ABSTRACT
Later I came to realize that at no point in James Joyce’s career has he been satisfied with his own work. Stephen Dedalus’s pronunciamento that the errors of an artist are portals of discovery expresses more bravado than its author has ever possessed. It will be recalled that in the lying-in hospital scene of Ulysses, Stephen (who, of course, is Joyce) was deeply chagrined when Buck Mulligan reminded him that he had given the world but one slim volume of verses. The volume in question may well have been Chamber Music. Those verses were strictly conventional in form and remarkable for their lyric beauty, but they seemed to indicate, rather a cautious talent, content to apply itself within narrow limits, than the scope which has characterized Joyce’s later work. To him, they must have seemed rather an indictment than a measure of his abilities.
