Stephen Hero Page 3

  My days are in the yellow leaf

  The flowers and fruits of love are gone

  The worm, the canker and the grief

  Are mine alone.

  The two brothers tried this theory on all the verse they could remember and it yielded wonderful results. Soon Stephen began to explore the language for himself and to choose, and thereby rescue once for all, the words and phrases most amenable to his theory. « He became a poet with malice aforethought. »

  He was at once captivated by the seeming eccentricities of the prose of Freeman and William Morris. He read them as one would read a thesaurus and made a « garner » of words. He read Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary by the hour and his mind, which had from the first been only too submissive to the infant sense of wonder, was often hypnotised by the most commonplace conversation. People seemed to him strangely ignorant of the value of the words they used so glibly. And pace by pace as this indignity of life forced itself upon him he became enamoured of an idealising, a more veritably human tradition. The phenomenon seemed to him a grave one and he began to see that people had leagued themselves together in a conspiracy of ignobility and that Destiny had scornfully reduced her prices for them. He desired no such reduction for himself and preferred to serve her on the ancient terms.

  There was a special class for English composition and it was in this class that Stephen first made his name. The English essay was for him the one serious work of the week. His essay was usually very long and the professor, who was a leader-writer on the Freeman’s Journal, always kept it for the last. Stephen’s style of writing, [that] though it was over affectionate towards the antique and even the obsolete and too easily rhetorical, was remarkable for a certain crude originality of expression. He gave himself no great trouble to sustain the boldnesses which were expressed or implied in his essays. He threw them out as sudden defence-works while he was busy constructing the enigma of a manner. For the youth had been apprised of another crisis and he wished to make ready for the shock of it. On account of such manoeuvres he came to be regarded as a very unequilibrated [youth] young man who took more interest than young men usually take in theories which might be permitted as pastimes. Father Butt, to whom the emergence of these unusual qualities had been duly reported, spoke one day to Stephen with the purpose of ‘sounding’ him. Father Butt expressed a great admiration for Stephen’s essays all of which, he said, the professor of English composition had shown him. He encouraged the youth and suggested that in a short time perhaps he might contribute something to one of the Dublin papers or magazines. Stephen found this encouragement kindly meant but mistaken and he launched forth into a copious explanation of his theories. Father Butt listened and, even more readily than [Stephen] Maurice had done, agreed with them all. Stephen laid down his doctrine very positively and insisted on the importance of what he called the literary tradition. « Words, he said, have a certain value in the literary tradition and a certain value in the market-place — a debased value. » Words are simply receptacles for human thought: in the literary tradition they receive more valuable thoughts than they receive in the market-place. Father Butt listened to all this, rubbing his chalky hand often over his chin and « nodding his head and said that Stephen evidently understood the importance of tradition. » Stephen quoted a phrase from Newman to illustrate his theory.

  — In that sentence of Newman’s, he said, the word is used according to the literary tradition: it has there its full value. In ordinary use, that is, in the market-place, it has a different value altogether, a debased value. “I hope I’m not detaining you.”

  — Not at all! not at all!

  — No, no …

  — Yes, yes, Mr Daedalus, I see … I quite see your point … detain …

  The very morning after this Father Butt returned Stephen’s monologue in kind. It was a raw nipping morning and when Stephen, who had arrived too late for the Latin lecture, strolled into the Physics Theatre he discovered Father Butt kneeling on the hearthstone engaged in lighting a small fire in the huge grate. He was making neat wisps of paper and carefully disposing them among the coals and sticks. All the while he kept up a little patter explaining his operations and at a crisis he produced from the most remote pockets of his chalkey soutane three dirty candle-butts. These he thrust in different openings and then looked up at Stephen with an air of triumph. He set a match to a few projecting pieces of paper and in a few minutes the coals had caught.

  — There is an art, Mr Daedalus, in lighting a fire.

  — So I see, sir. A very useful art.

  — That’s it: a useful art. We have the useful arts and we have the liberal arts.

