ABSTRACT
That he would regard it as formless seems certain: yet its form is almost pedantically determined. There is a real sense in which Ulysses fails, in which its author has bitten off more than he can chew: but his effort has enlarged the scope of the novelist’s art. He has not been content with a success inside the accepted limits: he has preferred to fail, if fail he must, on the scale of Tolstoi. James’s objection to War and Peace was not that it tried to do too much, but that Tolstoi did not succeed in carrying out what ought to have been his aim with regard to his material. He did not proceed by the laws James thought essential. A super-Tolstoi might have brought the thing off; but such a being was unlikely. To the aim of Ulysses he would probably have made a similar objection; but he might well have decided in addition that Joyce was trying to do too much. With all his subtlety, he might have shrunk from so vast a curiosity, such merciless pursuit of the human mind to its depths. He would have hated the book’s enormous superstition and have been shaken by its coarseness, all the more because he would have unerringly realised the fastidious writhing mind at the back of it. Seeing all this, he would simply not have understood it.
