A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (57 page)

165.35–6
Lottie Collins … lend her yours?
: Lottie Collins was an English music-hall star of the 1890s; popularized ‘Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay’ (a street rhyme) in
Dick Whittington
, a pantomime, in 1891; the rhyme continues ‘She is going far away | To sing Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’ (lona and Peter Opie,
Lore and Language of Schoolchildren
, 107).

166.1
five bob each way
: ‘five bob’: five shillings; ‘each way’: a bet as in a horse race, five shillings to win, five to place, five to show. Joyce to his translator: ‘He means nothing except that he affects to consider the Middlesex philosopher as the name of a racehorse’ (
LIII
130).

166.16
Pax super totum sanguinarium globum
: schoolboy Latin: ‘Peace over all this bloody globe’.

167.3
Nos ad manum ballum jocabimus
: schoolboy Latin: ‘Let’s go play handball’.

167.16–17
like a celebrant attended by his ministers
: as a priest about to celebrate mass.

167.28
prefect of the college sodality
: see 88.4–5 n. and 133.3–4.

167.32–3
matric men … first arts men … Second arts
: respectively, first-year, second-year, and third-year students (Sullivan, 158).

168.3
I’ll take my dying bible
: ‘I’ll swear on my dying words’.

168.20–1
Jean Jacques Rousseau
: (1712–78), French philosopher and writer, believed in the fundamental goodness of human nature and the corrupting influence of civilization, author of
Émile
(1762), in which he suggested that education should allow free individual development, and
Social Contract
(1762), in which he argued for the right of the people to revolt against any government which had broken its ‘social contract’ (i.e. if its policies ran counter to the general will).

168.25
super spottum
: schoolboy Latin: ‘On the spot’.

169.1–2
go-by-the-wall
: a slippery individual.

169.19
tame goose
: see 152.14 n.

169.29–30
Long pace, fianna! … salute, one, two
: ‘fianna’: Gaelic: soldiers or warriors (from the name of the army of Fionn Mac Cumhail, the hero chieftain of the later Irish heroic cycle); it also became associated with the ‘fenians’ (whence their name); the entire phrase here: instructions from the Fenian handbook. See 32.4 n.

169.34
rebellion with hurleysticks
: a ‘sneerer’s’ comment on the failed Fenian Rising of 1867 (training having taken place not with guns but with camann (see 152.39 n.).

169.35
indispensable informer
: another snide comment, this on the longestablished practice of the betrayal of nationalist groups by informers.

170.1
office of arms
: office (in Dublin castle) which had charge of coats of arms and genealogies.

170.4
league class
: Gaelic League class in the Irish language (see 51.13 n.).

170.14–15
address the jesuits as father
: as opposed to the polite Dublin convention of addressing them as ‘sir’.

170.18
Harcourt Street
: street running south from St Stephen’s Green.

170.36–7
days of Tone to those of Parnell
: see 155.5 n.

171.1–2
Our day will come
: Fenian slogan.

171.8
nationality, language, religion
: cf. ‘Portrait’ where a slightly different tetrad throws its nets: ‘social limitations, inherited apathy of race, an adoring mother, the Christian fable’ (
PSW
214).

171.8
nets
: cf. William Blake (1757–1827), English poet and radical,
The Book of Urizen
(1794), plate 25, ll. 15–16, 19–22: ‘Till a Web dark & cold, throughout all | the tormented element stretch’d … | None could break the Web, no wings of fire // So twisted the cords, & so knotted | The Meshes: twisted like to the human brain // And all call’d it, The Net of Religion.’

171.21
Your soul!
: Joyce to his translator: ‘A form of procope for “Damn your soul”’ (
LIII
, 130).

171.25
Let us eke go
: Joyce to his translator: ‘Cranly misuses words. Thus he says “let us eke go” when he means to say “let us e’en go” that is “let us even
go”. Eke meaning also and having no sense in the phrase, whereas even or e’en is slight adverbial embellishment. By quoting Cranly’s misquotation Lynch gives the first proof of his culture. The word yellow (the second [proof]) is his personal substitution for the more sanguine hued adjective, bloody’ (
LIII
130). On ‘proofs of culture’ see ‘Portrait’: ‘they recommend themselves by proofs of culture’ (
PSW
218).

171.33
second proof of Lynch’s culture
: see preceding note.

171.35
swear in yellow
: see 171.25 n.

171.38
Aristotle has not defined pity and terror
: not directly in the
Poetics
, which is where he says that ‘tragedy … is the imitation of an action … with incidents arousing pity and fear’ (vi. 1449
^b
24–8;
Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation
, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), ii. 2320); cf. xi. 1452
^a
38 (ii. 2324); though Aristotle does define them in relation to his conception of catharsis in e.g.
Rhetoric
ii. 5 and ii. 8 (ii. 2202–4, 2207–9). See, too, Joyce in his Paris notebook (1903): ‘Now terror is the feeling which arrests us before whatever is grave in human fortunes and unites us with its secret cause and pity is the feeling which arrests us before whatever is grave in human fortunes and unites us with the human sufferer’ (
CW
143).

172.29–30
Venus of Praxiteles in the Museum
: nude statue of Venus by Praxiteles (Greek sculptor of the fourth century
BC
) a plaster cast of which stood in the National Museum in Kildare Street.

172.32
carmelite school
: school run by the ‘Carmelites’, the strict Catholic Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (founded
c
.1156).

173.26
Rhythm … esthetic relation
: cf. Joyce in the Paris notebook (
CW
145), ‘Portrait’ (
PSW
211), and Aubert’s discussion of the significance of the concept to Joyce (89–93).

174.1
canal bridge
: bridge over the Grand Canal (forming a southern circular boundary of central Dublin).

