One thinks of Homer

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Lady Gregory helped Joyce by recommending him as a journalistic reviewer of books, but that was nothing compared to the substantial assistance she gave to Yeats, thirteen years her junior and considerably less affluent. After meeting him in 1896 she gave him money, loaned him more, put him up in her house at Coole Park for months on end to give him uninterrupted writing time, commissioned his father John Butler Yeats to paint portraits of Irish writers, bought paintings done by his brother Jack Yeats, and doled out gifts to Æ and other close acquaintances.

Yeats reciprocated by supporting Gregory's own literary efforts. At first, she recalled, he "was slow in coming to believe I had any gift for writing, and he would not encourage me to it, thinking he made better use of my folk-lore gatherings than I could do.” But when she published a collection of legends translated from the Ulster cycle, Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster (1902), Yeats agreed to write a preface and declared at its outset, "I think this book is the best that has come out of Ireland in my time. Perhaps I should say that it is the best book that has ever come out of Ireland; for the stories which it tells are a chief part of Ireland's gift to the imagination of the world––and it tells them perfectly for the first time." Yeats said nothing of the epic magnificence of "Homer," but Mulligan only slightly exaggerates what he did say: "When she has added her translations from other cycles, she will have given Ireland its Mabinogion, its Morte d'Arthur, its Nibelungenlied."

The Celtic Twilight held little allure for Joyce; nor did the mutual congratulations of the writers of the Irish Literary Revival. In the library chapter he shows Stephen being skeptically regarded by people like A.E., excluded from the literary salon taking place later in the day at George Moore's house, and generally disesteemed. Class no doubt played a part in this antipathy: most of the Revival writers were Anglo-Irish Protestants. Moore, born into a landed family, converted from Catholicism in 1903. Gogarty, born into an upper-middle-class Catholic family, thrived at Trinity and spent a term at Oxford. Yeats, Æ, Synge, Hyde, and Gregory were all raised in the Protestant faith. Although Joyce benefited from Yeats's kindly assistance on several occasions, he manages to make Yeats's urbane graciousness toward his own patron sound like sycophantish toadyism in Mulligan's mocking mouth. But there is something more than resentment operating in his echo of the Preface to Cuchulain, strong as that unsavory element may be.

Earlier in Scylla and Charybdis Stephen has listened to his fellow writers buzzing with excitement about which of them may publish something to rival Don Quixote: "I liked Colum's Drover. Yes, I think he has that queer thing genius. Do you think he has genius really? Yeats admired his line: As in wild earth a Grecian vase. Did he? I hope you'll be able to come tonight. Malachi Mulligan is coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did you hear Miss Mitchell's joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn's wild oats? Awfully clever, isn't it? They remind one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O'Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens is doing some clever sketches. We are becoming important, it seems."

Irish literature truly became important in 1922 with the publication of its "national epic," Ulysses, a book whose title invites the comparison that Mulligan ridicules: "One thinks of Homer." Comparisons to Homer are a perilous business, as Charles Hughes Terrot discovered after he wrote a line in Common Sense praising Robert Southey: "Thou shalt be read, when Homer is forgotten." Lord Byron, an inveterate despiser of Southey's verse, brilliantly replied: "Southey will be read when Homer is forgotten. And not till then." Mulligan aims to perform a similar takedown of Yeats and Lady Gregory, but Joyce conceals in his hyperbolic sentence a nod to the nature of Ulysses and a prediction that he will prove to be the greatest Irish writer, greater than Moore, Yeats, or Synge, someone to rank beside Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare.