Instigations Part 30

'Impleta sunt quae concinit David fideli carmine....'

"They turned into Lower Mount Street. A few steps from the corner a fat young man, wearing a silk neck-cloth, &c."

On almost every page of Joyce you will find just such swift alternation of subjective beauty and external shabbiness, squalor, and sordidness.

It is the ba.s.s and treble of his method. And he has his scope beyond that of the novelists his contemporaries, in just so far as whole stretches of his keyboard are utterly out of their compa.s.s.

The conclusion or moral termination from all of which is that the great writers of any period must be the remarkable minds of that period; they must know the extremes of their time; they must not represent a _social status_; they cannot be the "Grocer" or the "Dilettante" with the egregious and capital letter, nor yet the professor or the professing wearer of Jaeger or professional eater of herbs.

In the three hundred pages of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"

there is no omission; there is nothing in life so beautiful that Joyce cannot touch it without profanation--without, above all, the profanations of sentiment and sentimentality--and there is nothing so sordid that he cannot treat it with his metallic exact.i.tude.

I think there are few people who can read Shaw, Wells, Bennett, or even Conrad (who is in a category apart) without feeling that there are values and tonalities to which these authors are wholly insensitive. I do not imply that there cannot be excellent art within quite distinct limitations, but the artist cannot afford to be or to appear ignorant of such limitations; he cannot afford a pretense of such ignorance. He must almost choose his limitations. If he paints a snuff-box or a stage scene he must not be ignorant of the fact, he must not think he is painting a landscape, three feet by two feet, in oils.

I think that what tires me more than anything else in the writers now past middle age is that they always seem co imply that they are giving us all modern life, the whole social panorama, all the instruments of the orchestra. Joyce is of another donation.

His earlier book, "Dubliners," contained several well-constructed stories, several sketches rather lacking in form. It was a definite promise of what was to come. There is very little to be said in praise of it which would not apply with greater force to "A Portrait." I find that whoever reads one book inevitably sets out in search of the other.

The quality and distinction of the poems in the first half of Mr.

Joyce's "Chamber Music" (new edition, published by Elkin Mathews, 4A, Cork Street, W.1, at 1_s_. 3_d_.) is due in part to their author's strict musical training. We have here the lyric in some of its best traditions, and one pardons certain trifling inversions, much against the taste of the moment, for the sake of the cleancut ivory finish, and for the interest of the rhythms, the cross run of the beat and the word, as of a stiff wind cutting the ripple-tops of bright water.

The wording is Elizabethan, the metres at times suggesting Herrick, but in no case have I been able to find a poem which is not in some way Joyce's own, even though he would seem, and that most markedly, to shun apparent originality, as in:

Who goes amid the green wood With springtide all adorning her?

Who goes amid the merry green wood To make it merrier?

Who pa.s.ses in the sunlight By ways that know the light footfall?

Who pa.s.ses in the sweet sunlight With mien so virginal?

The ways of all the woodland Gleam with a soft and golden fire-- For whom does all the sunny woodland Carry so brave attire?

O, it is for my true love The woods their rich apparel wear-- O, it is for my true love, That is so young and fair.

Here, as in nearly every poem, the motif is so slight that the poem scarcely exists until one thinks of it as set to music; and the workmanship is so delicate that out of twenty readers scarce one will notice its fineness. If Henry Lawes were alive again he might make the suitable music, for the cadence is here worthy of his cunning:

O, it is for my true love, That is so young and fair.

The musician's work is very nearly done for him, and yet how few song-setters could be trusted to finish it and to fill in an accompaniment.

The tone of the book deepens with the poem beginning:

O sweetheart, hear you Your lover's tale; A man shall have sorrow When friends him fail.

For he shall know then Friends be untrue; And a little ashes Their words come to.

The collection comes to its end and climax in two profoundly emotional poems; quite different in tonality and in rhythm-quality, from the lyrics in the first part of the book:--

All day I hear the noise of waters Making moan, Sad as the sea-bird is, when going Forth alone, He hears the wind cry to the waters'

Monotone.

