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[ Aetat. 24-25 ] J O Y C E 235The stories I have read were about beautiful, pure faithful Connacht girlsand lithe, broad-shouldered open-faced young Connacht men, and I readthem without blinking, patiently trying to see whether the writer was tryingto express something he had understood. I always conclude by saying tomyself without anger something like this 'Well there's no doubt tbey arevery romantic young people: at first they come as a relief, then they tire.Maybe, begod, people like that are to be found by the Stream of Killmeenonly none of them has come undermy observation, as the deceased gentin Norway remarked.' 56On the other hand, Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills stirred his admirationfor at least its factual accuracy: if I knew Ireland as well asR. K. seems to know India,' he wrote Stanislaus on January 10, 1907, ifancy I could write something good. But it is becoming a mist in mybrain rapidly.'He refused to share his brother's admiration for Turgenev after readingSmoke and A Sportsman's Notebook in a French translation. He wroteindulgently, however, of Octave Mirbeau's Sebastien Koch, admiring bothits grim account of life in a Jesuit college and its style: it must be difficultto succeed in France,' he remarked on December 7, 'where nearly everyonewrites well.' Some praise, rather grudging, he meted out to AnatoleFrance: 'Crainquebille [ L'Affaire Crainquebel'], of course, is very fineand parts or rather phrases of his other books.' 57Perhaps because of Ibsen's death he picked up a copy of Hedda Gablerin Gosse's translation, but said Gosse had done it very badly. 58He wasconfirmed in this view by a man named Pedersen, from whom he wasnow taking Danish lessons—a luxury which Joyce reported to Stanislauswithout bothering to justify. He also bought a play of Hauptmann, anotherold admiration, and told Stanislaus on October 9:I finishedHauptmann's Rosa Bemd on Sunday. I wonder if he actswell. His plays, when read, leave an unsatisfying impression on the reader.Yet he must have the sense of the stage well developed in him by now.He never, in his later plays at least, tried for a curtain so that the ends ofhis acts seem ruptures of a scene. His characters appear to be more highlyvivified by their creator than Ibsen's do but also they are less under control.He has a difficulty in subordinating them to the action of his drama. Hedeals with life quite differently, more frankly in certain points (this playopens with Rosa and her lover emerging one after the other from oppositesides of a bush, looking at each other first and then laughing) but also sobroadly that my personal conscience is seldom touched. His way of treatingsuch types as Arnold Kramer and Rosa Bernd is, however, altogetherto my taste. His temperament has a little of Rimbaud in it. Like him, too,I suppose somebody else will be his future.* But, after all, he has written* Joyce was evidently alluding here to the famous and misleading final sentence in ArthurSymons's essay on Rimbaud in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899): 'Even inliterature he had his future; but his future was Verlaine.'