  Father Butt after this statement got up from the hearthstone and went away about some other business leaving Stephen to watch the kindling fire and Stephen brooded upon the fast melting candle-butts and on the reproach of the priest’s manner till it was time for the Physics lecture to begin.

  The problem could not be solved out of hand but the artistic part of it at least presented no difficulties. In reading through ‘Twelfth Night’ for the class Father Butt skipped the two songs of the clown without a word and when Stephen, determined on forcing them on his attention, asked very gravely whether they were to be learned by heart or not Father Butt said it was improbable such a question would be on the paper:

  — The clown sings these songs for the duke. It was a custom at that time for noblemen to have clowns to sing to them … for amusement.

  He took ‘Othello’ more seriously and made the class take a note of the moral of the play: an object-lesson in the passion of jealousy. Shakespeare, he said, had sounded the depths of human nature: his plays show us men and women under the influence of various passions and they show us the moral result of these passions. We see the conflict of these human passions and our own passions are purified by the spectacle. The dramas of Shakespeare have a distinct moral force and ‘Othello’ is one of the greatest of tragedies. Stephen trained himself to hear all this out without moving hand or foot but at the same time he was amused to learn that the president had refused to allow two of the boarders to go « to a performance of ‘Othello’ at the Gaiety Theatre on the ground that there were many coarse expressions in the play. »

  The monster in Stephen had lately taken to misbehaving himself and on the least provocation was ready for bloodshed. Almost every incident of the day was a goad for him and the intellect had great trouble keeping him within bounds. But the episode of religious fervour which was fast becoming a memory had resulted in a certain outward self-control which was now found to be very useful. Besides this Stephen was quick enough to see that he must disentangle his affairs in secrecy and reserve had ever been a light penance for him. His reluctance to debate scandal, to seem impolitely curious of others, aided him in his real indictment and was not without a satisfactory flavour of the heroic. Already while that fever-fit of holiness lay upon him he had encountered but out of charity had declined to penetrate disillusioning forces. These shocks had driven him from breathless flights of zeal shamefully inwards and the most that devotional exercises could do for him was to soothe him. This soothing he badly needed for he suffered greatly from contact with his new environment. He hardly spoke to his colleagues and performed the business of the class without remark or interest. Every morning he rose and came down to breakfast. After breakfast he took the tram for town, settling himself on the front seat outside with his face to the wind. He got down off the tram at Amiens St Station instead of going on to the Pillar because he wished to partake in the morning life of the city. This morning walk was pleasant for him and there was no face that passed him on its way to its commercial prison but he strove to pierce to the motive centre of its ugliness. It was always with a feeling of displeasure that he entered the Green and saw on the far side the gloomy building of the College.

  As he walked thus through the ways of the city he had his ears and eyes ever prompt to receive impressions. It was not only in Skeat that he found words
for his treasure-house, he found them also at haphazard in the shops, on advertisements, in the mouths of the plodding public. He kept repeating them to himself till they lost all instantaneous meaning for him and became wonderful vocables. He was determined to fight with every energy of soul and body against any possible consignment to what he now regarded as the hell of hells — the region, otherwise expressed, wherein everything is found to be obvious — and the saint who formerly was « chary of speech » in obedience to a commandment of silence could just be recognised in the artist who schooled himself to silence lest words should return him his discourtesy. Phrases came to him asking to have themselves explained. He said to himself: I must wait for the Eucharist to come to me: and then he set about translating the phrase into common sense. He spent days and nights hammering noisily as he built a house of silence for himself wherein he might await his Eucharist, days and nights gathering the first fruits and every peace-offering and heaping them upon his altar whereon he prayed clamorously the burning token of satisfaction might descend. In class, in the hushed library, in the company of other students he would suddenly hear a command to begone, to be alone, a voice agitating the very tympanum of his ear, a flame leaping into divine cerebral life. He would obey the command and wander up and down the streets alone, the fervour of his hope sustained by ejaculations until he felt sure that it was useless to wander any more: and then he would return home with a deliberate, unflagging step piecing together meaningless words and phrases with deliberate unflagging seriousness.*

  * In the MS. “End of First Episode of V” is written in red crayon at this point.

