James Joyce: Notes - Literary Figures [2/3]

[ For remarks on Douglas Hyde and John Millington Syne - see under their respective files - viz., Hyde > Notes > James Joyce - supra; Synge > Commentary > Joyce - infra. ]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: in Ulysses Stephen quotes Goethe’s saying, ‘Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in middle life.’ (Ulysses, [Bodley 1960] 9.451; quoted in Weldon Thornton, The Antimodernism of Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” , Syracuse UP 1994,p.1.)

Samuel Johnson: Boswell writes of Johnson’s refutation of George Berkeley: ‘After we came out of the church [at Harwich], we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I nevery shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute him thus”. This was a stout exemplification of the first truths of Père Buffier, or the original principles of Reid and Beattie; without admitting which, we can no more argue in metaphysicks, than we can argue in mathematicks without axioms. To me it is inconceivable how Berkeley can be answered by pure reasoning.’ (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, and rev. by L. F. Powell, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1935, Vol. I, p.471; quoted in Douglas Lane Patey, ‘Johnson’s Refutation of Berkeley: Kicking the Stone Again’, in Journal of the History of Ideas, 47, 1 [Pennsylvania UP] (Jan.-March 1986), pp.139-46; JSTOR online; accessed 12.11.2008.]

Boswell: The allusion is also given in Weldon Thornton, Allusions in Ulysses (N. Carolina UP 1961, 1968), citing Boswell’s Life, 6 Aug., 1763. Thorton adds that R. M. Adams (Surface and Symbol, p.134) says that Stephen has Aristotle repeat with his head Dr. Johnson’s famous experiment with his foot to refute Berkeley. (Thornton, op. cit, p.42; vide “Proteus”: ‘by knocking his sconce against it’.)

Note that Joyce was inclined to discuss Boswell’s Life, as well as St. Thomas on morality, Giambattista Vico and Freud. (Ellmann, James Joyce, 1982 Edn., p.340.)

Jonathan Swift: Peter Crisp quotes from Patrick Delany’s Memoir of Swift on that writer’s sufferings from inflamed eyes in his last days - and quotes Joyce’s short passage entitled he called “Twilight of Blindness Madness Descends Upon Swift”. written when he himself was suffering extremely from eye troubles which were partially alleviated by Dr Vogt in an operation on his left eye during 1930:

‘Unslow, malswift, pro mean, proh noblesse, Atrahora, Melancoloures, nears; whose glauque eyes glitt bedimmd to imm! whose fingrings creep o’er skull: till, qwench! asterr mist calls estarr and grauw! honath John raves homes glowcoma.’ (The passage occurs only in Robert McAlmon’s along with notes he had prepared on it incorporating Stuart Gilbert’s Burmese word for twilight and others from that language. The critic Edmund Wilson incorporated remarks on the passage in his essay on the Wake - fully realising from his own reading of the published book that it had not been included in it. (Wilson, “The Dream of H.C.Earwicker”, in The New Republic, 28 June 1939).

Further: Crisp also quotes Joyce’s letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver of 20 Sept. 1928: ‘The complete eclipse of my seeing faculties ... I am warding off by dressing in the three colours of successive stages of cecity as the Germans divide them; namely, green Starr; that is, green blindness, or glaucoma; grey Starr; that is, cataract, and black Starr, that is dissolution of the retina....So I had a jacket made in Munich of a green stuff I bought in Salzburg and the moment I got back to Paris I bought a pair of black and grey shoes and a grey shirt; and I had a pair of grey trousers and I found a black tie and I advertised for a pair of green braces and Lucia gave me a grey silk handkerchief and the girl found a black sombrero and that completed the picture.’ To HSW, in Letters Vol. 1, p.269.)

Crisp further cites the possible reasons given for its omission by critics including notably its personal allusion to his own glaucoma (Wilson) and the depressing atmosphere of the piece (James Atherton, Books at the Wake) - and adds the conjecture that Joyce could simply have forgotten to insert it in a work otherwise saturated with references to Swift. He also expressed a regret that Joyce didn't find occasion to include the literal translation of the Burmese word for twilight given him by Stuart Gilbert as ְliterally (the time when ) younger brother (meets) elder brother, does not recognise him but yet recognises him.’ (Quoted on Peter Crisp, “Twilight of Blindness Madness Descends on Swift”, in From Swerve of Shore to Bend of Bay [ a Joyce Blogsite] 10 May 2016 - online; see further under Swift > Commentary > Patrick Delay - as infra.)

[ top ]

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Essay on Poetry (1821; pub. 1840): ‘the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconsistent wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.’ [Cont.]

Percy Bysshe Shelley (Essay on Poetry, 1821 ) - cont.: ‘Poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appear, were called, in the earlier epochs of our world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but be beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of the latest time [...] A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one, as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and numbers are not.’ [Cont.]

Percy Bysshe Shelley (Essay on Poetry) - cont.: ‘Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man. [...] It transmutes all that it touches, and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes: it’s secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life; it strips the veil of familiarity from the world... it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know.’

Thomas de Quincey, “The Palimpsest of the Human Brain” [on memories]: ‘Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain soft as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before, and yet in reality not one has been extinguished.’ (in David Masson, ed., Thomas De Quincey: The Collected Writings, Vol. XIII p.346.) ‘Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious handwritings of grief or joy which have been inscribed upon the palimpsest of your brain.’ (Ibid., p.348.) ‘[L]ike the annual leaves of Aboriginal forests, or the undissolving snows of the Himalayas, or light falling upon light, the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness. But by the hour of death, but by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these can revive in strength. They are not dead, but sleeping.’ (Idem.)

Thomas de Quincey, “Suspiria de Profundis”: ‘[O]ften I have been struck with the important truth that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, that ever reach us directly, and in their abstract shapes.’ Masson, op. cit., Vol. I, p.39.) See also Confessions, ed., Edmund Baxter): ‘[...] I am convinced [...] that the dread book of account which the scriptures speak of is, in fact, the mind itself of each individual. Of this at least I feel assured: that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind.’ (p.235.)

Thomas de Quincey: John Barrell identifies ‘involutes’ as a scientific term used for conch-shells ( The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, Yale 1991, p.32.) Note: For Althea Hayther, De Quincey’s ‘whole lifetime of experiences which, under the agency of opium dreams, folded inwards round each other and became a single involute of feeling.’ (Opium and the Romantic Imagination, Faber 1971, p.126.) [All the foregoing quoted in The following quotations copied from Roisin McCluskey, PhD transfer submission, UUC 2008; see further in RICORSO Library, “Critics” > International, infra.]

De Quincey wrote of memories: ‘Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain soft as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before, and yet in reality not one has been extinguished.’ (‘The Palimpsest of the Human Brain’, in Thomas De Quincey: The Collected Writings, ed. Masson, Vol. XIII, p.346.)

‘Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious handwritings of grief or joy which have been inscribed upon the palimpsest of your brain.’ (Ibid., p.348.)

‘[L]ike the annual leaves of Aboriginal forests, or the undissolving snows of the Himalayas, or light falling upon light, the endless strata have covered up each other in forgetfulness. But by the hour of death, but by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these can revive in strength. They are not dead, but sleeping.’ (Masson, op. cit., Vol. XIII, p.34; cf. cf. ‘flick as flowflakes’ in Finnegans Wake.)

‘[O]ften I have been struck with the important truth that far more of our deepest thoughts and feelings pass to us through perpleced combinations of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may coin that word) [see note] in compound experiences incapable of being disentangled, that ever reach us directly, and in their abstract shapes.’ (‘Suspiria de Profundis’, in Masson, op. cit., Vol. I, p.39.)

‘[...] I am convinced [...] that the dread book of account which the scriptures speak of is, in fact, the mind itself of each individual. Of this at least I feel assured: that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind.’ (Confessions, ed. Edmund Baxter, p.235.) John Barrell identifies ‘involutes’ as a term used for conch-shells (The Infection of Thomas De Quincey, Yale 1991, p.32.)

‘Simple ideas will run into complex ones by Means of Association’ (In ‘Doctrine of Vibrations’, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty and His Expectations, 1834; available in Google Books.

(The foregoing quoted in Roisin McCluskey, PhD transfer submission, UUC 2008, p.7 - describing it as an ‘account of the brain’s memory system’.)

Note: For Althea Hayther, De Quincey’s ‘whole lifetime of experiences which, under the agency of opium dreams, folded inwards round each other and became a single involute of feeling.’ (Opium and the Romantic Imagination, Faber 1971, p.126.) Cf. Wordsworth: ‘There are in our existence spots of time / Which with distinct pre-eminence retain / A fructifying virtue ... / Such moments chiefly seem to have their date / In our first childhood.’ (Prelude; in Romanticism: An Anthology, p.307.)

[ top ]

Thomas Moore (History of Ireland, 1846), writing of Sir Henry Sydney: ‘on entering the ship appointed to bear him from that land [Ireland], it is said that he repeated, in allusion to Moses, when departing from Egypt, the words of the 114th Psalm, “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob [departed] from a people of strange language.”’ (p.87.) Cf. John F. Shawe-Taylor in the “Aoelus” chapter of Ulysses on the language of the outlaw.

