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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A

The entrance hall was crowded and loud with talk. On a table near the door were two photographs in frames and between them a long roll of paper bearing an irregular tail of signatures. MacCann went briskly to and fro among the students, talking rapidly, answering rebuffs and leading one after another to the table. In the inner hall the dean of studies stood talking to a young professor, stroking his chin gravely and nodding his head. Stephen, checked by the crowd at the door, halted irresolutely. From under the wide falling leaf of a soft hat Cranly's dark eyes were watching him. —Have you signed? Stephen asked. Cranly closed his long thin-lipped mouth, communed with himself an instant and answered: —EGO HABEO. —What is it for? —QUOD? —What is it for? Cranly turned his pale face to Stephen and said blandly and bitterly: —PER PAX UNIVERSALIS. Stephen pointed to the Tsar's photograph and said: —He has the face of a besotted Christ. The scorn and anger in his voice brought Cranly's eyes back from a calm survey of the walls of the hall. —Are you annoyed? he asked. —No, answered Stephen. —Are you in bad humour? —No. —CREDO UT VOS SANGUINARIUS MENDAX ESTIS, said Cranly, QUIA FACIES VOSTRA MONSTRAT UT VOS IN DAMNO MALO HUMORE ESTIS. Moynihan, on his way to the table, said in Stephen's ear: —MacCann is in tiptop form. Ready to shed the last drop. Brand new world. No stimulants and votes for the bitches. Stephen smiled at the manner of this confidence and, when Moynihan had passed, turned again to meet Cranly's eyes. —Perhaps you can tell me, he said, why he pours his soul so freely into my ear. Can you? A dull scowl appeared on Cranly's forehead. He stared at the table where Moynihan had bent to write his name on the roll, and then said flatly: —A sugar! —QUIS EST IN MALO HUMORE, said Stephen, EGO AUT VOS? Cranly did not take up the taunt. He brooded sourly on his judgement and repeated with the same flat force: —A flaming bloody sugar, that's what he is! It was his epitaph for all dead friendships and Stephen wondered whether it would ever be spoken in the same tone over his memory. The heavy lumpish phrase sank slowly out of hearing like a stone through a quagmire. Stephen saw it sink as he had seen many another, feeling its heaviness depress his heart. Cranly's speech, unlike that of Davin, had neither rare phrases of Elizabethan English nor quaintly turned versions of Irish idioms. Its drawl was an echo of the quays of Dublin given back by a bleak decaying seaport, its energy an echo of the sacred eloquence of Dublin given back flatly by a Wicklow pulpit. The heavy scowl faded from Cranly's face as MacCann marched briskly towards them from the other side of the hall. —Here you are! said MacCann cheerily. —Here I am! said Stephen. —Late as usual. Can you not combine the progressive tendency with a respect for punctuality? —That question is out of order, said Stephen. Next business. His smiling eyes were fixed on a silver-wrapped tablet of milk chocolate which peeped out of the propagandist's breast-pocket. A little ring of listeners closed round to hear the war of wits. A lean student with olive skin and lank black hair thrust his face between the two, glancing from one to the other at each phrase and seeming to try to catch each flying phrase in his open moist mouth. Cranly took a small grey handball from his pocket and began to examine it closely, turning it over and over. —Next business? said MacCann. Hom! He gave a loud cough of laughter, smiled broadly and tugged twice at the straw-coloured goatee which hung from his blunt chin. —The next business is to sign the testimonial. —Will you pay me anything if I sign? asked Stephen. —I thought you were an idealist, said MacCann. The gipsy-like student looked about him and addressed the onlookers in an indistinct bleating voice. —By hell, that's a queer notion. I consider that notion to be a mercenary notion. His voice faded into silence. No heed was paid to his words. He turned his olive face, equine in expression, towards Stephen, inviting him to speak again. MacCann began to speak with fluent energy of the Tsar's rescript, of Stead, of general disarmament arbitration in cases of international disputes, of the signs of the times, of the new humanity and the new gospel of life which would make it the business of the community to secure as cheaply as possible the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number. The gipsy student responded to the close of the period by crying: —Three cheers for universal brotherhood! —Go on, Temple, said a stout ruddy student near him. I'll stand you a pint after. —I'm a believer in universal