[In the following essay, Bandler discusses the conflict between artistic ideals and man's human nature in Exiles.]

The note of exile recurs frequently in our age. It is the one constant among the voices which have most engaged contemporary attention in literature, dissimilar as those voices otherwise are as in Proust, Eliot, and Joyce. Yet the note is not new: it has been sounded in the occident from the time of the Orphic mysteries and the Pythagorean order and magnificently by the youthful Plato. Similar circumstances everywhere prompt it. When the conditions of life are difficult, treacherous, and unstable, the soul of man repudiates its natural relation to the body and seeks its true home elsewhere. In some way or other it seeks to detach itself from the foreign and inimical substance in which it finds itself mysteriously entangled and aspires to a better and more spiritual life. Its true life, it declares, is not realized through the gross material body which at best must be patronized, indulged, chastised, and bullied, but through a discipline and purification which will restore it to its native element. But not since the decline of Rome and the rise of Christianity has the note of exile been so general and emphatic, vague and desperate. Exile has ceased to be exceptional, a voice crying in the wilderness, and has become typical. Human isolation is taken for granted.

The attempts to escape from exile and to attain some sufficiency are various and bewildering. The sands of history are heaped with motley ideals; every person ranging through the past can pick up some discarded shell and make his life therein, or else adopt some form that is not yet wholly abandoned. Throughout there is uncertainty as to the character of each special exile. Is it the exile from some particular period in the past that one seeks to restore; or from some qualities of personality, feeling, and action that are neglected by recent generations; or from some institutions which sheltered these qualities? However diverse the expressions of exile seem to be, there is, I believe, one element common to them all. That element is the refusal to be a man before all else, and the substitution of other ideals in place of the human one. The desire to be an artist, mystic, angel, or God instead of a man often produces works of extraordinary beauty; but these desires are usually based on the denial of the true nature of man; they are distorted; and their ultimate fruit is exile.

A familiar solution to the problem of exile is not that the nature of man has been misrepresented but that God has been forgotten. Reintroduce the idea of God and faith in Him, one hears said, and the maladies of our age will depart. No solution could be more irrelevant. Man is exiled from man and that exile is not caused by disbelief in God. The ground of exile is always, I believe, a false interpretation of the relation between the body and the soul; an ignoring of the function of the body and hence an erroneous analysis of the soul; and as a result of this untrue conception of man an incomplete and often destructive ideal is striven for. This thesis cannot be demonstrated apart from multiple examples, but an analysis of Exiles by James Joyce, where the problem is most clearly stated, will illustrate my argument.

What first strikes one upon consideration of Exiles is the irrelevance of God. There is simply no need for Him. The characters' exile and sorrow is the human one of incompatible desires and unrealized hopes, a sorrow suffered in a universe with God in all times as well as in a universe without Him. Their longing is not for God and their exile is not from Him. In such a world the only function left to God would be to render people's longings commensurate and satisfied, and to give them all complete happiness. But Joyce makes no such demands: he dispenses with God as the end and provider of human happiness. The picture which Joyce presents would not be materially affected by the addition of the various gods imagined or conceived by Jews, Greeks, and Christians; the existence of these gods, their attempted grace, even their omnipotence would not alter Joyce's vision of man. For Joyce's people are not only magnificently done, beautifully realized individuals of certain human types, but their dilemma is presented as true of all people, and hence inescapable. Exile as Joyce sees it, is necessarily our lot; it is the result of no accident, nor weakness, nor sin in human nature, the consequence of a fall from a Paradise to which a beneficent providence could restore us. Exile follows from the necessity of human nature itself, the incommensurability of our desires and goods, each man like the angels of St. Thomas being a separate species. Since each man's essence or soul tends to a unique and incommensurable perfection there is no parity of human goods and not even God could redeem us from exile. To save man, to harmonize one man's desires with his neighbor's, would be to destroy man as Joyce sees him: grace can but give us the strength and fortitude to bear our exile. When Richard Rowen appeals for help, it is not the light of self-knowledge that he seeks, or the knowledge of others, for their goods or salvation, being intrinsically different from his, are unknowable: Richard seeks the strength to be immovably and unchangeably himself

“O, if you knew how I am suffering at this moment! For your case, too. But suffering most of all for my own (with bitter force) and how I pray that I may be granted again my dead mother's hardness of heart! For some help, within me or without, I must find and find it I will”.

If Exiles were presented in its relative truth, as a play that distilled the sorrow of human isolation, the office of the critic would be limited to understanding and enjoyment. But Exiles goes further; the vision claims to be universal and as final and as irrevocable as the Last Judgment. From such a sentence there is no appeal; mercy has no lien on truth; and Exiles is held up as the Medusa head of truth. Hence it is the truth itself of Exiles that one must question, its absolute truth about human destiny. Why are Beatrice and Bertha, Robert and Richard, exiles? From what are they exiled? The formal statement that they have incommensurable goods can be answered by an equally formal dialectic. Since they are human and have bodies, senses, appetites, and reason, in a common world, their generic human identity would imply fundamentally similar goods. Individual differences would permit them to realize these goods in different ways and in different mediums, weaknesses and the failure of fortune might prevent their realization altogether, but the essence of man, as societies and communities achieved in the past witness, is social. Exile, like pain and all other evils, is interwoven with our human lot, but apart from the goods of which it is a privation, it is meaningless. But such a dialectic is general. Looked at individually and concretely, are each of the characters exiled for the same reason, necessarily, beyond redemption, because of the inmost demands of their nature, or is their exile accidental, arbitrary, and imposed from without? Would these characters naturally and under all conditions revolve in their hard isolation, would they fail of happiness because happiness is no real possibility for man, or are they thus solitary because they have gravitated into the orbit of an intense and powerful personality which then forsook them? If exile is imposed by the lure of a superior personality, what is the nature of that personality, what is his idea of himself and of others, and his demands from life? Does he regard himself as a rational animal, or a fallen angel, or a strange and untrammelled spirit? Is his exile less from mother and wife, friends, Ireland, and the Catholic Church, from their understanding, compassion, and love, as he would have us believe, than from the goods and limitations of human nature itself, society, and every form of order? Is the exile of Richard Rowen so hopeless and terrifying because he is in revolt against the conditions of life itself?

Certainly the exiles of Beatrice, Robert Hand and Bertha, while desperate and inevitable for them, are arbitrary. They are exiles because of their absorption in Richard, an absorption as involuntary as the moths in the flame. Once attracted by his luminous power, and consumed by his mind, they are indifferently cast forth, to wait until such time as his curiosity and art require them. Beatrice at the beginning of the play comes regularly to the Rowen house, ostensibly to give Archie piano lessons. She had been engaged to Robert, but after Richard's departure from Ireland, Robert seemed to change. After a year Richard wrote her, he sent her chapters of his novel, and for eight years continued to write her. Since his return from Italy, a return never fully explained, he is working on a new book for which he uses Beatrice as material. In the first scene between them he explains the power that holds Beatrice's gaze, nine years before.

RICHARD:
(with some vehemence) Then that I expressed in those chapters and letters, and in my character and life as well, something in your soul which you could not—pride or scorn?
BEATRICE:
Could not?
RICHARD:
(leans toward her) Could not because you dared not. Is that why?
BEATRICE:
(bends her head) Yes.
RICHARD:
On account of others or for want of courage—which?
BEATRICE:
(softly) Courage.
RICHARD:
(slowly) And so you have followed me with pride and scorn also in your heart?
BEATRICE:
And loneliness.

In this first scene Richard accuses Beatrice of being unable to give herself freely and wholly. But what does Richard want from her, and what in return is he willing to give? Richard wanted her to follow him as did Bertha, and he resented her love for Robert and sulked for a year in silence. If Beatrice had followed him she would have enjoyed the beatitude similar to that extended by God to His saints, the beatitude of watching Richard be himself. Beatrice has not the courage to embrace such a fearsome privilege. For this reason together with her protestant reluctance to give, a quality she shares with Lady Chaterley's sister, Beatrice is in exile. The tragedy flows from a fault in her character, a defect true for her and many others, but nevertheless a defect, and not a quality necessarily inherent in human nature. Even this unyielding, cold, barren soul which could not part with its virginity to God, might in time have responded to the pagan warmth of Robert. Only when the brighter star of Richard, by its sheer intensity, pulled her away without map and compass, was she irrevocably damned to exile.

