Books: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

J >> James Joyce >> A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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The director had begun to speak of the dominican and franciscan orders
and of the friendship between saint Thomas and saint Bonaventure. The
capuchin dress, he thought, was rather too

Stephen's face gave back the priest's indulgent smile and, not being
anxious to give an opinion, he made a slight dubitative movement with
his lips.

--I believe, continued the director, that there is some talk now among
the capuchins themselves of doing away with it and following the
example of the other franciscans.

--I suppose they would retain it in the cloisters? said Stephen.

--O certainly, said the director. For the cloister it is all right but
for the street I really think it would be better to do away with it,
don't you?

--It must be troublesome, I imagine.

--Of course it is, of course. Just imagine when I was in Belgium I
used to see them out cycling in all kinds of weather with this thing up
about their knees! It was really ridiculous. LES JUPES, they call them
in Belgium.

The vowel was so modified as to be indistinct.

--What do they call them?

--LES JUPES.

--O!

Stephen smiled again in answer to the smile which he could not see on
the priest's shadowed face, its image or spectre only passing rapidly
across his mind as the low discreet accent fell upon his ear. He gazed
calmly before him at the waning sky, glad of the cool of the evening
and of the faint yellow glow which hid the tiny flame kindling upon his
cheek.

The names of articles of dress worn by women or of certain soft and
delicate stuffs used in their making brought always to his mind a
delicate and sinful perfume. As a boy he had imagined the reins by
which horses are driven as slender silken bands and it shocked him to
feel at Stradbrooke the greasy leather of harness. It had shocked him,
too, when he had felt for the first time beneath his tremulous fingers
the brittle texture of a woman's stocking for, retaining nothing of all
he read save that which seemed to him an echo or a prophecy of his own
state, it was only amid soft-worded phrases or within rose-soft stuff's
that he dared to conceive of the soul or body of a woman moving with
tender life.

But the phrase on the priest's lips was disingenuous for he knew that a
priest should not speak lightly on that theme. The phrase had been
spoken lightly with design and he felt that his face was being searched
by the eyes in the shadow. Whatever he had heard or read of the craft
of jesuits he had put aside frankly as not borne out by his own
experience. His masters, even when they had not attracted him,
had seemed to him always intelligent and serious priests,
athletic and high-spirited prefects. He thought of them as men
who washed their bodies briskly with cold water and wore clean cold
linen. During all the years he had lived among them in Clongowes and in
Belvedere he had received only two pandies and, though these had been
dealt him in the wrong, he knew that he had often escaped punishment.
During all those years he had never heard from any of his masters a
flippant word: it was they who had taught him christian doctrine and
urged him to live a good life and, when he had fallen into grievous
sin, it was they who had led him back to grace. Their presence had made
him diffident of himself when he was a muffin Clongowes and it had made
him diffident of himself also while he had held his equivocal position
in Belvedere. A constant sense of this had remained with him up to the
last year of his school life. He had never once disobeyed or allowed
turbulent companions to seduce him from his habit of quiet obedience;
and, even when he doubted some statement of a master, he had never
presumed to doubt openly. Lately some of their judgements had sounded a
little childish in his ears and had made him feel a regret and pity as
though he were slowly passing out of an accustomed world and were
hearing its language for the last time. One day when some boys had
gathered round a priest under the shed near the chapel, he had heard
the priest say:

--I believe that Lord Macaulay was a man who probably never committed
a mortal sin in his life, that is to say, a deliberate mortal sin.

Some of the boys had then asked the priest if Victor Hugo were not the
greatest French writer. The priest had answered that Victor Hugo had
never written half so well when he had turned against the church as he
had written when he was a catholic.

--But there are many eminent French critics, said the priest, who
consider that even Victor Hugo, great as he certainly was, had not so
pure a French style as Louis Veuillot.

