So you must not insist to us that Isadora Duncan is an artist. This generation can’t be fed on any such stuff. We are tired of that kind of loose valuation. We all know and share the debt the world owes Isadora Duncan, and which the Russian Ballet acknowledged and put to a use she herself could not do. But you should not force us into a position where it positively takes courage to stand up for those values which you yourselves believe in. Isadora Duncan, as you will know after seeing her once, is a woman of small intelligence, a monument of undirected adolescent vision, an ingrained sentimentalist. The spectacle of her dancing draped in an American flag is bad enough; but her unconsciousness of how emotion must be transmuted through a significant medium is to me far more sad. A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft loud vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal and soft swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a turret quietly and swiftly.... Darkness was falling.... A trembling joy, lambent as a faint light, played like a fairy host around him. But why? Her passage through the darkening air or the verse with its black vowels and its opening sound, rich and lutelike?—_From James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man”._ James Joyce[1] I suppose Mr. Joyce had some idea in mind when he gave his book the title of A Portrait of the _Artist_ as a Young Man. But the critics seem to want it their own way and say, “Mr. Joyce paints the Irishman as he really is.”... Irishman, doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief, I suppose. Francis Hackett says it “reveals the inevitable malaise of serious youth.” Why then doesn’t this inevitable malaise of all our serious youth end inevitably like this: the call “to create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, a living thing, new and soaring, and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.” H. G. Wells assures us that the youth of his country need not suffer such tortures of adolescence because of England’s more common-sense treatment of the sex question. And all the time Mr. Joyce was talking about the artist of any land, not the youth of England or any other country. In this country there is only God to thank that the young artist does not go entirely mad over one and all of its institutions. In our country the young artists could suffer tortures far beyond anything suffered by Stephen, over the utter emptiness of the place. But he will always suffer. He will always be “a naked runner lost in a storm of spears.”