Complete Works of James Joyce (254 page)

XVI
II

Stephen’s paper was fixed for the second Saturday in March. Between Christmas and that date he had therefore an ample space of time wherein to perform preparative abstinences. His forty days were consumed in aimless solitary walks during which he forged out his sentences. In this manner he had his whole essay in his mind a from the first word to the last before he had put any morsel of it on paper. In thinking or constructing the form of the essay he found himself much a hampered by the sitting posture. His body disturbed him and he adopted the expedient of appeasing it by gentle promenading. Sometimes during his walks he lost the train of his thought and whenever the void of his mind seemed irreclaimable he forced order upon it by ejaculatory fervours. His morning walks were critical, his evening walks imaginative and whatever had seemed plausible in the evening was always rigorously examined in the light of day. These wanderings in the desert
 
were reported from different points and Mr Daedalus once asked his son what the hell had brought him out to a Dolphin’s Barn. Stephen said he had [been] gone part of the way home with a fellow from the college whereupon Mr Daedalus remarked that the fellow from the college [must] should have gone all the way into the county Meath to live as his hand was in. Any acquaintances that were encountered during these walks were never allowed to intrude on the young man’s meditations by commonplace conversation — a fact which they seemed to recognise in advance by a deferent salute. Stephen was therefore very much surprised one evening as he was walking past the Christian Brothers’ School in North Richmond St to feel his arm seized from behind and to hear a voice say somewhat blatantly:

 
— Hello, Daedalus, old man, is that you?

Stephen turned round and saw a tall young man with many eruptions on his face dressed completely in heavy black. He stared for a few moments, trying to recall the face.

 
— Don’t you remember me? I knew you at once.

 
— O, yes now I do, said Stephen. But you’ve changed.

 
— Think so?

 
— I wouldn’t know you . . . Are you . . . in mourning?

Wells laughed.

 
— By Jove, that’s a good one. Evidently a you don’t know your Church when you see it.

 
— What? You don’t mean to say . . . ?

 
— Fact, old man. I’m in Clonliffe at present. Been down in Balbriggan today on leave: the boss is very bad. Poor old chap!

 
— O, indeed!

 
— You’re over in the Green now, Boland told me. Do you know him? He said you were at Belvedere with him.

 
— Is he in too? Yes I know him.

 
— He has a great opinion of you. He says you’re a litterateur now.

Stephen smiled and did not know what subject to suggest next. He wondered how far this loud-voiced student intended to accompany him.

 
— See me down a bit of the way, will you? I’ve just come off the train at Amiens St. I’m making for dinner.

 
— Certainly.

So they walked on side by side.

 
— Well, and what have you been doing with yourself? Having a good time, I suppose? Down in Bray?

 
— Ah, the usual thing, said Stephen.

 
— I know: I know. After the esplanade girls, isn’t that it? Silly game, old man, silly game! Get tired of it.

 
— You have, evidently.

 
— Should think so: time too . . . Ever see any of the Clongowes fellows?

 
— Never one.

 
— That’s the way. We all lose sight of each other after we leave. You remember Roth?

 
— Yes.

 
— Out in Australia now — bushranger or something. You’re going in for literature, I suppose.

 
— I don’t know really what I’m going in for.

 
— I know: I know. On the loose, isn’t that it? a I’ve been there myself.

 
— Well, not exactly . . . began Stephen.

 
— O, of course not! said Wells quickly with a loud laugh.

Passing down Jones’s Road they saw a gaudy advertisement in strong colours for a melodramatic play. Wells asked Stephen had he read .

 
— Haven’t you? Famous book, you know; style would suit you, I think. Of course it’s a bit . . . blue.

 
— How is that?

 
— O, well, you know . . . Paris, you know . . . artists.

 
— O, is that the kind of book it is?

 
— Nothing very wrong in it that I could see. Still some people think it’s a bit immoral.

 
— You haven’t it in the library in Clonliffe?

