Stephen Hero Read online

  Between these two conflicting schools the city of the arts had become marvellously unpeaceful. To many spectators the dispute had seemed a dispute about names, a battle in which the position of the standards could never be foretold for a minute. Add to this internecine warfare — the classical school fighting the materialism that must attend it, the romantic school struggling to preserve coherence — and behold from what ungentle manners criticism is bound to recognise the emergence of all achievement. The critic is he who is able, by means of the signs which the artist affords, to approach the temper which has made the work and to see what is well done therein and what it signifies. For him a song by Shakespeare which seems so free and living, as remote from any conscious purpose as rain that falls in a garden or as the lights of evening, discovers itself as the rhythmic speech of an emotion otherwise incommunicable, or at least not so fitly. But to approach the temper which has made art is an act of reverence before the performance of which many conventions must be first put off for certainly that inmost region will never yield its secret to one who is enmeshed with profanities.

  Chief among these profanities Stephen set the antique principle that the end of art is to instruct, to elevate, and to amuse. “I am unable to find even a trace of this Puritanic conception of the esthetic purpose in the definition which Aquinas has given of beauty” he wrote “or in anything which he has written concerning the beautiful. The qualifications he expects for beauty are in fact of so abstract and common a character that it is quite impossible for even the most violent partizan to use the Aquinatian theory with the object of attacking any work of art that we possess from the hand of any artist whatsoever.” This recognition of the beautiful in virtue of the most abstract relations afforded by an object to which the term could be applied so far from giving any support to a commandment of Noli Tangere was itself no more than a just sequence from the taking-off of all interdictions from the artist. The limits of decency suggest themselves somewhat too readily to the modern speculator and their effect is to encourage the profane mind to very futile jurisdiction. For it cannot be urged too strongly on the public mind that the tradition of art is with the artists and that even if they do not make it their invariable practice to outrage these limits of decency the public mind has no right to conclude therefrom that they do not arrogate for themselves an entire liberty to do so if they choose. It is as absurd, wrote the fiery-hearted revolutionary, for a criticism itself established upon homilies to prohibit the elective courses of the artist in his revelation of the beautiful as it would be for a police-magistrate to prohibit the sum of any two sides of a triangle from being together greater than the third side.

  In fine the truth is not that the artist requires a document of licence from householders entitling him to proceed in this or that fashion but that every age must look for its sanction to its poets and philosophers. 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. When the poetic phenomenon is signalled in the heavens, exclaimed this heaven-ascending essayist, it is time for the critics to verify their calculations in accordance with it. It is time for them 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. The age, though it bury itself fathoms deep in formulas and machinery, has need of these realities which alone give and sustain life and it must await from those chosen centres of vivification the force to live, the security for life which can come to it only from them. Thus the spirit of man makes a continual affirmation.

  Except for the eloquent and arrogant peroration Stephen’s essay was a careful exposition of a carefully meditated theory of esthetic. When he had finished it he found it necessary to change the title from “Drama and Life” to “Art and Life” for he had occupied himself so much with securing the foundations that he had not left himself space enough to raise the complete structure. This strangely unpopular manifesto was traversed by the two brothers phrase by phrase and word by word and at last pronounced flawless at all points. It was then safely laid by until the time should come for its public appearance. Besides Maurice two other well-wishers had an advance view of it; these were Stephen’s mother and his friend Madden. Madden had not asked for it directly but at the end of a conversation in which Stephen had recounted sarcastically his visit to Clonliffe College he had vaguely wondered what state of mind could produce such irreverences and Stephen had at once offered him the manuscript saying “This is the first of my explosives.” The following evening Madden had returned the manuscript and praised the writing highly. Part of it had been too deep for him, he said, but he could see that it was beautifully written.

  — You know Stevie, he said (Madden had a brother Stephen and he sometimes used this familiar form) you always told me I was a country buachail * and I can’t understand you mystical fellows.

  — Mystical? said Stephen.

  — About the planets and the stars, you know. Some of the fellows in the League belong to the mystical set here. They’d understand quick enough.

  — But there’s nothing mystical in it I tell you. I have written it carefully …

  — O, I can see you have. It’s beautifully written. But I’m sure it will be above the heads of your audience.

  — You don’t mean to tell me, Madden, you think it’s a ‘flowery’ composition!

  — I know you’ve thought it out. But you are a poet, aren’t you?

  — I have … written verse … if that’s what you mean.

  — Do you know Hughes is a poet too?

  — Hughes!

  — Yes. He writes for our paper, you know. Would you like to see some of his poetry?

  — Why, could you show me any?

  — It so happens I have one in my pocket. There’s one in this week’s Sword * too. Here it is: read it.

