by James Joyce
The speaker’s words were lost in the crunch of the heavy boots on the gravel. The rain was spreading and increasing and the vagrant bands of students were all turning their steps towards the college. Stephen still waited at his post and at last saw Wells coming down the path quickly: he had changed his outdoor dress for a soutane. He was very apologetic and not quite so familiar in manner. Stephen wanted him to go in with the others but he insisted on seeing his visitor to the gate. They took a short cut down beside the wall and were soon opposite the lodge. The [gate] side-door was shut and Wells called out loudly to the lodge-woman to open it and let the gentleman out. Then he shook hands with Stephen and pressed him to come again. The lodge-woman opened the side-door and Wells looked out for a second or two almost enviously. Then he said:
— Well, goodbye, old man. Must run in now. Awfully glad to see you again — see any of the old Clongowes set, you know. Be good now: I must run. Goodbye.
As he tucked up his soutane high and ran awkwardly up the drive [and] he looked a strange, almost criminal, fugitive in the dreary dusk. Stephen’s eyes followed the running figure for a moment: and as he passed through the door into the lamplit street he smiled at his own impulse of pity.
XIX
He smiled because it seemed to him so unexpected a ripeness in himself — this pity — or rather this impulse of pity for he had no more than entertained it. But it was the actual achievement of his essay which had allowed him so mature a pleasure as the sensation of pity for another. Stephen had a thorough-going manner in many things: his essay was not in the least the exhibition of polite accomplishments. It was on the contrary very seriously intended to define his own position for himself. He could not persuade himself that, if he wrote round about his subject with facility or treated it from any standpoint of impression, good would come of it. On the other hand he was persuaded that no-one served the generation into which he had been born so well as he who offered it, whether in his art or in his life, the gift of certitude. The programme of the patriots filled him with very reasonable doubts; its articles could obtain no intellectual assent from him. He knew, moreover, that concordance with it would mean for him a submission of everything else in its interest and that he would thus be obliged to corrupt the springs of speculation at their very source. He refused therefore to set out for any task if he had first to prejudice his success by oaths to his patria and this refusal resulted in a theory of art which was at once severe and liberal. His Esthetic was in the main applied Aquinas, and he set it forth plainly with a naif air of discovering novelties. This he did partly to satisfy.his own taste for enigmatic roles and partly from a genuine predisposition in favour of all but the premisses of scholasticism. He proclaimed at the outset that art was the human disposition of intelligible or sensible matter for an esthetic end, and he announced further that all such human dispositions must fall into the division of three distinct natural kinds, lyrical, epical and dramatic. Lyrical art, he said, is the art whereby the artist sets forth his image in immediate relation to himself; epical art is the art whereby the artist sets forth his image in mediate relation to himself and to others; and dramatic art is the art whereby the artist sets forth his image in immediate relations to others. The various forms of art, such as music, sculpture, literature, do not offer this division with the same clearness and he concluded from this that those forms of art which offered the division most clearly were to be called the most excellent forms: and he was not greatly perturbed because he could not decide for himself whether a portrait was a work of epical art or not or whether it was possible for an architect to be a lyrical, epical or dramatic poet at will. Having by this simple process established the literary form of art as the most excellent he proceeded to examine it in favour of his theory, or, as he rendered it, to establish the relations which must subsist between the literary image, the work of art itself, and that energy which had imagined and fashioned it, that centre of conscious re-acting, particular life, the artist.
The artist, he imagined, standing in the position of mediator between the world of his experience and the world of his dreams — a mediator, consequently gifted with twin faculties, a selective faculty and a reproductive faculty. To equate these faculties was the secret of artistic success: the artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and re-embody it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it in its new office, he was the supreme artist. This perfect coincidence of the two artistic faculties Stephen called poetry and he imagined the domain of an art to be cone-shaped. The term ‘literature’ now seemed to him a term of contempt and he used it to designate the vast middle region which lies between apex and base, between poetry and the chaos of unremembered writing. Its merit lay in its portrayal of externals; the realm of its princes was the realm of the manners and customs of societies — a spacious realm. But society is itself, he conceived, the complex body in which certain laws are involved and overwrapped and he therefore proclaimed as the realm of the poet the realm of these unalterable laws. Such a theory might easily have led its deviser to the acceptance of spiritual anarchy in literature had he not at the same time insisted on the classical style. A classical style, he said, is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country: it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience. The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and not more by others than by its own, is an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them. The classical temper on the other hand, ever mindful of limitations, chooses rather to bend upon these present things and so to work upon them and fashion them that the quick intelligence may go beyond them to their meaning which is still unuttered. In this method the sane and joyful spirit issues forth and achieves imperishable perfection, nature assisting with her goodwill and thanks. For so long as this place in nature is given us it is right that art should do no violence to the gift.
