―Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean …
―He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish for a king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!
―What? asked Besteglinton.
William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people’s William. For terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house.....
―Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he thought of the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his hands and said: All we can say is that life ran very high in those days
. Lovely!
Catamite.
―The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to ugling Eglinton.
Steadfast John replied severe:
―The doctor can tell us what those words mean. You cannot eat your cake and have it.
Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me the palm of beauty?
―And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a cornjobber and moneylender with ten tods of corn hoarded in the famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing. He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could Aubrey’s ostler and callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the queen’s leech Lopez, his jew’s heart being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet alive: Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in Love’s Labour Lost. His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a porter’s theory of equivocation. The Sea Venture comes home from Bermudas and the play Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin. The sugared sonnets follow Sydney’s. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired The Merry Wives of Windsor let some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid meanings in the depths of the buckbasket.
I think you’re getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of theolologicophilolological. Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere.
―Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared, expectantly. Your dean of studies holds he was a holy Roman.
Sufflaminandus sum.
―He was made in Germany, Stephen replied, as the champion French polisher of Italian scandals.
―A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him myriadminded.
Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia inter multos.
―Saint Thomas, Stephen began …
―Ora pro nobis, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.
There he keened a wailing rune.
―Pogue mahone! Acushla machree! It’s destroyed we are from this day! It’s destroyed we are surely!
All smiled their smiles.
―Saint Thomas, Stephen, smiling, said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with avarice, are of all races the most given to intermarriage. Accusations are made in anger. The christian laws which built up the hoards of the jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm was shelter) bound their affections too with hoops of steel. Whether these be sins or virtues old Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so tightly to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.
―Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.
―Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.
―Which will! gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.
―The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will’s widow, is the will to die.
―Requiescat! Stephen prayed.
What of all the will to do?
It has vanished long ago …
―She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town paid for but in which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the Merry Wives and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought over Hooks and Eyes for Believers’ Breeches and The Most Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze. Venus has twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.
―History shows that to be true, inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos. The ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man’s worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that Russell is right. What do we care for his wife and father? I should say