  -XVI-

  Their Eminences of the Holy College are hardly more scrupulous solitaries during the ballot for Christ’s vicar than was Stephen at this time. He wrote a great deal of verse and, in default of any better contrivance, his verse allowed him to combine the offices of penitent and confessor. He sought in his verses to fix the most elusive of his moods and he put his lines together not word by word but letter by letter. He read Blake and Rimbaud on the values of letters and even permuted and combined the five vowels to construct cries for primitive emotions. To none of his former fervours had he given himself with such a whole heart as to this fervour; « the monk now seemed to him no more than half the artist. He persuaded himself that it is necessary for an artist to labour incessantly at his art if he wishes to express completely even the simplest conception and he believed that every moment of inspiration must be paid for in advance. He was not convinced of the truth of the saying [Poeta nascitur, non fit] “The poet is born, not made” but he was quite sure » of the truth of this at least: [Poema fit, non nascitur] “The poem is made not born.” The burgher notion of the poet Byron in undress pouring out verses [like] just as a city fountain pours out water seemed to him characteristic of most popular judgments on esthetic matters and he combated the notion at its root « by saying solemnly to Maurice — Isolation is the first principle of artistic economy. »

  Stephen did not attach himself to art in any spirit of youthful dillettantism but strove to pierce to the significant heart of everything. « He doubled backwards into the past of humanity and caught glimpses of emergent art as one might have a vision of the pleisiosauros emerging from his ocean of slime. He seemed almost to hear the simple cries of fear and joy and wonder which are antecedent to all song, the savage rhythms of men pulling at the oar, » to see the rude scrawls and the portable gods of men whose legacy Leonardo and Michelangelo inherit. And over all this chaos of history and legend, of fact and supposition, he strove to draw out a line of order, to reduce the abysses of the past to order by a diagram. The treatises which were recommended to him he found valueless and trifling; the Laocoon of Lessing irritated him. He wondered how the world could accept as valuable contributions such [fantas] fanciful generalisations. What finer certitude could be attained by the artist if he believed that ancient art was plastic and that modern art was pictorial — ancient art in this context meaning art between the Balkans and the Morea and modern art meaning art anywhere between the Caucasus and the Atlantic except in the sacrosanct region. A great contempt devoured him for the critics who considered “Greek” and “classical” interchangeable terms and so full was he of intemperate anger that [all week Saturday] when Father Butt gave ‘Othello’ as the subject for the essay of the week Stephen lodged on the following Monday a profuse, downright protest against the ‘masterpiece.’ The young men in the class laughed and Stephen, as he looked contemptuously at the laughing faces, thought of a self-submersive reptile.

  No-one would listen to his theories: no-one was interested in art. The « young men in the college » regarded art as a continental vice and they said in effect, “If we must have art are there not enough subjects in Holy Writ?” — for an artist with them was a man who painted pictures. It was a bad sign for a young man to show interest in anything but his examinations or his prospective ‘job.’ It was all very well to be able to talk about it but really art was all ‘rot’: besides it was probably immoral; they knew (or, at least, they had heard) about studios. They didn’t want that kind of thing in their country. Talk about beauty, talk about rhythms, talk about esthetic — they knew what all the fine talk covered. One day a big countrified student came over to Stephen and asked:

  — « Tell us, aren’t you an artist?

  Stephen gazed at the idea-proof young man, without answering. »

  — Because if you are why don’t you wear your hair long?

  A few bystanders laughed at this and Stephen wondered for which of the learned professions the young man’s father designed him.

