— and Stephen’s reveries center round a virtually anonymous young girl. But in the present text the girl is named Emma Clery, and she has a living personality which is lacking in her merely initialed successor. There are several scenes in the present text [particularly that on pp. 66 ff.] where we see Emma very clearly indeed, and as a result Stephen’s relations with her become, like his relations with other people, more dramatic than they are in the final version.*

The most striking differences which the reader will notice between the two versions is in the way Stephen himself is described. In the present text he is emotionally and intellectually a cruder and more youthful figure than in his creator’s eyes he was later to become; he is more like the average undergraduate and, in spite or because of the fact that he is portrayed more diffusely, he is on the whole a more sympathetic person, proud and arrogant as he may be. He has more weaknesses and does more foolish things (such as his pursuit of Emma) than are entirely consistent with the self-possession of his later portrait. He has a hero-worship for Ibsen, which is scarcely mentioned later, and his reaction from his Jesuit training makes him rage in a more sophomoric fury against what he calls the “plague of Catholicism.” He is more dependent on his family for approval and support.

In the development of Stephen Daedalus, as presented in both the earlier and later versions, there are five main themes, all closely related to the central theme of Stephen himself. The themes are these: Stephen’s family; his friends, male and female; the life of Dublin; Catholicism; Art. Stephen’s development as an individual may be described as a process which sloughs off the first four in order that the fifth may stand clear. When this happens, and art is defined, the artist may then return to the first four for his subject matter. In fact he has to return to them if his function as an artist is to be fulfilled.

But before he can do this he has to determine what sort of man the artist is and also what art is: the two, for autobiographical purposes, are in many respects the same. It is not only Stephen Hero who matters — Joyce mentions “that old English ballad Turpin Hero, which begins in the first person and ends in the third person” [Portrait, p. 252]; — it is the portrait of the artist as well. Stephen as hero is an adolescent; Stephen as artist is an adult. That is, perhaps, the major difference between the two versions of his career.

Yet the aesthetic theory with which we are familiar in the Portrait is already fully outlined in Stephen Hero, and no doubt one of the chief interests of the present text for most readers will consist in discovering how differently it is presented here from the way it is presented in the Portrait. In the Portrait Stephen outlines his aesthetic program in a conversation with Lynch, and the intellectual integrity and hardness of Stephen’s ideas are contrasted with the coarse ejaculations and comments of his companion. This is an effective way of sustaining interest in an abstract exposition, and by setting Stephen’s seriousness against Lynch’s humor, what might be heavy or monotonous becomes lively and entertaining. The theory is presented objectively and with a comic background. But in the Portrait Stephen merely expounds his views; we are made to feel that he is so convinced of their truth that it doesn’t in the least matter to him whether anybody else agrees with him or not. Cold fish that he is, he is above approval or disapproval; he is already prepared for “silence, exile and cunning.”

Not so the younger Stephen of the present text. To him the setting forth of his ideas is a matter of great personal importance, and he delivers them, not in the casual form of a conversation with a friend, but in the form of a public paper to a literary society; it is a public event, an event for which Stephen prepares with great care. Furthermore his ideas are not contrasted merely with one other man’s semi-humorous comments: they are contrasted with the conventionality of Catholicism, and the passage [pp. 90 ff.] which describes Stephen’s conversation on the subject with the President of the University is one of the best in the book. Stephen’s ideas are also contrasted, in the present text, with the intellectual paralysis of Dublin. For when he delivers his paper, which, word for word, he had so carefully planned, it gets only an indifferent and misunderstanding response; the philistines cannot be conquered on their own ground, and Stephen falls back more than ever on his own resources.*

The advantages of presenting the theory in such a fashion are obvious. We follow Stephen as he develops it through his conversations with his brother Maurice, the situation comes to a crisis in the delivery of the paper, and we are interested, as we are interested in a drama, as we wait to hear how the audience will react. We share Stephen’s disappointment and disillusionment. Yet the method has its disadvantages as well: the development of Stephen’s theory is spread out over a long period, it is intercepted by other episodes (the five main themes are interwoven throughout), and its exposition does not occupy, as in the Portrait, a crucial place in Stephen’s career. In the Portrait the statement of Stephen’s theory is an immediate prologue to his abandonment of Ireland, and hence is a climax to the whole book; in the present version, however dramatically it may be described, it is only one episode among many.

In fact the way the theory is finally presented in the Portrait is an illustration of the theory itself. One of Stephen’s central ideas is that only improper art is “kinetic”; it moves us to do something, which true art should not do; on the contrary, the true “esthetic emotion” is static, and the true artist is essentially impersonal: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” [Portrait, p. 252]. It is in this impersonal, static, non-kinetic fashion that Stephen expounds his theory to Lynch.