[...] my brother had a stronger stomach for patriotic poetry than I. He could read through the collected poems of those insignificant poets with high-sounding names, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Denis Florence McCarthy, with cold patient scorn, when a very few pages of them left me helpless and speechless [204] with devastating boredom. At one point of the review [of William Rooney] my brother’s ideas seem to be confused. It is hard to see how carelessness can ever become “a positive virtue” except by some fortunate chance. What he meant to say was that these poems of Rooney’s are the false and mean expression of a false and mean idea, but that studious (that is, careful) meanness can become a positive virtue. Writing to my brother at the time I raised this objection, and in a letter to Grant Richards from Trieste some years later he spoke, returning to the phrase, of the “scrupulous meanness” of the style of his own Dubliners.
It is evident from the last paragraph that while the business of saying adieu to the Catholic Church was still continuing, he had transferred his allegiance with diminished intransigence from the Word of God to the written word, about which at least we can know something, and further that in this new religion the paramount virtue was literary sincerity.
The other article is a review of an essay on George Meredith by Walter Jerrold. The tone is flippant and the review rather unsatisfactory, because the reviewer apparently does not see any reason why he should break a lance for Meredith, who had long since been recognized as one of the most original and most powerful forces in the English novel. He considers Meredith “a true man of letters” who had at last come into his own in spite of the obtuseness of public opinion, and he comments ironically on the strange company in which Meredith found himself in the series of English Writers Today which included Pinero and Hall Caine. He declares, however, that though Meredith has occasionally the “power of direct compelling speech”, as a poet, he lacks the irreplaceable “fluid quality, the lyrical impulse, which it seems, has been often taken from the wise and given unto the foolish”. The novels, he says, are unique, but have no value as epical art. For the reviewer they are the essays of “a philosopher at work with much cheerfulness upon a very stubborn problem”.
There is a spice of malice in the phrase “a true man of letters”. Shortly after the publication of his article on When We Dead [204] Awaken in the Fortnightly Review, Mr. Lyster, “the Quaker librarian” of the National Library, in congratulating his youthful reader effusively, had said:
— I see, Mr. Joyce, that you are a true man of letters.
It was exactly what my brother was striving heroically not to be. The review is a strange appreciation of a novelist whose influence, after all, was predominant in the first draft of the A Portrait of the Artist. There is no mention of Meredith’s wit or humour, or of those passionate glowing passages of a poet writing prose, which are Meredith’s most characteristic contribution to the novel. Yet I know that my brother liked them and imitated them in various places - for example, at the end of the fourth chapter of A Portrait. In Trieste, when making a pupil a present of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, he accompanied the gift with a letter advancing many reservations as to the author’s merits, but he would not have chosen that book if he had not liked it. He was altogether out of sympathy with the class of people Meredith wrote about.” (pp.204-05)
[...; Stanislaus tells that he clerked for his father during municipal elections and wrote of his experience in a letter to James.]
Writing to Jim in Paris, I described the committee-room and the people [205] who frequented it just as they appeared in “Ivy Day in the Committee Room”. The old caretaker and his family woes, Mr. Henchy (a sketch of my father toned down to the surroundings), the other canvassers, the unfrocked priest, the wastrel who recites the poem, everything, in fact, except the poem, he got from my letter or from my verbal description when he came home at Christmas. My brother was never in a committee-room in his life. I unwittingly supplied all the material for the story except, as I have said, the poem, which strikes a faint note of pathos and saves the story from being cynical. It is introduced in such a way that, as Padraic Colum observes in his preface to the American edition, despite the hackneyed phrases and the tawdry literary graces, one feels in it a loyalty to the departed chief and a real sorrow.
Of all the stories in Dubliners, “Ivy Day” was the one my brother said he preferred. As for my part in it, I had written and spoken of the committee-room and its canvassers and callers in a mood of sour disgust. But had never entered my mind that there might be material for a story in all that many-faceted squalor. I thought that not only were those Dubliners below literary interest but even below human interest except for hardened philanthropic societies. Still less had it occurred to me that by making a story of it in a spirit of detachment and in a style of “scrupulous meanness”, one could liberate one’s soul from the contagion of that experience and contemplate it from above with tolerance, even with compassion.
Yeats found time to correspond with my brother in Paris, an honour which would have flattered any other young unpublished and unknown poet; and besides busying himself in my brother’s behalf, Yeats encouraged him with praise and sage advice. Clearly, he believed that he had gained a remarkable recruit for his movement, and he did not underrate him. He alone seems to have recognized then and later that if my brother’s talent developed in a manner that disappointed his hopes, there was no reason to take offence; there was reason rather to welcome an artistic individuality so marked and so self-confident. When my [206] brother wrote to him, informing him of the failure of his project to study medicine in Paris and enclosing a poem, or rather a song, Yeats replied with a long letter urging him to take up literature as a profession. He liked the delicacy of the song, though he could remember that several of the other poems of my brother’s collection “had more subject, more marginal phrases, more passion”.
“I would strongly recommend you,” he continued, “to write some little essays. Impressions of books, or better still, of artistic events about you in Paris, bringing your point of view in as much as possible, but taking your text from some existing interest or current event. You could send some of these at once to the “Academy” or later on to the “Speaker”. It is always a little troublesome getting one’s first start in literature; but after the first start, one can make a pittance “if one is industrious, without a great deal of trouble.” Yeats gave proof of his perspicacity, the sensitivity of a poet rather than that of a critic, in divining that prose and not verse would be my brother’s medium, but I take a personal satisfaction in recording that I was the first and perhaps the only one to understand then that ruthlessness, not delicacy, would be the keynote of my brother’s work.
Shortly before my brother left Paris to return to Dublin for the Christmas holidays, he received a further letter from Yeats in which he tempered his praise with certain doubts [...; for this letter see under Joyce > Commentary, supra.]