Eugene Sheehy’s account to me, brief as it is, alone gives a reasonable outline. Not yet a student of the College, but knowning Joyce at Belvedere, he went to hear his friend and he followed the paper with understanding. There may conceivably have been, he said, some abstract aesthetics, but his recollections is of a debunking of romanticism and a vindication of Ibsen and the truthful handling of reality. What left the strongest impression on his memory was what he thought a most remarkable display by Joyce in his reply to the speakers. He had taken no notes, but taking up the speakers (W. P. Coyne, Arthur Clery, Hugh Kennedy, James J. MacDonald, and the others) one by one, he dealt with each point made against him. One of her retorts referred to Hugh Kennedy as “sheltering under the aegis of a Greek quotation”. The medicals in the back row of the Physics Theatre applauded rapturously, and breaking up at the end he remembers Seamus Clandillon clapping Joyce on the back, saying, “You were [11] magnificent, Joyce, but quite mad.” Eugene Sheehy, later circuit court judge, told me this before he wrote his May it Please the Court which gives a lively and reliable account of Joyce’s early days. I have deliberately retained his account to me as supplementing his own writing.
  As I have mentioned, Arthur Clery was the auditor on this particular occasion. He appears in the text of Stephen Hero as Whelan, the orator of the College, and Joyce quotes him, I should think with exact truth, as confessing that he had been listening to the discourse of angels without knowing the language they spoke. To establish a special relation between Stephen and McCann, Skeffington (McCann) is introduced as the auditor of the Society. In fact, he had been the auditor three years earlier. Other happenings are brought a year forward in order to emphasize Stephen’s maturity. William Magennis, the Professor of Mental and Moral Science, was, as I have said, in the chair, and not W. P. Coyne. But of more material interest is the difference in the actual subject of the paper. Though, as Eugene Sheehy says, there may have been some aesthetics in it, it is certain that the main subject was a vindication of Ibsen and his place in contemporary European drama. The whole discussion on aesthetics, the “applied Aquinas” which occupies twelve pages of Stephen Hero, had, I believe, no place at all in this paper. I am satisfied of this not merely by reason of Joyce’s absorption at this date with Ibsen but because the title of his address was not altered, as Stephen says it was, from “Drama and Life” to “Art and Life” - a change which would have been necessary if aesthetics were its main subject and also because Joyce’s elaboration of his “applied Aquinas” aesthetics was, I dare to say, a matter of later date. His monologues on this topic, begun on pages 76-80 (of the New Directions edition, 1944) before the delivery of his address, are continued later to Cranly on pages 212 and 213. These monologues were heard (but much later - from 1903 onwards) by more than one of Joyce’s friends. His brother, Stanislaus, was the chief, J. F. Byrne (Cranly) was another, and I myself in the autumn of 1903 and the beginning of 1904 was a third. Their subjects, the cone-shaped image of art, its disposition into the lyric, epic, and dramatic, the definition of these kinds, the Thomist constituents of beauty, were set forth to me, as no doubt to others, succinctly and dogmatically at times and places I well remember as belonging to a period three years after his “Drama and Life”. Cavendish Row and the slopes up Rutland Square [12] are indissolubly associated in my mind with such discourse - conversations they can hardly be called, their sententiousness betrays the written word. They were ideas derived from St. Thomas and extended to literature, theories which he had already set down on paper when drafting the text of Stephen Hero in or about 1903. They were the “flag-practices”, the trying-out on friendly ears of a book in progress. A little - his special use of the term “literature” and the definition of beauty—appeared, somewhat earlier, in his paper on Mangan.
