gives his wife breakfast in bed to the time of retiring to that same bed late at night, whither his wife has already preceded him. You spend no ordinary day in his company; it is a day of the most embarrassing intimacy. You live with him minute by minute; go with him everywhere, physically and mentally; you are made privy to his thoughts and emotions; you are introduced to his friends and enemies; you learn what he thinks of each; every action and reaction of his psychology is laid bare with Freudian nastiness until you know his whole life through and through; know him, in fact, better than you know any other being in art or life—and detest him heartily. The creation of Bloom is an achievement of genius. Dull and crapulous persons exist in life as well as in fiction. Bloom is disastrously real; as real as Samuel Pepys in his own immaculate portrait of himself in the great Diary—I wish I could say he was as pleasant to meet. One would have been glad to have met the diarist, but not Bloom. You do not feel grateful to Mr. Joyce for the introduction. It is not clear why he troubled to introduce him. At times I could not help feeling that the object was not so objectless as I had believed. Is Ulysses a stone flung at humanity—is Bloom the Twentieth Century Yahoo ? an It took five years of hard work to record this day in Mr. Bloom's life. The record fills a quarto volume of some 730 pages with an average of 600 words to the page say 500,000 words; ungainly, loose-limbed book which falls to pieces as you read it— as, indeed, you do. The very format of the book is an affront. Bloom could have been drawn effectively in a quarter the words. There are the deadliest of Dead Seas in this ocean of prose. You get becalmed in them-bored, drowsed, bewildered. And there are gulfs and bays which are muddy and noisome with the sewage of civilisation. On the other hand there are wide stretches of magnificent prose even when it is made up of unsavoury ingredients. Mr. James Joyce can write. But the greatest affront of all is the arrangement of the book. Ulysses is a chaos. All the conventions of organised prose which have grown with our race and out of our racial consciousness; which have been reverently handed on by the masters with such improvements as they have been able to make, have been cast aside as so much dross. Quotation marks for conversational passages are omitted; punctuation follows new and unknown rules; sentences begin and forget to end; chapters have no apparent relation to one another and neither numbers nor titles ; and one chapter, the last, runs to 42 pages (25,000 words) with not a single punctuation of any kind, and where the enormous stretches of type are condescendingly broken into occasional paragraphs, no capitals are used. Mr. Joyce evidently believes in making it difficult for his readers-but perhaps he wants to scare them away. I am bound to admit, however, that this chapter, perhaps the best in the book, and one of the most disgusting, is by no means so difficult to read as one might expect. This absence of the ordinary guide-posts of literature injures author as well as reader, for one may fairly assume that the author has something to say to his reader or he would not go to the trouble of writing and printing his work. He knows also that he is saying it in a new way. It seems gratuitous to put unnecessary difficulties in the way of a proper understanding of his message, story or record. For instance, much of the action of Ulysses is sub-conscious. Innumerable passages, and often whole pages together, record inward mental impressions, reactions from some external happening-a word, a sight of thing or person, a smell, a sound,―no hint or guide is given as to where these interpolations begin or end. They run on without warning from the known and familiar to the unknown and strange, on the assumption that the reader is as well-informed on the subject as James Joyce. The result is that the reader is continually losing his way and having to retrace his steps. Ulysses is like a country without roads. But it is a novel, and if it will not amuse the idle novel reader, or even attract the lewd by its unsavoury franknesses, it must claim the attention of those who look upon fiction as something more than confectionery. With all its faults, it is the biggest event in the history of the English novel since Jude. MAXIMS AND PRECEPTS There is nothing so bad which will not admit of something to be said in its defence. Beauty has so many charms, one knows not how to speak against it. He that is little in his own eyes is little too in his desires, and consequently moderate in his pursuit of them. There is no project to which the whole race of mankind is so universally a bubble, as to that of being thought wise. If we must be a solicitous race of self-tormentors, let us drop the common objects which make us soand for God's sake be solicitous only to live well. Writing, when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation. 