Full text of "Dublin diary"

See other formats

UNIVERSITY
OF FLORIDA
LIBRARIES

COLLEGE LIBRARY

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2012 with funding from

LYRASIS IVIembers and Sloan Foundation

http://archive.org/details/dublindiaryOOjoyc

The Dublin Diary
of Stanislaus Joyce

also by Stanislaus Joyce
•

MY brother's keeper

THE DUBLIN DIARY
OF

STANISLAUS JOYCE

edited by
George Harris Healey

o^U^

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS
Ithaca, New York

1^62 by Cornell University and George Harris Healey

Printed in Great Britain

PREFACE

Maurice Daedalus, the brother in James Joyce's Stephen
Hero, keeps a diary. Mr. Duffy, the principal character
of *A Painful Case', in Dubliners, Hkewise keeps 'a Httle
sheaf of papers held together with a brass pin', in which 'a sentence
was inscribed from time to time'. Both Maurice Daedalus and
Mr. Duffy are derived from the author's younger brother Stanis-
laus, and Stanislaus actually kept a diary, in which the sentences he
inscribed from time to time often had to do with his brother. That
sheaf of papers, still held together by the brass pin, is now pre-
served in the Cornell University Library with the other early
papers of the Joyce family.

Though called a diary by Stanislaus and James, and hence by
others who have mentioned it, the manuscript is rather a collection
of descriptions, confessions, narrations, and comments. Some are
dated, some are not. Some are placed in chronological sequence,
some are not. This journal records occurrences in the daily hfe and
thoughts of the stolid but tormented young Dubhner who, though
uncertain about many things, was utterly convinced that his
brother was an extraordinary person whose quahty the world
would one day recognize and whose thoughts and actions were
worth setting down. 'The interest which I took in Jim's life was
the main interest I took in my own; my hfe is dull without him '
he writes in a note after James's departure from Ireland. In re-
cording the incidents of his own life, then, Stanislaus records a
good deal about James's, at a time too when he probably knew
James better than anyone else did. More than most authors, James
Joyce wishes and indeed expects his readers to be acquainted with
minute details of his personal history. Stanislaus's diary is relevant

to his brother's Hfe and writings. It begins in 1903, soon after the
crisis of the mother's death, and runs well into 1905, after James's
sailing has left diarist and diary noticeably less lively. But James
is never absent ft"om the journal for long, and for much of it he and
his doings, at one of the most interesting periods of his life, appear
on almost every page. Though Stanislaus gives to no entry the
date 16 June — he could hardly have predicted Bloomsday — he
does mention in one place or other many of the persons who
appear as characters in Ulysses, and many also who appear in
Dubliners and in A Portrait of the Artist. A large circle of relatives,
friends, and acquaintances of the young Joyces are assembled here,
Gogarty, Byrne, Cosgrave, the Sheehys, the Murrays, and many
another, and also of course the Joyces themselves, of 7 St. Peter's
Terrace, Cabra.

That house held small happiness then for anyone, and Stanis-
laus's picture of the Joyces' home life will rouse both indignation
and compassion. James was not much at home in 1904. But
Stanislaus had no Martello tower^ and the other children were
either too small or too inmeshed to escape. Stanislaus gives here,
with a curious mixture of candour, irritation, and affection, a picture
— apparently the only picture — of his brothers and sisters. He
gives a picture of his father, too, but without affection. For John
Stanislaus Joyce his second son had little but dishke and contempt.
It is hard to beheve that the same man, the same father, stands
behind both James's portrayal of Simon Dedalus and Stanislaus's
portrayal of Tappie'. The two brothers saw in their wretched en-
vironment no prospect of betterment and no choice but to endure
or to escape. Both chose the latter. Though James's bitterness
softened somewhat as the years passed, Stanislaus never relented.
His early outrage was deep and durable, and denunciations of
father, country, and church continued to exercise him for half a
century after they were recorded here. His spring was cruel. It is
not easy to bear in mind that most of this scathing journal was
written while the author was a boy not yet twenty, that this voice,
so often harsh, is the voice of youth, that this weary spirit stands
at the threshold of Ufe. But what James called the 'paralysis' of
DubUn Hfe had literary uses to him, and his brother's jottings
stimulated his imagination. James read this record while it was

being written, asked to have it sent to him after he left Ireland, and
borrowed from it the kind of small thing that none but James
Joyce would have found worth borrowing at all.

This diary was recorded with great care by a sensitive and
intelligent boy who felt that something was terribly wrong with his
life, who reacted by lashing out savagely at almost everything
around him, who was often injudicious and unjust, but who was
trying to be reasonable and honest. He did not spare others, but
neither did he spare himself. He was painfully self-conscious,
about his clothes, his manners, his reputation, and even the shape
of his head. He recognized his own intelligence but could find no-
thing to do with it. He abhorred the commonplace, but everything
around him, except his brother and his Httle cousin, appeared to be
drably and deadeningly commonplace. His av/kward, adolescent
tenderness for little Katsy Murray, Hke ever3l:hing else, offered him
neither comfort nor hope. He could not properly be in love with
her now: she was too young. He could not properly be in love with
her ever, really: she was his first cousin. His attitude towards his
talented brother was already what it was to remain generally
throughout their lives, an utterly unselfish concern for James's
comfort, welfare, success, and reputation, sustained in the face of
his own wistful longings and James's thoughtless ingratitude.
Stanislaus, his brother's whetstone and keeper, wanted to emulate
James but was charged with imitating him. He wanted to share
James's fife but was repelled by its dissipations. He wanted a place
in James's circle of friends but disUked and distrusted most of the
persons he met there. James on the other hand found in his younger
brother a loyal ally, sympathetic towards his notions and patient
of his mockery. From Stanislaus James borrowed money, clothes,
ideas, and traits for the characters in his writings. Maurice
Daedalus and Mr. Duffy are obvious enough. But there is more
than a little of Stanislaus's envy, pride and gloom in Stephen him-
self.

The manuscript here transcribed consists of 230 pages of writ-
ing on sheets cut to size, about eight by six and a half inches.
These sheets, most of them previously used on one side, were
culled from old business letters, school exercises, ledger paper,
notebook leaves, and similar odds and ends. At least one sheet is a

palimpsest; the diarist erased a whole page of something else to
gain a usable page for himself. Paper was scarce in the Joyce
household. These sheets, so painfully assembled, preserve more
than the diary written on what was once their blank side. Of some
of them, the writing on the back is not important. Of many, how-
ever, it consists of early writings by James, in both verse and
prose, that otherwise would have perished. That material has been
published by Richard Ellmann and Ellsworth Mason in their
Critical Writings of James Joyce. Stanislaus's text is written neatly,
in a tiny hand, over every inch of the precious paper. He copied
from a draft of some kind, for revisions are rare and he mentions
a *Book of Days', which presumably contained his first notes. He
calls the collection at various times his *Diary', his ^Notes', and his
* Crucible'. After it was finished, he went through it and added
dates, sometimes with red pencil, in the margins. These dateSj be
it noted, refer not to the time of the writing but rather to the time
of the incident itself. The text was intended to stand in its present
order. The dates were considered to be incidental and in several
instances are out of sequence. This diary was preceded by one
dehberately destroyed in 1903, and was followed by one written in
Trieste that is not available for publication. Stanislaus in his
writings and correspondence quotes from *my diary' material of
1904 that is not found in this manuscript. Such material may have
come from the few leaves now missing from the sheaf or from some
other document not now with his papers at Cornell. He used tliis
diary in preparing his autobiographical My Brother's Keeper, but
the two do not much overlap. The pubhshed work, which he did
not Hve to finish, brings the story to about the time of the mother's
death in August 1903. This diary begins a few weeks after that
event and carries on for about a year and a half. Stanislaus's diary
is often callow when compared to My Brother's Keeper, but it is
nearer DubHn by fifty years, and what it lacks in sophistication it
perhaps makes up for in immediacy.

Young Stanislaus's spelling was uncertain and his punctuation
old-fashioned. Both have been modified for the convenience of the
reader. Together with the marginal dates, the diarist also added a
number of glosses that correct, criticize, or extend his original
remarks. Most of these seem to be almost contemporary with the

original^ but since they cannot be dated with certainty they are
carried separately and identified as 'MS. notes'. A few passages,
marked by dots (. . .), have been omitted, most of them because
they lacked interest, the rest because they were hbellous or other-
wise offensive.

For permission to publish the manuscript the editor records his
thanks to the Cornell University Library.

G.H.H.
Ithaca,
Nez'j York
April 1962

THE DUBLIN DIARY OF STANISLAUS JOYCE

[1903]

Jim's character is unsettled; it is developing. New influences are
coming over him daily, he is beginning new practices. He has
come home drunk three or four times within the last month (on
one occasion he came home sick and dirty-looking on Sunday
morning, having been out all night) and he is engaged at present
in sampling wines and Uqueurs and at procuring for himself the
means of living. He has or seems to have taken a hking for
conviviaHty, even with those whose jealousy and ill-will towards
himself he well knows, staying with them a whole night long danc-
ing and singing and making speeches and laughing and reciting,
and revelling in the same manner all the way home. To say what
is really his character, one must go beneath much that is passing in
these influences and habits and see what it is in them that his mind
really aflfects ; one must compare what he is with v/hat he Vv^as, one
must analyse, one must judge him by his moments of exaltation,
not by his hours of abasement.^

His intellect is precise and subtle, but not comprehensive. He is
no student. His artistic sympathy and judgment are such as would
be expected in one of his kind of intellect — if he were not more
than a critic, I beUeve he would be as good a critic of what interests
him as any using English today. His literary talent seems to be very
great indeed, both in prose and in verse.^ He has, as Yeats says, a
power of very deHcate spiritual writing and whether he writes in

^ Written across this paragraph, in the hand of James Joyce, is the word
'rubbish'.

^ MS. note: 'He is not an artist he says. He is interesting himself in
pohtics — in which he says [he has] original ideas. He says he does not care
for art or music though he admits he can judge them. He lives on the
excitement of incident.'

sorrow or is young and virginal, or whether (as in *He travels after
the wintry sun')^ he writes of what he has seen, the form is always
either strong, expressive, graceful or engaging, and his imagination
open-eyed and classic. His ^epiphanies' — his prose pieces (which I
almost prefer to his lyrics) and his dialogues — are again subtle. He
has put himself into these with singular courage, singular memory,
and scientific minuteness ; he has proved himself capable of taking
very great pains to create a very httle thing of prose or verse. The
keen observation and satanic irony of his character are precisely,
but not fully, expressed. Whether he will ever build up anything
broad — a drama, an esthetic treatise — I cannot say. His genius is
not literary and he will probably run through many of the smaller
forms of literary artistic expression. He has made living his end in
life, and in the Hght of this magnificent importance of hving,
everything else is Uke a rushhght in the sun. And so he is more
interested in the sampling of Hqueurs, the devising of dinners, the
care of dress, and whoring, than to know if the one-act play — *the
dwarf-drama' he calls it — is an artistic possibility.

Jim is a genius of character. When I say 'genius', I say just the
least httle bit in the world more than I believe; yet remembering
his youth and that I sleep with him, I say it. Scientists have been
called great scientists because they have measured the distances of
the unseen stars, and yet scientists who have watched the move-
ments in matter scarcely perceptible to the mechanically aided
senses have been esteemed as great; and Jim is, perhaps, a genius
though his mind is minutely analytic. He has, above all, a proud,
wilful, vicious selfishness, out of which by times now he writes a
poem or an epiphany, now commits the meannesses of whim and
appetite, which was at first protestant egoism, and had, perhaps,
some desperateness in it, but which is now well-rooted — or
developed? — in his nature, a very Yggdrasill. He has extraordinary
moral courage — courage so great that I have hopes that he will one
day become the Rousseau of Ireland. Rousseau, indeed, might be
accused of cherishing the secret hope of turning away the anger of
disapproving readers by confessing unto them, but Jim cannot be
suspected of this. His great passion is a fierce scorn of what he
calls the *rabblement' — a tiger-Uke, insatiable hatred. He has a

^ From 'Tilly', published in Pomes Penyeach.

distinguished appearance and bearing and many graces : a musical
singing and especially speaking voice (a tenor), a good undeveloped
talent in music, and witty conversation. He has a distressing habit
of saying quietly to those with whom he is famiHar the most
shocking things about himself and others, and, moreover, of
selecting the most shocking times, saying them, not because they
are shocking merely, but because they are true. They are such
things that even knowing him well as I do, I do not beheve it is
beyond his power to shock me or Gogarty^ with all his obscene
rhymes. His manner however is generally very engaging and
courteous with strangers, but, though he dislikes greatly to be rude,
I think there is little courtesy in his nature. As he sits on the
hearth-rug, his arms embracing his knees, his head thrown a Httle
back, his hair brushed up straight off his forehead, his long face
red as an Indian's in the reflexion of the fire, there is a look of
cruelty in his face. Not that he is not gentle at times, for he can be
kind, and one is not surprised to find simpleness in him. (He is
always simple and open with those that are so with him.) But few
people will love him, I think, in spite of his graces and his genius,
and whosoever exchanges kindnesses with him is likely to get the
worst of the bargain. (This is coloured too highly, like a penny
cartoon.)

[26 September 1903]

Jim says it is not moral courage in him but as he phrases it of
himself, *when the Bard begins to write he intellectualizes him-
self.' Jim's voice, when in good form, has a beautiful flavour, rich
and pure, and goes through one like a strong exhilarating wine.
He sings well.

Jim has a wolf-like intellect, neither massive nor very strong,
but lean and ravenous, tearing the heart out of his subject.

Pappie" is very scurrilous.

He scourges the house with his tongue.

Mother kept the house together at the cost of her life.^

1 Oliver St. John Gogarty, the original of 'Buck Mulligan' in Ulysses.

- John S. Joyce, father of the author.

^ Mrs. May Joyce had died on 13 August 1903, at the age of 44.

The Sophists will never be extinct while Jim is alive.
The twelve tribes of Galway are :

Athy, Blake, Bodkin
Deane, D'Arcy, Lynch
Joyce, Kirwin, Martin
Morris, Skerret, French

Pappie is the only child of an only child (his father) and therefore
the spoiled son of a spoiled son, the spendthrift son of a spend-
thrift. His temperament was probably Gasconish — gallant and
sentimental — and was certainly shallow and without love. If he
ever had any self-criticism his inordinate self-love and vanity
choked it in his early youth. Yet, strangely enough, he is shrewd
in his judgment of others. He takes pride in a family of some re-
finement, education and some little distinction on one side, and of
some wealth on the other. He is domineering and quarrelsome and
has in an unusual degree that low, voluble abusiveness charac-
teristic of the Cork people when drunk. He is worse in this respect
since we have grown up because even when silent v/e are an oppo-
sition. He is ease-loving and his ambition in Ufe has been to be
respected and to keep up appearances. However unworthy this
may sound, it has been so difficult of attainment and he has strug-
gled for it with such tenacious energy against the effects of his
constant drunkenness that it is hard to despise it utterly. He is
lying and hypocritical. He regards himself as the victim of circum-
stances and pays himself with words. His will is dissipated, and his
intellect besotted, and he has become a crazy drunkard. He is
spiteful like all drunkards who are thwarted, and invents the most
cowardly insults that a scandalous mind and a naturally derisive
tongue can suggest. He undoubtedly hastened Mother's death. He
was an insulting son, and as a husband, a household bully and a
bester in money matters. For his children he has no love or care
but a peculiar sense of duty arising out of his worship of respect-
abiHty. He is full of prejudices, which he tries to instil into us,
regarding all opposition as impertinent puppyism. He boasts of
being a bit of a snob. His idea of the home is a well-furnished
house in which he can entertain and his children grow up under
their mother's care, and to which, having spent the evening in

drinking and story-telling with his friends, he can return to lord
it and be obeyed.

He is generous, however, and when he claims to have 'some
ideas of a gentleman' he does not seem to be ridiculous. When he
has been sober for a few days he is strangely quiet, though irritable
and nerve-shaken, with a flow of lively talk. It is difficult to talk to
him even now at 54 for his vanity is easily hurt. Moreover this
quietness seems unnatural and to be the reaction of his drunken-
ness.

He has the remains of the best tenor of the light EngUsh style I
ever heard. His range was unusual and he sings with taste.

Jim's ingenuousness and gentleness are false, and since I pointed
this out to him his affectation of false ingenuousness and false
gentleness has been false.

I see in his verse and prose self-deception and a desire for dis-
play without the redeeming foolishness of vanity.

Jim claims of his friends the right to ruin himself.

Jim has a hardly controlled itch for deceit. He lies without
reason and exerts himself to deceive those that know him best,
from a contempt of the dullness of morality and right-doing.

When Pappie is sober and fairly comfortable he is easy and
pleasant spoken though inclined to sigh and complain and do no-
thing. His conversation is reminiscent and humourous, ridicuUng
without malice, and accepting peace as an item of comfort. This
phase is regrettably rare and of short duration. It comes at times of
dire poverty and does not last till bedtime. The mood is genuine,
indeed, but a chance phrase will reveal that it is more an amnesty
temporarily agreed to than a peace. Unsetthng from his comfort-
able position before the fire and gathering up his papers to go to
bed effect a change in him, and he goes up the stairs complaining
and promising changes over which he has no control.

Pappie has for many years regarded his family as an encum-
brance which he suffers impatiently while he must, and which he
seeks to cast off at the earliest opportunity. Jim and I and Charhe,^
who naturally do not see matters in this Hght, he abuses and
threatens as wasters. He calls all his children bastards as a habit,
and really the treatment he wishes to give them is that enforced by

^ Charles, then 17, was the youngest of the surviving brothers.
B 17

law even to bastards — support until the sixteenth year for a male
child.

He is truculent and inflicts a thoughtless selfishness on his
children. I have said he has a pecuhar sense of duty toward them.
It is true, but that sense does not include the office of feeding
them regularly. Even tonight when his being was comfortable
there Vv^as a somewhat vicious hue about his contentment.

My cousin Kathleen Murray (called Katsy)^ has a luxurious
nature and the promise of a magnificent contralto. It has the depth
(in tone) of a bass and I flattered myself that I first discovered it
in her.

That amongst his innumerable acquaintances, Pappie had a few
real friends, is to be remembered to his credit.

At that time which I remember most vividly. Mother had little
left of what had once made her a figure in drawing-rooms, httle
except a very graceful carriage and occasional briUiancy at the
piano. She had a small, very feminine head, and was pretty. I re-
member her inteUigent, sparing, very patient in troubles (the
normal state) and too patient of insults. When I saw her lying in
her brown habit on the bed in the front room, her head a little
wearily to one side, I seemed to be standing beside the death-bed
of a victim. Now for the first time waking in the quietness and
subdued light of the room, beside the candles and the flowers,
she had the importance that should always have been hers. An
ever-watchful anxiety for her children, a readiness to sacrifice
herself to them utterly, and a tenacious energy to endure for
their sakes replaced love in a family not given to shows of afl'ec-
tion. She was very gentle towards her children though she under-
stood them each. It is understanding and not love that makes the
confidence between Mother and children so natural though un-
acknowledged, so unreserved though nothing is confessed (there
is no need of words or looks between them, the confidence sur-
rounds them like the atmosphere). Rather it is this understanding
that makes the love so enduring. Pappie, who had no relatives and

^ Though only about 13 years of age, Katsy Murray had previously
attracted the passing interest of James and was now receiving the shy
attentions of Stanislaus. Her mother ('Aunt Josephine') was a favourite of
the Joyce boys. Her father ('Uncle WilHe'), brother of Mrs. Joyce, is the
'Richie Goulding' of Ulysses.

was free and selfish, demanded of Mother, who had many, ahena-
tion from them. I can well believe that she never brought them to
his house and that Pappie himself, being weak and inconstant, did ;
but in heart she was never altogether ahenated from them. To
have been so for Pappie's sake would have demanded more pas-
sionateness than was in Mother's nature. Perhaps if she had done
so she would have been just as unloved by one so eminently selfish
as Pappie, or if not as unloved certainly as cruelly treated. It is in
her favour that in the middle of worries in which it is hard to re-
main gentle or beautiful or noble Mother's character was refined
as much as Pappie's was debased, and she gained a Httle wisdom.
Yet I cannot regard Mother and Pappie as ill-m.atched, for with
Pappie Mother had more than mere Christian patience, seeing in
him what only lately and with great difficulty I have seen in him.
It is strange, too, that the true friendships Pappie made (with Mr.
Kelly^ for instance) were confirmed at home and, I think, under
Mother's influence, his friends being scarcely less friendly towards
Mother than towards himself. Up to the last Mother had a lively
sense of humour and was an excellent mimic of certain people.
Though worn and grave. Mother was capable at unusual times
of unusual energy. She was a selfish drunkard's unselfish wife.

Mother had seventeen children of whom nine are now living.

Mother's treatment of Poppie^ was unjust, not nearly so unjust
but of the same kind as Pappie's treatment of her, and perhaps due
a little unconsciously to that example. These women of Nirvana
who accept their greatest trials with resignation, letting worries be
heaped like ashes on their heads, and hoping only in one thing —
their power to live them down, vent themselves in irritabihty about
ridiculous little annoyances. One of the most difficult things to
excuse is a nagging temper, but it must be remembered that
Mother's temper was only lately of this kind, that it was due to
disease in one who died of cirrhosis^ of the liver, and that it was
directed against Poppie from a habit begun when Poppie was
young and very obstinate. Mother, too, saw that the reading of

^ John Kelly, of Tralee, the 'John Casey' of A Portrait of the Artisr as a
Young Man.
'' Nickname of Margaret, then 19, eldest daughter of the family.
^ The author first wrote 'cancer', then corrected it.

life in our home was unchristian and, constantly, deceived herself
to make her life submissive to that Priest-worship in which she
was reared. She even asserted her Catholicism that by speaking
much she might convince herself, and this is called insincerity.
Mother's reHgion was acquiescence and she had the eye of un-
believers constantly upon her.

Jim has lately become a prig about women, affecting to regard
them as dirty animals and frequently quoting an epigram of a Dr.
Perse's.^

Katsy Murray is a type of what the mediaeval schoolmen called
'the pride of the flesh'.

The Murrays don't know the value of kisses.

[2p February 1904]

The younger Miss Nolan wears her hair very tastefally in an
old-fashioned style, parted in the centre and combed flat down. It
is black and hangs in a plat behind. She is pretty and looks like as
if she stepped out of a Cruikshank illustration to Dickens. I have
nick-named her *Dora'.

Mary Sheehy^ has a very pleasant speaking voice and an engag-
ing laugh. She seems to be happy and lazy and is often amused.
Under her quietness I think she has a merry disposition. She is
very handsome and wears an immense plait of soft black hair.

The Irish are represented as being very much afraid of the
satire of the wandering poets. This 'satire' is really a habit of nick-
naming very prevalent in this country. Scarcely any escape. Among
those I know, for instance, Pappie calls Uncle John^ 'the cornet
player' and his wife 'Amina' and *La Somnambula', WiUiam Field*

^ MS. note: 'Woman is an animal that micturates once a day, defecates
once a week, menstruates once a month, and parturates once a year.'

2 Mary Sheehy, later Mrs. Thomas Kettle, was the first girl, according
to Stanislaus, in whom James took an emotional interest.

^ John Murray, brother of Mrs. Joyce, is the 'Red Murray' of the
'Aeolus' episode of Ulysses. In the 'Wandering Rocks' episode, Simon
Dedalus speaks of 'your uncle John the cornetplayer'.

^ Blackrock butcher and M.P. He appears in the 'Nestor' episode of
Ulysses.

*Hamlet'. Gogarty calls O'Leary Curtis^ *the Japanese Jesus',
Jim 'Kinch', me *Thug', iE *Corpse-face'. Jim calls 'John Eglin-
ton'" 'the horrible virgin'. Pappie calls Aunt Josephine 'the seal',
'Aunt Hobblesides'. Mother used to call Mr. Richard Thornton^
(an amusing, robust, florid little elderly man) 'the dicky bird'. I
call Gogarty 'Doll' because he reminds me of an India-rubber doll,
and a young fellow named Kelly, who goes to Sheehy's, a squat,
swarthy chap, 'Frog-face'.

My sister Eva^ reminds me of the 'Marchioness' in The Old
Curiosity Shop.

Jim says he is not an artist. I think he Hves on the excitement of
events.

[29 February 1904]

The wise virgins delight in the society of the necessitous young
genius. They are happy when he comes in. They laugh at him, or
with him, or for him, making the heart of the dullard envious. And
he is suspected of wild ways. They flatter him with pressing atten-
tion, an interest which is almost a wish — lasting the whole length
of an evening — to protect him from himself, and which the secret,
shy admiration in their eyes — for it is evident they suspect some-
thing they slyly will not even with a look question — betrays. There
is smiling unacknowledged friendship between them, but no more.
They will not meet him on the highways alone, nor will they marry
him.

What is the ambition of the hero's valet?

It is most important that I should remember that Pappie is my
father. This does not make me think him any different from what
he is, but it shows me why I find quite natural to tolerate from
him what I would certainly not tolerate from any other.

^ Curtis, a newspaper man, is mentioned in James Joyce's Gas from a
Burner. He is the 'O'Madden Burke' of 'The Mother' in Dublincrs and of
the 'Aeolus' episode in Ulysses.

" Pseudonym of W. K. Magee, essayist and poet, of the staff of the
National Library. He appears in Ulysses.

^ Richard Thornton, a professional tea-taster, was a model for 'Tom
Kernan', who appears in Ulysses and in the story 'Grace', in Diibliners.

^ Eva, age 12, was the fourth daughter of the family.

Jim says he has an instinct for women. He scarcely ever talks
decently of them, even of those he likes. He talks of them as of
warm, soft-skinned animals. *That one'd give you a great push.'
'She's very warm between the thighs, I fancy.' 'She has great
action, I'm sure.'

CharHe is an absurd creature. He is fooUsh, a vain and stupid
boaster and very sentimental, and has a habit of imitating people
he knows. He likes to hear himself talk big and, like his kind,
thinks himself shrewd. He is hvely and talkative, though rather
stupid. He is courageous, too, and against authority spirited. He is
an amusing clown when boisterous but rough and loud-voiced,
being round-shouldered and awkward and naturally very strong.
Yet he has the gift of silence when he likes. I fancy it was kicked
into him when he was young for he was treated the worst, being
considered an omadhaun} He has the gift of writing though prac-
tically uneducated, and writes verse. He occasionally expresses
himself well, gets a musical effect or a graceful phrase, but is pos-
sessed by a love of grandiloquence. One can see by him that he,
too, is troubled by that famiUar, Self-consciousness, which keeps
constantly teUing us what we have done and why we did it, and
which does not flatter. All of us have this familiar — mine is a me-
tormenting 'horla'^ — and it induces in us a manner which our re-
latives mistake for pride in us. Charhe is tall for his age (17) and
good-loob'ng, small-featured with very thick black hair and wears
glasses for a sUght turn in his eyes (he is very like a smaller Yeats).
But like most of those who are not clever and have been ill-
treated he is obstinate and overbearing where he has power. I do
not think he has any taste for music though as a boy he had an
exceptionally good treble. He drinks, smokes and has whored a
little, but is a Roman CathoUc. I do not think he would be a good
fellow for a woman to marry.

Besides family feehng and brotherly friendship, Charhe loved
Georgie,^ — far better than anyone else in the house.

Georgie was very handsome — ^very like Jim but with larger and

^ A simpleton.