The gray winds, the cold winds are blowing Where I go.

I hear the noise of many waters Far below.

All day, all night, I hear them flowing To and fro.

The third and fifth lines should not be read with an end stop. I think the rush of the words will escape the notice of scarcely any one. The phantom hearing in this poem is coupled, in the next poem, to phantom vision, and to a _robustezza_ of expression:

I hear an army charging upon the land, And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees; Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand, Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.

They cry unto the night their battle-name; I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter; They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame, Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.

They come shaking in triumph their long green hair; They come out of the sea and run shouting by the sh.o.r.e: My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?

My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

In both these poems we have a strength and a fibrousness of sound which almost prohibits the thought of their being "set to music," or to any music but that which is in them when spoken; but we notice a similarity of the technique to that of the earlier poems, in so far as the beauty of movement is produced by a very skilful, or perhaps we should say a deeply intuitive, interruption of metric mechanical regularity. It is the irregularity which has shown always in the best periods.

The book is an excellent antidote for those who find Mr. Joyce's prose "disagreeable" and who at once fly to conclusions about Mr. Joyce's "cloacal obsessions." I have yet to find in Joyce's published works a violent or malodorous phrase which does not justify itself not only by its verity, but by its heightening of some opposite effect, by the poignancy which it imparts to some emotion or to some thwarted desire for beauty. Disgust with the sordid is but another expression of a sensitiveness to the finer thing. There is no perception of beauty without a corresponding disgust. If the price for such artists as James Joyce is exceeding heavy, it is the artist himself who pays, and if Armageddon has taught us anything it should have taught us to abominate the half-truth, and the tellers of the half-truth in literature.

ULYSSES

Incomplete as I write this. His profoundest work, most significant--"Exiles" was a side-step, necessary katharsis, clearance of mind from continental contemporary thought--"Ulysses," obscure, even obscene, as life itself is obscene in places, but an impa.s.sioned meditation on life.

He has done what Flaubert set out to do in "Bouvard and Pecuchet," done it better, more succinct. An epitome.

"Bloom" answers the query that people made after "The Portrait." Joyce has created his second character; he has moved from autobiography to the creation of the complimentary figure. Bloom on life, death, resurrection, immortality. Bloom and the Venus de Milo.

Bloom brings life into the book. All Bloom is vital. Talk of the other characters, cryptic, perhaps too particular, incomprehensible save to people who know Dublin, at least by hearsay, and who have university education plus mediaevalism. But unavoidable or almost unavoidable, given the subject and the place of the subject.

NOTE: I am tired of rewriting the arguments for the realist novel; besides there is nothing to add. The Brothers de Goncourt said the thing once and for all, but despite the lapse of time their work is still insufficiently known to the American reader. The program in the preface to "Germinie Lacerteux" states the case and the whole case for realism; one can not improve the statement. I therefore give it entire, ad majoram Dei gloriam.

"PReFACE

_De la premiere edition_

Il nous faut demander pardon au public de lui donner ce livre, et l'avertir de ce qu'il y trouvera.

Le public aime les romans faux: ce roman est un roman vrai.

Il aime les livres qui font semblant d'aller dans le monde: ce livre vient de la rue.

Il aime les pet.i.tes uvres polissonnes, les memoires de filles, les confessions d'alcoves, les saletes erotiques, le scandale qui se retrousse dans une image aux devantures des libraires, ce qu'il va lire est severe et pur. Qu'il ne s'attende point a la photographie decolletee du plaisir: l'etude qui suit est la clinique de l'Amour.

Le public aime encore les lectures anodines et consolantes, les aventures qui finissent bien, les imaginations qui ne derangent ni sa digestion ni sa serenite: ce livre, avec sa triste et violente distraction, est fait pour contrarier ses habitudes et nuire a son hygiene.

Pourquoi donc l'avons-nous ecrit? Est-ce simplement pour choquer le public et scandaliser ses gots?

Non.