 The Decay of Lying and Observation Part 2 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Decay of Lying and Observation Part 2 By Oscar Wilde Vivian Reading Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is in the world. This is the first stage. Then life becomes fascinated with this new wonder and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it and refashions it in fresh forms. It is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment. The third stage is when life gets the upper hand and drives art out into the wilderness. That is the true decadence and it is from this that we are now suffering. Take the case of the English drama. At first, in the hands of the monks, dramatic art was abstract, decorative and mythological. Then she enlisted life in her service and using some of the words she used to describe her work. At first, dramatic art was abstract, decorative and mythological. Then she enlisted life in her service and using some of life's external forms, she created an entirely new race of beings whose sorrows were more terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener than lovers' joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods, who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues. To them she gave a language different from that of actual use, a language full of resonant music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence, or made delicate by fanciful rhyme, duelled with wonderful words and enriched with lofty diction. She clothed her children in strange raiment and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from its marble tomb. A new Caesar stalked through the streets of Risen Rome, and with purple sail and flute-led oars another Cleopatra passed up the river to Antioch. Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance. History was entirely rewritten, and there was hardly one of the dramatists who did not recognise that the object of art is not simple truth, but complex beauty. In this they were perfectly right. Art itself is really a form of exaggeration, and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of overemphasis. But life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in Shakespeare we can see the beginning of the end. It shows itself by the gradual breaking up of the blank verse in the later plays, by the predominance given to prose, and by the over-importance assigned to characterisation. The passages in Shakespeare, and there are many where the language is uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due to life calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the intervention of beautiful style, through which alone should life be suffered to find expression. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless artist. He is too fond of going directly to life and borrowing life's natural utterance. He forgets that when art surrenders her imaginative medium, she surrenders everything. Goethe says somewhere, in der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister. It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself, and the limitation, the very condition of any art, is style. However we need not linger any longer over Shakespeare's realism. The tempest is the most perfect of Pallinodes. All that we desired to point out was that the magnificent work of the Elizabethan and Jacobean artists contained within itself the seeds of its own dissolution, and that if it drew some of its strength from using life as rough material, it drew all its weakness from using life as an artistic method. As the inevitable result of this substitution of an imitative for a creative medium, this surrender of an imaginative form, we have the modern English melodrama. The characters in these plays talk on the stage exactly as they would talk off it. They have neither aspirations nor aspirates. They are taken directly from life and reproduce its vulgarity down to the smallest detail. They present the gate, manner, costume and accent of real people. They would pass unnoticed in a third-class railway carriage. And yet how wearisome the plays are. They do not succeed in producing even that impression of reality at which they aim, and which is their only reason for existing. As a method, realism is a complete failure. What is true about the drama and the novel is no less true about those arts that we call the decorative arts. The whole history of these arts in Europe is the record of the struggle between Orientalism, with its frank rejection of imitation, its love of artistic convention, its dislike to the actual representation of any object in nature, and our own imitative spirit. Wherever the former has been paramount, as in Byzantium, Sicily and Spain, by actual contact, or in the rest of Europe by the influence of the Crusades, we have had beautiful and imaginative work in which the visible things of life are transmuted into artistic conventions, and the things that life has not are invented and fashioned for her delight. But wherever we have returned to life and nature, our work has always become vulgar, common and uninteresting. Modern tapestry, with its aerial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism has no beauty whatsoever. The pictorial glass of Germany is absolutely detestable. We are beginning to weave passable carpets in England, but only because we have returned to the method and spirit of the East. Our rugs and carpets of twenty years ago, with their solemn, depressing truths, their inane worship of nature, their sorted reproductions of visible objects, have become even to the Philistinus source of laughter. A cultured Mohammedan once remarked to us, You Christians are so occupied in misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought of making an artistic application of the second. He was perfectly right, and the whole truth of the matter is this. The proper school to learn art in is not life, but art. And now let me read you a passage which seems to me to settle the question very completely. It was not always thus. We need not say anything about the poets, for they, with the unfortunate exception of Mr. Wordsworth, have been really faithful to their high mission, and are universally recognised as being absolutely unreliable. But in the works of Herodotus, who in spite of the shallow and ungenerous attempts of modern Siolists to verify his history, may justly be called the father of lies, in the published speeches of Cicero and the biographies of Suetonius, in Tacitus at his best, in Pliny's natural history, in Hamnus Periplus, in all the early chronicles in the lives of the saints, in Frasar and Sir Thomas Mallory, in the travels of Marco Polo, in Olaus Magnus and Aldrovandus, and Conrad Lycosthenes with his magnificent prodigiorum et ostentorum cronicon. In the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, in the memoirs of Casanova, in Defoe's history of the plague, in Boswell's life of Johnson, in Napoleon's dispatches, and in the works of our own Carlisle, whose French Revolution is one of the most fascinating historical novels ever written, facts are either kept in their proper subordinate position, or else entirely excluded, on the general ground of dullness. Now everything is changed. Facts are not merely finding a footing place in history, but they are usurping the domain of fancy, and have invaded the kingdom of romance. Their chilling touch is over everything. They are vulgarizing mankind. The crude commercialism of America, its materializing spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination, and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero, a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie. And it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature. Cyril, my dear boy! Vivian, I assure you it is the case, and the amusing part of the whole thing is that the story of the Cherry Tree is an absolute myth. However, you must not think that I am too despondent about the autistic future, either of America or of our own country. Listen to this. That some change will take place before this century has drawn to its close we have no doubt whatsoever. Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present, society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar. Who he was who first, without ever having gone out to the rude chase, told the wandering cavemen at sunset how he had dragged the Megatherium from the purple darkness of its jasper cave, or slain the mammoth in single combat, and brought back its gilded tusks we cannot tell, and not one of our modern anthropologists for all their much boasted science has had the ordinary courage to tell us. Whatever was his name or race he was certainly the true founder of social intercourse. For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilised society, and without him a dinner-party, even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the royal society, or a debate at the incorporated authors, or one of Mr. Bernanke's farcical comedies. Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style. While life, poor, probable, uninteresting human life, tired of repeating herself for the benefit of Mr. Herbert Spencer, scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly after him, and try to reproduce, in her own simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks. No doubt there will always be critics who, like a certain writer in the Saturday review, will gravely censure the teller of fairy tales for his defective knowledge of natural history, who will measure imaginative work by their own lack of any imaginative faculty, and will hold up their ink-stained hands in horror if some honest gentleman, who has never been farther than the yew-trees of his own garden, pens a fascinating book of travels like Sir John Mandeville, or like Great Roarley, writes a whole history of the world without knowing anything whatsoever about the past. To excuse themselves, they will try and shelter under the shield of him who made Prospero the magician, and gave him Caliban and Ariel as his servants, who heard the tritons blowing their horns round the coral reefs of the enchanted isle, and the fairies singing to each other in a wood near Athens, who led the phantom kings in dim procession across the misty Scottish heath, and hid heccity in a cave with the weird sisters. They will call upon Shakespeare. They always do, and will quote that hackneyed passage forgetting that this unfortunate aphorism about art holding the mirror up to nature is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art matters. Cyril, another cigarette, please. Vivian, my dear fellow, whatever you may say, it is merely a dramatic utterance, and no more represents Shakespeare's real views upon art than the speeches of Iago represent his real views upon morals. But let me get to the end of the passage. Art finds her own perfection within and not outside of herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the forms more real than living man, and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has in her eyes no laws, no uniformity. She can work miracles at her will, and when she calls monsters from the deep, they come. She can bid the almond tree blossom in winter and send the snow upon the ripe cornfield. At her word the frost lays its silver finger upon the burning mouth of June. And the winged lions creep out from the hollows of the Lydian Hills. The dryads peer from the thicket as she passes by, and the brown fawns smile strangely at her when she comes near them. She has hawk-faced gods that worship her and the centaurs gallop at her side. Cyril, I like that. I can see it. Is that the end, Vivian? No, there is one more passage, but it is purely practical. It simply suggests some methods by which we could revive this lost art of lying. Cyril, well, before you read it to me, I should like to ask you a question. What do you mean by saying that life, poor, probable, uninteresting human life, will try to reproduce the marvels of art? I can quite understand your objection to art being treated as a mirror. You think it would reduce genius to the position of a cracked looking glass. But you don't mean to say that you seriously believe that life imitates art, that life in fact is the mirror and art the reality. Vivian, certainly I do. Paradox, though it may seem, and paradoxes are always dangerous things, it is nonetheless true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. We have all seen in our own day in England our certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters, has so influenced life that whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon, one sees here the mystic eyes of Rosetti's dream, the long ivory throat, the strange square-cut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently loved. There the sweet maidenhood of the golden stare, the blossom-like mouth and weary loveliness of the lousomores, the passion-pale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivian in Merlin's dream. And it has always been so, a great artist invents a type, and life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. Neither Holbein nor Van Dyke found in England what they have given us, they brought their types with them, and life with her keen, imitative faculty set herself to supply the master with models. The Greeks, with their quick artistic instinct, understood this and set in the bride's chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo so that she might bear children as lovely as the works of art that she looked at in her rapture or her pain. They knew that life gains from art, not merely spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul turmoil or soul peace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours of art, and can reproduce the dignity of Phadias as well as the grace of Praxiteles. Hence came their objection to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly, and they were perfectly right. We try to improve the conditions of the race by means of good air, free sunlight, wholesome water and hideous bare buildings for the better housing of the lower orders. But these things merely produce health, they do not produce beauty. For this art is required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his studio imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be they plastic as in Greek days or pictorial as in modern times. In a word, life is art's best, art's only pupil. As it is with the visible arts, so it is with literature. The most obvious and the vulgarest form in which this is shown is in the case of the silly boys, who after reading the adventures of Jack Shepard or Dick Turpin pillage the stalls of unfortunate Apple women, break into sweet shops at night and alarm old gentlemen who are returning home from the city by leaping out on them in suburban lanes with black masks and unloaded revolvers. This interesting phenomenon, which always occurs after the appearance of a new edition of either of the books I have alluded to, is usually attributed to the influence of literature on the imagination. But this is a mistake. The imagination is essentially creative and always seeks for a new form. The boy burglar is simply the inevitable result of life's imitative instinct. He is fact, occupied as fact usually is, with trying to reproduce fiction. And what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life. Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev and completed by Dostoevsky. Rob Speer came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the people's palace rose out of the debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. Our Lucience de Rubenpré, our Rastignac and de Marseille made their first appearance on the stage of the Comédie humaine. We are merely carrying out with footnotes and unnecessary additions to him or fancy or creative vision of a great novelist. I once asked a lady who knew Thackeray intimately whether he had had any model for Becky Sharp. She told me that Becky was an invention, but that the idea of the character had been partly suggested by a governess who lived in the neighbourhood of Kensington Square and was the companion of a very selfish and rich old woman. I inquired what became of the governess and she replied that oddly enough, some years after the appearance of Vanity Fair she ran away with the nephew of the lady with whom she was living and for a short time made a great splash in society quite in Mrs. Rodden Crawley's style and entirely by Mrs. Rodden Crawley's methods. Ultimately she came to grief, disappeared to the continent and used to be occasionally seen at Monte Carlo and other gambling places. The noble gentleman from whom the same great sentimentalist Drew Colonel Newcombe died a few months after the Newcombes had reached a fourth edition with the word adsome on his lips. Shortly after Mr. Stephenson published his curious psychological story of transformation, a friend of mine called Mr. Hyde was in the north of London and being anxious to get to a railway station took what he thought would be a short cut, lost his way and found himself in a network of mean, evil looking streets. Feeling rather nervous he began to walk extremely fast when suddenly out of an archway ran a child right between his legs. It fell on the pavement, he tripped over it and trampled upon it. Being of course very much frightened and a little hurt it began to scream and in a few seconds the whole street was full of rough people who came pouring out of the houses like ants. They surrounded him and asked him his name. He was just about to give it when he suddenly remembered the opening incident in Mr. Stephenson's story. He was so filled with horror at having realised in his own person that terrible and well-written scene and at having done accidentally though in fact what the Mr. Hyde of fiction had done with deliberate intent that he ran away as hard as he could go. He was however very closely followed and finally he took refuge in a surgery the door of which happened to be open where he explained to a young assistant who happened to be there exactly what had occurred. The humanitarian crowd were induced to go away on his giving them a small sum of money and as soon as the coast was clear he left. As he passed out the name on the brass door plate of the surgery caught his eye. It was G-Kill. At least it should have been. Here the imitation as far as it went was of course accidental. In the following case the imitation was self-conscious. In the year 1879 just after I had left Oxford I met at a reception of the house of one of the foreign ministers a woman of very curious exotic beauty. We became great friends and were constantly together. And yet what interested me most in her was not her beauty but her character her entire vagueness of character. She seemed to have no personality at all but simply the possibility of many types. Sometimes she would give herself up entirely to art, turn her drawing room into a studio and spend two or three days a week at picture galleries or museums. Then she would take to attending race meetings, wear the most horsey clothes and talk about nothing but betting. She abandoned religion for mesmerism, mesmerism for politics and politics for the melodramatic excitements of philanthropy. In fact she was a kind of Proteus and as much a failure in all her transformations as was that wondrous sea-god when Odysseus laid hold of him. One day a serial began in one