Annotated Stephen Hero ch18.c
Jorn Barger
Except for the eloquent and arrogant peroration
peroration = grandiloquent close (more or less)
The real close, as delivered 01Feb 1902:
"...Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when
the imagination contemplates intensely the truth of its own
being or the visible world, and the spirit which proceeds out
of truth and beauty is the holy spirit of joy. These are
realities and these alone give and sustain life. As often as
human fear and cruelty, that wicked monster begotten by
luxury, are in league to make life ignoble and sullen and to
speak evil of death the time is come wherein a man of timid
courage seizes the keys of hell and death, and flings them far
out into the abyss, proclaiming the praise of life, which the
abiding splendour of truth may sanctify, and of death, the
most beautiful form of life. In those vast courses which
enfold us and in that great memory which is greater and
more generous than our memory, no life, no moment of
exaltation is ever lost; and all those who have written nobly
have not written in vain, though the desperate and weary
have never heard the silver laughter of wisdom. Nay, shall
not such as these have part, because of that high, original
purpose which remembering painfully or by way of prophecy
they would make clear, in the continual affirmation of the
spirit?"
SH again (midsentence):
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 is just a fudge-- 'D&L' was the April 1900 speech about Ibsen,
where the title was fully appropriate. The Feb 1902 speech was really
called 'James Clarence Mangan'.
This strangely unpopular manifesto
Just punning on 'popular manifesto' because no one else has heard it
yet.
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.
The suriving draft of 'D&L' is dated 10Jan 1900 but wasn't delivered
until 20Jan.
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
(So Madden was at least whetstone enough to sometimes hear SD's radical
opinions.)
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."
(So the Wells-Clonliffe vignette and the esthetics-speech illuminate
each other, as alternate representations of the same mindset.)
Finnegans Wake was the last of his 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)
Joyce clarified on a letter that the original here was 'Jim', but Byrne
says Clancy pronounced it 'Jebh' (with 'bh' aspirated, whatever that
means).
you always told me I was a country _buachail_
bumpkin
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.
Dublin's mystical set had been led since 1885 by Yeats and Russell.
Until 1897 Russell was a card-carrying Theosophist and the 'set' mostly
lived together in a commune they called 'The Household', but after that
date he re-formed their old, independent 'Dublin Hermetic Society',
which met weekly at his house in Rathgar, or later apparently had its
own meetingroom (that Joyce and Gogarty supposedly burglarised in June
1904). Most of Russell's Hermeticists would also naturally have
supported the Gaelic League.
Joyce surely planned to introduce Russell as a character later in SH,
probably under the name 'William Judge', so this reference may begin to
set that introduction up.
-- But there's nothing mystical in it I tell you. I have written
it carefully...
The Mangan essay was written after a year of reading mystical writers,
and _does_ include allusions to their ideas.
-- 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!
This seems both non sequitur and unfair-- it _was_ above their heads,
and it was flowery in the sense of Ruskin or Pater, for example.
-- 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.
This also seems disingenuous.
-- 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 _Sword_ too. Here it is: read it.
Gaelic League newspaper 'An Claidheamh Soluis' = The Sword of Light
Stephen took the paper and read a piece of verse entitled Mo
Náire Tų (My shame art thou). There were four stanzas in
the piece and each stanza ended with the Irish phrase-- Mo
Náire Tų, 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.
I fear that Clancy may really have extracted this promise before showing
Joyce the poem, really by Walsh, which Joyce not only quoted here in SH
(under the pseudonym Hughes) but also, unsparingly, under Walsh's own
name in Nausikaa.
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.'
Madden has so little experience of poetry he doesn't realise these are
cliches.
After this mournful idealism the final stanza offered a
certain consolatory, hypothetical alternative to the poet in
his woes: it began somewhat hopefully:
Art thou real, my Ideal?
Wilt thou ever come to me
In the soft and gentle twilight
With your baby on your knee?
The effect of this apparition on Stephen was a long staining
blush of anger.
Joyce may not have outgrown this over-the-top lack-of-compassion until
1906.
The tawdry lines, the futile change of number,
'thou' to 'your' (instead of 'thy')
the ludicrous waddling approach of Hughes's "Ideal" weighed
down by an inexplicable infant
Would 'our baby' have made it explicable?
combined to cause him a sharp
agony in the sensitive region. Again he handed back the verse
without saying a word of praise or of blame but he decided
that attendance in Mr Hughes's class was no longer possible
for him
(He was hanging by a thread, anyway.)
and he was foolish enough to regret having yielded to
the impulse for sympathy from a friend.
Byrne and Gogarty would also fail Joyce this way, which he took
extremely seriously.
When a demand for intelligent sympathy goes unanswered he
is a too stern disciplinarian who blames himself for having
offered a dullard an opportunity to participate in the warmer
movement of a more highly organised life.
Way too complex, for the thought:
'foolish enough to regret' = 'too stern disciplinarian who blames
himself'
So Stephen regarded his loans of manuscripts as elaborate
flag-practices with phrases.
