A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day. Listening to-night to the names of all these great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we were living in a less spacious age. Those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as this we shall still speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.
It's a speech given at the dining table in The Dead, the longest and last story in Joyce's Dubliners. Written some time between 1900 to 1907. Joyce was only 18 when he started writing his own stories as well as reviews for other great artists including Ibsen. Joyce simultaneously worked on Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Just finished reading Dubliners, I am now moving on to the Portrait (the story of a "moocow" and his "tuckoo.")
Joyce never wrote for a living. Thus, his motive for writing is very pure, for art's sake only. He doesn't repeat or add ideas, events, and extra sentences that do not contribute to the forwarding of the artistic form of literature. After reading Joyce's short story, Tolstoy begins to seem like a less competent writer who needed to rely on voluminous texts in order to express something that Joyce is able to express better in just a few lines.
What astonishes me is the fact that Joyce actually had really "new ideas and principles" which he later put into tangible forms in the Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Finnegans Wake in particular is still the pinnacle of literature in the world across history. As such, obviously it's not for readers who lack knowledge of history, literature, science, and language. I need to rely on Joseph Campbell's assistance in order to fully decipher the meaning of the text. But it's well worth the effort. A new style of writing is analogous to a new style of life. Even when the plot of the told story (or the lived life) can be summarized in worn-out terms that make it seem repetitive, a different style (or attitude) towards this repetition reveals differences, radical differences, that free people from the false cliche that associates repetition with nihilism, a nihilism that is then converted to either despair or mysticism.
Back to the Portrait.
