No More Learning

The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame
and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic
apprehension. Is that clear?

--But what is beauty? asked Lynch impatiently. Out with another
definition. Something we see and like! Is that the best you and Aquinas
can do?

--Let us take woman, said Stephen.

--Let us take her! said Lynch fervently.

--The Greek, the Turk, the Chinese, the Copt, the Hottentot, said
Stephen, all admire a different type of female beauty. That seems
to be a maze out of which we cannot escape. I see, however,
two ways out. One is this hypothesis: that every physical quality
admired by men in women is in direct connexion with the manifold
functions of women for the propagation of the species. It may be so.
The world, it seems, is drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. For my
part I dislike that way out. It leads to eugenics rather than to
esthetic. It leads you out of the maze into a new gaudy lecture-room
where MacCann, with one hand on THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES and the other hand
on the new testament, tells you that you admired the great flanks of
Venus because you felt that she would bear you burly offspring and
admired her great breasts because you felt that she would give good
milk to her children and yours.

--Then MacCann is a sulphur-yellow liar, said Lynch energetically.

--There remains another way out, said Stephen, laughing.

--To wit? said Lynch.

--This hypothesis, Stephen began.

A long dray laden with old iron came round the corner of Sir Patrick
Dun's hospital covering the end of Stephen's speech with the harsh roar
of jangled and rattling metal. Lynch closed his ears and gave out oath
after oath till the dray had passed. Then he turned on his heel rudely.
Stephen turned also and waited for a few moments till his companion's
ill-humour had had its vent.

--This hypothesis, Stephen repeated, is the other way out: that,
though the same object may not seem beautiful to all people, all people
who admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which
satisfy and coincide with the stages themselves of all esthetic
apprehension. These relations of the sensible, visible to you through
one form and to me through another, must be therefore the necessary
qualities of beauty. Now, we can return to our old friend saint Thomas
for another pennyworth of wisdom.

Lynch laughed.

--It amuses me vastly, he said, to hear you quoting him time after
time like a jolly round friar. Are you laughing in your sleeve?

--MacAlister, answered Stephen, would call my esthetic theory applied
Aquinas. So far as this side of esthetic philosophy extends, Aquinas
will carry me all along the line. When we come to the phenomena of
artistic conception, artistic gestation, and artistic reproduction I
require a new terminology and a new personal experience.

--Of course, said Lynch. After all Aquinas, in spite of his intellect,
was exactly a good round friar. But you will tell me about the new
personal experience and new terminology some other day. Hurry up and
finish the first part.

--Who knows? said Stephen, smiling. Perhaps Aquinas would understand
me better than you. He was a poet himself. He wrote a hymn for Maundy
Thursday. It begins with the words PANGE LINGUA GLORIOSI. They say it
is the highest glory of the hymnal. It is an intricate and soothing
hymn. I like it; but there is no hymn that can be put beside that
mournful and majestic processional song, the VEXILLA REGIS of Venantius
Fortunatus.

Lynch began to sing softly and solemnly in a deep bass voice:

IMPLETA SUNT QUAE CONCINIT
DAVID FIDELI CARMINE
DICENDO NATIONIBUS
REGNAVIT A LIGNO DEUS.

--That's great! he said, well pleased. Great music!

They turned into Lower Mount Street. A few steps from the corner a fat
young man, wearing a silk neckcloth, saluted them and stopped.

--Did you hear the results of the exams? he asked. Griffin was
plucked. Halpin and O'Flynn are through the home civil. Moonan got
fifth place in the Indian. O'Shaughnessy got fourteenth. The Irish
fellows in Clark's gave them a feed last night. They all ate curry.

His pallid bloated face expressed benevolent malice and, as he had
advanced through his tidings of success, his small fat-encircled eyes
vanished out of sight and his weak wheezing voice out of hearing.

In reply to a question of Stephen's his eyes and his voice came forth
again from their lurking-places.

--Yes, MacCullagh and I, he said. He's taking pure mathematics and I'm
taking constitutional history. There are twenty subjects. I'm taking
botany too. You know I'm a member of the field club.

He drew back from the other two in a stately fashion and placed a plump
woollen-gloved hand on his breast from which muttered wheezing laughter
at once broke forth.

--Bring us a few turnips and onions the next time you go out, said
Stephen drily, to make a stew.

The fat student laughed indulgently and said:

--We are all highly respectable people in the field club. Last
Saturday we went out to Glenmalure, seven of us.

--With women, Donovan? said Lynch.

Donovan again laid his hand on his chest and said:

--Our end is the acquisition of knowledge. Then he said quickly:

--I hear you are writing some essays about esthetics.

Stephen made a vague gesture of denial.

--Goethe and Lessing, said Donovan, have written a lot on that
subject, the classical school and the romantic school and all that. The
Laocoon interested me very much when I read it. Of course it is
idealistic, German, ultra-profound.

Neither of the others spoke. Donovan took leave of them urbanely.

--I must go, he said softly and benevolently, I have a strong
suspicion, amounting almost to a conviction, that my sister intended to
make pancakes today for the dinner of the Donovan family.

--Goodbye, Stephen said in his wake. Don't forget the turnips for me
and my mate.

Lynch gazed after him, his lip curling in slow scorn till his face
resembled a devil's mask:

--To think that that yellow pancake-eating excrement can get a good
job, he said at length, and I have to smoke cheap cigarettes!

They turned their faces towards Merrion Square and went for a little in
silence.

--To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most
satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the
necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the
qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: AD PULCRITUDINEM TRIA
REQUIRUNTUR INTEGRITAS, CONSONANTIA, CLARITAS. I translate it so: THREE
THINGS ARE NEEDED FOR BEAUTY, WHOLENESS, HARMONY, AND RADIANCE. Do
these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?

--Of course, I am, said Lynch. If you think I have an excrementitious
intelligence run after Donovan and ask him to listen to you.

Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's boy had slung inverted on
his head.

--Look at that basket, he said.

--I see it, said Lynch.

--In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all
separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not
the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn
about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to
us either in space or in time.

What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in
space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously
apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable
background of space or time which is not it. You apprehended it as ONE
thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is
INTEGRITAS.

--Bull's eye! said Lynch, laughing. Go on.

--Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal
lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its
limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the
synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of
apprehension. Having first felt that it is ONE thing you feel now that
it is a THING. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible,
separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum,
harmonious. That is CONSONANTIA.

--Bull's eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is CLARITAS
and you win the cigar.

--The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas
uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time.
It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism,
the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the
idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is
but the symbol. I thought he might mean that CLARITAS is the artistic
discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a
force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a
universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is
literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that
basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and
apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is
logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing
which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the
scholastic QUIDDITAS, the WHATNESS of a thing. This supreme quality is
felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his
imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened
beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality
of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended
luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and
fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic
pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which
the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as
beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.

Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his
words had called up around them a thought-enchanted silence.

--What I have said, he began again, refers to beauty in the wider
sense of the word, in the sense which the word has in the literary
tradition. In the marketplace it has another sense. When we speak of
beauty in the second sense of the term our judgement is influenced in
the first place by the art itself and by the form of that art. The
image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the
artist himself and the mind or senses of others. If you bear this in
memory you will see that art necessarily divides itself into three
forms progressing from one to the next. These forms are: the lyrical
form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate
relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his
image in mediate relation to himself and to others; the dramatic form,
the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others.

--That you told me a few nights ago, said Lynch, and we began the
famous discussion.

--I have a book at home, said Stephen, in which I have written down
questions which are more amusing than yours were. In finding the
answers to them I found the theory of esthetic which I am trying to
explain. Here are some questions I set myself: IS A CHAIR FINELY MADE
TRAGIC OR COMIC? IS THE PORTRAIT OF MONA LISA GOOD IF I DESIRE TO SEE
IT? IF NOT, WHY NOT?

--Why not, indeed? said Lynch, laughing.

--IF A MAN HACKING IN FURY AT A BLOCK OF WOOD, Stephen continued, MAKE
THERE AN IMAGE OF A COW, IS THAT IMAGE A WORK OF ART? IF NOT, WHY NOT?

--That's a lovely one, said Lynch, laughing again. That has the true
scholastic stink.

--Lessing, said Stephen, should not have taken a group of statues to
write of. The art, being inferior, does not present the forms I spoke
of distinguished clearly one from another. Even in literature, the
highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The
lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of
emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled
at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more
conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion.
The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature
when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an
epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional
gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The
narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist
passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons
and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in
that old English ballad TURPIN HERO which begins in the first person
and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the
vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every
person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and
intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry
or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally
refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak.
The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and
reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like
that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of
creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork,
invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his
fingernails.

--Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch.

A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned into
the duke's lawn to reach the national library before the shower came.

--What do you mean, Lynch asked surlily, by prating about beauty and
the imagination in this miserable Godforsaken island? No wonder the
artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated
this country.

The rain fell faster. When they passed through the passage beside
Kildare house they found many students sheltering under the arcade of
the library. Cranly, leaning against a pillar, was picking his teeth
with a sharpened match, listening to some companions. Some girls stood
near the entrance door. Lynch whispered to Stephen:

--Your beloved is here.

Stephen took his place silently on the step below the group of
students, heedless of the rain which fell fast, turning his eyes
towards her from time to time. She too stood silently among her
companions. She has no priest to flirt with, he thought with conscious
bitterness, remembering how he had seen her last. Lynch was right. His
mind emptied of theory and courage, lapsed back into a listless peace.

He heard the students talking among themselves. They spoke of two
friends who had passed the final medical examination, of the chances of
getting places on ocean liners, of poor and rich practices.

--That's all a bubble. An Irish country practice is better.

--Hynes was two years in Liverpool and he says the same. A frightful
hole he said it was. Nothing but midwifery cases.

--Do you mean to say it is better to have a job here in the country
than in a rich city like that? I know a fellow. . .

--Hynes has no brains. He got through by stewing, pure stewing.

--Don't mind him. There's plenty of money to be made in a big commercial
city.

--Depends on the practice.

--EGO CREDO UT VITA PAUPERUM EST SIMPLICITER ATROX, SIMPLICITER
SANGUINARIUS ATROX, IN LIVERPOOLIO.

Their voices reached his ears as if from a distance in interrupted
pulsation. She was preparing to go away with her companions.
The quick light shower had drawn off, tarrying in clusters of diamonds
among the shrubs of the quadrangle where an exhalation was breathed
forth by the blackened earth. Their trim boots prattled as they stood
on the steps of the colonnade, talking quietly and gaily, glancing at
the clouds, holding their umbrellas at cunning angles against the few
last raindrops, closing them again, holding their skirts demurely.

And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of
hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the
morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and
wilful as a bird's heart?


* * * * *


Towards dawn he awoke. O what sweet music! His soul was all dewy wet.
Over his limbs in sleep pale cool waves of light had passed. He lay
still, as if his soul lay amid cool waters, conscious of faint sweet
music. His mind was waking slowly to a tremulous morning knowledge, a
morning inspiration. A spirit filled him, pure as the purest water,
sweet as dew, moving as music. But how faintly it was inbreathed, how
passionlessly, as if the seraphim themselves were breathing upon him!
His soul was waking slowly, fearing to awake wholly. It was that
windless hour of dawn when madness wakes and strange plants open to the
light and the moth flies forth silently.

An enchantment of the heart! The night had been enchanted. In a dream
or vision he had known the ecstasy of seraphic life. Was it an instant
of enchantment only or long hours and years and ages?

The instant of inspiration seemed now to be reflected from all sides at
once from a multitude of cloudy circumstances of what had happened or
of what might have happened. The instant flashed forth like a point of
light and now from cloud on cloud of vague circumstance confused form
was veiling softly its afterglow. O! In the virgin womb of the
imagination the word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the
virgin's chamber. An afterglow deepened within his spirit, whence the
white flame had passed, deepening to a rose and ardent light. That rose
and ardent light was her strange wilful heart, strange that no man had
known or would know, wilful from before the beginning of the world; and
lured by that ardent rose-like glow the choirs of the seraphim were
falling from heaven.

Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

The verses passed from his mind to his lips and, murmuring them over,
he felt the rhythmic movement of a villanelle pass through them. The
rose-like glow sent forth its rays of rhyme; ways, days, blaze, praise,
raise. Its rays burned up the world, consumed the hearts of men and
angels: the rays from the rose that was her wilful heart.

Your eyes have set man's heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

And then? The rhythm died away, ceased, began again to move and beat.
And then? Smoke, incense ascending from the altar of the world.

Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Smoke went up from the whole earth, from the vapoury oceans, smoke of
her praise. The earth was like a swinging swaying censer, a ball of
incense, an ellipsoidal fall. The rhythm died out at once; the cry of
his heart was broken. His lips began to murmur the first verses over
and over; then went on stumbling through half verses, stammering and
baffled; then stopped. The heart's cry was broken.

The veiled windless hour had passed and behind the panes of the naked
window the morning light was gathering. A bell beat faintly very far
away. A bird twittered; two birds, three. The bell and the bird ceased;
and the dull white light spread itself east and west, covering the
world, covering the roselight in his heart.

Fearing to lose all, he raised himself suddenly on his elbow to look
for paper and pencil. There was neither on the table; only the soup
plate he had eaten the rice from for supper and the candlestick with
its tendrils of tallow and its paper socket, singed by the last flame.
He stretched his arm wearily towards the foot of the bed, groping with
his hand in the pockets of the coat that hung there. His fingers found
a pencil and then a cigarette packet. He lay back and, tearing open the
packet, placed the last cigarette on the window ledge and began to
write out the stanzas of the villanelle in small neat letters on the
rough cardboard surface.

Having written them out he lay back on the lumpy pillow, murmuring them
again. The lumps of knotted flock under his head reminded him of the
lumps of knotted horsehair in the sofa of her parlour on which he used
to sit, smiling or serious, asking himself why he had come, displeased
with her and with himself, confounded by the print of the Sacred Heart
above the untenanted sideboard. He saw her approach him in a lull of
the talk and beg him to sing one of his curious songs. Then he saw
himself sitting at the old piano, striking chords softly from its
speckled keys and singing, amid the talk which had risen again in the
room, to her who leaned beside the mantelpiece a dainty song of the
Elizabethans, a sad and sweet loth to depart, the victory chant of
Agincourt, the happy air of Greensleeves. While he sang and she
listened, or feigned to listen, his heart was at rest but when the
quaint old songs had ended and he heard again the voices in the room he
remembered his own sarcasm: the house where young men are called by
their christian names a little too soon.

At certain instants her eyes seemed about to trust him but he had
waited in vain. She passed now dancing lightly across his memory as she
had been that night at the carnival ball, her white dress a little
lifted, a white spray nodding in her hair. She danced lightly in the
round. She was dancing towards him and, as she came, her eyes were a
little averted and a faint glow was on her cheek. At the pause in the
chain of hands her hand had lain in his an instant, a soft merchandise.

--You are a great stranger now.

--Yes. I was born to be a monk.

--I am afraid you are a heretic.

--Are you much afraid?

For answer she had danced away from him along the chain of hands,
dancing lightly and discreetly, giving herself to none. The white spray
nodded to her dancing and when she was in shadow the glow was deeper on
her cheek.

A monk! His own image started forth a profaner of the cloister, a
heretic franciscan, willing and willing not to serve, spinning like
Gherardino da Borgo San Donnino, a lithe web of sophistry and
whispering in her ear.

No, it was not his image. It was like the image of the young priest in
whose company he had seen her last, looking at him out of dove's eyes,
toying with the pages of her Irish phrase-book.

--Yes, yes, the ladies are coming round to us. I can see it every day.
The ladies are with us. The best helpers the language has.

--And the church, Father Moran?

--The church too. Coming round too. The work is going ahead there too.
Don't fret about the church.

Bah! he had done well to leave the room in disdain. He had done well
not to salute her on the steps of the library! He had done well to
leave her to flirt with her priest, to toy with a church which was the
scullery-maid of christendom.

Rude brutal anger routed the last lingering instant of ecstasy from his
soul. It broke up violently her fair image and flung the fragments on
all sides. On all sides distorted reflections of her image started from
his memory: the flower girl in the ragged dress with damp coarse hair
and a hoyden's face who had called herself his own girl and begged his
handsel, the kitchen-girl in the next house who sang over the clatter
of her plates, with the drawl of a country singer, the first bars of BY
KILLARNEY'S LAKES AND FELLS, a girl who had laughed gaily to see him
stumble when the iron grating in the footpath near Cork Hill had caught
the broken sole of his shoe, a girl he had glanced at, attracted by her
small ripe mouth, as she passed out of Jacob's biscuit factory, who had
cried to him over her shoulder:

--Do you like what you seen of me, straight hair and curly eyebrows?

