Part 30 (1/2)

'Impleta sunt quae concinit David fideli carmine....'

”They turned into Lower Mount Street. A few steps from the corner a fat young man, wearing a silk neck-cloth, &c.”

On almost every page of Joyce you will find just such swift alternation of subjective beauty and external shabbiness, squalor, and sordidness.

It is the ba.s.s and treble of his method. And he has his scope beyond that of the novelists his contemporaries, in just so far as whole stretches of his keyboard are utterly out of their compa.s.s.

The conclusion or moral termination from all of which is that the great writers of any period must be the remarkable minds of that period; they must know the extremes of their time; they must not represent a _social status_; they cannot be the ”Grocer” or the ”Dilettante” with the egregious and capital letter, nor yet the professor or the professing wearer of Jaeger or professional eater of herbs.

In the three hundred pages of ”A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

there is no omission; there is nothing in life so beautiful that Joyce cannot touch it without profanation--without, above all, the profanations of sentiment and sentimentality--and there is nothing so sordid that he cannot treat it with his metallic exact.i.tude.

I think there are few people who can read Shaw, Wells, Bennett, or even Conrad (who is in a category apart) without feeling that there are values and tonalities to which these authors are wholly insensitive. I do not imply that there cannot be excellent art within quite distinct limitations, but the artist cannot afford to be or to appear ignorant of such limitations; he cannot afford a pretense of such ignorance. He must almost choose his limitations. If he paints a snuff-box or a stage scene he must not be ignorant of the fact, he must not think he is painting a landscape, three feet by two feet, in oils.

I think that what tires me more than anything else in the writers now past middle age is that they always seem co imply that they are giving us all modern life, the whole social panorama, all the instruments of the orchestra. Joyce is of another donation.

His earlier book, ”Dubliners,” contained several well-constructed stories, several sketches rather lacking in form. It was a definite promise of what was to come. There is very little to be said in praise of it which would not apply with greater force to ”A Portrait.” I find that whoever reads one book inevitably sets out in search of the other.

The quality and distinction of the poems in the first half of Mr.

Joyce's ”Chamber Music” (new edition, published by Elkin Mathews, 4A, Cork Street, W.1, at 1_s_. 3_d_.) is due in part to their author's strict musical training. We have here the lyric in some of its best traditions, and one pardons certain trifling inversions, much against the taste of the moment, for the sake of the cleancut ivory finish, and for the interest of the rhythms, the cross run of the beat and the word, as of a stiff wind cutting the ripple-tops of bright water.

The wording is Elizabethan, the metres at times suggesting Herrick, but in no case have I been able to find a poem which is not in some way Joyce's own, even though he would seem, and that most markedly, to shun apparent originality, as in:

Who goes amid the green wood With springtide all adorning her?

Who goes amid the merry green wood To make it merrier?

Who pa.s.ses in the sunlight By ways that know the light footfall?

Who pa.s.ses in the sweet sunlight With mien so virginal?

The ways of all the woodland Gleam with a soft and golden fire-- For whom does all the sunny woodland Carry so brave attire?

O, it is for my true love The woods their rich apparel wear-- O, it is for my true love, That is so young and fair.

Here, as in nearly every poem, the motif is so slight that the poem scarcely exists until one thinks of it as set to music; and the workmans.h.i.+p is so delicate that out of twenty readers scarce one will notice its fineness. If Henry Lawes were alive again he might make the suitable music, for the cadence is here worthy of his cunning:

O, it is for my true love, That is so young and fair.

The musician's work is very nearly done for him, and yet how few song-setters could be trusted to finish it and to fill in an accompaniment.

The tone of the book deepens with the poem beginning:

O sweetheart, hear you Your lover's tale; A man shall have sorrow When friends him fail.

For he shall know then Friends be untrue; And a little ashes Their words come to.

The collection comes to its end and climax in two profoundly emotional poems; quite different in tonality and in rhythm-quality, from the lyrics in the first part of the book:--

All day I hear the noise of waters Making moan, Sad as the sea-bird is, when going Forth alone, He hears the wind cry to the waters'