  Stephen took the paper and read a piece of verse entitled Mo Náire Tù (My shame art thou). There were four stanzas in the piece and each stanza ended with the Irish phrase — Mo Náire Tù, the last word, of course, rhyming to an English word in the corresponding line. The piece began:

  What! Shall the rippling tongue of Gaels

  Give way before the Saxon slang!

  and in lines full of excited patriotism proceeded to pour scorn upon the Irishman who would not learn the ancient language of his native land. Stephen did not remark anything in the lines except the frequency of such contracted forms as “e’en” “ne’er” and “thro’ ” instead of “even” “never” and “through” and he handed back the paper to Madden without offering any comment on the verse.

  — I suppose you don’t like that because it’s too Irish but you’ll like this, I suppose, because it’s that mystical, idealistic kind of writing you poets indulge in. Only you mustn’t say I let you see …

  — O, no.

  Madden took from his inside pocket a sheet of foolscap folded in four on which was inscribed a piece of verse, consisting of four stanzas of eight lines each, entitled “My Ideal.” Each stanza began with the words “Art thou real?” The poem told of the poet’s troubles in a ‘vale of woe’ and of the ‘heart-throbs’ which these troubles caused him. It told of ‘weary nights’ and ‘anxious days’ and of an ‘unquenchable desire’ for an excellence beyond that ‘which earth can give.’ After this mournful idealism the final stanza offered a certain consolatory, hypothetical alternative to the poet in his woes: it began somewhat hopefully:

  Art thou real, my Ideal?

  Wilt thou ever come to me

  In the soft and gentle twilight

  With your baby on your knee?

  The [combined] effect of this apparition on Stephen was a long staining blush of anger. The tawdry lines, the futile change of number, the ludicrous waddling approach of Hughes’s “Ideal” weighed down by an inexplicable infant combined to
cause him a sharp agony in the sensitive region. Again he handed back the verse without saying a word of praise or of blame but he decided that attendance in Mr Hughes’s class was no longer possible for him and he was foolish enough to regret having yielded to the impulse for sympathy from a friend.

  When a demand for intelligent sympathy goes unanswered [it] he is a too stern disciplinarian who blames himself for having offered a dullard an opportunity to participate in the warmer movement of a more highly organised life. So Stephen regarded his loans of manuscripts as elaborate « flag-practices with phrases. » He did not consider his mother a dullard but the result of his second disappointment in the search for appreciation was that he was enabled to place the blame on the shoulders of others — not on his own: he had enough responsibilities thereon already, inherited and acquired. His mother had not asked to see the manuscript: she had continued to iron the clothes on the kitchen-table without the « least suspicion of the agitation in the mind of her son. » He had sat on three or four kitchen chairs, one after another, and had dangled his legs unsuccessfully from all free corners of the table. At last, unable to control his agitation, he asked her point-blank would she like him to read out his essay.

  — O, yes, Stephen — if you don’t mind my ironing a few things …

  — No, I don’t mind.

  Stephen read out the essay to her slowly and emphatically and when he had finished reading she said it was very beautifully written but that as there were some things in it which she couldn’t follow, would he mind reading it to her again and explaining some of it. He read it over again and allowed himself a long exposition of his theories « garnished with many crude striking allusions with which he hoped to drive it home the better. » His mother who had never suspected probably that “beauty” could be anything more than a convention of the drawingroom or a natural antecedent to marriage and married life was surprised to see the extraordinary honour which her son conferred upon it. Beauty, to the mind of such a woman, was often a synonym for licentious ways and probably for this reason she was relieved to find that the excesses of this new worship were supervised by a recognised saintly authority. However as the essayist’s recent habits were not very re-assuring she decided to combine a discreet motherly solicitude with an interest, which without being open to the accusation of factitiousness was at first intended as a compliment. While she was nicely folding a handkerchief she said:

  — What does Ibsen write, Stephen?

  — Plays.

  — I never heard of his name before. Is he alive at present?

  — Yes, he is. But, you know, in Ireland people don’t know much about what is going on out in Europe.

  — He must be a great writer from what you say of him.

  — Would you like to read some of his plays, mother? I have some.

  — Yes. I would like to read the best one. What is the best one?

  — I don’t know … But do you really want to read Ibsen?

  — I do, really.

  — To see whether I am reading dangerous authors or not, is that why?

  — No, Stephen, answered his mother with a brave prevarication. I think you’re old enough now to know what is right and what is wrong without my dictating to you what you are to read.

  — I think so too … But I’m surprised to hear you ask about Ibsen. I didn’t imagine you took the least interest in these matters.

  Mrs Daedalus pushed her iron smoothly over a white petticoat « in time to the current of her memory. »

  — Well, of course, I don’t speak about it but I’m not so indifferent … Before I married your father I used to read a great deal. I used to take an interest in all kinds of new plays.

  — But since you married neither of you so much as bought a single book!

  — Well, you see, Stephen, your father is not like you: he takes no interest in that sort of thing … When he was young he told me he used to spend all his time out after the hounds or rowing on the Lee. He went in for athletics.

  — I suspect what he went in for, said Stephen irreverently. I know he doesn’t care a jack straw about what I think or what I write.

  — He wants to see you make your way, get on in life, said his mother defensively. That’s his ambition. You shouldn’t blame him for that.

  — No, no, no. But it may not be my ambition. That kind of life I often loathe: I find it ugly and cowardly.

  — Of course life isn’t what I used to think it was when I was a young girl. That’s why I would like to read some great writer, to see what ideal of life he has — amn’t I right in saying “ideal”?

  — Yes, but …

  — Because sometimes — not that I grumble at the lot Almighty God has given me and I have more or less a happy life with your father — but sometimes I feel that I want to leave this actual life and enter another — for a time.

  — But that is wrong: that is the great mistake everyone makes. Art is not an escape from life!

  — No?

  — You evidently weren’t listening to what I said or else you didn’t understand what I said. Art is not an escape from life. It’s just the very opposite. Art, on the contrary, is the very central expression of life. An artist is not a fellow who dangles a mechanical heaven before the public. The priest does that. The artist affirms out of the fulness of his own life, he creates … Do you understand?

  And so on. A day or two afterwards Stephen gave his mother a few of the plays to read. She read them with great interest and found Nora Helmer a charming character. Dr Stockmann she admired but her admiration was naturally checked by her son’s light-heartedly blasphemous description of that stout burgher as ‘Jesus in a frock-coat.’ But the play which she preferred to all others was the Wild Duck. Of it she spoke readily and on her own initiative: it had moved her deeply. Stephen, to escape a charge of hot-headedness and partizanship, did not encourage her to an open record of her feelings.

  — I hope you’re not going to mention Little Nell in the Old Curiosity Shop.

  — Of course I like Dickens too but I can see a great difference between Little Nell and that poor little creature — what is her name? …

  — Hedvig Ekdal?

  — Hedvig, yes … It’s so sad: it’s terrible to read it even … I quite agree with you that Ibsen is a wonderful writer.

  — Really?

  — Yes, really. His plays have impressed me very much.

  — Do you think he is immoral?

  — Of course, you know, Stephen, he treats of subjects … of which I know very little myself … subjects …

  — Subjects which, you think, should never be talked about?

  — Well, that was the old people’s idea but I don’t know if it was right. I don’t know if it is good for people to be entirely ignorant.

  — Then why not treat them openly?

  — I think it might do harm to some people — uneducated, unbalanced people. People’s natures are so different. You perhaps …

  — O, never mind me … Do you think these plays are unfit for people to read?

  — No, I think they’re magnificent plays indeed.

  — And not immoral?

  — I think that Ibsen … has an extraordinary knowledge of human nature … And I think that human nature is a very extraordinary thing sometimes.

  Stephen had to be contented with this well-worn generality as he recognised in it a genuine sentiment. His mother, in fact, had so far evangelised herself that she undertook the duties of missioner to the heathen; that is to say, she offered some of the plays to her husband to read. He listened to her praises with a somewhat startled air, observing no feature of her face, his eyeglass screwed into an astonished eye and his mouth poised in naïf surprise. He was always interested in novelties, childishly interested and receptive, and this new name and the phenomena it had produced in his house were novelties for him. He made no attempt to discredit his wife’s novel development but he resented both that she should have achieved it unaided by him and that she
should be able thereby to act as intermediary between him and his son. He condemned as inopportune but not discredited his son’s wayward researches into strange literature and, though a similar taste was not discoverable in him, he was prepared to commit that most pious of heroisms namely the extension of one’s sympathies late in life in deference to the advocacy of a junior. Following the custom of certain old-fashioned people who can never understand why their patronage or judgments should put men of letters into a rage he chose his play from the title. A metaphor is a vice that attracts the dull mind by reason of its aptness and repels the too serious mind by reason of its falsity and danger so that, after all, there is something to be said, nothing voluminous perhaps, but at least a word of concession for that class of society which in literature as in everything else goes always with its four feet on the ground. Mr Daedalus, anyhow, suspected that A Doll’s House would be a triviality in the manner of Little Lord Fauntleroy and, as he had never been even unofficially a member of that international society which collects and examines psychical phenomena, he decided that Ghosts would probably be some uninteresting story about a haunted house. He chose the League of Youth in which he hoped to find the reminiscences of like-minded roysterers and, after reading through two acts of provincial intrigue, abandoned the enterprise as tedious. He had promised himself, arguing from the alienated attitudes and half-deferential half-words of pressmen at the mention of the name, a certain extravagance, perhaps an anomalous torridity of the North and [he] though the name beneath Ibsen’s photograph never failed to reawaken his sense of wonder, the upright line of the “b” running so strangely beside the initial letter as to suspend [one] the mind amid incertitudes for some oblivious instants, the final impression made upon him by the figure to which the name was affixed, a figure which he associated with a solicitor’s or a stockbroker’s office in Dame St, was an impression of [disappointment mixed] relief mixed with disappointment, the relief for his son’s sake prevailing dutifully over his own slight but real disappointment. So that from neither of Stephen’s parents did respectability get full allegiance.