And yet he felt that, however he might revile and mock her image, his
anger was also a form of homage. He had left the classroom in disdain
that was not wholly sincere, feeling that perhaps the secret of her
race lay behind those dark eyes upon which her long lashes flung a
quick shadow. He had told himself bitterly as he walked through the
streets that she was a figure of the womanhood of her country, a bat-like
soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and
loneliness, tarrying awhile, loveless and sinless, with her mild lover and
leaving him to whisper of innocent transgressions in the latticed ear of a
priest. His anger against her found vent in coarse railing at her
paramour, whose name and voice and features offended his baffled pride: a
priested peasant, with a brother a policeman in Dublin and a brother a
potboy in Moycullen. To him she would unveil her soul's shy nakedness, to
one who was but schooled in the discharging of a formal rite rather than
to him, a priest of the eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread
of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.

The radiant image of the eucharist united again in an instant his
bitter and despairing thoughts, their cries arising unbroken in a hymn
of thanksgiving.

Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.

He spoke the verses aloud from the first lines till the music and
rhythm suffused his mind, turning it to quiet indulgence; then copied
them painfully to feel them the better by seeing them; then lay back on
his bolster.

The full morning light had come. No sound was to be heard; but he knew
that all around him life was about to awaken in common noises, hoarse
voices, sleepy prayers. Shrinking from that life he turned towards the
wall, making a cowl of the blanket and staring at the great overblown
scarlet flowers of the tattered wallpaper. He tried to warm his
perishing joy in their scarlet glow, imagining a roseway from where he
lay upwards to heaven all strewn with scarlet flowers. Weary! Weary! He
too was weary of ardent ways.

A gradual warmth, a languorous weariness passed over him descending
along his spine from his closely cowled head. He felt it descend and,
seeing himself as he lay, smiled. Soon he would sleep.

He had written verses for her again after ten years. Ten years before
she had worn her shawl cowlwise about her head, sending sprays of her
warm breath into the night air, tapping her foot upon the glassy road.
It was the last tram; the lank brown horses knew it and shook their
bells to the clear night in admonition. The conductor talked with the
driver, both nodding often in the green light of the lamp. They stood
on the steps of the tram, he on the upper, she on the lower. She came
up to his step many times between their phrases and went down again and
once or twice remained beside him forgetting to go down and then went
down. Let be! Let be!

Ten years from that wisdom of children to his folly. If he sent her the
verses? They would be read out at breakfast amid the tapping of
egg-shells. Folly indeed! Her brothers would laugh and try to wrest the
page from each other with their strong hard fingers. The suave priest,
her uncle, seated in his arm-chair, would hold the page at arm's
length, read it smiling and approve of the literary form.

No, no; that was folly. Even if he sent her the verses she would not
show them to others. No, no; she could not.

He began to feel that he had wronged her. A sense of her innocence
moved him almost to pity her, an innocence he had never understood till
he had come to the knowledge of it through sin, an innocence which she
too had not understood while she was innocent or before the strange
humiliation of her nature had first come upon her. Then first her soul
had begun to live as his soul had when he had first sinned, and a
tender compassion filled his heart as he remembered her frail pallor
and her eyes, humbled and saddened by the dark shame of womanhood.

While his soul had passed from ecstasy to languor where had she been?
Might it be, in the mysterious ways of spiritual life, that her soul at
those same moments had been conscious of his homage? It might be.

A glow of desire kindled again his soul and fired and fulfilled all his
body. Conscious of his desire she was waking from odorous sleep, the
temptress of his villanelle. Her eyes, dark and with a look of languor,
were opening to his eyes. Her nakedness yielded to him, radiant, warm,
odorous and lavish-limbed, enfolded him like a shining cloud, enfolded
him like water with a liquid life; and like a cloud of vapour or like
waters circumfluent in space the liquid letters of speech, symbols of
the element of mystery, flowed forth over his brain.

Are you not weary of ardent ways,
Lure of the fallen seraphim?
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Your eyes have set man's heart ablaze
And you have had your will of him.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Above the flame the smoke of praise
Goes up from ocean rim to rim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.

Our broken cries and mournful lays
Rise in one eucharistic hymn.
Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise
The chalice flowing to the brim.
Tell no more of enchanted days.

And still you hold our longing gaze
With languorous look and lavish limb!
Are you not weary of ardent ways?
Tell no more of enchanted days.


