A. T. Quiller Couch - "Major Vigoureux"

Charlotte M. Higgins - "The Angel Children"

George Sumner Weaver - "Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women"

Harriet T. Comstock - "A Son of the Hills"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Short Studies on Great Subjects

J >> James Anthony Froude >> Short Studies on Great Subjects




But how would it have been if, instead of turning on its axis once in
twenty-four hours, the earth had taken a year about it; if the year had
been nearly four hundred years; if man's life had been no longer than it
is, and for the initial steps of astronomy there had been nothing to
depend upon except observations recorded in history? How many ages would
have passed, had this been our condition, before it would have occurred
to any one, that, in what they saw night after night, there was any kind
of order at all?

We can see to some extent how it would have been, by the present state
of those parts of the science which in fact depend on remote recorded
observations. The movements of the comets are still extremely uncertain.
The times of their return can be calculated only with the greatest
vagueness.

And yet such a hypothesis as I have suggested would but inadequately
express the position in which we are in fact placed towards history.
There the phenomena never repeat themselves. There we are dependent
wholly on the record of things said to have happened once, but which
never happen or can happen a second time. There no experiment is
possible; we can watch for no recurring fact to test the worth of our
conjectures. It has been suggested, fancifully, that if we consider the
universe to be infinite, time is the same as eternity, and the past is
perpetually present. Light takes nine years to come to us from Sirius;
those rays which we may see to-night when we leave this place, left
Sirius nine years ago; and could the inhabitants of Sirius see the earth
at this moment, they would see the English army in the trenches before
Sebastopol; Florence Nightingale watching at Scutari over the wounded at
Inkermann; and the peace of England undisturbed by 'Essays and Reviews.'

As the stars recede into distance, so time recedes with them, and there
may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might be seen stepping
into the ark, Eve listening to the temptation of the serpent, or that
older race, eating the oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind them,
when the Baltic was an open sea.

Could we but compare notes, something might be done; but of this there
is no present hope, and without it there will be no science of history.
Eclipses, recorded in ancient books, can be verified by calculation, and
lost dates can be recovered by them, and we can foresee by the laws
which they follow when there will be eclipses again. Will a time ever
be when the lost secret of the foundation of Rome can be recovered by
historic laws? If not, where is our science? It may be said that this is
a particular fact, that we can deal satisfactorily with general
phenomena affecting eras and cycles. Well, then, let us take some
general phenomenon. Mahometanism, for instance, or Buddhism. Those are
large enough. Can you imagine a science which would have[A] _foretold_
such movements as those? The state of things out of which they rose is
obscure; but suppose it not obscure, can you conceive that, with any
amount of historical insight into the old Oriental beliefs, you could
have seen that they were about to transform themselves into those
particular forms and no other?

It is not enough to say, that, after the fact, you can understand
partially how Mahometanism came to be. All historians worth the name
have told us something about that. But when we talk of science, we mean
something with more ambitious pretences, we mean something which can
foresee as well as explain; and, thus looked at, to state the problem is
to show its absurdity. As little could the wisest man have foreseen this
mighty revolution, as thirty years ago such a thing as Mormonism could
have been anticipated in America; as little as it could have been
foreseen that table-turning and spirit-rapping would have been an
outcome of the scientific culture of England in the nineteenth century.

The greatest of Roman thinkers, gazing mournfully at the seething mass
of moral putrefaction round him, detected and deigned to notice among
its elements a certain detestable superstition, so he called it, rising
up amidst the offscouring of the Jews, which was named Christianity.
Could Tacitus have looked forward nine centuries to the Rome of Gregory
VII., could he have beheld the representative of the majesty of the
Caesars holding the stirrup of the Pontiff of that vile and execrated
sect, the spectacle would scarcely have appeared to him the fulfilment
of a rational expectation, or an intelligible result of the causes in
operation round him. Tacitus, indeed, was born before the science of
history; but would M. Comte have seen any more clearly?

Nor is the case much better if we are less hard upon our philosophy; if
we content ourselves with the past, and require only a scientific
explanation of that.

