ABSTRACT

Pride, contempt, ambition: these were the three qualities that disengaged themselves from all his writings. Toward the end of A Portrait of the Artist they stand forth most clearly…. He had pride, contempt, ambition-and these are the qualities which continue to stand forth clearly from Ulysses. Here once more is the pride of Stephen Dedalus that raises itself above the Dublin public and especially above the Dublin intellectual public as represented by Buck Mulligan; here is the author’s contempt for the world and for his readers-like a host being deliberately rude to his guests, he makes no concession to their capacity for attention or their power of understanding; and here is an ambition willing to measure itself, not against any novelist of its age, not against any writer belonging to a modern national literature, but with the arch-poet of the European race.