A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
trying vainly to struggle with his prayers against the fainting
sickness of his stomach. He saw himself sitting at dinner with the
community of a college. What, then, had become of that deeprooted
shyness of his which had made him loth to eat or drink under a strange
roof? What had come of the pride of his spirit which had always made
him conceive himself as a being apart in every order?
The Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S. J.
His name in that new life leaped into characters before his eyes and to
it there followed a mental sensation of an undefined face or colour of
a face. The colour faded and became strong like a changing glow of
pallid brick red. Was it the raw reddish glow he had so often seen on
wintry mornings on the shaven gills of the priests? The face was
eyeless and sourfavoured and devout, shot with pink tinges of
suffocated anger. Was it not a mental spectre of the face of one of the
jesuits whom some of the boys called Lantern Jaws and others Foxy
Campbell?
He was passing at that moment before the jesuit house in Gardiner
Street, and wondered vaguely which window would be his if he ever
joined the order. Then he wondered at the vagueness of his wonder, at
the remoteness of his own soul from what he had hitherto imagined her
sanctuary, at the frail hold which so many years of order and obedience
had of him when once a definite and irrevocable act of his threatened
to end for ever, in time and in eternity, his freedom. The voice of the
director urging upon him the proud claims of the church and the mystery
and power of the priestly office repeated itself idly in his memory.
His soul was not there to hear and greet it and he knew now that the
exhortation he had listened to had already fallen into an idle formal
tale. He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as
priest. His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders.
The wisdom of the priest’s appeal did not touch him to the quick. He
was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the
wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.
The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not
yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was
too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it
would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen,
still unfallen, but about to fall.
He crossed the bridge over the stream of the Tolka and turned his eyes
coldly for an instant towards the faded blue shrine of the Blessed
Virgin which stood fowl-wise on a pole in the middle of a hamshaped
encampment of poor cottages. Then, bending to the left, he followed the
lane which led up to his house. The faint sour stink of rotted cabbages
came towards him from the kitchen gardens on the rising ground above
the river. He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule
and confusion of his father’s house and the stagnation of vegetable
life, which was to win the day in his soul. Then a short laugh broke
from his lips as he thought of that solitary farmhand in the kitchen
gardens behind their house whom they had nicknamed the man with the
hat. A second laugh, taking rise from the first after a pause, broke
from him involuntarily as he thought of how the man with the hat
worked, considering in turn the four points of the sky and then
regretfully plunging his spade in the earth.
He pushed open the latchless door of the porch and passed through the
naked hallway into the kitchen. A group of his brothers and sisters was
sitting round the table. Tea was nearly over and only the last of the
second watered tea remained in the bottoms of the small glass jars and
jampots which did service for teacups. Discarded crusts and lumps of
sugared bread, turned brown by the tea which had been poured over them,
lay scattered on the table. Little wells of tea lay here and there on
the board, and a knife with a broken ivory handle was stuck through the
pith of a ravaged turnover.
The sad quiet greyblue glow of the dying day came through the window
and the open door, covering over and allaying quietly a sudden instinct
of remorse in Stephen’s heart. All that had been denied them had been
freely given to him, the eldest; but the quiet glow of evening showed
him in their faces no sign of rancour.
He sat near them at the table and asked where his father and mother
were. One answered:
—Goneboro toboro lookboro atboro aboro houseboro.
Still another removal! A boy named Fallon, in Belvedere, had often
asked him with a silly laugh why they moved so often. A frown of scorn
darkened quickly his forehead as he heard again the silly laugh of the
questioner.
He asked:
—Why are we on the move again if it’s a fair question?
—Becauseboro theboro landboro lordboro willboro putboro usboro outboro.
The voice of his youngest brother from the farther side of the
fireplace began to sing the air _Oft in the Stilly Night_. One by one
the others took up the air until a full choir of voices was singing.
They would sing so for hours, melody after melody, glee after glee,
till the last pale light died down on the horizon, till the first dark
nightclouds came forth and night fell.
He waited for some moments, listening, before he too took up the air
with them. He was listening with pain of spirit to the overtone of
weariness behind their frail fresh innocent voices. Even before they
set out on life’s journey they seemed weary already of the way.
He heard the choir of voices in the kitchen echoed and multiplied
through an endless reverberation of the choirs of endless generations
of children and heard in all the echoes an echo also of the recurring
note of weariness and pain. All seemed weary of life even before
entering upon it. And he remembered that Newman had heard this note
also in the broken lines of Virgil, “giving utterance, like the voice
of Nature herself, to that pain and weariness yet hope of better things
which has been the experience of her children in every time.”
