A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
too, when he had felt for the first time beneath his tremulous fingers
the brittle texture of a woman’s stocking for, retaining nothing of all
he read save that which seemed to him an echo or a prophecy of his own
state, it was only amid softworded phrases or within rosesoft stuffs
that he dared to conceive of the soul or body of a woman moving with
tender life.
But the phrase on the priest’s lips was disingenuous for he knew that a
priest should not speak lightly on that theme. The phrase had been
spoken lightly with design and he felt that his face was being searched
by the eyes in the shadow. Whatever he had heard or read of the craft
of jesuits he had put aside frankly as not borne out by his own
experience. His masters, even when they had not attracted him, had
seemed to him always intelligent and serious priests, athletic and
high-spirited prefects. He thought of them as men who washed their
bodies briskly with cold water and wore clean cold linen. During all
the years he had lived among them in Clongowes and in Belvedere he had
received only two pandies and, though these had been dealt him in the
wrong, he knew that he had often escaped punishment. During all those
years he had never heard from any of his masters a flippant word: it
was they who had taught him christian doctrine and urged him to live a
good life and, when he had fallen into grievous sin, it was they who
had led him back to grace. Their presence had made him diffident of
himself when he was a muff in Clongowes and it had made him diffident
of himself also while he had held his equivocal position in Belvedere.
A constant sense of this had remained with him up to the last year of
his school life. He had never once disobeyed or allowed turbulent
companions to seduce him from his habit of quiet obedience; and, even
when he doubted some statement of a master, he had never presumed to
doubt openly. Lately some of their judgements had sounded a little
childish in his ears and had made him feel a regret and pity as though
he were slowly passing out of an accustomed world and were hearing its
language for the last time. One day when some boys had gathered round a
priest under the shed near the chapel, he had heard the priest say:
—I believe that Lord Macaulay was a man who probably never committed a
mortal sin in his life, that is to say, a deliberate mortal sin.
Some of the boys had then asked the priest if Victor Hugo were not the
greatest French writer. The priest had answered that Victor Hugo had
never written half so well when he had turned against the church as he
had written when he was a catholic.
—But there are many eminent French critics, said the priest, who
consider that even Victor Hugo, great as he certainly was, had not so
pure a French style as Louis Veuillot.
The tiny flame which the priest’s allusion had kindled upon Stephen’s
cheek had sunk down again and his eyes were still fixed calmly on the
colourless sky. But an unresting doubt flew hither and thither before
his mind. Masked memories passed quickly before him: he recognised
scenes and persons yet he was conscious that he had failed to perceive
some vital circumstance in them. He saw himself walking about the
grounds watching the sports in Clongowes and eating slim jim out of his
cricketcap. Some jesuits were walking round the cycle-track in the
company of ladies. The echoes of certain expressions used in Clongowes
sounded in remote caves of his mind.
His ears were listening to these distant echoes amid the silence of the
parlour when he became aware that the priest was addressing him in a
different voice.
—I sent for you today, Stephen, because I wished to speak to you on a
very important subject.
—Yes, sir.
—Have you ever felt that you had a vocation?
Stephen parted his lips to answer yes and then withheld the word
suddenly. The priest waited for the answer and added:
—I mean, have you ever felt within yourself, in your soul, a desire to
join the order? Think.
—I have sometimes thought of it, said Stephen.
The priest let the blindcord fall to one side and, uniting his hands,
leaned his chin gravely upon them, communing with himself.
—In a college like this, he said at length, there is one boy or perhaps
two or three boys whom God calls to the religious life. Such a boy is
marked off from his companions by his piety, by the good example he
shows to others. He is looked up to by them; he is chosen perhaps as
prefect by his fellow sodalists. And you, Stephen, have been such a boy
in this college, prefect of Our Blessed Lady’s sodality. Perhaps you
are the boy in this college whom God designs to call to Himself.
A strong note of pride reinforcing the gravity of the priest’s voice
made Stephen’s heart quicken in response.
To receive that call, Stephen, said the priest, is the greatest honour
that the Almighty God can bestow upon a man. No king or emperor on this
earth has the power of the priest of God. No angel or archangel in
heaven, no saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself, has the power of
a priest of God: the power of the keys, the power to bind and to loose
from sin, the power of exorcism, the power to cast out from the
creatures of God the evil spirits that have power over them; the power,
the authority, to make the great God of Heaven come down upon the altar
and take the form of bread and wine. What an awful power, Stephen!
