Luca Crispi

A Commentary on James Joyce’s

National Library of Ireland ‘Early Commonplace Book’: 1903–1912

(MS 36,639/02/A)[i]

Luca Crispi

As far as we know, Joyce did not keep a diary in any traditional sense.[ii] Apart from his voluminous letters, this ‘commonplace book’ is one of the most revealing memoirs of any period in his life.[iii] Joyce began compiling the wide variety of materials in this copybook from late January to April 1903, returned to it in November 1904, and then again around 1912. This manuscript chronicles several crucial transitions in Joyce’s personal and artistic development from his second trip to Paris in January 1903, where he turned twenty-one on 2 February, to his flight to the continent with Nora Barnacle in October 1904, and, most surprisingly, he used it again to note a list of books as well as gather material for Stephen Dedalus destined for Ulysses in 1912 or after, presumably in Trieste, after his final trip to Ireland.

It is similar in some regards to the type of commonplace book that poets, philosophers, theologians, scholars, doctors, lawyers, and artists have compiled for centuries. Joyce’s commonplace book is an eclectic collection of his daily accounts, lists of authors and books he read or wanted to read, transcribed quotations from authors he admired and those with whom he found fault, his own writings on aesthetics and notes for works he would write, as well as other curiosities.

Joyce used some of the material in this manuscript to write Stephen Hero, Dubliners, and some of the texts noted here also appear in Ulysses. Oddly, there is no evidence here of Joyce’s own creative work in 1903 and 1904; the lyrical poems that became Chamber Music and his experimentations in the new art form he called his ‘Epiphanies’ (Buffalo MS I.A). As he would continue to do throughout his career, Joyce segregated the building blocks of his writings from his creative work.

Joyce abandoned his plans to pursue medical studies in Dublin and decided to go abroad in October 1902, though enrolling at the Collège de Médecine in Paris brought with it the same financial problems he had faced in Dublin. After just a month, he willingly returned home for Christmas. With just a vague prospect of work as a foreign correspondent for The Irish Times, Joyce left Dublin once again on 17 January 1903. Stopping in London, he met with William Archer, Lady Gregory and several English editors. Although he tended to exaggerate his prospects (notably in his letters home), Joyce did have reason to believe that these contacts would provide him with work in Paris, where he arrived a few days later. But, as review work was not immediately forthcoming, Joyce had to teach English and more often simply borrowed money to shore up his finances.

Most of Joyce’s commonplace book is filled with quotations from Ben Jonson, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas Percy, each for different reasons. This part of the manuscript appears to be a complete record of Joyce’s reading habits and intellectual interests in the winter of 1903. Joyce himself recounted how in those several months in Paris he spent his days at the Bibliothèque Nationale reading Jonson and his nights at Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève reading translations of Aristotle: ‘I am at present up to the neck in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and read only him and Ben Jonson (a writer of songs and plays)’.[iv] Unlike some authors, Joyce usually did not make marginal marks even in his own books. Rather, he transcribed notes from the books he was reading into a wide variety of notebooks that he kept to hand. Joyce rarely commented or provided context on what he was reading in these notes; he simply recorded short excerpts, words and phrases that drew his attention for whatever reason. Nonetheless, it is unusual that this manuscript documents so much of Joyce’s intellectual activity at the time and points forward to such a wide range of his creative works.

Since it was presumed to be lost until 2002, Herbert Gorman’s 1939 ‘definitive biography’ of Joyce was the source text for almost all the information scholars had about this manuscript.[v] Evidently Joyce had given Gorman this manuscript for use in his biography. After Gorman transcribed excerpts from it, he worked solely from that transcription. Based on its presentation in Gorman’s work, this manuscript previously had been thought to consist of two distinct copybooks (often referred to as ‘The Paris Notebook’ and ‘The Pola Notebook’). The fact that Joyce returned to this manuscript in or around 1912 only became clear in 2008. This NLI MS 36,639/02/A is just one of the spectacular new manuscripts to come to light since 2000, almost all of which are at the National Library of Ireland.[vi]

Joyce did not publish any of the compositions that appear in this manuscript and Gorman’s (at times faulty) transcriptions have been the source of the standard published versions of these works, even though Gorman did not document several important revisions that illuminate Joyce’s evolving theory and style.[vii] Gorman’s transcriptions as they appeared in his published biography (and 3 pages of manuscript discussed below) have served as the source of all subsequent editions of Joyce’s aesthetic texts in The Workshop of Daedalus,[viii] The Critical Writings,[ix] and the Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings.[x]

Gorman’s biography was also the source text for the quotations from Ben Jonson, Aristotle and all of Joyce’s notes compiled in WD and OCPW. Then, in 1980, Richard F. Peterson published his study of a typescript of extracts from this manuscript that Gorman had prepared, but Gorman had only used some of it in his biography.[xi] More recently, Fran O’Rourke prepared an annotated study of Joyce’s excerpts from Aristotle in ‘Allwisest Stagyrite: Joyce’s Quotations from Aristotle’.[xii]

Front cover recto:

This manuscript is an early example of Joyce’s reliance on inexpensive school exercise jotters for his works. He used writing materials of this kind throughout his writing career. For example, in 1904, he borrowed his sister Mabel’s Vere Foster’s National School Edition copybook to write out his ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ essay and notes (Buffalo MS II.A) and Joyce used just this kind of school exercise copybook to write Ulysses from at least 1917 to 1921 in Locarno, Trieste, Zurich, and Paris; the copybooks that survive for Ulysses and are now in the National Library of Ireland (MSS 36,639/03–14) and in Buffalo (MSS V.A).

Page [1r]:

At the top of the page, Joyce wrote out a calendar in five columns by month with seven rows each, from Tuesday, 20 January (2 days before Joyce arrived in Paris) to at least Sunday, 31 May 1903. The last days of each month are underlined twice. He began a sixth column at the very right edge of the page and listed just the first 2 dates in June, but there was no room on the page for the month, and the dating abruptly stops there. The days of the week (from Sunday to Saturday) are listed in a column on the left side of the page; although Joyce first wrote the beginnings of the words in pencil, he wrote them again in black ink. The dates are written in columns by week (2 columns for what remained of January and 4 for the other months) in pencil and the months are written as a row in the left margin above and before the columns of dates in pencil and they are double underlined in ink. The dates from 20 January to 10 April, the day Joyce left Paris for Dublin, are crossed through with Xs in black ink.

A centred double line separates the calendar from two listings of accounts below it from 20 January to 4 April 1903. The first accounting lists money received and spent in London and the second in Paris. The first list is separated into 3 columns: ‘Received’, ‘Outlay’ and ‘Rem’ (that is, ‘Remainder’), while the second is separated only into 2 columns: ‘Received’ and ‘Outlay’. Joyce probably numbered the page but its upper right corner is worn away. The accounts are continued on the following page.

These accounts mostly record loans from his friends Joseph and Patrice Casey (recalled as Kevin and Patrice Egan by Stephen in Ulysses) as well as from Oliver St John Gogarty. Joyce received most of his funds from his family (listed here under the heading ‘home’), who were themselves struggling financially back in Dublin. In all, from 10 February to 9 April, they sent Joyce almost 160 Francs, out of which he paid 30 Francs a month for his hotel bill. Joyce earned 40.50 Francs teaching English to Joseph Douce, who began taking lessons again from Joyce exactly one week after Joyce returned to Paris. Douce also introduced Joyce to another student, A. Auvergniot, who paid Joyce 5 Francs per lesson every other Monday from 16 February to 16 March, with one final lesson just days before Joyce hurried back to Dublin (see Joyce to Mrs John Stanislaus Joyce; 15 December 1903, [?8 March 1903] and 20 March 1903; LII 21–22, 34 and 37). Joyce had to ask Douce for the 375 Francs he needed to return to his family which John Stanislaus Joyce ultimately repaid. Joyce was also paid 25.20 Francs by the Dublin Daily Express on 7 February 1903. The only outlay Joyce lists was for his hotel bill and the continuing repayment of some of the loans to the Caseys. Like Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, Joyce was abruptly called home to his mother’s side as she lay ill and dying. On Easter Sunday, 12 April 1903, Joyce was home in Dublin once again.[xiii]

Page [1v]:

This page continues Joyce’s accounting from 13 March to 10 April 1903 on p. [1r]. There are only two columns ‘Received’ and ‘Outlay’ but there are no entries under the second column. Although a portion of the upper left corner of the page is missing, it is evident that Joyce numbered this page ‘2)’.[xiv]

Besides further loans and fees from his English lessons, the final item on the list is the payment of 16.60 Francs from The Irish Times on 10 April for Joyce’s interview with the French driver Henri Fournier before the Gordon Bennett Cup Race. The interview appeared on 7 April 1903 and the race took place on 2 July (see ‘The Motor Derby: Interview with the French Champion’ CW 106–108 and OCPW 77–79).

