Complete Works of James Joyce
Page 239
A Flower Given to My Daughter
A Goldschmidt swam in a Kriegsverein
A holy Hegelian Kettle
A Memory of the Players in a Mirror at Midnight
A Portrait of the Artist as an Ancient Mariner
A Prayer
A voice that sings
After the tribulation of dark strife
Aiutami dunque, O Musa, nitidissima Calligraphia
Alas, how sad the lover’s lot
Alone
And I have sat amid the turbulent crowd
And I shall have no peace
Are you not weary of ardent ways
As I was going to Joyce Saint James’
Bahnhofstrasse
Bis Dat Qui Cito Dat
Bran! Bran! the baker’s ban!
Buried Alive
Buy a book in brown paper
C’era una volta, una bella bambina
Chamber Music
Come out to where youth is met
Come-all-ye
Crossing to the Coast
D. L. G.
Dear, I am asking a favour
Discarded, broken in two
Dooleysprudence
Ecce Puer
Epilogue to Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’
Et Tu, Healy
Father O’Ford
Flood
Flower to flower knits
For he’s a jolly queer fellow
Fréderic’s Duck
G. O’Donnell
Gas from a Burner
Gladly above
Goodbye, Zurich, I must leave you
Gorse-flower makes but sorry dining
Hands that soothe my burning eyes
Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty
Have you heard of the admiral
Hue’s Hue?
Humptydump Dublin squeaks through his norse
I intone the high anthem
I never thought a fountain pen
I only ask you to give me your fair hands
I said: I will go down to where
I saw at Miss Beach’s when midday was shining
In the soft nightfall
Is it dreadfully necessary
Jimmy Joyce, Jimmy Joyce, where have you been
John Eglinton, my Jo, John
La scintille de l’allumette
Lament for the Yeomen
Le bon repos
Les Verts de Jacques
Let us fling to the winds all moping and madness
Lord, thou knowest my misery
Love that I can give you, lady
New Tipperary
Nightpiece
Now a whisper... now a gale
Now let awhile my messmates be
O fons Bandusiae
O, it is cold and still - alas!
O, Mr Poe
O, queen, do on thy cloak
O, there are two brothers, the Fays
Of thy dark life, without a love, without a friend
On the Beach at Fontana
P. J. T.
Pennipomes Twoguineaseach
Post Ulixem Scriptum
Pour la Rime Seulement
Pour Ulysse IX
Requiem eternam dona ei, Domine
Rosy Brook he bought a book
Rouen is the rainiest place getting
Scalding tears shall not avail
Scheveningen, 1927
She is at peace where she is sleeping
She Weeps over Rahoon
Simples
Solomon
Some are comely and some are sour
Stephen’s Green
That I am feeble, that my feet
The clinic was a patched one
The flower I gave rejected lies
The grieving soul. But no grief is thine
The Holy Office
The press and the public misled me
The Right Heart in the Wrong Place
The Right Man in the Wrong Place
The Sorrow of Love
There is a clean climber called Sykes
There is a weird poet called Russell
There is a young gallant named Sax
There once was a Celtic librarian
There once was a lounger named Stephen
There once was an author named Wells
There was a young priest named Delaney
There was an old lady named Gregory
There’s a coughmixture scopolamine
There’s a donor of lavish largesse
There’s a genial young poetriarch Euge
There’s a maevusmarked maggot called Murphy
There’s a monarch who knows no repose
There’s an anthropoid consul called Bennett
Though there is no resurrection from the past
Though we are leaving youth behind
Thunders and sweeps along
Tilly
To Budgeon, raughty tinker
To Mrs H. G. who complained that her visitors kept late hours
Told sublimely in the language
Troppa Grazia, Sant’ Antonio!
