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The Cat and the Devil

I sent you a little cat filled with sweets a few days ago but perhaps you do not know the story about the cat of Beaugency.

Beaugency is a tiny old town on the bank of Loire, France’s longest river. It is also a very wide river, for France at least. At Beaugency it is so wide that if you wanted to cross it from one bank to the other you would have to take at least one thousand steps. Long ago the people of Beaugency, when they wanted to cross it, had to go in a boat for there was no bridge. And they could not make one for themselves or pay anybody else to make one. So what were they to do?

The devil, who is always reading the newspapers, heard about this sad state of theirs so he dressed himself and came to call on the lord mayor of Beaugency, who was named Monsieur Alfred Byrne. This lord mayor was very fond of dressing himself too. He wore a scarlet robe and always had a great golden chain round his neck even when he was fast asleep in bed with his knees in his mouth.

The devil told the lord mayor what he had read in the newspaper and said he could make a bridge for the people of Beaugency so that they could cross the river as often as they wished. He said he could make a bridge as good as ever was made, and make it in one single night.

The lord mayor asked him how much money he wanted for making such a bridge. No money at all, said the devil, all I ask is that the first person who crosses the bridge shall belong to me. Good, said the lord mayor.

The night came down, all the people in Beaugency went to bed and slept. The morning came. And when they put their heads out of their windows they cried: O Loire, what a fine bridge! For they saw a fine strong stone bridge thrown across the wide river.

All the people ran down to the head of the bridge and looked across it. There was the devil, standing at the other side of the bridge, waiting for the first person who should cross it. But nobody dared to cross it for fear of the devil. Then there was the sound of bugles—that was a sign for the people to be silent—and the lord mayor M. Alfred Byrne appeared in his great scarlet robe and wearing his heavy golden chain round his neck. He had a bucket of water in one hand and under his arm—the other arm—he carried a cat.

The devil stopped dancing when he saw him from the other side of the bridge and put up his long spyglass. All the people whispered to one another and the cat looked up at the lord mayor because in the town of Beaugency it was allowed that a cat should look at a lord mayor. When he was tired of looking at the lord mayor (because even a cat gets tired of looking at a lord mayor) he began to play with the lord mayor’s heavy golden chain.

When the lord mayor came to the head of the bridge every man held his breath and every woman held her tongue. The lord mayor put the cat down on the bridge and, quick as a thought, splash! he emptied the whole bucket of water over it.

The cat who was now between the devil and the bucket of water made up his mind quite as quickly and ran with his ears back across the bridge and into the devil’s arms.

The devil was as angry as the devil himself. Messieurs les Balgentiens, he shouted across the bridge, vous n’ etes pas de belles gens du tout! Vous n’ ete que des chats!*

And he said to the cat: Viens ici, mon petit chat! Tu as peur, mon petit chou-chat! Viens ici, le diable t’ emporte! On va se chauffer tous les deuex. And off he went with the cat.

But the bridge is there still and there are boys walking and riding and playing upon it.

P.S. The devil mostly speaks a language of his own called Bellsybabble which he makes up himself as he goes along but when he is very angry he can speak quite bad French very well, though some who have heard him, say that he has a strong Dublin accent.

Giacomo Joyce

[The text follows Poems and Shorter Writings, Faber & Faber, London 1991, Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz, and John Whittier-Ferguson, eds.]

Who? A pale face surrounded by heavy odorous furs. Her movements are shy and nervous. She uses quizzing-glasses. Yes: a brief syllable. A brief laugh. A brief beat of the eyelids.

Cobweb handwriting, traced long and fine with quiet disdain and resignation: a young person of quality.

I launch forth on an easy wave of tepid speech: Swedenborg, the pseudo-Areopagite, Miguel de Molinos, Joachim Abbas. The wave is spent. Her classmate, retwisting her twisted body, purrs in boneless Viennese Italian: Che coltura! The long eyelids beat and lift: a burning needleprick stings and quivers in the velvet iris.

High heels clack hollow on the resonant stone stairs. Wintry air in the castle, gibbeted coats of mail, rude iron sconces over the windings of the winding turret stairs. Tapping clacking heels, a high and hollow noise. There is one below would speak with your ladyship.

Rounded and ripened: rounded by the lathe of intermarriage and ripened in the forcing-house of the seclusion of her race.

A ricefield near Vercelli under creamy summer haze. The wings of her drooping hat shadow her false smile. Shadows streak her falsely smiling face, smitten by the hot creamy light, grey wheyhued shadows under the jawbones, streaks of eggyolk yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour lurking within the softened pulp of the eyes.

A flower given by her to my daughter. Frail gift, frail giver, frail blue-veined child.

