 RELIGION AND LOVE by A.E. I have often wondered whether there is not something wrong in our religious systems, in that the same ritual, the same doctrines, the same aspirations, are held to be sufficient both for men and women. The tendency everywhere is to obliterate distinctions, and if a woman be herself, she is looked upon unkindly. She rarely understands our metaphysics, and she gazes on the expounder of the mystery of the Logos with enigmatic eyes which reveal the enchantment of another divinity. The ancients were wiser than we in this, for they had Aphrodite and Hera, and many another form of the mighty mother, who bestowed on women their peculiar graces and powers. Surely no girl in ancient Greece ever sent up to all pervading Zeus a prayer that her natural longings might be fulfilled, but we may be sure that to Aphrodite came many such prayers. The deities we worship today are too austere for women to approach with their peculiar desires, and indeed in Ireland the largest number of our people do not see any necessity for love-making at all, or what connections spiritual powers have with the affections. A girl, without repining, will follow her four-legged dowry to the house of a man she may never have spoken twenty words to before her marriage. We praise our women for their virtue, but the general acceptance of the marriage has arranged shows so unemotional, so undesirable a temperament that it is not to be wondered at. One wonders was their temptation. What the lost the race may be it is impossible to say, but it is true that beautiful civilisations are built up by the desire of man to give his beloved all her desires. Where there is no beloved, but only a housekeeper, there are no beautiful fancies to create the beautiful arts, no spiritual protest against the mean dwelling, no hunger to build the world anew for her sake. Aphrodite is outcast, and with her many of the other immortals have also departed. The home life in Ireland is probably more squalid than with any other people equally prosperous in Europe. The children begotten without love fill more and more the teeming asylums. We are without art, literature is despised, we have few of those industries which spring up in other countries in response to the desire of woman to make gracious influences pervade the home of her partner, a desire to which man readily yields and toils to satisfy if he loves truly. The desire for beauty has come almost to be regarded as dangerous, if not sinful, and the woman who is still the natural child of the great mother and priestess of the mysteries, if she betray the desire to exercise her divinely given powers, if there be enchantment in her eyes and her laugh, and if she bewilder too many men, is in our latest Code of Morals distinctly an evil influence. The spirit, melted and tortured with love which does not achieve its earthly desire, is held to have wasted its strength, and the judgment which declares the life to be wrecked is equally severe on that which caused this wild conflagration in the heart. But the end of life is not comfort but divine being. We do not regard the life which closed in the martyr's fire as ended ignobley. The spiritual philosophy which separates human emotions and ideas, and declares some to be secular and others spiritual is to blame. There is no meditation which, if prolonged, will not bring us to the same world where religion would carry us, and if a flower in the wall will lead us to all knowledge, so the understanding of the peculiar nature of one half of humanity will bring us far on our journey to the sacred deep. I believe it was this wise understanding which in the ancient world declared the embodied spirit in man to be influenced more by the divine mind, and in woman by the mighty mother by which nature in its spiritual aspect was understood. In this philosophy boundless being, when manifested, revealed itself in two forms of life, spirit and substance, and the endless evolution of its divided rays had as its root impulse the desire to return to that boundless being. By many ways, blindly or half-consciously, the individual life strives to regain its old fullness. The spirit seeks union with nature to pass from the life of vision into pure being, and nature conscious that its grosser forms are impermanent is forever dissolving and leading its votary to a more distant shrine. Nature is timid like a woman, declares an Indian scripture. She reveals herself shyly and withdraws again. All this metaphysics will not appear out of place if we regard woman as influenced beyond herself and her conscious life for spiritual ends. I do not enter a defence of the loveless coquette, but the woman who has a natural delight in awakening love in man is priestess of a divinity than which there is none mightier among the rulers of the heavens. Through her eyes, her laugh, in all her motions there is expressed more than she is conscious of herself. The mighty mother through the woman is kindling a symbol of herself in the spirit, and through that symbol she breathes her secret life into the heart, so that it is fed from within and is drawn to herself. We remember that with Dante the image of a woman became at last the purified vesture of his spirit through which the mysteries were revealed. We are forever making our souls with effort and pain and shaping them into images which reveal or are voiceless according to their degree, and the man whose spirit has been obsessed by a beauty so long brooded upon that he has almost become that which she contemplated owes much to the woman who may never be his. And if he or the world understood her right, he has no cause of complaint. It is the essentially irreligious spirit of Ireland which has come to regard love as an unnecessary emotion, and the mingling of the sexes as dangerous. For it is a curious thing that while we commonly regard ourselves as the most religious people in Europe, the reverse is probably true. The country which has never produced spiritual thinkers or religious teachers of whom men have heard, if we accept Barclay and perhaps the remote Johannes Kotos Erigina, cannot pride itself on its spiritual achievement. And it might seem even more paradoxical, but I think it would be almost equally true to say that the first spiritual note in our literature was struck when a poet generally regarded as pagan wrote it as the aim of his art to reveal in all poor foolish things that live a day eternal beauty wandering on her way. The heavens do not declare the glory of God any more than do shining eyes, nor the firmament show his handiwork more than the woven wind of hair, for these were wrought with no lesser love than set the young stars swimming in seas of joyous and primeval air. If we drink in the beauty of the night or the mountains it is deemed to be praise of the maker, but if we show an equal adoration of the beauty of man or woman it is dangerous, it is almost wicked. Of course it is dangerous, and without danger there is no passage to eternal things. There is the valley of the shadow beside the pathway of light, and it will always be there, and the heavens will never be entered by those who shrink from it. Spirituality is the power of apprehending formless spiritual essences, of seeing the eternal in the transitory, and in the things which are seen the unseen things of which they are the shadow. I call Mr. Yates's poetry spiritual when it declares, as in the lines I quoted, that there is no beauty so trivial that it is not the shadow of the eternal beauty. A country is religious where it is common belief that all things are instinct with divinity, to where the love between man and woman is seen as a symbol, the highest we have, of the union of spirit and nature, and their final blending in the boundless being. For this reason the lightest desires even, the lightest graces of women, have a philosophical value for what suggestions they bring us of the divinity behind them. Because men and women feel themselves more and more to be sharers of universal aims, they will contemplate in each other and in themselves that aspect of the boundless being under whose influence they are cast, and will appeal to it for understanding and power. Time, which is forever bringing back the old and renewing it, may yet bring back to us some counterpart of Aphrodite or Hera, as they were understood by the most profound thinkers of the ancient world, and woman may again have her temples and her mysteries, and renew again her radiant life at its fountain, and feel that in seeking for beauty she is growing more into her own ancestral being, and that in its shining forth she is giving to man, as he may give to her, something of that completeness of spirit of which it is written, neither is the man without the woman, nor the woman without the man in the highest. It may seem strange that what is so clear should require statement, but it is only with a kind of despair the man or woman of religious mind can contemplate the materialism of our thought about life. It is not our natural heritage from the past, for the bardic poetry shows that a heaven lay about us in the mystical childhood of our race, and a supernatural original was often divined for the great hero, all the beautiful woman. All this perception has withered away, for religion has become observance of rule and adherence to doctrine. The first steps to the goal have been made sufficient in themselves. But religion is useless unless it has a transforming power, unless it is able to turn fishermen into divines, and make the blind see and the deaf hear. They are no true teachers who cannot rise beyond the world of sense and darkness and awaken the links within us from earth to heaven, who cannot see within the heart what are its needs, and who have not the power to open the poor blind eyes and touch the ears that have heard no sound of the heavenly harmonies. Our clergymen do their best to deliver us from what they think is evil, but do not lead us into the kingdom. They forget that the faculties cannot be spiritualised by restraint, but in use, and that the greatest evil of all is not to be able to see the divine everywhere, in life and love no less than in the solemn architecture of the spheres. In the free play of the beautiful and natural human relations lie the greatest possibilities of spiritual development, for heaven is not prayer nor praise, but the fullness of life, which is only divine through the richness and variety of life on earth. There is a certain infinitude in the emotions of love, tenderness, pity, joy, and all that is begotten in love, and this limitless character of the emotions has never received the philosophical consideration which is due to it. For even laughter may be considered solemnly, and gaiety and joy in us are the shadowy echoes of that joy spoken of the radiant morning stars, and there is not an emotion in man or woman which has not, however, perverted and muddied in its coming, in some way flowed from the first fountain. We are no more divided from super-nature than we are from our own bodies, and where the life of man or woman is naturally most intense, it most naturally overflows and mingles with the subtler and more lovely world within. If religion has no word to say upon this, it is incomplete, and we wander in the narrow circle of prayers and praise, wondering all the while what it is we are praising God for, because we feel so melancholy and lifeless. Dante had a place in his inferno for the joyless souls, and if his conception be true, the population of that circle will be largely modern Irish. A reaction against this conventional restraint is setting in, and the needs of life will perhaps in the future no longer be violated as they are today. And since it is the pent-up flood of the joy which ought to be in life, which is causing this reaction, and since there is a divine root in it, it is difficult to say where it might not carry us. I hope into some renewal of ancient conceptions of the fundamental purpose of womanhood, and its relations to divine nature, and that from the temples where woman may be instructed, she will come forth with strength in her to resist all pleading until the lover worship in her a divine womanhood, and that through their love the divided portions of the immortal nature may come together and be one as before the beginning of worlds. 1904. End of Religion and Love by A. E. Recording by Martin Geeson in Hazelmere Surrey. The Antichrist, Chapter 1. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Martin Geeson. James Joyce in Context, Volume 1, Telemachus. The Antichrist, Chapter 1. By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, translated by H. L. Mencken. Let us look each other in the face. We are hyperboreans. We know well enough how remote our place is. Neither by land nor by water will you find the road to the hyperboreans. Even Pindar in his day knew that much about us. Beyond the ice, beyond death, our life, our happiness. We have discovered that happiness. We know the way. We got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it? The man of today. I don't know either the way out or the way in. I am whatever doesn't know either the way out or the way in. So sighs the man of today. This is the sort of modernity that made us ill. We sickened on lazy peace. Cowardly compromise. The whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern yay and nay. This tolerance and larcheur of the heart that forgives everything because it understands everything is a Sirocco to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such south winds. We were brave enough. We spared neither ourselves nor others, but we were a long time finding out where to direct our courage. We grew dismal. They called us fatalists. Our fate, it was the fullness, the tension, the storing up of powers. We thirsted for the lightnings and great deeds. We kept as far as possible from the happiness of the weakling from resignation. There was thunder in our air. Nature as we embodied it became overcast, for we had not yet found the way. The formula of our happiness, a yay, a nay, a straight line, a goal, end of the Antichrist by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Chapter 1. Translated from the German by H. L. Menken. Recording by Martin Giesen in Hazelmeer Surrey. Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Act 1, Scene 2. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Philippa. James Joyce in context, Volume 1, Telemachus. Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Act 1, Scene 2. Elsinor, a room of state in the castle. Enter the King, Queen, Hamlet, Polonius, Laertes, Volta-Man, Cornelius, Lords, and Attendance. King. Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death, the memory be green, and that it has befitted to bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom to be contracted in one brow of woe. Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature, that we with wisest sorrow think on him, together with remembrance of ourselves. Therefore, our sometimes sister, now our queen, the imperial jointress to this warlike state, have we, as to her, with a defeated joy, with an auspicious and one dropping eye, with mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage, an equal scale weighing delight and dull, taken to wife. Nor have we herein barred your better wisdoms, which have freely gone with this affair along, or all our thanks. Now follows, that you know, young fort in brass, holding a weak supposal of our worth, or thinking by our late dear brother's death, our state to be disjoint and out of frame, colleague with this dream of his advantage, he hath not failed to pester us with message, importing the surrender of those lands lost by his father, with all bonds of law, to our most valiant brother. So much for him. Now for our self, and for this time of meeting. Thus much the business is. We have here writ to Norway, uncle of young fort in brass, you impotent and bed-rid scarcely hears of this his nephew's purpose, to suppress his further gate herein, in that the levees, the lists, and full proportions are all made out of his subject, and we here dispatch you, good Cornelius, and you, Volta-man, for bearers of this greeting to old Norway, giving to you no further personal power to business with the king, more than the scope of these dilated articles allow. Farewell, and let your haste commend your duty. Cornelius and Volta-man, in that and all things will we show our duty. We doubt it nothing, heartily farewell. Excient Volta-man and Cornelius. And now, laertes, what's the news with you? You told us of some suit. What is it, laertes? You cannot speak of reason to the dain and lose your voice. What wouldst thou beg, laertes, that shall not be my offer, not thy asking? The head is not more native to the heart, the hand more instrumental to the mouth, than is the throne of Denmark to thy father. What wouldst thou have, laertes? Dread, my lord, your leave and favour to return to France, from whence, though willingly, I came to Denmark to show my duty in your coronation, yet now I must confess that, duty done, my thoughts and wishes bend again toward France, and bow them to your gracious leave and pardon. Have you your father's leave? What says Polonius? He hath my lord round from me my slow leave by laboursome petition, and at last upon his will I sealed my hard consent. I do beseech you, give him leave to go. Take thy fair hour, laertes, time be thine, and thy best graces spend it at thy will. But now, my cousin Hamlet and my son, Hamlet aside, a little more than kin and less than kind. How is it that the clouds still hang on you? Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun. Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off, and let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark. Do not, for ever, with thy valid lids, seek for thy noble father in the dust. Thou knowest, tis common, all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity. Hamlet, I, madam, it is, common. If it be, why seems it so particular with thee? Seems, madam, nay it is, I know not seems. It is not alone my inky cloak, good madam, or customary suits of solemn black, nor windy suspiration of forced breath, nor the fruitful river in the eye, nor the dejected haveryre of the visage, together with all forms, moods, shows of grief that can denote me truly. These indeed seem, for they are actions that a man might play. But I have that within which passeth show, these but the trappings and the suits of woe. King, it is sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, to give these morning duties to your father. But you must know, your father lost a father, that father lost lost his, and the survivor bound in filial obligation for some term to do obsequious sorrow, but to persevere in obstinate condolment is a course of impious stubbornness, tis unmanly grief. It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, a heart unfortified, a mind impatient, an understanding simple and unschooled. For what we know must be, and is as common as any the most vulgar thing to sense, why should we in our peevish opposition take it to heart? Fie, tis a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, a fault to nature, to reason most absurd, whose common theme is death of fathers, and who still hath cried from the first cause till he that died to-day, this must be so. We pray you throw to earth this unprevailing woe, and think of us as of a father. For let the world take note you are the most immediate to our throne, and with no less nobility of love than that which dearest father bears his son do I impart toward you. For your intent in going back to school in Wittenberg it is most retrograde to our desire, and we beseech you bend you to remain here in the cheer and comfort of our eye, our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son. But not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet, I pray thee stay with us, go not to Wittenberg. Hamlet, I shall in all my best obey you, madam. King, why, tis a loving and a fair reply, be as our self in Denmark. Madam, come! This gentle and unforced accord of Hamlet sits smiling to my heart, in grace whereof no jockened health that Denmark drinks to-day, but the great cannon to the clouds shall tell, and the king's rouse, the heaven shall brute again, respeaking earthly thunder. Come away! Exiant all but Hamlet, oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, or that the everlasting had not fixed his cannon against self-slaughter. Oh, God, oh, God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world. Fiant! Oh, fight is an unweeded garden that grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature possess it merely. That it should come to this, but two months dead, and they not so much, not two, so excellent a king, that was to this Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother that he might not beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth must I remember why she would hang on him as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on, and yet within a month, let me not think, aunt, frailty thy name is woman, a little month, or ere those shoes were old with which she followed my poor father's body, like Niobe, all tears, why she, even she, oh, God, a beast that once discourse of reason would have mourned longer, married with my uncle, my father's brother, but no more like my father than I to Hercules within a month, ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears had left the flushing in her gallant eyes, she married, almost wicked speed to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets. It is not, nor it cannot come to good, but break my heart, for I must hold my tongue, unto Heratio, Marcellus, and Bernardo, Heratio, hail to your lordship, Hamlet, I am glad to see you well, Heratio, or I do forget myself, the same, my lord, and your poor servant ever, sir, my good friend, I'll change that name with you, and what make you from Wittenberg, Heratio, Marcellus, my good lord. I am very glad to see you, good even, sir, but what, in faith, make you from Wittenberg? Heratio, a truant disposition, good my lord. I would not hear your enemy say so, nor shall you do my ear that violence to make it truster of your own report against yourself. I know you are no truant. But what is your affair in Elsinore? We'll teach you to drink deep, bear you depart. My lord, I came to see your father's funeral. I prizied and mocked me, fellow student. I think it was to see my mother's wedding. Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon, thrift, thrift, Heratio. The funeral-baked meat did coldly furnish forth the marriage-tables. Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven, or ever I had seen that day, Heratio? My father, me thinks I see my father. Where, my lord? In my mind's eye, Heratio. I saw him once. He was a goodly king. He was a man. Take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again. My lord, I think I saw him yesterday night. So who? My lord, the king your father. The king my father. Season your admiration for a while with an attend ear till I may deliver upon the witness of these gentlemen this marvel to you. For God's love let me hear. Two nights together had these gentlemen, Marsalis and Bernardo, on their watch, in the dead, vast and middle of the night, been thus encountered. A figure, like your father, armed at a point exactly cappa-pay appears before them, and with solemn march goes slow and stately by them. Thrice he walked by their oppressed and fear-surprised eyes, within his truncheon's length, as they, distilled almost a jelly with the act of fear, stand dumb and speak not to him. This to me in dreadful secrecy in part they did, and I with them the third night kept the watch, where, as they had delivered, both in time, form of the thing, each word made true and good, the apparition comes. I knew, your father, these hands are not more like. But where was this? Marsalis, my lord, upon the platform where we watched, did you not speak to it? A ratio. My lord, I did, but answer made it none, yet once me thought it lifted up its head and did address itself to motion like as it would speak, but even then the morning cock, crew, loud, and at the sound it shrunk in haste away and vanished from our sight. It is very strange, as I do live, my honoured lord, it is true, and we did think it writ down in our duty to let you know of it. Indeed, indeed says, but this troubles me. Hold you the watch to-night, Marsalis and Bernardo. We do, my lord. Armed, say you, armed, my lord, from top to toe, my lord, from head to foot, then saw you not his face. A ratio. Oh yes, my lord, he wore his beaver up. What's lookedy frowningly, a countenance more in sorrow than in anger, pale or red, may, very pale, and fixed his eyes upon you, most constantly, I would have been there. It would have much amazed you. Very like, very like, stayed it long, while one with moderate haste might tell a hundred. Longer. Longer. Not when I saw it. His beard was grizzled, no. It was, as I have seen it in his life, a sable silvered. I will watch to-night, but chance to walk again. I warrant it will. If it assume my noble father's person, I'll speak to it, though hell itself should gape and bid me hold my peace. I pray you all, if you have hitherto concealed this sight, let it be tenable in your silence still, and whatsoever else shall happen to-night, give it an understanding, but no tongue. I will requite your loves. So fare you well. Upon the Platform, Twix XI and XII, I'll visit you. All. Our duty to your honour. Your loves, as mine to you. Farewell. Exit Horatio, Mosella, Sambonado. My father's spirit in arms, all is not well. I doubt some foul play would the night will come. Till then sit still, my soul. Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth are welled them to men's eyes. Exit. End of Hamlet, Act 1, Theme 2. To Allows, by Robert Burns. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Shaleefa Mollikim. James Joyce in Context, Volume 1, Tillamacus. To Allows, by Robert Burns. To Allows, on seeing one in a lady's bonnet at church. A Maughlin incident of a Maughlin lady is related in this poem, which, to many of the softer friends of the Bard, was anything but welcome. It appeared in the Kelmanock copy of his poems, and remonstrance and persuasion very like tried in vain to keep it out of the Edinburgh edition. Instead of regarding it as a seasonable rebuke to pride and vanity, some of his learned commentators called it cause and vulgar. Most classic persons might have remembered, that Julian, no vulgar person but an emperor and a scholar, wore a populist beard and was proud of it. Ha! Where are you going? You're growling fairly. Your impudence protects you certainly. I cannot say, but you surrender rarely, or it goes in lease. Though faiths are fair, you don't but sparely unsick a please. You're ugly, creeping, blasted one-er, detested, shunned by his own sinner, how dory is it your fate upon earth to find a lady, yes and what else, as he could dinner on some poor body. Swith, in some beggar's half its squiddle, there you may creep and sprawl and spratle, with either kindred jumping cattle in shoals and nations, where horno be near door and settle your sick plantations. Now would you dare, your utter sicht, below the fetterels nog and ticht, now feith ye yet shall be no richtil you've got on it, the far-eep-cop most howring hecht o' Mrs. Bonnet. My Swith, rech bulgis at her nose it, as plump and cray is on the cross it, or for some rank mercurial rose it, or fell reds madden, I'd give a sick heart the doset, and dress your trodden. I wouldn't have been surprised this by you on an old ice-flenin' toy, or ablin' some bit dirty boy, unswily coat, but Mrs. Bonnet ought to fey, how dory you do it. O, Jenny, dinner's at your head, and set your beauty to a bread, ye little kindred corset speed to blast his mackin', they wink some finger inside the red, or notice takin'. O, as some party-gifty gaze, to see ourselves as our seers, ay, what frey money a blunder frees, on foolish notion, o' airs and dressin' gate would lay this, and in devotion, and of two louse by Robert Burns. The Lord's Prayer This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Lenny, James Joyce in Context, Volume 1, Telemachus, The Lord's Prayer, Latin version. Sik ergo vos orabitis, Pater noster, hui in celis es, sanctificetur nomen tuum, veniat renium tuum, fiat voluntas tua, sikut in celu et interra, panem nostrum, super substancialem da nobis hodie, et dimite nobis debita nostra, sikut et nos dimisimus debitoribus nostris, et nein dukas nos intempasionem sed liberanos amalo, amen, English version. Thus therefore shall you pray, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our super substantial bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, amen. End of The Lord's Prayer. Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Sarah Williams. James Joyce in context, volume one, Telemachus. Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is the art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest form of criticism, is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist. But the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator and not life that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. Oscar Wilde. End of preface to the picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. Recording by Sarah Williams. Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold. Chapter 4. Hellenism and Hebraism. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Philippa. James Joyce in context. Volume 1. Telemachus. Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold. Chapter 4. Hellenism and Hebraism. This fundamental ground is our preference of doing to thinking. Now this preference is a main element in our nature, and as we study it we find ourselves opening up a number of large questions on every side. Let me go back for a moment to what I've already quoted from Bishop Wilson. First, never go against the best light you have. Secondly, take care that your light be not darkness. I said we show, as a nation, laudable energy and persistence in walking according to the best light we have, but are not quite careful enough, perhaps, to see that our light be not darkness. This is only another version of the old story that energy is our strong point and favourable characteristic, rather than intelligence. But we may give to this idea a more general form still, in which it will have a yet larger range of application. We may regard this energy, driving at practice, this paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this earnestness in going manfully with the best light we have, as one force. And we may regard the intelligence, driving at those ideas which are, after all, the basis of right practice, the ardent sense for all the new and changing combinations of them which man's development brings with it, the indomitable impulse to know and adjust them perfectly, as another force. And these two forces we may regard as, in some sense, rivals. Rivals not by the necessity of their own nature, but as exhibited in man and his history, as rivals dividing the empire of the world between them. And to give these forces names, from the two races of men who have supplied the most signal and splendid manifestations of them, we may call them, respectively, the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism. Hebraism and Hellenism, between these two points of influence, moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other, and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them. The final aim of both Hellenism and Hebraism, as of all great spiritual disciplines, is no doubt the same, man's perfection or salvation. The very language which they both of them use in schooling us to reach this aim is often identical. Even when their language indicates by variation, sometimes a broad variation, often a but slight and subtle variation, the different courses of thought which are uppermost in each discipline, even then the unity of the final end and aim is still apparent. To employ the actual words of that discipline with which we ourselves are all of us most familiar, and the words of which therefore come most home to us, that final end and aim is that we might be partakers of the divine nature. These are the words of a Hebrew apostle, but of Hellenism and Hebraism alike, this is, I say, the aim. When the two are confronted, as they very often are confronted, it is nearly always with what I may call a rhetorical purpose. The speaker's whole design is to exalt and enthrone one of the two, and he uses the other only as a foil, and to enable him the better to give effect to his purpose. Obviously, with us, it is usually Hellenism which is thus reduced to minister to the triumph of Hebraism. There is a sermon on Greece and the Greek spirit by a man never to be mentioned without interest and respect, Frederick Robertson, in which this rhetorical use of Greece and the Greek spirit, and the inadequate exhibition of them necessarily consequent upon this, is almost ludicrous, and would be censurable if it were not to be explained by the exigences of a sermon. On the other hand, Heinrich Heiner, and other writers of his sort, give us the spectacle of the tables completely turned, and of Hebraism brought in just as a foil and contrast to Hellenism, and to make the superiority of Hellenism more manifest. In both these cases there is injustice and misrepresentation. The aim and end of both Hebraism and Hellenism is, as I have said, one and the same, and this aim and end is august and admirable. Still, they pursue this aim by very different courses. The uppermost idea with Hellenism is to see things as they really are. The uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience. Everything can do away with this ineffacable difference. The Greek quarrel with the body and its desires is that they hinder right thinking. The Hebrew quarrel with them is that they hinder right acting. He that keepeth the law happy is he. There is nothing sweeter than to take heed unto the commandments of the Lord. That is the Hebrew notion of felicity, and pursued with passion and tenacity, this notion would not let the Hebrew rest till, as is well known, he had at last got out of the law a network of prescriptions to enwrap his whole life, to govern every moment of it, every impulse, every action. The Greek notion of felicity, on the other hand, is perfectly conveyed in these words of a great French moralist. C'est le bonheur des hommes? When? When they abhor that which is evil? No. When they exercise themselves in the law of the Lord day and night? No. When they die daily? No. When they walk about the New Jerusalem with palms in their hands? No. But when they think a right? When their thought hits? Quand il pense juste? At the bottom of both the Greek and the Hebrew notion is the desire native in man for reason and the will of God, the feeling after the universal order, in a word, the love of God. But while Hebraism seizes upon certain plain, capital intimations of the universal order, and rivets itself, one may say, with unequalled grandeur of earnestness and intensity on the study and observance of them, the bent of Hellenism is to follow with flexible activity the whole play of the universal order, to be apprehensive of missing any part of it, of sacrificing one part to another, to slip away from resting in this or that intimation of it however capital. An unclouded clearness of mind, an unimpeded play of thought is what this bent drives that. The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness, that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience. Christianity changed nothing in this essential bent of Hebraism to set doing above knowing. Self-conquest, self-devotion, the following not our own individual will but the will of God, obedience, is the fundamental idea of this form also of the discipline to which we have attached the general name of Hebraism. Only as the old law and the network of prescriptions with which it enveloped human life were evidently a motive power not driving and searching enough to produce the result aimed at, patient continuance in well-doing self-conquest, Christianity substituted for them boundless devotion to that inspiring and effecting pattern of self-conquest offered by Christ, and by the new motive power of which the essence was this, though the love and admiration of Christian churches have for centuries been employed in varying, amplifying and adorning the plain description of it, Christianity, as St. Paul truly says, establishes the law, and in the strength of the amplar power which she has thus supplied to fulfil it, has accomplished the miracles which we all see of her history. So long as we did not forget that both Hellenism and Hebraism are profound and admirable manifestations of man's life, tendencies and powers, and that both of them aim at a like final result, we can hardly insist too strongly on the