brotherhood, said Temple, glancing about him out of his dark oval eyes. Marx is only a bloody cod. Cranly gripped his arm tightly to check his tongue, smiling uneasily, and repeated: —Easy, easy, easy! Temple struggled to free his arm but continued, his mouth flecked by a thin foam: —Socialism was founded by an Irishman and the first man in Europe who preached the freedom of thought was Collins. Two hundred years ago. He denounced priestcraft, the philosopher of Middlesex. Three cheers for John Anthony Collins! A thin voice from the verge of the ring replied: —Pip! pip! Moynihan murmured beside Stephen's ear: —And what about John Anthony's poor little sister: Lottie Collins lost her drawers; Won't you kindly lend her yours? Stephen laughed and Moynihan, pleased with the result, murmured again: —We'll have five bob each way on John Anthony Collins. —I am waiting for your answer, said MacCann briefly. —The affair doesn't interest me in the least, said Stephen wearily. You know that well. Why do you make a scene about it? —Good! said MacCann, smacking his lips. You are a reactionary, then? —Do you think you impress me, Stephen asked, when you flourish your wooden sword? —Metaphors! said MacCann bluntly. Come to facts. Stephen blushed and turned aside. MacCann stood his ground and said with hostile humour: —Minor poets, I suppose, are above such trivial questions as the question of universal peace. Cranly raised his head and held the handball between the two students by way of a peace-offering, saying: —PAX SUPER TOTUM SANGUINARIUM GLOBUM. Stephen, moving away the bystanders, jerked his shoulder angrily in the direction of the Tsar's image, saying: —Keep your icon. If we must have a Jesus let us have a legitimate Jesus. —By hell, that's a good one! said the gipsy student to those about him, that's a fine expression. I like that expression immensely. He gulped down the spittle in his throat as if he were gulping down the phrase and, fumbling at the peak of his tweed cap, turned to Stephen, saying: —Excuse me, sir, what do you mean by that expression you uttered just now? Feeling himself jostled by the students near him, he said to them: —I am curious to know now what he meant by that expression. He turned again to Stephen and said in a whisper: —Do you believe in Jesus? I believe in man. Of course, I don't know if you believe in man. I admire you, sir. I admire the mind of man independent of all religions. Is that your opinion about the mind of Jesus? —Go on, Temple, said the stout ruddy student, returning, as was his wont, to his first idea, that pint is waiting for you. —He thinks I'm an imbecile, Temple explained to Stephen, because I'm a believer in the power of mind. Cranly linked his arms into those of Stephen and his admirer and said: —NOS AD MANUM BALLUM JOCABIMUS. Stephen, in the act of being led away, caught sight of MacCann's flushed blunt-featured face. —My signature is of no account, he said politely. You are right to go your way. Leave me to go mine. —Dedalus, said MacCann crisply, I believe you're a good fellow but you have yet to learn the dignity of altruism and the responsibility of the human individual. A voice said: —Intellectual crankery is better out of this movement than in it. Stephen, recognizing the harsh tone of MacAlister's voice did not turn in the direction of the voice. Cranly pushed solemnly through the throng of students, linking Stephen and Temple like a celebrant attended by his ministers on his way to the altar. Temple bent eagerly across Cranly's breast and said: —Did you hear MacAlister what he said? That youth is jealous of you. Did you see that? I bet Cranly didn't see that. By hell, I saw that at once. As they crossed the inner hall, the dean of studies was in the act of escaping from the student with whom he had been conversing. He stood at the foot of the staircase, a foot on the lowest step, his threadbare soutane gathered about him for the ascent with womanish care, nodding his head often and repeating: —Not a doubt of it, Mr Hackett! Very fine! Not a doubt of it! In the middle of the hall the prefect of the college sodality was speaking earnestly, in a soft querulous voice, with a boarder. As he spoke he wrinkled a little his freckled brow and bit, between his phrases, at a tiny bone pencil. —I hope the matric men will all come. The first arts' men are pretty sure. Second arts, too. We must make sure of the newcomers. Temple bent again across Cranly, as they were passing through the doorway, and said in a swift whisper: —Do you know that he is a married man? he was a married man before they converted him. He has a wife and children somewhere. By hell, I think that's the queerest notion I ever heard! Eh? His whisper trailed off into sly