2 He refers to 'Le Horla', a story by Guy de Maupassant.
^ The youngest son of the family, who had died in March 1902 at the
age of 14. James named his son after this brother.

better features. He was a regular young pagan with a very high
colour and a brownish skin, and had beautiful long hands. He was
little over the average height, but nimble and always very neat in
his dress though shabby. He was brilliantly selfish and mischievous
and had a loud rippling laugh — a Homeric laugh. He was very
clever and deh'cate, excitable and cowardly. He took Jim very
seriously, and, I think, vv^as beginning to be a pagan in more than
nature. The priest v/ho attended him in his last illness was very
much attracted by him and said he had an extraordinary mind for
a boy. He was given a public funeral from Belvedere College where
he was a favourite (the only one I remember for lo years). He was
not in the least sentimental and was unemotional. Silence became
him very well, and he was often very quiet. He was a most inspiring
listener, and had a sUght excitable stutter. Jim used to speak to him
freely because he was sure of getting inteUigence and, under his
ridicule, real admiration. He died in his fifteenth year of typhoid
badly treated by a stupid doctor. Pappie used to call him *the
Nipper'. Our relatives did not like him.

Pappie had no affection for him.

I was very attached to him though not so much as Charlie, who
was his constant companion. He was the youngest — the cadet. ^

Jim is often silly-mannered and impolite. I have no doubt that
he is a poet, a lyric poet, that he has a still greater mastery of prose.
He may be a genius — it seems to me very possible — but that he
has not yet found himself is obvious.

The house is and always has been intolerable with bickering,
quarrelling and scurrility. A blaze of a row is almost a relief.

Aunt Josephine, Uncle Willie and their household are very kind
to Jim. I do not visit there for I have a prejudice that Uncle
Willie's friendship is uncertain.

[lo January 1904]
May^ is a comfortable fat girl, slow and rather chuffy. She does

^ MS. note: 'I know Charlie better lately and I suspect that there was
a great deal of sentimental maudlinness in Charlie's affection. Probably,
as usual, what affection Jim had was purest.'

^ May, nearing 14, was the third daughter.

nothing or practically nothing in the house and will not be forced
to do anything but some light and pJeasant labour. She used to
watch in the room with Mother, who Jiked to have her there. She
is very sensible and has an observant sense of humour. She has no
voice but likes music and is clever at it. Eileen amuses her. Of all
the girls she is the only one who has any intellectual curiosity. I do
not think she will remain a Catholic, for she does not seem to have
much religion in her, knows her own mind, and has moreover
stubborn courage. She does not look upon priests with any
different eyes than those with which she looks upon, say, Pappie's
friends or Pappie's self. She once described a certain priest to me
as *don't ye know — a fat chap with queer eyes', and then began to
laugh. I like her.

Eileen^ is older than May. She is very pale, with an expression-
less face and thin fair hair. She would be considered pretty. She is
not clever but her manner is very quick and she is inimitably funny,
even witty. She works very hard in the house and seems to like it,
as she is strong and healthy. She has a good tuneful contralto but
no taste for music.^ She is thoughtless and careless and a greater
favourite than May with those that know her. She very rarely
laughs, generally keeping an expressionless face and making
others laugh. When she laughs she has a contralto's laugh. She
dances lightly.

Poppie is a woman, and has a woman's attractiveness, a beautiful
voice but small when she sings, beautiful eyes, and peculiarly
feminine ways. She has stepped into Mother's place, and though
uneducated and not over-intelligent she is managing by herself to
settle her younger sisters in convents. Pappie gives her no help,
but abuse. Among her duties she accepts that of making the
younger children speak respectfully of Pappie, and her arguments
to this end are charming^ in their inadequacy. She likes music but

^ Eileen, nearly 15, was the second daughter.

2 MS. note: 'Eileen's voice is, I believe, becoming very fine and
developing into a high soprano. Pappie thinks that as his voice first
promised to be a contralto and had depth, that Eileen will be able to make
something of it.'

3 MS. note: 'Ugh! What a word! Goethe fished it up somewhere when
he tried to turn the world into a mutual admiration society. I mean
"funny".'

is not clever at it. She has a good and strange to say strong touch
on the piano. She has learnt that Jim and Charlie whore.

Jim is fickle.

Charlie is going on the stage. Engagement off.

[29 March 1904]

I suggested the title of a paper of Jim's which was commissioned
for a new review to be called Dana in February last. It is now
almost April and the review has not yet appeared.^ The paper — the
title of which was 'A Portrait of the Artist' — was rejected by the
editors Magee ('John Eghnton') and F. Ryan^ because of the sexual
experiences narrated therein — at least this was the one reason they
gave. Jim has turned the paper into a novel the title of which —
* Stephen Hero' — I also suggested. He has written eleven chapters.
The chapters are exceptionally well written in a style which seems
to me altogether original. It is a lying autobiography and a raking
satire. He is putting nearly all his acquaintances in it, and the
Catholic Church comes in for a bad quarter of an hour. I suggested
many of the names for the characters on an onomatopoeic principle.^

Anything I owe to Jim I owe to his example, for he is not an en-
couraging person in criticism. He told me when I began keeping a
diary that I would never write prose and that my diary was most un-
interesting except in the parts that were about him. (Indeed it was
a journal of his life with detailed conversations with him and be-
tween him and Irish men of letters, poets, etc., covering often 3
and 4 pages of close-written foolscap. I burnt it to make a holo-
caust. Perhaps Jim owes something of his appearance to this mir-
ror held constantly up to him. He has used me, I fancy, as a
butcher uses his steel to sharpen his knife.)* He told me I re-
minded him of Gogarty's description of Magee, *that he had to

^ The first issue of Dana appeared in May.

" Frederick Ryan was also secretary of the Irish Theatre Society.

^ MS. note: 'I parodied some of the names: Pappie, "Sighing Simon";
Jim, "Stuck-up Stephen"; myself, "Morose Maurice"; the sister, "Im-
becile Isabel"; Aunt Josephine (Aunt Brigid), "Blundering Brigid";
Uncle Willie (Uncle Jim), "Jealous Jim".'

* 'Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone.' {UlysseSy
London, 1936, p. 199; New York, 1934, p. 208.)

f — t every time before he could think', has written an epiphany of
a sluggish polar bear on me,^ and used to say frequently that I was
a *thick-headed bloody fool', even a 'commonplace youth'. He has
told me when I am listening seriously to what he is telling 'to
please turn my face away as it bored him'. One night when I was
lying on my back in bed thinking of something or another, Jim,
who was watching me from his, said, 'I wouldn't like to be a wo-
man and wake up to find your "goo" (face) on the pillow beside
me in the morning.' Lately he has told me I have a right idea of
writing prose and compared my method with his when he was
young, laughing at his own. He has also told me that he thought I
was wittier than Wilde. Before, I believed him because he was tell-
ing me my opinion of myself ; now I cannot trust his judgment. He
also told me my voice was unpleasant and expressionless, though
many like it very much. No one whose judgment I respect has told
me he liked it, and I cannot help believing Jim as my voice tires
my throat and bores me. Christ hear us, Christ graciously hear us.

Jim reconciled his admiration of Italians and his contempt for
Rossetti by calhng Rossetti an ice-cream Italian.

I called Mr. Kane *the Green Street Shakespeare.'^

It is annoying that I should have a typically Irish head; not the
baboon-faced type, but the large, square, low-fronted head of
O'Connell, and Curran.

Jim seems to have many friends amongst the younger men he
has met.

Charlie's Catholicism is intolerable. He is the spoiled priest to
his finger tips. His talk is all of Father This-body and Father That,
and this Church and that Church, what he said to the Missioner
and how the people were all looking on. He likes to hear himself
criticising priests. Of devotional exercises he talks dogmatically
like one who knows all the tricks of the trade. Fr. Brennan is his
latest model. He puffs like him when speaking.

To May (whom, by her own account, he bores), 'Oh you know'
(puff) *you can make the seven visits without going any further

^ See 'The white mist is falHng in slow flakes', in Epiphanies , ed. O. A.
Silverman, University of Buffalo (New York), 1956.

^ Matthew Kane, clerk in the solicitor general's office, was the model
for 'Martin Cunningham' of Ulysses and Dubliners. Kane was thought to
look like Shakespeare.

than Phibsboro here' (puff), 'without going to a single other
chapel' (puff). *But, of course, you're supposed to go to seven
chapels if you can' (puff). *Nov/ today, for instance' (puff), *I went
etc' I took my candle and went upstairs to bed.

Toet Kinch has a brother called Thug,
His imitator, and jackal, and mug.

His stride like a lord's is

His pretension absurd is
In fact, he's an awful thick-lug.'

Dick Sheehy^ is a regular Dick — the big, footbalhng brother.

I am of that temperament which does not decide in its own case.

J. F. Byrne's^ judgments of people are prejudiced by his desire
to accuse.

Jim has the first character of the hero — strange to say, he is
noble; and the first character of the lyric poet — he is most sus-
ceptible. His affairs have the proper air of reality. His second last
was his cousin Katsy Murray — a child. His present Mary Sheehy.

Mary Sheehy is good looking but ungraceful in figure, and has
a beautiful voice. She is romantic but clever and sensible and
therefore dissatisfied. She wants Hero.

Mrs. Sheehy- Skeffington {nee Hannah Sheehy)^ was till about
27 a student — yet I think she has no sympathy with student life,
and does not understand those disattached personalities, the
world's poets and artists and cranks, the Shakespeares and the
Rimbauds. She is a practical animal and regards as worthless those
who do not work, seeing truly enough that men of that stamp will
not serve the purpose of her and her kind.

Some names fill me with a strange and troubled pleasure.

A medical student by name Sheehan (an oval-faced, under-shod
fellow with a small curly head like an Assyrian king) should be
given a civil list pension for a word with which he has enriched the

^ Of the young members of the hospitable Sheehy family, Richard was
closest to James Joyce.

- J. F. Byrne, in some ways James Joyce's closest friend, is 'Cranly' in
A Portrait of the Artist.

^ Wife of Francis Skeffington, who upon his marriage changed his name
to include that of his wife.

vocabulary — Aquacity.^ He applied it to obvious statements and to
platitudes.

[i2 April 1904]

I loathe my father. I loathe him because he is himself, and I
loathe him because he is Irish — Irish, that word that epitomises
all that is loathsome to me. I loathe him more than I loathe my
Uncle John. He went out today to a funeral at 8.30 and came

[Two leaves lacking in manuscript]
with a pupil scarcely distinct from the iris in a clear white fruit-Hke
ball and a long well-defined eyebrow, an eye Velasquez would have
painted.

Jim says Mary Sheehy seems to him like a person who had a
great contempt for many of the people she knew. He has written
two poems under her inspiration^ but she is ignorant of his
tributes.

1 called J. F. Byrne *the intense face'.

[29 March 1904]

We — Jim, Charlie and I — relieve one another in the house like
pohceman as the girls are not safe in it with Pappie. A few nights
ago, not knowing I was in — I do most of the duty — he attempted
to strike some of them. He catches at the thing nearest to hand — a
poker, plate, cup or pan — to fling at them. This has been the cause
of many rows here. If the children see two of us preparing to go
out, they run up to the third to ask him to stay in. Last night when
I came home from the concert — to go to which by the bye I had to
sell a book and borrow

[A leaf lacking in manuscript]

He asked her was she little Miss Joyce, told [her] to tell her father

^ James Joyce remembered Sheehan's coined word and used it, though
with a different meaning, in Ulysses (London, 1936, p. 634; New York,

1934. p. 657).

2 'What counsel has the learned moon' and 'Lightly come and lightly
go' ; both were later published in Chamber Music.

that Mr. Kettle called. 'You won't forget now — iVlr. Kettle —
what you boil water in.' Baby^ was telling this as a joke, and Eva,
[who] was sitting on the fender at the fire boiling water, said,
'Unfortunately he didn't know that it's Mr. Teapot we boil the
water in.' We have no kettle.

[lo April 1904]

Gogarty is treacherous in his friendship towards Jim. While
never losing an opportunity of 'keeping in touch' with celebrities
to whom he is introduced, he affects to care nothing for them, or
his own reputation, or anyone else's. He affects to be careless of
all things and carries this out by acting generously towards Jim in
regard to money. The other day Yeats, Ryan, Colum and Gogarty
[were] talking and Yeats mentioned a fellow in London who was
making three hundred a year writing short clever articles for some
London paper. 'It is a pity Joyce couldn't get something like that,'
said Ryan. 'He could write the articles all right, but then he
couldn't keep sober for three days together.' 'Why put it at three
days?' corrected Gogarty. 'For one day.' As a matter of fact, Jim
has a reputation altogether out of keeping with his merits. Within
the last two months he has been only once drunk, and showed
signs of drink not more than three times. Nor is he a person that is
easily made drunk, for though he is slight, he is healthy and clear-
headed and not at all excitable. Colum said, 'He is going in for the
Feis Ceoil now. He came over to me to borrow ten shilhngs to
enter. I hadn't it so he was looking all over town for it. At last,*
said Colum, 'we managed to enter him.' Colum had really nothing
to do with Jim's entrance. Jim got the money by selling the ticket
of some of his own books. The truth is, Gogarty — and his mother
believes him — hopes to win a Hterary reputation in Ireland. He is
jealous of Jim and wishes to put himself before him by every
means he can. The carelessness of reputation is the particular he
he has chosen to deceive himself with. Both Gogarty and his
mother are mistaken, however, for Gogarty has nothing in him and
precious little character, and is already becoming hea\T, while
Jim has more literary talent than anyone in Ireland except Yeats —

^ Mabel, age 10, the youngest child.

even Yeats he surpasses in mastery of prose, and he has what
Yeats lacks, a keen critical intellect. If Jim never wrote a line he
would be greater than these people by reason of the style of his
life and his character. Gogarty told Jim this incident but Jim has
such a low opinion of these Young Irelanders it is really beyond
their power to hurt him. If Jim thought there would be a chance of
his getting it he would ask Colum for money tomorrow with no
very definite idea of paying it back. Jim says he should be supported
at the expense of the State because he is capable of enjoying Hfe.
Yet Gogarty has friendship for Jim.

This house should be known as the *House of the Bare Table'.

Shallow Gogarty — *a whirl- wind of pot-belHed absurdities with
a fund of vitaHty that it does one good to see'.^

I think Jim's sense of honour is altogether humoursome.

Gogarty tells Jim's affairs to everyone he knows. He told a
whore called NelHe that Jim was going in for the Feis, and that he
had to feed himself on what he got from books he sold, there was so
little at home. At this Nelhe was astonished, and having taken a
liking for Jim,^ said that if he came in to her she'd give him what-
ever she had, *but you couldn't suggest that to him, he's too in'

proud.' She has a great admiration for Jim's voice and says that he

has *the in' est best voice she ever heard.' 'I could sit Hstening

to you all night. Kiddie.' Having, I suppose, a taste for chamber-
music, she offered to accompany Jim on the 'po' on one occasion
when he was about to sing. Jim, who has never lain with this whore
by the bye, likes her. In moments of excitement she exclaims,
'God's truth I hate you. Christ, God's truth I do hate you.'

[20 April 1904]

Jim is living in lodgings in Shelbourne Rd on money Gogarty
lent him, and Byrne and Russell.

A certain sea-captain Cunniam keeps a pubhc-house in Kings-
town. He is a drunken vulgarian, with an American accent, a
friend of Pappie's. In one of the upper windows of the house a

' MS. note: 'No;, he's very tiresome after the first ten minutes.'
^ Nellie lives on, in A Portrait of the Artist and in the 'Scylla and
Charybdis' episode of Ulysses.

large statue of the Blessed Virgin is conspicuous. I call him
Captain Cunniam of the Shrine in Kingstown.

When there is money in this house it is impossible to do any-
thing because of Pappie's drunkenness and quarrelling. When
there is no money it is impossible to do anything because of the
hunger and cold and want of light.

Pappie seems to think it preposterous that we should expect him
to support us until we are settled.

It is not edifying to hear Pappie even when sober taunt his
children with their deformities. Te dirty pissabed, ye bloody-
looking crooked-eyed son of a bitch. Ye ugly bloody corner-boy,
you've a mouth like a bloody nigger.' 'Ye black-looking mulatto.
You were black the day you were born, ye bitch. Ye bloody,
gummy toothless bitch. I'll get ye a set of teeth, won't I, etc'

I suggested to Jim to call his verses 'Chamber Music'. The
incident with the whore is surely an omen.

My spiritual life has been very slight, but constant.

[20 April 1904]

I am not afraid of Hedda Gabler but I Vv^as when I knew her
first. I think I like her perhaps better than Jim, though I don't
understand her as well. Jim is Eilert Lovberg, and the oracular
authority on Hedda in Britain. She is the highest type of woman I
know.

This is not a diary or a journal written to be kept and possibly —
we are vain in secret — pubhshed. Though it is written carefully,
even painfully, I appreciate that it is badly written because I do
not know myself. These are notes made for my private help.

[2 J April 1904]

I am reading Marie Bashkirtseff 's Journal. What a hotch-potch !
A journal such as that is not worth publishing. I thinly much more
than she does in a day — not unfrequently original matter of im-
portance— and would not consider it worth while putting it in
these notes, much less printing it. She does not know herself and
therefore tells Ues. I lay dow^n the book many times and I try to

know her but it is too troublesome when I do not know mj^self. I
fancy if she had become a singer she w^ould have had the applause
and life she wanted and her other gifts would have adorned her
monument. She was evidently no artist and though singularly
clever she has not the deep^ strong, logical probing of the sane
mind which is intellect. She has written her journal because she
has not the continence to keep silent until she knows herself. She
must have been a fine contralto — for contralto I presume from her
temperament it was. (It was a mezzo-contralto she says later.)

[i6 August 1904Y

1 doubt if I will ever sing well. I have not much voice and I have
a delicate throat. It would want to be saved and well trained and
made the most of — and my temper is too violent for that. Today
I got up at about one — there is no reason why I should get up
earlier. I found my boots gone. I rang for them and was told Poppie
had taken out the laces to give them to Pappie early in the morning.
As both Pappie and Poppie were out and there were no means of
getting laces, I thought I would have to walk about in my socks all
day, unable to go out. I shouted and cursed, thumped the deck and
called for the boots to be brought up anyhow, and bawled out
foolishly that laces must be got somewhere. Eileen and Florrie^
were frightened, and Florrie brought me up my boots gingerly.
My throat felt burning, sore and frayed, and that annoyed me. It
is really unfair when I need so little and keep my things so long,
that that little should not be left with me. Pappie has my coat,
gloves, and laces, Jim my rain cloak and this morning wanted my
hat, and these are clothes that are much older than their own. It
was all over in a few minutes and I was sorry for my unphilosophic
incontinence. I shall tell this to Aunt J.^ when Katsy is there and
obtain absolution — we need confession. Shall I though? No. This
is silly.

^ The date, though out of sequencCj is clear in the manuscript.

2 Florence, age 10 at this date, was the youngest child except for
'Baby'.

^ Josephine Murray was the wife of William Murray, brother of Mrs.
Joyce.

Jim has an irritating trick of disappointing one.

[j April 1904]

In a room I am self-hypnotised. I see only the chair I am going
towards or the person I am talking to in a chaotic fashion. But let
us once go outside in the open air and I take the upper hand.

Padraic MacCormack Colum — the messenger-boy genius.

I am not able [to decide] for myself. My mind suggests too many
by-considerations when I attempt to decide rationally on any
matter.

I feel like a blind man, that is, my outlook on Ufe is not clear.
It is my endeavour to live in a clearer world.

I dislike lies, yet I tell them and often without reason. They
encompass me. Nevertheless it would often be offensive to speak
the truth, and also often too intimate a compliment.

Why should I respect my father, and why, when Jim tells me
how he stood up and left when Uncle Willie confessed to him that
he hated Pappie, should his pride seem to me the working of a
natural and old-fashioned nobility in Jim's perverse and modern
character — and a sign of its aristocracy? I envied him that impulse
for I am envious. And yet Jim called Pappie 'that little whore up
in Cabra' before Elwood^ for selling the piano on him. Pappie's
mind too works towards Jim's with the same backward motion. I
know Jim acted purely on impulse. Is it sometimes noble to act
on prejudice? Or are they stupid? Or am I? If Jim read this he
would probably laugh and throw it at me and say, 'Ye thick-
headed bitch.'

I reject scholarship and reading and adventures — such adven-
tures as one meets with by drinking and going the round of tlie
town, and prefer rather to remain discontented and barren than to
satisfy a false appetite.

My soul is fainting with shame at my want of courage, and lies
to the world by an erect carriage. I stride in my walk but I am
drooping with fatigue in my interior. I have never dared to act as
I please, but think in a Httle way 'what will be thought of it?'

1 John Elwoodj a medical student, is 'Temple' in A Portrait of the
Artist.

G 33

*Will so-and-so be displeased, will so-and-so despise me?' My
manner would be complimentary. Women admire most in a man
moral courage, and I wish most of all to be worthy to be admired,
yet reject the wish itself as unworthy when I have framed it. The
devil's advocate in me taunts me with being my own greatest
tyrant. But I shall act as Httle as possible till I know surely, and I
will not allow myself to be self-forced into extravagances and
imitations of the courageous.

Gogarty is generally regarded as a dangerous companion. He is
scarcely this until he is intimate, but he is certainly a most demora-
lizing person intellectually.

[A leaf lacking in manuscript]

Pappie cannot have been a bad lover when he was newly married
for I notice that his manner of fondling Baby, for instance, is very
playful and endearing. ^

Reflection is my predominate habit. I have the character of a
philosopher, without the strong intellectual curiosity and without
the intellect. I am slow. I dislike getting up in the morning because
rising entails dressing, washing and coldness, and either interrupts
or puts a full stop to my train of thought. Besides, I can think best
in bed. I dislike making beginning, and I dislike reading because
books are so badly written and mostly lies. *Let a man say what he
knows, I have guesses enough of my own.'

I would like to be revenged on my country for giving me the
character I have.

I have been unhappy all day. I find that the cause is I have been
walking on my heels instead of from the ball of my foot.

I am tempted seven times a day to play a part, and others en-
courage me by playing up to me. Let me guard against this and I
may become something worth knowing.

I am not more characterless than most people, indeed quite the
contrary. But I have been so educated that I can make some pre-
tence to an impersonal judgment of myself. I have blushed all over
my body at times at my own ignobility and shrunk from confessing
utmost stupidity. Since sixteen or seventeen I have practically done
nothing except unlearn the Hes I was taught, and I will probably

IMS. note: 'Fudge!*

not be myself until I am close on thirty. 'Know thyself — but if
when I know myself, I should discover I know a self not worth
knowing, what then O Oracle? I will prophesy this of myself,
however, that I will improve with age Hke good wine.

Pappie is jealous for his children at least — a good point.

One thing can be said of Jim's friends — Colum, Byrne, Gogarty,
Cousins^ and those, that they are good Hars. The rest I doubt.

Jim got fourth at the Feis Ceoil tenor solo competition. He did
not try the piece *at sight'. ^

Charlie has been in gaol for drunkenness. The fine was paid
after four days, and he was released. He is in with Jim's medical
friends very much thicker than I ever was — not with Cosgrave^ or
Byrne however. He was something of a hero after this exploit, and
lately has been obviously emulating Jim in drinking and whoring.
He has slept three nights running with a whore in Tyrone St. His
intimacy with the 'medicals' has given him precisely what he most
desired, and has relieved me of society that was always too thirsty
and dissipated for my taste. Not that I don't Hke Elwood, for in-
stance, or that O'Callaghan isn't a good-natured, thick-headed
fellow, but when together they become very boisterous and gross.

J. F. Byrne is a man who never thinks until someone begins to
speak to him. Then he deliberates behind an impenetrable mask
like a Cistercian bishop's face, and one is given to understand great
mental activity. Having spoken, he pretends to infallibility. The
more subtle the conversation becomes, the more brutally he speaks.
He is fond of the words 'bloody' and 'flamin' '. My latest name for
him is 'Thomas Square-toes'.*

Cosgrave and I are much in one another's company of late. We
agree on many things and our minds follow much the same train of
thought. We are intimate, but there is not the faintest trace of
friendship. I must guard against it for fear some should spring up.

^ James Cousins, poet and theosophist, at whose home James Joyce
lived for a short time in the summer of 1904.

^ MS. note: 'His voice was alluded to in the report, though no other
tenor is mentioned.'

^ Vincent Cosgrave, who shared James's dissipations in their university
days and later, is 'Lynch' in A Portrait of the Artist.

* Compare James's sketch of 'Cranly' in the opening of chapter 22 of
Stephen Hero,

I do not wish to be dependent on anyone's mind except on Katsy's.
Friendship with men repells me.

There was never any friendship for Jim in my relations with
him for there was never any real trust.

Katsy has at times a sharp look in her face. This look is common
in a certain class and I disUke it most in women. Miss Wall^er,^ the
actress on the Irish National Theatre Company, who is thought
here and was thought in London to be so beautiful, has it. Mother
had it slightly, and Miss Rathbourne or Mrs. Casey (whichever
she is) has no other expression in her face at any time. The sight of
Miss Rathbourne irritates me. I would turn down a street to avoid
her.

Colum has a gross affectation of manner, an eagerness which is
rendered all the more unpleasant by a hard and hoarse voice. His
gait is hurried and his eyes without lustre. Altogether he is not a
person one would take a fancy to.

MacDonald, a medical student, is I think rarely thirsty, though
Cosgrave says he has the thirstiest face he ever saw. It seems to me
that his mind needs *a pint'. I know a provision m.er chant in
Dorset St. whose mind, in the same way, seems to me to need a
horse's haunches between the shafts before him, and perhaps
Jim's mind needs dissipation.

There is a third Irish national vice besides drunkenness and
masturbation, lying.

When McCormack^ has been singing piano and he lets out his
voice in its full power, it gives you a bang on the ear.

Mrs. Skeffington has a nice little hand and like her sister Mary,
a beautiful voice.

Gogarty's hooked nose and pointed chin and rotund form re-
mind me of Punch. He wears a Punch-built waistcoat.

Elwood has a hectic-coloured, blue-tinted face, with an imma-
ture, shambling deportment like a young recruit. He has a long
head hke a gipsy, Jim says. He is reported to be the best chemist
in the medical school.

Uncle Willie has made two good phrases. He described the

^ Marie Walker (Maire Nic Shibhlaigh).

^ John McCormack, now beginning his rise to fame, had encouraged
James to enter the Feis Ceoil.

aristocracy waltzing at the castle ball as ^looking at one another
like cats'. Describing Georgina Burns singing *I am Titantia' from
'Mignon', he said that she used to sing the runs with extra-
ordinary flexibility and that she hit the last high *C' (I think)
with a note like the smashing of thin glass.

Palmieri^ has written to Jim telhng him that Denza,^ the judge
at the Feis Ceoil, spoke very highly of Jim's voice and said he
would have given him first place but for sight-singing and v/ant of
sufficient training. Palmieri is now training Jim's voice for nothing
and advises Jim to take to concert singing as a profession.

Pride is a good thing for the spinal column.

Aunt Josephine says that Katsy has no secrets from her. If this
is true— I doubt it — Katsy has not yet begun to live.

Pappie is a balking little rat. His idea when he has money is that
he has power over those whom he should support, and his character
is to bully them, make them run after him, and in the end cheat
them of their wish. In his face this is featured in his O'Connell
snout.

I read, like Katsy learning her lesson, to get words. A good
writer uses words justly and I appreciate good writing, but beyond
this what is written is often not meant, and very rarely authorita-
tive.

I fail to see the magnificent generosity in standing a drink, much
less a drink which nobody wants. It is an idle habit — ballast to fill
up empty time and an empty mind. Moreover I understand that
the greater number stand drink at somebody else's expense, Jim
for instance at the expense of anyone he can 'touch', Pappie all his
life at the expense of his wife and children.

The manner in which Uncle Willie tyrannizes his children is to
me an intolerable and stupid cowardice. And yet though not bad or
low at heart, I think, they are most unruly and ill-reared. They are
subdued, even terrorized at home, and regard it as a great pleasure
to be allowed to run about the roads. He is [too] stupid to see that
they will be obedient only so long as they must. Alice told me that
on one occasion Bertie, then an infant of six or seven, begged
Uncle William not to beat him and promised to say a 'Hail Alary'

^ Benedetto Palmieri, leading voice teacher of Dublin, coached James.
^ Luigi Dcnza, composer of 'Funiculi-Funicula'.

for him if he didn't.^ Such appalling cowardice on both sides
nearly made me ill. I laughed as if I had been hurt. His manner of
asking his children to do anything is absolutely boorish.

Sometimes when I am walking with another and talking, I begin
slowly to fear that I am stupid.

CycHsts are my pet aversion. I have an artist's objection to their
bulging thighs and dining-table legs, and an amateur's disHke for
their bent-leg diving and style-less swimming.

Life is becoming very difficult. It seems that one must submit
to a pettifogging mechanical routine and ughness in some form, a
half-witted, mastering incubus.

My character is permeated by suspicion from constantly listen-
ing to Pappie reviling people behind their backs and throwing his
hospitaHty to them in their faces.

Jim considers the music-hall, not Poetry, a criticism on life.

I prefer idling alone, therefore I hate 'knocking about town'.

To any priests who question me about Jim, I shall say he is
studying explosive chemistry preparatory to inventing a new
torpedo, and a little later that he is writing a novel.^

*The thing about Byrne,' according to Jim, is that he is so
daringly commonplace. He can speak Uke a pint.^

Both Jim and Pappie seem to be a Httle proud of having spend-
thrift blood in them. This is a Httle ridiculous in Jim at present, as
he has nothing to spend.

Jim rarely or never acts on principle, yet some fixed ideas in-
fluence his life. I think one of these is an objection to constraint —
even self-constraint, never to force any growth in his soul even
though he consider it good.

The names of Uncle Wilhe or Uncle John do not become my
tongue or pen.

Women like the cruel look in men because they feel that the
spirit which may be cruel to them will also be cruel for them in
times of danger, and moreover that the tigers of wrath are wiser
than the horses of instruction.

1 James used this incident for the ending of his story 'Counterparts*, in
Duhliners.

2 MS. note: 'Rot!'

3 Compare James's sketch of *Cranly' in the opening of Chapter 22 of
Stephen Hero.

My conduct is, I think, as nearly negative as is practical. I refuse
to do anything of definite importance in my life until I have made
a rational interpretation of life a basis for Hving. I appreciate the
fact that if I did anything of consequence and with larger experi-
ence highly disapproved of it, the reaction would be a satisfying
spiritual experience, but I refuse the falsity and artificiahty of such
a course. Therefore I have not whored, for instance.

Few things are so puzzling as the way in which we submit to
dogmatic lies, unless, perhaps, it be the way in which we fail to
grasp the obvious.

I have a habit of listening to my thoughts, which somewhat
destroys their ingenuousness.

One phrase Georgie used to say of Charlie with great conviction
— *0h the stupid ass!'

I called McCormack's voice *a white voice' — it is a male con-
tralto.

My constant endeavour is to be articulate to myself.

I call 7 S. Peter's Terrace, Cabra, *Bleak House'.

[13 July 1904]

About a week ago I went out for a walk with Aunt Josephine and
Katsy. Katsy was very difficult, puUing away from me, pretending
I was hurting her, and seeming to cry — once or twice, I thought,
really on the verge of tears — and was even a little rude without
meaning it. I was disappointed and dissatisfied — dissatisfied with
myself chiefly for being unable to make the wall^ interesting with-
out these tricks. I vented my irritation by being ill-mannered. I
remained silent. In a few minutes Aunt Josephine asked me in her
coaxing manner what was the matter. I said. Oh! nothing at all!'
innocently, and remained silent. 'Ah! he wants to be petted,' said
Katsy as if talking to a baby. This being nearly true — though not
by Aunt J. — did not help me out of my ill humour. Aunt Josephine
said something to Katsy evidently blaming her. I heard, *0h! let
him! He'll get out of it,' but as yet she was only half in earnest.
Here was additional cause. At Annesley Bridge coming home I
spoke for the first time to her and asked her if I was so rough that
she began to cry every time I laid hands on her. She said, 'Oh! I

didn't cry — did I, Mother?' I said good night to them. Katsy was
I beheve very much offended and said I was too huify, that Aunt
Josephine wasn't to mind me, and that she would not go out for a
walk again in the evenings. I met her next day while waiting for
Jim. She answered when I spoke to her but managed to be entirely
[in] different to me. I had an incUnation to stand on my dignity,
while I admired the right instinct which led her to take me up so
quickly. This little girl of fourteen is quite secure in her manner
and very much cleverer than me. I recognised that pig-headed
obstinacy was not an heroic virtue. When I was leaving Cabra it
seemed very easy to admit I was wrong, but it became more diffi-
cult with every step. I was to meet Jim there. He was not there
when I called, and Katsy was not in. She came in later. She shook
hands but did not speak to me directly, and when I tried to look
intimately at her, the slight tendency to a turn was noticeable in
her eyes and she looked down quietly. She went down to some
kittens in the kitchen. I followed her. I went up to her where she
was kneehng at the press, and asked her what was the matter. She
said nothing was the matter. I was silent and kept playing with her
hair. I felt it very hard to say what I should say. I asked, *Do you
think I have been too huffy with you?' 'That is a matter for your-
self.' I was silent again. Terhaps I have been too huffy, Katsy.'
*You should try and correct it in your character,' said Katsy, play-
ing with a kitten. This was more than I expected but I did not stop.
I spoke to her for a long time, asked had I not any reason, said I

would not let a Httle thing like that stand . I partly succeeded,

with difficulty, in keeping my eyes dry and my voice clear. She
spoke more friendly after a while, defending herself,. and would
have put her own *huff ' down to annoyance on Aunt Josephine's
account. I said I was sorry, and later when I said I wanted to see
her that evening and she hesitated, I said, *You don't think I
would be "huffy" (as you put it) with you again?' This was the
nearest I could go. I was sorry I did not directly do what I wanted.
I felt really relieved and happy, much the same as I used to feel
after confession. The next day was her birthday and I made her a
small present. It is a humihating thing to be poor. I would have
liked to have made her a valuable one. There is something in
Katsy which challenges me. I am deeply dissatisfied with myself,

however, for one thing — that I made a clever and I think lying
epigram about it. *It is largely a matter of chance or circumstance
whom men make the instruments of their passion.' I am glad now
I admitted I was wrong. This submission on the emotional plane
seems to have a correspondent on the physical plane in a certain
sexual aberration which once obsessed me.^

I am of that disposition which would keep a trust for the sake of
the keeping, not for the sake of the person trusting.

[23 July 1904]

'There's Katsy!' I saw her tonight from the Annesley Bridge.
She ran quickly across the road in the dark and back again. I
started at the sight of her. I had been sullen all night. She could not
know I was there and saw her. Where did she go? Into Elmore's,
run out on her last message before going to bed? No, into my heart
and scuttled round it and out again, the little mouse.

I am trying to be wise, and when I cannot be so, trying to
pretend that I am.

I have a habit of making up my mind one way and from weakness
of will, want of courage, or stupidity, acting another.

I am dehghted with what I have discovered. Katsy did not tell
Aunt J. how I apologised or that I did. This loyalty is high flattery.
I did not ask her not to, and she is a talkative little girl who has
no secrets from her Mother. Moreover they talk a lot about us at
Murrays and this incident is sure to have been well analysed.

Jim treats me in a very cavalier fashion.

Aunt Josephine has been very 'mopish' in her manner towards
me lately, as if she meant to let me see how indifferent she is as to
how her manner affects me.

I have spent the month (July) suffering from people's manners.

Virginian stock has a familiar name, 'Night-stock.' I think this
would be a fine fragrant name for whores.

Why should lowness of character be any more blame-worthy
than lowness of stature? Are we responsible for one and not for the
other? Why should not greatness, self-constrained in a httle mind,

^ MS. note: 'This incident now seems to me sentimental, ridiculous,
and to have been put on paper before it was understood.'

be as ridiculous as an assumption of stature in the gait of a little
man?

I admire maturity.

[23jfuly 1904]

Charlie is in hospital — in the Whitworth Hospital — with inci-
pient tuberculosis of the pleura of the lung. It is self-induced. I do
not like to have to go and see him, yet I pity him. I did not appre-
ciate a fine or great character in him healthy. He did not interest
me in any one particular way. Why should he now that he is in
danger of a life-destroying disease? He remains Charlie. When I
think of his chances in life, not merely material prospects, but
chances of overthrowing the kingdom of boredom, of winning
happiness — a quickening interest in life and the interest, self-
unrebuking, of others that attends it — of loving and winning love
upon the peaks of promise, I see that they are small, and I cannot
regard his possible death as a calamity. But I know how pitiful it
would be, for I know with what tenacious blindness we hug our
Httle curs of lives. Perhaps his vanity — a life-lie — might let him
live. It is a poor card.

How can I say that I like Poppie when I see that her life is with-
out purpose and without interest. She moves me only to compare
her hopeless hfe to mine. What is the virus of her disease? A
forced virginity? Yet I know the unselfish, patient goodness of her
character. Is she not wishing really that what substitutes a purpose
in her Hfe may be taken away, if she wishes that a steady income
may sweep away our difficulties? I have Uved as a sucker on the
resources of the family and she has suffered thereby, but I am
looking for the life that fits me. Why should I hmp about in a life
too small for me, like a man wearing tight boots?

Somebody said that Jim was very determined. Jim denied saying
that like a wise man he was determined by circumstances.

My mind is old.

[j August 1904]

May was let out from Mountjoy St. Convent for today — Mon-

day, August the first. 1 think she has become a little stupider, Vm
sure she has become fatter. But I was bored all day, bored because
I had not Katsy, or was not with her. I found out the reason early
in the day. I was bitterly disappointed on the 19th July because I
could not go to a Regatta with Katsy. Katsy was dressed in a Hght
summer dress. It was a bright day and I like Regattas in the sun,
but above all I like Katsy. I was bitterly disappointed and the
bitterness is in me still. ^

[31 July 1904]

Last night, Sunday night, I was more boisterous than usual and
then became silent. I was put out because [of] Poppie and Eileen
being there. Katsy went all night with Eileen. They ran past
quickly on the path and Katsy turned her face to me laughing. I
felt as if she was trampUng over my liking for her Hke a charge of
cavalry. Alice^ said something had annoyed me, and would not
believe me though I told her, *No,' I was not annoyed.

Mr. Matthew Kane — whom I nick-named the 'Green St.
Shakespeare' — has been drowned in Dublin Bay.^ I am sorry be-
cause this throws Pappie more on me. Pappie depends much on his
friends to pass his hours now that his life is Uved.

Chopin is a favourite musician of mine; he is, perhaps, the
genius of Poland. This is only a guess, however, for I know very
Uttle of the PoUsh people. To me his music expresses a deep,
melodious melancholy, or with formal but most supple grace, a
cold briUiant revelry; and these, I gather, are the features of the
character of an aristocracy, to whom, because of several conditions
of life, a naturally despondent temper, and a dark, proud hatred of
the power that has overcome them, dancing nightly with haughty
and elaborate pleasure is Hfe.

When Jim is away I am not so much lonely as alone.

Jim says that his ambition in Ufe is to burn with a hard and
gem-like ecstacy. Mine is then — it would be said — to burn with a
hard and Jim-like ecstacy.*

^ For an expanded rendering of this incident, see pp. 108-110.
2 Katsy's sister.

* The drowning is mentioned in the 'Ithaca' episode of Ulysses.

* MS. note: 'After Pater.'

The people I hate most are those in whom I see a caricature of
myself.

Others who act fooUshly or in a low maimer fall beneath them-
selves; I fall back.

I feelj at times, like one who is sick but doesn't know it.

Strangely enough in one whom science irritates and wearies, the
subject which most interests me is semi-scientific — energy.

I am tormented by a longing to please and to be liked. I am
painfully sensitive and httle things sting me like a whip. O Anger,
leave me a Httle peace !

I called Katsy once 'my sly saint'. She looked at me mockingly
and said, ' "Your sly saint" ! I like that! What dog died, may I ask,
and left you anything?' The phrase is not coarse in her mouth, it is
a phrase in their house. Aunt J., who was there, laughed; I laughed
and went on talking again. I was checked and hurt but I did [not]
let it be seen. It would be ridiculous to inflict my sensitiveness on
others. I did not call her 'my sly saint' again, because I did not
want to have the incident repeated.

My mind is discontented because I do not know whether I love
Katsy. My judgments when I dislike or disapprove seem to me
sincerer and truer than my judgments when I Hke or approve.

Byrne is not near as clever nor half as sane as Cosgrave, but I
think there is more in him, that his mind is of a higher type. He
wears endless discontent like a hair-shirt, and is deeply dissatisfied
with himself.

I think all my confessions when in the Church must have been
bad, as in none of them was I ever revealed to myself.

I am trying to be spiritually free.

Many people have suffered as much as Jesus to gain that free-
dom of spirit the right to which Katsy is wilhng to resign in be-
coming a nun.

I like Katsy because I think w^hen she is a woman she will live.^

I admire in Pappie, at times, an unspoken, absolutely unangered
contempt for his interlocutor. It witnesses a complete superiority
and is quite without pity.

The banjo has a comic, nasal voice.

1 MS. note: *That is, I like her for the possibilities which I think are
in her.'

I can imagine an original style of criticism by pointing the stops
on which the organist is playing. In a novel, for instance, such a
phrase as, 'He was a man slightly over the average height.' Or in
Henry J Simts' Portrait of a Lady^ such a sentence as, 'Under certain
circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the
hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.'

I have a number of wooden ideals lying rejected in the lumber-
room of my brain.

Is thought the motion of grey matter in the head, or is it
dependent on but distinct from that motion, just as life is
dependent on the action of the heart but is yet not a heart-beat nor
a succession of them?

Gogarty acts on ill- formed, hastily conceived theories of conduct
and thereby causes not a little inconvenience to his friends. As he
was once a champion cycHst, I called him 'Last-lap Gogarty'.
Need I say that his theories never work out against himself.

Jim, who once considered that J. F. Byrne had signs of genius
in him, now thinks he has been very much mistaken. He calls him
*His Intensity' and 'the sea-green incorruptible', and says he is the
only man to play the comedy with him (Jim).

The possession of money changes Jim very much for the worse.
His mind seems to go on fire for dissipation, and he becomes
hasty, overbearing, and impolite. His dissipation has disimproved
him greatly. His mind has become a little vulgarised and even
brutalised and insincere.

Pappie is trying to escape from the boredom of his life. This is
the cause of his tears really if he only knew it.

The catechism remarks that St. Paul says of apostates, that 'it is
impossible for them to be renewed again to penance', that is, their
conversion is extremely difficult. It asks, 'Why is the conversion of
apostates so very difficult?' Answer : 'The conversion of apostates
is very difficult because by their apostacy they sin against the Holy
Ghost, crucify again the Son of God, and make a mockery of him.'
This wholesale begging of [the] question and neat shutting to of a
false door, so that others may be deceived as to how the free ones
escaped, are an admirable mixture of simpUcity and roguery and
very typical of the CathoUc Church.

How am I to live? Not gain an income, not educate myself, be-

come clever — but how to eradicate boredom? I reflect my thoughts
on paper so that I may know my state, but I must operate on my-
self. I must do something. I must know myself and the life that fits
me, and act rightly out of my true character. But I fear I shall
ultimately remain what I was born.

A master in Belvedere College said I was talking heresy once
when I declared that I did not think any act was ever inspired by
a simple motive. He said I should believe that Christ died for the
pure love of us. I remained silent.

Pappie has been drunk for the last three days. He has been
shouting about getting Jim's arse kicked. Always the one word. *0
yes! Kick him, by God! Break his arse with a kick, break his
bloody arse with three kicks! O yes! Just three kicks!' And so on
through tortuous obscenity. I am sick of it, sick of it. I have a dis-
position like a woman, and I am sick of this brutal insistence on
indignity. I writhe under it. I try to regard [it] as drunken, drivel-
ling Up-excrement, but it is too strong for me. Ugh ! It is a word
that is scarcely ever out of Jim's mouth. He has been remarked for
it and playfully accused of being a bugger because of the way he
pronounces it.

Oh how it shamed me! What a sinking of the heart it gave me to
hurry down at nine in the morning amongst a number of other
clerks to my office! To my office! Ugh!

I love Ustening to barrel-organs, not to piano organs. They have
such quaint old airs and they grind them so slowly. They remind
me of the south of France, of oranges, of Spain, that I want to Hve
in.

[75 August 1904]

My Ufe has been modelled on Jim's example, yet when I am
accused, by my unprepossessing Uncle John or by Gogarty, of
imitating Jim, I can truthfully deny the charge. It was not mere
aping as they imply, I trust I am too clever and my mind too old
for that. It was more an appreciation in Jim of what I myself really
admire and wish for most. But it is terrible to have a cleverer elder
brother, I get small credit for ariginahty. I follow Jim in nearly all
matters of opiuioii, but not al], Jim, I think, has even taken a few

opinions from me. In some things, however, I have never followed
him. In drinking, for instance, in whoring, in speaking broadly, in
being frank without reserve with others, in attempting to write
verse or prose or fiction, in manner, in ambitions, and not always
in friendships. I think I may safely say I do not like Jim.^ I perceive
that he regards me as quite commonplace and uninteresting — he
makes no attempt at disguise — and though I follow him fully in
this matter of opinion, I cannot be expected to Uke it. It is a matter
beyond the power of either of us to help. He treats me badly, too,
in his manner, and I resent it. I shall try to remember the articles
of the creed which I have gathered from Jun's life — the individual
life that has influenced me most. He has ceased to beUeve in
Catholicism for many years. It is of Uttle use to say that a man re-
jects Catholicism because he wishes to lead the life of a libertine.
This is not the last word that can be said. Libertinism will, doubt
it not, be clever in its own defence. To me one is as likely to be near
the truth as the other. There is need of a more subtle criticism, a
more scientific understanding, a more satisfactory conviction than
is given by such a wholesale begging of the question. Begging
questions is a habit with Catholicism. Jim wants to Hve. Life is his
creed. He boasts of his power to live, and says, in his pseudo-
medical phraseology, that it comes from his highly speciaHzed
central nervous system. He talks much of the syphilitic contagion
in Europe, is at present writing a series of studies in it in Dubhn,
tracing practically everything to it. The drift of his talk seems to be
that the contagion is congenital and incurable and responsible for
all manias, and being so, that it is useless to try to avoid it. He even
seems to invite you to delight in the manias and to humour each to
the top of its bent. In this I do not follow him except to accept his
theory of the contagion, which he adduces on medical authority.
Even this I do slowly, for I have the idea that the influence of
heredity is somewhat overstated. Yet I am rapidly becoming a
valetudinarian on the point. I see symptoms in every turn I take.
It seems to me that my central nervous system is wretched, and I
take every precaution my half-knowledge suggests to revive it. In
his love of Hfe I find something experimental, something aestlieti-
cal. He is an artist first. He has too much talent to be anything else.
^ MS. note: 'See later' [i.e. pp. 63 and loij.

If he was not an artist first, his talent would trouble him constantly
like semen. For the things that go to make up life, glory, pohtics,
women (I exclude whores), family wealth, he has no care. He seems
to be deceiving himself on this point and it gives his manner a
certain untrustworthiness and unpleasantness. His nature is
naturally antagonistic to morality. MoraUty bores and irritates him.
He tries to live on a principle of impulse. The justification of his
conduct is the genuineness of the impulse. The Principle is itself
an impulse, not a conviction. He is a polytheist. What pleases him
for the moment is his god for the moment. He demands an absolute
freedom to do as he pleases. He wants the freedom to do wrong
whether he uses it or no, and for fear he should be deceiving him-
self by any back thought he is vindicating his right to ruin himself.
He accepts no constraint, not even self-constraint, and regards a
forced growth, however admirable in itself, as an impossible
satisfaction. This kind of life is naturally highly unsatisfactory and
his conduct bristles with contradictions. For instance, he practises
exercises for the voice regularly; he works at his novel nearly every
day saying that he wants to get his hand into such training that
style will be as easy to him as singing. The inconsistency might
itself be called an impulse but that he mentions both practices as
proofs of the power to do regular work that is still in him. Above aU,
he has spoken with admiration of Ibsen as a *self-made man' —
partly of course for the pleasure of using this formula of common-
placeness of so singular a man.^ I find much to puzzle me and to
trouble me in the antinomy between the Exercise Monopoly and
idea of systematically improving myself — by becoming a scientific
humanist (laws which I loathe but which seem my only hope) — and
the Principle of Simple Impulse, which pleases me greatly and which
seems to me to be the right First Principle in regarding life because
the most natural. (^Natural' suggests a private judgment of my own
on Hfe. I think the art of life should imitate nature.) I live in a state
of intimate and constant dissatisfaction because this Principle seems
logically unpracticable. In the love of Philosophy I have not fol-
lowed Jim, I forestalled him. I even tried, between sixteen and

1 MS. note: 'He reconciles this impulsiveness with an exalted opinion
of Philosophy. He upholds Aristotle against his friends, and boasts him-
self an Aristotelean.'

seventeen, to write a Philosophy (I suppose it would have been
called a Metaphysic), but having written about nine pages of it and
finding that my interpretation of life was a little too simple to be
interesting, I burnt the leaves. To say that any course of action is
irrational is enough to condemn it in my eyes, but unfortunately
not enough to make me dislike it. Indeed, saying that it is rational
seems perilously like saying it is commonplace. Mediocrity is a
poor relative of mine that *I can't abear'. The golden mean is as
abhorrent to me as to Jim. It will be obvious that whatever method
there is in Jim's life is highly unscientific, yet in theory he approves
only of the scientific method. About science he knows 'damn all',
and if he has the same blood in him that I have he should disUke it.
I call it a lack of vigilant reticence in him that he is ever-ready to
admit the legitimacy of the scientist's raids outside his frontiers.
The word 'scientific' is always a word of praise in his mouth. I,
too, admire the scientific method, but I see that it existed and was
practised long before science became so churlish as it is now. On
one point allied to this I differ with him altogether. He wishes to
take every advantage of scientific inventions, while I have an un-
conquerable prejudice against artifice — outside special appliances
and instruments. Bicycles, motor-cars, motor- trams and all that,
seem to me wanton necessities, the pampering of an artificial want.
As for such sensual aids as Herbert Spencer's ear-caps, they seem
to me most revoltingly mean and undignified. And to Jim, too, I
have forced him to admit. Even from an inventor's point of view,
I am sure they are wretched, for there is a great disproportion
between the end effected and the means taken.

Jim boasts — for he often boasts now — of being modern. He calls
himself a socialist but attaches himself to no school of sociahsm.
He marks the uprooting of feudal principles. Besides this, and that
subtle egoism which he calls the modern mind, he proclaims all
kinds of anti-Christian ideals — selfishness, Hcentiousness, pitiless-
ness. What he calls the domestic virtues are words of contempt in
his mouth. He does not recognise such a thing as gratitude. He
says it reminds him of a feUow lending you an overcoat on a wet
night and asking for a receipt. (Gratitude is, after all, such an un-
comfortable sentiment — thanks with a grudge at the back of it.)
As he lives on borrowing and favours, and as people never fail to

D 49

treat him in their manners as a genius while he treats them as fools,
he has availed himself of plenty of opportunity of showing in-
gratitude. It is, of course, impossible for him to carry out his ideas
consistently, but he does the best he can.^ He says that no man has
so much hope for the future as he has, but as he is the worst liar I
know, and as he is rapidly acquiring a drunkard's mind, he seems
so far as his own possible progeny is concerned to have precious
little care for it. Catholicism he has appreciated, rejected and
opposed, and liked again when it had lost its power over him; and
towards Pappie, who, too, represents feudaHsm to him, his mind
works perversely. But his sense of filial honour, as of all honour,
is quite humoursome. What is more to the point is this: why
should Jim proclaim his own selfishness, and be angry at the
selfishness of others toward him? I am so far with Jim in all this
that his idea of modernity is probably a corollary of my theory of
genius being a new biological species. I have many theories. And,
moreover, I find something stodgy and intrinsically imsatisfying in
moraUty.

Many things he has expressed I remember, for they seemed to
me to be just while they seemed to suit me. His contempt, for
instance, for enthusing, for strenuousness, for flirting and senti-
mentality, which he says he leaves to clerks. (He walks out at night
with Miss Barnacle, and kisses her, while she calls him *my love',
though he is not a clerk.) He has said that what women admire
most in men is moral courage, and that people are unhappy because
they cannot express themselves, and these things I recollect and at
times consider, and though they seem small, they affect me
greatly. This is Jim's reUgion — his faith is probably a Httle
different — so far as I can draw up its articles. The experiment of
his life has, I think, less personal interest now than formerly,
though he is still capable of holding judgment on himself with a
purity of intention altogether beyond my power. Yet should he
discover that his interest was mainly experimental, he would con-
sider it an unpardonable self-deception to try to infuse into it a
personal anxiety. He is in great danger of himself. I see the way his
conduct prevaricates to an unsatisfied mind. He has not the com-

^ MS. note: 'In fact he is trying to commit the sin against the Holy
Ghost for the purpose of getting outside the utmost rim of CathoHcism.'

mand of himself he once had. He has been in the power of his
friends lately, and has needed to be rescued by Cosgrave's in-
strumentality from them. A year ago he would have rescued him-
self. He has always read these notes, for there was always much in
them about him, and if I was calhng them anything I would call
them *My journal in imitation of Jim', but I think his influence on
me is becoming less than it was. August 1904.

May is beginning to live. She has been asking Katsy has she
changed — changed in manner she meant. Katsy said she didn't
see any change in her. May said she thought she had become
horrible in her manner — stupid you know. The Murrays think
May clever. She is clever.

My diary is not very startlingly frank, for I am not over-
communicative even to myself.

Woman admire originaHty almost as well as moral courage, and
I think they Hke it not less.

I am incongruously envious. I envy Jim, for instance, what
Catholics would call *the purity of his intentions'. His manner,
his appearance, his talents, his reputation I do not envy him. When
I do envy him anything — the strength of his emotions, the beauty
of his mind at times, his sense of honour, his pride, his spon-
taneity— I do so impersonally. I do not really envy him but his
state of mind.

Miss Barnacle has a very pretty manner, but the expression
of her face seems to me a Httle common. She has magnificent
hair.

There is one thing which will save me, though I change ever so
much, from becoming absolutely commonplace. I shall always
regard hfe as an activity of the spirit, which is capable of yielding
spiritual satisfaction. I shall always regard this spiritual satisfaction
as the highest good, and shall never accept life as a disciphnary
habit which may be made more or less pleasant.

I have nick-named myself 'II Penseroso'.

I think Meredith's tide One of Our Conquerors would apply very
well to the priests in Ireland.

One of my chief reasons for keeping these notes is to prevent
myself becoming stupid.

Jim has a face like a scientist. Not an old fumbler like Huxley

or Tyndall, but like one of those young foreigners — like Finsen or
Marconi.

Have you ever hummed all day an air you loathed? Have you
ever been unable to rid yourself of it no matter how you tried?
Have you ever thought thoughts you loathed and been unable to
silence them in you no matter how you loathed yourself for them?
We are no more responsible for these thoughts than for our dreams.
Yet we do not hold ourselves guiltless.

[6 January 1904Y

'There is a man who lives in Cork,
A man of great renown.
Because he has a maxim which
He preaches round the town.
He's been a family doctor ever
Since his very 'teens.
But he made his great discovery when
A student at the Queen's.'

*0 Dr. Dooley! O Dr. Dooley!

The nation owes a great big debt to you.

For "It's masturbation

That kills a nation,"

Said Dr. Dooley-ooley-ooley-00.'^

Poppie is the most unselfish person I know. She is obstinate and
incUned to answer back a great deal, but she is gentle and takes the
affairs of the house very much to heart. She seems to wish, if any-
one is to suffer, that she should be the victim. What an extra-
ordinary sense of duty women have !

Jim cares nothing, he says, what others think of him, yet I know
his pride must suffer from being subjected to their manner as much
as I do.

1 am always talking within myself, sometimes struggling to
word thoughts, sometimes, most frequent! 5^, remembering music,

^ The date, far out of sequence, is probably that of his hearing the
verse.

2 MS. note: 'A nasty fact not cleverly parodied.'

sometimes repeating mechanically phrases and rhymes which are
often without even a shadow of meaning. Often some trifling in-
cident is the genesis of a long rambling adventure of which I am
the hero, till I suddenly return on myself and see my foohshness,
and feel myself left naked to the ridicule of the normal mind with-
out, and my habitual self-contempt within. Sometimes within
myself and not quite spontaneously I take up the phrases of the
passers-by as they meet, and curse at them. 'O, how are ye?' 'Very
well, thank you, ye drink-sodden, foetid-souled clown!' Or, 'Ah,
is this yourself?' 'Who the devil else should it be, ye Httle clerk!
Ye consummate common cad! Ye dapper Httle bastard!' And at
times becoming suddenly silent within, I feel like one who, walking
at night noisily along a road singing and whistHng to himself, stops
suddenly to listen.

Aunt Josephine tells me I underrate myself and that I am not
an egoist. The fact that I think so constantly about myself should
prove to her that I am. Yet I take myself at Jim's valuation of me,
because it is my own, perhaps.

At any crisis of his life, in any times of importance, in times
when he has money and notoriety, Jim's Hfe separates from mine.
When these have passed after a while, we seem to come together
again. Etje nCenfou^je reste dans mon trou.

[6 August 1904]

A few days ago Jim, as is his custom, read these notes of mine.
He read them quickly and threw them down without saying a
word. I asked him did he finish them. He said, 'Yes.' 'Did you read
them all?' I asked with intention. *0 yes,' said Jim with a short
laugh at his own frankness, 'all except the part between yourself
and Kathleen.' What he impHed seemed to me true, so I said noth-
ing, but I may tell that my secret soul was wounded. When Jim
had gone, after some time, I took up the notes and read that part
again. ^ It did not bore me.

I number among the happiest moments of my Hfe those moments
when, as a child locked into a dark room, I ceased from crying and
listened to the strange noises downstairs of talk and the clatter of

^ See pp. 39-41.

plates of the rest of the family at dinner late in the evening.

Cosgrave paid me a very high compliment in conversation to
Jim in my absence. There was some question as to whether Jim was
in love or not. Cosgrave told him he was, and that this love was the
first of a hundred and that it would not last. He told him that he
was not the man to be the protagonist of such a love as the novelists
speak off — one love enduring forever — that if any man he knew was
capable of this it was I.

I have been paid many compliments — by Aunt Josephine and
by Cosgrave. I have been told that some prefer me to Jim. Before
one's face praise comes always a little insincere, but when the
words are told me and I respect the person I am grateful as for a
gift. Yet I think no more of myself for that, being convinced,
however much I may esteem his judgment, that in my case it is at
fault. I am not sure but I think a little less highly of him because
he has a high opinion of me. This is truth. (The first in whom I
was conscious of this disappointment was Fr. Henry, who was
Rector of Belvedere and my master for some years. Dempsey, the
EngHsh master with whom I was very familiar — told me he had a
very high opinion of me. *High opinion of me in what respect?'
*In every respect,' said Dempsey. I was genuinely surprised that a
man of his discernment should make such a mistake, and I began
to remember certain incidents which should have undeceived
him.)^ When I despise the person — as in the case of Bergan^ — I
set no value on his good opinion, yet I cannot deny that it pleases
me. I see that it is often only a way of saying that he is afraid of
Jim — we are, of course, constantly compared in their minds — that
it is often insincere, and that it is always a reproach, since what he
considers good must to my thinking be undistinguished and vulgar.
The opinions of me that I am inclined to trust are those into which
people are surprised, for I know that when they set about giving an
opinion they cannot really say what is on their minds. Therefore I
trust more Jim's exclamations or an incident like this. One night,
some years ago at Sheehy's, we were playing a game called the

1 MS. note: 'Generally, too, I come to the conclusion that I am a good
hypocrite.'

2 Alfred Bergan, a friend of John Joyce, appears under his own name in
Ulysses.

'School for Scandal'. The game consists in someone going out, and
everyone in the room saying something about him. He has to guess
who said the different things. It is an amusing game. This time
Dick Sheehy was out and Maggie was taking down the remarks.
When she came to me I said that Dick was elephantine in wit and
in person. Maggie wrote it down, looked at me for a second, and
then said confidently, *0h, he'll never think you said that!' I said
nothing. The quite Parisian compliment passed unnoticed, but I
noticed that she was betraying the opinion of me which was held
there when I was thought of. I have at least this character of the
observer. I have a memory for compliments and their opposites. I
confess I find all this obstinate self-distrust very tiresome.

What use is all this writing to me when, for instance, there is no
dinner in the house? I ask myself this question but I do not face
the answer. What use are my thoughts to me when they do not
make me either distinguished or clever, and do take up that time
which I might spend in such a way as to gain a competency and
win security? I do not see why I should renounce them and am not
sure that I could do so even if I wished. It would seem like the
renouncing of ambition. I have had two strange impulses lately.
One was to try to make money, the other to give up my struggle to
be anything but commonplace. The idea of suicide has never been
anything more to me than a philosophic contingency.

I persuaded Jim once to read Turgenieflf's Diary of a Superfluous
Man, for I had an idea about it. I asked him what he thought about
it. He said he thought the man very like me. This was my idea too.
Can anyone blame me for taking Jim's valuation of me when we
agree so well about it independently?

I want to be washed and left out to air — washed inside though.
I seem to have toad-blood in me. I have never been either virginal
or spontaneous, ingenuous or boyish. The springs of happiness are
soiled and sickened in my sick mind.

I have sympathy with Dean Swift. His sullen and saturnine
character, consumed with dull rage against his people, has much in
it that I fully understand. Yeats says that he made a soul for the
gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbour as himself If the
Irish had as deep-rooted and constant a loathing of England as I
have of Ireland, there would be no need for agitation.

Yeats, by the bye, says also very wittily that the Irish think in
packs.

They are all asking me, *What is the matter with me?' *What's
wrong with me?' I hardly know.^ I am in doubt and have some idea
of holding an inquiry in camera, I do not trust people's minds
towards me and I do not like anyone sufficiently well to speak to
them what is in my mind. What could I say to them in any case?
How dull and uninteresting such a talk would be! I ask myself
whether I am not deceiving myself and the other when I show
affection, and this doubt leaves my manner uncertain. I do not
please myself when I laugh and talk with them. I am oppressed by
the want of understanding myself and many other matters. I feel
barren and ungenerous, dissipated and stupid, but I am less dissa-
tisfied with myself when I am silent.

I like very much a portrait of a young noble by Sanchez Coello,
a Spanish painter of the sixteenth century.

It seems to me that much of the mystical discussion between wri-
ters— especially moderns — comes from their imperfect expression
of their thoughts or their unwilHngness to develop them patiently.

Antiquity is a time of which old men, being given but scanty and
malleable knowledge about it, amuse themselves like children
making theories and building commonwealths. It is an unpardon-
able credulousness to mistake these for anything but imaginary
histories.

Death is a very complete ending, an irrelevant, unanswerable,
brutal argument, a decision at last in an unready Hfe. There will be
the memory of me when I am gone, for a Httle while. What good is
remembrance to me? I shall not remember. The additions to my
life and knowledge were daily getting longer, but death has drawn
two neat red lines under them and written down nought as total.
But the sinking at the end, the fainting, the ecstatic weakness, the
surrender, the cowardly knowledge that nothing more can be ex-
pected of you — this indeed is a consummation devoutly to be
wished for. What if only we could gain something greater than hfe
by Hving?

1 MS. note: *When they ask me coaxingly what has annoyed me I am
angered, because my silence seems without reason. I tell them "Nothing"
— the truth — but they do not beUeve me and begin to treat me sulkily.*

The Irish are morally a cowardly, chaos-loving people, quarrel-
some and easily deceived, dissipated in will and intellect, and
accustomed to masters, with a profitless knowledge of their own
worthlessness, which causes them constantly to try to persuade
themselves and others that they are what they are not. The lying,
untrustworthy, characterless inhabitants of an unimportant island
in the Atlantic.

The Inquisitive, the Mnemonic, and the Rational and Deduc-
tive Faculties — a trial division of the human intellect.

In Chopin's waltzes the mood is weary and languorous, but the
melody seems to have a separate brilHancy.

I remember the morning I finished the House of Sin — a damp,
yellow morning. The book satisfied me quite, and left me a per-
sonal sadness. I went out into the garden. It was humid there. The
black earth of the path was flecked under the trees with shade and
light. The disc of the sun was large, brimming over with rich,
yellow, melting light falling on the ground in heavy drops. There
was little noise, for the carts made no rumbhng along the soft
road and the voices of children did not carry far.

I remember also a scene of my disappointment. Pappie had
asked Uncle WiUie up. I was expecting *an evening'. Aunt Jose-
phine came. Uncle Willie was to follow her if he could, she said. I
persuaded Pappie to come with me down to Fairview and bring
Uncle Willie up. This although I disliked Uncle Willie, but so that
Pappie would have someone to talk to. Alice answered the door at
Maria Terrace and told us Uncle WiUie had gone out. Pappie had
been prophesying this all the way down, but he pretended to
believe and left word what he had called for. The truth was, Uncle
Willie had some writing to do at home, but besides he was envious
of the house, I think, and has disliked Pappie himself secretly since
first he knew him I am sure. He had taken offence at some trifle,
which I forget and I am sure he does in much the same way as I do
with him. Not so cleverly, I fancy, for people beheve me. I am
more just to him in my mind however. The incident was one of
those little things that irritate. We came home by the North Circu-
lar Road. It was a rainy Sunday evening about October, and at
Mountjoy the pavement was wet and shining, reflecting the street
lamps, and in the sky was one soiled rag of iridescent satin-white

in a black storm-cloud. They were at tea when we came in. Pappie
went in to the fire in the drawing-room. I went in to tea and told
them Uncle Willie was out when we called. They said it was a pity,
and after that had been said two or three times there was a momen-
tary silence. Then Aunt Josephine made the obvious remark, *I
don't believe he was.' 'Neither do 1/ said I simply, but the laugh
I caused did not dispel my disappointment.

I remember other scenes but the emotion they suggest is too
sHght and too long to tell — a cold night, the lamps of the trams and
the street lamps shining very brightly, the stars veiled in an in-
cense of haze — a clear cold night of wind-blown stars, the road
and the low walls stretching over the hill very white between green
fields — the hushed sound of continuous falling rain, broken by the
separate splashes of heavy drops on the sill of the open window.

I have lent the first part of my diary [to] Aunt Josephine. Charlie
used to tell her all his boring mind and his worse verse, Jim tells
her practically everything, and here am I now. Such conduct,
somehow, seems to me very boorish and trying. In her place I
should be heartily sick of all three — no, not of Jim, perhaps. Such
a surly discontented production as my journal is, is no reading to
offer anyone. To be sure I was asked — even pressed — to give it.

I have a strange sentiment towards Jim of late, a sentiment I would
not have been capable of feeUng a year ago, a sentiment of pity.

I find 'like' almost as difficult to understand as 'love'. Is it that
one finds nothing very objectionable to him in a character and
something that pleases? I do not understand my own impulses of
liking and disliking, of obstinacy or sycophancy, but I try to under-
stand them and I try to purify them with reason. ...

[26 July 1904]

I have been happy this evening — quietly, observantly happy —
happy without having done [any] violence to my mind to attain
my happiness. We have had very Httle food — no meal at all in fact
— and having taken some tea and dry bread, I washed and went
out. Pappie came in sober, without money, and in ill-humour, just
as I was coming down stairs. I heard him threatening to put me
out. I was inchned to be irritated, as we are this way through his

having spent £2 105. on himself in the last ten days. I began to
curse him but I found it easy after a few seconds to whistle instead.
Why should I trouble myself about this matter? When there is
money he will spend all he can and reel home drunk in the evening,
and when there is not he will blame everyone but himself I went
out. It had been raining heavily an hour or so before and the air
was sharp. The foot-path and the fa9ades of the houses were rain-
washed and drying in patches. I took pleasure in observing the
contrasts in colour — a study in grey. The dark grey of the church,
the grey of the side-walk, the terra-cotta colour of the houses, the
freshened green of the clipped grass in the gardens and of the
leaves on the trees at the end of them, each holding a drop in its
centre, the grey — dark and light — of the dresses of the women
passing under them. The road was quiet and busy with trams and
many people walking quickly. I took pleasure in the sameness of
colour in the streets I went through, marking the slight change. The
stone roadway and path now almost dry, the dark brown houses
with one startling colour — the bright yellow front of a dairy — the
druggists at the corner of the crossing in front, with dark ivy
climbing over the house above the shop, suburban but pretty, the
fading dusky sun reflected from behind me on the faces of the
people. My mind was at rest for a while, my moral malaise was
gone from me. I had no wish for the things that trouble me and
unsettle me, nothing reproached me, and I did not afflict myself
to be compared with any other. I was content to remain as I was,
alert and quiet; but not altogether content and not altogether
quiet, for something I desired most was not here, O intimate
ambition. By the time I reached O'Connell Bridge the dusk was
beginning to gather. Far down the quays an obscure blue was
beginning to fall about the picturesque faded-green dome of the
Custom House and to conceal it. The quays were crowded with
cars, and coming up out of the traffic was an organ-man between
the shafts, a young ItaHan woman tugging with one arm at the
strap, a red handkerchief on her head, her hair blown back from
her temples, her broad passionate face thrown upwards with the
effort of pulHng — tired, thoughtless, and happy. At the top of
Grafton Street the sky was a faint blue with a reflection of flesh-
tints over the trees in Stephen's Green, holding a bright horned

moon, and I fancied the Green an immense park full of shadows
and ruined statues and wide lawns of moonlight stretching down
to a rippled blue-grey sea bordered by red-stone rocks — a garden to
the crescent moon.

Having written this easily and quickly, I had an impulse of
disgust for it.

I have often wished to know why it is that, though Pappie sup-
ports us indifferently, knows practically nothing about us, shows
us a low example, treats those who let him with the highest moral
brutality, and holds up before us constantly a low ideal — an ideal of
respectability [that] is selfish, snobbish — yet his mind towards us
has something I miss in other households. I think it is this, that he
wishes and confidently expects that his sons will be different from
the sons of other people, even — and this shows a yet higher mind —
more distinguished than he, in his own judgment, has been. He has
succeeded, I think, but not in a way he understands.^ Remember, I
dislike Pappie very much, he is intolerable to me. I am resolved not
to deceive myself on this point, and this resolution may, perhaps,
be the beginning of a spiritual life in me. The idea of it seems to
satisfy me.

The question as to what I am to do with myself is becoming
urgent in me. I do not think it is to be my fate to be a clerk all my
Hfe, though I am prepared to do clerking as a means to my ambi-
tion. Men travel in the dark and their fate travels in the dark to
meet them, and I am prepared to wait until my ambition comes to
me. I have a growing confidence — ^perhaps a foolish confidence —
that it will be different from the compromising life I had accus-
tomed my mind to accept as mine. Maybe when it comes I shall
find my fate more like myself than I imagine or wish.

[31 July 1904]

I have walked a good deal today (about twenty-two miles in all)

^ MS. note: 'Moreover, he has always treated us with a kind of equality
with an item or two of authority, and did not think it fit to do away with
all ordinary politeness in dealing with us. He has tacitly respected our
privacy and has not treated us with that contemptuous inconsiderateness,
as toward animals, by which fathers try silently to insist on their absolute
superiority. He has not been able to be a senseless bully, and we have no
reason not to respect him for what he is — our father.'

but I am not sleepy, only pleasantly tired, conscious of increased
warmth in my legs and feet. I left Jim at Sandymount at twelve
and walked home. I was watching the turns I had come so as not to
lose my way, for I hardly know the locahty, until I came to Lands-
downe Road Station. The lanterns shone brightly at different
heights on the gates and the signal posts of the pretty Httle station
in the trees. It was empty. I passed up Landsdowne Road before
those big semi-detached houses with their high stone steps back
from the road. The people who Uve in them are well-to-do, I
suppose. I liked the night, it was clear and dry. My intimacy with
Jim brings me in ways I like. I wrote a note to Pohlman's for him
in the G.P.O. on my way through town. I Hke the City at night,
wide O'Connell Street (I have O'Connell blood in me and an
O'Connell face. I would prefer I hadn't. The Joyce blood is
better) lit with many high opalescent lamps of muffed glass,
deserted but for a few people and a cat nimbling quietly along, the
horse walldng, without noise but for an occasional shout of laughter
from the cabman's coffee booth. DubUn is an old, small, seaport
Capital with a tradition. Yes, Dean Swift is the tradition. I go
youngly through the late streets hearing a nocturne of Chopin's.
Who but Chopin was able to write nocturnes? He Hved by night.
He is returned to Paris from some revel that has been briUiant, and
is standing at this hour in his attic looking out at the open-dormer
window. The huge pulse of life is lulled, darkness like a heavy
cloud lowers overhead, and straddled roofs shine beneath him
from recent rain. A melody is awake and moves with hushed
weariness through the black harmonies of night, easily, almost
inaudibly, changing to higher keys till hght begins to be seen. It
was associated in my mind with a memory. Aunt Josephine played it
for me in her house on the North Strand when long after midnight
I was about to leave to come home to Cabra. Neither dissembled
drowsiness nor the changes from warmth into the cold night air
could weaken my sense of gratification, for I was well pleased with
the night, and I admired Katsy. I thought her nature luxurious and
proud — the pride of the flesh. I felt honoured by the admiration of
her which had taken me, as if some influence of complex impor-
tance had come really and unsought into my Hfe, but I feared and
doubted. More than this she was a simple happiness possessing me

— bonum simpliciter. I had never found in the conversation of those
I liked best, half so much pleasure as a word or a look from Katsy,
or as even her propinquity could give me. *Those I liked best.' I
seemed to dislike everyone I knew but her, while my unstable
admiration and doubting thoughts left me with only forced and
crooked words and looks for her. But a simple unhappiness, since
I knew that if she was what I thought she was, she would not like
me — ^would even dislike me when she grew to be a woman — for she
must be aware of the disingenuousness, the disloyalty, the
spiritual cowardice, the spiritual envy, the calculating dissatisfied
egoism, dogged in my dull philosophy, the criminal idleness, the
stupid efforts, the immorality of my mind, the want of dis-
tinguishing talent, the affectation of dignity and depth of character
and passion, the ugHness, in fine, of me, of which I am all too con-
scious and which has always made it a presentiment of mine that I
could never love, or that, if by some miracle I could, the person I
would love could not love me. I wished for shame — that plenary
indulgence of all the high opinions of others — that it might simplify
me, but I was afraid of it because I was afraid of Katsy. I knew,
again, that if she was not what I thought her (I saw with a dis-
heartening disappointment in myself that my influence on her
was bad, and that the commonness in her character, which had
been weakening through Jim, was developing through me) I could
not admire her, but I was unwilling to believe that she was not, as to
admit it would have been to admit that I had deceived myself with a
hope. Rassure-toi, V amour viendra; desole-toi, il rCest pas Videal de
bonheur que tu penses. Certainly love is very difficult to a modern.^

This is like a thing George Moore would write in Dana, only it
contains a witty remark.

Jim has written a nocturne in prose beginning *She comes at
night when the City is still,'^ and a matutine in verse beginning
Trom dewy dreams my soul arise.'^

Jim's style is becoming a little sententious and congested. He

1 MS. note: 'I am reminded of, "Oh for the da^^s of my youth when I
was so miserable".'

2 Pubhshed in his Epiphanies, ed. O. A. Silverman, University of
Buffalo (New York), 1956.

^ Published in Chamber Music.

locks words of too great weight together constantly and they make
the rhythm heavy. I advised him to read Goldsmith or Henry
James to gain easy lucidity, but he does nothing now. His lyrics
are becoming much of a piece. His last^ contained a contradiction
(Tor elegance and antique phrase. Dearest, my Hps are all too
wise' — the song is both elegant and antique), a mistake ('Mithra-
dates' for *Mithridates'), the words 'Dearest' and 'Dearer' used
with the same accent at the beginning of two lines in the second
verse. It has a recapitulary phrase as a close to the second and last
verse and as there is not the excuse of length this is something of a
cliche.

As Jim has become very weak lately, I thought I might be strid-
ing up to him. I met him the other day after a few days and I was
glad that my secret thoughts are hidden, for it seemed to me that
the difference between us was not a difference of degree but of
kind.

My secret thought is the one I do not wish to write, and my
present temper the one I cannot write.

I am wrong in saying I loathe Pappie. I have absolutely no Hking
for him. The injustice of his mind is aggressive and puts me off, the
quarrelsomeness of his temper irritates me, and these being pretty
constant led me to make a mistake. I am wrong also in saying I
dislike Jim.^ I have no liking for him but I see that his life is
interesting.

My opinion of myself is what I write, and is so low probably be-
cause I have a very high standard and can judge myself by no
other. Perhaps this high standard implies a high temper of mind. I
am more inclined to believe that it is the reflection of Jim's nature.
It is none the less the only standard I can judge myself by, and is
really in the essence of my character.

Jim has spoken frankly contemptuous things of me so often —
without any purpose to offend — that it is beyond his power to hurt
me now. He and Cosgrave have lately said flattering things of me,
but now that he praises it is beyond his power to please. I remem-
ber what others think of me very constantly and very accurately.

Katsy had it in her power to give me more pleasure than anyone

1 'Though I thy Mithridates were', published in Chamber Music.

2 See p. 47.

I knew, and therefore, perhaps, to wound me more. I told Katsy I
did not love her. Not in those words, for as she is half a child it
would have been ridiculous and out of place. I said I liked her, but
not to any great, unusual extent. I told her I wished she was
seventeen, not fourteen. At seventeen Katsy ought to have a
woman's mind at the present rate.

What is the higher moraHty? Is it to be able not to believe the
cleverly untrue things we think about ourselves?

I never saw Jim manage any affair so badly as he has managed
his affair with Miss Barnacle.

Jim said once that he was like the Bourbons, *he never forgot'.
I think it would have been more accurate if he and they had said
they never forgot injuries.

I resolved not to put myself anymore in the way of Jim's rude-
nesses. The letter of these resolutions is broken by me, but the
spirit of them remains in me.

I am very unstable, pulled about by a dozen contrary impulses.
I do nothing of importance that pleases me.

I have at times an elating sense of seeing people for what they
are. This is often to see them as less than I thought them, but the
view is elating for all that. I even seem better pleased with people
for seeing them so.

My mind cannot be so old yet, as I am capable of being thrilled
by new ideas. I feel exhilarated sometimes without cause, but I
reject this exhilaration just as Luther rejected his false vision on
Good Friday. Sometimes in these moments of exhilaration I hear
music in my head which I do not remember to have heard before
and which excites me not a little. I have thought from this that,
perhaps, if I had studied music and could make these sounds
articulate I could become a composer. I doubt.

Food is good and warmth is good. This is a good house to learn
to appreciate both in. We do weeks on one chance insufficient meal,
and a collation in the days I have been stripped of my garments,
even of my heavy boots, wiUingly stripped, to pawn them and feed
on them. What kind of adults will we be? I am becoming quite
morbid on the point and regard food as energy-stuff. In what
manner would we stand sickness?

I have a sure sign that I have no friendship for Cosgrave. Once

or twice I thought I had offended him. I was sorry for my own sake
to think I had been guilty of rudeness, yet, though I thought it
would put an end to intimacy, I was not troubled for that, rather
felt a shght sense of freedom to think that someone else I knew had,
by no intention of mine even through a vice in me, been brought
not to expect any conversation with me different from his conver-
sation with others. I do not like the youthful, Hght tone my manner
takes with him. I seem to myself like a Ught, manageable vessel
flirting round a four-master. The manner is false for I know my
mind is old, and, as it appears to be inevitable, perhaps there is only
one remedy, my taciturn remedy, withdrawal.

There is one Mr. James Brady, a police-court soUcitor, a brother-
in-law of Mr. Bergan, whom I dislike very much. He seems to me
a rare type of the common, cute, Irish fool. He is a friend of
Pappie's.

There is one, too, Mr. John Clancy,^ Sub- Sheriff, whom I also
dislike very thoroughly. He is regarded with mild awe, chiefly I
fancy because of his height. His creatures — and practically all the
people he knows are his creatures in the degree of their intimacy —
agree that if he had gone to America in his youth he would be
President now. I think he should have become a poHceman. He has
the appearance, the walk, the bossing manner, and the intellect of a
policeman. He is elderly and drink-seasoned. Pappie boasts when
he is drunk *0 ! John Clancy has a wish for me ! He'd do a fellow a
good turn!' but I think his real idea about him is something like
mine. I had an opportunity once of crossing the impostor and it
vexes me into the pluck, when I remember it, that I did not take
it. I know neither of these gentlemen.

I Uke Velasquez's portrait *iEsop' very much. I have a very
vivid idea of iEsop, the wise old freed slave, thej^^r bourgeois, and
Velasquez's portrait depicts it perfectly. I think i£sop was wiser
than Solomon, but Solomon was a poet, iEsop was not.

To call Pappie's mind unjust is as distinct a euphemism as to
call a drunken fishwoman's abuse unladylike. I dislike him because
his mind is opposed, and I am always better pleased with myself
when I treat him with dislike.

1 Long John Clancy appears in Finnegam Wake and, as 'Long John
Fanning', in Ulysses.

E 65

Jim's style in prose writing many times is almost perfection in
its kind, holding in periodic, balanced sentences and passages a
great spiritual delicacy. But between these passages, instead of
writing quietly and relying on his life-like dialogue, he tortures his
sentences in figurative psychology and writes strenuously.

I can neither do nor think anything that pleases me completely;
my mind wearies itself among falsities.

I had once portraits of both Meredith and Whitman in the house.
I remember comparing the two, as they were both spoken of as
nature poets. Meredith had his chin thrust rather pragmatically
out, his face wore a refined, eager, witty, penetrating look. Whit-
man's had a more egoistical air, strange to say, a meditative egoism,
an air of day-light mysticism, which is a prejudice against all other
activity. He was looking at you quite conscious of your presence
but with the eyes of a man who has the rhythm of a song in his
head.

