








Chapter V


He drained his third cup of watery tea to the dregs and set to chewing
the crusts of fried bread that were scattered near him, staring into
the dark pool of the jar. The yellow dripping had been scooped out like
a boghole and the pool under it brought back to his memory the dark
turfcoloured water of the bath in Clongowes. The box of pawn tickets at
his elbow had just been rifled and he took up idly one after another in
his greasy fingers the blue and white dockets, scrawled and sanded and
creased and bearing the name of the pledger as Daly or MacEvoy.


  1 Pair Buskins.
  1 D. Coat.
  3 Articles and White.
  1 Mans Pants.


Then he put them aside and gazed thoughtfully at the lid of the box,
speckled with louse marks, and asked vaguely:

How much is the clock fast now?

His mother straightened the battered alarm clock that was lying on its
side in the middle of the mantelpiece until its dial showed a quarter
to twelve and then laid it once more on its side.

An hour and twenty-five minutes, she said. The right time now is
twenty past ten. The dear knows you might try to be in time for your
lectures.

Fill out the place for me to wash, said Stephen.

Katey, fill out the place for Stephen to wash.

Boody, fill out the place for Stephen to wash.

I cant, Im going for blue. Fill it out, you, Maggy.

When the enamelled basin had been fitted into the well of the sink and
the old washing glove flung on the side of it he allowed his mother to
scrub his neck and root into the folds of his ears and into the
interstices at the wings of his nose.

Well, its a poor case, she said, when a university student is so
dirty that his mother has to wash him.

But it gives you pleasure, said Stephen calmly.

An ear-splitting whistle was heard from upstairs and his mother thrust
a damp overall into his hands, saying:

Dry yourself and hurry out for the love of goodness.

A second shrill whistle, prolonged angrily, brought one of the girls to
the foot of the staircase.

Yes, father?

Is your lazy bitch of a brother gone out yet?

Yes, father.

Sure?

Yes, father.

Hm!

The girl came back, making signs to him to be quick and go out quietly
by the back. Stephen laughed and said:

He has a curious idea of genders if he thinks a bitch is masculine.

Ah, its a scandalous shame for you, Stephen, said his mother, and
youll live to rue the day you set your foot in that place. I know how
it has changed you.

Good morning, everybody, said Stephen, smiling and kissing the tips of
his fingers in adieu.

The lane behind the terrace was waterlogged and as he went down it
slowly, choosing his steps amid heaps of wet rubbish, he heard a mad
nun screeching in the nuns madhouse beyond the wall.

Jesus! O Jesus! Jesus!

He shook the sound out of his ears by an angry toss of his head and
hurried on, stumbling through the mouldering offal, his heart already
bitten by an ache of loathing and bitterness. His fathers whistle, his
mothers mutterings, the screech of an unseen maniac were to him now so
many voices offending and threatening to humble the pride of his youth.
He drove their echoes even out of his heart with an execration; but, as
he walked down the avenue and felt the grey morning light falling about
him through the dripping trees and smelt the strange wild smell of the
wet leaves and bark, his soul was loosed of her miseries.

The rainladen trees of the avenue evoked in him, as always, memories of
the girls and women in the plays of Gerhart Hauptmann; and the memory
of their pale sorrows and the fragrance falling from the wet branches
mingled in a mood of quiet joy. His morning walk across the city had
begun, and he foreknew that as he passed the sloblands of Fairview he
would think of the cloistral silverveined prose of Newman; that as he
walked along the North Strand Road, glancing idly at the windows of the
provision shops, he would recall the dark humour of Guido Cavalcanti
and smile; that as he went by Bairds stonecutting works in Talbot
Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a
spirit of wayward boyish beauty; and that passing a grimy marine
dealers shop beyond the Liffey he would repeat the song by Ben Jonson
which begins:

    I was not wearier where I lay.


His mind when wearied of its search for the essence of beauty amid the
spectral words of Aristotle or Aquinas turned often for its pleasure to
the dainty songs of the Elizabethans. His mind, in the vesture of a
doubting monk, stood often in shadow under the windows of that age, to
hear the grave and mocking music of the lutenists or the frank laughter
of waistcoateers until a laugh too low, a phrase, tarnished by time, of
chambering and false honour stung his monkish pride and drove him on
from his lurking-place.

The lore which he was believed to pass his days brooding upon so that
it had rapt him from the companionship of youth was only a garner of
slender sentences from Aristotles poetics and psychology and a
Synopsis Philosophi Scholastic ad mentem divi Thom. His thinking
was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust, lit up at moments by the
lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in
those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been
fireconsumed; and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes
of others with unanswering eyes, for he felt that the spirit of beauty
had folded him round like a mantle and that in reverie at least he had
been acquainted with nobility. But when this brief pride of silence
upheld him no longer he was glad to find himself still in the midst of
common lives, passing on his way amid the squalor and noise and sloth
of the city fearlessly and with a light heart.

Near the hoardings on the canal he met the consumptive man with the
dolls face and the brimless hat coming towards him down the slope of
the bridge with little steps, tightly buttoned into his chocolate
overcoat, and holding his furled umbrella a span or two from him like a
divining rod. It must be eleven, he thought, and peered into a dairy to
see the time. The clock in the dairy told him that it was five minutes
to five but, as he turned away, he heard a clock somewhere near him,
but unseen, beating eleven strokes in swift precision. He laughed as he
heard it for it made him think of MacCann; and he saw him a squat figure
in a shooting jacket and breeches and with a fair goatee, standing in
the wind at Hopkins corner, and heard him say:

Dedalus, youre an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself. Im not.
Im a democrat and Ill work and act for social liberty and equality
among all classes and sexes in the United States of the Europe of the
future.

Eleven! Then he was late for that lecture too. What day of the week was
it? He stopped at a newsagents to read the headline of a placard.
Thursday. Ten to eleven, English; eleven to twelve, French; twelve to
one, physics. He fancied to himself the English lecture and felt, even
at that distance, restless and helpless. He saw the heads of his
classmates meekly bent as they wrote in their notebooks the points they
were bidden to note, nominal definitions, essential definitions and
examples or dates of birth or death, chief works, a favourable and an
unfavourable criticism side by side. His own head was unbent for his
thoughts wandered abroad and whether he looked around the little class
of students or out of the window across the desolate gardens of the
green an odour assailed him of cheerless cellardamp and decay. Another
head than his, right before him in the first benches, was poised
squarely above its bending fellows like the head of a priest appealing
without humility to the tabernacle for the humble worshippers about
him. Why was it that when he thought of Cranly he could never raise
before his mind the entire image of his body but only the image of the
head and face? Even now against the grey curtain of the morning he saw
it before him like the phantom of a dream, the face of a severed head
or death mask, crowned on the brows by its stiff black upright hair as
by an iron crown. It was a priestlike face, priestlike in its pallor,
in the wide winged nose, in the shadowings below the eyes and along the
jaws, priestlike in the lips that were long and bloodless and faintly
smiling; and Stephen, remembering swiftly how he had told Cranly of all
the tumults and unrest and longings in his soul, day after day and
night by night, only to be answered by his friends listening silence,
would have told himself that it was the face of a guilty priest who
heard confessions of those whom he had not power to absolve but that he
felt again in memory the gaze of its dark womanish eyes.

Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of
speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not
yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friends
listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and
deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to
another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so
silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend
bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up
sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead
language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain
and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and
disband themselves in wayward rhythms:

    The ivy whines upon the wall,
    And whines and twines upon the wall,
    The yellow ivy upon the wall,
    Ivy, ivy up the wall.


Did anyone ever hear such drivel? Lord Almighty! Who ever heard of ivy
whining on a wall? Yellow ivy; that was all right. Yellow ivory also.
And what about ivory ivy?

The word now shone in his brain, clearer and brighter than any ivory
sawn from the mottled tusks of elephants. Ivory, ivoire, avorio,
ebur. One of the first examples that he had learnt in Latin had run:
India mittit ebur; and he recalled the shrewd northern face of the
rector who had taught him to construe the Metamorphoses of Ovid in a
courtly English, made whimsical by the mention of porkers and potsherds
and chines of bacon. He had learnt what little he knew of the laws of
Latin verse from a ragged book written by a Portuguese priest.

    Contrahit orator, variant in carmine vates.


The crises and victories and secessions in Roman history were handed on
to him in the trite words in tanto discrimine and he had tried to
peer into the social life of the city of cities through the words
implere ollam denariorum which the rector had rendered sonorously as
the filling of a pot with denaries. The pages of his timeworn Horace
never felt cold to the touch even when his own fingers were cold; they
were human pages and fifty years before they had been turned by the
human fingers of John Duncan Inverarity and by his brother, William
Malcolm Inverarity. Yes, those were noble names on the dusky flyleaf
and, even for so poor a Latinist as he, the dusky verses were as
fragrant as though they had lain all those years in myrtle and lavender
and vervain; but yet it wounded him to think that he would never be but
a shy guest at the feast of the worlds culture and that the monkish
learning, in terms of which he was striving to forge out an esthetic
philosophy, was held no higher by the age he lived in than the subtle
and curious jargons of heraldry and falconry.

The grey block of Trinity on his left, set heavily in the citys
ignorance like a dull stone set in a cumbrous ring, pulled his mind
downward and while he was striving this way and that to free his feet
from the fetters of the reformed conscience he came upon the droll
statue of the national poet of Ireland.

He looked at it without anger; for, though sloth of the body and of the
soul crept over it like unseen vermin, over the shuffling feet and up
the folds of the cloak and around the servile head, it seemed humbly
conscious of its indignity. It was a Firbolg in the borrowed cloak of a
Milesian; and he thought of his friend Davin, the peasant student. It
was a jesting name between them, but the young peasant bore with it
lightly:

Go on, Stevie, I have a hard head, you tell me. Call me what you will.

The homely version of his christian name on the lips of his friend had
touched Stephen pleasantly when first heard for he was as formal in
speech with others as they were with him. Often, as he sat in Davins
rooms in Grantham Street, wondering at his friends well-made boots
that flanked the wall pair by pair and repeating for his friends
simple ear the verses and cadences of others which were the veils of
his own longing and dejection, the rude Firbolg mind of his listener
had drawn his mind towards it and flung it back again, drawing it by a
quiet inbred courtesy of attention or by a quaint turn of old English
speech or by the force of its delight in rude bodily skillfor Davin
had sat at the feet of Michael Cusack, the Gaelrepelling swiftly and
suddenly by a grossness of intelligence or by a bluntness of feeling or
by a dull stare of terror in the eyes, the terror of soul of a starving
Irish village in which the curfew was still a nightly fear.

Side by side with his memory of the deeds of prowess of his uncle Mat
Davin, the athlete, the young peasant worshipped the sorrowful legend
of Ireland. The gossip of his fellow-students which strove to render
the flat life of the college significant at any cost loved to think of
him as a young fenian. His nurse had taught him Irish and shaped his
rude imagination by the broken lights of Irish myth. He stood towards
the myth upon which no individual mind had ever drawn out a line of
beauty and to its unwieldy tales that divided  themselves as they moved
down the cycles in the same attitude as towards the Roman catholic
religion, the attitude of a dullwitted loyal serf. Whatsoever of
thought or of feeling came to him from England or by way of English
culture his mind stood armed against in obedience to a password; and of
the world that lay beyond England he knew only the foreign legion of
France in which he spoke of serving.

Coupling this ambition with the young mans humour Stephen had often
called him one of the tame geese and there was even a point of
irritation in the name pointed against that very reluctance of speech
and deed in his friend which seemed so often to stand between Stephens
mind, eager of speculation, and the hidden ways of Irish life.

One night the young peasant, his spirit stung by the violent or
luxurious language in which Stephen escaped from the cold silence of
intellectual revolt, had called up before Stephens mind a strange
vision. The two were walking slowly towards Davins rooms through the
dark narrow streets of the poorer jews.

A thing happened to myself, Stevie, last autumn, coming on winter, and
I never told it to a living soul and you are the first person now I
ever told it to. I disremember if it was October or November. It was
October because it was before I came up here to join the matriculation
class.

Stephen had turned his smiling eyes towards his friends face,
flattered by his confidence and won over to sympathy by the speakers
simple accent.

I was away all that day from my own place over in ButtevantI dont
know if you know where that isat a hurling match between the Crokes
Own Boys and the Fearless Thurles and by God, Stevie, that was the hard
fight. My first cousin, Fonsy Davin, was stripped to his buff that day
minding cool for the Limericks but he was up with the forwards half the
time and shouting like mad. I never will forget that day. One of the
Crokes made a woeful wipe at him one time with his caman and I declare
to God he was within an aims ace of getting it at the side of his
temple. Oh, honest to God, if the crook of it caught him that time he
was done for.

I am glad he escaped, Stephen had said with a laugh, but surely thats
not the strange thing that happened you?

Well, I suppose that doesnt interest you, but leastways there was
such noise after the match that I missed the train home and I couldnt
get any kind of a yoke to give me a lift for, as luck would have it,
there was a mass meeting that same day over in Castletownroche and all
the cars in the country were there. So there was nothing for it only to
stay the night or to foot it out. Well, I started to walk and on I went
and it was coming on night when I got into the Ballyhoura hills, thats
better than ten miles from Kilmallock and theres a long lonely road
after that. You wouldnt see the sign of a christian house along the
road or hear a sound. It was pitch dark almost. Once or twice I stopped
by the way under a bush to redden my pipe and only for the dew was
thick Id have stretched out there and slept. At last, after a bend of
the road, I spied a little cottage with a light in the window. I went
up and knocked at the door. A voice asked who was there and I answered
I was over at the match in Buttevant and was walking back and that Id
be thankful for a glass of water. After a while a young woman opened
the door and brought me out a big mug of milk. She was half undressed
as if she was going to bed when I knocked and she had her hair hanging
and I thought by her figure and by something in the look of her eyes
that she must be carrying a child. She kept me in talk a long while at
the door and I thought it strange because her breast and her shoulders
were bare. She asked me was I tired and would I like to stop the night
there. She said she was all alone in the house and that her husband had
gone that morning to Queenstown with his sister to see her off. And all
the time she was talking, Stevie, she had her eyes fixed on my face and
she stood so close to me I could hear her breathing. When I handed her
back the mug at last she took my hand to draw me in over the threshold
and said: Come in and stay the night here. Youve no call to be
frightened. Theres no one in it but ourselves.... I didnt go in,
Stevie. I thanked her and went on my way again, all in a fever. At the
first bend of the road I looked back and she was standing at the door.

The last words of Davins story sang in his memory and the figure of
the woman in the story stood forth reflected in other figures of the
peasant women whom he had seen standing in the doorways at Clane as the
college cars drove by, as a type of her race and of his own, a batlike
soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and
loneliness and, through the eyes and voice and gesture of a woman
without guile, calling the stranger to her bed.

A hand was laid on his arm and a young voice cried:

Ah, gentleman, your own girl, sir! The first handsel today, gentleman.
Buy that lovely bunch. Will you, gentleman?

The blue flowers which she lifted towards him and her young blue eyes
seemed to him at that instant images of guilelessness, and he halted
till the image had vanished and he saw only her ragged dress and damp
coarse hair and hoydenish face.

Do, gentleman! Dont forget your own girl, sir!

I have no money, said Stephen.

Buy them lovely ones, will you, sir? Only a penny.

Did you hear what I said? asked Stephen, bending towards her. I told
you I had no money. I tell you again now.

Well, sure, you will some day, sir, please God, the girl answered
after an instant.

Possibly, said Stephen, but I dont think it likely.

He left her quickly, fearing that her intimacy might turn to gibing and
wishing to be out of the way before she offered her ware to another, a
tourist from England or a student of Trinity. Grafton Street, along
which he walked, prolonged that moment of discouraged poverty. In the
roadway at the head of the street a slab was set to the memory of Wolfe
Tone and he remembered having been present with his father at its
laying. He remembered with bitterness that scene of tawdry tribute.
There were four French delegates in a brake and one, a plump smiling
young man, held, wedged on a stick, a card on which were printed the
words: Vive lIrlande!

But the trees in Stephens Green were fragrant of rain and the
rainsodden earth gave forth its mortal odour, a faint incense rising
upward through the mould from many hearts. The soul of the gallant
venal city which his elders had told him of had shrunk with time to a
faint mortal odour rising from the earth and he knew that in a moment
when he entered the sombre college he would be conscious of a
corruption other than that of Buck Egan and Burnchapel Whaley.

It was too late to go upstairs to the French class. He crossed the hall
and took the corridor to the left which led to the physics theatre. The
corridor was dark and silent but not unwatchful. Why did he feel that
it was not unwatchful? Was it because he had heard that in Buck
Whaleys time there was a secret staircase there? Or was the jesuit
house extra-territorial and was he walking among aliens? The Ireland of
Tone and of Parnell seemed to have receded in space.

He opened the door of the theatre and halted in the chilly grey light
that struggled through the dusty windows. A figure was crouching before
the large grate and by its leanness and greyness he knew that it was
the dean of studies lighting the fire. Stephen closed the door quietly
and approached the fireplace.

Good morning, sir! Can I help you?

The priest looked up quickly and said:

One moment now, Mr Dedalus, and you will see. There is an art in
lighting a fire. We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts.
This is one of the useful arts.

I will try to learn it, said Stephen.

Not too much coal, said the dean, working briskly at his task, that is
one of the secrets.

He produced four candle-butts from the sidepockets of his soutane and
placed them deftly among the coals and twisted papers. Stephen watched
him in silence. Kneeling thus on the flagstone to kindle the fire and
busied with the disposition of his wisps of paper and candle-butts he
seemed more than ever a humble server making ready the place of
sacrifice in an empty temple, a levite of the Lord. Like a levites
robe of plain linen the faded worn soutane draped the kneeling figure
of one whom the canonicals or the bellbordered ephod would irk and
trouble. His very body had waxed old in lowly service of the Lordin
tending the fire upon the altar, in bearing tidings secretly, in
waiting upon worldlings, in striking swiftly when biddenand yet had
remained ungraced by aught of saintly or of prelatic beauty. Nay, his
very soul had waxed old in that service without growing towards light
and beauty or spreading abroad a sweet odour of her sanctitya
mortified will no more responsive to the thrill of its obedience than
was to the thrill of love or combat his ageing body, spare and sinewy,
greyed with a silver-pointed down.

The dean rested back on his hunkers and watched the sticks catch.
Stephen, to fill the silence, said:

I am sure I could not light a fire.

You are an artist, are you not, Mr Dedalus? said the dean, glancing up
and blinking his pale eyes. The object of the artist is the creation of
the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.

He rubbed his hands slowly and drily over the difficulty.

Can you solve that question now? he asked.

Aquinas, answered Stephen, says pulcra sunt qu visa placent.

This fire before us, said the dean, will be pleasing to the eye. Will
it therefore be beautiful?

In so far as it is apprehended by the sight, which I suppose means
here esthetic intellection, it will be beautiful. But Aquinas also says
Bonum est in quod tendit appetitus. In so far as it satisfies the
animal craving for warmth fire is a good. In hell, however, it is an
evil.

Quite so, said the dean, you have certainly hit the nail on the head.

He rose nimbly and went towards the door, set it ajar and said:

A draught is said to be a help in these matters.

As he came back to the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step,
Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at him from the pale
loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no
spark of Ignatius enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the company,
a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled books of secret subtle
wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of apostleship. It
seemed as if he used the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as
bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, without joy in their
handling or hatred of that in them which was evil but turning them,
with a firm gesture of obedience back upon themselves and for all this
silent service it seemed as if he loved not at all the master and
little, if at all, the ends he served. Similiter atque senis baculus,
he was, as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old mans
hand, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather,
to lie with a ladys nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace.

The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin.

When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic
question? he asked.

From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a
fortnight if I am lucky.

These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is
like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go
down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go
down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.

If you mean speculation, sir, said Stephen, I also am sure that there
is no such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be
bound by its own laws.

Ha!

For my purpose I can work on at present by the light of one or two
ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas.

I see. I quite see your point.

I need them only for my own use and guidance until I have done
something for myself by their light. If the lamp smokes or smells I
shall try to trim it. If it does not give light enough I shall sell it
and buy another.

Epictetus also had a lamp, said the dean, which was sold for a fancy
price after his death. It was the lamp he wrote his philosophical
dissertations by. You know Epictetus?

An old gentleman, said Stephen coarsely, who said that the soul is
very like a bucketful of water.

He tells us in his homely way, the dean went on, that he put an iron
lamp before a statue of one of the gods and that a thief stole the
lamp. What did the philosopher do? He reflected that it was in the
character of a thief to steal and determined to buy an earthen lamp
next day instead of the iron lamp.

A smell of molten tallow came up from the deans candle butts and fused
itself in Stephens consciousness with the jingle of the words, bucket
and lamp and lamp and bucket. The priests voice, too, had a hard
jingling tone. Stephens mind halted by instinct, checked by the
strange tone and the imagery and by the priests face which seemed like
an unlit lamp or a reflector hung in a false focus. What lay behind it
or within it? A dull torpor of the soul or the dullness of the
thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of
God?

I meant a different kind of lamp, sir, said Stephen.

Undoubtedly, said the dean.

One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know
whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or
according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of
Newmans in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained
in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the
marketplace is quite different. I hope I am not detaining you.

Not in the least, said the dean politely.

No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean...

Yes, yes; I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point:
detain.

He thrust forward his under jaw and uttered a dry short cough.

To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice
problem. You must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you
pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can
hold.

What funnel? asked Stephen.

The funnel through which you pour the oil into your lamp.

That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish?

What is a tundish?

That. The... the funnel.

Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the
word in my life.

It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen, laughing,
where they speak the best English.

A tundish, said the dean reflectively. That is a most interesting
word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must.

His courtesy of manner rang a little false and Stephen looked at the
English convert with the same eyes as the elder brother in the parable
may have turned on the prodigal. A humble follower in the wake of
clamorous conversions, a poor Englishman in Ireland, he seemed to have
entered on the stage of jesuit history when that strange play of
intrigue and suffering and envy and struggle and indignity had been all
but given througha latecomer, a tardy spirit. From what had he set
out? Perhaps he had been born and bred among serious dissenters, seeing
salvation in Jesus only and abhorring the vain pomps of the
establishment. Had he felt the need of an implicit faith amid the
welter of sectarianism and the jargon of its turbulent schisms, six
principle men, peculiar people, seed and snake baptists, supralapsarian
dogmatists? Had he found the true church all of a sudden in winding up
to the end like a reel of cotton some finespun line of reasoning upon
insufflation on the imposition of hands or the procession of the Holy
Ghost? Or had Lord Christ touched him and bidden him follow, like that
disciple who had sat at the receipt of custom, as he sat by the door of
some zincroofed chapel, yawning and telling over his church pence?

The dean repeated the word yet again.

Tundish! Well now, that is interesting!

The question you asked me a moment ago seems to me more interesting.
What is that beauty which the artist struggles to express from lumps of
earth, said Stephen coldly.

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his
sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a
smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a
countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How
different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on
mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His
language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired
speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at
bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

And to distinguish between the beautiful and the sublime, the dean
added, to distinguish between moral beauty and material beauty. And to
inquire what kind of beauty is proper to each of the various arts.
These are some interesting points we might take up.

Stephen, disheartened suddenly by the deans firm, dry tone, was
silent; and through the silence a distant noise of many boots and
confused voices came up the staircase.

In pursuing these speculations, said the dean conclusively, there is,
however, the danger of perishing of inanition. First you must take your
degree. Set that before you as your first aim. Then, little by little,
you will see your way. I mean in every sense, your way in life and in
thinking. It may be uphill pedalling at first. Take Mr Moonan. He was a
long time before he got to the top. But he got there.

I may not have his talent, said Stephen quietly.

You never know, said the dean brightly. We never can say what is in
us. I most certainly should not be despondent. Per aspera ad astra.

He left the hearth quickly and went towards the landing to oversee the
arrival of the first arts class.

Leaning against the fireplace Stephen heard him greet briskly and
impartially every student of the class and could almost see the frank
smiles of the coarser students. A desolating pity began to fall like
dew upon his easily embittered heart for this faithful servingman of
the knightly Loyola, for this halfbrother of the clergy, more venal
than they in speech, more steadfast of soul than they, one whom he
would never call his ghostly father; and he thought how this man and
his companions had earned the name of worldlings at the hands not of
the unworldly only but of the worldly also for having pleaded, during
all their history, at the bar of Gods justice for the souls of the lax
and the lukewarm and the prudent.

The entry of the professor was signalled by a few rounds of Kentish
fire from the heavy boots of those students who sat on the highest tier
of the gloomy theatre under the grey cobwebbed windows. The calling of
the roll began and the responses to the names were given out in all
tones until the name of Peter Byrne was reached.

Here!

A deep bass note in response came from the upper tier, followed by
coughs of protest along the other benches.

The professor paused in his reading and called the next name:

Cranly!

No answer.

Mr Cranly!

A smile flew across Stephens face as he thought of his friends
studies.

Try Leopardstown! said a voice from the bench behind.

Stephen glanced up quickly but Moynihans snoutish face, outlined on
the grey light, was impassive. A formula was given out. Amid the
rustling of the notebooks Stephen turned back again and said:

Give me some paper for Gods sake.

Are you as bad as that? asked Moynihan with a broad grin.

He tore a sheet from his scribbler and passed it down, whispering:

In case of necessity any layman or woman can do it.

The formula which he wrote obediently on the sheet of paper, the
coiling and uncoiling calculations of the professor, the spectrelike
symbols of force and velocity fascinated and jaded Stephens mind. He
had heard some say that the old professor was an atheist freemason. O
the grey dull day! It seemed a limbo of painless patient consciousness
through which souls of mathematicians might wander, projecting long
slender fabrics from plane to plane of ever rarer and paler twilight,
radiating swift eddies to the last verges of a universe ever vaster,
farther and more impalpable.

So we must distinguish between elliptical and ellipsoidal. Perhaps
some of you gentlemen may be familiar with the works of Mr W. S.
Gilbert. In one of his songs he speaks of the billiard sharp who is
condemned to play:

    On a cloth untrue
    With a twisted cue
    And elliptical billiard balls.


He means a ball having the form of the ellipsoid of the principal axes
of which I spoke a moment ago.

Moynihan leaned down towards Stephens ear and murmured:

What price ellipsoidal balls! chase me, ladies, Im in the cavalry!

His fellow students rude humour ran like a gust through the cloister
of Stephens mind, shaking into gay life limp priestly vestments that
hung upon the walls, setting them to sway and caper in a sabbath of
misrule. The forms of the community emerged from the gust-blown
vestments, the dean of studies, the portly florid bursar with his cap
of grey hair, the president, the little priest with feathery hair who
wrote devout verses, the squat peasant form of the professor of
economics, the tall form of the young professor of mental science
discussing on the landing a case of conscience with his class like a
giraffe cropping high leafage among a herd of antelopes, the grave
troubled prefect of the sodality, the plump roundheaded professor of
Italian with his rogues eyes. They came ambling and stumbling,
tumbling and capering, kilting their gowns for leap frog, holding one
another back, shaken with deep false laughter, smacking one another
behind and laughing at their rude malice, calling to one another by
familiar nicknames, protesting with sudden dignity at some rough usage,
whispering two and two behind their hands.

The professor had gone to the glass cases on the sidewall, from a shelf
of which he took down a set of coils, blew away the dust from many
points and, bearing it carefully to the table, held a finger on it
while he proceeded with his lecture. He explained that the wires in
modern coils were of a compound called platinoid lately discovered by
F. W. Martino.

He spoke clearly the initials and surname of the discoverer. Moynihan
whispered from behind:

Good old Fresh Water Martin!

Ask him, Stephen whispered back with weary humour, if he wants a
subject for electrocution. He can have me.

Moynihan, seeing the professor bend over the coils, rose in his bench
and, clacking noiselessly the fingers of his right hand, began to call
with the voice of a slobbering urchin:

Please teacher! This boy is after saying a bad word, teacher.

Platinoid, the professor said solemnly, is preferred to German silver
because it has a lower coefficient of resistance by changes of
temperature. The platinoid wire is insulated and the covering of silk
that insulates it is wound on the ebonite bobbins just where my finger
is. If it were wound single an extra current would be induced in the
coils. The bobbins are saturated in hot paraffin wax...

A sharp Ulster voice said from the bench below Stephen:

Are we likely to be asked questions on applied science?

The professor began to juggle gravely with the terms pure science and
applied science. A heavybuilt student, wearing gold spectacles, stared
with some wonder at the questioner. Moynihan murmured from behind in
his natural voice:

Isnt MacAlister a devil for his pound of flesh?

Stephen looked coldly on the oblong skull beneath him overgrown with
tangled twinecoloured hair. The voice, the accent, the mind of the
questioner offended him and he allowed the offence to carry him towards
wilful unkindness, bidding his mind think that the students father
would have done better had he sent his son to Belfast to study and have
saved something on the train fare by so doing.

The oblong skull beneath did not turn to meet this shaft of thought and
yet the shaft came back to its bowstring; for he saw in a moment the
students whey-pale face.

That thought is not mine, he said to himself quickly. It came from the
comic Irishman in the bench behind. Patience. Can you say with
certitude by whom the soul of your race was bartered and its elect
betrayedby the questioner or by the mocker? Patience. Remember
Epictetus. It is probably in his character to ask such a question at
such a moment in such a tone and to pronounce the word science as a
monosyllable.

The droning voice of the professor continued to wind itself slowly
round and round the coils it spoke of, doubling, trebling, quadrupling
its somnolent energy as the coil multiplied its ohms of resistance.

Moynihans voice called from behind in echo to a distant bell:

Closing time, gents!

The entrance hall was crowded and loud with talk. On a table near the
door were two photographs in frames and between them a long roll of
paper bearing an irregular tail of signatures. MacCann went briskly to
and fro among the students, talking rapidly, answering rebuffs and
leading one after another to the table. In the inner hall the dean of
studies stood talking to a young professor, stroking his chin gravely
and nodding his head.

Stephen, checked by the crowd at the door, halted irresolutely. From
under the wide falling leaf of a soft hat Cranlys dark eyes were
watching him.

Have you signed? Stephen asked.

Cranly closed his long thinlipped mouth, communed with himself an
instant and answered:

Ego habeo.

What is it for?

Quod?

What is it for?

Cranly turned his pale face to Stephen and said blandly and bitterly:

Per pax universalis.

Stephen pointed to the Tsars photograph and said:

He has the face of a besotted Christ.

The scorn and anger in his voice brought Cranlys eyes back from a calm
survey of the walls of the hall.

Are you annoyed? he asked.

No, answered Stephen.

Are you in bad humour?

No.

Credo ut vos sanguinarius mendax estis, said Cranly, quia facies
vostra monstrat ut vos in damno malo humore estis.

Moynihan, on his way to the table, said in Stephens ear:

MacCann is in tiptop form. Ready to shed the last drop. Brand new
world. No stimulants and votes for the bitches.

Stephen smiled at the manner of this confidence and, when Moynihan had
passed, turned again to meet Cranlys eyes.

Perhaps you can tell me, he said, why he pours his soul so freely into
my ear. Can you?

A dull scowl appeared on Cranlys forehead. He stared at the table
where Moynihan had bent to write his name on the roll, and then said
flatly:

A sugar!

Quis est in malo humore, said Stephen, ego aut vos?

Cranly did not take up the taunt. He brooded sourly on his judgement
and repeated with the same flat force:

A flaming bloody sugar, thats what he is!

It was his epitaph for all dead friendships and Stephen wondered
whether it would ever be spoken in the same tone over his memory. The
heavy lumpish phrase sank slowly out of hearing like a stone through a
quagmire. Stephen saw it sink as he had seen many another, feeling its
heaviness depress his heart. Cranlys speech, unlike that of Davin, had
neither rare phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned
versions of Irish idioms. Its drawl was an echo of the quays of Dublin
given back by a bleak decaying seaport, its energy an echo of the
sacred eloquence of Dublin given back flatly by a Wicklow pulpit.

The heavy scowl faded from Cranlys face as MacCann marched briskly
towards them from the other side of the hall.

Here you are! said MacCann cheerily.

Here I am! said Stephen.

Late as usual. Can you not combine the progressive tendency with a
respect for punctuality?

That question is out of order, said Stephen. Next business.

His smiling eyes were fixed on a silver-wrapped tablet of milk
chocolate which peeped out of the propagandists breast-pocket. A
little ring of listeners closed round to hear the war of wits. A lean
student with olive skin and lank black hair thrust his face between the
two, glancing from one to the other at each phrase and seeming to try
to catch each flying phrase in his open moist mouth. Cranly took a
small grey handball from his pocket and began to examine it closely,
turning it over and over.

Next business? said MacCann. Hom!

He gave a loud cough of laughter, smiled broadly and tugged twice at
the strawcoloured goatee which hung from his blunt chin.

The next business is to sign the testimonial.

Will you pay me anything if I sign? asked Stephen.

I thought you were an idealist, said MacCann.

The gipsylike student looked about him and addressed the onlookers in
an indistinct bleating voice.

By hell, thats a queer notion. I consider that notion to be a
mercenary notion.

His voice faded into silence. No heed was paid to his words. He turned
his olive face, equine in expression, towards Stephen, inviting him to
speak again.

MacCann began to speak with fluent energy of the Tsars rescript, of
Stead, of general disarmament, arbitration in cases of international
disputes, of the signs of the times, of the new humanity and the new
gospel of life which would make it the business of the community to
secure as cheaply as possible the greatest possible happiness of the
greatest possible number.

The gipsy student responded to the close of the period by crying:

Three cheers for universal brotherhood!

Go on, Temple, said a stout ruddy student near him. Ill stand you a
pint after.

Im a believer in universal brotherhood, said Temple, glancing about
him out of his dark oval eyes. Marx is only a bloody cod.

Cranly gripped his arm tightly to check his tongue, smiling uneasily,
and repeated:

Easy, easy, easy!

Temple struggled to free his arm but continued, his mouth flecked by a
thin foam:

Socialism was founded by an Irishman and the first man in Europe who
preached the freedom of thought was Collins. Two hundred years ago. He
denounced priestcraft, the philosopher of Middlesex. Three cheers for
John Anthony Collins!

A thin voice from the verge of the ring replied:

Pip! pip!

Moynihan murmured beside Stephens ear:

And what about John Anthonys poor little sister:

    Lottie Collins lost her drawers;
    Wont you kindly lend her yours?


Stephen laughed and Moynihan, pleased with the result, murmured again:

Well have five bob each way on John Anthony Collins.

I am waiting for your answer, said MacCann briefly.

The affair doesnt interest me in the least, said Stephen wearily. You
know that well. Why do you make a scene about it?

Good! said MacCann, smacking his lips. You are a reactionary, then?

Do you think you impress me, Stephen asked, when you flourish your
wooden sword?

Metaphors! said MacCann bluntly. Come to facts.

Stephen blushed and turned aside. MacCann stood his ground and said
with hostile humour:

Minor poets, I suppose, are above such trivial questions as the
question of universal peace.

Cranly raised his head and held the handball between the two students
by way of a peaceoffering, saying:

Pax super totum sanguinarium globum.

Stephen, moving away the bystanders, jerked his shoulder angrily in the
direction of the Tsars image, saying:

Keep your icon. If we must have a Jesus let us have a legitimate
Jesus.

By hell, thats a good one! said the gipsy student to those about him,
thats a fine expression. I like that expression immensely.

He gulped down the spittle in his throat as if he were gulping down the
phrase and, fumbling at the peak of his tweed cap, turned to Stephen,
saying:

Excuse me, sir, what do you mean by that expression you uttered just
now?

Feeling himself jostled by the students near him, he said to them:

I am curious to know now what he meant by that expression.

He turned again to Stephen and said in a whisper:

Do you believe in Jesus? I believe in man. Of course, I dont know if
you believe in man. I admire you, sir. I admire the mind of man
independent of all religions. Is that your opinion about the mind of
Jesus?

Go on, Temple, said the stout ruddy student, returning, as was his
wont, to his first idea, that pint is waiting for you.

He thinks Im an imbecile, Temple explained to Stephen, because Im a
believer in the power of mind.

Cranly linked his arms into those of Stephen and his admirer and said:

Nos ad manum ballum jocabimus.

Stephen, in the act of being led away, caught sight of MacCanns
flushed bluntfeatured face.

My signature is of no account, he said politely. You are right to go
your way. Leave me to go mine.

Dedalus, said MacCann crisply, I believe youre a good fellow but you
have yet to learn the dignity of altruism and the responsibility of the
human individual.

A voice said:

Intellectual crankery is better out of this movement than in it.

Stephen, recognising the harsh tone of MacAlisters voice, did not turn
in the direction of the voice. Cranly pushed solemnly through the
throng of students, linking Stephen and Temple like a celebrant
attended by his ministers on his way to the altar.

Temple bent eagerly across Cranlys breast and said:

Did you hear MacAlister what he said? That youth is jealous of you.
Did you see that? I bet Cranly didnt see that. By hell, I saw that at
once.

As they crossed the inner hall, the dean of studies was in the act of
escaping from the student with whom he had been conversing. He stood at
the foot of the staircase, a foot on the lowest step, his threadbare
soutane gathered about him for the ascent with womanish care, nodding
his head often and repeating:

Not a doubt of it, Mr Hackett! Very fine! Not a doubt of it!

In the middle of the hall the prefect of the college sodality was
speaking earnestly, in a soft querulous voice, with a boarder. As he
spoke he wrinkled a little his freckled brow and bit, between his
phrases, at a tiny bone pencil.

I hope the matric men will all come. The first arts men are pretty
sure. Second arts, too. We must make sure of the newcomers.

Temple bent again across Cranly, as they were passing through the
doorway, and said in a swift whisper:

Do you know that he is a married man? He was a married man before they
converted him. He has a wife and children somewhere. By hell, I think
thats the queerest notion I ever heard! Eh?

His whisper trailed off into sly cackling laughter. The moment they
were through the doorway Cranly seized him rudely by the neck and shook
him, saying:

You flaming floundering fool! Ill take my dying bible there isnt a
bigger bloody ape, do you know, than you in the whole flaming bloody
world!

Temple wriggled in his grip, laughing still with sly content, while
Cranly repeated flatly at every rude shake:

A flaming flaring bloody idiot!

They crossed the weedy garden together. The president, wrapped in a
heavy loose cloak, was coming towards them along one of the walks,
reading his office. At the end of the walk he halted before turning and
raised his eyes. The students saluted, Temple fumbling as before at the
peak of his cap. They walked forward in silence. As they neared the
alley Stephen could hear the thuds of the players hands and the wet
smacks of the ball and Davins voice crying out excitedly at each
stroke.

The three students halted round the box on which Davin sat to follow
the game. Temple, after a few moments, sidled across to Stephen and
said:

Excuse me, I wanted to ask you, do you believe that Jean Jacques
Rousseau was a sincere man?

Stephen laughed outright. Cranly, picking up the broken stave of a cask
from the grass at his feet, turned swiftly and said sternly:

Temple, I declare to the living God if you say another word, do you
know, to anybody on any subject, Ill kill you super spottum.

He was like you, I fancy, said Stephen, an emotional man.

Blast him, curse him! said Cranly broadly. Dont talk to him at all.
Sure, you might as well be talking, do you know, to a flaming
chamberpot as talking to Temple. Go home, Temple. For Gods sake, go
home.

I dont care a damn about you, Cranly, answered Temple, moving out of
reach of the uplifted stave and pointing at Stephen. Hes the only man
I see in this institution that has an individual mind.

Institution! Individual! cried Cranly. Go home, blast you, for youre
a hopeless bloody man.

Im an emotional man, said Temple. Thats quite rightly expressed. And
Im proud that Im an emotionalist.

He sidled out of the alley, smiling slily. Cranly watched him with a
blank expressionless face.

Look at him! he said. Did you ever see such a go-by-the-wall?

His phrase was greeted by a strange laugh from a student who lounged
against the wall, his peaked cap down on his eyes. The laugh, pitched
in a high key and coming from a so muscular frame, seemed like the
whinny of an elephant. The students body shook all over and, to ease
his mirth, he rubbed both his hands delightedly over his groins.

Lynch is awake, said Cranly.

Lynch, for answer, straightened himself and thrust forward his chest.

Lynch puts out his chest, said Stephen, as a criticism of life.

Lynch smote himself sonorously on the chest and said:

Who has anything to say about my girth?

Cranly took him at the word and the two began to tussle. When their
faces had flushed with the struggle they drew apart, panting. Stephen
bent down towards Davin who, intent on the game, had paid no heed to
the talk of the others.

And how is my little tame goose? he asked. Did he sign, too?

Davin nodded and said:

And you, Stevie?

Stephen shook his head.

Youre a terrible man, Stevie, said Davin, taking the short pipe from
his mouth, always alone.

Now that you have signed the petition for universal peace, said
Stephen, I suppose you will burn that little copybook I saw in your
room.

As Davin did not answer, Stephen began to quote:

Long pace, fianna! Right incline, fianna! Fianna, by numbers, salute,
one, two!

Thats a different question, said Davin. Im an Irish nationalist,
first and foremost. But thats you all out. Youre a born sneerer,
Stevie.

When you make the next rebellion with hurleysticks, said Stephen, and
want the indispensable informer, tell me. I can find you a few in this
college.

I cant understand you, said Davin. One time I hear you talk against
English literature. Now you talk against the Irish informers. What with
your name and your ideas . . . Are you Irish at all?

Come with me now to the office of arms and I will show you the tree of
my family, said Stephen.

Then be one of us, said Davin. Why dont you learn Irish? Why did you
drop out of the league class after the first lesson?

