James Stephens: Poet and Pagan
The Demi-Gods, by James Stephens. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
God’s most high messengers and certain Irish loafers nest well together. James Stephens was the first man to discern this and other plain, albeit unique, facts; and in the Demi-Gods he takes the reader into a delightful confidence, telling him the inmost thoughts of three angels, their two companions (also Irish), a philosophic donkey, an ecstatic crow, and the like of them. The angels learn table-manners and similar ethics from the two Celtic vagabonds, whom they chance upon when they touch foot to earth, one dark night. The father-vagabond gets daily food for the party, paying for it when he isn’t temperamentally swept into stealing; the other, who is the dearest kind of an Irish girl, naturally in love with the youngest angel, does the cooking and mothering for them all,—and celestial wisdom is shelved during the acquirement of so much worldly knowledge.
How can the astonishing charms of this book be described? In the first place, there is poetry—neither cadent nor decadent poetry, but the sort of prose that conveys the most finely imagined poetic thought. And there is contrast. Such contrast! From the calm conversation of angels to the braying of an ass is the easiest jump for Stephens. It is a gentle slide from paragraphs of delicate dawn-picturing to a peasant’s narration of brawls and thieving, or a description of the angels attired in Pat McCann’s trousers. And, given the latitude of half a dozen quotations, one might prove that this same Stephens was a deep-gazing mystic. Nor would his extreme paganism be difficult to establish. But to avoid all the inevitable shruggings of literary shoulders, if one really said these things about the man, let it be quickly stated that James Stephens is before all else an artist, a writer with a superlative sense of humor and a pleasantly incomprehensible imagination.
While a deeper probing of his mysticism or paganism (as such) would perhaps bring about a sudden discounting of his humor and his poetic sensibilities, it is necessary to remember that Stephens is Irish, with all the implied values of that temperament. Therefore, it is well to consider the author of The Demi-Gods to be this day’s most unique literary light. The combination stands alone.
Herman Schuchert.