He could wait no longer.
From the door of Byron’s public-house to the gate of Clontarf Chapel,
from the gate of Clontarf Chapel to the door of Byron’s public-house
and then back again to the chapel and then back again to the
public-house he had paced slowly at first, planting his steps
scrupulously in the spaces of the patchwork of the footpath, then
timing their fall to the fall of verses. A full hour had passed since
his father had gone in with Dan Crosby, the tutor, to find out for him
something about the university. For a full hour he had paced up and
down, waiting: but he could wait no longer.
He set off abruptly for the Bull, walking rapidly lest his father’s
shrill whistle might call him back; and in a few moments he had rounded
the curve at the police barrack and was safe.
Yes, his mother was hostile to the idea, as he had read from her
listless silence. Yet her mistrust pricked him more keenly than his
father’s pride and he thought coldly how he had watched the faith which
was fading down in his soul ageing and strengthening in her eyes. A dim
antagonism gathered force within him and darkened his mind as a cloud
against her disloyalty and when it passed, cloudlike, leaving his mind
serene and dutiful towards her again, he was made aware dimly and
without regret of a first noiseless sundering of their lives.
The university! So he had passed beyond the challenge of the sentries
who had stood as guardians of his boyhood and had sought to keep him
among them that he might be subject to them and serve their ends. Pride
after satisfaction uplifted him like long slow waves. The end he had
been born to serve yet did not see had led him to escape by an unseen
path and now it beckoned to him once more and a new adventure was about
to be opened to him. It seemed to him that he heard notes of fitful
music leaping upwards a tone and downwards a diminished fourth, upwards
a tone and downwards a major third, like triple-branching flames
leaping fitfully, flame after flame, out of a midnight wood. It was an
elfin prelude, endless and formless; and, as it grew wilder and faster,
the flames leaping out of time, he seemed to hear from under the boughs
and grasses wild creatures racing, their feet pattering like rain upon
the leaves. Their feet passed in pattering tumult over his mind, the
feet of hares and rabbits, the feet of harts and hinds and antelopes,
until he heard them no more and remembered only a proud cadence from
Newman:
—Whose feet are as the feet of harts and underneath the everlasting
arms.
The pride of that dim image brought back to his mind the dignity of the
office he had refused. All through his boyhood he had mused upon that
which he had so often thought to be his destiny and when the moment had
come for him to obey the call he had turned aside, obeying a wayward
instinct. Now time lay between: the oils of ordination would never
anoint his body. He had refused. Why?
He turned seaward from the road at Dollymount and as he passed on to
the thin wooden bridge he felt the planks shaking with the tramp of
heavily shod feet. A squad of Christian Brothers was on its way back
from the Bull and had begun to pass, two by two, across the bridge.
Soon the whole bridge was trembling and resounding. The uncouth faces
passed him two by two, stained yellow or red or livid by the sea, and,
as he strove to look at them with ease and indifference, a faint stain
of personal shame and commiseration rose to his own face. Angry with
himself he tried to hide his face from their eyes by gazing down
sideways into the shallow swirling water under the bridge but he still
saw a reflection therein of their topheavy silk hats and humble
tapelike collars and loosely hanging clerical clothes.
—Brother Hickey.
Brother Quaid.
Brother MacArdle.
Brother Keogh.—
Their piety would be like their names, like their faces, like their
clothes, and it was idle for him to tell himself that their humble and
contrite hearts, it might be, paid a far richer tribute of devotion
than his had ever been, a gift tenfold more acceptable than his
elaborate adoration. It was idle for him to move himself to be generous
towards them, to tell himself that if he ever came to their gates,
stripped of his pride, beaten and in beggar’s weeds, that they would be
generous towards him, loving him as themselves. Idle and embittering,
finally, to argue, against his own dispassionate certitude, that the
commandment of love bade us not to love our neighbour as ourselves with
the same amount and intensity of love but to love him as ourselves with
the same kind of love.
He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to
himself:
—A day of dappled seaborne clouds.
The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was
it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue:
sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves,
the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was
the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the
rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of
legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy
of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing
sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly
storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual
emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?
He passed from the trembling bridge on to firm land again. At that
instant, as it seemed to him, the air was chilled and, looking askance
towards the water, he saw a flying squall darkening and crisping
suddenly the tide. A faint click at his heart, a faint throb in his