Emerson, after his experiences in Europe, became an armchair traveller. He positively despised the idea of voyaging across the water to see what is just as good at home. He calls Europe a tapeworm in the brain of his countrymen. "The stuff of all countries is just the same." So Ralph Waldo sat in his chair and enjoyed thinking about Europe, thus evading the worries of going there too often. It has its merit, this Emersonian way, particularly for souls easily disillusioned. To anticipate too much of a foreign city may result in disappointment. We have all had this experience. Paris resembles Chicago, or Vienna is a second Philadelphia at times; it depends on the colour of your mood. Few countries have been so persistently misrepresented as Ireland. It is lauded to the eleventh heaven of the Burmese or it is a place full of fighting devils in a hell of crazy politics. Of course, it is neither, nor is it the land of Lover and Lever; Handy Andy and Harry Lorrequer are there, but you never encounter them in Dublin. John Synge got nearer to the heart of the peasantry, and Yeats and Lady Gregory brought back from the hidden spaces fairies and heroes.
Is Father Ralph by Gerald O'Donovan a veracious picture of Irish priesthood and college life? Is the fiction of Mr. Joyce representative of the middle class and of the Jesuits? A cloud of contradictory witnesses passes across the sky. What is the Celtic character? Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun? Or isn't the pessimistic dreamer with the soul of a "wild goose," depicted in George Moore's story, the real man? Celtic magic, cried Matthew Arnold. He should have said, Irish magic, for while the Irishman is a Celt, he is unlike his brethren across the Channel. Perhaps he is nearer to the Sarmatian than the continental Celt. Ireland and Poland! The Irish and the Polish! Dissatisfied no matter under which king! Not Playboys of the Western World, but martyrs to their unhappy temperaments.
The Dublin of Mr. Joyce shows another variation of this always interesting theme. It is a rather depressing picture, his, of the daily doings of his contemporaries. His novel is called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a title quite original and expressive of what follows; also a title that seems to have emerged from the catalogue of an art-collector. It is a veritable portrait of the artist as a boy, a youth and a young man. From school to college, from the brothel to the confessional, from his mother's apron-strings to coarse revelry, the hero is put to the torture by art and relates the story of his blotched yet striving soul. We do not recall a book like this since the autobiography En Route of J.-K. Huysmans. This Parisian of Dutch extraction is in the company of James Joyce. Neither writer stops at the half-way house of reticence. It's the House of Flesh in its most sordid aspects, and the human soul is occasionally illuminated by gleams from the grace of God. With both men the love of Rabelaisian speech is marked. This, if you please, is a Celtic trait. Not even the Elizabethans so joyed in "green" words, as the French say, as do some Irish. Of richest hue are his curses, and the Prince of Obliquity himself must chuckle when he overhears one Irishman consign another to everlasting damnation by the turn of his tongue.