Complete Works of James Joyce (346 page)
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Authors: Unknown
1903
In this book one reads about a people whose life is ordered according to beliefs and sympathies which will seem strange to us. The writer has very properly begun his account of that life by a brief exposition of Buddhism, and he sets forth so much of its history as illustrates its main principles. He omits some incidents which are among the most beautiful of the Buddhist legend — the kindly devas strewing flowers under the horse, and the story of the meeting of Buddha and his wife. But he states at some length the philosophy (if that be the proper name for it) of Buddhism. The Burmese people seem naturally adapted to follow such a wise passive philosophy. Five things are the five supreme evils for them — fire, water, storms, robbers, and rulers. All things that are inimical to human peace are evil. Though Buddhism is essentially a philosophy built against the evils of existence, a philosophy which places its end in the annihilation of the personal life and the personal will, the Burmese people have known how to transform it into a rule of life at once simple and wise.
Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence. There is a Burmese saying—’The thoughts of his heart, these are the wealth of a man’, and Mr. Hall, who has lived in Burma for many years, draws a picture of Burmese life which shows that a happiness, founded upon peace of mind in all circumstances, has a high place in the Burmese table of values. And happiness abides among this people: the yellow-robed monks begging alms, the believers coming to tell their beads in the temple, tiny rafts drifting down the river on the night of some festival, each one bearing upon it a tiny lamp, a girl sitting at evening in the shadow of the eaves until the young men come ‘courting’ — all this is part of a suave philosophy which does not know that there is anything to justify tears and lamentations. The courtesies of life are not neglected; anger and rudeness of manners are condemned; the animals themselves are glad to be under masters who treat them as living beings worthy of pity and toleration.
Mr. Hall is one of the conquerors of this people, and as he does not think it a warrior people he cannot predict for it any great political future. But he knows that peace lies before it, and, perhaps in literature, or in some art, a national temper so serene and order-loving may achieve itself. He gives a version of the story of Ma Pa Da, which he calls ‘Death, the Deliverer’, and this story itself is so pitiful that one would wish to know more of the Burmese popular tales. He gives elsewhere a rendering in prose of a Burmese love-song, which has, as may be seen, kept some of its charm, though it has lost, no doubt, much of its music:
‘The moon wooed the lotus in the night, the lotus was wooed by the moon, and my sweetheart is their child. The flower opened in the night, and she came forth; the petals moved and she was born.
‘She is more beautiful than any flower; her face is as delicate as the dusk; her hair is as night falling over the hills; her skin is as bright as the diamond. She is very full of health, no sickness can come near her.
‘When the wind blows I am afraid, when the breezes move I fear. I fear lest the south wind take her, I tremble lest the breath of evening woo her from me — so light is she, so graceful.
‘Her dress is of gold, of silk and gold, and her bracelets are of fine gold. She has precious stones in her ears, but her eyes, what jewels can compare unto them?
‘She is proud, my mistress; she is very proud, and all men are afraid of her. She is so beautiful and so proud that all men fear her.
‘In the whole world there is none anywhere that can compare unto her’.
Mr. Hall has written a most pleasing book in an easy and temperate style, a book which is full of interesting manners and stories. One is glad to see that even in these days of novels, religious and sensational, this book has run to four editions.
An Effort at Precision in Thinkin
g
1903
He must be a hardy man who contends that the disputants in this book are common people. They are, happily for the peace of human animals, very uncommon people. For common people will not argue for any considerable time as to whether succession of appearances is or is not anything more than the appearance of succession. But these uncommon people, whose colloquies are recorded here at somewhat distressing length by Mr. Anstie, argue about such subtleties with a precision which is more apparent than real. The speakers will seem more precise than they are, for at one time they dispute eagerly over certainty of thought, though certainty is not a habit of the mind at all, but a quality of propositions, and the speakers are really arguing about certitude, and more than once all the speakers are agreed that sense impressions mark the furthest limit of knowledge, and that ‘reasonable belief is an oxymoron — conclusions with which the man of the people, who is no philosopher, professes himself in loud accord. However, this book is an effort at precision in thinking, even if it does not always provoke that stimulated attention which one speaker calls a form of activity.
1903
These are colonial verses. The colonial Esau is asked on page 3 would he change his pottage for Jacob’s birthright — a question which evidently expects the answer, No. One piece is named ‘Is Canada Loyal?’ and Mr. Wolley proclaims that it is loyal. His verse is for the most part loyal, and where it is not, it describes Canadian scenery. Mr. Wolley says that he is a barbarian; he does not want the ‘murmurous muddle’ of the choir; he wants a ‘clean- cut creed, ‘plain laws for plain men. There is a piece called ‘Tableau’, about a girl dreaming in a picture gallery. It begins: ‘I wonder if it’s really true that you are only paint.’
1903
The French translators of this play have included in their preface some extracts from Ibsen’s preface to the Dresden edition of 1875, and these extracts tell somewhat humorously the history of Ibsen’s early years. The play was written in 1848, when Ibsen was twenty, a poor student working all day in a druggist’s shop, and studying during the night as best he could. Sallust and Cicero, it seems, awakened his interest in the character of Catiline, and he set to work to write a tragedy, in part historical, and in part political, a reflection of the Norway of his day. The play was politely refused by the directors of the Christiania Theatre and by all the publishers. One of Ibsen’s friends, however, published it at his own expense, fully convinced that the play would at once make the writer’s name famous in the world. A few copies were sold and, as Ibsen and his friend were in need of money, they were glad to sell the remainder to a pork-butcher. ‘For some days’, Ibsen writes, ‘we did not lack the necessaries of life.’ This is a sufficiently instructive history, and it is well to remember it when reading a play which Ibsen publishes simply that his work may be complete. For the writer of
Catilina
is not the Ibsen of the social dramas, but, as the French translators joyfully proclaim, an ardent romantic exulting in disturbance and escaping from all formal laws under cover of an abundant rhetoric. This will not appear so strange when it is remembered that the young Goethe was somewhat given to alchemical researches, and as, to quote Goethe himself, the form in which a man goes into the shadows is the form in which he moves among his posterity, posterity will probably forget Ibsen the romantic as completely as it forgets Goethe and his athanor.
Yet, in some ways, this earlier manner suggests the later manner. In
Catilina
three figures are projected against the background of a restless and moribund society — Catiline, Aurelia, his wife, and Fulvia, a vestal virgin. Ibsen is known to the general public as a man who writes a play about three people — usually one man and two women — and even critics, while they assert their admiration for Ibsen’s ‘unqualified objectivity’, find that all his women are the same woman renamed successively Nora, Rebecca, Hilda, Irene — find, that is to say, that Ibsen has no power of objectivity at all. The critics, speaking in the name of the audience, whose idol is common sense, and whose torment is to be confronted with a clearwork of art that reflects every obscurity like a mirror, have sometimes had the courage to say that they did not understand the system of three. They will be pleased to learn that some of the characters in
Catilina
are in as sorry a plight as themselves. Here is a passage in which Curius, a young relative of Catiline, professes his inability to understand Catiline’s relations with Fulvia and Aurelia:
Curius:
Les aimerais-tu toutes deux à la fois?
Vraiment je n’y comprends plus rien.
Catilina:
En effet c’est singulier et je n’y comprends rien moi-même.
But perhaps that he does not understand is part of the tragedy, and the play is certainly the struggle between Aurelia, who is happiness and the policy of non-interference, and Fulvia, who is at first the policy of interference and who, when she has escaped from the tomb to which her sin had brought her, becomes the figure of Catiline’s destiny. Very little use is made in this play of alarms and battles, and one can see that the writer is not interested in the usual property of romanticism. Already he is losing the romantic temper when it should be at its fiercest in him, and, as youth commonly brooks no prevention, he is content to hurl himself upon the world and establish himself there defiantly until his true weapons are ready to his hand. One must not take too seriously the solution of the drama in favour of Aurelia, for by the time the last act is reached the characters have begun to mean nothing to themselves and in the acted play would be related to life only by the bodies of the performers. And here is the most striking difference between Ibsen’s earlier manner and his later manner, between romantic work and classical work. The romantic temper, imperfect and impatient as it is, cannot express itself adequately unless it employs the monstrous or heroic. In
Catilina
the women are absolute types, and the end of such a play cannot but savour of dogma — a most proper thing in a priest but a most improper in a poet. Moreover, as the breaking-up of tradition, which is the work of the modern era, discountenances the absolute and as no writer can escape the spirit of his time, the writer of dramas must remember now more than ever a principle of all patient and perfect art which bids him express his fable in terms of his characters.
As a work of art
Catilina
has little merit, and yet one can see in it what the directors of the Christiania theatre and the publishers failed to see — an original and capable writer struggling with a form that is not his own. This manner continues, with occasional lapses into comedy, as far as
Peer Gynt,
in which, recognizing its own limitations and pushing lawlessness to its extreme limit, it achieves a masterpiece. After that it disappears and the second manner begins to take its place, advancing through play after play, uniting construction and speech and action more and more closely in a supple rhythm, until it achieves itself in
Hedda Gabier.
Very few recognize the astonishing courage of such work and it is characteristic of our age of transition to admire the later manner less than the earlier manner. For the imagination has the quality of a fluid, and it must be held firmly, lest it become vague, and delicately, that it may lose none of its magical powers. And Ibsen has united with his strong, ample, imaginative faculty a preoccupation with the things present to him. Perhaps in time even the professional critic, accepting the best of the social dramas for what they are — the most excellent examples of skill and intellectual self-possession — will make this union a truism of professional criticism. But meanwhile a young generation which has cast away belief and thrown precision after it, for which Balzac is a great intellect and every sampler who chooses to wander amid his own shapeless hells and heavens a Dante without the unfortunate prejudices of Dante, will be troubled by this pre-occupation, and out of very conscience will denounce a method so calm, so ironical. These cries of hysteria are confused with many others — the voices of war and statecraft and religion — in the fermenting vat. But Bootes, we may be sure, thinks nothing of such cries, eager as ever at that ancient business of leading his hunting-dogs across the zenith ‘in their leash of sidereal fire’.
1903
Aristotle finds at the beginning of all speculation the feeling of wonder, a feeling proper to childhood, and if speculation be proper to the middle period of life it is natural that one should look to the crowning period of life for the fruit of speculation, wisdom itself. But nowadays people have greatly confused childhood and middle life and old age; those who succeed in spite of civilization in reaching old age seem to have less and less wisdom, and children who are usually put to some business as soon as they can walk and talk, seem to have more and more ‘common sense’; and, perhaps, in the future little boys with long beards will stand aside and applaud, while old men in short trousers play handball against the side of a house.
This may even happen in Ireland, if Lady Gregory has truly set forth the old age of her country. In her new book she has left legends and heroic youth far behind, and has explored in a land almost fabulous in its sorrow and senility. Half of her book is an account of old men and old women in the West of Ireland. These old people are full of stories about giants and witches, and dogs and black-handled knives, and they tell their stories one after another at great length and with many repetitions (for they are people of leisure) by the fire or in the yard of a workhouse. It is difficult to judge well of their charms and herb-healing, for that is the province of those who are learned in these matters and can compare the customs of countries, and, indeed, it is well not to know these magical-sciences, for if the wind changes while you are cutting wild camomile you will lose your mind.
But one can judge more easily of their stories. These stories appeal to some feeling which is certainly not that feeling of wonder which is the beginning of all speculation. The story-tellers are old, and their imagination is not the imagination of childhood. The story-teller preserves the strange machinery of fairyland, but his mind is feeble and sleepy. He begins one story and wanders from it into another story, and none of the stories has any satisfying imaginative wholeness, none of them is like Sir John Daw’s poem that cried tink in the close. Lady Gregory is conscious of this, for she often tries to lead the speaker back to his story by questions, and when the story has become hopelessly involved, she tries to establish some wholeness by keeping only the less involved part; sometimes she listens ‘half interested and half impatient’. In fine, her book, wherever it treats of the ‘folk’, sets forth in the fulness of its senility a class of mind which Mr. Yeats has set forth with such delicate scepticism in his happiest book, ‘The Celtic Twilight’.
Something of health and naturalness, however, enters with Raftery, the poet. He had a terrible tongue, it seems, and would make a satirical poem for a very small offence. He could make love-poems, too (though Lady Gregory finds a certain falseness in the western love-poems), and repentant poems. Raftery, though he be the last of the great bardic procession, has much of the bardic tradition about him. He took shelter one day from the rain under a bush: at first the bush kept out the rain, and he made verses praising it, but after a while it let the rain through, and he made verses dispraising it.
Lady Gregory translates some of his verses, and she also translates some West Irish ballads and some poems by Dr. Douglas Hyde. She completes her book with translations of four one-act plays by Dr. Douglas Hyde, three of which have for their central figure that legendary person, who is vagabond and poet, and even saint at times, while the fourth play is called a ‘nativity’ play. The dwarf-drama (if one may use that term) is a form of art which is improper and ineffectual, but it is easy to understand why it finds favour with an age which has pictures that are ‘nocturnes’, and writers like Mallarmé and the composer of’Récapitulation’. The dwarf-drama is accordingly to be judged as an entertainment, and Dr. Douglas Hyde is certainly entertaining in the ‘Twisting of the Rope’, and Lady Gregory has succeeded better with her verse- translations here than elsewhere, as these four lines may show:
I have heard the melodious harp On the streets of Cork playing to us; More melodious by far I thought your voice, More melodious by far your mouth than that.
This book, like so many other books of our time, is in part picturesque and in part an indirect or direct utterance of the central belief of Ireland. Out of the material and spiritual battle which has gone so hardly with her Ireland has emerged with many memories of beliefs, and with one belief — a belief in the incurable ignobility of the forces that have overcome her — and Lady Gregory, whose old men and women seem to be almost their own judges when they tell their wandering stories, might add to the passage from Whitman which forms her dedication, Whitman’s ambiguous word for the vanquished—’Battles are lost in the spirit in which they are won.’
J. J.