Mulligan has my telegram.

Folly. Persist.

--Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a
figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though
I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.

--All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his
shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex.
Clergymen's discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to
us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work
of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave
Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words
of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's
world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for
schoolboys.

A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer. Wall, tarnation strike
me!

--The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely.
Aristotle was once Plato's schoolboy.

--And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said. One
can see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm.

He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face.

Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the heavenly
man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who suffers in
us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the fire upon the altar. I
am the sacrificial butter.

Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A.E., Arval, the Name
Ineffable, in heaven hight: K.H., their master, whose identity is no
secret to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching to
see if they can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of light,
born of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the plane of
buddhi. The life esoteric is not for ordinary person. O.P. must work off
bad karma first. Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very illustrious
sister H.P.B.'s elemental.

O, fie! Out on't! PFUITEUFEL! You naughtn't to look, missus, so you
naughtn't when a lady's ashowing of her elemental.

Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with grace
a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.

--That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet's musings about
the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and
undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato's.

John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:

--Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle
with Plato.

--Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his
commonwealth?

Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse.
Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the street: very
peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through spaces
smaller than red globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after Blake's
buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow.
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.

--Haines is gone, he said.

--Is he?

--I was showing him Jubainville's book. He's quite enthusiastic, don't
you know, about Hyde's LOVESONGS OF CONNACHT. I couldn't bring him in to
hear the discussion. He's gone to Gill's to buy it.


BOUND THEE FORTH, MY BOOKLET, QUICK
TO GREET THE CALLOUS PUBLIC.
WRIT, I WEEN, 'TWAS NOT MY WISH
IN LEAN UNLOVELY ENGLISH.


--The peatsmoke is going to his head, John Eglinton opined.

We feel in England. Penitent thief. Gone. I smoked his baccy. Green
twinkling stone. An emerald set in the ring of the sea.

--People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of
Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the
world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the
hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living
mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the
sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower
of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the
poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians.



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