Complete Works of James Joyce (270 page)

These pleadings which Stephen so punctiliously heard out were supplemented by Cranly’s influence. Neither of the young men [were] was studying for [their] his examination and they spent their evenings as usual in aimless walking and talking. Their walks and talks led nowhere because whenever anything definite threatened to make its appearance in their talk Cranly promptly sought the company of some of his chosen companions. The billiard-room of the Adelphi Hotel was now a favourite resort of the two friends. After ten o’clock every night they went into the billiard-room. It was a big room well furnished with ill-kept inelegant tables and poorly furnished with players. Cranly played protracted matches with one or other of his companions while Stephen sat on the seat that ran alongside of the table. A game of fifty cost sixpence which was duly paid by each of the players in equal parts, Cranly producing his threepence very deliberately from a leather heart-shaped purse. The players sometimes sent their balls on to the floor and Cranly occasionally swore at his flamin’ cue. There was a bar attached to the billiard-room. In the bar was a stout barmaid who wore badly made stays, served bottles of stout with her head on one side, and conversed in an English accent with her customers about the theatrical companies of the different theatres. Her customers were young men who carried their hats sideways far back on their heads and walked with their feet far apart. Their trousers were usually turned up high above their tan boots. One of the regular customers at this bar ( though he did not mix with the young gentlemen mentioned above) was a friend of Cranly’s, a young man who was a clerk in the Agricultural Board Office. He was a bandy-legged little man who spoke very little when he was sober but very much when he was drunk. When he was sober he was very orderly but his tipsiness, signalled by a dark-coloured ooze upon his pock-marked face, was boastful and disorderly. One night he engaged in a fierce argument about Tim Healy with a thick set medical student who had a taste for the art of self-defence. The argument was nearly entirely one-sided inasmuch as the medical student’s contributions were derisive laughs and such remarks as “Is he handy with the mits?” “Can he put up his props?” “Is he a good man with the mits?” At last the clerk from the Agricultural Board Office called the medical student a dirty name whereupon the medical student immediately knocked down all the drinks on the counter in his efforts to ‘smash’ the offender. The barmaid ran screaming for the proprietor, the medical student was soothed and restrained by considerate friends and the offender was escorted out by Cranly and Stephen and a few others. At first he lamented that his new cuffs were stained with porter and expressed a great desire to go back and fight it out but, dissuaded by Cranly, he began to tell Stephen in an indistinct undertone that he had got the highest marks in Pure Mathematics ever given in the degree examination. He advised Stephen to go to London to write for the papers and said he could put him in the right way to get on. When Cranly had begun a conversation with the others concerning the interrupted game of billiards Stephen’s companion again announced that he had got the highest marks ever given in the degree in Pure Mathematics.

Stephen continued making his book of verses in spite of these distracting influences. He had come to the conclusion that nature had designed him for a man of letters and therefore he determined that, in spite of all influences, he would do as nature counselled. He had begun to consider Cranly a bad influence. Cranly’s method in argument was to reduce all things to their food values (though he himself was the most impractical of theorists) and Stephen’s conception of art fared very badly from such a method. Stephen held the test of food values an extreme one and one which in its utter materialism suggested a declination from the heights of romanticism. He knew that Cranly’s materialism was only skin-deep and he surmised that Cranly chose to express himself in language and conduct of direct ugliness simply because his fear of ridicule and more than diplomatic wish to be well with men urged him to refrain from beauty of any kind. He fancied moreover that he detected in Cranly’s attitude towards him a certain hostility arising out of a thwarted desire to imitate. Cranly was fond of ridiculing Stephen to his bar companions and though this was supposed to be no more than banter Stephen found touches of seriousness in it. Stephen refused to close with this trivial falsehood of his friend and continued to [disclose] share all the secrets of his bosom as if he had not observed any change. He no longer, however, sought his friend’s opinion or allowed the sour dissatisfaction of his friend’s moods to weigh with him. He was egoistically determined that nothing material, no favour [of] or reverse of fortune, no bond of association or impulse or tradition should hinder him from working out the enigma of his position in his own way. He avoided his father sedulously because he now regarded his father’s presumptions as the most deadly part of a tyranny, internal and external, which he determined to combat with might and main. He argued no further with his mother, persuaded that he could have no satisfactory commerce with her so long as she chose to set the shadow of a clergyman between her nature and his. His mother told him one day that she had spoken of him to her confessor and asked his spiritual advice. Stephen turned to her and remonstrated hotly with her for doing such a thing.

