by Unknown
The drama ends happily. The child that Posnet wanted to save dies, and the mother is tracked down. She tells her story to the court, and Posnet is acquitted. Nothing imaginable is more innocuous than this and the audience wonders in amazement why on earth the work was intercepted by the censor.
Shaw is right: it is a sermon. Shaw is a born preacher. His loquacious and lively spirit cannot suffer the imposition of the noble, spare style that befits a modern playwright. By giving vent to his feelings in farraginous prefaces and in endless stage-directions, he creates a dramatic form for himself which has much of the dialogue-novel in it. He has a sense of situation rather than of drama logically and ethically brought to its conclusion. In this case he has exhumed the central event from his play The Devil’s Disciple, and he has transformed it into a sermon. It is a transformation too rapid to be convincing as a sermon, just as its art is too poor to make it convincing as a drama.
Does this play not perhaps coincide with a crisis in the mind of the writer? Already, at the end of John Bull’s Other Island, the crisis had announced its advent. Shaw, like his latest hero, has also had an irregular and irreverent past. Fabianism, vegetarianism, anti-alcoholism, music, painting, drama, all the progressive movements in both art and politics have had him as a champion. Now, perhaps some divine finger has touched his brain: and he, too, just like Blanco Posnet, is shewn up.
James Yoyce [sic]
A Curious History
To the Editor 17 August 1911 Via della Barriera Vecchia 32, III, Trieste (Austria)
Sir May I ask you to publish this letter which throws some light on the present conditions of authorship in England and Ireland?
Nearly six years ago Mr Grant Richards, publisher, of London signed a contract with me for the publication of a book of stories written by me, entitled Dubliners. Some ten months later he wrote asking me to omit one of the stories and passages in others which, as he said, his printer refused to set up. I declined to do either and a correspondence began between Mr Grant Richards and myself which lasted more than three months. I went to an international jurist in Rome (where I lived then) and was advised to omit. I declined to do so and the MS was returned to me, the publisher refusing to publish notwithstanding his pledged printed word, the contract remaining in my possession.
Six months afterwards a Mr Hone wrote to me from Marseilles to ask me to submit the MS to Messrs Maunsel, publishers, of Dublin. I did so: and after about a year, in July 1909, Messrs Maunsel signed a contract with me for the publication of the book on or before 1 September 1910. In December 1909 Messrs Maunsel’s manager begged me to alter a passage in one of the stories, ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, wherein some reference was made to Edward VII. I agreed to do so, much against my will, and altered one or two phrases. Messrs Maunsel continually postponed the date of publication and in the end wrote, asking me to omit the passage or to change it radically. I declined to do either, pointing out that Mr Grant Richards of London had raised no objection to the passage when Edward VII was alive and that I could not see why an Irish publisher should raise an objection to it when Edward VII had passed into history. I suggested arbitration or a deletion of the passage with a prefatory note of explanation by me but Messrs Maunsel would agree to neither. As Mr Hone (who had written to me in the first instance) disclaimed all responsibility in the matter and any connection with the firm I took the opinion of a solicitor in Dublin who advised me to omit the passage, informing me that as I had no domicile in the United Kingdom I could not sue Messrs Maunsel for breach of contract unless I paid £100 into court and that, even if I paid £100 into court and sued them, I should have no chance of getting a verdict in my favour from a Dublin jury if the passage in dispute could be taken as offensive in any way to the late king. I wrote then to the present king, George V, enclosing a printed proof of the story with the passage therein marked and begging him to inform me whether in his view the passage (certain allusions made by a person of the story in the idiom of his social class) should be withheld from publication as offensive to the memory of his father. His Majesty’s private secretary sent me this reply:
Buckingham Palace
The private secretary is commanded to acknowledge the receipt of Mr James Joyce’s letter of the 1 instant and to inform him that it is inconsistent with rule for His Majesty to express his opinion in such cases. The enclosures are returned herewith.
