XVIII

Stephen's paper was fixed for the second Saturday and in March. Between Christmas and that date he had therefore an ample space of time wherein to perform preparative abstinences. His forty days were consumed in aimless solitary walks during which he forged out his sentences. In this manner he had his whole essay in his mind from the first word to the last before he had put any morsel of it on paper.º In thinking or constructing the form of the essay he found himself much hampered by the sitting posture.º His body disturbed him and he adapted the expedient of appeasing it by gentle promenading. Sometimes during his walks he lost the train of his thought and whenever the void of his mind seemed irreclaimable he forced order upon it by ejaculatory fervours. His morning walks were critical, his evening walks imaginative and whatever had seemed plausible in the evening was always rigorously examined in the light of day. These wanderings in the desert were reported from different points and Mr Daedalus once asked his son what the hell had brought him out to Dolphin's Barn.º Stephen said he had been gone part of the way home with a fellow from the college
{ms, 602}
whereupon Mr Daedalus remarked that the fellow from the college must should have gone all the way into the county Meath ^|1to live^1| as his hand was in. Any acquaintances that were encountered during these walks were never allowed to intrude on the young man's meditations by commonplace conversation — a fact which they seemed to recognise in advance by a deferent salute. Stephen was therefore very much surprised one evening as he ^|1was^1| walking past the Christian Brother's School in North Richmond St to feel his arm seized from behind and to hear a voice say somewhat blatantly:

— Hello, Daedalus, old man, is that you? —

Stephen turned round and saw a tall young man with many eruptions on his face dressed completely in heavy black. He stared for a few moments, trying to recall the face.

— Don't you remember me? I knew you at once —

— O, yes now I do, said Stephen. But you've changed —

— Think so? —

— I wouldn't know you  .  .  .  . Are you  .  .  . in mourning? —

Wells laughed.

— By Jove, that's a good one. Evidently
{ms, 603}
you don't know your Church when you see itº —

— What? You don't mean to say  .  .  .? —

— Fact, old man. I'm in Clonliffe at present. Been down in Balbriggan today on leave: the boss is very bad. Poor old chap! —

— O, indeed! —

— You're over in the Green now, Boland told me. Do you know him? He said you were at Belvedere with him —

— Is he in too? Yes I know him —

— He has a great opinion of you. He says you're a litterateur now —

Stephen smiled and did not know what subject to suggest next. He wondered how far this loud-voiced student intended to accompany him.

— See me down a bit of the way, will you? I've just come off the train at Amiens St. I'm making for dinner —

— Certainly —
So they walked on side by side.

— Well, and what have you been doing with yourself? Having a good time, I suppose? Down in Bray? —

— Ah, the usual thing, said Stephen —

— I know: I know. After the esplanade girls, isn't that it? Silly game, old man, silly game! Get tired of it —
{ms, 604}

— You have, evidently —

— Should think so: time too  .  .  .  . Ever see any of the Clongowes fellows? —

— Never one —

— That's the way. We all lose sight of each other after we leave. You remember Roth? —

— Yes —

— Out in Australia now — bushranger or something. You're going in for literature, I suppose —

— I don't know really what I'm going in for —

— I know: I know. On the loose, isn't that it? I've been there myselfº —

— Well, not exactly  .  .  . began Stephen —

—O, of course not! said Wells quickly with a loud laugh —

Passing down Jones's Road they saw a gaudy advertisement in strong colours for a melodramatic play. Wells asked Stephen had he read Trilby.

— Haven't you? Famous book, you know; style would suit you, I think. Of course it's a bit  .  .  . blue —

— How is that? —

— O, well, you know  .  .  . Paris, you know  .  .  . artists —

— O, is that the kind of book it is? —

— Nothing very wrong in it that I could see. Still some people think it's a bit
{ms, 605}
immoral —

— You haven't it in the library in Clonliffe —

— No, not likely  .  .  . Don't I wish I was out of the show! —

— Are you thinking of leaving? —

— Next year — perhaps this year — I go to Paris for my theology —

— You won't be sorry, I suppose —

— You bet. Rotten show, this place. Food is not so bad but so dull, you know —

— Are there many students in it now? —

— O, yes  .  . I don't mix much with them, you know  .  .  . There are a good lot —

— I suppose you'll be a parish priest, one of these days —

— I hope so. You must come and see me when I am —

— Very good —

— When you're a great writer yourself — as the author of a second Trilby or something of that sort  .  .  . Won't you come in —

— Is it allowed —

— O, with me  . . . you come in, never mind —

The two young men went into the grounds of the College and along the circular carriage-drive. It was a damp evening and rather dark. In the uncertain light a few of the more adventurous were to be seen vigorously playing handball in a little side-alley, the smack of the wet ball against the concrete
{ms, 606}
wall of the alley alternating with their lusty shouts. For the most part the students were walking in little groups through the ground, some with their bérrettas pushed far back to the nape of their necks and others holding their soutanes up as women do with their skirts when they cross a muddy street.

— Can you go with anyone you like? asked Stephen —

— Companions are not allowed.º You must join the first group you meet —

— Why didn't you go to the Jesuit order —

— Not likely, my boy. Sixteen years of noviciate and no chance of ever settling down. Here today, there tomorrow —

As Stephen looked at the big square block of masonry, looming before them through the faint daylight, he re-entered again in thought the seminarist life which he had led for so many years, to the understanding of the narrow activities of which he could now in a moment bring the spirit of an acute sympathetic alien. He recognised at once the martial mind of the Irish Church in the style of this ecclesiastical barracks. He looked in vain at the faces and figures which passed him for a token of moral elevation: all were cowed without being humble, modish without being simple-mannered. Some of the students saluted Wells but got
{ms, 607}
scanty thanks for the courtesy. Wells wished Stephen to gather that he despised his fellow-students and that it was not his fault if they regarded him as an important person. At the foot of the stone steps he turned to Stephen:

— I must go in to see the Dean for a minute. I'm afraid it's too late for me to show you round the show this evening  .  .  . —

— O, not at all. Another time —

— Well, will you wait for me. Stroll along there towards the chapel: I won't be a minute —

He nodded at Stephen for a temporary farewell and sprang up the steps. Stephen wandered on towards the chapel meditatively kicking a white flat stone along the grey pebbly path. He was not likely to ^|1be^1| deceived by Wells's words into an acceptance of that young man as a quite vicious person. He knew that Wells had exaggerated his airs in order to hide his internal sense of mortification at meeting one who had not forsaken the world, the flesh and the devil and he suspected that, if there were any tendency to oscillation in the soul of the free-spoken young student, the iron hand of the discipline of the Church would firmly intervene to restore equipoise. At the same time Stephen felt somewhat
{ms, 608}
indignant that anyone should expect him to entrust spiritual difficulties to such a confessor or to receive with pious feelings any sacrament or benediction from the hands of the young students whom he saw walking through the grounds. It was not any personal pride which would prevent ^|1him^1| but a recognition of the incompatibility of two natures, one trained to repressive enforcement of a creed, the other equipped with a vision the angle of which would never adjust itself for the reception of hallucinations and with an intelligence which was as much in love with laughter as with combat.º

The mist of the evening had begun to thicken into slow fine rain and Stephen halted at the end of a narrow path beside a few laurel bushes, watching ^|1at the end of a leaf^1| a tiny point of rain form and twinkle and hesitate and finally take the plunge into the sodden clay beneath. He wondered was it raining in Westmeath, were the cattle standing together patiently in the shelter of the hedges. He remembered ^|1seeing^1| the cattle standing together patiently in the shelter of the hedges and reeking in the rain. A little band of students passed at the other side of the laurel bushes: they were talking among
{ms, 609}
themselves:

— But did you see Mrs Bergin? —

— O, I saw her  .  .  . with a black and white boa —

— And the two Miss Kennedys were there —

— Where? —

— Right behind the Archbishop's Throne —

— O, I saw her — one of them. Hadn't she a grey hat with a bird in it? —

— That was her! She's very lady-like, isn't she —

The little band went down the path. In a few minutes another little band passed behind the bushes. One student was talking and the others were listening.

— Yes and an astronomer too: that's why he had built that observatory built over there at the side of the palace. I heard a priest say once that the three greatest men in Europe were Gladstone, Bismarck (the great German statesman) and our own Archbishop — as all-round men. He knew him at Maynooth. He said that in Maynooth  .  .  .  . —

The speaker's words were lost in the crunch of the heavy boots on the gravel. The rain was spreading and increasing and the vagrant bands of students were all turning their steps towards the college. Stephen still waited at his post and at last saw Wells coming down the path
{ms, 610}
quickly: he had changed his outdoor dress for a soutane. He was very apologetic and not quite so familiar in manner. Stephen wanted him to go in with the others but he insisted on seeing his visitor to the gate. They took a short cut down beside the wall and were soon opposite the lodge. The ^|1gate side-door^1| was shut and Wells called out loudly to the lodge-woman to open it and let the gentleman out. Then he shook hands with Stephen and pressed him to come again. The lodge-woman opened the side-door and Wells looked out for a second or two almost enviously. Then he said:
Well, goodbye, old man. Must run in now. Awfully glad to see you again — see any of the old Clongowes set, you know. Be good now: I must run. Goodbye —
As he tucked up his soutane high and ran awkwardly up the drive he looked a strange, almost criminal, fugitiveº in the dreary dusk. Stephen's eyes followed the running figure for a moment: and as he passed through the door into the lamplit street he smiled at his own impulse of pity.

Heº

He smiled because it seemed to him so unexpected a ripeness in himself — this pity or rather this impulse of pity for he had no more than entertained it. But it was
{ms, 611}
theº actual achievement of his essay which had allowed him so mature a pleasure as the sensation of pity for another. Stephen had a thoroughgoing manner in many things: his essay was not in the least the exhibition of polite accomplishments. It was on the contrary very seriously intended to define his own position for himself He could not persuade himself that, if he wrote round about his subject with facility or treated it from any standpoint of impression, good would come of it. On the other hand he was persuaded that no-one served the generation into which he had been born so well as he who offered it, whether in his art or in his life, the gift of certitude. The programme of the patriots filled him with very reasonable doubts; its articles could obtain no intellectual assent from him. He knew, moreover, that concordance with it would mean for him a submission of everything else in its interest and that he would thus be obliged to corrupt the springs of speculation at their very sources. He refused therefore to set out for any task if he had first to prejudice his success by oaths to his patria
{ms, 612}
and this refusal resulted in a theory of art which was at once severe and liberal. His Esthetic was in the main applied Aquinasº and he set it forth plainly with a naïf air of discovering novelties. This he did partly to satisfy his own taste for enigmatic râles and partly from a genuine predisposition in favour of all but the premisses of scholasticism.º He proclaimed at the outset that art was the human disposition of intelligible or sensible matter for an esthetic end, and he announced further that all such human dispositions must fall into the division of three distinct natural kinds, lyrical, epical and dramatic. Lyrical art, he said, is the art whereby the artist sets forth his image in immediate relation to himself; epical art is the art whereby the artist sets forth his image in mediate relation to himself and to others; and dramatic art is the art whereby the artist sets forth his image in immediate relations to others. The various forms of art, such as music, sculpture, literature, do not offer this division with the same clearness and he concluded from this that those forms of art which offered the division most dearly
{ms, 613}
were to be called the most excellent forms: and he was not greatly perturbed because he could not decide for himself whether a portrait was a work of epical art or not or whether it was possible for an architect to be a lyrical, epical or dramatic poet at will. Having by this simple process ^|1establishing established^1| the literary form of art as the most excellent he proceeded to examine it in favour of his theory, or, as he rendered it, to establish the relations which must subsist between the literary image, the work of art itself, and that energy which had imagined and fashioned it, that centre of conscious, re-acting, particular life, the artist.

The artist, he imagined, standing in the position of mediator between the world of his experience and the world of his dreams — a mediator, consequently gifted with twin faculties, a selective faculty and a reproductive faculty.º To equate these faculties was the secret of artistic success: the artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and re-embody it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its
{ms, 614}
new office, he was the supreme artist. This perfect coincidence of the two artistic faculties Stephen called poetry and he imagined the domain of an art to be cone-shaped. The term ‘literature’ now seemed to him a term of contempt and he used it to designate the vast middle region which lies between apex and base, between poetry and the chaos of unrembered writing. Its merit lay in its portrayal of externals; the realm of its princes was the realm of the manners and customs of societies — a spacious ^|1realm^1|. But society is itself, he conceived, the complex body in which certain laws are involved and overwrapped and he therefore proclaimed as the realm of the poet the realm of these unalterable laws. Such a theory might easily have led its deviser to the acceptance of spiritual anarchy in literature had he not at the same time insisted on the classical style. A classical style, he said, is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another.
{ms, 615}
Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country: it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience. The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and not more by others than by its own, is an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to ^|1regard disregard^1| certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them. The classical temper on the other hand, ever mindful of limitations, chooses rather to bend upon these present things and so to work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered. In this method the sane and joyful spirit issues forth and achieves imperishable perfection, nature assisting with her goodwill
{ms, 616}
and thanks. For so long as this place in nature is given us it is right that art should do no violence to the gift.º

Between these two conflicting schools the city of the arts had become marvellously unpeaceful. To many spectators the dispute had seemed a dispute about names, a battle in which the position of the standards could never be foretold for a minute. Add to this internecine warfare — the classical school fighting the materialism that must attend it, the romantic school struggling to preserve coherence — and behold from what ungentle manners criticism is bound to recognise the emergence of all achievement. The critic is he who is able, by means of the signs which the artist affords, to approach the temper which has made the work and to see what is well done therein and what it signifies. For him a song by Shakespeare which seems so free and living, as remote from any conscious purpose as rain that falls in a garden or as the lights of evening, discovers itself as the rhythmic
{ms, 617}
speech of an emotion otherwise incommunicable, or at least so fitly. But to approach the temper which has made art is an act of reverence before the performance of which many conventions must be first put off for certainly that inmost region will never yield its secret to one who is enmeshed with profanities.

Chief among these profanities Stephen set the antique principle that the end of art is to instruct, to elevate, and to amuse. “I am unable to find even a trace of this Puritanic conception of the esthetic purpose in the definition which Aquinas has given of beauty” he wrote “or in anything which he has written concerning the beautiful. The qualifications he expects for beauty are in fact of so abstract and common a character that it is quite impossible for even the most violent partizan to use the Aquinatian theory with the object of attacking any work of art that we possess from the hand of any artist whatsoever”. This recognition of the beautiful in virtue of the most abstract relations
{ms, 618}
afforded by an object to which the term could be applied so far from giving any support to a commandment of Noli Tangere was itself no more than a just sequence from the taking-off of all interdictions from the artist. The limits of decency suggest themselves somewhat too readily to the modern speculator and their effect is to encourage the profane mind to very futile jurisdiction. For it cannot be urged too strongly on public mind that the tradition of art is with the artists and that ^|1even^1| if ^|1these they^1| do not make it their invariable practice to outrage these limits of decency the public ^|1mind^1| has no right to conclude therefrom that they do not arrogate for themselves an entire liberty to do so if they choose. It is as absurd, wrote the fiery-hearted revolutionary, for a criticism itself established upon homilies to prohibit the elective courses of the artist ^|1in his revelation of the beautiful^1| as it would be for a police-magistrate to prohibit ^|1the sum of any^1| two sides of a triangle from being together greater than the third side.

In fine the truth is not that the artist requires a document of licence
{ms, 619}
from householders entitling him to proceed in this or that fashion but that every age must look for its sanction to its poets and philosophers. The poet is the intense centre of the life of his age to which he stands in a relation than which none can be more vital. He alone is capable to of absorbing in himself the life that surrounds him and of flinging it abroad again amid planetary music. When the poetic phenomenon is signalled in the heavens, exclaimed this heaven-ascending essayist, it is time for the critics to verify their calculations in accordance with it. It is time for them to acknowledge that here the imagination has contemplated intensely the truth of the being of the visible world and that beauty, the splendour of truth, has been born. The age, though it bury itself fathoms deep in formulas and machinery, has need of these realities which alone give and sustain life and it must await from those chosen centres of vivification the force to live, the security for life which can come to it only from them. Thus
{ms, 620}
the spirit of man makes a continual affirmation.

Except for the eloquent and arrogant peroration Stephen's essay was a careful exposition of a carefully meditated theory of esthetic. When he had finished it he found it necessary to change the title from “Drama and Life” to “Art and Life” for he had occupied himself so much with securing the foundations that he had not left himself space enough to raise the complete structure. This strangely unpopular manifesto was traversed by the two brothers phrase by phrase and word by word and at last pronounced flawless at all points. It was then safely laid by until the time should come for its public appearance. Besides Maurice two other well-wishers had an advance view of it; these were Stephen's mother and his friend Madden. Madden had not asked for it directly but at end of a conversation in which Stephen had recounted sarcastically his visit to Clonliffe College he had vaguely wondered what state of mind could produce such irreverences and Stephen had at once offered him the manuscript saying “This is the first of my explosives”. The following evening Madden had
{ms, 621}
returned the manuscript and praised the writing highly. Part of it had been too deep for him, he said, but he could see that it was beautifully written.

— You know Stevie, he said (Madden had a brother Stephen and he sometimes used this familiar form) you always told me I was a country buachail and I can't understand you mystical fellows —

— Mystical? said Stephen —

— About the planets and the stars, you know. Some of the fellows in the League belong to the mystical set here. They'd understand quick enough —

— But there's nothing mystical in it I tell you. I have written it carefully  .  .  . —

— O, I can see you have. It's beautifully written. But I'm sure it will be above the heads of your audience —

— You don't mean to tell me. Madden, you think it's a ‘flowery’ composition! —

— I know you've thought it out. But you are a poet, aren't you? —

— I have  .  .  . written verse  .  .  . if that's what you mean —

— Do you know Hughes is a poet too? —

— Hughes! —

— Yes. He writes for our paper, you know. Would you like to see some of his poetry? —

— Why, could you show me any?
{ms, 622}

— It so happens I have one in my pocket. There's one in this week's Sword too. Here it is: read it —
Stephen took the paper and read a piece of verse entitled Mo Náire Tù (My shame art thou). There were four stanzas in the piece and each stanza ended with the Irish phrase — Mo Náire Tù, the last word, of course, rhyming to an English word in the corresponding line. The piece began:

What! Shall the rippling tongue of Gaels
Give way before the Saxon slang!

and in lines ^|1full^1| of excited patriotism proceeded to pour scorn upon the Irishman who would not learn the ancient language of his native land. Stephen did not remark anything in the lines except ^|1the frequency of^1| such contracted forms as “e'en” “ne'er” and “thro'” instead of “even” “never” and “through” and he handed back the paper to Madden without offering any comment on the verse.

— I suppose you don't like that because it's too Irish but you'll like this, I suppose, because it's that mystical, idealistic kind of writing you poets indulge in. Only you musn't say I let you see —

— O, no —
{ms, 623}

Madden took from his inside pocket a sheet of foolscap folded in four on which was inscribed a piece of verse, consisting of four stanzas of eight lines each, entitled ‘My Idealº. Each stanza began with the words “Art thou real?.” The poem told of the poet's troubles in a ‘vale of woe’ and of the ‘heart-throbs’ which these troubles caused him. It told of ‘weary nights' and ‘anxious days’ and of an ‘unquenchable desire’ for an excellence beyond that ‘which earth can give’. After this mournful idealism the final stanza offered a certain consolatory, hypothetical alternative to the poet in his woes: it began somewhat hopefully:

Art thou real, my Ideal?
Wilt thou ever come to me
In the soft and gentle twilight
With your baby on your knee?

The combined effect of this apparition on Stephen was a long staining blush of anger. The tawdry lines, the futile change of number, the ludicrous waddling approach of Hughes's “Ideal” weighed down by an inexplicable infant, combined to cause him a sharp agony in the sensitive region. Again he handed back the verse without saying a
{ms, 624}
word of praise or of blame but he decided that attendance in Mr Hughes's class was no longer possible for him and he was foolish enough to regret ^|1having yielded to^1| the impulse for sympathy from a friend.

When a demand for intelligent sympathy goes unanswered ^|1it is too sternly he is a too stern^1| disciplinarian who blames himself for having offered a dullard an opportunity f to participate in the warmer movement of a more highly organised life. So Stephen regarded his loans of manuscripts as elaborate flag-practices with phrases.º He did not consider his mother a dullard but the result of his second disappointment in the search for appreciation ^|1was that he was^1| enabled to place the blame on the shoulders of others — not on his own: he had enough responsibilities thereon already, inherited and acquired. His mother had not asked to see the manuscript: she had continued to iron the clothes on the kitchen-table without the least suspicion of the agitation in the mind of ^|1the her^1| son. He ^|1had^1| sat on three or four kitchen chairs, one after another, and had dangled his legs unsuccessfully from all free corners
{ms, 625}
of the table. At last, unable to control his agitation, he asked her point-blank would she like him to read out his essay.

— O, yes, Stephen: — if you don't mind my ironing a few things  . . . —

— No, I don't mind —

Stephen read out the essay to her slowly and emphatically and when he had finished reading she said it was very beautifully written but that as there were some things in it which she couldn't follow, would he mind reading it to her again and explaining some of it. He read it over again and allowed himself a long exposition of his theories, garnished with many crude striking allusions with which he hoped to drive it home the better.º His mother who had never suspected probably that “beauty” could be anything more than a convention of the drawingroom or a natural antecedent to marriage and married life was surprised to see the extraordinary honour which her son conferred upon it. Beauty, to the mind of such a woman, was often a synonym for licentious ways and probably for this reason she was
{ms, 626}
relieved to find that the excesses of this new worship were supervised by a recognised saintly authority. However as the essayist's recent habits were not very re-assuring she decided to combine a discreet motherly solicitude with an interest, which without being open to the accusation of factitiousness was at first intended as a compliment. While she was nicely folding a handkerchief she said:

— What does Ibsen write, Stephen? —

— Plays —

— I never heard of his name before. Is he alive at present? —

— Yes, he is. But, you know, in Ireland people don't know much about what is going on out in Europe —

— He must be a great writer from what you say of him —

— Would you like to read some of his plays, mother. I have some —

— Yes. I would like to read the best one. What is the best one? —

— I don't know  . . . But do you really want to read Ibsen? —

— I do, really —

— To see whether I am reading dangerous authors or not, is that why? —
{ms, 627}

— No, Stephen, answered his mother with a brave prevarication. I think you're old enough now to know what is right and what is wrong without my dictating to you what you are to read —

— I think so too  . . . But I'm surprised to hear you ask about Ibsen. I didn't imagine you took the least interest in these matters —

Mrs Daedalus pushed her iron smoothly over a white petticoat in time to the current of her memory.

— Well, of course, I don't speak about it but I'm not so indifferent  .  .  . Before I married your father I used to read a great deal. I used to take an interest in all kinds of new plays —

— But since you married neither of you so much as bought a single book! —

— Well, you see, Stephen, your father is not like you: he takes no interest in that sort of thing  .  .  . When he was young he told me he used to spend all his time out after the hounds or rowing on the Lee. He went in for athletics —

— I suspect what he went in for, said Stephen irrevently. I know he doesn't care a jack straw about what I think or what I write —
{ms, 628}

— He wants to see you make your way, get on in life, said his mother defensively. That's his ambition. You shouldn't blame him for that —

— No, no, no. But it may not be my ambition. That kind of life I often loathe: I find it ugly and cowardly —

— Of course life isn't what I used to think it was when I was a young girl. That's why I would like to read some great writer, to see what ideal of life he has — amn't I right in saying “ideal”? —

— Yes, but  .  .  . —

— Because sometimes — not that I grumble at the lot Almighty God has given me and I have more or less a happy life with your father — but sometimes I feel that I want to leave this actual life and enter another — for a time —

— But that is wrong: that is the great mistake everyone makes. Art is not an escape from life! —

— No? —

— You evidently weren't listening to what I said or else you didn't understand what I said. Art is not an escape from life. It's just the very opposite. Art, on the contrary, is the very central
{ms, 629}
expression of life. An artist is not a fellow who dangles a mechanical heaven before the public. The priest does that. The artist affirms out of the fulness of his own life, he creates  .  .  . Do you understand? —

And so on. A day or two afterwards Stephen gave his mother a few of the plays to read. She read them with great interest and found Nora Helmer a charming character. Dr Stockmann she admired but her admiration was naturally checked by her son's light-heartedly blasphemous description of that stout burgher as ‘Jesus in a frock-coat’. But the play which she preferred to all others was the ‘Wild Duck. Of it she spoke readily and on her own initiative: it had moved her deeply. Stephen, to escape a charge of hot-headedness and partizanship, did not encourage her to ^|1an^1| open record of her feelings.

— I hope you're not going to mention Little Nell in the Old Curiosity Shop —

— Of course I like Dickens too but I can see a great difference between Little Nell and that poor little creature — what is her name? —

— Hedvig Ekdal? —
{ms, 630}

— Hedvig, yes  .  .  . It's so sad: it's terrible to read it even.  .  .  . I quite agree with you that Ibsen is a wonderful writer —

— Really? —

— Yes, really. His plays have impressed me very much —

— Do you think he is immoral —

— Of course, you know, Stephen, he treats of subjects  .  .  . of which I know very little myself  .  .  . subjects  .  .  . —

— Subjects which, you think, should never be talked about? —

— Well, that was the old people's idea but I don't know if it was right. I don't know if it is good for people to be entirely ignorant  .  .  .  . —

— Then why not treat them openly? —

— I think it might do harm to some people — uneducated, unbalanced people. People's natures are so different. You perhaps  .  .  . —

— O, never mind me.  .  .  . Do you think ^|1the these^1| plays are unfit for people to read? —

— No, I think they're magnificent plays indeed —

— And not immoral? —

— I think that Ibsen  .  .  . has an extraordinary knowledge of human nature  .  .  . And I think that human nature is a
{ms, 631}
very extraordinary thing sometimes —

Stephen had to be contented with this well-worn generality as he recognised in it a genuine sentiment. His mother, in fact, had so far evangelised herself that she undertook the ^|1duty duties^1| of missioner to the heathen; that is to say, she offered some of the plays to her husband to read. He listened to her praises with a somewhat startled air, observing no feature of her face, his eyeglass screwed into an astonished eye and his mouth poised in naïf surprise. He was always interested in novelties, childishly interested and receptive, and this new name and the phenomena it had produced in his house were novelties for him. He made no attempt to discredit his wife's novel development but he resented both that she should have achieved it unaided by him and that she should be able thereby to act as intermediary between him and his son. He condemned as inopportune ^|1but^1| not discredited his son's wayward researches into strange literature and, though a similar taste was not discoverable in him, he was prepared to commit that most pious of heroisms namely the extension of one's sympathies late in life in deference to the advocacy of a junior. Following
{ms, 632}
the custom of certain old-fashioned people who can never understand why their patronage or judgments should put men of letters into a rage he chose his play from the title. A metaphor is a vice that attracts ^|1the dull mind^1| by reason of its aptness and repels the too serious mind by reason ^|1of^1| its falsity and danger so that, after all, there is something to be said, nothing voluminous perhaps, but at least a word of concession for that class of society which in literature as in everything else goes always with its four feet on the ground. Mr Daedalus, anyhow, suspected that A Doll's House would be a triviality in the manner of Little Lord Fauntleroy and, as he had never been even unofficially a member of that international society which collects and examines psychical phenomena, he decided that Ghosts would probably be some ^|1interesting uninteresting^1| story about a haunted house. He chose the League of Youth in which he hoped to find the reminiscences of like-minded roysterers and, after reading through too two acts of provincial intrigue abandoned the enterprise as tedious. He had promised himself
{ms, 633}
arguing from the alienated attitudes and half-deferential half-words of pressmen at the mention of the name, a certain extravagance, perhaps an anomalous torridity of the North and hi though the name beneath Ibsen's photograph never failed to reawaken his sense of wonder, the upright line of the “b” running so strangely beside the initial letter as to suspend ^|1one the mind^1| amid incertitudes for some oblivious instants, the final impression made upon him by the figure to which the name was affixed, a figure which he associated with a solicitor's or a stockbroker's office in Dame St, was an impression of disappointment mixed relief mixed with disappointment, the relief for his son's sake prevailing dutifully over his own slight but real disappointment. So that from neither of Stephen's pap parents did respectability get full allegiance.

A week before the date fixed for the reading of the paper Stephen consigned a small packet covered with neat characters into the Auditor's hands. McCann smacked his lips and put the manuscript into
{ms, 634}
the inside pocket of his coat:

— I'll read this tonight and I'll see you here at the same hour tomorrow. I think I know all that is in it beforehand —

The next ^|1evening afternoon^1| McCann reported:

— Well, I've read your paper —

— Well? —

— Brilliantly written — a bit strong, it seems to me. However I gave it to the President this morning to read —

— What for? —

— All the papers must be submitted to him first for approval, you know —

— Do you mean to say, said Stephen scornfully, that the President must approve of my paper before I can read it to your society! —

— Yes. He's the Censor —

— What a valuable society! —

— Why not? —

— It's only child's play, man. You remind me of children in the nursery —

— Can't be helped. We must take what we can get —

— Why not put up the shutters at once? —

— Well, it is valuable. It trains young men for public speaking — for the bar and the political platform —

— Mr Daniel could say as much for his charades —

— I daresay he could —
{ms, 635}

— So this Censor of yours is inspecting my essay? —

— Well. He's liberal-minded  .  .  .  . —

— Ay —
While the two young men were holding this conversation on the steps of the Library, Whelan, the college orator ^|s1offering him the grapes, ‘I never eat Muscatel grapes,’^s1| came up to them. This suave rotund young man, ^|1wh who^1| was the Secretary of the Society, was reading for the Bar. His eyes regarded Stephen now with mild, envious horror and he forgot all his baggage from Attica:

— Your essay is tabu, Daedalus —

— Who said so? —

— The Very Reverend Dr Dillon —

^|1The delivery of^1| This news was followed by a silence during which Whelan slowly moistened his lower lip with saliva from his tongue and McCann made ready to shrug his shoulders —

— Where is the damned old fool,? said the essayist promptly —

Whelan blushed and pointed his thumb over his shoulder. Stephen in a moment was half across the quadrangle. McCann called after him:

— Where are you going? —

Stephen halted but ^|1discovered, discovering^1| that he was too angry to trust himself to speak, he merely pointed in the direction
{ms, 636}
of the College, and went forward quickly.

So after all his trouble, thinking out his essay and composing his periods, this old fogey was about to prohibit it! His indignation settled into a mood of politic contempt as he crossed the Green. The clock in the hall of the College pointed to half past three as Stephen addressed the dodderingº door-porter. He had to speak twice, the second time with a distinct, separated enunciation, for the door-porter was rather stupid and deaf:

— Can—I—see—the—President? —

The President was not in his room: he was saying his office in the garden. Stephen went out into the garden and went down towards the ball-alley. A small figure wrapped in a loose Spanish-looking black cloak presented its back to him near the far end of the side-walk. The figure went on slowly to the end of the walk, halted there for a few moments, and then turning about presented to him over the edge of a breviary a neat round head covered with curly grey hair and a very wrinkled face of an indescribable colour: the upper part was the colour of putty and the lower part was shot with slate colour. The President came slowly down the side-walk, in his capacious cloak, noiselessly moving his grey lips as he said his office. At the end
{ms, 637}
of the walk he halted again and looked inquiringly at Stephen. Stephen raised his cap and said “Good evening, sir.” The President answered with the smile which a pretty girl gives when she receives some compliment which puzzles her — a ‘winning’ smile:

— What can I do for you? he asked in a ^|1wonderfully^1| rich deep ^|1calculated^1| voice —

— I understand, said Stephen, that you wish to see me about my essay — an essay I have written for the Debating Society —

— O, you are Mr Daedalus, said the President more seriously but still agreeably —

— Perhaps I am disturbing  .  .  . —

— No, I have finished my office, said the President —

He started began to walk slowly down the path at such a pace as implied invitation. Stephen kept therefore at his side.

— I admire the style of your paper, he said firmly, very much but I do not approve at all of your theories. I am afraid I cannot allow you to read your paper before the Society —

They walked on to the end of the path, without speaking. Then Stephen
{ms, 638}
said:

— Why, sir? —

— I cannot encourage you to to disseminate such theories among the young men in this college —

— You think my theory of art is a false one? —

— It is certainly not the theory of art which is respected in this college —

— I agree with that, said Stephen —

— On the contrary, it represents the sum-total of modern unrest and modern freethinking. The authors you quote as examples, those you seem to admire  .  .  . —

— Aquinas? —

— Not Aquinas; I have to speak of him in a moment. But Ibsen, Maeterlinck  .  .  . these atheistic writers  .  . —

— You do not like  .  . —

— I am surprised that any student of this college could find anything to admire in such writers, writers who usurp the name of poet, who openly profess their atheistic doctrines and fill the minds of their readers with all the garbage of modern society. That is not art —

— Even admitting the corruption you speak of I see nothing unlawful in an examination of corruption —

— Yes, it may be lawful — for the scientist,
{ms, 639}
for the reformer —

— Why not for the poet too? Dante surely examines and upbraids society —

— Ah, yes, said the President explanatorily, with a moral purpose in view: Dante was a great poet —

— Ibsen is also a great poet —

— You cannot compare Dante and Ibsen —

— I am not doing so —

— Dante, the lofty upholder of beauty, the greatest of Italian poets, and Ibsen, the writer above and beyond all others, Ibsen and Zola, who seek to degrade their art, who pander to a corrupt taste  .  .  . —

— But you are comparing them! —

— No, you cannot compare them. One has a high moral aim, — he ennobles the human race: the other degrades it —

— The lack of a specific code of moral conventions does not degrade the poet, in my opinion —

— Ah, if he were to examine even the basest things, said the President with a suggestion of tolerance in store, ^|1that it^1| would be different if he were to examine and then show men the way to purify themselves —
{ms, 640}

— That is for the Salvationists, said Stephen —

— Do you mean  .  .  .

— I mean that Ibsen's account of modern society is as genuinely ironical as Newman's account of English Protestant morality and belief —

— That may be, said the President appeased by the conjunction —

— And as free from any missionary intention —

The President was silent.

— It is a question of temper. Newman could refrain from writing his Apologia for twenty years —

— But when he came out on him! said the President with a chuckle and an expressive incompletion of the phrase. Poor Kingsley! —

— It is all a question of temper — one's attitude towards society whether one is poet or critic —

— O, yes —

— Ibsen has the temper of an archangel —

— It may be: but I have always believed that he was a fierce realist like Zola with some kind of a new doctrine to preach —

— You were mistaken, sir —

— This is the general opinion —
{ms, 641}

— A mistaken one —

— I understood he had some doctrine or other — a social doctrine, free living, and an artistic doctrine, unbridled licence — so much so that the public will not tolerate his plays on the stage and that you cannot name him even in mixed society —

— Where have you seen this? —

— O, everywhere  .  .  . in the papers —

— This is a serious argument, said Stephen reprovingly —

The President far from resenting this hardy statement seemed to bow to its justice: no-one could have a poorer opinion of the half-educated journalism of the present day than he had and he certainly would not allow a newspaper to dictate criticism to him. At the same time there was such a unanimity of opinion everywhere about Ibsen that he imagined  .  .  .  .

— May I ask you if you have read much of his writing? asked Stephen —

— Well, no  .  .  . I must say I  .  .  . —

— May I ask you if you have read even a single line?

— Well, no  . . . I must admit  .  .  . —

— And surely you do not think it right to pass judgment on a writer ^|1a single line^1| of whose
{ms, 642}
writing you have never read —

— Yes, I must admit that —
Stephen hesitated after this first success. The President resumed:

— I am very interested in the enthusiasm you show for this writer. I have never had any opportunity to read Ibsen myself but I know that he enjoys a great reputation. What you say of him, I must confess, alters my view of him considerably. Some day perhaps I shall  .  .  . —

— I can lend you some of the plays if you like, sir, said Stephen with imprudent simplicity —

— Can you indeed? —
Both paused for an instant: then —

— You will see that he is a great poet and a great artist, said Stephen —

— I shall be very interested, said the President with an amiable intention, to read some of his work for myself. I certainly shall —
Stephen had an impulse to say “Excuse me for five minutes while I send a telegram to Christiania” but he resisted his impulse. During the interview he had occasion more than once to put severe shackles on this importunate devil within him whose
{ms, 643}
appetite was on edge for the farcical. The President was beginning to exhibit the liberal side of his character, but with priestly cautiousness.

— Yes, I shall be most interested. Your opinions are somewhat strange. Do you intend to publish this essay? —

— Publish it! —

— I should not care for anyone to identify the ideas in your essay with the teaching in our college. We receive this college in trust —

— But you are not supposed to be responsible for everything a student in your college thinks or says —

— No, of course not  .  .  . but, reading your essay and knowing you came from our college, people would suppose that we inculcated such ideas here —

— Surely a student of this college can pursue a special line of study if he chooses —

— It is just that which we always try to encourage in our students but your study, it seems to me, leads you to adopt very revolutionary  .  .  . very revolutionary theories —

— If I were to publish tomorrow a very revolutionary pamphlet on the means of avoiding potato-blight would you consider yourself responsible for my theory? —
{ms, 644}

— No, no, of course not  .  .  . but then this is not a school of agriculture —

— Neither is it a school of dramaturgy, answered Stephen —

— Your argument is not so conclusive as it seems, said the President after a short pause. However I am glad to see that your attitude towards your subject is so genuinely serious. At the same time you must admit that this theory you have — if pushed to its logical conclusion — would emancipate the poet from all moral laws. I notice too that in your essay you allude satirically to what you call the ‘antique’ theory — the theory, namely, that the drama should have special ethical aims, that it should instruct, elevate and amuse. I suppose you mean Art for Art' sake —

— I have only pushed to its logical conclusion the definition Aquinas has given of the beautiful —

— Aquinas? —

— Pulcra sunt quae visa placent. He seems to regard the beautiful as that which satisfies the esthetic appetite and nothing more — that the mere apprehension of which pleases —

— But he means the sublime — that which leads man upwards —

— His remark would apply to a Dutch painter's representation of a plate of onions —
{ms, 645}

— No, no that which pleases the soul in a state of sanctification, the soul seeking ^|1its^1| spiritual good —

— Aquinas' definition of the good is an unsafe basis of operations: it is very wide. He seems to me almost ironical in his treatment of the “appetites” —
The President scratched his head a little dubiously:

— Of course Aquinas is an extraordinary mind he murmured, the greatest doctor of the Church: but he requires immense interpretation. There are parts of Aquinas which no priest would think of announcing in the pulpit —

— But what if I, as an artist, refuse to accept the cautions which are considered necessary for those who are still in a state of original stupidity? —

— I believe you are sincere but I will tell you this as an older human being than you are and as a man of some experience: the cult of beauty is difficult. Estheticism often begins well only to end in the vilest abominations of which  .  .  . —

— Ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur —

— It is insidious, it creeps into the mind, little by little  .  .  . —

— Integritas, consonantia, claritas. There seems to me to be effulgence in that theory instead of danger. The intelligent nature apprehends it at once —
{ms, 646}

— S. Thomas of course  .  .  . —

— Aquinas is certainly on the side of the capable artist. I hear no mention of instruction or elevation —

— To support Ibsenism on Aquinas seems to me somewhat paradoxical. Young men often substitute brilliant paradox for conviction —

— My conviction has led me nowhere: my theory states itself —

— Ah, you are a paradoxist, said the President smiling with gentle satisfaction. I can see that  .  .  . And there is another thing — a question of taste perhaps rather than anything else — which makes me think your theory juvenile. You don't seem to understand the importance of the classical drama  .  .  . Of course in his own line Ibsen also may be an admirable writer  .  .  . —

— But, allow me, sir, said Stephen. My entire esteem is for the classical temper in art. Surely you must remember that I said  .  .  . —

— So far as I can remember, said the President lifting to the pale sky a faintly smiling face on which memory endeavoured to bring a vacuous amiability to book, so far as I can remember you treated the Greek drama — the classical temper — very summarily indeed, with a kind of juvenile  .  .  . impudence, shall I say? —
{ms, 647}

— But the Greek drama is heroic, monstrous. Eschylus is not a classical writer! —

— I told you you were a paradoxist, Mr Daedalus. You wish to upset centuries of literary criticism by a brilliant turn of speech, by a paradox —

— I use the word ‘classical’ in a certain sense, with a certain definite meaning, that is all —

— But you cannot use any terminology you like —

— I have not changed the terms. I have explained them. By ‘classical’ I mean the slow elaborative patience of the art of satisfaction. The heroic, the fabulous, I call romantic. Menander perhaps, I don't know  .  .  . —

— All the world recognises Eschylus as a supreme classical dramatist —

— O, the world of professors whom he helps to feed  .  .  . —

— Competent critics, said the President severely, men of the highest culture. And even the public themselves can appreciate him. I have read, I think, in some  .  .  . a newspaper, I think it was  .  .  . that Irving, the great actor, Henry Irving produced one of his plays in London and that the London public flocked to see it —
{ms, 648}

— From curiosity. The London public will flock to see anything new or strange. If Irving were to give an imitation of a hard-boiled egg they would flock to see it —
The President received this absurdity with unflinching gravity and when he had come to the end of the path, he halted for a few instants before leading the way to the house —

— I do not predict much success for your advocacy in this country, he said generally. Our people have their faith and they are happy. They are faithful to their Church and the Church is sufficient for them. ^|1Even^1| For the profane world these modern pessimistic writers are a little too  .  .  . too much —
With his ^|1scornful^1| mind scampering from Clonliffe College to Mullingar Stephen strove to make himself ready for some definite compact. The President had carefully brought the interview into the region of chattiness.

— Why not make death a capital offence? said Stephen. People are very timorous. It would be so much simpler to take the bull by the horns and have done with it —
When they reached the hall of the College the President stood at the foot of the staircase before going up to his room. Stephen waited silently:

— Begin to look at the bright side of things, Mr Daedalus. Art should be healthy first of all —
The President gathered in his soutane for the ascent with a slow hermaphroditic gesture:

— I must say you have defended your theory very well  .  .  . very well indeed. I do not agree with it, of course, but I can see you have thought it all out carefully beforehand. You have thought it out carefully? —

— Yes, I have —

— It is very interesting — a little paradoxical at times and a little juvenile — but I have been very interested in it. I am sure too that when your studies have brought you further afield you will be able to amend it so as to
{ms, 650}
fit in more with recognised facts; I am sure you will be able to apply it better then — when your mind has undergone a course of  .  .  . regular  . . . training and you have a larger, wider sense of  .  .  . comparison  .  .  . —
{ms, 650}
XIX
The President's indefinite manner of closing the interview had left some doubts in Stephen's mind; he was unable to decide whether the retreat upstairs was a breach of friendly relations or a politic confession of inability. However as no definite prohibition had been pronounced upon him he determined to proceed calmly on his way until he encountered a substantial check. When he met McCann again he smiled and waited to be questioned. His account of the interview went the rounds of the undergraduate classes and he was much amused to observe the startled expression of many pairs of eyes which, to judge from their open humiliated astonishment, appeared to behold in him characteristics of a moral Nelson. Maurice listened to his brother's account of his battle with recognised authority but he made no remark upon it. Stephen ^|1himself^1|, in default of unread another's service, began to annotate the incident copiously, expanding every suggestive phase of the interview. He consumed much imaginative fuel in this diverting chase of the presumable and his
{ms, 652}
rapid changeful courses kindled in him a flame of discontent for Maurice's impassiveness:

— Are you listening to me at all? Do you know what I'm talking about? —

— Yes, it's all right  .  .  . You can read your paper, can't you? —

— Yes. Of course I can  .  .  . But what's up with you? Are you bored? Are you thinking of anything? —

— Well  .  . yes, I am —

— What? —

— I have found out why I feel different this evening. Why, do you think? —

— I have been walking ^|1on from^1| the ball of my left foot. I usually walk from the ball of my right foot —
Stephen looked sideways at the speaker's solemn face to see if there were any signs thereon of a satirical mood but, finding only steadfast self-analysis, he said:

— Indeed? That's damned interesting —

On the Saturday night ^|1which had been^1| fixed for the reading of the paper Stephen found himself facing the benches in the Physics' Theatre. While the minutes were being read out by the secretary he had time to observe his father's eyeglass glimmering high up near the window
{ms, 653}
and he divined more than saw the burly form of Mr Casey hard by that observant centre. He could not see his brother but in the front benches he noticed Father Butt and McCann and two other priests. The Chairman was Mr Keane, the professor of English composition. When the formal business was ended the chairman called on the essayist to read his paper and Stephen stood up. He waited until a compliment of discreet applause had subsided ^|1and^1| until McCann's energetic hands had given four resounding clapsº as a concluding solo of welcome. Then he read out his essay. He read it quietly and distinctly, involving every hardihood of thought or expression in an envelope of low innocuous melody. He read it on calmly to the end: his reading was never once interrupted with applause: and when he had read out the final sentences in a tone of metallic clearness he sat down.