A flame began to flutter again on Stephen’s cheek as he heard in this
proud address an echo of his own proud musings. How often had he seen
himself as a priest wielding calmly and humbly the awful power of which
angels and saints stood in reverence! His soul had loved to muse in
secret on this desire. He had seen himself, a young and silentmannered
priest, entering a confessional swiftly, ascending the altarsteps,
incensing, genuflecting, accomplishing the vague acts of the priesthood
which pleased him by reason of their semblance of reality and of their
distance from it. In that dim life which he had lived through in his
musings he had assumed the voices and gestures which he had noted with
various priests. He had bent his knee sideways like such a one, he had
shaken the thurible only slightly like such a one, his chasuble had
swung open like that of such another as he turned to the altar again
after having blessed the people. And above all it had pleased him to
fill the second place in those dim scenes of his imagining. He shrank
from the dignity of celebrant because it displeased him to imagine that
all the vague pomp should end in his own person or that the ritual
should assign to him so clear and final an office. He longed for the
minor sacred offices, to be vested with the tunicle of subdeacon at
high mass, to stand aloof from the altar, forgotten by the people, his
shoulders covered with a humeral veil, holding the paten within its
folds or, when the sacrifice had been accomplished, to stand as deacon
in a dalmatic of cloth of gold on the step below the celebrant, his
hands joined and his face towards the people, and sing the chant, _Ite
missa est._ If ever he had seen himself celebrant it was as in the
pictures of the mass in his child’s massbook, in a church without
worshippers, save for the angel of the sacrifice, at a bare altar, and
served by an acolyte scarcely more boyish than himself. In vague
sacrificial or sacramental acts alone his will seemed drawn to go forth
to encounter reality; and it was partly the absence of an appointed
rite which had always constrained him to inaction whether he had
allowed silence to cover his anger or pride or had suffered only an
embrace he longed to give.
He listened in reverent silence now to the priest’s appeal and through
the words he heard even more distinctly a voice bidding him approach,
offering him secret knowledge and secret power. He would know then what
was the sin of Simon Magus and what the sin against the Holy Ghost for
which there was no forgiveness. He would know obscure things, hidden
from others, from those who were conceived and born children of wrath.
He would know the sins, the sinful longings and sinful thoughts and
sinful acts, of others, hearing them murmured into his ears in the
confessional under the shame of a darkened chapel by the lips of women
and of girls; but rendered immune mysteriously at his ordination by the
imposition of hands, his soul would pass again uncontaminated to the
white peace of the altar. No touch of sin would linger upon the hands
with which he would elevate and break the host; no touch of sin would
linger on his lips in prayer to make him eat and drink damnation to
himself not discerning the body of the Lord. He would hold his secret
knowledge and secret power, being as sinless as the innocent, and he
would be a priest for ever according to the order of Melchisedec.
—I will offer up my mass tomorrow morning, said the director, that
Almighty God may reveal to you His holy will. And let you, Stephen,
make a novena to your holy patron saint, the first martyr, who is very
powerful with God, that God may enlighten your mind. But you must be
quite sure, Stephen, that you have a vocation because it would be
terrible if you found afterwards that you had none. Once a priest
always a priest, remember. Your catechism tells you that the sacrament
of Holy Orders is one of those which can be received only once because
it imprints on the soul an indelible spiritual mark which can never be
effaced. It is before you must weigh well, not after. It is a solemn
question, Stephen, because on it may depend the salvation of your
eternal soul. But we will pray to God together.
He held open the heavy hall door and gave his hand as if already to a
companion in the spiritual life. Stephen passed out on to the wide
platform above the steps and was conscious of the caress of mild
evening air. Towards Findlater’s church a quartet of young men were
striding along with linked arms, swaying their heads and stepping to
the agile melody of their leader’s concertina. The music passed in an
instant, as the first bars of sudden music always did, over the
fantastic fabrics of his mind, dissolving them painlessly and
noiselessly as a sudden wave dissolves the sandbuilt turrets of
children. Smiling at the trivial air he raised his eyes to the priest’s
face and, seeing in it a mirthless reflection of the sunken day,
detached his hand slowly which had acquiesced faintly in that
companionship.
As he descended the steps the impression which effaced his troubled
selfcommunion was that of a mirthless mask reflecting a sunken day from
the threshold of the college. The shadow, then, of the life of the
college passed gravely over his consciousness. It was a grave and
ordered and passionless life that awaited him, a life without material
cares. He wondered how he would pass the first night in the novitiate
and with what dismay he would wake the first morning in the dormitory.
The troubling odour of the long corridors of Clongowes came back to him
and he heard the discreet murmur of the burning gasflames. At once from
every part of his being unrest began to irradiate. A feverish
quickening of his pulses followed, and a din of meaningless words drove
his reasoned thoughts hither and thither confusedly. His lungs dilated
and sank as if he were inhaling a warm moist unsustaining air and he
smelt again the moist warm air which hung in the bath in Clongowes
above the sluggish turfcoloured water.
Some instinct, waking at these memories, stronger than education or
piety, quickened within him at every near approach to that life, an
instinct subtle and hostile, and armed him against acquiescence. The
chill and order of the life repelled him. He saw himself rising in the
cold of the morning and filing down with the others to early mass and