divergence of line and of operation with which they proceed. It is a divergence so great that it most truly, as the Prophet Zechariah says, has raised up thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece. The difference whether it is by doing or by knowing that we set most store and the practical consequences which follow from this difference leave their mark on all the history of our race and of its development. Language may be abundantly quoted from both Hellenism and Hebraism to make it seem that one follows the same current as the other towards the same goal. They are truly born towards the same goal, but the currents which bear them are infinitely different. It is true Solomon will praise knowing. Understanding is a wellspring of life unto him that hath it. And in the New Testament again Christ is a light, and truth makes us free. It is true Aristotle will undervalue knowing. In what concerns virtue, says he, three things are necessary—knowledge, deliberate will, and perseverance. But whereas the two last are all important, the first is a matter of little importance. It is true that with the same impatience with which St. James enjoins a man to be not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, Epictetus exhorts us to do what we have demonstrated to ourselves we ought to do, or he taunts us with futility, for being armed at all points to prove that lying is wrong, yet all the time continuing to lie. It is true Plato, in words which are almost the words of the New Testament or the imitation, calls life a learning to die. But underneath the superficial agreement the fundamental divergence still subsists. The understanding of Solomon is the walking in the way of the commandments. This is the way of peace. And it is of this that blessedness comes. In the New Testament the truth which gives us the peace of God and makes us free is the love of Christ constraining us to crucify as he did, and with a like purpose of moral regeneration the flesh with all its affections and lusts, and thus establishing as we have seen the law. To St. Paul it appears possible to hold the truth in unrighteousness, which is just what Socrates judged impossible. The moral virtues, on the other hand, are with Aristotle but the porch and access to the intellectual, and with these last is blessedness. But partaking of the divine life which both Hellenism and Hebraism as we have said fix as their crowning aim, Plato expressly denies to the man of practical virtue merely, of self-conquest with any other motive than that of perfect intellectual vision. He reserves it for the lover of pure knowledge, of seeing things as they really are, the philomates. Both Hellenism and Hebraism arise out of the wants of human nature, and address themselves to satisfying those wants. But their methods are so different, they lay stress on such different points, and call into being by their respective disciplines such different activities, that the face which human nature presents when it passes from the hands of one of them to those of the other is no longer the same. To get rid of one's ignorance, to see things as they are, and by seeing them as they are to see them in their beauty, is the simple and attractive ideal which Hellenism holds out before human nature, and from the simplicity and charm of this ideal Hellenism and human life in the hands of Hellenism is invested with a kind of aerial ease, clearness, and radiancy. They are full of what we call sweetness and light. Difficulties are kept out of view, and the beauty and rationalness of the idea have all our thoughts. The best man is he who most tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that he is perfecting himself. This account of the matter by Socrates, the true Socrates of the memorabilia, has something so simple, spontaneous, and unsophisticated about it, that it seems to fill us with clearness and hope when we hear it. But there is a saying which I have heard attributed to Mr. Carlisle about Socrates, a very happy saying, whether it is really Mr. Carlisle's or not, which excellently marks the essential point in which Hebraism differs from Hellenism. Socrates, this saying goes, is terribly at ease in Zion. Hebraism, and here is the source of its wonderful strength, has always been severely preoccupied with an awful sense of the impossibility of being at ease in Zion, of the difficulties which oppose themselves to man's pursuit or attainment of that perfection of which Socrates talks so hopefully, and as from this point of view one might also say, so glibly. It is all very well to talk of getting rid of one's ignorance, of seeing things in their reality, seeing them in their beauty. But how is this to be done when there is something which thwarts and spoils all our efforts? This something is sin, and the space which sin fills in Hebraism as compared with Hellenism is indeed prodigious. This obstacle to perfection fills the whole scene, and perfection appears remote and rising away from earth in the background. Under the name of sin, the difficulties of knowing oneself and conquering oneself which impede man's passage to perfection, become for Hebraism a positive, active entity hostile to man, a mysterious power which I heard Dr. Pusey the other day in one of his impressive sermons compared to a hideous hunchback seated on our shoulders, and which it is the main business of our lives to hate and oppose. The discipline of the Old Testament may be summed up as a discipline teaching us to abhor and flee from sin, the discipline of the New Testament as a discipline teaching us to die to it. As Hellenism speaks of thinking clearly, seeing things in their essence and beauty, as a grand and precious feat for man to achieve, so Hebraism speaks of becoming conscious of sin, of awakening to a sense of sin, as a feat of this kind. It is obvious to what wide divergence these differing tendencies, actively followed, must lead. As one passes and repasses from Hellenism to Hebraism, from Plato to St. Paul, one feels inclined to rub one's eyes, and ask oneself whether man is indeed a gentle and simple being showing the traces of a noble and divine nature, or an unhappy, chained captive, laboring with groanings that cannot be uttered to free himself from the body of this death. Apparently it was the Hellenic conception of human nature which was unsound, for the world could not live by it. To call it unsound, however, is to fall into the common error of its Hebraising enemies, but it was unsound at that particular moment of man's development. It was premature. The indispensable basis of conduct and self-control, the platform upon which alone the perfection aimed at by Greece can come into bloom, was not to be reached by our race so easily. Centuries of probation and discipline were needed to bring us to it. All the bright promise of Hellenism sated, and Hebraism ruled the world. Then was seen that astonishing spectacle, so well marked by the often quoted words of the prophet Zechariah, when men of all languages of the nations took hold of the skirt of him that was a Jew, saying, We will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you. And the Hebraism which thus received and ruled a world all gone out of the way and altogether become unprofitable, was, and could not but be, the later, the more spiritual, the more attractive development of Hebraism. It was Christianity, that is to say, Hebraism aiming at self-conquest and rescue from the thrall of vile affections, not by obedience to the letter of a law, but by conformity to the image of a self-sacrificing example. To a world stricken with moral innovation, Christianity offered its spectacle of an inspired self-sacrifice. To men who refused themselves nothing, it showed one who refused himself everything. My saviour banished joy, says George Herbert. When the Alma Venus, the life-giving and joy-giving power of nature, so fondly cherished by the pagan world, could not save her followers from self-dissatisfaction and ennui, the severe words of the apostle came bracingly and refreshingly. Let no man deceive you with vain words, for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience. Throughout age after age, and generation after generation, our race, or all that part of our race which was most living and progressive, was baptised into a death, and endeavoured by suffering in the flesh to cease from sin. Of this endeavour the animating labours and afflictions of early Christianity, the touching asceticism of medieval Christianity, are the great historical manifestations. Literary monuments of it, each in its own way incomparable, remain in the epistles of St. Paul, into Augustine's confessions, and in the two original and simplest books of the imitation. Of two disciplines laying their main stress, the one on clear intelligence, the other on firm obedience, the one on comprehensively knowing the grounds of one's duty, the other on diligently practising it, the one on taking all possible care, to use Bishop Wilson's words again, that the light we have be not darkness, the other that, according to the best light we have, we diligently walk. The priority naturally belongs to that discipline which braces man's moral powers, and found for him an indispensable basis of character. And therefore it is