The first single thought that emerged through a swift mood of confusion was the bright conviction that he should never have written his essay. While he was gloomily taking counsel with himself as to whether he should fling
{ms, 654}
the manuscript at their headsº and march home or remain as he was shading his face from the light of the candles on the Chairman's table he became aware that the discussion on his paper had begun: this discovery surprised him. Whelan, the orator of the College, was proposing a vote of thanks and wagging his head in time to ornate phrases. Stephen wondered did anyone else observe the infantile movements of the orator's mouth^|1; he. He^1| wished that Whelan would shut his jaws with a clap so as to reveal the presence of solid teeth; the mere sound of the speech reminded him of the noise Nurse Sarah used to make when she mashed Isabel's bread-and-milk in the ^|1blue^1| bowl which his mother now used to hold starch. But he at once corrected himself for such a manner of criticism and strove to listen to the words of the orator. Whelan was profusely admiring: he felt (he said) during the reading of Mr Daedalus' essay as though he had been listening to the discourse of angels and did not know the language that they spoke. It was with some diffidence that he
{ms, 655}
ventured to criticise but it was evident that Mr Daedalus did not understand the beauty of the Attic theatre. He pointed out that Eschylus was an imperishable name and he predicted that the drama of the Greeks would outlive many civilisations. Stephen noticed that Whelan said ‘yisterday’ twice instead of ‘yesterday’ in imitation of Father Butt who was a South of England man and he speculated as to whether it was a Dominican preacher or a Jesuit preacher ^|1that who^1| had given the orator his final phrase. “Greek art” said Whelan “is not for a time but for all times. It stands aloof, alone. It is imperial, imperious and imperative.º ”

McCann seconded the vote of thanks which had been so ably proposed by Mr Whelan and he desired to add his tribute to Mr Whelan's eloquent tribute to the essayist of the night. There were perhaps many things in the paper which Mr Daedalus had read to them with which he could not agree. Bu but he was not such a blind partizan of antiquity for antiquity' sake as Mr Whelan seemed to be. Modern ideas must find their expression:
{ms, 656}
the modern world had to face pressing problems: and he considered that any writer who could call attention to those problems in a striking way was well worthy of every serious person's consideration. He considered that he was speaking for one and all of those present when he said that Mr Daedalus, by reading his frank and earnest essay that night, had conferred a benefit on the Society.

The general diversion of the night began when these two opening speeches had ended. Stephen was subjected to ^|1a fire the fires^1| of six or seven hostile speakers. One speaker, a young man named Magee, said he was surprised that any paper which was conceived in a spirit so hostile to the spirit of religion itself — he did not know if Mr Daedalus understood the ^|1true^1| purport of the theory he propounded — should find approval in their society. Who but the Church had sustained and fostered the artistic temper? Had not the drama owed its very birth to religion? That was indeed a poor theory which tried to bolster up the dull dramas of sinful intrigues and to decry the immortal masterpieces. Mr Magee said he did not know as
{ms, 657}
much about Ibsen as Mr Daedalus did — nor did he want to know anything about him — but he knew that one of his plays was about the sanitary condition of a bathing-place. If this was drama he did not see why some Dublin Shakespeare should not pen an immortal work dealing with the new Main Drainage Scheme of the Dublin Corporation. This speech was the signal for a general attack. The essay was pronounced a jingle of meaningless words, a clever presentation of vicious principles in the guise of artistic theories, a reproduction of the decadent literary opinions of exhausted European capitals. The essayist was supposed to intend parts of his essay as efforts at practical joking: everyone knew that Macbeth would be famous when the unknown authors of whom Mr Daedalus was so fond were dead and forgotten. Ancient art loved to uphold the beautiful and the sublime: modern art might select other themes but those who still preserved their minds uncontaminated by atheistic poisons would know which to choose. The climax of aggressiveness was reached when Hughes stood up. He declared in ringing Northern accents that the moral welfare of the Irish people
{ms, 658}
was menaced by such theories. They wanted no foreign filth.º Mr Daedalus might read what authors he liked, of course, but the Irish people had their own glorious literature where they could always find fresh ideals to spur them on to new patriotic endeavours. Mr Daedalus was himself a renegade from the Nationalist ranks: he professed cosmopolitism. But a man that was of all countries was of no country — you must first have a nation before you have art. Mr Daedalus might do as he pleased, kneel at the shrine of Art (with a capital A), and rave about obscure authors. In spite of ^|1his any^1| hypocritical use of the name of a great doctor of the Church Ireland would be on her guard against the insidious theory that art can be separated from morality. If they were to have art let it be moral art, art that elevated, above all, national art,

Kindly Irish of the Irish,
Neither Saxon nor Italian.

When the time had come for the Chairman to sum up and to put the motion before the house there was the usual pause. In this pause Father Butt rose and begged leave to say a few words. The benches applauded
{ms, 659}
with excitement and settled themselves to hear a denunciation ex cathedra. Father Butt excused himself amid cries of “No, no” for detaining his audience at such an advanced hour but he thought he should enter a word in favour of the much-abused essayist. He would be advocatus diaboli and he felt the uncomfortableness of his office all the more since one of the speakers had, not unjustly, described the language in which Mr Daedalus' essay had been couched as a language of angels. Mr Daedalus had contributed a very striking paper, a paper which had filled the house and entertained them by the lively discussion which it had provoked. Of course everyone could not be of the same opinion in matters artistic.º Mr Daedalus admitted the conflict between romantics and classicals as the condition of all achievement and they had certainly proof that night that a conflict between antagonistic theories had been able to produce such distinct achievements as the essay itself, a remarkable piece of work, on the one hand and the memorable attack delivered by Mr Hughes, as leader of the opposition, on the other hand. He thought that one or two
{ms, 660}
of the speakers had been unduly severe with the essayist but he was confident that the essayist was well able to take care of himself in the matter of argument. As for the theory itself Father Butt confessed that it was a new sensation for him to hear Thomas Aquinas quoted as an authority on esthetic philosophy. Esthetic philosophy was ^|1a^1| modern branch and, if it was anything at all, it was practical. Aquinas had treated slightly of the beautiful but always from a theoretic standpoint. To interpreted interpret his statements ^|1practically^1| one needed a fuller knowledge than Mr Daedalus could have of his entire theology. At the same time he would not go so far as to say that Mr Daedalus had really, intentionally or unintentionally, misinterpreted Aquinas. But just as an act which may be good in itself may become bad by reason of circumstances so an object intrinsically beautiful may be vitiated by other considerations. Mr Daedalus had chosen to consider to consider beauty intrinsically and to neglect these other considerations. But beauty also has its practical side. Mr Daedalus was a passionate admirer of the artistic and such people are not always the most practical people in the ^|1wide^1| world. Father Butt
{ms, 661}
then reminded his audience of the story of King Alfred and the old woman who was cooking cakes — of the theorist, that is, and of the practical person and concluded by expressing the hope that the essayist would emulate King Alfred and not be too severe on the practical persons who had criticised him.

The chairman in his summing-up speech complimented the essayist on his style but he said the essayist had evidently forgotten that art implies selection. He thought that the discussion on the paper had been very instructive and ^|s1we he^s1| was sure they were all thankful f to Father Butt for his clear, concise criticism. Mr Daedalus had been somewhat severely handled but he thought that, considering the many excellences of his paper, he (the Chairman) was well justified in asking them to agree unanimously that the best thanks of this society ^|1are were^1| due and ^|1are were^1| hereby tendered to Mr Daedalus for his admirable and instructive ^|1paper^1|. The vote of thanks was passed unanimously but without enthusiasm.

Stephen stood up and bowed.
{ms, 662}
It was customary for the essayist of the night to avail himself of this occasion for replying to his critics but Stephen contented himself with acknowledging the vote of thanks. Some called on him for a speech but, when the Chairman had waited in vain for a few moments, the proceedings ran on rapidly to a close. In five minutes the Physics' Theatre was empty. Downstairs in the hall the young men were busy putting on their coats and lighting cigarettes. Stephen looked for his father and Maurice but could see them nowhere so he set out for home alone. At the corner of the Green he came up with a group of four young men, Madden, Cranly, a young medical student named Temple, and a clerk in the Custom-House. Madden caught Stephen's arm and said consolingly in private:

— Well, old man, I told you those fellows wouldn't understand it. I knew it was too good for them —
Stephen was touched by this show of friendship but he shook his head as if he wished to change the subject. Besides, he knew that Madden really understood very little of the paper and
{ms, 663}
disapproved of what he understood. When Stephen came up with the four young men they were strolling very slowly, discussing a projected trip to Wicklow on Easter Monday. Stephen walked beside Madden at the edge of the footpath and thus the group advanced abreast along the wide footpath. Cranly ^|1in the centre^1| was linking Madden and the clerk from the Custom-House. Stephen listened vaguely. Cranly was speaking (as was his custom when he walked with other gentlemen of leisure) in a language the base of which was Latin and the superstructure of which was composed of Irish, French and German:

— Atque ad duas horas in Wicklowio venit —

— Damnum longum tempus prendit, said the Clerk from the Custom-House.

— Quando  .  .  . no, I mean  .  . quo in  .  .  . bateau  .  .  . irons-nous? asked Temple

— Quo in batello? said Cranly,in “Regina Maris” —

So after a little talk the young men agreed to take a trip to Wicklow on the Sea-Queen. Stephen was much relieved to listen to this conversation; in a
{ms, 664}
few minutes the sting of his disaster was no longer felt so acutely. Cranly at last observed Stephen walking at the edge of the path and said:

—Ecce orator qui in malo humore est —

— Non sum, said Stephen —

— Credo ut estis, said Cranly —

— Minime —

— Credo ut vos sanguinarius mendox estis quia facies vestra mostrat ut vos in malo humore estisº —
Madden who could not talk this language well led the group back to English. The clerk from the Custom-House seemed to have it on his conscience to express admiration for Stephen's style. He was a big stout young man with a lardy face and he carried an umbrella.º He was several years ^|1younger older^1| than any of his companions but he had decided to read for his degree in Mental and Moral Science. He was ^|1an a^1| constant companion of Cranly's and it was the latter's eloquence which had induced him to enter the night-classes in the college. Cranly spent
{ms, 665}
a great part of his time persuading young men to adopt different lines of life. The Clerk from the Custom-Houseº was named O'Neill. He was a very amiable person, always laughing asthmatically at Cranly's serious fooling, but he was interested to hear of any occasion whereby he might improve himself mentally. He attended the Debating Society and the meetings of the College Sodality because he was thus brought into ‘touch‘ with University life. He was a circumspect young man but he allowed Cranly to ‘chaff’ him about girls. Stephen tried to dissuade the company from alluding to his essay but O'Neill had accepted the occasion as one to be availed of. He asked Stephen questions such as are to be found in the pages of young ladies' confession-albums and Stephen thought that his mental heaven must greatly resemble a confectioner's shop. Temple was a raw Gipsy-looking youth with a shambling gait and a shambling manner of speaking. He was from the West of Ireland and he was known to be very revolutionary. When O'Neill had spoken for some time to Cranly, who had answered him more politely than Stephen, Temple
{ms, 666}
after a few false starts got in a phrase:

— I think  .  .  . was a bloody fine paper —
Cranly turned a vacant face in the direction of the speaker but ^|1O'Neill Temple^1| continued:

— Made 'em sit up too —

— Habesne bibitum? asked Cranly —

— 'Scuse me, sir, said O'Neill to Temple to Stephen across the intervening bodies, do you believe in Jesus  .  .  . I don't believe in Jesus, he added —
Stephen laughed loudly at the tone of this statement and he continued when Temple began to shamble through a kind of apology:

— 'Course I don't know  .  . if you believe in Jesus  .  . I believe in Man  .  .  . If you b'lieve in Jesus  .  .  . of course  .  . I oughtn't to say anything the first time I met you  .  .  . Do you think that? —

O'Neill preserved a solemn silence until Temple's speech had faded into indistinct mutterings; then he said, as if he were beginning an entirely new subject:

— I was very interested in your paper and in the speeches too  .  .  . What did you think of Hughes? —
Stephen did not answer.

— Bloody cod, said Temple —
{ms, 667}

— I thought his speech was in very bad taste, said O'Neill sympathetically —

— Bellam boccam habet, said Cranly —

— Yes, I think he went too far, said Madden, but, you see, he gets carried away by his enthusiasm —

— Patrioticus est —

— Yes, he is a patriotic 'cus, said O'Neill laughing wheezily. But I thought Father Butt's speech very good, very clear and philosophical —

— Did you think that? cried Temple from the inside of the path, to Stephen  .  .  . 'Scuse me  .  .  . I wanted to know what he thought of Butt's speech, he explained at the same time to the other ^|1four three^1|  .  .  . Did you think  .  .  . he was a bloody cod too? —
Stephen could not help laughing at this novel form of address though Father Butt's speech had put him into anything but a charitable mood.

— It was just the kind of thing he gives us every day, said Madden. You know the style —

— His speech annoyed me, said Stephen curtly —

— Why was that? said Temple eagerly. Why was it he annoyed you? —
Stephen made a grimace instead of
{ms, 668}
answering:

— Bloody cod of a speech, said Temple  .  .  . I'm a rationalist. I don't b'lieve in any religion —

— I think he meant part of his speech kindly, said Cranly slowly after a pause, turning his face full towards Stephen. Stephen answered his gaze and met, ^|1looked looking^1| steadily into a pair of bright dark eyes, and at the moment when their eyes met he felt hope. There was nothing in the phrase to encourage; he doubted its justice very much: yet he knew that hope had touched him. He walked on beside the four young men, pondering. Cranly stopped before the window of a little huckster's shop in one of the mean streets through which they passed, staring fixedly at an old yellow copy of the Daily Graphic which was hanging sideways on the glass. The illustration was a winter scene. No-one said anything and as silence seemed about to set in permanently Madden asked him what he was looking at. Cranly looked at his questioner and then looked back again at the dirty picture, towards which he nodded his head heavily:

— What is  .  .  . what is? asked Temple,
{ms, 669}
who had been looking at some cold crubeens in the next window —
Cranly turned his vacant face again towards his questioner and pointed to the picture, saying:

— Feuc an eis super stradam  . . in Liverpoolio —

Stephen's family circle was ^|1now^1| increased by Isabel's return from her convent. For some time she had been in delicate health and the nuns had recommended that she should have home care. She came home a few days after the famous day of Stephen's paper. Stephen was standing at the little front window that looked towards the mouth of the river when he saw his parents walking from the tram with a thin pale girl walking between them. Stephen's father did not like the prospect of another inhabitant in his house, particularly a daughter for whom he had little affection. He was annoyed that his daughter would not avail herself of the opportunity afforded her in the convent but his sense of public duty was real if spasmodic and he would by no means permit his wife to bring the girl home without his aid. The reflection that his
{ms, 670}
daughter, instead of being a help to him would be a hindrance, and the suspicion that the burden of responsibility which he had piously imposed on his eldest son's shoulders was beginning to irk that young man troubled his vision of the future. He had a taste for contrasts, perhaps, which led him to expect industry and sobriety in his offspring ^|1and but^1| it cannot be said that he desired any material re-exaltation. It was just this impalpable excellence which he wished his son to assert again in the teeth of circumstances which gained him a conditional pardon at Stephen's hands. But this slight thread of union between father and son had been worn away by the usages of daily life and, by reason of its tenuity and of the failure gradual rustiness which had begun to consume the upper station, it bore fewer and feebler messages along it.

Stephen's father was quite capable of talking himself into believing what he knew to be untrue. He knew that his own ruin had been his own handiwork but he had talked himself into believing that it was the handiwork of others. He had his son's distaste for responsibility without his son's courage. He was one of
{ms, 671}
those illogical wiseacres with whom no evidence can outreason the first impression. His wife had fulfilled her duties to him with startling literalness and yet she had never been able to expiate the offence of her blood. Misunderstanding such as this, ^|1which^1| is accepted as natural in higher social grades, is ^|1wrongly^1| refused recognition in the burgher class where it is often found ^|1to^1| issue in feuds of insatiable, narrow hatred. Mr Daedalus hated his wife's maiden name with a medieval intensity: it stunk in his nostrils. His alliance therewith was the only sin of which, in the entire honesty of his cowardice, he could accuse himself. Now that he was making for the final decades of life with the painful consciousness of having diminished comfortable goods and of having accumulated uncomfortable habits he consoled and revenged himself by tirades so prolonged and so often repeated that he was in danger of becoming a monomaniac. The hearth at night was the sacred witness of these revenges, pondered, muttered, growled and execrated. The exception which his clemency had originally made in favour
{ms, 672}
of his wife was soon out of mind and she began to irritate him by her dutiful symbolism. The great disappointment of his life was accentuated by a lesser and keener loss — the loss of a coveted fame. On account of a certain income and of certain sociable gifts Mr Daedalus had been accustomed to regard himself as the centre of a little world, the darling of a little society. This position he still strove to maintain but at the cost of ^|1a^1| reckless liberality from which his household had to suffer both in deed and in spirit. He imagined that while he strove to retain this ^|1infatuating^1| position his home affairs would, through the agency of a son whom he made no effort to understand, in some divine manner right themselves. This hope when indulged in would sometimes embitter his affection for a son whom he ^|1thereby^1| acknowledged as superior but, now that he was led to suspect that his hope was fatuous, an embitterment of that affection seemed likely to fix itself permanently among his emotional landmarks. His son's notion of aristocracy was not the one which he could sympathise with and his son's silence during the
{ms, 673}
domestic battles no longer seemed to him a conveyed compliment. He was, in fact, sufficiently acute to observe here a covert menace against castellar rights and he would not have been wrong if he had imagined ^|1that^1| his son regarded these assistance at these tortuous and obscene monologues as the tribute exacted by a father for affording a wayward child a base of supplies.

Stephen did not consider his parents very seriously. In his opinion they had opened up misleading and unnatural relations between themselves and him and he considered their affection for him requited by a studious demeanour towards ^|1them^1| and by a genuine goodwill to perform ^|1for them^1| a great number of such material services as, in his present state of fierce idealism, he could look upon as trifles. The only material services he would refuse them were those which he judged to be spiritually dangerous and it is as well to admit that this exception all but nullified his charity for he had cultivated an independence of the soul which could brook very few subjections. Divine exemplars abetted him in this. The phrase which preachers elaborate into a commandment of obedience seemed to him meagre,
{ms, 674}
ironical and inconclusive and the narrative of the life of Jesus did not in any way impress him with as the narrative of the life of one who was subject to others. When he had been a Roman Catholic in the proper sense of the term the figure of Jesus had always seemed to him too remote and too passionlessº and he had never uttered from his heart a single fervent prayer to the Redeemer: ^|1it was^1| to Mary, as to a weaker and more engaging vesselº of salvation, ^|1that^1| he had entrusted his spiritual affairs. Now his enfranchisement from the discipline of the Church seemed to be coincident with ^|1a natural an^1| instinctive return to the Founder thereof and this impulse would have led him perhaps to a considerations of the merits of Protestantism had not another natural impulse inclined him to bring even the self-contradictory and the absurd into order. He did not know, besides, whether the haughtiness of the Papacy was not as derivable from Jesusº himself as the reluctance to be pressed beyond “Amen: I say to you” for an account of anything but he was quite sure that behind the enigmatic utterances of Jesus ^|1there was^1| a very much more
{ms, 675}
definite conception than any which could be supposed to discoverable behind Protestant theology:

— Put this in your diary, he said to transcriptive Maurice. Protestant Orthodoxy is like Lanty McHale's dog: it goes a bit of the road with everyone —

— It seems to me that S. Paul trained that dog, said Maurice —

One day when Stephen had gone to the College by accident he found McCann standing in the hall holding a long testimonial. Another part of the testimonial was on the hall-table and nearly all the young men in the College were signing their names to it. McCann was speaking volubly to a little group and Stephen discovered that the testimonial was the tribute of Dublin University students to the tsar of Russia. World-wide peace: solution of all disputes by arbitration: general disarming of the nations: these were the benefits for which the students were returning their thanks. On the hall table there were two photographs, one of the Tsar of Russia, the other of the Editor of the Review of Reviews: both of the photographs were signed by the famous couple. As McCann was standing sideways to the light Stephen amused himself in tracing a resemblance between him and the pacific Emperor whose photograph had been taken in profile. The tsar's air of besotted Christ moved him to scorn
{ms, 676}
and he turned for support to Cranly who was standing beside the door. Cranly wore a very dirty yellow straw hat of the shape of an inverted bucket in the shelter of which his face was composed to a glaucous calm.

— Doesn't he look a wirrasthrue Jaysus? said Stephen pointing to the tsar's photograph and using the Dublin version of the name as an effective common noun —
Cranly looked in the direction of McCann and replied, nodding his head:

— Wirrasthrue Jaysus and hairy Jaysus —
At that moment McCann caught sight of Stephen and signalled that he would be with him in a moment:

— Have you signed,? asked Cranly —

— This thing,? no — have you? —
Cranly hesitated and then brought out a well deliberated ‘Yes’ —

— What for? —

— What for? —

— Ay —

— For  .  .  . Pax —
Stephen looked up under the bucket-shaped hat but could read no expression on his neighbour's face. His eyes wandered up to the dinged vertex of the hat.