 
— No, not likely . . . Don’t I wish I was out of the show!

 
— Are you thinking of leaving?

 
— Next year — perhaps this year — I go to Paris for my theology.

 
— You won’t be sorry, I suppose.

 
— You bet. Rotten show, this place. Food is not so bad but so dull, you know.

 
— Are there many students in it now?

 
— O, yes . . . I don’t mix much with them, you know . . . There are a good lot.

 
— I suppose you’ll be a parish priest one of these days.

 
— I hope so. You must come and see me when I am.

 
— Very good.

 
— When you’re a great writer yourself — as the author of a second or something of that sort . . . Won’t you come in?

 
— Is it allowed?

 
— O, with me . . . you come in, never mind.

The two young men went into the grounds of the College and along the circular carriage-drive. It was a damp evening and rather dark. In the uncertain light a few of the more adventurous were to be seen vigorously playing handball in a little side-alley, the smack of the wet ball against the concrete wall of the alley alternating with their lusty shouts. For the most part the students were walking in little groups through the ground, some with their berretas [] pushed far back to the nape of their necks and others holding their soutanes up as women do with their skirts when they cross a muddy street.

 
— Can you go with anyone you like? asked Stephen.

 
— Companions are not allowed. You must join the first group you meet.

 
— Why didn’t you go to the Jesuit order?

 
— Not likely, my boy. Sixteen years of noviciate and no chance of ever settling down. Here today, there tomorrow.

As Stephen looked at the big square block of masonry looming before them through the faint daylight, he re-entered again in thought the seminarist life which he had led for so many years, to the understanding of the narrow activities of which he could now in a moment bring the spirit of an acute sympathetic alien. He recognised at once the martial mind of the Irish Church in the style of this ecclesiastical barracks. He looked in vain at the faces and figures which passed him for a token of moral elevation: all were cowed without being humble, modish without being simple-mannered. Some of the students saluted Wells but got scanty thanks for the courtesy. Wells wished Stephen to gather that he despised his fellow-students and that it was not his fault if they regarded him as an important person. At the foot of the stone steps he turned to Stephen:

 
— I must go in to see the Dean for a minute. I’m afraid it’s too late for me to show you round the show this evening . . .

 
— O, not at all. Another time.

 
— Well, will you wait for me. Stroll along there towards the chapel. I won’t be a minute.

He nodded at Stephen for a temporary farewell and sprang up the steps. [Wells] Stephen wandered on towards the chapel meditatively kicking a white flat stone along the grey pebbly path. He was not likely to be deceived by Wells’ words into an acceptance of that young man as a quite vicious person. He knew that Wells had exaggerated his airs in order to hide his internal sense of mortification at meeting one who had not forsaken the world, the flesh and the devil and he suspected that, if there were any tendency to oscillation in the soul of the free-spoken young student, the iron hand of the discipline of the Church would firmly intervene to restore equipoise. At the same time Stephen felt somewhat indignant that anyone should expect him to entrust spiritual difficulties to such a confessor or to receive with pious feelings any sacrament or benediction from the hands of the young students whom he saw walking through the grounds. It was not any personal pride which would prevent him but a recognition of the incompatibility of two natures, one trained to repressive enforcement of a creed, the other equipped with a vision the angle of which would never adjust itself for the reception of hallucinations and with an intelligence which was as much in love with laughter as with combat.

The mist of the evening had begun to thicken into slow fine rain and Stephen halted at the end of a narrow path beside a few laurel bushes, watching at the end of a leaf a tiny point of rain form and twinkle and hesitate and finally take the plunge into the sodden clay beneath. He wondered was it raining in Westmeath, [were the cattle standing together patiently in the shelter of the hedges]. He remembered seeing the cattle standing together patiently in the hedges and reeking in the rain. A little band of students passed at the other side of the laurel bushes: they were talking among themselves:

 
— But did you see Mrs Bergin?

 
— O, I saw her . . . with a black and white boa.

 
— And the two Miss Kennedys were there.

 
— Where?

 
— Right behind the Archbishop’s Throne.

 
— O, I saw her — one of them. Hadn’t she a grey hat with a bird in it?

 
— That was her! She’s very lady-like, isn’t she.

The little band went down the path. In a few minutes another little band passed behind the bushes. One student was talking and the others were listening.

 
— Yes and an astronomer too: that’s why he had [built] that observatory built over there at the side of the palace. I heard a priest say once that the three greatest men in Europe were Gladstone, Bismarck (the great German statesman) and our own Archbishop — as all-round men. He knew him at Maynooth. He said that in Maynooth . . .

The speaker’s words were lost in the crunch of the heavy boots on the gravel. The rain was spreading and increasing and the vagrant bands of students were all turning their steps towards the college. Stephen still waited at his post and at last saw Wells coming down the path quickly: he had changed his outdoor dress for a soutane. He was very apologetic and not quite so familiar in manner. Stephen wanted him to go in with the others but he insisted on seeing his visitor to the gate. They took a short cut down beside the wall and were soon opposite the lodge. The [gate] side-door was shut and Wells called out loudly to the lodge-woman to open it and let the gentleman out. Then he shook hands with Stephen and pressed him to come again. The lodge-woman opened the side-door and Wells looked out for a second or two almost enviously. Then he said:

 
— Well, goodbye, old man. Must run in now. Awfully glad to see you again — see any of the old Clongowes set, you know. Be good now: I must run. Goodbye.

As he tucked up his soutane high and ran awkwardly up the drive [and] he looked a strange, almost criminal, fugitive in the dreary dusk. Stephen’s eyes followed the running figure for a moment: and as he passed through the door into the lamplit street he smiled at his own impulse of pity.

X
IX

He smiled because it seemed to him so unexpected a ripeness in himself — this pity — or rather this impulse of pity for he had no more than entertained it. But it was the actual achievement of his essay which had allowed him so mature a pleasure as the sensation of pity for another. Stephen had a thorough-going manner in many things: his essay was not in the least the exhibition of polite accomplishments. It was on the contrary very seriously intended to define his own position for himself. He could not persuade himself that, if he wrote round about his subject with facility or treated it from any standpoint of impression, good would come of it. On the other hand he was persuaded that no-one served the generation into which he had been born so well as he who offered it, whether in his art or in his life, the gift of certitude. The programme of the patriots filled him with very reasonable doubts; its articles could obtain no intellectual assent from him. He knew, moreover, that concordance with it would mean for him a submission of everything else in its interest and that he would thus be obliged to corrupt the springs of speculation at their very source. He refused therefore to set out for any task if he had first to prejudice his success by oaths to his patria and this refusal resulted in a theory of art which was at once severe and liberal. His Esthetic was in the main applied Aquinas, and he set it forth plainly with a naif air of discovering novelties. This he did partly to satisfy.his own taste for enigmatic roles and partly from a genuine predisposition in favour of all but the premisses of scholasticism. He proclaimed at the outset that art was the human disposition of intelligible or sensible matter for an esthetic end, and he announced further that all such human dispositions must fall into the division of three distinct natural kinds, lyrical, epical and dramatic. Lyrical art, he said, is the art whereby the artist sets forth his image in immediate relation to himself; epical art is the art whereby the artist sets forth his image in mediate relation to himself and to others; and dramatic art is the art whereby the artist sets forth his image in immediate relations to others. The various forms of art, such as music, sculpture, literature, do not offer this division with the same clearness and he concluded from this that those forms of art which offered the division most clearly were to be called the most excellent forms: and he was not greatly perturbed because he could not decide for himself whether a portrait was a work of epical art or not or whether it was possible for an architect to be a lyrical, epical or dramatic poet at will. Having by this simple process established the literary form of art as the most excellent he proceeded to examine it in favour of his theory, or, as he rendered it, to establish the relations which must subsist between the literary image, the work of art itself, and that energy which had imagined and fashioned it, that centre of conscious re-acting, particular life, the artist.

The artist, he imagined, standing in the position of mediator between the world of his experience and the world of his dreams — a mediator, consequently gifted with twin faculties, a selective faculty and a reproductive faculty. To equate these faculties was the secret of artistic success: the artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and re-embody it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist. This perfect coincidence of the two artistic faculties Stephen called poetry and he imagined the domain of an art to be cone-shaped. The term ‘literature’ now seemed to him a term of contempt and he used it to designate the vast middle region which lies between apex and base, between poetry and the chaos of unremembered writing. Its merit lay in its portrayal of externals; the realm of its princes was the realm of the manners and customs of societies — a spacious realm. But society is itself, he conceived, the complex body in which certain laws are involved and overwrapped and he therefore proclaimed as the realm of the poet the realm of these unalterable laws. Such a theory might easily have led its deviser to the acceptance of spiritual anarchy in literature had he not at the same time insisted on the classical style. A classical style, he said, is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country: it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience. The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and not more by others than by its own, is an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them. The classical temper on the other hand, ever mindful of limitations, chooses rather to bend upon these present things and so to work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered. In this method the sane and joyful spirit issues forth and achieves imperishable perfection, nature assisting with her goodwill and thanks. For so long as this place in nature is given us it is right that art should do no violence to the gift.

Between these two conflicting schools the city of the arts had become marvellously unpeaceful. To many spectators the dispute had seemed a dispute about names, a battle in which the position of the standards could never be foretold for a minute. Add to this internecine warfare — the classical school fighting the materialism that must attend it, the romantic school struggling to preserve coherence — and behold from what ungentle manners criticism is bound to recognise the emergence of all achievement. The critic is he who is able, by means of the signs which the artist affords, to approach the temper which has made the work and to see what is well done therein and what it signifies. For him a song by Shakespeare which seems so free and living, as remote from any conscious purpose as rain that falls in a garden or as the lights of evening, discovers itself as the rhythmic speech of an emotion otherwise incommunicable, or at least not so fitly. But to approach the temper which has made art is an act of reverence before the performance of which many conventions must be first put off for certainly that inmost region will never yield its secret to one who is enmeshed with profanities.

Chief among these profanities Stephen set the antique principle that the end of art is to instruct, to elevate, and to amuse. “I am unable to find even a trace of this Puritanic conception of the esthetic purpose in the definition which Aquinas has given of beauty” he wrote “or in anything which he has written concerning the beautiful. The qualifications he expects for beauty are in fact of so abstract and common a character that it is quite impossible for even the most violent partizan to use the Aquinatian theory with the object of attacking any work of art that we possess from the hand of any artist whatsoever.” This recognition of the beautiful in virtue of the most abstract relations afforded by an object to which the term could be applied so far from giving any support to a commandment of was itself no more than a just sequence from the taking-off of all interdictions from the artist. The limits of decency suggest themselves somewhat too readily to the modern speculator and their effect is to encourage the profane mind to very futile jurisdiction. For it cannot be urged too strongly on the public mind that the tradition of art is with the artists and that even if they do not make it their invariable practice to outrage these limits of decency the public mind has no right to conclude therefrom that they do not arrogate for themselves an entire liberty to do so if they choose. It is as absurd, wrote the fiery-hearted revolutionary, for a criticism itself established upon homilies to prohibit the elective courses of the artist in his of the beautiful as it would be for a police-magistrate to prohibit the sum of any two sides of a triangle from being together greater than the third side.

In fine the truth is not that the artist requires a document of licence from householders entitling him to proceed in this or that fashion but that every age must look for its sanction to its poets and philosophers. The poet is the intense centre of the life of his age to which he stands in a relation than which none can be more vital. He alone is capable of absorbing in himself the life that surrounds him and of flinging it abroad again amid planetary music. When the poetic phenomenon is signalled in the heavens, exclaimed this heaven-ascending essayist, it is time for the critics to verify their calculations in accordance with it. It is time for them to acknowledge that here the imagination has contemplated intensely the truth of the being of the visible world and that beauty, the splendour of truth, has been born. The age, though it bury itself fathoms deep in formulas and machinery, has need of these realities which alone give and sustain life and it must await from those chosen centres of vivification the force to live, the security for life which can come to it only from them. Thus the spirit of man makes a continual affirmation.

Except for the eloquent and arrogant peroration Stephen’s essay was a careful exposition of a carefully meditated theory of esthetic. When he had finished it he found it necessary to change the title from “Drama and Life” to “Art and Life” for he had occupied himself so much with securing the foundations that he had not left himself space enough to raise the complete structure. This strangely unpopular manifesto was traversed by the two brothers phrase by phrase and word by word and at last pronounced flawless at all points. It was then safely laid by until the time should come for its public appearance. Besides Maurice two other well-wishers had an advance view of it; these were Stephen’s mother and his friend Madden. Madden had not asked for it directly but at the end of a conversation in which Stephen had recounted sarcastically his visit to Clonliffe College he had vaguely wondered what state of mind could produce such irreverences and Stephen had at once offered him the manuscript saying “This is the first of my explosives.” The following evening Madden had returned the manuscript and praised the writing highly. Part of it had been too deep for him, he said, but he could see that it was beautifully written.

 
— You know Stevie, he said ( Madden had a brother Stephen and he sometimes used this familiar form) you always told me I was a country and I can’t understand you mystical fellows.

 
— Mystical? said Stephen.

 
— About the planets and the stars, you know. Some of the fellows in the League belong to the mystical set here. They’d understand quick enough.

 
— But there’s nothing mystical in it I tell you. I have written it carefully . . .

 
— O, I can see you have. It’s beautifully written. But I’m sure it will be above the heads of your audience.

 
— You don’t mean to tell me, Madden, you think it’s a ‘flowery’ composition!

 
— I know you’ve thought it out. But you are a poet, aren’t you?

 
— I have . . . written verse . . . if that’s what you mean.

 
— Do you know Hughes is a poet too?

 
— Hughes!

 
— Yes. He writes for our paper, you know. Would you like to see some of his poetry?

 
— Why, could you show me any?

 
— It so happens I have one in my pocket. There’s one in this week’s too. Here it is: read it.

Stephen took the paper and read a piece of verse entitled (My shame art thou). There were four stanzas in the piece and each stanza ended with the Irish phrase — , the last word, of course, rhyming to an English word in the corresponding line. The piece began:

          
What! Shall the rippling tongue of Gaels

     
   
Give way before the Saxon slang!

and in lines full of excited patriotism proceeded to pour scorn upon the Irishman who would not learn the ancient language of his native land. Stephen did not remark anything in the lines except the frequency of such contracted forms as “e’en” “ne’er” and “thro’ “ instead of “even” “never” and “through” and he handed back the paper to Madden without offering any comment on the verse.

 
— I suppose you don’t like that because it’s too Irish but you’ll like this, I suppose, because it’s that mystical, idealistic kind of writing you poets indulge in. Only you mustn’t say I let you see . . .

 
— O, no.

Madden took from his inside pocket a sheet of foolscap folded in four on which was inscribed a piece of verse, consisting of four stanzas of eight lines each, entitled “My Ideal.” Each stanza began with the words “Art thou real?” The poem told of the poet’s troubles in a ‘vale of woe’ and of the ‘heart-throbs’ which these troubles caused him. It told of ‘weary nights’ and ‘anxious days’ and of an ‘unquenchable desire’ for an excellence beyond that ‘which earth can give.’ After this mournful idealism the final stanza offered a certain consolatory, hypothetical alternative to the poet in his woes: it began somewhat hopefully: