by James Joyce
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There are twenty million Irishmen scattered all over the world. The Emerald Isle contains only a small part of them. But, reflecting that, while England makes the Irish question the centre of all her internal politics she proceeds with a wealth of good judgment in quickly disposing of the more complex questions of colonial politics, the observer can do no less than ask himself why St. George’s Channel makes an abyss deeper than the ocean between Ireland and her proud dominator. In fact, the Irish question is not solved even today, after six centuries of armed occupation and more than a hundred years of English legislation, which has reduced the population of the unhappy island from eight to four million, quadrupled the taxes, and twisted the agrarian problem into many more knots.
In truth there is no problem more snarled than this one. The Irish themselves understand little about it, the English even less. For other people it is a black plague. But on the other hand the Irish know that it is the cause of all their sufferings, and therefore they often adopt violent methods of solution. For example, twenty- eight years ago, seeing themselves reduced to misery by the brutalities of the large landholders, they refused to pay their land rents and obtained from Gladstone remedies and reforms. Today, seeing pastures full of well fed cattle while an eighth of the population lacks means of subsistence, they drive the cattle from the farms. In irritation, the Liberal government arranges to refurbish the coercive tactics of the Conservatives, and for several weeks the London press dedicates innumerable articles to the agrarian crisis, which, it says, is very serious. It publishes alarming news of agrarian revolts, which is then reproduced by journalists abroad.
I do not propose to make an exegesis of the Irish agrarian question nor to relate what goes on behind the scene in the two- faced politics of the government. But I think it useful to make a modest correction of facts. Anyone who has read the telegrams launched from London is sure that Ireland is undergoing a period of unusual crime. An erroneous judgment, very erroneous. There is less crime in Ireland than in any other country in Europe. In Ireland there is no organized underworld. When one of those events which the Parisian journalists, with atrocious irony, call ‘red idylls’ occurs, the whole country is shaken by it. It is true that in recent months there were two violent deaths in Ireland, but at the hands of British troops in Belfast, where the soldiers fired without warning on an unarmed crowd and killed a man and woman. There were attacks on cattle; but not even these were in Ireland, where the crowd was content to open the stalls and chase the cattle through several miles of streets, but at Great Wryrley in England, where for six years bestial, maddened criminals have ravaged the cattle to such an extent that the English companies will no longer insure them. Five years ago an innocent man, now at liberty, was condemned to forced labour to appease public indignation. But even while he was in prison the crimes continued. And last week two horses were found dead with the usual slashes in their lower abdomen and their bowels scattered in the grass.
James Joyce
Oscar Wilde: The Poet of ‘Salomé’
1909
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. These were the high- sounding titles that with youthful haughtiness he had printed on the title-page of his first collection of poems, and in this proud gesture, by which he tried to achieve nobility, are the signs of his vain pretences and the fate which already awaited him. His name symbolizes him: Oscar, nephew of King Fingal and the only son of Ossian in the amorphous Celtic Odyssey, who was treacherously killed by the hand of his host as he sat at table. O’Flahertie, a savage Irish tribe whose destiny it was to assail the gates of medieval cities; a name that incited terror in peaceful men, who still recite, among the plagues, the anger of God, and the spirit of fornication, in the ancient litany of the saints: ‘from the wild O’Flaherties, libera nos Domine.’ Like that other Oscar, he was to meet his public death in the flower of his years as he sat at table, crowned with false vine leaves and discussing Plato. Like that savage tribe, he was to break the lance of his fluent paradoxes against the body of practical conventions, and to hear, as a dishonoured exile, the choir of the just recite his name together with that of the unclean.
Wilde was born in the sleepy Irish capital fifty-five years ago. His father was a ranking scientist, who has been called the father of modern otology. His mother, who took part in the literary- revolutionary movement of ‘48, wrote for the Nationalist newspaper under the pseudonym ‘Speranza’, and incited the public, in her poems and articles, to seize Dublin Castle. There are circumstances regarding the pregnancy of Lady Wilde and the infancy of her son which, in the eyes of some, explain in part the unhappy mania (if it may be called that) which later dragged him to his ruin; and at least it is certain that the child grew up in an atmosphere of insecurity and prodigality.
The public life of Oscar Wilde began at Oxford University, where, at the time of his matriculation, a pompous professor named Ruskin was leading a crowd of Anglo-Saxon adolescents to the promised land of the future society — behind a wheelbarrow. His mother’s susceptible temperament revived in the young man, and, beginning with himself, he resolved to put into practice a theory of beauty that was partly original and partly derived from the books of Pater and Ruskin. He provoked the jeers of the public by proclaiming and practising a reform in dress and in the appearance of the home. He made lecture tours in the United States and the English provinces and became the spokesman of the aesthetic school, while around him was forming the fantastic legend of the Apostle of Beauty. His name evoked in the public mind a vague idea of delicate pastels, of life beautified with flowers. The cult of the sunflower, his favourite flower, spread among the leisured class, and the little people heard tell of his famous white ivory walking stick glittering with turquoise stones, and of his Neronian hair-dress.