 
— It is a nice thing, he said, that you go and discuss me behind my back. Have you not your own nature to guide you, your own sense of what is right, without going to some Father Jack-in-the-Box to ask him to guide you?

 
— Priests know a great deal of the world, said his mother.

 
— And what did he advise you to do?

 
— He said if there were any young children in the house he would advise me to get out away from there as quickly as I could.

 
— Very nice! said Stephen angrily. That’s a pretty thing for you to come and say to a son of yours!

 
— I am simply telling you what the priest advised me to do, said his mother quietly.

 
— These fellows, said Stephen, know nothing of the world. You might as well say that a rat in a sewer knew the world. Anyway you won’t repeat what I say to your confessor in future because I won’t say anything. And the next time he asks you “What is that mistaken young man, that unfortunate boy, doing?” you can answer “I don’t know, father. I asked him and he said I was to tell the priest he was making a torpedo.”

The general attitude of women towards religion puzzled and often maddened Stephen. His nature was incapable of achieving such an attitude of insincerity or stupidity. By brooding constantly upon this he ended by anathemising () Emma as the most deceptive and cowardly of marsupials. He discovered that it was a menial fear and no spirit of chastity which had prevented her from granting his request. Her eyes, he thought, must look strange when upraised to some holy image and her lips when poised for the reception of the host. He cursed her burgher cowardice and her beauty and he said to himself that though her eyes might cajole the half-witted God of the Roman Catholics they would not cajole him. In every stray image of the streets he saw her soul manifest itself and every such manifestation renewed the intensity of his disapproval. It did not strike him that the attitude of women towards holy things really implied a more genuine emancipation than his own and he condemned them out of a purely suppositious () conscience. He exaggerated their iniquities and evil influence and returned them their antipathy in full measure. He toyed also with a theory of dualism which would symbolise the twin eternities of spirit and nature in the twin eternities of male and female and even thought of explaining the audacities of his verse as symbolical allusions. It was hard for him to compel his head to preserve the strict temperature of classicism. More than he had ever done before he longed for the season to lift and for spring — the misty Irish spring — to be over and gone. He was passing through Eccles’ St one evening, one misty evening all these thoughts dancing the dance of unrest in his brain when a trivial incident set him composing some ardent verses which he entitled a “Vilanelle of the Temptress.” A young lady was standing on the steps of one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leaning on the rusty railings of the area. Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely.

The Young Lady — (drawling discreetly) . . . O, yes . . . I was . . . at the . . . cha . . . pel . . .

The Young Gentleman — (inaudibly) . . . I . . . (again inaudibly) . . . I . . .

The Young Lady — (softly) . . . O . . . but you’re . ve. . . ry . . . wick . . . ed . . .

This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance:

 
— Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.

 
— What?

 
— Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty.

 
— Yes? said Cranly absently.

 
— No esthetic theory, pursued Stephen relentlessly, is of any value which investigates with the aid of the lantern of tradition. What we symbolise in black the Chinaman may symbolise in yellow: each has his own tradition. Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derides them both. It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has ever been adored on the earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow or black. We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action.

 
— Yes . . .

 
— You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. Some day I will expand that sentence into a treatise. Consider the performance of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else: and then you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise its integrity. Isn’t that so?

 
— And then?

 
— That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then? Analysis then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a , a definitely constituted entity. You see?

 
— Let us turn back, said Cranly.

They had reached the corner of Grafton St and as the footpath was overcrowded they turned back northwards. Cranly had an inclination to watch the antics of a drunkard who had been ejected from a bar in Suffolk St but Stephen took his arm summarily and led him away.

 
— Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn’t make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him ) but I have solved it. is . After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.

Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly’s hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend’s company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled: