Page:A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Huebsch 1916).djvu/229

 —The question you asked me a moment ago seems to me more interesting. What is that beauty which the artist struggles to express from lumps of earth—said Stephen coldly.

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:

—The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.—

—And to distinguish between the beautiful and the sublime—the dean added—to distinguish between moral beauty and material beauty. And to inquire what kind of beauty is proper to each of the various arts. These are some interesting points we might take up.—

Stephen, disheartened suddenly by the dean's firm dry tone, was silent: and through the silence a distant noise of many boots and confused voices came up the staircase.

—In pursuing these speculations—said the dean conclusively—there is, however, the danger of perishing of inanition. First you must take your degree. Set that before you as your first aim. Then, little by little, you will see your way. I mean in every sense, your way in life and in thinking. It may be uphill pedalling [221]