The bourgeoisie has a settled mind on a few subjects, and has a
habit of assuming that all people are as settled and in the same
way about them. These people know that God Almighty gave
Moses a very difficult decalogue and that Christ pushed matters
farther — between you and me — than anyone but himself could go,
but after all both gentlemen are very open to common sense. Of
other matters they know that every fellow should get a job, and
the worth of the job corresponds with the worth of the fellow; that
every fellow has a girl and when his screw has been raised he
should marry his girl; that every fellow should knock about a bit
and see a bit of Ufe, because those that don't marry or that go into
monasteries or Uve out of the world haven't really as sensible a way
of looking at things as you or I, but we won't say anything out
loud about them, they have pecuUar ideas about these things. They
may be clever — they go in for a lot of nonsense we wouldn't bother
our heads about — but they haven't any go in them, they're not
like men at all. But after all, it's only out and-out blackguards, or
wasters cocked up with a Uttle education, or fellows who want to
pretend they are different from everyone else, who talk against
religion. We blaspheme sometimes when we are worried, out of
humour, and hard worked, but we don't mean any real harm.
Sometimes fellows' heads get turned from reading too much, but

everyone knows that all the great intellects of the world . Be-
sides, compared with our Saviour all their little intellects are like
rushlights in the sun. When this philosophy of the man-in-the-
street is being talked, it is difficult to know what to do. To pick an
argument with such opponents would be waste of wind and time,
and to be silent is to seem to acquiesce. One day^ in the Apothecary
Hall a discussion about the Catholic Association was being carried
on, and from phrases I perceived that these ideas were latent in
their minds. Religious discussions were frequent for the Hall was
Protestant, and they used to get on my nerves. One fellow — a
traveller and a Catholic — was saying that no one that he got orders
from cared what religion he was. His Usteners all agreed 'Of course
not.' *Do you think, for instance,' said he, *that if I went in to Dr.
Stock to get an order from him he'd care what reHgion I was? Do
you think he'd know what reUgion I am?' They all agreed *Not he.'
I had been taking no part in the discussion, but I turned round
quietly to White — the traveller — and asked ingenuously 'Do you?'
They thought it very witty, and White seemed to take it as a com-
pliment. In the laugh, the discussion stopped.

Another of these latent ideas is that a fellow may whore a Httle
and live a little loosely — especially in youth — and no harm, but
he should always do so secretly, and, though he may joke about it
when he is wild, admit afterwards that it was wrong for him, and
when he is older and married he should give it up, and strictly for-
bid it, and put it down in his sons and daughters above all, remem-
bering that it is his duty not to give bad example, especially by
word. The facility with which your wild young fellow adapts his
mind to such a contradictory and complex view is really beyond
me. I cannot understand such obvious inconsistency and injustice
to a younger generation. The day after Mother died a number of
people called to sympathise with Pappie. After they had seen
Mother in her coffin they came down to the drawing-room and sat

there drinking and talking in an undertone. There was Mr. ,

. . . who had to marry his wife, Mr. , who is known to be still a

consummate whore, and Uncle John, who was an atheist and a
whore, ... He is now converted, however, except for an occasional
*burst'. He was talking and I was half sitting on, half leaning against,

IMS. note: *8th Jan. '04.'

a square piano. The talk changed from subject to subject and at
last it came rotmd to some letters that had been written to the
papers against a play at the 'RoyaP. Uncle John asked me did I
ever read any of Zola's and what did I think of him. I was more
bored by Uncle John than even by Zola and I answered indiffer-
ently and in monosyllables. Then Mr. began to explain — a

little awkwardly, I think, because of my presence and with much
gesticulation — how he had to read some of Zola's novels — in an
official capacity of course — and how they were horrible, horrible.
How they could print such stuff — ! Uncle John began to relate
how — 'when he was a young fellow and his taste for reading was
omnivorous and his means small' (Uncle John laughed asthmati-
cally) *he used to go to a second-hand bookseller in High Street.
One day he went there to get The Colleen Bawn''^ (Uncle John,
whose accent is bad, came down very flatly on *Bawn'; his taste
must have been omnivorous indeed) *and when he went in the
fellow there brought him into the back and showed him some

books . Such ideas to be putting into the heads of young

fellows !' There was a silence to imply the enormity of the

books. I was on the point of asking *Did you buy them?' but I
thought it would be very indecorous in the circumstances.^ I am a
damned fool, I always let slip opportunities of getting a neat jolt in
the ribs at those I dislike.

I desire the pure, faithful beauty of certitude. . . .

Jim said one day to Cosgrave and me, * Isn't my mind very
optimistic? Doesn't it recur very consistently to optimisim in spite
of the trouble and worry I have?' I said *Yes, to proper optimism.'

Cosgrave told me there was more money in my voice than in
Jim's because it was stronger and I would take more trouble with
its training if I was having it trained. I do not believe there is very
much money in my voice; it is losing its richness, is becoming
noisy, and I sing badly.

[14 September 1904]
Jim's landlady and her husband^ have shut up house and gone

1 Play by Dion Boucicault.

2 This incident appears in Chapter 22 of Stephen Hero.
^ Their name was McKernan.

away on holiday, and Jim has consequently left Shelbourne
Road — for the time being at any rate — since the 31st August. It is
now the 14th September. In that time he has stayed first two nights
at a Mr. Cousin's ^ on invitation, then a few nights at Murrays, and,
being locked out there, one night with a medical student, O'Cal-
laghan. At present he is staying on sufferance with Gogarty in the
Tower at Sandycove. Gogarty wants to put Jim out, but he is
afraid that if Jim made a name someday it would be remembered
against him (Gogarty) that though he pretended to be a bohemian
friend of Jim's, he put him out. Besides, Gogarty does not wish to
forfeit the chance of shining with a reflected Hght. Jim is scarcely
any expense to Gogarty. He costs him, perhaps, a few shiUings in
the week and a roof, and Gogarty has money. Jim is determined
that if Gogarty puts him out it will be done pubHcly. Cousins and
Mrs. Cousins, especially, invited Jim to stay for a fortnight, but
Jim found their vegetarian household and sentimental Mrs.
Cousins intolerable, and more than this he did not like their man-
ner to him. They made no effort to induce him to stay longer. Jim
met Cousins afterwards and Cousins told him that many people
had asked them about him and that their household had become
quite a centre of interest because he had honoured them with two
days of his life.

On the 7th, 8th, and 9th of July [I] went in for an exam — the
Veterinary Prelim — for a fellow named Gordon. Jim was to have
gone in for it but he decided that he was too well known. He asked
me to do it instead, and at half-past twelve the night before, I said
I would. The exam was very easy and I heard afterwards that I
got through. Gordon was to have given Jim 30/-. He gave me 25/-,
out of which I shared 14/6 to Jim. I was nearly being caught, for
the superintendent knew Gordon's brothers and seeing the name
on my paper asked me was I [their] brother. I pretended I was
Gordon's cousin, and having taken care to inform myself a Httle
about his people, I was able to answer the superintendent's family
questions fairly intelHgently.

Eileen has been staying at Aunt Callanan's'- for the past month,

1 James H. Cousins and his wife Gretta lived at Ballsbridge.
^ Mrs. Callanan, aunt of the late Mrs. Joyce, lived at 15 Usher's Island,
scene of the party in 'The Dead', in Dubliners.

where they like her very well. They wanted her to stay altogether,
but Pappie objected. He said Eileen was not going to become a
slavey. Eileen would prefer to stay, but she is to go into Mt. Joy
Convent, where May is, on Friday next.

When Jim was explaining what he meant by saying that the
brilliancy of my mind was mechanical, he said * You know, I push
myself behind what ever I do.' I certainly reserve myself behind
whatever I say or do.

There is no act however bad or low that I cannot sympathise
with, and yet there are few acts however noble or good that I do
not understand. I find in myself the germ of pure criminal mania,
for sometimes when I am walking with a person, whom I like well
for the time, and talking quietly, I think with a rush *if I were to
draw out now suddenly and without reason and give this inoffen-
sive person a punch in the teeth ?'

I have a habit when I look at the faces of people of note or of
clever or distingmshed men in town of examining their heads and
features to discover what it is that they have and that I have not,
but chiefly to discover what it is that they have not and that I have
that constitutes me their critic. They are nearly always finer looking
and bigger, their heads are built on broad Hues, they have quick faces
with a look of confidence in some well-developed or naturally great
power, but to me the expression of their eyes is a Uttle fixed, and
can I accuse [them] from this of having unrefined, imcultivated,
incomprehensive minds? I think I can; their minds are really
commonplace; they seem not to see and not to wish very much to
know their own purpose; they have none of the 'readiness' which
*is all'; they are tools well fit for one purpose, speciaHsts.

There are no questions which trouble me grievously, yet
troubled I am, but not grievously.

Gogarty uses two words well, the DubUnized Jesus, *Jaysus,'
and the word *box'. A 'J^ysus' is a guy. Then there's *an awful
Jaysus', and 'hairy Jaysus', and you can act or 'do moody Jaysus',
or 'gloomy Jaysus'. A 'box' is any kind of pubUc estabHshment, or a
hall where any Society holds meetings for some purpose. The rooms
of the Hermetic Society are a 'ghost-box', a church a 'God-box', a

brothel a ' box'. He has a good name for priests, too, a strange

name in keeping with their ridiculous appearance and manner in

the street, the name of certain Chinese priests, the *Bonzes'. . . .

The price of my intimacy with Jim has been clever sayings or
little betrayals of myself, and the wittier the turn I can give to these
latter the better, but I have lost my taste for these Httle Judasics,
and with it I nearly lost my intimacy with Jim. Jim's intimacy with
his friends and theirs with him are also bought at this price —
Byrne excepted. Byrne has no unusual abiUties or characteristics
but he has this, that he can never be induced to betray himself for
what he is — whatever that may be.

I am determined that if I break with Katsy it will not be because
of any fault in my character, and therefore I have let two or three
incidents pass because [it] was not clear to me that I was not at
fault. Besides, I like her and it would be not without a certain self-
contempt that I would break with her.

Jim was getting into the regular drunkard's habit of paying
himself with words.

I have a very instructive habit when I have made a mistake
either in acting, in thinking, or in studying, of going back slowly
over each step I took, and trying to find out exactly how I was
led to make the mistake.

I have moods constantly recurring in which I loathe everything
and everyone near me and many I have only seen. Then this house
seems to me rotten, useless and decaying, like the hollow tooth I
have my tongue in.

I think I dislike anybody who prefers me.

O, I wish the summer was not over, I wish sincerely it was mid-
summer and we would have more burning days, the air scintillat-
ing with sparks of heat, the sea to swim in, and the fresh breeze
from the sea, the rocks and the sand-grass to lie among, and long
warm evenings.

Jim used to think Ibsen meant Eilert Lovberg for a genius, but
I don't think he did. Eilert is not a type of a genius — as say Arnold
Kramer is — but a young man of great talent — a poet perhaps.

I am unwilling to admit intellectual indebtedness. If an idea is
suggested to my mind by another, even though it may seem to me
at least very plausible, I oppose it because the suggestion does not
come from myself.

Cosgrave and I were looking into Morrow's window one day

waiting for Jim. In the window were a number of prints of pictures
of young girls at half length and partly undraped. I dislike the
window, and about a year before I had remarked to Jim that it
reminded me of a butcher's shop. On this day Cosgrave said that
he did not Hke the window. I said, *Nor I. It reminds me of a
butcher's shop.' Cosgrave laughed and just then Jim coming round
the corner saw him looking into the window and laughing and
asked him what he was laughing at. *I am laughing at these pictures'
said Cosgrave. *Yes,' said Jim, *they remind me of a butcher's
shop.' Cosgrave, of course, immediately concluded that I had re-
peated as my own what I had heard Jim saying, and looked at me
and spluttered out laughing. Cosgrave and Byrne and Gogarty and
in fact everybody who knows us is anxious to accuse me of aping
Jim, and I suppose Cosgrave thought that here was evident proof.
I was fooUsh enough to tell that I had made the remark to Jim a
year before, and Jim admitted it. The best revenge I could have
had would have been to let Cosgrave feel happy in the sense of
having convicted me. When I had explained, I am sure Cosgrave's
opinion of me went up as unjustly as it had gone down.

Gogarty told Jim once that I was an awful thug, that I was grossly
affected in manner, a *washed-out imitation of Jim,' and added
that there was only one freak in the family. I admitted that my
manner was affected, was a manner in so far as it was affected. Jim
agreed and went on to detail how I did not imitate him. As I saw
Jim had made up his mind and would beheve me only — to use St.
Augustine's phrase — 'when I confessed unto him,' I said 'Hm.'
Cosgrave too thinks I imitate Jim, but these people bore me and I
do not care a rambling damn for their opinions good or bad. I
really despise them all — Colum, Starkey,^ Gogarty, Byrne, even
Cosgrave. I despise them because I cannot do otherwise.

I have read xh^ Journal to Stella. It is very uninteresting. I like
*Uttle language', and see possibilities in it for writing, but this
journal bored me. The Dean, by the way, remarks playfully to

Stella that he would Hke to whip her a *for her sauciness,'

calls people *sons of b s,' invokes *pox on this' and *pox on

that,' says *pox on this cold weather, I wish my hand was in the
warmest part of your person, young woman; it starves my thigh,'

^ James S. Starkey, 'Seumas O'Sullivan.'

and tells how he is taking a medicine which 'works him' in the
morning. Excepting these charming little confidences, the journal
is political or scandalous.

Jim has called me brilliant and Cosgrave seems to agree, but I
cannot but think them mistaken, perhaps wilfully mistaken. Maybe
I think so because I am always conscious of the absence of bril-
liancy in the manner in which I conceive these ideas which are
considered witty. *My coruscations' come to me slowly and form
themselves in my head. Perhaps I am writing. I note them and
probably continue writing, and when I have finished I go out
trembHng with the idea. I am sorry these sayings have been
remarked, for I neither wish to be witty — in the ordinary sense —
nor to be thought so.

Gladstone is my idea of a great impostor. Jim tells me that the
great word in Dante for damning a man is the ItaUan for *impos-
tor'. William Ewart Gladstone seems to me to deserve that title
thoroughly. The English, with that admiration of theirs in which
it is hard to hold the balance between falsity and stupidity, used to
call him the Grand Old Man, but Parnell's perversion of this is a
perfect description of him — a Grand Old Impostor. Parnell must
have had a lovely contempt for him. Parnell had, I think, not
much ability, except perhaps financial ability; he was not as
intimately acquainted with the disadvantages of his country, as
say, Davitt, nor knew as well how to remedy them, nor what was
most desirable to replace them. He was unlettered, no patriot, and
obviously an Anglo-Irishman, but he was a genius and in my
judgment the only genius Ireland has produced. He had the power
of managing men and using their capabilities, and a great eye for
ability. He must have had a very fine mind; he had great words of
contempt, 'impostors,' 'peddling.' His genius was probably more
distinguished and finer than Napoleon's, but in ambition and
ability he was as much the lesser as his success was less than the
Corsican's.

Hospitality is not so much a gift as a two-edged pleasure. That
was a generous idea of the Itahan nobles of the Middle Ages who
tried to rival each other in hospitality and prodigahty, kept an
open table to all comers, and spent large estates in gifts to their
dependents.

Jim says that he set out from University College with a few
gentlemen of his acquaintance to find his summum honum. Clancy
got as far as McGarvey's.^

Aristotle has said that work is a means to leisure, and Coventry
Patmore says that all souls in whom there is wisdom hate work. It
is probably true that idleness is the first condition of all fine art,
and leisure the first condition of all speculation. I am inclined to
think that a man should cultivate idleness as far as possible, not
any idleness, but his own idleness. Few men are worthy of idle-
ness.

Byrne has the features of the Middle Ages. A pale, square, large-
boned face; an aquihne nose with wide nostrils, rather low on his
face; a tight-shut, Hpless mouth, full of prejudice; brown eyes set
wide apart under short thick eye-brows; and a long, narrow fore-
head surmounted by short, coarse hair brushed up off it like an
iron crown. His forehead is Uned, and he has a steady look. He is
low-sized, square, and powerful looking, and has a strong walk.
He dresses in light grey and wears square-toed boots. Jim calls
him the Grand Byrne; he has the grand manner, the manner of a
Grand Inquisitor. He was born in Wicklow and goes there every
summer. My name for him hits the rustic — 'Thomas Square-toes.'
He is over sceptical as a sign of great wisdom — a doubting
Thomas.^ . . .

The schismatics from the Irish Theatre objected to Synge's
play — a play in which a quick, intelligent peasant woman who has
made a loveless marriage is discovered by a trick of her husband's
to be intriguing with a young farmer.^ The old man hunts her out
and, the young farmer refusing to take her, she goes off with a
tramp while the old man and the young farmer sit down to the
remains of a wake that had been prepared. The play is a very good
comedy and, with another play^ also by Synge, is the best thing the
Irish National Theatre Society has produced. Naturally, too, it

^ George Clancy is the character *Davin' in A Portrait of the Artist.
McGarvey's was a tobacconist's, presumably the separatist headquarters
called 'Cooney's' in Chapter 17 of Stephen Hero.

2 Compare James's sketch of 'Cranly' in the opening of Chapter 22 of
Stephen Hero.

3 In the Shadow of the Glen, performed 8 October 1903.
* Riders to the Sea, performed 25 February 1904.

gave better opportunities for acting than any of the other plays
gave, and was better acted. But the socialistically moral and free-
thinking republicans in Ireland objected to it as a libel on Irish
peasantry and Irish peasant Hfe. They seemed to assume — I don't
know why — that it was a portrayal of typical Irish peasants, and
though they admit adulteries have been committed in Ireland —
O thank you Mr. Griffiths ! — they deny indignantly that adultery
is typical. Leaving aside the question as to whether it is more or less
typical of Ireland than of Scotland or England or Norway or
Germany, do they intend that nothing should be portrayed but
statistically observed types? The position may be somewhat un-
usual, is unusual in as much as it is interesting, but the characters
are Irish all of them — the woman, the young farmer, the old man,
and the tramp; the humour is Irish and the treatment quite
original. Of all the reasons in history or fable for a woman leaving
her husband to go off with another man and take the chances of the
road, the reason in this seems to me the most comical. She Hstens,
and weighs her chances between going and staying, and at last
takes her shawl off a nail and goes out with the tramp saying,
*YeVe a power o' talk anyway!'

There is sickness in the house. I am the sick one. I am in bed in
my own room alone in the evening. Eileen, my white-faced,
thoughtless younger sister is playing the *Rakes of Mallow' on the
piano downstairs. I loathe the air. It is a mechanical repetition of
the same two or three notes in the same succession, with a turn at
the end of each phrase in it to the beginning, like the turn of a
handle. She is playing it quickly and badly, stumbHng every ten or
fifteen seconds, stopping and beginning again. A long string of
faces pass slantwise up before my eyes, so quickly that I can hardly
distinguish them, but they are grotesque, unhuman, like the faces ^
you see in hucksters' windows painted in cheap yellow paint on
cardboard and they are hitched one under the other. I cannot pre-
vent myself seeing them as they fly up noiselessly with interminable
length, before my eyes. My palate is quite hard and stiff; every-
thing I touch is stiff and rough. My head is swimming. 'Oh for the
Rakes of Mai — low town. Oh for the — . Oh for the Rakes of
Mallow town. Oh for the — ' Oh for the Rakes of Mai — of Mallow

1 MS. note: 'jumping jacks'.

town, the Rakes of Mai — low tow — own.' Damn them, does no
one hear me whistling? They won't answer me. I can't whistle
whatever — . I wish to Christ someone would stop her — the
imbecile! This is intolerable! . . .

I hate to see Jim Ump and pale, with shadows tmder his watery
eyes, loose wet lips, and dank hair. I hate to see him sitting on the
edge of a table grinning at his own state. It gets on my nerves to be
near him then. Or to see him sucking in his cheeks and his lips, and
swallowing spittle in his mouth, and talking in an exhausted husky
voice, as if to show how well he can act when drunk, talking about
philosophy or poetry not because he hkes them at the time but
because he remembers that he has a certain character to maintain,
that he has to show that he is clever even when drunk, and because
he likes to hear himself talking. He likes the novelty of his role of
dissipated genius. I hate to hear him making speeches, or to be
subjected to his obviously and distressingly assumed courteous
manner. He is more intolerable in the street, running after every
chit with a petticoat on it and making fooUsh jokes to them in a
high weak voice, although he cannot possibly have any desire, his
organ of generation being too weak for him to do anything with it
but make water. They — the little bitches — run screaming away in
pairs and then come back to see if he will chase them again. Jim
courts this wasting and fooHng although he knows it to be an
insinuating danger. He tried it first as an experiment, then he got
drunk in company for the want of something more interesting to
do. He welcomes drunkenness at times, hoping to find in it some
kind of conscious obUvion, and finding I don't know what. Some-
times he becomes quite imbecile, falling up against and mauling
whoever he is talking to, or sinks down on the floor quite over-
come, moaning and venting huge sighs. Now, however, he gets
drunk in the regular way, by lounging from one pubhc house to
another. Few things are more intolerable than it is for a sober per-
son to be in company with — it generally means in charge of — a
drunken one. Perhaps for this reason I cannot stand drunkards. I
hate to see anyone, let him be as stupid as a hog, nine or ten
degrees below his standard — drunk; and I know that with time
this state becomes permanent. . . .

[29 September 1904]

Pappie's religion is the funniest thing about him. He does not
conform to it in any one particular, yet he wished to force me to go
to mass etc., when I announced my intention of not doing so, and
as reports used to come from the College for him to sign, he said
he would let the Rector know about me. There was a row about it
in the parlour while I was up in my own room reading. I was given
to understand that Mother's entreaties had induced him to change
his purpose, and that Charlie, who was going in for the Church,
had also begged for me, telling Pappie that 'I'd come back.' While
the messages were being sent up to me I was highly amused and
secretly wishing that Pappie would do as he said (though I knew
quite well he wouldn't). I was even thinking of 'declaring myself,'
as the position would force me to give the priests a taste of my
quality, but the final indignity of Charlie begging for me with
those words disgusted me. I felt like the dying lion in the fable.
The last time Pappie went to Confession and Communion was
highly amusing. I bawled laughing at the time. It was about two
years ago. Mr. Kane and Mr. Boyd and Mr. Chance were to
attend a retreat in Gardiner Street, and Pappie, who would never
do anything so vulgar from himself, was persuaded by Mr. Kane
to attend it too.^ He did so, and came home very drunk for two
nights after each sermon. On the second night Chance brought
him home. He was to go [to] confession next evening. I heard the
conversation down stairs.

Chance. Holy Communion on Sunday morning and then at

half five go to renew baptismal vows. They'll give you

candles — and then all together we'll

Pappie (very drunk). Oh, I bar the candles, I bar the candles !

I'll do the other job all right, but I bar the candles.
Chance. Oh, that'll do all right — only a formality — but what

hour'U we call for you tomorrow night to go to Con-

^ Matthew Kane is the 'Martin Cunningham' of Diibliners and Ulysses.
Charles Chance appears in Finnegans Wake and contributed to the
character of 'Bloom' in Ulysses. (His wife, Marie, contributed to that of
*Molly'.) Boyd is mentioned in Ulysses. The incident here recounted was
the genesis of the story 'Grace', in Dubliriers.

fession? Matt Kane and Boyd and myself are going at

half seven.
Pappie. Oh, I don't know, I don't know—. I'll—. Well, call

at half seven then. Will that suit you?
Chance. Splendidly. And you'll come then?
Pappie. Oh yes ! Oh yes ! Old fellow, I'll go, never you fear,

I'll go — . Can you go to whoever you like?
Chance. Oh yes ! They've all equal power, all the same.
Pappie. I don't mind, you know. I don't mind, you know. I

don't care. I'd go to the first felleh that's open. I haven't

got much to tell him, you know. D'you think I have

much to tell him?
Mother. I do. God forbid I had as much.
Chance. Oh, that's not the point.
Mother. Oh, no ! That's not the point of course.
Chance. It doesn't matter how much you have to tell him, it'll

all be wiped off; you'll have a clean sheet.
Pappie. I don't mind, you know. I'd go in to the first bloody

felleh that's open and have a httle chat with him.
Chance. Right! That's right! Now don't forget I'll be here at

5.30.
Pappie went as he promised to Confession on Saturday night and
went out early to Holy Communion on Sunday morning. There
seems to me to be something irresistibly fiinny in the picture of
Pappie going out at about nine in the morning by himself, trying
not to blaspheme about the things not being sent up for him to
shave, to go through the farce in the Jesuit Church quite solemnly.
I can imagine how much he disliked acting so thoroughly vulgarly.
But his vanity would not let this idea remain with him, and he
told at the breakfast table (there was a special breakfast on the
occasion) how Fr. Vernon (the Jesuit who had conducted the
triduum) told him, *You're not such a bad fellow after all. Ha ! ha !
ha! ha!' That day after dinner Pappie went to the winding-up
lecture at about 4.30 and came home not quite sober with Chance
a little before seven. He wanted to borrow money from Mother
and was becoming impatient when Mother made a difficulty about
giving it, ridiculed her family, and when Mother shook her head
at him, went out blaspheming and banging the door behind him.

I laughed and said something bitter and satirical. It was certainly
the shortest conversion on record. Mother said nothing, but
looked patient. Michaelmas Day [1904]

[2 October 1904]

Today, Sunday October 2nd5 I stood with a number of young
men of the lower class, dressed chiefly in navy-blue serge, and
wearing hard hats or caps, on the bridge at Jones' Road looking
into the Grounds there beside the Canal at a cycle-race. I dislike
their flat accents and their interest in sport which fills their Sun-
days and their holidays. The *sport' too is vulgar and dull and poor.
A cycUst is undistinguished — anyone can be a cyclist. It requires
no special abiUty, no particular training to race as these athletes
race. To excel may, perhaps, but it is not in the minds of these
young men to excel in anything. I may guess that everyone around
me is a cycHst of the same kind as those racing. The racing is a
little exciting. The figures move round the course bent jockey-hke
over the handle-bars. There is a hoarse cheering when they finish,
like an enraged acclamation. Like a gross oath. Why this brutal
excitement? The minds of these men are brutal and low, and the
scene like a sketch in crayons by Jack B. Yeats. He seems to Uke it,
but their brutality threatens me — . On Clonliffe Road the brown-
ing trees are clear against a pale, cold, blue sky with white pufls of
cloud on it, and the sun is bright on the path — . Along the Canal
above Dorset Street a man is swimming an Irish terrier. The
Canal is steely blue and rippled. The green of the grass is fresh to
my eye, the smell of the earth strong — Irish. On the opposite bank
at the lock-gates a knot of men are sitting roimd playing cards —
they will play there till evening I suppose. One bursts out with a
horselaugh and slaps a card down, the others start arguing and
jumping up, talking all together at the top of their voices with
cursing and obscenity yet friendly — these are their manners. How
can such a pleasure satisfy them! On the Whitworth Road beyond
the deep channel where the rail-road runs to my right, a nurse is
playing with a black dog in the grounds of the Dnmicondra Hospi-
tal. I can see she is pretty and young. I would like to be near her,

to . But the wish is impossible. Therefore let it pass. Many

people are out, for it is not yet two o'clock, their dinner hour.
Before me a tallish young man in a blue-serge suit not new and a
hard felt hat is walking with a young woman in a dove-grey cos-
tume; obviously she is a bride of some months. I have noticed
many brides and many women with child at this time. Is it possible
that human beings couple and parturate at seasons, like birds and
animals? I hate Sundays — all Sundays, the gentleman's Sunday,
the clerk's Sunday, the labourer's Sunday, and worst of all the
pubHcan's Sunday. Sunday is the worst day of the week — Dull
Sunday. And my Sunday, wherein all the dullness of the week is
outdone ! That nurse ! I would Hke to He with her in a bed, now, at
mid-day, to see her almost stripped in the daylight. Mid-day
lechery! But where's the use of this? Though to be sure mid-day
lechery is not unusual. The pungent smell of bleached Hnen being
stretched and asperged with cold water and rolled up before
ironing excites to cold bright lechery. Such lechery wears an air of
health and frankness but loses in sensual intensity. Something in it
dissatisfies me. Sunday dinner, Sunday evening yet to be gone
through !

