As for what he says about beauty, Joyce make use of an old definition creeated by Thomas Aquinas, translating from latin as 'Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance'. When he talks about wholeness, the author means the need for the observer to define what is the objected that he is analysing and ignore everything else, you must notice it as a whole. Harmony is seen when the artist perceive all the parts that form the whole observed before, with each tiny structure and how these little pieces connect with each other to compose the object. The third element of beauty is also the most complex to understand and define. Radiance is the artist's way to understand the object, how it is reflected on his mind, imprinted on his soul. This can only be obtained when the observer clearly sees the two previous elements of beauty on the object, meaning that the artist need to understand both the whole as he perceive it's harmony.
James Joyce brings us a marvelous description of art and beauty. First he try to set a limit to how an art form should be observed, saying that ‘(...) 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 beauty we have to come to understand (...)’. We have to observe that with this definition he makes us see Art as a representation of Beauty in forms that can be perceived by anyone, not only the artist himself.
He does so artisticaly, using the expression ‘from the gross earth’, as did God when He “formed man of the dust of the ground”.