— In the name of God what do you wear that hat for? It's not so terribly hot, is it? he asked —
Cranly took off the hat slowly and gazed into its depths. After a little pause he pointed into it and said:

— Viginti-uno denarios —
{ms, 677}

— Where? said Stephen —

— I bought it, said Cranly very impressively ^|1and very flatly^1|, last summer in Wickla —
He looked back into the hat and said, smiling with a sour affectionº

— It's not  .  .  . too bloody bad  .  .  . of a hat  .  .  . d'ye know —
And he replaced it on his head slowly, murmuring to himself from force of habit ‘Viginti-uno denarios’.

— Sicut bucketus est, said Stephen —
The subject was not discussed further. Cranly produced a little grey ball from one of his pockets and began to examine it carefully, indenting the surface at many points. Stephen was watching this operation when he heard McCann addressing him

— I want you to sign this testimonial —

— What about? —

— It's a testimonial of admiration for the courage displayed by the Tsar of Russia in issuing a rescript to the Powers, advocating arbitration instead of war as a means of settling national disputes —
Stephen shook his head. Temple who had been wandering round the hall in search of sympathy came over at this moment and said to Stephen:

— Do you believe in peace? —
No-one answered him.

— So you won't sign? said McCann —
{ms, 678}

Stephen shook his head again:

— Why not? said McCann sharply —

— If we must have a Jesus, answered Stephen, let us have a legitimate Jesus —

— By hell! said Temple laughing, that's good. Did you hear that? he said to Cranly and McCann both of whom he seemed to regard as very hard of hearing. D'you hear that? Legitima' Jesus! —

— I presume then you approve of war and slaughter, said McCann —

— I did not make the world, said Stephen —

— By hell! said Temple to Cranly. I believe in universal brotherhood. 'Scuse me, he said, turning to McCann, do you believe in universal brotherhood? —
McCann took no heed of the question but continued addressing Stephen. He began an argument in favour of peace which Temple listened to for a few moments, but, as he spoke with his back to Temple, that revolutionary young man ^|1who^1| could not hear him very well began to wander round the hall again. Stephen did not argue with McCann but at a convenient pause he said:

— I have no intention of signing —
McCann halted and Cranly said, taking Stephen's arm:
Nos ad manum ballum jocabimus —
{ms, 679}

— All right, said McCann promptly, as if he was accustomed to rebuffs, if you won't, you won't —
He went off to get more signatures for the Tsar while Cranly and Stephen went out into the garden. The ball-alley was deserted so they arranged a match of twenty, Cranly allowing Stephen seven points. Stephen had not had much practice at the game and so he was only seventeen when Cranly cried out ‘Game Ball’. He lost the second game also. Cranly was a strong, accurate player but Stephen thought too heavy of foot to be a brilliant one. While they were playing Madden came into the alley and sat down on an old box. He was much more excited than either of the players and kept kicking the box with his heels and crying out “Now, Cranly! Now, Cranly!” “But it, Stevie!” Cranly who had to serve the third game put the ^|1wall ball^1| over the side of the alley into Lord Iveagh's grounds and the game had to wait while he went in search of it. Stephen sat down on his heels beside Madden and they both looked up at the figure of Cranly who was holding on to the netting and making signals to one of the gardeners from the top of the wall. Madden took out smoking materials:
{ms, 680}

— Are you and Cranly long here? —

— Not long, said Stephen —
Madden began to stuff very coarse tobacco into his pipe:

— D'ye know what, Stevie? —

— What? —

— Hughes  .  .  . doesn't like you  .  .  . at all. I heard him speaking of you to someone —

— ‘Someone’ is vague —

— He doesn't like you at all —

— His enthusiasm carries him away, said Stephen —

On the ^|1evening of the^1| Saturday before Palm Sunday Stephen found himself alone with Cranly. The two were leaning over the marble staircase of the Library, idly watching the people coming in and going out. The big windows in front of them were thrown and the mild air ^|1entered through them came through^1|:

— Do you like the services of Holy Week? said Stephen —

— Yes, said Cranly —

— They are wonderful, said Stephen. Tenebrae — it's so damned childish to frighten us by knocking prayerbooks on a bench. Isn't it strange to see the Mass of the Presanctified — no lights or vestments, the altar naked, the door of the tabernacle gaping open, the priests lying prostrate on the altar steps? —

— Yes, said Cranly —

— Don't you think the Reader who begins
{ms, 681}
the mass is a strange person. No-one knows where he comes from: he has no connection with the mass. He comes out by himself and opens a book at the right hand side of the altar and when he has read the lesson he closes the book and goes away as he came. Isn't he strange? —

— Yes, said Cranly —

— You know how his lesson begins? ^|1Dixit enim Haec dicit^1| Dominus: in tribulatione sua consurgent ad me; venite et revertamur ad Dominum —
He chanted the opening of the lesson in mezza voce and his voice went flowing down the staircase and round the circular hall, each tone coming back upon the ear enriched and softened.

— He pleads, said Stephen. He is what that chalk-faced chap was for me, advocatus diaboli. Jesus has no friend on Good Friday. Do you know what kind of a figure rises before me on Good Friday? —

— What kind? —
^|1the idea of the scapegoat in the Old Testament and of the Lamb of God in New (Christ's own words)^1|

— An ugly little man who has taken into his body the sins of the world. Something between Socrates and a Gnostic Christ — A Christ of the Dark Ages. That's what his mission of redemption has got for him: a crooked ugly body for which neither God nor man have pity. Jesus is on strange
{ms, 682}
terms with that father of his. His father seems to me something of a snob. Do you notice that he never notices his son publicly but once — when Jesus is in full dress on the top of Thabor? —

— I don't like Holy Thursday much, said Cranly —

— Neither do I. There are too many mammas and daughters going chapel-hunting. The chapel smells too much of flowers and ^|1hot^1| candles and women. Besides girls praying put me off my stroke —

— Do you like Holy Saturday? —

— The service is always too early but I like it —

— I like it —

— Yes, the Church seems to have thought the matter ^|1over^1| and to be saying “Well, after all, you see, it's morning now and he wasn't so dead we thought he was.” ^|1The corpse has become a paschal candle with five grains of incense stuck in it instead of its five wounds. The three faithful Mary's too who thought all was over on Friday have a candle each. The bells ring and the service is full of irrelevant alleluias.^1| It's rather a technical affair, blessing this, that and the other but it's cheerfully ceremonious —

— But you don't y imagine the damned fools of people see anything in these services, do you? —

— Do they not? said Stephen —

— Bah, said Cranly —
One of Cranly's friends came up the stairs while they were talking. He was a young man who was by day a clerk in Guinness's Brewery and by night a student of
{ms, 683}
mental and moral philosophy in the night classes of the College. It was, of course, Cranly who had induced him to attend. This young man, who was named Glynn, was unable to keep his head steady as he suffered from inherited nervousness and his hands trembled very much whenever he tried to do anything with them. He spoke with nervous hesitations and seemed to obtain satisfaction only in the methodic stamp of his feet. He was a low-sized young man, with a nigger's face and the curly black head of a nigger. He usually carried an umbrella and his conversation was for the most part a translation of commonplaces into polysyllabic phrases. This habit he cultivated partly because it saved him from the inconvenience of cerebrating at the normal rate and perhaps because he considered it was the channel best fitted for his peculiar humour.

— Here is Professor Bloody-Big-Umbrella Glynn, said Cranly —

— Good evening, gentlemen, said Glynn, bowing —

— Good  .  .  . evening, said Cranly vacantly. Well, yes  .  .  . it is a good evening —

— I can see, said Glynn shaking a trembling forefinger in reproof, I can see that you are about to make obvious remarks —
{ms, 684}

On Spy Wednesday night Cranly and Stephen attended the office of Tenebrae in the Pro-Cathedral. They went round to the back of the altar and knelt behind the students from Clonliffe who were chanting the office. Stephen was right opposite Wells and he observed the great change which a surplice made in that young man's appearance. Stephen did not like the office which was gabbled over quickly. He said to Cranly that the chapel with its polished benches and incandescent lamps reminded him of an insurance office. Cranly arranged that on Good Friday they should attend the office in the Carmelite Church, Whitefriar's St where, he said, the office was much more homely. Cranly accompanied Stephen part of the way home and explained very minutely, using his large hands for the purpose, all the merits of Wicklow bacon.

— You are no Israelite, said Stephen, I see you eat the unclean animal —
Cranly replied that it was nonsense to consider the pig unclean because he ate dirty garbage and at the same time to consider the oyster, which fed chiefly on excrements, a delicacy. He believed that the pig was much maligned: he said there was a lot of money to be made out of pigs. He instanced all the Germans who made small fortunes in Dublin
{ms, 685}
by opening pork-shops.

— I often thought seriously, he said stopping in his walk to give emphasis to his remark, of opening a pork-shop, d'ye know  .  .  . a gentleman butcher and putting Kranliberg or some German name, d'ye know, over the door  .  .  . and makin' a flamin' fortune out of pig's meat —

— God bless us! said Stephen, What a terrible idea! —

— Ay, said Cranly walking on heavily, a flamin' bloody fortune I'd make —

On Good Friday as Stephen was wandering aimlessly about the city he caught sight of a placard on a wall which announced that the Three Hours' Agony would be preached by the Very Reverend W. Dillon S.J and the Very Reverend J. Campbell S.J in the Jesuit Church, Gardiner St. Stephen felt very solitary and purposeless as he traversed empty street after empty street and, without being keenly aware of it, he began to proceed in the direction of Gardiner St. It was a warm sunless day and the city wore an air of sacred torpor. As he passed under S. George's Church he saw that it was already half past two; — he had been three hours wandering up and down the city. He entered the Church in Gardiner St and, passing by ^|1without honouring^1| the table of the lay-brother who roused himself from a stupefied doze in expectation of silver, arrived in
{ms, 686}
the right wing of the chapel. The chapel was crowded from altar to doors with a well-dressed multitude. Everywhere he saw the same flattered affection for the Jesuits who are in the habit of attaching to their order the souls of thousands of the insecurely respectable middle-class by offering them a refined asylum, an interested, a considerate confessional, a particular amiableness of manners which their spiritual adventures in no way entitled them to. Not very far from him in the shelter of one of the pillars Stephen saw his father and two friends. His father had directed his eyeglass upon the distant choir and his face wore an expression of impressed piety. The choir was executing some florid tracery which was intended as an expression of mourning. The walk, the heat, the crush, the darkness of the chapel overcame Stephen and, leaning against the lintel of the door, he half closed his eyes and allowed his thoughts to drift. Rhymes began to make themselves in his head.

He perceived dimly that a white figure had ascended the pulpit and he heard a voice saying Consummatum est. He recognised the voice and he knew that Father Dillon was preaching on the Seventh Word. He took no trouble to hear the sermon but every few
{ms, 687}
minutes he heard a new translation of the Word rolling over the congregation. “It is ended” “It is accomplished” This sensation awoke him from his day-dream and as the translations followed each one another more and more rapidly he found his gambling instinct on the alert. He wagered with himself as to what word the preacher would select. “It is  .  .  . accomplished” “It is  .  .  . consummated” “It is  .  .  . achieved”. In the few seconds which intervened between the first part and the second part of the phrase Stephen's mind performed feats of divining agility “It is  .  .  . finished” “It is  .  .  . completed” “It is  .  .  . concluded”. At last with a final burst of rhetoric Father Dillon cried out that it was over and the congregation began to pour itself out into the streets. Stephen was borne along in the crowd and everywhere about him he heard the same murmurs of admiration, and saw the same expressions of satisfaction, discreet murmurs, subdued expressions. The special charges of the Jesuits were congratulating themselves and one another on a well-spent Good Friday.

To avoid his father Stephen slipped round towards the body of the chapel and waited in the central porch while the common people
{ms, 688}
came shuffling and stumbling past him. Here also there was admiration, satisfaction. A young workman passed out with his wife and Stephen heard the words “He knows his thayology, I tell ye”. Two women stopped beside the holy water font and after scraping their hands vainly overº the bottom crossed themselves in a slovenly fashion with their dry hands. One of them sighed and drew her brown shawl about her:
^|1|x“If I told them there is no water in the font to symbolise that when Christ has washed us in blood we have no need of other aspersions.^x|1|

— An' his language, said the other woman —

— Aw yis —
Here the other woman sighed in her turn and drew her shawl about her:

— On'y, said she, God bless the gintleman, he uses the words that you nor me can't intarpit —
{ms, 689}

XX

Between Easter and the end of May Stephen's acquaintance with Cranly progressed night by night. As the time of the Summer Examinations was approaching Maurice and Stephen were both supposed to be hard at work. Maurice retired to his room carefully every evening after tea-time and Stephen repaired to the ^|1library Library^1| where he was supposed to be engaged in serious work. As a matter of fact he read little or nothing in the Library. He talked with Cranly by the hour either at a table, or, if removed by the librarian or by the indignant glances of students, standing at the top of the staircase. At ten o'clock when the library closed the two returned together through the central streets exchanging banalities with the other students.

It would seem at first somewhat strange and improbable that these two young men should have anything in common beyond an incurable desire for leisure. Stephen had begun to regard himself seriously as a literary artist: he professed scorn for the rabblement and contempt for authority. Cranly's chosen companions represented the rabblement in a stage
{ms, 690}
of partial fermentation when it is midway between vat and flagon and Cranly seemed to please himself in the spectacle of this caricature of his own unreadiness. Anyhow towards rabblement and authority alike he behaved with submissive deference and Stephen would have been disposed to regard this too mature demeanour as a real sign of interior corruption had he not daily evidence that Cranly was willing to endanger his own fair name as a member of the Sodality and as a general lay-servant of the Church by association with one who was known to be contaminated. Cranly, however, might have wished the fathers to suppose that he went with ^|1this the^1| rebellious young artist with the secret purpose of leading him back again to good ways and, as if from a secret appreciation of his own fitness for such a task, he always enlarged and interpreted the doctrines of the Church side by side with Stephen's theories. Thus confronted, it was a trick of the pleader for orthodoxy to suggest a possible reconciliation between neighbours and to suggest ^|1even^1| further that the Church would not be over-hasty in condemning vagaries of architecture or ^|1even^1| the use of pagan emblems and flourishes so long as her ground rent was paid quarterly in advance.
{ms, 691}
These accommodating business terms, which would have seemed of suspicious piety to more simple souls, were not likely to startle two young men who were fond of tracing even moral phenomena back to the region of their primal cells. The moral doctrine of Catholicism with so cunningly lined and interwoven with a studious alloy of conscience was capable under the management of a nimble spirit of performing feats of extension and contraction. After a thousand such changes of form this elastic body was suddenly detected in a change of position and a point hitherto external was now seen to be well enclosed within it: and all this imperceptibly, while the eye was lulled by the mere exhibition of so many variations ^|1executed^1| with a certain amoeboid instinct.º

As for artistic sympathies Cranly could hardly be said to offer these. He had all the rustic's affection for the prosaic things of the six days of the week and, in addition to this, he lacked the hypocritical taste which the rustic affects for the fine arts on the seventh day. In the Library he read nothing but the weekly illustrated papers. Sometimes he took a big book from the counter and carried it solemnly
{ms, 692}
to his place where he opened it and studied the title-page and preface for an hour or so. Of fine literature he had, almost literally speaking, no knowledge. His acquaintance with English prose seemed to be limited to a hazy acquaintance with the beginning of Nicholas Nickleby and of English verse he had certainly read Wordsworth's poem which is called “Advice to a Father.” Both of these accomplishments he divulged to Stephen one day when he had been discovered reading with great attention the title-page of a book which was called Diseases of the Ox. He offered no comment on what he had read and simply stated the achievement not without wonder at his having achieved it. He had a straggling regiment of words at his command and he was thus enabled to express himself: but he spoke flatly and frequently made childish errors. He had a defiant manner of using technical and foreign terms as if he wished to suggest that for him they were mere conventions of language.º His receptiveness was not troubled by any nausea; he received everything that came in his way and it was purely instinctive of Stephen to perceive any special affinity in so indiscriminate a vessel. He was fond of leading a philosophical argument back to the machinery
{ms, 693}
of the intellectual faculty itself and in mundane matters he did likewise, testing everything by its food value.

It was in favour of this young man that Stephen decided to break his commandment of reticence. Cranly, on his side, must have been above all the accidents ^|1of life^1| if he had not suffered a slight commotion from such delicately insistent flattery. Stephen spoke to his impoverished ear out of the plenitude of an amassed vocabulary, and confronted the daring commonplaces of his companion's moods b with a complex radiance of thought. Cranly seldom or never obtruded his presence upon these monologues. He listened to all, seemed to understand all, and seemed to think it was the duty of his suppositious character to listen to and understand. He never refused his ear. Stephen claimed it in and out of season as he felt the need for intelligent sympathy. They promenaded miles of the streets together, arm-in-arm. They halted in wet weather under spacious porches, desisting at the sight of some inviting triviality. They sat sometimes in the pit of a music-hall and one unfolded to the other the tapestry
{ms, 694}
of his poetical aims while the band bawled to the comedian and the comedian bawled to the band. Cranly grew used to having sensations and impressions recorded and analysed before him at the very instant of their apparition. Such concentration upon oneself was unknown to ^|1Cranly him^1| and he wondered at first with the joy of solitary possession at Stephen's ingenuous arrogance. This phenomenon, which called all his previous judgments to accounts and opened out a new system of life at the last limit of ^|1Cranly's his^1| world, rankled somewhat in ^|1Cranly's his^1| mind. It irritated him also because he knew too well the large percentage of Christian sentiment which concealed itself under ^|1a his^1| veneer of Stoicism to suspect himself of any talent for a similar extravagance. And yet, hearing the whole-hearted young egoist pour ^|1out^1| his pride and anger at his feet like some costly ointment, and benefiting by a liberality which seemed to keep nothing in reserve, much as he would have liked to hold himself aloof from such ties he felt himself gradually answering the appeal by a silent, perverse affection. He affected more brutality than was in his nature
{ms, 695}
and, as if infected by his companion's arrogance, seemed to expect that the practice of aggressive criticism would be suspended in his case.

A licence which he allowed himself rather freely was that of impolite abstraction, so deep as to suggest great mental activity but issuing at last in some blunt actuality. If a ^|1conversation monologue^1| which had set out from a triviality seemed to him likely to run on unduly he would receive it with a silence through which aversion was just discernible and at a lull bring his hammer down brutally on the poor original object. At times Stephen found this ultra-classical habit very unpalatable. One evening the monologue was interrupted time after time. Stephen had mentioned his sister's illness and had spread out a few leagues of theory on the subject of the tyranny of home. Cranly never actually broke in upon the oration but he continued inserting question after question whenever he had an opening. He asked Isabel's age, her symptoms, her doctor's name, her treatment, her diet, her appearance, how her mother nursed her, whether they had sent for a priest or not, whether
{ms, 696}
she had ever been sick before or not. Stephen answered all these questions and still Cranly was not satisfied. He continued his questions until the monologue had in all decency to be abandoned: and Stephen, thinking over his manner, was unable to decide whether such conduct was to be considered the sign of a deep interest in a human illness or the sign of irritated dissatisfaction with an inhuman theorist.

Stephen did not in the least shrink from applying the reproach to himself but he found himself honestly unable to admit its justice. His sister had become almost a stranger to him on account of the way in which she had been brought up. He had hardly spoken a hundred words to her since the time when they had been children together. He could not speak to her now except as to a stranger. She had acquiesced in the religion of her mother; she had accepted everything that had been proposed to her. If she lived she had exactly the temper for a Catholic wife of limited intelligence and of pious docility and if she died she was supposed to have earned for herself a place in the eternal heaven of Christians from which her two brothers were
{ms, 697}
likely to be shut out. Calamities in this world are reported to sit lightly on the shoulders of the true Christian who can bide his time until the Creator institutes the kingdom of the good. Isabel's case moved Stephen's anger and commiseration but he saw at once how hopeless it was and how vain it would be for him to interfere. Her life had been and would always be a trembling walk before God. The slightest interchange of ideas between them must be either a condescension on his part or an attempt to corrupt. No consciousness of their nearness in blood troubled him with natural, unreasoning affection. She was called his sister as his mother was called his mother but there had never been any proof of that relation offered him in their emotional attitude towards him, or any recognition of it permitted in his emotional attitude towards them. The Catholic husband and wife, the Catholic father and mother, are allowed to be natural at discretion but the same grace is not vouchsafed to Catholic children. They must preserve an unquestioning
{ms, 698}
orderliness even at the risk of being upbraided as unnatural by the very preachers who assert that nature is the possession of Satan.º Stephen had felt impulses of pity for his mother, for his father, for Isabel, for Wells also but he believed that he had done right in resisting them: he had first of all to save himself and he had no business trying to save others unless his experiment with himself justified him. Cranly had all but formulated serious charges against him, calling up by implication the picture of Isabel with her gradually wasting flame, her long dark hair and great wondering eyes, but Stephen stood up to the charges and answered in his heart that it was injustice to point a finger of reproach at him and that ^|1a^1| vague inactive pity from those who upheld a system of mutual servile association towards those who accepted it was only a play upon emotions as characteristic of the egoist as of the man of sentiment. Isabel, moreover, did not seem to Stephen to be in any great danger. He told Cranly she was probably growing too fast; many girls
{ms, 699}
were delicate at that age. He confessed that the subject tired him a little. Cranly stood still and looked at him fixedly:

— My dear man, said he, d'ye know what it is  .  .  .  . You're an extraordinary  .  .  .  . man —

A week before the examination Cranly explained to Stephen his plan for reading the course in five days.º It was a carefully made plan, founded upon an intimate knowledge of examiners and examination papers. Cranly's plan was to study from ten in the morning until half past two in the afternoon, then from four to six, and then from half past seven to ten. Stephen declined to follow this plan as he imagined he had a fair chance of passing on what he called ‘roundabout’ knowledge but Cranly said that the plan was perfectly safe.