I can't find a plausible explanation of 'flag practices'. Some sport?
He did not consider his mother a
dullard but the result of his second disappointment in the
search for appreciation was that he was enabled to place the
blame on the shoulders of others-- not on his own: he had
enough responsibilities thereon already, inherited and
acquired.
What blame??? One of the main traits of Dedalus in PoA5 is that he
feels no responsibility for what he is-- "This race and this country and
this life produced me..."
His mother had not asked to see the manuscript:
she had continued to iron the clothes on the kitchen-table
without the least suspicion of the agitation in the mind of her
son. He had sat on three or four kitchen chairs, one after
another, and had dangled his legs unsuccessfully from all free
corners of the table. At last, unable to control his agitation,
he asked her point-blank would she like him to read out his
essay.
(So he's again 'yielding to the impulse for sympathy'.)
This may be a composite of mother May, plus Aunt Jo (later, after May's
death).
-- O, yes, Stephen-- if you don't mind my ironing a few
things...
-- No, I don't mind.
Stephen read out the essay to her slowly and emphatically
and when he had finished reading she said it was very
beautifully written but that as there were some things in it
which she couldn't follow, would he mind reading it to her
again and explaining some of it.
This at least is a much more intelligent response than Madden's.
He read it over again and
allowed himself a long exposition of his theories garnished
with many crude striking allusions with which he hoped to
drive it home the better.
(These explanations were arrogantly withheld from the L&H, though?)
His mother who had never suspected
probably that "beauty" could be anything more than a
convention of the drawingroom or a natural antecedent to
marriage and married life was surprised to see the
extraordinary honour which her son conferred upon it.
Oscar Wilde's trial had made him universally notorious in 1895, and
Wilde-et-al's cult of beauty had been parodied by Gilbert and Sullivan
as early as 1881, so this is exaggerated.
Beauty, to the mind of such a woman, was often a synonym
for licentious ways and probably for this reason she was
relieved to find that the excesses of this new worship were
supervised by a recognised saintly authority. However as the
essayist's recent habits were not very re-assuring she
decided to combine a discreet motherly solicitude with an
interest, which without being open to the accusation of
factitiousness was at first intended as a compliment.
factitious = inauthentic
While she was nicely folding a handkerchief she said:
-- What does Ibsen write, Stephen?
-- Plays.
-- I never heard of his name before. Is he alive at present?
-- Yes, he is. But, you know, in Ireland people don't know
much about what is going on out in Europe.
-- He must be a great writer from what you say of him.
(I thought the essay never got around to drama...?)
-- Would you like to read some of his plays, mother? I have
some.
-- Yes. I would like to read the best one. What is the best
one?
-- I don't know... But do you really want to read Ibsen?
-- I do, really.
-- To see whether I am reading dangerous authors or not, is
that why?
-- No, Stephen, answered his mother with a brave
prevarication. I think you're old enough now to know what is
right and what is wrong without my dictating to you what
you are to read.
-- I think so too... But I'm surprised to hear you ask about
Ibsen. I didn't imagine you took the least interest in these
matters.
Mrs Daedalus pushed her iron smoothly over a white
petticoat in time to the current of her memory.
(Nice!)
-- Well, of course, I don't speak about it but I'm not so
indifferent... Before I married your father I used to read a
great deal. I used to take an interest in all kinds of new
plays.
The Joyces were _always_ great theater fans, so this is misleading.
-- But since you married neither of you so much as bought a
single book!
-- Well, you see, Stephen, your father is not like you: he
takes no interest in that sort of thing... When he was young
he told me he used to spend all his time out after the hounds
or rowing on the Lee. He went in for athletics.
...and acting, and singing, and telling stories, and he wrote at least
one song.
-- I suspect what he went in for, said Stephen irreverently. I
know he doesn't care a jack straw about what I think or what
I write.
-- He wants to see you make your way, get on in life, said
his mother defensively. That's his ambition. You shouldn't
blame him for that.
-- No, no, no. But it may not be my ambition. That kind of life
I often loathe: I find it ugly and cowardly.
'That kind of life' seems here to include _anything_ along the lines of
'making your way' or 'getting on', so SD is making an extremely bold
admission about his future prospects.
-- Of course life isn't what I used to think it was when I was
a young girl.
For one example, she probably expected a maidservant would be doing
their ironing!
That's why I would like to read some great
writer, to see what ideal of life he has-- amn't I right in
saying "ideal"?
-- Yes, but...
-- Because sometimes-- not that I grumble at the lot
Almighty God has given me and I have more or less a happy
life with your father-- but sometimes I feel that I want to
leave this actual life and enter another-- for a time.
-- But that is wrong: that is the great mistake everyone
makes. Art is not an escape from life!
(Matisse made the opposite case, quite credibly.)
-- No?
-- You evidently weren't listening to what I said or else you
didn't understand what I said. Art is not an escape from life.