You know one reason why, answered Stephen.

Davin tossed his head and laughed.

Oh, come now, he said. Is it on account of that certain young lady and
Father Moran? But thats all in your own mind, Stevie. They were only
talking and laughing.

Stephen paused and laid a friendly hand upon Davins shoulder.

Do you remember, he said, when we knew each other first? The first
morning we met you asked me to show you the way to the matriculation
class, putting a very strong stress on the first syllable. You
remember? Then you used to address the jesuits as father, you remember?
I ask myself about you: Is he as innocent as his speech?

Im a simple person, said Davin. You know that. When you told me that
night in Harcourt Street those things about your private life, honest
to God, Stevie, I was not able to eat my dinner. I was quite bad. I was
awake a long time that night. Why did you tell me those things?

Thanks, said Stephen. You mean I am a monster.

No, said Davin. But I wish you had not told me.

A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of Stephens
friendliness.

This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall
express myself as I am.

Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In heart you are an Irishman but
your pride is too powerful.

My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said.
They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am
going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?

For our freedom, said Davin.

No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his
life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of
Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled
him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. Id
see you damned first.

They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet,
believe me.

Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant.

The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you
of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the
body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets
flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality,
language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

Davin knocked the ashes from his pipe.

Too deep for me, Stevie, he said. But a mans country comes first.
Ireland first, Stevie. You can be a poet or a mystic after.

Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland
is the old sow that eats her farrow.

Davin rose from his box and went towards the players, shaking his head
sadly. But in a moment his sadness left him and he was hotly disputing
with Cranly and the two players who had finished their game. A match of
four was arranged, Cranly insisting, however, that his ball should be
used. He let it rebound twice or thrice to his hand and struck it
strongly and swiftly towards the base of the alley, exclaiming in
answer to its thud:

Your soul!

Stephen stood with Lynch till the score began to rise. Then he plucked
him by the sleeve to come away. Lynch obeyed, saying:

Let us eke go, as Cranly has it.

Stephen smiled at this sidethrust.

They passed back through the garden and out through the hall where the
doddering porter was pinning up a hall notice in the frame. At the foot
of the steps they halted and Stephen took a packet of cigarettes from
his pocket and offered it to his companion.

I know you are poor, he said.

Damn your yellow insolence, answered Lynch.

This second proof of Lynchs culture made Stephen smile again.

It was a great day for European culture, he said, when you made up
your mind to swear in yellow.

They lit their cigarettes and turned to the right. After a pause
Stephen began:

Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have. I say...

Lynch halted and said bluntly:

Stop! I wont listen! I am sick. I was out last night on a yellow
drunk with Horan and Goggins.

Stephen went on:

Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of
whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with
the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the
presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and
unites it with the secret cause.

Repeat, said Lynch.

Stephen repeated the definitions slowly.

A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She
was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years.
At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of
the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered
glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant. The reporter called
it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity
according to the terms of my definitions.

The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards
terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use
the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather
the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are
kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to
something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts
which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper
arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore
static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

You say that art must not excite desire, said Lynch. I told you that
one day I wrote my name in pencil on the backside of the Venus of
Praxiteles in the Museum. Was that not desire?

I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. You also told me that when
you were a boy in that charming carmelite school you ate pieces of
dried cowdung.

Lynch broke again into a whinny of laughter and again rubbed both his
hands over his groins but without taking them from his pockets.

O, I did! I did! he cried.

Stephen turned towards his companion and looked at him for a moment
boldly in the eyes. Lynch, recovering from his laughter, answered his
look from his humbled eyes. The long slender flattened skull beneath
the long pointed cap brought before Stephens mind the image of a
hooded reptile. The eyes, too, were reptile-like in glint and gaze. Yet
at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit by one
tiny human point, the window of a shrivelled soul, poignant and
selfembittered.

As for that, Stephen said in polite parenthesis, we are all animals. I
also am an animal.

You are, said Lynch.

But we are just now in a mental world, Stephen continued. The desire
and loathing excited by improper esthetic means are really not esthetic
emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but also
because they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from what it
dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely
reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are
aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.

Not always, said Lynch critically.

In the same way, said Stephen, your flesh responded to the stimulus of
a naked statue, but it was, I say, simply a reflex action of the
nerves. Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion
which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens,
or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis,
an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged, and
at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.

What is that exactly? asked Lynch.

Rhythm, said Stephen, is the first formal esthetic relation of part to
part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts
or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part.

If that is rhythm, said Lynch, let me hear what you call beauty; and,
please remember, though I did eat a cake of cowdung once, that I admire
only beauty.

Stephen raised his cap as if in greeting. Then, blushing slightly, he
laid his hand on Lynchs thick tweed sleeve.

We are right, he said, and the others are wrong. To speak of these
things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it,
to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again,
from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and
colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty
we have come to understandthat is art.

They had reached the canal bridge and, turning from their course, went
on by the trees. A crude grey light, mirrored in the sluggish water and
a smell of wet branches over their heads seemed to war against the
course of Stephens thought.

But you have not answered my question, said Lynch. What is art? What
is the beauty it expresses?

That was the first definition I gave you, you sleepyheaded wretch,
said Stephen, when I began to try to think out the matter for myself.
Do you remember the night? Cranly lost his temper and began to talk
about Wicklow bacon.

I remember, said Lynch. He told us about them flaming fat devils of
pigs.

Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or
intelligible matter for an esthetic end. You remember the pigs and
forget that. You are a distressing pair, you and Cranly.

Lynch made a grimace at the raw grey sky and said:

If I am to listen to your esthetic philosophy give me at least another
cigarette. I dont care about it. I dont even care about women. Damn
you and damn everything. I want a job of five hundred a year. You cant
get me one.

Stephen handed him the packet of cigarettes. Lynch took the last one
that remained, saying simply:

Proceed!

Aquinas, said Stephen, says that is beautiful the apprehension of
which pleases.

Lynch nodded.

I remember that, he said, Pulcra sunt qu visa placent.

He uses the word visa, said Stephen, to cover esthetic apprehensions
of all kinds, whether through sight or hearing or through any other
avenue of apprehension. This word, though it is vague, is clear enough
to keep away good and evil which excite desire and loathing. It means
certainly a stasis and not a kinesis. How about the true? It produces
also a stasis of the mind. You would not write your name in pencil
across the hypothenuse of a rightangled triangle.

No, said Lynch, give me the hypothenuse of the Venus of Praxiteles.

Static therefore, said Stephen. Plato, I believe, said that beauty is
the splendour of truth. I dont think that it has a meaning, but the
true and the beautiful are akin. Truth is beheld by the intellect which
is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible;
beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most
satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the direction
of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect itself,
to comprehend the act itself of intellection. Aristotles entire system
of philosophy rests upon his book of psychology and that, I think,
rests on his statement that the same attribute cannot at the same time
and in the same connexion belong to and not belong to the same subject.
The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame
and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic
apprehension. Is that clear?

But what is beauty? asked Lynch impatiently. Out with another
definition. Something we see and like! Is that the best you and Aquinas
can do?

Let us take woman, said Stephen.

Let us take her! said Lynch fervently.

The Greek, the Turk, the Chinese, the Copt, the Hottentot, said
Stephen, all admire a different type of female beauty. That seems to be
a maze out of which we cannot escape. I see, however, two ways out. One
is this hypothesis: that every physical quality admired by men in women
is in direct connexion with the manifold functions of women for the
propagation of the species. It may be so. The world, it seems, is
drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. For my part I dislike that way
out. It leads to eugenics rather than to esthetic. It leads you out of
the maze into a new gaudy lectureroom where MacCann, with one hand on
The Origin of Species and the other hand on the new testament, tells
you that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you felt that
she would bear you burly offspring and admired her great breasts
because you felt that she would give good milk to her children and
yours.

Then MacCann is a sulphuryellow liar, said Lynch energetically.

There remains another way out, said Stephen, laughing.

To wit? said Lynch.

This hypothesis, Stephen began.

A long dray laden with old iron came round the corner of Sir Patrick
Duns hospital covering the end of Stephens speech with the harsh roar
of jangled and rattling metal. Lynch closed his ears and gave out oath
after oath till the dray had passed. Then he turned on his heel rudely.
Stephen turned also and waited for a few moments till his companions
ill-humour had had its vent.

This hypothesis, Stephen repeated, is the other way out: that, though
the same object may not seem beautiful to all people, all people who
admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy
and coincide with the stages themselves of all esthetic apprehension.
These relations of the sensible, visible to you through one form and to
me through another, must be therefore the necessary qualities of
beauty. Now, we can return to our old friend saint Thomas for another
pennyworth of wisdom.

Lynch laughed.

It amuses me vastly, he said, to hear you quoting him time after time
like a jolly round friar. Are you laughing in your sleeve?

MacAlister, answered Stephen, would call my esthetic theory applied
Aquinas. So far as this side of esthetic philosophy extends, Aquinas
will carry me all along the line. When we come to the phenomena of
artistic conception, artistic gestation, and artistic reproduction I
require a new terminology and a new personal experience.

Of course, said Lynch. After all Aquinas, in spite of his intellect,
was exactly a good round friar. But you will tell me about the new
personal experience and new terminology some other day. Hurry up and
finish the first part.

Who knows? said Stephen, smiling. Perhaps Aquinas would understand me
better than you. He was a poet himself. He wrote a hymn for Maundy
Thursday. It begins with the words Pange lingua gloriosi. They say it
is the highest glory of the hymnal. It is an intricate and soothing
hymn. I like it; but there is no hymn that can be put beside that
mournful and majestic processional song, the Vexilla Regis of
Venantius Fortunatus.

Lynch began to sing softly and solemnly in a deep bass voice:

    Inpleta sunt qu concinit
    David fideli carmine
    Dicendo nationibus
    Regnavit a ligno Deus.


Thats great! he said, well pleased. Great music!

They turned into Lower Mount Street. A few steps from the corner a fat
young man, wearing a silk neckcloth, saluted them and stopped.

Did you hear the results of the exams? he asked. Griffin was plucked.
Halpin and OFlynn are through the home civil. Moonan got fifth place
in the Indian. OShaughnessy got fourteenth. The Irish fellows in
Clarks gave them a feed last night. They all ate curry.

His pallid bloated face expressed benevolent malice and, as he had
advanced through his tidings of success, his small fat-encircled eyes
vanished out of sight and his weak wheezing voice out of hearing.

In reply to a question of Stephens his eyes and his voice came forth
again from their lurkingplaces.

Yes, MacCullagh and I, he said. Hes taking pure mathematics and Im
taking constitutional history. There are twenty subjects. Im taking
botany too. You know Im a member of the field club.

He drew back from the other two in a stately fashion and placed a plump
woollen-gloved hand on his breast from which muttered wheezing laughter
at once broke forth.

Bring us a few turnips and onions the next time you go out, said
Stephen drily, to make a stew.

The fat student laughed indulgently and said:

We are all highly respectable people in the field club. Last Saturday
we went out to Glenmalure, seven of us.

With women, Donovan? said Lynch.

Donovan again laid his hand on his chest and said:

Our end is the acquisition of knowledge.

Then he said quickly:

I hear you are writing some essays about esthetics.

Stephen made a vague gesture of denial.

Goethe and Lessing, said Donovan, have written a lot on that subject,
the classical school and the romantic school and all that. The Laocoon
interested me very much when I read it. Of course it is idealistic,
German, ultra-profound.

Neither of the others spoke. Donovan took leave of them urbanely.

I must go, he said softly and benevolently, I have a strong suspicion,
amounting almost to a conviction, that my sister intended to make
pancakes today for the dinner of the Donovan family.

Goodbye, Stephen said in his wake. Dont forget the turnips for me and
my mate.

Lynch gazed after him, his lip curling in slow scorn till his face
resembled a devils mask:

To think that that yellow pancake-eating excrement can get a good job,
he said at length, and I have to smoke cheap cigarettes!

They turned their faces towards Merrion Square and went for a little in
silence.

To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most
satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the
necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the
qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: Ad pulcritudinem tria
requiruntur integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so:
Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance.
Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?

Of course, I am, said Lynch. If you think I have an excrementitious
intelligence run after Donovan and ask him to listen to you.

Stephen pointed to a basket which a butchers boy had slung inverted on
his head.

Look at that basket, he said.

I see it, said Lynch.

In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all
separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not
the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn
about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to
us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time,
what is visible is presented in space. But temporal or spatial, the
esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and
selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which
is not it. You apprehended it as one thing. You see it as one whole.
You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas.

Bulls eye! said Lynch, laughing. Go on.

Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal
lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its
limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the
synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of
apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now
that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible,
separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum,
harmonious. That is consonantia.

Bulls eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is claritas
and you win the cigar.

The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas
uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time.
It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism,
the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the
idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is
but the symbol. I thought he might mean that claritas is the artistic
discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a
force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universal
one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk.
I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing
and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a
thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically
permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other
thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic quidditas,
the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist
when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind
in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading
coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear
radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind
which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony
is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state
very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist
Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelleys, called
the enchantment of the heart.

Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his
words had called up around them a thought-enchanted silence.

What I have said, he began again, refers to beauty in the wider sense
of the word, in the sense which the word has in the literary tradition.
In the marketplace it has another sense. When we speak of beauty in the
second sense of the term our judgement is influenced in the first place
by the art itself and by the form of that art. The image, it is clear,
must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the
mind or senses of others. If you bear this in memory you will see that
art necessarily divides itself into three forms progressing from one to
the next. These forms are: the lyrical form, the form wherein the
artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the epical
form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to
himself and to others; the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents
his image in immediate relation to others.

That you told me a few nights ago, said Lynch, and we began the famous
discussion.

I have a book at home, said Stephen, in which I have written down
questions which are more amusing than yours were. In finding the
answers to them I found the theory of esthetic which I am trying to
explain. Here are some questions I set myself: Is a chair finely made
tragic or comic? Is the portrait of Mona Lisa good if I desire to see
it? Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical, epical or dramatic. If
not, why not?

