nings: we are well on towards noon with Dedalus when we have to return to the waking-up of Mr Leopold Bloom. I have managed to read one way or the other nearly the whole of this work, but I confess that after a hundred pages or so I read on with an admiration chiefly of the heroic persistence of the author; of the number of things he knows, notices, remembers; of the unfailing vitality and purity of his phrase; of his superb powers of mimicry and literary impersonation; of the half-kindly and painstaking exactness which mitigates his cruelty. Such a display of erudition is only possible where a man has subordinated all his reading and research for a long period to a single purpose. This alone is admirable; and it condones the use (which one suspects) of encyclopaedias and above all of Thom’s Dublin Directory.
All the same, I doubt whether this massive work is of good augury for Irish literature. Just as it was a disappointment that Sweden—a land, one fancied, with bones of iron and breath fragrant with the pine—should produce as her literary representative a mere bundle of nerves like Strindberg, such as the exhausted Mediterranean races could so well understand; so it is a little disconcerting to find Ireland—the country where, as the world fancied, Faith still lingered in all its bookless artlessness—breathing out no healing airs from its boglands into European literature, but rather—in this its most important contribution to literature for some time—a particularly strong and composite odour from mean streets and brothels. Mr Joyce's masterpiece is a violent interruption of the movement known as the Irish Literary Renascence, and I shall look forward to the new edition of Mr Ernest Boyd’s history of that movement, in which he will study its significance.
