Homage to James Joyce

Abstract

At first it seems odd that Mr Joyce should be only fifty years old. For already he is as much part of a slightly younger Irishman’s background as O’Rahilly¹ and more so than Mangan or Synge or Mr Yeats. Mr Yeats has the nobility of passionate intellect and Olympian imagination and like Corneille and Goethe he has influenced his country, and goes on influencing it, from above. But Joyce! Joyce’s nobility seems to me to be all heart, all loving interpretation. It is why he can afford to be so honest why he can say everything. He writes about human beings as the most enlightened and humane of father confessors might, if it were permitted, write about his penitents. For an Irish Catholic, his Dublin is the eternal Dublin, as Dante’s Florence is the eternal Florence, Dublin meditated on, crooned over, laughed at, loved, warned, Dublin with its moments of hope and its almost perpetual despair, its boastfulness and its cravenness, its nationalism, its provincialism, its religion, its profanity, its Sunday mornings, its Saturday nights, its culture, its ignorance, its work, its play, its streets, its lanes, its port, its parks, its statues; its very cobbles, and the feet, shod and unshod, worthy and unworthy — if a charity like Joyce’s permits the use of so final a word as ‘unworthy ’in relation to any human being — that walk them.

transition (Paris), no. 21 (March 1932) 254–5.