But, What is Stephen’s mission as an artist?
Stephen’s need to break with his family, church, language and country has a clearly objective: to gain the freedom that he needs for being creative as an artist; he feels the need “to discover the mode of life or of art whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom” (267); emerging the freedom as a key element for his artistic way of understand life “Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can” (268).
When Stephen decides his real vocation he opts for a aesthetic way of understanding art that means criticising the life he has known and also feeling the obligation of starting a new way of life. Through art, he desires to analyze and perceive life aesthetically remaining outside of the dominant cultural, political and religious “nets” of society and allowing his soul to fly.
The personality of the artist finally refines itself out of his existence. “The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (233). The artists is detached of his vital live and all his concerns are projected in the creation. Something that occurs especially in the dramatic form (Stephen differentiates three genres: lyrical, epic and dramatic, 232) where the artist “fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life” (233).
Stephen considers the art as “the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end” (224), making clear the objective of an artist: “the creation of the beautiful” (201), understanding the beauty as “the splendor of truth…. The true and the beautiful are akin”. From this point Stephen links his proposal of universal beauty to the theory of Thomas Aquinas : “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” (229); addressing in the following pages of A portrait of the Artist as a Young man the concept of each of these terms.
