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200 J A M E S [ 1905 ]his real enemies. Joyce imagined himself, in a letter of July 19, as aprisoner at the bar answering the charges against him by asserting theimmemorial right of the soul to live without fetters:The struggle against conventions in which I am at present involved wasnot entered into by me so much as a protest against these conventions aswith the intention of living in conformity with my moral nature. Thereare some people in Ireland who would call my moral nature oblique, peoplewho think that the whole duty of man consists in paying one's debts;but in this case Irish opinion is certainly only the caricature of the opinionof any European tribunal. To be judged properly I should not be judgedby 12 burghers taken at haphazard, judging under the dictation of a hideboundbureaucrat, in accordance with the evidence of [a] policeman butby some jury composed partly of those of my own class and of my ownage presided over by a judge who had solemnly forsworn all English legalmethods. But why insist on this point? I do so only because my presentlamentable circumstances seem to constitute a certain reproach againstme. 1 1In other words, he would be acquitted by a jury composed of people whothought exactly as he did. Ludicrous as this scene appears, it derivesperhaps from Ibsen's tenet (in the poem 'At Digte') that the artist mustperpetually hold doomsday over himself. (Both Ibsen and Joyce interpretedthis rather circuitously to mean that they should not be doomed.)For the moment Joyce was not averse to a little special pleading beforethis tribunal, but he mocked himself and his court by the time he cameto write Ulysses, where Bloom confesses to an imaginary judge all sortsof committed and uncommitted crimes, and Finnegans Wake, whereEarwicker clears himself of one crime only to admit a dozen others. Theimage of himself making a public self-defense with the eloquence of SeymourBushe and John F. Taylor never quite left Joyce.He haled his betrayers also before the bar. In June 1905, he obtainedfrom a printer in Trieste fiftycopies of'The Holy Office,' and sent themto Stanislaus with orders to distribute them to Byrne, Curran, Roberts,Ryan, Russell, Gogarty, Magee, Best, Cousins, Starkey, Keller, GeorgeMoore, O'Leary Curtis,* G. A. McGinty,t Elwood, and Cosgrave. Hehad enough discretion not to send copies to Yeats, Lady Gregory, orAnnie Horniman, though all were involved in it. To take so much troubleto print the broadside almost a year after writing it did not strike Joyceas strange; his quarrels had lost nothing from distance. This splendidattack, in which the scatology only enhances the pride, was a foretaste ofvengeance; the main attack would come in his novel and stories, as heannounced to Stanislaus in early autumn with a burst of humorous ferocity:* Curtis was a newspaperman; see p. 336.t It was McGinty of Irish Industries who had invited Joyce to sing at the concert of August27, 1904, at the Antient Concert Rooms. 12