Complete Works of James Joyce
Page 250
The Bruno Philosophy
1903
Except for a book in the English and Foreign Philosophical Library, a book the interest of which was chiefly biographical, no considerable volume has appeared in England to give an account of the life and philosophy of the heresiarch martyr of Nola.
Inasmuch as Bruno was born about the middle of the sixteenth century, an appreciation of him — and that appreciation the first to appear in England — cannot but seem somewhat belated now. Less than a third of this book is devoted to Bruno’s life, and the rest of the book to an exposition and comparative survey of his system. That life reads like a heroic fable in these days of millionaires. A Dominican monk, a gipsy professor, a commentator of old philosophies and a deviser of new ones, a playwright, a polemist, a counsel for his own defence, and, finally, a martyr burned at the stake in the Campo dei Fiori — Bruno, through all these modes and accidents (as he would have called them) of being, remains a consistent spiritual unity.
Casting away tradition with the courage of early humanism, Bruno has hardly brought to his philosophical enquiry the philosophical method of a peripatetic. His active brain continually utters hypotheses; his vehement temper continually urges him to recriminate; and though the hypothesis may be validly used by the philosopher in speculation and the countercheck quarrelsome be allowed him upon occasion, hypotheses and recriminations fill so many of Bruno’s pages that nothing is easier than to receive from them an inadequate and unjust notion of a great lover of wisdom. Certain parts of his philosophy — for it is many-sided — may be put aside. His treatises on memory, commentaries on the art of Raymond Lully, his excursions into that treacherous region from which even ironical Aristotle did not come undiscredited, the science of morality, have an interest only because they are so fantastical and middle-aged.
As an independent observer, Bruno, however, deserves high honour. More than Bacon or Descartes must he be considered the father of what is called modern philosophy.’ His system by turns rationalist and mystic, theistic and pantheistic is everywhere impressed with his noble mind and critical intellect, and is full of that ardent sympathy with nature as it is — natura naturata — which is the breath of the Renaissance. In his attempt to reconcile the matter and form of the Scholastics — formidable names, which in his system as spirit and body retain little of their metaphysical character — Bruno has hardily put forward an hypothesis, which is a curious anticipation of Spinoza. Is it not strange, then, that Coleridge should have set him down a dualist, a later Heraclitus, and should have represented him as saying in effect: ‘Every power in nature or in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole condition and means of its manifestation; and every opposition is, therefore, a tendency to reunion.’?
And yet it must be the chief claim of any system like Bruno’s that it endeavours to simplify the complex. That idea of an ultimate principle, spiritual, indifferent, universal, related to any soul or to any material thing, as the Materia Prima of Aquinas is related to any material thing, unwarranted as it may seem in the view of critical philosophy, has yet a distinct value for the historian of religious ecstasies. It is not Spinoza, it is Bruno, that is the god-intoxicated man. Inwards from the material universe, which, however, did not seem to him, as to the Neoplatonists the kingdom of the soul’s malady, or as to the Christians a place of probation, but rather his opportunity for spiritual activity, he passes, and from heroic enthusiasm to enthusiasm to unite himself with God. His mysticism is little allied to that of Molinos or to that of St. John of the Cross; there is nothing in it of quietism or of the dark cloister: it is strong, suddenly rapturous, and militant. The death of the body is for him the cessation of a mode of being, and in virtue of this belief and of that robust character ‘prevaricating yet firm’, which is an evidence of that belief, he becomes of the number of those who loftily do not fear to die. For us his vindication of the freedom of intuition must seem an enduring monument, and among those who waged so honourable a war, his legend must seem the most honourable, more sanctified, and more ingenuous than that of Averroes or of Scotus Erigena.
Humanism
1903
Barbarism, says Professor Schiller, may show itself in philosophy in two guises, as barbarism of style and as barbarism of temper, and what is opposed to barbarism is Professor Schiller’s philosophical creed: Humanism, or, as he sometimes names it, Pragmatism. One, therefore, who has been prepared to expect courteous humanism both in temper and in style, will read with some surprise statements such as—’The a priori philosophies have all been found out’; ‘Pragmatism . . . has . . . reached the “Strike, but hear me!” stage’; ‘It [the Dragon of Scholasticism] is a spirit. . . that grovels in muddy technicality, buries itself in the futile burrowings of valueless researches, and conceals itself from human insight [but not from humane insight, Professor Schiller!] by dust-clouds of desiccated rubbish which it raises.’
But these are details. Pragmatism is really a very considerable thing. It reforms logic, it shows the absurdity of pure thought, it establishes an ethical basis for metaphysic, makes practical usefulness the criterion of truth, and pensions off the Absolute once and for all. In other words, pragmatism is common-sense.
The reader, accordingly, will not be surprised to find that in the post-Platonic dialogue, which is called ‘ “Useless” Knowledge,’ a disciple of William James utterly routs and puts to shame the ghostly forms of Plato and Aristotle. Emotional psychology is made the starting-point, and the procedure of the philosopher is to be regulated in accordance. If Professor Schiller had sought to establish rational psychology as a starting-point, his position would have been well-grounded, but rational psychology he has either never heard of or considers unworthy of mention. In his essay on the desire of immortality he establishes one fact — that the majority of human beings are not concerned as to whether or not their life is to end with the dissolution of the body. And yet, after having set up efficiency as the test of truth and the judgment of humanity as the final court of appeal, he concludes by pleading on behalf of the minority, by advocating the claims of the Society for Psychical Research,’ of which, it seems, he has been for many years a member.
Was it so well done, after all, to reform logic so radically? But your pragmatist is nothing if not an optimist, and though he himself denies philosophies by the score, he declares that pessimism is ‘der Geist der stets verneint.’ The Mephistopheles of Goethe is the subject of one of the most entertaining essays in the book. The subtlest of his disguises,’ says Prof. Schiller in a characteristic sentence, ‘his most habitual mask, is one which deceives all the other characters in Faust, except the Lord, and has, so far as I know, utterly deceived all Goethe’s readers except myself.’ But surely Professor Schiller can hardly derive much satisfaction from the knowledge that he shares his discovery with the Lord in Goethe Faust, a being which (to quote the phrase of the English sceptic upon a term of the English sensationalist- theologians) is taken for God because we do not know what the devil it can be, a being, moreover, which is closely allied to such inefficient and pragmatically annihilated entities as the Absolute of Mr. Bradley and the Unknowable of Mr. Spencer.
Shakespeare Explained
1903
In a short prefatory note the writer of this book states that he has not written it for Shakespearian scholars, who are well provided with volumes of research and criticism, but has sought to render the eight plays more interesting and intelligible to the general reader. It is not easy to discover in the book any matter for praise. The book itself is very long — nearly five hundred pages of small type — and expensive. The eight divisions of it are long drawn out accounts of some of the plays of Shakespeare — plays chosen, it would seem, at haphazard. There is nowhere an attempt at criticism, and the interpretations are meagre, obvious, and commonplace. The passages ‘quoted’ fill up perhaps a third of the book, and it must be confessed that the writer’s method of treating Shakespeare is (or seems to be) remarkably irreverent. Th
us he ‘quotes’ the speech made by Marullus in the first act of ‘Julius Caesar’, and he has contrived to condense the first sixteen lines of the original with great success, omitting six of them without any sign of omission.
Perhaps it is a jealous care for the literary digestion of the general public that impels Mr. Canning to give them no more than ten-sixteenths of the great bard. Perhaps it is the same care which dictates sentences such as the following: ‘His noble comrade fully rivals Achilles in wisdom as in valour. Both are supposed to utter their philosophic speeches during the siege of Troy, which they are conducting with the most energetic ardour. They evidently turn aside from their grand object for a brief space to utter words of profound wisdom .. . .’ It will be seen that the substance of this book is after the manner of ancient playbills. Here is no psychological complexity, no cross-purpose, no interweaving of motives such as might perplex the base multitude. Such a one is a ‘noble character’, such a one a ‘villain’; such a passage is ‘grand’, ‘eloquent’, or ‘poetic’. One page in the account of’Richard the Third’ is made up of single lines or couplets and such non-committal remarks as ‘York says then’, ‘Gloucester, apparently surprised, answers’, ‘and York replies’, ‘and Gloucester replies’, ‘and York retorts’. There is something very naïve about this book, but (alas!) the general public will hardly pay sixteen shillings for such naïveté. And the same Philistine public will hardly read five hundred pages of’replies’, and ‘retorts’ illustrated with misquotations. And even the pages are wrongly numbered.
Borlase and Son
1903
‘Borlase and Son’ has the merit, first of all, of’actuality’. As the preface is dated for May last, one may credit the author with prophetic power, or at least with that special affinity for the actual, the engrossing topic, which is a very necessary quality in the melodramatist. The scene of the story is the suburban district about Peckham Rye, where the Armenians have just fought out a quarrel, and, moreover, the epitasis (as Ben Jonson would call it) of the story dates from a fall of stocks incident upon a revolution among the Latin peoples of America.
But the author has an interest beyond that derivable from such allusions. He has been called the Zola of Camberwell, and, inappropriate as the epithet is, it is to Zola we must turn for what is, perhaps, the supreme achievement in that class of fiction of which ‘Borlase and Son’ is a type. In ‘Au Bonheur des Dames’ Zola has set forth the intimate glories and shames of the great warehouse — has, in fact, written an epic for drapers; and in ‘Borlase and Son’, a much smaller canvas, our author has drawn very faithfully the picture of the smaller ‘emporium’, with its sordid avarice, its underpaid labour, its intrigue, its ‘customs of trade’.
The suburban mind is not invariably beautiful, and its working is here delineated with unsentimental vigour. Perhaps the unc- tuousness of old Borlase is somewhat overstated, and the landladies may be reminiscent of Dickens. In spite of its ‘double circle’ plot, ‘Borlase and Son’ has much original merit, and the story, a little slender starveling of a story, is told very neatly and often very humorously. For the rest, the binding of the book is as ugly as one could reasonably expect.
