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was a town-Irishman, of the sort who holds the peasant in contempt. One
of the donations of generations of English oppression and misrule is this
Irish snobbery, of the Irish toward the Irish-a snobbery rarely admitted,
but a strong factor in Irish life and politics. The elder Joyce would have
none of Christian Brother schools, where his son would be a fellow
scholar of "Paddy Stink and Micky Mud." Clongowes, which Joyce
entered at the age of six, was a kind of Irish Eton, and young James was a
companion of "gentlemen." This snobbery and this education shaped
Joyce more than is generally realized. It accounts for his early exile from
caste-ridden Dublin, for the "seedy hauteur" noted in his manner as a
youth, for his scorn of Irish Nationalism and his contempt for the theatre
Yeats and Lady Gregory worked to give the Irish people. To Joyce the
Irish people were "rabblement"; his interests were attached to the main
stream of European art and literature: Ibsen, Hauptmann, Maeterlinck.
He
took no part in any of the developments of Irish writing and politics,
from the production of
Countess Cathleen
when he was seventeen, through
the
Playboy
riots, the Easter Rebellion and the later "troubles.'' He had
exiled himself from them.
Joyce began, that is, with the attitude which Yeats came to share.
Yeats broke with the "popular theatre" in 1912; Joyce left Ireland in
1906. The results of these breaks were, however, completely different,
because the reasons and background of the two men were different. Yeats
never had to fight the same set-up as Joyce; he was an Anglo-Irishman and
a Protestant. Ireland will tolerate a heretic where it will never tolerate a
renegade. Joyce's break with the Church necessitated his break with Ire–
land. Yeats' break with the fervent Nationalism of his youth, and his loss
of belief in the possibilities of a native Irish art, came only after he had
fought the battle out on his own ground. In some way this freed him, and
exorcised the spell Ireland had cast over him for so long. Joyce never
llecame free of Irish bonds, or of the influence of Jesuit training. He suf–
fered, and still suffers
(Finnegans Wake
stands as recent proof) from an
iltense
mal du pays,
against which his "silence, exile, and cunning" have
nailed him nothing. And Joyce's tendency to schematize, to make into
mgma, to reduce the universal to the particular and see "unity" in diver–
ay,
at the root of all his writing, is profoundly Jesuitical as well as
Aristotelian. In
Ulysses
Dublin becomes the known world of the ancients,
die
Mediterranean. In
Finnegans Wake
Dublin is the point in Vico's circle
&om
which the circumference springs, and to which it returns. It is as
iough, to change the figure, Joyce had explored the surface of Dublin, in
Ulysses,
and in
Finnegans Wake,
under an even deeper compulsion, . had
~beneath
the city, into its very foundations in place, and its very begin–
lings
in
time. It is the center of his exile's thought, and the tie his artist's
-.ning has never been clever enough finally to cut. To put one of Yeats
lit
poems against a page of
Finnegans Wake
proves one thing, if one
lily: Yeats succeeded in cutting the tie.
Joyce's fight against poverty and blindness, his spirit, his malice,