First, for the facts themselves. They come to us through the minds of
those who recorded them, neither machines nor angels, but fallible
creatures, with human passions and prejudices. Tacitus and Thucydides
were perhaps the ablest men who ever gave themselves to writing history;
the ablest, and also the most incapable of conscious falsehood. Yet even
now, after all these centuries, the truth of what they relate is called
in question. Good reasons can be given to show that neither of them can
be confidently trusted. If we doubt with these, whom are we to believe?

Or again, let the facts be granted. To revert to my simile of the box of
letters, you have but to select such facts as suit you, you have but to
leave alone those which do not suit you, and let your theory of history
be what it will, you can find no difficulty in providing facts to prove
it.

You may have your Hegel's philosophy of history, or you may have your
Schlegel's philosophy of history; you may prove from history that the
world is governed in detail by a special Providence; you may prove that
there is no sign of any moral agent in the universe, except man; you may
believe, if you like it, in the old theory of the wisdom of antiquity;
you may speak, as was the fashion in the fifteenth century, of 'our
fathers, who had more wit and wisdom than we;' or you may talk of 'our
barbarian ancestors,' and describe their wars as the scuffling of kites
and crows.

You may maintain that the evolution of humanity has been an unbroken
progress towards perfection; you may maintain that there has been no
progress at all, and that man remains the same poor creature that he
ever was; or, lastly, you may say with the author of the 'Contrat
Social,' that men were purest and best in primeval simplicity--

When wild in woods the noble savage ran.

In all, or any of these views, history will stand your friend. History,
in its passive irony, will make no objection. Like Jarno, in Goethe's
novel, it will not condescend to argue with you, and will provide you
with abundant illustrations of anything which you may wish to believe.

'What is history,' said Napoleon, 'but a fiction agreed upon?' 'My
friend,' said Faust to the student, who was growing enthusiastic about
the spirit of past ages; 'my friend, the times which are gone are a book
with seven seals; and what you call the spirit of past ages is but the
spirit of this or that worthy gentleman in whose mind those ages are
reflected.'

One lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat with
distinctness; that the world is built somehow on moral foundations;
that, in the long run, it is well with the good; in the long run, it is
ill with the wicked. But this is no science; it is no more than the old
doctrine taught long ago by the Hebrew prophets. The theories of M.
Comte and his disciples advance us, after all, not a step beyond the
trodden and familiar ground. If men are not entirely animals, they are
at least half animals, and are subject in this aspect of them to the
conditions of animals. So far as those parts of man's doings are
concerned, which neither have, nor need have, anything moral about them,
so far the laws of him are calculable. There are laws for his digestion,
and laws of the means by which his digestive organs are supplied with
matter. But pass beyond them, and where are we? In a world where it
would be as easy to calculate men's actions by laws like those of
positive philosophy as to measure the orbit of Neptune with a foot-rule,
or weigh Sirius in a grocer's scale.

And it is not difficult to see why this should be. The first principle
on which the theory of a science of history can be plausibly argued, is
that all actions whatsoever arise from self-interest. It may be
enlightened self-interest; it may be unenlightened; but it is assumed as
an axiom, that every man, in whatever he does, is aiming at something
which he considers will promote his happiness. His conduct is not
determined by his will; it is determined by the object of his desire.
Adam Smith, in laying the foundations of political economy, expressly
eliminates every other motive. He does not say that men never act on
other motives; still less, that they never ought to act on other
motives. He asserts merely that, as far as the arts of production are
concerned, and of buying and selling, the action of self-interest may be
counted upon as uniform. What Adam Smith says of political economy, Mr.
Buckle would extend over the whole circle of human activity.

Now, that which especially distinguishes a high order of man from a low
order of man--that which constitutes human goodness, human greatness,
human nobleness--is surely not the degree of enlightenment with which
men pursue their own advantage; but it is self-forgetfulness--it is
self-sacrifice--it is the disregard of personal pleasure, personal
indulgence, personal advantages remote or present, because some other
line of conduct is more right.