Page [2r]:

At the top of the page Joyce transcribed the following song from The Vision of Delight (1617) and below it he wrote ‘Ben Jonson’:

Aur. I was not wearier where I lay

By frozen Tithon’s side, to-night ;

Than I am willing now to stay,

And be part of your delight.

But I am urged by the Day,

Against my will, to bid you come away.

[Vol. VII, p. 294–295][xv]

Stephen mentions the first line of Jonson’s song in A Portrait.[xvi] Joyce transcribed further songs from various Ben Jonson works on pp. [4r], [5r], [7r], [8r], [11r], [13r] and [14r].[xvii] It is interesting to note that Joyce maintained the close association in A Portrait of this particular Jonson song with the reference to a work on Aristotle that he noted on the following page: ‘His mind when wearied of its search for the essence of beauty amid the spectral words of Aristotle or Aquinas, turned often for its pleasure to the dainty songs of the Elizabethans’ (P 148).

Beneath this are seven quotations from Aristotle in English, below which Joyce wrote ‘Aristotle’. Jacques Aubert has shown that the quotations are based on J. Barthémély-Saint-Hilaire’s French translation of Aristotle’s De Anima (On the Soul),[xviii] Psychologie d’Aristote. Traité de l’âme (Paris: Librairie Philosophique Ladrange, 1846).[xix] Only the first quotation is transcribed in Gorman (95), but all seven are transcribed in Peterson (213–214) and in O’Rourke (7–15). Joyce then copied five more quotations from Aristotle from the same source, of which only three (the 2nd, 3rd and last) are in Gorman (95–96); but all appear in Peterson (214) and in O’Rourke (16–22). The quotations in this list are continued on p. [2v].

Page [2v]:

Joyce’s quotations from Aristotle are continued at the top of the page with six more (in two groups of three, separated by ‘Aristotle’ and underlined); only the second of which appears in Gorman (96), but all are in Peterson (214) and in O’Rourke (23–29). Below the second group of quotations, Joyce wrote ‘Aristotle / ^in his^ “Psychology” ’. He then drew three horizontal lines all the way across the page, dividing the quotations from a schema of the Aristotelian structure of tragedy: ‘i — Prologue | ii — Protasis | iii — Epitasis | iv — Catastrophe | v — Epilogue’. He compiled a list of four books, each separated by short, centred horizontal lines (one between the diagram and the first book and two between the other books and after the last one).

Stephen Dedalus’ Aristotelian frame of mind in A Portrait is a reflection of Joyce’s own interests at this time: ‘The lore which he was believed to pass his days brooding upon so that it had rapt him from the companionships of youth was only a garner of slender sentences from Aristotle’s poetics and psychology and a Synopsis Philosophiæ Scholasticæ ad Mentem Divi Thomæ, ad Utilitatem Discipulorum Redacta’ (P 148). Once thought to be fictional, the last is in fact a real work and Joyce explicitly noted the title at the bottom of the page here, with the publication date (Paris: Apud A. Roger F. Chernoviz, editors, 2nd edition, 1892), and the library shelf number.

Joyce’s interest in music and costume are evident in the other books he lists: Cesare Vecellio’s Abiti Antichi e Moderni (Venice, 1889), an early illustrated work on costume; William Allingham’s The Ballad Book: A Selection of the Choicest British Ballads (1864), a selection of folk literature; and Wharton Marriott’s Vestiarium Christianum, whose subtitle is The Origin and Gradual Development of the Dress of Holy Ministry in the Church (1868).

Page [3r]:

This page contains the beginning of Joyce’s first aesthetic tract in this manuscript, which is continued on p. [3v]. The text was first transcribed by Gorman and appears in his biography (96–97). It has been reprinted from Gorman in CW (143–145) and WD (52–54). OCPW based its version of this tract on what is most likely a later manuscript version at Yale (102–103).[xx] Joyce wrote further aesthetic fragments on pp. [3v], [12r], [15r] and [16r]–[17r].

Page [3v]:

The text from p. [3r] is continued and concluded on this page, below which Joyce drew a short horizontal line in the centre of the page. He signed and dated the tract ‘(Jas A Joyce. | Feb.13. 1903 | Paris)’. Below this and between two short horizontal lines Joyce wrote another aesthetic tract. Both these texts appear in Gorman (97–98), CW (145), WD (54) and OCPW (103).[xxi] Joyce signed and dated the second tract ‘(Jas A Joyce. | 6 Mar 1903 | Paris)’.

Page [4r]:

Here Joyce transcribed a series of three songs from Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels (1601). They are in two columns, beneath each song Joyce wrote ‘Ben Jonson’, underlining the name and towards the bottom of the page he also wrote ‘in his play “Cynthia Revels” ’ between double horizontal lines across the page. The songs are:

Thou more than most sweet glove,

Unto my more sweet love,

Suffer me to store with kisses

This empty lodging, that now misses

The pure rosy hand, that wear thee,

Whiter than the kid that bare thee,

Thou art soft, but that was softer ;

Cupid’s self hath kiss’d it ofter

Than e’re he did his mother’s doves,

Supposing her the queen of loves,

That was thy mistress, best of gloves.

[Act V. Scene I.: Vol. II, pp. 292–293]

Now each one dry his weeping eyes,

And to the well of knowledge haste ;

Where purged of your maladies,

You may of sweeter waters taste :

And, with refined voice, report

The grace of Cynthia, and her court.

[Act V. Scene III.: Vol. II, p. 359]

Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,

Now the sun is laid to sleep

Seated in thy silver chair,

State in wonted manner keep :

Hesperus entreats thy light,

Goddess excellently bright.

Earth, let not thy envious shade

Dare it self to interpose ;

Cynthia’s shining Orb was made.

Heav’n to clear, when day did close :

Bless us then with wished sight,

Goddess excellently bright.

Lay thy bow of pearl apart,

And thy crystal-shining quiver ;

Give unto the flying hart

Space to breath, how short soever :

Thou that mak’st a day of night,

Goddess excellently bright.

[Act V. Scene III.: Vol. II, p. 339]

Joyce’s biographers have differed on why Joyce read Jonson at this time. Gorman wrote that the ‘young writer seeking metrical discipline could travel far without finding a better model than Jonson’ (95); while Ellmann suggested that Jonson’s ‘precision and fastidiousness’ were ‘a useful check’ on Joyce’s ‘penchant for lyricism’ (JJII 127). As this manuscript makes evident, Joyce was interested in all sorts of music at this time and in fact most of the quotations are of songs from Jonson’s plays.

Page [4v]:

Here Joyce made an accounting of his first month’s stay in Paris from 23 January to 20 February 1903 in Francs and Sterling. It has been reproduced in black and white in Gorman (facing p. 91).

Nearly one month after he had arrived in Paris (and between the two aesthetic tracts he wrote on the previous page), Joyce added up his income and his debts. Punctilious to a fault, he noted that his expenses exceeded the funds he had received so far. Nonetheless, he went to the effort of accounting for his remainder–nil–and even fashioned a notary stamp with his signature. The day after he compiled his accounts, Joyce wrote two of the many pleading letters to his family in Dublin, first to his mother and then to his father (see LII 29–30 and 30–32). His parents somehow managed to send him 68.50 Francs by the time Joyce’s hotel bill was due. When the money arrived, Joyce celebrated Mardi Gras with some luxuries: dinner, a cigar, and confetti. Joyce also tried to be more practical, buying a stove and some food so he could now begin to make meals for himself at home. His accounting reveals that Gogarty had sent him £1 (25.00 Francs, according to Joyce’s conversion) on 6 February, which according to this ledger Joyce did not return but with which he did manage to repay 10 Francs to Joseph Casey. In all, from 27 January to 17 March 1903, Joyce borrowed 21 Francs from Joseph Casey and 3.40 Francs from Patrice Casey but he only repaid 20.50 Francs to the father and 1.50 Francs to the son (see Joyce to Mrs John Stanislaus Joyce; 19 March 1903; LII 36).

Page [5r]:

Here Joyce transcribed two songs from Ben Jonson’s The Poetaster (1602), beneath which he wrote his name and towards the bottom of the page he also wrote ‘in his play “The Poetaster” ’ between a horizontal line across the page.

Crispinus Sings.

If I freely may discover

What would please me in my lover,

I would have her fair and witty,

Savouring more of court than city ;

A little proud, but full of pity :

Light and humorous in her toying,

Oft building hopes, and soon destroying,

Long, but sweet in the enjoying ;

Neither too easy nor too hard :

All extremes I would have barr’d

Gal. Believe me, sir, you sing most excellently.

Ovid. If there were a praise above excellence, the gentleman highly deserves it.

Her. Sir, all this doth not yet make me envy you ; for I know I sing better than you.

Tib. Attend Hermogenes, now.

Hermogenes, accompanied.

She should be allow’d her passions,

So they were but used as fashions ;

Sometimes froward, and then frowning,

Sometimes sickish, and then swowning,

Every fit with change still crowning.

Purely jealous, I would have her,

Then only constant when I crave her :

’Tis a virtue should not save her.

Thus, nor her delicates would cloy me,

Neither her peevishness annoy me.

[Act II. Scene I.: Vol. II, pp. 403–404][xxii]

Page [5v]:

On this page, Joyce compiled a series of eight quotations in two uneven columns, under the heading ‘MEMORABILIA’. In the first column are a list of the quotations, one each from ‘W L Courtney LLD’ (William Leonard Courtney [1850–1928]), ‘Walter Sichel’ (1855–1933), ‘W.B. Yeats’ (1865–1939) and two by ‘Edmund Gosse LLD’ (1849–1928). In the second column are two quotations from ‘Herbert Spencer’ (1820–1903) and one from ‘Theodore Watts’ (Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton [1832–1924]). (See Gorman 89–90 and JJII 124–125).

Why do you turn away

Face that was always kind?

W.L. Courtney, Udine, A Dream Play in Three Acts (London: Heinemann, 1902).

Honest manly Jack Fielding …

Everybody is thinking about themselves.

Walter Sichel

See The Fortnightly Review, Vol. 78 (1902), p. 290.

Little winged god that dozes

Fly not with the falling roses

Edmund Gosse

See The Contemporary Review, Vol. 26 (1875), p. 979.

And more I may not write of, for then that cleave

The waters of sleep can make a chattering tongue

Heavy like stone, their wisdom being half silence.

W.B. Yeats, ‘I Walked Among the Seven Woods’, The Speaker (1 December 1900).

When the autumn night was hot

(Peach and apple and apricot)

Under the shade of a twining rose,

Guenevere, red as a sunset glows,

Plighted her love to Lancelot.

Overhead at a window, unseen,

(Apple and filbert and nectarine)

Gawain lounged in the hot gold air

Fingered a lute and at last aware

Of an eager [blank] and the Queen’s bright hair

Laughed a little in bitter spleen.

Edmund Gosse, On Viol and Flute (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1890).

Now from a good style are excluded all

words having unsettled connotations,

save where indefiniteness is intended,

which it is not in this case.

Herbert Spencer, Facts and Comments (New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1902), p. 102.

Hereafter her [George Eliot] rank will be considerably

higher than now.

Herbert Spencer, Facts and Comments (New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1902), p. 81.

But after its (Tyranny) dethronement

when human nature has become

infinitely perfectable how can etc.

Theodore Watts, ‘Poetry’, Encyclopaedia Britannica (1885; reprinted in 1911).

This is the page of the manuscript Joyce showed to John Millington Synge while they were both staying at the Grand Hôtel Corneille. Under a seemingly ironic heading, Joyce may have written out the relatively brief quotations on this page because, as Gorman writes, ‘he had no mercy for “easy” writing, grammatical slips or loose ends. […] We have, then, the spectacle of the young man assiduously analyzing the works of his contemporaries as well as the literature of the past and pouncing upon their lapses with an unholy glee. […] The future great grammarian was implicit in the impatient young man’ (Gorman 89; see also pp. 90, 101–102 and JJII 124–125). Joyce mis-remembered or mis-transcribed the lines from Yeats here.

Page [6r]:

Joyce’s interest in music is clearly evident in the various notes on this page. Beneath a centred horizontal line in ink, Joyce listed two societies engaged in publishing old music: the Musical Antiquarian Society and the Percy Society. He also noted five histories of music. The first is the Works of John Wilbye (baptised 7 March 1574 – September 1638), one of the renowned madrigalists of his time, who set the works of Sidney and Spenser, among others, to music. The Musical Antiquarian Society published The Works of John Wilbye, edited by James Thurle and George W. Budd (London, 1841, 1846). The next work is A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (London: J. Alfred Novello, 1853) by Sir John Hawkins (29 March 1719 – 21 May 1789), who was as famous for the life of his friend Samuel Johnson as for this work, which was the first history of music in English. The third work is Charles Burney’s four-volume A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (London, 1726–1814). The work next is the Bibliotheca Madrigaliana by Edward Francis Rimbault, which had been recently republished in London in 1900. The last is Henry Davey’s History of English Music (London: J. Curwen and Sons, 1895).

Then, between two sets of double centred horizontal lines, Joyce wrote out within quotation marks a riddle in Latin on Raymond Lull,[xxiii] the late 13th century martyr, that he copied from a note in Jonson’s ‘Volpone; or The Fox’ that reads:

Nor Raymond Lully’s great elixir.] Lully was a celebrated character of the fourteenth century. He was born in Majorca, and studied what was then termed natural philosophy, i. e., the transmutation of metals, &c. In this he was very successful ; having, as everyone knows, discovered the philosopher’s stone, and above all, the great elixir, or drink of immortality. Thus secured against poverty and death, he turned beggar, hermit, missionary, and, finally, lost his life by an unlucky blow, while preaching to the wild inhabitants of Mount Atlas. In a credulous age, and while men obstinately shut their eyes to conviction, Lully enjoyed an extraordinary degree of reputation. He is now deservedly forgotten. The following distich on him, is as old as Zan Fritada’s song :

“Qui Lulli lapidem quaerit quem quaerere nulli

Profuit; haud Lullus sed mihi Nullus erit.”

[Act II. Scene I; Vol. III, n. 9, pp. 208–209][xxiv]

Raymond Lull (a.k.a. Lully and properly Ramón Llull; c1232–c1316) was a Catalan missionary-friar and philosopher who sought to convert Muslims to Christianity. He made three trips to North Africa with this intention and tradition holds that he was stoned to death on the last of these missions. Lull created a combinatory system by which he hoped to attain a universal symbolic logic, suitable for his missionary work that he hoped would establish the truth or falsehood of all propositions. (See p. [7r] of this manuscript where Joyce transcribed the song where ‘Lully’ is annotated.)

In the centre of the page is a diagram of Aristotle’s Four Causes (see O’Rourke 33). Beneath the diagram and again between two sets of double centred horizontal lines, Joyce transcribed an epigram on Ben Jonson, also within quotation marks that in the Gifford edition reads: ‘The Fox, the Alchemist, and Silent Woman, | Done by Ben Jonson and outdone by no man’, which Joyce also copied from a note in that edition.

At the bottom of the page Joyce listed four works, along with their prices, edited and/or published by Bertram Dobell (1842–1914), with his 77 Charing Cross Road address. Since some of these works were yet to appear, Joyce must have copied this information from an advert or bookseller’s catalogue. The first work is the Poems of Thomas Traherne. According the Encyclopædia Britannica, Traherne (1637–1674) was the ‘last of the mystical poets of the Anglican clergy […]. The chance discovery in 1896 in a London street bookstall of the manuscripts of Traherne’s Poetical Works (published 1903) and his Centuries of Meditations (published 1908) created a literary sensation’. The other works are Dobell’s Sidelights on Charles Lamb (1903), The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems by James Thomson (1700–1748), which was published by Dobell in 1888 and was being republished by Thomas B. Mosher (Portland, Maine) in 1903, and, finally, Oliver Goldsmith’s A Prospect of Society (London: Dobell, 1902).

Page [6v]:

Joyce continued his collection of quotations from Aristotle here. He wrote ‘Aristotle | in his “Metaphysic” ’ below these thirteen quotations. Only 4 of these quotations appear in Gorman (the first, sixth, eleventh, and thirteenth on p. 96) but see Peterson (214–215) and O’Rourke (29–45) for a complete transcription of all the quotations that appear on this page. Note that the last quotation is mis-transcribed in Gorman (and so it is repeated in Peterson); see O’Rourke where the quotation reads: ‘[…] episodes, like a bad tragedy’ (45).

Page [7r]:

Here Joyce transcribed two songs from Ben Jonson’s Volpone (1607) in two columns, beneath each song he wrote ‘Ben Jonson’ and towards the bottom of the page he also wrote ‘in his play “Volpone” or “The Fox” ’ between a horizontal line across the page.

Had old Hippocrates, or Galen,

That to their Books put med’cines all in,

But known this secret, they had never

(Of which they will be guilty ever)

Been murderers of so much paper,

Or wasted many a hurtless taper ;

No Indian drug had e’re been famed,

Tobacco, sassafras not named ;

Ne yet, of quacum one small stick, sir,

Nor Raymund Lully’s great elixir.

Ne had been known the Danish Gonswart,

Or Paracelsus, with his long sword.