I have examined my face in the glass — naturally without vanity !
This is almost a habit of mine, an intention to know my own
character as I would a stranger's by criticizing his expression. My
head is oval-shaped and rather well capped with a round forehead
narrowing a very little at the top and covered with fine, dull-
bronze hair, close-cut, with a thread of Hght here and there in it.
My face is square, a little brutally marked at the jaws ; my nose some-
what tip-tilted and large, with wide nostrils — sign of sensuality ; my
chin recedes and my ears, though not large, stand out a httle from
my skull. My complexion is clean and pale and hollow-cheeked.
Under frowning eye-brows, my eyes are large, a dull grey set in
clear shining whites. My mouth looks small and is not badly
formed in the lips, but the upper Hp is deeper than usual, with the
downward ridges broad apart and marked, and the corners hidden
in a slight droop of flesh. The flesh of my chin is round, with a
sHght dimple — what is called, I think, an ^artistic chin'. The ex-
pression of my eyes is one of steady, soldier-like inquiry, as if it
was their duty to examine according to some frowning, meditative
morality and to condemn, an expression that remains in them when

there is nothing to examine to remind people that they do examine,
an affected expression masking real slowness of cerebration. My
mouth is surly and tight-shut to conceal the weakness of a charac-
ter. When the frown lifts, a mind is seen recognising itself without
note and without interest, without liking or disUking its own
image, a mind which is not pleased yet not consciously displeased
because it was born in that ignobiUty to escape from which it is
working and saving up. My face is Uke Rembrandt as a boy and
promises to be like him as a man (or that portrait of him by a man
of 37 in a furred busby, which is thought to be of himself) or,
when I whistle, like Goldsmith. Gogarty called me Jim's Flemish
brother. The background of my mind is as dark as Rembrandt's —
without the art, and circumstances can make me as bothered and
as foolish as Goldsmith — without the style. My character, what of
it there is, is between the two, artist and man of letters. We hear
of the minor poet, but who has ever mentioned the minor philo-
sopher. I am he. I am never surprised when anyone dislikes me,
nor do I contemn them for doing so, nor attribute it to any
jealousy; rather I respect in them the capabiHty of a sudden high
judgment. Yet I know it is easier to accuse than to refute. As to my
manner, in two words, I have no manner. I wonder what will be
thought of me when I lie in my narrow box, with my face of Rem-
brandt stiff on the white cushions between the edgings of ugly
paper-lace ! Pitying thoughts — the thoughts I would wish to make
impossible. More likely my memory will not be vivid at all. I do
not remember my dead vividly. Damn Death anyhow!

Charlie sings like a sentimental poHceman.

Jim is thought to be very frank about himself, but his style is
such that it might be contended that he confesses in a foreign
language — an easier confession than in the vulgar tongue.

I hate the commonplace. I was born amongst it; I belong to it,
body and blood. Therefore I hate it. When I think of the common-
place I feel hke a scientist who is watching an evil-smeUing gas. It
repeats in me like a gastric juice. The compact Majority — the
Social Monster — is an enemy of all spiritual or intellectual pro-
gress and of all emotional purity. Its brutal scepticism is opposed
to me. It would have all surrender to its sordidness and accept the
maimed, unsatisfying life it insists on. I hate its City Hfe — the

F 8i

chartered life, the love of work for its own sake, the business, the
task-work quite contemptible in itself but that by doing it one
earns the means to support life. Cities were built to be Uved in, not
for, and these city-men sacrifice their lives to the City they live in.
They have their reward. Paris caused the greatest town in the
ancient world to be burnt for his happiness, and modern Europe
calls the finest of its cities after him. Pious Aeneas sacrificed his
happiness to an admirable sense of duty, and an inconsistent and
ungrateful civilisation disregards him. Is there even a hamlet
named after him? . . .

1 know many University students of twenty or twenty-one —
some of them with their degree — whose letters are opened by their
fathers when they go down for their hoUdays to the country.
Padraic MacCormack Colum, the Irish messenger-boy genius, the
beloved of Yeats and Russell and their clique, and the *ragged
patch'^ patronized by AlilUonaire Kelly,^ has his letters opened for
him by his father. At least one Jim sent him was. What kind of
courtesy could these hobble-de-hoys learn to show their wives
when they grow to be men and marry? The average father takes no
interest in his sons' education except such as he is made to take by
the Commissioner of Education. He does not want them educated.
They are afraid to educate them; they would be jealous of their
sons. If a boy is being sent to a good college, at least half a dozen
friends will warn the father against it. *He'll become stuck up, I'm
telling you, and he'll turn against you.' How often have I heard
that from Pappie when, having tried to force his ideals of respecta-
bihty on Jim and make him enter either for the High Court of
Justice or the Bar, he would end by blurting out what he really
thought of Jim's ideals — somewhat sensitive then — and Jim by
retaUating on Pappie's. Of course Jim can retaliate. They want
them trained, taught stock-knowledge, mechanical accuracy.
Higher mathematics, even higher arithmetic, is as useless for their
purpose as verse-making. More useless, for a good EngHsh educa-

^ Or him who plays the ragged patch
To millionaires in Hazelhatch

THE HOLY OFFICE

2 Thomas F. Kelly, an American then living at Celbridge, was provid-
ing an income for Padraic Colum to encourage Colum's writing. James
Joyce had appUed to Kelly, without success, for ^2,000.

tion makes a man fluent — gives him what they call 'the gift of the
gab'. But they say nothing about mathematical studies because,
knowing nothing about them, they have a vague idea that they are
very intellectual (mathematicians are the stupidest class of men
except musicians; they haven't an idea to throw to a dog), very
practical, and that anybody who is *smart at figures' could be a
good mathematician if only he could spare the time to study. At
most they wish their sons to acquire knowledge, for they know that
those that do have a certain marketable value as imparters of the
same. What the devil is the use of anybody knowing who killed
Julius Caesar any more than of knowing who killed Cock Robin,
it occurs to them to ask. They endeavour to engraft their own un-
reflecting prejudices on the minds of their progeny, and regard
objection as disrespect not to be tolerated. The Home is a place
where children can learn what their nature chooses from the con-
stant low example of their parents. Yet while themselves Hving
sufficiently disreputable lives, parents demand a high standard of
uprightness and virtue in their children, and in at least half a
dozen households which I know intimately, if they don't get it
their phrase — O irony! — is *they are no children of mine'. As for
trying to understand the character or ambitions of their children,
or to help them with advice which is not an empty phrase borrowed
from the pulpit — what wisdom have they stored from experience to
give — or showing qualities or interests that are either admirable or
amiable, the thing is as rare as virtue. Many fathers I know do not
know the names of their children. Perhaps there is something we
should be thankful for in this ignorance of us when we are at the
difficult age, for we want no favours from those secretly tmcon-
verted whores who are our fathers. In fine, their fathers are gener-
ally the greatest obstacles in children's young fife, and the first
thing a child has to do on coming to years of discretion is to
forget the Hes he has been taught. When they are a Uttle grown —
say to sixteen or seventeen — the parents have managed (either the
one or the other of them — the father for choice) to ruin the house-
hold, and they are expected to become sources of income. They
feed them indeed, and even this sometimes badly. . . .

I have been reading lately some novels by Henry James and
some by George Meredith, and naturally a constant comparison

between the two men has been made in my mind. Meredith has the
biggest name in English literature today, now that Swinburne has
withdrawn, and James has practically no reputation. He is thought
to be the writer of patient society novels. In my judgment a stupid
injustice has been done to James in this. He is far and away the
better noveUst, but more than this his work is a much more impor-
tant contribution to the modern conscience than Meredith's.

Both noveHsts have the antiquated idea of working out a plot,
and their construction is correspondingly bad. In A Portrait of a
Lady^ for instance, he is a trifle prolix and it might justly be ob-
jected that unfortunately it is socially impossible to keep an affair
such as that between Madame Merle and Osmond, with a very
visible result too, such a dead secret and for so long. It is quite un-
suspected by the reader and, as an accidental cause being the deus
ex machina in a psychological novel, is unacceptable. His stories
are original and modern and as delicate as his characters, but not
always skilful. In The American^ again there is a surprise sprung on
you which nearly spoils the novel. I mean the uprooting of the
death of Henri-Urbain de Bellegarde. It is unnecessary to the
story, and is neither one thing nor the other between murder and a
natural death. More unpardonable still, it necessitates the intro-
duction of a long monologue — another story in fact — and an
absolutely imdistinguished character — Mrs. Bread. These are big
faults but they are less than Meredith's in Richard Feverel, where
he keeps half a dozen characters working at cross purposes for half
the book — about three years. Richard Fever el is really three plots :
to the end of the Bakewell Comedy, one plot; to the end of the
Raynham Courtship, another plot; and the last episode, a third
plot. At best it is an old story modernized. The Egoist is later and
more mature work, but its construction is far worse. It drags in-
tolerably until within about loo pages of the end, and then ends
like a farce by Pinero. He even makes use of a screen and two doors.
Four or five unforeseen causes work together to make Cross jay run
into a drawing-room and hide beneath a shawl. Sir Willoughby
and Letty come in there and talk as they have never talked before,
telhng one another things both knew quite well for no purpose that
one can see except to let Crossjay know all. Crossjay very kindly
acts quite out of his character to assist Meredith, and Vernon

Whitford and Colonel de Craye evidently know as much about the
affair as Meredith himself. There is no other explanation of their
conduct. About this latter character the exigiencies of his plot make
Meredith change his mind at the last moment. Perhaps what is
called a *plot' has little attraction for me, but it seems to me that
The Egoist has to be written again and that the man who will write
it must be able to write without a 'plot', directly from his charac-
ters.

Great novelists are chiefly distinguishable from lesser ones by
the perfection of their secondary characters. Henry James's
secondary characters are sometimes perilously near being boring,
but for his Greek sanity of vision and cleverness they would be
fatally so. Consider A Portrait of a Lady. Lord Warburton is Max
Beerbohm's William Archer to the Hfe, a wooden puppet that
moves very correctly and wears a beard, Madame Merle is too
perfect to have blundered as she did, besides what did she do for
all her scheming? She effected what one is led to believe was her
purpose, but how? I can explain it only by suspecting that she
was in league with James. And then he uses with reference to her a
rather caricaturing adjective, the adjective 'large', an adjective
which always sprawls over the paper before my eyes into 'la-r-r-rge'.
Pansy is pretty but insipid, and Caspar Goodwood intolerably stiff
and business-like, a speechlessly earnest person whom James
seems to admire. Meredith's secondary characters are better
finished, yet I think James has still the advantage of him, for
Meredith's manner is, to my thinking, a wrong manner. He treats
his marionettes as a jovial god might who had his wine in him. His
manner is comic. In every novel there is some character with
whom we associate the novelist more closely than with the others.
Ralph Touchett in A Portrait of a Lady, Adrian Harley in Richard
Fever el. But Meredith associates himself closely with all, and seems
to plead his own excuses by laughing at his creatures. Witness the
Baronet, Adrian, Master Ripton Thompson. In Sir Willoughby
Patterne Meredith has a chance of achieving something by such a
method but it seems to me that he has made him too stupid. Sir
Willoughby is less of an egoist and more of a snob than Gilbert
Osmond. But it is in delineating women, an art in which Meredith
has a reputation, Henry James most shows his superiority. Cer-

tainly I know no one to flatter women with Meredith: 'a dainty
rogue in porcelain/ *a dazzling offender/ *calypso-clad/ *the
ribbons on her dress playing happy mother across her bosom.' But
he seems to have no intimacy with the female mind, or if he has he
cannot betray it. Few men have. Guy de Maupassant had, it seems
to me, and James has, but with a different tjrpe of mind. Meredith
has done nothing as good as Isabel Archer. Clara Middleton does
not compare with her, and Laetitia Dale is almost as boring as Dr.
Middleton. I like Clare Doria Forey, she is a Xypc of invalid
beauty, but she is a child. Of James's novels, I think Daisy Miller
has the least faults. It is a perfect Uttle tragedy of manners. Jim
considers Daisy Miller silly, I am sure he is mistaken. I have read
it twice and I liked it better the second time than the first. In spite
of being apparently a thoughtless, gay flirt, she seems to me to
have a subtle and admirable pride and to be very courageous. I
like her. It is typical of James's manner that I have absolutely no
idea as to whether he approves or disapproves of her. Jim says he
cannot understand how any woman could prefer Winterbourne to
GiovaneUi. Henry James gets phrases sometimes which Meredith
could not better. He alludes to GiovaneUi as *the subtle Roman'.
GiovaneUi knew Daisy MiUer far more intimately than Winter-
bourne and naturaUy has very good reason not to find fault with
her manner. I know he liked her, but he was quite incapable of
appreciating her. It is a real psychological catastrophe when
Winterbourne, smiUng quietly and without any attempt at dis-
guise, decides in his mind about Daisy MiUer, so unjustly yet so
little suspecting injustice. The only artistic completion of the
history is Daisy MUler's death. And James's attitude towards
death — a very trying test — is quite without sentimentaHty. He
reproduces the sense of spiritual discomfort at her loss perfectly in
his description of Daisy MUler's little grave — *a new protuberance
among the AprU daisies'.

The emotions Henry James chooses to deal with are sHght, but
in them his psychology is extraordinarily acute and fuU. He does
not put you into the mind of his characters; you always feel you
are reading about them, nor does he ever abandon his character of
artist to disert upon what he has said — that habit of Meredith's
which suggests the psychological essayist (Meredith's psychology

always carries its own explanation with it) — but remains patiently
impersonal. The Lord be thankit ! He is more consistently delicate
than Meredith, more deHcately humourous, more scientific in
treatment, and at least as subtle. He is more finely intellectual than
Meredith but not at all as quick or witty. Meredith's wit is chiefly
verbal cleverness. He borrows his epigram from his last word, and
spoils his psychology with his epigram. He gives the impression of
scoring points — not altogether a satisfying impression. His psy-
chology is often laboured, and sometimes no more than an excuse
for making his characters act as they do. Meredith thinks with the
pen in hand and writes on the spur of the thought. His style is
warm with the heat of motion and occasionally a little out of
breath. Thinking, it would appear, is becoming an obsolete or at
least degenerate science. It is now merely the science of taking
notes and putting them together on paper. Of course Meredith is
often brilliantly intellectual, but he is a man with a pen and James
is not. James writes quietly and without haste and seems to write
not what he is thinking but what he has thought. He does not
grasp at a thought when it is presented to him, but waits until it
has settled itself in his mind's perspective and then arranges it
with easy lucidity, writing clearly, minutely, and consequently.
James has not the perspicacity of Meredith, but his style has more
perspicuity. Therefore his psychology is more readable than
Meredith's, because it is not so clearly given. His best style is in
his conversations; they are exquisite and marvellous. Meredith's
conversations are good, but they are not in the same class with
Henry James's. Yet James's conversations are a little too much
like fine play between cultivated minds, and again his men and
women frequently talk more like people who have lived than like
people who are living. His prose style is without colour, for the
most part like the writing of an educated gentieman, and at times
so wretched as to give the impression that he served his apprentice-
ship by writing for society papers. It is here that Meredith has the
decided advantage over James. James has nothing like Meredith's
power over English, or his humour of style, or his force of ex-
pression, or his imagination. Meredith is something between a
spoiled psychological essayist and a spoiled poet, and though
prone to wordiness is one of the makers of EngUsh. Meredith in

his best passages writes lyrically and can get a magnificent effect
by doing so because he can do [it] so well. In Richard Feverel, for
instance, there is magnificent writing in the chapters *A diversion
on a penny whistle', and ^Glare's diary', in a wood in Germany,
and in the second last chapter — in fact all through. During a kindly
meant but tedious lecture of the Baronet's to his son, Richard is
reminded of Lucy. *The young man's heart galloped back to
Raynham,' says Meredith, and mine galloped back with him.
Beside this, the constant urbanity of Henry James's style be-
comes insipid and lifeless. He seems to have made up his mind
to underwrite the emotion, for fear perhaps of being betrayed
by the limitations of his nature. The emotion which Jim expresses
in:

Oh hurry over the dark lands

And run upon the sea.

The lands and the sea shall not divide us

My love and me — ^

becomes in Henry James *the zeal of an admirer who on his way
down to Rome had stopped neither at Bologna nor at Florence
simply because of a certain sentimental impatience.' Besides this
he has a really surprising collection of tags: *inconsequently,'
*with intention,' ^uncultivated minds,' *always' used for *still,'
^conspicuous by absence,' things are ^awfully jolly,' and are
'mentioned above,' girls are 'strikingly pretty,' there are even
'pretty men,' he 'tries to sketch scenes,' and addresses his 'reader,'
'at the risk of exciting a somewhat derisive smile on the reader's
part — .' His style is frequently absolutely sHp-shod and careless,
witness the following: 'but the historic atmosphere scientifically
considered was no better than a villainous miasma' (miasma^ Gr.
sing., or 'miasm' = an atom or particle arising from putrefying or
poisonous bodies; miasmata, Gr. plur., or 'miasms', Eng.); and
visits at night to the Colosseum, though much valued by the
romantics, 'are deprecated by the doctors'. Surely sufficiently bad
for a first-rate noveHst. But it is in his mind that his style is.

Henry James derives from Richardson through D'IsraeU per-
haps, and from Goethe, whereas Meredith might be said to derive

^ From *Go seek her out all courteously', published in Chamber Music,

his mind from Lytton — The Egoist labours in the same way as My
Novel — and from Carlyle, whom his wordiness and rugged writing
suggest. My prejudice is that James has the finer tradition. Henry
James is the most refined and the most modern writer in modem
English Literature. The citizens of his repubhc seem to have
extricated their minds from prejudices and attained an enviable
emotional purity, and his treatment of hfe is consistently a most
refined gentleness. His mind, more than any other mind with
which I am acquainted, more than Pater's, shows the influence of
Goethe. I admire Goethe and I flatter myself that I have a good
understanding of his character though I have read very httle of
what he has written. There are many things in him which lead me
to expect that his attitude towards Hfe will supplant in the future
that one which Jesus took and the western world has imitated for
so many centuries. If he fails to master our world as Jesus and his
school did, it will be, I think, because he failed to master himself
as they did. His life was chaotic and without order Hke his work
(his lyrics excepted), like his Faust and his Wilhelm Meister^ for in
spite of his extraordinary education he is neither in his work nor
in his life the artist that Jesus was in his Hfe, yet it seems to me that
he will usurp the estabhshed power because there is more truth
in him. Henry James is his apostle in America and follows him in
many things which I find it altogether outside of my power to accept.
The aflable pleasure and polite interest which Henry James's men
and women take in everything and in everybody — an article of the
Creed of Goethe — seems to me insincere, because it seems to me
that all things and all persons are not interesting and that all things
and all persons are not pleasant to meet with, and it seems to me
that this habit is disciplinary and an affectation, and that the tem-
per of mind which it produces is unsatisfactory and unsoundly
based — a forced growth. I am sure, too, that he enJarges on
emotions that Goethe has certainly ridiculed — his Americans'
admiration for old monuments for instance. In Daisy Miller
Winterbourne, visiting the Colosseum in the luminous dusk of the
moon, is made to walk up it with his coat-collar up reciting Byron's
'well-known hues' on it. This is that horrible sentimentaUty that
spoils Werther^ the Goethe that Goethe laughed at. Henry James
is so safe behind his style that I would have suspected him of

laughing at Winterbourne but that this sentimentality for the
historic and the picturesque re-occurs constantly in his novels. I
have other quarrels with him than these. The men and women who
are the protagonists of his stories are, we may assume, not
Christians, nor are they believers in any deistic reHgion, yet they
rule their lives according to a certain morality. It would interest
me to know what they mean by ^morality', and on what in reason
they base their 'sense of duty', 'sense of honour', and 'sense of
privacy'. Caspar Goodwood and Henrietta Stackpole are types of
pious members of the religion of America, and to my thinking they
are quite hopeless. They are as full of prejudices as my father, the
only difference being that their prejudices are newer. Nearly all
noveHsts have their pet prejudices, which I find objectionable.
Meredith has two that are constant and that I remember. Vernon
Whitford is one. He is the muscular young Englishman who expels
nonsense and induces uprightness of spirit by long-distance walk-
ing. But perhaps like Shelley's Indian lover he has 'a spirit in his
feet'. Meredith's admiration for the lean of meat — in writers a
mark generally of those who in spite of intellect have a weakness in
them of which they are conscious and a brutaHty of which they are
not — is excelled only by Sir A. Conan Doyle's adoration of prize-
fighters. This admiration is a diflferent thing from Michael Angelo's
body-worship, which is mainly the worship of formal beauty, it is
not even the worship of athletic beauty — there is nothing athletic
in such heaviness — it is the carnal stupidity of what I have named
to myself the cyclist mind. There is danger that these people really
prefer their bodies, and when their minds prefer their bodies to
their minds, all men of sense must agree that they are right. I
have noticed however — observing the crowds who come down to
swim at the Bull Wall — that their commonplaceness is as easily
detected in their bodies as in their eyes. By the way, women hate
big men of muscle. Meredith's other stupidity is his idea about
boys. He thinks that all boys have to do is to tell no lies, eat
pudding, and get birched. The birching, he says, will cure morbid
sensitiveness.

(Bye the bye, that reminds me. I remember many years ago at
Belvedere a young boy mitched and was found out. A Jesuit named
Fr. Ryan did the flogging then, and it was in his class the boy was.

Ryan flogged him in the morning. Afterwards at lunch time Ryan
came over to him in the class-room, smihng and playful. Ryan
seldom smiled and was never playful. 'So you stayed away because
you were afraid of me/ said he, and began tickling the boy till he
wiggled out of him and ran away. Ryan's complexion was pale,
with a blueish chin. He became red. Mem. This incident is not
supposed to have any meaning.)

The occupation of boys, according to Meredith, is to be outdoor
sports, for it is one of the principles of moral hygienics that these
expel suprapatellar curiosities. I cannot imagine how these simple-
tons expect football to vie in attractiveness with the weak loins of
young girls and their white next linen warm with the flesh, except
by supposing that they became elderly men at a jump, without
ever passing through the restrained and perverted lechery of
puberty. Meredith, to be sure, alludes to the *apple season' (Jim
did not understand this to refer to the Adam and Eve aflair till I
reminded him), and this is so delightfully witty that one can for-
give him any amount of stupidity for it, but on the whole I think
his prejudices are more stupid than James's.

A certain asexuaUty is over Henry James's men and women, and
perhaps for this reason he is not at all comparable to Meredith as a
poet nor is he ever the lover Meredith is. He totally disregards
what certain French comic papers supply so well and with so Httle
shyness. He does not allude except in rare and distant phrases to
the self-insistent difference of sex, and his men and women might
be accused of waxing too dainty for their uses. *Many of these'
delectable impressions, he writes, *still linger in the minds of our
travellers, attended by a train of harmonious images, images of
brilliant mornings on lawns or piazzas that overlook the sea, in-
numerable pretty girls, infinite lounging and talking and laughing
and flirting and lunching and dining' — but that is just the point. I
opine that it is impossible for sensitive males to treat girls as if they
were pretty tea-cups. He fails to interest me in this summer hoHday
life. Pretty, confined, ineffectual, is the life he shows at Newport;
I feel like Gulliver among the LiUiputians when I look down on it.
He is far more irreligious than Meredith. Meredith talks a Uttle
too much about God. God is so hidden that what can be said about
him belongs to philosophy. What Meredith has to say about our

first cause is not of this kind. It is most unpardonable sentimen-
tality about an old gentleman in a beard, who lives in heaven and
is very much like his grandpapa. There is nothing like this in
James. He satirizes the religious beliefs with his usual temperate
urbanity. It is hard to beUeve that he is quite serious when writing
in The American^, describing young de Bellegarde's death, he says
the door was opened for someone to come in. *This was M. le
Cure, who carried in his hand an object unknown to Newman and
covered with a white napkin.' Or in Daisy Miller, * "My father
ain't in Europe, my father's in a better place than Europe."
Winterbourne imagined for a moment that tliis was the manner in
which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had
been removed to the sphere of celestial rewards. But Randolph
immediately added, "My father is in Schenectady." ' He writes
more seriously of a French gentleman of an old family, 'Savoir-
vivre — knowing how to Hve — was his speciality, in which he in-
cluded knowing how to die, but as Newman reflected with a good
deal of dumb irritation, he seemed disposed to delegate to others
the appHcation of his learning on this point'. Henry James's mind
is socialistic; there are years of sanely reasoned disapproval behind
the convent episode in A Portrait of a Lady. Writing of a nun's
voice, he says, *It fell with a leaden weight upon Isabel's ears; it
seemed to represent the surrender of a personaHty, the authority
of a Church'. Henry James does not mention any other church but
the CathoHc Church that I know of; he seems to take it because it
is the old feudal Church, the traditional Church, the aristocratic
Church which is most uncompromisingly monarchical. We get
nearer his personal opinion of it with Newman in The American.
At Mass in the Convent Chapel where Madame de Cintre has been
immured 'Newman watched their genuflections and gyrations
with a grim, still enmity; they seemed aids and abettors of Madame
de Cintre's desertion; they were mouthing and droning out their
triumph — (a waiUng sound). It was the chant of the Carmelite
nuns, their only human utterance. It was their dirge over their
buried affections — . It was horrible; as it continued Newman felt
that he needed all his self-control. He was growing more agitated,
he felt tears in his eyes. At last, as in its free force the thought
came to him that this confused, impersonal Vv^ail was all he or the

world she had deserted should ever hear of the voice he had found
so sweet, he felt that he could bear it no longer. He rose abruptly
and made his way out'. The emotion Meredith harps loudly on is
love, in Henry James it is freedom. Sentences remind one of free-
dom with a thrill. They show an unusual and fine courage in their
use of their freedom, yet there seems to be some horrible paralysis
in them at crises. These Americans seem to regard their nation as
an experiment of the result of which they were rather proud, and
freedom as their national religion. The American girls seem to be
even more conscious of their birthright than American men; they
demand and use an emotional and conventional freedom when
their men are working for politic. I do not understand their idea
about flirting and their offence when love is mentioned. If they
think that friendship and intimacy with men is possible withou
desire, they deceive themselves. They have great courage to make
the experiment when they come to Europe in the face of conven-
tion and with such thoroughness, but they succeed only because of
a defiant spirit. I do not know what satisfaction they get out of such
a Pyrrhic victory. But it seems to me, if one may trust Henry James,
that America has more to expect from her women than from her
men. Compared with Tolstoy or Turgeniev neither Henry James
nor Meredith has very much to say. Neither could have conceived
Master and Man.

*Billy Byrne' is a fine threatening air.

I am pestered with dogs and children while I am writing with
my window open. I wonder how no one has written to the papers
about the dogs in Cabra Park. They bark all day and the greater
part of the night. If one were sick this would be intolerable. I hate
noise just as I hate stinks, yet I have endured three dogs ansvrering
each other from back-yards, and children 'la-la-oo-ing' for hours
on end. It is one of the secret improbable desires of my heart to
shoot the dog next door. Dogs and children reject very accurately
the household in which they were reared.

