A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (56 page)

157.20–4
put an iron lamp … instead of the iron lamp
: again, Epictetus (
Discourses of Epictetus
, i. 18. 15 (ed. Gill, 44–5)).

157.37–8
literary tradition … marketplace
: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), English poet and aesthetic philosopher, makes a similar distinction in his
Biographia Literaria
(1817), ch. XXII.

157.38–158.1
a sentence of Newman’s … company of the saints
: Newman, ‘The Glories of Mary’ (in which he is translating very literally Ecclus. 24: 16 (Vulgate: ‘
et in plenitudine sanctorum detentio mea
’;
JSA
and
A
): ‘And I took root in an honourable people, and in the glorious company of the Saints I was detained’ (
Mixed Congregations
, 358).

158.15
tundish
: English (not Irish): ‘a shallow vessel with a tube at the
bottom fitting into the bung-hole of a tun or cask, forming a kind of tunnel used in brewing; hence, generally, funnel’ (
SOED
).

158.19
Lower Drumcondra
: northern suburb of Dublin.

158.25
prodigal
: from the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11–32) in which the elder and consistently faithful son is angry at his father’s forgiveness of and largesse toward the younger ‘prodigal’ son who has squandered his father’s goods and only latterly returned to the fold.

158.26
clamorous conversions
: the Oxford Movement (
c
. 1833–45), led by Newman among others, which aimed at restoring to the Anglican Church traditional Catholic teaching and practice; it emphasized ceremony, set up Anglican religious communities, supported social work and scholarship; formed the basis of Anglo-Catholicism. Newman, of course, subsequently converted to Catholicism.

158.29–30
tardy spirit
: one who has come late to the truth.

158.31
serious dissenters
: ‘dissenters’: in England, those who were neither Catholic nor Anglican, but belonged to a nonconformist religion; they too had a history of persecution in England.

158.32
pomps of the establishment
: the elaborate rituals of Catholicism or High Church Anglicanism.

158.34–5
six principle men … supralapsarian dogmatists
: Each of these is a (particularly peculiar) dissenting Baptist sect. See
G
and
A
for descriptions.

158.37
insufflation
: blowing or breathing on a person to symbolize the influence of the Holy Spirit (
OERD
).

158.37–8
imposition of hands
: like the ‘laying on of hands’ of Jesus and the apostles: to transfer the authority of the priesthood or bestow the Holy Spirit (see 134.22 n.).

158.38
procession of the Holy Ghost
: the doctrine that the Holy Spirit ‘proceeds’ from the Father to the Son and thence to the Church.

158.39–159.1
disciple … receipt of custom
: Matthew, the tax collector, as described in Matt. 9: 9: ‘And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man, named Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he saith unto him, Follow me. And he arose, and followed him.’

159.2
chapel
: in England, nonconformist churches are commonly called ‘chapels’, those of the Established Church ‘churches’ (unless they happen to come attached to larger institutions like colleges or castles, when they are called ‘chapels’); in contrast to Ireland (see 119.4 n.).

159.11
Ben Jonson
: see 148.7–8 n.

159.12
language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine
: i.e. English, with all that that means given the history of the English in Ireland, though see 170.35–9.

159.18
the beautiful and the sublime
: a distinction drawn by various aesthetic philosophers, most famously in English by Edmund Burke (1729–97, an Irishman, educated at Trinity College, who became a lawyer in England), in his ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful’ (1757).

159.33
Per aspera ad astra
: Latin cliché: ‘Through hardships [literally, rough things] to the stars’.

159.35
first arts’ class
: class for preparation towards one of the four examinations (‘First Arts’ taken in the second year) required for a degree at University College (Sullivan, 158).

160.1
Loyola
: see 46.34 n.

160.1
halfbrother of the clergy
: cf. Joyce in his Trieste notebook, where of the Jesuits he writes: ‘They flatter the clergy their half brothers’ (
WD
102).

160.3
ghostly father
: a spiritual father (i.e. confessor), after the Holy Ghost.

160.3–7
this man … the lukewarm and the prudent
: see 131.18 n.

160.8–9
Kentish fire
: ‘rapturous applause, or three times three and one more. The expression probably originated with the protracted cheers given in Kent to the No-Popery orators in 1828–29’, i.e. during the time of the debate over Catholic Emancipation (
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
, 620).

160.22
Leopardstown
: racecourse in south Dublin.

160.28
Are you as bad as that?
: a juvenile joke: has Stephen been caught so short he needs toilet paper?

160.30
In case of necessity
: an even worse joke; see 89.33–5 and 89.29 n. ff.

160.34–5
atheist freemason
: strictly a contradiction in terms, since Masons require that all members believe in ‘The Great Architect of the Universe’, but here ‘atheist’ because non- (and presumed by many to be anti-) Catholic.

161.3
W. S. Gilbert
: William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911), English dramatist, most famously paired with the musician Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) to write fourteen light operas (1871–96).

161.5–7
On a cloth … billiard balls
: from the final act of Gilbert and Sullivan’s
The Mikado
(1895), where in the reign of the benevolent Mikado wrongdoers will be brought to particular forms of justice; here, the billiard sharp will have to play ‘extravagant matches | In fitless finger stall | On a cloth untrue, | With a twisted cue | And elliptical billiard balls’.

161.15–16
sabbath of misrule
: like the medieval Feasts of Misrule, licensed carnival festivities (see
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
, 625).

