A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
—To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most
satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the
necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the
qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: _Ad pulcritudinem tria
requiruntur integritas, consonantia, claritas._ I translate it so:
_Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance._
Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?
—Of course, I am, said Lynch. If you think I have an excrementitious
intelligence run after Donovan and ask him to listen to you.
Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher’s boy had slung inverted on
his head.
—Look at that basket, he said.
—I see it, said Lynch.
—In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all
separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not
the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn
about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to
us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time,
what is visible is presented in space. But temporal or spatial, the
esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and
selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which
is not it. You apprehended it as _one_ thing. You see it as one whole.
You apprehend its wholeness. That is _integritas._
—Bull’s eye! said Lynch, laughing. Go on.
—Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal
lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its
limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the
synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of
apprehension. Having first felt that it is _one_ thing you feel now
that it is a _thing_. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible,
separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum,
harmonious. That is _consonantia_.
—Bull’s eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is _claritas_
and you win the cigar.
—The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas
uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time.
It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism,
the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the
idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is
but the symbol. I thought he might mean that _claritas_ is the artistic
discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a
force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universal
one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk.
I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing
and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a
thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically
permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other
thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic _quidditas_,
the _whatness_ of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist
when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind
in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading
coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear
radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind
which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony
is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state
very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist
Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called
the enchantment of the heart.
Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his
words had called up around them a thought-enchanted silence.
—What I have said, he began again, refers to beauty in the wider sense
of the word, in the sense which the word has in the literary tradition.
In the marketplace it has another sense. When we speak of beauty in the
second sense of the term our judgement is influenced in the first place
by the art itself and by the form of that art. The image, it is clear,
must be set between the mind or senses of the artist himself and the
mind or senses of others. If you bear this in memory you will see that
art necessarily divides itself into three forms progressing from one to
the next. These forms are: the lyrical form, the form wherein the
artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the epical
form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to
himself and to others; the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents
his image in immediate relation to others.
—That you told me a few nights ago, said Lynch, and we began the famous
discussion.
—I have a book at home, said Stephen, in which I have written down
questions which are more amusing than yours were. In finding the
answers to them I found the theory of esthetic which I am trying to
explain. Here are some questions I set myself: _Is a chair finely made
tragic or comic? Is the portrait of Mona Lisa good if I desire to see
it? Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical, epical or dramatic. If
not, why not?_
—Why not, indeed? said Lynch, laughing.
—_If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood,_ Stephen continued,
_make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why
not?_
—That’s a lovely one, said Lynch, laughing again. That has the true
scholastic stink.
—Lessing, said Stephen, should not have taken a group of statues to
write of. The art, being inferior, does not present the forms I spoke
of distinguished clearly one from another. Even in literature, the
highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The
lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of
emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who
pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is
more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling
emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical
literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the
centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of
emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from
others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of
the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round
the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see
easily in that old English ballad _Turpin Hero,_ which begins in the
first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached
when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills
every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and
intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry
or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally
refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak.
The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and
reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like
that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of
creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork,
invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his
fingernails.
—Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch.
A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned into
the duke’s lawn to reach the national library before the shower came.
—What do you mean, Lynch asked surlily, by prating about beauty and the
imagination in this miserable Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist
retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this
country.
The rain fell faster. When they passed through the passage beside
Kildare house they found many students sheltering under the arcade of
the library. Cranly, leaning against a pillar, was picking his teeth
with a sharpened match, listening to some companions. Some girls stood
near the entrance door. Lynch whispered to Stephen:
—Your beloved is here.
Stephen took his place silently on the step below the group of
students, heedless of the rain which fell fast, turning his eyes
towards her from time to time. She too stood silently among her
companions. She has no priest to flirt with, he thought with conscious
bitterness, remembering how he had seen her last. Lynch was right. His
mind emptied of theory and courage, lapsed back into a listless peace.
He heard the students talking among themselves. They spoke of two
friends who had passed the final medical examination, of the chances of
getting places on ocean liners, of poor and rich practices.
—That’s all a bubble. An Irish country practice is better.
—Hynes was two years in Liverpool and he says the same. A frightful
hole he said it was. Nothing but midwifery cases.
—Do you mean to say it is better to have a job here in the country than
in a rich city like that? I know a fellow...
—Hynes has no brains. He got through by stewing, pure stewing.
—Don’t mind him. There’s plenty of money to be made in a big commercial
city.
—Depends on the practice.
—_Ego credo ut vita pauperum est simpliciter atrox, simpliciter
sanguinarius atrox, in Liverpoolio._
Their voices reached his ears as if from a distance in interrupted
pulsation. She was preparing to go away with her companions.
The quick light shower had drawn off, tarrying in clusters of diamonds
among the shrubs of the quadrangle where an exhalation was breathed
forth by the blackened earth. Their trim boots prattled as they stood
on the steps of the colonnade, talking quietly and gaily, glancing at
the clouds, holding their umbrellas at cunning angles against the few
last raindrops, closing them again, holding their skirts demurely.
And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of
hours, her life simple and strange as a bird’s life, gay in the
morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and
wilful as a bird’s heart?
Towards dawn he awoke. O what sweet music! His soul was all dewy wet.
Over his limbs in sleep pale cool waves of light had passed. He lay
still, as if his soul lay amid cool waters, conscious of faint sweet
music. His mind was waking slowly to a tremulous morning knowledge, a
morning inspiration. A spirit filled him, pure as the purest water,
sweet as dew, moving as music. But how faintly it was inbreathed, how
passionlessly, as if the seraphim themselves were breathing upon him!
His soul was waking slowly, fearing to awake wholly. It was that
windless hour of dawn when madness wakes and strange plants open to the
light and the moth flies forth silently.
An enchantment of the heart! The night had been enchanted. In a dream
or vision he had known the ecstasy of seraphic life. Was it an instant
of enchantment only or long hours and years and ages?
The instant of inspiration seemed now to be reflected from all sides at
once from a multitude of cloudy circumstances of what had happened or
of what might have happened. The instant flashed forth like a point of
light and now from cloud on cloud of vague circumstance confused form
was veiling softly its afterglow. O! In the virgin womb of the
imagination the word was made flesh. Gabriel the seraph had come to the
virgin’s chamber. An afterglow deepened within his spirit, whence the
white flame had passed, deepening to a rose and ardent light. That rose
and ardent light was her strange wilful heart, strange that no man had
known or would know, wilful from before the beginning of the world; and
lured by that ardent roselike glow the choirs of the seraphim were
falling from heaven.