Between these two conflicting schools the city of the arts had become marvellously unpeaceful. To many spectators the dispute had seemed a dispute about names, a battle in which the position of the standards could never be foretold for a minute. Add to this internecine warfare — the classical school fighting the materialism that must attend it, the romantic school struggling to preserve coherence — and behold from what ungentle manners criticism is bound to recognise the emergence of all achievement. The critic is he who is able, by means of the signs which the artist affords, to approach the temper which has made the work and to see what is well done therein and what it signifies. For him a song by Shakespeare which seems so free and living, as remote from any conscious purpose as rain that falls in a garden or as the lights of evening, discovers itself as the rhythmic speech of an emotion otherwise incommunicable, or at least not so fitly. But to approach the temper which has made art is an act of reverence before the performance of which many conventions must be first put off for certainly that inmost region will never yield its secret to one who is enmeshed with profanities.
Chief among these profanities Stephen set the antique principle that the end of art is to instruct, to elevate, and to amuse. “I am unable to find even a trace of this Puritanic conception of the esthetic purpose in the definition which Aquinas has given of beauty” he wrote “or in anything which he has written concerning the beautiful. The qualifications he expects for beauty are in fact of so abstract and common a character that it is quite impossible for even the most violent partizan to use the Aquinatian theory with the object of attacking any work of art that we possess from the hand of any artist whatsoever.” This recognition of the beautiful in vir
tue of the most abstract relations afforded by an object to which the term could be applied so far from giving any support to a commandment of
In fine the truth is not that the artist requires a document of licence from householders entitling him to proceed in this or that fashion but that every age must look for its sanction to its poets and philosophers. The poet is the intense centre of the life of his age to which he stands in a relation than which none can be more vital. He alone is capable of absorbing in himself the life that surrounds him and of flinging it abroad again amid planetary music. When the poetic phenomenon is signalled in the heavens, exclaimed this heaven-ascending essayist, it is time for the critics to verify their calculations in accordance with it. It is time for them to acknowledge that here the imagination has contemplated intensely the truth of the being of the visible world and that beauty, the splendour of truth, has been born. The age, though it bury itself fathoms deep in formulas and machinery, has need of these realities which alone give and sustain life and it must await from those chosen centres of vivification the force to live, the security for life which can come to it only from them. Thus the spirit of man makes a continual affirmation.
Except for the eloquent and arrogant peroration Stephen’s essay was a careful exposition of a carefully meditated theory of esthetic. When he had finished it he found it necessary to change the title from “Drama and Life” to “Art and Life” for he had occupied himself so much with securing the foundations that he had not left himself space enough to raise the complete structure. This strangely unpopular manifesto was traversed by the two brothers phrase by phrase and word by word and at last pronounced flawless at all points. It was then safely laid by until the time should come for its public appearance. Besides Maurice two other well-wishers had an advance view of it; these were Stephen’s mother and his friend Madden. Madden had not asked for it directly but at the end of a conversation in which Stephen had recounted sarcastically his visit to Clonliffe College he had vaguely wondered what state of mind could produce such irreverences and Stephen had at once offered him the manuscript saying “This is the first of my explosives.” The following evening Madden had returned the manuscript and praised the writing highly. Part of it had been too deep for him, he said, but he could see that it was beautifully written.
— You know Stevie, he said ( Madden had a brother Stephen and he sometimes used this familiar form) you always told me I was a country
— Mystical? said Stephen.
— About the planets and the stars, you know. Some of the fellows in the League belong to the mystical set here. They’d understand quick enough.
— But there’s nothing mystical in it I tell you. I have written it carefully . . .
— O, I can see you have. It’s beautifully written. But I’m sure it will be above the heads of your audience.
— You don’t mean to tell me, Madden, you think it’s a ‘flowery’ composition!
— I know you’ve thought it out. But you are a poet, aren’t you?
— I have . . . written verse . . . if that’s what you mean.
— Do you know Hughes is a poet too?
— Hughes!
— Yes. He writes for our paper, you know. Would you like to see some of his poetry?
— Why, could you show me any?
