age, because it is the most practical. If ever there was a man who put
his foot on the neck of the sublime, that man is Uncle Sam. His
contribution to the arts is almost nothing. His outrages against
established artistic canons have been innumerable. He owns a new land
without traditions. He laughs at all traditions. He has never raised a
saint or a mummy or a religion (Mormonism he stole from the East), a
crusader, a tyrant, a painter, a sculptor, a musician, a dramatist, an
inquisition, a star chamber, a council of ten. All his efforts have
been in a strictly practical direction, and most of his efforts have
been crowned with success. He has devoted his leisure time, the hours
not spent in cutting down forests or drugging Indians with whisky, to
laughing at the foolish old notions which the foolish old countries
cherish. He had a wonderfully fertile estate of two thousand million
acres, about only one fourth of which is even to this day under direct
human management. In getting these five hundred million acres of land
under him he had met all kinds of ground--valley, forest, mountain,
plain. But in none of these did he find anything but axes and whisky of
the least use. No mountain had been sanctified to him by first earthly
contact with the two Tables of the Law. No plain had been rendered
sacred as that upon which the miraculous manna fell to feed the chosen
people. No inland sea had been the scene of a miraculous draught of
fishes. All the land acquired and cultivated by Uncle Sam came to him by
the right of whisky and the axe. The mountain was nothing more than so
much land placed at a certain angle that made it of little use for
tillage. The plains, the rivers, and inland seas had a simply commercial
value in his eyes. He had no experience of a miracle of any kind, and he
did not see why he should bow down and respect a mountain, that, to him,
was no more than so many thousand acres on an incline unfavourable to
cultivation. Such a condition of the ground was a bore, and he would
have cut down the mountain as he had cut down the Indian and the forest,
if he had known how to accomplish the feat. He saw nothing mystic in the
waters or the moon. Were the rivers and lakes wholesome to drink and
useful for carriage, and well stocked with fish? These were the
questions he asked about the waters. Would there be moonlight enough for
riding and working? was the only question he asked about that “orbèd
maiden with white fire laden whom mortals call the moon.” His notions,
his plains, his rivers, his lakes, were all “big,” but he never thought
of calling them sublime. On his own farm he failed to find any present
trace of the supernatural; and he discovered no trace of the
supernatural in tradition, for there was no tradition once the red man
had been washed into his grave with whisky. Hence Uncle Sam began
treating the supernatural with familiarity, and matters built on the
supernatural with levity. Now without the supernatural the sublime
cannot exist any length of time, if at all.
It may be urged it is unreasonable to hold that the Americans have done
away with the sublime, since in the history of all nations the earlier
centuries were, as in America, devoted to material affairs. There is one
fact bearing on this which should not be left out of count, namely, that
America did not start from barbarism, or was not raised on a site where
barbarism had overrun a high state of civilisation. The barbarous hordes
of the north effaced the civilisation of old Rome, and raised upon its
ashes a new people, the Italians, who in time led the way in art, as the
old Romans had before them. The Renaissance was a second crop raised off
the same ground by new men. The arts Rome had borrowed from Greece had
been trampled down by Goths, who, when they found themselves in the land
of milk and honey, sat down to enjoy the milk and honey, until suddenly
the germs of old art struck root, and once more all eyes turned to Italy
for principles of beauty. But America started with the civilisation of a
highly civilised age. She did not rear her own civilisation on her own
soil. She did not borrow her arts from any one country. She simply
peopled her virgin plains with the sons of all the earth, who brought
with them the culture of their respective nationalities. She has not
followed the ordinary course of nations, from conflict to power, from
power to prosperity, from prosperity to the arts, luxury, and decay. She
started with prosperity, and the first use she made of her prosperity
was, not to cultivate the fine arts in her own people, but to laugh at
them in others. In the individual man the sense of humour grows with
years. In nations the sense of humour develops with centuries. The
literature of nations begins with battle-songs and hymns, and ends with
burlesques and blasphemies.