Tutto è sciolto
Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba
We will leave the village behind
Where none murmureth
Who is Sylvia, what is she
Wind thine arms round me
Yea, for this love of mine
The Non-Fiction
Joyce with the publishers Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, Paris, 1920
LIST OF ESSAYS, LETTERS AND ARTICLES
A Portrait of the Artist (1904 essay)
Trust Not Appearances
Force
The Study of Languages
Royal Hibernian Academy ‘Ecce Homo’
Drama and Life
Ibsen’s New Drama
The Day of the Rabblement
James Clarence Mangan (1902)
An Irish Poet
George Meredith
Today and Tomorrow in Ireland
A Suave Philosophy
An Effort at Precision in Thinking
Colonial Verses
Catilina
The Soul of Ireland
The Motor Derby
Aristotle on Education
A Ne’er-Do-Well
Empire Building
New Fiction
The Mettle of the Pasture
A Peep Into History
A French Religious Novel
Unequal Verse
Mr. Arnold Graves’ New Work
A Neglected Poet
Mr. Mason’s Novels
The Bruno Philosophy
Humanism
Shakespeare Explained
Borlase and Son
Aesthetics
The Holy Office
Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages
James Clarence Mangan (1907)
Fenianism
Home Rule Comes of Age
Ireland at the Bar
Oscar Wilde: The Poet of ‘Salomé’
Bernard Shaw’s Battle with the Censor
The Home Rule Comet
William Blake
The Shade of Parnell
The City of the Tribes
The Mirage of the Fisherman of Aran
Politics and Cattle Disease
Gas from a Burner
Dooleysprudence
Programme Notes for the English Players
Letter on Pound
Letter on Hardy
Letter on Svevo
From a Banned Writer to a Banned Singer
Ad-Writer
Epilogue to Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’
Communication de M. James Joyce sur le Droit Moral des Ecrivains
Subjugation
The Irish Literary Renaissance
The Battle Between Bernard Shaw and the Censor: ‘The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet’
A Curious History
Realism and Idealism in English Literature
Daniel Defoe I.
Daniel Defoe
II.
William Blake
The Centenary of Charles Dickens
The Universal Literary Influence of the Renaissance
On the Moral Right of Authors
Joyce, c. 1939
A Portrait of the Artist (1904 essay)
In January 1904, Joyce, aged 20, copied this essay into an exercise book belonging to his sister, which he submitted to the publisher W.K. Magee. When the essay was rejected, Joyce decided to turn the essay into a novel, eventually leading to the publication of one of the most famous works of the twentieth century. Joyce’s brother Stanislaus later wrote that Joyce began his first novel “half in anger to show that in writing about himself he has a subject of more interest than their aimless discussion.”
Stanislaus Joyce
THE PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST
The features of infancy are not commonly reproduced in the adolescent portrait for, so capricious are we, that we cannot or will not conceive the past in any other than its iron memorial aspect. Yet the past assuredly implies a fluid succession of presents, the development of an entity of which our actual present is a phase only. Our world, again, recognises its acquaintance chiefly by the characters of beard and inches and is, for the most part, estranged from those of its members who seek through some art, by some process of the mind as yet untabulated, to liberate from the personalised lumps of matter that which is their individualising rhythm, the first or formal relation of their parts. But for such as these a portrait is not an identificative paper but rather the curve of an emotion.
Use of reason is by popular judgment antedated by some seven years and so it is not easy to set down the exact age at which the natural sensibility of the subject of this portrait awoke to the ideas of eternal damnation, the necessity of penitence and the efficacy of prayer. His training had early developed a very lively sense of spiritual obligations at the expense of what is called “common sense.” He ran through his measure like a spendthrift saint, astonishing many by ejaculatory fervours, offending many by airs of the cloister. One day in a wood near Malahide a labourer had marvelled to see a boy of fifteen praying in an ecstasy of Oriental posture. It was indeed a long time before this boy understood the nature of that most marketable goodness which makes it possible to give comfortable assent to propositions without ordering one’s life in accordance with them. The digestive value of religion he never appreciated and he chose, as more fitting his case, those poorer humbler orders in which a confessor did not seem anxious to reveal himself, in theory at least, a man of the world. In spite, however, of continued shocks, which drove him from breathless flights of zeal shamefully inwards, he was still soothed by devotional exercises when he entered the University.
About this period the enigma of a manner was put up to all comers to protect the crisis. He was quick enough now to see that he must disentangle his affairs in secrecy and reserve had ever been a light penance. His reluctance to debate scandal, to seem curious of others, aided him in his real indictment and was not without a satisfactory flavour of the heroic. It was part of that ineradicable egoism of which he was afterward redeemer that he imagined converging to him the deeds and thoughts of the microcosm. Is the mind of boyhood medieval that it is so divining of intrigue? Field sports (or their correspondents in the world of mentality) are perhaps the most effective cure, but for this fantastic idealist, eluding the grunting booted apparition with a bound, the mimic hunt was no less ludicrous than unequal in a ground chosen to his disadvantage. But behind the rapidly indurating shield the sensitive answered: Let the pack of enmities come tumbling and sniffing to the highlands after their game. There was his ground and he flung them disdain from flashing antlers. There was evident self-flattery in the image but a danger of complacence too. Wherefore, neglecting the wheezier bayings in that chorus which no leagues of distance could make musical, he began loftily [sic Cixous] diagnosis of the younglings. His judgment was exquisite, deliberate, sharp; his sentence sculptural. These young men saw in the sudden death of a dull French novelist the hand of Emmanuel God with us; they admired Gladstone, physical science, and the tragedies of Shakespeare; and they believed in the adjustment of Catholic teaching to everyday needs, in the Church diplomatic. In their relations among themselves and towards their superiors they displayed a nervous and (wherever there was question of authority) a very English liberalism. He remarked half-admiring, half-reproving demeanour of a class, implicitly pledged to abstinences towards others among whom (the fame went) wild living was not unknown. Though the union of faith and fatherland was ever sacred in that world of easily inflammable enthusiams a couplet from Davis, accusing the least docile of tempers, never failed of its applause and the memory of McManus was hardly less revered than that of Cardinal Cullen. They had many reasons to respect authority; and even if a student were forbidden to go to Othello (“There are some coarse expressions in it” he was told) what a little cross was that? Was it not rather an evidence of watchful care and interest, and were they not assured that in their future lives this care would continue, this interest be maintained? The exercise of authority might be sometimes (rarely) questionable, its intention, never. Who therefore readier than these young men to acknowledge gratefully the sallies of some genial professor or the surliness of some door-porter, who more solicitous to cherish in every way and to advance in person the honour of Alma Mater? For his part he was at the difficult age, dispossessed and necessitous, sensible of all that was ignoble in such manners who, in revery at least, had been acquainted with nobility. An earnest Jesuit had prescribed a clerkship in Guinness’s: and doubtless the clerk-designate of a brewery would not have had scorn and pity only for an admirable community had it not been that he desired (in the language of the schoolmen) an arduous good. It was impossible that he should find solace in societies for the encouragement of thought among laymen or any other than bodily comfort in the warm sodality amid so many foolish or grotesque virginities. Moreover, it was impossible that a temperament ever trembling towards its ecstasy should submit to acquiesce, that a soul should decree servitude for its portion over which the image of beauty had fallen as a mantle. One night in early spring, standing at the foot of the staircase in the library, he said to his friend “I have left the Church.” And as they walked home through the streets arm-in-arm he told, in words that seemed an echo of their closing, how he had left it through the gates of Assisi.
Extravagance followed. The simple history of the Poverello was soon out of mind and he established himself in the maddest of companies, Joachim Abbas, Bruno the Nolan, Michael Sendivogius, all the hierarchs of initiation cast their spells upon him. He descended among the hells of Swedenborg and abased himself in the gloom of Saint John of the Cross. His heaven was suddenly illuminated by a horde of stars, the signatures of all nature, the soul remembering ancient days. Like an alchemist he bent upon his handiwork, bringing together the mysterious elements, separating the subtle from the gross. For the artist the rhythms of phrase and period, the symbols of word and allusion, were paramount things. And was it any wonder that out of this marvelous life, wherein he had annihilated and rebuilt experience, laboured and despaired, he came forth at last with a single purpose - to reunite the children of the spirit, jealous and long-divided, to reunite them against fraud and principality. A thousand eternities were to be reaffirmed, divine knowledge was to be re-established. Alas for fatuity! as easily might he have summoned a regiment of the winds. They pleaded their natural pieties - social limitations, inherited apathy of race, an adoring mother, the Christian fable. Their treasons were venial only. Wherever the social monster permitted they would hazard the extremes of heterodoxy, reason of an imaginative determinant in ethics, of anarchy (the folk), of blue triangles, of the fish-gods, proclaiming in a fervent moment the necessity for action. His revenge was a phrase and insolation. He lumped the emancipates together - — Venomous Butter - and set away from the sloppy neighbourhood.