Padua far beyond the sea. The silent middle age, night, darkness of history sleep in the Piazza delle Erde [Erbe] under the moon. The city sleeps. Under the arches in the dark streets near the river the whores’ eyes spy out for fornicators. Cinque servizi per cinque franchi. A dark wave of verse, again and again and again.

Mine eyes fail in darkness, mine eyes fail,

Mine eyes fail in darkness, love.

Twilight. Crossing the piazza. Grey eve lowering on wide sagegreen pasturelands, shedding silently dusk and dew. She follows her mother with ungainly grace, the mare leading her filly foal. Grey twilight moulds softly the slim and shapely haunches, the meek supple tendonous neck, the fine-boned skull. Eve, peace, the dusk of wonder ....... Hillo! Ostler! Hilloho!

Papa and the girls sliding downhill, astride of a toboggan: the Grand Turk and his harem. Tightly capped and jacketted, boots laced in deft crisscross over the flesh-warmed tongue, the short skirt taut from the round knobs of the knees. A white flash: a flake, a snowflake:

I rush out of the tobacco-shop and call her name. She turns and halts to hear my jumbled words of lessons, hours, lessons, hours: and slowly her pale cheeks are flushed with a kindling opal light. Nay, nay, be not afraid!

Mio padre: she does the simplest acts with distinction. Unde derivatur? Mia figlia ha una grandissima ammirazione per il suo maestro inglese. The old man’s face, handsome, flushed, with strongly Jewish features and long white whiskers, turns towards me as we walk down the hill together. O! Perfectly said: courtesy, benevolence, curiosity, trust, suspicion, naturalness, helplessness of age, confidence, frankness, urbanity, sincerity, warning, pathos, compassion: a perfect blend. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!

Moving mists on the hill as I look upward from night and mud. Hanging mists over the damp trees. A light in the upper room. She is dressing to go to the play. There are ghosts in the mirror ..... Candles! Candles!

A gentle creature. At midnight, after music, all the way up the via San Michele, these words were spoken softly. Easy now, Jamesy! Did you never walk the streets of Dublin at night sobbing another name?

Corpses of Jews lie about me rotting in the mould of their holy field. Here is the tomb of her people, black stone, silence without hope ..... Pimply Meissel brought me here. He is beyond those trees standing with covered head at the grave of his suicide wife, wondering how the woman who slept in his bed has come to this end ..... The tomb of her people and hers: black stone, silence without hope: and all is ready. Do not die!

She raises her arms in an effort to hook at the nape of her neck a gown of black veiling. She cannot: no, she cannot. She moves backwards towards me mutely. I raise my arms to help her: her arms fall. I hold the websoft edges of her gown and drawing them out to hook them I see through the opening of the black veil her lithe body sheathed in an orange shift. It slips its ribbons of moorings at her shoulders and falls slowly: a lithe smooth naked body shimmering with silvery scales. It slips slowly over the slender buttocks of smooth polished silver and over their furrow, a tarnished silver shadow .... Fingers, cold and calm and moving .... A touch, a touch.

Small witless helpless and thin breath. But bend and hear: a voice. A sparrow under the wheels of Juggernaut, shaking shaker of the earth. Please, mister God, big mister God! Goodbye, big world! ....... Aber das ist eine Schweinerei!

The lady goes apace, apace, apace ..... Pure air on the upland road. Trieste is waking rawly: raw sunlight over its huddled browntiled roofs, testudoform; a multitude of prostrate bugs await a national deliverance. Belluouro rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife: the busy housewife is astir, sloe-eyed, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand ..... Pure air and silence on the upland road: and hoofs. A girl on horseback. Hedda! Hedda Gabler!

The sellers offer on their altars the first fruits: green-flecked lemons, jewelled cherries, shameful peaches with torn leaves. The carriage passes through the lane of canvas stalls, its wheel-spokes spinning in the glare. Make way! Her father and his son sit in the carriage. They have owls’ eyes and owls’ wisdom. Owlish wisdom stares from their eyes brooding upon the lore of their Summa contra Gentiles.

She thinks the Italian gentlemen were right to haul Ettore Albini, the critic of the Secolo, from the stalls because he did not stand up when the band played the Royal March. She heard that at supper. Ay. They love their country when they are quite sure which country it is.

A skirt caught back by her sudden moving knee; a white lace edging of an underskirt lifted unduly; a leg-stretched web of stocking. Si pol?

I play lightly, softly singing, John Dowland’s languid song. Loth to depart: I too am loth to go. That age is here and now. Here, opening from the darkness of desire, are eyes that dim the breaking East, their shimmer the shimmer of the scum that mantles the cesspool of the court of slobbering James. Here are wines all ambered, dying fallings of sweet airs, the proud pavan, kind gentlewomen wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths, the pox-fouled wenches and young wives that, gaily yielding to their ravishers, clip and clip again.

In the raw veiled spring morning faint odours float of morning Paris: aniseed, damp sawdust, hot dough of bread: and as I cross the Pont Saint Michel the steelblue waking waters chill my heart. They creep and lap about the island whereon men have lived since the stone age ..... Tawny gloom in the vast gargoyled church. It is cold as on that morning: quia frigus erat. Upon the steps of the far high altar, naked as the body of the Lord, the ministers lie prostrate in weak prayer. The voice of an unseen reader rises, intoning the lesson from Hosea. Haec dicit Dominus: in tribulatione sua mane consurgent ad me. Venite et revertamur ad Dominum .... She stands beside me, pale and chill, clothed with the shadows of the sindark nave, her thin elbow at my arm. Her flesh recalls the thrill of that raw mist-veiled morning, hurrying torches, cruel eyes. Her soul is sorrowful, trembles and would weep. Weep not for me, O daughter of Jerusalem!

I expound Shakespeare to docile Trieste: Hamlet, quoth I, who is most courteous to gentle and simple is rude only to Polonius. Perhaps, an embittered idealist, he can see in the parents of his beloved only grotesque attempts on the part of nature to produce her image ........... Marked you that?

She walks before me along the corridor and as she walks a dark coil of her hair slowly uncoils and falls. Slowly uncoiling, falling hair! She does not know and walks before me, simple and proud. So did she walk by Dante in simple pride and so, stainless of blood and violation, the daughter of Cenci, Beatrice, to her death:

....... Tie

My girdle for me and bind up this hair

In any simple knot.

The housemaid tells me that they had to take her away at once to the hospital, poveretta, that she suffered so much, so much, poveretta, that it is very grave ...... I walk away from her empty house. I feel that I am about to cry. Ah, no! It will not be like that, in a moment, without a word, without a look. No, no! Surely hell’s luck will not fail me!

Operated. The surgeon’s knife has probed in her entrails and withdrawn, leaving the raw jagged gash of its passage on her belly. I see her full dark suffering eyes, beautiful as the eyes of an antelope. O cruel wound! Libidinous God!

Once more in her chair by the window, happy words on her tongue, happy laughter. A bird twittering after storm, happy that its little foolish life has fluttered out of reach of the clutching fingers of an epileptic lord and giver of life, twittering happily, twittering and chirping happily.

She says that, had The Portrait of the Artist been frank only for frankness’ sake, she would have asked why I had given it to her to read. O you would, would you? A lady of letters.

She stands black-robed at the telephone. Little timid laughs, little cries, timid runs of speech suddenly broken .... Parlerò colla mamma .... Come! chook, chook! come! The black pullet is frightened: little runs suddenly broken, little timid cries: it is crying for its mamma, the portly hen.

Loggione. The sodden walls ooze a steamy damp. A symphony of smells fuses the mass of huddled human forms: sour reek of armpits, nozzled oranges, melting breast ointments, mastick water, the breath of suppers of sulphurous garlic, foul phosphorescent farts, opoponax, the frank sweat of marriageable and married womankind, the soapy stink of men ...... All night I have watched her, all night I shall see her: braided and pinnacled hair and olive oval face and calm soft eyes. A green fillet upon her hair and about her body a green-broidered gown: the hue of the illusion of the vegetable glass of nature and of lush grass, the hair of graves.

Those quiet cold fingers have touched the pages, foul and fair, on which my shame shall glow for ever. Quiet and cold and pure fingers. Have they never erred?

On the stairs. A cold frail hand: shyness, silence: dark langour-flooded eyes: weariness.

Whirling wreaths of grey vapour upon the heath. Her face, how grey and grave! Dark matted hair. Her lips press softly, her sighing breath comes through. Kissed.

My voice, dying in the echoes of its words, dies like the wisdom-wearied voice of the Eternal calling on Abraham through echoing hills. She leans back against the pillowed wall: odalisque-featured in the luxurious obscurity. Her eyes have drunk my thoughts: and into the moist warm yielding welcoming darkness of her womanhood my soul, itself dissolving, has streamed and poured and flooded a liquid and abundant seed ...... Take her now who will! ....

As I come out of Ralli’s house I come upon her suddenly as we both are giving alms to a blind beggar. She answers my sudden greeting by turning and averting her black basilisk eyes. E col suo vedere attosca l’uomo quando lo vede. I Thank you for the word, messer Brunetto.

They spread under my feet carpets for the son of man. They await my passing. She stands in the yellow shadow of the hall, a plaid cloak shielding from chills her sinking shoulders: and as I halt in wonder and look about me she greets me wintrily and passes up the staircase darting at me for an instant out of her sluggish sidelong eyes a jet of liquorish venom.