— I don't quite see that, said Stephen, how can you manage to pass — in Latin composition, say — after such a cursory run over it? If you like I'll show you some things — not that I can write so marvellously —  .  .  . —
Cranly meditated without seeming to observe the offer. Then he averred flatly that his plan would work:
{ms, 700}

— I'll take my dyin' bible, he said. I'll write them as good a thing, d'ye know, ay — as good a thing as they want. What do they know about Latin prose? —

— Not much, I suppose, said Stephen, but they may not be quite ignorant of Latin grammar —
Cranly thought this over and then found his remedy:

— D'ye know what, he said, whenever I can't think of the grammar I'll bring in a piece out of Tacitus —

— Apropos of what? —

— What the flamin' hell does it matter what it's apropos of? —

— Quite right, said Stephen —

Cranly's plan neither succeeded nor failed for the very good reason that it was never followed. The nights before the examination were spent sitting outside under the porch of the Library. The two young men gazed up into the tranquil sky and discussed how it was possible to live with the least amount of labour. Cranly suggested bees: he seemed to know the entire economy of bee-life and he did not seem as intolerant towards bees as towards men. Stephen said it would be a good arrangement
{ms, 701}
if Cranly were to live on the labour of the bees and allow him (Stephen) to live on the united labours of the bees and of their keeper.

— “I will watch from dawn to gloom
The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy bloom”

— “Illume”? said Cranly —

— You know the meaning of “illume”? —

— Who wrote that? —

— Shelley —

— Illume — it's just the word, d'ye know, for autumn, deep gold colour —

— A spiritual interpretation of landscape is very rare. Some people think they write spiritually if they make their scenery dim and cloudy —

— That bit you said now doesn't seem to me spiritual —

— Nor to me: but sometimes Shelley does not address the eye. He says “many a lake-surrounded flute”. Does that strike your eye or your sense of colour? —

— Shelley has a face that reminds me of a bird. What is it? “The lake-surrounded sun illume”?  . . . —

— “The lake-reflected sun illume
The yellow bees in the ivy bloom” —

— What are you quoting? asked Glynn who had just come out of the Library after several hours of study.
{ms, 702}

Cranly surveyed him before answering:

— Shelley —

— O, Shelley? What was the quotation again? —
Cranly nodded towards Stephen.

— What was the quotation? asked Glynn. Shelley is an old flame of mine —
Stephen repeated the lines and Glynn nodded his head nervously several times in approval

— Beautiful poetry Shelley wrote, didn't he? So mystical —

— D'ye know what they call them yellow bees in Wickla? asked Cranly suddenly, turning to Glynn —

— No? what? —

— Red-arsed bees —
Cranly laughed loudly at his own remark and struck his heels on the granite steps. Glynn, conscious of a false position, began to fumble with his umbrella and to search for one of his stock witticisms.

— But that is only, he said, if you will pardon the expression, that is only so to speak —

— “The lake-surrounded sun illume
The red-arsed bees in the ivy bloom”

— it's every bit as good bloody poetry as Shelley's, said Cranly to Glynn. What do you think? —

— It seems to me undeniable, said Glynn driving his unsteady umbrella before him as an emphasis, that the bees
{ms, 703}
are in the bloom. Of that we may say that it is distinctly so —

The examination lasted five days. After the first two days Cranly did not even go through the form of entering the examination hall but after each paper he was to be seen outside the University going over all the questions carefully with his more diligent friends. He said that the papers were very easy and that anyone could pass them on a fair knowledge. He did not ask Stephen any particular questions but said merely “I suppose you're through”. “I expect so” said Stephen. McCann usually came to meet the students who had been under examination. He came partly because he considered it was part of his duty to show an interest in all that concerned the College, and partly because one of Mr Daniel's daughters was under examination. Stephen who did not care very much whether he succeeded or failed in the examination was very much amused observing the jealousies and nervous anxieties which tried to conceal themselves under airs of carelessness. Students who had studied hard all the year pretended to be in the same case as idlers and idle and diligent both appeared to submit to the
{ms, 704}
examination with great unwillingness. Those who were rivals did not speak to each other, being afraid to trust their eyes, but one questioned wandering acquaintances privily about the other's success. ^|1The Their^1| excitement was so genuine that even the excitement of sex failed to overcome it. The girl students were not the subject of the usual sniggers and jokes but were regarded with some aversion as sly enemies. Some of the young men eased their enmity and vindicated their superiority at the same time by saying that it was no wonder the women would do well seeing that they could study ten hours all a day all the year round. McCann, who acted as go-between, told them the gossip from the other camp and it was he who had spread the report that Landy would not get first class honours in English because Miss Reeves had written an essay of twenty pages on The Use and Abuse of Ridicule.

The examination ended on Tuesday. On Wednesday morning Stephen's mother seemed to be rather anxious. Stephen had not given his parents much satisfaction as to his conduct at the examination but he could not think that this was the cause of his mother's trouble: he waited, however,
{ms, 705}
for the trouble to declare itself. His mother waited till the room was clear and then she said casually:

— You have not made your Easter duty yet, have you, Stephen? —
Stephen answered that he had not.

— It would be better for you to go to confession in the day-time. Tomorrow is Ascension Thursday and the chapels are sure to be crowded tonight by people who have left off making their Easter duty till the last moment. It's a wonder people wouldn't have more shame in them. Goodness knows they have time enough from Ash Wednesday without waiting till the stroke of twelve to go to the priest  .  .  . I'm not speaking of you, Stephen. I know you have been studying for your examination. But people who have nothing to do  .  .  .  . —
Stephen made no answer to this but went on scraping diligently in his eggshell.

— I have made my Easter duty already — on Holy Thursday — but I'm going to the altar in the morning. I am making a novena and I want you to offer up your communion for a special intention of mine —

— What special intention? —

— Well, dear. I'm very much concerned about Isabel  .  .  . I don't know what to think  .  .  . . —
Stephen stuck his spoon angrilyº through
{ms, 706}
the bottom of the shell and asked was there any more tea.

— There's no more in the pot but I can boil some water in a minute —

— O, never mind —

— It won't be a jiffy —

Stephen allowed the water to be put on as it would ^|1allow give^1| him time to put an end to the conversation. He was much annoyed that this his mother should try to wheedle him into conformity by using his sister's health as an argument. He felt that such an attempt dishonoured him and freed him from the last dissuasions of considerate piety. His mother put on the water and appeared to be less anxious as if she had expected a blunt refusal. She even ventured on the small talk of religious matrons.

— I must try and get in to town tomorrow in time for High Mass in Marlborough St. Tomorrow is a great feast-day in the Church —

— Why? asked Stephen smiling —

— The Ascension of Our Lord, answered his mother gravely —

— And why is that a great feast-day? —

— Because it was on that day that he showed Himself Divine: he ascended into Heaven —

Stephen began to plaster butter over a
{ms, 700}
crusty heel of the loaf while his features settled into definite hostility:

— Where did he go off? —

— From Mount Olivet, answered his mother reddening under her eyes —

— Head first? —

— What do you mean, Stephen? —

— I mean he must have been rather giddy by the time he arrived. Why didn't he go by balloon? —

— Stephen, are you trying to scoff at Our Lord? I really thought you had more intelligence than to use that kind of language: it's only what people who believe only in what they can see under their noses say. I'm surprised —

— Tell me, mother, said Stephen between mouthfuls, do you mean to tell me you believe that our friend went up off the mountain as they say he did? —

— I do —

— I don't —

— What are you saying, Stephen? —

— It's absurd: it's Barnum. He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this? —

— Stephen! —

— I don't believe it: and it would be no
{ms, 708}
credit if I did. It's no credit to me that I don't. It's drivel —

— The most learned doctors of the Church believe it and that's good enough for me —

— He can fast for forty days —

— God can do all things —

— There's a fellow in Capel St at present in a show who says he can eat glass and hard nails. He calls himself The Human Ostrich —

— Stephen, said his mother, I'm afraid you have lost your faith —

— I'm afraid so too, said Stephen —

Mrs Daedalus looked very discomposed and sat down helplessly on the nearest chair. Stephen fixed his attention on the water and when it was ready made himself another cup of tea.

— I little thought, said his mother, that it would come to this — that a child of mine would lose the faith —

— But you knew some time ago —

— How could I know? —

— You knew —

— I suspected something was wrong but I never thought  .  .  .  . —

— And yet you wanted me to receive Holy Communion! —

— Of course you cannot receive it now. But I thought you would make your Easter
{ms, 709}
duty as you have done every year up till now. I do not know what led you astray unless it was those books you read. John, too, your uncle — he was led astray by books when he was young but — only for a time —

— Poor fellow! said Stephen —

— You were religiously brought up by the Jesuits, in a Catholic home  .  .  . —

— A very Catholic home! —

— None of your people, neither your father's nor mine, have a drop of anything but Catholic blood in their veins —

— Well, I'll make a beginning in the family —

— This is the result of being left too much liberty. You do as you like and believe what you like —

— I don't believe, for example, that Jesus was the only man that ever had pure auburn hair —

— Well? —

— Nor that he was the only man that was exactly six feet high, neither more nor less —

— Well? —

— Well, you believe that. I heard you tell that years ago to our nurse in Bray — do you remember nurse Sarah? —
Mrs Daedalus defended the tradition in a half-hearted way —

— That is what they say —
{ms, 710}

— O, they say! They say a great deal —

— But you need not believe that if you don't want to —

— Thanks very much —

— All you are asked to believe in is the word of God. Think of the beautiful teachings of Our Lord. Think of your own life when you believed in those teachings. Weren't you better and happier then? —

— It was good for me at the time, perhaps, but it is quite useless for me now —

— I know what is wrong with you — you suffer from the pride of the intellect. You forget that we are only worms of the earth. You think you can defy God because you have misused the talents he has given you —

— I think Jehovah gets too high a salary for judging motives. I want to retire him on the plea of old age —
Mrs Daedalus stood up.

— Stephen, you may use that kind of language with your companions whoever they are but I will not allow you to use it with me. Even your father, bad as he is supposed to be, does not speak such blasphemy as you do. I am afraid that you are a changed boy since you went to that University. I suppose you fell in with some of those students  .  .  . —

— Good Lord, mother, said Stephen, don't believe that. The students are awfully
{ms, 711}
nice fellows. They love their religion: they wouldn't say boo to a goose

— Wherever you've learnt it I will not allow you to use such language to me when you speak of holy things. Keep that for the street-corners at night —

— Very well, mother, said Stephen. But you began the conversation —

— I never thought I would see the day when a child of mine would lose the faith. God knows I didn't. I did my best for you to keep you in the right way —
Mrs Daedalus began to cry. Stephen, having eaten and drunk all within his province, rose and went towards the door:

— It's all the fault of those books and the company you keep. Out at all hours of the night instead of in your home, the proper place for you. I'll burn every one of them. I won't have them in the house to corrupt anyone else —

Stephen halted at the door and turned towards his mother who had now broken out into tears:

— If you were a genuine Roman Catholic, mother, you would burn me as well as the books —

— I knew no good would come of your going to that place. You are ruining yourself body and soul. Now your faith is gone! —
{ms, 712}

— Mother, said Stephen, from ^|1the^1| threshhold, I don't see what you're crying for. I'm young, healthy, happy. What is the crying for?  .  .  . It's too silly  .  .  .  .—

Stephen went over to the Library that evening expressly to see Cranly and ^|1tell him of narrate^1| his latest conflict with orthodoxy. Cranly was standing under the Library porch announcing the results of the examinations beforehand. He was surrounded, as usual, by a little group among whom were his friend, the clerk from the Custom House, and another bosom friend, a very grave-looking elderly student named Lynch. Lynch was of ^|1a^1| very idle disposition and had allowed six or seven years to intervene between his leaving school and beginning a course in medicine at the College of Surgeons. He was much esteemed by his colleagues because he had a deep bass voice, never ‘stood’ any drinks in return for those which he accepted from others, and seldom uttered any remarks in return for those he listened to. He always kept both his hands in his trousers' pockets when he walked and jutted out his chest in a manner which was intended as a criticism of life.º He spoke, however, to Cranly principally about women and for
{ms, 713}
this reason Cranly had nicknamed him Nero. It was possible to accuse his mouth of a Neronic tendency but he destroyed the illusion of imperialism by wearing his cap very far back from a shock forehead.º He had unbounded contempt for medical students and their ways and, if he had not absorbed so much Dublin into his mind, he would have been a lover of the fine arts. He was, in fact, very interested in the art of singing ^|1and he. He^1| used this interest to attempt an intimacy with Stephen and, his gravity covering a shame-faced idealism,º he had already begun to feel through Cranly the influence of Stephen's vivifying disorderliness. His objection, singular enough in a lax character, to trite and meaningless execrations, to the facile iniquitiesº of the lips, had resulted for him in two moments of inspiration. He execrated in yellowº in protest against the sanguine adjective of uncertain etymology and, to describe the hymeneal tract, he had one invariable term. He called it Oracle and all within the frontiers he called oracular. The term was considered distinguished in his circle and he was careful never to explain the process which had discovered it.

Stephen stood on one of the steps of the porch but Cranly did not honour him with
{ms, 714}
any kind of welcome. Stephen inserted a few phrases into the conversation but his presence was still unhonoured by Cranly.º He was not in the least daunted by this reception, much as he was puzzled by it, and waited quietly for his opportunity. Once he addressed Cranly directly but got no answer. His mind began to ruminate upon this and at last his ruminations expressed themselves in a prolonged smile. While he was enjoying his smile he saw that Lynch was observing him. Lynch came down from the group and said ‘Good evening’. He then took a packet of Woodbine cigarettes from his side pocket and offered one to Stephen, saying:

— Five a penny —

Stephen, who knew that Lynch was a very poor young man, accepted the cigarette appreciatively. They smoked in silence for some minutes and at length the group under the porch fell silent also:

— Have you a copy of your essay? said Lynch —

— Do you want it? —

— I'd like to read it —

— I'll bring it to you tomorrow night, said Stephen going up the steps —

He went up to Cranly who was leaning against a pillar and gazing straight before him and touched him lightly on the shoulder:
{ms, 715}

— I want to speak to you, he said —

Cranly turned slowly round and looked at him. Then he asked:

— Now? —

— Yes —

They walked together up along Kildare St without speaking. When they came to the Green Cranly said:

— I'm going home on Saturday. Will you come as far as Harcourt St Station? I want to see the hour the train goes at —

— All right —

In the station Cranly spent a great deal of time reading the time-tables and making abstruse calculations. Then he went up to the platform and watched for a long time the shunting of the engine of a goods train on to a passenger train. The engine was steaming and blowing a deafening whistle and rolling billows of thick smoke towards the roof of the station. Cranly said that the engine-driver came from his part of the country and that he was the son of a cobbler in Tinahely. The engine executed a series of indecisive movements and finally settled itself on to the train. The engine-driver stuck his head out through the side and gazed languidly along the train:

— I suppose you would call him sooty Jaysus, said Cranly —

— Cranly, said Stephen, I have left
{ms, 716}
the Church —
Cranly took his arm at the word and they turned away from the platform and went down the staircase. As soon as they had emerged into the street he said encouragingly:

— You have left the Church? —

Stephen went over the interview phrase by phrase.

— Then you do not believe any longer? —

— I cannot believe —

— But you could at one time —

— I cannot now —

— You could now if you wanted to —

— Well, I don't want to —

— Are you sure you do not believe —

— Quite sure —

— Why do you not go to the altar? —

— Because I do not believe —

— Would you make a sacrilegious communion? —

— Why should I? —

— For your mother's sake —

— I don't see why I should —

— Your mother will suffer very much. You say you do not believe. The Host for you is a piece of ordinary bread. Would you not eat a piece of ordinary bread to avoid causing your mother pain? —

— I would in many cases —

— And why not in this case? Have you any
{ms, 717}
reluctance to commit a sacrilege? If you do not believe you should not have any —

— Wait a minute, said Stephen. At present I have a reluctance to commit a sacrilege. I am a product of Catholicism; I was sold to Rome before my birth. Now I have broken my slavery but I cannot in a moment destroy every feeling in my nature. That takes time. However if it were a case of needs must — for my life, for instance — I would commit any enormity with the host —

— Many Catholics would do the same, said Cranly, if their lives were at stake —

— Believers? —

— Ay, believers. So by your own showing you are a believer —

— It is not from fear that I refrain from committing a sacrilege —

— Why then? —

— I see no reason for committing sacrilege —

— But you have always made your Easter Duty. Why do you change? The thing for you is mockery, mummery —

— If I mum it is an act of submission, a public act of submission to the Church. I will not submit to the Church —

— Even so far as to mum? —

— It is mumming with an intention. The
{ms, 718}
outward show is nothing but it means a good deal —

— Again you are speaking like a Catholic. The host is nothing in outward show — a piece of bread —

— I admit: but all the same I insist on disobeying the Church. I will not submit any longer —

— But could you not be more diplomatic? Could you not rebel in your heart and yet conform out of contempt? You could be a rebel in spirit —

— That cannot be done for long by anyone who is sensitive. The Church knows the value of her services: her priest must hypnotise himself every morning before the tabernacle. If I get up every morning, go to the looking-glass and say to myself “You are the Son of God” at the end of twelve months I will want disciples —

— If you could make your religion pay like Christianity I would advise you to get up every morning and go to the looking-glass —

— That would be good for my vicars on earth but I would find crucifixion a personal inconvenience —
{ms, 719}

— But here in Ireland by following your new religion of unbelief you may be crucifying yourself like Jesus — only socially not physically —

— There is this difference. Jesus was good-humoured over it. I will die hard —

— How can you propose such a future to yourself and yet be afraid to trust yourself to perform even the simplest mumming in a church? said Cranly —

— That is my business, said Stephen, tapping at his forehead —

When they had come to the Green they crossed the streets and began to walk round the enclosure inside the chains. A few mechanics and their sweethearts were sitting on the swinging-chains turning the shadows to account. The footpath was deserted except for the metallic image of a distant policeman who had been posted in well in the gaslight as an admonition. When the two young men passed the college they both looked up at the same moment towards the dark windows.

— May I ask you why you left the Church? asked Cranly —
{ms, 720}

— I could not observe the precepts —

— Not even with grace? —

— No —

— Jesus gives very simple precepts. The Church is severe —

— Jesus or the Church — it's all the same to me. I can't follow him. I must have liberty to do as I please —

— No man can do as he pleases —

— Morally —

— No, not morally either —

— You want me, said Stephen, to toe the line with those sycophants and hypocrites in the college. I will never do so —

— No. I mentioned Jesus —

— Don't mention him. I have made it a common noun. They don't believe in him; they don't observe his precepts. In any case let us leave Jesus aside. My sight will only carry me as far as his lieutenant in Rome. It is quite useless: I will not be frightened into paying tribute in money or in thought —

— You told me — do you remember the evening we were standing at the top of the staircase talking about  .  .  . . .? —

— Yes, yes, I remember, said Stephen who hated Cranly's method of rememberingº the
{ms, 721}
past, What did I tell you? —

— You told me the idea you had of Jesus on Good Friday, an ugly misshapen Jesus. Did it ever strike you that Jesus may have been a conscious impostor? —

— I have never believed in his chastity — that is since I began to think about him. I am sure he ^|1is was^1| no eunuch priest. His interest in loose women is too persistently humane. All the women associated with him are of dubious character —

— You don't think he was God? —

— What a question! Explain it: explain the hypostatic union: tell me if the figure which that policeman worshipsº as the Holy Ghost is intended for a spermatozoon with wings added. What a question! He makes general remarks on life, that's all I know: and I disagree with them —

— For example? —

— For example,  .  .  . . Look here, I cannot talk on this subject. I am not a scholar and I receive no pay as a minister of God. I want to live, do you understand. McCann wants air and food: I want them and a hell of a lot of other things too. I don't care whether I am right or wrong. There is always that
{ms, 722}
risk in human affairs, I suppose. But even if I am wrong at least I shall not have to endure Father Butt's company for eternity —
Cranly laughed

— Remember he would be glorified —

— Heaven for climate, isn't that it, and hell for society.  .  .  . The whole affair is too damn idiotic. Give it up. I am very young. When I have a beard to my middle I will study Hebrew and then write to you about it —

— Why are you so impatient with the Jesuits? asked Cranly.

Stephen did not answer and, when they arrived in ^|1the^1| next region of light Cranly exclaimed:

— Your face is red! —

— I felt it, said Stephen —

— Most people think you are self-restrained, said Cranly after a pause —

— So I am, said Stephen —

— Not on this subject. Why do you get so excited: I can't understand that. It is a thing for you to think out —

— I can think out things when I like. I have thought this affair out very carefully though you may not believe me when I tell you. But my escape
{ms, 723}
excites me: I must talk as I do. I feel a flame in my face. I feel a wind rush through me —

— ‘Like a mighty wind rushing’, said Cranly —

— You urge me to postpone life — till when? Life is now — this is life: if I postpone it I may never live. To walk nobly on the surface of the earth, to express oneself without pretence, to acknowledge one's own humanity! You mustn't think I rhapsodise: I am quite serious. I speak from my soul —

— Soul? —

— Yes: from my soul, my spiritual nature. Life is not a yawn. Philosophy, love, art will not disappear from my world because I no longer believe that by entertaining an emotion of desire for the tenth part of a second I prepare for myself an eternity of torture. I am happy —

— Can you say that? —

— Jesus is sad. Why is he so sad? He is solitary  .  .  .  .  . I say, you must feel the truth of what I say. You are holding up the Church against me  .  .  . —

— Allow me  .  .  . —

— But what is the Church? It is not Jesus, the magnificent solitary with his
{ms, 724}
inimitable abstinences. The Church is ^|1made by me and my like —^1| her services, legends, practices, paintings, music, traditions. These ^|1her^1| artists gave her. They made her what she is. They accepted Aquinas' commentary on Aristotle as the Word of God and made her what she is —

— And why will you not help her to be so still — you as an artist? —

— I see you recognise the truth of what I say though you won't admit it —

— The Church allows the individual conscience to have great  .  .  . in fact, if you believe  .  .  . believe, that is, said Cranly stamping each heavy foot on the words, honestly and truly  .  .  . —

— Enough! said Stephen gripping his companion's arm. You need not defend me. I will take the odds as they are —
They paced along three sides of the Green in silence while the couples began to leave the chains and return meekly to their modest resting-places and after a while Cranly began to explain to Stephen how he too had felt a desire for life — a life of freedom and happiness — when he had been younger and how at that time he too had been about to leave the Church in search of happiness but that many considerations had restrained him.
{ms, 725}

XXI

Cranly went to Wicklow at the end of the week leaving Stephen to find another auditor. Luckily Maurice was enjoying his holidays and though Stephen spent a great deal of his time roaming through the slums of the city while Maurice was out on the Bull the two brothers often met and discoursed. Stephen reported his long conversations with Cranly of which Maurice made full notes. The younger sceptic did not seem to share his brother's high opinion of Cranly though he said little. It was not from jealousy but rather from an over-estimate of Cranly's rusticity that Maurice allowed himself this prejudice. To be rustic, in his eyes, was to be a mass of cunning and stupid and cowardly habits. He had spoken with Cranly only once but he had often seen him. He gave it as his opinion that Cranly never thought until someone spoke to him and then he ^|1gives gave^1| birth to some commonplace which he would ^|1have^1| liked to ^|1be have been^1| able to disbelieve. Stephen thought this exaggerated and saying that Cranly was daringly commonplace, that he could talk like a pint,º and that it was possible to credit him with a certain perverse genius. Cranly's
{ms, 726}
undue scepticism and his heavy feet moved Maurice to hit the rusticº in him with a name. He called him Thomas Squaretoes and he would not even admit that ^|1Cranly he^1| had to a certain extent the grand manner. Cranly, in his opinion, went to Wicklow because it was necessary for him to play the godº to an audience. He will grow to dislike you, said the shrewd young heathen, when you begin to play the god to someone else. He will give you nothing in exchange for what you give him whether he has it or not because his ^|1nature character^1| is naturally overbearing. He cannot possibly understand half of what you say to him and yet he would like to be thought the only one y who could understand you. He wants to become more and more necessary to you until he can have you in his power. Be careful never to show any weakness to him when you are together. You can have him in your power so long as you hold the whip-hand. Stephen replied that he thought this was a very novel conception of friendship which could not be proved true or false by debate alone but that he was himself the conscious possessor of an intuitive instrument
{ms, 727}
which might be trusted to register any enmity as soon as it appeared. He defended his friend and his friendship at the same time.

The summer was dull and warm. Nearly every day Stephen wandered through the slums watching the sordid lives of the inhabitants. He read all the street-ballads which were stuck in the dusty windows of the Liberties. He read the ^|1racing^1| names and prices scrawled in blue pencil outside the dingy tobacco-shops, the windows of which ^|1were^1| adorned with scarlet police journals. He examined all the book-stalls which offered old directories and volumes of sermons and unheard-of treatises for at the rate of a penny each or three for twopence. He often posted himself opposite one of the factories in old Dublin at two o'clock to wh watch the hands coming out to dinnerº — principally young boys and girls with colourless, expressionless faces, who seized the opportunity to be gallant in their way. He drifted in and out of interminable chapels in which an old man dozed on a bench or a clerk dusted the woodwork or an old woman prayed before the candle she had
{ms, 728}
lighted. As he walked slowly through the maze of poor streets he stared proudly in return for the glances of stupid wonder that he received and watched from under his eyes the great cow-like trunks of police constables swing slowly round after him as he passed them. These wanderings filled him with deep-seated anger and whenever he encountered a burly black-vested priest taking a stroll of pleasant inspection through these warrens full of swarming and cringing believers he cursed the farce of Irish Catholicism^|1. An: an^1| island whereof the inhabitants of which entrust ^|1will mind their wills and minds^1| to others that they may ensure for themselves a life of spiritual paralysis, an island in which all the power and riches i are in the keeping of those whose kingdom is not of this world, an island in which Caesar professes confesses Christ and Christ confesses Caesar that together they may wax fat upon a starveling rabblement which is bidden ironically to take to itself this consolation in hardship “The Kingdom of God is within you”.

This mood of indignation which
{ms, 729}
was not guiltless of a certain superficiality was undoubtedly due to the excitement of release and it was hardly countenanced by him before he realised the dangers of being a demagogue. The attitude which was constitutional with him was a silent, self-occupied, contemptuous manner and his intelligence, moreover, persuaded him that the tomahawk, as an effective instrument of warfare, had become obsolete. He acknowledged to himself in honest egoism that he could not take to heart the distress of a nation, the soul of which was antipathetic to his own, so bitterly as the indignity of a bad line of verse: but at the same time he was nothing in the world so little as an amateur artist. He wished to express his nature freely and fully for the benefit of ^|1a^1| society which he would enrich and also for his own benefit, seeing that it was part of his life to do so. It was not part of his life to undertake an extensive alteration of society but he felt the need to express himself such an urgent need, such a real need, that he was determined no conventions of a society, ^|1however^1| plausibly mingling pity with its tyranny, should be allowed to stand in his way, and
{ms, 730}
though a taste for elegance and detail unfitted him for the part of demagogue, ^|1in from^1| his general attitude he might have been supposed not unjustly an ally of the collectivist politicians, who are often very seriously upbraided by believers opponents who believe in Jehovahs, and decalogues and judgments ^|1for with^1| sacrificing the reality to an abstraction.

That kind of Christianity which is called Catholicism seemed to him to stand in his way and forthwith he removed it. He had been brought up in the belief of the Roman supremacy and to cease to be a Catholic for him meant to cease to be a Christian. The idea that the power of an empire is weakest at its borders requires some modification for everyone knows that the Pope cannot govern Italy as he governs Ireland nor is the Tsar as terrible an engine to the tradesmen of S. Petersburg as he is to the little Russian of the Steppes. In fact in many cases the government of an empire is strongest at its borders and it is invariably strongest there in the case when its power at the centre is on the wane. The waves of the rise and fall of empires do not travel with the rapidity of waves of light and it will be perhaps
{ms, 731}
a considerable time before Ireland will be able to understand that the Papacy is no longer going through a period of anabilism.º The bands of pilgrims who are shepherded safely across the continent by their Irish pastors must shame the jaded reactionaries of the eternal city by their stupefied intensity of worship in much the same way as the staring provincial newly arrived from Spain or Africa may have piqued the loyalty of some smiling Roman for whom the his past had his the future of his race was becoming uncertain as its past had already become obvious. Though it is evident on the one hand that this persistence of Catholic power in Ireland must intensify very greatly the loneliness of the ^|1Irish Irish^1| Catholic who voluntarily outlaws himself yet on the other hand the force which he must generate to propel himself out of so strong and intricate a tyranny may often be sufficient to place him beyond the region of re-attraction. It was, in fact, the very fervour of Stephen's former religious life which sharpened for him now the pains of his solitary position and at the same time hardened into a less
{ms, 732}
pliable, a less appeasable enmity molten rages and ^|1glowing^1| transports on which the emotions of helplessness and loneliness and despair had first acted as chilling influences.

The tables in the Library were deserted during the summer months and whenever Stephen wandered in there he found few faces that he knew. Cranly's friend ^|1O'Neill Glynn^1|, the clerk from ^|1the Custom House Guinness's^1|, was one of these familiar faces: he was very busy all the summer reading philosophical handbooks. Stephen had the misfortune to be captured one night by ^|1O'Neill Glynn^1|, who at once attempted a conversation on the modern school of Irish writers — a subject of which Stephen knew nothing — and he had to listen to an inconstant stream of literary opinions. These opinions were not very interesting: Stephen, for instance, ^|1was grew^1| rather weary of ^|1O'Neill's Glynn's^1| telling him what beautiful poetry Byron and Shelley and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats and Tennyson wrote, and of hearing that Ruskin and Newman and Carlyle and Macaulay were the greatest modern English prose stylists. At last when ^|1O'Neill Glynn^1| was about to begin an account of a literary paper which his sister had read to the ^|1Girl's^1| Debating Society in
{ms, 734}
Loretoº Convent Stephen thought he was justified in putting a closure on the conversation b, somewhat in Cranly's manner, by asking ^|1O'Nell Glynn^1| very pointedly could he manageº to get him a ‘pass’ to see the Brewery. The request was made in such a tone of subdued thirsty curiosity that ^|1O'Neill Glynn^1| was ^|1too^1| discouraged to continue his literary criticism and promised to do his best to get the ‘pass’. Another reader in the Library who seemed to wish to be very friendly with Stephen was a young student named Moynihan who had been elected Auditor of the Literary and Historical Society for the following year. He had to read his inaugural address in November and he had chosen as his subjects “Modern Unbelief and Modern Democracy”. He was an extremely ^|1small ugly^1| young man with a wide mouth which gave the idea that it was under his chin until the face was seen at close quarters, eyes of an over-washed olive green colour set viciously close together, and large rigid ears standing far apart. He took a most agitated interest in the success of his paper as he was going to be a solicitor and he relied on this inaugural
{ms, 736}
addressº to make his name known. He had not yet developed the astuteness of the legal mind in as much as he imagined that Stephen shared his agitated interest concerning the inaugural address. Stephen came upon him one night while he was busily ‘making-up’ his subject. He had some bulky volumes by Lecky at his side and he was reading and making notes upon an article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica under the heading of ‘Socialism’. He desisted from his labours when he saw Stephen and began to explain the preparations which the committee were making. He showed the letters which had been received from various public men who had been written to by the committee to know if they would speak. He showed the patterns of the cards of invitation which they had decided to have printed and he showed a copy of the notice which was to be sent to all the papers. Stephen who did not know Moynihan very well was surprised at all these confidences. Moynihan said he was sure Stephen would be the auditor
{ms, 737}
who would be elected after him and added how much he had admired the style of Stephen's paper. After this he began to discuss his own and Stephen's prospects for the degree. He said German was more useful than Italian ^|1(though, of course, Italian was more beautiful as a language)^1| and that he had always studied it for that reason. When Stephen rose to go Moynihan said he might as well go too and put up his books. He came along Nassau St to catch his tram for Palmerston Park and ^|1on the way^1|, the night being wet and the streets black and glistening with rain, he united himself still more intimately with his successor-designate by little ejaculations and glances in the wake of a hospital nurse who wore brown stockings and pink petticoats. Stephen was not at all displeased by the spectacle which he had been ^|1quietly^1| observing for a long time before Moynihan had caught sight of it but Moynihan's ejaculatory desi desirous ejaculations reminded him of the clicking of a type-writing machine. Moynihan who by this time was on famous terms with him said he would like to know Italian on account
{ms, 738}
of Boccaccio and the other Italian writers. He told Stephen that if he wanted to read something ‘smutty’ that the Decameron took the biscuit for ‘smut’.

— I wish I was like you, he said, it must be ten times as bad in the original. I can't tell you now because here's my tram  .  .  . but it takes the biscuit for downright  .  .  . you know?  .  .  . well, Tooraloo! —

Mr Daedalus had not an acute sense of the rights of private property: he paid rent very rarely. To demand money for eatables seemed to him just but to expect people to pay for shelter the exorbitant sums which are demanded annually by houseowners in Dublin seemed to him unjust. He had now been a year in his house in Clontarf and for that year he had paid a quarter's rent The writ which had been first served on him had contained a legal flawº and this fact enabled him to prolong his term of occupancy. Just now matters were drawing to a head and he was scouring the city for another house. A private message from a friend in the Sheriff's office gave him exactly five days of grace and every morning he brushed his silk
{ms, 739}
hat very diligently and polished his eyeglass and went forth humming derisively to offer himself as a bait to landlords. The halldoor was often banged loudly on these occasions as the only possible close of an altercation. The results of the examination had awarded Stephen a mere pass and his father told him very confidentially that he had better look out for some kind of a doss because in a week's time they would all be out on the street. The funds in the house were very low for the new furniture had fetched very little after its transport piecemeal to a pawn-office. Tradesmen who had seen it depart had begun a game of knocking and w ringing which was very often followed by the curious eyes of street-urchins. Isabel was lying upstairs in the backroom, day by day growing more wasted and querulous. The doctor came twice a week now and ordered her delicacies. Mrs Daedalus had to set her wits to work to provide even one substantial meal every day and she certainly had no time to spare between accomplishing this feat, appeasing the clamour at the halldoor, parrying her husband's
{ms, 740}
ill-humour and attending on her dying daughter. As for her sons, one was a freethinker, the other surly. Maurice ate dry bread, muttered maledictions against his father and his father's creditors, practised pushing a heavy flat stone in the garden and raising and lowering a broken dumb-bell,º and trudged to the Bull every day that the tide served. In the evening he wrote his diary or went ^|1out^1| for a walk by himself. Stephen wandered about morning, noon and night. The two brothers were not often together ^|1until one dusky summer evening when. One dusky summer evening^1| they walked into each other very gravely ^|1at a corner^1| and both burst out laughing: and after that they sometimes went for walks together in the evening and discussed the art of literature.

Stephen had lent his essay to Lynch as he had promised to do and this loan had led to a certain intimacy. Lynch had almost taken the final vows in the order of the discontented but Stephen's unapologetic egoism, his remorseless lack of sentiment for himself no less than for others, gave him pause. His taste for fine arts, which had always seemed to him a taste
{ms, 741}
which should be carefully hidden away, now began to encourage itself timidly. He was also very much relieved to find Stephen's estheticism united with a sane and conscienceless acceptance of the animal needs of young men for, being a shrewd animal himself, he had begun to suspect from Stephen's zeal and loftiness of discourse at least an assertion of that incorrigible virginity which the Irish race demandsº ^|1alike^1| from any John who would baptise it or from any Joan who would set it free as the first heavenly proof of fitness for such high offices. Daniel's household had become so wearisome to Stephen that he had discontinued his Sunday visits there and had substituted rambles with Lynch through the city. They made their way with difficulty along the crowded streets where underpaid young men and flaunting girls were promenading in bands. After a few of these rambles Lynch had absorbed the new terms which expressed the new point of view and he began to feel that he was justifying the contempt to which the spectacle of Dublin manners had always moved him. Many times they stopped to confer in scrupulous slang with the foolish
{ms, 742}
virgins of the city, whose souls were almost terrified out of their naughty intentions by the profundity of the tones of the elder of the young men, and Lynch, sunning himself in a companionship which was so alert and liberal, so free from a taint of secret competition or patronage, began to wonder how he could ever have thought Stephen an affected young man. Everyone, he thought now, who has a character to preserve must have a manner to preserve it with.

One evening as Stephen was coming down the Library staircase, after idling away a half-hour at a dictionary of music a medical treatise on singing, he heard a dress brushing the steps behind him. The dress belonged to Emma Clery who, of course, was very much surprised at seeing Stephen. She had just been working at some old Irish and now she was going home: her father didn't like her to stay in the Library until ten o'clock as she had no escort. The night was so fine that she thought she would not take the tram. Stephen asked her might he not see her home. They stood under the porch for a few minutes, talking. Stephen took out
{ms, 743}
a cigarette and lit it but at once knocked off the lighted end very meditatively and put the cigarette back into his case: her eyes were very bright.

They went up Kildare St and when they came to the corner of the Green she crossed the road and they continued to walk, but not quite so quickly, along the gravel path beside the chains.º The chains bore their nightly burden of amorousness. He offered her his arm which she took, leaning appreciably upon it. They talked gossip. She discussed the likelihood of McCann's marrying the eldest of Mr Daniel's daughters. She seemed to think it very amusing that McCann should have a desire for matrimony but she added quite seriously that Annie Daniel was certainly a nice girl. A feminine voice called out from the dusky region of the couples “Don't!”

— “‘Don't’, said Emma. Isn't that Mr Punch's advice to young men who are about to marry  .  .  . I hear you are quite a woman-hater now, Stephen —

— Wouldn't that be a change? —

— And I heard you read a dreadful paper
{ms, 744}
paper in the college — all kinds of ideas in it. Isn't that so? —

— Please, don't mention that paper —

— But I'm sure you're a woman-hater. You've got so stand-offish, you know, so reserved. Perhaps you don't like ladies' company? —
Stephen pressed her arm a little by way of a disclaimer.

— Are you a believer in the emancipation of women too? she asked —

— To be sure! said Stephen —

— Well, I'm glad to hear you say that, at any rate. I didn't think you were in favour of women —

— O, I am very liberal — like Father Dillon — he is very liberal-minded —

— Yes? Isn't he? she said in a. puzzled manner  .  .  . Why do you never go to Daniel's now? —

— I  .  . don't know —

— What do you do with yourself on Sunday evenings? —

— I  .  .  . stay at home, said Stephen —

— You must be morose when you're at home —

— Not I. I'm as happy as if the divil had me —
{ms, 745}

— I want to hear you sing again —

— O, thanks  .  .  . Some time, perhaps  .  .  . —

— Why don't you study music? Have your voice trained? —

— Strange to say I was reading a book on singing tonight. It is called  .  .  . —

— I am sure you would make a success with your voice, she said quickly evidently afraid to allow him control of the conversation  .  .  .  . Have you ever heard Father Moran sing? —

— No. Has he a good voice —

— O, very nice; he sings with such taste. He's an awfully nice man, don't you think? —

— Very nice indeed. Do you go to confession to him? —
She leaned a little more appreciably on his arm and said:

— Now, don't be bold, Stephen —

— I wish you would go to confession to me, Emma, said Stephen from his heart —

— That's a dreadful thing to say.  .  .  . Why would you like that? —

— To hear your sins —

— Stephen! —
{ms, 746}

— To hear you murmur them into my ear and say you were sorry and would never ^|1do commit^1| them again and ask me to forgive you. And I would forgive you and make you promise to commit them every time you liked and say “God bless you, my dear child” —

— O, for shame, Stephen! Such a way to talk of the sacraments! —
Stephen had expected that she would blush but her cheek maintained its ^|1innonce innocence^1| and her eyes grew brighter and brighter.

— You'd get tired of that too —

— Do you think so? said Stephen, making an effort not to be surprised at such an intelligent remark —

— You'd be a dreadful flirt, I'm sure. You get tired of everything so quickly — just the way you did in the Gaelic League —

— People should not think of the end in the beginning of flirtations, should they? —

— Perhaps not —

When they came to the corner of her terrace she stopped and said:

— Thanks ever so much —

— Thank you —

— Well, you must reform, won't you, and
{ms, 747}
come next Sunday to Daniel's —

— If you expressly  .  .  . —

— Yes, I insist —

— Very good, Emma. In that case, I'll go —

— Mind. I expect you to obey me —

— Very good —

— Thanks again for your kindness coming across with me. Aur Au revoir!º

— Good night —

He waited till he had seen her enter the fourth garden of the terrace. She did not turn her head to see if he was watching but he was not cast down because he knew she had a trick of seeing things without using her eyes frankly.

Of course when Lynch heard ^|1of^1| this incident he rubbed his hands together and prophesied. By his advice Stephen went to Daniel's on the following Sunday. The old horsehair sofa was there, the picture of the Sacred Heart was there, she was there. The prodigal was welcomed. She spoke to him very little during the evening and seemed to be in deep conversation with Hughes, who had lately been honoured by an invitation. She was dressed in cream
{ms, 748}
colour and the great mass of her hair lay heavily upon her cream-coloured neck. She asked him to sing and when he had sung a song of Dowland's she asked him would he not sing them an Irish song. Stephen glanced from her eyes to Hughes's face and sat down again at the piano. He sang her one of the few Irish melodies which he knew “My love she was born in the North Countree”. When his song was over she applauded loudly and so did Hughes.

— I love the Irish music, she said a few minutes afterwards, inclining herself toward him with an air of oblivion, it is so soul-stirring —

Stephen said nothing. He remembered almost every word she had said from the first time he had met her and he strove to recall any word which revealed the presence of a spiritual principle in her worthy of so significant a name as soul. He submitted himself to the perfumes of her body and strove to locate a spiritual principle in it: but he could not. She seemed to conform to the Catholic belief, to obey the
{ms, 749}
commandments and the precepts. By all outward signs he was compelled to esteem her holy. But he could not so stultify himself as to misread the gleam in her eyes as holy or to interpret the motions rise and fall of her bosom as a movement of a sacred intention. He thought of his own ^|1fervid religiousness spendthrift religiousness and airs of the cloister^1|, he remembered having astonished a labourer in a wood near Malahide by an ecstasy of oriental posture and ^|1no more than^1| half-conscious under the influence of her charm he wondered whether the God of the Roman Catholics would put him into hell because he had failed to understand that most marketable goodness which makes it possible to give comfortable assent to propositions without in the least ordering one's life in accordance with them and had failed to appreciate the digestive value of the sacraments.

Among the guests was an elder brother of Mrs Daniel's, Father Healy. He had just come back from the United States of America where he had been for seven years collecting money to build a chapel near ^|1Ennicothy Enniscorthy^1|. He was being
{ms, 750}
fîted on his home-coming. He sat in the armchair which Mr Daniel insisted on giving him and joined the tips of his fingers lightly together and smiled on the company. He was ^|1a^1| little fat white priest whose body reminded one of a new tennis-ball and as he sat in his chair with one leg thrown smartly over the other he kept agitating quickly a fat little foot which was encased in a fat little creaky leather shoe. He spoke with a judicious American accentº and when he spoke the room was all ears. He was greatly interested in the new Gaelic revival and in the new literary movement in Ireland. He paid particular attention to McCann and to Stephen, asking both of them many questions. He agreed with McCann that Gladstone was the greatest man of the nineteenth century and then Mr Daniel, who was glowing with pride at the honour he was paying so honourable a guest, told a dignified story of Gladstone ^|1and Sir Ashmead Bartlett^1| and deepened his voice to reproduce the oratory of the grand old man. During the charades ^|1he Father Healy^1| kept asking Mr Daniel to repeat to him the witticisms of the players
{ms, 751}
and very often he shook laughing when Mr Daniel had told him what a player had said. He let no opportunity for increasing his knowledge of the interior life of the University escape him and every allusion was beaten out into an unmistakable flatness before he nodded a head in satisfaction. Attacking Stephen on the literary side he began a monologue on the writings of John Boyle O'Reilly but finding Stephen too polite he began to depreciate an exclusively literary training for young men. Stephen thereupon began to tell him of the alley in the College and of the hand-ball tournament and all with discreet earnestness.

— I am sure now, said Father Healy putting his head shrewdly on one side and looking genially at the youth, I am sure you would make a good player. You're just the build —

— O, no, said Stephen longing for Cranly's presence. I'm a poor player —

— So you say, said Father Healy laughing, so you say —

— Really, said Stephen, smiling at this clever detection of ^|1the his^1| merits as a handball-player and at the recollection of
{ms, 752}
Cranly's execrations at his play.