174.10
Wicklow
: see 28.29 n and 164.20.

174.27
Pulcra sunt quœ visa placent
: see 156.5 n.

174.35–6
Venus of Praxiteles
: see 172.29–30 n.

174.37–8
Plato … splendour of truth
: Plato (
c
. 429–
c
. 347
BC
), Greek idealist philosopher, pupil of Socrates, tutor of Aristotle; Ellmann and Mason claim that Joyce takes this rather epigrammatic version of a typical Platonic statement from a letter (18 Mar. 1857) to Mlle Leroyer de Chantepie from Gustave Flaubert (1821–80, French novelist, author of
Madame Bovary
(1857)): ‘la forme, la beau indéfinissable résultant de la conception même et qui est la splendeur du vrai, comme disait Platon’ (quoted at length in
CW
141 n.): ‘form, the indefinable Beauty resulting from the conception itself, which is the splendour of truth, according to Plato’ (translated (with date 11 Mar. 1857) in
WD
248). Cf. Joyce’s use of the same phrase in ‘James Clarence Mangan’ (1902) (
CW
83 and
KB
60).

175.5–8
Aristotle’s … book of psychology … to the same subject
: Stephen means Aristotle’s
Metaphysics
, only in part a ‘book of psychology’; the ‘statement’ comes from Book IV (Γ), iii. 1005
^b
19–20: ‘The same attribute
cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect’ (ed. Barnes, 11. 1588).

175.24
eugenics rather than to esthetic
: Stephen makes the same distinction as does Bernard Bosanquet: ‘sexual preference is … contrasted with aesthetic selection, real beauty is distinguished from beauty which only has reference to desire’ (
The History of Aesthetic
(1892; repr. London: Macmillan, 1904), 62) quoted by Aubert who argues throughout the significance of Bosanquet to Joyce (84 and
passim
). Bosanquet is adapting Aristotle,
Problems
lii. 896
^b
10–30 (ed. Barnes, ii. 1389).

175.26
The Origin of Species
: (1859) by Charles Darwin (1809–82), whose theory of ‘natural selection’ proposed that organisms that are best adapted to their environment are most likely to thrive and to reproduce; their genes get passed on and their kind become predominant; the ‘fittest’ will ‘survive’; but Darwin stressed that this was a long-term process, not something which could be easily seen within the life of a given individual.

175.36–7
sir Patrick Dun’s hospital
: hospital near the canal, built in 1803 from the estate of Sir Patrick Dun (1642–1713), Scots-Irish physician.

176.15
applied Aquinas
: the remark seems perverse, since Aquinas’s aim was to elucidate Catholic doctrine, not to produce an aesthetic (see, on this point, William T. Noon,
Joyce and Aquinas
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 4, 9, 126, and
passim
); though for a full discussion of what this might mean for an aesthetic theory, see Aubert (4–6, 100–9). See, too, Joyce, ‘Holy Office’ (1904): ‘So distantly I turn to view | The shamblings of that motley crew, | Those souls that hate the strength that mine has | Steeled in the school of old Aquinas’ (
PSW
99).

176.26–7
Pange lingua gloriosi
: Latin, in full,
Pange lingua gloriosi corporis mysterium
: ‘Tell, my tongue, of the mystery of the glorious body of Christ’, Aquinas’s hymn sung on Maundy Thursday (day before Good Friday) to celebrate Jesus’s institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper (an English translation is given in Liguori,
Visitations
, 98); by Fortunatus (see below), not Aquinas.

176.30
Vexilla Regis of Venantius Fortunatus
: Latin, in full,
Vexilla Regis Prodeunt
: ‘The King’s Banners Advance’; as Stephen says, a hymn by Venantius Fortunatus (
c
. 530–600), bishop of Poitiers and Latin poet, which is sung during Passiontide.

176.32–5
Impleta sunt quæ concinit … Regnavit a ligno Deus
: Latin: ‘The mystery we now unfold, | Which David’s faithful verse foretold | Of Our Lord’s kingdom, while we see | God ruling nations from a tree’; another stanza of the
Pange lingua
.

176.37
Lower Mount Street
: leads north towards the centre of Dublin from the Grand Canal.

177.3–5
Griffin was plucked … the Indian
: Griffin failed at the civil service exams; Halpin and O’Flynn passed the exams for places in the civil service within the United Kingdom; Moonan ranked very highly in the exams for a place within the British administration in India; O’Shaughnessy did well in the same.

177.6
Irish fellows
: if ‘nationalists’ is meant, odd that they should be celebrating the success of Irish men in the British civil service exams; more likely, those serving in the Irish civil service (which was, of course, British, not nationalist).

177.11
a question of Stephen’s
: ‘Who came top in the matric [first-year] exams?’

177.23
Glenmalure
: valley in County Wicklow.

177.30
Goethe and Lessing
: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), German poet and dramatist (author of
Faust
and of the ‘Wilhelm Meister’ novels which developed the genre of the
Bildungsroman
); Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), German critic and dramatist, author of
Laocoön
(see 177.32 n.).

177.31
the classical school and the romantic school
: these comments are little more than clichés; the two writers did not write
about
the ‘classical’ and ‘romantic schools’ (as though they were political movements one might or might not support).

177.32
Laocoon
: (1766), Lessing’s analysis of the limits of poetry and painting, based on the Graeco-Roman statue of Laocoön and his sons wrestling with the serpents; argued that the limits of the two kinds of art (poetry in time and sculpture in space) make straightforward comparisons between the two impossible. Stephen quotes Lessing on this point in
Ulysses
, ‘Proteus’ (
U
37).

177.33
idealistic, German, ultraprofound
: nonsense.