Clarence Mangan
NO ONE CAN thoroughly realize Mangan’s life without some knowledge of Dublin: not knowledge of Ireland at large, for Mangan had practically none, save by reading; but knowledge of that Dublin “dear and dirty,” splendid and squalid, fascinating and repulsive, which was Mangan’s from the cradle to the grave. There is there an unique piteousness of poverty and decay, a stricken and helpless look, which seem appropriate to the scene of the doomed poet’s life. It was a life of dreams and misery and madness, yet of self-pity which does not disgust us, and of a weakness which is innocent; it seems the haunted, enchanted life of one drifting through his days in a dream of other days and other worlds, golden and immortal. He wanders about the rotting alleys and foul streets, a wasted ghost, with the “Dark Rosaleen” on his lips, and a strange light in those mystical blue eyes, which burn for us yet in the reminiscences of all who ever saw him and wrote of the unforgettable sight. And, with all his remoteness, all his wretchness, there was a certain grimly pathetic and humorous common-sense about him, which saved him from being too angelic a drunkard, too ethereal a vagabond, too saintly a wastrel. Hard as it is to believe at all times, he was an intelligible, an explicable human being, and not some ‘‘twy-natured” thing, some city faun. All the accounts and descriptions of him show us a man whom external circumstances, however prosperous and bright, would not have prevailed upon to be as other men are. As has been said of other poets, “he hungered for better bread than can be made of wheat,” and would have contrived to lose this way, to be “homesick for eternity,” despite all earthly surroundings of happiness and ease. Sensitive in the extreme, he shrank back into the shadows at a breath, not merely of unkindness, but of unpleasantness; he shuddered and winced, blanched and withered away at a touch of the east wind. His miseries, which dictated to him that agonized poem, “The Nameless One,” were primarily of his own creation, realities of his own imagination, and, therefore, the more terrible: they were the agonies of a child in the dark, quivering for fear of that nothing which is to him so infinitely real and dread a “something.” For Mangan’s childhood, boyhood, first youth, though hard and harsh, were not unbearably so; many a poet has borne far worse, and survived it unscathed. A rough and stern, rather than cruel, father; office drudgery with coarse companions; stinted, but not insufficient means; a general absence of congenial sympathy and friendship—these are rude facts to face; but even a poet, all nerves and feeling, need not find life a hell because of them, the world a prison, all things an utter darkness of despair. And even Mangan’s failure in love, whatever be the truth of that obscure event, would hardly account, by its own intrinsic sadness, for his abysmal melancholy and sense of doom. Further, when we find him in true deeps of actual woefulness, the bond-slave of opium and alcohol, living in the degradations of poverty, enchained, as St. Augustine has it, sua ferrea voluntate, by the iron chain of his unwilling will, yet it is not his fall that haunts him, but that sense of undeserved early torments and tortures, enfolding him as with a black impenetrable cloud. It was not only the lying imaginativeness of the opium-eater or of the drunkard that made him tell stories of fearful things which never happened; nor was it merely his artistic instinct toward presenting his life not quite as it was, but as it might have been, nor yet his elvish turn for a little innocent deception. Beyond a doubt, his temperament, immeasurably delicate and sensitive, received from its early experiences a shock, a shaking, which left him tremulous, impotent, a leaf in the wind, upon the water. His first sufferings in life were but the child’s imagined ghosts; but the “shock to the system,” to his imaginative sensitive temperament, was lasting, and he lived in a penumbra of haunting memories and apprehensions. In Browning’s words, it was:
The glimmer of twilight,
Never glad confident morning again!
Life had struck him in his affections and emotions: he could never recover from the blow, could but magnify it in memory and imagination, conceive himself marked by it, go apart from the world to hide it, go astray in the world to forget it. That was Mangan’s tragedy.