cackling laughter. The moment they were through the doorway Cranly seized him rudely by the neck and shook him, saying: —You flaming floundering fool! I'll take my dying bible there isn't a bigger bloody ape, do you know, than you in the whole flaming bloody world! Temple wriggled in his grip, laughing still with sly content, while Cranly repeated flatly at every rude shake: —A flaming flaring bloody idiot! They crossed the weedy garden together. The president, wrapped in a heavy loose cloak, was coming towards them along one of the walks, reading his office. At the end of the walk he halted before turning and raised his eyes. The students saluted, Temple fumbling as before at the peak of his cap. They walked forward in silence. As they neared the alley Stephen could hear the thuds of the players' hands and the wet smacks of the ball and Davin's voice crying out excitedly at each stroke. The three students halted round the box on which Davin sat to follow the game. Temple, after a few moments, sidled across to Stephen and said: —Excuse me, I wanted to ask you, do you believe that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a sincere man? Stephen laughed outright. Cranly, picking up the broken stave of a cask from the grass at his feet, turned swiftly and said sternly: —Temple, I declare to the living God if you say another word, do you know, to anybody on any subject, I'll kill you SUPER SPOTTUM. —He was like you, I fancy, said Stephen, an emotional man. —Blast him, curse him! said Cranly broadly. Don't talk to him at all. Sure, you might as well be talking, do you know, to a flaming chamber-pot as talking to Temple. Go home, Temple. For God's sake, go home. —I don't care a damn about you, Cranly, answered Temple, moving out of reach of the uplifted stave and pointing at Stephen. He's the only man I see in this institution that has an individual mind. —Institution! Individual! cried Cranly. Go home, blast you, for you're a hopeless bloody man. —I'm an emotional man, said Temple. That's quite rightly expressed. And I'm proud that I'm an emotionalist. He sidled out of the alley, smiling slyly. Cranly watched him with a blank expressionless face. —Look at him! he said. Did you ever see such a go-by-the-wall? His phrase was greeted by a strange laugh from a student who lounged against the wall, his peaked cap down on his eyes. The laugh, pitched in a high key and coming from a so muscular frame, seemed like the whinny of an elephant. The student's body shook all over and, to ease his mirth, he rubbed both his hands delightedly over his groins. —Lynch is awake, said Cranly. Lynch, for answer, straightened himself and thrust forward his chest. —Lynch puts out his chest, said Stephen, as a criticism of life. Lynch smote himself sonorously on the chest and said: —Who has anything to say about my girth? Cranly took him at the word and the two began to tussle. When their faces had flushed with the struggle they drew apart, panting. Stephen bent down towards Davin who, intent on the game, had paid no heed to the talk of the others. —And how is my little tame goose? he asked. Did he sign, too? David nodded and said: —And you, Stevie? Stephen shook his head. —You're a terrible man, Stevie, said Davin, taking the short pipe from his mouth, always alone. —Now that you have signed the petition for universal peace, said Stephen, I suppose you will burn that little copybook I saw in your room. As Davin did not answer, Stephen began to quote: —Long pace, fianna! Right incline, fianna! Fianna, by numbers, salute, one, two! —That's a different question, said Davin. I'm an Irish nationalist, first and foremost. But that's you all out. You're a born sneerer, Stevie. —When you make the next rebellion with hurleysticks, said Stephen, and want the indispensable informer, tell me. I can find you a few in this college. —I can't understand you, said Davin. One time I hear you talk against English literature. Now you talk against the Irish informers. What with your name and your ideas—Are you Irish at all? —Come with me now to the office of arms and I will show you the tree of my family, said Stephen. —Then be one of us, said Davin. Why don't you learn Irish? Why did you drop out of the league class after the first lesson? —You know one reason why, answered Stephen. Davin tossed his head and laughed. —Oh, come now, he said. Is it on account of that certain young lady and Father Moran? But that's all in your own mind, Stevie. They were only talking and laughing. Stephen paused and laid a friendly hand upon Davin's shoulder. —Do you remember, he said, when we knew each other first? The first morning we met you asked me to show you the way to the matriculation class, putting a very strong stress on the first