Thomas Moore: ‘ ‘tis gone, and for ever, the light we saw breaking, / Like Heaven’s first dawn o’er the sleep of the dead / When Man, from the slumber of ages awaking, / Look’d upward, and bless’d the pure ray, ere it fled. [...; see further under Moore, Quotations, infra - and cf. Finnegans Wake (Ricorso): ‘ ‘tis gone infarover. So fore now, dayleash. Pour deday. To trancefixureashone. Feist of Taborneccles, scenopegia, come! Shamwork, be in our scheining! And let every crisscouple be so crosscomplimentary, little eggons, youlk and meelk, in a farbiger pancosmos. With a hottyhammyum all round. Gudstruce!’ (FW 613.12)

Caesar Otway, A Tour of Connaught: Comprising Sketches of Clonmacnoise, Joyce Country, and Achill (Dublin: W. Curry Jun. 1839): The conjunction of a story about a hen and the tale of the ‘heir of Howth [...] carried when stolen by the O’Malleys’ suggests a possible source of motifs in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Can he have read Otway on the Joyce Country? And, if so, when, and in what form did he record or otherwise remember it? (For extract from this text, see under Caesar Otway, q.v., or view attached.)

W. M. Thackeray (1): ‘[...] you pass from some of the stately fine streets straight into the country. After No. 46 Eccles Street, for instance, potatoes begin at once. You are on a wide green plain, diversified by occasional cabbage-plots, by drying grounds white with chemises, in the midst of which the chartered wind is revelling; and though in the map some fanciful engineer has laid down streets and squares, they exist but on paper; nor, indeed, can there be any need of them at present, in a quarter where houses are not wanted so much as people to dwell in the same.’ (Irish Sketchbook, 1883 Edn. p.555; quoted also in Patricia Hutchins, James Joyce’s World, 1957, pp. 52-53 & 72.) Note that ‘on paper’ is possible echoed as ‘on papel or off of it’ in Finnegans Wake.

W. M. Thackeray (2): Staying at Eccles Hotel, Glengarriff, Thackeray witnesses an altercation involving some Cockneys one of whom avers the importance of their station by saying, ‘I pay my way.’ Thackeray reflects: ‘I have met more gentlemen here than in any place I ever say, gentlemen of high and low ranks ... “I am a gentleman, and pay my way ...” I have not heard a sentence near so vulgar from any man in Ireland.’ (Sketch Book; quoted in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.191.)

Note that Joyce gives the line to Mr. Deasy in Ulysses; and see also his reflections on the “two truths” to be encountered in the country which have been quoted by critics and historians as a defining account of the condition of nineteenth-century Ireland [under Thackeray, infra.]

[ top ]

Thomas Carlyle (1): There is reason to believe that Joyce was a close reader of Sartor Resartus and the Lectures on Heroes - especially the lecture on “The Hero as a Man of Letters”. Vide -

R. F. Foster remarks on Carlyle’s influence on what he calls ‘the epiphanic histories’ of Ireland by Standish James O’Grady and the ‘polemical historiographies’ of John Mitchel. See further under Thomas Carlyle, Notes, infra.

Thomas Carlyle (2) Sartor Resartus, Book I, Chap. XI - Prospective: ‘[...] To all these natural questions the voice of public History is as yet silent. Certain only that he has been, and is, a Pilgrim, and Traveller from a far Country; more or less footsore and travel-soiled; has parted with road-companions; fallen among thieves, been poisoned by bad cookery, blistered with bug-bites; nevertheless, at every stage (for they have let him pass), has had the Bill to discharge. But the whole particulars of his Route, his Weather-observations, the picturesque Sketches he took, though all regularly jotted down (in indelible sympathetic-ink by an invisible interior Penman), are these nowhere forthcoming? Perhaps quite lost: one other leaf of that mighty Volume (of human Memory) left to fly abroad, unprinted, unpublished, unbound up, as waste paper; and to rot, the sport of rainy winds? “No, verehrtester Herr Herausgeber, in no wise!”’ (Chapman & Hall 1888, p.46.)

Cf. Shem’s ink factory: ‘demum ex stercore turpi cum divi Orionis iucunditate mixto, cocto, frigorique exposito, encaustum sibi fecit indelibile (faked O’Ryan’s the indelible ink).’ [FW185]; but also:- ‘Brave footsore Haun! Work your progress! Hold to! Now! Win out, ye divil ye! The silent cock shall crow at last. The west shall shake the east awake. Walk while ye have the night for morn, lightbreakfastbringer, morroweth whereon evey past shall full fost sleep. Amain. (FW473:20-25; composed in 1926; my italics. quoted as epigraph in Magda Velloso Fernandes de Tolentino, ‘Dubliners: The Journey Westward’ [MA Thesis] Fed. University of Minas Gerais [UFMG] 1989 [available as .pdf online]).

Thomas Carlyle (3) - Was Joyce influenced by Carlyle? Where Carlyle writes: ‘[The] Man of Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern person. [...] The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the true, the divine, the Eternal ... under the Temporary, Trivial ... he declares that abroad, by act or speech as it may be, by declaring himself abroad’, Joyce writes: ‘The poet is the intense centre of the life of his age to which he stands in a relation than which none can be more vital. He alone is capable of absorbing in himself the life that surrounds him and of flinging it abroad again amid planetary music. [...]’ [Stephen Hero, ed. Cape. Edn., p.85; my italics.] (See “The Hero as a Man of Letters”, in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841; in Sartor Resartus, Lectures on Heroes, Chartism, Past and Present London: Chapman & Hall, 1888,  p.301.)

Thomas Carlyle (4): In his schoolboy essay on “Force”, Joyce quoted Carlyle: ‘Again in the case of man’s mission, marked out for him from the gate of Eden, labour and toil, has not subjugation a direct influence, with advantage both to the world and to the man himself. “foul jungles” says Carlyle, “are cleared away, fair seedfields rise instead of stately cities, and withal the man” [here the MS breaks off since one half-page is missing] (See Critical Writings [1959], Viking Press 1966, p.23.)

Thomas Carlyle (5): Joyce quotes Carlyle in his review of Catilina by Ibsen where he writes in conclusion: ‘[...] Ibsen has united with his strong, ample, imaginative faculty a pre-occupation with the things present to him. [...] meanwhile a young generation which has cast away belief and thrown precision after it [here compares Balzac and Dante in ironic phrases] and out of very conscience will denounce a method so calm, so ironical. These cries of hysteria are confused with many others - the voices of war and statecraft and religion - in the fermenting vat. But Bootes, we may be sure, thinks nothing of such cries, eager as ever at that ancient business of leading his hunting-dogs across the zenith “in their leash of sidereal fire”.’ The source of the quotation is given as Sartor Resartus in Kevin Barry, ed., Occasional, Critical and Political Writings (OUP 2000) - noting that ‘Bootes is a constellation of the northern hemisphere and citing Sartor Resartus (1836; Book 1, Chap. 3; Barry, op. cit., p.304, n.7).

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Emerson’s conception of ‘great men’ closely resembles Carlyle’s eponym on his lectures on Heroes and Hero-worship in Representative Men (Boston 1856) - as follows [infra] - and note that Emerson visited Carlyle in Scotland in 1833, and remained in correspondence with him until Carlyle’s death in 1881.

Joyce and Carlyle - acc. to Stanislaus Stanislaus Joyce on Thomas Carlyle in My Brother’ Keeper (London: Faber & Faber 1958): 1. An admiring commentary on Carlyle’s essay on Luther, presumably in the Lecture on Heroes where that reformer is characterised as “The Hero as Priest” (p.115) 2: Stanislaus explicitly compares his brother to ‘Carlyle’s ideal of the poet as priest’ in as much as ‘he watched, though he did not pray. ‘ (p.121). 3. Stanislaus invokes Carlyle as an example of those in whom the trait of ‘honouring one’ father ‘ can be seen as a ‘subtle way of honouring oneself.’ - writing of Shakespeare, ‘in treating of the theme of fathers and children, the author of Hamlet and King Lear could drawn upon deep personal feeling.’ (p.234.) The Complete Dublin Diary [1971] (Dublin: Anna Livia Press 1994) 1. Stanislaus traces George Meredith’ novel The Egoist to Carlyle on account of its ‘wordiness’ (p.126). 2. A sentence pertaining to an informal discussion of ‘genius ‘ begins ‘Carlyle said that’ but breaks off where some pages are missing (p.167). Party pieces: Stanislaus’ party piece in childhood was “Houlihan’ Cake”, while James Joyce’ was “Finnegan’ Wake” (Ellmann, James Joyce, 1966 Edn., p.26; cited in Hemphill, op. cit., supra.) [ This note is copied under Stanislaus Joyce ]

[ top ]

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (1850) - “Uses of Great Men” [being Chap. 1]: ‘I count him a great man who inhabits a higher sphere of thought, into which other men rise with labor and difficulty; he has but to open his eyes to see things in a true light and in large relations, whilst they must make painful corrections and keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error. His service to us is of like sort. It costs a beautiful person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes; yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men. And every one can do his best thing easiest. “Peu de moyens, beaucoup d’effet.” He is great who is what he is from nature, and who never reminds us of others.’ (In English Traits and Representative Men, London: Macmillan: [rep. edn.] 1902, pp.259-60.) Further: ‘With each new mind a new secret of nature transpires; nor can the Bible be closed until the last man is born. These men correct the delirium of the animal spirits, make us considerate, and engage us to new aims and powers. The veneration of mankind selects these for the highest place.’ (p.271). Note that Emerson also writes, ‘every novel is a debtor to Homer’ (p.264).

[Note: Emerson’s Representative Lives (1856) may be regarded as a refashioning of Carlyle’s “Lectures on Heroes” (1840) for an American audience. Compare in particular Emerson’s “higher sphere” and Carlyle’s “inmost sphere”. ]

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (1850) - cont.:‘But great men: - the word is injurious. Is there [278] caste? Is there fate? What becomes of the promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments the superfoetation of nature. “Generous and handsome,” he says, “is your hero; but look at yonder poor Paddy, whose country is his wheelbarrow; look at his whole nation of Paddies.” Why are the masses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love, self-devotion; and they make war and death sacred; - but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of man is every day’s tragedy. It is as real a loss that others should be as low as that we should be low; for we must have society. / Is it a reply to these suggestions, to say society is a Pestalozzian school: all are teachers and pupils in turn. We are equally served by receiving and imparting. Men who know the same things are not long the best company. But bring to each an intelligent person [...]’ (p.279.) ‘As to what we call the masses, and common men; - there are at least no common men. All men are at last of a size; and [279] true art is only possible, on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere.’ 279-80.) [See also Emerson’s meeting with Carlyle: ‘ Poor Irish folk come wandering over these moors’- as infra.]

[For full version of this chapter, see Emerson’s English Traits and Representative Men, in RICORSO Library, “Criticism / International Critics” - via index, or attached.)

John Mitchel: Mitchel’s epithet toploftical - which finds a place in Finnegans Wake - is also quoted in Guiney in her introduction to Poems by James Clarence Mangan, with biographical introduction by John Mitchel (NY: D. & J. Sadlier 1866) - ‘James Clarence Mangan, His Life, Poetry, and Death’ (pp.7-31) - viz., ‘Selber’s toploftical disdain of human applause is the only great thing about him, except his cloak.’ (Op. cit., 1897, p.56.)

[ top ]

Gustave Flaubert [1a] wrote to Mme de Chantepie: ‘Madame Bovary [...] is a totally fictitious story. The illusion of truth - if there is one - comes from the book’s impersonality. It is a one of my principles that a writer should not be his own theme. An artist must be in his work like God in creation - invisible and all-powerful: he must be everywhere felt, but nowhere seen’. (18 March, 1857; Selected Letters, ed. Francis Steegmuller, London: Hamish Hamilton 1954, p.186; see French original - infra.)

Cf. Stephen on artistic impersonality in A Portrait (Chapter 5): ‘The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’, speaking of the ‘godlike impersonality’ of the artist, who remains ‘in or behind his handiwork, paring his fingernails in indifference.’ (AP 219 [corr. edition, ed. Robert Scholes.]

Note - Flaubert also wrote: ‘Art, like God in space, must remain suspended in the infinite, complete in itself, independent of its provider.’ (Letter to Louis Colet of 27 March 1852; quoted in Stephen Heath, Flaubert: Madame Bovary [Landmarks of World Literature] Cambridge UP 1992, q.p.; available at Google Books [online] - accessed 30.10.2008.)

Gustave Flaubert [1b] - Letter to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie (18e Mars 1857): ‘Avec une lectrice telle que vous, Madame, at aussi sympathique, la franchise est un devoir. Je vais done répondre à vos questions: Madame Bovary n’a rien de vrai. C’est une histoire totalement inventée; je n’y ai rien mis ni de mes sentiments ni de mon existence. L’illusion (s’il y en a une) vient au contraire de l’impersonnalité de l’oeuvre. C’est un de mes principes: qu’il ne faut pas s’écrire. L’artiste doit être dans son oeuvre comme Dieu dans la Création, invisible et tout-puissant, qu’on le sente partout, mail qu’on ne le voie pas. / Et puis l’art doit s’élever au-dessus des affections personnelles et des susceptibilités nerveuses! Il est temps de lui dormer, par une méthode impitoyable, la prevision des sciences physiques! La difficulté capitale, pour moi, n’en reste pas moins le style; la forme, la beau indiffinisable résultant de la conception même et qui est la splendour du vrai, comme disait Platon.’ (Quoted in Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason & Richard Ellmann, NY: Viking Press, 1959, 1966. p.141n.; and see also shorter footnote on ibid., p.65; my emphasis.)

Note - Joyce uses the phrase ‘Beauty, the splendour of Truth’ - equivalent of Flaubert’s Platonic phrase, la splendour du vrai - in Stephen Hero: ‘The poet is the intense centre of the life of his age to which he stands in a relation than which none can be more vital. He alone is capable of absorbing in himself the life that surrounds him and of flinging it abroad again amid planetary music. [... I]t is time for the critics to [...] to acknowledge that here the imagination has contemplated intensely the truth of the being of the visible world and that beauty, the splendour of truth, has been born.’ (Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer [et al.; rev. edn.], London: Jonathan Cape 1956, [Chap. XIX] p.85; my emphasis.)

Cf. T. S. Eliot’s remarks on the impersonality of emotion in poetry - not the emotion of the poet but the emotion of the poem, and the poet’s continual surrender of self to impersonality comprised by the wider tradition. (“Tradition and the Individual Talent”, 1919, in Selected Essays, NY: Harcourt Brace & World 1964,. pp.3-11 - as given in extensive extracts, infra.)

Gustave Flaubert [1c] - see alternative translation: ‘Madame Bovary has nothing “true” in it. It is a totally invented story; into it I put none of my own feelings and nothing from my own life. The illusion (if there is one) comes, on the contrary, from the impersonality of the work. It is a principle of mine that a writer must not be his own theme. The artist in his work must be like God in his creation - invisible and all-powerful: he must be everywhere felt, but never seen’. (Quoted in as given in Tim Dean, ‘Paring His Fingernails: Homosexuality and Joyce’s Impersonalist Aesthetic, in Quare Joyce, ed. Joseph Valente, Michigan UP 2000, p.248; Google Books - accessed 31.10. 2008 [online].

Gustave Flaubert [2]: Gregory Castle quotes Roy Pascal on Flaubert’s style and compares it positively with Joyce’s: ‘Flaubert’s realism did not imply the sort of objectivity that belongs to natural science, an objectivity founded on communicable skill and authoritative control over the (imaginary) object; on the contrary, it meant an imaginative self-submergence in the object, participation in the imagined character’s experience, and communication of this intuitive experience.’ (Pascal, The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and Its Functioning in the Nineteenth-century European Novel, Manchester UP 1977, p.98; Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Cambridge UP 2001, p.183.) See also Pound’s comparisons between Joyce and Flaubert.

Flaubert’s Ass: Joyce knew Flaubert’s Trois Contes intimately enough to be able to point out, years later, so trivial an error as the use of ‘alternativement’ in a case where three persons rather than two were concerned. (See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce [1959], 1965 Edn., p.506.)

Gustave Flaubert [3] - Joyce on Flaubert: 1. ‘GF treats language as an expression of his despair. JJ au contraire.’ (Wake Notebook VI.B.8, in James Joyce Archive, gen. ed. Michael Groden, NY: Garland Pub. 1978, Vol. 30, p.315.) [Note: information supplied by Geert Lernout who adds that the reading of ‘treats’ is conjectural.)] 2. ‘G. F can rest having made me.’ (Notebook VI.B.8, 42; JJA 30, p.315.

Scarlett Baron cites three such allusions to Flaubert as constituting a ‘momentous discovery’ made by David Hayman in the Finnegans Wake Notebooks and cited by him in his introduction to James Joyce Archive, Vol. 30. She also cites W. B. Yeats’s remark that works of Flaubert were difficult to come by in turn-of-the-century Dublin (in ‘The Reform of the Theatre’, in Samhain: An Occasional Review, Sept. 1903, p.11) and includes plates of Flaubert’s Correspondance [in French] acquired by the National Library of Ireland in 1900. (See Scarlett Baron, ‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality, London: Palgrave 2012, p.15 [Hayman], 17 [Yeats]; 26 & 27 [pls. of Correspondence (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, Premier Série, 1891 [1830-50] and Troisième Série 1892 [1854-1869]- available online; accessed 05.06.2021.) Baron also quotes Flaubert to Mlle. Leroyer de Chantepie on the need to give literature the ‘pitiless method of science’ (‘une méthode impitoyable, la précision des sciences physiques’ (18 March 1857; Correspondence, Vol. 2, p.691), and matches it with Joyce’s ‘the modern spirit if vivisective’ in Stephen Hero. (SH186; Baron, op. cit., pp.46-47.) Joyce purchased his copy of Madame Bovary in 1901 and also owned a copy of Education Sentimentale (see Fig. 6 in Baron, op. cit., p.28). Note also that Baron cites Gareth Downes' PhD thesis on Joyce’s engagement with the heresiarch Giordano Bruno (Swansea, 2001; Baron, p.136; Bibl., p.291).

[ top ]

Charles Robert Maturin: Joyce wrote to the Grant Richards, the publisher of Dubliners (1914), in 1907: ‘My intention was to write a chapter in the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis.’ This seems to echo the sentence in the Dedication to Maturin’s The Milesian Chief (1812), where he writes: ‘I have chosen my own country for the scene ...’. On the title page of The Wild Irish Boy (1808), Maturin gives us a famous sentence of Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland as an epigraph: ‘But if that country of Ireland whence you lately came, be so goodly and commodious a soyle as you report, I wounder that no course is taken for the tourning therof to good uses, and reducing that salvage nation to better goverment and civillity’ [my italics] - a phrase possibly echoed in Joyce’s ‘commodius vicus of recirculation’ in the opening passage of Finnegans Wake. Note that Maturin has recently been described as conflicted Irish nationalist and an enemy of the Act of Union in a recent book on him BY Jim Kelly (Charles Maturin: Authorship, Authenticity and the Nation, Dublin: Four Courts 2011). [See also Benedict Seynhave & Raphael Ingelbien, ‘Whose Gothic Bard? Charles Robert Maturin and Contestations of Shakespearean Authority in British/Irish Romantic Culture’, in Shakespeare and Authority, ed. Katie Halsey & Angus Vine (Palgrave 2018) [q.pp.] See also under Maturin - infra.]

[Note also: John Abernethy employs the word ‘commodiously’ to describe the Divinely-given supply sunshine on earth according to season in his Discourses Concerning the Being and Natural Perfections of God (1742) - as supra.]

Benedetto Croce: Richard Ellmann finds a source for the phraseology and ideas in Stephen’s speech “Circe” [as follows] in Benedetto Croce’s Estetica (chap. on Giambattista Vico): ‘Stephen: (Abruptly.) What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself. God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself traversed in reality itself, becomes that self, .. Self which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. Ecco!’ (Ulysses, Bodley Head Edn., 1967, [p.606].) Croce wrote: ‘man creates the human world, creates it by transforming himself into the facts of society: by thinking it he re-creates his own creations, traverses over gain the paths he has already traversed, reconstructs the wholly ideally, and thus knows it with full and true knowledge’. (See Ellmann, James Joyce, [1959] 1965 Edn., p.351 ftn.) Ellmann adds that Joyce borrowed the book from Dario de Tuoni, as the latter told him in 1953.)

Cf. [1984 Edn.]: ‘Joyce knew Croce’s Estetica which contains a chapter on Vico incorporating a restatement of Vico on the creation of the human world: ‘Man creates the human world, creates it by transforming himself into the facts of society: by thinking it he re-creates his own creations, traverses over again the paths he has already traversed, reconstructs the whole ideally, and thus knows it with full and true knowledge.’ Cf., ‘What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse not itself [...] having itself traversed in reality itself, becomes that self ... Self which it was ineluctibly preconditioned to become. Ecco!’ (Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1982 Edn., p.340, n., citing Ulysses [“Scylla and Charybdis”], 505[623].)

Note: Croce had a chapter on Vico in his Estetica (1902) and this was followed by his La Filosofia di Giambattista Vico (Bari, 1911) - translated by R. G. Collingwood (Macmillan 1913) [available at Gutenberg Project - online; accessed 5 Jan. 2024.

[ top ]

John Henry Newman (Cardinal Newman): In his schoolboy essay on “Force”, Joyce writes of ‘the much maligned, greatest charity [...] which lives and thrives in the atmosphere of thoughts, so upraised and so serene that they will not suffer themselves to be let down on earth among men, but in their own delicate air “intimate their presence and commune with themselves” - this utter unselfishness in all things, how does it on the contrary call for constant practice and worthy fulfilling!’ (Critical Writings, ed. Ellmann & Mason [1959], Viking Press 1966, p.23]). This echoes Newman:

John Henry Newman: “Stephen quoted a sentence from Newman to illustrate his theory” that words “receive more valued thoughts” in “the literary tradition” than “in the marketplace” [SH, Jonathan Cape edition 33] - but does not transcribe it in the novel. Fr. Butt, Dean of Studies, clearly misunderstands “that sentence” or is not paying attention, because when Stephen gives a commonplace example in the phrase “I hope I’m not detaining you”, the priest answers, “No at all, not at all!” and then corrects himself, “Yes, yes, Mr Daedalus, I see ... I quite see your point .. detain ...” [SH, 33]. This episode is the primitive form of the one in which Stephen uses the word “tundish” in A Portrait of the Artist - a passage now taken as a touchstone and even a mandate for the use of Hiberno-English in Irish literature. (Seamus Heaney has touched on it.) In A Portrait, however, Stephen gives a paraphrase of the sentence in question - as follows:

‘One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman’s in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different. I hope I am not detaining you.’ [AP, Cape, 192.]

In fact, the passage to which Stephen is referring may be that in his ‘discourse’ on Mary, the Mother of God, which goes as follows:

‘You will find, that, in this respect, as in Mary’s prerogatives themselves, there is the same careful reference to the glory of Him who gave them to her. You know, when first He went out to preach, she kept apart from Him; she interfered not with His work; and, even when He was gone up on high, yet she, a woman, went not out to preach or teach, she seated not herself in the Apostolic chair, she took no part in the priest’s office; she did but humbly seek her Son in the daily Mass of those, who, though her ministers in heaven, were her superiors in the Church on earth. Nor, when she and they had left this lower scene, and she was a Queen upon her Son’s right hand, not even {357} then did she ask of Him to publish her name to the ends of the world, or to hold her up to the world’s gaze, but she remained waiting for the time, when her own glory should be necessary for His. [...] And thus the Antiphon speaks of her: [... 358] “And so in Sion was I established, and in the holy city I likewise rested, and in Jerusalem was my power. And I took root in an honourable people, and in the glorious company of the saints was I detained. I was exalted like a cedar in Lebanus, and as a cypress in Mount Sion; I have stretched out my branches as the terebinth, and my branches are of honour and grace.” Thus was she reared without hands, and gained a modest victory, and exerts a gentle sway, which she has not claimed. When dispute arose about her among her children, she hushed it; when objections were urged against her, she waived her claims and waited; till now, in this very day, should God so will, she will win at length her most radiant crown, and, without opposing voice, and amid the jubilation of the whole Church, she will be hailed as immaculate in her conception.’ (Discourse 17: “The Glories of Mary for the Sake of her Son”, in Discourses to Mixed Congregations [1849], new edn. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1906, pp.356-59 - available at the National Institute for Newman Studies - online.)

However, the same is repeated elsewhere in the Discourses under “Growth of the Cults of Mary” - ‘[...] when heretics said that God was not incarnate, then was the time for her own honours. And then, when as much as this had been accomplished, she had done with strife; she fought not for herself No fierce controversy, no persecuted confessors, no heresiarch, no anathema, marks the history of her manifestation ; as she had increased day by day in grace and merit, while the world knew not of it, so has she raised herself aloft silently, and has grown into her place in the Church by a tranquil influence and a natural process. It was as some fair tree, stretching forth her fruitful branches and her fragrant leaves, and overshadowing the territory of the Saints. And thus the Antiphon speaks of her: “Let thy dwelling be in Jacob, and thine inheritance in Israel, and strike thy roots in My elect.” Again, “And so in Sion was I established, and in the holy city I likewise rested, and in Jerusalem was my power. And I took root in an honourable people, and in the glorious company of the Saints was I detained, I was exalted like a cedar in Lebanus, and as a cypress in Mount Sion; I have stretched out My branches as the terebinth, and My branches are of honour and of grace.” Thus was she reared without hands, and gained a modest victory, and exerts a gentle sway, which she has not claimed. When dispute arose about her among her children, she hushed it [...]’ (In Characteristics from the writings of John Henry Newman: being selections personal, historical, philosophical, and religious from his various works, arranged by William Samuel Lilly, London: H. S. King 1874, q.pp-

See also under “Anglicanism”: ‘O, look well to your footing that you slip not; be very much afraid lest the world should detain you ; dare not in anything to fall short of God’s grace, or to lag behind when that grace goes forward.’ (p.318; my italics.)

Also under “Catholicism”: ‘That there can be peace, and joy, and knowledge, and freedom, and spiritual strength in the Church, is a thought far beyond its imagination; for it regards her simply as a frightful conspiracy against the happiness of man, seducing her victims by specious professions, and, when they are once hers, caring nothing for the misery which breaks upon them, so that by any means she may detain them in bondage.’ (p.330; copy at Boston College - online; BS 25.04.2015.]

Note that Mary, Star of the Sea - being the name of the Catholic Church in Sandymount noticed in Ulysses - derives from the Antiphone “Alma Redemptoris Mater”: ‘Alma Redemptoris Mater, quae pervia caeli / porta manes, et stella maris, succurre cadenti, / surgere qui curat, populo: tu quae genuisti, / natura mirante, tuum sanctum Genitorem, / Virgo prius ac posterius, Gabrielis ab ore, / sumens illud Ave, peccatorum miserere. [Loving mother of the Redeemer, / gate of heaven, star of the sea, / assist your people who have fallen yet strive to rise again. / To the wonderment of nature you bore your Creator, / Yet remained a virgin after as before. / You who received Gabriel’s joyful greeting, / have pity on us poor sinners.’

The most celebrated antiphon to Mary is the Magnificat, or Canticle of Mary, based on Luke 1:46-55 in the Vulgate. [‘My soul magnifies the Lord, / and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, / for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. / For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed. ...’]

“Magnificat anima mea Dominum. / Et exultavit spiritus meus: in Deo salutari meo. / Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae: / Ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes. / Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est: et sanctum nomen eius. // Et misericordia eius in progenies et progenies timentibus eum. / Fecit potentiam in brachio suo: dispersit superbos mente cordis sui. / Deposuit potentes de sede: et exaltavit humiles. / Esurientes implevit bonis: et divites dimisit inanes. / Suscepit Ísrael puerum suum: recordatus misericordiae suae. / Sicut locutus est ad patres nostros: Abraham, et semini eius in saecula. / Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto, / Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum. Amen.’

See also Prayers, Verses, and Devotions by John Henry Newman (Ignatius Press 2000) - incorporating The Devotions of Bishop Andrewes (1843), Meditations and Devotions (1903) and Verses on Various Occasions (1903) - available online.