justly said of the Jewish people, who were charged with setting powerfully forth that side of the divine order to which the words conscience and self-conquest point, that they were entrusted with the oracles of God, as it is justly said of Christianity which followed Judaism, and which set forth this side with a much deeper effectiveness, and a much wider influence, that the wisdom of the old pagan world was foolishness compared to it. No words of devotion and admiration can be too strong to render thanks to these beneficent forces which have so borne forward humanity in its appointed work of coming to the knowledge and possession of itself, above all in those great moments when their action was the wholesomeest and most necessary. But the evolution of these forces, separately and in themselves, is not the whole evolution of humanity. Their single history is not the whole history of man, whereas their admirers are always apt to make it stand for the whole history. Hebraism and Hellenism are neither of them, the law of human development, as their admirers are prone to make them. They are each of them contributions to human development, august contributions, invaluable contributions, and each showing itself to us more august, more invaluable, more preponderant over the other, according to the moment in which we take them and the relation in which we stand to them. The nations of our modern world, children of that immense and salutary movement which broke up the pagan world, inevitably stand to Hellenism in a relation which dwarfs it, and to Hebraism in a relation which magnifies it. They are inevitably prone to take Hebraism as the law of human development, and not as simply a contribution to it, however precious. And yet the lesson must per force be learned that the human spirit is wider than the most priceless of the forces which bear it onward, and that to the whole development of man Hebraism itself is like Hellenism, but a contribution. Perhaps we may help ourselves to see this clearer by an illustration drawn from the treatment of a single great idea which has profoundly engaged the human spirit, and has given it eminent opportunities for showing its nobleness and energy. It surely must be perceived that the idea of the immortality of the soul, as this idea rises in its generality before the human spirit, is something grander, truer, and more satisfying than it is in the particular forms by which St. Paul, in the famous fifteenth chapter of the Epistle to the Corinthians, and Plato, in the Fido, endeavour to develop and establish it. Surely we cannot but feel that the argumentation with which the Hebrew apostle goes about to expound this great idea is, after all, confused and inconclusive, and that the reasoning drawn from analogies of likeness and equality, which is employed upon it by the Greek philosopher, is oversuttle and sterile. Above and beyond the inadequate solutions which Hebraism and Hellenism here attempt extends the immense and august problem itself, and the human spirit which gave birth to it. And this single illustration may suggest to us how the same thing happens in other cases also. But meanwhile, by alternations of Hebraism and Hellenism, of man's intellectual and moral impulses, of the effort to see things as they really are and the effort to win peace by self-conquest, the human spirit proceeds, and each of these two forces has its appointed hours of culmination and seasons of rule. As the great movement of Christianity was a triumph of Hebraism and man's moral impulses, so the great movement which goes by the name of the Renaissance was an uprising and reinstatement of man's intellectual impulses and of Hellenism. We in England, the devoted children of Protestantism, chiefly know the Renaissance by its subordinate and secondary side of the Reformation. The Reformation has been often called a Hebraizing revival, a return to the ardour and sincereness of primitive Christianity. No one, however, can study the development of Protestantism and of Protestant churches without feeling that into the Reformation, too, Hebraizing child of the Renaissance and offspring of its fervour rather than its intelligence, as it undoubtedly was, the subtle, Hellenic leaven of the Renaissance found its way, and that the exact respective parts in the Reformation of Hebraism and of Hellenism are not easy to separate. But what we may with truth say is that all which Protestantism was to itself clearly conscious of, all which it succeeded in clearly setting forth in words, had the characters of Hebraism rather than of Hellenism. The Reformation was strong in that it was an earnest return to the Bible and to doing from the heart the will of God as they are written. It was weak in that it never consciously grasped or applied the central idea of the Renaissance, the Hellenic idea of pursuing in all lines of activity the law and science to use Plato's words of things as they really are. Whatever direct superiority therefore Protestantism had over Catholicism was a moral superiority, a superiority arising out of its greater sincerity and earnestness at the moment of its apparition at any rate, in dealing with the heart and conscience. Its pretensions to an intellectual superiority are in general quite illusory. For Hellenism, for the thinking side in man as distinguished from the acting side, the attitude of mind of Protestantism towards the Bible in no respect differs from the attitude of mind of Catholicism towards the church. The mental habit of him who imagines that Barlam's ass spoke in no respect differs from the mental habit of him who imagines that a Madonna of wood or stone winked, and the one who says that God's church makes him believe what he believes, and the other who says that God's word makes him believe what he believes, are for the philosopher perfectly alike in not really and truly knowing when they say God's church and God's word what it is they say or whereof they affirm. In the sixteenth century therefore Hellenism re-entered the world and again stood in presence of Hebraism, a Hebraism renewed and purged. Now it has not been enough observed how in the seventeenth century a fate befell Hellenism in some respects analogous to that which befell it at the commencement of our era. The renaissance, that great reawakening of Hellenism, that irresistible return of humanity to nature and to seeing things as they are, which in art, in literature and in physics produced such splendid fruits, had, like the anterior Hellenism of the pagan world, a side of moral weakness, and of relaxation or insensibility of the moral fibre which in Italy showed itself with the most startling plainness, but which in France, England and other countries, was very apparent too. Again this loss of spiritual balance, this exclusive preponderance given to man's perceiving and knowing side, this unnatural defect of his feeling and acting side, provoked a reaction. Let us trace that reaction where it most nearly concerns us. Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people. Hellenism is of Indo-European growth, Hebraism is of Semitic growth, and we English, a nation of Indo-European stulk, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism. But nothing more strongly marks the essential unity of man than the affinities we can perceive, in this point or that, between members of one family of peoples, and members of another. And no affinity of this kind is more strongly marked than that likeness in the strengths and prominence of the moral fibre which notwithstanding immense elements of difference, knits in some special sort the genius and history of us English, and of our American descendants across the Atlantic, to the genius and history of the Hebrew people. Hellenism which has been so great a power in the English nation, and in the strongest part of the English nation, was originally the reaction in the seventeenth century of the conscience and moral sense of our race against the moral indifference and lax rule of conduct which in the sixteenth century came in with the Renaissance. It was a reaction of Hebraism against Hellenism, and it powerfully manifested itself, as was natural, in a people with much of what we call a Hebraising turn, with a signal affinity for the bent which was the master-bent of Hebrew life. Eminently Indo-European by its humour, by the power it shows, through this gift of imaginatively acknowledging the multi-form aspects of the problem of life, and of thus getting itself unfixed from its own over-certainty, of smiling at its over-tenacity, our race has yet, and a great part of its strength lies here, in matters of practical life and moral conduct, a strong share of the assuredness, the tenacity, the intensity of the Hebrews. This turn manifested itself in Puritanism, and has had a great part in shaping our history for the last two hundred years. Undoubtedly it checked and changed amongst us that movement of the Renaissance which we see producing in the reign of Elizabeth such wonderful fruits. Undoubtedly it stopped the prominent rule and direct development of that order of ideas which we call by the name of Hellenism, and gave the first rank to a different order of ideas. Apparently too, as we said of the former defeat of Hellenism, if Hellenism was