The place of Chamber Music in the Joyce canon is at once first, last, and nowhere. Chronologically it is first. It is last for most critics. It is nowhere for most readers, who ignore it or read it too rapidly to gather what it can give. Joyce's own view, even at the moment when he had his worst doubts and almost withheld the volume from publication, was that the poems had "grace"; and perhaps he would also have called them "dainty," the word he uses in A Portrait of the Artist to describe the Elizabethan song which he sang at the piano. For the historian the book is certainly and organically what Joyce allowed it to become when he quelled his doubts and let the printer proceed: Opus I; the first stage in the evolution of the complete opera.

"It is not a book of love verses at all, I perceive," Joyce wrote to his brother. They are not love verses because they do not really attempt to reach a woman, to speak to her, to persuade her, nor do they really attempt to reflect their writer's experience of love or even of the fantasy of love. They are essays in style. This in two senses. They are essays in a style of life. Although they are not purely "Shakespearean" or "Jonsonian" or "lutanist" (since other influences from Horace to the Victorian drawing room ballads, from the Irish come-all-yous to Verlaine, converge in them), yet their singer takes shape, if a blurred shape, as a grave-mannered gentleman of a pre-industrial world, a courtier. Something must be said about him later. They are also essays in style in the more familiar literary meaning of the term: essays in the arrangement of words to please the ear. Pulchra sunt quae audita placent.

Read as an exhibition of the verbal skill, the more satisfying for the carefully-spun simplicity of the context, Chamber Music will seem a remarkable collection. It bears the sign which characterizes the poetic stylist in all languages, the deliberate invention of technical obligations and their fulfillment. In each stanza of Poem "VIII," Joyce obliges himself to renew and amplify the first line in the third line. He loves to take a word from one stanza and employ it in the next in a different position. In Poem "X" he agreeably converts two rhyming nouns of the first stanza, streamers and dreamers, into two rhyming participles in the corresponding lines of the second stanza. The craft of the disposition and redisposition of words in a short lyric might be learned from Chamber Music. So might the art of the reduction of large-scale effects to lyric proportions. We know how Joyce was gratified by the rhetoric with which Seymour Bushe spoke of Michelangelo's Moses, the frozen music, "which, if anything that the hand of man has wrought of noble and inspiring and beautiful deserves to live deserves to live." That immediate closure of a whole period by the iteration of a verb that has just closed a subordinate clause, Joyce uses and extends in Ulysses, and uses but appropriately curbs in Chamber Music—when he tells his sweetheart or his soul to repudiate the slanderers:

His literary architecture, metropolitan in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, Joyce practices in miniature in Chamber Music. Parallel parentheses, parallel questions, hold stanza supported against stanza. Songs curve in elegant quasi-palindrome to end as they began.

There is a spice of absurdity in proving the talents of rhetoric in a writer who through the course of a lifetime was to demonstrate a master's power over the styles of his precursors and contemporaries: who was to resume the prose of all the eras of English literature in the "Deshil Holies Eamus" chapter of Ulysses; who parodied The Waste Land; who dexterously plied a birthday lyric into five languages, each version authentic in tone and tune. The reminder of the obvious is to clarify the intention of Opus I. The persistent stylistic care has one predominant purpose, implicit in the title of the volume. The aim is "music."

It is legitimate to call Joyce neoclassical and to see him in the neoclassical procession of our century. Yet the term is too narrow and too broad. Joyce was a Romantic poet as well as an Archaic. And of the classical centuries he totally ignored the eighteenth, for some observers the supremely classical. He was not of the Age of Reason. He valued the lyric above all other poetry, and understood its birth and its beauty as beyond the reach of reason or observation. That is clear from his love of Mangan, from his appeal to the standard of "Es war ein König in Thule," from his rejection of Meredith's poetry for its lack of the lyrical impulse. In both A Portrait and Ulysses he describes Stephen writing a lyric, and shows with scrupulosity of introspection that it is a brimming of unconscious powers and knowledge: that it is indeed a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling." It overflows as music. "A song by Shakespeare or Verlaine, which seems so free and living and as remote from any conscious purpose as rain that falls in a garden or the lights of evening, is discovered to be the rhythmic speech of an emotion otherwise incommunicable, at least so fitly."

The Age of Reason judged that one of the problems of the poet was to make his sound seem an echo of the sense. Joyce worked from the opposite point. His effort was to find sense capable of carrying the sound that he heard when the inner life brimmed over. The sense must be the medium of the sound. He was a musician in search of a system of notation. When Joyce perceived that the poems of Chamber Music were not love poems, this was what he perceived: that he had been looking for words to register the music of the emotions of a young man of twenty-two.

The purpose was music. And the success? A partial success: the music is there for the seeking but does not invade the reader unless it is patiently sought. If we give the songs of Chamber Music several readings, they begin to take hold; and afterwards, when we are about other occupations, the music will stir in the memory, possibly without the accompaniment of the words; the melody will rise, fall, recur, prolong itself, offer its atmosphere and world picture.

But we do not give them so much reading, unless for [an essay] of this kind. And a writer is at least partly to blame if we read him no more than perfunctorily. He has not put in enough to detain the eye. What Joyce has not given to Chamber Music is enough sense to carry the music. For us on this North American continent at this period when some density is expected of literature, density and a scatter of potent symbols which we may construe and connect ad lib., the verses want substance. Together with his view of its music, Joyce seems to have had a conception of the lyric which deterred him from that necessary accumulation of sense. He seems to have thought that the lyric required frailty: a flower quality: it must be as fresh, standing, and defined as a flower, and as frail. For the taste of our time, consequently, he could never solve, in a poem, the problem of scoring his music with sense rich enough to carry it. But in prose he could. It was a pertinent comment when he said that one leaf of "A Little Cloud" was worth more than Chamber Music. He devoted nearly all his energy to prose because there he judged it right to impress a robust substance and score it densely, satisfyingly to the modern ear. Nevertheless, the music of the poems is worth seeking: a communication, however faint, of the voice of the world.

The better to see that the chamber music is what counts, I turn to a different aspect of the volume. Was it original? Joyce liked to appear before his city, his people, and his rivals as original: to upstage them with a display of easy intercourse with men of whom they had never heard but who were apparently Masters. But though the surprise performances of his youth came off, and though in his ultimate achievement he was so immensely original, he was not original at every moment of his progress. When, for example, he transposed Verlaine into Poem "XXXV" of Chamber Music he chose precisely the piece that most quickly made an appeal to the common English reader; Arthur Symons' translation of the same piece was to find its way into a popular anthology of world literature. In what might at this distance of sixty years seem to be the novelty of Joyce's affection for the lutesong, he was not novel. He was part of an English movement which has continued for another two generations, giving rise in literature to the sestinas and villanelles of the thirties, and in music to the revival of the sixteenth and seventeenth century composers and their forms and temper, and especially to the work of Benjamin Britten. He was not at the root of the movement. He was an offshoot from the main stem. The movement was a generation old when he published Chamber Music.

An essay by Francis Hueffer (father of Ford Madox Hueffer) is a useful signpost to the enquirer. In Macmillan's Magazine, November, 1880, Hueffer wrote on "Troubadours, Ancient and Modern." His modern troubadours were younger poets of the epoch, engaged in writing "rondeaux and roundels, villanelles and triolets." He named Arthur O'Shaughnessy, John Payne, E. W. Gosse, T. Marzials, Andrew Lang, Austin Dobson, and Mary Robinson, and quoted a triolet by Robert Bridges. During the two decades following his article, these troubadours were joined by others, including the Irishman whom Joyce regarded with some passion, Oscar Wilde.

So when Stephen, awaking towards dawn in a suffusion of music, experiences the word made flesh in the rhythmic recapitulations of the villanelle, he is not the first rediscoverer of the delight of this antique form. It is a glowing villanelle that he composes, shot with a romantic ardour. He fills the form with his own melody and movement. But in his choice of the form the innovator-to-be is not yet an innovator.

How another Irishman, who was as dexterous and virtuous with poetry as Joyce was to be with prose, could draw on the troubadour fashion and innovate with it, can be seen by a glance at three poems written by Yeats in three well-separated and markedly contrasting periods of his career. Among the perfect poems of The Wind among the Reeds is "He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven." There Yeats borrows from the modern troubadours by hinting, scarcely hinting, at their recurring phrases, and assimilates their method to his twilight style. Twenty years later he writes lines in which "I would be ignorant as the dawn" recurs as if in a rondeau, but grows to the surprise of "Ignorant and wanton as the dawn" (the rondeau is transformed by the Yeatsian dynamic). Twenty years later still, he writes the Crazy Jane sequence and the cognate ballads that depend on a refrain—thus assimilating the troubadour convention to the interclashing violence and tenderness of his final art. Feigning in his early days, when the troubadours were most the mode, to stand apart and to leave their exercises to his less profound friends among the rhymers, Yeats in fact stole their recapitulations and refrains, and stole with genius to add to his technical resources.

My impression of the relationship between Yeats and Joyce, while close to that proposed by W. Y. Tindall in his preface and notes to the Columbia University Press edition of Chamber Music, differs a little from his, and particularly on a point of rhyme. The note to Poem "XXVIII" urges that Yeats inaugurated the technical experiments of his middle life, especially his experiments in distant and as I would say felicitous rhyme, or as Prof. Tindall says, "bad" rhyme, under the stimulus of Chamber Music. The argument is persuasively put, yet I am not quite persuaded. It is true that the rhymes of Chamber Music ring now and then like those of the later Yeats. In particular Joyce is successful, like Yeats, in rhyming monosyllable and plurisyllable. But there were already such rhymes in "To Ireland in the Coming Times." As for distant rhymes, the poet who had written "The Song of Wandering Aengus," in which an exquisite series of consonantal rhymes, "wood," "wand," "wing," threads the familiar vowel rhymes, did not need to learn the skill from Joyce. What he had to learn and did supremely learn from Joyce in due season was to face the real world: to face those "things uncomely and broken," by which he had been shocked in the nineties when they "wronged" his image of ideal beauty. But he could not learn that from Chamber Music, whose troubadour, another idealizer as troubadours are, had still to teach himself the lesson.

For the technique of lyric, Joyce was entirely willing to go to school with Yeats. He marvellously renders homage to Yeats the technician in the passage of A Portrait which recalls the playing of The Countess Cathleen in Dublin, the jeering incomprehension of Stephen's fellow students, and Stephen's enchantment. "A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal and soft low swooning cry":—that is his experience of Yeats' dramatic verse. The metrical modulations of Chamber Music must at least have been encouraged by the iamb-qualifying metrics of The Wind among the Reeds and Aleel's songs in The Countess Cathleen. What is striking, perhaps, is that Joyce could incorporate the metrical lessons of Yeats without any of the more obvious signs of imitation. He liked to dissemble his debts to his immediate elders, at least if they shared the same language. Although the lyrics of Chamber Music are modern troubadour songs, they avoid a too evident association with the movement: there is not a roundel or villanelle among them; yet to the eye of the historian certain usages (the prohibition "O bend no more," and the exploitation of the adaptable noun "ways") clearly connect them with the villanelle of A Portrait. Joyce prefers the Shakespearean or Jonsonian song to differentiate himself from the Dobsons; and to imply, perhaps, that refrains are obstacles for schoolboys, relatively easy for a poet to leap, and that he will do the harder thing, meet the demands of an archaic form "free and living." By the same step he differentiates himself from Yeats. When Yeats heard some of the early Joyce poems in the autumn of 1902 he was amazed at their technique: "… much better than the technique of any young Dublin man I have met during my time. It might have been the work of a young man who had lived in an Oxford literary set." That last sentence is not ironic. It means that he saw the poems as an exacting development of the modern troubadouring of England. It also means that the form had beguiled him into overlooking his own influence, which he would have recognized in Irish forms or themes or in the smoke of theosophical imagery.

But of course the form was not chosen for the sake of concealment. That was an incidental benefit. It was chosen because it belonged to a Weltanschauung, a stance, a "style" of life. In plotting the relative unoriginality of the "modern troubadour" form, I have no intention of depreciating its value or the function or the value of the Joycean stance. The archaic lyricist was an essential part of Joyce and his work.

An essential half. There were two Joyces: the lyrical and the satirical; the singer and the clown. At the beginning of his writing life they were well-split halves: he was the complete schizophrene. The personality ascendant in Chamber Music was the courtier, the punctualist, the grave and dainty singer. The other personality was the obscenist, the ribald rapscallion, the brayer. In Joyce's outward daily behaviour at twenty-two the latter seems to have been better-known to the Dubliners (though Stanislaus tells of his craving for good manners even then). As he grew older the courtier became the conductor of his living; he would let no one outvie him in etiquette. The movement in his works was towards the ascendancy of the rollicker. But not, I hasten to add, to the exclusion of the lyricist. That is the subject of my story.

Thanks to Richard Ellmann's scholarship, we have a document which tells us a great deal about both personalities and their goings-on and gettings-together. It is the Giacomo Joyce notebook of the last prewar period in Trieste. At once lachrymose and animated, it helps to explain the lifelong survival of the Courtier in Joyce, and accordingly his role in Chamber Music.

We may sometimes ask ourselves why so stern a literary critic as Joyce permitted himself his luteplaying, and the idealizing daintiness to which Ellmann, nearly as stern, has attached the damning label "prettified." Giacomo Joyce shows that the literary critic knew the limitations of the style but also discerned a value at its core:

Jan Pieters Sweelink. The quaint name of the old Dutch musician makes all beauty seem quaint and far. I hear his variations for the clavichord on an old air: Youth has an end. In the vague mist of old sounds a faint point of light appears: the speech of the soul is about to be heard.

The limitations are the distance and faintness of the revelation. The justification is, that the revelation comes: "the speech of the soul."

Written some ten years after the Chamber Music songs, Giacomo Joyce makes use more explicitly than they of an old-world setting and old-world locutions. Joyce transposes Amalia Popper's home across five centuries: "Wintry air in the castle, gibbeted coats of mail …" A servant interrupts the lesson with the announcement of a visitor: "There is one below would speak with your ladyship." On a later occasion Joyce seeks (but in the safe realm of interior dialogue) a rapport with Amalia, and when she apparently trembles before his adult approach he reassures her in a lutanist's phrase: "Nay, be not afraid." Later still he fancies that he has possessed her in a wordless, touchless interpenetration of looks, and accepts that as the most consummate of all possible conquests and resigns the physical Amalia to any lucky later-comer: "Take her now who will!" Listen to these phrases with not a troubadour's but a theatre-goer's sensibility, and you may contend that they are lifted from the dialogue of Victorian melodrama. There was certainly the oddest communication in the Joycean memory-chambers between the refined-and-archaic and the Victorian-and-plush. But it is evident from his castle scenery that he himself dated his language and stance as antique. That "elegant and antique phrase," which he had made as if to abjure in Poem "XXVII" of Chamber Music, alleging that he knew that the reality of love was different from the troubadour's ideal, he still uttered. It was irrepressible and indispensable.

However, the lyric gentleman who was the soliloquist of Chamber Music no longer has matters all to himself in 1913. The Other Joyce interrupts, halloos, heckles, and more and more asserts his counterstrain. Lyric twists into comedy. "Love me, love my umbrella." The two personae compete for the stage. If the graver affects to be alone, the Other cavorts around him and pokes him with bum and truncheon. This is a decisive development. The notebook drives a road towards Ulysses.

In Ulysses Joyce makes a masterpiece out of the cooperation of his two selves. As the current lore of our mid-twentieth-century tells, the schizophrene who elevates his conflict into art does it not by slaying either of the partners but by bringing them into a relationship where both live and fulfill themselves in a totality that is greater than their sum. The multifarious power of Ulysses arises from the integration of the Two Joyces, the coordination of what they both know and their different ways of saying it. The ribald comedian gets his heroic fling, and the lyricist still discourses in a flow of music. The vision opens, clearer, nearer. Tributes have been paid, as they must be, to the comedian as the vision-bidder. Our concern here is with Orpheus and his lute as visionary and instrument of the vision. Of course, the music of the epic is often rich beyond the dainty range of Chamber Music: "Yes, bronze from anear, by gold from afar, heard steel from anear, hoofs ring from afar …" But when Joyce wishes most precisely to elicit "the speech of the soul," he still uses the simplest lyrical phrase. So as he approaches the culmination of Molly's monologue: "he said I was a flower of the mountain." If we turn to that and look at it in a ruthless mood, we may feel not unfamiliar qualms about the suspension of Joyce's literary censorship. Has he relaxed the control when he should have exerted it sternly? He does not think so. He is working at full stretch here, and if he employs the lyrical method it is because he believes in it. He expects us not to turn and look at the phrase, but to come to it on the tide of continuous reading: to understand the style by going all the way with him through the vicissitudes in which it inheres; and thus to feel it and hear it as he does.

An event in the history of Chamber Music connects alike with the occurrence of that lyric phrase at the climax of Ulysses and with the whole problem of Joyce's valuation of his lyrical self. During the crisis of 1909 when Joyce fell victim to Cosgrave's slander of Nora and wrote to her in agonized abuse, then feared that he had destroyed his contact with her and that he would never repossess the pleasure and nourishment of her tenderness unless he could undo his outburst, one of his gestures of propitiation was to quote Chamber Music to her. And she, astonishingly, took up the volume and read it. He did not pretend that he had written the poems for her. On the contrary he admitted that they were conceived for an imaginary ceremonious lady of a tower: "a girl fashioned into a curious grave beauty by the culture of generations before her." By contrast Nora was, as we can see at this distance, Reality, earthy and sound, a physical wife, a healing force. Yet the poems were for Nora, he went on to say, because there was "something in you higher than anything I had put into them." Joyce was sure, and remained sure long after his love had "waxed all too wise," that in Real Woman there springs the point of light or the point of life or a flower, and that Real Woman longs for its recognition and for a man's worship of it. Molly, after she has had her romp with the large Blazes Boylan, still cares for Bloom because he feels for her and for all women with this lyric intuition:

… yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is …

In 1909 it helped Joyce to expunge his mistake and win Nora back when the poems of Chamber Music reminded his wife that he "understood or felt what a woman is." They reminded her not by saying it, but singing it.

The episode may have confirmed to Joyce that the Chamber Music poems secrete the light of reality at the core of their idealism, and that song is the most compelling testimony of life, that the lyrical method must never be dropped. It might be enriched, but not dropped.

Wherever Joyce strove, and he strove persistently, to broach the light of reality, he relied on music. We can never go towards that point of light. It will recede if we press forward. It can only grow towards us, and will only come if beckoned, conjured—and can best be conjured by music. Joyce had been impressed, say Mason and Ellmann in their notes to The Critical Writings, by the last line in Verlaine's "Art Poétique": "Et tout le reste est littérature." It may be so; but he was more impressed by the first line: "De la musique avant toute chose." It was his own innate conviction, his own innate practice. We are always impressed to find that we are right to do what we do.

"The speech of the soul" formed in the vague mist of antique music, but the flower of Ulysses was Molly's body, not her soul. As the singer and the obscenist coalesced and Joyce's art strengthened, the speech of the soul became the song of the earth. In the last opus, Finnegans Wake, the world speaks: its rivers, its thunder. Since the effects of a major book spread in ripples through the ensuing decades, it has naturally followed that the better entertainment of our present time listens for the music of the world. An instance is the scene in Fellini's La Dolce Vita in which the tape-recorder, in the elegant room in Rome, plays back the menacing eddies of the cosmic winds.

To revisit Chamber Music with that outcome of the opera in mind is to seek the first tape of the speech of the soul which is also the first tape of the world-voice. Joyce recorded it in Poem "XXXIV." As he told Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer, the composer who set the song, Poem "XXXIV" is dramatically the last of the sequence ("XXXV" and "XXXVI" are tailpieces). Two forces are registered: the winter that menaces outside the door and forbids rest; the breathing of the sleep of a heart soothed by a poet's gentleness. The melancholy of the cosmic winter drifts through the music, but there is a lulling countermotion, a berceuse, the warmth, the protection of the pleasure of art; and the music involves, however faintly felt, faintly heard, an equilibrium of the two forces, the two rhythms. There are four vocative "O"s in this short poem. They are unnecessary to the meaning, almost unnecessary to the metre, for the poem would be metrically sufficient without them; but they are right for the music. A composer, and a singer, would make something of them. When the music comes to life in us in the days after the reading, they play their part.

The music of Poem "XXXIV," faint but haunting, grows into the winter rhapsody of the last paragraph of "The Dead," with which Joyce begins to realize his orchestral powers. Then the maturation of a quarter of a century goes forward. In Chamber Music the paucity of the success, it has been suggested, lies in the paucity of the sense. In the subsequent books the sense gains in body. It engages the intellect in its own right in Dubliners and A Portrait, perhaps occasionally over-engages it to the neglect of the musical flow. In Ulysses there is the most satisfying interplay of sense and sound. But in certain sections of Ulysses, and in the whole of Finnegans Wake to which they look forward, a curious thing happens. "The sense must be the medium of the sound"; but Joyce plaits layer on layer of sense; and that almost defeats his purpose; not perhaps by his fault, but by our habits, which, however, he might have forseen. We are readers of literature, not listeners to music. We are much, much worse than our ancestors, of whom Ben Jonson bitterly complained that they were beginning to use their eyes and stop their ears. We are eye-folk on the verge of deafness. The glaucomatic Joyce was not. With Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton he was all inclining ear. We go to work with our eyes on Finnegans Wake, as the spelling tempts us to, laboring to analyze the layers of sense into their components. It is salutary to turn repeatedly to the letter in which Joyce tells Miss Weaver that he is "considerably wound up" after proofreading Anna Livia Plurabelle, that the "sing-song" fills his addled head, and that till it fades he cannot deal with the news of the day. To be filled with the singsong must be the hope of every devotee of Finnegans Wake. We are brought to the right condition whenever we listen to an Irishman reading the work, or anyone reading it with the resources of the tenor voice. These aids failing, we must read it aloud ourselves. Even if we are non-Celts and even if we are crows, the sound will be better than anything the eye alone can afford. Yet though I say this as essential doctrine, I must not make it exclusive doctrine. Since Joyce took the risk of plying his sense closely, he obviously wanted the criss-cross to play a part in the total effect; and it is doubtful whether the ear can pick up half the ambiguities that are within the comprehension of the eye. It may be that Joyce overtaxed the capacity of every reader with so intricate a polyphony of sense and sound. I leave that topic to my wiser colleagues. Assuming ad interim what we like to assume of a master, that he is always right, let us justify him by saying that in Finnegans Wake the musical love of God and the intellectual love of God and the bodily love of God meet and merge.

One last consideration. Joyce presented himself in Chamber Music as a neoclassicist and as a perfectionist who shaped faultless lyrics and assembled them in an impeccable book. Yet the last lyric is ill-chosen if a book of perfect proportions is the objective, and ill-chosen if the objective of the book is consonance. Poem "XXXVI" has been praised to the neglect of the preceding thirty-five. It is a good poem. But it is not archaic, and it is not chamber music. It works in a style with which Yeats had experimented in "Do you not hear me calling" and "I hear the white horses," a style far from softness or daintiness, a style that bids for the furious energy of the horses of passion, a style that, regardless of all daedalian animad-versions on the Celtic Revival, draws on the imagery of the Red Branch and the battlecars. How are we to account for its presence after Poem "XXXIV" and that perfect winter ending? We may contrive this reason: that Poems "XXXV" and "XXXVI" go on to register sharply the hostility of the winter, of the outer elements, within which Joyce had quietened his love to her long sleep. More, it registers the terror within the beauty, that violence in the cosmos, which lady and poet who lean their ear for the lovely sounds of the world will catch in the undersong—catch and lose and never cease to lean for till they have caught it again and notated what the sea murmurs and the thunder says. By this argument we may claim that the final poems issue organically from the volume, though as a disproportionate and fearsome cauda or coda. But we must add another reason. Joyce and his brother, who helped him to arrange the volume, subordinated their sense of perfection to a romantic passion from which neither they nor some of their foremost neoclassical coevals, including T. S. Eliot, were free: the love of the grand curtain. George Moore was, for better or worse, more genuinely neoclassical: he deliberately cultivated the "minor" ending, the dying fall. In this matter Joyce was romantic and Wagnerian. Dubliners culminates in "The Dead," extensive beyond any of the preceding stories, resonant beyond any of them, its own end soaring away from Dublin. A Portrait is formally neoclassical, touched with the sense of the downbeat ending as the narrative cracks into fragments of diary, utterly right to convey approaching departure and the disconnecting of the son, tissue by tissue, from the boyd of home; but emotionally it is romantic, fervidly charged with the ritual of self-dedication and intimations of immortality. Ulysses is the most famous example in literature of the concentration of every power in the final chapter and the unremitting amplification of the power through the last page and the last word. The final page of Finnegans Wake is correspondingly intense, cosmic, Wagnerian. But here, for his last bow, Joyce pulls one new trick from his reserves and exhilaratingly synthesizes his romantic and neoclassical modes: the purple curtain, seeming to descend on a Liebestod, suddenly furls back again, and by a dream-transformation everything is where it was at the start, and death is birth and there is no end but resumption. The final page of Finnegans Wake does on the largest scale what the lyrics of Chamber Music do in miniature, loops back to the first line. A nice example of the consistency and unity of Joyce's art.