would be better for Ireland to sink under the seas and join Atlantis, rather than allow her life of letters to affect the least reconciliation with a book which, owing to accidents of circumstance, probably only Dubliners can really understand in detail. Certainly, it takes a Dubliner to pick out the familiar names and allusions of twenty years ago, though the references to men who have become as important as Arthur Griffith assume a more universal hearing. And we are sorry to say that it would take a theologian, even Jesuit, to understand all the theological references. At the same time, nobody in his senses would hold Clongowes School responsible for this portent. It was its ill fortune to breed without being able to harness a striking literary genius, who has since yoked himself to the steeds of Comedy and Blasphemy and taken headlong flight, shall we say like the Gadarene swine, into a choking sea of impropriety. If George Moore is right in saying that blasphemy is the literature of Catholic countries,' this is verily literature!

Mr Joyce spares nobody if he can help it. It was said of a cold-blooded botanist that he would not hesitate to

collect specimens on his mother's grave. Mr Joyce's Stephen Dedalus is represented as refusing to pray with his dying mother. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers,' is the criticism of Mr Buck Mulligan. The most ghastly detail is given of her deathbed and no one can be surprised if she haunts his prose, if not his life,

'Silently in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes

And again he recalls

'her secrets; old feathers fans, tassled dance cards, powdered with musk . . . her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had approached the sacrament. Her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children's shirts . . . her glazing eyes staring out of death to shake and bend my soul.'

Mr Joyce's method of allusion, cross-reminiscence and thought-sequence makes most of the book tediously obscure and irrelevantly trivial. He simply dots down

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whatever succession of thoughts might occur to his mind in certain circumstances. Sometimes the reader catches a flash as in the allusion . . . 'white teeth with gold points. Chrysostomos'. . . The account of the old servant pouring out the milk in Dublin raises a host of Gaelic imagery.

'She praised the goodness of the milk pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom they knew, dew silky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her [Ireland] in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal, serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upraid whether, he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour.'-[Our italics].

A discussion about the Jews leads to the corollary that the reason why Ireland never persecuted them was because she never let them in; but a curious vision in words is vouchsafed the reader of

goldskinned men quoting prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud, uncouth about the temple, their heads thick-plotted under maladroit silk hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience to heap and hoard. Time would surely scatter all. A hoard heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew the years of wandering.'

Such pictures as can be rescued from the cloaca are distinct and sometimes unforgettable. When the style is lucid and restrained, literature is the result in patches; but who can wade through the spate in order to pick out what little is at the same time intelligible and not unquotable? We can catch in our sieve some account of a refugee Fenian in the Latin Quarter of Paris :

'Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of farls of bread, the frog-green wormwood, her matin incense, court the air. Belluomo rises from the bed of wife's lover's wife Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer's ink .. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets

Well slainte! Around the slabbed tables the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. ... Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw facebones under his peep-of-day boy's hat. How the Head Centre got away, authentic version. Got up as a young brideman, veil orangeblossoms, drove out the road to Malahide . . . he prowled with Colonel Richard Burk, tanist of his sept, under the walls of Clerkenwell and crouching saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upward in the fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry. In gay Paree he hides, Egan of Paris, unsought by any save by me. Making his day's stations, the dingy printing case, his three taverns, the Montmartre lair he sleeps short night in, rue de la Goutte d'Or, damascened with flyblown faces of the gone.'

The novel of Fenianism was never written, but these words seem to outline it in a nutshell.

We are led to make quotations because the confusion of the book is so great that there is no circumventing its clumsiness and unwinding its deliberate bamboozlement of the reader. With an occasional lucid bait the attention is gripped, and then the expectant eye is lost in incoherent fantasies. For sheer realism we have never read such a passage as the paragraphs describing the drowned man in Dublin Bay, and we add that they are unequalled elsewhere in the book.

'Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin Bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising salt-white from the undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise. There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. We have him. Easy now. Bag of corpse gas sopping in foul brine. . . . Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust.... Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.'

We need not quote the account of underground chemistry in Glasnevin cemetery except to observe that in letters as in cuisine some gourmands prefer their meat high. The morbid train of thought in Mr Joyce is expressed sufficiently by one sentence-'a corpse is meat gone bad. Well, and what's cheese? Corpse of milk!'

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Mr Joyce is apparently as fond of rats as Chinese ladies of their Pekinese. His affection seems divided between churchyard and brewery rats. Of Guinness' Brewery he has a peculiar statistic: Regular world in itself. Vats of porter wonderful. Rats get in too. Drink themselves bloated as big as a collie floating. Dead drunk on the porter.' His snapshot of a butcher's shop should encourage vegetarianism, though the scene is common enough and only striking when put into words. Through the mist of sexual analysis and psychounravelment we can only pass quickly for good. We are sorry that such stuff should have ever reached the dignity even of surreptitious print, and are glad that the limited copies and their exaggerated cost will continue to prevent the vast majority of the reading public from sampling even faintly such unpleasant ware. It will suffice for those who are interested, to know whether Mr Joyce has invented new styles of literature or written a book to be classed as a literary milestone with 'Madame Bovary' or 'Crime and Punishment,' to take a few more insights into Dublin life, the favoured subject of Mr Joyce's scalpel.

A jeweller's shop, the vegetable market, and the entrance to a Dublin slum are thus severally dealt with: 'Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary's fingers prove a time-dulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the show trays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones. Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil lights shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows. Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest them.'

If that is the feeling evoked by a cheap jeweller one need not be surprised by the portentous account of market gardening in the same city :

'thither the extremely large wains bring foison of the field, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach, pineapple chunks, Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs, drills of Swedes, spherical potatoes and tallies of iridiscent kale, York and Savoy, and trays of onions, pearls of the earth and pumets of mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches

and bere and rape and red green yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious, and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes.'

One wonders if the writer had been reading Charles Kingsley's Poetry of a root-crop,' with its unforgettable 'Underneath their eider-robe

Russet swede and golden globe,
Feathered carrot burrowing deep.'

A large part of this stupendous volume is in the form of drama with the most intricate and vivid stage directions. The opening scene of a Dublin purlieu is set thus:

'The Mabbot Street entrance of night town, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks red and green will o' the wisps and danger signals. Rows of flimsy houses with gaping doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fans. Round Rabaiotti's halted ice gondola stunted men and women squabble. They grab wafers between which are wedged lumps of coal and copper snow. Sucking they scatter slowly. Children. The swancomb of the gondola highreared forges on through the murk, white and blue under a lighthouse. Whistles call and answer

In the same desiccated rare-worded style he can sketch an Irish type in thirty words; ' enter Magee Mor Mathew a rugged rough rug-headed kern, in strossers with a buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten forests, a wand of wilding in his hand.'

Mr Magee's son is apparently the well-known 'John Eglinton,' who is the principal speaker in the Shakespearean discussion, a brilliant chapter of Dublin causerie and criticism, which might well be reprinted apart from the rest of the book. Playing on Miss Susan Mitchell's celebrated joke that George Moore was Edward Martyn's wild oats, Mr Joyce chimes; Good Bacon: gone musty. Shakespeare Bacon's wild oats. Cypher-jugglers going the highroads. Seekers on the great quest. What town good masters? Mummed in names: A. E., eon: Magee, John Eglinton. East of the sun, west of the moon: Tir na nog.'

One wonders what the French critics made of that! Yet it has a connected meaning. A. E. and John Eglinton