Louise Imogen Guiney

								

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