— It so happens I have one in my pocket. There’s one in this week’s
Stephen took the paper and read a piece of verse entitled
What! Shall the rippling tongue of Gaels
Give way before the Saxon slang!
and in lines full of excited patriotism proceeded to pour scorn upon the Irishman who would not learn the ancient language of his native land. Stephen did not remark anything in the lines except the frequency of such contracted forms as “e’en” “ne’er” and “thro’ “ instead of “even” “never” and “through” and he handed back the paper to Madden without offering any comment on the verse.
— I suppose you don’t like that because it’s too Irish but you’ll like this, I suppose, because it’s that mystical, idealistic kind of writing you poets indulge in. Only you mustn’t say I let you see . . .
— O, no.
Madden took from his inside pocket a sheet of foolscap folded in four on which was inscribed a piece of verse, consisting of four stanzas of eight lines each, entitled “My Ideal.” Each stanza began with the words “Art thou real?” The poem told of the poet’s troubles in a ‘vale of woe’ and of the ‘heart-throbs’ which these troubles caused him. It told of ‘weary nights’ and ‘anxious days’ and of an ‘unquenchable desire’ for an excellence beyond that ‘which earth can give.’ After this mournful idealism the final stanza offered a certain consolatory, hypothetical alternative to the poet in his woes: it began somewhat hopefully:
Art thou real, my Ideal?
Wilt thou ever come to me
In the soft and gentle twilight
With your baby on your knee?
The [combined] effect of this apparition on Stephen was a long staining blush of anger. The tawdry lines, the futile change of number, the ludicrous waddling approach of Hughes’s “Ideal” weighed down by an inexplicable infant combined to cause him a sharp agony in the sensitive region. Again he handed back the verse without saying a word of praise or of blame but he decided that attendance in Mr Hughes’s class was no longer possible for him and he was foolish enough to regret having yielded to the impulse for sympathy from a friend.
When a demand for intelligent sympathy goes unanswered [it] he is a too stern disciplinarian who blames himself for having offered a dullard an opportunity to participate in the warmer movement of a more highly organised life. So Stephen regarded his loans of manuscripts as elaborate flag-practices with phrases. He did not consider his mother a dullard but the result of his second disappointment in the search for appreciation was that he was enabled to place the blame on the shoulders of others — not on his own: he had enough responsibilities thereon already, inherited and acquired. His mother had not asked to see the manuscript: she had continued to iron the clothes on the kitchen-table without the least suspicion of the agitation in the mind of her son. He had sat on three or four kitchen chairs, one after another, and had dangled his legs unsuccessfully from all free corners of the table. At last, unable to control his agitation, he asked her point-blank would she like him to read out his essay.
— O, yes, Stephen — if you don’t mind my ironing a few things . . .
— No, I don’t mind.
Stephen read out the essay to her slowly and emphatically and when he had finished reading she said it was very beautifully written but that as there were some things in it which she couldn’t follow, would he mind reading it to her again and explaining some of it. He read it over again and allowed himself a long exposition of his theories garnished with many crude striking allusions with which he hope
d to drive it home the better. His mother who had never suspected probably that “beauty” could be anything more than a convention of the drawingroom or a natural antecedent to marriage and married life was surprised to see the extraordinary honour which her son conferred upon it. Beauty, to the mind of such a woman, was often a synonym for licentious ways and probably for this reason she was relieved to find that the excesses of this new worship were supervised by a recognised saintly authority. However as the essayist’s recent habits were not very re-assuring she decided to combine a discreet motherly solicitude with an interest, which without being open to the accusation of factitiousness was at first intended as a compliment. While she was nicely folding a handkerchief she said:
— What does Ibsen write, Stephen?
— Plays.
— I never heard of his name before. Is he alive at present?
— Yes, he is. But, you know, in Ireland people don’t know much about what is going on out in Europe.
— He must be a great writer from what you say of him.
— Would you like to read some of his plays, mother? I have some.
— Yes. I would like to read the best one. What is the best one?
— I don’t know . . . But do you really want to read Ibsen?
— I do, really.
— To see whether I am reading dangerous authors or not, is that why?
— No, Stephen, answered his mother with a brave prevarication. I think you’re old enough now to know what is right and what is wrong without my dictating to you what you are to read.
— I think so too . . . But I’m surprised to hear you ask about Ibsen. I didn’t imagine you took the least interest in these matters.
Mrs Daedalus pushed her iron smoothly over a white petticoat in time to the current of her memory.
— Well, of course, I don’t speak about it but I’m not so indifferent . . . Before I married your father I used to read a great deal. I used to take an interest in all kinds of new plays.