Beatrice's exile one feels is for life and without remedy, for no one will replace Richard in her mind's heart. Less hopeless, more like the purgatory of defeated desire than an everlasting sentence is Robert's exile. At the close of the play he leaves for a fortnight's visit to his cousin. The visit is a retreat, a chance to rest and heal his wounds, and when he returns to Dublin that particular exile will be over. He will necessarily suffer other disappointments, as fugitive as his ecstacies, but only death can exile him completely. For Robert is a pagan and a lover of life, a romantic pagan who narrows living to the lyrical immediacy of the moment. It is no accident of Robert's nature that while he awaits Bertha he is playing the first bars of Wolfram's song in the last act of Tannhäuser, nor is it an accident that after kissing Bertha he sighs

ROBERT:
(sighs) My life is finished—over.
BERTHA:
O don't speak like that now, Robert.
ROBERT:
Over, over. I want to end it and have done with it.
BERTHA:
(Concerned but lightly) You silly fellow!
ROBERT:
(Presses her to him) To end it all—death. To fall from a great high cliff, down, right down into the sea.
BERTHA:
Please, Robert. …
ROBERT:
Listening to music and in the arms of the woman I love—the sea, music and death.

He cannot feel otherwise. As he says to Richard in the language Richard used in his youth “There was an eternity before we were born and another will come after we are dead. The blinding instant alone … passion, free, unashamed, irresistible, that is the only gate through which we can escape from the misery of what slaves call life.”

But there is another side to Robert besides the pagan and the romantic, and that is the sentimental. He hopes and believes that passion will give not only life but eternal life. He refuses to accept mutability, and to learn from experience. Hence there is something ludicrous and pathetic in his passion. Like the roses he gives to Bertha it is overblown.

RICHARD:
And that other law of nature, as you call it: change. How will it be when you turn against her and against me; when her beauty, or what seems so to you now, wearies you and my affection for you seems false and odious?
ROBERT:
That will never be. Never.

One can easily see the attraction Richard exercises on Robert. It is the hold of master on disciple. In the past Richard professed and practiced the ideals Robert now partially follows. Richard sought a new life, free from human laws and bonds, free from deceit and falsehood. Rather than compromise, Richard went into exile. His ideals, his genius, and his mode of life all proved him different from other men. Robert is even drawn to Bertha partly because she is Richard's work.

ROBERT:
(With animation) You have that fierce indignation which lacerated the heart of Swift. You have fallen from a higher world, Richard, and you are filled with fierce indignation, when you find that life is cowardly and ignoble. While I … shall I tell you?
RICHARD:
By all means.
ROBERT:
(Archly) I have come up from a lower world and I am filled with astonishment when I find that people have any redeeming virtue at all.

The disciple never loses faith in his master's intellect. At the end of the play Robert can say to Bertha “Richard is always right.” But Robert not only sees Richard, he finally sees through him. When Robert appeals to Richard for help he is refused. Richard will not free him to fight the spectre of friendship. Robert must free himself. Nor will Richard commit himself about Bertha's good. To Robert's request that he keep Bertha and forgive him, Richard replies “I will not live on your generosity. You have asked her to meet you here tonight and alone. Solve the question between you.” Robert knows that Richard has left him in his hour of need. Hence in the future he will not place his hopes in Richard as Beatrice does, repeatedly to be disappointed. He is not predestined to exile by a life accessible to him alone, nor does he seek some supernatural good in which he no longer believes. His exile is the one his God, nature, imposes on the body when it contains a wayward, sentimental, and unripened heart.

More desperate and heartbreaking is Bertha's exile. It is simpler than Robert's because more natural and easier to remedy, more hopeless than Beatrice's because of its entire dependence on Richard. There is no need to analyze Bertha in order to understand her suffering. She gave up everything for Richard, “religion, family, and my own peace,” yet finds herself in exile from him. “You are a stranger to me. You do not understand anything in me—not one thing in my heart or soul. A stranger! I am living with a stranger!” And with her last agonized cry the play closes. “Forget me Dick. Forget me and love me again as you did the first time. I want my lover. To meet him, to go to him, to give myself to him. You, Dick, O, my strange wild lover, come back to me again.”

There is nothing to show that Bertha has changed from the day she accompanied Richard in exile. She followed him then voluntarily and by her own proposal. Why did you choose him—asks Robert.—Is that not love? she replies. She never pretended to understand or to enter into Richard's ideas: she had no interest in the complete liberty he allowed her; she did not understand nor want it; nor did it make her happy. The books he wrote were beyond her. Her jealousy of Beatrice, her belief that Richard allowed her liberty in order that he might love Beatrice could have arisen as easily before they left Ireland as after their return. She gave Richard her love and asked to be loved as he once had loved her, in return. As she drifted with Robert she appealed to Richard for help which he denied her.