It's just the very opposite. Art, on the contrary, is the very
central expression of life. An artist is not a fellow who
dangles a mechanical heaven before the public. The priest
does that. The artist affirms out of the fulness of his own
life, he creates... Do you understand?
And so on.
(Weak!)
A day or two afterwards Stephen gave his mother
a few of the plays to read. She read them with great interest
and found Nora Helmer a charming character. Dr Stockmann
she admired but her admiration was naturally checked by her
son's light-heartedly blasphemous description of that stout
burgher as 'Jesus in a frock-coat.' But the play which she
preferred to all others was the Wild Duck. Of it she spoke
readily and on her own initiative: it had moved her deeply.
(This is nice to hear, for a change.)
Stephen, to escape a charge of hotheadedness and
partizanship, did not encourage her to an open record of her
feelings.
-- I hope you're not going to mention Little Nell in the Old
Curiosity Shop.
-- Of course I like Dickens too but I can see a great
difference between Little Nell and that poor creature-- what
is her name...?
-- Hedvig Ekdal?
-- Hedvig, yes... It's so sad: it's terrible to read it even... I
quite agree with you that Ibsen is a wonderful writer.
-- Really?
-- Yes, really. His plays have impressed me very much.
-- Do you think he is immoral?
-- Of course, you know, Stephen, he treats of subjects... of
which I know very little myself... subjects...
-- Subjects which, you think, should never be talked about?
-- Well, that was the old people's idea but I don't know if it
was right. I don't know if it is good for people to be entirely
ignorant...
-- Then why not treat them openly?
-- I think it might do harm to some people-- uneducated,
unbalanced people. People's natures are so different. You
perhaps...
-- O, never mind me... Do you think these plays are unfit for
people to read?
-- No, I think they're magnificent plays indeed.
-- And not immoral?
-- I think that Ibsen... has an extraordinary knowledge of
human nature... And I think that human nature is a very
extraordinary thing sometimes.
Stephen had to be contented with this well-worn generality
as he recognised in it a genuine sentiment.
Cf SD with Bloom? (Or just Bloom in general.)
His mother, in
fact, had so far evangelised herself that she undertook the
duties of missioner to the heathen; that is to say, she offered
some of the plays to her husband to read. He listened to her
praises with a somewhat startled air, observing no feature
of her face,
(What does this mean? He suspects she's teasing him?)
his eyeglass screwed into an astonished eye and
his mouth poised in naïf surprise. He was always interested
in novelties, childishly interested and receptive, and this new
name and the phenomena it had produced in his house were
novelties for him. He made no attempt to discredit his wife's
novel development but he resented both that she should have
achieved it unaided by him
Very Victorian.
and that she should be able
thereby to act as intermediary between him and his son.
(I find this touching.)
He condemned as inopportune but not discredited his son's
wayward researches into strange literature and, though a
similar taste was not discoverable in him, he was prepared
to commit that most pious of heroisms namely the extension
of one's sympathies late in life in deference to the advocacy
of a junior. Following the custom of certain old-fashioned
people who can never understand why their patronage or
judgments should put men of letters in a rage he chose his
play from the title.
(Was this really 'the custom' of such people?)
A metaphor is a vice that attracts the
dull mind by reason of its aptness and repels the too serious
mind by reason of its falsity and danger so that, after all,
there is something to be said, nothing voluminous perhaps,
but at least a word of concession for that class of society
which in literature as in everything else goes always with its
four feet on the ground.
(Awkward as Eumeus!)
Mr Daedalus, anyhow, suspected that
A Doll's House would be a triviality in the manner of Little
Lord Fauntleroy and, as he had never been even unofficially
a member of that international society which collects and
examines psychical phenomena, he decided that Ghosts
would probably be some uninteresting story about a haunted
house. He chose the League of Youth in which he hoped to
find the reminiscences of like-minded roysterers
Witty and credible.
and, after
reading through two acts of provincial intrigue, abandoned
the enterprise as tedious. He had promised himself, arguing
from the alienated attitudes and half-deferential half-words
of pressmen at the mention of the name, a certain
extravagance, perhaps an anomalous torridity of the North
This is a remarkably sensitive reconstruction of philistine thought.
(Much better than with Madden, above.)
and though the name beneath Ibsen's photograph never failed
to reawaken his sense of wonder, the upright line of the "b"
running so strangely beside the initial letter as to suspend
the mind amid incertitudes for some oblivious instants,
Joyce grants his father the same basic intuitions that Joyce himself
must have started from, but emphasizes that his father never became
self-conscious of them.
the final impression made upon him by the figure to which the
name was affixed, a figure which he associated with a
solicitor's or a stockbroker's office in Dame St, was an
impression of relief mixed with disappointment, the relief for
his son's sake prevailing dutifully over his own slight but real
disappointment. So that from neither of Stephen's parents did
respectability get full allegiance.
This summary seems inadequate to me-- his mother came to respect Ibsen
highly, with misgivings, while his father was bored but allowed others'
respect (and misgivings too) to serve in place of his own...?
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