  In spite of his surroundings Stephen continued his labours of research and all the more ardently since he imagined they had been « put under ban. » It was part of that ineradicable egoism which he was afterwards to call redeemer that he conceived converging to him the deeds and thoughts of his microcosm. Is the mind of youth medieval that it is so divining of intrigue? Field-sports (or their equivalent in the world of mentality) are perhaps the most effective cure and Anglo-Saxon educators favour rather a system of hardy brutality. But for this fantastic idealist, eluding the grunting booted apparition with a bound, the mimic warfare was no less ludicrous than unequal in a ground chosen to his disadvantage. Behind the rapidly indurating shield the sensitive answered: Let the pack of enmities come tumbling and sniffing to my highlands after their game. There was his ground and he flung them disdain from flashing antlers.*

  Indeed he felt the morning in his blood: he was aware of some movement already proceeding « out in Europe. » Of this last phrase he was fond for it seemed to him to unroll the measurable world before the feet of the islanders. Nothing could persuade him that the world was such as Father Butt’s students conceived it. He had no need for the cautions which were named indispensable, no reverence for the proprieties which were called the bases of life. He was an enigmatic figure in the midst of his shivering society where he enjoyed a reputation. His comrades hardly knew how far to venture with him and professors pretended to think his seriousness a sufficient warrant against any practical disobedience. On his side chastity, having been found a great inconvenience, had been quietly abandoned and the youth amused himself in the company of certain of his fellow-students among whom (as the fame went) wild living was not unknown. The Rector of Belvedere had a brother who was at this time a student in the college and one night in the gallery of the Gaiety (for Stephen had become a constant ‘god’) another Belvedere boy, « who was also a student in the college, bore scandalous witness into Stephen’s ear. »

  — I say, Daedalus …

  — Well?

  — I wonder what MacNally would say if he met his brother — you know the fellow in the college?

  — Yes …

  — I saw him in Stephen’s Green the other day with a tart. I was just thinking if MacNally saw him …

  The informant paused: and then, afraid of over-implication and with an air of a connoisseur, he added seriously: />
  — Of course she was … all right.

  Every evening after tea Stephen left his house and set out for the city, Maurice at his side. The elder smoked cigarettes and the younger ate lemon drops and, aided by these animal comforts, they beguiled the long journey with philosophic discourse. Maurice was a very attentive person and one evening he told Stephen that he was keeping a diary of their conversations. Stephen asked to see the diary but Maurice said it would be time enough for that at the end of the first year. Neither of the youths had the least suspicion of themselves; they both looked upon life with frank curious eyes (Maurice naturally serving himself with Stephen’s vision when his own was deficient) and they both felt that it was possible to arrive at a sane understanding of so-called mysteries if one only had patience enough. On their way in every evening the heights of argument were traversed and the younger boy aided the elder bravely in the building of an entire science of esthetic. They spoke to each other very decisively and Stephen found Maurice very useful for raising objections. When they came to the gate of the Library they used to stand to finish some branch of their subject and often the discussion was so protracted that Stephen would decide that it was too late to go in to read and so they would set their faces for Clontarf and return in the same manner. Stephen, after certain hesitations, showed Maurice the first-fruits of his verse and Maurice asked who the woman was. Stephen looked a little vaguely before him before answering and in the end had to answer that he didn’t know who she was.

  To this unknown verses were now regularly inscribed and it seemed that the evil dream of love which Stephen chose to commemorate in these verses lay veritably upon the world now in a season of « damp violet mist. He had abandoned his Madonna, » he had forsaken his word and he had withdrawn sternly from his little world and surely it was not wonderful that his solitude should propel him to frenetic outbursts of a young man’s passion and to outbursts of loneliness? This quality of the mind which so reveals itself is called (when incorrigible) a decadence but if we are to take a general view of [life] the world we cannot but see a process to life through corruption. There were moments for him, however, when such a process would have seemed intolerable, life on any common terms an intolerable offence, and at such moments he prayed for nothing and lamented for nothing but he felt with a sweet sinking of consciousness that if the end came to him it was in the arms of the unknown that it would come to him: