Now, we know that Joyce knew “The Adoration of the Magi” by heart and presumably knew the “Tables of the Law” and “Rosa Alchemica” just as well. In all of these, Yeats engages in a game in which Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne represent respectively the unlimited mystical impulse of Yeats’s ideal Irishman - a Western peasant transmogrified by theosophical sutdies reading into an antithetical self for the poet - while Aherne stands for the initiate who finally draws back from the challenge of new philosophy to embrace his rosary beads and a cold, conventional Catholicism instead (that is, the actual Irishman, peasant or middle-class, whom Yeats saw about him).

In “Tables of the Law”, the narrator characterises Aherne thus:

He was to me, at that moment, the supreme type of our race, which, when it has risen above, or is sunken below, the formalisms of half-education and the rationalisms of conventional affirmation and denial, turns away [...] from practicable desires and intuition towards desires so unbounded that no human vessel can contain them.[1]

Warwick Gould has made a close study of Aherne both as to Yeats sources for the character and what he represents, tracing the various Ahernes of Irish history excluding, of course, our own eminent contemporary but including a Captain John Ahearne who, an United Irishman who spied for Napoleon, and another, Maurice Aherne, DD., who was ‘zealous upholder of Gallican liberties of the Church’ at Maynooth. (Aherne is actually a ‘lord of horses’ in the original Gaelic: Ó Eachtighearn. All of this leads him to conclude that ‘in Aherne and his doctrine we have a mask for the prophecy of coming revolution in Ireland and that the inspiration for this revolution is Yeats’s study of the events and personalities of a century before.’ [2] It is probably Aherne who narrates “Rosa Alchemica” in which the bold Robartes and his fellow-initiates use dope (aka ‘incense’) and dance to raised devils in their west-of-Ireland temple and are effectively repressed, if not murdered, by the irate fishermen of the harbour-village. Kinvara in Co. Galway, with its Norman tower and harbour. would be the ideal film-setting though perhaps Bullock Harbour in Co. Dublin could compete the contract. After those catastrophe narrator is so frightened that he resorts to wearing a ‘rosary about [his] neck’ at all times after he disentangles himself from the mass of sleeping revellers just as the Legion of Mary launches its attack upon he whose name is Legion. [3] It may be said that Aherne’s intellectual principles oscillate between the road of excess and the parish church: his errors are the portals of repentence.

The varieties of Catholicism in Yeats makes a fascinating study; they range from from sectarian panic (as in his letter to Maud Gonne when she married John MacBride) to aesthetic expropriation in the manner of many Victorian aesthetes who felt the loss of deus absconditus or even dea abscondita: ‘For we have bent low and low and kissed the proud feet of Cathleen Ni Houlihan’. For Yeats, Catholicism could be a hyperborean force for use when he wanted to abuse the actually-existing hierarchy in Free-State Ireland. In the short-lived paper ‘To-morrow’ (1924), he penned an editorial that went out as Francis Stuart and Blanaid Salkeld’s in which he said: ‘We are Catholics, but of the school of Pope Julius the Second and the Medicine Popes [...] We proclaim that we can forgive the sinner, but abhor the atheist, and that we count among atheists bad writers and Bishops of all denominations. [...]’ [4]-a neat inversion of Aherne’s dilemma. In other places, however, he saw in Catholicism as all formalism and timidity which he thought the greatest handicap from which modern Ireland suffered: ‘The education given by the Catholic schools seems to me to be in all matters of general culture a substituting of pedantry for taste. [...] Catholic education seems to destroy the qualities which they get from their religion. Provincialism destroys the nobility of the Middle Ages.’ [5] In the midst of this he argues that Catholic schools educate by rote for exams, and calls on his family’s observations to support him: ‘The young [Catholic] men and women who have not been through the Secondary Schools seem to me [...] much more imaginative than Protestant boys and girls and to have better taste. My sisters have the same experience.’ [6] At a slightest later moment in the Journal, he advances his own view: ‘This pedantry destroys religion as it destroys poetry, for it destroys all direct knowledge. We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.’ [7]

All of this has much bearing on Yeats’s encounter with Joyce, who came armed to meet him with such a perfect knowledge of Yeats’s mystical stories. There is unfortunately a question of biographical chronology here as regards their meeting and the events surrounding it. Richard Ellmann has it that, inspired by meeting Yeats, Joyce went off to Marsh’s Library to read Joachim de Fiore in the ‘stagnant bay’ of Marsh’s Library-as Stephen puts it in Ulysses and as the Library’s records show he did on 22-23rd Oct., 1902. [[8] There for some reason he took down Vaticinia, siue Prophetiae Abbastis Joachimi (1589), not the Liber Concordie, or the Exposition in Apocalypsim, mentioned by Yeats and actually held in the Library. [[9] Roy Foster reads the dates of the Yeats-Joyce encounter from Yeats’s movements at the time and the George Russell’s correspondence. ‘In October Russell told him [Joyce] that WBY would be in Dublin the following month and would like to meet him. [...] There was accordingly a rendezvous outside the National Library.’ [10] On this time-table it appears that Joyce read Joachim prior to meeting Yeats, presumably because Joachim is the main dish in the story “The Tables of the Law”. Yeats was later to say that the only reason why he reprinted the collection that of that title in 1903-albeit in a somewhat altered version from the 197 original-was because ‘a young man’ he met in Dublin had liked them and nothing else that he had written. [11] He himself thought the fake Latin and the frontispiece-portrait by John Butler Yeats were the only good things in the volume; Yeats was trying to look as little like a heretic as possible in Ireland at that moment.

What had Joyce so particularly liked in the stories? In “The Adoration of the Magi”, the advent of universal revolution through knowledge of the mystical names is invested in an ageing Paris prostitute whom three hoary Irish peasant-sages come to visit on her death-bed-much as if the Three Magi were paying court to La dame aux camillias. In “The Tables of the Law” Yeats had played fast and loose with the historical Joachim de Fiore (1132-1202) and invented sentences in Latin-or, rather, invited Lionel Johnson to do so [12]-which dished up a form of anarchistic cabbalism suited to the fin-de-siècle atmosphere in which the stories-and Yeats himself-were steeped. (Yeats recorded with great pride that Oscar Wilde thought his “The Crucifixion of the Outcast” in The Secret Rose, ‘sublime, wonderful, wonderful’.) [13]

[...] Joachim of Flora [...] considered that those whose work was to live and not to reveal were children and that the Pope was their father; but he taught in secret that certain others, and in always increasing numbers, were elected, not to live, but to reveal that hidden substance of God which is colour and music and softness and a sweet odour; and that these have no father but the Holy Spirit. Just as poets and painters and musicians labour at their works, building them with lawless and lawful things alike, so long as they embody the beauty that is beyond the grave, these children of the Holy Spirit labour at their moments with eyes upon the shining substance on which Time has heaped the refuse of creation; for the world only exists to be a tale in the ears of coming generations; and terror and content, birth and death, love and hatred, and the fruit of the Tree, are but instruments for that supreme art which is to win us from life and gather us into eternity like doves into their dove-cots. [14]

This is clearly intoxicating stuff involving the notion of a two-tier Catholic theology, as fanciers of Teihard de Chardin sometimes imagine in their dreams. (We are incidentally told by Yeats that Joachim submitted his writings ‘to the censorship of the Pope’.) [15] More importantly, the doctrine makes room for the idea that the artists are the real saviours whether they work in ‘lawless or lawful things’. Behind this stands the ethos of Walter Pater (’burn with a hard, gemlike flame’), of Villiers l’Isle Adam (’As to living out servants can do that for us’), and of Oscar Wilde (’There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book’; ‘All bad art is the result of good intentions’). In a Joycean context, it is a direct licence to invert Catholic theology by representing the artist as ‘a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.’ [16]

If Joyce reached for his penny catechism for that idea, he found something of it at work in Yeats’s story too: ‘I had discovered [...] that they sought to fashion gold out of common metals [...] as part of an universal transmutation of all things into some divine and imperishable substance, and this enabled me to make my little book a fanciful reverie over the transmutation of life into art, and a cry of measureless desire for a world made wholly of essences.’ [italics mine] [17] That epithet imperishable, so vital a part of the young Joyce’s aesthetic vocabulary -receives its most dramatic embodiment in the scene in A Portrait where the bared thigh of a girl on wading on Dollymount Strand causes Stephen Dedalus to see her dovelike form as ‘a prophecy of the end he had been born [...], a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being’. [18] (He also receives a baptism from her not unlike that of Jesus at the hands of St. John in Jordan ‘s stream-hence the phrase, ‘a voice from beyond the world was calling..’ [19] A little later, at the imaginative climax of this encounter-which can be fruitfully compared with Leopold’s encounter with Gerty McDowell on Sandymount Strand-he emits the following ejaculation (as such outburst used to be known):

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable. [20]

It is conspicuous here that, just as Joyce is separating himself from the Irish literary revival tradition by means of his bold distinction between classical and romantic tempers, he retains a good deal of the vocabulary and the reflexes of a fin de siècle aesthete whose gaze is fixed on the artifice of eternity and the corresponding idea of pure essences. The fact is that Joyce took time to replace the pharmacopia of the symbolists with his own literary language. (I think of this as the ‘stickiness’ of style.) In A Portrait he rapidly revamped the egoistical manuscript Stephen Hero, this time bracketing Stephen Dedalus with specific styles per chapter that reveal his entrapment in various mindsets. Stephen, for all his determination to ‘forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race’ never really escapes his influences and returns from Paris as the ‘lapwing poet’, floundering in Ulysses. He certainly does not know, when he leaves Bloom’s house by the back door, that he has discovered his true subject matter. The persistently awful prose of Stephen Hero is all the odder since he was simultaneously writing Dubliners. [21] Take the self-portrait that opens the extant pages of the manuscript, capturing Stephen in his nineteenth year:

A girl might or might not have called him handsome: the face was regular in feature and its pose was almost softened into a [...] beauty by a small feminine mouth. In [a] general survey of the face the eyes were not prominent [...] they were small light blue eyes which checked advances. They were quite fresh and fearless but in spite of this the face was to a certain extent the face of a debauchee.

- in other words, a cross between a Parisian flaneur and a Dublin stage-door Johnnie. [22] The trouble is, he didn’t yet know what kind of writer he was going to be-or, rather, considered prose to be part of ‘mere literature’ as distinct from poetry and drama, which he thought of as the proper literary arts.

Yeats, on his side, was borrowing from Catholic ritual hardly less than from alchemy; indeed, the Golden Dawn might be regarded as a crypto-Catholic formation in the sense of harking back to a kind of sacral medievalism and to a cultural climate in which spirit had not yet been locked out of the world by spinning jennies and ghost-free Protestant theology. But he was also competing with Catholicism in the strict sense that his ‘system’, if only he could ‘hammer [his] thoughts into a unity’, [23] might rival the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, the great Catholic philosopher-theologian in whose school James Joyce held himself to have been ‘steeled’, according to “The Holy Office” -J oyce’s parting shot to Dublin in 1904 in which he threw some rotten cabbages at W. B.). []

It may seem odd to portray Yeats as a conscious rival of St. Thomas. Yet, in unpublished papers of 1919, he wrote of the future reception of A Vision (1925), with its fictive Arab teacher-philosopher Ben Luka, in just those terms: ‘In that day the system of Aquinas will be weighed [with] that of Ben Luka who thinks not more inaccurately because he thinks in pictures and the world will have plenty of time to choose.’ [25] Margaret Harper has recently quoted the holograph original complete with cancelled phrases, among which: ‘ this other Aquinas Ben Luka.’ [26] About this line of thinking Ellmann has written: ‘The spectacle of the world choosing between Thomism and Yeatsism was of course removed before publication.’ [27] To say that a fragment of esoteric Yeatsism (in Ellmann’s coinage) might be placed on par with Summa Theologica would certainly be sure to call down anathemas from the Archbishop’s residence in Drumcondra and lesser domiciles where his opinions were echoed or even-as in the case of Frank Hugh O’Donnell’s attack on The Countess Cathleen -actually manufactured and afterwards adopted by Cardinal Archbishop Logue (’sight-unseen’, as Terence Brown puts it). [28] More interestingly, perhaps, it shows Yeats turning to Aquinas-not, say, Luther’s Disputation or Calvin’s Institutes, but to the gore-bellied tomes that Stephen Dedalus professes to read in the original; and this is because of the ‘summa’ element, for St Thomas represents to him the last moment in the European world when a synthesis of theology and science, polity and art was possible. Like Eliot’s ‘disociation of sensibility’, it is a somewhat delusion but it also reflects a historical truth: the Protestant reformation led to further theological fissions.

The dynamics of the literary revival were somewhat different: centripetal, not centrifugal. It would appear that there was a tendency for the defected Catholics and the Irish Protestants to meet in the middle ground of cultural nationalism, albeit without recognising one another. Certainly, when Yeats met Joyce he did not know that the symbolist pupa had emerged from the Catholic chrysalis.

He is from the Royal University, I thought, and he thinks that everything has been settled by Thomas Aquinas, so we need not trouble about it. I have met so many like him. [...] But the next moment he spoke of a friend of mine who after a wild life

-he means Oscar Wilde, of course-

had turned Catholic on his deathbed. He said that he hoped his conversion was not sincere. He did not like to thing that he had been untrue to himself at the end. No, I had not understood him. [29]

Understanding Joyce would take a long time.

END

Notes
[1. W. B. Yeats, Short Fiction, ed. G. J. Watson (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1995), p.201. “Lionel Johnson Comes First to Mind”: Sources for Owen Aherne’, in Yeats and the Occult, ed., George Mills Harper (London: Macmillan 1975), pp.255-84; here p.281.
[2. W. B. Yeats, Short Fiction (1995), p.[198] I don’t seriously suggest that Frank [?]’s Catholic sodality is fingered in the story.
[3. Quoted in Frank Tuohy, W. B. Yeats: An Illustrated Biography (London: Macmillan 1976), p.186. “Journal”, 14 March [1909], in Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue (Macmillan 1972), p.186 [item 99]; quoted in small part in Tuohy, op. cit., 1976, p.185.
[4. Idem.
[5.Memoirs, 1972, p.195-96; quoted in R. F. Foster, ‘Protestant Magic: W. B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History’ [1990], rep. in Jonathan Allison, ed., Yeats’s Political Identities (Michigan UP 1996), p.91.
[6. Joyce read there was Vaticinia, siue Prophetiae Abbastis Joachimi, et Anselmi Episcopi Marsicani (Venice 1589), the pseudo-Joachimist Pope Prophecies.
[7.] See Marjorie Reeves & Warwick Gould, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries [1986] (Oxford: Clarendon; rev. edn. 2001), pp.271-78. The ‘Pope Prophecies’ referred to in Ulysses is illustrated in Reeves & Gould, op. cit., p.277.
[8. R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: - A Life, Vol. I: “The Apprentice Mage” (OUP 1997), p.276.
[9. Ibid., p.278.
[10. See Warwick Gould, op. cit., 1975, p.267. In my belief, Johnson’s Latin (amore somnoque gravata et vestibus versicoloribus) finds its way into Finnegans Wake where it provides the mock-Latin of the “ St. Patrick and Balkelly the Archdruid” episode of the ricorso [ FW, Bk. IV]-but that is another day’s work.
[11. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan 1955), p.285. In passing, ‘Irish Poets and Soft Drugs’ is an essay crying out to be written: I anticipate sections on Yeats, Muldoon, and perhaps Durcan.
[12. Rep. in W. B. Yeats: Short Fiction, ed. George J. Watson (Harmonsworth: Penguin 1995), pp.201-11; here p.206.
[13. Idem.
[14. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: The Definitive Edition, corrected from the Dublin Holograph by Chester Anderson & ed. by Richard Ellmann, with six drawings by Robin Jacques (London: Jonathan Cape 1968), p.225.
[15. George J. Watson, ed., W. B. Yeats: Short Fiction (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1995), p.180
[16. James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: The Definitive Edition (London: Jonathan Cape 1968), p.127.
[17. Ibid., p.[?129]
[18.A Portrait of the Artist, corrected edition, ed. Robert Scholes (1967), pp.172-73.
[19.Stephen Hero: Part of the First Draft of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, ed. Theodore Spencer [1944], rev. with add. material and a Foreword by John J. Slocum & Herbert Cahoon [eds.] (London: Jonathan Cape 1969), p.27. It need hardly be said that this paragraph breaks all the rules of Joycean fiction.
[20. See the introductory remarks in Derek Attridge & Daniel Ferrer, eds., Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French (Cambridge UP 1984): ‘let us remember how much of Joyce’s peculiar and explosive energy derived from the uncloseable gap between shocking Paris and shockable Dublin, and let us not condemn his domesticated ghost to traverse a safe, easy bridge across the Atlantic.’ (p.2.)
[21. W. B. Yeats, If I Were Four and Twenty [1919] (Dundrum: Cuala Press 1940), p.1; quoted in Ellmann, W. B. Yeats: The Man and the Masks (London: Faber & Faber 1948), p.241.
“The Holy Office” (1904): ‘But I must accounted be / One of that mumming company / - With him, who hies him to appease / His giddy dames frivolities / While they console him when he whinges / With gold-embroidered Celtic fringes [...] So distantly I turn to view / The shamblings of the motley crew / those souls that hate the strength that mine has / Steeled in the school of old Aquinas [...]’ (Critical Writings of James Joyce, Viking Press 1966, p.151-52.)
22.Yeats-who is obviously intended as the whinger here - wrote in “To Ireland in the Coming Times”: ‘Know that I would accounted be / True brother of the company.’ (The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright, Everyman 1990, p.70.)
23.The poem concludes The Rose (1893), being the collection in which Joyce’s favourite Yeats lyric, “Who Goes with Fergus?”, appears.
24.‘In that day the system of the Aquinas will be weighed and that of this other Aquinas Ben Luka who thinks not more inaccurately because he thinks in pictures.’ (The Discoveries of Michael Robartes, YVP, iv, 20; quoted in Margaret Mills Harper, Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats, Oxford: OUP 2006, p.337.)
25. [lost text]
26. [lost text]
27. Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and Masks (London: Faber & Faber 1948), p.238.
28. See Terence Brown, W. B. Yeats: A Critical Life (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1999), p.126-27.
29. Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce [1959] (OUP 1965 Edn.), pp.107-08.