BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.
BETHEL SOLOMONS, M.B.
INTRODUCTION
If any of James Stephens books might be thought to have
need of an Introduction it would be the delightful story that
is called Mary, Mary on one side of the Atlantic Ocean
and The Charwomans Daughter on the other. It
was written in 1910, when the author was known as the poet of
Insurrections and the writer of a few of the mordant
studies that belong to a later book, Here Are Ladies.
In 1911 four people came together to establish The Irish
Review. They were David Houston, Thomas MacDonagh, James
Stephens and the present writer. James Stephens mentioned that
he could hand over some stuff for publication. The stuff
was the book in hand. It came out as a serial in the second number
with the title Mary, A Story, ran for a twelvemonth
and did much to make the fortune (if a review that perished after
a career of four years ever had its fortune made) of The
Irish Review.
From the publication of its first chapters the appeal of Mary
was felt in two or three countries. Mary Makebelieve was not just
a fictional heroine - she was Cinderella and Snow-white and all
the maidens of tradition for whom the name of heroine is big and
burthensome. With the first words of the story James Stephens
put us into the attitude of listeners to the household tale of
folk-lore. Mary, Mary is the simplest of stories:
a girl sees this and that, meets a Great Creature who makes advances
to her, is humiliated, finds a young champion and comes into her
fortune - that is all there is to it as a story. But is it not
enough to go with Mary to Stephens Green and watch the young
ducks pick up nothing with the greatest eagerness and swallow
it with the greatest delight, and after that to notice that
the ring priced One Hundred Pounds has been taken from the Jewellers
window, and then stand outside the theatre with her and her mother
and make up with them the story of the plays from the pictures
on the posters? - plays of mystery and imagination they must have
surely been.
Then, of course, there is always Marys mother; and Mrs.
Makebelieve, with her beaked nose, and her eyes like pools of
ink, and her eagle-flights of speech would give a backbone to
any story. Mrs. Makebelieve has and holds all the privileges of
the poor and the lonely. Moreover, she is the eternal Charwoman.
She could not remain for any length of time in peoples
employment without being troubled by the fact that these folk
had houses of their own and were actually employing her in a menial
capacity. Mrs. Makebelieve is, I think, a typical figure.
She is the incarnation of the pride and liveliness and imaginative
exuberance that permit the poor to live.
How poor are Mary and Mrs. Makebelieve? We know their lack by
the measure of their desire. Mrs. Makebelieve, always generous,
would have paid her servants Ten Shillings per Week each, and
their Board. And we know that she had often observed desolate
people dragging themselves through the streets, standing to glare
through the windows of bakeries and confectioners shops,
with little children in some of their arms, and that thinking
of such things every morsel she ate would have choked her were
it not for her own hunger. By our being brought to desire what
Mary and her mother desired we come to know the things they lacked.
Yes, poverty was the state in which Mary and Mrs. Makebelieve
existed, but freedom was the other side of that poverty. They
had not to set the bounds of realization upon their wishes. They
were not shut off, as too many of us are, from the adventure and
the enchantment that are in things. A broken mirror upon the wall
of a bare room! It is, after all, that wonder of wonders, a thing.
But one cannot convey to those who have not known the wonder,
how wonderful a mere thing is! A child who has watched and watched
the face of a grandfathers clock, stopped before he was
born, feels this wonder. To grown folk and to those who have many
possessions the things they own are lumber, some more convenient,
some more decorative than others. But to those who have few possessions
things are familiars and have an intimate history. Hence it is
only the poor or only unspoiled children that have the full freedom
of things - who can enter into their adventure and their enchantment.
Mary and her mother have this franchise. And for this reason also
Mary, Mary has an inner resemblance to a folk-tale.
For the folk-tale, shaped as it has been by the poor and by unspoiled
people, reveals always the adventure and the enchantment of things.
An old lamp may be Aladdins. A comb might kill a false queen.
A key may open the door of a secret chamber. A dish may be the
supreme possession of a King. The sense of the uniqueness of things
- the sense that the teller of the folk-tale has always, and that
such a poet of the poor as Burns has often, is in Mary,
Mary. And there is in it too the zest that the hungry -
not the starved but the hungry - have for life. James Stephens
says of the young man who became Marys champion, His
ally and stay was hunger, and there is no better ally for any
man: that satisfied and the game is up; for hunger is life, ambition,
good will and understanding, while fulness is all those negatives
which culminate in greediness, stupidity, and decay.
The scene of the story is that grey-colored, friendly capital
- Dublin. It is not the tortuous, inimical, Aristotlian-minded
Dublin of James Joyces 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 mustnt doubt it.
He was not satisfied;
His look was all dissatisfied.
His beard swung on a wind far out of sight
Behind the worlds 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; Im 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.