But he did not suffer it to cloud his poetry with darkness of expression at any time, nor, at its finest times, with darkness of theme or thought. It forced him into writing a deal of unworthy stuff, and a deal of excellent work far below his highest ability and achievement. But not a faint shadow of unhappiness dims the radiance of his “Dark Rosaleen,” its adoring, flashing, flying, laughing rapture of patriotic passion. It is among the great lyrics of the world, one of the fairest and fiercest in its perfection of imagery and rhythm; it is the chivalry of a nation’s faith struck on a sudden into the immortality of music. And Mangan's next glory, his version of O’Hussey’s “Ode to the Maguire,” is no less perfect upon its lower, yet lofty, plane. A certain Elizabethan poet has this pleasing stanza upon the Irish of his day, as he viewed them:
The Irish are as civil, as
The Russies in their kind;
Hard choice, which is the best of both,
Each bloodie, rude, and blind!
The “Ode to the Maguire” gives the noble side to the question, a ferocity that is heroic, in lines of the largest Homeric simplicity and greatness; and as “Dark Rosaleen” sings the devotion of a nation to their country in oppression, so this chants that of a follower to his chief in defeat; but in neither is there the note of despair, in both is the note of glory. Other of Mangan’s poems upon Ireland, original and based upon Gaelic originals, have a like lustrous quality: he loved to lose himself in Ireland’s past and future, and thereby made poems which will have helped to make the future Ireland. Upon such work as this he left no mark of his mental miseries and physical dishonours; indeed, his poems, though often tragic with sorrow, or trivial with levity, or both at once, are always pure and clear in every sense: in poetry, at least, he lived an innocent life. Besides his own Ireland, there were two chief worlds in which he loved to wander: the moonlit forests of German poetry, often painfully full of “moonshine,” and the glowing gardens or glittering deserts of the Eastern, the “Saracenic” world. He wished, half-whimsically and half-seriously, to make his readers believe that he knew some dozen languages; certain it is that he had a strong philological instinct, and much of that aptitude for acquiring a vast half-knowledge of many things not commonly known, which he shares with the very similar, and dissimilar, Poe. But his “translations” from many tongues, even when, as in the case of German, he knew his originals well, were wont to be either frank paraphrases or imitations, often to his original’s advantage. Some of his work in this kind is admirable, and of a cunning art: the work of a poet to whom rhythm and metre, with all technical difficulties and allurements, are passionately interesting; yet we regret the time spent upon most of them, and lost to his own virgin Muse. He seems to have felt that he was content to earn the wages upon which he lived from hand to mouth, by such secondary work, as though he despaired of attempting, or preferred to keep in sacred silence, his higher song. He has given us little of that. A selection from his poems can be bought for sixpence, and one could spare, it may be, a hundred out of its one hundred and forty-four pages. But what remains is, in its marvellous moments of entire success, greater than anything that Ireland has yet produced in English verse, from Goldsmith to Mr. Yeats. From Mangan’s birth in 1803 to his painful and merciful death in 1849, if there be anything joyous or pleasant in his record the reader forgets it in the woes and glooms that precede and follow. He had true friends, he could talk with them brilliantly, books were ever a solace and delight to him; little as he cared for fame, he knew that he deserved it, and he loved his art. His curious humour, chiefly at his own expense, was sometimes more than a Heinesque jesting, and shows him with sudden phases or fits of good spirits. But, for the rest, his life is a record of phantasmal dejections and cloudings of soul, as though he were rejected of God and abandoned of man. At almost every page, a reader fresh to his name and fame might expect the next to chronicle a suicide’s end, like those of Chatterton and Gerard de Nerval. His story is infinitely sad, but never abjectly or repulsively so. Here is the foredoomed dreamer, of fragile body and delicate soul, the innocent victim of himself, about whom we know much that is frail and pitiable, nothing that is base and mean: the voice, often tremulous in lamentation and broken by weeping, from which rose and rang the very glory and rapture of Irish song.
Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble,
Deep in your bosoms: there let him dwell!
He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble
Here, and in Hell.
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