A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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 Davin’s
rooms in Grantham Street, wondering at his friend’s well-made boots
that flanked the wall pair by pair and repeating for his friend’s
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 skill—for Davin
had sat at the feet of Michael Cusack, the Gael—repelling 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 man’s 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 Stephen’s
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 Stephen’s mind a strange
vision. The two were walking slowly towards Davin’s 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 friend’s face,
flattered by his confidence and won over to sympathy by the speaker’s
simple accent.
—I was away all that day from my own place over in Buttevant—I don’t
know if you know where that is—at a hurling match between the Croke’s
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 aim’s 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 that’s
not the strange thing that happened you?
—Well, I suppose that doesn’t interest you, but leastways there was
such noise after the match that I missed the train home and I couldn’t
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, that’s
better than ten miles from Kilmallock and there’s a long lonely road
after that. You wouldn’t 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 I’d 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 I’d
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. You’ve no call to be
frightened. There’s no one in it but ourselves....’_ I didn’t 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 Davin’s 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! Don’t 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 don’t 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 l’Irlande!_
But the trees in Stephen’s 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
Whaley’s 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 levite’s
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 Lord—in
tending the fire upon the altar, in bearing tidings secretly, in
waiting upon worldlings, in striking swiftly when bidden—and 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 sanctity—a
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 quæ visa placent_.