A soft crumpled peagreen cover drapes the lounge. A narrow Parisian room. The hairdresser lay here but now. I kissed her stocking and the hem of her rustblack dusty skirt. It is the other. She. Gogarty came yesterday to be introduced. Ulysses is the reason. Symbol of the intellectual conscience .... Ireland then? And the husband? Pacing the corridor in list shoes or playing chess against himself. Why are we left here? The hairdresser lay here but now, clutching my head between her knobby knees .... Intellectual symbol of my race. Listen! The plunging gloom has fallen. Listen!

—I am not convinced that such activities of the mind or body can be called unhealthy—

She speaks. A weak voice from beyond the cold stars. Voice of wisdom. Say on! O, say again, making me wise! This voice I never heard.

She coils towards me along the crumpled lounge. I cannot move or speak. Coiling approach of starborn flesh. Adultery of wisdom. No. I will go. I will.

Soft sucking lips kiss my left armpit: a coiling kiss on myriad veins. I burn! I crumple like a burning leaf! From my right armpit a fang of flame leaps out. A starry snake has kissed me: a cold nightsnake. I am lost!

Jan Pieters Sweelink. The quaint name of the old Dutch musician makes all beauty seem quaint and far. I hear his variations for the clavichord on an old air: Youth has an end. In the vague mist of old sounds a faint point of light appears: the speech of the soul is about to be heard. Youth has an end: the end is here. It will never be. You know that well. What then? Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?

Sliding—space—ages—foliage of stars—and waning heaven—stillness—and stillness deeper—stillness of annihilation—and her voice.

Unreadiness. A bare apartment. Torbid [?Torpid] daylight. A long black piano: coffin of music. Poised on its edge a woman’s hat, red-flowered, and umbrella, furled. Her arms: a casque, gules, and blunt spear on a field, sable.

Stephen Hero

c o n t e n t s — s t e p h e n

[Start of text]

XVI XVII XVIII

XIX XX XXI

XXII XXIII XXIV

XXV XXVI [Add. pages]

[The text follows the New Directions edition, Norfolk 1963, edited from the Manuscript in the Harvard College Library by Theodore Spencer, incorporating the Additional Manuscript Pages in the Yale University Library and the Cornell University Library, edited by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon.]

[Start of text]

anyone spoke to him mingled a too polite disbelief with its expectancy. His [stiff] coarse brownish hair was combed high off his forehead but there was little order in its arrangement. [The face] A girl might or might not have called him handsome: the face was regular in feature and its pose was almost softened into [positive distinct] beauty by a small feminine mouth. In [the] a general survey of the face the eyes were not prominent: they were small light blue eyes which checked advances. They were quite fresh and fearless but in spite of this the face was to a certain extent the face of a debauchee.

The president of the college was a sequestrated person who took the chair at reunions and inaugural meetings of societies. His visible lieutenants were a dean and a bursar. The bursar, Stephen thought, fitted his title: a heavy, florid man with a black-grey cap of hair. He performed his duties with great unction and was often to be seen looming in the hall watching the coming and going of the students. He insisted on punctuality: a minute or so late once or twice—he would not mind that so much; he would clap his hands and make some cheery reproof. But what made him severe was a few minutes lost every day: it disturbed the proper working of the classes. Stephen was nearly always more than a quarter of an hour late and [so] when he arrived the bursar had usually gone back to his office. One morning, however, he arrived at the school earlier than usual. Walking up the stone steps before him was a fat [young] student, a very hard-working, timorous young man with a bread-and-jam complexion. The bursar was standing in the hall with his arms folded across [the] his chest and when he caught sight of the fat young man he looked significantly at the clock. It was eight minutes past eleven.

—Now then, Moloney, you know this won’t do. Eight minutes late! Disturbing your class like that—we can’t have that, you know. Must be in sharp for lecture every morning in future.

The jam overspread the bread in Moloney’s face as he stumbled over some excuses about a clock being wrong and then scurried upstairs to his class. Stephen delayed a little [while] time hanging up his overcoat while the large priest eyed him solemnly. Then he turned his head quietly towards the bursar and said

The bursar at once clapped his hands and rubbed them together and clapped them together again. The beauty of the morning and the appositeness of the remark both struck him at the same time and he answered cheerily:

One morning [he] Stephen arrived three quarters of an hour late and he thought it his decenter plan to wait till the French lecture should begin. As he was leaning over the banisters, waiting for the twelve o’clock bell to ring a young man began to ascend the winding-stairs slowly. At a few steps from the landing he halted and turned a square rustic face towards Stephen.

—Is this the way to the Matriculation class, if you please, he asked in a brogue accenting the first syllable of Matriculation.

Stephen directed him and the two young men began to talk. The new student was named Madden and came from the county of Limerick. His manner without being exactly diffident was a little scared and he seemed grateful for Stephen’s attentions. After the French lecture the two walked across the green together and Stephen brought the newcomer into the National Library. Madden took off his hat at the turnstile and as he leaned on the counter to fill up the docket for his book Stephen remarked the peasant strength of his jaws.

The dean of the college was professor of English, Father Butt. He was reputed the most able man in the college: he was a philosopher and a scholar. He had read a series of papers at a total abstinence club to prove that Shakespeare was a Roman Catholic: he had also written against another Jesuit father who had very late in life been converted to the Baconian theory of the authorship of the plays. Father Butt had always his hands full of papers and his soutane very soiled with chalk. He was an elderly greyhound of a man and his vocal ligaments, like his garb, seemed to be coated with chalk. He had a plausible manner with everyone and was particularly——

of verse are the first conditions which the words must submit to, the rhythm is the esthetic result of the senses, values and relations of the words thus conditioned. The beauty of verse consisted as much in the concealment as in the revelation of construction but it certainly could not proceed from only one of these. For this reason he found Father Butt’s reading of verse and a schoolgirl’s accurate reading of verse intolerable. Verse to be read according to its rhythm should be read according to the stresses; that is, neither strictly according to the feet nor yet with complete disregard of them. All this theory he set himself to explain to Maurice and Maurice, when he had understood the meanings of the terms and had put these meanings carefully together, agreed that Stephen’s theory was the right one. There was only one possible way of rendering the first quatrain of Byron’s poem:

My days are in the yellow leaf

The flowers and fruits of love are gone

The worm, the canker and the grief

Are mine alone.

The two brothers tried this theory on all the verse they could remember and it yielded wonderful results. Soon Stephen began to explore the language for himself and to choose, and thereby rescue once for all, the words and phrases most amenable to his theory. He became a poet with malice aforethought.

He was at once captivated by the seeming eccentricities of the prose of Freeman and William Morris. He read them as one would read a thesaurus and made a garner of words. He read Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary by the hour and his mind, which had from the first been only too submissive to the infant sense of wonder, was often hypnotised by the most commonplace conversation. People seemed to him strangely ignorant of the value of the words they used so glibly. And pace by pace as this indignity of life forced itself upon him he became enamoured of an idealising, a more veritably human tradition. The phenomenon seemed to him a grave one and he began to see that people had leagued themselves together in a conspiracy of ignobility and that Destiny had scornfully reduced her prices for them. He desired no such reduction for himself and preferred to serve her on the ancient terms.

There was a special class for English composition and it was in this class that Stephen first made his name. The English essay was for him the one serious work of the week. His essay was usually very long and the professor, who was a leader-writer on the Freeman’s Journal, always kept it for the last. Stephen’s style of writing, [that] though it was over affectionate towards the antique and even the obsolete and too easily rhetorical, was remarkable for a certain crude originality of expression. He gave himself no great trouble to sustain the boldnesses which were expressed or implied in his essays. He threw them out as sudden defence-works while he was busy constructing the enigma of a manner. For the youth had been apprised of another crisis and he wished to make ready for the shock of it. On account of such manoeuvres he came to be regarded as a very unequilibrated [youth] young man who took more interest than young men usually take in theories which might be permitted as pastimes. Father Butt, to whom the emergence of these unusual qualities had been duly reported, spoke one day to Stephen with the purpose of ‘sounding’ him. Father Butt expressed a great admiration for Stephen’s essays all of which, he said, the professor of English composition had shown him. He encouraged the youth and suggested that in a short time perhaps he might contribute something to one of the Dublin papers or magazines. Stephen found this encouragement kindly meant but mistaken and he launched forth into a copious explanation of his theories. Father Butt listened and, even more readily than [Stephen] Maurice had done, agreed with them all. Stephen laid down his doctrine very positively and insisted on the importance of what he called the literary tradition. Words, he said, have a certain value in the literary tradition and a certain value in the market-place—a debased value. Words are simply receptacles for human thought: in the literary tradition they receive more valuable thoughts than they receive in the market-place. Father Butt listened to all this, rubbing his chalky hand often over his chin and nodding his head and said that Stephen evidently understood the importance of tradition. Stephen quoted a phrase from Newman to illustrate his theory.

—In that sentence of Newman’s, he said, the word is used according to the literary tradition: it has there its full value. In ordinary use, that is, in the market-place, it has a different value altogether, a debased value. “I hope I’m not detaining you.”

The very morning after this Father Butt returned Stephen’s monologue in kind. It was a raw nipping morning and when Stephen, who had arrived too late for the Latin lecture, strolled into the Physics Theatre he discovered Father Butt kneeling on the hearthstone engaged in lighting a small fire in the huge grate. He was making neat wisps of paper and carefully disposing them among the coals and sticks. All the while he kept up a little patter explaining his operations and at a crisis he produced from the most remote pockets of his chalkey soutane three dirty candle-butts. These he thrust in different openings and then looked up at Stephen with an air of triumph. He set a match to a few projecting pieces of paper and in a few minutes the coals had caught.