We are sometimes told that this is but another way of expressing the
same thing; that when a man prefers doing what is right, it is only
because to do right gives him a higher satisfaction. It appears to me,
on the contrary, to be a difference in the very heart and nature of
things. The martyr goes to the stake, the patriot to the scaffold, not
with a view to any future reward to themselves, but because it is a
glory to fling away their lives for truth and freedom. And so through
all phases of existence, to the smallest details of common life, the
beautiful character is the unselfish character. Those whom we most love
and admire are those to whom the thought of self seems never to occur;
who do simply and with no ulterior aim--with no thought whether it will
be pleasant to themselves or unpleasant--that which is good, and right,
and generous.

Is this still selfishness, only more enlightened? I do not think so. The
essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self
pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone--like the bloom from a
soiled flower. Surely it is a paradox to speak of the self-interest of a
martyr who dies for a cause, the triumph of which he will never enjoy;
and the greatest of that great company in all ages would have done what
they did, had their personal prospects closed with the grave. Nay, there
have been those so zealous for some glorious principle, as to wish
themselves blotted out of the book of Heaven if the cause of Heaven
could succeed.

And out of this mysterious quality, whatever it be, arise the higher
relations of human life, the higher modes of human obligation. Kant, the
philosopher, used to say that there were two things which overwhelmed
him with awe as he thought of them. One was the star-sown deep of space,
without limit and without end; the other was, right and wrong. Right,
the sacrifice of self to good; wrong, the sacrifice of good to
self;--not graduated objects of desire, to which we are determined by
the degrees of our knowledge, but wide asunder as pole and pole, as
light and darkness--one, the object of infinite love; the other, the
object of infinite detestation and scorn. It is in this marvellous power
in men to do wrong (it is an old story, but none the less true for
that)--it is in this power to do wrong--wrong or right, as it lies
somehow with ourselves to choose--that the impossibility stands of
forming scientific calculations of what men will do before the fact, or
scientific explanations of what they have done after the fact. If men
were consistently selfish, you might analyse their motives; if they were
consistently noble, they would express in their conduct the laws of the
highest perfection. But so long as two natures are mixed together, and
the strange creature which results from the combination is now under one
influence and now under another, so long you will make nothing of him
except from the old-fashioned moral--or, if you please,
imaginative--point of view.

Even the laws of political economy itself cease to guide us when they
touch moral government. So long as labour is a chattel to be bought and
sold, so long, like other commodities, it follows the condition of
supply and demand. But if, for his misfortune, an employer considers
that he stands in human relations towards his workmen; if he believes,
rightly or wrongly, that he is responsible for them; that in return for
their labour he is bound to see that their children are decently taught,
and they and their families decently fed and clothed and lodged; that he
ought to care for them in sickness and in old age; then political
economy will no longer direct him, and the relations between himself and
his dependents will have to be arranged on quite other principles.

So long as he considers only his own material profit, so long supply and
demand will settle every difficulty; but the introduction of a new
factor spoils the equation.

And it is precisely in this debatable ground of low motives and noble
emotions--in the struggle, ever failing, yet ever renewed, to carry
truth and justice into the administration of human society; in the
establishment of states and in the overthrow of tyrannies; in the rise
and fall of creeds; in the world of ideas; in the character and deeds of
the great actors in the drama of life; where good and evil fight out
their everlasting battle, now ranged in opposite camps, now and more
often in the heart, both of them, of each living man--that the true
human interest of history resides. The progress of industries, the
growth of material and mechanical civilisation, are interesting, but
they are not the most interesting. They have their reward in the
increase of material comforts; but, unless we are mistaken about our
nature, they do not highly concern us after all.

Once more; not only is there in men this baffling duality of principle,
but there is something else in us which still more defies scientific
analysis.

Mr. Buckle would deliver himself from the eccentricities of this and
that individual by a doctrine of averages. Though he cannot tell whether
A, B, or C will cut his throat, he may assure himself that one man in
every fifty thousand, or thereabout (I forget the exact proportion),
will cut his throat, and with this he consoles himself. No doubt it is a
comforting discovery. Unfortunately, the average of one generation need
not be the average of the next. We may be converted by the Japanese, for
all that we know, and the Japanese methods of taking leave of life may
become fashionable among us. Nay, did not Novalis suggest that the whole
race of men would at last become so disgusted with their impotence, that
they would extinguish themselves by a simultaneous act of suicide, and
make room for a better order of beings? Anyhow, the fountain out of
which the race is flowing perpetually changes--no two generations are
alike. Whether there is a change in the organisation itself, we cannot
tell; but this is certain, that as the planet varies with the atmosphere
which surrounds it, so each new generation varies from the last, because
it inhales as its atmosphere the accumulated experience and knowledge of
the whole past of the world. These things form the spiritual air which
we breathe as we grow; and in the infinite multiplicity of elements of
which that air is now composed, it is for ever matter of conjecture what
the minds will be like which expand under its influence.

