James Joyce (Part 1)

(Pictured: James Joyce.) We herewith present the first post of P. E. More’s essay, “James Joyce,” the fourth of nine essays that make up More’s book On Being Human. Paul Elmer More (1864-1937) was an American journalist, critic, essayist, and Christian apologist. He collaborated with Irving Babbitt from before 1900 in the project later called the New Humanism. His conservative literary criticism was published in the eleven-volume Shelburne Essays (1904-1921) and the three-volume New Shelburne Essays (1928). He also published several books on Plato and Greek philosophy, including the Greek Tradition. Late in his life he undertook Christian apologetics, notably in The Christ of the Testament. On Being Human was published in 1936.

[Excerpted from ON BEING HUMAN by Paul Elmer More. Princeton University Press, 1936. This excerpt is reprinted here by permission of Princeton University Press and may not be distributed or disseminated without the permission of the publisher.]

IN MR. T. S. ELIOT’S latest volume of prose, After Strange Gods, there are several sentences that have been turning over in my memory all through the recent reading, rather re-reading, of Joyce, and have given point to my reflections. More than once Mr. Eliot and I had fallen out in conversation over that portentous author, and perhaps my reaction to these comments has a little the note of repentance, since the inability of the printed page to retort invites a degree of assent which it would be humiliating to accord to the same ideas in the heat of controversy. I refer to such statements as that Joyce’s works are charged with Christian sentiment and that he is the most “orthodox” of the moderns. More particularly I have in mind the comparison of two short stories respectively by Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence with the final scene of Dubliners by Joyce. All three tales deal with virtually the same situation, Miss Mansfield’s Bliss with the disillusion of a wife about her relations with her husband, Lawrence’s The Shadow in the Rose Garden and The Dead of Joyce with the similar disillusion of a husband. Mr. Eliot’s thesis is the difference of ethical implication. In Bliss he finds no hint of any perception in the author’s mind of the moral issue of good and evil involved in such an awakening; in Lawrence besides such amoralism he discovers a strain of sheer alarming cruelty; whereas the disillusioned husband in Joyce has a sudden revealing glimpse of that innocent love, spiritualized by the sentiment of Christian tradition, which a long-dead boy had lavished upon his wife when a girl, and which he himself had so completely missed in his coarser physical possession:

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. . . . His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.

And Mr. Eliot is, I now see, right. By nature Joyce was a moralist endowed with that penetration into the secret issues of life which can scarcely exist without a keen sense of religious values; and he was, indeed is, an artist gifted with genius, nothing less, for the subtleties of style. So much I am forced to admit. My fault was that, annoyed by the obliquities of his latest manner, I judged his work as a whole without historical discrimination. Now my dilemma is to explain by what experience of life and by what theories of art a man capable, when barely more than a youth, of writing the last scene of The Dead, should have been brought to wallow in the moral slough of Ulysses and to posture through the linguistic impertinences of Work in Progress.

I

The answer to that question must be sought in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which followed the collection of short stories in the Dubliners, and under the name of Stephen Dedalus gives a thinly disguised account of Joyce’s own preparation for the career of literature. It is a work of mixed value. A good deal of the conversation of the group of students surrounding Stephen is still to me cheaply sordid and irritatingly disjointed; but for the most part the book justifies Mr. Eliot’s praise of the author as one permeated with Catholic sentiment, and it contains passages of really exquisite prose. For the latter I need only mention the famous picture of the bathing girl (p. 199 of the edition in the Modern Library), beyond which few writers of English have gone in conveying the glamour of human flesh untainted by lust.