[ij October 1904]

When my mind is unsettled old men like Pat Casey irritate me.
They say the very things my mind quarrels with, while from

politeness I must listen to them^ and from listening must appear to
acquiesce.

Pappie had borrowed 2/. from Temple, proprietor of The Hut',
had stood drinks and had been talking old times for an hour, and
now, waiting outside the pubHc-house for him, Pat Casey was
shaking my hand. He held my hand and seemed to catch some of
my restlessness for he kept glancing shiftily at a gable-end opposite
and mumbled awkwardly :

Good-bye — a — a — good-bye, my dear boy — and — a — a take
care of your father, now that James is gone away^ — don't let
anything separate you — you don't mind me — as an old man
— a — a — to a young one — I know — a — a — my dear boy — I
know — a — a — your father loves you all — he has gone through
a great deal of trouble — and you ought to take care of him,
my dear boy — and — a — a — please God — please God you all

be happy — good-bye now my dear boy

and the rest of it, in a thick brogue.

Knowing the immediate cause of the advice — drinks and the
stories, Pat Casey's own struggles with poverty — and the temper
of mind in which it was given to me, I was acutely bored. I kept
smiUng and moving on my feet and saying *0h yes', and 'Of course',
and *Not at all', and *Good-bye'. If there is anything more boring
than being bored, it is being bored and trying to appear interested.
I was restless and, like a boy being flogged, was telling myself that
this infliction could not in reason last much longer. I was not even
surprised at the bare-facedness of the platitude till I had left him.
The expression was trivial and vague, the expression of a trivial
and vague mind, but the intent was grave to me and I did not
agree with it yet could not securely put it aside.^ My treatment of
Pappie with dislike would be cried out upon by men of this kind,
disapproved by Jim, and not approved by myself, because my
disUke of him has shown itself, though indeed rarely, unstable.
Besides, I admire those who treat their fathers with respect,
though I know that honouring one's father is a subtle way of

^ James and Nora had sailed from Dublin on 8 October.

2 MS. note: 'Besides, Pat Casey (called "of Paris") is an old man of a
few settled ideas, in secret an unbeliever (I believe) like myself, and a man
\vho has lived abroad for fenian accomplicy,'

honouring oneself. I do not like being near Pappie and when I ask
myself why, I cannot pretend to like him. How much I am depend-
ent upon the minds of others, and how much I dislike the fossilized
stupidity of old men! I avoid Pat Casey in the street, and dislike
him in the manner of loathing, though he professes to like me very
much. I am sorry for it.

I am often conscious of suspending unfavourable judgment on
people all the while I am speaking to them.

Listening in silence to another eating is most unpleasant.

The world is full of a number of things that I do not understand,
and I am insufferably wearied by Reviews and Magazines because
they remind me of them, and because I can plainly see that the
contributors do not understand them any more than I but write
from the point of view of the latest catch-word. Besides, the style
of these articles is generally wretched. The contributors all seem
to desire to write finely or picturesquely, and these desires are
perhaps the greatest foes to style.

I like idling but I hate being kept idle.

This pain is the grossest tyranny of Nature. I walk with Htde
steps along the asphalt, treading on the outside edges of my feet,
for an iron rod of pain transfixes my bowels and they emit burning
gas. The people flit past me on the roadway. The scales seem to
have fallen from my eyes, and I see them with the unnatural clear-
ness of the sick. They do not seem like human figures ; their bodies
seem imponderable, and they pass not with a motion of their own
but like daylight ghosts, out of my tense and hurried vision. The
noise of a coal-cart passing near me with shaking bell crashes in
upon my ear. I turn all hot. I am suffocating. In a moment I shall
cry out to them. No, I shall not even grunt — . The pain begins
slowly to weaken. I turn all cold. Now this is pleasant, for the
loosening of sharp pain is one of the pleasantest of experiences — a
Platonic pleasure. I almost forget now the pain my body had but
a few seconds ago, for the memory of the senses is short, except
that a dull fire remains in me and that it has left me trembhng. It
will come again, but how soon? In how many seconds? In thirty
seconds? In a minute? How many times before I reach home? It is
coming again, and I am almost running from it as if it were chasing
me, not in me.

I have read Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills. It is the first
book of Kipling's I have read and I am greatly disappointed. I
conclude it takes far more talent to write remarkable short stories
than to write a good novel, for I have noticed that many good novel-
ists fail in the short story. Kipling's mind is quite commonplace, Uke
Mick Manning's of The Herald or like Pappie's, but clever. It is that
type of mind which has a strong sense of the actuaUties of com-
mon sense and of convention, and is as unpleasant as these. The
stories are wretchedly written in a half-comic, half-satirical, con-
versational style. His point of view is one of married shrewdness.
He seems to wish to impress on his reader: *I am older than these
young fellows I write about, and I've seen a bit more of the world
than they did and I know the ropes. I was young and had those
ideas myself at one time, but in the long run the commonsense
view is the right way of looking at things.' The collection is of
anecdotes, not of tales. They remind me of Pappie's reminiscent
anecdotes. Like him, KipHng always tells you how many rupees a
month his hero had, what was his business, and whether he was a
smart man at it. But Pappie tells you his appearance and propor-
tions, and imitates his manner and his voice, or burlesques them.
KipHng moralizes on his tales with one eye shut. 'There are more
ways of running a horse to suit your book than pulling his neck off
in the straight. Which everybody knows. But you couldn't tell so-
and-so that. He knew too much. I knew a fellow once — but that is
another story — . One night the crash came. As was quite natural.
When the trouble was over etc'

His style is as conversational as this. He talks a little too much
about horses to please me.

* "Stopped in the straight when the race was his own!
Look at him cutting — cur to the bone!"
Ask, ere the youngster be rated and chidden.
What did he carry and how was he ridden?
May be they used him too much at the start.
May be Fate's weight-cloths were breaking his heart.'

Life's Handicap

His horsey sentimentality draws tears from people of Pappie's
mind, is very English, and pleases EngHshmen. One or two are

tales (the title is the best thing in the book). I hke a little of 'Beyond
the Pale', but it ends hke the rest in anecdotive chat. I beUeve
Moore has compared his use of Enghsh to Shakespeare's. I am
astonished. I suspect Moore did so because he had to look out so
many slang terms and Anglo-Indian words in a dictionary.

I was paid a fine compliment by a drunken man. He told me he
had met me before v/ith Pappie and asked me had I travelled much.
I said I had never travelled at all. He seemed very much surprised
and said he thought I had lived a long time away on the Continent.
I tried to persuade him that he was mistaking me for Jim. But he
stuck to his point with the persistence of a drunken man who re-
members only one thing. He said he knew Jim well and that
Pappie had told him that he had been a couple of times in Paris,
so I gave in and asked him what made him think I had travelled —
my accent? 'Ah, no — your manner. I thought from your manner
that you had travelled a share.' Jaysus! My manner! For once in
my life a drunken man interested me. The compHment was the
finer as I am quite sure it was not intended.

[December 1904]

It is now December and for this year we have Hved in this house
on practically starvation rations. There has been a very small
breakfast, perhaps, no dinner, and no tea, and at about seven
o'clock I find the house intolerable and go down town. Very
frequently I meet on these strolls fellows who were in class with
me in Belvedere coming home from business. They are, evidently,
useful members of the community since they are worth being paid.
I am, in a word, an idler, or if you prefer, a wastrel. I am hving on
the very meagre fare of idleness, and am at present very conscious
of its insufficiency, while I amuse myself picturing the domestic
security to which they are returning — fruit of industry. They are
believers; I am an unbeHever. I remember the trite moral the
vulgarian priests who were my masters, the Jesuits, would draw
from my case. My mind must be very lax and my thoughts very
desultory, for I permit myself to think lazily and quite without
sincerity, would I change with them? I am not over-clever but I
am not stupid. I could easily cultivate the domestic virtues, throw

G 97

up the sponge, and become a not-commonplace citizen. What in
the end am I trying to do with this head-piece of mine? But if my
mind has been lax, it suddenly rises up and is glad, for I would not
change with them. I have no certitude in me. If they are right, then
I lose all. If I am right, they certainly suffer nothing. I quite en-
visage the fact that my policy is bad policy, but I could not change
with them if I would. I can answer them no questions, but I do
not believe their blessed fable of Jesus Christ nor in the Church
they have built out of it, and though I am quite without principles
and accuse myself of inconsistency, a personal honour will not let
me try to beHeve for policy's sake. This enlivening of my faith in
unbelief seems to me not unworthy. They stop me (because they
regard me as an amusing fellow, I think) for I rarely stop to speak
to any one of them. A gawky idiot legs it up to me slowly, with a
broad grin on his face. I would have preferred to nod and pass on.
However (as Pappie would say), I find myself talking as if I were
repeating the lines of a role, mechanically twisting and turning
phrases.

— Hello, Joyce.

— Hello, Dodd. How are you getting on? Are you studying
hard for your exams these times?

— Yes. But not too hard, you know. (With a significant laugh
to me,) I've two more chances.

— Oh I see! Just hard enough to fail?

— Yes. {Laughs.)

— With honour?

— Oh! with honour, of course! {Laughs.)

— I see. Oh, that's right. So long.
Ugh! The Thing! The Fool! The Imbecile! Did you see him
chuckhng in his long neck with delight at being let live? The
bloody ostrich!

Some women approach love after marriage. Mother, I think,
was one of that number.

Jim read these Notes of mine when he came back into the house.^
He threw them down without a v/ord. He cursed me in jest for not
having written anything about himself and Nora^in them, and

1 That is, after 19 September, when he returned home to St. Peter's
Terrace after having lodged elsewhere during the summer.

later amused himself by parodying them. His parody was some-
thing like * Sometimes I do be thiiikin', goin' along the road, etc'

Ruskin said, I believe, that the true test of a m_an and what he
believed in would be what he would do if he were told that he
would be dead in a few hours. The vulgarian priests hke this
rubbish but I prefer a reply St. Stanislaus gave. One day he was
sent out to play ball with the other novices. While they were play-
ing, one of the novices asked him what he would do if he were told
he was to die in an hour. *I would go on playing ball,' said St.
Stanislaus. I do not like this insipid little saint, but on this occasion
he seems to me to have cerebrated with great distinction.

Jim turned a number of the Irish hterary cHque against him by
announcing his dislike for work and his intention to do it only
when he must, whereas Colum is highest in their favour because
he is a strenuous little poet, and writes strenuous poems. These
people forget that Jim's idleness is of more importance than
Colum's work, because Jim is never idle except when studying for
an exam, but always spiritually very much ahve.

I shall call these Notes 'My Crucible', because I try to refine
myself in them and to separate what is subtle from what is gross.

When Charlie is going out in the evening Pappie starts, *Where
are ye going, Ch-a-a-arlie? Down to the Murray s, I hope' — and the
rest of it. *Going down to sponge on them for porter, eh? Sucldng
porter, that's all you're good for. You seem to be very fond of
them. Ye'll get out of this, ye bloody waster of hell. Ye can go and
stay with the Murrays, then. Ye can go and sponge on them as
your brother did' ; and much more. Charlie takes no notice of him,
but goes out. He never goes down to the Murrays, but I go every
night almost. I feel very cowardly while this is going on, though I
don't see how I could help it. When Pappie asks me where I am
going, which he does sometimes, very apologetically, I say *Out,'
or sometimes 'Dov/n town'. I never asked myself where he thought
I was going, but I had a vague impression that he knew very well.
I left Pappie once or twice in the street to wait for me wliile I w^ent
to talk to Aunt Josephine at Aughrim Street. I think it was notice-
able that I showed myself very different from him towards any
members of the family that called up. When Jim Murray was
diffident about going into the room where Pappie was, I went in

with him and affected more intimacy with him than, I think,
exists, and would have affected more but for fear of appearing
patronizing, and finally I left Pappie (who was fairly drunk — his
most abusive stage) to come home by himself, so that I could go
and see Katsy home, very sincerely and much preferring her
society to Pappie's. I have to his knowledge received presents from
both Aunt Josephine and Katsy, yet I must suppose that all this
was wasted on him for he never abuses me about them. I thought
once or twice that his abuse of Charlie was meant for me, but the
other day he said he hoped I wasn't in with those blackguard
friends of Jim's. I said I hadn't seen any of them for months.
Pappie may have been play-acting, pretending to think that I went
to them every night I went out, so as to lead me to believe he did
not know I went down so constantly to the North Strand. Any-
thing is possible with Pappie. If he does not abuse me, although
he would Hke to, it is because my tongue and my temper are at
least the equal of his ; but if he is really deceived then he is too
stupid and too bhnd to observe what is quite plain to others. I
have never found him either stupid or bhnd. I have thought I
should say, 'I have reason to know CharHe does not go to Murrays
as I go down there constantly and he is never there,' but this
would seem to me, somehow, Hke an explanation, and would stick
in my throat. His abusing Charhe for sponging ma}^, all unknown
to me, have something to do with my unwilHngness to accept
drink from Aunt Josephine. I get over my unwillingness pretty
frequently, sure. Yet when one is so full of doubt and indecision
as I am, Httle causes have inordinate effects.

Pappie has had a rather Byronic education, being the only child
of an only child and spendthrift, and being left to be educated by
an elderly, sulky, and uncertain-tempered mother. Lately in the
evenings when I go down to Fairview, I have desisted during my
walks with Aunt Josephine and Katsy from my attempt to utter
no words but revised wisdom. I have begun to talk a great deal, in
fact, and mostly about Pappie, until one night Katsy with her
usual sharpness and impudence told me in fun, *0h, that'll do,
John. Don't talk so much about your "ould fellah".' I had an im-
pression that she had the right of me again, and this, with the
knowledge that I was caught in a false position, somewhat annoyed

100

me. I concealed my annoyance, however, by fondling her, for I
have learnt to conceal my annoyance, and, I suspect, been taught
to try. I have not a particle of affection for Pappie, yet I do not
think I underrate him. Nor do I think I overrate him. What I had
been telling about him were accompHshed facts. I know that he
has made something out of his life and has enjoyed himself in a
way. I have been watching him in many phases, watching him
drunk, watching him sober, v/atching him when he has money and
when he has not, when he is on friendly terms with me and when
he is not, and as a result I find I do not Hke him. I think it very
likely, now, that from this forward I shall take less notice of him.
I wrote once that I disliked Jim,^ but I see now how I v/as led to
believe a lie. With reference to anyone whom we know, we may
like or dislike more than one thing; we may like that person's
character, for instance, and yet dishke what he does or the way he
does it. Jim had done many things which I dishked and had
shghted me a few times before I wrote. Now that I think of it, I
suggest I may have been irritated by the demands which, quite
unknown to me, Jim's presence made on my character; but more
than all this, the idea of affection between characters so distrustful
and mutually so little affectionate repelled me as it does now. I
think I understand Jim, however, and Hke him in the way of
admiration. As for my interest in Jim, it has become chronic, for
it has always been my habit to try to live Jim's intellectual Hfe as
well as my own.

I am glad I have written a kind of appreciation of Henry James,
because I dislike him very much. My admiration of him was one of
those pecuhar admirations, like Edgar Allan Poe's admiration of
Lord Tennyson, which are forced upon you because you under-
stand the person so well, while for exactly the same reason you
cannot give him all the honour in your mind. I think I understand
Henry James very well because of a certain similarity of character,
and, for this same reason disliking him, I have perhaps overrated
him for fear I should underrate him. So, too, when Poe said
Tennyson was the greatest poet that ever Hved he did not quite
believe what he said, and therefore repeated it in italics. He ad-
mired Tennyson very much in this forced way and risked the

^ See p. 47.

lOI

statement hoping that if Tennyson should be considered a very
great poet by his posterity — say as great as Shakespeare is con-
sidered— people would say of Poe, *What a discerning critic ! And
to declare it while Tennyson was still aHve! So difficult!' Unfor-
tunately for Poe's memoryj posterity does not seem in any hurry
to exalt Tennyson.

I think when men get drunk what they most display is their
vanity, their ugly and stupid vanity, their prodigious vanity.

I have a new idea for a honeymoon; that the happy couple
should get into bed and stay there for a week, getting their meals
brought to them.

Tolstoy's return to Nature and simplicity is so much less than
Rousseau's as a conviction is less than a passion. I once thought
Tolstoy very intellectual, I now think him only clever. Unlike
Saul, the son of Kish, Tolstoy seems to me to have gone out to
find a kingdom and to have found his father's asses.

I am displeased with these notes because I know that every
thought of my mind is not interesting of itself, yet I am irritated
when I cannot articulate every disordered and inconsequent
thought of it, because I seem to have the idea that they will be of
interest experimentally.

I taught Jim two things, to whistle and to curse.

There is a legend that when Christ was born a voice was heard
in Greece saying, 'Great Pan is dead.' D'Annunzio proclaims,
* Great Pan is not dead,' but I suggest that Christ is,

I have read the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio twice com-
pletely through, and many novels from it much oftener at times
when I had a mind for lecherous reading. Now on my last reading
I dislike them because the pleasure is not subtle enough for me, I
think. To tell the truth, they never excited me much, I never re-
garded them as lecherous tales. What chiefly held my attention
was the manner of teUing and the kind of Hfe they portrayed. I
had read them in an Enghsh translation (though in one story they
thought it more decent to give a page of French) and of course the
style is translation English. I Uke some of the tales well, some even
very well; some are witty, often he gives a witty turn to the story;
I admire the picture of Italian life he gives in some, and the free-
dom of the natural soul that is in all; but after a hundred stories I

102

think that the book is wretched. They remind me of a saying of
Paracelsus. Paracelsus said that the artist must do nothing but
separate what is subtle from what is gross, what is pure from what
is impure. In a sense it might be said that Boccaccio did this, but
that he kept the wrong retort. Yet I Uke very well those stories
which are catalogued in booksellers' hsts under the title 'Erotic' —
when they are well told, when, in fact, they are by de Maupassant.

I Uke instrumental music best, better than songs, better than
operas, and this seems to me strange as I have absolutely no know-
ledge of music or of any instrument, and not much ear, I am very
hard to please in operas, perhaps because my ear is confused. I
generally look at the shoulders of the people under me so as not to
see the acting. Operas seem to me literally screaming farces, and
I like best those that are simple or those in which the melody is
strange. I have no love for orchestration, and when it makes the
voice difficult to hear I abominate it. I consider it chiefly (when,
that is, it is not playing by itself) as an accompaniment to the
singer. I suspect that this is very vulgar, and that in Wagner, for
instance, the orchestration is frightfully intellectual, but then I
prefer a rich voice to an intellectual singer. In waltzes, polkas,
mazurkas, chacones, nocturnes, fugues, bourrees, sonatas, and
even overtures, I take a very genuine pleasure.

People Like Jim easily, although he is a man of strange impulses.
Perhaps it is because he is so much alive. He seemed to me the per-
son in Ireland who was most alive. My own want of energy, of what
they call 'heart', oppresses me. I remind myself of de Goncourt's
saying about Saint-Beuve, 'that he was always gnashing his teeth
in disgust that he was not a handsome young officer of hussars'.

Tommy Moore and Waltenfel are the two most typical poets of
the common mind, I have heard, and just as Moore has written
one or two poems, Waltenfel has written one or two waltzes.

[January 1905]

It is now January 1905 and I am still writing at these notes. I
dislike them very much. They are not honest. I have often deter-
mined to burn them and write no more, but for the sake of some
things well-expressed in them have spared them. They are to any

103

shrewd reader the workings of a worthless mind with nothing
beautiful in it. Yet now, envisaging a new-discovered vice of dis-
honourableness, I am preparing to continue them because of my
habit of idleness and my silent egoism, although I do not hope to
set down anything in them that will please me, for my Hfe is now,
even more than formerly, Hke a stale taste and emptiness in my
mouth. I have been dishonourable. This word shames me yet it
shouldn't, for I have no standards of conduct and no principles.
When Aunt Josephine once told me (to prove to me that Uncle
Willie liked me) that he had said to her that I *was a lad who had
some principles but that Jim had none', I was not pleased, knowing
the elements of cowardice, indecision and prejudice of which these
'principles' were compounded, and I pictured how narrow my Hfe
would become inside them, and how much pleasure I would have
to deny myself for the ignoble and inconsistent end of earning the
praise. When Jim was told, he seemed to take it as a compliment,
at least to bis consistency. Now when I am expecting to hear that I
have none, I feel still ignoble. I am hard to flatter, certainly. Jim is
none so difficult to flatter, for I suspect that if I wrote to him 'after
all, you have both honour and peculiar principles of your own'
(which, by the bye, is hardly more than truth), he would take it as
a compliment again. With regard to these notes, I have noticed
that the later ones are better written, so that perhaps by writing
them I am learning to write. Once or twice I have been able to
say, looking at parts in it, 'That's good.'

Jim's criticisms of these notes on mine are characteristic. One
of them is this : 'An' do ye be sittin' up here, scratchin' your arse,
an' writin' thim things.' He pronounces 'arse' something like 'aerse'.

Some people say, 'You can never know what you can do until
you try,' but it seems to me that I can never know what I am able
to do until a twelvemonth after I have done it.

I am tempted seven times a day to burn these notes. I yielded to
the temptation in summer, 1903, and burnt a long and full diary
which I had kept for two years. Jim said he was very sorry I burnt
it, as it would have been of great use to him in writing his
novel,^ and if it would have been of use, I am sorry too. Aunt

^ 'Send me all documents dealing with University College period from
your diary etc' (Letter from James to Stanislaus, 13 January 1905.)

104

Josephine, who was staying in the house at the time, asked me not
to burn it, but I did so to make myself beUeve I was burning my
ships. I shall probably not burn these, however, as Aunt Josephine
has repeatedly asked me to give them to her when I want them no
longer. I would give them but that looking through them I find
that they are very ugly and I would be shamed if they were found
in her drawer. But it is sure that I shall not keep them, for I find
that few things are heavier to have on your hands (or on your con-
science) than paper that has been written on. . . .

I abhor old age.

A woman's love never brooks the delay of sacrament, for as the
woman's desire is for the man's desire, the woman obtains her
desire before marriage, and what she gives in marriage is a kind of
reward or consummation. I have written 'what she gives'; who
would ever speak in this connection of the man 'giving'? Never-
theless marriage means more for a woman than for a man, for
whereas a woman enters into the fullness of life by m.arriage, a
man gives hostages to fortune. Marriage is a 'becoming' something,
a 'setting up' for the woman, but a 'settling down' for the man.
Whenever the marriage is anything more than a social contract or
whenever his life is not already decided, a man writes himself
down at a certain value and must hang up his hunting-spears to be
drawing-room ornaments. One of the chief reasons why I would
be afraid of marriage in my own case is that I would be afraid my
children would be like me. The thought of Stannie-Hke children
troubles me. This is not very egotistical, is it?

In the later centuries in Europe the love of money for its own
sake was held a degrading vice and the miser was a stock character
in fiction. Is the miser extinct now? I think not while we have
police pensioners with us. Today the love of much learning for its
own sake seems to have usurped this vice without incurring the
obloquy which should attach to intellectual misery. Except in the
mind of one. I despise these spectacled, bookish people.

Today I met with Pappie a gentleman named Clegg, a soHcitor
who is 'down in his luck'. He had held 'very good' positions but
afterwards 'lost' them. He would be a 'very clever fellow' if he
'minded his business'. He is a Northerner. He told some story of a
police pensioner known to both of them who had kept a pubUc-

105

house but was now in the Isle of Man. Clegg explained how he
lived rent-free in his ^beautiful island home' and had *a bit over',
on which he comes to Dublin in the summer time, sees *all his old
friends', and goes back after a good stay here. *What do you think
of that for finance?' These stupid Northerns. Nothing stirs their
admiration but the 'finance' in a man spending a shilhng and
getting back one-and-six.

Might-have-beens are often securer of their reputations than
those who have achieved themselves.

A man is what he thinks, looks what he eats, and his manner
holds up the mirror to the Hfe he leads.

I try to avoid rudeness, for in my case rudeness is not the
smaller working of a complete egoism which consistently prefers
its own impulse, since it is not inconsiderateness of others' feelings
because I am rationally decided in favour of my own whim, but
rather a v/eakness, a momentary bhnding of rational choice by an
impulse to vent oneself, or a desire to seem something so as to
overbear, or a grossness which does not see that it offends. There-
fore I dislike it. I think there are occasions when by the sacrifice of
an impulse of no special importance to us, we can respect the
feelings of others, whose minds, though they may be inferior, even
offensive, to our own, yet as civil minds deserve the civiHty of free-
dom and privacy, and the discernment of these occasions is, per-
haps, a mark of refinement.

On one occasion I had a long argument with Jim about the
respect for Pappie which he professes amongst strangers. I main-
tained that Jim's respect was false and a pure prejudice, and that
as he was unable to defend it rationally, persistence in it was a lie.
We were arguing quickly and Jim found himself cornered. 'Then
your respect is false?' *Yes.' *And is a prejudice?' 'Yes.' 'And when
Uncle WilUe told you that he hated Jack Joyce, you should not
have stood up to leave?' 'No, I should not.' Having got him so far,
I remarked quickly, 'You're a bloody Har,' at which Jim gave a
shout of laughter. When he had finished, I proceeded to show him
why I thought he should respect Pappie. I have written that I
hated Pappie, that I loathed him even, but I think I have again to
retract, or rather again to write down that my mind has changed.
This is a poor admission after so much writing, and after so much

io6

changing I fear to write this down as final. Out on 'quod scripsi,
scripsi,' and out on 'quod dixi, dixi,' too ! His mind is old, and full
of prejudices that are not my prejudices, and youth will have youth;
his mind is opposed and abusive, and I am impatient. I am very
impatient, and my just impatience has vitiated my judgment. I
have not a particle of original affection for him, but just a particle
of admiration for a character of vitality and a judgment which is
occasionally strange and his own. Yet the greater part of what I
have Vi^ritten about him is true, while the greater part of what I
have written about myself (O stupidity!) seems false.

Pappie's own judgment of himself he rarely tells. Tonight, being
drunk, he mused to himself, 'I'm Hke the Bourbons, I never forget.
I don't learn much, perhaps, but I forget very Httle.'

That neo-Catholic argument in favour of confession, which says
that confession is a need of the human conscience and an emotional
relief, is quite true; but is equally a defence of those 'Confessions'
and novels which the Church discountenances as most dangerous
to morals, and the second part of it equally a defence of that
scortatory love in which characters of too great susceptibihty, pent
up by sensitiveness and reserve, find emotional relief. For my part
I find the practice of confession abhorrent, though while in the
Church I had neither any choice of confessors nor appreciable
difficulty in telling my tale, except whatever would arise from
ignorance. I see now that if I had known how to confess, I might
have turned it to some end.

It is typical of me that I am more easily led to beheve good of
others than of myself. The Murrays say that Charlie has more con-
sideration for Aunt Josephine and that he likes her better than I.
I think they mean by considerateness an occasional forbearance
with off-hand treatment, and if they do I suspect it is true that I
am inconsiderate. For rudenesses and sHghts that seem smaU to
them, I suppose, vex me into the gut, and when they are dehberate,
anger takes me by the shoulders and shakes me. Aunt Josephine
tells me as a kind of reproach that she has to be far more careful in
what she says or does to me than she would be with either Jim or
CharHe. I feel it as a kind of reproach. Perhaps such punctihous-
ness seems to them arrogance affected for the purpose of over-
bearing, but I seem to myself to make a good effort not to be hasty,

107

and when, having cahned my mind, the rudeness still makes its
appeal to me, I would have to reproach myself with a meanness if
I let the offence go by the board. If, on the other hand, it should
suggest itself to them to adopt the same standard with me as I do
with them (which would obviously be an affectation), I think I
would supply them with very Httle cause. As to whether Charlie
likes Aunt Josephine better than I do, I know neither how much
Charlie hkes her nor to what degree I like her, but just as I vv^ould
trust Jim's emotion to be purer than mine, I am inclined to think
that whatever feeHng I have is purer than Charlie's. And so,
though I didn't doubt them at the time, I think I was led to beUeve
them too easily.