—That’s it: a useful art. We have the useful arts and we have the liberal arts.

Father Butt after this statement got up from the hearthstone and went away about some other business leaving Stephen to watch the kindling fire and Stephen brooded upon the fast melting candle-butts and on the reproach of the priest’s manner till it was time for the Physics lecture to begin.

The problem could not be solved out of hand but the artistic part of it at least presented no difficulties. In reading through ‘Twelfth Night’ for the class Father Butt skipped the two songs of the clown without a word and when Stephen, determined on forcing them on his attention, asked very gravely whether they were to be learned by heart or not Father Butt said it was improbable such a question would be on the paper:

—The clown sings these songs for the duke. It was a custom at that time for noblemen to have clowns to sing to them ... for amusement.

He took ‘Othello’ more seriously and made the class take a note of the moral of the play: an object-lesson in the passion of jealousy. Shakespeare, he said, had sounded the depths of human nature: his plays show us men and women under the influence of various passions and they show us the moral result of these passions. We see the conflict of these human passions and our own passions are purified by the spectacle. The dramas of Shakespeare have a distinct moral force and ‘Othello’ is one of the greatest of tragedies. Stephen trained himself to hear all this out without moving hand or foot but at the same time he was amused to learn that the president had refused to allow two of the boarders to go to a performance of ‘Othello’ at the Gaiety Theatre on the ground that there were many coarse expressions in the play.

The monster in Stephen had lately taken to misbehaving himself and on the least provocation was ready for bloodshed. Almost every incident of the day was a goad for him and the intellect had great trouble keeping him within bounds. But the episode of religious fervour which was fast becoming a memory had resulted in a certain outward self-control which was now found to be very useful. Besides this Stephen was quick enough to see that he must disentangle his affairs in secrecy and reserve had ever been a light penance for him. His reluctance to debate scandal, to seem impolitely curious of others, aided him in his real indictment and was not without a satisfactory flavour of the heroic. Already while that fever-fit of holiness lay upon him he had encountered but out of charity had declined to penetrate disillusioning forces. These shocks had driven him from breathless flights of zeal shamefully inwards and the most that devotional exercises could do for him was to soothe him. This soothing he badly needed for he suffered greatly from contact with his new environment. He hardly spoke to his colleagues and performed the business of the class without remark or interest. Every morning he rose and came down to breakfast. After breakfast he took the tram for town, settling himself on the front seat outside with his face to the wind. He got down off the tram at Amiens St Station instead of going on to the Pillar because he wished to partake in the morning life of the city. This morning walk was pleasant for him and there was no face that passed him on its way to its commercial prison but he strove to pierce to the motive centre of its ugliness. It was always with a feeling of displeasure that he entered the Green and saw on the far side the gloomy building of the College.

As he walked thus through the ways of the city he had his ears and eyes ever prompt to receive impressions. It was not only in Skeat that he found words for his treasure-house, he found them also at haphazard in the shops, on advertisements, in the mouths of the plodding public. He kept repeating them to himself till they lost all instantaneous meaning for him and became wonderful vocables. He was determined to fight with every energy of soul and body against any possible consignment to what he now regarded as the hell of hells—the region, otherwise expressed, wherein everything is found to be obvious—and the saint who formerly was chary of speech in obedience to a commandment of silence could just be recognised in the artist who schooled himself to silence lest words should return him his discourtesy. Phrases came to him asking to have themselves explained. He said to himself: I must wait for the Eucharist to come to me: and then he set about translating the phrase into common sense. He spent days and nights hammering noisily as he built a house of silence for himself wherein he might await his Eucharist, days and nights gathering the first fruits and every peace-offering and heaping them upon his altar whereon he prayed clamorously the burning token of satisfaction might descend. In class, in the hushed library, in the company of other students he would suddenly hear a command to begone, to be alone, a voice agitating the very tympanum of his ear, a flame leaping into divine cerebral life. He would obey the command and wander up and down the streets alone, the fervour of his hope sustained by ejaculations until he felt sure that it was useless to wander any more: and then he would return home with a deliberate, unflagging step piecing together meaningless words and phrases with deliberate unflagging seriousness.

XVI

Their Eminences of the Holy College are hardly more scrupulous solitaries during the ballot for Christ’s vicar than was Stephen at this time. He wrote a great deal of verse and, in default of any better contrivance, his verse allowed him to combine the offices of penitent and confessor. He sought in his verses to fix the most elusive of his moods and he put his lines together not word by word but letter by letter. He read Blake and Rimbaud on the values of letters and even permuted and combined the five vowels to construct cries for primitive emotions. To none of his former fervours had he given himself with such a whole heart as to this fervour; the monk now seemed to him no more than half the artist. He persuaded himself that it is necessary for an artist to labour incessantly at his art if he wishes to express completely even the simplest conception and he believed that every moment of inspiration must be paid for in advance. He was not convinced of the truth of the saying [Poeta nascitur, non fit] “The poet is born, not made” but he was quite sure of the truth of this at least: [Poema fit, non nascitur] “The poem is made not born.” The burgher notion of the poet Byron in undress pouring out verses [like] just as a city fountain pours out water seemed to him characteristic of most popular judgments on esthetic matters and he combated the notion at its root by saying solemnly to Maurice—Isolation is the first principle of artistic economy.