syllable. You remember? Then you used to address the jesuits as father, you remember? I ask myself about you: IS HE AS INNOCENT AS HIS SPEECH? —I'm a simple person, said Davin. You know that. When you told me that night in Harcourt Street those things about your private life, honest to God, Stevie, I was not able to eat my dinner. I was quite bad. I was awake a long time that night. Why did you tell me those things? —Thanks, said Stephen. You mean I am a monster. —No, said Davin. But I wish you had not told me. A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of Stephen's friendliness. —This race and this country and this life produced me, he said I shall express myself as I am. —Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In heart you are an Irish man but your pride is too powerful. —My ancestors threw off their language and took another Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for? —For our freedom, said Davin. —No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I'd see you damned first. —They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet, believe me. Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant. —The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. Davin knocked the ashes from his pipe. —Too deep for me, Stevie, he said. But a man's country comes first. Ireland first, Stevie. You can be a poet or a mystic after. —Do you know what Ireland is? asked Stephen with cold violence. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow. Davin rose from his box and went towards the players, shaking his head sadly. But in a moment his sadness left him and he was hotly disputing with Cranly and the two players who had finished their game. A match of four was arranged, Cranly insisting, however, that his ball should be used. He let it rebound twice or thrice to his hand and struck it strongly and swiftly towards the base of the alley, exclaiming in answer to its thud: —Your soul! Stephen stood with Lynch till the score began to rise. Then he plucked him by the sleeve to come away. Lynch obeyed, saying: —Let us eke go, as Cranly has it. Stephen smiled at this side-thrust. They passed back through the garden and out through the hall where the doddering porter was pinning up a hall notice in the frame. At the foot of the steps they halted and Stephen took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and offered it to his companion. —I know you are poor, he said. —Damn your yellow insolence, answered Lynch. This second proof of Lynch's culture made Stephen smile again. —It was a great day for European culture, he said, when you made up your mind to swear in yellow. They lit their cigarettes and turned to the right. After a pause Stephen began: —Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have. I say— Lynch halted and said bluntly: —Stop! I won't listen! I am sick. I was out last night on a yellow drunk with Horan and Goggins. Stephen went on: —Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause. —Repeat, said Lynch. Stephen repeated the definitions slowly. —A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant. The reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions. —The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word ARREST. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing. —You say that art must not excite desire, said Lynch. I told you that one day I wrote my name in pencil on the backside of the Venus of Praxiteles in the Museum. Was that not desire? —I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. You also told me that when you were a boy in that charming carmelite school you ate pieces of dried cowdung. Lynch broke again into a whinny of laughter and again rubbed both his hands over his groins but without taking them from his pockets. —O, I did! I did! he cried. Stephen turned towards his companion and looked at him for a moment boldly in the eyes. Lynch, recovering from his laughter, answered his look from his humbled eyes. The long slender flattened skull beneath the long pointed cap brought before Stephen's mind the image of a hooded reptile. The eyes, too, were reptile-like in glint and gaze. Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit by one tiny human point, the window of a shrivelled soul, poignant and self-embittered. —As for that, Stephen said in polite parenthesis, we are all animals. I also am an animal. —You are, said Lynch. —But we are just now in a mental world, Stephen continued. The desire and loathing excited by improper esthetic means are really not esthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but also because they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye. —Not always, said Lynch critically. —In the same way, said Stephen, your flesh responded to the stimulus of a naked statue, but it was, I say, simply a reflex action of the nerves. Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged, and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty. —What is that exactly? asked Lynch. —Rhythm, said Stephen, is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or of an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part. —If that is rhythm, said Lynch, let me hear what you call beauty; and, please remember, though I did eat a cake of cowdung once, that I admire only beauty. Stephen raised his cap as if in greeting. Then, blushing slightly, he laid his hand on Lynch's thick tweed sleeve. —We are right, he said, and the others are wrong. To speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand—that is art. They had reached the canal bridge and, turning from their course, went on by the trees. A crude grey light, mirrored in the sluggish water and a smell of wet branches over their heads seemed to war against the course of Stephen's thought. —But you have not answered my question, said Lynch. What is art? What is the beauty it expresses? —That was the first definition I gave you, you sleepy-headed wretch, said Stephen, when I began to try to think out the matter for myself. Do you remember the night? Cranly lost his temper and began to talk about Wicklow bacon. —I remember, said Lynch. He told us about them flaming fat devils of pigs. —Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end. You remember the pigs and forget that. You are a distressing pair, you and Cranly. Lynch made a grimace at the raw grey sky and said: —If I am to listen to your esthetic philosophy give me at least another cigarette. I don't care about it. I don't even care about women. Damn you and damn everything. I want a job of five hundred a year. You can't get me one. Stephen handed him the packet of cigarettes. Lynch took the last one that remained, saying simply: —Proceed! —Aquinas, said Stephen, says that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases. Lynch nodded. —I remember that, he said, PULCRA SUNT QUAE VISA PLACENT. —He uses the word VISA, said Stephen, to cover esthetic apprehensions of all kinds, whether through sight or hearing or through any other avenue of apprehension. This word, though it is vague, is clear enough to keep away good and evil which excite desire and loathing. It means certainly a stasis and not a kinesis. How about the true? It produces also a stasis of the mind. You would not write your name in pencil across the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle. —No, said Lynch, give me the hypotenuse of the Venus of Praxiteles. —Static therefore, said Stephen. Plato, I believe, said that beauty is the splendour of truth. I don't think that it has a meaning, but the true and the beautiful are akin. Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible; beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection. Aristotle's entire system of philosophy rests upon his book of psychology and that, I think, rests on his statement that the same attribute cannot at the same time and in the same connexion belong to and not belong to the same subject. The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension. Is that clear? —But what is beauty? asked Lynch impatiently. Out with another definition. Something we see and like! Is that the best you and Aquinas can do? —Let us take woman, said Stephen. —Let us take her! said Lynch fervently. —The Greek, the Turk, the Chinese, the Copt, the Hottentot, said Stephen, all admire a different type of female beauty. That seems to be a maze out of which we cannot escape. I see, however, two ways out. One is this hypothesis: that every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connexion with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species. It may be so. The world, it seems, is drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. For my part I dislike that way out. It leads to eugenics rather than to esthetic. It leads you out of the maze into a new gaudy lecture-room where MacCann, with one hand on THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES and the other hand on the new testament, tells you that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you felt that she would bear you burly offspring and admired her great breasts because you felt that she would give good milk to her children and yours. —Then MacCann is a sulphur-yellow liar, said Lynch energetically. —There remains another way out, said Stephen, laughing. —To wit? said Lynch. —This hypothesis, Stephen began. A long dray laden with old iron came round the corner of Sir Patrick Dun's hospital covering the end of Stephen's speech