Complete Works of James Joyce (353 page)

James Clarence Mangan (1907
)

There are certain poets who, in addition to the virtue of revealing to us some phase of the human conscience unknown until their time, also have the more doubtful virtue of summing up in themselves the thousand contrasting tendencies of their era, of being, so to speak, the storage batteries of new forces. For the most part, it is in the latter role rather than the former that they come to be appreciated by the masses, who are by nature unable to evaluate any work of true self-revelation, and so hasten torecognize by some act of grace the incalculable aid that the individual affirmation of a poet gives to a popular movement. The most popular act of grace in such cases is a monument, because it honours the dead while it flatters the living. It has also the supreme advantage of finality, since, to tell the truth, it is the most polite and effective way to assure a lasting oblivion of the deceased. In logical and serious countries, it is customary to finish the monument in a decent manner, and have the -sculptor, the city officials, orators, and a great crowd of people attend the unveiling. But in Ireland, a country destined by God to be the eternal caricature of the serious world, even when the monuments are for the most popular men, whose character is most amenable to the will of the people, they rarely get beyond the laying of the foundation stone. In the light of the foregoing, perhaps I can give you an idea of the Cimmerian night that enfolds the name of Clarence Mangan when I say that, to the detriment of the noted generosity of the Emerald Isle, up to now no ardent spirit has thought of laying the restless ghost of the national poet with the foundation stone and the usual wreaths. Perhaps the unbroken peace in which he lies will have become so pleasant for him that he will be offended (if mortal accents ever come to that world beyond the grave) at hearing his spectral quiet disturbed by a countryman in exile, at hearing an amateur talk about him in a strange tongue before well-wishing foreigners.

Ireland’s contribution to European literature can be divided into five periods and into two large parts, that is, literature written in the Irish language and literature written in the English language. Of the first part, which includes the first two periods, the more remote is almost lost in the night of the times in which all the ancient sacred books, the epics, the legal codes, and the topographic histories and legends were written. The more recent period lasted a long time after the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons and Normans under Henry II and King John, the age of the wandering minstrels, whose symbolic songs carried on the tradition of the triple order of the old Celtic bards, and of this period I had occasion to speak to you several nights ago. The second part, that of Irish literature written in the English language, is dividedinto three periods. The first is the eighteenth century, which includes among other Irishmen the glorious names of Oliver Goldsmith, author of the famous novel
The Vicar of Wakefield,
of the two famous writers of comedy, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Congreve, whose masterpieces are admired even today on the sterile stage of modern England, of the Rabelaisian Dean, Jonathan Swift, author of
Gulliver’s Travels,
of the so-called English Demosthenes, Edmund Burke, whom even his English critics consider the most profound orator that ever spoke in the House of Commons and one of the wisest statesmen, even among the astute band of politicians of fair Albion. The second and third periods belong to the last century. One is the literary movement of Young Ireland in ‘42 and ‘45, and the other the literary movement of today, of which I intend to speak to you in my next lecture.

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.