defeated this shows that Hellenism was imperfect, and that its ascendancy at that moment would not have been for the world's good. Yet there is a very important difference between the defeat inflicted on Hellenism by Christianity eighteen hundred years ago, and the check given to the Renaissance by Puritanism. The greatness of the difference is well measured by the difference in force, beauty, significance, and usefulness between primitive Christianity and Protestantism. Eighteen hundred years ago it was altogether the hour of Hebraism. Primitive Christianity was legitimately and truly the ascendant force in the world at that time, and the way of mankind's progress lay through its full development. Another hour in man's development began in the fifteenth century, and the main road of his progress then lay for a time through Hellenism. Puritanism was no longer the central current of the world's progress, it was a side-stream crossing the central current and checking it. The cross and the check may have been necessary and salutary, but that does not do away with the essential difference between the main stream of man's advance and a cross or side-stream. For more than two hundred years the main stream of man's advance has moved towards knowing himself and the world, seeing things as they are, spontaneity of consciousness. The main impulse of a great part, and that the strongest part of our nation, has been towards strictness of conscience. They have made the secondary the principle at the wrong moment, and the principle they have at the wrong moment treated as secondary. This contravention of the natural order has produced, as such contravention always must produce, a certain confusion and false movement, of which we are now beginning to feel in almost every direction the inconvenience. In all directions our habitual courses of action seem to be losing efficaciousness, credit, and control, both with others and even with ourselves. Everywhere we see the beginnings of confusion, and we want a clue to some sound order and authority. This we can only get by going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life. End of Culture and Anarchy, Chapter 4, Hellenism and Hebraism, by Matthew Arnold. The Twin Soul, by William Sharpe. This is a LibriVox recording, or LibriVox recording turned into a public domain. For more information or to run until here, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by a Shirley van Malchem. James Joyce, in Context, Volume 1, Telemachus. The Twin Soul, by William Sharpe. In the dead of the night a spirit came. Her moon-wide face and her eyes of flame were known to me. I called her name. The name that shall not be spoken at all till death have this body of mine enthralled. And she laughed to see me lying there, wrapped in the living corpse, bloody and fair, and my soul met its thin film shining bare. And I rose, and followed her glance so sweet, and passed from the house with noiseless feet. I know not myself what I knew, what I saw. I know that it filled me with trouble and awe, with pain that still at my heart doth gnaw, that she with her wild eyes witched my soul, and whispered the name of the unknown Gaul. O wild was her laugh, and wild was my cry, when with one long flesh and a wary sigh I awoke as from sleep bewilderingly. Her voice, her eyes, they are with me still. O spirit and chanters, O demon will. End of the Twin Soul. A School for Scandal. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. James Joyce in Context, Vol. 1, Telemachus. A School for Scandal. By Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Act I, Scene II. Scene II, Sir Peter's House. Enter Sir Peter. When an old bachelor takes a young wife, what is he to expect? It is now six months since Lady Teasel made me the happiest of men, and I have been the most miserable dog ever since that committed wedlock. We tiffed a little going to church, and come back to quarrel before the bells had done ringing. I was more than once nearly choked with Gaul during the honeymoon, and had lost all comfort in life before my friends had done wishing me joy. Yet I choose with caution a girl bred wholly in the country who never knew luxury beyond one silk gown nor dissipation above the annual gala of a race-ball. Yet she now plays her part in all the extravagant properties of the fashion in the town with as ready a grace as if she had never seen a bush nor a grass-plot out of Grouvenor Square. I am sneered at by my old acquaintances, paragraphed in the newspapers. She dissipates my fortune and contradicts all my humours. Yet the worst of it is I doubt I love her, or I should never bear all this. However, I'll never be weak enough to own it. Enter Rowley. Rowley. Sir Peter, you're servant. How is it with you, sir? Sir Peter. Very bad, Master Rowley, very bad. I meet with nothing but crosses and vexations. Rowley, what can have happened to trouble you since yesterday? Sir Peter, a good question to a married man. Rowley, nay, I'm sure your lady, sir Peter, can't be the cause of your uneasiness. Sir Peter, why, has anyone told you she was dead? Rowley, come, come, sir Peter, you love her, notwithstanding your tempers do not exactly agree. Sir Peter. But the fault is entirely hers, Master Rowley. I am, myself, the sweetest tempered man alive, and I hate a teasing temper. And so I tell her a hundred times a day. Rowley, indeed— Sir Peter, I, in what is very extraordinary, in all our disputes, she is always in the wrong. But Lady Snirwell, on this set she meets at her house, encouraged the perverseness of her disposition. Then to complete my vexations, Maria, my ward, whom I ought to have the power of a father over, is determined to turn rebel too, and absolutely refuses the man whom I have long resolved on her for a husband, meaning I suppose to bestow herself on his profligate brother. Rowley, you know, sir Peter, I have always taken the liberty to differ with you on the subject of those two young gentlemen. I only wish you may not be deceived in your opinion of the elder. For Charles, my life-aunt, he will retrieve his errors yet. Their worthy father, once my honoured master, was at his years nearly as wild a spark. Sir Peter, you are wrong, Master Rowley. On their father's death you know I acted as a kind of guardian to them both, till their uncle, Sir Oliver's Eastern bounty, gave them an early independence. Of course no person could have more opportunities of judging of their hearts, and I was never mistaken in my life. Joseph is indeed a model for the young man of the age. He is a man of sentiment, and acts up to the sentiments he professes. But for the other, take my word for it, if he had any grain of virtue by descent, he has dissipated it with the rest of his inheritance. Ah, my old friend Sir Oliver will be deeply mortified when he finds how part of his bounty has been misapplied. Rowley, I am sorry to find you so violent against the young man, because this may be the most critical period of his fortune. I came hither with news that will surprise you. Sir Peter, what? Let me hear. Rowley, Sir Oliver is arrived, and at this moment in town. Sir Peter, how? You astonish me. I thought you did not expect him this month. Rowley, I did not, but his passage has been remarkably quick. Sir Peter, ye gad, I shall rejoice to see my old friend, to sixteen years since we met. We have had many a day together, but does he still enjoin us not to inform his nephew of his arrival? Rowley, most strictly he means, before he makes it known to make some trial of their dispositions, and we have already planned something for the purpose. Sir Peter, ah, there needs no art to discover their merits. However, he shall have his way. But pray, does he know I am married? Rowley, yes, and will soon wish you joy. Sir Peter, you may tell him, it is too late. Oliver will laugh at me. We used to rail at matrimony together, but he has been steady to his text. Well, he must be at my house, though. I'll instantly give orders for his reception. But Master Rowley, don't drop a word that Lady Teasel and I ever disagree. Rowley, by no means. Sir Peter, for I should never be able to stand noel's jokes, so I'd have him think we are a very happy couple. Rowley, I understand you, but then you must be very careful not to differ while he's in the house with you. Sir Peter, he gad, so we must. That's impossible. Ah, Master Rowley, when an old bachelor meets a young wife he deserves, no, the crime carries the punishment along with it. And a school for scandal. Who goes with Fergus? This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Daniel W. James Joyce in context volume one, Telemachus, Who Goes with Fergus by William Butler Yeats. Who will go drive with Fergus now in Pierce the Deep Woods woven shade and dance upon the level shore? Young man, lift up your russet brow and lift your tender eyelids made and brood on hopes and fear no more. And no more turn aside and brood upon love's bitter mystery. For Fergus rules the brazen cause and rules the shadows of the wood and the white breast of the dim sea and all disheveled wandering stars. And Who Goes with Fergus by William Butler Yeats. Recording by Daniel W. Numbers chapter five, verses 11 through 31. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Daniel W. James Joyce in context volume one, Telemachus. Numbers chapter five, verses 11 through 31. Duae reems translation. And the Lord spoke to Moses saying, Speak to the children of Israel and thou shalt say to them, the man whose wife shall have gone astray and condemning her husband shall have slept with another man and her husband cannot discover it, but the adultery is secret and cannot be proved by witnesses because she was not found in the adultery. If the spirit of jealousy stir up the husband against his wife who either is defiled or is charged with false suspicion, he shall bring her to the priest and shall offer an oblation for her, the 10th part of a measure of barley meal. He shall not pour oil thereon, nor put frankincense upon it because it is a sacrifice of jealousy and an oblation searching out adultery. The priest therefore shall offer it and set it before the Lord and he shall take holy water and an earthen vessel and he shall cast little earth of the pavement of the tabernacle into it. And when the women shall stand before the Lord, he shall uncover her head and shall put on her hands the sacrifice of remembrance and the oblation of jealousy. And he himself shall hold the most bitter waters whereon he hath heaped curses with excretion. And he shall adjure her and shall say, if another man hath not slept with thee and if thou be not defiled by forsaking thy husband's bed, these most bitter waters on which I have heaped curses shall not hurt thee. But if thou hast gone aside from thy husband and art defiled and hast lain with another man, these curses shall light upon thee. The Lord make thee a curse and an example for all among his people. May he make thy thigh to rot and may they belly swell and burst asunder. Let the cursed waters enter into thy belly and may thy womb swell and thy thigh rot. And the women shall answer, amen, amen. And the priest shall write these curses in a book and shall wash them out with the most bitter waters upon which he has heaped these curses and he shall give them her to drink. And when she hath drunk them up, the priest shall take from her hand the sacrifice of jealousy and shall elevate it before the Lord and shall put it upon the altar. Yet so is first to take a handful of the sacrifice of that which is offered and burn it upon the altar and so to give the most bitter waters to the woman to drink. And when she hath drunk them, if she be defiled and having despised her husband, be guilty of adultery, the malediction shall go through her and her belly swelling her thigh shall rot and the woman shall be a curse and an example to all the people. But if she be not defiled, she shall not be hurt and shall bear children. This is the law of jealousy. If a woman hath gone aside from her husband and be defiled and the husband stirred up by the spirit of jealousy, bring her before the Lord and the priest due to her according to all these things that are here written, the husband shall be blameless and she shall bear her iniquity. End of Numbers chapter five, verses 11 through 31, Dewey Rheem's translation, recording by Daniel W. From the book of Genesis chapter 19, verses 18 through 29. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Anderson. James Joyce in context, volume one, Telemachus from the book of Genesis chapter 19, verses 18 through 29, from the Dewey Rheem's version. And the sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Sam, Cam, and Japheth. And Cam is the father of Canaan. These three are the sons of Noah and from these were all mankind spread over the whole earth. And Noah, a husbandman, began to till the ground and planted a vineyard. And drinking of the wine was made drunk and was uncovered in his tent. Which when Cam, the father of Canaan had seen, to wit that his father's nakedness was uncovered, he told it to his two brethren without. But Sam and Japheth put a cloak upon their shoulders and going backwards covered the nakedness of their father and their faces were turned away and they saw not their father's nakedness. And Noah, awakening from the wine when he had learned what his younger son had done to him, he said, cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be under his brethren. And he said, blessed be the Lord God of Sam, be Canaan his servant. May God enlarge Japheth and may he dwell in the tents of Sam and Canaan be his servant. And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years and all his days were in the whole nine hundred and fifty years and he died. And from the book of Genesis chapter nineteen verses eighteen through twenty-nine from the Dewey-Reem's version. Tis the Last Rose of Summer by Thomas Moore sung to the traditional air the groves of Blarney. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ruth Golding. James Joyce in context, volume one, Telemachus. Tis the Last Rose of Summer by Thomas Moore. Tis the Last Rose of Summer left blooming. All her lovely companions are faded and gone. No flowers but his now reflect, not leave, Thee thou the gemstone. End of Tis the Last Rose of Summer. Ned Grogan, Irish folk song by an unknown author. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Ruth Golding. James Joyce in context, volume one, Telemachus. Ned Grogan, author unknown. Ned Grogan, dear Joy, was the son of his mother, and as like her it seems as one pee to another. But to find out his dad he was put to the rout, as many folks wiser have been Joy, no doubt. To this broth of a boy off his mother would say, When the moon shines, my Jew, be making your hay. Always ask my advice when the business is done, for two heads sure your own are much better than one. So Neddy, taking it into his pate to fetch a walk over to England, stepped to ask the advice of his second head. But by St. Patrick a drop of the creature had made her speechless, and so, being dead into the bargain, all that he could get out of her was, Filaloo, Bodaro, Wack, Grammar Creme. Ned's mother being waked to England he came, sir, big with hopes of promotion of honour and fame, sir. Where a snug birth he got, do you mind, by my soul, to be partner, dear Joy, with a knight of the pole. For Larry to teach him his art, proving willing, soon taught him the changes to ring with a shilling, and that folks, when not sober, are easily one, which proves that two heads, Joy, are better than one. Oh, to be sure, and they didn't carry on a roaring trade, till Larry having the misfortune to take a drop too much at the old Bailey, poor Grogan, was once more left alone to sing, Filaloo, Bodaro, Wack, Grammar Creme. Left alone, sure, old Grogan set up for himself, got a partner, and Twix, them, got plenty of pelf. And because he was pleased with the bachelor's life, married Catty, oh, Doody, who made him her wife. For some time they played Joy like kittens so frisky, till Catty, oh, Horn, took to drinking of whiskey, sold his sticks, and away with his partner did run, proving still, that two heads are much better than one. Oh, bad luck to her, cried Grogan. To be sure, I took her for better or worse, but since she's proved all worse and no better faith, her loss makes me sing, Filaloo, Bodaro, Wack, Grammar Creme. End of Ned Grogan. The Oblation. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, reading by Kristen Hughes. James Joyce in context, volume one, Telemachus. The Oblation by Elginon Charles Swinburne. Ask nothing more of me, sweet. All I can give you, I give, heart of my heart. Were it more, more would be laid at your feet, love that should help you to live, song that should spur you to soar. All things were nothing to give, once to have sense of you more, touch you and taste of you sweet, think you and breathe you and live, swept of your wings as they soar, trodden by chance of your feet. I that have love and no more, give you but love of you sweet. He that hath more, let him give. He that hath wings, let him soar. Mine is the heart at your feet, here that must love you to live. End of The Oblation. The Death of Nelson. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org recording by Shaleefa Malhiem. James Joyce in context volume one, Telemachus. The Death of Nelson by S. J. Arnold. O Nelson's tomb with silent grief oppressed, Britannia mourns her hero now addressed. But those bride laurels now shall fade with years whose leaves are watered by a nation's tears. It was in Trafalgar's Bay we saw the Frenchman lay. Each heart was bounding then. We scorned the foreign yoke, for our ships were British oak, and hearts of oak are men. Our Nelson marked them on the wave, for each year's our gallant seamen gave, nor thought of home or beauty along the lines this signal ran. England expects that every man this day will do his duty. And now the cannon's roar along the frightened shore, our Nelson left the way, his ship the victory named, long be that victory famed, for victory crowned the day. But dearly was it that conquest bought, too well the gallant hero fought, for England home and beauty. He cried as midst the fire he ran, England shall find that every man this day will do his duty. At last the fatal wound which is spread dismay round, the hero's breast received. Heaven fights on our side, the days our own, he cried. Now long enough I've lived, in honest cause my life was passed, in honest cause I fell at life.