Now although America has begun with burlesques and blasphemies, no one
can for a moment imagine that America is not going to create a noble
literature of her own. She is destined not only to found and build up a
noble literature, but one which will be unique. When she has time, when
she has let most of those idle one thousand five hundred million acres,
she will begin writing her books. By that time she will have running in
her veins choice blood from every race on earth, and it is a matter of
certainty she will give the world many delights now undreamed of. No
other nation on earth will have, or ever has had, such an opportunity of
devoting attention to man in his purely domestic and social relations.
The United States of to-day has, for practical purposes, no foreign
policy. She has no foreign rivals, she is not likely to have foreign
wars, while in her own country she has large bodies of men from every
people on the world. She owns the largest assorted lot of mankind on the
globe, and as years go by we may safely conclude she will add to the
variety and number of her sons. In all this appears no hope for the
sublime. There is no instance in literature of a nation going back from
laughter to heroics. The two may exist side by side. But that is not the
case in America. Up to this hour only one class of transatlantic writers
has challenged the attention of Europe, and that class is humorous and
profane. Emerson, Bryant, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, and
Irving are merely Europeans born in America. But Ward, Harte, Twain, and
Breitmann are original and American.
America is undoubtedly the literary promise-land of the future. It has
done nothing up to this. Its condition has forbidden it to achieve
anything, but great triumphs may be anticipated from it. Crossing the
Atlantic, what do we find in the other great branch of the
English-speaking race? Religious publications head the list by a long
way. They have nothing to do with this subject save in so far as they
are in the line of the sublime. All forms of the Christian and Jewish
creeds are sublime. Looking at the other walks of literature, we find
the death sentence of the sublime written everywhere. With the
exception of Mr. Browning, here or there we have no poet or dramatist
who attempts it. We have elegant trifles and beautiful form in many
volumes of second-rate contemporary verse. There never was a time when
the science of poetry was understood until now. Our critics can tell you
with mathematical certainty the number of poems as distinguished from
pieces of verse every well-known man has written. But we are not
producing any great poetry, and none of the sublime kind. This is the
age of elegant poetic incentive, of exquisite culture, but it is too
dainty. We do not rise much above a poem to a shoe, or an ode to a
ringlet, perfumed with one of Mr. Rimmel’s best admired distillations.
We have a few poets who are continually trying to find out who or what
the deuce they are, and what they meant by being born, and so on; but
then these men are for the eclectic, and not the herd of sensible
people. We have two men who have done noble work, Browning and Tennyson;
but, speaking broadly, we find the sublime nowhere. It is true you
cannot force genius as you force asparagus; and these remarks are not
intended to indict the age with having no poetic faculty or aspiration.
Abundance of poetry of a new and beautiful kind does exist, but it is
not of the lofty kind born to the men of old.
Turning eyes away from literature, take a few more of the arts. Before
we go farther, let us admit that one art at least never reached sublimer
recorded heights than to-day. The music of the generation just past is,
I believe, in the front rank of the art. It is an art now in the throes
of an enormous transformation. Not using the phrase in its slangy
meaning, the music of the future is sure to touch splendours never
dreamed of by that Raphael of the lyre, Mozart. The only art-Titans now
wrestling are the musicians; not those paltry souls that pad the poor
words of inane burlesques, but the great spirits that sit apart, and
have audiences of the angels. These men, out of their own mouths, assure
us that they catch the far-off murmurs of such imperial tones as never
filled the ear of man yet. They cannot gather up the broken chords they
hear. They admit they have heard no more than a few bars of the great
masters who are close upon us; but, they say, if they only reproduce the
effect these preluding passages have upon them, “Such harmonious madness
from their lips would flow, the world should listen then as they are
listening now.”
Go to the Royal Academy and look round you. How pretty! How nice! How
pathetic! But would you like to lend your arm to Michael Angelo, and go
round those walls with him? He would prefer the rack, the gridiron of
St. Laurence. It is true there is no necessity for the sublime; but
those men who have been in the awful presence of such dreams as _Night_
and _Morning_, by that sculptor, must be pardoned if they prefer it to
the art you find in Burlington House. One of our great English poets
said, speaking of the trivial nature of conversation at the beginning of
this century, that if Lord Bacon were alive now, and made a remark in an
ordinary assembly, conversation would stop. If casts of _Night_ and
_Morning_ were placed at the head of the staircase of Burlington House,
no one with appreciation of art would enter the rooms; the strong would
linger for ever round those stupendous groups, and the feeble would be
frighted away. Of course, the vast crowd of art-patrons would pass the
group with only a casual glance, and a protest against having plaster
casts occupying ground which ought to be allotted to original work.