Stephen did not attach himself to art in any spirit of youthful dillettantism but strove to pierce to the significant heart of everything. He doubled backwards into the past of humanity and caught glimpses of emergent art as one might have a vision of the pleisiosauros emerging from his ocean of slime. He seemed almost to hear the simple cries of fear and joy and wonder which are antecedent to all song, the savage rhythms of men pulling at the oar, to see the rude scrawls and the portable gods of men whose legacy Leonardo and Michelangelo inherit. And over all this chaos of history and legend, of fact and supposition, he strove to draw out a line of order, to reduce the abysses of the past to order by a diagram. The treatises which were recommended to him he found valueless and trifling; the Laocoon of Lessing irritated him. He wondered how the world could accept as valuable contributions such [fantas] fanciful generalisations. What finer certitude could be attained by the artist if he believed that ancient art was plastic and that modern art was pictorial—ancient art in this context meaning art between the Balkans and the Morea and modern art meaning art anywhere between the Caucasus and the Atlantic except in the sacrosanct region. A great contempt devoured him for the critics who considered “Greek” and “classical” interchangeable terms and so full was he of intemperate anger that [all week Saturday] when Father Butt gave ‘Othello’ as the subject for the essay of the week Stephen lodged on the following Monday a profuse, downright protest against the ‘masterpiece.’ The young men in the class laughed and Stephen, as he looked contemptuously at the laughing faces, thought of a self-submersive reptile.

No-one would listen to his theories: no-one was interested in art. The young men in the college regarded art as a continental vice and they said in effect, “If we must have art are there not enough subjects in Holy Writ?”—for an artist with them was a man who painted pictures. It was a bad sign for a young man to show interest in anything but his examinations or his prospective ‘job.’ It was all very well to be able to talk about it but really art was all ‘rot’: besides it was probably immoral; they knew (or, at least, they had heard) about studios. They didn’t want that kind of thing in their country. Talk about beauty, talk about rhythms, talk about esthetic—they knew what all the fine talk covered. One day a big countrified student came over to Stephen and asked:

A few bystanders laughed at this and Stephen wondered for which of the learned professions the young man’s father designed him.

In spite of his surroundings Stephen continued his labours of research and all the more ardently since he imagined they had been put under ban. It was part of that ineradicable egoism which he was afterwards to call redeemer that he conceived converging to him the deeds and thoughts of his microcosm. Is the mind of youth medieval that it is so divining of intrigue? Field-sports (or their equivalent in the world of mentality) are perhaps the most effective cure and Anglo-Saxon educators favour rather a system of hardy brutality. But for this fantastic idealist, eluding the grunting booted apparition with a bound, the mimic warfare was no less ludicrous than unequal in a ground chosen to his disadvantage. Behind the rapidly indurating shield the sensitive answered: Let the pack of enmities come tumbling and sniffing to my highlands after their game. There was his ground and he flung them disdain from flashing antlers.

Indeed he felt the morning in his blood: he was aware of some movement already proceeding out in Europe. Of this last phrase he was fond for it seemed to him to unroll the measurable world before the feet of the islanders. Nothing could persuade him that the world was such as Father Butt’s students conceived it. He had no need for the cautions which were named indispensable, no reverence for the proprieties which were called the bases of life. He was an enigmatic figure in the midst of his shivering society where he enjoyed a reputation. His comrades hardly knew how far to venture with him and professors pretended to think his seriousness a sufficient warrant against any practical disobedience. On his side chastity, having been found a great inconvenience, had been quietly abandoned and the youth amused himself in the company of certain of his fellow-students among whom (as the fame went) wild living was not unknown. The Rector of Belvedere had a brother who was at this time a student in the college and one night in the gallery of the Gaiety (for Stephen had become a constant ‘god’) another Belvedere boy, who was also a student in the college, bore scandalous witness into Stephen’s ear.

—I wonder what MacNally would say if he met his brother—you know the fellow in the college?

—I saw him in Stephen’s Green the other day with a tart. I was just thinking if MacNally saw him ...

