Complete Works of James Joyce (354 page)

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.

In what niche of the temple of glory should we place his image? If he has never won the sympathy of his own countrymen, how can he win that of foreigners? Doesn’t it seem probable that the oblivion that he would almost have desired awaits him? Certainly he did not find in himself the force to reveal to us triumphant beauty, the splendour of truth that the ancients deify. He is a romantic, a herald manqué, the prototype of a nation manqué, but with all that, one who has expressed in a worthy form the sacred indignation of his soul cannot have written his name in water. In those vast courses of multiplex life that surround us, and in that vast memory which is greater and more generous than ours, probably no life, no moment of exaltation is ever lost; and all those who have written in noble disdain have not written in vain, although, weary and [desperate, they have never heard the silver laughter of wisdom.]

[Manuscript ends here.]

Fenianis
m

THE LAST FENIAN

1907

With the recent death of John O’Leary in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish national holiday, went perhaps the last actor in the turbid drama of Fenianism, a time-honoured name derived from the old Irish language (in which the word ‘fenians’ means the King’s bodyguard) which came to designate the Irish insurrectionist movement. Anyone who studies the history of the Irish revolution during the nineteenth century finds himself faced with a double struggle — the struggle of the Irish nation against the English government, and the struggle, perhaps no less bitter, between the moderate patriots and the so-called party of physical force. This party under different names: ‘White Boys’, ‘Men of ‘98’, ‘United Irishmen’, ‘Invincibles’, ‘Fenians’, has always refused to be connected with either the English political parties or the Nationalist parliamentarians. They maintain (and in this assertion history fully supports them) that any concessions that have been granted to Ireland, England has granted unwillingly, and, as it is usually put, at the point of a bayonet. The intransigent press never ceases to greet the deeds of the Nationalist representatives at Westminster with virulent and ironic comments, and although it recognizes that in view of England’s power armed revolt has now become an impossible dream, it has never stopped inculcating in the minds of the coming generation the dogma of separatism.

Unlike Robert Emmet’s foolish uprising or the impassioned movement of Young Ireland in ‘45, the Fenianism of ‘67 was not one of the usual flashes of Celtic temperament that lighten the shadows for a moment and leave behind a darkness blacker than before. At the time that the movement arose, the population of the Emerald Isles was more than eight million, while that of England was no more than seventeen million. Under the leadership of James Stephens, head of the Fenians, the country was organized into circles composed of a Sergeant and twenty-five men, a plan eminently fitted to the Irish character because it reduces to a minimum the possibility of betrayal. These circles formed a vast and intricate net, whose threads were in Stephens’” hands. At the same time, the American Fenians were organized in the same way, and the two movements worked in concert. Among the Fenians there were many soldiers in the English Army, police spies, prison guards, and jailers.

Everything seemed to go well, and the Republic was on the point of being established (it was even proclaimed openly by Stephens), when O’Leary and Luby, editors of the party newspaper, were arrested. The government put a price on Stephens’ head, and announced that it knew all the locations where the Fenians held their military drills by night. Stephens was arrested and imprisoned, but succeeded in escaping, thanks to the loyalty of a Fenian prison guard; and while the English agents and spies were under cover at every port, watching the departing ships, he left the capital in a gig, disguised as a bride (according to legend) with a white crepe veil and orange blossoms. Then he was taken aboard a little charcoal boat that quickly set sail for France. O’Leary was tried and condemned to twenty years of forced labour, but later he was pardoned and exiled from Ireland for fifteen years.

And why this disintegration of a movement so well organized? Simply because in Ireland, just at the right moment, an informer always appears.

* * * *

After the dispersal of the Fenians, the tradition of the doctrine of physical force shows up at intervals in violent crimes. The Invincibles blow up the prison at Clerkenwell, snatch their friends from the hands of the police at Manchester and kill the escort, stab to death in broad daylight the English Chief Secretary, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and the Under-Secretary, Burke, in Phoenix Park, Dublin.

After each one of these crimes, when the general indignation has calmed a little, an English minister proposes to the House some reform measure for Ireland, and the Fenians and Nationalists revile each other with the greatest scorn, one side attributing the measure to the success of parliamentary tactics and the other attributing it to the persuasive faculty of the knife or the bomb. And as a backdrop to this sad comedy is the spectacle of a population which diminishes year by year with mathematical regularity, of the uninterrupted emigration to the United States or Europe of Irishmen for whom the economic and intellectual conditions of their native land are unbearable. And almost as if to set in relief this depopulation there is a long parade of churches, cathedrals, convents, monasteries, and seminaries to tend to the spiritual needs of those who have been unable to find courage or money enough to undertake the voyage from Queenstown to New York. Ireland, weighed down by multiple duties, has fulfilled what has hitherto been considered an impossible task — serving both God and Mammon, letting herself be milked by England and yet increasing Peter’s pence (perhaps in memory of Pope Adrian IV, who made a gift of the island to the English King Henry II about 800 years ago, in a moment of generosity).

Now, it is impossible for a desperate and bloody doctrine like Fenianism to continue its existence in an atmosphere like this, and in fact, as agrarian crimes and crimes of violence have become more and more rare, Fenianism too has once more changed its name and appearance. It is still a separatist doctrine but it no longer uses dynamite. The new Fenians are joined in a party which is called Sinn Fein (We Ourselves). They aim to make Ireland a bilingual Republic, and to this end they have established a direct steamship service between Ireland and France. They practise boycotts against English goods; they refuse to become soldiers or to take the oath of loyalty to the English crown; they are trying to develop industries throughout the entire island; and instead of paying out a million and a quarter annually for the maintenance of eighty representatives in the English Parliament, they want to inaugurate a consular service in the principal ports of the world for the purpose of selling their industrial products without the intervention of England.

* * * *

From many points of view, this last phase of Fenianism is perhaps the most formidable. Certainly its influence has once more remodelled the character of the Irish people, and when the old leader O’Leary returned to his native land after years spent in study while an exile in Paris, he found himself among a generation animated by ideals quite different from those of ‘65. He was received by his compatriots with marks of honour, and from time to time appeared in public to preside over some separatist conference or some banquet. But he was a figure from a world which had disappeared. He would often be seen walking along the river, an old man dressed in light-coloured clothes, with a shock of very white hair hanging down to his shoulders, almost bent in two from old age and suffering. He would stop in front of the gloomy shops of the old-book dealers, and having made some purchase, would return along the river. Aside from this, he had little reason to be happy. His plots had gone up in smoke, his friends had died, and in his own native land, very few knew who he was and what he haddone. Now that he is dead, his countrymen will escort him to his tomb with great pomp. Because the Irish, even though they break the hearts of those who sacrifice their lives for their native land, never fail to show great respect for the dead.

James Joyce