One of the floating bits of wreckage she gave a hand to confirming in the illustrious place given him by a few discerning minds, was Mangan, the uniquely brilliant author of an authoritative version of My Dark Rosaleen, a perverse and suffering soul, prey to a blackness of mind and the Nemesis of his own wandering will. There were “two Mangans,” she quotes from a previous biographer, “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 the gutters of Peter Street and Bride Street.”
He was a worshipper of that which is above us, and prey to what is below, the body’s slave, the poor brain’s mistaken ministrant, striving alternately to fire it to new apprehensions and drug it with a despair of its own possibilities. In this Study, James Clarence Mangan, (1897) Louise Guiney says:
“One can think of no other, in the long disastrous annals of English literature, cursed with so monotonous a misery, so much hopelessness and stagnant grief. He had no public; he was poor, infirm, homeless, loveless; travel and adventure were cut off from him, and he had no minor risks to run; the cruel necessities of labor sapped his dreams from a boy; morbid fancies mastered him as the rider masters his horse; the demon of opium, then the demon of alcohol, pulled him under, body and soul, despite a persistent and heart-breaking struggle, and he perished ignobly in his prime.”
Could a combination of evils have been imagined more poignantly appealing to this young champion of shipwrecked souls? My Dark Rosaleen alone was enough to enlist her generous pen. As Mangan himself rescued it from the indifferent fame of an archaic fragment, a norm of beauty, and clothed it with the flying draperies of a glorifying fancy, so she unfolded its history and holds it up to new appreciation in a world not given to dwell upon the historically obscure. Mangan, she tells us, “was a pattern of sweet gratitude and deference, and left his art to prosper or perish as heaven should please.” How this moved her as an appeal she understood! for she also was of those who sow their seed in the wild garden of the world’s indifference and pass on, meekly unaware of any right of mankind, born to heavenly destinies, to stay and gather. He was dear to her. She treated him tenderly, yet his strange humors moved her to a smile. He was “so ludicrous and so endeared a figure that one wishes him but a thought in Fielding’s brain, lovingly handled in three volumes octavo and abstracted from the hard vicissitudes of mortality.”
This Study of hers reflects, with an especial clarity, the form and color of her own critical genius. In the comparison of masterpieces and the measurement of values by accepted standards, she was at ease in a large activity. If we would understand her method, we may look on it here. The shallow conception of the critic’s task, as an expression of personal preference, was not even germane to the richness of preparation she brought to even the most inconsiderable reviewing. Here are no snap judgments, ingenuous betrayal of temperamental likings. The genesis of criticism is the tool in her hands. Lead her to the slenderest rill of poetry and, out of her witch-hazel magic, she locates the spring that fed it. She bows before “the few whose senses are quick at literary divination.” In this Study learning ran, not wild, but at a splendid even pace over the road of past achievement, saluting guideposts by the way. Literary resemblances, the least intentional, are rarest joys to her. She is enchanted to find some of Mangan’s lighter verse rattling on like a Gilbertian libretto.
“Behold the exhumed precursor of The Mikado!”
Nothing rewards her more indubitably than the discovery of even a quasi-lineage, a shadow of likeness not to be developed into the actual relationship supported by time and place. She does not often floor you with unimpeachability of dates, but she knows the very complexion of her time, “his form and color.” She remembers what wings beat the air of fortunate decades, dropping pinions more than one imitator snatched in falling and wore brazenly in his cap. She can rehearse the unbroken descent of metres. Her parallel between Mangan and Poe, their dependence on the haunting adjunct of the refrain, does revolve about chronology; but chiefly she relies upon the convictions of her divining mind. She compares the “neck and neck achievements of Mangan and Poe.” She traces both back to the colossus Coleridge, with his wells of color. His was the spring of youth, and they bore away full flagons. It is hardly possible to overrate her value to the student of literature in these learned but uncharted flights all over the visible sky of the periods where her subjects moved. Literature, she knows, is a species of royal descent. The Titans may not live to see the faces of their own children, yet out of those rich fecundities of authentic utterance children are born and show trace of august lineage. And it is hers, the “abstract and brief chronicler” of values, to find it.