There is no happiness for the gross, who have no understanding.

When family jealousy asserts itself and there is a difference
between the Murrays and ourselves, or more precisely between
Uncle WilHe and Pappie, I take no part. What part I do take bears
Vi^itness to an impulse in me to take up Pappie's cause straightway.
My conscience does not become very uneasy for its justice's sake
in doing this, as Pappie is at least as trustworthy as Uncle Willie.
Yet when this jealousy is at rest, I find it intolerable to remain at
home with Pappie and the household. Pappie says that I flout him
and that I 'declare to win' with the Murrays, so that from the first
it would appear that blood is thicker than water and from the
second that it is just as little preferred. I do not like Pappie for the
same reason that I do not like my country, because he has sur-
rounded me with unhappiness and opposition from my youth
continually. . . .

Jim professed a great contempt for the morality of the Irish
Mystics. He said their leaving the churches was useless and
nominal, for when they left them they tried to become latter-day
saints. Even as such they do not compare either for consistency,
holiness, or especially charity with a fifth-rate saint of the CathoUc
Church. . . .

Monday, i8 July 1904.^ I'm an unlucky, bloody, bloody, bloody
fool. Och ! I can't curse big enough ! I wanted to go to this Regatta
with Katsy tomorrow, I wanted to go ! Curse on this ankle of mine !

^ The following literary exercise is worked up from the incident men-
tioned under date of i August [1904]. See p. 43.

108

Curse on it! But maybe it'll be well in the morning? No, I know
the kind it'll be; I'll suffer hell getting it into my boot. Oh, Jesus !
I can't get my boot off! It feels Hke as if I was smashing my foot off
at the ankle. That's only imagination I know, but if I force the
boot off I may injure my foot still more by straining it, and I won't
be able to put a foot under me at all at all tomorrov/. I wanted par-
ticularly to go to that cursed Regatta with Katsy. I'd have been
able to borrow a shilling from Pappie; I don't often borrow, and
besides, I'd have been able to pay it back — . Oh, if only I hadn't
jumped at that ditch I'd have been all right now and could have
gone as I intended tomorrow. Even if I do go, I'll be limping
damnably about, unable to enjoy anything. Probably injuring my
foot by walking on it, too. I don't care a curse. I want to go and I'll
go. S-s-sis! I can't even press my foot on the floor; it strains my
whole leg. I'm sick into the bargain, this thing has made me sick.
I can't get this boot off, that's all about it; somebody else will have
to take it off. See, I'm all trembling. I wish I had a Hght; this room
of mine is so dark. I'll call Charlie? No, somehow I would dishke
to ask him to do the least thing for me; I suppose I must dislike
him. Poppie then, or Eileen? Oh, I forgot; they're down at Fair-
view, out with the Murrays and Katsy, while I'm here. In any case
I hate to have anyone attending on me. It seems to me peevish and
weak. There! It's off, that wasn't so hard. My foot seems to be
singing a song, a stinking, painful song, but ! I'll be into bed in a
minute now — . The pain isn't so intense, but the darloiess here !
the uncomfortableness of the bed ! my unluckiness — I hate to be
invahded up. Boys are shouting out there behind in Cabra Park, it
can't be so late, about 9 I suppose. Everyone is up and out this
fine summer evening, but here am I. I suppose they're out at
Domiycarny now, Katsy too. I think she prefers to be out with
them than with me. They bore me utterly. I would like to run
away down a side road by myself. Why does she prefer them? How
long will they be; tiU half past ten. An hour and a half. It'll seem
hours to me, the length of a night. I can't sleep on this side, I am
uncomfortable. I won't be able to turn, either. It'll strain my foot.
Then I'll have to lie in this one position all night. Some one of
those dull, feat-performing saints remained in the one position for
a week before he died, or maybe it was a month? Aye, or a year or

109

two, perhaps? See if I can control myself, too. I'll try to abstract
myself, I'll think about something. What'll I think about—? What's
this I was — ? Genius. Well, Genius ! What's this everybody said
about Genius? Carlyle said that body subjugates and tortares the
mind with pain, and the mind flies from pain as the ball flies round
the hand that holds it by a string—. How long? How long will this
keep on? How stupid of me to forget that about genius, because it
was good — clever — . Ah, sure in any case it'll be thrown up on the
scum of my mind again at some other time — 'like scum' I mean, of
course — . This bed is very warm now — . The skin seems tightening
around my head — slowly! — slow-ly! — . Oh! — that was clever —
wish I had said that — . *A — a — a — ah — multitude' — M — said
that — . What was his name? — I just caught the name, just! —
Who's this said that?— Who's this?— I can't— What's this the
thing was? — I can't think — remember — Dawn! — A — ah! — sink!

— *A — a — a — ah multitude' — multitude — ude . And so,

sleep.^

I feel ungrateful when others whom I do not like, like me, be-
cause I know I will repay them with indifference if not with disHke.
Pappie has lately made a difierence in his manner towards Charlie
and towards myself, and this troubles me. I ask myself would it not
be honester for me to make him dislike me beyond the shadow of a
doubt. I would prefer it to be so, for I am happier, happier,
happier, freer, and better without his Uking. I do not Hke his Uking.
Yet I argue this way with myself, that Pappie does not really like
me (the idea is repugnant), for when I come in, the daily, fatiguing,
scurrilous, endless rigamarole begins. 'Begins' — no, changes theme
and key. I say nothing, grimly.^ Then after some time he begins to
tell something that has happened through the day and in which I
take not the least interest. The abusiveness has gone out of his
words, but not yet out of his tone and manner. I allow myself to
answer him, even to talk about what does not interest me, though
I am aware that disgust, like Katsy, glances at my eyes, and silently
does not admire. I see that he wants someone to talk to. Why

^ The preceding paragraph is considered to be one of several possible
sources for James's use of the interior monologue.

^ MS. note: 'I know it is not because I am twenty and idle, for it has
been going on since I can remember.'

1 10

should I not talk to him while I am here? And then this happens. I
am down in Murrays. Aunt Josephine being ill, I have called to see
her. Uncle WilUe comes in unexpectedly, and after a fev/ minutes
I get up to go. I am asked to stay. I make some efforts to go, but
being pressed both by Uncle WiUie and Aunt Josephine, and being
undecided, I stay against my better judgment. It is the first time
for I don't know how long that I have stayed the evening. You
might have been more careful than to have left it possible; you
compromised your self-respect for no visible purpose. Uncle Willie
in the middle of a drunken, rambling, apparently friendly speech
to me aimed covert insults at Jim and, in a lower tone to Aunt
Josephine, open insults. Katsy had asked me to wait until she re-
turned from the chapel, and when she came in, having played a
few short games of cards, I left. I was annoyed as usual with myself
for having put myself in the way of a vulgar jealousy which I know
so well.^' Pappie was drunk when I came home. He is imder the
impression that every night that I am late, I have been down with
them. 'Oh, ye bloody-looking Yahoo of hell! Down with the
Murrays were ye?' 'Is my supper ready, please?' 'How long. Oh
Jesus, how long? Oh wait! A fortnight! Just about a fortnight and
then I'll pelt the Murrays with you. Pelt them, by God.' Then he
proceeded to tell how Tom Devon^ asked what Charlie and I were
doing, and how he told Devon he was going to put us on the street
when he sold the house. 'And what are they going to do?' 'Oh, they
teU me they can go down and stay with the Murrays. Willie Murray
will take them in; in fact, I beheve he's very anxious for them to go
down! Oh yes, and chat'll travel.' He said much more that v/as
equally offensive, but the text of his discourse I know to be true,
that Uncle WilHe has no love for Jim or for me or for anyone of
our name. I Hstened tiredly to him for some time. What had been
wearisomely wrong for months was wearisomely true tonight. I
thought of it on the way home. He might have been present, and
yet in spite of his drunkenness he is not without impartiahty, as if
he were exercising his mind really to tell me that which is. My
scanty respect for him is relative, not absolute. Ugh! How much I

^ Tom Devon (or Devin), an old friend of John Joyce, is the 'J^ck
Power' of the story 'Grace', in Diibli7wrs, and appears under his own
name in Ulysses.

Ill

write about this family bickering, but then, how much it thrusts
itself upon me! However, Aunt Josephine is not Uncle Willie, and
I am not my father. Aunt Josephine alluded to the phrase that
occurs so often in these 'Notes' — 'the Murrays'. I have grown up
with it; it [is] associated in my mind forever with the sound of
Pappie's voice drunkenly haranguing his silent family, that deep,
open-vowelled, rasping, blatant voice, listening to which, at least
I understand hate. . . .

I am considered hardier and healthier than either Jim or Charlie.
I take care of myself and watch my body almost as carefully as I
watch my mind, but I seem to myself to have been braving off
weakness and delicacy always and in all respects. I regard myself
as one of naturally weak. . . .

The Jesuit influence, not their system, is educational, because it
trains those under it to educate themselves.

A reply to a matrimonial advertisement : ^Undersigned begs to
apply for above position'.

Matter is indestructible, scientists tell us, so here is an epitaph
for us mortalists: 'Here lie the immortal remains'.

I was in the prettily-furnished, softly-carpeted house of a
Belfast builder today. Every cheap luxury a clerk could want was
there in some corner. There was everjrthing — except room. His
wife appeared to be cooking the dinner in the kitchen. His child-
ren's children will shiver at the space between sky and sea. I know
poverty, yet I prefer our house with its dirty windows and door
and without even the necessary furniture, because, perhaps for
this reason, there is no shameful want of room, and I understand
Diogenes' preference for poverty.

I prefer either music or prose to verse, but I like poetry wherever
it is found. I admit it is found oftenest in verse.

I have so much sympathy with people I know that when I am in
the same room with them and silent, everything that happens them
seems to happen me and I pass through every mood of theirs. How
can I believe, then, that I have a mind of my own. Add to this that
I have no afl'ection for my family, and I will show something
strange. I am silent and reserved to live with for this reason, that I
wish my conversation with those who expect affection from me but
to whom I can offer none, to be civil, what is necessary, but no

112

more. I would prefer to live with strangers, because I do not suc-
ceed as I wish in my attempt. But I watch over myself with irritable
scrupulousness lest a tone, a superfluous word, a look, a spon-
taneous expression might be misunderstood. I have defined love as
an intimate and desirous dependence. Isn't this the opposite of
that love — an intimate but repugnant dependence — and do I, then
hate all my family who tacitly expect affection from me?

I have a novel system of reading : I sell what books I can, and
read what books I can't — out of spite.

I attribute the following to Pappie: (i) the undermining of his
children's health, and their rotting teeth, to absolutely irregular
feeding and living, cheap adulterated food, and general unsanitary
conditions of life; (2) the handicap of his children's chances in life
(whereby Poppie's chance, for example, is quite ruined); (3)
Mother's unhealth, unhappiness, weakening mind, and death, to
his moral brutality and the Juggernaut he made life with him, and
to his execrable treatment of her even up to her last day; and (4),
indirectly, Georgie's death, for if Georgie had been properly
doctored or in a hospital, he would have lived. Besides these, he is
pulling down his children's characters with him as he sinks lower.
It's a pretty list on paper yet somewhat understated. 'Moral
brutality' does not convey to the stranger mind the eternity of
abuse that in memory impinges monotonously on my accustomed
ear at will. It was a constant threat of his to Mother, 'I'll break
your heart! I'll break your bloody heart!' It must be admitted that
this was exactly what he did, but not of set purpose. He saw that
his callous habit of commonplace gluttony, as graceless and dull a
routine as the rest of his life, would have this effect, and it eased
his ill nature to think so. He uses the threat to us, now, but adds,
'I'll break your stomach first though, ye buggers. You'll get the
effects of it later on. Wait till you're thirty and you'll see where
you'll be.' He has made the house what it has always been by his
unlovely nature and his excellent appetite for whiskey and water,
and that he has any pension left to live upon is due to the influence
of friends and consideration for the family dependent on him. He
was near being left without. Here is one out of my Book of Days.
On Thursday the 27th April. ^ I was up fairly early — 8 perhaps —

1 1905.

H 113

and the day went according to my plan till a certain hour. Pappie
was defendant in an appeal case and expected the case to be called.
He was going to defend the action himself. I went down to see. I
did not see, for it was not called, and I came home at six. Pappie
was not in, there was no light, and no meal. I had wasted my day
waiting for him in the Four Courts — a snobbish, utterly stupid,
noisy hole — while he was getting drunk in some bar parlour or
snug. I was irritated, for I knew he had money. I sat down heavily
on the table and cursed his name vehemently. Poppie, who had
been moping over the fire in the dark with the children, began to
ease her own irritation and her tongue on me. I cursed at her like
Pappie's son and went out. I was happy out — but what do in such
a house? Answer advertisements? Is anything more futile and dis-
heartening? And what to do out? Aunt Josephine was laid up, so
they would not be out, and my customary relief was blocked. I
walked out to DoUymount by myself, then I came home, after
nine. Pappie was not in yet. I had been speculating by outward
signs about it while I knocked and had given myself hope. I
cursed again violently for perhaps a minute, and was silent. After-
wards I went up to bed. It was partly stomach anger, it was partly
a fanning of resentment into violent hatred, but it was deep
irritation at myself far more than these. For some idea of amiability
I had lived with him for some days and had consented not [to] go
with those my thoughts should have chosen. Lache ! I had acted
the part of companion to him — 'acted' is the word, for I knew that
my slight, perceptible dislike for him was as constant and un-
changing as my sHght, perceptible pity for Mother. I felt my pride
outwitted and humiliated. After ten Pappie came in with few
pence left. We — and the children — had fasted 14 hours. I heard his
drunken intonations in the dark downstairs, and then the saddening
flow. This is a true portrait of my progenitor : the leading one a
dance and then the disappointing, baffling, baulking and turning
up drunk — the business of breaking hearts.

114

INDEX

Aeneas, 82

Aesopj 65

America, 93

American, The (Henry James), 84,

92
Apothecary Hall, 67
'Archer, Isabel' (character), 86
Archer, Wilham, 85
Aristotle, 74, 48 n.
'Aunt Brigid' (character), 25 n.

Ballsbridge, 69 n.

Barnacle, Nora, 51, 54, 64, 98

BashkirtsefF, Marie, 31-2

Beerbohm, Max, 85

'Bellegarde, Henri-Urbain de'
(character), 84

'Bellegarde, Valentin de' (charac-
ter), 92

'Casey, John' (character), 19 n.

Casey, Mrs., 36

Casey, Pat, 93-5

Catholic Church, 20, 22, 24, 25,

26, 38, 44, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51, 67,

70-1, 92-3, 97, 98, 107, 108, 112
Chance, Charles, 77-8
Chance, Marie, 77 n.
Chamber Music, 28 n., 30, 31, 62 n.,

63 n., 88
Chopin, 43, 57, 61
'Cintre, Claire de' (character), 92
Clancy, George, 74
Clancy, John, 65
Clegg, solicitor, 105-6
Coello, Sanchez, 56
Colum, Padraic, 29, 30, 33, 35, 36,

72, 82, 99
Colleen Bawn, The (Boucicault), 68

Belvedere College, 23, 46, 54, 77, Cosgrave, Vincent, 35, 36, 44, 51,

90, 97
Bergan, Alfred, 54, 65
'Bloom, Molly' (character), 77 n.
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 102-3
Boucicault, Dion, 68
Boyd, Mr., 77-8
Brady, James, 65
'Bread, Mrs.' (character), 84
Brennan, Father, 26
'Burke, O'Madden' (character), Curtis, O'Leary, 21

21 n.
Burns, Georgina, 37
Byrne, J. F., sketch of, 74; 27, 28,

30, 35, 44, 45, 71, 72

54, 63, 64-5, 68, 71-2, 73
'Counterparts', 38 n.
Cousins, Gretta, 69
Cousins, James, 35, 69
'Cranly' (character), 27 n., 35 n.,

38 n., 74 n.
Cunniam, Captain, 30-1
'Cunningham, Martin' (character),

26 n., 77 n.

Callanan, Mrs. (great-aunt), 69

and n.
Carlyle, Thomas, 89, no

'Daedalus, Isabel' (character), 25 n.
'Daedalus, Maurice' (character),

25 n.
'Daedalus, Stephen' (character),

25 n.
Daisy Miller (Henry James), 86, 89,

115

'Dale, Laetitia* (character), 84, 86

Dana, 25 and n., 62

D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 102

'Davin' (character), 74 n.

Davitt, Michael, 73

'Dead, The', 69 n.

Decameron, 102

'De Craye, Colonel' (character), 85

Dempsey, George, 54

Denza, Luigi, 37

'Desborough, Lucy' (character), 88

Devin, Tom, 11 1

Diary of a Superfluous Man (Tur-

genev), 55
Dolly mount, 114
Diogenes, 112
D' Israeli, Benjamin, 88
Donnycarny, 109
Doyle, Conan, 90
'Dr. Dooley' (verse), 52
Dublin, 61
Dubliners, 21 n., 26 n., 38 n., 69 n.,

77 n.. Ill n. See also titles of the

stories.

Eglinton, John, see Magee, W. K.
Egoist, The (George Meredith), 84,

85,88
Elwood, John, 33, 35, 36
'Epiphanies', 14, 26 n., 62

'Fanning, Long John' (character),

65 n.
Feis Ceoil, 29, 30, 35
'Feverel, Richard' (character), 88
Field, William, 20
Finnegans Wake, 65 n., 77 n.
Finsen, Niels, 52
'Forey, Clare Doria' (character), 86

'Gabler, Hedda' (character), 31

Galway, Tribes of, 16

'Gas from a Burner', 21 n.

'Giovanelh' (character), 86

Gladstone, W. E., 73

Goethe, 24 n., 88, 89

Gogarty, Oliver St. John, charac-
ter of, 29; 15, 21, 25, 30 and n.,
343 35. 36, 453 46, 69, 70-1, 72, 81

Goldsmith, Oliver, 63, 81
Goncourt, Edmond de, 103
'Goodwood, Caspar' (character),

85, 90
Gordon, veterinary student, 69
'Goulding, Richie' (character), 18 n.
'Grace', 21 n., 77 n., in n.
Griffiths, Mr., 75

'Harley, Adrian' (character), 85
Henry, Father, 54
Hermetic Society, 70
'Holy Office, The', 82 n.
House of Sin, 57
Huxley, T. H., 51

Ibsen, Henrik, 31, 48, 71

In the Shadow of the Glen (Synge),

74-5
Ireland and the Irish, 14, 20, 28,

34. 36. 57. 66-7, 75, 79-80, 82-3
Irish National Theatre, 36, 74

James, Henry, 45, 63, 83-93, loi
Jesuits, 112

Journal to Stella (Swift), 72-3
Joyce, Charles (brother), sketch of,

22; 17, 23 and n., 25, 26-7, 28,

35^ 393 42, 58, 773 81, 99, 100,

107-8, 109, no, 112
Joyce, Eileen (sister), sketch of, 24;

32, 43, 69-70, 75, 109
Joyce, Eva (sister), 21
Joyce, Florence (sister), 32
Joyce, George (brother), sketch of,

22-3; 39, 113
Joyce, James (brother), character,

13, 14, 15, 17, 25, 27, 30, 38,
47-8, 64, 99; interests, 13 andn.,

14, 21, 49; appearance, 15, 76;
musical abihty, 15; writing, 13,

14, 17, 25, 29, 48, 62-3, 66, 104;
manners, 15, 23, 26, 45, j6; and
women, 20 and n., 21, 22, 27, 30,
48, 76; reputation, 21, 26, 29, 81,
104, III; friendships, 17, 21, 23,
26, 29, 35, 45, 51, 69, 71, 100,
103; drinking, 13, 76; opinions,

15, 20, 22, 25, 26, 38, 43, 45,

Joyce, James — con.

47, 49-5 1 5 52, 68, 70, 74, 106,
108; at Shelbourne Road, 30;
defends his father, 33; at Feis
Ceoil, 35, 37; angers his father,
46 j reads this diary, 53, 98, 104;
Hving in Tower, 69; borrows
witticisms, 71-2; vexed by
father, 33; er passim

Joyce, John Stanislaus (father),
sketch of, 16-18; 15, 19, 21, 23,
24 and n., 25 n., 28, 30, 31, 32,

33? 345 37j 38, 43. 44. 46, 50,
57-8, 60 and n., 63, 65, 70, 77-8,
82, 94, 95j 96, 97. 99. 100, loi,
106, 107-8, 1 10-12, 1 13-14
Joyce, Mabel (sister), 29, 34
Joyce, Margaret (sister), sketch of,
24-5; 19, 32, 42, 43, 52, 109,

ii3j 114

Joyce, May (sister), sketch of, 23-
4; 26-7, 42-3, 51, 70

Joyce, May Murray (mother),
sketch of, 18-20; 15, 16, 24, 36,
67.77-9398, 113

Joyce, Stanislaus, burns diary, 25,
104; a whetstone, 25; suggests
title of A Portrait, 25 ; suggests
title of Stephen Hero, 25; sub-
ject of an epiphany, 26; suggests
title of Chamber Music, 31; a
clerk, 46, 60; differs from James,
46-7; takes examination for
Gordon, 69; appearance of, 80-
I ; his criticisms of Henry James
and George Meredith, 83-93;
writes interior monologue, 108-
10

Joyce, family of, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23,
28, 31, 39, 58-9, 60, 64, 97, 113

Kane, Matthew, 26, 43, 77-8

Kelly, John, 19

Kelly, Thomas F., 82

Kelly, young, 21

Kettle, Mr., 29

'Kernan, Tom' (character), 21 n.

Kipling, Rudyard, 96-7

'Kramer, Arnold' (character), 71

Life's Handicap (Kipling), 96
'Lightly come and lightly go', 28 n.
'Lovberg, Eilert' (character;, 31,71
'Lynch' (character), 35 n.
Lytton, Lord, 88
Luther, Martin, 64

McCormack, John, 36, 39
Macdonald, medical student, 36
McGarvey's, 74
McKernan, 68
Magee, W. K., 21, 25
Manning, Mick, 96
Marconi, Guglielmo, 52
Martello Tower, Sandycove, 69
Maupassant, Guy de, 22 n., 86, 103
Meredith, George, 51, 66, 83-93
'Merle, Madame' (character), 84,

85
Michelangelo, 90
'Middleton, Clara' (character), 86
'Miller, Randolph' (character), 92
Moore, George, 62, 97
Moore, Thomas, 103
'Mother, The', 21 n.
Murray, Alice, 37, 43, 57
Murray, Bertie, 37
Murray, Jim, 99
Murray, John (uncle), 20, 28, 38,

46, 67-8
Murray, Josephine (aunt), 18 n.,

21, 23, 25 n., 32, 37, 39, 41, 44,

53. 54, 57-8, 61, 99, 100, 104,

105, 107, III, 112, 114
Murray, Kathleen (cousin), 18, 20,

27, 32, 36, 37, 39-4I3 43> 44. 51,

53, 61, 62, 63, 64, 71, 100, lOI,

108-9, no
'Murray, Red' (character), 20 n.
Murray, William (uncle), 18 n., 23,

25 n., 33, 36, 37, 38, 57-8, 104,

108, III, 112
Murray, family of, 20, 37-8, 51,

69, 99, 100, 108, III, 112

Napoleon, 73

NelHe, prostitute, 30 and n., 31
'Newman, Christopher' (charac-
ter), 92

117

Nicknames^ 20-1, 25 n,, 70-1
Nolarij MisSj 20

O'Callaghan, medical student^ 35
O'Connell characteristics j 37, 61
One of Our Conquerors (Meredith),

51
'Osmondj Gilbert' (character), 84,

85
'Osmond, Pansy' (character), 85

Palmieri, Benedetto, 37

Paracelsus, 103

Paris, 61, 82, 97

Parnell, Charles Stewart, 73

Pater, Walter, 43 n., 89

Patmore, Coventry, 74

'Patterne, Crossjay' (character), 84

'Patterne, Sir Willoughby' (charac-
ter), 84, 85

Perse, Dr., 20 andn.

Plain Tales from the Hills (Kipling),
96

Poe, Edgar Allan, loi, 102

Pohlman's, 61

Poland, 43

Pomes Penyeach, 14 n.

Portrait of a Lady (Henry James),
45^ 84, 85, 92

Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Mani 19 n., 25, 27 n., 30 n.,
33 n., 35 n., 74 n.

'Power, Jack' (character), iii n.

'Rakes of Mallow' (song), 75-6
Rathbourne, Miss, 36
Regatta, 43, 108-10
Rembrandt, 81

Richard Feverel, Ordeal of (Mere-
dith), 84, 88
Richardson, Samuel, 88
Riders to the Sea (Synge), 74
Rossetti, D. G., 26
Rousseau, J. -J., 14
Ruskin, John, 99
Russell, George, 30, 82
Ryan, Father, 90-1
Ryan, Frederick, 25, 29

Sainte-Beuve, C. A., 103

Sandy cove, 69

Sandymount, 61

'School for Scandal' (a game), 55

Sheehan, medical student, 27

Sheehy, Hannah, 27, 36

Sheehy, Maggie, 55

Sheehy, Mary, 20, 27, 28, 36

Sheehy, Richard, 27, 55

Sheehy, family of, 54

Sheehy- Skeffington, Haimah, 27,

36
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 90
'Stackpole, Henrietta' (character),

90
Stanislaus, St., 99
Starkey, James S., 72
Stephen Hero, 25 andn., 35 n., 38 n.,

74 n., 68 n.
Stock, Dr., 67

Swift, Jonathan, 55, 61, 72-3
Swinburne, A. C, 84
Synge, J. M., 74-5

Temple, of 'The Hut', 94
'Temple' (character), 33 n.
Termyson, Alfred, loi, 102
'Thompson, Ripton' (character),

85
Thornton, Richard, 21
'Tilly', 14 n.
Tolstoy, Leo, 93, 102
'Touchett, Ralph' (character), 85
Tower, Sandycove, 69
Turgenev, I. S., 55, 93
Tyndall, John, 52

Ulysses, 15 n., 18 n., 20 n., 21 n.,
25 n., 26 n., 28 n., 30 n., 43 n.,
54 n., 65 n., 77 n., iii n.

'Uncle Jim' (character), 25 n.

Velasquez, 28, 65
Vernon, Father, 78

Wagner, Richard, 103

Walker, Marie, 36

Waltenfel, 103

'Warburton, Lord' (character), 85

118

'What counsel has the learned Yeats, Jack B., 79

moon', 28 n. Yeats, William Butler, 13, 22, 29,

White, a traveller, 67 30, 55, 56, 82

'Whitford, Vernon' (character), 85, Yggdrasill, 14

90 Young Irelanders, 30

Whitman, Walt, 66

Wilde, Oscar, 26

'Winterbourne' (character), 86, 89, Zola, Emile, 68
90,92

119

•^^ rOLLEGE UBRfifi*ate Due

^°^ HUMANITIES ROOM

Due R^hixn^trA" Due Returned

Mk MMij r*^^'

WUUT 'U

i -r

m-l\ U'j. -^■

-ir^lBt

h/LK 1 J ZoJd

eiBU.^

C, c7

Dublin diary mam
823.91J89Yj3C.2

3 \^^^ D3311 AE3E

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Texts

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "Dublin diary"

See other formats