Isolation, he had once written, is the first principle of artisti
c economy but traditional and individual revelatigns were at that time pressing their claims and self-communion had been but shyly welcomed. But in the intervals of friendships (for he had outridden three) he had known the sisterhood of meditative hours and now the hope began to grow up within him of finding among them that serene emotion, that certitude which among men he had not found. An impulse had led him forth in the dark season to silent and lonely places where the mists hung streamerwise among the trees; and as he had passed there amid the subduing night, in the secret fall of leaves, the fragrant rain, the mesh of vapours moon-transpierced, he had imagined an admonition of the frailty of all things. In summer it had led him seaward. Wandering over the arid, grassy hills or along the strand, avowedly in quest of shellfish, he had grown almost impatient of the day. Waders, into whose childish or girlish hair, girlish or childish dresses, the very wilfulness of the sea had entered - even they had not fascinated. But as day had waned it had been pleasant to watch the far last figures islanded in distant pools; and as evening deepened the grey glow above the sea he had gone out, out among the shallow waters, the holy joys of solitude uplifting him, singing passionately to the tide. Sceptically, cynically, mystically, he had sought for an absolute satisfaction and now little by little he began to be conscious of the beauty of mortal conditions. He remembered a sentence in Augustine - “It was manifested unto me that those things be good which yet are corrupted; which neither if they were supremely good, nor unless they were good could be corrupted: for had they been supremely good they would have been incorruptible but if they were not good there would be nothing in them which could be corrupted.” A philosophy of reconcilement […] possible […] as eve[…] The […] of the […] at lef […] ber […] lit up with dolphin lights but the lights in the chambers of the heart were unextinguished, nay, burning as for espousal.
Dearest of mortals! In spite of tributary verses and of the comedy of meetings here and in the foolish society of sleep the fountain of being (it seemed) had been interfused. Years before, in boyhood, the energy of sin opening a world before him, he had been made aware of thee. The yellow gaslamps arising in his troubled vision, against an autumnal sky, gleaming mysteriously there before that violent altar - the groups gathered at the doorways arranged as for some rite - the glimpses of revel and fantasmal mirth - the vague face of some welcomer seeming to awaken from a slumber of centuries under his gaze - the blind confusion (iniquity! iniquity!) suddenly overtaking him - in all that ardent adventure of lust didst thou not even then communicate? Beneficent one! (the shrewdness of love was in the title) thou camest timely, as a witch to the agony of the self-devourer, an envoy from the fair courts of life. How could he thank thee for that enrichment of soul by thee consummated? Mastery of art had been achieved in irony; asceticism of intellect had been a mood of indignant pride: but who had revealed him to himself but thou alone? In ways of tenderness, simple, intuitive tenderness, thy love had made to arise in him the central torrents of life. Thou hadst put thine arms about him and, intimately prisoned as thou hadst been, in the soft stir of thy bosom, the raptures of silence, the murmured words, thy heart had spoken to his heart. Thy disposition could refine and direct his passion, holding mere beauty at the cunningest angle. Thou wert sacramental, imprinting thine indelible mark, of very visible grace. A litany must honour thee; Lady of the Apple Trees, Kind Wisdom, Sweet Flower of Dusk. In another phase it had been not uncommon to devise dinners in white and purple upon the actuality of stirabout but here, surely, is sturdy or delicate food to hand; no need for devising. His way (abrupt creature!) lies out now to the measurable world and the broad expanses of activity. The blood hurries to gallop in his veins; his nerves accumulate an electric force; he is footed with flame. A kiss: and they leap together, indivisible, upwards, radiant lips and eyes, bodies, sounding with the triumph of harps! Again, beloved! Again, thou bride! Again, ere life is ours!