BERTHA:
(almost passionately) Why do you not defend me then against him? Why do you go away from me now without a word? Dick, my God, tell me what you wish me to do?
RICHARD:
I cannot, dear. (Struggling with himself) Your own heart will tell you. (He seizes both her hands) I have a wild delight in my soul, Bertha, as I look at you. I see you as you are yourself. That I came first in your life or before him then—that may be nothing to you. You may be his more than mine.
BERTHA:
I am not. Only I feel for him, too.
RICHARD:
And I do too. You may be his and mine. I will trust you, Bertha, and him too. I must. I cannot hate him since his arms have been around you. You have drawn us near together. There is something wiser than wisdom in your heart. Who am I that I should call myself master of your heart or of any woman's? Bertha, love him, be his, give yourself to him if you desire—or if you can.

Bertha's exile is Penelope's. While she sorrowfully awaits her Ulysses she feels that the time of love “comes only once in a lifetime. The rest of life is good for nothing except to remember that time.”

In an artist so conscious as Joyce each character has his full significance. Neither old Brigid nor Archie at eight are exiles. Their roles are secondary and aesthetic, to inform us of the natures and motives of the other characters. Brigid figures seriously only in the opening scene of the third act. She there appears as the mother substitute: even when Richard's mother lived he confided to Brigid his love for Bertha, talked of her letters and discussed his plans. Brigid's weight in the play rests on her material assurance to Bertha that “there's good times coming still.” Archie plays a more important part. To Brigid he is Master Richard's son; to Beatrice he is an excuse for coming to see Richard; to Bertha he is son and symbol of Richard's love; and to Robert he is lusty, buoyant, hopeful youth. Archie scrambles through windows, crawls out of piano lessons, and arranges to drive early mornings with the milkman.

ARCHIE:
Open the window, please, will you?
ROBERT:
Perhaps, there, Richard, is the freedom we seek—you in one way, I in another. In him and not in us. Perhaps …
RICHARD:
Perhaps … ?
ROBERT:
I said perhaps. I would say almost surely if …
RICHARD:
If what?
ROBERT:
(with a faint smile) If he were mine.

Richard's feeling for Archie is ambiguous. He takes pride in him as a son, but is this son child or angel. Richard is uncertain and one sees him hesitant, fearful to correct a higher, wiser spirit, watching with curiosity and in indulgence. To Bertha is left the responsibility of Archie's discipline.

BERTHA:
Whenever I tried to correct him for the least thing you went on with your folly, speaking to him as if he were a grownup man. Ruining the poor child, or trying to. Then, of course, I was the cruel mother and only you loved him. (With growing excitement) But you did not turn him against me—against his own mother. Because why? Because the child has too much nature in him.
RICHARD:
I never tried to do such a thing, Bertha. You know I cannot be severe with a child.
BERTHA:
Because you never loved your own mother. A mother is always a mother, no matter what. I never heard of any human being that did not love the mother that brought him into the world, except you.
RICHARD:
(Approaching her quietly) Bertha, do not say things you will be sorry for. Are you not glad my son is fond of me?
BERTHA:
Who taught him to be? Who taught him to run to meet you? Who told him you would bring him home toys when you were out on your rambles in the rain, forgetting all about him—and me? I did. I taught him to love you.

Who then is this being Richard about whom the destinies of Bertha and Beatrice and Robert revolve? Without him their lives and personalities would have been different, they affect each other only as they are acted on by Richard. Like so many iron filings they are forced into a pattern of exile by the magnet of a single energizing personality. No formula can simplify Richard to a few elements: he has portrayed himself, like Rousseau, in all his strength and weaknesses. So complex is this man, so lucid and subtle and consistent is his mind, that we can hardly distinguish at first pride from humility. Judgment waivers between the exile of the Mount of Olives drinking in solitude and pain his cup of suffering, and the rebel exile cast from the hosts of heaven. “There is a faith still stranger than the faith of the disciple in his master”, Richard says to Robert, … “And that is?—”—“The faith of a master in the disciple who will betray him”.

The betrayal is attempted, the master is deserted.