Read any speech Burke or Grattan ever spoke, and then your _Times_ and
the debate last night. How plain it becomes that from no art has the
sublime so completely vanished as the orator’s. Take those two speakers
above, and run your eye over Cicero and Demosthenes, the four are of the
one school, in the great style. Theirs is the large and universal
eloquence. It is as fresh and beautiful, as pathetic, as sublime now as
when uttered, although the occasions and circumstances are no longer of
interest to man. The statistician and the poltroon and the verbatim
reporter have killed the orator. If any man were to rise in the House
and make a speech in the manner of the ancients, the honourable members
would hurry in from all sides to laugh. A few sessions ago a member rose
in his place, and delivered an oration on a subject not popular with the
House, but in a manner which echoed the grand old style. At once every
seat for which there was a member present at the time was occupied; and
the next morning the daily papers had articles which, while disposing of
the speaker’s cause in a few lines, devoted columns to the manner in
which he had pleaded it.
To discover what has led to the decay of the sublime is not difficult,
and even in an ignorant essay like this, it may be briefly indicated.
Roughly speaking, it is attributable to the accumulation of certainties.
Any handbook that cribs from Longinus or Burke will tell you the vague
is essential to the sublime. To attain it there must be something half
understood--not fully known, only partly revealed. To attain it detail
must be lost, and only a totality presented to the mind. For instance,
if a great lover of Roman history were suddenly to find himself on the
top of the Coliseum, the most sublime result to be obtained from the
situation would be produced by repeating to himself the simple words,
“This is Rome.” By these words the totality of the city’s grandeur,
influence, power, and enterprises would be vaguely presented to a
scholar’s mind dim in the glow of a multitude of half-revealing
side-lights. If a companion whispered in the scholar’s ears, “This place
would at one time seat a hundred thousand people,” then the particular
is reached, and the sublime vanishes like sunshine against a cloud. Most
of North America has been explored. Africa and Australia have been
traversed. The source of the Nile has been found. We can read the
hieroglyphics. We know the elements now flaming in the sun. Many of the
phenomena in all branches of physiology which were mysteries to our
fathers are familiar commonplaces of knowledge now. We have learned to
foretell the weather. We travel a thousand miles for the hundred
travelled by our fathers. We have daily newspapers to discuss all
matters, clear away mysteries. We have opened the grave for the sublime
with the plough of progress. Though the words stick in my throat, I
must, I daresay, cry, “God speed the plough!”
A BORROWED POET.
Twenty years ago I borrowed, and read for the first time, the poems of
James Clarence Mangan. I then lived in a city containing not one-third
as many people as yearly swell the population of London. The friend of
whom I borrowed the volume in 1866 is still living in his old home, in
the house from which I carried away the book then. I saw him last winter
and he is almost as little aged as the hills he has fronted all that
time. I have had in those years as many homes as an Arab nomad. He still
stays in the old place, and in the gray twilight of dark summer mornings
wakes to hear as of yore the twitter of sparrows and the cawing of rooks
from the other side of the river, and the hoarse hooting of the
steamboat hard by.
The volume of Mangan now by me I borrowed of another old friend, who
passes most of his day within sight of that familiar river not quite a
hundred yards from the house of the lender of twenty years back. In the
meantime I have seen no other copy of Mangan.
This latest fact is not much to be wondered at, for I am not
enterprising in the matter of books--rarely buy and rarely borrow, and
have never been in the reading room of the British Museum in my life.
The book may be common to those who know much about books; but I have
seen only the two copies I speak of, and these are of the same edition
and of American origin. I believe a selection from the poems was issued
a few years ago in Dublin, but a copy has not drifted my way. The
title-page of the volume before me is missing, but in a list of
publications at the back I find “_The Poems of James Clarence Mangan_.
Containing German Anthology, Irish Anthology, Apocrypha, and
Miscellaneous Poems. With a Biographical and Critical Introduction, by
John Mitchel. 1 vol. 12mo. Printed on tinted and calendered paper.
Nearly 500 pages. $1.” Beyond all doubt this is the book, and it was
published by Mr. P. M. Haverty, of New York.
As far as I know, this is the only edition of Mangan which pretends to
be even comprehensive. It does not lay claim to completeness. At the
time the late John Mitchel wrote his introduction he was aware of but
one other edition of Mangan’s poems--the German Anthology, published in
Dublin many years ago. I am nearly sure that since the appearance of
Mitchel’s edition there have been no verses of Mangan’s published in
book form on this side of the Atlantic, except the selections I have
already mentioned, and I do not think any edition whatever has been
published in this country.
During the twenty years which have elapsed since first I made the
acquaintance of the poems of James Clarence Mangan, I have read much
verse and many criticisms of verse, and yet I don’t remember to have
seen one line about Mangan in any publication issued in England. I
believe two magazine articles have appeared, but I never saw them.
Almost during these years, or within a period which does not extend
back far beyond them, criticism of verse has ceased to be a matter of
personal opinion, and has been elevated or degraded, as you will, into
an exact science. The opinions of old reviewers--the Jeffreys and
Broughams--are now looked on as curiosities of literature. There is as
wide a gulf between the mode of treating poetry now and eighty years ago
as there is between the mode of travelling, or the guess-work that makes
up the physician’s art; and if in a gathering of literary experts any
one were now to apply to a new bard the dogmas of criticism quoted for
or against Byron, Shelley, Keats, and the Lakers in their time, a
silence the reverse of respectful would certainly follow.
This is not the age of great poetry, but it is the age of “poetical
poetry,” to quote the phrase of one of the finest critics using the
English language--one who has, unfortunately for the culture of that
tongue and those who use it, written lamentably little. The great danger
by which we stand menaced at present is, that our perceptions may become
too exquisite and our poetry too intellectual. This, anyway, is true of
poetry which may at all claim to be an expression of thought. There are
in our time supreme formists in small things, carvers of cameos and
walnut shells, and musical conjurors who make sweet melodies with richly
vowelled syllables. But unfortunately the tendency of the poetic men of
to-day is towards intellectuality, and this is a humiliating decay. In
the times of Queen Elizabeth, when all the poets were Shakespeares, they
cared nothing for their intellects. The intellectual side of a poet’s
mind is an impertinence in his art.
I do not presume to say what place exactly James Clarence Mangan ought
to occupy on the greater roll of verse-writers, and I am not sure that
he is, in the finest sense of the phrase, a “poetical poet;” but he is,
at all events, the most poetical poet Ireland has produced, when we take
into account the volume and quality of his song. I shall purposely avoid
any reference to him as a translator, except in acting on John Mitchel’s
opinion, and treating one of his “translations” from the Arabic as an
original poem; for during his lifetime he confessed that he had passed
off original poems of his own as translations; and Mitchel assures us
that Mangan did not know Arabic. As this essay does not profess to be
orderly or dignified, or anything more than rambling gossip, put into
writing for no other reason than to introduce to the reader a few pieces
of verse he may not have met before, I cannot do better than insert here
the lines of which I am now speaking:
THE TIME OF THE BARMECIDES.
I.
“My eyes are filmed, my beard is grey,
I am bowed with the weight of years;
I would I were stretched in my bed of clay
With my long-lost youth’s compeers!
For back to the past, though the thought brings woe,
My memory ever glides--
To the old, old time, long, long ago,
The time of the Barmecides!
To the old, old time, long, long ago,
The time of the Barmecides.
II.
“Then youth was mine, and a fierce wild will,
And an iron arm in war,
And a fleet foot high upon Ishkar’s hill,
When the watch-lights glimmered afar,
And a barb as fiery as any I know
That Khoord or Beddaween rides,
Ere my friends lay low--long, long ago,
In the time of the Barmecides;
Ere my friends lay low--long, long ago,
In the time of the Barmecides.
III.
“One golden goblet illumed my board,
One silver dish was there;
At hand my tried Karamanian sword
Lay always bright and bare;
For those were the days when the angry blow
Supplanted the word that chides--
When hearts could glow--long, long ago,
In the time of the Barmecides;
When hearts could glow--long, long ago,
In the time of the Barmecides.
IV.
“Through city and desert my mates and I
Were free to rove and roam,
Our diapered canopy the deep of the sky,
Or the roof of the palace dome.
Oh, ours was the vivid life to and fro,
Which only sloth derides:
Men spent Life so--long, long ago,
In the time of the Barmecides;
Men spent Life so--long, long ago,
In the time of the Barmecides.
V.
“I see rich Bagdad once again,
With its turrets of Moorish mould,
And the Kalif’s twice five hundred men
Whose binishes flamed with gold.
I call up many a gorgeous show
Which the Pall of Oblivion hides--
All passed like snow, long, long ago,
With the time of the Barmecides;
All passed like snow, long, long ago,
With the time of the Barmecides.
VI.
“But mine eye is dim, and my beard is grey,
And I bend with the weight of years--
May I soon go down to the House of Clay,
Where slumber my Youth’s compeers!
For with them and the Past, though the thought wakes woe,
My memory ever abides,
And I mourn for the Times gone long ago,
For the Times of the Barmecides!
I mourn for the Times gone long ago,
For the Times of the Barmecides!”
This is the poem claimed by Mangan to be from the Arabic. I have no
means of knowing whether it is or not. There is one translation from the
Persian, one from the Ottoman, and according to Mitchel, one from the
Coptic. But seeing that he turned into verse a great number of Irish
poems from prose translations done by another, and that he did not know
a word of that language, I think it may be safely assumed that _The Last
of the Barmecides_ is original. This poem is so old a favourite of mine
that I cannot pretend to be an impartial judge of it. When I hear it (I
can never see a poem I know well and love much) I listen as to the
unchanged voice of an old friend; I wander in a maze of memories; “I see
rich Bagdad once again;” I am once more owner of the magic carpet, and
am floating irresponsibly and at will on the intoxicating atmosphere of
the poets over the enchanted groves, and streams, and hills, and seas of
fairyland, or harkening to voices that years ago ceased to stir in my
ears, gazing at the faces that have long since moulded the face cloth
into blunted memories of the face for the grave.
On the 20th of June, 1849, Mangan died in the Meath Hospital, Dublin.
Having been born in 1803, he was, in 1849, eight years older than Poe,
who died destitute and forlorn at Baltimore in the same year. Both poets
had been in abject poverty, both had been unfortunate in love, both had
been consummate artists, both had been piteously unlucky in a thousand
ways, and both had died the same year, and in common hospitals. Two more
miserable stories it is impossible to find anywhere. I would recommend
those of sensitive natures to confine their reading to the work these
men did, and not to the misfortunes they laboured under, and the follies
they committed. I think, of the two, Mangan suffered more acutely; for
he never rose up in anger against the world, or those around him, but
glided like an uncomplaining ghost into the grave, where, long before
his death, all his hopes lay buried. He had only a half-hearted pity for
himself. Poe, in his _Raven_, is, all the time of his most pathetic and
terrible complaining, conscious that he complains as becomes a fine
artist. But the raven’s croak does not touch the heart. It appeals to
the intellect; it affects the fancy, the imagination, the ear, the eye.
When Mangan opens his bosom and shows you the ravens that prey upon him,
he cannot repress something like a laugh at the thought that any one
could be interested in him and his woes. See:
THE NAMELESS ONE.
BALLAD.
I.
“Roll forth, my song, like the rushing river,
That sweeps along to the mighty sea;
God will inspire me while I deliver
My soul of thee!
II.
“Tell thou the world, when my bones lie whitening
Amid the last homes of youth and eld,
That there was once one whose veins ran lightning
No eye beheld.
III.
“Tell how his boyhood was one drear night-hour,
How shone for _him_, through his griefs and gloom,
No star of all heaven sends to light our
Path to the tomb.
IV.
“Roll on, my song, and to after ages
Tell how, disdaining all earth can give,
He would have taught men from wisdom’s pages
The way to live.
V.