To Louise Guiney, there were two transcending realities: poetry and what men call, with varying accent, religion. She believed in poetry as, in the old sense, an ecstasy. She loved archaic phrases and grieved because fit words should perish, mourning them as men would mourn if, believing there were children of immortal lineage among them, they discovered these could die. To her there were archetypes of beauty, the living heavenly substance we have, with an unshaken prescience, learned to call undying. Wandering evanescences, we persuade them down to us or snatch at them and cage them in our heavier atmosphere with the hope, sometimes bewilderingly justified, of their singing on and on. One condition of our even hearing the beat of those wings bending their swallow flight to the responsive mind, is the high vibration in ourselves, the intense activity of what we call imagination. And this vibration is so often the effervescence of youth, the overplus of a richness of physical life—the speed of the blood, a quick sensibility of the brain—that after the pulse slows and the brain responds less eagerly the poet sings no more; or he clouds his verse with moralities and loads it with the stiff embroidery of intellectual conceits. Louise Guiney’s singing life was not long, because, after the impulse, in its first capricious spontaneity, had left her, she did not urge it back again. It would have been impossible for her, at any period, to select desirable subjects for poetry as the landscape painter marks a lovely spot in his mind’s eye, to return with tubes and brush. Once she did own to the tempting exercise of composing a poem in cold blood. It turned out to be compact of beauties appealing to the public mind, and she viewed it thenceforth from a hurt and wistful wonder. You might say she cherished a distaste for it, as being a child of indirect lineage, a mood disloyal to the greater gods. She was ever the acolyte in that temple, never beseeching at the altar, but serving it. For she was of those pilgrims of destiny who are perpetually referring this world to the pattern of worlds existing before time began. To her, poetry is an unspoken allegiance to the very essence of mysticism, magic, glamourie. It is the echo from far hills of space. It is never without the witchery of the unknown, the guessed-at, the adored but never seen. Not all its dances are woven under the sky we scan chiefly for the weather, but in the elusive gleaming where not we but our dreams are denizens. It is perpetually looking from “magic casements.” It brings the twilight feeling. It may not be melancholy, yet it inspires melancholy. It may not be joyous, yet the pleasure it awakens is more exquisite than it has words to celebrate. These are matters far from the market where we buy and sell and measure our worth by cleverness in exploiting it. These are courts where our poet’s “shy foot” dared penetrate with the confidence of a daughter of the house.
From Songs at the Start to Happy Ending (1909) this last bearing her stamp as comprising “the less faulty half of all the author’s published verse,” her work hardly varies in a certain cool, limpid, sometimes austere content. Songs at the Start is distinctly unlike the familiar books of perfervid and unbridled youth. Almost childlike, in some instances, the songs are always restrained within due measure. The gusts of a too tempestuous heart, the revolt of youth against a world ready made for it, are not hers. She might be the child of a pagan ardency of simple joy, singing to the echo in some waking spring. These are the dewy recognitions of a world “not realized.” The faults she showed in this first printing are the ones that plagued her throughout, though she recognized them with a rueful self-dispraise and mock extravagance of remorse. They are the infrequent lapses of a not invariably musical ear. To the end, she would, from stanza to stanza, unconsciously change her cadence. It might be a fault for her to redress; but who among her lovers would complain of it now? It was an individual flaw, the little human imperfection like a mole on beauty’s cheek; the too studied reverse of it might have been something not only “icily regular” but “splendidly null.”
The White Sail, part legend and part lyric, with an academic ballast of sonnets, sang out in fuller tone, though with no less individual a measure. The legends ring curiously scholastic in these days when the industrious versifier celebrates the small beer of his own “home town” in untrained eccentricities all too faithful to his villageous mood. Her legends were the tall pines of the fairy grove she wandered in. There were pillared aisles and porticos, not New England dooryards, tapestries shaken by winds of the past, not leaves, red and gold, blown her from the swamps and hills she knew. Yet her bookish fetters were straining from within, and in Daybreak she sings out with a more individual note, a faint far music, as if some young chorister dared part the antiphonal ranks of ordered service and try the song he heard that morning when he and the lark together saluted the hills of dawn.