 I was fortunate enough to be present at the reading of this paper to the Literary and Historical. It was read on the evening of 1 February 1902, a coincidence with his birthday, 2 February 1882, which, if not actually designed by him, would not have escaped his attention. The meeting was held as usual in the old Physics Theatre, a large, octagonal room lit from its end bay by tall, octagonal windows against which the benches rose as in an amphitheatre, crowded in the day-time with joint classes of medical and arts students, and filled on Saturday evenings by the members of the Literary and Historical and its camp-followers. On such occasions the guest chairman, auditor, and officers of the Society had their places at the long demonstration table facing the rising tiers and the reader of the paper stood to its left. Joyce’s delivery is clear in my memory. He spoke in a withdrawn, impersonal way; his clear enunciation, staccato, even metallic at times; his voice impassive and very deliberate as if coming from some cold and distant oracle. In Joyce’s account of Mr. Duffy, in “A Painful Case” (Dubliners), “Sometimes he caught himself listening to the sound of his own voice.... he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognized as his own, insisting on the soul’s incurable loneliness.” This passage reminds me strongly of Joyce’s manner both in speech and his recitatives of Yeats at the piano. The voice could be singularly musical, rising and passing away in quotation or at will into characteristic aerial harmonies. It lent itself with grace to the elaborate rhythms of the prose into whose complicated web he had so studiously woven his own meditation on the quiet city of the arts and Mangan’s relation to the highest knowledge and to those “laws which do not take holiday because men and times forget them”.
  Except for a quotation from “A Swabian Popular Song”, the text was printed in full in the May 1902 issue of St. Stephen’s, the College magazine, and it has since had a wider public. has written on this topic. [James Meehan, ed., The Centenary History of the Literary and Historical Society, UCD, 1855-1955 (Tralee n.d.)]

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This close-packed paper, prose-poem, or manifesto, will repay close study. It has the interest of its nominal subject but in conception and execution it is in a very high degree spiritual, self-revealing and prophetic. It drew its central theme from a sentence or two of Yeats and John Mitchel. Yeats wrote that Ferguson restored to our hills and rivers their epic interest, and that the nation found in Davis a battle-cry, as in Mangan its cry of despair.” [Dublin University Review, Nov. 1886.] .In his edition of Mangan, Mitchel wrote: “Like Ireland’s, Mangan’s gaze was ever backward with vain and feeble complaint for vanished years. ... It was easy to perceive that his being was all drowned in the blackest despair.”
  The paper owed much also to Lionel Johnson who had been writing on Mangan in 1898 and more elaborately in 1900. He found in him, as Joyce did, a drifting will too ready to dwell in the valley of the shadow, haunted by memories, keening an Ireland desolate and derelict. Also, something of it was conceived in Pater’s manner of an imaginary portrait; but if a second “Nameless One” enters by way of self-portraiture, the mask is resolutely set aside in the closing passages to disclose a serene and stronger spirit.
  I hardly think any one of us students present was then aware of the parallel which existed between Joyce’s father and Mangan’s. In an autobiographic fragment Mangan makes frequent mention of his father’s irascible temper, his recklessness, and the misery it entailed on his family. His mother bore with admirable fortitude the whims of her street-angel, house-devil of a husband who, Mangan wrote, seemed to think that all feelings “with regard to family connections and the obligations imposed by them were totally beneath his notice. ... As a last resource he looked to the wretched members of his family for that help which he should rather have been able to extend to them. My father and mother meant well by me but they did not understand me. They held me by chains of iron.”

[Curran’s note: D. J. O’Donoghue, Life and Writings of Mangan (Dublin 1897, p.3, 10, 13, 64. For Lionel Johnson on Mangan see his Introduction to Mangan’s poems in the Stopford Brooke-Rolleston Treasury of Irish Poetry (London 1900) and his address to the National Literary Society in May 1898.]

  Mangan spoke of this deplorable parent of his as a “boa-constrictor”. In Finnegan Wake (London, 1939, p.180) Joyce wrote of his own as a ’Boer-constructor’ what time Shem the Penman was still a lexical student. His first audience no doubt missed the parallel, but they did not fail to pick up his allusion to Mangan as lamenting no deeper loss to his country than the loss of plaids and interlaced ornament. This topical, now obscure, allusion pointed to Edward Martyn’s Maeve whose exacting love required her pattern of Celtic youth to equal “the rare and delicate perfection” of Celtic ornament. It pointed also, and more immediately, to the new evangel of national dress preached in saffron kilt and plaid to the Literary and Historical just a fortnight before by Fournier d’Albe, an assistant lecturer in physics [15] at the College of Science - better known to us as the inventor of the particoloured, druidical Pan-Celts.
 The paper disconcerted some later speakers by ignoring the politics of ’48 and Mangan’s share in the movement, which they had come prepared to debate. But there was enough to prick them on to battle. Joyce’s tapestry presented them with no obscure allegory: the challenges were deliberate and obvious, but they were thrown down as self-evident truths and with a seeming indifference. Remote as from Sinai, but without its cloudy tumult, the lightning stabbed. It was not enough scornfully to dismiss the Nation poets as departing half-gods and in the teeth of the history books to qualify Mangan, the greatest of them and the friend of John Mitchel, as “little of a patriot”. But presented first as one whose natural habitat is in the regions of ideal beauty, Mangan becomes, in Joyce’s final view, the last justification of a narrow and hysterical nationalism, the passive inheritor of a tradition of griefs and failures and empty menaces, of a sterile and treacherous order, enemy of life, which would establish upon the future an intimate and far more cruel tyranny than the past of his race had known. For Mangan, a lover of death, Caitlin ni Houlihan is a queen, but for Joyce an abject queen upon whom also death is coming. Another voice, however, the voice of the speaker, is heard singing, faintly now but not to be always so; the future is with this strong spirit who will cast down with violence the high tradition of Mangan’s race, its love of sorrow and despair, one who like Dante will take to its centre the life that surrounds it and fling it abroad again amid planetary music and who like Ibsen will sing of earth’s joyous fullness det dejlige vidunderlige jordliv det gaadefulde jordliv. These were barbed, provocatory thrusts and I recall, by reason of their incongruity, two impassioned speakers impaled by them. The first was John E. Kennedy, a callow fledgling some three months in the College, whose reading at that time had travelled not far beyond Alice in Wonderland. Dashing first into the fray, what he wanted to know and insisted on knowing behind all Mr. Joyce’s pretentious talk was whether Mangan was a drunkard or an opium-eater. He pressed his question with all the patriotic urgency at his command. At this stage Tom Kettle—perhaps on some indication from the auditor, Bob Kinahan - thought it well to get the debate running on saner and more courteous lines, but of his complimentary speech I remember nothing. But I do remember that speaker who followed him. Louis Walsh was one of [16] the three or four recognized spokesmen of the Gaelic League, vehement and full of fire. Outraged by Joyce’s assault on our nationality and traditions he let loose in the cause of the Gaelic gospel what Tim Healy, speaking of William O’Brien, called the untameable squadrons of his irrelevant eloquence.Louis’s accent belonged to the Derry border which for Doric harshness can compare only with west Cork whose speech is as stones rattling from an upturned cart. Coming so soon after Joyce’s silvery utterance, Louis reminded me less of a crusader in glittering mail than of a scared hen indignantly rising to no great heights on clattering wings across the farmyard.
  This paper on Mangan is not mentioned by name in the surviving fragment of Stephen Hero, but its material, I imagine, bulks larger than “Drama and Life” in that composite text. Its definitions of literature and beauty have been already referred to. There is as well, as I have mentioned, the more personal reference to the poet who alone is capable of absorbing in himself the life that surrounds him and of flinging it abroad amid planetary music. And there is again the “eloquent and arrogant peroration” (Stephen Hero, p.80). Whether “Mangan” or the earlier “Drama and Life” was the “first of my explosives” (ibid., p.81) is immaterial. One need not be misled by Stephen’s indignation; Joyce regarded him with more ironical eyes. Was his fate, after all, so dreadful or the explosive reckoned so deadly? The fowler had spread his nets and caught the unwary. His other hearers stood free and approved the performance. How else explain the note of the meeting sent by the Society’s secretary to the Freeman’s Journal to appear in its columns on Monday 3 February? It reported categorically that it was “the best paper ever read before the Society”. This student opinion was re-echoed in the next issue of St. Stephen’s, which described the paper as “reaching an unusual height of eloquence” and “displaying exceptional qualities of thought and style”. Glancing at the two speakers I have mentioned, the same writer, William Dawson, tartly commented on “the philistinism of young Ulster” and on “the ignorance which had a field day for the nonce”. Furthermore, the editor and staff saw to it that the “explosive” should have its fullest detonation at the earliest moment. Ibsen, too, in early days had written of the “torpedoes” he had placed under the “Ark”. Joyce’s explosives echoed these. The editor printed the address in his next issue, a few months after “The Day of the Rabblement” had been declined.

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