At last Father Healy began to yawn a little and this was taken as a signal for handing rounds cups of milk and slices of bread and butter to the young men and women, none of whom took anything stronger. Hughes, indeed, was so frugal that he declined to eat or drink anything at all whereat Stephen was somewhat disappointed as he could have had a good view of the idealist. McCann who represented the practical view of life ate rather noisily and asked for jam. This remark made Father Healy, who had never heard it before, laugh very heartily and made the others smile but Hughes and Stephen looked at each other very gravely across the uninhabitedº tablecloth. The young women were all sitting at one end of the table and the young men at the other end with the result that one end of the table was very lively and the other end very serious. Stephen after having failed
{ms, 753}
to engage in conversation a maiden aunt of the family who had fulfilled her office by bringing in two tumblers of punch, one for Father Healy and the other for Mr Daniel, retired silently to the piano where he began to strum old airs and hum them to himself until someone at the table said “Do sing us something” and then he left the piano and returned to the horsehair sofa.

Her eyes were very bright. Stephen's way through self-examinations had worn him out so much that he could not but long to repose himself in the neighbourhood of her beauty. He remembered the first mood of monstrous dissatisfaction which had overcome him on his entrance into Dublin life and how it was her beauty that had appeased him. Now she seemed to offer him rest. He wondered did she understand him or sympathise with him and was the vulgarity of her manners only a condescension of one who was consciously playing the game. He knew that it was not for such an image that he had constructed
{ms, 754}
a theory of art and life and a garland of verse and yet if he could have been sure of her he would have held his art and verses lightly enough. The longing for a mad night of love came upon him, a desperate willingness to cast his soul away, his life and his art, and to bury them all with her under fathoms of lust-ladenº slumber. The ugly artificiality of the lives over which Father Healy was comfortably presiding struck this outrageous instant out of him and he went on repeating to himself a line from Dante for no other reason except that it contained the angry disyllable “frode”. Surely, he thought, I have as much right to use the word as ever Dante had. The spirits of Moynihan and O'Neill and Glynn seemed to him worthy of some blowing about round the verges of a hell which would be a caricature of Dante's. The spirits of the patriotic and religious enthusiasts seemed to him fit to inhabit the fraudulent circles where hidden in hives of immaculate ice they
{ms, 755}
they might work their bodies to the due pitch of frenzy. The spirits of the tame sodalists, unsullied and undeserving, he would petrify amid a ring of Jesuits in the circle of foolish and grotesque virginities and ascend above them and their baffled icons to where his Emma, with no detail of her earthly form or vesture abated, invoked him from a Mohammedan paradise.

At the door he had to resign her to others and see her depart with insignificant courtesies and as she he came home alone he led his mood through mazes of doubts and misgivings. After that evening he did not see her for a little time as home affairs were rather engrossing. His father's days of grace were exciting days. It seemed likely that the family would not have where to lay its heads when at the eleventh hour Mr Daedalus found a roof with a friend from the North of Ireland who was traveller for an ironmonger. Mr Wilkinson was in possession of an old-fashioned house containing perhaps fifteen
{ms, 756}
rooms of which he was nominally a tenant but, the landlord, an old miser without kith or kin in the world, having died very opportunely, Mr Wilkinson's tenancy was untroubled by considerations of time or money. Mr Daedalus was allowed a set of apartments in this dilapidated mansion for a small weekly payment and on the night before the day fixed for his legal eviction he moved his camp by night. The little furniture which remained to them was carried on a floatº and Stephen and his brother and his mother and his father carried the ancestral portraits themselves as the draymen had drunk a good deal more than was good for them. It was a clear night of late summer freshened with cold as they walked in a body beside the sea-wall. Isabel had been removed earlier in the day and put in Mrs Wilkinson's charge. Mr Daedalus was a long way in front with Maurice and in high spirits with his successful manoeuvre. Stephen followed with his mother and even she was light-hearted. The tide was lapping softly ^|1at by^1| the wall, being at the full, and through
{ms, 757}
the clear air Stephen heard his father's voice like a muffled flute singing a love-song. He made his mother stop to listen and they both leaned on the heavy picture-frames and listened:

Shall carry my heart to thee
Shall carry my heart to thee
And the breath of the balmy night
Shall carry my heart to thee

In Mr Wilkinson's house there was a lofty drawing-room panelled in oak entirely bare of furniture except for a piano. During the winter Mr Wilkinson had been paid seven shillings a week by a dancing club for the use of the room on Tuesdays and Fridays but now he used the lower end of the room as a ^|1general store place of general storage^1| for ^|1hadware hardware^1| samples. He was a tall one-eyed man with a silent manner and a great power of holding his drink. He had a deep appreciation of his guest whom he never addressed without the prefix “Mr”.º He was married to a tall woman as silent as himself who read a great many novelettes and hung half her body out of the windows while her
{ms, 758}
two young children entangled themselves in pieces of wire-netting and coilsº of gas-pipes. She had a long white face and she laughed at everything. Mr Daedalus and Mr Wilkinson went to town every morning together and often came back together and, during the day, Mrs Wilkinson hung out of the windows or talked with messenger boys and milkmen while Mrs Daedalus sat by Isabel's bedside. There could be no doubt now that the girl was in a bad way. Her eyes were piteously enlarged and her voice had become hollow: she sat half propped-up by pillows in the bed all day, her damp-looking hair hanging in wisps about her face, turning over the pages of an illustrated book. She began to whimper when she was told to eat or when anyone left her bedside. She showed very few little animation except when the piano was playing in the room below and then she made them o leave the ^|1bedroom^1| door open and closed her eyes. Money was still scarce and still the doctor ordered her delicacies. The lingering nature of her illness had spread a hopeless apathy about the household and, though she herself
{ms, 759}
was little more than a child, she must have been aware of this. Stephen alone with persistent kindness preserved his usual manner of selfish cheerfulness and strove to stir a fire out of her embersº of life. He even exaggerated and his mother reproved him for being so noisy. He could not go into his sister and say to her “Live! live!” but he tried to touch her soul in the shrillness of a whistle or the vibration of a note. Whenever he went into the room he asked questions with an indifferent air as if her illness was of no importance and once or twice he could have assured himself that the eyes that looked at him from the bed had guessed his meaning.

The summer closed in sultry weather. Cranly was still in Wicklow and Lynch had begun to study for an examination in October. Stephen was too concerned with himself to talk much with his brother. In a few days Maurice was to return to school, that event having been delayed a fortnight on account of what he himself called the ‘boot and clothes’ complaint. Mr Wilkinson's household dragged out day after day, Mrs Wilkinson hanging herself out of the windows and
{ms, 760}
Mrs Daedalus watching her daughter. Very often Mr Wilkinson brought his guest home after a day's carouse and the two would sit in the kitchen for the rest of the night talking politics loudly. When Stephen turned the corner of the avenue he could often hear his father's voice shouting or his father's ^|1voice fist^1| banging the table. When he came in the two disputants would ask him for his opinion but he always ate what supper there was without remark and ^|1went up retired^1| to his room ^|1hearing and as he went up the stairs he could hear^1| his father say to Mr Wilkinson “Queer chap, you know, queer chap!” and he could imagine the heavy stare of Mr Wilkinson's eyes.

Stephen was very lonely. As at the beginning of the summer so now: he wandered vaguely through the streets. Emma had gone away to the Isles of Aran with a Gaelic party. He was hardly unhappy and yet not happy. His moods were still waited upon and courted and set down in phrases of prose and verse: and when the soles of his feet were too tired or, his mood too dimº a memory or too timid a hope, he would wander into the long loafty lofty dusty drawing-room
{ms, 761}
and sit at the piano while the sunless dusk enwrapped him.º He could feel about him and above him the hopeless house and the decay of leaves and in his soul the one bright insistent star of joy trembling at her wane. The chords that floated towards the cobwebs and rubbish and floated vainly to the dust-strewn windows were the meaningless voices of his perturbation and all they could do was flow ^|1in^1| meaningless succession through ^|1all^1| the chambers of sentience. He breathed an air of tombs.

Even the value of his own life came into doubt with him. He laid a finger upon every falsehood it contained: an egoism which proceeded bravely before men to be frighted by the least challenge of the conscience, freedom which would dress the world anew in the vestments and usages begotten of enslavement, mastery of an art understood by few which owed its very delicacy to a physical decrepitude, itself the brand and sign of vulgar ardours. Cemeteries revealed their ineffectual records to him, records
{ms, 762}
of the lives of all those who with good grace or bad grace had accepted t an obvious divinity. The vision of all those failures, and the vision, far more pitiful, of congenital lives, shuffling onwards amid yawn and howl, beset him with evil: and evil, in the similitude of a distorted ritual, called to his soul to commit fornication with her.

One evening he sat silent at his piano while the dusk enfolded him. The dismal sunset lingered still upon the window-panes in a smoulder of rusty fires. Above him and about him hung the shadow of decay, the decay of leaves and flowers, the decay of hope. He desisted from his chords and waited, bending upon the keyboard in silence: and his soul commingled itself with the assailing, inarticulate dusk. A form which he knew for his mother's appeared far down in the room, standing in the doorway.º In the gloom her excited face was crimson. A voice
{ms, 763}
which he remembered as his mother's, a voice of a terrified human being, called his name. The form at the piano answered:

— The hole  .  .  . the hole we all have  .  .  . here —
{ms, 764}

XXII

Stephen was present in the room when his sister died. As soon as her mother had been alarmed the priest was sent for. He was a diminutive man who carried his head mostly on his right shoulder and spoke in a lisping voice which was not very easily heard. He heard the girl's confession and went away saying “Leave it to God: He knows best: leave it to God”. The doctor came with Mr Daedalus on a car, examined the girl and asked had she seen a priest. He went away saying that while there was life there was hope but she was very low: he would call in the morning. Isabel died a little after midnight. Her father who was not quite sober walked about the room on tiptoe, cried in little fits every time his daughter showed a change and kept on saying “That's right, duckey: take that now” whenever her mother forced her to swallow a little champagne and then nodded his head until he began to cry afresh. He kept telling everyone to keep her spirits up. Maurice sat down by the empty fireplace and gazed in the grate. Stephen sat at the head of the bed and held his sister's
{ms, 765}
hand, her mother bending over her offering her the glass and kissing her and praying. Isabel seemed to Stephen to have grown very old: her face had become a woman's face. Her eyes turned constantly between the two figures nearest to her as if to say she had been wronged in being given life and, at Stephen's word, she gulped down whatever was offered her. When she could swallow no more her mother said to her “You are going home, dear, now. You are going to heaven where we will all meet again. Don't you know?  .  .  . Yes, dear  .  .  . Heaven, with God” and the child fixed her great eyes on her mother's face while her bosom began to heave loudly beneath the bedclothes.

Stephen felt very acutely the futility of his sister's life. He would have done many things for her and, though she was almost a stranger to him, he was sorry to see her lying dead. Life seemed to him a gift; the statement ‘I am alive’ seemed to him to contain a satisfactory certainty and many other things, held up as indubitable, seemed to him uncertain. His sister had enjoyed little more than the fact of life, few or none
{ms, 765}
ofº its privileges. The supposition of an allwise God calling a soul home whenever it seemed good to Him could not redeem in his eyes the futility of her life. The wasted body that lay before him had existed by sufferance; the spirit that dwelt ^|1therein^1| had literally never dared to live and had not learned anything by an abstention which it had not willed for itself. She had not been anything herself and for that reason had not attached anything to herself or herself to anything. When they were children together people had spoken of ‘Stephen and Maurice’ and her name had been added by an afterthought. Even her name, a certain lifeless name, had held her apart from the plays of life. Stephen remembered the voices of children crying with glee and venom:

Stephen, the Reephen, the Rix-Dix Deephen!

but it was always with half-hearted glee and shamefaced venom that they ^|1had^1| called out her name:

Isabel, the Risabel, the Rix-Dix Disabel.

{ms, 766}

Isabel's death was the occasion of bringing to the house many of Mrs Daedalus' relatives. They knocked a little timidly at the hall-door and though they were very retiring in manner their host convicted them ^|1— the females, at least —^1| privately of making a cunning use of their eyes. The males he received in the long empty drawingroom in which an early fire had been lit. During the two nights of the girl's wake a big company assembled in the drawingroom: they did not smoke but they drank and told stories. ^|1Every The^1| morning after the table looked like a marine-stores so crowded was it with empty bottles, black and green. Isabel's two brothers assisted at this wake. The discussions were often general. One of the boys' uncles was a very shock-headed asthmatic man who had in his youth rather indiscreet with his landlady's daughter and the family had been scarcely appeased by a tardy marriage. One of Mr Daedalus friends, a clerk in the Police Courts, told the company of the task which a friend of his in the Castle had in examining prohibited books:

— Such filth, he said, You'd wonder
{ms, 777}
howº any man would have the face to print it —

— When I was a boy, said Uncle John in a very flat accent, and had more ^|1of a^1| taste for reading than now and much less money I used to go to a bookshop near Patrick's Close. One day I went there to buy a copy of the ‘Colleen Bawn’. The man asked me in and he showed me a book  .  .  . —

— I know, I know, said the clerk from the Police Courts —

— Such a book to put into the hands of a young lad! Such ideas to put in his head! Scandalous! —
Maurice let a moment of respectful approval pass and then he asked:

— Did you buy the book. Uncle John? —
?— Everyone seemed inclined to laugh but Uncle John grew very red and angry and went on:

— They should be prosecuted for putting such books on sale. Children should be kept in their places —
{ms, 778}

Standing beside the closed piano on the morning of the funeral Stephen heard the coffin bumping down the crooked staircase. The mourners followed it out and seated themselves in the four carriages. Stephen and Maurice carried the three wreaths into the mourning coach. The hearse made for Glasnevin Cemetery at a smart trot. At the cemetery gates six hearses were drawn up. The funeral which had drawn up immediately before Isabel's was a funeral of someone of the poor class. The mourners, who were huddled in sixes on outside cars, were just scrambling down from the cars as Mr Daedalus and his fellow-mourners drove up. The first funeral went in through the gates where a little crowd of loungers and officials were grouped. Stephen watched them pass in. Two of them who were late pushed their way viciously through the crowd. A girl, one hand catching the woman's skirt, ran a pace in advance. The girl's face was the face of a fish, discoloured and oblique-eyed; the woman's face was square and pinched, the face of a bargainer. The girl, her mouth distorted, looked up at the woman to see if itº
{ms, 779}
was time to cry: the woman, settling a flat bonnet, hurried on towards the mortuary chapel.

At the mortuary chapel Mr Daedalus and his friends had to wait until the poor mourners had first been served. In a few minutes the service was over and Isabel's coffin was carried up and laid on the bier. The mourners scattered in the seats and knelt timidly on their handkerchiefs. A priest with a great ^|1toad-like^1| belly balanced to one side came out of the sacristy, followed by an altar boy. He read the service rapidly in a croaking voice and shook the aspergill drowsily over the coffin, the boy piping responses at intervals. When he had read the service he closed the book, crossed himself, and made back for the sacristy at a swinging ^|1gate gait^1|. Labourers came in and bore out the coffin to a barrow and pushed it along the gravel-path. The super-intendant of the cemetery shook hands with Mr Daedalus at the door of the chapel and followed the funeral slowly. The coffin slid evenly into the grave and the grave-diggers began
{ms, 780}
to shovel in the earth. At the sound of the first clods Mr Daedalus began to sob and one of his friends came to his side and held his arm.

When the grave had been covered in the grave-diggers laid their shovels upon it and crossed themselves. The wreaths were put on the grave and after a pause for prayer the mourning party returned through the trim alleys of the cemetery. The unnatural tension of condolence had been somewhat relieved and the talk was becoming practical again. They got into the carriages and drove back along the Glasnevin road. At Dunphy's corner the carriage drew up behind the carriages of other funerals. In the bar Mr Wilkinson stood the party the first drink: the drivers of the carriages were called in and they stood by the door in a clump and rubbed their coat-sleeves across their bony battered-looking faces until they were asked to name their drink. They all chose pints and indeed their own bodily tenements were not unlike hardly used pewter measures. The mourners drank small specials for the most part.
{ms, 781}

Stephen, when asked what he would drink, answered at once:

— A pint —
His father ceased talking and began to regard him with great attention but, Stephen feeling too cold-hearted to be abashed, received his pint very seriously and drank it off in a long draught. While his head was beneath the tankard he was conscious of his startled father and he felt the savour of the bitter clay of the graveyard sharp in his throat.

The inexpressibly mean way in which his sister had been buried inclined Stephen to consider rather seriously the claims of water and fire to be the last homes of dead bodies. The entire apparatus of the State seemed to him at fault from its first to its last operation. No young man can contemplate the fact of death with extreme satisfaction and no young man, specialised by fate or her stepsister chance for an organ of sensitiveness and intellectiveness, can contemplate the network of falsities and trivialities which make up the funeral of a dead burgher without extreme disgust. For some days after
{ms, 782}
the funeral Stephen, clothed in second-hand clothes of two shades of black,º had to receive sympathies. Many of these sympathies proceeded from casual friends of the family. Nearly all the men said “And how is the poor mother bearing it?” and nearly all the women said “It's a great trial for your poor mother”: and the sympathies were always uttered in the same listless unconvincing monotone. McCann was also sympathetic. He came over to Stephen while that young man was looking into a haberdasher's window at some ties and wondering why the Chinese chose ^|1yellow whiteº^1| as a colour of mourning. He shook hands briskly with Stephen:

— I was sorry to hear of the death of your sister  .  .  .  .sorry we didn't know in time  .  .  . to have been at the funeral —
Stephen released his hand gradually and said:

— Still  .  .  .  .it hurts —

The acme of unconvincingness seemed to Stephen to have been reached
{ms, 783}
at that moment.

The second year of Stephen's University life opened early in October. His godfather had made no comment on the result of the first year but Stephen was told that this opportunity would be the last given him. He chose Italian as his optional subject, partly from a desire to read Dante seriously, and partly to escape the crush of French and German lectures. No-one else in the college studied Italian and every second morning he came to the college at ten o'clock and went up to Father Artifoni's bedroom. Father Artifoni was an intelligent little moro who came from Bergamo, a town in Lombardy. He had clean lively eyes and a thick full mouth. Every morning when Stephen rapped at his door he there was the noise of chairs being disarranged before the “Avanti!” The little priest never read in the sitting posture and the noise which Stephen heard was the noise of an improvised lectern returning to its constituent parts, namely, two cane chairs and a stiff blotting-pad. The Italian lessons often extended
{ms, 784}
beyond the hour and much less grammar and literature was discussed than philosophy. The teacher probably knew the doubtful reputation of his pupil but for this very reason he adopted a language of ingenuous piety, not that he was himself Jesuit enough to lack ingenuousness but that he was Italian enough to enjoy a game of belief and unbelief. He reproved his pupil once for an admiring allusion to the author of The Triumphant Beast.

— You know, he said, the writer, Bruno, was a terrible heretic —

— Yes, said Stephen, and he was terribly burned —
But the teacher was a poor ^|s1inquisitioner inquisitor^s1|. He told Stephen very slily that when he and his clerical companions attended public lectures in the University the lecturer was shrewd enough to add a trifle of salt to his criticisms. Father Artifoni accepted the salt with a relish. He was unlike many of the citizens of the third Italy in his want of affection for the English and he was inclined to be lenient towards the audacities of his pupil, which, he supposed, must ^|1have^1| been the outcome
{ms, 785}
of too fervid Irishism. He was unable to associate audacity of thought with any temper but that of the irredentist.

Father Artifoni had to admit one day to Stephen that the most reprehensible moment of human delight in as much as it had given pleasure to a human being was good in the sight of God. The conversation had been about an Italian novel. A priest in the house had read the novel and condemned it to the dinner-table. It was bad, he said. Stephen urged that it had given him at least esthetic pleasure and that, for that reason, it could be said to be good:

— Father Byrne does not think so —

— But God? —

— For God it might be  .  .  . good —

— Then I prefer to side against Father Byrne —
They argued very acutely of the beautiful and the good. Stephen wished to amend or to clarify scholastic terminology: a contrast between the good and the beautiful was not necessary. Aquinas had defined the good as that towards the possession of which an appetite tended, the desirable. But the true and the beautiful were desirable, were the highest, most persistent orders of the desirable, truth being desired by the
{ms, 786}
intellectual ^|1appeased appetite^1| which was appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible, beauty being desired by the esthetic appetite appetite which was appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. Father Artifoni admired very much the whole-hearted manner in which Stephen vivified philosophic generalisations and encouraged the young man to write a treatise on esthetic. It must have been a surprise for him to find in such latitudes a young man who could not conceive a divorce between art and nature and that not for reasons of climate or temperament but for intellectual reasons. For Stephen art was neither a copy nor an imitation of nature: the artistic process was a natural process. In all his talk about artistic perfection it was impossible to deteuct detect an artificial accent. To talk about the perfection of one's art was not for him to talk about ^|1something^1| agreed upon as sublime but in reality no more than a sublime convention but rather to talk a veritably sublime process of one's nature which had a right to examination and open discussion.
{ms, 787}

It was exactly this vivid interest which kept him away from such places of uncomely dalliance as the debating society and the warmly cushioned sodality. Mr Moynihan's inaugural address was held in the Aula Maxima in November. The president took the chair, surrounded by his professors. The platform was given up to notabilities and the body of the hall to the irregular intellectuals who go from address to address during the winter season and never miss attendance at the theatre when the play is not played in English. The end of the hall was packed with the students of the college. Nine-tenths of them were very serious and nine-tenths of the remainder were serious at intervals. Before the paper was read Whelan received from the president a gold medal for oratory, and one of Mr Daniel's sons a silver medal for oratory. Mr Moynihan was in evening dress and the front of his hair was curled. The president clapped him when When he stood up to read his paper the president clapped him and then the hall clapped. Moynihan's paper showed that the true consoler
{ms, 788}
of the afflicted was not the self-seeking demagogue with his ignorance and lax morality but the Church and that the true way to better the lot of the working classes was not by teaching them to disbelieve in a spiritual and material order, working together in harmony, but by teaching them to follow ^|1in humility^1| the life of One who was the friend of all humanity, great and lowly, rich and poor, just and unjust, lettered and unlettered, of One who though above all other men was Himself the meekest of men. Moynihan alluded also to the strange death of a French atheistic writer and implied that Emmanuel had chosen to revenge himself on the unhappy gentleman by privily tampering with his gas-stove.

