Page 256 - a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man

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 art-
ist 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 rela-
tion 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

256 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man