The informant paused: and then, afraid of over-implication and with an air of a connoisseur, he added seriously:

Every evening after tea Stephen left his house and set out for the city, Maurice at his side. The elder smoked cigarettes and the younger ate lemon drops and, aided by these animal comforts, they beguiled the long journey with philosophic discourse. Maurice was a very attentive person and one evening he told Stephen that he was keeping a diary of their conversations. Stephen asked to see the diary but Maurice said it would be time enough for that at the end of the first year. Neither of the youths had the least suspicion of themselves; they both looked upon life with frank curious eyes (Maurice naturally serving himself with Stephen’s vision when his own was deficient) and they both felt that it was possible to arrive at a sane understanding of so-called mysteries if one only had patience enough. On their way in every evening the heights of argument were traversed and the younger boy aided the elder bravely in the building of an entire science of esthetic. They spoke to each other very decisively and Stephen found Maurice very useful for raising objections. When they came to the gate of the Library they used to stand to finish some branch of their subject and often the discussion was so protracted that Stephen would decide that it was too late to go in to read and so they would set their faces for Clontarf and return in the same manner. Stephen, after certain hesitations, showed Maurice the first-fruits of his verse and Maurice asked who the woman was. Stephen looked a little vaguely before him before answering and in the end had to answer that he didn’t know who she was.

To this unknown verses were now regularly inscribed and it seemed that the evil dream of love which Stephen chose to commemorate in these verses lay veritably upon the world now in a season of damp violet mist. He had abandoned his Madonna, he had forsaken his word and he had withdrawn sternly from his little world and surely it was not wonderful that his solitude should propel him to frenetic outbursts of a young man’s passion and to outbursts of loneliness? This quality of the mind which so reveals itself is called (when incorrigible) a decadence but if we are to take a general view of [life] the world we cannot but see a process to life through corruption. There were moments for him, however, when such a process would have seemed intolerable, life on any common terms an intolerable offence, and at such moments he prayed for nothing and lamented for nothing but he felt with a sweet sinking of consciousness that if the end came to him it was in the arms of the unknown that it would come to him:

The dawn awakes with tremulous alarms,

How grey, how cold, how bare!

O, hold me still white arms, encircling arms!

And hide me, heavy hair!

Life is a dream, a dream. The hour is done

And antiphon is said.

We go from the light and falsehood of the sun

To bleak wastes of the dead.

Little by little Stephen became more irregular in his attendances at the college. He would leave his house every morning at the usual hour and come into the city on the tram. But always at Amiens St Station he would get down and walk and as often as not he would decide to follow some trivial indication of city life instead of entering the oppressive life of the College. He often walked thus for seven or eight hours at a stretch without feeling in the least fatigued. The damp Dublin winter seemed to harmonise with his inward sense of unreadiness and he did not follow the least of feminine provocations through tortuous, unexpected ways any more zealously than he followed through ways even less satisfying the nimble movements of the elusive one. What was that One: arms of love that had not love’s malignity, laughter running upon the mountains of the morning, an hour wherein might be encountered the incommunicable? And if the heart but trembled an instant at some approach to that he would cry, youthfully, passionately “It is so! It is so! Life is such as I conceive it.” He spurned from before him the stale maxims of the Jesuits and he swore an oath that [never] they should never establish over him an ascendancy. He spurned from before him a world of the higher culture in which there was neither scholarship nor art nor dignity of manners—a world of trivial intrigues and trivial triumphs. Above all he spurned from before him the company of [the] decrepit youth—and he swore an oath that never would they establish with him a compact of fraud. Fine words! fine oaths! crying bravely and passionately even in the teeth of circumstances. For not unfrequently in the pauses of rapture Dublin would lay a sudden hand upon his shoulder, and the chill of the summons would strike to his heart. One day he passed on his homeward journey through Fairview. At the fork of the roads before the swampy beach a big dog was recumbent. From time to time he lifted his muzzle in the vapourous air, uttering a prolonged sorrowful howl. People had gathered on the footpaths to hear him. [and] Stephen made one of them till he felt the first drops of rain, and then he continued his way in silence under the dull surveillance of heaven, hearing from time to time behind him the strange lamentation.

It was natural that the more the youth sought solitude for himself the more his society sought to prevent his purpose. Though he was still in his first year he was considered a personality and there were even many who thought that though his theories were a trifle ardent they were not without meaning. Stephen came seldom to lectures, prepared nothing and absented himself from term examinations and not merely was no remark passed on these extravagances but it was supposed probable that he represented really the artistic type and that he was, after the fashion of that little known tribe, educating himself. It must not be supposed that the popular University of Ireland lacked an intelligent centre. Outside the compact body of national revivalists there were here and there students who had certain ideas of their own and were more or less tolerated by their fellows. For instance there was a serious young feminist named McCann—a blunt brisk figure, wearing a Cavalier beard and shooting-suit, and a steadfast reader of the Review of Reviews

JAMES

JOYCE

The Cat and the Devil

Giacomo Joyce

Stephen Hero

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XVI