with the harsh roar of jangled and rattling metal. Lynch closed his ears and gave out oath after oath till the dray had passed. Then he turned on his heel rudely. Stephen turned also and waited for a few moments till his companion's ill-humour had had its vent. —This hypothesis, Stephen repeated, is the other way out: that, though the same object may not seem beautiful to all people, all people who admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy and coincide with the stages themselves of all esthetic apprehension. These relations of the sensible, visible to you through one form and to me through another, must be therefore the necessary qualities of beauty. Now, we can return to our old friend saint Thomas for another pennyworth of wisdom. Lynch laughed. —It amuses me vastly, he said, to hear you quoting him time after time like a jolly round friar. Are you laughing in your sleeve? —MacAlister, answered Stephen, would call my esthetic theory applied Aquinas. So far as this side of esthetic philosophy extends, Aquinas will carry me all along the line. When we come to the phenomena of artistic conception, artistic gestation, and artistic reproduction I require a new terminology and a new personal experience. —Of course, said Lynch. After all Aquinas, in spite of his intellect, was exactly a good round friar. But you will tell me about the new personal experience and new terminology some other day. Hurry up and finish the first part. —Who knows? said Stephen, smiling. Perhaps Aquinas would understand me better than you. He was a poet himself. He wrote a hymn for Maundy Thursday. It begins with the words PANGE LINGUA GLORIOSI. They say it is the highest glory of the hymnal. It is an intricate and soothing hymn. I like it; but there is no hymn that can be put beside that mournful and majestic processional song, the VEXILLA REGIS of Venantius Fortunatus. Lynch began to sing softly and solemnly in a deep bass voice: IMPLETA SUNT QUAE CONCINIT DAVID FIDELI CARMINE DICENDO NATIONIBUS REGNAVIT A LIGNO DEUS. —That's great! he said, well pleased. Great music! They turned into Lower Mount Street. A few steps from the corner a fat young man, wearing a silk neckcloth, saluted them and stopped. —Did you hear the results of the exams? he asked. Griffin was plucked. Halpin and O'Flynn are through the home civil. Moonan got fifth place in the Indian. O'Shaughnessy got fourteenth. The Irish fellows in Clark's gave them a feed last night. They all ate curry. His pallid bloated face expressed benevolent malice and, as he had advanced through his tidings of success, his small fat-encircled eyes vanished out of sight and his weak wheezing voice out of hearing. In reply to a question of Stephen's his eyes and his voice came forth again from their lurking-places. —Yes, MacCullagh and I, he said. He's taking pure mathematics and I'm taking constitutional history. There are twenty subjects. I'm taking botany too. You know I'm a member of the field club. He drew back from the other two in a stately fashion and placed a plump woollen-gloved hand on his breast from which muttered wheezing laughter at once broke forth. —Bring us a few turnips and onions the next time you go out, said Stephen drily, to make a stew. The fat student laughed indulgently and said: —We are all highly respectable people in the field club. Last Saturday we went out to Glenmalure, seven of us. —With women, Donovan? said Lynch. Donovan again laid his hand on his chest and said: —Our end is the acquisition of knowledge. Then he said quickly: —I hear you are writing some essays about esthetics. Stephen made a vague gesture of denial. —Goethe and Lessing, said Donovan, have written a lot on that subject, the classical school and the romantic school and all that. The Laocoon interested me very much when I read it. Of course it is idealistic, German, ultra-profound. Neither of the others spoke. Donovan took leave of them urbanely. —I must go, he said softly and benevolently, I have a strong suspicion, amounting almost to a conviction, that my sister intended to make pancakes today for the dinner of the Donovan family. —Goodbye, Stephen said in his wake. Don't forget the turnips for me and my mate. Lynch gazed after him, his lip curling in slow scorn till his face resembled a devil's mask: —To think that that yellow pancake-eating excrement can get a good job, he said at length, and I have to smoke cheap cigarettes! They turned their faces towards Merrion Square and went for a little in silence. —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? 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? <HR ALIGN="center" WIDTH="60%"> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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