Aesthetics
1903-04
I. Paris Notebook
Desire is the feeling which urges us to go to something and loathing is the feeling which urges us to go from something: and that art is improper which aims at exciting these feelings in us whether by comedy or by tragedy. Of comedy later. But tragedy aims at exciting in us feelings of pity and terror. Now terror is the feeling which arrests us before whatever is grave in human fortunes and unites us with its secret cause and pity is the feeling which arrests us before whatever is grave in human fortunes and unites us with the human sufferer. Now loathing, which in an improper art aims at exciting in the way of tragedy, differs, it will be seen, from the feelings which are proper to tragic art, namely terror and pity. For loathing urges us from rest because it urges us to go from something, but terror and pity hold us in rest, as it were, by fascination. When tragic art makes my body to shrink terror is not my feeling because I am urged from rest, and moreover this art does not show me what is grave, I mean what is constant and irremediable in human fortunes nor does it unite me with any secret cause for it shows me only what is unusual and remediable and it unites me with a cause only too manifest. Nor is an art properly tragic which would move me to prevent human suffering any more than an art is properly tragic which would move me in anger against some manifest cause of human suffering. Terror and pity, finally, are aspects of sorrow comprehended in sorrow — the feeling which the privation of some good excites in us.
And now of comedy. An improper art aims at exciting in the way of comedy the feeling of desire but the feeling which is proper to comic art is the feeling of joy. Desire, as I have said, is the feeling which urges us to go to something but joy is the feeling which the possession of some good excites in us. Desire, the feeling which an improper art seeks to excite in the way of comedy, differs, it will be seen, from joy. For desire urges us from rest that Ave may possess something but joy holds us in rest so long as we possess something. Desire, therefore, can only be excited in us by a comedy (a work of comic art) which is not sufficient in itself inasmuch as it urges us to seek something beyond itself; but a comedy (a work of comic art) which does not urge us to seek anything beyond itself excites in us the feeling of joy. All art which excites in us the feeling of joy is so far comic and according as this feeling of joy is excited by whatever is substantial or accidental in human fortunes the art is to be judged more or less excellent: and even tragic art may be said to participate in the nature of comic art so far as the possession of a work of tragic art (a tragedy) excites in us the feeling of joy. From this it may be seen that tragedy is the imperfect manner and comedy the perfect manner in art. All art, again, is static for the feelings of terror and pity on the one hand and of joy on the other hand are feelings which arrest us. It will be seen afterwards how this rest is necessary for the apprehension of the beautiful — the end of all art, tragic or comic — for this rest is the only condition under which the images, which are to excite in us terror or pity or joy, can be properly presented to us and properly seen by us. For beauty is a quality of something seen but terror and pity and joy are states of mind.
James A. Joyce, 13 Feb., 1903.
. . . There are three conditions of art: the lyrical, the epical and the dramatic. That art is lyrical whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to himself; that art is epical whereby the artist sets forth the image in mediate relation to himself and to others; that art is dramatic whereby the artist sets forth the image in immediate relation to others ....
James A. Joyce, 6 March, 1903, Paris.
Rhythm seems to be the first or formal relation of part to part in any whole or of a whole to its part or parts, or of any part to the whole of which it is a part.... Parts constitute a whole as far as they have a common end.
James A. Joyce, 25 March, 1903, Paris.
e tekhne mimeitai ten physin — This phrase is falsely rendered as ‘Art is an imitation of Nature’. Aristotle does not here define art; he says only, ‘Art imitates Nature’ and means that the artistic process is like the natural process’. ... It is false to say that sculpture, for instance, is an art of repose if by that be meant that sculpture is unassociated with movement. Sculpture is associated with movement in as much as it is rhythmic; for a work of sculptural art must be surveyed according to its rhythm and this surveying is an imaginary movement in space. It is not false to say that sculpture is an art of repose in that a work of sculptural art cannot be presented as itself moving in space and remain a work of sculptural art.
James A. Joyce, 27 March, 1903, Paris.
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.
James A. Joyce, 28 March, 1903, Paris.
Question: Why are not excrements, children, and lice works of ar
t?
Answer: Excrements, children, and lice are human products — human dispositions of sensible matter. The process by which they are produced is natural and non-artistic; their end is not an aesthetic end: therefore they are not works of art.
Question: Can a photograph be a work of art? Answer: A photograph is a disposition of sensible matter and may be so disposed for an aesthetic end but it is not a human disposition of sensible matter. Therefore it is not a work of art.
Question: If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood make there an image of a cow (say) has he made a work of art? Answer: The image of a cow made by a man hacking in fury at a block of wood is a human disposition of sensible matter but it is not a human disposition of sensible matter for an aesthetic end. Therefore it is not a work of art.
Question: Are houses, clothes, furniture, etc., works of art? Answer: Houses, clothes, furniture, etc., are not necessarily works of art. They are human dispositions of sensible matter. When they are so disposed for an aesthetic end they are works of art.
II. Pola Notebook