But behind these glimpses of haunting grace, mingled, it must be admitted, with scenes of satyr-like ugliness, runs the story of Stephen’s conversion from religion to art. The boy is brought up in a family devoutly Catholic and intensely Irish; and in a sense Joyce himself, though he has rebelled against both these restrictions, has never lost the stamp they set upon his soul. Now it is to be noted that the religious atmosphere enveloping his formative years was mediaeval to a degree hard for one moulded by other ideas to comprehend. Such a survival from the dead past was indeed not without aesthetic appeal to the imagination, but it was shot through with materialistic magic carried straight down from the Darkest Ages. It calls for a faith capable of creating saints, but it offers little support certainly so, as presented by Joyce; I am not at all criticising Roman Catholicism itself for the sober integrities of daily conduct, and provides little power to resist the corrosions of modern rationalism. And we must note also that his Ireland was of the sordid, down-at-the-heels kind which puts away the unliked obligations of life with a jest and has furnished too easy a target for caricature. What the Portrait gives us, then, is the story of one who is escaping from the demands of a religion compounded of mediaevalism and patriotism into the alluring liberty of pure art. Stephen is educated by Jesuits and is expected to become a priest. A vein of subtle psychology runs through his earlier analyses of religious experience, showing us that we are not far from the Dubliners; but even here there is already something, I will not say of insincerity, but of sentimental religiosity. What really enthralls him is a luxury of emotion, Christian in its conviction of sin and its vision of purity, which yet fails of conversion into character. His temptation is primarily of the imagination. The supernatural element of an inherited ritualism dissolves more and more, as we proceed, into the thin vapours of the body. And so, in that scene of morning reverie as he lies in bed (pp. 259 ff.), we are not surprised to find recollections of the confessional and radiant images of the eucharist melting into dreams of the flesh:

“Her nakedness yielded to him, radiant, warm odorous and lavish limbed, enfolded him like a shining cloud, enfolded him like water with a liquid life: and like a cloud of vapour or like waters circumfluent in space the liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth over his brain.”

So far it is not so much a matter of formal disbelief as of spiritual lapse. The actual conversion to intellectual doubt, the second temptation, seems to have been brought about by a series of sermons on the four “last things”: death, judgement, heaven, hell. In part the tragic effect on the sensitive hearer was produced by the Jesuit preacher’s insistence on evil as a disease eating into the very substance of the soul, but in greater part by his presentation of the future life of the damned in terms of materialistic horror brought straight out of the Dark Ages. Upon Stephen the first impression was purely emotional: “The faint glimmer of fear became a terror of spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into his soul. He suffered its agony.” I do not know how far these sermons, which make the centre of the book and are reported with extraordinary vividness, are authentic, and how far a dramatization of what was going on slowly in the author’s mind. In either case they show, I think, how the shock of frightful threats out of the otherworld acted to tear religion and art asunder. There could be no comfortable coalescence of religious symbols, however devoid of spiritual authority, with kindred vapours of the flesh until the dogmas of faith were rejected categorically by the intellect. Only so could the imagination be freed of responsibility to any power save its own untrammelled creativity.

And to these negative influences were added others of a more positive sort. There was the author’s pure delight in the charm of language. He is haunted by a chance phrase: “A day of dappled seaborne clouds.” He meditates on the power of words to convey the flowing scenery of the outer world; and from this turns to their more intimate connection with the flood of thoughts and images passing spontaneously through his own soul: “He drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language many-coloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose.” And then follows that vision of the bathing girl, so exquisitely recorded, with its promise that in art he should indeed discover a sphere for the imagination, where rhythm and beauty may be pursued for their own sweet sake, freed from any such external demand upon the conscience as had driven him from religion. Stephen’s reflections on this ideal of art, in conversation with a fellow student, are mixed with half-digested scraps from the aesthetic theories of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas and show that disjointed sort of erudition always dear to Joyce’s vanity; but in the main they are sound enough. And so, at the close of the book, in a sentence from Stephen’s diary which has perhaps been more admired than anything else from Joyce’s pen, we have the artist’s viaticum: “Welcome, O life ! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Into that noble purpose, as it appears, have been converted the religion and nationalism which had held him in bondage. Art has set him free. And the result is Ulysses.

[To be continued.]