of the French magazines. At that time I used to read serial stories and I well remember the shock of surprise I felt when I came to the description of the heroine. She was so like my friend that I brought her the magazine and she recognized herself in it immediately and seemed fascinated by the resemblance. I should tell you, by the way, that the story was translated from some dead Russian writer so that the author had not taken his type from my friend. Well, to put the matter briefly, some months afterwards I was in Venice and finding the magazine in the reading-room of the hotel I took it up casually to see what had become of the heroine. It was a most piteous tale as the girl had ended by running away with a man absolutely inferior to her, not merely in social station but in character and intellect also. I wrote to my friend that evening about my views on John Bellini and the admirable ices at Florians and the artistic value of gondolas but added a post-script to the effect that her double in the story had behaved in a very silly manner. I don't know why I added that but I remember I had a sort of dread over me that she might do the same thing. Before my letter had reached her she had run away with a man who deserted her in six months. I saw her in 1884 in Paris where she was living with her mother and I asked her whether the story had had anything to do with her action. She told me that she had felt an absolutely irresistible impulse to follow the heroine step by step in her strange and fatal progress and that it was with a feeling of real terror that she had looked forward to the last few chapters of the story. When they appeared it seemed to her that she was compelled to reproduce them in life and she did so. It was a most clear example of this imitative instinct of which I was speaking and an extremely tragic one. However, I do not wish to dwell any further upon individual instances. Personal experience is a most vicious and limited circle. All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life and I feel sure that if you think seriously about it you will find that it is true. Life holds the mirror up to art and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction. Scientifically speaking the basis of life, the energy of life as Aristotle would call it is simply the desire for expression and art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained. Life seizes on them and uses them even if they be to her own hurt. Young men have committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died by their own hand because by his own hand Werther died. Think of what we owe to the imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Caesar. Cyril, the theory is certainly a very curious one. But to make it complete you must show that nature, no less than life, is an imitation of art. Are you prepared to prove that? Vivian, my dear fellow, I am prepared to prove anything. End of The Decay of Lying, An Observation Part 2 Recording by Martin Giesen in Hazelmere Surrey The Decay of Lying, An Observation Part 3 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Martin Giesen James Joyce in Context, Volume 1 Telemachus The Decay of Lying, An Observation Part 3 By Oscar Wilde Cyril, nature follows the landscape painter then and takes her effects from him. Vivian, certainly! Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river and turn to faint forms of fading grace, curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of art. You smile, consider the matter from a scientific or a metaphysical point of view, and you will find that I am right. For what is nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see and how we see it depends on the arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then and then only does it come into existence. At present people see fogs. Not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London, I dare say there were, but no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till art had invented them. Now it must be admitted fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis. Where the cultured catch an effect, the uncultured catch cold. And so let us be humane, and invite art to turn her wonderful eyes elsewhere. She has done so already indeed. That white quivering sunlight that one sees now in France, with its strange blotches of mauve, and its restless violet shadows, is her latest fancy, and on the whole nature reproduces it quite admirably. Where she used to give us corals and dobinies, she now gives us exquisite moneys and entrancing pissarros. Indeed there are moments, rare it is true, but still to be observed from time to time when nature becomes absolutely modern. Of course she is not always to be relied upon. The fact is she is in this unfortunate position. Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and having done so passes on to other things. Nature upon the other hand, forgetting that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely worried of it. Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art, to admire the miser distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on. Yesterday evening Mrs. Arendl insisted on my going to the window and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter's worst faults exaggerated and overemphasized. Of course I am quite ready to admit that life very often commits the same error. She produces her false renais and her charme vautres, just as Nature gives us on one day a doubtful caup and on another a more than questionable rousseau. Still Nature irritates one more when she does things of that kind. It seems so stupid, so obvious, so unnecessary. A false vautre might be delightful. A doubtful caup is unbearable. However, I don't want to be too hard on Nature. I wish the channel, especially at Hastings, did not look quite so often like a Henry Moore, grey pearl with yellow lights. But then, when art is more varied, Nature will no doubt be more varied also. That she imitates art, I don't think even her worst enemy would deny now. It is the one thing that keeps her in touch with civilized man. But have I proved my theory to your satisfaction? Cyril, you have proved it to my dissatisfaction, which is better. But even admitting this strange imitative instinct in life and Nature, surely you would acknowledge that art expresses the temper of its age, the spirit of its time, the moral and social conditions that surround it, and under whose influence it is produced. Vivian, certainly not. Art never expresses anything but itself. This is the principle of my new aesthetics, and it is this more than that vital connection between form and substance on which Mr. Pater dwells that makes music the type of all the arts. Of course, nations and individuals with that healthy natural vanity which is the secret of existence are always under the impression that it is of them that the muses are talking, always trying to find in the calm dignity of imaginative art some mirror of their own turbid passions, always forgetting that the singer of life is not Apollo, but Marcias. Remote from reality, and with her eyes turned away from the shadows of the cave, art reveals her own perfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the opening of the marvellous many-petalled rose fancies that it is its own history that is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding expression in a new form, but it is not so. The highest art rejects the burden of the human spirit and gains more from a new medium or a fresh material than she does from any enthusiasm for art or from any lofty passion or from any great awakening of the human consciousness. She develops purely on her own lines. She is not symbolic of any age, it is the ages that are her symbols. Even those who hold that art is representative of time and place and people cannot help admitting that the more imitative an art is, the less it represents to us the spirit of its age. The evil faces of the Roman emperors look out at us from the foul porphyry and spotted jasper in which the realistic artists of the day delighted to work, and we fancy that in those cruel lips and heavy sensual jaws we can find the secret of the ruin of the empire, but it was not so. The vices of Tiberius could not destroy that supreme civilisation any more than the virtues of the Antonines could save it. It fell for other, for less interesting reasons. The sibles and prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to interpret for some that new birth of the emancipated spirit that we call the Renaissance. But what do the drunken boars and bawling peasants of Dutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland? The more abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its architecture or its music. Cyril, I quite agree with you there. The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract, ideal art, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal. Upon the other hand, for the visible aspect of an age, for its look as the phrase goes, we must of course go to the arts of imitation. Vivian, I don't think so. After all, what the imitative arts really give us are merely the various styles of particular artists or of certain schools of artists. Surely you don't imagine that the people of the Middle Ages bore any resemblance at all to the figures on medieval stained glass or in medieval stone and wood carving or on medieval metalwork or tapestries or illuminated manuscripts. They were probably very ordinary looking people, with nothing grotesque or remarkable or fantastic in their appearance. The Middle Ages, as we know them in art, are simply a definite form of style, and there is no reason at all why an artist with this style should not be