The tiny flame which the priest's allusion had kindled upon Stephen's
cheek had sunk down again and his eyes were still fixed calmly on the
colourless sky. But an unresting doubt flew hither and thither before
his mind. Masked memories passed quickly before him: he recognized
scenes and persons yet he was conscious that he had failed to perceive
some vital circumstance in them. He saw himself walking about the
grounds watching the sports in Clongowes and eating slim jim out of his
cricket cap. Some jesuits were walking round the cycle-track in the
company of ladies. The echoes of certain expressions used in Clongowes
sounded in remote caves of his mind.

His ears were listening to these distant echoes amid the silence of the
parlour when he became aware that the priest was addressing him in a
different voice.

--I sent for you today, Stephen, because I wished to speak to you on a
very important subject.

--Yes, sir.

--Have you ever felt that you had a vocation?

Stephen parted his lips to answer yes and then withheld the word
suddenly. The priest waited for the answer and added:

--I mean, have you ever felt within yourself, in your soul, a desire
to join the order? Think.

--I have sometimes thought of it, said Stephen.

The priest let the blindcord fall to one side and, uniting his hands,
leaned his chin gravely upon them, communing with himself.

--In a college like this, he said at length, there is one boy or perhaps
two or three boys whom God calls to the religious life. Such a boy is
marked off from his companions by his piety, by the good example he
shows to others. He is looked up to by them; he is chosen perhaps as
prefect by his fellow sodalists. And you, Stephen, have been such a boy
in this college, prefect of Our Blessed Lady's sodality. Perhaps you
are the boy in this college whom God designs to call to Himself.

A strong note of pride reinforcing the gravity of the priest's voice
made Stephen's heart quicken in response.

To receive that call, Stephen, said the priest, is the greatest honour
that the Almighty God can bestow upon a man. No king or emperor on this
earth has the power of the priest of God. No angel or archangel in
heaven, no saint, not even the Blessed Virgin herself, has the power of
a priest of God: the power of the keys, the power to bind and to loose
from sin, the power of exorcism, the power to cast out from the
creatures of God the evil spirits that have power over them; the power,
the authority, to make the great God of Heaven come down upon the altar
and take the form of bread and wine. What an awful power, Stephen!

A flame began to flutter again on Stephen's cheek as he heard in this
proud address an echo of his own proud musings. How often had he seen
himself as a priest wielding calmly and humbly the awful power
of which angels and saints stood in reverence! His soul had loved
to muse in secret on this desire. He had seen himself, a young
and silent-mannered priest, entering a confessional swiftly,
ascending the altarsteps, incensing, genuflecting, accomplishing
the vague acts of the priesthood which pleased him by reason of
their semblance of reality and of their distance from it. In that
dim life which he had lived through in his musings he had
assumed the voices and gestures which he had noted with various
priests. He had bent his knee sideways like such a one, he had
shaken the thurible only slightly like such a one, his chasuble had
swung open like that of such another as he turned to the altar again
after having blessed the people. And above all it had pleased him to
fill the second place in those dim scenes of his imagining. He shrank
from the dignity of celebrant because it displeased him to imagine that
all the vague pomp should end in his own person or that the ritual
should assign to him so clear and final an office. He longed for the
minor sacred offices, to be vested with the tunicle of subdeacon at
high mass, to stand aloof from the altar, forgotten by the people, his
shoulders covered with a humeral veil, holding the paten within its
folds or, when the sacrifice had been accomplished, to stand as deacon
in a dalmatic of cloth of gold on the step below the celebrant, his
hands joined and his face towards the people, and sing the chant ITE
MISSA EST. If ever he had seen himself celebrant it was as in the
pictures of the mass in his child's massbook, in a church without
worshippers, save for the angel of the sacrifice, at a bare altar, and
served by an acolyte scarcely more boyish than himself. In vague
sacrificial or sacramental acts alone his will seemed drawn to go forth
to encounter reality; and it was partly the absence of an appointed
rite which had always constrained him to inaction whether he had
allowed silence to cover his anger or pride or had suffered only an
embrace he longed to give.

