Art thou real, my ideal?

Gerty feels "that she too could write poetry if she could only express herself like that poem that appealed to her so deeply that she had copied out of the newspaper she found one evening round the potherbs. Art thou real, my ideal? it was called by Louis J. Walsh, Magherafelt, and after there was something about twilight, wilt thou ever? and ofttimes the beauty of poetry, so sad in its transient loveliness, had misted her eyes with silent tears that the years were slipping by for her, one by one." Louis Joseph Walsh was born in Maghera, a town in the civil parish of Magherafelt in County Londonderry, in 1880. At the beginning of the 20th century he was studying law at University College Dublin. Later he practiced law as a solicitor in Maghera, and after independence he was made a district judge in County Donegal. He published a number of books and stage plays.

Walsh was an ardent nationalist active in the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin, and that detail fits the portrait of Hughes in Stephen Hero. He is introduced as the teacher of an Irish language class, "a young man in spectacles with a very sick-looking face and a very crooked mouth. He spoke in a high-pitched voice and with a cutting Northern accent" (59). He is "a great enthusiast" for Irish nationhood, an aspiring orator, and a quoter of verse. Stephen scorns him: "One of these days he will be a barrister, a Q.C. [Queen's Counsel], perhaps a judge—and yet he sneers at the Parliamentary Party because they take an oath of allegiance" (63).

Hughes is also a poet, according to one of Stephen's classmates, and "He writes for our paper"—a detail which fits with Gerty's having found Walsh's poem in a newspaper. Madden hands Stephen a handwritten poem, presumably submitted to him for publication. Consisting of four stanzas of eight lines each, it is titled "My Ideal."

Each stanza began with the words "Art thou real?" The poem told of the poet's troubles in a "vale of woe" and of the "heart-throbs" which these troubles caused him. It told of "weary nights" and "anxious days" and of an "unquenchable desire" for an excellence beyond that "which earth can give." After this mournful idealism the final stanza offered a certain consolatory, hypothetical alternative to the poet in his woes: it began somewhat hopefully:

Art thou real, my Ideal?
Wilt thou ever come to me
In the soft and gentle twilight
With your baby on your knee?

The effect of this apparition on Stephen was a long staining blush of anger. The tawdry lines, the futile change of number, the ludicrous waddling approach of Hughes's "Ideal" weighed down by an inexplicable infant combined to cause him a sharp agony in the sensitive region. (82-83)

The clumsy absurdities of the poem would have given Joyce enough reason to recall a couple of lines from the final stanza and wrap them around some kitchen produce. But the mention of the author—under his real name this time—suggests some personal animus. The source of that bad feeling is not hard to find. Joyce and Walsh found occasions to clash in meetings of the Literary and Historical Society, a UCD debating union established by John Henry Newman at the university's outset in 1855.

Ellmann notes that Joyce "was elected to the executive committee of the society on February 18, 1899, and was nominated to be treasurer on March 21, but was defeated by 'the boy orator' L. J. Walsh" (70); in 1900 Walsh "won the society's gold medal for oratory over Joyce" (96). A deeper cause for resentment arose in February 1902, when Joyce read a paper on James Clarence Mangan to the society. It was exceptionally well received by most of the audience, but Walsh rose to accuse Joyce of "unpatriotically ignoring the fact that Mangan was one of the men of '48" (96). In My Brother's Keeper Stanislaus Joyce speculates that something else was at stake: "The student from Magherafelt, to whom I have already alluded, Walsh by name, made it the occasion for a personal attack upon my brother, based not on the paper but on 'The Day of the Rabblement'. And perhaps not altogether on that either" (165). Stephen Hero presents what is either a fictionalized version of this attack or an account of one two years earlier when Joyce lectured on Ibsen to the society:

The climax of aggressiveness was reached when Hughes stood up. He declared in ringing Northern accents that the moral welfare of the Irish people was "menaced by such theories." They wanted no foreign filth. Mr Daedalus might read what authors he liked, of course, but the Irish people had their own glorious literature where they could always find fresh ideals to spur them on to new patriotic endeavours. Mr Daedalus was himself a renegade from the Nationalist ranks: he professed cosmopolitism. But a man that was of all countries was of no country—you must first have a nation before you have art. (103)

Clearly Joyce carried unpleasant memories of "Louis J. Walsh, Magherafelt" from these days and found a way to mock his asinine aesthetics in Nausicaa. An interpretive loose end nags at the writer of this note, however. Joyce briefly studied the Irish language with Patrick Pearse and reportedly quit the class because Pearse had offered the word "thunder" as an example of the inferiority of the English language. Pearse too was an ardent nationalist and a writer of poems (in both Irish and English), and having been born on 10 November 1879 he was at most one year older than Walsh. Walsh must have been the primary model for Hughes, but there are enough echoes of Pearse to give one pause. A very striking one comes up in Stephen Hero: having read the dismal dreck titled "My Ideal," Stephen decides that "attendance in Mr Hughes's class was no longer possible for him" (83).

I am not sure how to account for this strange overlap. Perhaps Walsh was learning the language from Pearse (Vivien Igoe says that he was) while simultaneously conducting a beginner's study group of his own. That would be consistent with Stephen Hero's observation that Hughes often speaks at meetings of the Gaelic League "but as he did not know enough Irish he always excused himself at the beginning" for having to speak in English (60). It seems more likely, though, that Hughes is a teacher because, within the confines of the fiction, Joyce mapped some of his experiences with Pearse onto him. In addition to the tale of Stephen leaving the class in disgust, the novel gives Hughes qualities very distinctive of Pearse: "He never lost an opportunity of sneering at seoninism [West Britonism] and at those who would not learn their native tongue. He said that Beurla [English] was the language of commerce and Irish the speech of the soul and he had two witticisms which always made his class laugh. One was the 'Almighty Dollar' and the other was the 'Spiritual Saxon'" (59).

If Hughes does combine qualities of Walsh and Pearse, that fact should not dismay anyone familiar with Joyce's fictive methods in Ulysses. But here the compression feels awkwardly forced: how could Hughes be both a teacher of Irish and mostly ignorant of the language?