From the England of Fielding and Richardson to the England of Miss
Austen--from the England of Miss Austen to the England of Railways and
Free-trade, how vast the change; yet perhaps Sir Charles Grandison would
not seem so strange to us now, as one of ourselves will seem to our
great-grandchildren. The world moves faster and faster; and the
difference will probably be considerably greater.

The temper of each new generation is a continual surprise. The fates
delight to contradict our most confident expectations. Gibbon believed
that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life
of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few
years ago we believed the world had grown too civilised for war, and the
Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was to be the inauguration of a new era.
Battles, bloody as Napoleon's, are now the familiar tale of every day;
and the arts which have made greatest progress are the arts of
destruction. What next? We may strain our eyes into the future which
lies beyond this waning century; but never was conjecture more at fault.
It is blank darkness, which even the imagination fails to people.

What then is the use of History? and what are its lessons? If it can
tell us little of the past, and nothing of the future, why waste our
time over so barren a study?

First, it is a voice for ever sounding across the centuries the laws of
right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall,
but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false
word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or
vanity, the price has to be paid at last: not always by the chief
offenders, but paid by some one. Justice and truth alone endure and
live. Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at
last to them, in French revolutions and other terrible ways.

That is one lesson of History. Another is, that we should draw no
horoscopes; that we should expect little, for what we expect will not
come to pass. Revolutions, reformations--those vast movements into which
heroes and saints have flung themselves, in the belief that they were
the dawn of the millennium--have not borne the fruit which they looked
for. Millenniums are still far away. These great convulsions leave the
world changed--perhaps improved,--but not improved as the actors in them
hoped it would be. Luther would have gone to work with less heart, could
he have foreseen the Thirty Years' War, and in the distance the theology
of Tubingen. Washington might have hesitated to draw the sword against
England, could he have seen the country which he made as we see it
now.[B]

The most reasonable anticipations fail us--antecedents the most apposite
mislead us; because the conditions of human problems never repeat
themselves. Some new feature alters everything--some element which we
detect only in its after-operation.

But this, it may be said, is but a meagre outcome. Can the long records
of humanity, with all its joys and sorrows, its sufferings and its
conquests, teach us no more than this? Let us approach the subject from
another side.

If you were asked to point out the special features in which
Shakespeare's plays are so transcendently excellent, you would mention,
perhaps, among others, this, that his stories are not put together, and
his characters are not conceived, to illustrate any particular law or
principle. They teach many lessons, but not any one prominent above
another; and when we have drawn from them all the direct instruction
which they contain, there remains still something unresolved--something
which the artist gives, and which the philosopher cannot give.

It is in this characteristic that we are accustomed to say Shakespeare's
supreme _truth_ lies. He represents real life. His dramas teach as life
teaches--neither less nor more. He builds his fabrics as nature does, on
right and wrong; but he does not struggle to make nature more systematic
than she is. In the subtle interflow of good and evil--in the unmerited
sufferings of innocence--in the disproportion of penalties to desert--in
the seeming blindness with which justice, in attempting to assert
itself, overwhelms innocent and guilty in a common ruin--Shakespeare is
true to real experience. The mystery of life he leaves as he finds it;
and, in his most tremendous positions, he is addressing rather the
intellectual emotions than the understanding,--knowing well that the
understanding in such things is at fault, and the sage as ignorant as
the child.

Only the highest order of genius can represent nature thus. An inferior
artist produces either something entirely immoral, where good and evil
are names, and nobility of disposition is supposed to show itself in the
absolute disregard of them--or else, if he is a better kind of man, he
will force on nature a didactic purpose; he composes what are called
moral tales, which may edify the conscience, but only mislead the
intellect.

The finest work of this kind produced in modern times is Lessing's play
of 'Nathan the Wise.' The object of it is to teach religious toleration.
The doctrine is admirable--the mode in which it is enforced is
interesting; but it has the fatal fault, that it is not true. Nature
does not teach religious toleration by any such direct method; and the
result is--no one knew it better than Lessing himself--that the play is
not poetry, but only splendid manufacture. Shakespeare is eternal;
Lessing's 'Nathan' will pass away with the mode of thought which gave it
birth. One is based on fact; the other, on human theory about fact. The
theory seems at first sight to contain the most immediate instruction;
but it is not really so.

Cibber and others, as you know, wanted to alter Shakespeare. The French
king, in 'Lear,' was to be got rid of; Cordelia was to marry Edgar, and
Lear himself was to be rewarded for his sufferings by a golden old age.
They could not bear that Hamlet should suffer for the sins of Claudius.
The wicked king was to die, and the wicked mother; and Hamlet and
Ophelia were to make a match of it, and live happily ever after. A
common novelist would have arranged it thus; and you would have had your
comfortable moral that wickedness was fitly punished, and virtue had its
due reward, and all would have been well. But Shakespeare would not have
it so. Shakespeare knew that crime was not so simple in its
consequences, or Providence so paternal. He was contented to take the
truth from life; and the effect upon the mind of the most correct theory
of what life ought to be, compared to the effect of the life itself, is
infinitesimal in comparison.

Again, let us compare the popular historical treatment of remarkable
incidents with Shakespeare's treatment of them. Look at 'Macbeth.' You
may derive abundant instruction from it--instruction of many kinds.
There is a moral lesson of profound interest in the steps by which a
noble nature glides to perdition. In more modern fashion you may
speculate, if you like, on the political conditions represented there,
and the temptation presented in absolute monarchies to unscrupulous
ambition; you may say, like Dr. Slop, these things could not have
happened under a constitutional government; or, again, you may take up
your parable against superstition--you may dilate on the frightful
consequences of a belief in witches, and reflect on the superior
advantages of an age of schools and newspapers. If the bare facts of the
story had come down to us from a chronicler, and an ordinary writer of
the nineteenth century had undertaken to relate them, his account, we
may depend upon it, would have been put together upon one or other of
these principles. Yet, by the side of that unfolding of the secrets of
the prison-house of the soul, what lean and shrivelled anatomies the
best of such descriptions would seem!

Shakespeare himself, I suppose, could not have given us a theory of what
he meant--he gave us the thing itself, on which we might make whatever
theories we pleased.

Or again, look at Homer.

The 'Iliad' is from two to three thousand years older than 'Macbeth,'
and yet it is as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. We have
there no lessons save in the emotions which rise in us as we read. Homer
had no philosophy; he never struggles to impress upon us his views about
this or that; you can scarcely tell indeed whether his sympathies are
Greek or Trojan; but he represents to us faithfully the men and women
among whom he lived. He sang the Tale of Troy, he touched his lyre, he
drained the golden beaker in the halls of men like those on whom he was
conferring immortality. And thus, although no Agamemnon, king of men,
ever led a Grecian fleet to Ilium; though no Priam sought the midnight
tent of Achilles; though Ulysses and Diomed and Nestor were but names,
and Helen but a dream, yet, through Homer's power of representing men
and women, those old Greeks will still stand out from amidst the
darkness of the ancient world with a sharpness of outline which belongs
to no period of history except the most recent. For the mere hard
purposes of history, the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' are the most effective
books which ever were written. We see the Hall of Menelaus, we see the
garden of Alcinous, we see Nausicaa among her maidens on the shore, we
see the mellow monarch sitting with ivory sceptre in the Marketplace
dealing out genial justice. Or again, when the wild mood is on, we can
hear the crash of the spears, the rattle of the armour as the heroes
fall, and the plunging of the horses among the slain. Could we enter the
palace of an old Ionian lord, we know what we should see there; we know
the words in which he would address us. We could meet Hector as a
friend. If we could choose a companion to spend an evening with over a
fireside, it would be the man of many counsels, the husband of Penelope.

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