A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
power and love. Life became a divine gift for every moment and
sensation of which, were it even the sight of a single leaf hanging on
the twig of a tree, his soul should praise and thank the Giver. The
world for all its solid substance and complexity no longer existed for
his soul save as a theorem of divine power and love and universality.
So entire and unquestionable was this sense of the divine meaning in
all nature granted to his soul that he could scarcely understand why it
was in any way necessary that he should continue to live. Yet that was
part of the divine purpose and he dared not question its use, he above
all others who had sinned so deeply and so foully against the divine
purpose. Meek and abased by this consciousness of the one eternal
omnipresent perfect reality his soul took up again her burden of
pieties, masses and prayers and sacraments and mortifications, and only
then for the first time since he had brooded on the great mystery of
love did he feel within him a warm movement like that of some newly
born life or virtue of the soul itself. The attitude of rapture in
sacred art, the raised and parted hands, the parted lips and eyes as of
one about to swoon, became for him an image of the soul in prayer,
humiliated and faint before her Creator.
But he had been forewarned of the dangers of spiritual exaltation and
did not allow himself to desist from even the least or lowliest
devotion, striving also by constant mortification to undo the sinful
past rather than to achieve a saintliness fraught with peril. Each of
his senses was brought under a rigorous discipline. In order to mortify
the sense of sight he made it his rule to walk in the street with
downcast eyes, glancing neither to right nor left and never behind him.
His eyes shunned every encounter with the eyes of women. From time to
time also he balked them by a sudden effort of the will, as by lifting
them suddenly in the middle of an unfinished sentence and closing the
book. To mortify his hearing he exerted no control over his voice which
was then breaking, neither sang nor whistled, and made no attempt to
flee from noises which caused him painful nervous irritation such as
the sharpening of knives on the knifeboard, the gathering of cinders on
the fireshovel and the twigging of the carpet. To mortify his smell was
more difficult as he found in himself no instinctive repugnance to bad
odours whether they were the odours of the outdoor world, such as those
of dung or tar, or the odours of his own person among which he had made
many curious comparisons and experiments. He found in the end that the
only odour against which his sense of smell revolted was a certain
stale fishy stink like that of longstanding urine; and whenever it was
possible he subjected himself to this unpleasant odour. To mortify the
taste he practised strict habits at table, observed to the letter all
the fasts of the church and sought by distraction to divert his mind
from the savours of different foods. But it was to the mortification of
touch he brought the most assiduous ingenuity of inventiveness. He
never consciously changed his position in bed, sat in the most
uncomfortable positions, suffered patiently every itch and pain, kept
away from the fire, remained on his knees all through the mass except
at the gospels, left part of his neck and face undried so that air
might sting them and, whenever he was not saying his beads, carried his
arms stiffly at his sides like a runner and never in his pockets or
clasped behind him.
He had no temptations to sin mortally. It surprised him however to find
that at the end of his course of intricate piety and selfrestraint he
was so easily at the mercy of childish and unworthy imperfections. His
prayers and fasts availed him little for the suppression of anger at
hearing his mother sneeze or at being disturbed in his devotions. It
needed an immense effort of his will to master the impulse which urged
him to give outlet to such irritation. Images of the outbursts of
trivial anger which he had often noted among his masters, their
twitching mouths, closeshut lips and flushed cheeks, recurred to his
memory, discouraging him, for all his practice of humility, by the
comparison. To merge his life in the common tide of other lives was
harder for him than any fasting or prayer and it was his constant
failure to do this to his own satisfaction which caused in his soul at
last a sensation of spiritual dryness together with a growth of doubts
and scruples. His soul traversed a period of desolation in which the
sacraments themselves seemed to have turned into dried up sources. His
confession became a channel for the escape of scrupulous and unrepented
imperfections. His actual reception of the eucharist did not bring him
the same dissolving moments of virginal self-surrender as did those
spiritual communions made by him sometimes at the close of some visit
to the Blessed Sacrament. The book which he used for these visits was
an old neglected book written by saint Alphonsus Liguori, with fading
characters and sere foxpapered leaves. A faded world of fervent love
and virginal responses seemed to be evoked for his soul by the reading
of its pages in which the imagery of the canticles was interwoven with
the communicant’s prayers. An inaudible voice seemed to caress the
soul, telling her names and glories, bidding her arise as for espousal
and come away, bidding her look forth, a spouse, from Amana and from
the mountains of the leopards; and the soul seemed to answer with the
same inaudible voice, surrendering herself: _Inter ubera mea
commorabitur._
This idea of surrender had a perilous attraction for his mind now that
he felt his soul beset once again by the insistent voices of the flesh
which began to murmur to him again during his prayers and meditations.