161.16
the community
: see 7.37 n.

161.20–1
mental science
: as opposed to ‘moral science’, the study of the general rules that govern human behaviour (1860, first use cited in
SOED
).

161.21
case of conscience
: more usually within the domain of ‘moral science’.

161.34
platinoid
: an alloy of nickel, zinc, copper, and tungsten (
SOED
).

161.35
F. W. Martino
: not Martino, but Fernando Wood Martin (b. 1863), an American chemist who did develop platinoid and wrote several chemistry textbooks.

162.15
Ulster
: one of the original four Irish provinces (see 52.3 n.); here, the Protestant-dominated north-east part of Ireland.

162.21
pound of flesh
: now proverbial, from Shakespeare,
The Merchant of
Venice
, I. iii. 147–52, where Shylock demands that should Antonio not repay his debt, the forfeit will be ‘an equal pound of your fair flesh’.

162.27
Belfast
: main city in Ulster; Stephen reads MacAlister as what he thinks of as a typical Ulsterman (more practical than imaginative) whose father would have done better to send him to Queen’s University, Belfast (by implication more vocational than University College) and save himself the rail fare.

162.36
Epictetus
: see 157.15 n.

162.37–8
pronounce the word science as a monosyllable
: a comment on the Ulster accent.

163.7
two photographs
: of the Tsar Nicholas II (1868–1918, r. 1894–1917) and Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovina (1872–1918; r. 1894–1917) of Russia; Nicholas issued a ‘Peace Rescript’ in 1898 which resulted in the Hague Peace Conference of 1899 (which Sheehy-Skeffington attended (see 149.6–7 n.) which led not to ‘general disarmament’ but to the setting up of an international war tribunal.

163.19
Ego habeo
: schoolboy Latin: ‘I have’.

163.21
Quod?
: schoolboy Latin: ‘What?’

163.24
Per pax universalis
: schoolboy Latin: ‘For universal peace’.

163.33–4
Credo ut … humore estis
: schoolboy Latin: ‘I believe you are a bloody liar and your expression shows that you are in a damned bad humour’.

163.37
No stimulants and votes for the bitches
: parody of the demands of those like Sheehy-Skeffington (see 149.6–7 n.).

164.1–2
he pours his soul so freely into my ear
: cf. John Keats’s (1795–1821) ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1820) where the bird ‘pours his soul abroad’ and see 99.28–9 n.

164.6
A sugar!
: Joyce to his translator: ‘A euphemism used by Cranley [
sic
] in as much as it begins with the same letter for a product of the body the monosyllabic term for which in English is sometimes used as an exclamation and sometimes as descriptive of a person whom one does not like. In the French language it is associated with Marshal Cambronne and the French (the females at least) sometimes use a similar euphemism employing the [word] miel instead of the word used by the military commander’ (
LIII
129–30).

164.7
Quis est in malo humore … ego aut vos?
: schoolboy Latin: ‘Who is in a bad humour, me or you?’

164.16
Elizabethan English
: examples of which are still to be found spoken in parts of Ireland; Stephen is thinking of the Irish rural eloquence in which the twin strains of Gaelic and Elizabethan English persist.

164.19
sacred eloquence of Dublin
: that of the famous Irish eighteenth-century orators.

164.20
Wicklow pulpit
: see 28.29 n. and 174.10.

164.25
the progressive tendency
: socialism.

164.34
handball
: ball for the traditional Irish version of the game, revived by the Gaelic Athletic Association (see 6.13 and 51.13 nn.).

165.10
Czar’s rescript
: see 163.7 n.

165.11
Stead
: William Thomas Stead (1849–1912), crusading, anti-war journalist.

165.11
general disarmament
: see 163.7 n.

165.11–12
arbitration in cases of international disputes
: see 163.7 n..

165.12
signs of the times
: after Jesus to the Pharisees and Sadducees in Matt. 16: 3: ‘O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?’

165.12–15
the new humanity … greatest possible number
: cf. Frances Hutcheson (1694–1746), English philosopher,
Concerning Moral Good and Evil
, §3, 8: ‘The action is best, which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest number’, and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), English Utilitarian, in
The Commonplace Book
: ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation’; now a near cliché.

165.21
Marx … cod
: Karl Marx (1818–83), German political philosopher and economist; Temple’s slang: ‘Marx is only a bloody joke’.

165.27
Socialism was founded by an Irishman
: extraordinarily oversimplistic and chauvinist claim; at a very long stretch, one possible candidate is James (Bronterre) O’Brien (1804–64), who wrote on the state of the working class, propounded schemes for land nationalization, ‘came closer than any of his peers to formulating a coherent social policy’ (
F
365), and coined the terms ‘social democrat’ and ‘social democracy’; another is William Thompson (1775–1833), who published
An Inquiry into the Distribution of Wealth
(1824) and an
Appeal
(1825) for the equality of the sexes, willed his property to the co-operative movement (though his family wrested it back), was quoted by Marx, who was himself described by Sidney (1859–1947) and Beatrice (1858–1943) Webb (English socialists) as ‘Thompson’s disciple’, atheist and vegetarian (
F
307–8).

165.28
Collins
: Anthony Collins (1676–1729), born at Hexton, Middlesex, English theologian, deist, wrote
Discourse of Freethinking
(1713), ‘freethinker’ (see 157.5–6 n.).