A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
—This fire before us, said the dean, will be pleasing to the eye. Will
it therefore be beautiful?
—In so far as it is apprehended by the sight, which I suppose means
here esthetic intellection, it will be beautiful. But Aquinas also says
_Bonum est in quod tendit appetitus_. In so far as it satisfies the
animal craving for warmth fire is a good. In hell, however, it is an
evil.
—Quite so, said the dean, you have certainly hit the nail on the head.
He rose nimbly and went towards the door, set it ajar and said:
—A draught is said to be a help in these matters.
As he came back to the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step,
Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at him from the pale
loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no
spark of Ignatius’ enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the company,
a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled books of secret subtle
wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of apostleship. It
seemed as if he used the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as
bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, without joy in their
handling or hatred of that in them which was evil but turning them,
with a firm gesture of obedience back upon themselves and for all this
silent service it seemed as if he loved not at all the master and
little, if at all, the ends he served. _Similiter atque senis baculus_,
he was, as the founder would have had him, like a staff in an old man’s
hand, to be leaned on in the road at nightfall or in stress of weather,
to lie with a lady’s nosegay on a garden seat, to be raised in menace.
The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin.
—When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic
question? he asked.
—From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a
fortnight if I am lucky.
—These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is
like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go
down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go
down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again.
—If you mean speculation, sir, said Stephen, I also am sure that there
is no such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be
bound by its own laws.
—Ha!
—For my purpose I can work on at present by the light of one or two
ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas.
—I see. I quite see your point.
—I need them only for my own use and guidance until I have done
something for myself by their light. If the lamp smokes or smells I
shall try to trim it. If it does not give light enough I shall sell it
and buy another.
—Epictetus also had a lamp, said the dean, which was sold for a fancy
price after his death. It was the lamp he wrote his philosophical
dissertations by. You know Epictetus?
—An old gentleman, said Stephen coarsely, who said that the soul is
very like a bucketful of water.
—He tells us in his homely way, the dean went on, that he put an iron
lamp before a statue of one of the gods and that a thief stole the
lamp. What did the philosopher do? He reflected that it was in the
character of a thief to steal and determined to buy an earthen lamp
next day instead of the iron lamp.
A smell of molten tallow came up from the dean’s candle butts and fused
itself in Stephen’s consciousness with the jingle of the words, bucket
and lamp and lamp and bucket. The priest’s voice, too, had a hard
jingling tone. Stephen’s mind halted by instinct, checked by the
strange tone and the imagery and by the priest’s face which seemed like
an unlit lamp or a reflector hung in a false focus. What lay behind it
or within it? A dull torpor of the soul or the dullness of the
thundercloud, charged with intellection and capable of the gloom of
God?
—I meant a different kind of lamp, sir, said Stephen.
—Undoubtedly, said the dean.
—One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know
whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or
according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of
Newman’s in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained
in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the
marketplace is quite different. _I hope I am not detaining you._
—Not in the least, said the dean politely.
—No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean...—
—Yes, yes; I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point:
_detain_.
He thrust forward his under jaw and uttered a dry short cough.
—To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice
problem. You must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you
pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can
hold.
—What funnel? asked Stephen.
—The funnel through which you pour the oil into your lamp.
—That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish?
—What is a tundish?
—That. The... the funnel.
—Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the
word in my life.
—It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen, laughing,
where they speak the best English.
—A tundish, said the dean reflectively. That is a most interesting
word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must.
His courtesy of manner rang a little false and Stephen looked at the
English convert with the same eyes as the elder brother in the parable
may have turned on the prodigal. A humble follower in the wake of
clamorous conversions, a poor Englishman in Ireland, he seemed to have
entered on the stage of jesuit history when that strange play of
intrigue and suffering and envy and struggle and indignity had been all
but given through—a latecomer, a tardy spirit. From what had he set
out? Perhaps he had been born and bred among serious dissenters, seeing
salvation in Jesus only and abhorring the vain pomps of the
establishment. Had he felt the need of an implicit faith amid the
welter of sectarianism and the jargon of its turbulent schisms, six
principle men, peculiar people, seed and snake baptists, supralapsarian
dogmatists? Had he found the true church all of a sudden in winding up
to the end like a reel of cotton some finespun line of reasoning upon
insufflation on the imposition of hands or the procession of the Holy
Ghost? Or had Lord Christ touched him and bidden him follow, like that
disciple who had sat at the receipt of custom, as he sat by the door of
some zincroofed chapel, yawning and telling over his church pence?