11 August 1911
Here is the passage in dispute:
— But look here, John, — said Mr O’Connor. — Why should we welcome the king of England? Didn’t Parnell himself...? —
— Parnell, — said Mr Henchy, — is dead. Now, here’s the way I look at it. Here’s this chap comes to the throne after his old mother keeping him out of it till the man was grey. He’s a jolly fine decent fellow, if you ask me, and no damn nonsense about him. He just says to himself — The old one never went to see these wild Irish. By Christ, I’ll go myself and see what they’re like. — And are we going to insult the man when he comes over here on a friendly visit? Eh? Isn’t that right, Crofton? —
Mr Crofton nodded his head.
— But after all now, — said Mr Lyons, argumentatively, — King Edward’s life, you know, is not the very... —
— Let bygones be bygones. — said Mr Henchy — I admire the man personally. He’s just an ordinary knockabout like you and me. He’s fond of his glass of grog and he’s a bit of a rake, perhaps, and he’s a good sportsman. Damn it, can’t we Irish play fair? —
I wrote this book seven years ago and, as I cannot see in any quarter a chance that my rights will be protected, I hereby give Messrs Maunsel publicly permission to publish this story with what changes or deletions they may please to make and shall hope that what they may publish may resemble that to the writing of which I gave thought and time. Their attitude as an Irish publishing firm may be judged by Irish public opinion. I, as a writer, protest against the systems (legal, social and ceremonious) which have brought me to this pass. Thanking you for your courtesy, I am, Sir, Your obedient servant James Joyce
Realism and Idealism in English Literature
Daniel Defoe I.
In the year of grace, 1660, the exiled, fugitive, and dispossessed Charles Stuart landed on English soil at Dover and, escorted by the fanfare and torches of a jubilant people, headed towards the capital to assume the crown that his father, the martyr king, had removed eleven years previously when he was executed on the gallows in Whitehall by order of the regicide generals. The corpses of Cromwell and Ireton were disinterred and dragged to Tyburn (the Golgotha, site of the skulls, in English history) where they were hanged on the gibbets and then, putrefied as they were, beheaded by the executioner. Merriment returned to Merry England; the gracefulness, culture, pomp, and luxury of the Stuart courts returned. The young king flung open the doors of his palace to flatterers of both sexes. Holding his lapdog in his arms, he gave audience to his ministers. Leaning against the fireplace of the House of Lords he would listen to the discourses of that elevated assembly, swearing by God’s bodikins (his majesty’s favourite oath) that his noblemen entertained him more than his comedians.
But this triumph was misleading and, within a short time, the star of the Stuart dynasty had set forever, and Protestant succession, embodied by the person of William of Nassau, had become the cornerstone of the British constitution. Here, according to the textbooks, the chapter of ancient history comes to an end, and that of modern history begins.
And yet, the constitutional crisis that was then resolved by a covenant between the crown, the church and the legislature is not the only, nor the most interesting, feat accomplished by that prince, who is called in remembrance the pious, glorious and immortal. His victory also signifies a crisis of race, an ethnic revenge. From the days of William the Conqueror onwards, no monarch of Germanic stock had wielded the English sceptre. The Normans were succeeded by the Plantagenets, the Plantagenets by the House of Tudor, the Tudors by the Stuarts.
&nb
sp; Even Oliver Cromwell himself, the Lord Protector of civil liberties, was of Celtic origin, son of a Welsh father and a Scottish mother. So, over six centuries had passed since the Battle of Hastings before the true successor of the Anglo-Saxon dynasty was to ascend to the throne of England. The people who acclaimed the coming of the awkward and taciturn Dutch commander were acclaiming themselves, and saluting the human symbol of a true rebirth.
For the first time now the true English spirit begins to appear in literature. Consider how minimal the importance of that spirit was in the earlier times. In Chaucer, a court writer with a polished and comely style, the indigenous spirit can just be discerned as the framework for the adventures of respectable people — meaning Norman clerics and foreign heroes. How is the great English public depicted in the variegated dramas of William Shakespeare, who wrote two hundred years after Chaucer? A boorish peasant, a court jester, a half-mad and half-stupid ragamuffin, a gravedigger. Shakespeare’s characters all come from abroad and afar: Othello, a Moorish prince; Shylock, a Venetian Jew; Caesar, a Roman; Hamlet, a Danish prince; Macbeth, a Celtic usurper; Romeo and Juliet, citizens of Verona. Of all the rich gallery, perhaps the only one who can be called English is the fat knight with the monstrous paunch, Sir John Falstaff. In the centuries following the French conquest, English literature was schooled by masters such as Boccaccio, Dante, Tasso and Messer Lodovico. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are a version of the Decameron or the Novellino; Milton’s Paradise Lost is a puritanical transcript of the Divine Comedy. Shakespeare, with his Titianesque palette, his eloquence, his epileptic passion, and his creative fury, is an Italianized Englishman, while the theatre of the Restoration takes its cue from the Spanish stage and the works of Calderon and Lope de Vega. The first English writer to write without copying or adapting foreign works, to create without literary models, to instil a truly national spirit into the creations of his pen, and to manufacture an artistic form for himself that is perhaps without precedent (with the exception of the monographs of Sallust and Plutarch) is Daniel Defoe, the father of the English novel.
Daniel Defoe was born in 1661, a year after the return of Charles Stuart. His father was a wealthy butcher from Cripplegate who, like a good burgher, intended his son for holy orders. But the son was anything but a saint, and preaching the gospel of Christian peace ill-fitted this bellicose man whose life from the cradle to the grave was a hard, vigorous, and ineffective struggle.
As soon as he had finished his studies, the young man threw himself into the vortex of politics. When the Duke of Monmouth (one of the merry monarch’s many bastard sons) raised the banner of revolt, he enlisted in the ranks of the pretender. The revolt failed and Defoe barely managed to escape with his life. A few years later we find him engaged in business as a hosiery merchant. In 1689, he rode in the volunteer light-horse regiment that escorted the new sovereigns William and Mary to a solemn banquet in the Guildhall. Later, he began trading in eastern drugs. He travelled to France, Spain and Portugal, stopping over there for a time. He also went to Holland and Germany on his business travels, but when he returned to England, the first of a long series of disasters awaited him. He was declared bankrupt and, as his creditors pursued him mercilessly, he thought it best to flee to Bristol, where the townspeople attached the nickname of Mr Sunday to him, because he only dared leave his house on a Sunday, a day on which the bailiffs could not legally arrest him. An agreement with his creditors freed him from his forced domicile, and for a full twelve years he worked to pay off the enormous debt of seventeen thousand pounds sterling.
From his liberation until the death of King William, Defoe was a director of a Dutch tile factory and actively involved himself in politics, publishing pamphlets, essays, satires, tracts, all in defence of the foreign king’s party, and all, with the exception of The True-Born Englishman, of very little literary value. Following the accession of Queen Anne, parliament voted for a coercive law against Protestant Dissenters (that is, those who did not recognize the supremacy of the Anglican church), and Defoe, masquerading as an extremist Anglican, published his famous satire, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, in which he proposed that all those who did not accept the dogmas and rites of the Anglican Church be condemned to the gallows or prison, reserving the honour of crucifixion for the fathers of the Society of Jesus. The satire caused an enormous uproar, at first fooling the very ministers who, having praised its sincerity and wisdom, realized that they were dealing with a solemn hoax. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Defoe and the London Gazette published this description of the satirist:
A spare man, middle-aged, about forty years old, of a brown complexion, dark-brown coloured hair, but wears a wig; a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth, born in London, for many years a hose-factor in Cornhill, now owner of a brick and pantile works at Tilbury in Essex County.
The police put a price on his head, and within the month Defoe was imprisoned in Newgate. His book was burnt by the public executioner, and the writer was pilloried for three successive days in front of the Exchange, in Cheapside, at the gates to the City at Temple Bar. He did not lose heart during his punishment. By an act of royal clemency, his ears were not cropped; flower-sellers wreathed the instrument of torture with garlands; copies of his A Hymn to the Pillory, which the newsboys were selling for a few pennies, went like hot cakes, while the mob of citizens filled the square reciting the verses and toasting the health of the prisoner and the freedom of speech.
