hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the musichall song, France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarmé but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer’s Phæacians.
From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.
―Mallarmé, don’t you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about Hamlet . He says: il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même , don’t you know, reading the book of himself. He describes Hamlet given in a French town, don’t you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.
His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.
Hamlet ou Le Distrait Pièce de Shakespeare
He repeated to John Eglinton’s newgathered frown:
― Pièce de Shakespeare , don’t you know. It’s so French, the French point of view. Hamlet ou …
―The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended.
John Eglinton laughed.
―Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but distressingly shortsighted in some matters.
Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.
―A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not for nothing was he a butcher’s son wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palm. Nine lives are taken off for his father’s one, Our