produced in the 19th century. No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate, self-conscious creation of certain individual artists. If you set a picture by Hokusai or Hokkei or any of the great native painters beside a real Japanese gentleman or lady, you will see that there is not the slightest resemblance between them. The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English people. That is to say they are extremely commonplace and have nothing curious or extraordinary about them. In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country. There are no such people. One of our most charming painters went recently to the land of the Chrysanthemum in the foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans. He was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his delightful exhibition at Messer's Doudswells Gallery showed only too well. He did not know that the Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art. And so if you desire to see a Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go to Tokyo. On the contrary, you will stay at home and steep yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists, and then, when you have absorbed the spirit of their style and caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go some afternoon and sit in the park or stroll down Piccadilly. And if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese effect there, you will not see it anywhere. Or to return again to the past, take as another instance the ancient Greeks. Do you think that Greek art ever tells us what the Greek people were like? Do you believe that the Athenian women were like the stately dignified figures of the Parthenon Fries, or like those marvellous goddesses who sat in the triangular pediments of the same building? If you judge from the art, they certainly were so. But read an authority, like Aristophanes, for instance. You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore high-heeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their faces, and were exactly like any silly, fashionable or fallen creature of our own day. The fact is that we look back on the ages entirely through the medium of art, and art, very fortunately, has never once told us the truth. Cereal. But modern portraits by English painters, what of them? Surely they are like the people they pretend to represent. Vivian, quite so. They are so like them that a hundred years from now no one will believe in them. The only portraits in which one believes are portraits where there is very little of the sitter, and a very great deal of the artist. Holbein's drawings of the men and women of his time impress us with a sense of their absolute reality. But this is simply because Holbein compelled life to accept his conditions, to restrain itself within his limitations, to reproduce his type, and to appear as he wished it to appear. It is style that makes us believe in a thing, nothing but style. Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see, they paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything. Cereal. Well, after that I think I should like to hear the end of your article. Vivian, with pleasure. Whether it will do any good I really cannot say. Ours is certainly the dullest and most prosaic century possible. Why, even sleep has played us false, and has closed up the gates of ivory, and opened the gates of horn. The dreams of the great middle classes of this country, as recorded in Mr. Myers's two bulky volumes on the subject, and in the transactions of the psychical society, are the most depressing things I have ever read. There is not even a fine nightmare among them. They are commonplace, sordid and tedious. As for the church, I cannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country, than the presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe in the supernatural, to perform daily miracles, and to keep alive that mythopeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination. But in the English church a man succeeds not through his capacity for belief, but through his capacity for disbelief. Ours is the only church where the skeptic stands at the altar, and where St. Thomas is regarded as the ideal apostle. Many a worthy clergyman who passes his life in admirable works of kindly charity, lives and dies unnoticed and unknown. But it is sufficient for some shallow, uneducated passman out of either university to get up in his pulpit and express his doubts about Noah's Ark, or Balam's Ass, or Jonah and the Whale, for half of London to flock to hear him, and to sit open-mouthed in rapt admiration at his superb intellect. The growth of common sense in the English church is a thing very much to be regretted. It is really a degrading concession to a low form of realism. It is silly, too. It springs from an entire ignorance of psychology. Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable. However, I must read the end of my article. What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive this old art of lying. Much, of course, may be done in the way of educating the public by amateurs in the domestic circle at literary lunches and at afternoon teas. But this is merely the lightened, graceful side of lying, such as was probably heard at Cretan dinner parties. There are many other forms. Lying for the sake of gaining some immediate personal advantage, for instance. Lying with a moral purpose, as it is usually called, though of late it has been rather looked down upon, was extremely popular with the antique world. Athena laughs when Odysseus tells us his words of sly devising, as Mr. William Morris phrases it, and the glory of mendacity illumines the pale brow of the stainless hero of Euripidian tragedy, and sets among the noble women of the past the young bride of one of Horace's most exquisite odes. Later on, what at first had been merely a natural instinct, was elevated into a self-conscious science. Elaborate rules were laid down for the guidance of mankind, and an important school of literature grew up round the subject. Indeed, when one remembers the excellent philosophical treatise of Sanchez on the whole question, one cannot help regretting that no one has ever thought of publishing a cheap and condensed edition of the works of that great casuist. A short primer, when to lie and how, if brought out in an attractive and not too expensive a form, would no doubt command a large sale, and would prove a real practical service to many earnest and deep-thinking people. Lying for the sake of the improvement of the young, which is the basis of home education, still lingers amongst us, and its advantages are so admirably set forth in the early books of Plato's Republic that it is unnecessary to dwell upon them here. It is a mode of lying for which all good mothers have peculiar capabilities, but it is capable of still further development, and has been sadly overlooked by the school-board. Lying for the sake of a monthly salary is, of course, well known in Fleet Street, and the profession of a political leader-writer is not without its advantages, but it is said to be a somewhat dull occupation, and it certainly does not lead to much beyond a kind of ostentatious obscurity. The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is, as we have already pointed out, lying in art. Just as those who do not love Plato more than truth cannot pass beyond the threshold of the academe, so those who do not love beauty more than truth never know the inmost shrine of art. The solid, stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the sphinx in Flaubert's marvellous tale and fantasy La Chimaire, dances round it and calls to it with her false, flute-toned voice. It may not hear her now, but surely some day, when we are all bored to death with the commonplace character of modern fiction, it will hearken to her and try to borrow her wings. And when that day dawns or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, truth will be found mourning over her fetters, and romance with her temper of wonder will return to the land. The very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise behemoth and leviathan, and sail round the high-pooped galleys as they do on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were actually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste-places, and the phoenix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the toad's head. Champing his gilded oats, the hippogriff will stand in our stalls, and over our heads will float the bluebird, singing of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and that never happen, and of things that are not and that should be. But before this comes to pass, we must cultivate the lost art of lying. Cyril, then we must entirely cultivate it at once, but in order to avoid making any error, I wanted to tell me briefly the doctrines of the new aesthetics. Vivian, briefly then they are these. Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress. Sometimes it returns upon its footsteps and revives some antique form, as happened in the archaistic movement of late Greek art, and in the pre-Raphaelite movement of our own day. At other times it entirely anticipates its age, and produces in one century work that it takes another century to understand, to appreciate and to enjoy. In no case does it reproduce its age. To pass from the art of a time to the time itself is the great mistake that all historians commit. The second doctrine is this. All bad art comes from returning to life and nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and nature may sometimes be used as part of art's rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment art surrenders its imaginative medium, it surrenders everything. As a method realism is a complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject matter. To us who live in the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject for art, except our own. The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us. It is to have the pleasure of quoting myself exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us, that her sorrows are so suitable a motive for a tragedy. Besides it is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned. Monsieur Zola sits down to give us a picture of the second empire. Who cares for the second empire now? It is out of date. Life goes faster than realism, but romanticism is always in front of life. The third doctrine is that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. This results not merely from life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of life is to find expression, and that art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may release that energy. It is a theory that has never been put forward before, but it is extremely fruitful and throws an entirely new light upon the history of art. It follows as a corollary from this that external nature also imitates art. The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have already seen through poetry or in paintings. This is the secret of nature's charm as well as the explanation of nature's weakness. The final revelation is that lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art. But of this I think I have spoken at sufficient length. And now let us go out on the terrace where droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost, while the evening star washes the dusk with silver. At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets. Come, we have talked long enough. End of The Decay of Lying An Observation Part 3 End of James Joyce in Context, Volume 1 Telemachus Telemachus This is LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. James Joyce in Context, Volume 1. Telemachus Stately, plump, buck mulligan, came from the stair-head bearing a bowl of lather, on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned. Intruibo ad altare de i. Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely. Come up, kinch! Come up, you fearful Jesuit! Solemly he came forward and mounted the round gun-rest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land, and the awakening mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Daedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Daedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking, girdling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light, untonsured hair, grained and hewed like pale oak. Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the bowl smartly. Back to barracks, he said sternly. He added, in a preacher's tone, For this, oh dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine, body and soul and blood and wounds. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all. He peered sideways up and gave a long, slow whistle of call. Then paused a while in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there with gold points. Crisostomos. Two strong, shrill whistles answered through the calm. Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the current, will you? He slipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, Gathering about his legs, the loose folds of his gown, The plump, shadowed face and sullen oval jowl recalled apprelet, Patron of the arts in the Middle Ages. A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips. The mockery of it, he said gaily, Your absurd name, an ancient Greek. He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet, laughing to himself. Even Daedalus stepped up, followed him wearily, halfway, And sat down on the edge of the gunrest, Watching him still as he propped his mirror on the parapet, Dipped his brush in the bowl and lathered cheeks and neck. Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on, My name is absurd, too. Molokai Mulligan. Two dectils. But it has a Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the Buck himself. We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the ant to fork out twenty quid? He laid the brush aside and laughing with delight cried. Will he come? The Jejun Jesuit. Ceasing he began to shave with care. Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly. Yes, my love. How long is Haines going to stay in this tower? Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder. God, isn't he dreadful? He said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks you are not a gentleman. God, these bloody English bursting with money and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Daedalus, you have the real Oxford Manor. He can't make you out. Oh, my name for you is the best. Kinch, the knife blade. He shaved warily over his chin. He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is his gun case? Oh, woeful lunatic, Mulligan said. Were you in a funk? I was, Stephen said, with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark with a man I don't know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You saved men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however. If he stays on here, I am off. Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razor blade. He hopped down from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily. Scutter, he said thickly. He came over to the gun rest and thrusting a hand into Stephen's upper pocket said. Lend us a loan of your nose rag to wipe my razor. Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razor blade neatly. Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said, The bard's nose rag, a new art color for our Irish poets. Snot green. You can almost taste it, can't you? He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin Bay. His fair oak pale hair stirring slightly. God, he said quietly. Is it the sea what algae calls it? A great sweet mother? The snot green sea. The scotum tritoning sea. Epi oin opa ponton. Aha, Daedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalata, thalata. She is our great sweet mother. Come and look. Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked down on the water and on the mail boat clearing the harbour mouth of Kingstown. Our mighty mother, Buck Mulligan said. He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the sea to Stephen's face. The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't let me have anything to do with you. Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily. You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked you. Buck Mulligan said. I'm hyperborean as much as you. But to think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you. He broke off and lathered again lightly his father-cheek. A tolerant smile curled his lips. But a lovely mummer, he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all. He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously. Stephen, an elbow raised on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream, she had come to him after her death. Her wasted body and its loose, brown grave-clothes giving off an odor of wax and rosewood. Her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odor of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffage he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the well-fed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her death-bed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud, groaning, vomiting. Buck Mulligan wiped again his razor-blade. Ah, poor dog's body, he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few nose-rags. How are the second-hand breeches? They fit well enough, Stephen answered. Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his upper lip. The mockery of it, he said contentedly. Second leg they should be. God knows what poxy-bowzy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hair-stripe, gray. You'll look spiffing in them. I'm not joking, Kinch. You'll look damn well when you're dressed. Thanks, Stephen said. I can't wear them if they are gray. He can't wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror. Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother, but he can't wear gray trousers. He folded his razor neatly, and with stroking pulps of fingers felt the smooth skin. Stephen turned his gaze from the sea to the plump face with its smoke-blue, mobile eyes. That fellow I was with in the ship last night, said Buck Mulligan, says you have GPI. He was up in Dottyville with Connolly Norman, general paralysis of the insane. He swept the mirror in a half-circle in the air and flashed the tidings abroad in sunlight, now radiant on the sea. His curling, shaven lips laughed in the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong, well-knit trunk. Look at yourself, he said. You dreadful bard. Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by crooked crack, hair on end. As he and others see me, who chose this face for me, this dog's body to rid of vermin. It asked me, too. I pinched it out of the skivvy's room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her all right. Thy aunt always keeps plain-looking servants from Alakai. Lead him not into temptation, and her name is Ursula. Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes. The rage of Caliban had not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness, it is a symbol of Irish art, the cracked-looking glass of a servant. Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arms in Stephen's and walked with him round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had thrust them. It's not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? He said kindly, God knows you have more spirit than any of them. Perryed again, one of my art is I fear that of his, the cold steel pen. Cracked-looking glass of a servant. I must tell that to the oxy-chap downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He's stinking with money and thinks you are not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling Jalip to Zulu's or some bloody swindle or other. God, Kinch, if you and I could only work together, we might do something for the island. Hellonize it. And to think of you having to beg from these swine. I'm the only one who knows what you are. Why don't you trust me more? What have you up your nose against me? Is it Haines? If he makes any noise here, I'll bring down Seymour and we'll give him a ragging worse than they gave Clive Kempthorpe. Young shouts of moneyed voices in Clive Kempthorpe's rooms. Pale faces. They hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another. I'll give the news to her gently. Aubrey, I shall die. With slit ribbons of his shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the table with trousers down at knees chased by aids of Magdalene with the tailor's shears. A scared calf's face gilded with marmalade. I don't want to be debagged. Don't you play the giddy ox with me? Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold's face pushes his mower on the somber lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grass-helms. To ourselves, new paganism, umphalos. Let him stay, Stephen said. There's nothing wrong with him except at night. Then what is it, bunk Mulligan asked impatiently, cough it up, I'm quite frank with you. What have you against me now? Looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head, that lay on the water like a snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quietly. Do you wish me to tell you, he asked? Yes, what is it? Buck Mulligan answered. I don't remember anything. He looked at Stephen's face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow, fanning softly his fair, uncombed hair and stirring silver points of anxiety in his eyes. Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said, Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother's death? Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said, What? Where? I can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God? You were making tea, Stephen said, and went across the landing to get more hot water. Your mother and some visitor came out of the drawing room. She asked who was in your room. Yes, Buck Mulligan said. What did I say? I forget. You said, Stephen answered, Oh, it is only Daedalus whose mother is beastly dead. A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck Mulligan's cheek. Did I say that? He asked. Well, what harm is that? He shook his constraint from him nervously. And what is death? He asked. Daedalus or my own? You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the matter in Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissecting room. It is a beastly thing and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter. You wouldn't kneel down to pray for your mother on her death bed when she asked you. Why? Because you had the cursed Jesuit strain in you. Only it's injected the wrong way. To me, it's all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not functioning. She calls the doctor, Sir Peter Teasel, and picks buttercups off the quilt. Humor her till it's over. You crossed her last wish and death and yet you sulk with me because I don't whinge like some hired mute from Laulats. Absurd! I suppose I did say it. I didn't mean to offend the memory of your mother. I am not thinking of the offence to my mother. Of what then? Buck Mulligan asked. Of the offence to me, Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel. Oh, an impossible person, he exclaimed. He walked off quickly round the parapet. Stephen stood at his post, gazing over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea and headland now grow dim. Pulses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt the fever of his cheeks. A voice within the tower called loudly. Are you up there, Mulligan? I'm coming, Buck Mulligan answered. He turned towards Stephen and said, Look at the sea. What does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola, kinch, and come on down. The Sasanach wants his morning rashes. His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level with the roof. Don't mope over it all day, he said. I'm inconsequent. Give up the moody brooding. His head vanished, but the drone of his descending voice and all more turn aside and brood upon love's bitter mystery. For Fergus rules the brazen cars. Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. In shore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by light shot, hurrying feet, white breast of the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two, merging their twining cords. White wave wedded words shimmering on the dim tide. The cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly shadowing the bay in deeper green. It lay beneath him a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus's song. I sang it alone in the house holding down the long dark cords. Her door was open. She wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity she went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For these words, Stephen, love's bitter mystery. Where now? Her secrets, old feather fans, tassled dance-cards, powdered with musk, a gall of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in the pantomime of Turco the Terrible with others when he sang, I am the boy that can enjoy invisibility. Phantasmal mirth folded away, musk perfumed, and no more turn aside and brood. Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament. A cord apple filled with brown sugar roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from her children's shirts. In a dream, silently, she had come to him. Her wasted body within its loose grave-clothes, getting off an odor of wax and rosewood. Her breath bent over him with mute, secret words. A faint odor of wetted ashes. Her glazing eyes staring out of death to shake and bend my soul. On me alone, a candle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured face. Her hoarse, loud breath, rattling in horror, while all preyed on her knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. Liliata rutiliantium te confessorum torma kercom dent. Jubilantium te virginum corus echipiat. Gul, chur of corpses. No, mother. Let me be and let me live. Kinch, ahoy! Buck Mulligan's voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul's cry, heard warm, running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words. Daedalus, come down like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haynes is apologizing for waking us last night. It's all right. I'm coming, Stephen said, turning. Due for Jesus' sake, Buck Mulligan said, for my sake and for all our sakes. His head disappeared and reappeared. I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it's very clever. Touch him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean. I get paid this morning, Stephen said. The school-kip, Buck Mulligan said, how much? Four quid? Lend us one. If you want it, Stephen said. He says, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We'll have a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids for omnipotent sovereigns. He flung up his hands and trapped down the stone stairs, singing out of tune with a cockney accent. Oh, won't we have a merry time drinking whiskey, beer, and wine on coronation, coronation day? Oh, won't we have a merry time on coronation day? Warm sunshine, marrying over the sea. The nickel-shaving bowl shone, forgotten on the parapet. Why should I bring it down, or leave it there all day? Forgotten friendship? He went over to it, held it in his hands a while feeling its coolness, smelling the clammy slather of the lather in which the brush was stuck. So I carried the boat of incense then at Klangau's. I am another now, and yet the same, a servant too, in the gloomy domed living room of the tower, Buck Mulligan's gowned form moved briskly to and fro about the hearth, hiding and revealing its yellow glow. Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor from the high barbecons, and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of cold smoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning. We'll be choked, Buck Mulligan says. Haynes, open that door will you? Buck Mulligan laid the shaving bowl on the locker. A tall figure rose from the hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open the inner doors. Have you the key? A voice asked. Daedalus has it, Buck Mulligan said. Janie Mack, I'm choked! He howled without looking up from the fire. Kinch! It's in the lock, Stephen said, coming forward. The key scraped round harshly twice, Haynes stood at the doorway looking out. Stephen hauled his up-ended valise to the table and sat down to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry onto the dish beside him. Then he carried the dish and large teapot over to the table and set them down heavily inside with relief. I'm melting, he said. As the camel remarked when, but hush! Not a word more on that subject. Kinch, wake up! Bread, butter, honey! Haynes, come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts. Where's the sugar? O Jay, there's no milk. Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the butter-cooler from the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet. What sort of kip is this? He said. I told her to come after eight. We can drink in black, Stephen said thirstily. There's a lemon in the locker. There's the milk. Haynes came in from the doorway and said quietly, that woman is coming up with the milk. Oh, blessings of God on you! Buck Mulligan cried, jumping up from his chair. Sit down, pour out the tea there. The sugar is in the bag. Here, I can't go fumbling at the damned eggs. He hacked through the fry on the dish and slapped it out on three plates, saying, in no mene patres, it filii, it spiritus sancti. Buck Mulligan went on to pour out the tea. I'm giving you two lumps each, he said. But I say, Mulligan, you do make strong tea, don't you? Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old woman's weadling voice. When I makes tea, I makes tea, as Old Mother Grogan said. And when I makes water, I makes water. By Jove it is tea, Haynes said. Buck Mulligan went on hewling and weadling. So do I, Mrs. Castle, says she. Be gob, ma'am, says Mrs. Cahill. God send you, don't make them in one pot. He lunged towards his messmates and turned a thick slice of bread and paled on his knife. That's folk, he said, very earnestly for your book, Haynes. Five lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fish gods of Dundrum, printed by the weird sisters in the ear of the big wind. He turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his brows. Can you recall, brother, is Mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken of in the Mamma Ogion or is it in the Upanishads? I doubt it, said Stephen gravely. Do you now, Buck Mulligan said in the same tone, your reasons, pray? I fancy, Stephen said, as he ate, it did not exist in or out of the Mamma Ogion. Mother Grogan was, one imagines, a kinswoman of Mary Ann. Buck Mulligan's face smiled with delight. Charming, he said, in a finical sweet voice showing his white teeth and blinking his eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Quite charming. Then suddenly overclouding all his features he growled in a horsed and rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf. For old Mary Ann, she doesn't care a damn, but heising up her petticoats. He timed his mouth with fry and munched and droned. The doorway was darkened by an entering form. The milk, sir. Come in, ma'am, Buck Mulligan said. Kinch, get the jug. An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen's elbow. That's a lovely morning, sir, she said. Glory be to God. To whom, Buck Mulligan said, glancing at her. Ha! To be sure. Stephen reached back and took the milk jug from the locker. Mulligan said to Hayens casually, speak frequently of the collector of purposes. How much, sir? asked the old woman. A quart, Stephen said. He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug. Rich, white milk. Not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a mourning world, maybe a messenger. Watching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They loud about her whom they knew, do silky cattle. Silk of the kind and poor old woman, names given her in old times, a wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving, her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cut queen, a messenger from the secret morning, who died, whether he could not tell, but scorned to beg her favor. It is indeed, ma'am, Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their cups. Tasted, sir, she said. He drank at her bidding. If we could live on good food like that, he said to her, somewhat loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts, living in a bog swamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with dust, horse dung and consumptive spits. The old woman asked, I am, ma'am, Buck Mulligan answered. Look at that now, she said. Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to a voice that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicine man. Me, she slights, to the voice that will strive in oil for the grave all that is of her, but her woman's unclean loins of man's flesh made not in God's likeness. The serpents pray and to the loud voice that now bids her be silent with wondering, unsteady eyes. Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her. Is it French who are talking, sir? The old woman said to Haynes. Haynes spoke to her again in a longer speech, confidently. Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you? I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from the West, sir? He's English, Buck Mulligan says, and he thinks we ought to speak Irish in Ireland. Well, sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I'm ashamed I don't speak the language myself. I'm told it's a grand language by them that knows. Grand is no name for it, said Buck Mulligan. Wonderful entirely. Fill us out some more tea, kinch. Would you like a cup, ma'am? And about to go. Haynes said to her, have you your bill? We'd better pay her, Mulligan, hadn't we? Stephen filled out the three cups. Bill, sir, she said, halting. Well, it's seven mornings a pint at two pence, is seven twos, is a shilling in two pence over, and these three mornings a quart at four pence is three quarts is a shilling. That's a shilling in one and two is two and two, sir. And having filled his mouth with a crust, thickly buttered on both sides, stretched forth his legs and began to search his trouser pockets. Pay up and look pleasant, Haynes said to him, smiling. Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea, coloring faintly the rich thick milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted around in his fingers and cried, a miracle! He passed it along the table towards the old woman saying, ask nothing more of me, sweet. Stephen laid the coin on her uneager hand. Well, oh, two pence, he said. Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin, time enough. Good morning, sir. She curtsied and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan's tender chant. Heart of my heart, were it more? More would be laid at your feet. He turned to Stephen and said, seriously, Daedalus, I'm stony. Hurry out to your school-kip and bring us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junk it. Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty. That reminds me, Haynes said, rising, that I have to visit your national library today. Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said. He turned to Stephen and asked blandly, is this the day for your monthly wash-kinch? Then he says to Haynes, the uncleaned bard makes a point of washing once a month. All Ireland is washed by the golf stream, Stephen said, as he let honey trickle over a slice of the loaf. Haynes, from the corner where he was nodding easily a scarf about the loose collar of his tennis shirt, spoke, I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me. Speaking to me, they wash and tub and scrub, a gynbite of inward conscience. Yet here's a spot. That one about the cracked-looking glass of a servant being the symbol of Irish art is deused good. Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen's foot under the table and said, with worth of tone, wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haynes. Well, I mean it, Haynes said, still speaking to Stephen. I was just thinking of it when that poor old creature came in. Would I make any money by it? Stephen asked. Haynes laughed, and as he took his soft grey hat from the whole foast of the hammock said, I don't know, I'm sure. He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across Stephen and said with coarse vigor, you put your hoof in it now, what did you say that for? Well, Stephen said, the problem is to get money, from whom? From the milk woman or from him. It's a toss-up, I think. I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along with your lousy leer and your gloomy Jesuit jibes. I see little hope, Stephen said, from her or from him. Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen's arm. He said. In a suddenly changed tone, he added, to tell you the God's truth, I think you're right, damn all else they're good for. Why don't you play them as I do, to hell with them all. Let us get out of the kip. He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown, saying, resignedly, Mulligan is stripped of his garments. He emptied his pockets on the table. There's your snot-rag, he said. And putting on his stiff collar on his thigh, he spoke to them, chiding them and to his dangling watch chain. His hands plunged and rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. God will simply have to dress the character. I want puse gloves and green boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. Mercurial Malachi, a limp black missile, flew out of his talking hands. There's your Latin quarter hat, he said. Stephen picked it up and put it on. Hands called to them from the doorway. Are you coming, you fellows? I'm ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. Come out, kinch. You've eaten all we have left, I suppose. Resigned, he passed out with grave words and gait, saying, well nigh was sorrow. And going forth, he met butterly. Stephen, taking his ash plant from its leaning place, followed them out, to the slow iron door and locked it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket. At the foot of the ladder, Buck Mulligan said, did you bring the key? I have it, Stephen said, preceding them. He walked on. Behind them he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy bath towel. The leader shoots of ferns or grasses. Down, sir! How dare you, sir? Hands asked, do you pay rent for this tower? To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added, over his shoulder. They halted while Haynes surveyed the tower and said at last, rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello, you call it? Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on the sea, but ours is the Amphilos. What is your idea of Hamlet? Haynes asked, Stephen. Oh no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I am not equal to Thomas Aquinas, and the 55 reasons he has made out to prop it up. Wait till I've had a few pints in me first. He turned to Stephen saying, as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his primrose waistcoat. You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you? It has waited so long, Stephen said listlessly. It can wait longer. You peak my curiosity, Haynes said amably. Buck Mulligan said, we've grown out of wild and paradoxes. It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father. What, Haynes said, beginning to point at Stephen, he himself? Buck Mulligan slung his towel stole-wise round his neck and bending in loose laughter said to Stephen's ears. He said, we're always tired in the morning, Stephen said to Haynes and it is rather long to tell. Buck Mulligan, walking forward, raised his hands. The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Daedalus, he said. I mean to say, Haynes explained to Stephen as they followed, this tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinor. They were an instant toward Stephen but did not speak. In the bright, silent instant Stephen saw his own image in cheap, dusty morning between their gay attires. It's a wonderful tale, Haynes said, bringing them to Halt again. Eyes pale as the sea, the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent, the sea's ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty except for the smoke plume stacking by the mugglins. I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused. The father and the son idea, the son striving to be atoned with the father. Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe, broadly smiling face. He looked at them, his well-shaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. His head, too in fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and began to chant in a quiet, happy, foolish voice. I am the queerest young fellow that you have heard, my mother's a Jew, my father's a bird, with Joseph the joiner I cannot agree, so here's to disciples and cavalry. He held up a forefinger of warning, and if anyone thinks that I'm not divine, he'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine, that I make when the wine becomes water again. He tugged swiftly at Stephen's ash-plant in farewell, and running forward to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or wings of one about to rise in the air and chanted, Good-bye now, good-bye! Write down all I said, and tell Tom, Dick, and Harry I rose from the dead. What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly, well, good-bye! He capered before them, down towards the forty-foot hole, fluttering his wing-like hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh wind that bore back to them his brief, bird-sweet cries. Haynes, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and said, We oughtn't laugh, I suppose. He's rather blasphemous. I'm not a believer myself, that is to say. Did he call it? Joseph the joiner? The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered. Oh, Haynes said, you've heard it before? Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said dryly. You're not a believer, are you? Haynes asked. I mean a believer in the narrow sense of the word, creation from nothing and miracles and a personal God. There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me, a smooth silver case in which twinkled a green stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it. Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette. Haynes helped himself and snapped the case too. He put it back in his side pocket and took from his waist-coast pocket a nickel tinder-box, sprang it open too and having lit his cigarette held the flaming spunk toward Stephen in the shell of his hands. You don't believe or you don't, isn't it? Personally, I couldn't stomach that idea of a personal God. You don't stand for that, I suppose. You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought. He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ash-plant by his side. Its feral followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels. My familiar after me, calling Stephen. He was hovering line along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt-spread. Give him the key too. All he will ask for it. That was in his eyes. After all, Haynes began, Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was not all unkind. It was a master, it seems to me. I am the servant of two masters, Stephen said, in English and in Italian. Italian, a crazy quaint, old and jealous, kneeled down before me. And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs. Italian, Haynes said again, what do you mean? The imperial British state, Stephen answered, Haynes detached from his underlip some fibers of tobacco before he spoke. I can quite understand that, he said calmly, an Irish man must think like that, I dare say. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly, it seems history is to blame. The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory, the triumph of their blazing bells. It unum sanctum cattolicum, it apostolicum ecclesium. The slow growth and change of right and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars, symbol of the apostles in the mass for Pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation, in behind their chant, the vigilant angel of the church, militant, disarmed and menaced her hairisarks. A horde of heresies fleeing with miters awry, foteas and the brood of mockers as Mulligan was won, and arias warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the son with the father, and Valentine, spurning Christ's Terrian body, and the subtle African heresiarc, Sibelius, who held that the father was himself his own son. Words Mulligan had spoken a moment since in mockery to the stranger, idle mockery. The void awaits surely all of them, that weave the wind, and a worsting, from these embattled angels of the church, Michael's host, who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their shields. Here, here, prolonged applause, Zut, Norm de Dieu. Of course, I'm a Britisher, Haynes's voice said. I feel as one. I don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German Jews, either. It stood at the verge of the cliff, watching businessmen, boatmen. She's making for Bullock Harbor. The boatmen nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain. There's five fathoms out there, he said. It'll be swept up that way when the tide comes in about one. It's nine days today. The man that was drowned, assail veering about the blank bay, waiting for a swollen bundle to bob up. Roll over to the sun a puffy face, salt-white. Here I am. They followed the winding path down to the creek. Buck Mulligan stood on a stone in shirt sleeves, his uncliped tie rippling over his shoulder. A young man clinging to a spur of the rock near him, moved slowly, frog-wise, his green legs in the deep jelly of the water. Is the brother with you, Malachi? Down in Westmeath, with the bannons. Buck Mulligan sat down there. Photo girl, he calls her. Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure. Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up near the spur of the rock, a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones, water glistening on his paint and on its garland of gray hair, water rilling over his chest and punch and spilling jets out of his black sagging sleeve. Buck Mulligan and Stephen crossed himself piously with his thumbnail at brow and lips and breastbone. Seymour's back in town, the old man said, grasping again the spur of his rock. Chucked medicine and going in for the army. Oh, go to God, Buck Mulligan said. Going over next week to stew. You know that red Carlisle girl, Lily? Is she up the pole? Better ask Seymour that. Seymour's a bleeding officer, Buck Mulligan said. He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying, tritely, red-headed woman, buck-like goats. He broke off an alarm, feeling his side under his flapping shirt. My twelfth rib is gone. He cried, I am the ubermensch, toothless kinch and I, the Superman. Are you going to play? Are you going in here, Malachi? Yes, make room in the bed. The young man shoved himself backwards through the water and reached the middle of the creek in two long, clean strokes. Hain sat down on a stone, smoking. Are you not coming in? Buck Mulligan said. Later on, Hain said, not on my breakfast. Stephen turned away. I'm going, Mulligan, he said. Give us that key, kinch, my chemise flat. Stephen handed him the key. Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped clothes. And two pence, he said, for a pint, throw it there. Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heaped, dressing, undressing. Buck Mulligan erected with joined hands before him, said solemnly, he who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. His plump body plunged. We'll see you again, Hain said, turning as Stephen walked up the path and smiling at Wild Irish. Horn of a ball, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon. The ship, Buck Mulligan cried, half-twelve. Good, Stephen said. He walked along the upward curving path. Liliata, Utiliantum, Torma, Kirkumdate, Ubilantium, Dei, Reginum. The priest, Gray Nimbus, in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will not sleep here tonight. Home, also I cannot go. A voice, sweet-tuned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning the curve, he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a seals far off on the water, round, usurper. End of Telemachus.