Louise Imogen Guiney

								

longer visited. She would sail, not for those known islands on every
map where harbors are charted and the smallest craft can coal and
water, but for some lost Atlantis, even if she might only moor in its
guessed neighborhood and hear, at least, the plash of ripples over it.
She was always listening, the generous hand to the responsive ear, to
echoes from “forgotten or infrequent lyres.”
“Apollo,” she says, “has a class of might-have-beens whom he loves:
poets bred in melancholy places, under disabilities, with thwarted
growth and thinned voices; poets compounded of everything magical and
fair, like an elixir which is the outcome of knowledge and patience,
and which wants, in the end, even as common water would, the essence of
immortality.”
It is not quite easy to tell why she delighted so absolutely in digging
for ore in spots of incredible difficulty. It was not that she was
ill-grounded in the greater, more entirely accepted cults. Shakespeare
was hers and Milton, and in Dante she did authoritative work. And it is
idle to wonder whether, so many of the big critical jobs being done,
she had a keen eye to the market value of such unconsidered trifles
as were left. The practical worth of a task would never have been an
incentive; it might have been a deterrent. Like Mangan, there was
that in her which bade her not to cross the street to advance her own
interests; it persuaded her to what seemed even wilful adoption of
the losing cause. (That she did, in many senses, harness herself to
drudgery, as life drove her the more pitilessly to the wall, is the
more to her lasting renown; by nature she was single in devotion to
the tasks she loved and ready to forswear the body’s ease.) Nor was
her attachment to the imperfectly known by any means the pleasure of
the chase, the exhilaration of the hunt when dates and genealogical
and critical sequences had “gone away” from her hounds of scent and
swiftness. It was simply true that she had an inextinguishable love
for the souls “ordained to fail.” As it made no difference to her
whether a lasting line of verse were hers or another’s, so she had the
patience of the born annalist in picking up and conserving every least
coin of the realm of letters or of manly and romantic deeds.
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