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394 J A M E S [ 1915-1916 ]to add dignity to it, he said more than once to Weiss, 'You know, thewords are taken from Ossian.'Their talk often turned to political science and literature. Weiss toldJoyce of Montesquieu's theory that political institutions were inevitablythe special product of local conditions. Joyce was uniformly skeptical andironical about all such theories, although some of them made an appearancein Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Weiss made an unsuccessful effortto interest Joyce in the writings of Gottfried Keller, assuring him theywould make him look at Zurichers as less stolid. Joyce did not respond,perhaps because he found Keller technically conventional; but when areviewer compared Keller's Der Griine Heinrich to A Portrait of the Artist,he evinced more attention, and later he translated some of Keller'spoems into English. For the moment, however, literature in German didnot attract him, and he scoffed even at Goethe as 'un noioso funzionario'(a boring civil servant).In the course of their conversations Weiss was able to persuade Joyce,who was physically lazy and said that every room should have a bed init, to take long walks up the Uitliberg and Zurichberg, or along the laketo Kusnacht. Once they were coming down the Uitliberg when they caughtup with two youngsters who were trying to push a heavy cart. Weisshelped them and Joyce, not to be outdone, said, i will help you too.'He took his thin walking stick, placed it on the cart, and walked with anair of great co-operation beside them.*Sometimes during their walks a storm broke out, and at such momentsJoyce's panic was comic. When a friend asked him, i suppose thunderaffects your nervous system, Mr. Joyce?' he replied, 'No, I'm frightened.'Weiss, to reassure and divert him, told him funny stories about thunderstorms.But Joyce was not amused; thunder was not to be joked about.Every house, he solemnly lectured his friends, should be equipped withlightning protectors. The subject roused him to eloquence.He got along easily with Weiss's student friends, for he comportedhimself as youthfully as they did. No one could laugh more wholeheartedlyor more infectiously. On one occasion he came to tea in Weiss'srooms and was introduced to two of his fellow-students. The animatedconversation was in French, and in the course of it Joyce told them howtwo diplomats in Brussels had tried to discomfit the cultured ArchbishopPecci, then papal nuncio to Belgium and later Pope Leo XIII. Theyapproached him with a tabatiere of ebony on which a nude woman was* Joyce soon epitomized his attitude towards long hikes in a limerick about another friend:There is a keen climber called SykesWho goes scrambling through ditches and dykesTo skate on his scalpDown the side of an alpIs the kind of diversion he likes. 13