He was then detained in prison, but his literary activity did not cease. While still in prison, he founded and edited one of the first English Journals, The Review, and knew so well how to placate the authorities that a little while later he was not only set free, but appointed by the government to go to Edinburgh as a secret envoy.
Another seven years follow in which the figure of the writer is lost in the grey shadows of politics. Then the government levied a heavy tax on newspapers, and the Review folded after nine years of existence. Defoe, indefatigable scribbler that he was, launched himself once again into polemic. His pamphlet on the Jacobite succession earned him another trial and, condemned for contempt, he was again imprisoned in Newgate. He owed his release to a violent attack of apoplexy which almost killed him. Had it been fatal, world literature would have one masterpiece less. After the union of Scotland and England and the establishment of the House of Hanover on the English throne, Defoe’s political importance quickly ebbed. He then turned (he had passed his sixtieth year) to literature properly speaking in the first years of the reign of George I (the uneven life of Defoe stretches over seven reigns). He wrote and sent the first part of Robinson Crusoe to press. The author offered his book to almost all the publishing houses of the capital which, showing immense foresight, turned it down. It saw the light in April 1719; by the end of August it was already in its fourth reprinting. Eighty thousand copies were sold, an unprecedented circulation for those times. The public could not get enough of the adventures of Defoe’s hero and wanted more. Like Conan Doyle who, bowing to the insistence of the contemporary public, brought his lanky scarecrow Sherlock Holmes back from the dead to set him off once more chasing scroungers and malefactors, the sixty-year-old Defoe also followed up the first part of his novel with a second, in which the hero, nostalgic for his travels, returns to his island home. To this second part there followed a third, the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe. Defoe, bless his soul, realizing a little late that in his prosaic realism he had taken little account of his hero’s spiritual side, wrote a collection of serious reflections on man, human destiny, and the Creator as a third part to his novel. These reflections and thoughts adorn the rough figure of the mariner like votive talismans hanging from the neck and outstretched arms of a miracle-working Madonna. The famous book even had the great fortune to be parodied by a London wit who also made a pile of money through the sales of a whimsical satire entitled The Life and Surprizing Adventure of a Certain Daniel Defoe, Wool Merchant, Who Lives
All Alone in the Uninhabited Island of Great Britain.
The pedants strove to uncover the small mistakes which the great precursor of the Realist movement had run into. How could Robinson Crusoe have filled his pockets with biscuits if he had undressed before swimming from the beach to the stranded ship? How could he have seen the eyes of the goat in the pitch blackness of the cave? How could the Spaniards have given Friday’s father a written agreement if they had no ink or quill pens? Are there bears or not on the islands of the West Indies? And so forth. The pedants are right: the mistakes are there; but the wide river of the new realism sweeps them majestically away like bushes and rushes uprooted by the flood.
From 1719 to 1725 the aged writer’s pen was never still: he wrote almost a dozen romances (the so-called lives), pamphlets, tracts, journals, travelogues, and spiritualistic studies. Gout and old age forced him to lay aside his pen. It is thought that he was in prison for the third time in 1730. A year later we see him as a fugitive in a citadel in Kent. There is an air of mystery shrouding his death.
Perhaps he was on the run, perhaps the quarrel with his son (a downright scoundrel worthy of inclusion in one of his father’s books) had forced him to wander about in misery in a way reminiscent of the tragedy of King Lear. Perhaps the travails of his long life, the excessive writing, the intrigues, the disasters, his ever-increasing avarice had produced a sort of senile atrophy of his quick and fertile intelligence. We are and shall remain uncertain. And yet, there is something meaningful in his strange, solitary death in the little boarding-house in Moorfields. The man that immortalized the strange, solitary Crusoe and many others as lost in their great sea of social misery, as Crusoe was lost in a sea of waters, may have felt a longing for solitude as his end drew nigh. The old lion goes to a secluded place when his final hour approaches. He feels loathing for his worn and tired-out body and wishes to die where no eye may see him. And so, sometimes man, born into shame, will also bow before the shame of death, not wishing others to be saddened by the sight of that obscene phenomenon with which brutal and mocking Nature puts an end to the life of a human being.