He listened in reverent silence now to the priest's appeal and through
the words he heard even more distinctly a voice bidding him approach,
offering him secret knowledge and secret power. He would know then what
was the sin of Simon Magus and what the sin against the Holy Ghost for
which there was no forgiveness. He would know obscure things, hidden
from others, from those who were conceived and born children of wrath.
He would know the sins, the sinful longings and sinful thoughts and
sinful acts, of others, hearing them murmured into his ears in the
confessional under the shame of a darkened chapel by the lips of women
and of girls; but rendered immune mysteriously at his ordination by the
imposition of hands, his soul would pass again uncontaminated to the
white peace of the altar. No touch of sin would linger upon the hands
with which he would elevate and break the host; no touch of sin would
linger on his lips in prayer to make him eat and drink damnation to
himself not discerning the body of the Lord. He would hold his secret
knowledge and secret power, being as sinless as the innocent, and he
would be a priest for ever according to the order of Melchisedec.

--I will offer up my mass tomorrow morning, said the director, that
Almighty God may reveal to you His holy will. And let you, Stephen,
make a novena to your holy patron saint, the first martyr, who is very
powerful with God, that God may enlighten your mind. But you must be
quite sure, Stephen, that you have a vocation because it would be
terrible if you found afterwards that you had none. Once a priest
always a priest, remember. Your catechism tells you that the sacrament
of Holy Orders is one of those which can be received only once because
it imprints on the soul an indelible spiritual mark which can never be
effaced. It is before you must weigh well, not after. It is a solemn
question, Stephen, because on it may depend the salvation of your
eternal soul. But we will pray to God together.

He held open the heavy hall door and gave his hand as if already to a
companion in the spiritual life. Stephen passed out on to the wide
platform above the steps and was conscious of the caress of mild
evening air. Towards Findlater's church a quartet of young men were
striding along with linked arms, swaying their heads and stepping to
the agile melody of their leader's concertina. The music passed in an
instant, as the first bars of sudden music always did, over the
fantastic fabrics of his mind, dissolving them painlessly and
noiselessly as a sudden wave dissolves the sand-built turrets of
children. Smiling at the trivial air he raised his eyes to the priest's
face and, seeing in it a mirthless reflection of the sunken day,
detached his hand slowly which had acquiesced faintly in the
companionship.

As he descended the steps the impression which effaced his troubled
self-communion was that of a mirthless mask reflecting a sunken day
from the threshold of the college. The shadow, then, of the life of the
college passed gravely over his consciousness. It was a grave and
ordered and passionless life that awaited him, a life without material
cares. He wondered how he would pass the first night in the novitiate
and with what dismay he would wake the first morning in the dormitory.
The troubling odour of the long corridors of Clongowes came back to him
and he heard the discreet murmur of the burning gasflames. At once from
every part of his being unrest began to irradiate. A feverish
quickening of his pulses followed, and a din of meaningless words drove
his reasoned thoughts hither and thither confusedly. His lungs dilated
and sank as if he were inhaling a warm moist unsustaining air and he
smelt again the moist warm air which hung in the bath in Clongowes
above the sluggish turf-coloured water.

Some instinct, waking at these memories, stronger than education or
piety, quickened within him at every near approach to that life, an
instinct subtle and hostile, and armed him against acquiescence. The
chill and order of the life repelled him. He saw himself rising in the
cold of the morning and filing down with the others to early mass and
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 deep-rooted
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 sour-favoured 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 ham-shaped
encampment of poor cottages. Then, bending to the left, he followed the
lane which led up to his house. The faint dour 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 grey-blue 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 night
clouds 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 Clontail 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, cloud-like, 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 top-heavy silk hats and humble
tape-like 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 harmonized 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 grey-fringed 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 many-coloured and richly
storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual
emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?

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