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250 / A M E S [ 1907 ]beauty, and passion; he feels close also to her dead lover, another lambburnt on her altar, though she too is burnt now; he feels no resentment,only pity. In his own sacrifice of himself he is conscious of a melancholyunity between the living and the dead.Gabriel, who has been sick of his own country, findshimself drawninevitably into a silent tribute to it of much more consequence than hisspoken tribute to the party. He has had illusions of the Tightness of a wayof life that should be outside of Ireland; but through this experience withhis wife he grants a kind of bondage, of acceptance, even of admirationto a part of the country and a way of life that are most Irish. Ireland isshown to be stronger, more intense than he. At the end of A Portrait ofthe Artist, too, Stephen Dedalus, who has been so resolutely opposed tonationalism, makes a similar concession when he interprets his departurefrom Ireland as an attempt to forge a conscience for his race.Joyce did not invent the incidents that conclude his story, the secondhoneymoon of Gabriel and Gretta which ends so badly. His method ofcomposition was very like T. S. Eliot's, the imaginative absorption ofstray material. The method did not please Joyce very much because heconsidered it not imaginative enough, but it was the only way he couldwork. He borrowed the ending for 'The Dead' from another book. In thatbook a bridal couple receive, on their wedding night, a message that ayoung woman whom the husband jilted has just committed suicide. Thenews holds them apart, she asks him not to kiss her, and both are tormentedby remorse. The wife, her marriage unconsummated, falls off atlast to sleep, and her husband goes to the window and looks out at 'themelancholy greyness of the dawn.' For the firsttime he recognizes, withthe force of a revelation, that his life is a failure, and that his wife lacksthe passion of the girl who has killed herself. He resolves that, since heis not worthy of any more momentous career, he will try at least to makeher happy. Here surely is the situation that Joyce so adroitly recomposed.The dead lover who comes between the lovers, the sense of the husband'sfailure, the acceptance of mediocrity, the resolve to be at all events sympathetic,all come from the other book. But Joyce transforms them. Forexample, he allows Gretta to kiss her husband, but without desire, andrarefies the situation by having it arise not from a suicide but from amemory of young love. The book Joyce was borrowing from was one thatnobody reads any more, George Moore's Vain Fortune; but Joyce readit,* and in his youthful essay, 'The Day of the Rabblement,' overpraisedit as 'fine, original work.' 21Moore said nothing about snow, however. No one can know howJoyce conceived the joining of Gabriel's finalexperience with the snow.But his fondness for a background of this kind is also illustrated by his* He evidently refreshed his memory of it when writing 'The Dead.' His copy of VainFortune is now at Yale.