A Chapter in Irish Poetry
The Speaker, October 31, 1903



Poems of James Clarence Mangan. Dublin: O'Donoghue and Co.

Of late years the insistence on the merely visionary and elvish aspect of Ireland has been perhaps from the point of view of those who love nationalism and the nation a little overdone. It is true that the Irish spirit has a tendency towards dreams; it is true that this is a noble and essential spirit, but it is a noble and essential spirit in all peoples, and ought not to be an obsession in any. Every nation has dreamed. and Ireland has not only dreamed. It is perfectly ridiculous to talk about historic Ireland as if she were a nation of sleep-walkers. It has had other functions- that fairy being the late Mr. Parnell, that shrouded mystic Mr. Daniel O'Connell, that poet of weird loves the Duke of Wellington, that broken lily of beautiful failure the late Lord Russell of Killowen, that sad-eyed changeling Mr. T. P. O'Connor, that orphan of the simple appeal of the old gods Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that home of lost causes Sir Thomas Lipton, all these in various manners, despite their prevailing dreaminess, exhibit what looks to the ordinary eye very like the ordinary miscellaneous human output of a nation, great men, small men, bullies, rationalists, business men, and charlatans. It is quite ridiculous that at a point when even Englishmen are beginning to admit that Irishmen have for a century largely ruled the Army, the law courts, the newspapers, and the colonies, Irishmen should begin to say that they will never have any kingdom to rule but elfland.

The truth surely is that Irishmen in dwelling on the unquestionable poetry of their people have been so totally misled by the more morbid modernism as to misunderstand what poetry signifies. They have talked of it as if it were a beautiful disease, whereas it is simply one of the primary conditions of national health. If it be true (I do not think it is completely true) that England is practical to the neglect of poetry, that Ireland dreams and England does not dream, then it means that Ireland is healthy and England is diseased. If Ireland is conscious of the borderland of the reason which leads to the unreasonable and the divine, if Ireland is vain of a prehistoric glory, if Ireland listens to old wives' fables and calls upon the genius of the hill or stream, Ireland is not therefore a dreamer among nations. She is simply a nation, a common healthy nation like the other nations of the world. If England neglects these things, and talks only about the advance of civilisation and the fall in Consols, then England is not in the least the type of normal common sense. England is in this the morbid exception among peoples; England is the eccentric; England is the dreamer. That Ireland believes in the fairies is one of the proofs that she has to offer that she is a sane and vigorous community. Too many Celtophiles talk as if the man who believed in the fairies must be a fragile and over-sensitised artist. The general truth about the world as it is may be best expressed by saying that the man who believes in the fairies in any country might be trusted physically and morally to knock down two of the men who do not.

This preliminary protest is rendered necessary by the very act of criticising the poems of James Clarence Mangan, which have just been issued by Messrs. O'Donoghue and Co., of Dublin. For the most common criticism which this remarkable man is likely to meet with in England is the suggestion that the combination in him of imaginative talent and moral failure is typical of some such alleged combination in the Irish race. Englishmen of the heavy Unionist type will be only too glad to admit that Mangan had a genius that towered up to the stars and a sympathy that descended into hell, if only they can insist alongside of it that he owed money to a landlady and took opium. For this at bottom means their whole case, that the Irishman can delight the Englishman, but cannot rule himself. Against that preliminary notion of Mangan, that he is Irish in his brilliant futility, a simple stand must be made, and it is true, as Mr. O'Donoghue says in his very interesting introduction: "There were 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 gutters of Peter-street and Bride-street." But facts well known to everyone remind us at once that there is nothing in the least Irish about this; the type is international, certainly not national. There were two Byrons, there were two De Quinceys, there were two Poes. Mangan said of himself, in a poem of quite incomparable power and horror:

"And he fell far through that pit abysmal,
The gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns,
And pawned his soul for the devil's dismal
Stock of returns."

But no one says that the temperament of Burns is a splendid example of the rhapsodical waste and weakness, the dreaminess and unpracticality of the character of the Scotch. Nobodv suggests that because Edgar Allan Poe was often found drunk in the streets, like Mangan, it exemplifies a certain impracticable poesy to be looked for in Mr. Pierpont Morgan.

The faults of Mangan were not peculiarly Irish; the world would be an easier place if they could be confined to Ireland. But, even if they were Irish, the man himself was so totally exceptional as an Irishman, so common as an international type, that he indicates nothing about the general moral attitude of his race. What he does beyond question attest is the existence of a most vivid and powerful element in the modem Irish, not only of literary instinct, but of great literary tradition. The truth that the modern English cannot, without great difficulty, get into their heads, is the fact that in Ireland they have played the part of Alaric and the barbarians. They have damaged an existing civilisation. They may have had a better one of their own; so may Alaric; that is another matter. The point is that they do not know what a singular thing the Act of Union really did. It is now evident that it destroyed a civilised Ireland, an Ireland with innumerable faults, but a distinct, dignified European nation of the eighteenth century. The British Empire has done the same good work perhaps to Ireland that the barbarians did to Italy. It has made it simple by breaking it to pieces; it has plunged it again into a hopeful darkness. But when Ireland was independent it was far more akin to England in its culture and civilisation than it is likely ever to be again. Before the Union its poet is Moore, who is almost an Englishman. A hundred years after the Union its poet is Yeats, who boasts himself not merely as an Irishman, but as a Fenian. Mangan stands in a curious position between these two developments. In his sternness and anarchism he is akin to the new Celtic school, but there is another quality in him which, as I say, bears the trace of the old eighteenth-century civilisation of Ireland. For instance, he is an absolute master of that great faculty of the Irish spirit, a faculty lamentably vanished from the new Irish aesthetes, the faculty of passing easily from the grotesque to the serious literary form and back again. It is in almost every old Irish song and old Irish story, but it is not, it must with regret and respect be admitted, in Yeats or Martin or "A. E." It is present in its most perfect ease and pungency in that wonderful poem of Mangan's about the remoteness of youth, of which every verse ends with the refrain:

"Twenty golden years ago."

Outside Burns you will not find a better instance of a verse being common and casual and great than such a verse as this:

"Dear! dear! I don't feel well at all somehow.
Few in Weimar dream how bad I am;
Floods of tears grow common with me now,
High Dutch floods that reason cannot dam;
Doctors think I'll neither live nor thrive
If I mope at home so I don't know
Am I living now? I was alive
Twenty golden years ago."

There is something that lingers in such verses as these of Mangan's, black and bitter and desperate as they are, of an Ireland which is not wholly represented by the later poets; the echoes of an Ireland that fought and feasted and broke hearts and heads in good temper. If it is so, and we have spoiled that gaiety in a people, if we have turned by our continued oppression fighters into mere controversialists and lovers into mere poets, we have a darker charge to answer before God than the bloodiest of the forgotten empires.