* * * * *


What birds were they? He stood on the steps of the library to look at
them, leaning wearily on his ashplant. They flew round and round the
jutting shoulder of a house in Molesworth Street. The air of the late
March evening made clear their flight, their dark quivering bodies
flying clearly against the sky as against a limp-hung cloth of smoky
tenuous blue.

He watched their flight; bird after bird: a dark flash, a swerve, a
flutter of wings. He tried to count them before all their darting
quivering bodies passed: six, ten, eleven: and wondered were they odd
or even in number. Twelve, thirteen: for two came wheeling down from the
upper sky. They were flying high and low but ever round and round in
straight and curving lines and ever flying from left to right, circling
about a temple of air.

He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice behind the wainscot:
a shrill twofold note. But the notes were long and shrill and whirring,
unlike the cry of vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as
the flying beaks clove the air. Their cry was shrill and clear and fine
and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.

The inhuman clamour soothed his ears in which his mother's sobs and
reproaches murmured insistently and the dark frail quivering bodies
wheeling and fluttering and swerving round an airy temple of the
tenuous sky soothed his eyes which still saw the image of his mother's
face.

Why was he gazing upwards from the steps of the porch, hearing their
shrill twofold cry, watching their flight? For an augury of good or
evil? A phrase of Cornelius Agrippa flew through his mind and then
there flew hither and thither shapeless thoughts from Swedenborg on the
correspondence of birds to things of the intellect and of how the
creatures of the air have their knowledge and know their times and
seasons because they, unlike man, are in the order of their life and
have not perverted that order by reason.

And for ages men had gazed upward as he was gazing at birds in flight.
The colonnade above him made him think vaguely of an ancient temple and
the ashplant on which he leaned wearily of the curved stick of an
augur. A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his
weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawk-like man whose
name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier-woven wings, of
Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and
bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon.

He smiled as he thought of the god's image for it made him think of a
bottle-nosed judge in a wig, putting commas into a document which he
held at arm's length, and he knew that he would not have remembered the
god's name but that it was like an Irish oath. It was folly. But was it
for this folly that he was about to leave for ever the house of prayer
and prudence into which he had been born and the order of life out of
which he had come?

They came back with shrill cries over the jutting shoulder of the
house, flying darkly against the fading air. What birds were they? He
thought that they must be swallows who had come back from the south.
Then he was to go away for they were birds ever going and coming,
building ever an unlasting home under the eaves of men's houses and
ever leaving the homes they had built to wander.

Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel.
I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes
Upon the nest under the eave before
He wander the loud waters.

A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory
and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading
tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying
through the sea-dusk over the flowing waters.

A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long vowels
hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever
shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal, and
soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the
wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come
forth from his heart like a bird from a turret, quietly and swiftly.

Symbol of departure or of loneliness? The verses crooned in the ear of
his memory composed slowly before his remembering eyes the scene of the
hall on the night of the opening of the national theatre. He was alone
at the side of the balcony, looking out of jaded eyes at the culture of
Dublin in the stalls and at the tawdry scene-cloths and human dolls
framed by the garish lamps of the stage. A burly policeman sweated behind
him and seemed at every moment about to act. The catcalls and hisses and
mocking cries ran in rude gusts round the hall from his scattered fellow
students.

--A libel on Ireland!

--Made in Germany.

--Blasphemy!

--We never sold our faith!

--No Irish woman ever did it!

--We want no amateur atheists.

--We want no budding buddhists.

A sudden swift hiss fell from the windows above him and he knew that
the electric lamps had been switched on in the reader's room. He turned
into the pillared hall, now calmly lit, went up the staircase and
passed in through the clicking turnstile.

Cranly was sitting over near the dictionaries. A thick book, opened at
the frontispiece, lay before him on the wooden rest. He leaned back in
his chair, inclining his ear like that of a confessor to the face of
the medical student who was reading to him a problem from the chess
page of a journal. Stephen sat down at his right and the priest at the
other side of the table closed his copy of THE TABLET with an angry
snap and stood up.

Cranly gazed after him blandly and vaguely. The medical student went on
in a softer voice:

--Pawn to king's fourth.

--We had better go, Dixon, said Stephen in warning. He has gone to
complain.

Dixon folded the journal and rose with dignity, saying:

--Our men retired in good order.