Among the speakers who followed Moynihan were a County Court Judge and a retired colonel of reactionary sympathies. All the speakers praised the work done by the Jesuits in training the youth of Ireland for the higher walks of life. The essayist of the night was adduced as an example. From his post beside Cranly in an angle of the hall Stephen glanced along the ranks of students. The faces which were now composed to seriousness all bore the same stamp
{ms, 789}
of Jesuit training. For the most part they were free from the more blatant crudities of youth; they were not without a certain inoffensive and genuine distaste for the vices of youth.º They admired Gladstone, physical science and the tragedies of Shakespeare: and they believed in the adjustment of Catholic teaching to everyday needs, in the Church diplomatic. Without displaying an English desire for an aristocracy of substance they held violent measures to be unseemly and in their relations among themselves and towards their superiors they displayed a nervous and (whenever there was question of authority) a very English liberalism. They respected spiritual and temporal authorities, the spiritual authorities of Catholicism and of patriotism, and the temporal authorities of the hierarchy and the government. The memory of Terence MacManus was not less revered by them than the memory of Cardinal Cullen. If the call to a larger and nobler life ever came to visit them they heard it with secret gladness but always they decided to defer their lives until a favourable moment because they felt unready. They listened to all
{ms, 790}
the speakers attentively and applauded whenever there was an allusion to the President, to Ireland or to the faith. Temple shambled into the hall in the middle of the proceedings and introduced a friend of his to Stephen:

— 'Scuse me, this is Fitz, decent fellow. He admires you. 'Scuse me for introducing him, decent fellow —
Stephen shook hands with Fitz, a grey-headed young man with a puzzled flushed face. Fitz and Temple stood against the wall for support as they were both a little unsteady. Fitz began to doze quietly.

— He's a revolutionist, said Temple to Stephen and Cranly. D'ye know what, Cranly, I believe you're a revolutionist too. Are you a revolutionist  .  .  .  .Ah, by hell, you don't like answering that  .  .  . I'm a revolutionist —
At this moment a speaker was applauded for mentioning the name of John Henry Newman.

— Who is he? said Temple to everyone near him, Who's this chap? —

— Colonel Russell —

— O, is this Colonel  .  .  . . . What did he say? What was he said? —
{ms, 791}

Nobody answered him so he shambled through a few more incoherent questions and at last, unable to satisfy himself as to the Colonel's way of thinking, called out “Hurrah for the Mad Mullah” and then asked Cranly did he not think the Colonel was a ‘bloody cod’.

Stephen studied even less regularly ^|1during^1| the second year than he had done during the first. He attended lectures oftener but he seldom went to the Library to read. The Vita Nuova of Dante suggested to him that he should make his scattered love-verses into a perfect wreath and he explained to Cranly at great length the difficulties of the verse-maker. His love-verses gave him pleasure: he wrote them at long intervals and when he wrote it was always a mature and reasoned emotion which urged him. But in his expressions of love he found himself compelled to use what he called the feudal terminology and as he could not use it with the same faith and purpose as animated the feudal poets themselves he was compelled to express his love ^|1a little^1| ironically. This suggestion of relativity, he said, mingling itself with so immune a passion is a modern note: we cannot swear or expect eternal fealty because we
{ms, 792}
recognise too accurately the limits of every human energy. It is not possible for the modern lover to think the universe an assistant at his love-affair and modern love, losing somewhat of its fierceness, gains also somewhat in amiableness. Cranly would not hear of this: for him a distinction between ancient and modern was a trick of words because he had in his own mind reduced past and present to a level of studious ignobility. Stephen tried to sustain against him that though humanity may not change beyond recognition during the short eras known as the ages of man yet these ages are the preys of different ideas in accordance with which every activity, even the least, which they engender is conceived and directed. The distinction, he argued, between the feudal spirit and the spirit of humanity at present is not a phrase of the men of letters. Cranly, like many cynical romanticists, held that the civil life affected in no way the individual life and that it was possible for men to preserve ancient superstitions and prejudices in the midst of a machinery of modernity, just as it was possible for a man to live in the medley of machines a liveº of
{ms, 793}
conformity and yet to be in his heart a rebel against the order he upheld: human nature was a constant quantity. As for the scheme of making a wreath of songs in praise of love he thought that if such a passion really existed it was incapable of being expressed.

— We are not likely to know whether it exists or not if no man tries to express it, said Stephen. We have nothing to test it by —

— What can you test if it by? said Cranly. ^|1Jesus The Church^1| says the test of friendship is to see if a man will lay down his life for a friend—

— You do not believe that, surely? —

— No; bloody fools of people will die for different things. McCann, for instance, would die out of sheer obstinacy —

— Renan says a man is a martyr only for things of which he is not quite sure —

— Men die for two sticks ^|1put^1| crosswise even in this modern age. What is a cross but two common sticks? —

— Love, said Stephen, is a name, if you like, for something inexpressible  .  .  . but no, I won't admit that  .  .  . I believe it might be a test of love to see what exchanges it offers. What do people give when they love? —

— A wedding breakfast, said Cranly —
{ms, 794}

— Their bodies, isn't it: that, at the very least. It is something to give one's body even for hire —

— Then you think that women who give their bodies for hire, as you say, love the people they give them to? —

— When we love, we give. In a way they love too. We give something, a tall hat or a book of music or one's time and labour or one's body, in exchange for love —

— I'd a damn sight sooner them women gave me a tall hat than their bodies —

— A matter of taste. You may like tall hats. I don't —

— My dear man, said Cranly, you know next to nothing about human nature —

— I know a few elementary things and I express them in words. I feel emotions and I express them in rhyming lines. Song is the simple rhythmic liberation of an emotion. Love can express itself in part through song —

— You idealise everything —

— You make me think of Hughes when you say that —

— You imagine that people are capable of all these   .  . all these this beautiful imaginary business. They're not. Look
{ms, 795}
at the girls you see every day. Do you think they would understand what you say about love? —

— I don't know really, said Stephen. I do not idealise the girls I see every day. I regard them as marsupials.   .  . But still I must express my nature —

— Write the verses, anyway, said Cranly —

— I feel rain, said Stephen stopping under a branch and waiting for the fall of raindrops —
Cranly stood beside him and watched his pose with an expression of bitter satisfaction on his face.

During his wanderings Stephen came on an old library in the midst of ^|1those^1| sluttish streets which are called old Dublin. The library had been founded by Archbishop Marsh and though it was open to the public few people seemed aware of its existence. The librarian was, delighted at the prospect of a reader, showed Stephen niches and nooks inhabited by dusty brown volumes. Stephen went there a few times in the week to read old Italian books of the Trecento. He had begun to be interested in Franciscan literature. He appreciated not without
{ms, 796}
pitiful feelings the legend of the mild heresiarch of Assisi. He knew, by instinct, that S. Francis' love-chains would not hold him very long but the Italian was very quaint. Elias and Joachim also relieved the naïf history. He had found on one of the carts of books near the river an unpublished book containing two stories by Mr WB Yeats. One of these stories was called The Tables of the Law and in it was mentioned the fabulous preface which Joachim, abbot of Flora, is said to have prefixed to his Eternal Gospel. This discovery, coming so aptly upon his own researches, induced him to follow his Franciscan studies with vigour. He went every Sunday evening to the church of the Capuchins whither he had once carried the disgraceful burden of his sins to be eased of it. He was not offended by the processions of artizans and labourers round the church and the sermons of the priests were grateful to him inasmuch as the speakers did not seem inclined to make much use of their rhetorical and elocutionary training nor anxious to reveal themselves, in theory, at least, men of the world. He thought,
{ms, 797}
in an Assisan mood, that these men might be nearer to his purpose than others: and one evening, while talking with a Capuchin, he had over and over to restrain an impulse which urged him to take the priest by the arm, lead him up and down the chapel-yard and deliver himself boldly of the whole story of the Tables of the Law, every word of which he remembered. Considering Stephen's general attitude towards the Church, there was certainly a profound infection in such an impulse which it needed great efforts of his intelligent partner to correct. He satisfied himself by leading Lynch round the enclosure of Stephen's Green and making that young man very awkward by reciting Mr Yeats's story with careful animation. Lynch said he didn't know what the story was about but, afterwards, when safely secluded in a ‘snug’ he said that the recitation had given him immense pleasure:

— These monks are worthy men, said Stephen —

— Full, round men, said Lynch —

— Worthy men. I went a few days ago to their library. I had great trouble getting in: all the monks came out of different corners to spy at me. Father ^|1Abbot Guardian^1| asked me what I wanted. Then he brought me in and gave himself a great deal of trouble going over books^|1, mind. Mind^1| you, he was a fat priest and he had just dined so he really was good-natured —

— Good worthy man —

— He didn't know in the least what I wanted or why I wanted it but he went up one page and down the next with his finger looking for the name and puffing and humming to himself “Jacopone, Jacopone, Jacopone, Jacopone”. Haven't I a sense of rhythm, eh? —

Stephen was still a lover of the deformations wrought by dusk. Late autumn and winter in Dublin are always seasons of damp gloomy weather. He went through the streets at night intoning phrases to himself. He repeated often the story of The Tables of the Law and the story of the Adoration of the Magi. The atmosphere of these stories was heavy with incense and omens and the figures of the monk-errants, Ahern and Michael
{ms, 799}
Robartes strode through it with great strides. Their speeches were like the enigmas of a disdainful Jesus; their morality ^|1was^1| infrahuman or superhuman: the ritual they laid such store by was so incoherent and heterogeneous, so strange a mixture of trivialities and sacred practices, that it could be recognised as the ritual of men who had received from the hands of ^|1high^1| priests, ^|1who had been anciently^1| guilty of some arrogance of the spirit, a confused and dehumanised tradition, a mysterious ordination. Civilisation may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws but the least ^|1protest^1| against the existing order is made by the outlaws whose creed and manner of life is not renewable even so far as to ^|1be^1| reactionary. These inhabit a church apart; they lift their thuribles wearily before their deserted altars; they live beyond the region of mortality, having chosen to fulfil the law of their being. A young man like Stephen in such a season of damp and unrest had has no pains to
{ms, 800}
believe in the reality of their existence. They lean pitifully above towards the earth, like vapours, desirous of sin, ^|1remembering the pride of their origin,^1| calling to others to come to them. Stephen was fondest of repeating to himself this beautiful passage from The Tables of the Law: Why do you fly from our torches which were made out of the wood of the trees under which Christ wept in the gardens of Gethsemane? Why do you fly from our torches which were made of sweet wood after it had vanished from the world and come to us who made it of old times with our breath —

A certain extravagance began to tinge his life. He was aware that, though he was nominally in amity with the order of society into which he had been born, he would not be able to continue so. The life of an errant seemed to him far less ignoble than the life of one who had accepted the tyranny of the mediocre because the cost of being exceptional was too high. The young generation which he saw growing up about him regarded his manifestations of spiritual activity as something
{ms, 801}
more than unseemly and he knew that, under their air of fearful amiableness, the representatives of authority cherished the hope that his unguided nature would bring him into ^|1such^1| a lamentable conflict with actuality that they would one day have the pleasure of receiving him officially into some hospital or asylum. This would have been no unusual end for the high emprise of youth often ^|1leads brings^1| one to premature senility and ^|1De Nerval's a poet's^1| boldness ^|1was is^1| certainly proved an ill keeper of promises when it induces him to lead a lobster unread by a bright blue ribbon along the p footpath reserved for the citizens. He felt acutely the insidious dangers which conceal themselves under the guise of extravagance but he was convinced also that a dull discharge of duties, neither understood nor congenial, was far more dangerous and far less satisfactory.

— The Church believes that in every act a man does he seeks some good, said Cranly. The publican wants to make money, Whelan wants to become
{ms, 802}
a County Court judge, that girl I saw you talking to yesterday —

— Miss Clery? —

— She wants a man and a little house to live h in. The missioner wants to make heathens into Christian, the librarian ^|1of the National Library^1| wants to make the Dublin people into students and readers. What goo I understand the good which these men seek but what do you seek? —

— The Church differentiates between the good which this man seeks and the good which I seek. There is a bonum simpliciter. The men you mention seek a good of that kind because they are impelled by direct passions which are direct even if they are menial: lust, ambition, gluttony. I seek a bonum arduum —

— It might be a bonum very much simpliciter. I don't think you know, said Cranly —
{ms, 803}

XXIII

About this time there was some agitation in the political world concerning the working of the Royal University. It was proposed to institute a commission to examine into the matter. The Jesuits were accused of working the machine for their own ends without a just sense of impartiality. To parry the charge of obscurantism a monthly review was started under the editorship of McCann. The new editor was in high spirits over this event.

— I have got nearly all the ‘copy’ for the first number, he said to Stephen. I'm sure it will be a success. I want you to write us something for the second number — but something we can understand. Condescend a little. You can't say we are such barbarians now: we have a paper of our own. We can express our views. You will write us something, won't you? We have an article by Hughes in this month —

— Of course there is a censor? said Stephen —

— Well, said McCann, the person who originated the idea of the paper in the first instance was Father Cummins —

— The director of your sodality? —

— Yes. He originated the idea so you see he
{ms, 804}
acts as a kind of sponsor to us —

— He is the Censor then? —

— He has discretionary powers but he is not at all narrow-minded. You needn't be afraid of him —

— I see. And tell me, will I be paid? —

— I thought you were an idealist, said McCann —

— Good luck to the paper, said Stephen waving his hand in adieu —

The first number of McCann's paper contained a long article by Hughes on The Future of the Celt. It contained also an article in Irish by Glynn's sister and an ^|1editorial^1| article by McCann in which was narrated the history of the inception of the paper. The article began “It was a happy thought of the director of our sodality to unite the various elements of our college life by affording them the opportunity of interchanging ideas and criticisms through the medium of a University magazine. Thanks to the zeal and enterprise of Father Cummins the initial difficulties have been surmounted and we make our bow to the public in the expectation that the public will give us a hearing” The paper also contained several pages of
{ms, 805}
notes from various sporting and intellectual societies in which celebrities were ‘chaffed’ under the thin disguise of their Latinised surnames. The ‘Medical Memos^|1, which^1| were signed “H₂O” ^|1and^1| consisted of several congratulatory paragraphs about medicoes who had passed their final examinations and a few complimentary paragraphs about the genial professors of the medical school. The paper also contained some verses: The Female Fellow: (a swallow-flight of song) which were signed “Toga Girilis”.

Stephen was shown the new review ^|1in the Library^1| by Cranly who seemed to have read it from the first line to the last. Cranly took his friend from one item to another with great persistence, paying no heed to Stephen's exclamations of impatience. At the “Medical Memoes” Stephen execrated with such smothered fervour that Cranly began to laugh between the pages of the paper and a red-faced priest who was sitting opposite stared indignantly across his copy of The Tablet. In the porch of the Library were a little knot
{ms, 806}
of young men and a little knot of young women, all provided with copies of the new review. All were laughing and talking, making the rain an excuse for lingering under shelter. McCann, brisk and heated with his cycling-cap sideways on his head, went to and fro between the groups. When he saw Stephen he approached with an air of expectancy.

— Well? Have you seen   .  .? —

— It is a great day for Ireland, said Stephen, seizing the Editor's hand and shaking it gravely —

— Well   .  . it is something, said McCann with a suffused forehead —

Stephen leaned against one of the stone pillars and regarded the farther group. She stood in a ring of her companions, laughing and talking with them. The anger ^|1with^1| which the new review had filled him gradually ebbed away and he chose to contemplate the spectacle which she and her companions offered him. As on his entrance into the grounds of Clonliffe College a sudden
{ms, 807}
sympathy arose out of a sudden reminiscence, a reminiscent sympathy toward a sheltered protected seminarist life the very virtues of which seemed to be set provokingly before the wild gaze of the world, so provokingly that only the strength of walls and watchdogs held them in a little circle of modish and timid ways. Though their affectations often lacked grace and their vulgarity wanted only lungs to be strident the rain brought him charity.º The babble of the young students reached him as if from a distance, in broken pulsations and lifting his eyes he saw the high rain-clouds retreating across the rain-swept ^|1country^1|. The quick light shower was over, tarrying, a cluster of diamonds, among the shrubs of the quadrangle where an exhalation ascended from the blackened earth. The company in the colonnade was leaving shelter, with many a doubting glance, with a prattle of trim boots, a pretty rescue of petticoats, under umbrellas, a light armoury, upheld at cunning
{ms, 808}
angles. He saw them returning to the convent — demure corridors and simple dormitories, a quiet rosary of hours — while the rain-clouds retreated towards the west and the babble of the young men reached him in regular pulsations. He saw far away amid a flat rain-swept country a high plain building with windows that filtered the obscure daylight. Three hundred boys, noisy and hungry, sat at long tables eating beef fringed with green fat like blubber and junks of white damp bread and one young boy, leaning upon his elbows, opened and closed the flaps of his ears while the noise of the diners reached him rhythmically as the wild gabble of animals.

— There should be an art of gesture, said Stephen one night to Cranly —

— Yes? —

— Of course I don't mean art of gesture in the sense that the elocution professor understands the word. For him a gesture is an emphasis. I mean a rhythm. You know the
{ms, 809}
song “Come unto these yellow sands”? —

— No —

— This is it, said the youth making a graceful anapaestic gesture with each arm. That's the rhythm, do you see? —

— Yes —

— I would like to go out into Grafton St some day and make gestures in the middle of the street —

— I'd like to see that —

— There is no reason why life should lose all grace and nobility even though Columbus discovered America. I will live a free and noble life —

— Yes? —

— My art will proceed from a free and noble source. It is too troublesome for me to adopt the manners of these slaves. I refuse to be terrorised into stupidity. Do you believe that one line of verse can immortalise a man? —

— Why not one word? —

— ‘Sitio’ is a classical cry. Try ^|1and to^1| improve on it —

— Do you think that Jesus when he hung on the cross appreciated what you would call the rhythm of that remark? Do you think
{ms, 810}
that Shakespeare when he wrote a song went out into the street to make gestures for the people? —

— It is evident that Jesus was unable to illustrate his remark by a correspondingly magnificent gesture but I do not imagine he uttered it in a matter-of-fact voice. Jesus had a very pure tragic manner: his conduct during his trial was admirable. Do you imagine the Church could have erected such elaborately artistic sacraments about his legend unless the original figure had been one of a certain tragic majesty? —

— And Shakespeare    . .? —

— I don't believe he wanted to go out into the street but I am sure he appreciated his own music. I don't believe that beauty is fortuitous. A man might think for seven years at intervals and all at once write a quatrain which would immortalise ^|1him^1| seemingly without thought or care — seemingly. Then the groundling will say: “O, he could write poetry”: and if I ask “ ^|1how How^1| was that?” the groundling will answer “Well, he just wrote it, that's all” —

— In my opinion you imagine all this about rhythm and gesture. A poet
{ms, 811}
according to you, is a terribly mixed-up fellow —

— The reason you say that is because you have never seen a poet in action before —

— How do you know that? —

— You think my theorising very high-flown and fantastical, don't you? —

— Yes, I do —

— Well, I tell you you think me fantastical simply because I am modern —

— My dear man, that's rubbish. You're always talking about “modern”. Have you any idea of the age of the earth? You say you're emancipatedº but, in my opinion, you haven't got beyond the first book of Genesis yet. There is no such thing as “modern” or “ancient”: it's all the same —

— What's all the same? —

— Ancient and modern —

— O, yes, I know, everything is the same as everything else. Of course I know the word “modern” is only a word. But when I use it I use it with a certain meaning —

— What do you mean, for instance? —

— The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection itself is the ^|1most^1| modern process one can conceive. The ancient spirit
{ms, 812}
accepted phenomena with a bad grace. The ancient method investigated law with the lantern of justice, morality with the lantern of revelation, art with the lantern of tradition. But all these lanterns have magical properties: they transform and disfigure. The modern method examines its territory by the light of day. Italy has added a science to civilisation by putting out the lantern of justice and considering the criminal in ^|1action production^1| and in action. All modern political and religious criticism dispenses with presumptive States ^|1and,^1| presumptive Redeemers and Churches^|1. It* examines the entire community in action and reconstructs the spectacle of redemption. If you were an esthetic philosopher you would take note of all my vagaries because here you have the spectacle of the esthetic instinct in action. The philosophic college should spare a detective for me —

— It is absurd that I should go crawling and cringing and praying and begging to mummers who are themselves no more than beggars. Can we not root this pest out of our minds and out of our society that men may be able to walk through the streets without meeting some old stale belief or hypocrisy at every street corner? I, at least, will try. I will not accept anything from them. I will not take service under them. I will not submit to them,
{ms, 901}
either outwardly or inwardly. A Church is not a fixture like Gibraltar: no more is an institution. Subtract its human members from it and its solidity becomes less evident. I, at least, will subtract myself: and remember that if we allow a dozen for one's progeny the subtraction of oneself may mean a loss to the Church of 12ⁿ members —

— Aren't you rather liberal about the progeny? said Lynch —

— Did I tell you I met Father Healy this evening? asked Stephen —

— No, where? —

— I was walking along the Canal with my Danish grammar (because I am going to study it properly now   . I'll tell you why later on) and whom should I meet but this little man. He was walking right into the golden sunset: all his creases and wrinklesº were scattered with gold. He looked at my book and said it was very interesting: he thought it must
{ms, 902}
be so interesting to know and compare the different languages. Then he looked far away into the golden sun and all of a sudden — imagine! — his mouth opened and he gave a slow, noiseless yawn    . . Do you know you get a kind of shock when a man does a thing like that unexpectedly? —

— He'll have something to do shortly, said Lynch pointing to a little group which was laughing and chatting in the doorway, and that'll keep him from walking in his sleep —

Stephen glanced over at the group. Emma and Moynihan and McCann and two of the Miss Daniels were evidently in high spirits.

— Yes, I suppose she will do it legitimately one of these days, said ^|1Lynch Stephen^1| —

— I was talking of the other pair, said Lynch —

— O, McCann    . . She is nothing to me now, you know —

— I don't believe that, let me tell you —

[MANUSCRIPT ENDS HERE]