The dean repeated the word yet again.
—Tundish! Well now, that is interesting!
—The question you asked me a moment ago seems to me more interesting.
What is that beauty which the artist struggles to express from lumps of
earth, said Stephen coldly.
The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his
sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a
smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a
countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:
—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How
different are the words _home, Christ, ale, master,_ on his lips and on
mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His
language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired
speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at
bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
—And to distinguish between the beautiful and the sublime, the dean
added, to distinguish between moral beauty and material beauty. And to
inquire what kind of beauty is proper to each of the various arts.
These are some interesting points we might take up.
Stephen, disheartened suddenly by the dean’s firm, dry tone, was
silent; and through the silence a distant noise of many boots and
confused voices came up the staircase.
—In pursuing these speculations, said the dean conclusively, there is,
however, the danger of perishing of inanition. First you must take your
degree. Set that before you as your first aim. Then, little by little,
you will see your way. I mean in every sense, your way in life and in
thinking. It may be uphill pedalling at first. Take Mr Moonan. He was a
long time before he got to the top. But he got there.
—I may not have his talent, said Stephen quietly.
—You never know, said the dean brightly. We never can say what is in
us. I most certainly should not be despondent. _Per aspera ad astra._
He left the hearth quickly and went towards the landing to oversee the
arrival of the first arts’ class.
Leaning against the fireplace Stephen heard him greet briskly and
impartially every student of the class and could almost see the frank
smiles of the coarser students. A desolating pity began to fall like
dew upon his easily embittered heart for this faithful servingman of
the knightly Loyola, for this halfbrother of the clergy, more venal
than they in speech, more steadfast of soul than they, one whom he
would never call his ghostly father; and he thought how this man and
his companions had earned the name of worldlings at the hands not of
the unworldly only but of the worldly also for having pleaded, during
all their history, at the bar of God’s justice for the souls of the lax
and the lukewarm and the prudent.
The entry of the professor was signalled by a few rounds of Kentish
fire from the heavy boots of those students who sat on the highest tier
of the gloomy theatre under the grey cobwebbed windows. The calling of
the roll began and the responses to the names were given out in all
tones until the name of Peter Byrne was reached.
—Here!
A deep bass note in response came from the upper tier, followed by
coughs of protest along the other benches.
The professor paused in his reading and called the next name:
—Cranly!
No answer.
—Mr Cranly!
A smile flew across Stephen’s face as he thought of his friend’s
studies.
—Try Leopardstown! said a voice from the bench behind.
Stephen glanced up quickly but Moynihan’s snoutish face, outlined on
the grey light, was impassive. A formula was given out. Amid the
rustling of the notebooks Stephen turned back again and said:
—Give me some paper for God’s sake.
—Are you as bad as that? asked Moynihan with a broad grin.
He tore a sheet from his scribbler and passed it down, whispering:
—In case of necessity any layman or woman can do it.
The formula which he wrote obediently on the sheet of paper, the
coiling and uncoiling calculations of the professor, the spectrelike
symbols of force and velocity fascinated and jaded Stephen’s mind. He
had heard some say that the old professor was an atheist freemason. O
the grey dull day! It seemed a limbo of painless patient consciousness
through which souls of mathematicians might wander, projecting long
slender fabrics from plane to plane of ever rarer and paler twilight,
radiating swift eddies to the last verges of a universe ever vaster,
farther and more impalpable.
—So we must distinguish between elliptical and ellipsoidal. Perhaps
some of you gentlemen may be familiar with the works of Mr W. S.
Gilbert. In one of his songs he speaks of the billiard sharp who is
condemned to play:
On a cloth untrue
With a twisted cue
And elliptical billiard balls.
—He means a ball having the form of the ellipsoid of the principal axes
of which I spoke a moment ago.
Moynihan leaned down towards Stephen’s ear and murmured:
—What price ellipsoidal balls! chase me, ladies, I’m in the cavalry!
His fellow student’s rude humour ran like a gust through the cloister
of Stephen’s mind, shaking into gay life limp priestly vestments that
hung upon the walls, setting them to sway and caper in a sabbath of
misrule. The forms of the community emerged from the gust-blown