Complete Works of James Joyce (366 page)

Armed with this double-edged sword of Michelangelo’s art and Swedenborg’s revelations, Blake killed the dragon of natural experience and natural wisdom. By annihilating space and time and denying the existence of memory and the senses, he wanted to paint his work upon the void of the divine bosom. For him, every time less than the pulsation of an artery is equal in its period and value to six thousand years because in that infinitely brief time the poet’s work is conceived and born. For him, each space greater than a red drop of human blood was visionary, created by the hammer of Los, while in each space smaller than this we approached eternity of which our vegetable world was but a shadow. So the soul must not look
with
but rather
through
the eye because the eye, born in the night while the soul slept in the rays of light, would also die in the night.

In his book
The Divine Names
, Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite arrives at the throne of God by denying and overcoming every moral and metaphysical attribute; in the final chapter he falls into an ecstasy and prostrates himself before the divine obscurity, the unnameable immensity that antedates and encompasses the highest wisdom and love in the eternal order. The process by which Blake reaches the threshold of the infinite is similar. His soul, flying from the infinitely small to the infinitely big, from a drop of blood to the universe of stars, is consumed by the rapidity of its flight, and finds itself renewed, winged and imperishable on the edge of the dark ocean of God.

And although he based his art upon such idealistic premises, in the conviction that eternity was in love with the products of time, the sons of God of the daughters of

[The concluding page of the manuscript is missing.]

The Centenary of Charles Dicken
s

The influence which Dickens has exercised on the English language (second perhaps to that of Shakespeare alone) depends to a large extent on the popular character of his work. Examined from the standpoint of literary art or even from that of literary craftmanship he hardly deserves a place among the highest. The form he chose to write in, diffuse, overloaded with minute and often irrelevant observation, carefully relieved at regular intervals by the unfailing humorous note, is not the form of the novel which can carry the greatest conviction. Dickens has suffered not a little from too ardent admirers. Before his centenary there was perhaps a tendency to decry him somewhat. Towards the close of the Victorian period the peace of literary England was disturbed by the inroads of Russian and Scandinavian writers inspired by artistic ideals very different from those according to which the literary works (at least of the last century) of the chief writers of fiction had been shaped. A fierce and headstrong earnestness, a resoluteness to put before the reader the naked, nay, the flayed and bleeding reality, coupled with a rather juvenile desire to shock the prim middle-class sentimentalism of those bred to the Victorian way of thinking and writing — all these startling qualities combined to overthrow or, perhaps it would be better to say, to depose the standard of taste. By comparison with the stern realism of Tolstoy, Zola, Dostoiewsky [sic], Bjornson and other novelists of ultra-modern tendency the work of Dickens seemed to have paled, to have lost its freshness. Hence, as I have said, a reaction set in against him and so fickle is popular judgement in literary matters that he was attacked almost as unduly as he had been praised before. It is scarcely necessary to say that his proper place is between these two extremes of criticism; he is neither the great-hearted, great-brained, great-souled writer in whose honour his devotees burn so much incense nor yet the common purveyor of sentimental domestic drama and emotional claptrap as he appears to the jaundiced eye of a critic of the new school.

He has been nicknamed ‘the great Cockney’: no epithet could describe him more neatly nor more fully. Whenever he went far afield to America (as in
American Notes)
or to Italy (as in
Pictures from

Italy)
his magic seems to have failed him, his hand seems to have lost her ancient cunning. Anything drearier, and therefore less Dickensian, than the American chapters of
Martin Chuzzlewit
it would be hard to imagine. If Dickens is to move you, you must not allow him to stray out of hearing of the chimes of Bow Bells. There he is on his native heath and there are his kingdom and his power. The life of London is the breath of his nostrils: he felt it as no writer since or before his time felt it. The colours, the familiar noises, the very odours of the great metropolis unite in his work as in a mighty symphony wherein humour and pathos, life and death, hope and despair, are inextricably interwoven. We can hardly appreciate this now because we stand too close to the scenery which he described and are too intimate with his amusing and moving characters. And yet it is certainly by his stories of the London of his own day that he must finally stand or fall. Even
Barnaby Rudge,
though the scene is laid chiefly in London and though it contains certain pages not unworthy of being placed beside
the Journal of the Plague
of Defoe (a writer, I may remark incidentally, of much greater importance than is commonly supposed), does not show us Dickens at his best. His realm is not the London of the time of Lord George Gordon but the London of the time of the Reform Bill. The provinces, indeed the English country of ‘meadows trim with daisies pied’, appear in his work but always as a background or as a preparation. With much greater truth and propriety could Dickens have applied to himself Lord Palmerston’s famous
Civis Romanus sum.
The noble lord, to tell the truth, succeeded on that memorable occasion (as Gladstone, unless my memory misleads me, took care to point out) in saying the opposite of what he had in mind to say. Wishing to say that he was an imperialist he said that he was a Little Englander. Dickens, in fact, is a Londoner in the best and fullest sense of the word. The church bells which rang over his dismal, squalid childhood, over his struggling youth, over his active and triumphant manhood, seem to have called him back whenever, with scrip and wallet in his hand, he intended to leave the city and to have bidden him turn again, like another Whittington, promising him (and the promise was to be amply fulfilled) a threefold greatness. For this reason he has a place for ever in the hearts of his fellow-citizens and also for this reason the legitimate affection of the great city for him has coloured to no slight extent the criticisms passed upon his work. To arrive at a just appreciation of Dickens, to estimate more accurately his place in what we may call the national gallery of English literature it would be well to read not only the eulogies of the London-born but also the opinion of representative writers of Scotland, or the Colonies or Ireland. It would be interesting to hear an appreciation of Dickens written, so to speak, at a proper focus from the original by writers of his own class and of a like (if somewhat lesser) stature, near enough to him in aim and in form and in speech to understand, far enough from him in spirit and in blood to criticize. One is curious to know how the great Cockney would fare at the hands of R.L.S. or of Mr Kipling or of Mr George Moore.

