Their work varies in merit, never rising (except in Mr. Yeats’s case) above a certain fluency and an occasional distinction, and often falling so low that it has a value only as documentary evidence. It is work which has an interest of the day, but collectively it has not a third part of the value of the work of a man like Mangan, that creature of lightning, who has been, and is, a stranger among the people he ennobled, but who may yet come by his own as one of the greatest romantic poets among those who use the lyrical form.
Mr. Gwynn, however, is more successful in those essays which are illustrative of the industrial work which has been set in movement at different points of Ireland. His account of the establishing of the fishing industry in the West of Ireland is extremely interesting, and so are his accounts of dairies, old-fashioned and new- fashioned, and of carpet-making. These essays are written in a practical manner, and though they are supplemented by many quotations of dates and figures, they are also full of anecdotes. Mr. Gwynn has evidently a sense of the humorous, and it is pleasing to find this in a revivalist. He tells how, fishing one day, it was his fortune to meet with an old peasant whose thoughts ran all upon the traditional tales of his country and on the histories of great families. Mr. Gwynn’s instinct as a fisherman got the better of his patriotism, and he confesses to a slight disappointment when, after a good catch on an unfavourable day, he earned no word of praise from the peasant, who said, following his own train of thought, ‘The Clancartys was great men, too. Is there any of them living?’ The volume, admirably bound and printed, is a credit to the Dublin firm to whose enterprise its publication is due.