It gave him an intense sense of power to know that he could, by a
single act of consent, in a moment of thought, undo all that he had
done. He seemed to feel a flood slowly advancing towards his naked feet
and to be waiting for the first faint timid noiseless wavelet to touch
his fevered skin. Then, almost at the instant of that touch, almost at
the verge of sinful consent, he found himself standing far away from
the flood upon a dry shore, saved by a sudden act of the will or a
sudden ejaculation; and, seeing the silver line of the flood far away
and beginning again its slow advance towards his feet, a new thrill of
power and satisfaction shook his soul to know that he had not yielded
nor undone all.
When he had eluded the flood of temptation many times in this way he
grew troubled and wondered whether the grace which he had refused to
lose was not being filched from him little by little. The clear
certitude of his own immunity grew dim and to it succeeded a vague fear
that his soul had really fallen unawares. It was with difficulty that
he won back his old consciousness of his state of grace by telling
himself that he had prayed to God at every temptation and that the
grace which he had prayed for must have been given to him inasmuch as
God was obliged to give it. The very frequency and violence of
temptations showed him at last the truth of what he had heard about the
trials of the saints. Frequent and violent temptations were a proof
that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to
make it fall.
Often when he had confessed his doubts and scruples, some momentary
inattention at prayer, a movement of trivial anger in his soul, or a
subtle wilfulness in speech or act, he was bidden by his confessor to
name some sin of his past life before absolution was given him. He
named it with humility and shame and repented of it once more. It
humiliated and shamed him to think that he would never be freed from it
wholly, however holily he might live or whatever virtues or perfections
he might attain. A restless feeling of guilt would always be present
with him: he would confess and repent and be absolved, confess and
repent again and be absolved again, fruitlessly. Perhaps that first
hasty confession wrung from him by the fear of hell had not been good?
Perhaps, concerned only for his imminent doom, he had not had sincere
sorrow for his sin? But the surest sign that his confession had been
good and that he had had sincere sorrow for his sin was, he knew, the
amendment of his life.
—I have amended my life, have I not? he asked himself.
The director stood in the embrasure of the window, his back to the
light, leaning an elbow on the brown crossblind, and, as he spoke and
smiled, slowly dangling and looping the cord of the other blind,
Stephen stood before him, following for a moment with his eyes the
waning of the long summer daylight above the roofs or the slow deft
movements of the priestly fingers. The priest’s face was in total
shadow, but the waning daylight from behind him touched the deeply
grooved temples and the curves of the skull. Stephen followed also with
his ears the accents and intervals of the priest’s voice as he spoke
gravely and cordially of indifferent themes, the vacation which had
just ended, the colleges of the order abroad, the transference of
masters. The grave and cordial voice went on easily with its tale and
in the pauses Stephen felt bound to set it on again with respectful
questions. He knew that the tale was a prelude and his mind waited for
the sequel. Ever since the message of summons had come for him from the
director his mind had struggled to find the meaning of the message;
and, during the long restless time he had sat in the college parlour
waiting for the director to come in, his eyes had wandered from one
sober picture to another around the walls and his mind wandered from
one guess to another until the meaning of the summons had almost become
clear. Then, just as he was wishing that some unforeseen cause might
prevent the director from coming, he had heard the handle of the door
turning and the swish of a soutane.
The director had begun to speak of the Dominican and Franciscan orders
and of the friendship between saint Thomas and saint Bonaventure. The
Capuchin dress, he thought, was rather too....
Stephen’s face gave back the priest’s indulgent smile and, not being
anxious to give an opinion, he made a slight dubitative movement with
his lips.
—I believe, continued the director, that there is some talk now among
the Capuchins themselves of doing away with it and following the
example of the other Franciscans.
—I suppose they would retain it in the cloisters? said Stephen.
—O certainly, said the director. For the cloister it is all right but
for the street I really think it would be better to do away with it,
don’t you?
—It must be troublesome, I imagine.
—Of course it is, of course. Just imagine when I was in Belgium I used
to see them out cycling in all kinds of weather with this thing up
about their knees! It was really ridiculous. _Les jupes_, they call
them in Belgium.
The vowel was so modified as to be indistinct.
—What do they call them?
—_Les jupes_.
—O!
Stephen smiled again in answer to the smile which he could not see on
the priest’s shadowed face, its image or spectre only passing rapidly
across his mind as the low discreet accent fell upon his ear. He gazed
calmly before him at the waning sky, glad of the cool of the evening
and of the faint yellow glow which hid the tiny flame kindling upon his
cheek.
The names of articles of dress worn by women or of certain soft and
delicate stuffs used in their making brought always to his mind a
delicate and sinful perfume. As a boy he had imagined the reins by
which horses are driven as slender silken bands and it shocked him to
feel at Stradbrooke the greasy leather of harness. It had shocked him,