Why not, indeed? said Lynch, laughing.

If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood, Stephen continued,
make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why
not?

Thats a lovely one, said Lynch, laughing again. That has the true
scholastic stink.

Lessing, said Stephen, should not have taken a group of statues to
write of. The art, being inferior, does not present the forms I spoke
of distinguished clearly one from another. Even in literature, the
highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The
lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of
emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who
pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is
more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling
emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical
literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the
centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of
emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from
others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of
the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round
the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see
easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero, which begins in the
first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached
when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills
every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and
intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry
or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally
refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak.
The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and
reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like
that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of
creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork,
invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his
fingernails.

Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch.

A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned into
the dukes lawn to reach the national library before the shower came.

What do you mean, Lynch asked surlily, by prating about beauty and the
imagination in this miserable Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist
retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this
country.

The rain fell faster. When they passed through the passage beside
Kildare house they found many students sheltering under the arcade of
the library. Cranly, leaning against a pillar, was picking his teeth
with a sharpened match, listening to some companions. Some girls stood
near the entrance door. Lynch whispered to Stephen:

Your beloved is here.

Stephen took his place silently on the step below the group of
students, heedless of the rain which fell fast, turning his eyes
towards her from time to time. She too stood silently among her
companions. She has no priest to flirt with, he thought with conscious
bitterness, remembering how he had seen her last. Lynch was right. His
mind emptied of theory and courage, lapsed back into a listless peace.

He heard the students talking among themselves. They spoke of two
friends who had passed the final medical examination, of the chances of
getting places on ocean liners, of poor and rich practices.

Thats all a bubble. An Irish country practice is better.

Hynes was two years in Liverpool and he says the same. A frightful
hole he said it was. Nothing but midwifery cases.

Do you mean to say it is better to have a job here in the country than
in a rich city like that? I know a fellow...

Hynes has no brains. He got through by stewing, pure stewing.

Dont mind him. Theres plenty of money to be made in a big commercial
city.

Depends on the practice.

Ego credo ut vita pauperum est simpliciter atrox, simpliciter
sanguinarius atrox, in Liverpoolio.

Their voices reached his ears as if from a distance in interrupted
pulsation. She was preparing to go away with her companions.

The quick light shower had drawn off, tarrying in clusters of diamonds
among the shrubs of the quadrangle where an exhalation was breathed
forth by the blackened earth. Their trim boots prattled as they stood
on the steps of the colonnade, talking quietly and gaily, glancing at
the clouds, holding their umbrellas at cunning angles against the few
last raindrops, closing them again, holding their skirts demurely.

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of
hours, her life simple and strange as a birds life, gay in the
morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and
wilful as a birds heart?

Towards dawn he awoke. O what sweet music! His soul was all dewy wet.
Over his limbs in sleep pale cool waves of light had passed. He lay
still, as if his soul lay amid cool waters, conscious of faint sweet
music. His mind was waking slowly to a tremulous morning knowledge, a
morning inspiration. A spirit filled him, pure as the purest water,
sweet as dew, moving as music. But how faintly it was inbreathed, how
passionlessly, as if the seraphim themselves were breathing upon him!
His soul was waking slowly, fearing to awake wholly. It was that
windless hour of dawn when madness wakes and strange plants open to the
light and the moth flies forth silently.

An enchantment of the heart! The night had been enchanted. In a dream
or vision he had known the ecstasy of seraphic life. Was it an instant
of enchantment only or long hours and years and ages?

The instant of inspiration seemed now to be reflected from all sides at
once from a multitude of cloudy circumstances of what had happened or
of what might have happened. The instant flashed forth like a point of
light and now from cloud on cloud of vague circumstance confused form
was veiling softly its afterglow. O! In the virgin womb of the
imagination the word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the
virgins chamber. An afterglow deepened within his spirit, whence the
white flame had passed, deepening to a rose and ardent light. That rose
and ardent light was her strange wilful heart, strange that no man had
known or would know, wilful from before the beginning of the world; and
lured by that ardent roselike glow the choirs of the seraphim were
falling from heaven.

    Are you not weary of ardent ways,
    Lure of the fallen seraphim?
    Tell no more of enchanted days.


The verses passed from his mind to his lips and, murmuring them over,
he felt the rhythmic movement of a villanelle pass through them. The
roselike glow sent forth its rays of rhyme; ways, days, blaze, praise,
raise. Its rays burned up the world, consumed the hearts of men and
angels: the rays from the rose that was her wilful heart.

    Your eyes have set mans heart ablaze
    And you have had your will of him.
    Are you not weary of ardent ways?


And then? The rhythm died away, ceased, began again to move and beat.
And then? Smoke, incense ascending from the altar of the world.

    Above the flame the smoke of praise
    Goes up from ocean rim to rim
    Tell no more of enchanted days.


Smoke went up from the whole earth, from the vapoury oceans, smoke of
her praise. The earth was like a swinging swaying censer, a ball of
incense, an ellipsoidal ball. The rhythm died out at once; the cry of
his heart was broken. His lips began to murmur the first verses over
and over; then went on stumbling through half verses, stammering and
baffled; then stopped. The hearts cry was broken.

The veiled windless hour had passed and behind the panes of the naked
window the morning light was gathering. A bell beat faintly very far
away. A bird twittered; two birds, three. The bell and the bird ceased;
and the dull white light spread itself east and west, covering the
world, covering the roselight in his heart.

Fearing to lose all, he raised himself suddenly on his elbow to look
for paper and pencil. There was neither on the table; only the soup
plate he had eaten the rice from for supper and the candlestick with
its tendrils of tallow and its paper socket, singed by the last flame.
He stretched his arm wearily towards the foot of the bed, groping with
his hand in the pockets of the coat that hung there. His fingers found
a pencil and then a cigarette packet. He lay back and, tearing open the
packet, placed the last cigarette on the window ledge and began to
write out the stanzas of the villanelle in small neat letters on the
rough cardboard surface.

Having written them out he lay back on the lumpy pillow, murmuring them
again. The lumps of knotted flock under his head reminded him of the
lumps of knotted horsehair in the sofa of her parlour on which he used
to sit, smiling or serious, asking himself why he had come, displeased
with her and with himself, confounded by the print of the Sacred Heart
above the untenanted sideboard. He saw her approach him in a lull of
the talk and beg him to sing one of his curious songs. Then he saw
himself sitting at the old piano, striking chords softly from its
speckled keys and singing, amid the talk which had risen again in the
room, to her who leaned beside the mantelpiece a dainty song of the
Elizabethans, a sad and sweet loth to depart, the victory chant of
Agincourt, the happy air of Greensleeves. While he sang and she
listened, or feigned to listen, his heart was at rest but when the
quaint old songs had ended and he heard again the voices in the room he
remembered his own sarcasm: the house where young men are called by
their christian names a little too soon.

At certain instants her eyes seemed about to trust him but he had
waited in vain. She passed now dancing lightly across his memory as she
had been that night at the carnival ball, her white dress a little
lifted, a white spray nodding in her hair. She danced lightly in the
round. She was dancing towards him and, as she came, her eyes were a
little averted and a faint glow was on her cheek. At the pause in the
chain of hands her hand had lain in his an instant, a soft merchandise.

You are a great stranger now.

Yes. I was born to be a monk.

I am afraid you are a heretic.

Are you much afraid?

For answer she had danced away from him along the chain of hands,
dancing lightly and discreetly, giving herself to none. The white spray
nodded to her dancing and when she was in shadow the glow was deeper on
her cheek.

A monk! His own image started forth a profaner of the cloister, a
heretic Franciscan, willing and willing not to serve, spinning like
Gherardino da Borgo San Donnino, a lithe web of sophistry and
whispering in her ear.

No, it was not his image. It was like the image of the young priest in
whose company he had seen her last, looking at him out of doves eyes,
toying with the pages of her Irish phrasebook.

Yes, yes, the ladies are coming round to us. I can see it every day.
The ladies are with us. The best helpers the language has.

And the church, Father Moran?

The church too. Coming round too. The work is going ahead there too.
Dont fret about the church.

Bah! he had done well to leave the room in disdain. He had done well
not to salute her on the steps of the library. He had done well to
leave her to flirt with her priest, to toy with a church which was the
scullery-maid of christendom.

Rude brutal anger routed the last lingering instant of ecstasy from his
soul. It broke up violently her fair image and flung the fragments on
all sides. On all sides distorted reflections of her image started from
his memory: the flower girl in the ragged dress with damp coarse hair
and a hoydens face who had called herself his own girl and begged his
handsel, the kitchen-girl in the next house who sang over the clatter
of her plates, with the drawl of a country singer, the first bars of
By Killarneys Lakes and Fells, a girl who had laughed gaily to see
him stumble when the iron grating in the footpath near Cork Hill had
caught the broken sole of his shoe, a girl he had glanced at, attracted
by her small ripe mouth, as she passed out of Jacobs biscuit factory,
who had cried to him over her shoulder:

Do you like what you seen of me, straight hair and curly eyebrows?

And yet he felt that, however he might revile and mock her image, his
anger was also a form of homage. He had left the classroom in disdain
that was not wholly sincere, feeling that perhaps the secret of her
race lay behind those dark eyes upon which her long lashes flung a
quick shadow. He had told himself bitterly as he walked through the
streets that she was a figure of the womanhood of her country, a
batlike soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and
secrecy and loneliness, tarrying awhile, loveless and sinless, with her
mild lover and leaving him to whisper of innocent transgressions in the
latticed ear of a priest. His anger against her found vent in coarse
railing at her paramour, whose name and voice and features offended his
baffled pride: a priested peasant, with a brother a policeman in Dublin
and a brother a potboy in Moycullen. To him she would unveil her souls
shy nakedness, to one who was but schooled in the discharging of a
formal rite rather than to him, a priest of the eternal imagination,
transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of
everliving life.

The radiant image of the eucharist united again in an instant his
bitter and despairing thoughts, their cries arising unbroken in a hymn
of thanksgiving.

    Our broken cries and mournful lays
    Rise in one eucharistic hymn
    Are you not weary of ardent ways?

    While sacrificing hands upraise
    The chalice flowing to the brim
    Tell no more of enchanted days.


He spoke the verses aloud from the first lines till the music and
rhythm suffused his mind, turning it to quiet indulgence; then copied
them painfully to feel them the better by seeing them; then lay back on
his bolster.

The full morning light had come. No sound was to be heard; but he knew
that all around him life was about to awaken in common noises, hoarse
voices, sleepy prayers. Shrinking from that life he turned towards the
wall, making a cowl of the blanket and staring at the great overblown
scarlet flowers of the tattered wallpaper. He tried to warm his
perishing joy in their scarlet glow, imagining a roseway from where he
lay upwards to heaven all strewn with scarlet flowers. Weary! Weary! He
too was weary of ardent ways.

A gradual warmth, a languorous weariness passed over him descending
along his spine from his closely cowled head. He felt it descend and,
seeing himself as he lay, smiled. Soon he would sleep.

He had written verses for her again after ten years. Ten years before
she had worn her shawl cowlwise about her head, sending sprays of her
warm breath into the night air, tapping her foot upon the glassy road.
It was the last tram; the lank brown horses knew it and shook their
bells to the clear night in admonition. The conductor talked with the
driver, both nodding often in the green light of the lamp. They stood
on the steps of the tram, he on the upper, she on the lower. She came
up to his step many times between their phrases and went down again and
once or twice remained beside him forgetting to go down and then went
down. Let be! Let be!

Ten years from that wisdom of children to his folly. If he sent her the
verses? They would be read out at breakfast amid the tapping of
eggshells. Folly indeed! Her brothers would laugh and try to wrest the
page from each other with their strong hard fingers. The suave priest,
her uncle, seated in his armchair, would hold the page at arms length,
read it smiling and approve of the literary form.

No, no; that was folly. Even if he sent her the verses she would not
show them to others. No, no; she could not.

He began to feel that he had wronged her. A sense of her innocence
moved him almost to pity her, an innocence he had never understood till
he had come to the knowledge of it through sin, an innocence which she
too had not understood while she was innocent or before the strange
humiliation of her nature had first come upon her. Then first her soul
had begun to live as his soul had when he had first sinned, and a
tender compassion filled his heart as he remembered her frail pallor
and her eyes, humbled and saddened by the dark shame of womanhood.

While his soul had passed from ecstasy to languor where had she been?
Might it be, in the mysterious ways of spiritual life, that her soul at
those same moments had been conscious of his homage? It might be.

A glow of desire kindled again his soul and fired and fulfilled all his
body. Conscious of his desire she was waking from odorous sleep, the
temptress of his villanelle. Her eyes, dark and with a look of languor,
were opening to his eyes. Her nakedness yielded to him, radiant, warm,
odorous and lavish-limbed, enfolded him like a shining cloud, enfolded
him like water with a liquid life; and like a cloud of vapour or like
waters circumfluent in space the liquid letters of speech, symbols of
the element of mystery, flowed forth over his brain.

    Are you not weary of ardent ways,
    Lure of the fallen seraphim?
    Tell no more of enchanted days.

    Your eyes have set mans heart ablaze
    And you have had your will of him.
    Are you not weary of ardent ways?

    Above the flame the smoke of praise
    Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
    Tell no more of enchanted days.

    Our broken cries and mournful lays
    Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
    Are you not weary of ardent ways?

    While sacrificing hands upraise
    The chalice flowing to the brim.
    Tell no more of enchanted days.

    And still you hold our longing gaze
    With languorous look and lavish limb!
    Are you not weary of ardent ways?
    Tell no more of enchanted days.


What birds were they? He stood on the steps of the library to look at
them, leaning wearily on his ashplant. They flew round and round the
jutting shoulder of a house in Molesworth Street. The air of the late
March evening made clear their flight, their dark darting quivering
bodies flying clearly against the sky as against a limp-hung cloth of
smoky tenuous blue.

He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a
flutter of wings. He tried to count them before all their darting
quivering bodies passed: six, ten, eleven: and wondered were they odd
or even in number. Twelve, thirteen: for two came wheeling down from
the upper sky. They were flying high and low but ever round and round
in straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right,
circling about a temple of air.

He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice behind the wainscot:
a shrill twofold note. But the notes were long and shrill and whirring,
unlike the cry of vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as
the flying beaks clove the air. Their cry was shrill and clear and fine
and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.

The inhuman clamour soothed his ears in which his mothers sobs and
reproaches murmured insistently and the dark frail quivering bodies
wheeling and fluttering and swerving round an airy temple of the
tenuous sky soothed his eyes which still saw the image of his mothers
face.

Why was he gazing upwards from the steps of the porch, hearing their
shrill twofold cry, watching their flight? For an augury of good or
evil? A phrase of Cornelius Agrippa flew through his mind and then
there flew hither and thither shapeless thoughts from Swedenborg on the
correspondence of birds to things of the intellect and of how the
creatures of the air have their knowledge and know their times and
seasons because they, unlike man, are in the order of their life and
have not perverted that order by reason.

And for ages men had gazed upward as he was gazing at birds in flight.
The colonnade above him made him think vaguely of an ancient temple and
the ashplant on which he leaned wearily of the curved stick of an
augur. A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his
weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawklike man whose
name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier-woven wings, of
Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and
bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon.

He smiled as he thought of the gods image for it made him think of a
bottle-nosed judge in a wig, putting commas into a document which he
held at arms length, and he knew that he would not have remembered the
gods name but that it was like an Irish oath. It was folly. But was it
for this folly that he was about to leave for ever the house of prayer
and prudence into which he had been born and the order of life out of
which he had come?

They came back with shrill cries over the jutting shoulder of the
house, flying darkly against the fading air. What birds were they? He
thought that they must be swallows who had come back from the south.
Then he was to go away for they were birds ever going and coming,
building ever an unlasting home under the eaves of mens houses and
ever leaving the homes they had built to wander.

    Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel.
    I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes
    Upon the nest under the eave before
    He wander the loud waters.


A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory
and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading
tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying
through the seadusk over the flowing waters.

A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long vowels
hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever
shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal, and
soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the
wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come
forth from his heart like a bird from a turret, quietly and swiftly.

Symbol of departure or of loneliness? The verses crooned in the ear of
his memory composed slowly before his remembering eyes the scene of the
hall on the night of the opening of the national theatre. He was alone
at the side of the balcony, looking out of jaded eyes at the culture of
Dublin in the stalls and at the tawdry scenecloths and human dolls
framed by the garish lamps of the stage. A burly policeman sweated
behind him and seemed at every moment about to act. The catcalls and
hisses and mocking cries ran in rude gusts round the hall from his
scattered fellow students.

A libel on Ireland!

Made in Germany.

Blasphemy!

We never sold our faith!

No Irish woman ever did it!

We want no amateur atheists.

We want no budding buddhists.

A sudden swift hiss fell from the windows above him and he knew that
the electric lamps had been switched on in the readers room. He turned
into the pillared hall, now calmly lit, went up the staircase and
passed in through the clicking turnstile.

Cranly was sitting over near the dictionaries. A thick book, opened at
the frontispiece, lay before him on the wooden rest. He leaned back in
his chair, inclining his ear like that of a confessor to the face of
the medical student who was reading to him a problem from the chess
page of a journal. Stephen sat down at his right and the priest at the
other side of the table closed his copy of The Tablet with an angry
snap and stood up.

Cranly gazed after him blandly and vaguely. The medical student went on
in a softer voice:

Pawn to kings fourth.

We had better go, Dixon, said Stephen in warning. He has gone to
complain.

Dixon folded the journal and rose with dignity, saying:

Our men retired in good order.

With guns and cattle, added Stephen, pointing to the titlepage of
Cranlys book on which was printed Diseases of the Ox.

As they passed through a lane of the tables Stephen said:

Cranly, I want to speak to you.

Cranly did not answer or turn. He laid his book on the counter and
passed out, his well-shod feet sounding flatly on the floor. On the
staircase he paused and gazing absently at Dixon repeated:

Pawn to kings bloody fourth.

Put it that way if you like, Dixon said.

He had a quiet toneless voice and urbane manners and on a finger of his
plump clean hand he displayed at moments a signet ring.

As they crossed the hall a man of dwarfish stature came towards them.
Under the dome of his tiny hat his unshaven face began to smile with
pleasure and he was heard to murmur. The eyes were melancholy as those
of a monkey.

Good evening, gentlemen, said the stubble-grown monkeyish face.

Warm weather for March, said Cranly. They have the windows open
upstairs.

Dixon smiled and turned his ring. The blackish, monkey-puckered face
pursed its human mouth with gentle pleasure and its voice purred:

Delightful weather for March. Simply delightful.

There are two nice young ladies upstairs, captain, tired of waiting,
Dixon said.

Cranly smiled and said kindly:

The captain has only one love: sir Walter Scott. Isnt that so,
captain?

What are you reading now, captain? Dixon asked. The Bride of
Lammermoor?

I love old Scott, the flexible lips said, I think he writes something
lovely. There is no writer can touch sir Walter Scott.

He moved a thin shrunken brown hand gently in the air in time to his
praise and his thin quick eyelids beat often over his sad eyes.

Sadder to Stephens ear was his speech: a genteel accent, low and
moist, marred by errors, and, listening to it, he wondered was the
story true and was the thin blood that flowed in his shrunken frame
noble and come of an incestuous love?

The park trees were heavy with rain; and rain fell still and ever in
the lake, lying grey like a shield. A game of swans flew there and the
water and the shore beneath were fouled with their greenwhite slime.
They embraced softly, impelled by the grey rainy light, the wet silent
trees, the shieldlike witnessing lake, the swans. They embraced without
joy or passion, his arm about his sisters neck. A grey woollen cloak
was wrapped athwart her from her shoulder to her waist and her fair
head was bent in willing shame. He had loose redbrown hair and tender
shapely strong freckled hands. Face? There was no face seen. The
brothers face was bent upon her fair rain-fragrant hair. The hand
freckled and strong and shapely and caressing was Davins hand.

He frowned angrily upon his thought and on the shrivelled mannikin who
had called it forth. His fathers gibes at the Bantry gang leaped out
of his memory. He held them at a distance and brooded uneasily on his
own thought again. Why were they not Cranlys hands? Had Davins
simplicity and innocence stung him more secretly?

He walked on across the hall with Dixon, leaving Cranly to take leave
elaborately of the dwarf.

Under the colonnade Temple was standing in the midst of a little group
of students. One of them cried:

Dixon, come over till you hear. Temple is in grand form.

Temple turned on him his dark gipsy eyes.

Youre a hypocrite, OKeeffe, he said. And Dixon is a smiler. By hell,
I think thats a good literary expression.

He laughed slily, looking in Stephens face, repeating:

By hell, Im delighted with that name. A smiler.

A stout student who stood below them on the steps said:

Come back to the mistress, Temple. We want to hear about that.

He had, faith, Temple said. And he was a married man too. And all the
priests used to be dining there. By hell, I think they all had a touch.

We shall call it riding a hack to spare the hunter, said Dixon.

Tell us, Temple, OKeeffe said, how many quarts of porter have you in
you?

All your intellectual soul is in that phrase, OKeeffe, said Temple
with open scorn.

He moved with a shambling gait round the group and spoke to Stephen.

Did you know that the Forsters are the kings of Belgium? he asked.

Cranly came out through the door of the entrance hall, his hat thrust
back on the nape of his neck and picking his teeth with care.

And heres the wiseacre, said Temple. Do you know that about the
Forsters?

He paused for an answer. Cranly dislodged a figseed from his teeth on
the point of his rude toothpick and gazed at it intently.

The Forster family, Temple said, is descended from Baldwin the First,
king of Flanders. He was called the Forester. Forester and Forster are
the same name. A descendant of Baldwin the First, captain Francis
Forster, settled in Ireland and married the daughter of the last
chieftain of Clanbrassil. Then there are the Blake Forsters. Thats a
different branch.

From Baldhead, king of Flanders, Cranly repeated, rooting again
deliberately at his gleaming uncovered teeth.

Where did you pick up all that history? OKeeffe asked.

I know all the history of your family, too, Temple said, turning to
Stephen. Do you know what Giraldus Cambrensis says about your family?

Is he descended from Baldwin too? asked a tall consumptive student
with dark eyes.

Baldhead, Cranly repeated, sucking at a crevice in his teeth.

Pernobilis et pervetusta familia, Temple said to Stephen.

The stout student who stood below them on the steps farted briefly.
Dixon turned towards him, saying in a soft voice:

Did an angel speak?

Cranly turned also and said vehemently but without anger:

Goggins, youre the flamingest dirty devil I ever met, do you know.

I had it on my mind to say that, Goggins answered firmly. It did no
one any harm, did it?

We hope, Dixon said suavely, that it was not of the kind known to
science as a paulo post futurum.

Didnt I tell you he was a smiler? said Temple, turning right and
left. Didnt I give him that name?

You did. Were not deaf, said the tall consumptive.

Cranly still frowned at the stout student below him. Then, with a snort
of disgust, he shoved him violently down the steps.

Go away from here, he said rudely. Go away, you stinkpot. And you are
a stinkpot.

Goggins skipped down on to the gravel and at once returned to his place
with good humour. Temple turned back to Stephen and asked:

Do you believe in the law of heredity?

Are you drunk or what are you or what are you trying to say? asked
Cranly, facing round on him with an expression of wonder.

The most profound sentence ever written, Temple said with enthusiasm,
is the sentence at the end of the zoology. Reproduction is the
beginning of death.

He touched Stephen timidly at the elbow and said eagerly:

Do you feel how profound that is because you are a poet?

Cranly pointed his long forefinger.

Look at him! he said with scorn to the others. Look at Irelands hope!

They laughed at his words and gesture. Temple turned on him bravely,
saying:

Cranly, youre always sneering at me. I can see that. But I am as good
as you any day. Do you know what I think about you now as compared with
myself?

My dear man, said Cranly urbanely, you are incapable, do you know,
absolutely incapable of thinking.

But do you know, Temple went on, what I think of you and of myself
compared together?

Out with it, Temple! the stout student cried from the steps. Get it
out in bits!

Temple turned right and left, making sudden feeble gestures as he
spoke.

Im a ballocks, he said, shaking his head in despair. I am and I know
I am. And I admit it that I am.

Dixon patted him lightly on the shoulder and said mildly:

And it does you every credit, Temple.

But he, Temple said, pointing to Cranly, he is a ballocks, too, like
me. Only he doesnt know it. And thats the only difference I see.

A burst of laughter covered his words. But he turned again to Stephen
and said with a sudden eagerness:

That word is a most interesting word. Thats the only English dual
number. Did you know?

Is it? Stephen said vaguely.

He was watching Cranlys firm-featured suffering face, lit up now by a
smile of false patience. The gross name had passed over it like foul
water poured over an old stone image, patient of injuries; and, as he
watched him, he saw him raise his hat in salute and uncover the black
hair that stood stiffly from his forehead like an iron crown.

She passed out from the porch of the library and bowed across Stephen
in reply to Cranlys greeting. He also? Was there not a slight flush on
Cranlys cheek? Or had it come forth at Temples words? The light had
waned. He could not see.

Did that explain his friends listless silence, his harsh comments, the
sudden intrusions of rude speech with which he had shattered so often
Stephens ardent wayward confessions? Stephen had forgiven freely for
he had found this rudeness also in himself. And he remembered an
evening when he had dismounted from a borrowed creaking bicycle to pray
to God in a wood near Malahide. He had lifted up his arms and spoken in
ecstasy to the sombre nave of the trees, knowing that he stood on holy
ground and in a holy hour. And when two constabulary men had come into
sight round a bend in the gloomy road he had broken off his prayer to
whistle loudly an air from the last pantomime.

He began to beat the frayed end of his ashplant against the base of a
pillar. Had Cranly not heard him? Yet he could wait. The talk about him
ceased for a moment and a soft hiss fell again from a window above. But
no other sound was in the air and the swallows whose flight he had
followed with idle eyes were sleeping.

She had passed through the dusk. And therefore the air was silent save
for one soft hiss that fell. And therefore the tongues about him had
ceased their babble. Darkness was falling.

    Darkness falls from the air.


A trembling joy, lambent as a faint light, played like a fairy host
around him. But why? Her passage through the darkening air or the verse
with its black vowels and its opening sound, rich and lutelike?

He walked away slowly towards the deeper shadows at the end of the
colonnade, beating the stone softly with his stick to hide his reverie
from the students whom he had left: and allowed his mind to summon back
to itself the age of Dowland and Byrd and Nash.

Eyes, opening from the darkness of desire, eyes that dimmed the
breaking east. What was their languid grace but the softness of
chambering? And what was their shimmer but the shimmer of the scum that
mantled the cesspool of the court of a slobbering Stuart. And he tasted
in the language of memory ambered wines, dying fallings of sweet airs,
the proud pavan, and saw with the eyes of memory kind gentlewomen in
Covent Garden wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths and the
poxfouled wenches of the taverns and young wives that, gaily yielding
to their ravishers, clipped and clipped again.

The images he had summoned gave him no pleasure. They were secret and
inflaming but her image was not entangled by them. That was not the way
to think of her. It was not even the way in which he thought of her.
Could his mind then not trust itself? Old phrases, sweet only with a
disinterred sweetness like the figseeds Cranly rooted out of his
gleaming teeth.

It was not thought nor vision though he knew vaguely that her figure
was passing homeward through the city. Vaguely first and then more
sharply he smelt her body. A conscious unrest seethed in his blood.
Yes, it was her body he smelt, a wild and languid smell, the tepid
limbs over which his music had flowed desirously and the secret soft
linen upon which her flesh distilled odour and a dew.

A louse crawled over the nape of his neck and, putting his thumb and
forefinger deftly beneath his loose collar, he caught it. He rolled its
body, tender yet brittle as a grain of rice, between thumb and finger
for an instant before he let it fall from him and wondered would it
live or die. There came to his mind a curious phrase from Cornelius a
Lapide which said that the lice born of human sweat were not created by
God with the other animals on the sixth day. But the tickling of the
skin of his neck made his mind raw and red. The life of his body, ill
clad, ill fed, louse eaten, made him close his eyelids in a sudden
spasm of despair and in the darkness he saw the brittle bright bodies
of lice falling from the air and turning often as they fell. Yes, and
it was not darkness that fell from the air. It was brightness.

    Brightness falls from the air.


He had not even remembered rightly Nashs line. All the images it had
awakened were false. His mind bred vermin. His thoughts were lice born
of the sweat of sloth.

He came back quickly along the colonnade towards the group of students.
Well then, let her go and be damned to her! She could love some clean
athlete who washed himself every morning to the waist and had black
hair on his chest. Let her.

Cranly had taken another dried fig from the supply in his pocket and
was eating it slowly and noisily. Temple sat on the pediment of a
pillar, leaning back, his cap pulled down on his sleepy eyes. A squat
young man came out of the porch, a leather portfolio tucked under his
armpit. He marched towards the group, striking the flags with the heels
of his boots and with the ferrule of his heavy umbrella. Then, raising
the umbrella in salute, he said to all:

Good evening, sirs.

He struck the flags again and tittered while his head trembled with a
slight nervous movement. The tall consumptive student and Dixon and
OKeeffe were speaking in Irish and did not answer him. Then, turning
to Cranly, he said:

Good evening, particularly to you.

He moved the umbrella in indication and tittered again. Cranly, who was
still chewing the fig, answered with loud movements of his jaws.

Good? Yes. It is a good evening.

The squat student looked at him seriously and shook his umbrella gently
and reprovingly.

I can see, he said, that you are about to make obvious remarks.

Um, Cranly answered, holding out what remained of the half chewed fig
and jerking it towards the squat students mouth in sign that he should
eat.

The squat student did not eat it but, indulging his special humour,
said gravely, still tittering and prodding his phrase with his
umbrella:

Do you intend that...

He broke off, pointed bluntly to the munched pulp of the fig, and said
loudly:

I allude to that.

Um, Cranly said as before.

Do you intend that now, the squat student said, as ipso facto or,
let us say, as so to speak?

Dixon turned aside from his group, saying:

Goggins was waiting for you, Glynn. He has gone round to the Adelphi
to look for you and Moynihan. What have you there? he asked, tapping
the portfolio under Glynns arm.

Examination papers, Glynn answered. I give them monthly examinations
to see that they are profiting by my tuition.

He also tapped the portfolio and coughed gently and smiled.

Tuition! said Cranly rudely. I suppose you mean the barefooted
children that are taught by a bloody ape like you. God help them!

He bit off the rest of the fig and flung away the butt.

I suffer little children to come unto me, Glynn said amiably.

A bloody ape, Cranly repeated with emphasis, and a blasphemous bloody
ape!

Temple stood up and, pushing past Cranly, addressed Glynn:

That phrase you said now, he said, is from the new testament about
suffer the children to come to me.

Go to sleep again, Temple, said OKeeffe.

Very well, then, Temple continued, still addressing Glynn, and if
Jesus suffered the children to come why does the church send them all
to hell if they die unbaptised? Why is that?

Were you baptised yourself, Temple? the consumptive student asked.

But why are they sent to hell if Jesus said they were all to come?
Temple said, his eyes searching Glynns eyes.

Glynn coughed and said gently, holding back with difficulty the nervous
titter in his voice and moving his umbrella at every word:

And, as you remark, if it is thus, I ask emphatically whence comes
this thusness.

Because the church is cruel like all old sinners, Temple said.

Are you quite orthodox on that point, Temple? Dixon said suavely.

Saint Augustine says that about unbaptised children going to hell,
Temple answered, because he was a cruel old sinner too.

I bow to you, Dixon said, but I had the impression that limbo existed
for such cases.

Dont argue with him, Dixon, Cranly said brutally. Dont talk to him
or look at him. Lead him home with a sugan the way youd lead a
bleating goat.

Limbo! Temple cried. Thats a fine invention too. Like hell.

But with the unpleasantness left out, Dixon said.

He turned smiling to the others and said:

I think I am voicing the opinions of all present in saying so much.

You are, Glynn said in a firm tone. On that point Ireland is united.

He struck the ferrule of his umbrella on the stone floor of the
colonnade.

Hell, Temple said. I can respect that invention of the grey spouse of
Satan. Hell is Roman, like the walls of the Romans, strong and ugly.
But what is limbo?

Put him back into the perambulator, Cranly, OKeeffe called out.

Cranly made a swift step towards Temple, halted, stamping his foot,
crying as if to a fowl:

Hoosh!

Temple moved away nimbly.

Do you know what limbo is? he cried. Do you know what we call a notion
like that in Roscommon?

Hoosh! Blast you! Cranly cried, clapping his hands.

Neither my arse nor my elbow! Temple cried out scornfully. And thats
what I call limbo.

Give us that stick here, Cranly said.

He snatched the ashplant roughly from Stephens hand and sprang down
the steps: but Temple, hearing him move in pursuit, fled through the
dusk like a wild creature, nimble and fleet-footed. Cranlys heavy
boots were heard loudly charging across the quadrangle and then
returning heavily, foiled and spurning the gravel at each step.

His step was angry and with an angry abrupt gesture he thrust the stick
back into Stephens hand. Stephen felt that his anger had another cause
but, feigning patience, touched his arm slightly and said quietly:

Cranly, I told you I wanted to speak to you. Come away.

Cranly looked at him for a few moments and asked:

Now?

Yes, now, Stephen said. We cant speak here. Come away.

They crossed the quadrangle together without speaking. The bird call
from Siegfried whistled softly followed them from the steps of the
porch. Cranly turned, and Dixon, who had whistled, called out:

Where are you fellows off to? What about that game, Cranly?

They parleyed in shouts across the still air about a game of billiards
to be played in the Adelphi hotel. Stephen walked on alone and out into
the quiet of Kildare Street opposite Maples hotel he stood to wait,
patient again. The name of the hotel, a colourless polished wood, and
its colourless front stung him like a glance of polite disdain. He
stared angrily back at the softly lit drawingroom of the hotel in which
he imagined the sleek lives of the patricians of Ireland housed in
calm. They thought of army commissions and land agents: peasants
greeted them along the roads in the country; they knew the names of
certain French dishes and gave orders to jarvies in highpitched
provincial voices which pierced through their skintight accents.

How could he hit their conscience or how cast his shadow over the
imaginations of their daughters, before their squires begat upon them,
that they might breed a race less ignoble than their own? And under the
deepened dusk he felt the thoughts and desires of the race to which he
belonged flitting like bats across the dark country lanes, under trees
by the edges of streams and near the pool-mottled bogs. A woman had
waited in the doorway as Davin had passed by at night and, offering him
a cup of milk, had all but wooed him to her bed; for Davin had the mild
eyes of one who could be secret. But him no womans eyes had wooed.

His arm was taken in a strong grip and Cranlys voice said:

Let us eke go.

They walked southward in silence. Then Cranly said:

That blithering idiot, Temple! I swear to Moses, do you know, that
Ill be the death of that fellow one time.

But his voice was no longer angry and Stephen wondered was he thinking
of her greeting to him under the porch.

They turned to the left and walked on as before. When they had gone on
so for some time Stephen said:

Cranly, I had an unpleasant quarrel this evening.

With your people? Cranly asked.

With my mother.

About religion?

Yes, Stephen answered.

After a pause Cranly asked:

What age is your mother?

Not old, Stephen said. She wishes me to make my easter duty.

And will you?

I will not, Stephen said.

Why not? Cranly said.

I will not serve, answered Stephen.

That remark was made before, Cranly said calmly.

It is made behind now, said Stephen hotly.

Cranly pressed Stephens arm, saying:

Go easy, my dear man. Youre an excitable bloody man, do you know.

He laughed nervously as he spoke and, looking up into Stephens face
with moved and friendly eyes, said:

Do you know that you are an excitable man?

I daresay I am, said Stephen, laughing also.

Their minds, lately estranged, seemed suddenly to have been drawn
closer, one to the other.

Do you believe in the eucharist? Cranly asked.

I do not, Stephen said.

Do you disbelieve then?

I neither believe in it nor disbelieve in it, Stephen answered.

Many persons have doubts, even religious persons, yet they overcome
them or put them aside, Cranly said. Are your doubts on that point too
strong?

I do not wish to overcome them, Stephen answered.

Cranly, embarrassed for a moment, took another fig from his pocket and
was about to eat it when Stephen said:

Dont, please. You cannot discuss this question with your mouth full
of chewed fig.

Cranly examined the fig by the light of a lamp under which he halted.
Then he smelt it with both nostrils, bit a tiny piece, spat it out and
threw the fig rudely into the gutter. Addressing it as it lay, he said:

Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire!

Taking Stephens arm, he went on again and said:

Do you not fear that those words may be spoken to you on the day of
judgement?

What is offered me on the other hand? Stephen asked. An eternity of
bliss in the company of the dean of studies?

Remember, Cranly said, that he would be glorified.

Ay, Stephen said somewhat bitterly, bright, agile, impassible and,
above all, subtle.

It is a curious thing, do you know, Cranly said dispassionately, how
your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you
disbelieve. Did you believe in it when you were at school? I bet you
did.

I did, Stephen answered.

And were you happier then? Cranly asked softly, happier than you are
now, for instance?

Often happy, Stephen said, and often unhappy. I was someone else then.

How someone else? What do you mean by that statement?

I mean, said Stephen, that I was not myself as I am now, as I had to
become.

Not as you are now, not as you had to become, Cranly repeated. Let me
ask you a question. Do you love your mother?

Stephen shook his head slowly.

I dont know what your words mean, he said simply.

Have you never loved anyone? Cranly asked.

Do you mean women?

I am not speaking of that, Cranly said in a colder tone. I ask you if
you ever felt love towards anyone or anything?

Stephen walked on beside his friend, staring gloomily at the footpath.

I tried to love God, he said at length. It seems now I failed. It is
very difficult. I tried to unite my will with the will of God instant
by instant. In that I did not always fail. I could perhaps do that
still...

Cranly cut him short by asking:

Has your mother had a happy life?

How do I know? Stephen said.

How many children had she?

Nine or ten, Stephen answered. Some died.

Was your father.... Cranly interrupted himself for an instant, and
then said: I dont want to pry into your family affairs. But was your
father what is called well-to-do? I mean, when you were growing up?

Yes, Stephen said.

What was he? Cranly asked after a pause.

Stephen began to enumerate glibly his fathers attributes.

A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting
politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good
fellow, a storyteller, somebodys secretary, something in a distillery,
a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of his own past.

Cranly laughed, tightening his grip on Stephens arm, and said:

The distillery is damn good.

Is there anything else you want to know? Stephen asked.

Are you in good circumstances at present?

Do I look it? Stephen asked bluntly.

So then, Cranly went on musingly, you were born in the lap of luxury.

He used the phrase broadly and loudly as he often used technical
expressions as if he wished his hearer to understand that they were
used by him without conviction.

Your mother must have gone through a good deal of suffering, he said
then. Would you not try to save her from suffering more even if... or
would you?

If I could, Stephen said, that would cost me very little.

Then do so, Cranly said. Do as she wishes you to do. What is it for
you? You disbelieve in it. It is a form: nothing else. And you will set
her mind at rest.

He ceased and, as Stephen did not reply, remained silent. Then, as if
giving utterance to the process of his own thought, he said:

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a
mothers love is not. Your mother brings you into the world, carries
you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But
whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real. It must be. What are
our ideas or ambitions? Play. Ideas! Why, that bloody bleating goat
Temple has ideas. MacCann has ideas too. Every jackass going the roads
thinks he has ideas.

Stephen, who had been listening to the unspoken speech behind the
words, said with assumed carelessness:

Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him
as he feared the contact of her sex.

Pascal was a pig, said Cranly.

Aloysius Gonzaga, I think, was of the same mind, Stephen said.

And he was another pig then, said Cranly.

The church calls him a saint, Stephen objected.

I dont care a flaming damn what anyone calls him, Cranly said rudely
and flatly. I call him a pig.

Stephen, preparing the words neatly in his mind, continued:

Jesus, too, seems to have treated his mother with scant courtesy in
public but Suarez, a jesuit theologian and Spanish gentleman, has
apologised for him.

Did the idea ever occur to you, Cranly asked, that Jesus was not what
he pretended to be?

The first person to whom that idea occurred, Stephen answered, was
Jesus himself.

I mean, Cranly said, hardening in his speech, did the idea ever occur
to you that he was himself a conscious hypocrite, what he called the
jews of his time, a whited sepulchre? Or, to put it more plainly, that
he was a blackguard?

That idea never occurred to me, Stephen answered. But I am curious to
know are you trying to make a convert of me or a pervert of yourself?

He turned towards his friends face and saw there a raw smile which
some force of will strove to make finely significant.

Cranly asked suddenly in a plain sensible tone:

Tell me the truth. Were you at all shocked by what I said?

Somewhat, Stephen said.

And why were you shocked, Cranly pressed on in the same tone, if you
feel sure that our religion is false and that Jesus was not the son of
God?

I am not at all sure of it, Stephen said. He is more like a son of God
than a son of Mary.

And is that why you will not communicate, Cranly asked, because you
are not sure of that too, because you feel that the host, too, may be
the body and blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread? And
because you fear that it may be?

Yes, Stephen said quietly, I feel that and I also fear it.

I see, Cranly said.

Stephen, struck by his tone of closure, reopened the discussion at once
by saying:

I fear many things: dogs, horses, firearms, the sea, thunderstorms,
machinery, the country roads at night.

But why do you fear a bit of bread?

I imagine, Stephen said, that there is a malevolent reality behind
those things I say I fear.

Do you fear then, Cranly asked, that the God of the Roman catholics
would strike you dead and damn you if you made a sacrilegious
communion?

The God of the Roman catholics could do that now, Stephen said. I fear
more than that the chemical action which would be set up in my soul by
a false homage to a symbol behind which are massed twenty centuries of
authority and veneration.

Would you, Cranly asked, in extreme danger, commit that particular
sacrilege? For instance, if you lived in the penal days?

I cannot answer for the past, Stephen replied. Possibly not.

Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?

I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had
lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an
absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is
illogical and incoherent?

They had walked on towards the township of Pembroke and now, as they
went on slowly along the avenues, the trees and the scattered lights in
the villas soothed their minds. The air of wealth and repose diffused
about them seemed to comfort their neediness. Behind a hedge of laurel
a light glimmered in the window of a kitchen and the voice of a servant
was heard singing as she sharpened knives. She sang, in short broken
bars:

Rosie OGrady

Cranly stopped to listen, saying:

Mulier cantat.

The soft beauty of the Latin word touched with an enchanting touch the
dark of the evening, with a touch fainter and more persuading than the
touch of music or of a womans hand. The strife of their minds was
quelled. The figure of a woman as she appears in the liturgy of the
church passed silently through the darkness: a white-robed figure,
small and slender as a boy, and with a falling girdle. Her voice, frail
and high as a boys, was heard intoning from a distant choir the first
words of a woman which pierce the gloom and clamour of the first
chanting of the passion:

Et tu cum Jesu Galilo eras.

And all hearts were touched and turned to her voice, shining like a
young star, shining clearer as the voice intoned the proparoxyton and
more faintly as the cadence died.

The singing ceased. They went on together, Cranly repeating in strongly
stressed rhythm the end of the refrain:

    And when we are married,
    O, how happy well be
    For I love sweet Rosie OGrady
    And Rosie OGrady loves me.


Theres real poetry for you, he said. Theres real love.

He glanced sideways at Stephen with a strange smile and said:

Do you consider that poetry? Or do you know what the words mean?

I want to see Rosie first, said Stephen.

Shes easy to find, Cranly said.

His hat had come down on his forehead. He shoved it back and in the
shadow of the trees Stephen saw his pale face, framed by the dark, and
his large dark eyes. Yes. His face was handsome and his body was strong
and hard. He had spoken of a mothers love. He felt then the sufferings
of women, the weaknesses of their bodies and souls: and would shield
them with a strong and resolute arm and bow his mind to them.

Away then: it is time to go. A voice spoke softly to Stephens lonely
heart, bidding him go and telling him that his friendship was coming to
an end. Yes; he would go. He could not strive against another. He knew
his part.

Probably I shall go away, he said.

Where? Cranly asked.

Where I can, Stephen said.

Yes, Cranly said. It might be difficult for you to live here now. But
is it that makes you go?

I have to go, Stephen answered.

Because, Cranly continued, you need not look upon yourself as driven
away if you do not wish to go or as a heretic or an outlaw. There are
many good believers who think as you do. Would that surprise you? The
church is not the stone building nor even the clergy and their dogmas.
It is the whole mass of those born into it. I dont know what you wish
to do in life. Is it what you told me the night we were standing
outside Harcourt Street station?

Yes, Stephen said, smiling in spite of himself at Cranlys way of
remembering thoughts in connexion with places. The night you spent half
an hour wrangling with Doherty about the shortest way from Sallygap to
Larras.

Pothead! Cranly said with calm contempt. What does he know about the
way from Sallygap to Larras? Or what does he know about anything for
that matter? And the big slobbering washingpot head of him!

He broke into a loud long laugh.

Well? Stephen said. Do you remember the rest?

What you said, is it? Cranly asked. Yes, I remember it. To discover
the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in
unfettered freedom.

Stephen raised his hat in acknowledgement.

Freedom! Cranly repeated. But you are not free enough yet to commit a
sacrilege. Tell me would you rob?

I would beg first, Stephen said.

And if you got nothing, would you rob?

You wish me to say, Stephen answered, that the rights of property are
provisional, and that in certain circumstances it is not unlawful to
rob. Everyone would act in that belief. So I will not make you that
answer. Apply to the jesuit theologian Juan Mariana de Talavera who
will also explain to you in what circumstances you may lawfully kill
your king and whether you had better hand him his poison in a goblet or
smear it for him upon his robe or his saddlebow. Ask me rather would I
suffer others to rob me or, if they did, would I call down upon them
what I believe is called the chastisement of the secular arm?

And would you?

I think, Stephen said, it would pain me as much to do so as to be
robbed.

I see, Cranly said.

He produced his match and began to clean the crevice between two teeth.
Then he said carelessly:

Tell me, for example, would you deflower a virgin?

Excuse me, Stephen said politely, is that not the ambition of most
young gentlemen?

What then is your point of view? Cranly asked.

His last phrase, sour smelling as the smoke of charcoal and
disheartening, excited Stephens brain, over which its fumes seemed to
brood.

Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what
I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do.
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call
itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express
myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as
I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to
usesilence, exile and cunning.

Cranly seized his arm and steered him round so as to lead him back
towards Leeson Park. He laughed almost slily and pressed Stephens arm
with an elders affection.

Cunning indeed! he said. Is it you? You poor poet, you!

And you made me confess to you, Stephen said, thrilled by his touch,
as I have confessed to you so many other things, have I not?

Yes, my child, Cranly said, still gaily.

You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also
what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for
another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to
make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps
as long as eternity too.

Cranly, now grave again, slowed his pace and said:

Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that
word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not
even one friend.

I will take the risk, said Stephen.

And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a
friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.

His words seemed to have struck some deep chord in his own nature. Had
he spoken of himself, of himself as he was or wished to be? Stephen
watched his face for some moments in silence. A cold sadness was there.
He had spoken of himself, of his own loneliness which he feared.

Of whom are you speaking? Stephen asked at length.

Cranly did not answer.

March 20. Long talk with Cranly on the subject of my revolt.

He had his grand manner on. I supple and suave. Attacked me on the
score of love for ones mother. Tried to imagine his mother: cannot.
Told me once, in a moment of thoughtlessness, his father was sixtyone
when he was born. Can see him. Strong farmer type. Pepper and salt
suit. Square feet. Unkempt, grizzled beard. Probably attends coursing
matches. Pays his dues regularly but not plentifully to Father Dwyer of
Larras. Sometimes talks to girls after nightfall. But his mother? Very
young or very old? Hardly the first. If so, Cranly would not have
spoken as he did. Old then. Probably, and neglected. Hence Cranlys
despair of soul: the child of exhausted loins.

March 21, morning. Thought this in bed last night but was too lazy
and free to add to it. Free, yes. The exhausted loins are those of
Elizabeth and Zacchary. Then he is the precursor. Item: he eats chiefly
belly bacon and dried figs. Read locusts and wild honey. Also, when
thinking of him, saw always a stern severed head or death mask as if
outlined on a grey curtain or veronica. Decollation they call it in the
fold. Puzzled for the moment by saint John at the Latin gate. What do I
see? A decollated precursor trying to pick the lock.

March 21, night. Free. Soul free and fancy free. Let the dead bury
the dead. Ay. And let the dead marry the dead.

March 22. In company with Lynch followed a sizeable hospital nurse.
Lynchs idea. Dislike it. Two lean hungry greyhounds walking after a
heifer.

March 23. Have not seen her since that night. Unwell? Sits at the
fire perhaps with mammas shawl on her shoulders. But not peevish. A
nice bowl of gruel? Wont you now?

March 24. Began with a discussion with my mother. Subject: B.V.M.
Handicapped by my sex and youth. To escape held up relations between
Jesus and Papa against those between Mary and her son. Said religion
was not a lying-in hospital. Mother indulgent. Said I have a queer mind
and have read too much. Not true. Have read little and understood less.
Then she said I would come back to faith because I had a restless mind.
This means to leave church by backdoor of sin and re-enter through the
skylight of repentance. Cannot repent. Told her so and asked for
sixpence. Got threepence.

Then went to college. Other wrangle with little round head rogues eye
Ghezzi. This time about Bruno the Nolan. Began in Italian and ended in
pidgin English. He said Bruno was a terrible heretic. I said he was
terribly burned. He agreed to this with some sorrow. Then gave me
recipe for what he calls risotto alla bergamasca. When he pronounces
a soft o he protrudes his full carnal lips as if he kissed the vowel.
Has he? And could he repent? Yes, he could: and cry two round rogues
tears, one from each eye.

Crossing Stephens, that is, my Green, remembered that his countrymen
and not mine had invented what Cranly the other night called our
religion. A quartet of them, soldiers of the ninetyseventh infantry
regiment, sat at the foot of the cross and tossed up dice for the
overcoat of the crucified.

Went to library. Tried to read three reviews. Useless. She is not out
yet. Am I alarmed? About what? That she will never be out again.

Blake wrote:

    I wonder if William Bond will die
    For assuredly he is very ill.


Alas, poor William!

I was once at a diorama in Rotunda. At the end were pictures of big
nobs. Among them William Ewart Gladstone, just then dead. Orchestra
played O, Willie, we have missed you.

A race of clodhoppers!

March 25, morning. A troubled night of dreams. Want to get them off
my chest.

A long curving gallery. From the floor ascend pillars of dark vapours.
It is peopled by the images of fabulous kings, set in stone. Their
hands are folded upon their knees in token of weariness and their eyes
are darkened for the errors of men go up before them for ever as dark
vapours.

Strange figures advance as from a cave. They are not as tall as men.
One does not seem to stand quite apart from another. Their faces are
phosphorescent, with darker streaks. They peer at me and their eyes
seem to ask me something. They do not speak.

March 30. This evening Cranly was in the porch of the library,
proposing a problem to Dixon and her brother. A mother let her child
fall into the Nile. Still harping on the mother. A crocodile seized the
child. Mother asked it back. Crocodile said all right if she told him
what he was going to do with the child, eat it or not eat it.

This mentality, Lepidus would say, is indeed bred out of your mud by
the operation of your sun.

And mine? Is it not too? Then into Nile mud with it!

April 1. Disapprove of this last phrase.

April 2. Saw her drinking tea and eating cakes in Johnstons, Mooney
and OBriens. Rather, lynx-eyed Lynch saw her as we passed. He tells
me Cranly was invited there by brother. Did he bring his crocodile? Is
he the shining light now? Well, I discovered him. I protest I did.
Shining quietly behind a bushel of Wicklow bran.

April 3. Met Davin at the cigar shop opposite Findlaters church. He
was in a black sweater and had a hurley stick. Asked me was it true I
was going away and why. Told him the shortest way to Tara was via
Holyhead. Just then my father came up. Introduction. Father polite and
observant. Asked Davin if he might offer him some refreshment. Davin
could not, was going to a meeting. When we came away father told me he
had a good honest eye. Asked me why I did not join a rowing club. I
pretended to think it over. Told me then how he broke Pennyfeathers
heart. Wants me to read law. Says I was cut out for that. More mud,
more crocodiles.

April 5. Wild spring. Scudding clouds. O life! Dark stream of
swirling bogwater on which appletrees have cast down their delicate
flowers. Eyes of girls among the leaves. Girls demure and romping. All
fair or auburn: no dark ones. They blush better. Houp-la!

April 6. Certainly she remembers the past. Lynch says all women do.
Then she remembers the time of her childhoodand mine if I was ever a
child. The past is consumed in the present and the present is living
only because it brings forth the future. Statues of women, if Lynch be
right, should always be fully draped, one hand of the woman feeling
regretfully her own hinder parts.

April 6, later. Michael Robartes remembers forgotten beauty and,
when his arms wrap her round, he presses in his arms the loveliness
which has long faded from the world. Not this. Not at all. I desire to
press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.

April 10. Faintly, under the heavy night, through the silence of the
city which has turned from dreams to dreamless sleep as a weary lover
whom no caresses move, the sound of hoofs upon the road. Not so faintly
now as they come near the bridge; and in a moment, as they pass the
darkened windows, the silence is cloven by alarm as by an arrow. They
are heard now far away, hoofs that shine amid the heavy night as gems,
hurrying beyond the sleeping fields to what journeys endwhat
heart?bearing what tidings?

April 11. Read what I wrote last night. Vague words for a vague
emotion. Would she like it? I think so. Then I should have to like it
also.

April 13. That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked
it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean
of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for to teach us his
own language or to learn it from us. Damn him one way or the other!

April 14. John Alphonsus Mulrennan has just returned from the west of
Ireland. European and Asiatic papers please copy. He told us he met an
old man there in a mountain cabin. Old man had red eyes and short pipe.
Old man spoke Irish. Mulrennan spoke Irish. Then old man and Mulrennan
spoke English. Mulrennan spoke to him about universe and stars. Old man
sat, listened, smoked, spat. Then said:

Ah, there must be terrible queer creatures at the latter end of the
world.

I fear him. I fear his redrimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must
struggle all through this night till day come, till he or I lie dead,
gripping him by the sinewy throat till... Till what? Till he yield to
me? No. I mean no harm.

April 15. Met her today point blank in Grafton Street. The crowd
brought us together. We both stopped. She asked me why I never came,
said she had heard all sorts of stories about me. This was only to gain
time. Asked me was I writing poems? About whom? I asked her. This
confused her more and I felt sorry and mean. Turned off that valve at
once and opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented
and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri. Talked rapidly of
myself and my plans. In the midst of it unluckily I made a sudden
gesture of a revolutionary nature. I must have looked like a fellow
throwing a handful of peas into the air. People began to look at us.
She shook hands a moment after and, in going away, said she hoped I
would do what I said.

Now I call that friendly, dont you?

Yes, I liked her today. A little or much? Dont know. I liked her and
it seems a new feeling to me. Then, in that case, all the rest, all
that I thought I thought and all that I felt I felt, all the rest
before now, in fact... O, give it up, old chap! Sleep it off!

April 16. Away! Away!

The spell of arms and voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of
close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the
moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are
alonecome. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the
air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman,
making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible
youth.

April 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She
prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home
and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it.
Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality
of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated
conscience of my race.

April 27. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good
stead.


Dublin, 1904.
Trieste, 1914.


