Chapter 10 - ‘The Rhythm of Beauty’

Summary

Some critics polarize Joyce and Yeats by invoking the Irish Literary Revival. This practice, which can seem unduly based on sectarian divisions, the politics of post-1916 Ireland, and the retrospective formulation of ‘Modernism’, fails to address adequately Yeats’s and Joyce’s common origins in the Aesthetic and Symbolist ethos of the 1890s, their common dedication to ‘the religion of art’. Yeats’s profound influence on Joyce attaches Joyce to the Revival, as does the struggle between different brands of cultural nationalism as represented by Joyce in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Walter Pater was fundamentally important to the aesthetics of both Yeats and Joyce; the Paterian ‘epiphany’ as a symbolic structure bridges their poetry and prose; and Charles Stewart Parnell, who can assume qualities of Pater’s ‘artist-hero’, complements Pater in his importance to both: to their dialectics between art and history. The chapter ends with a discussion of some startling thematic overlaps c. 1914 between Yeats’s Responsibilities and Joyce’s Portrait.