The scene of the story is that grey-colored, friendly capital—Dublin. It is not the tortuous, inimical, Aristotlian-minded Dublin of James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist"—it is the Dublin of the simple-hearted Dubliner: Dublin with its great grey clouds and its poising sea-birds, with its hills and its bay, with its streets that everyone would avoid and with its other streets that everyone promenades; with its greens and its park and its river-walks—Dublin, always friendly. It is true that there are in it those who, as the Policeman told Mary, are born by stealth, eat by subterfuge, drink by dodges, get married by antics, and slide into death by strange, subterranean passages. Well, even these would be kindly and humorous the reader of "Mary, Mary" knows. James Stephens has made Dublin a place where the heart likes to dwell.
And would to God that I to-day
Saw sunlight on the Hill of Howth,
And sunlight on the Golden Spears,
And sunlight out on Dublin Bay.
So one who has known Dublin might well exclaim on reading "Mary, Mary" east or west of Eirinn.
James Stephens brought a fresh and distinctive element into the new Irish literature—an imaginative exuberance that in its rush of expression became extravagant, witty, picturesque and lovely. His work began to appear about 1906. Like the rest of the young Irish writers he made his appearance in the weekly journal "Sinn Fein," contributing to it his first poems and his mordant or extravagant essays and stories. At once he made a public for himself. His first poems were published in a volume called "Insurrections" and his public became a wide one. "Mary, Mary" brought out in 1912 was his first prose book. His next, the unclassifiable "Crock of Gold," was given the De Polignac Prize in 1914. Since then he has published two other prose books—"Here Are Ladies" and "The Demi-Gods," with three books of verse, "The Hill of Vision," "Songs from the Clay," and "The Rocky Road to Dublin."
"Insurrections," written just before "Mary, Mary," has vivid revelations of personality. "I saw God—do you doubt it?" says Tomas an Buile in the "pub."—
I saw God. Do you doubt it?
Do you dare to doubt it?
I saw the Almighty Man. His hand
Was resting on a mountain, and
He looked upon the World and all about it:
I saw Him plainer than you see me now,
You mustn't doubt it.
He was not satisfied;
His look was all dissatisfied.
His beard swung on a wind far out of sight
Behind the world's curve, and there was light
Most fearful from His forehead, and He sighed,
"That star went always wrong, and from the start
I was dissatisfied."
He lifted up His hand—
I say He heaved a dreadful hand
Over the spinning Earth, then I said "Stay,
You must not strike it, God; I'm in the way;
And I will never move from where I stand."
He said, "Dear child, I feared that you were dead,"
And stayed His hand.
His God is never a lonely God—he has need of humanity, and the quick champion of humanity springs straight into the love of God. Such is the intuition that is in all James Stephens' books.
He is the only author I have ever known whose talk is like his books. The prodigality of humour, intuition and searching thought that he puts into his pages he also puts into what he says. And he is the only man I ever met who can sing his stories as well as tell them. Like the rest of the Irish writers of to-day, what he writes has a sense of spiritual equality as amongst all men and women—a sense of a democracy that is inherent in the world.