“Ibsen,” writes Joyce in the Fortnightly Review essay that astonished his fellow undergraduates, “… treats all things … with large insight, artistic restraint, and sympathy.” The young author begins his next sentence by echoing Arnold's sonnet “To a Friend,” which pays homage to Homer, Epictetus, and Sophocles. At issue is Ibsen's handling of an episode in When We Dead Awaken: “He sees it steadily and whole, as from a great height, with perfect vision and an angelic dispassionateness, with the sight of one who may look on the sun with open eyes.” Joyce lauded the classical temperament of Ibsen's work, especially his sense of character. But Joyce's classicism, unlike Arnold's, is aesthetic. For Joyce, a classical style is “the syllogism of art.” Classicism is “a constant state of the artistic mind.” It is not a requirement that the permanent elements of human nature be moved.

Ibsen's artistic vision was confirmed for the young Joyce not by Arnold, but by Pater and Flaubert. “If all high things have their martyrs,” writes Pater, “Gustave Flaubert might perhaps rank as the martyr of literary style.” By a suggestive coincidence, Stephen Dedalus shares his name with the first Christian martyr, the eloquent Saint Stephen – much as Florian Deleal takes his name from a martyred saint. Certainly Joyce was remembering Flaubert's letters when he had Stephen remark: “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.”