[Act II. Scene I; Vol. III, n. 1, pp. 208–209]

Come, my Celia, let us prove,

While we can, the sports of love,

Time will not be ours for ever,

He, at length, our good will sever ;

Spend not then his gifts in vain :

Suns, that set, may rise again ;

But if once we lose this light,

’Tis with us perpetual night.

Why should we defer our joys ?

Fame and rumour are but toys.

Cannot we delude the eyes

Of a few poor household spies ?

Or his easier ears beguile,

Thus removed by our wile ?

’Tis no sin love’s fruits to steal ;

But the sweet thefts to reveal :

To be taken, to be seen,

These have crimes accounted been.

[Act III. Scene VI; Vol. III, pp. 247–248]

Page [7v]:

Joyce wrote a fragment of an unidentified song in Persian, repeated three times: from top to bottom, once with a musical notation, then under the headings ‘Rhythm of the Verse’ and ‘Rhythm of the Music’.

Page [8r]:

Joyce transcribed other two songs here, this time from Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, of the Silent Woman (1616) in two columns with ‘Ben Jonson’ beneath each song. Beneath the song on the left Joyce noted ‘(Jean Bonnefons “Pancharis”)’ and at the bottom of the page he wrote: ‘in his play “Epicene or the Silent Woman” ’ between horizontal lines across the page.

Still to be neat, still to be drest,

As you were going to a feast ;

Still to be powder’d, still perfumed :

Lady, it is to be presumed,

Though art’s hid causes are not found,

All is not sweet, all is not sound.

Give me a look, give me a face,

That makes simplicity a grace ;

Robes loosely flowing, hair as free :

Such sweet neglect more taketh me,

Than all the adulteries of art ;

They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.

[Vol. III, pp. 337–339]

Daw. Nay, I’ll read them myself, too : an author must recite his own works. It is a madrigal of Modesty.

Modest, and fair, for fair and good are near

Neighbours, howe’re.—

Daup. Very good.

Cler. Ay, Is’t not ?

Daw. Excellent !

No noble virtue ever was alone,

But two in one.

Daup. Excellent !

Cler. That again, I pray, sir John.

Daup. It has something in’t like rare wit and sense.

Cler. Peace.

Daw. No noble virtue ever was alone,

But two in one.

Then, when I praise sweet modesty, I praise

Bright beauty’s rays :

And having praised both beauty and modesty,

I have praised thee.

[Vol. III, p. 362][xxv]

There is a note to ‘drest’ that reads:

“This song,” says Upton, “is very happily imitated from the following poem, which I found at the end of an edition of Petronius ; the verses there printed are known to the learned by the title Priapeia Carmina :” —rather, of Errones Venerei.

Semper munditias, semper, Basilissa, decores,

Semper compositas arte recente comas,

Et comptos semper cultus, unguentaque semper,

Omnia sollicitâ compta videre, manu,

Non amo. Neglectim mihi se quæ comit amica

Se det ; et ornatus simplicitate valet.

Vincula ne cures capitis discussa soluti,

Nec ceram in faciem : mel habet illa suum.

Fingere se semper, non est confidere amori ;

Quid quod sæpe décor, cum prohibetur, adest?

It seems from this, that Upton was ignorant of the author of these verses. They were written by Jean Bonnefons, (Bonnefonius) and made part of what he calls Pancharis. Bonnefons was born about the midlle of the 16th century, at Clermont in Auvergne, where he cultivated Latin poetry with considerable success. He affected to imitate Catullus : there was one, however, whom he followed more closely, though he made “no boast of it;” this was Johannes Secondus. Bonnefons died in 1614. […]

[‘The Silent Woman’, Act I, Scene I.; Vol. III, n. 9, pp. 337–338][xxvi]

Page [8v]:

Joyce compiled two lists of authors and book titles categorized under the headings ‘Verse’ and ‘Biography and History’ here and the latter list is continued on the facing page.

These lists of Irish literary works include a wide range of authors most of whom were popular in 1903, but over a century later are relatively unread. Most of the selections in the poetry and fiction lists are noticeably conventional; they do not deviate from the then accepted canon of Irish literature. This is particularly true of the selection of poets, all but one of whom was included in either Katharine Tynan’s revised edition of the Cabinet of Irish Literature (1902/1903) or in Justin McCarthy’s Irish Literature (1904). Some omissions are surprising; such as Maria Edgeworth, Somerville and Ross, George Moore, and AE, to name only some of the authors whose reputations endure today.

There are some notable inaccuracies in the citations, which suggest that Joyce may have been working from memory rather than from a specific bibliography or other sources, or quite probably from a mixture of recalled details and printed sources. The lists provide a puzzling perspective on Joyce as a young, would-be author or critic. One wonders why he compiled them: could they be a reading programme or even an itemisation of material already read? Were they his own attempts to establish a canon of Irish literature or was he trying to plot where his work could fit into an accepted canon? The appearance of William Rooney’s work is interesting when one has Ulysses in mind. Stephen’s judgment in ‘Nestor’ about ‘those big words […] which make us so unhappy’ had first been used by Joyce in his scathing review of Rooney’s poetry in The Daily Express (CW 87).[xxvii]

The list on the left is headed ‘Verse’ and the following surnames are numbered ‘1’–‘33’, the first 17 of which appear in this order: Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774), Jeremiah John Callanan (1795–1829), George Moore (1852–1933), Thomas Osborne Davis (1814–1845), James Clarence Mangan (1803–1849), William Rooney (1873–1901), Samuel Ferguson (1810–1886), Robert Dwyer Joyce (1830–1883), Gerald Griffin (1803–1840), Richard D’Alton Williams (1822–1862), Lionel Johnson (1867–1902), Ethna Carbery (1866–1902), Aubrey Thomas DeVere (1814–1902), William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Dora Mary Sigerson (1866–1918), Patrick Joseph McCall (1861–1919), and Eleanor Jane [Nora] Hopper (1871–1906).

The list continues with a variety of names and titles. It includes the following names: John Keegan Casey (1846–1870), William Allingham (c1824–1889), J.F. O’Donnell (1837–1874), and Speranza [Lady Jane Francesca Wilde] (1821–1896).

The following lists of citations are based on information in the British Library and National Library catalogues and are only meant as a guide to Joyce’s bibliographical listing here.[xxviii] Further work needs to be done to ascertain Joyce’s source(s), as well as his possible motivation for compiling these lists here. Note that Joyce often does not provide sufficient information to determine which specific work or author he is citing. Though not in this order, these are some of the works Joyce listed here under the heading ‘Verse’:

BARRY, Michael Joseph. The Songs of Ireland. Edited by M.J. Barry. (James Duffy: Dublin, 1845).

DUFFy, James. The Spirit of the Nation. Ballads and Songs by the writers of “The Nation,” etc. (Dublin: J. Duffy, [1858]).

Goodman, James. An Duanaire Diadha. A Selection of Psalms and Hymns, for the use of Irish-speaking Congregations. (Printed for the Irish Society by Goodwin, Son & Nethercott: Dublin, 1854).

Graves, Alfred Perceval. The Irish Song Book, with original Irish Airs. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by A.P. Graves. (London: T. F. Unwin, 1894).

HAYES, Edward. The Ballads of Ireland; collected and edited by E. H. (2 vol. London, Edinburgh [printed] and Dublin, 1855.)

MADDEN, Richard Robert. Literary Remains of the United Irishmen of 1798, and selections from other popular lyrics of their times, with an essay on the authorship of “The Exile of Erin” [of Thomas Campbell]. Collected and edited by R. R. Madden. (Dublin: J. Duffy & Sons, 1887).

SIGERSON, George. Bards of the Gael and Gall: Examples of the Poetic Literature of Erinn. Done into English After the Metres and Modes of the Gael by G. Sigerson. (T.F. Unwin: London, 1897).

SPARLING, Henry Halliday. Irish Minstrelsy. Being a selection of Irish songs, lyrics and ballads; original and translated. Edited, with notes and introduction by H. H. Sparling (1887).

Varian, Ralph. Street Ballads, Popular Poetry, and Household Songs of Ireland. Collected and arranged by Duncathail. (Dublin, 2nd edition, 1865).

Though not in this order, these are some of the works Joyce listed here under the heading ‘Biography and History’:

ATKINSON, Sarah. Essays. [With a memoir of the author by R. Mulholland Gilbert.] (M.H. Gill & Son: Dublin, 1895 [1894]).

BARRINGTON, Jonah. Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation. [With portraits.] (James Duffy: Dublin, 1853).

Coyne, William P. Ireland: Industrial and Agricultural (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1902).

DAUNT, William Joseph O’Neill. [A Life spent for Ireland. Being selections from the journals of the late W. J. O'Neill Daunt. Edited by his daughter [i.e. Alice I. O’N. Daunt]. [With a prefatory letter by William E. H. Lecky, and a portrait.] (T. Fisher Unwin: London, 1896).