'Tis no uncommon thing for one half of the world to use the other half of it like brutes, and then endeavour to make them so. The brave only know how to forgive. The height of station or worldly grandeur will as soon add a cubit to a man's stature as to his happiness. Pride may make a man violent, but humility will make him firm. The great business of man is the regulation of his spirit. T THE PORTRAIT OF MR. GAY By FRANCIS BICKLEY HE soft double chin, the full lips, the rather pettish nose, and the observant humorous eyes, which appear in Kneller's obviously veracious sketch in the National Portrait Gallery, go far to forewarn one what to expect and what not to expect in the writings of John Gay. Clearly no high heroic ardour is to be looked for; nor, since the eyes are the only residence of vigour 'twixt brow and chin, any trenchancy of intellect It is, on a balance of qualities, the face of a weak man; one who could be stubborn on occasion but was possessed of no driving energy. And such history as well as physiognomy shows Gay to have been. Apart from the "Beggar's Opera," probably his most consistently popular work has been "Trivia "; and trivial, it is hardly too harsh to say, were both his personal character and the literature he made. He was an amiable man, as amiable, if not as admirable, as Arbuthnot. Swift loved him, and Pope; neither of them easy to please; but in their love was something not altogether flattering. Gay was the general favourite of the whole association of wits," says Johnson; "but they regarded him as a play-fellow rather than a partner, and treated him with more fondness than respect." He had the helplessness which appeals to the self-reliant. The worldlier and more wise liked to manage his affairs for him: he was lazy, and they bade him work; improvident, and they told him how to invest his money. Great ladies petted him, and he wrote their letters for them. Had he been in orders-but his father sent him behind a counter instead of into the Church-he would have made a perfect domestic chaplain. One can see him, like the abbé in the French engraving, nicely pondering a shade of ribbon. 66 He was not then the man to write great poetry; hardly, indeed, to write good verse. For he lacked what Prior, who was not much nearer the stars than himself, had in saving abundance, the gift of style. His fables and pastorals, descriptive poems of town and country, contain little that is memorable for the manner of its saying, though much interesting matter. They will always be more quoted by the social historian than by the literary critic. None the less are they readable, as many things that are not high literature are readable. 66 In his art as in his life he was swayed by the suggestions of others. Pope told him to write the "Shepherd's Week " (as a move in his quarrel with "Namby-pamby" Philips) and Swift gave him the notion for "Trivia," that lively picture of the London streets. It was Swift, too, who presented him with the idea of a Newgate pastoral, which grew into "The Beggar's Opera," made Rich gay and Gay rich, Miss Fenton a duchess, and, at long last, Hammersmith an intellectual centre and Mr. Nigel Playfair the most envied man in London. While the opera was a-writing, Gay showed it often to Pope and Swift, who "now and then gave a correction, or a word or two of advice." But, says Pope, "it was wholly of his own writing. When it was done, neither of us —that is, the great twin brethren of Augustan letters—“ thought it would succeed." They were wrong, as all the world now knows. The thing had a run of sixty-three days: it was the "Chu-ChinChow" of the period. "The ladies carried about with them the favourite songs of it in fans, and houses were furnished with it in screens." Dr. Herring, who was to occupy both the archiepiscopal thrones in turn, said it was immoral. The Dean of St. Patrick's said it wasn't. No wonder if the author was gratified. Had his life been prolonged for two hundred years, he might well have been dumbfounded. And yet, true to himself, in the "Beggar's Opera " Gay was still a dependent; nor only to the hints and criticisms of Pope and Swift. Topicality helped him, sly hits at Walpole, patent mockery of the Italian opera. These things have lost their point, but the piece still stands largely on merits not intrinsic. Its revival was admittedly a bold venture. Few, reading it, could have predicted success, at any rate such success as has befallen. It does not act itself to the imagination, as the plays of Farquhar-to name one |