Myth and identity in Joyce's fiction: disentangling the image - James Joyce

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1994 by William O'Neill

Another reason had to do with his rejection of what he called the romantic temper. In his reading before the University Literary and Historical Society(1) Stephen elaborates his idea that the classical temper for which Ibsen provides an example, rather than the romantic as exemplified by Aeschylus, is the proper one for an artist. The classical temper avoids the monstrously heroic in favor of "the slow elaborative patience of the art of satisfaction" (SH 97). He explains the same idea to his mother in simpler terms: "Art is not an escape from life . . . [but] the very central expression of life. An artist is not a fellow who dangles a mechanical heaven before the public. The priest does that" (86). In the paper he condemns Aeschylus for being heroic and romantic, but, of course, the argument applies to the Celtic Revivalists as well. In the ensuing discussion Stephen is attacked by a follower of Hyde, who has applied the theory as Stephen has intended:

Hughes . . . declared in ringing Northern accents that the moral welfare of the Irish people was menaced by such theories. They wanted no foreign filth. Mr Dedalus might read what authors he liked, of course, but the Irish people had their own glorious literature where they could always find fresh ideals to spur them on to new patriotic endeavors. Mr Dedalus was himself a renegade from the Nationalist ranks; he professed cosmopolitanism. But a man that was of all countries was of no country - you must first have a nation before you can have art. . . . It [if?] they were to have art let it be moral art, art that elevated, above all, national art. (103)

Like Joyce in his Trieste lecture, "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," Stephen agrees with Celtic Revivalists that Ireland needed some kind of cultural revival, but holds that they have misidentified the cause of the spiritual poverty;

Madden who had previously tried in vain to infect Stephen with nationalistic fever was surprised to hear these overtures [Stephen has been asking the whereabouts of Emma Clery, a Gaelic Leaguer]. . . . The so-desired community for the realising of which Madden sought to engage his personal force seemed to him anything but ideal and the liberation which would have satisfied Madden would by no means have satisfied him. The Roman, not the Sassenach, was for him the tyrant of the islanders. . . . The watchcry was Faith and Fatherland, a sacred word in that world of cleverly inflammable enthusiasms. (53).

Stephen/Joyce recognized immediately something that Hyde and Yeats discovered only gradually: that for many Catholics, including Michael Cusack, who regularly used the expression "Protestant dog" (Ellmann 61n.), the Celtic Revival was a movement to overthrow the Protestant ascendancy, which had governed Ireland for two hundred years, and to replace it with a Catholic one. Both Hyde and Yeats labored under the idea that celebration of things Celtic could unite all Irish people. Yeats, of course, did not agree with Hyde's extreme antipathy for English literature, but he did share for a time the belief that the remnants of Celtic culture could be found among the peasants of western Ireland, and that the nurturing of this culture, its folklore and its language, could effect its revival. Yeats collected several volumes of folklore, and Hyde published his Lovesongs of Connacht on this theory. Stephen, on the other hand, speaks of "the farce of Irish Catholicism: an island the inhabitants of which entrust their wills and minds to others that they may ensure for themselves a life of spiritual paralysis" (SH 146). Celtic culture, he believes, had been fatally undermined by Rome long before the English arrived.