DAVIS, Thomas Osborne. The Patriot Parliament of 1689. With its statutes, votes and proceedings ... Edited with an introduction by the Hon. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy. (T. Fisher Unwin: London; Sealy, Bryers & Walker: Dublin; P. J. Kenedy: New York, 1893).

Denvir, John. The Brandons: A Story of Irish Life in England (London: Denvir’s Irish Library, 1903).

DOHENY, Michael. The Felon’s Track: a narrative of ’48. Embracing the leading events in the Irish struggle from the year 1843 to the close of 1848 ... (New York, second edition, 1867).

Duffy, Charles Gavan. Young Ireland. (London: [s.n.], 1880).

——. The League of North and South: an episode in Irish history, 1850-1854 .... (London: Chapman & Hall, 1886).

——. Short Life of Thomas Davis. (1896.)

Gaelic Union (DUBLIN). Keating (Geoffrey) Forus Feasa air Eirinn: Keating’s History of Ireland. Book I. pt. 1. Edited with Gaelic text ... literal translation ... complete vocabulary, &c. by P. W. Joyce. Irish & Eng. (M.H. Gill & Son: Dublin, 1880).

HAVERTY, Martin. The History of Ireland, ancient and modern. Derived from our native annals, from the most recent researches of eminent Irish Scholars. ... With copious topographical and general notes. (Dublin, 1860).

Healy, Rev. John. Insula Sanctorum et Doctorum, or Ireland’s Ancient Schools and Scholars (Dublin: Sealy, Bryers and Walker, 1890).

Hull, Edward. The Physical Geology and Geography of Ireland (London: Edward Stanford, 1878)

Kavanagh, Patrick F. A Popular History of the Insurrection of 1798, derived from every available written record and reliable tradition, 4^th ed. (Dublin: M.H. Gill & Son, 1884).

KING, Richard Ashe. Swift in Ireland. (1895)

Luby, Thomas Clarke. The life and times of Daniel O’Connell. (Glasgow: Cameron, Ferguson & Company, [187?]).

MACDONAGH, Michael, Bishop Doyle, “J.K.L.” A biographical and historical study. (1896).

MacNevin, Thomas. The History of the Volunteers of 1782 (Dublin: J. Duffy, 1882).

MASON, Henry Joseph Monck. Essay on the antiquity and constitution of Parliaments in Ireland. (Dublin, 1820.)

McGee, Thomas d’Arcy. A popular history of Ireland: from the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics. [Cameron & Ferguson ed.] (London; Glasgow: R. & T. Washbourne, [1867?])

——. A memoir of the life and conquests of Art MacMurrogh king of Leinster, from A.D. 1377 to A.D. 1417: with some notices of the Leinster wars of the 14th century. (Dublin: J. Duffy, second edition, [1886?]).

MEEHAN, Charles Patrick. The Confederation of Kilkenny. (Dublin, 1860).

MITCHEL, John [Editor of “The United Irishman”]. The Life and Times of Aodh O’Neill, Prince of Ulster, called by the English, Hugh, Earl of Tyrone; with some account of his predecessors, Con, Shane and Tirlough. (Dublin: James Duffy, 1846).

——. Jail Journal; or, Five Years in British prisons, etc. (New York, 1868.)

——. [The History of Ireland, from the Treaty of Limerick to the present time; being a continuation of the History of the Abbé Macgeoghegan. Compiled by J. Mitchel.] (Dublin [printed], London, 1869).

——. The Crusade of the Period: and Last Conquest of Ireland (perhaps). [Being a reply to J. A. Froude's book entitled: “The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century.”] (New York, 1873).

——. An Apology for the British Government in Ireland, etc. (O’Donoghue & Co.: Dublin, 1905).

Molyneux. William, The Case of Ireland’s being bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated. (Dublin, 1706).

Moore, Thomas. The life and death of Lord Edward Fitzgeral. ([S.l.] : Longman, 1831).

O’Conor, Matthew. Military History of the Irish Nation (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1845).

O’Connor, T.P. Gladstone-Parnell, and the great Irish struggle: a complete and thrilling history of the fearful injustice and oppression inflicted upon the Irish tenants by landlordism supported by coercive legislation; full and authentic account of the great Home Rule movement championed by Gladstone; rocking the British Empire and agitating the world: together with biographies of Gladstone, Parnell and others. (Toronto; London [Ont.]: J.S. Robertson, [1886?]).

O’DALY, Daniel. The Geraldines, Earls of Desmond, and the persecution of the Irish Catholics. Translated from the Latin with notes and illustrations by C.P. [Charles Patrick] Meehan. (Dublin, 1847).

O’DONOGHUE, David James. Life of Robert Emmet. (James Duffy & Co.: Dublin, 1902).

——. The Poets of Ireland: A biographical and bibliographical dictionary of Irish writers of English verse. (Dublin: Hodges Figgis).

O’Keefe, J.C. and Art O’Brien, A Handbook of Irish Dances, with an essay on their Origina and History (Dublin: O’Donoghue, 1902).

O’KELLY, Charles. The Jacobite War in Ireland, 1688-1691 ... Edited by G.N. Count Plunkett ... and the Rev. E. Hogan ... (Sealy, Byers & Walker: Dublin, second edition 1894).

O’Leary, John. Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism. ([S.l.]: Downey, 1896).

Prendergast, John Patrick. The Cromwellian settlement of Ireland ([S.l.]: [s.n.], 1865).

QUAID, David A. Robert Emmet: his birth-place and burial. (J. Duffy & Co.: Dublin, 1902).

Read, Charles A. The Cabinet of Irish Literature. (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1879).

Richey, A.G. A Short History of The Irish People, Down to the date of the Plantation of Ulster (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis and Co, 1887).

SULLIVAN, Alexander Martin. New Ireland. (London, 1877).

Sullivan, T.D. [Timothy Daniel]. “Guilty or not guilty?”: speeches from the dock, or, Protests of Irish patriotism, containing, with introductory sketches and biographical notices, speeches delivered after conviction. (Dublin: Published at 6 Lower Abbey Street, 1867).

TAYLOR, John Francis. Owen Roe ONeill. [A biography.] (1896).

TEELING, Charles Hamilton. Personal Narrative of the “Irish Rebellion” of 1798. (London, 1828).

TODHUNTER, John. Life of Patrick Sarsfield, Earl of Lucan. With a short narrative of the principal events of the Jacobite War in Ireland. (1895).

Tone, Theobald Wolfe. Memoirs of Theobald Wolfe Tone, written by himself, ed. by William Theobald Wolfe Tone (London: Henry Colburn, 1827).

Page [9r]:

Continued from the previous page, here Joyce compiled further lists of authors and book titles categorized under the headings ‘Fiction’ and ‘Speeches’. Presumably at a later date, Joyce continued this list on p. [15v].

Some of the names Joyce listed under fiction are: Sydney, Lady Morgan (c1776–1859), William Carleton (1794–1869), Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873), Samuel Lover (1797–1868), Charles James Lever (1806–1872), Charles Joseph Kickham (1828–1882), Richard Dowling, Richard Ashe King, F.M. Allen [Edmond Downey] (1856–1937), Lady Gilbert [Rosa Mulholland] (1841–1921), Richard Baptist O’Brien (1809–1885), Dora Mary Sigerson (1866–1918), Charlotte O’Brien (1845–1909), William Boyle (1853–1923), Patrick Joseph McCall (1861–1919), Samuel Ferguson (1810–1886), Mary Anne Sadlier (1820–1903), Patrick Grehan Smyth (1857–?), Margaret T. Pender (?1850–1920), T O’Neill Russell (1828–1908), Julia Kavanagh (1824–1877), Seumas MacManus (1869–1960), Shan F. Bullock (1865–1935), W.B. Yeats (1865–1939), Lady Jane Francesca Wilde (1821–1896), Thomas Crofton Crocker (1798–1854), FitzJames O’Brien (1828–1862), and Jane Barlow (?1857–1917).

Joyce listed the following names under the heading ‘Speeches’: Henry Grattan (1746–1820), John Philpot Curran (1750–1817), Richard Lalor Sheil (1791–1851), Horace Plunkett (1854–1932) and Charles Stewart Parnell (1846–1891), specifically the ‘[John O’Conner] Power edition’.

Page [9v]:

At the top of the page, in between two short horizontal lines, Joyce listed three names, Rémusat, Vondel and Hroswritha, followed by colons but no further information. Joyce is probably referring to Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat (1788–1832), the French sinologist, whose Essai sur la Langue et la Littérature Chinoises, avec cinq planches, contenant des textes chinois, accompagnés de traductions, de remarques, et d'un commentaire littéraire et grammatical; suivi de notes, et d'une table alphabétique des mots chinois, was published in Paris in 1811. His 1826 work Iu-kiao-li, ou les deux cousines, roman chinois was translated from the French the following year as Iu-kiao-li: or, the Two Fair Cousins. A Chinese novel, (Hunt & Clarke: London) as was widely read in both in French and English. Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679) was a poet and dramatist who produced some of the greatest works of Dutch literature. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, he ‘was a master of the lyric, the ode and sonnet, the epic, the long religious poem, and the essay, but his dramatic tragedies, with their powerful and lyrical language and the grandeur of their conception, remain his most important literary achievement’. Hroswritha (c935–c1000), also spelled Hrosvit, Hroswitha, Hrotsvit, Hrotsvitha, Rosvita, and Roswitha is regarded as the first German woman poet.

Joyce noted several more books, which document his continuing and wide-ranging interest in music. Below another horizontal line, Joyce noted the work Metrum und Rhythmus: die Entstehung der arabischen Versmasse (1896) by Martin Hartmann (1851–1919), followed by what appears to be a shelf number. This work examines the development of metre in Arabic verse. Then he noted La Musique Arabe by Francisco Salvador-Daniel (Alger, 1879).

Further down the page Joyce noted A.O. Prickard (1843–1939), Aristotle on the Art of Poetry (Macmillan, 1891) and David Binning Monro’s The Modes of Ancient Greek Music (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1894).

Below this Joyce noted several philosophical works beginning with ‘Peter Lombard: Four Books of Sentences’. Pierre Lombard (Petrus Lombardus) was bishop of Paris and his Sententiarum libri IV (1148–1151) was the standard theological text of the Middle Ages. He then noted Bernard Bosanquet’s (1848–1923) A History of Aesthetic (Allen & Unwin, 1892 and 1904), which Jacques Aubert recognized as a seminal influence on the young James Joyce.[xxix]

At the bottom of the page Joyce wrote ‘Aristotle & the Beautiful | Poet: vii–4 | Met: xiii–3, 1078a36 | Probl: xvii–1, 915b36’ and finally ‘see | Newman – “Aristotle’s Poetics”: in | Essays Crit & Hist’. These citations of primary texts should shed further light on Joyce (and then Stephen Dedalus’s) aesthetic theories.

Page [10r]:

On this page, Joyce transcribed the ballad of ‘Sir Hugh, or the Jew’s Daughter’ (here spelled ‘sir Hew’) in two columns. Stephen Dedalus sings a variant extract of this song in Ulysses (U 17.0802–0807). At the end of the song and after a line of asterisks, Joyce wrote ‘Scottish Ballad | Percy’s Reliques | vol. 1’ between square brackets.

None of the versions of Percy I was able to consult is exactly like Joyce’s transcription here. This could simply be due to the way Joyce standardised and modernised the spelling and punctuation. The following version is similar but not identical to Joyce’s:

III. THE JEW’S DAUGHTER

A Scottish Ballad

The rain doun through Mirry-land toune,

Sae dois it doune the Pa :

Sae dois the lads of Mirry-land toune,

Quhan they play at the ba’.

Than out and cam the Jewis dochtèr,

Said, Will ye cum in and dine?

“I winnae cum in, I cannae cum in,

Without my play-feres nine.”

Scho powd an apple reid and white,

To entice the zong in :

Scho powd an apple white and reid,

And that the sweit bairne did win.

And scho has taine out a little pen-knife,

And low down by her gair,

Scho has twin’d the zong thing and his life,

A word he nevir spak mair.

And out and cam the thick thick buid,

And out and cam the thin ;

And out and cam the bonny herts bluid :

Thair was nae life left in.

Scho laid him on a dressing borde,

And drest him like a swine,

And laughing said, Gae nou and pley

With zour sweit play-feres nine.

Scho rowd him in a cake of lead,

Bade him lie still and sleip.

Scho cast him in a deip draw-well,

Was fifty fadom deip.

Quhan bells were wrung, and mass was sung,

And every lady went hame :

Than ilka lady had her zong sonne,

Bot lady Helen had nane.

Scho rowd hir mantil hir about,

And sair sair gan she weip :

And she ran in the Jewis castèl,

Quhan they wer all asleip.

My bonny Sir Hew, my pretty Sir Hew,

I pray thee to me speik :

“ O lady, rinn to deip draw-well,

Gin ze zour sonne wad seik.”

Lady Helen ran to the deip draw-well,

And knelt upon her knee :

My bonny Sir Hew, an ze be here,

I pray thee speik to me.

“The lead is wondrous heavy, mither,

The well is wondrous deip,

A keen pen-knife stick in my hert,

A word I dounae speik.

Gae hame, gae hame, my mother deir

Fetch me my windling sheet

And at the back o’ Mirry-land toun,

Its thair we twa sall meet”.

Page [10v]:

Here Joyce made an accounting of his second month’s stay in Paris from 20 February to 20 March 1903, ‘(exclusive of Hotel Bill)’, in Francs and Sterling. Just as in the accounting for the first month, Joyce noted ‘Remainder 0’ and signed his name around a self-fashioned stamp with the date: ‘20 March 1903’ (see LII 34). In a letter of 20 March, Joyce describes these accounts to his mother and proudly boasts of the reduction in his expenses from 161 to 106 Francs from the previous month (LII 36–39). See Gorman [107] where the contents of the page are transcribed, although not represented as they actually appear on the page, which is similar in format to the reproduction of the first month’s accounting; see the illustration facing p. 91 in Gorman.

Page [11r]:

Joyce wrote out a song from Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass (1616) in one column and ‘Ben Jonson’ beneath it. At the bottom of the page Joyce also wrote: ‘in his play “The Devil is an Ass” ’ between horizontal lines across the page.

Do but look on her eyes, they do light

All that love’s world compriseth !

Do but look on her hair, it is bright,

As love’s star, when it riseth !

Do but mark, her forehead’s smoother,

Then words that sooth her !

And from her arched brows, such a grace

Sheds itself through the face ;

As alone there triumphs to the life,

All the gain, all the good, of the elements strife !

Have you seen but a bright lily grow,

Before rude hands have touch’d it ?

Have you mark’d but the fall of the snow,

Before the soil hath smutch’d it?

Have you felt the wool of the beaver ?

Or swan’s down ever ?

Or have smelt of the bud of the brier ?

Or the nard in the fire ?

Or have tasted the bag of the bee ?

O so white ! O so soft ! O, so sweet is she !

[Act II. Scene II.: Vol. V, p. 64]

Page [11v]:

Under the heading ‘Questions’, Joyce listed eight numbered questions. See Gorman (98–99) and WD (55), where questions 5, 7, 6 and 8 are transcribed along with their answers, which appear on p. [13v] of this manuscript.

Readers of A Portrait will recognize four of these questions because Joyce used them there virtually verbatim (questions 2, 3, 4 and 6) and has Lynch describe them as having ‘the true scholastic stink’ (P 180). By the time A Portrait appeared a decade after this manuscript page was written, Joyce had decided to spare the reader the somewhat pedantic answers he wrote out on p. [13v]. One wonders why Joyce chose to include in A Portrait two of the three questions he did not answer here? By furnishing us with four other questions that did not appear in Herbert Gorman’s 1939 biography, this manuscript sheds further light on Joyce’s early aesthetics, and by purporting to answer some of the questions themselves, it also provides a more complete example of Stephen Dedalus’ cryptic aesthetic philosophy.

Interestingly, in A Portrait Joyce altered the second question to refer to the more eccentric and better-known Dublin landmark of the statue of Philip Crampton that then stood at the intersection of College, D’Olier and Great Brunswick Streets. Here Joyce asks about Spicer-Simson’s work. The French-American artist had met Joyce in 1903 and he later produced a bronze medallion of Joyce in 1922. Spicer-Simson’s works were mostly of prominent world and literary figures, such as Padraic Colum, Sherwood Anderson as well as Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Page [12r]:

Joyce’s interest in song continues with these lyrics from Thomas Percy (1729–1811), an antiquarian and collector of traditional and early poetry, who came to Ireland as bishop of Dromore in 1782. Joyce transcribed two pieces from Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765); a work of acknowledged influence on the Romantic poets. At the top of the page is another extract from Percy’s Reliques: the epitaph on the tomb of ‘Robin Hood’, supposedly of Robert, Earl of Huntington, beneath which Joyce wrote ‘Epitaph on his tomb near | the nunnery of Kirklees | in Yorkshire: Percy’s Reliques, | Vol I’, within square brackets:

Hear undernead dis laitl stean

laiz robert earl of huntingtun

nea arcie ver hie sae geud

an pipl kauld as hi an is men

vil England nivir is agen[xxx]

Below this verse Joyce has transcribed one stanza of the anonymous nursery rhyme that Stephen sings to himself as he hears the bells toll from the infirmary at Clongowes (see P 19), beneath which Joyce drew a short horizontal line between parentheses.

Page [12v]:

This page contains three aesthetic fragments. The first is signed and dated: ‘(Jas A Joyce | 25 March 1903 | Paris)’, see Gorman (98), although note that Gorman’s transcription does not take into account the additions and revisions Joyce has made here; the second is signed and dated: ‘(Jas A Joyce | 27 March 1903 | Paris)’, see Gorman (98), although Gorman has rendered two long series of dots on two lines as an ellipsis; and the last is signed and dated: ‘(Jas A Joyce | 28 March 1903 | Paris)’, see Gorman (98), although note that here the fragment ends with an ellipsis and not a period as Gorman has it. All these texts have also been published in CW (145), WD (54–55) and OCPW (103–104).

Page [13r]:

Joyce transcribed two songs from Ben Jonson’s The Staple of News (1631) in 2 columns under the headings ‘A Madrigal’ (on the left) and ‘A Saraband’ (on the right), with ‘Ben Jonson’ beneath each song. At the bottom of the page Joyce wrote ‘in his play | “The Staple News” ’ and each line of the title is between horizontal lines across the page.

Mad. As bright as is the sun her sire,

Or earth her mother, in her best attire,

Or Mint, the midwife, with her fire,

Comes forth her grace !

P. jun. That Mint, the midwife, does well.

The splendour of the wealthiest mines,

The stamp and strength of all imperial

lines,

Both majesty and beauty shines,

In her sweet face.

Fit. That’s fairly said of money.

Look how a torch of taper light,

Or of that torch’s flame, a beacon bright ;

P. jun. Good !

Mad. Now there, I want a line to finish, sir.

P. jun. Or of that beacon’s fire, moon-light :

Mad. So takes she place !

[Act IV. Scene I.: Vol. V, p. 255][xxxi]

Fit. ’Tis Good.

Mad. And then I have a saraband—

She makes good cheer, she keeps full

boards,

She holds a fair of knights and lords,

A market of all offices,

And shops of honour, more or less.

According to Pecunia’s grace,

The bride hath beauty, blood, and place ;

The bridegroom virtue, valour, wit,

And wisdom, as he stands for it.

P. jun. Call in the fiddlers.

[Act IV. Scene I.: Vol. V, pp. 255–256][xxxii]

Page [13v]:

Under the heading ‘Answers’, Joyce wrote a series of four replies (numbered ‘5)’, ‘7)’, ‘6)’ and ‘8)’, in that order) to some of the ‘Questions’ on p. [11v] above. See Gorman (98–99), CW (146), WD (55) and OCPW (104–105).

Page [14r]:

Here Joyce transcribed a song from Ben Jonson and at the bottom of the page he also wrote ‘in his play | “The New Inn” ’ and each line of the title is between horizontal lines across the page.

It was a beauty that I saw

So pure, so perfect, as the frame

Of all the universe was lame,

To that one figure could I draw,

Or give least line of it a law !

A skein of silk without a knot,

A fair march made without a halt,

A curious form without a fault,

A printed book without a blot,

All beauty and without a spot !

[Act IV. Scene III.: Vol. V, p. 385]

Page [14v]:

Joyce wrote four aphorisms at the top of this page, none of which has been published. These are most likely some form of quotation that Joyce noted here (the source(s) of which have not been ascertained) or else they could be his original aphorisms. Whichever is the case, this is either the last bit of writing Joyce managed to accomplish in Paris in early April, the only writing he did during those crucial months back in Dublin from 12 April 1903 to 8 October 1904, or something he wrote or noted in Pola. These texts are unpublished.

Page [15r]:

At the top of the page is the following quotation from the Summa Contra Gentiles, Chapter III: ‘Bonum est in quod tendit appetites | S. Thomas Aquinas’, beneath which is a centred horizontal line and then another of Joyce’s aesthetic fragments. At the bottom of the page, Joyce signed and dated the text: ‘JAJ | Pola. 7. XI. 04’. It has been published in Gorman (133), CW (146–147) and WD (81). The text in OCPW differs from this manuscript version (105).[xxxiii]

Page [15v]:

This page continues the lists of books Joyce had made on pp. [8v] and [9r], although it is unclear when Joyce compiled it since the page before it was written in Pola. At the top of the page Joyce wrote ‘[see pp – 16 and 17]’ and beneath this are lists of titles of books and authors under four headings: ‘Verse’, ‘Drama’, ‘Old Literature’ and ‘Modern Literature’, all in one column. The following are most likely some of the works Joyce noted here under the heading ‘Verse’:

HYDE, Douglas, The Love Songs of Connacht: being the fourth chapter of the Songs of Connacht, collected and translated by Douglas Hyde. (Elizabeth Corbet Yeats: Dundrum, 1904).

Joyce, Patrick Weston, Irish Music and Song: a Collection of Songs in the Irish Language set to music. Edited for the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language by P. W. Joyce. (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1888).

KEATING, Geoffrey, Dánta amhráin is caointe ... iar na gcruinniughadh & iar na gcur i gclodh don chéad uair ag Eoin Cathmhaolach MacGiolla Eáin, c.i. (1900.) “Dánta, Amhráin is Caointe” (Poems, Songs and Elegies), ed. Rev. John C. MacErlean, S.J., for the Gaelic League (Dublin, 1900).

MANGAN, James Clarence. The Poets and Poetry of Munster. A selection of Irish Songs ... with poetical translations. By ... J. C. Mangan, and the original music; biographical sketches of the authors [by John O'Daly]; and ... Irish text revised by W. M. Hennessey, M.R.I.A. Edited by C. P. Meehan, C.C. Fourth edition. Irish & Eng. (J. Duffy & Sons: Dublin, [1901]).

The following are most likely some of the works Joyce noted here under the heading ‘Old Literature’:

Hogan, Edmund. The Latin Lives of the Saints as aids towards the translation of Irish texts and the production of an Irish Dictionary. (1894).

O’Clery, Michael. Annala Rioghachta Eireann. Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland by the Four Masters [Michael O'Clery, Conary O'Clery, Cucogry O'Clery, and Ferfeasa O'Mulconry] from the earliest period to the year 1616. Edited with a translation and copious notes by J. O'Donovan. Irish and Eng. (7 vol. Hodges and Smith: Dublin, 1851).

Stokes, Whitley, Lives of Saints from the Book of Lismore. Edited ... by W. Stokes. (1890).

——. A Criticism of Dr. Atkinson’s Glossary to Volumes I.-V. of the Ancient Laws of Ireland. (pp. 49. David Nutt: London, 1903).

Page [16r]:

At the top of the page Joyce wrote the following epigraph: ‘— Pulcra sunt quae visa placent —’, which is based on a phrase in Aquinas’s Summa Theologica I, Question 5, Article 4. Below this Joyce began another aesthetic fragment that is continued on the following page. This text has been published in Gorman (133–134), CW (147–148), WD (81) and OCPW (105–106) but note that there are numerous revisions in this draft that are not represented in the published texts and also that Gorman’s transcription was at times erroneous.

Page [16v]:

The text from p. [16r] is continued and concluded on this page, beneath which Joyce wrote ‘JAJ | Pola. 15. XI. 04’. It has been published in Gorman (134), CW (147–148), WD (81–82) and OCPW (106) but note that Joyce crossed through the final paragraph with a diagonal line, possibly because he was not satisfied with it.

Page [17r]:

Below the title ‘The Act of Apprehension’ and a short centred line, Joyce wrote another aesthetic fragment. He signed and dated it at the bottom of the page: ‘JAJ | Pola. 16. XI. 04’. It has been published in Gorman (134–135), CW (148), WD (82–83) and OCPW (106–107).

Page [17v]:

Here Joyce compiled eight lists of notes, with no heading, each list is separated by three wavy, centred lines, only three notes have been crossed through in black ink by Joyce and these can be found in the extant manuscript of Stephen Hero.[xxxiv] Only some of these notes have been published in Gorman (135–136) and WD (83–85); the rest are unpublished.[xxxv]

On his twenty-second birthday, 2 February 1904, Joyce announced to his brother Stanislaus that he had set out to write a semi-autobiographical novel: Stephen Hero. Joyce wrote its first chapter in just eight days and at that stage he claimed it would be sixty-three chapters long. But he had written only three more chapters by the end of March and did not make any progress with this work between April and October. Joyce did manage to finish chapter XII in Zurich between 11 and 19 October. No drafts of these first eleven chapters of Stephen Hero survive, nor have any preliminary materials or notes for them been documented. Nonetheless, given the systematic way in which Joyce wrote and revised his drafts from notes, they most certainly existed in some form or another.

This list of shorthand topics, fragmentary phrases and short sentences, most of which are quotations, are the first indication of Joyce’s mature system of note taking for use in his writings. It would become his preferred method of assembling material for possible use in his work for the rest of his creative life, from Stephen Hero to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

When Joyce had used a word or phrase, he would habitually cross it through (here in ink, although later he favoured coloured crayons). The first phrase in this list that Joyce crossed through, ‘Ireland: an afterthought of Europe’, appears in chapter XVII of Stephen Hero. We can date this page of the manuscript quite precisely because of the systematic way in which Joyce both compiled his working notes and wrote his drafts. He was writing chapters XII–XIV of Stephen Hero from the end of November to Christmas 1904, but he interrupted the work on his novel on 15 and 16 December to write the aesthetic tracts on the previous pages of this manuscript. He then finished those Stephen Hero chapters and sent them to his brother on 13 January 1905 and, on 7 February, he told Stanislaus he was working on chapter XVII (see LII 76 and 79–81). Joyce placed this phrase half way through the manuscript version of that chapter (see SH 53).

Another note on the page refers to ‘Dr Dougherty’. In 1905, Joyce thought he would include Oliver St John Gogarty in Stephen Hero as ‘Dr Dougherty’, but decided against it (as far as we know from the parts of the manuscript that survive). Gogarty was then supposed to be a character in A Portrait, but again Joyce chose to exclude him from Stephen’s circle of friends there. Gogarty finally makes his appearance as ‘Malachi Mulligan’ in Ulysses.[xxxvi]

Page [18r]:

At the top of the page Joyce wrote ‘ — Ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur: integritas, consonantia et claritas — | S Thomas Aquinas’ (paraphrasing the Summa Theologiae, Part I, Question 39, Article 8) and below it he wrote his translations that can be found in SH 96 and P 178. In A Portrait Stephen translates ‘consonantia’ as ‘harmony’ but here and in Stephen Hero it is ‘symmetry’.

Joyce first returned to his commonplace book on 7 November 1904, exactly one week after he and Nora Barnacle had settled in Pola, Austria (today Pula, Croatia). They spent a very cold first winter there from 30 October 1904 to 11 March 1905.

Page [18v]:

At the top of the page are variations of the name of Saint Nicholas (Santa Claus) in different languages in one column. Beside this list is another column with the first verse of an Istrian folksong on San Nicolo di Bari, patron saint of children; his Feast Day is 6 December, which helps to date this page. Below this is a short, centred horizontal line beneath which is a variant rendering of the French comic song about ‘Monsieur de la Palice [sic]’, which Stephen Dedalus mentions at the beginning of ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ (9.0016–0017). Even at this early stage Joyce consistently spelled ‘Pallise’ as ‘Palice’ (pace the 1926 Ulysses edition’s historically accurate correction of the name).[xxxvii] Below this Joyce wrote out a popular song beginning ‘Don Zanetti muso di porco’.

Page [19r]:

This page contains a long list of notes. Joyce wrote the heading ‘For Stephen Hero’ diagonally in the left margin. Only some of these notes appear on Gorman (136–137) and WD (85–87).[xxxviii]

Here Joyce is explicitly compiling material that he intends to use in his own work; it includes verbatim quotations from printed sources, conversations, letters, and even his brother Stanislaus’ Dublin diary. Joyce used the crossed-through entries in chapters XIX–XXII of Stephen Hero, which he was writing from the end of February through May 1905.

Page [19v]:

The list of notes begun on p. [19r] is continued and concluded on this page. Only some of these notes appear in Gorman (137) and WD (88); the rest are unpublished.[xxxix]

Again, the entries Joyce crossed through appear in Stephen Hero. Joyce used the first and second notes in chapters XXI and XXII and the last is most likely at the core of a scene in chapter XVII. Along with several other quotations here, the latter two come from Stanislaus Joyce’s Dublin diary. They are fragments of quite poignant and self-conscious revelations in his brother’s journal, although Joyce seems to have been more interested in the words themselves than in Stanislaus’ sentiments.

Four months after their mother’s death and two months after James had left the Joyce home and Dublin, Stanislaus wrote in his diary:

It is now December and this year we have lived in this house on practically starvation rations. There has been a very small breakfast, perhaps, no dinner, and no tea, and 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 at 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 living 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 unbeliever. I remember the trite moral the vulgarian priests who were my masters, the Jesuits, would draw from my case.[xl]

Page [20r]:

This page contains another list of notes. Joyce wrote the heading ‘For Dubliners’ diagonally in the left margin. Only some of these notes appear in Gorman (137–138) and WD (89–91); the rest are also unpublished.[xli]

Joyce seemingly compiled this list of fragments specifically for his work on stories for Dubliners. In October 1904, while travelling from Dublin to Zurich to Trieste and then on to Pola, Joyce began a new short story, ‘Christmas Eve’. He then rewrote the story as ‘Hallow Eve’ and sent it to Dublin in January 1905, hoping that it too would appear in The Irish Homestead, but the editors declined to print it. Over the next several months, while still working on Stephen Hero, Joyce recast this story once again, this time as ‘Clay’. He then also wrote ‘The Boarding House’ which he sent to Dublin in July 1905, still using his adopted persona, ‘Stephen Daedalus’, but it too was refused by The Irish Homestead. Joyce wrote several more short stories that summer and fall, though now he was signing them with his own name. For whatever reason, Joyce did not use any of these notes in that series of stories.

The only entry Joyce crossed though from this list is a paraphrase from the introduction of Book II of The Reason of Church Government Urg’d against Prelaty (1641) by John Milton: ‘[…] I might perhaps leave something written to after times as they should not willingly let it die’. Joyce used a phrase from this in Gabriel Conroy’s dinner speech in ‘The Dead’,[xlii] which Joyce only began in 1907. No other collection of notes for Dubliners survives, although presumably Joyce constructed or assembled all those stories from notes in the same or similar fashion.

Page [21v]:

Here Joyce compiled a list of notes under the heading: ‘Byrne’.[xliii] All of these notes appear in Gorman (137–138) and WD (89–91),[xliv] although there are some transcriptional errors in the published texts.[xlv]

Page [22r]:

Joyce wrote just three lines of a dialect version of a song headed ‘Maria Candelora’ in Italian on this page. It is an ancient popular verse song in celebration of Candlemas, 2 February.

Page [22v]: Blank.

Pages [23r]–[23v]:

This leaf was torn from the notebook and the small remaining portion is blank.

Page [24r]:

Under the heading ‘Books’, Joyce listed the following seven works (though not in this order) with imprints and prices.

Green Alice Stopford, Irish Nationality. (London: Williams and Norgate, [1911]).

Green, Charles Edward, The Local Incidence of Cancer, William Green & Sons: Edinburgh & London, 1912.

Mason, Stuart [Christopher Millard], Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality: A Defence of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (London: J. Jacobs 1908).

Wallace, Charles William. The Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare. With a history of the first Blackfriars theatre. A survey based upon original records now for the first time collected and published by C. W. Wallace. (Berlin, 1912, [Schriften der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft. Bd. 4]).

Hatzfeld, E., editor, Masterpieces of Music. ([Biographies of musicians, with selections from their works] London & Edinburgh: T.C. and E.C. Jack, [1912, 1913]).

Lesnes, E., De la laideur dans l'art. (Bruxelles: Société Belge de Librairie, 1911).

Procter, John Thomas, An Apology for the Religious Orders: Being a Translation from the Latin of Two of the Minor Works of the Saint by Saint Thomas Aquinas; Edited, with Introduction, by John Procter. (London: Sands & Co., 1902).

Surprisingly, some of the books listed here were published in 1912, which proves that Joyce returned to this manuscript at least 9 years after he first starting using it. This is the only known example of Joyce returning to a manuscript for further use after such a long hiatus.

Page [24v]:

Joyce wrote three notes under the heading ‘S.D’. All of these notes appear in Gorman (138) and WD (91).[xlvi] ‘S.D.’ obviously refers to ‘Stephen Daedalus’ and until recently it was assumed that Joyce compiled these notes for Stephen Hero. But, since they follow a booklist Joyce compiled around 1912 at the earliest, these notes could be some of the earliest notes Joyce gathered for Ulysses. Although the first note does not figure in Stephen Dedalus’ fictional life in either Stephen Hero or A Portrait, it is taken as a well-known boast on Stephen’s part in Ulysses. Right after his snide remark about Maréchal de la Palice (see Joyce’s note on p. [18v] above), W.K. Magee, the assistant librarian of the National Library, asks Stephen:

— Have you found those six brave medicals, John Eglinton asked with elder’s gall, to write Paradise Lost at your dictation? The Sorrows of Satan he calls it. (U 9.0018–0019)

Pages [24v]–Back cover verso:

The remainder of the manuscript is blank.