".. His thinking was a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust, lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition, but lightnings of so clear a splendour that in those moments the world perished about his feet as if it had been fire consumed: and thereafter his tongue grew heavy and he met the eyes of others with unanswering eyes for he felt that the spirit of beauty had folded him round like a mantle and that in reverie at least he had been acquainted with nobility.
-
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 exerementitious 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
was but the shadow, the reality of which it was but the symbol. I thought he
might mean that claritas was 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 al-most 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
market place it has another sense. When we speak of beauty in the second sense
of the term our judgment 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 the 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 & 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. lie 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, 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 the 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."