The subject of this shining picture was more miserable than the bourgeois thought. From time to time his medals, trophies of his academic youth, went to the pawnshop, and at times the young wife of the epigrammatist had to borrow from a neighbour the money for a pair of shoes. Wilde was constrained to accept a position as editor of a very petty newspaper, and only with the presentation of his brilliant comedies did he enter the short last phase of his life — luxury and wealth. Lady Windermere’s Fan took London by storm. In the tradition of the Irish writers of comedy that runs from the days of Sheridan and Goldsmith to Bernard Shaw, Wilde became, like them, court jester to the English. He became the standard of elegance in the metropolis, and the annual income from his writings reached almost half a million francs. He scattered his gold among a series of unworthy friends. Every morning he bought two expensive flowers, one for himself and one for his coachman; and until the day of his sensational trial, he was driven to the courtroom in a two-horse carriage with its brilliantly outfitted coachman and powdered page.
His fall was greeted by a howl of puritanical joy. At the news of his condemnation, the crowd gathered outside the courtroom began to dance a pavane in the muddy street. Newspaper reporters were admitted to the prison, and through the window of his cell fed on the spectacle of his shame. White bands covered up his name on theatre billboards. His friends abandoned him. His manuscripts were stolen, while he recounted in prison the pain inflicted on him by two years of forced labour. His mother died under a shadow. His wife died. He was declared bankrupt and his goods were sold at auction. His sons were taken from him. When he got out of prison, thugs urged on by the noble Marquis of Queensbury were waiting in ambush for him. He was hunted from house to house as dogs hunt a rabbit. One after another drove him from the door, refusing him food and shelter, and at nightfall he finally ended up under the windows of his brother, weeping and babbling like a child.
The epilogue came rapidly to an end, and it is not worth the effort to follow the unhappy man from the slums of Naples to his poor lodgings in the Latin Quarter where he died from meningitis in the last month of the last year of the nineteenth century. It is not worth the effort to shadow him, like the French spie
s did. He died a Roman Catholic, adding another facet to his public life by the repudiation of his wild doctrine. After having mocked the idols of the market place, he bent his knees, sad and repentant that he had once been the singer of the divinity of joy, and closed the book of his spirit’s rebellion with an act of spiritual dedication.
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This is not the place to examine the strange problem of the life of Oscar Wilde, nor to determine to what extent heredity and the epileptic tendency of his nervous system can excuse that which has been imputed to him. Whether he was innocent or guilty of the charges brought against him, he undoubtedly was a scapegoat. His greater crime was that he had caused a scandal in England, and it is well known that the English authorities did everything possible to persuade him to flee before they issued an order for his arrest. An employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs stated during the trial that, in London alone, there are more than 20,000 persons under police surveillance, but they remain footloose until they provoke a scandal. Wilde’s letters to his friends were read in court, and their author was denounced as a degenerate obsessed by exotic perversions: ‘Time wars against you; it is jealous of your lilies and your roses’,’I love to see you wandering through violet-filled valleys, with your honey-coloured hair gleaming’. But the truth is that Wilde, far from being a perverted monster who sprang in some inexplicable way from the civilization of modern England, is the logical and inescapable product of the Anglo-Saxon college and university system, with its secrecy and restrictions.
Wilde’s condemnation by the English people arose from many complex causes; but it was not the simple reaction of a pure conscience. Anyone who scrutinizes the graffiti, the loose drawings, the lewd gestures of those people will hesitate to believe them pure at heart. Anyone who follows closely the life and language of men, whether in soldiers’ barracks or in the great commercial houses, will hesitate to believe that all those who threw stones at Wilde were themselves spotless. In fact, everyone feels uncomfortable in speaking to others about this subject, afraid that his listener may know more about it than he does. Oscar Wilde’s own defence in the Scots Observer should remain valid in the judgment of an objective critic. Everyone, he wrote, sees his own sin in Dorian Gray (Wilde’s best known novel). What Dorian Gray’s sin was no one says and no one knows. Anyone who recognizes it has committed it.
Here we touch the pulse of Wilde’s art — sin. He deceived himself into believing that he was the bearer of good news of neo-paganism to an enslaved people. His own distinctive qualities, the qualities, perhaps, of his race — keenness, generosity, and a sexless intellect — he placed at the service of a theory of beauty which, according to him, was to bring back the Golden Age and the joy of the world’s youth. But if some truth adheres to his subjective interpretations of Aristotle, to his restless thought that proceeds by sophisms rather than syllogisms, to his assimilations of natures as foreign to his as the delinquent is to the humble, at its very base is the truth inherent in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot reach the divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss called sin.
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In his last book, De Profundis, he kneels before a gnostic Christ, resurrected from the apocryphal pages of The House of Pomegranates, and then his true soul, trembling, timid, and saddened, shines through the mantle of Heliogabalus. His fantastic legend, his opera — a polyphonic variation on the rapport of art and nature, but at the same time a revelation of his own psyche — his brilliant books sparkling with epigrams (which made him, in the view of some people, the most penetrating speaker of the past century), these are now divided booty.
A verse from the book of Job is cut on his tombstone in the impoverished cemetry at Bagneux. It praises his facility, ‘eloquium suunT, — the great legendary mantle which is now divided booty. Perhaps the future will also carve there another verse, less proud but more pious:
Partiti sunt sibi vestimenta mea et super
vestem meam miserunt sortis.
James Joyce
Bernard Shaw’s Battle with the Censor
‘THE SHEWING-UP OF BLANCO POSNET’
1909
Dublin, 31 August
There is one gay week every year in the Dublin calendar, the last week of August, in which the famous Horse Show draws to the Irish capital a vari-coloured crowd, of many languages, from its sister island, from the continent, and even from far-off Japan. For a few days the tired and cynical city is dressed like a newly- wed bride. Its gloomy streets swarm with a feverish life, and an unaccustomed uproar breaks its senile slumber.
This year, however, an artistic event has almost eclipsed the importance of the Show, and all over town they are talking about the clash between Bernard Shaw and the Viceroy. As is well known, Shaw’s latest play, ‘The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet’, was branded with the mark of infamy by the Lord Chamberlain of England, who banned its performance in the United Kingdom. The censor’s decision probably came as no surprise to Shaw, because the same censor did the same thing to two other of his theatrical works, ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’ and the very recent ‘Press Cuttings’; and Shaw probably considers himself more or less honoured by the arbitrary proclamation which has condemned his comedies, together with Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’, Tolstoy’s ‘The Power of Darkness’, and Wilde’s ‘Salome’.
However, he would not give up, and he found a way to elude the frightened vigilance of the censor. By a strange chance, the city of Dublin is the only place in all the British territory in which the censor has no power; in fact, the old law contains these words: ‘except the city of Dublin.’ Shaw, then, offered his play to the company of the Irish National Theatre, which accepted it and announced its performance just as though nothing were out of the ordinary. The censor was apparently rendered powerless. Then the Viceroy of Ireland intervened to uphold the prestige of authority. There was a lively exchange of letters between the representative of the King and the writer of comedy, severe and threatening on the one side, insolent and scoffing on the other, while Dubliners, who care nothing for art but love an argument passionately, rubbed their hands with joy. Shaw held fast, insisting on his rights, and the little theatre was so filled at the first performance that it literally sold out more than sevenjtimes over.
A heavy crowd thronged about the Abbey Theatre that evening, and a cordon of giant guards maintained order; but it was evident at once that no hostile demonstration would be made by the select public who jammed every nook of the little avant garde theatre. In fact, the report of the evening performance mentioned not even the lightest murmur of protest; and at the curtain fall, a thunderous applause summoned the actors for repeated curtain calls.
Shaw’s comedy, which he describes as a sermon in crude melodrama, is, as you know, in a single act. The action unfolds in a wild and woolly city of the Far West, the protagonist is a horse thief, and the play limits itself to his trial. He has stolen a horse which he thought belonged to his brother, to repay himself for a sum taken from him unjustly. But while he is fleeing from the city, he meets a woman with a sick baby. She wants to get back to town in order to save the life of her child, and, moved by her appeal, he gives her the horse. Then he is captured and taken to the city to be tried. The trial is violent and arbitrary. The sheriff acts as prosecutor, shouting at the accused, banging the table, and threat ening witnesses with revolver in hand. Posnet, the thief, sets forth some primitive theology. The moment of sentimental weakness in which he yielded to the prayers of a poor mother has been the crisis of his life. The finger of God has touched his brain. He no longer has the strength to live the cruel, animal life he had led before this encounter. He breaks out into long, disjointed speeches (and it is here that the pious English censor covered his ears), which are theological insofar as their subject is God, but not very churchly in diction. In the sincerity of his convictions, Posnet resorts to the language of the mining camp; and, among other reflections, when he is trying to say that God works secretly in the hearts of men,
to the language of horse thieves.
The play ends happily. The baby which Posnet tried to save dies, and the mother is apprehended. She tells her story to the court and Posnet is acquitted. Nothing more flimsy can be imagined, and the playgoer asks himself in wonder why on earth the play was interdicted by the censor.
Shaw is right; it is a sermon. Shaw is a born preacher. His lively and talkative spirit cannot stand to be subjected to the noble and bare style appropriate to modern playwriting. Indulging himself in wandering prefaces and extravagant rules of drama, he creates a dramatic form which is much like a dialogue novel. He has a sense of situation, rather than of drama logically and ethically led to a conclusion. In this case he has dug up the central incident of his ‘Devil’s Disciple’ and transformed it into a sermon. The transformation is too abrupt to be convincing as a sermon, and the art is too poor to make it convincing as drama.