NOTES 451 



former generation who, like Tennyson in his landscape work, made tech- 

 nical rivalry difficult, was accompanied by obvious and amazing ignorance 

 with regard to the quality of his thought in his greatest work and its relation 

 to the thought of his own age. The work of this great poet was spoken 

 of again and again with the contempt of complete ignorance, and occasionally 

 of malicious perversity. Even his morality was impugned as unworthy of 

 the young generation who were — quite ridiculously — said to be in revolt 

 against it ; and at the same time, in the columns of English journals, some- 

 thing happened which is quite without precedent in the history of any 

 civilised people. I would ask you to weigh what I am saying, for I have 

 thought about this matter and weighed every word that I am submitting 

 to you now. I have the documentary evidence here to prove what I am 

 about to assert, and I think the time has come for some plain speaking. 



A book was recently published. In the current number of the Quarterly 

 Review there is a review — an exceedingly able review — of this work, which 

 I say, without hesitation, and without the slightest fear that anyone here 

 who has seen it will disagree with me, is the foulest that has ever found 

 its way into print. Much of it is obscure, through sheer disorder of the 

 syntax. But there is no foulness conceivable to the mind of madman or 

 ape that has not been poured into its imbecile pages. It has been suppressed 

 by the police, and is being smuggled into this country from Paris at five 

 guineas a copy. My attention was first called to it by a column and a half 

 in a leading newspaper, where it was said to be eagerly awaited by select 

 literary circles. The writer said that its very obscenity was somehow 

 beautiful and " if this is not high art, what is ? " A weekly journal followed 

 with eight columns, in which the book was compared with Goethe's Faust. 

 A leading novelist said that Mr. Joyce, the author, had only just missed 

 being the most superb novelist of all time and proclaimed him to be a 

 " genius." Writer after v/riter took up the word, until Joyce and genius 

 seemed to be almost synonymous ; and even those who shrank from this 

 book acclaimed an earlier work by the same author as that of a genius, 

 quite unmistakably. The Quarterly Review is fully justified in printing its 

 exposure of the critics who praised this insane product; but even the 

 Quarterly is unable to tell the whole truth about it. The technical quality 

 of the writing is beneath contempt ; and large sections of the book are 

 simply unspeakably degraded. No word or thought conceivable in the 

 gutters of Dublin or the New York Bowery is omitted, and the foulest 

 references are made to real persons in this country, attributing vile diseases 

 to them, amongst other equally foul suggestions. There is no criminal court 

 in this country which would not brand the book as inexpressibly degraded ; 

 and yet, only last night, in a leading newspaper, I see James Joyce referred 

 to as one of our masters. Weighing every word, I say that, whether we know 

 it or not, this is nothing less than a national disgrace ; a disgusting blot 

 upon our national heritage ; and it is all the more disgusting in that it took 

 place at a time when some of the noblest work of the last century — work 

 with human faults, but— as in the case of Tennyson — work that may out-live 

 England as Virgil has out-lived Rome — work of this quality was being 

 depreciated and treated with a silly and ignorant contempt. One critic, in 

 a leading journal recently, said " we resent " the fine defence of Tennyson 

 recently made by Dean Inge. I have not noticed any resentment of this 

 far more serious matter which absolutely confirms Dean Inge in his main 

 contention ; for James Joyce in more than one passage echoes the fatuous 

 depreciation of Tennyson. 



I have cited the extreme case of this book, because it is a complete 

 reduction to absurdity of what I have called the literary Bolshevism of the 

 hour. The book itself is utterly worthless and beneath consideration. It can 

 do little harm, because the police are, on the whole, circumventing our pseudo- 



