A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [with Biographical Introduction]

by James Joyce

—Hell has enlarged its soul and opened its mouth without any limits— words taken, my dear little brothers in Christ Jesus,

—Dedalus, you're an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself. I'm not. I'm a democrat and I 'Il work and act for social liberty and equality among all classes and sexes in the United States of the Europe of the future.

There is an art in lighting a fire. We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts. This is one of the useful arts.

His very body had waxed old in lowly service of the Lord—in tending the fire upon the altar, in bearing tidings secretly, in waiting upon worldlings, in striking swiftly when bidden—and yet had remained ungraced by aught of saintly or of prelatic beauty.

—You are an artist, are you not, Mr Dedalus? said the dean, glancing up and blinking his pale eyes. The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question. He rubbed his hands slowly and drily over the difficulty. —Can you solve that question now? he asked.

—These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come

—One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradition or according to the tradition of the marketplace.

But a man's country comes first. Ireland first, Stevie. You can be a poet or a mystic after.

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.

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.

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.

An enchantment of the heart! The night had been enchanted. In a dream or vision he had known the ecstasy of seraphic life.

—Do you not fear that those words may be spoken to you on the day of Judgment? —What is offered me on the other hand? Stephen asked. An eternity of bliss in the company of the dean of studies?

So be it. Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.