A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (59 page)

188.23
the library
: National Library in Kildare Street.

188.24
ashplant
: the ash was, in Celtic mythology, the plant from which spears were made (Robert Graves,
The White Goddess
(New York, 1948), 22).

188.25
Molesworth Street
: runs west from Kildare Street.

188.32–3
odd or even in number … thirteen
: in numerology, odd numbers are masculine, even feminine, and the number thirteen unlucky (though differently associated—with water and the maternal—by Agrippa in his
Philosophy of Natural Magic
(see 189.16 n.).

189.2
temple of air
: in Roman divination, the ‘augur’ (the official who observed and interpreted the meaning of natural signs) marked off the ground to correspond with the sky above (the ‘temple of air’), then observed (the number, kind, behaviour of) the birds overhead; from this the gods’ approval or disapproval of a proposed event was deduced.

189.3–4
squeak of mice behind the wainscot
: cf. Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’ (who waits in vain for the arrival of one who ‘cometh not’), sixth stanza: ‘the mouse | Behind the mouldering wainscot shrieked’.

189.15
augury
: an omen; see 189.2 n.

189.16
Cornelius Agrippa
: Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535), German physician, philosopher, and suspected magician; he discusses augural divination in chs. 53–6 of his
De Occulta Philosophia
(
The Philosophy of Natural Magic
, 1531).

189.17–18
Swedenborg
: Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), Swedish scientist, philosopher, and mystic; concerned to show by scientific means the spiritual structure of the universe; influenced theosophists and poets alike. (
G
notes that his nickname was
Daedalus Hyperboreus
(‘Daedalus of the North’).) He wrote about augural divination in various places;
JSA
suggests one source,
G
another. Cf. Joyce in his essay on William Blake (1912): ‘Swedenborg, who frequented all of the invisible worlds for several years …’ (
CW
221 and
KB
181) and ‘Portrait’ (
PSW
214).

189.25
curved stick of an augur
: the
lituus
with which the augur marked off the ground.

189.26–7
the hawklike man
: Daedalus.

189.28–9
Thoth … cusped moon
: Thoth: the Egyptian god of wisdom, justice, writing and patron of sciences; most usually represented in human form with the head of an ibis surmounted by the moon’s disc and crescent (
OERD
).

189.33
an Irish oath
:
O
draws the comparison with the Gaelic
tat
(a call to sheep about to turn the wrong way) and
tot
(noise, clamour); neither is really an oath, though the first might have been mistaken for one (
O
336). See, too, ‘
thauss
’ in 146.22 n.

190.4–7
Bend down your faces … loud waters
: opening lines of Cathleen’s farewell speech to her nurse, Oona, and her poet-friend, Aleel, in
The Countess Cathleen
(1892) by W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), Irish poet and dramatist; she has exchanged her soul for bread to feed her people who are dying in a famine.

190.19
Symbol of departure or of loneliness
: i.e. do the birds he’s seen (coupled with the verses he’s recalled) signal that he will leave or that he will find no beloved? 190.21
the opening of the national theatre
: the first production of the Irish Literary Theatre (precursor of the Irish National Theatre Society, which came to be known as the Abbey Theatre) was Yeats’s
Cathleen
(May 1899); it was greeted with extreme protest: ‘a libel on Ireland’ because in it the country was shown as poverty- and famine-stricken, her people willing to sell their souls to the devil for food. See ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ for Joyce’s response (
CW
68–72 and
KB
50–2).

190.29
Made in Germany
: from the title of Ernest Williams’s
Made in Germany
(1896) which suggested that the effect of oversubsidized and shoddy German goods on the British economy was wholly detrimental; here, because Germany represents the source of Protestantism (or anti-Catholicism).

190.34
budding buddhists
: after the popular reaction against the interests of various Irish (and English) artists in theosophy and other occult Eastern religions.

191.6
The Tablet
: English Catholic weekly journal (then very conservative).

191.10
Pawn to king’s fourth
: conventional opening in chess.

191.16
Diseases of the Ox
: apparently the title of a chapter in a book (see
A
).

192.4
sir Walter Scott
: (1771–1832) Scottish novelist and poet, established the form of the historical novel in English.

192.6–7
Bride of Lammermoor
: (1819) Gothic novel by Scott involving crossed love, curses, and the extinction of an ancient family line.

192.12–13
genteel accent … marred by errors
: he lacks the education to go with his class.

192.15
incestuous love
: folklore about one of ‘dwarfish stature’ (191.27).

192.17
game of swans
: ‘game’: collective noun for a flock of swans kept for pleasure (
SOED
).

192.29
Bantry gang
: the Sullivan brothers (Timothy Daniel (1827–1914) and Alexander Martin (1830–84)) and their nephew Timothy Healy (1855–1931), all from Bantry (on the south-western tip of Ireland), all ostensibly pro-Parnellite but regarded as Parnell’s betrayers; this is especially the case with Healy, who led the majority against Parnell in the fateful meeting in Committee Room 15 (see 26.18 n.).

193.8–9
a touch
: ‘to have sexual contact with’ (
SOED
).

193.10
riding a hack to spare the hunter
: ‘riding the workhorse to spare the good one’.

193.13
your intellectual soul
: one of Aristotle’s three parts of the soul, the others being the vegetable and the animal.

193.17
Forsters are the kings of Belgium
: everything Temple says about the Forsters here and in what follows is nonsense (see
G
); it parodies the then current national/cultural interest in claiming Irish heritage.

193.29
Clanbrassil
: Gaelic:
Clann Bhreasail
: children of
Breasal
(‘red’), the clan-name of the MacCanns of Armagh (
O
336).

193.35
Giraldus Cambrensis
: Latin: ‘Gerald of Wales’: Geraldus de Barri (
c
. 1146–1220), Welsh ecclesiastic who visited Ireland with Henry II’s son, Prince John, and wrote two books on Ireland:
Topographia Hibernica
(
The Topography of Ireland
,
c
.1185) and
Expugnatio Hibernica
(
The History of the Conquest of Ireland
, 1169–85), apologist’s histories meant to justify the Anglo-Norman invasion; found nothing admirable in the Irish.

194.1
Pernobilis et pervetusta familia
: Latin: ‘A very noble and ancient family’; Gerald uses the phrase to compliment the family of Fitz-Stephen (literally, ‘sons of Stephen’) for its role in the Anglo-Norman conquest.

194.11
paulo post futurum
: Latin translation of the Greek phrase
ó μετ
’
λíγον òμελλων
: literally, ‘the future after a little’; the ‘name of a tense of the passive voice of Greek verbs, used chiefly to state that an event will take place immediately’, but figuratively, ‘a future which is a little after the present; a by-and-by (1848)’ (
SOED
).

194.22
law of heredity
: much discussed in the wake of Darwin’s
Origin of Species
(see 175.26 n.).

194.26–7
Reproduction is the beginning of death
: exact source unknown, but despite its being spoken by Temple, it is neither nonsense nor an uncommon sentiment in the wake of Darwin.

195.16
dual number
: grammatical term: ‘the inflected form expressing two or a pair’ (
SOED
); used in Latin, Greek, and even Old English, but not in modern English.

195.22
an iron crown
: ‘the ancient crown of the kings of Lombardy, so called from having a circlet of iron inserted (reputed to have been made from one of the nails of the Cross)’ (
SOED
).

195.32
Malahide
: for ‘Malahide’ see 105.37 n.; and cf. ‘Portrait’ (
PSW
211).

196.7
Darkness falls from the air
: a misquotation (as Stephen later realizes: 197.12 n.) of a line in the third stanza of ‘A Litany in Time of Plague’ (1592) by Thomas Nashe (1567–1601), English poet and playwright: ‘Beauty is but a flower | Which wrinkles will devour; | Brightness falls from the air; | Queens have died young and fair; | Dust hath closed Helen’s eye. | I am sick, I must die | Lord, Have mercy on us!’ Cf. Yeats’s use of the line in his ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ (1900).

196.8–9
A trembling joy … like a fairy host around him
: cf. Virgil’s
Aeneid
,
II
. 682–4, where Aeneas’s son Ascanius [Iülus] is shown to be favoured of the gods: ‘a tongue of flame seemed to shed a gleam and, harmless in its touch,
lick his soft locks and pasture round his temples’ (trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1978), i. 341).

196.14
Dowland and Byrd
: John Dowland (
c
. 1563–1626), English lutenist and composer; William Byrd (1543–1623), English composer.

196.14
Nash
: Thomas Nashe: see 196.7 n.

196.16–17
softness of chambering
: see 148.15 n.

196.18
slobbering Stuart
: James I of England (1566–1625; r. 1603–25) and VI of Scotland (r. 1567–1625), whose reign is typically seen as darkness in the wake of the brilliance of that of his predecessor Elizabeth I (1533–1603; r. 1558–1603); he was not popular and a common contemporary description of him focuses on a tongue too large for his mouth.

196.19
ambered wines
: those perfumed with ambergris (
SOED
).

196.20
proud pavan
: sixteenth-century dance.

196.21
Covent Garden
: in London; originally the ‘convent garden’ of the Abbey of Westminster; later a piazza, laid out by Inigo Jones in 1630 (the first square to be laid out in London); by 1670 it had become a market, mainly for fruit, vegetables, and flowers, which it remained until 1974 (
OERD
); but Stephen’s thoughts are slightly anachronistic.

196.22
wenches
: MS has ‘wenchers’ and so, briefly, men appear in Stephen’s reverie (
JJA
10: 1131).

196.24
clipped
: embraced (
SOED
).

197.3–4
curious phrase from Cornelius a Lapide … sixth day
: Cornelius a Lapide (1567–1637), Flemish Jesuit biblical commentator; in his
The Great Commentary on the Bible
he suggests (in comment on Gen. 1: 25: ‘And God made … every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good’) that actually God didn’t make lice and the like but rather that they ‘spontaneously generated’ from other substances (like maggots from bad meat).

197.12
Brightness falls from the air
: see 196.7 n.

197.25
ferrule
: ‘a ring or cap of metal put round the end of a stick to strengthen it or to prevent it from splitting and wearing’ (
SOED
).

198.12
ipso facto
: Latin: ‘by that very fact’. Joyce to his translator regarding this passage: ‘Translate this word for word. It means and is intended to mean nothing’ (
LIII
130).

198.15–16
the Adelphi
: hotel not far from the National Library.

198.24
I suffer little children to come unto me
: see 120.27 n.

198.32–3
why does the church … hell if they die unbaptised
: doctrinally, unbaptized children go not to hell, but to limbo, which borders on hell, where they will be sad but will not suffer; they cannot go to heaven because they have been born in ‘original sin’.

199.6–7
Saint Augustine … going to hell
: Augustine argues in various places that the gravity of ‘original sin’ means the unbaptized must be punished; in
Enchiridion
, however, he remarks that ‘the mildest punishment of all will fall upon those who have added no actual sin to the original sin they brought with them’ (ch. 93). For Augustine, see 109.5–8 n.