[ top ]

See Don Gifford’s Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait (1982)

Gifford, Notes for Joyce (1982), p.218.

Note that Stephen refers to ‘the cloistral silverveined prose of Newman’ [AP 179 Chap. 5] while the phrase ‘proud cadence’ of Newman is associated in his mind with the rejection of the priesthood in Chap. 4 [AP169]. The adjacent allusion to ‘lucid supple periodic prose’ [AP171], by contrast, clearly pertains to the writing-manner of Hugh Miller (Testimony of the Rocks, Edinburgh 1857 - as infra.) [Joyce refs. to Portrait: The Corrected Edition, 1967].

Newman’s Augustine: Joyce probably found the sentence from Augustine reading ‘securus iudicat orbis terrarum’ which he uses in the Wake when reading Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua. Newman wrote there

[ top ]

See James Pribek, ‘Joyce and Newman’, in Voices on Joyce, ed. Anne Fogarty & Fran O’Rourke, UCD Press 2015): ‘One characteristic expression of Newman, “luminous certitude”, appears in Joyce’s Exiles. Richard Rowan and Robert Hand, the play’s two principal male characters, use thing languag as the investigate their shared sense of attraction to Bertha, Rowan’s common-law wife. Ulysses proceeds to feature seven Newmanian allusions from five separate sources. These range from Bloom’s and Molly’s light-hearted references to Newman’s “Lead, Kindly Light” U.4.434, 18.381) to Joyce’s serious rendition of Newman’s prose in “Oxen of the Sun” (U14.1344-55).

Further:  ‘Joyce told Mercanton that in this chapter, “Newman alone is rendered pure, in the grave beauty of his style.” [Jules Mercanton, ‘The Hours of Joyce’, in Portraits of the Artist in Exile, ed. Willard Potts, 217.] He added: “Besides, I needed that fulcrum to hold up the rest.” True to the randomness of the day depicted, the allusions to Newman in Ulysses follow no pattern; but significantly, most occur in minds other than that of Stephen. Given his background and interests, stephens’s thoughts of Newman come as no surprise. However, Joyce makes a greater claim for Newman’s prominence when he builds in four allusions to Newman or his works in Bloom’s interior musings and one reference in Molly’s interior monologue.  Finnegans Wake makes 11 distinct allusions to Newman and several of these are repeated throughout the book. For instance [...] “Securus judicat orbis terrarum” occurs in eight different forms. If these were all counted, then there are 20 allusion[s] in the Wake to Newman and his work.

Note: Pribek elsewhere quotes Joyce’s saying that Newman’s simple, elegant and evocative style ‘owed itself to the fait of the convert.’ (Pribek, op. cit., p.196; quoting Carola Giedion-Welcker, ‘Meeting with Joyce’, in Portraits of the Artist in Exile, ed. Potts, pp.256-80; p.273.)

[ top ]

Valentine Cunningham, ‘James Joyce’ [Chap. 30], in The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, ed. Andrew Hass, David Jasper, Elisabeth Jay [Oxford Handbooks] (OUP 2007), pp.499-522, p.504. Cunningham quotes Stephen’s reflections on the ‘deadly chill’ of the Catholic seminary at Jones’s Rd., Dublin, including the phrases ‘plague of Catholicism .. like the plague of locusts described in Callista’ (Stephen Hero, p.198-99) - with a footnote reference: John Newman’s historical novel Callista: A Tale of the Third Century (1855), about early African Christianity.’ ([n.p.]; here p.503.) In the ensuing paragraph Cunningham explains Joyce’s repudiation of Newman’s style in favour of the naturalism of Hugh Miller and connects it with his rejection of the priesthood. (p.504).

p.503.

p.504.

Note: Cunningham’s footnote on this page indicates that the quotations from Newman and Miller are taken from Don Gifford’s ‘invaluable’ Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A Portrait (1982)(as supra).

Available at Amazon Books - online; accessed 14.05.2017.

[ top ]

John Henry Newman: ‘And he remembered that Newman had heard this note also in the broken lines of Virgil, giving utterance, like the voice of Nature herself to that pain and weariness yet hope of better things which has been the experience of her children in every time.” (A Portrait [Corrected Edition], ed. Scholes, p.168). The source is Newman’s Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870) - Chap. 4, Sect. [§] 2:

“Real Assents”, 4: ‘Let us consider, too, how differently young and old are affected by the words of some classic author, such as Homer or Horace. Passages, which to a boy are but rhetorical common-places, neither better nor worse than a hundred others which any clever writer might supply, which he gets by heart and thinks very fine, and imitates, as he thinks, successfully, in his own flowing versification, at length come home to him, when long years have passed, and he has had experience of life, and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the mind, and a charm, which the current literature of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival. Perhaps this is the reason of the medieval opinion about Virgil, as if a prophet or magician; his single words and phrases, his pathetic half {79} lines, giving utterance, as the voice of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which is the experience of her children in every time.’ [Italics added.]

(Bibl., An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, London: Burns, Oates, & Co. 1870, viii, 485, [1]pp. - available at Newman Reader - online; accessed 23.01.2013.)  

J. S. Atherton remarks in a note to his edition of A Portrait (London: Heinemann 1964) that ‘Joyce makes Stephen quote from various works of Newman to enhance the impression that Stephen reads very widely’, but adds: ‘It does not follow that Joyce himself had this wide reading, although he did, of course, read a great deal; but all the passages which Stephen quotes from Newman’s works in A Portrait are given in a one-volume anthology, Characteristics from the writings of John Henry Newman, William S. Lilly, London 1875.’ He goes on: ‘It is interesting that Stephen quotes from writers such as Newman who would be approved of by his Catholic teachers; James Joyce at the age Stephen is here was reading, and quoting, Ibsen who was thought obscene and Bruno who was a famous heretic.’ (Atherton, op. cit., 1964, Notes, p.249 [n.152].)

This passage in Atherton’s edition is the subject of a reference in Don Gifford’s Joyce Annotated [rev. edn.] (California UP 1982, Intro., p.11, with the comment: ‘Atherton argues that Joyce is trying to give the impression that Stephen is widely read. But Stephen treats his bit of Newman [...] as parts of a collection of phrases notable for their sounds and rhythms, not notable for their [...] reflection of the attitudes of the writer from whom they are taken. This would again suggest the tendency to regard learning not as a grasp of contexts but as an acquisition of quotable moments’. (Gifford, op. cit., idem.)

Note also that Stephen shortly quotes ‘a proud cadence from Newman: “Whose feet are as the feet of harts and underneath the everlasting arms”.’ (A Portrait, Corr. Edn., p.168), and speaks later of the ‘cloistral silverveined prose of Newman’ (idem., p.175.) Newman was the first rector [president] of the Catholic University of Ireland, later the Royal University of Ireland and ultimately the National University of Ireland.

‘The plague of locusts, one of the most awful visitations to which the countries included in the Roman empire were exposed, extended from the Atlantic to Ethiopia, from Arabia to India, and from the Nile and Red Sea to Greece and the north of Asia Minor. Instances are recorded in history of clouds of the devastating insect crossing the Black Sea to Poland, and the Mediterranean to Lombardy. It is as numerous in its species as it is wide in its range of territory. Brood follows brood, with a sort of family likeness, yet with distinct attributes, as we read in the prophets of the Old Testament, from whom Bochart tells us it is possible to enumerate as many as ten kinds. It wakens into existence and activity as early as the month of March; but instances are not wanting, as in our present history, of its appearance as late as June. Even one flight comprises myriads upon myriads passing imagination, to which the drops of rain or the sands of the sea are the only fit comparison; and hence it is almost a proverbial mode of expression in the East (as may be illustrated {169} by the sacred pages to which we just now referred), by way of describing a vast invading army, to liken it to the locusts. So dense are they, when upon the wing, that it is no exaggeration to say that they hide the sun, from which circumstance indeed their name in Arabic is derived. And so ubiquitous are they when they have alighted on the earth, that they simply cover or clothe its surface.’ (168-69.) [...] they came to do the work of ruin [...] their curious energetic rapacity’ [...]

Further:

‘Such are the locusts, - whose existence the ancient heretics brought forward as their palmary proof that there was an evil creator, and of whom an Arabian writer shows his national horror, when he says that they have the head of a horse, the eyes of an elephant, the neck of a bull, the horns of a stag, the breast of a lion, the belly of a scorpion, the wings of an eagle, the legs of a camel, the feet of an ostrich, and the tail of a serpent.’

[ See editions of Callista in Internet Archive, viz., 1st edn. (London: Burns and Lambert; Cologne : J.P. Bachem [1856; recte 1855] - online; another edn. (London: Burns & Oates 1881) - online. ]

See also the new edition introduced by Alan G. Hall, Callista [... &c.] (University of Notre Dame Press 2000). There is also a Kessinger edition (2008, 292pp.) a Kindle/Amazon copy of same (2011).

Publisher’s notice: Callista is an arresting picture of Christian commitment under trial in the third century A.D. John Henry Newman’s novel follows the moral and spiritual development of three very different characters caught up in the mysterious processes of divine Providence, who all fulfill their destinies through suffering and self-sacrifice. The Greek sculptress Callista, an exile from her native island in the Sea of Marmara, serves the cause of paganism by fashioning images of the gods. Agellius, her suitor, rediscovers his Christian duty and vocation in the terrifying circumstances in which he finds himself, while his brother Juba struggles to overcome his own passions and inner torment. Far from being tied to the past, Newman’s novel challenges the assumptions of the modern reader in unexpected ways. More perhaps than his major works, Newman’s fiction reveals the contours of his imaginative life, the range and power of his prose writing, and the wider literary culture which he so often subordinated to his higher vocation or the demands of controversy. Callista’s picture of the Christian venture of faith, so close to Newman’s own, and the setting in his beloved church of the Fathers in Roman North Africa, make it one of his most characteristic works. Callista is an important text for understanding Newman’s lifelong vocation as a Christian apologist, and the importance for him of the early Church.

Available at Amazon Books online - accessed 13.05.2017];

(Note: Joyce used the phrase ‘the plague of locusts’ in Stephen Hero, Cape Edn., pp.198-99 - as attached. See also the Newman’s invitation to write Callista made by Cardinal Wiseman in tandem with his own Fabiola, A Tale of the Catacombs (1854), written to combat anti-Catholic feelings in England [see further under Wiseman - infra. )

[ top ]

Hugh Miller (1802-1856): author of A Testimony of the Rocks: Geology in Its Bearing on the Two Theologies (Edinburgh: Constable 1857), 251pp. [another edn. Boston 1857]. From this text Joyce’s has Stephen Dedalus recall the phrase ‘a day of dappled seaborne clouds’ - recte ‘breeze-born clouds’ on p.277 of the Boston edition. For an account of the original, see Don Gifford, Joyce Annotated: Notes for “Dubliners” and “A Portrait” [1982] (Berkeley: California UP 1988).

Don Gifford - writing on Hugh Miller as the source of Joyce’s phrase ‘a day of dappled seaborne clouds’ in A Portrait:

Gifford, Notes for Joyce (1982), p.219; for further remarks on the influence of Miller, see under Notes > Texts > A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [chap. IV] - supra. [Note that the phrases on Irish ugliness and Irish want are quoted from an Irish writer rather than written by Miller himself: BS.]

See original—

Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks [... &c.] (Edinburgh; J. Constable 1857), pp.260-61.

Hugh Miller, The Testimony of the Rocks: Geology in its Bearing on the Two Theologies (Edinburgh J. Constable 1857), [Lect. VI - ‘Geology in its Bearing on the Two Theologies: Part II’, pp.219ff., here pp.260-61:

[...]

There has been war among the intelligences of God’s spiritual creation. Lucifer, son of the morning, has fallen like fire from heaven; and our present earth, existing as a half-extinguished hell, has received him and his angels. Dead matter exists, and in the unembodied spirits vitality exists; but not yet in all the universe of God has the vitality been united to the matter; animal life, to even the profound apprehension of the fallen angel, is an inconceivable idea. Meanwhile, as the scarce reckoned centuries roll by, vacantly and dull, like the cheerless days and nights over the head of some unhappy captive, the miserable prisoners of our planet become aware that there is a slow change taking place in the condition of their prison-house. Where a low, dark archipelago of islands raise their flat backs over the thermal waters, the heat glows less intensely than of old; the red fire bursts forth less frequently; the dread earthquake [259] shakes more rarely; save in a few centres of intenser action, the great deep no longer boils like a pot; and though the heavens are still shut out by a gray ceiling of thick vapor, through which sun or moon never yet appeared, a less gloomy twilight struggles at noonday through the enveloping cloud, and falls more cheerfully than heretofore upon land and sea. At length there comes a morning in which great ocean and the scattered islands declare that God the Creator had descended to visit the earth. The hitherto verdureless land bears the green flush of vegetation; and there are creeping things among the trees. Nor is the till now unexampled mystery of animal life absent from the sounds and bays. It is the highest intelligences that manifest the deepest interest in the works of the All Wise. Nor can we doubt that on that morning of creative miracle, in which matter and vitality were first united in the bonds of a strange wedlock, the comprehensive intellect of the great fallen spirit - profound and active beyond the lot of humanity - would have found ample employment in attempting to fathom the vast mystery, and in vainly asking what these strange things might mean. With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed creation, - as life sprang out of death, and death out of life, - must not that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine Worker, - scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately to comprehend! Standing in the presence of unsolved mystery, under the chill and withering shadow of that secret of the Lord which was not with him, how thoroughly must [260] he not have seen, and with what bitter malignity felt, that the grasp of the Almighty was still upon him, and that in the ever varying problem of creation, which, with all his powers, he failed to unlock, and which, as age succeeded age, remained an unsolved problem still, the Divine Master against whom he had rebelled, but from whose presence it was in vain to flee, emphatically spake to him, as in an after age to the patriarch Job, and, with the quiet dignity of the Infinite, challenged him either to do or to know! “Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that reproveth God, let him answer. Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? or canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?” With what wild thoughts must that restless and unhappy spirit have wandered amid the tangled mazes of the old carboniferous forests! With what bitter mockeries must he have watched the fierce wars which raged in their sluggish waters, among ravenous creatures horrid with trenchant teeth, barbed sting, and sharp spine, and enveloped in glittering armor of plate and scale! And how, as generation after generation passed away, and ever and anon the ocean rolled where the land had been, or the land rose to possess the ancient seats of the ocean, - how, when looking back upon myriads of ages, and when calling up in memory what once had been, the features of earth seemed scarce more fixed to his view than the features of the sky in a day of dappled, breeze-borne clouds, - how must he have felt, as he became conscious that the earth was fast ripening, and that, as its foundations became stable on the abyss, it was made by the Creator a home of higher and yet higher forms of existence, - how must he have felt, if, like some old augur looking into the inner mysteries of animal life, [261] with their strange prophecies, the truth had at length burst upon him, that reasoning, accountable man was fast coming to the birth, - man, the moral agent, - man, the ultimate work and end of creation, - man, a creature in whom, as in the inferior animals, vitality was to be united to matter, but in whom also, as in no inferior animal, responsibility was to be united to vitality! How must expectancy have quickened, - how must solicitude have grown, - when, after the dynasty of the fish had been succeeded by the dynasty of the reptile, and that of the reptile by the dynasty of the sagacious mammal, a time had at length arrived when the earth had become fixed and stable, and the proud waves of ocean had been stayed, - when, after species and genera in both kingdoms had been increased tenfold beyond the precedent of any former age, the Creative Hand seemed to pause in its working, and the finished creation to demand its lord! Even at this late period, how strange may not the doubts and uncertainties have been that remained to darken the mind of the lost spirit! It was according to his experience, - stretched backwards to the first beginnings of organic vitality, and coextensive, at a still earlier period, with God’s spiritual universe, - that all “animals” should die, - that all “moral agents” should live. How, in this new creature, - this prodigy of creation, who was to unite what never before had been united, - the nature of the animals that “die” with the standing and responsibility of the moral agents that “live”, - how, in this partaker of the double nature, was the discrepancy to be reconciled? How, in this matter, were the opposite claims of life and death to be adjusted, or the absolute “immortality”, which cannot admit of degrees, to be made to meet with and shade into the “mortality” which, let us extend [262] the term of previous vitality as we may, must forever involve the antagonistic idea of final annihilation and the ceasing to be? At length creation receives its deputed monarch. For, moulded by God’s own finger, and in God’s own likeness, man enters upon the scene, an exquisite creature, rich in native faculty, pregnant with the yet undeveloped seeds of all wisdom and knowledge, tender of heart and pure of spirit, formed to hold high communion with his Creator, and to breathe abroad his soul in sympathy over all that the Creator had made. [...] (pp.259-263.)

There has been war among the intelligences of God’s spiritual creation. Lucifer, son of the morning, has fallen like fire from heaven; and our present earth, existing as a half-extinguished hell, has received him and his angels. Dead matter exists, and in the unembodied spirits vitality exists; but not yet in all the universe of God has the vitality been united to the matter; animal life, to even the profound apprehension of the fallen angel, is an inconceivable idea. Meanwhile, as the scarce reckoned centuries roll by, vacantly and dull, like the cheerless days and nights over the head of some unhappy captive, the miserable prisoners of our planet become aware that there is a slow change taking place in the condition of their prison-house. Where a low, dark archipelago of islands raise their flat backs over the thermal waters, the heat glows less intensely than of old; the red fire bursts forth less frequently; the dread earthquake [259] shakes more rarely; save in a few centres of intenser action, the great deep no longer boils like a pot; and though the heavens are still shut out by a gray ceiling of thick vapor, through which sun or moon never yet appeared, a less gloomy twilight struggles at noonday through the enveloping cloud, and falls more cheerfully than heretofore upon land and sea. At length there comes a morning in which great ocean and the scattered islands declare that God the Creator had descended to visit the earth. The hitherto verdureless land bears the green flush of vegetation; and there are creeping things among the trees. Nor is the till now unexampled mystery of animal life absent from the sounds and bays. It is the highest intelligences that manifest the deepest interest in the works of the All Wise. Nor can we doubt that on that morning of creative miracle, in which matter and vitality were first united in the bonds of a strange wedlock, the comprehensive intellect of the great fallen spirit - profound and active beyond the lot of humanity - would have found ample employment in attempting to fathom the vast mystery, and in vainly asking what these strange things might mean. With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed creation, - as life sprang out of death, and death out of life, - must not that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine Worker, - scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately to comprehend! Standing in the presence of unsolved mystery, under the chill and withering shadow of that secret of the Lord which was not with him, how thoroughly must [260] he not have seen, and with what bitter malignity felt, that the grasp of the Almighty was still upon him, and that in the ever varying problem of creation, which, with all his powers, he failed to unlock, and which, as age succeeded age, remained an unsolved problem still, the Divine Master against whom he had rebelled, but from whose presence it was in vain to flee, emphatically spake to him, as in an after age to the patriarch Job, and, with the quiet dignity of the Infinite, challenged him either to do or to know! “Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that reproveth God, let him answer. Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? or canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?” With what wild thoughts must that restless and unhappy spirit have wandered amid the tangled mazes of the old carboniferous forests! With what bitter mockeries must he have watched the fierce wars which raged in their sluggish waters, among ravenous creatures horrid with trenchant teeth, barbed sting, and sharp spine, and enveloped in glittering armor of plate and scale! And how, as generation after generation passed away, and ever and anon the ocean rolled where the land had been, or the land rose to possess the ancient seats of the ocean, - how, when looking back upon myriads of ages, and when calling up in memory what once had been, the features of earth seemed scarce more fixed to his view than the features of the sky in a day of dappled, breeze-borne clouds, - how must he have felt, as he became conscious that the earth was fast ripening, and that, as its foundations became stable on the abyss, it was made by the Creator a home of higher and yet higher forms of existence, - how must he have felt, if, like some old augur looking into the inner mysteries of animal life, [261] with their strange prophecies, the truth had at length burst upon him, that reasoning, accountable man was fast coming to the birth, - man, the moral agent, - man, the ultimate work and end of creation, - man, a creature in whom, as in the inferior animals, vitality was to be united to matter, but in whom also, as in no inferior animal, responsibility was to be united to vitality! How must expectancy have quickened, - how must solicitude have grown, - when, after the dynasty of the fish had been succeeded by the dynasty of the reptile, and that of the reptile by the dynasty of the sagacious mammal, a time had at length arrived when the earth had become fixed and stable, and the proud waves of ocean had been stayed, - when, after species and genera in both kingdoms had been increased tenfold beyond the precedent of any former age, the Creative Hand seemed to pause in its working, and the finished creation to demand its lord! Even at this late period, how strange may not the doubts and uncertainties have been that remained to darken the mind of the lost spirit! It was according to his experience, - stretched backwards to the first beginnings of organic vitality, and coextensive, at a still earlier period, with God’s spiritual universe, - that all “animals” should die, - that all “moral agents” should live. How, in this new creature, - this prodigy of creation, who was to unite what never before had been united, - the nature of the animals that “die” with the standing and responsibility of the moral agents that “live”, - how, in this partaker of the double nature, was the discrepancy to be reconciled? How, in this matter, were the opposite claims of life and death to be adjusted, or the absolute “immortality”, which cannot admit of degrees, to be made to meet with and shade into the “mortality” which, let us extend [262] the term of previous vitality as we may, must forever involve the antagonistic idea of final annihilation and the ceasing to be? At length creation receives its deputed monarch. For, moulded by God’s own finger, and in God’s own likeness, man enters upon the scene, an exquisite creature, rich in native faculty, pregnant with the yet undeveloped seeds of all wisdom and knowledge, tender of heart and pure of spirit, formed to hold high communion with his Creator, and to breathe abroad his soul in sympathy over all that the Creator had made. [...] (pp.259-263) There has been war among the intelligences of God’s spiritual creation. Lucifer, son of the morning, has fallen like fire from heaven; and our present earth, existing as a half-extinguished hell, has received him and his angels. Dead matter exists, and in the unembodied spirits vitality exists; but not yet in all the universe of God has the vitality been united to the matter; animal life, to even the profound apprehension of the fallen angel, is an inconceivable idea. Meanwhile, as the scarce reckoned centuries roll by, vacantly and dull, like the cheerless days and nights over the head of some unhappy captive, the miserable prisoners of our planet become aware that there is a slow change taking place in the condition of their prison-house. Where a low, dark archipelago of islands raise their flat backs over the thermal waters, the heat glows less intensely than of old; the red fire bursts forth less frequently; the dread earthquake [259] shakes more rarely; save in a few centres of intenser action, the great deep no longer boils like a pot; and though the heavens are still shut out by a gray ceiling of thick vapor, through which sun or moon never yet appeared, a less gloomy twilight struggles at noonday through the enveloping cloud, and falls more cheerfully than heretofore upon land and sea. At length there comes a morning in which great ocean and the scattered islands declare that God the Creator had descended to visit the earth. The hitherto verdureless land bears the green flush of vegetation; and there are creeping things among the trees. Nor is the till now unexampled mystery of animal life absent from the sounds and bays. It is the highest intelligences that manifest the deepest interest in the works of the All Wise. Nor can we doubt that on that morning of creative miracle, in which matter and vitality were first united in the bonds of a strange wedlock, the comprehensive intellect of the great fallen spirit - profound and active beyond the lot of humanity - would have found ample employment in attempting to fathom the vast mystery, and in vainly asking what these strange things might mean. With how much of wonder, as scene succeeded scene, and creation followed creation, - as life sprang out of death, and death out of life, - must not that acute Intelligence have watched the course of the Divine Worker, - scornful of spirit and full of enmity, and yet aware, in the inner depths of his intellect, that what he dared insultingly to depreciate, he yet failed, in its ultimate end and purpose, adequately to comprehend! Standing in the presence of unsolved mystery, under the chill and withering shadow of that secret of the Lord which was not with him, how thoroughly must [260] he not have seen, and with what bitter malignity felt, that the grasp of the Almighty was still upon him, and that in the ever varying problem of creation, which, with all his powers, he failed to unlock, and which, as age succeeded age, remained an unsolved problem still, the Divine Master against whom he had rebelled, but from whose presence it was in vain to flee, emphatically spake to him, as in an after age to the patriarch Job, and, with the quiet dignity of the Infinite, challenged him either to do or to know! “Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him? He that reproveth God, let him answer. Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? or canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?” With what wild thoughts must that restless and unhappy spirit have wandered amid the tangled mazes of the old carboniferous forests! With what bitter mockeries must he have watched the fierce wars which raged in their sluggish waters, among ravenous creatures horrid with trenchant teeth, barbed sting, and sharp spine, and enveloped in glittering armor of plate and scale! And how, as generation after generation passed away, and ever and anon the ocean rolled where the land had been, or the land rose to possess the ancient seats of the ocean, - how, when looking back upon myriads of ages, and when calling up in memory what once had been, the features of earth seemed scarce more fixed to his view than the features of the sky in a day of dappled, breeze-borne clouds, - how must he have felt, as he became conscious that the earth was fast ripening, and that, as its foundations became stable on the abyss, it was made by the Creator a home of higher and yet higher forms of existence, - how must he have felt, if, like some old augur looking into the inner mysteries of animal life, [261] with their strange prophecies, the truth had at length burst upon him, that reasoning, accountable man was fast coming to the birth, - man, the moral agent, - man, the ultimate work and end of creation, - man, a creature in whom, as in the inferior animals, vitality was to be united to matter, but in whom also, as in no inferior animal, responsibility was to be united to vitality! How must expectancy have quickened, - how must solicitude have grown, - when, after the dynasty of the fish had been succeeded by the dynasty of the reptile, and that of the reptile by the dynasty of the sagacious mammal, a time had at length arrived when the earth had become fixed and stable, and the proud waves of ocean had been stayed, - when, after species and genera in both kingdoms had been increased tenfold beyond the precedent of any former age, the Creative Hand seemed to pause in its working, and the finished creation to demand its lord! Even at this late period, how strange may not the doubts and uncertainties have been that remained to darken the mind of the lost spirit! It was according to his experience, - stretched backwards to the first beginnings of organic vitality, and coextensive, at a still earlier period, with God’s spiritual universe, - that all “animals” should die, - that all “moral agents” should live. How, in this new creature, - this prodigy of creation, who was to unite what never before had been united, - the nature of the animals that “die” with the standing and responsibility of the moral agents that “live”, - how, in this partaker of the double nature, was the discrepancy to be reconciled? How, in this matter, were the opposite claims of life and death to be adjusted, or the absolute “immortality”, which cannot admit of degrees, to be made to meet with and shade into the “mortality” which, let us extend [262] the term of previous vitality as we may, must forever involve the antagonistic idea of final annihilation and the ceasing to be? At length creation receives its deputed monarch. For, moulded by God’s own finger, and in God’s own likeness, man enters upon the scene, an exquisite creature, rich in native faculty, pregnant with the yet undeveloped seeds of all wisdom and knowledge, tender of heart and pure of spirit, formed to hold high communion with his Creator, and to breathe abroad his soul in sympathy over all that the Creator had made. [...] (pp.259-63.)

Testimony of the Rocks by Hugh Miller (Boston: Gould & Lincoln 1857), available at Gutenberg Project - online [plain text & page view]. (My colour font: BS 14.05.2017.)

Note: Don Gifford (op. cit. - as supra.) remarks that Joyce would have encountered a welter of racist opinions, including some anti-Irish sentiments attributed to Thomas Carlyle while a slightly earlier passage includes remarks by another writer therein called ‘a shrewd writer of the present day, himself an Irishman’ on the subject of the Ulster Plantations and later Irish emigration [to Britain], making reference à la Carlyle to ‘Irish ugliness and Irish want’.

[...]

Adam, the father of humanity, was no squalid savage, of doubtful humanity, but a noble specimen of Man; and Eve a soft Circassian beauty, but exquisitey lovely beyond the lot of fallen humanity. (p.252.) [Here quotes: ‘A loveliest pair / That ever yet in love’s embraces met: Adam, the goodliest man of men since born / His sons; the fairest of her daughters, Eva.’ [PL, Bk. IV]]. Eve a soft Circassian beauty, but exquisitey lovely beyond the lot of fallen humanity. [...] This, however, I know, that if such was the form which the adorable Redeemer assumed when he took to himself a real body and a reasonable soul, the second Adam, like the first, when upon earth, the perfect type of Caucasian man. /  Let me next remark, that the further we remove from the original centre of the race, the more degraded and sunk do we find the several varieties of humanity. We must set wholly aside, in our survey, the disturbing element of modern emigration. Caucasian man has been pressing outwards. In the backwoods of America, in Southern Africa, in Australia, and in the Polynesian islands, the old Adamic type has been asserting its superiority, and annihilating before it the degraded races. (p.252.)

[...]

But if man, in at least the more degraded varieties of the race, be so palpably “not” what the Creator originally made him, by whom, then, was he made the poor lost creature which in these races we find him to be? He was made what he is, I reply, by man himself; and this, in many instances, by a process which we may see every day taking place among ourselves in individuals and families, though happily, not in races. Man’s nature again, - to employ the condensed statement of the poet, - has been bound fast in fate, but his will has been left free. He is free either to resign himself to the indolence and self-indulgence so natural to the species; or, “spurning delights, to live laborious days;” - free either to sink into ignorant sloth, dependent uselessness, and self-induced imbecility, bodily and mental, or to assert by honest labor a noble independence, - to seek after knowledge as for hidden treasures, and, in the search, to sharpen his faculties and invigorate his mind. And while we see around us some men addressing themselves with stout, brave hearts to what Carlyle terms, with homely vigor, their “heavy job of work,” and, by denying themselves many an insidious indulgence, doing it effectually and well, and rearing up well-taught families in usefulness and comfort, to be the stay of the future, we see other men yielding to the ignoble [255] solicitations of appetite or of indolence, and becoming worse than useless themselves, and the parents of ignorant, immoral, and worse than useless families. The wandering vagrants of Great Britain at the present time have been estimated at from fifteen to twenty thousand souls; the hereditary paupers of England, - a vastly more numerous class, - have become, in a considerable degree, a sept distinct from the general community; and in all our large towns there are certain per centages of the population, - unhappily ever increasing per centages, - that, darkened in mind and embruted in sentiment, are widely recognized as emphatically the dangerous classes of the community. And let us remember that we are witnessing in these instances no new thing in the history of the species: every period since that of the vagabond Cain has had its waifs and stragglers, who fell behind in the general march. In circumstances such as obtained in the earlier ages of the human family, all the existing nomades and paupers of our country would have passed into distinct races of men. For in the course of a few generations their forms and complexions would begin to tell of the self-induced degradation that had taken place in their minds; and in a few ages more they would have become permanent varieties of the species. There are cases in which not more than from two to three centuries have been found sufficient thoroughly to alter the original physiognomy of a race. “On the plantation of Ulster in 1611, and afterwards, on the success of the British against the rebels in 1641 and 1689,” says a shrewd writer of the present day, himself an Irishman, “great multitudes of the native Irish were driven from Armagh and the south of Down, into the mountainous tract extending from the Barony of Fleurs eastward [256] to the sea; on the other side of the kingdom the same race were exposed to the worst effects of hunger and ignorance, the two great brutalizers of the human race. The descendants of these exiles are now distinguished physically by great degradation. They are remarkable for open, projecting mouths, with prominent teeth and exposed gums; and their advancing cheek bones and depressed noses bear barbarism on their very front. In Sligo and northern Mayo the consequences of the two centuries of degradation and hardship exhibit themselves in the whole physical condition of the people, affecting not only the features, but the frame. Five feet two inches on an average, - pot-bellied, bow-legged, abortively featured, their clothing a wisp of rags, - these spectres of a people that were once well-grown, able-bodied, and comely, stalk abroad into the daylight of civilization, the annual apparition of Irish ugliness and Irish want.” [my italics.] Such is man as man himself has made him, - not man as he came from the hand of the Creator. [...]

—Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, Edinburgh (1857), p.252.

Bibliographical note: Testimony of the Rocks by Hugh Miller Editions: The Edinburgh First Edition [html or page view]. There is another Edinburgh edition of 1874 published by Nimmo [page view]. Do. (Boston: Gould & Lincoln 1857) - available at Gutenberg Project [plain text or page view].

[ top ]

Henrik Ibsen (1): Stephen Dedalus’s encounter with Ibsen’s plays is described in Stephen Hero as ‘a moment of radiant simultaneity’ - viz.:

‘The spectacle of the world which his intelligence presented to him with every sordid and deceptive detail set side by side with the spectacle of the world which the monster in him, now grown to a reasonably heroic stage, presented also had often filled him with such sudden despair as could only be assuaged by melancholic versing. He had all but decided to consider the two worlds as alien to one another ... when he encountered ... Henrik Ibsen. He understood that spirit instantaneously. ... the minds of the old Norse poet and the young Celt met in a moment of radiant simultaneity.’ [Spencer & Slocum, eds., 1977, p.67; Cape Edn. 45.]

Note also that Ibsen’s childhood embraced the decline of his father’s fortune as a wealthy merchant in Skien, Norway - necessitating a family move to Grimstad and placing them uncomfortably between classes, making the young Ibsen deeply distrustful of society. (See CurtainUp - online; accessed 01.10.2016.)

Henrik Ibsen (2): ‘Everything that I have written is most minutely connected with what I have lived through, if not personally experienced; every new work has had for me the object of serving the process of spiritual liberation and catharsis; for every man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs. That is why I once inscribed in a copy of one of my books the following dedicatory lines: ‘to live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.’ (Quoted [up to belongs] in Michael Meyer, Ibsen, Penguin 1974, p.291; cited in Lynee Hamill, Henrik Ibsen, UG Diss., UUC 2002; also cited in Almeida pack for Hedda Gabler at Almeida Th., in March, 2007.)

Hedda Gabler: ‘The title of the play is Hedda Gabler. My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife.’

Henrik Ibsen (3): In his first play, Cataline, Ibsen gives these lines to his eponymous hero: ‘I dreamed that, winged like Icarus of old, / I flew aloft beneath the vault of heaven.’ (See Critical Writings, ed. Mason & Ellmann, [1959] 1965, p.98.)

Henrik Ibsen (4): Richard Ellmann (in James Joyce [1959], 1965 Edn.) notes that Joyce read Ibsen, in W. B. Yeats’s phrase, ‘through William Archer’s hygenic bottle’ (p.55), and makes ftn. reference to A Vision, NY: 1938, p.35. The passage in question is a speech by Daniel O’Leary in “Stories of Michael Robartes” which reads: ‘[...] You at any rate cannot sympathise with a horrible generation that in childhood sucked Ibsen from Archer’s hygienic bottle. You can understand even better than Robartes why that protest must always seem the great event of my life.’ (London: Macmillan 1937; 1978 reprint, p.35.)

Henrik Ibsen (5): The grave-cloths that Stephen’s soul casts off at the end of Chapter Four of A Portrait of the Artist, together with the encounter with the wading girl that occasions it, are modeled on the episode in Ibsen’s play When We Dead Awaken where Rubek throws off the cerements of his soul and is drawn by a young woman wading in the sea to seek life and freedom. (See prefatory note to “Ibsen’s New Drama” in James Joyce: Critical Writings, ed. Mason & Ellmann, [1959 1966, p.48.)

Cesare Lombroso (1) - Stephen Hero [1944]: Stephen in conversation with Cranly is compelled to define “modern” and says: ‘The modern spirit is vivisective. [...] The modern method examines its territory by the light of day. Italy has added a science to civilisation by [190] putting out the lantern of justice and considering the criminal in production and in action. All modern political and religious criticism dispenses with presumptive States [and] presumptive Redeemers and Churches. [and] It examines the entire community in action and reconstructs the spectacle of redemption.’ (Stephen Hero [rev. edn.], ed. Slocum & Cahoon, London: Jonathan Cape 1969, pp.190-91.]

See also the allusion to Lombroso in Joyce’s account of Guglielmo Ferrero’s L’Europe giovane (1897), of which he says, inter alia: ‘The most arrogant statement made by Israel so far, he says, not excluding the gospel of Jesus is Marx’s proclamation that socialism is the fulfilment of a natural law. In considering Jews he slips in Jesus between Lassalle and Lombroso: the latter too (Ferrero’s father’-in-law) is a Jew.’ (See longer extract under Quotations, “Letters”, infra; and see further on Lombroso under Bram Stoker, infra.)

Lewis Carroll: Hugh Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, 1958) and James Atherton (The Books at the Wake, 1959) both treated of the Joyce-Carroll connection with some emphasis on the ‘portmanteau’ words whose origin can be traced, notionally at least, to his works. The link appears to be more than accidental. According to Atherton Joyce received a copy of Carroll’s Bruno and Sylvie in 1927 and began to read him more extensively - and for the first time: hence the many allusions to Dodgson/Alice in the Wake. Reviewing Danis Rose and John O’Hanlon’s edition of Finnegans Wake, Michael Wood sensibly concludes: ‘Joyce alludes to Carroll, then, but already had much of his own method.’ See Michael Wood, ‘Quoshed Quotatoes’, in London Review of Books (May 2010), p.20 - online. REferences to Carroll have been listed by James Atherton in Books at the Wake.