ABSTRACT
Some fragments of another work of genius which Mr. James Joyce is slowly perfecting have been published in London. They show him as a fashioner or creator and transformer of language. He continues on a great scale the method of Lewis Carroll. Not infrequently he employs the metathesis system which the Oxford undergraduates so long and affectionately attributed to Dr. Spooner. But his new strange tongue is not the perfume and suppliance of a moment. It is constant, elaborate, voluminous. The beginner has no trouble with such simplicities as ‘weight a momentum’; but there must be at least 160 seconds in a minute before we can read at sight a passage like this, cited by the Spectator and apparently relating to the operation of describing ‘an aquillitoral dryangle on a given strayed line’. The theme is easy, but some of the language surprises by himself. . . .