Pending such final judgment we can at least assign him a place among the great literary creators. The number and length of his novels prove incontestably that the writer is possessed by a kind of creative fury. As to the nature of the work so created we shall be safe if we say that Dickens is a great caricaturist and a great sentimentalist (using those terms in their strict sense and without any malice) — great caricaturist in the sense that Hogarth is a great caricaturist, a sentimentalist in the sense which Goldsmith would have given to that word. It is enough to point to a row of his personages to see that he has few (if any) equals in the art of presenting a character, fundamentally natural and probable with just one strange, wilful, wayward moral or physical deformity which upsets the equipoise and bears off the character from the world of tiresome reality and as far as the borderland of the fantastic. I should say perhaps the human fantastic, for what figures in literature are more human and warm-blooded than Micawber, Pumblechook, Simon Tappertit, Peggoty [sic], Sam Weller (to say nothing of his father), Sara Gamp, Joe Gargery? We do not think of these, and of a host of others in the well-crowded Dickensian gallery, as tragic or comic figures or even as national or local types as we think, for instance, of the characters of Shakespeare. We do not even see them through the eyes of their creator with that quaint spirit of nice and delicate observation with which we see the pilgrims at the Tabard Inn, noting (smiling and indulgent) the finest and most elusive points in dress or speech or gait. No, we see every character of Dickens in the light of one strongly marked or even exaggerated moral or physical quality — sleepiness, whimsical self-assertiveness, monstrous obesity, disorderly recklessness, reptile-like servility, intense round-eyed stupidity, tearful and absurd melancholy. And yet there are some simple people who complain that, though they like Dickens very much and have cried over the fate of Little Nell and over the death of Poor Joe [sic], the crossing-sweeper, and laughed over the adventurous caprices of Pickwick and his fellow-musketeers and hated (as all good people should) Uriah Heep and Fagin the Jew, yet he is after all a
little
exaggerated. To say this of him is really to give him what I think they call in that land of strange phrases, America, a billet for immortality. It is precisely this little exaggeration which rivets his work firmly to popular taste, which fixes his characters firmly in popular memory. It is precisely by this little exaggeration that Dickens has influenced the spoken language of the inhabitants of the British Empire as no other writer since Shakespeare’s time has influenced it and has won for himself a place deep down in the hearts of his fellow-countrymen, a honour which has been withheld from his great rival Thackeray. And yet is not Thackeray at his finest greater than Dickens? The question is an idle one. English taste has decreed to Dickens a sovereign position and Turk-like will have no brother near his throne.

James Joyce B. A.

The Universal Literary Influence of the Renaissanc
e

The doctrine of evolution in the light of which our civilization basks teaches us that when we were small, we were not yet grown up. Accordingly, if we take the European Renaissance as a point of division, we must conclude that, until that age, humanity only had the soul and body of a child and it was only after this age that it developed physically and morally to the point of deserving the name of adulthood. It is a very drastic and somewhat unconvincing conclusion. In fact (were I not afraid of seeming to be a
laudator temporis acti), I
should like to oppose this conclusion with all my might. The much trumpeted progress of this century consists for the most part of a tangle of machines whose aim is simply to gather fast and furiously the scattered elements of profit and knowledge and to redistribute them to each member of the community who can afford a small fee. I agree that this social system can boast of great mechanical conquests, of great and beneficial discoveries. To be convinced of this, it is enough just to draw up a brief list of what we see on the street of a large modern city: the electric tram, telegraph wires, the humble and necessary postman, newspaper boys, large companies etc. But in the midst of this complex and many-sided civilization the human mind, almost terrorized by material greatness, becomes lost, denies itself and grows weaker. Should we then conclude that present-day materialism, which descends in a direct line from the Renaissance, atrophies the spiritual faculties of man, impedes his development, blunts his keenness? Let us see.

In the age of the Renaissance the human spirit struggled against scholastic absolutism, against that immense (and in many ways admirable) system of philosophy that has its fundamental origins in Aristotelian thought, cold, clear and imperturbable, while its summit stretched upwards towards the vague and mysterious light of Christian ideology. But if the human spirit struggled against this system, it was not because the system in itself was alien to him. The yoke was sweet and light: but it was a yoke. So when the great rebels of the Renaissance proclaimed the Good News to the peoples of Europe, that there was no more tyranny, that human sadness and suffering had dissolved like mist at sunrise, that man was no longer a prisoner, perhaps the human spirit felt the fascination of the unknown, heard the voice of the visual world tangible, inconstant, where one lives and dies, sins and repents, and, abandoning the cloistered peace in which it had been languishing, embraced the new gospel. It abandoned its peace, its true abode because it had tired of it, just as God, tired (if you will permit a rather irreverent term) of his perfections, called forth the creation out of nothing, just as woman, tired of the peace and quiet that were wasting away her heart, turned her gaze towards the life of temptation. Giordano Bruno himself says that all power, whether in nature or the spirit, must create an opposing power without which man cannot fulfil himself, and he adds that in every such separation there is a tendency towards a reunion. The dualism of the great Nolan faithfully reflects the phenomenon of the Renaissance. And if it seems a little arbitrary to quote a witness against himself and to quote the very words of an innovator so as to condemn (or at least to judge) the work of which he was the author, I respond that I am doing no more than following the example of Bruno himself who, in the course of his long, persistent and quibbling self-defence, turned the weapons of the prosecution against his accuser.

It would be easy to fill these pages with the names of the great writers whom the wave of the Renaissance lifted to the clouds (or thereabouts), easy to praise the greatness of their works which, in any case, no one is calling into doubt, and to end with a ritual prayer: and it might be an act of cowardice since reciting a litany is not philosophical inquiry. The crux of the question lies elsewhere. It must be seen what is really meant by the Renaissance as far as literature is concerned, and towards what end, happy or tragic, it leads us. The Renaissance, to put it briefly, has placed the journalist in the monk’s chair: in other words, it has deposed a sharp, limited and formal mind in order to hand the sceptre over to a mentality that is facile and wide-ranging (as the saying goes in theatre journals), a mentality that is restless and somewhat amorphous. Shakespeare and Lope de Vega are to a certain extent responsible for modern cinematography. Untiring creative power, heated, strong passion, the intense desire to see and feel, unfettered and prolix curiosity have, after three centuries, degenerated into frenetic sensationalism. Indeed, one might say of modern man that he has an epidermis rather than a soul. The sensory power of his organism has developed enormously, but it has developed to the detriment of his spiritual faculty. We lack moral sense and perhaps also strength of imagination. The most characteristic literary works that we possess are simply amoral:
The Crisis
by Marco Praga,
Pelléas et Mélisande
by Maeterlinck,
Crainquebille
by Anatole France, and
Smoke
by Turgenev. Perhaps I have taken these somewhat at random. No matter: they will do to document the thesis which I uphold. A great modern artist who wishes to set the sentiment of love to music will reproduce, as far as his art allows him to, every pulsation, every tremor, the lightest shiver, the lightest sigh; the chords interweave and wage a secret war among themselves: one loves while acting cruelly, one suffers when and as much as one rejoices, anger and doubt flash in the eyes of lovers whose bodies are the one flesh. Put
Tristan and Isolde
beside the
Inferno
and you will realize how the poet’s hate follows its path from abyss to abyss in the wake of an increasingly intense idea, and the more intensely that the poet is consumed in the fire of the idea of hate, the fiercer becomes the art by which the artist communicates his passion to us. One is the art of circumstance, the other is ideational. In the high Middle Ages, the compiler of an atlas would not lose his composure when he found himself at a loss. He would write over the unknown area the words:
Hic sunt leones.
The idea of solitude, the terror of strange beasts, the unknown were enough for him. Our culture has an entirely different goal: we are avid for details. For this reason our literary jargon speaks of nothing else than local colour, atmosphere, atavism: whence the restless search for what is new and strange, the accumulation of details that have been observed or read, the parading of common culture.

In strict terms the Renaissance should mean a rebirth after a death, an unexpected fecundity like that of Sarah after a long period of sterility. In fact, the Renaissance came about when art was dying of formal perfection, and thought was losing itself in vain subtleties. A poem would be reduced to an algebraic problem, put forth and resolved into human symbols in accordance with the rules. A philosopher was a learned sophist who, for all that he preached the word of Jesus to the crowd, would, like Bellarmine or Giovanni Mariana, strive to construct a moral defence of tyrannicide The Renaissance arrived like a hurricane in the midst of all this stagnation, and throughout Europe a tumult of voices arose, and, although the singers no longer exist, their works may be heard just as the shells of the sea in which, if we put them up to our ear, we can hear the voice of the sea reverberating.

Listening to it, it sounds like a lament: or at least, so our spirit interprets it. Strange indeed! All modern conquest, of the air, the land, the sea, disease, ignorance, melts, so to speak, in the crucible of the mind and is transformed into a little drop of water, into a tear. If the Renaissance did nothing else, it did much in creating within ourselves and our art a sense of pity for every being that lives and hopes and dies and deludes itself. In this at least we excel the ancients: in this the popular journalist is greater than the theologian.

James Joyce