RICHARD:
Before dawn I went out and walked the strand from end to end.
ROBERT:
(Shaking his head) Suffering. Torturing yourself.
RICHARD:
Hearing voices about me. The voices of those who say they love me.
ROBERT:
And what did they tell you?
RICHARD:
They told me to despair.

Yet foreseeing his fate, what counsels and examples of perfection does Richard not give so that one almost hears again: “he who seeks his life shall lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake shall find it.”

RICHARD:
Do you understand what it is to give a thing?
ARCHIE:
To give? Yes.
RICHARD:
While you have a thing it can be taken from you.
ARCHIE:
By robbers? No?
RICHARD:
But when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.

I say, one almost hears again for we have yet to see for whose sake Richard loses his life. Certainly, at first sight, it seems that Richard loses his life for the sake of those he loves. To love Bertha, to Richard, means “to wish her well”. His only fear is that he will deprive her of one instant of the good that should be hers.

RICHARD:
But that I will reproach myself then for having taken all for myself because I would not suffer her to give to another what was hers and not mine to give, because I accepted from her her loyalty and made her life poorer in love. That is my fear. That I stand between her and any moments of life that should be hers, between her and you, between her and anyone, between her and anything. I will not do it. I cannot and I will not. I dare not.

Hence Richard's indecision and inability to give help to Robert and Bertha. He does not know what is their good, and in default of knowledge cannot act.

RICHARD:
Have you the luminous certitude that yours is the brain in contact with which she must think and understand and that yours is the body in contact with which her body must feel? Have you this certitude in yourself?
ROBERT:
Have you?
RICHARD:
(Moved) Once I had it, Robert: a certitude as luminous as that of my own existence—or an illusion as luminous.
ROBERT:
(Cautiously) And now?
RICHARD:
If you had it and I could feel that you had it—even now …
ROBERT:
What would you do?
RICHARD:
(Quietly) Go away. You, and not I, would be necessary to her. Alone as I was before I met her.

But is it really the humility of ignorance and the desire for Bertha's happiness that determines Richard? Is his the abasement that resigns itself to another's will and his the love that relieves and enlightens? Does he want those who are weary and heavy laden to come unto him? Or are his humility and love, sincere as they are but the semblance of humility and love, counterfeit virtues necessary to Richard in the consistency of his life? A passage in the Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man shows clearly the nature of his love.

“—Brother Hickey.
Brother Quaid
Brother MacArdle
Brother Keogh.—

Their piety would be like their names, like their faces, like their clothes; and it was idle for him to tell himself that their humble and contrite hearts, it might be, paid a far richer tribute of devotion than his had ever been, a gift tenfold more acceptable than his elaborate adoration. It was idle for him to move himself to be generous towards them, to tell himself that if he ever came to their gates, stripped of his pride, beaten and in beggar's weeds, that they would be generous towards him, loving him as themselves. Idle and embittering, finally, to argue, against his own dispassionate certitude, that the commandment of love bade us not to love our neighbors as ourselves with the same amount and intensity of love but to love him as ourselves with the same kind of love.”

Richard is no charlatan, he is without deceit and hypocrisy, and is moral in the sense that what he wants for himself he wants for others. He has conceived a new life. Since his youth, when he and Robert lived together, he has followed it, sought to give it to Bertha, and pursues it still. In his conception of that life he is unchanged; any changes of action, any rifts of friendship, and exiles are the consequences of that conception. Robert repeats Richard's declarations about the blinding instant of passion and asks if he has changed from the language of his youth. But the present opposition of their attitudes existed then—either has changed. Their house in the past was to Robert a house of revelry; to Richard it was to be the “hearth of a new life”. To Robert a kiss is an act of homage as natural as any act possessing beauty; to Richard it is “an act of union between man and woman”, and without contact of minds carnal intercourse is what Duns Scotus calls “the death of the spirit.” Richard's desire was to hold “by no bonds, even of love, to be united with you in body and soul in utter nakedness.” But it was Richard who wandered from Bertha, only in his absence did Penelope entertain her suitor. Why did he wander so that she found herself living with him as with an utter stranger? Why did he not desire to be held by the bonds of love and the spectre of fidelity? Why after nine years should he profess ignorance of Bertha's good, leaving her freer than Eve and with no commandments, when what she wanted was Richard, her lover? The answer lies in Richard's conception of himself and in the nature of the new life he proposed to follow. That life is the source of Richard's exile. Seeking it he led his world into exile. When Satan fell, a third of the Heavenly Hosts fell with him.

When Bertha accuses Richard of granting her complete liberty because he wants complete liberty for himself, she is right in her charge. But she is wrong in believing that he wants his freedom in order to love Beatrice. Richard wants to be free from all bonds in order to be himself. He must be himself and that self in all its courage and shame must be understood by others. When for the first time he betrayed Bertha carnally, he came home, awakened her from her sleep, told her, cried beside her bed and pierced her heart. “O, Richard, why did you do that?” asks Robert. “She must know me as I am” he replies. Bertha reproaches Richard for having left her with Robert:

BERTHA:
Why, then, did you leave me last night?
RICHARD:
(Bitterly) In your hour of need.
BERTHA:
(Threateningly)You urged me to it. Not because you love me. If you loved me or if you knew what love was you would not have left me. For your own sake you urged me to it.

Richard does not answer because he loved her, because he wished her well, and because he feared to deprive her of a moment of life. These sentiments are but deductions and corollaries from the fundamental axiom of his nature, the definition of Himself God gave to Moses, “I am what I am”. What that “I” is Richard reveals to Robert in absolute confession. “For you, too, must know me as I am—now.”

RICHARD:
Because in the very core of my ignoble heart I longed to be betrayed by you and by her—in the dark, in the night—secretly, meanly, craftily. By you, my best friend, and by her. I longed for that passionately and ignobly, to be dishonoured for ever in love and in lust, to be. …
ROBERT:
Enough. Enough. But no. Go on.
RICHARD:
To be for ever a shameful creature and to build up my soul again out of the ruins of its shame.

How similar the words are to those of Stephen Dedalus when, after having renounced his ambitions in the Jesuit order, he wanders up the rivulet in the strand and sees a girl of mortal beauty.

“Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on!”

Richard demands freedom, complete and absolute freedom from every possible and conceivable form life can assume if it is to emerge from chaos and from death. But this liberty is not purely negative. Opposed to it is the good, the new life that Richard embraces. It is no accident that he leaves Bertha and seeks to be betrayed. That destruction and exile are imposed ineluctably by the same new life that imposed Stephen Dedalus' decline from the priesthood and his lapse from the Catholic Church. Stephen did not refuse the Jesuit order because he thought it unaesthetic, though its ugliness revolted him; and he did not forsake the Church because he thought the dogmas of Christianity literally absurd. As Stephen pictured himself a Jesuit in the routine of his daily life he wondered

“what, then had become, of that deep rooted shyness of his which had made him loath to eat and drink under a strange roof? What had come of the pride of his spirit which had always made him conceive himself as a being apart in every order?”

The Reverend Stephen Dedalus, S.J.

No,

“His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders. The wisdom of the priest's appeal did not touch him to the quick. He was destined to learn his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.

“The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling, but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall.”

The new life that Richard-Stephen sought was that of the artist-creator. The name he bore was “a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth, a new soaring impalpable, imperishable being.” It was in order to create that Richard demanded the freedom which would liberate him from every bond of life. Outside of his sacerdotal office of artist he wished for no real earthly existence. As a pure spirit, as an angel, as a Jesuit who aspired to sanctity he would have little intercourse with the world which was to nourish his imagination. Contemptuous of life and impatient of restrictions he must submit time and time again to the immediacy of experience in order to forage materials for his art. The higher world that according to Robert he had fallen from is the world of the creator-artist; but it is not absolute: to create, the artist must refuse the Jesuit Order or any other, even of love, so that he may fall and be betrayed and build a soul again out of the ruins of its shame. When you have given a thing, Richard tells Archie, it is yours forever; it is his because the artist possesses the image and essence as the image of the girl in the inlet passed into Stephen's soul forever. But as the artist-creator must fall in order to meet with experience so he must first possess and attract in order to give. But how, without deliberate hurt to others is he to fall, be betrayed, and give? Superior being as he is he refuses to possess in body just as he refuses to be possessed, and gives complete freedom just as he demands it. His love for the creatures of the earth is sincere, he wishes them well, and would carry them aloft with him in his flight. But they must follow freely, he will exercise no compulsion and will make no proposals. He is what he is and will seem no other. He will attract in the only way open to him, by the sheer luminous power of his being, a sort of unmoved mover, which as Aristotle says, moves in the way a loved object moves a lover. But having shown himself, having looked, attracted, possessed, and renounced, he moves on, moves on to create. His exile is to be forced to fall and to be in life, but those in life who follow him are exiled first from life and then from him.

Robert's exile is partial since the ecstasy of the new life, that of the artist-creator, is interpreted by him as the ecstasy of the body: he has at least the joys of the sensualist. Beatrice's exile is greater; she is suspended between body and spirit, fearful to give herself to either. But Bertha does more than follow Richard with her eyes. “I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do” says Stephen Dedalus to Crowley “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my Church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silent, exiled, and cunning.” Bertha becomes Richard's “bride in exile”, she gives up country, religion, and peace for him, her lover. Then he leaves her, alone in Italy, with Archie and her memories, leaves her to return from his exile to his true home of creator-artist. It was for the book he wrote that Richard left Bertha, just as it was for his book that he corresponded with Beatrice, and continued to see her, and it was for his future book that he longed to be betrayed. Richard's asceticism is the most severe ever imposed by man. All life including the personality of the artist must be crucified to gain the kingdom of art.

“The dramatic form is reached,” says Stephen to Lynch, “when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.—”

When the man is identified with the artist he is refined out of existence and perishes with him. Unless he has a separate individual personal existence he will necessarily divert and destroy every human relationship he enters into. For while pleasure and friendship and love are sufficient ends in themselves, they are to the artist only means, the indispensable sacrifices at the altar of art. Hence all life that comes into contact with him is exiled from nature and humanity. It is sucked up by the insatiable greed of the artist-creator, squeezed dry, and discarded. Acute as the suffering is which the artist-creator inflicts on others, greater still is his own agony. His life like that of the mystic demands unceasing discipline, obedience, and self-immolation for the object of his love. “I tried to unite my will with the will of God instant by instant”, said Stephen to Crowley “in that I did not always fail. I could perhaps do that still. …” Instead he united his will to the will of the artist-creator and wished for his fellow man the same kind of good. The suffering of the mystic in the night of his soul appears to be greater than any form of human suffering, as his ecstasies transcend other forms of ecstasies. There is no reason to doubt the similarity of Stephen-Richard's suffering and joy. But there is an element in Stephen-Richard not found in the mystic and which is the cause of his exile. That element is not the belief that art is an end in itself. The contemplation that is the artist's is an end in itself, just as is the contemplation of the mystic, of the scientist, and of the philosopher. The greatest tragedy connected with the dying of Christianity and Judaism is the disappearance from the world of the knowledge that the contemplative life is superior to the practical life, and that in the activity of contemplation our restless motion finds its repose and finality. It is the glory of the artist in modern times to have kept alive some form of contemplation to refuse to be deceived by Mammon, by the snares of any group, social, political, or religious, who move and act and would change the world without knowing for what good. Stephen-Richard's conception of the artist is no more the cause of his exile than the belief in art as an end in itself. The account of the relations between the maker and the material which he shapes is not a theory to be disputed but a description to be understood. The element that distinguishes Stephen-Richard from the mystic is that Stephen-Richard plays the role of a man without accepting the responsibilities of being a man. The mystic aims at a supernatural life and accepts its discipline, but he knows that a specifically human life has its discipline and bonds and obligations. Stephen-Richard in his concentration on himself as artist has neglected himself as man. His exile is caused by his refusal to submit to his nature as a man, to the patient perfecting of the body which forms the soul. Creation accomplished the artist returns to his body as to an alien substance.

“I am very proud of myself, if you want to know” Bertha declares to Beatrice “What have they ever done for him? I made him a man.”

Rather she made it possible for him to be a man and to end his exile. Restored to the body Richard can enter into human life. But to enter into life he must admit his common nature, the most difficult of all things for him who would be a being apart in every order. Bertha can make him a man and she can teach their son to love him. But one thing more is needed. Richard must want to be a man. As artist, so great is his genius, he can for a time attain angelic perfection, and so long as he can sustain himself as pure spirit he is at peace. But if in the body and with people in life he continues to deny his nature and to act as an immaterial being he is painfully in exile. And all who yield to his attraction are forced with him into an exile which no god could relieve. Out of that exile there is only one way, more difficult than art and sanctity which it includes, the destiny of being a man.